Then Chip overtook her, knowing too well the hurt
which the Countess had given with her blundering anxiety. Just at the
porch he caught up with her, and she clung to him, sobbing wildly.

"You don't want to mind what that old hen says," he told her brusquely.
"She's got to do just so much cackling or she'd choke, I reckon. The
Kid's all right. Some of the boys have run across him by this time, most
likely, and are bringing him in. He'll be good and hungry, and the scare
will do him good." He forced himself to speak as though the Kid had
merely fallen on the corral fence, or something like that. "You've got
to make up your mind to these things," he argued, "if you tackle raising
a boy, Dell. Why, I'll bet I ran off and scared my folks into fits fifty
times when I was a kid."

"But--he's--just a baby!" sobbed the Little Doctor with her face pressed
hard against Chip's strong, comforting shoulder.

"He's a little devil!" amended Chip fiercely. "He ought to be walloped
for scaring you like this. He's just as capable of looking after himself
as most kids twice his size. He'll get hungry and head for home--and if
he don't know the way, Silver does; so he can't--"

"But he may have fallen and--"

"Come, now! Haven't you got any more sense than the Countess? If you
insist of thinking up horrors to scare yourself with, I don't know
as anybody can stop you. Dell! Brace up and quit worrying. I tell
you--he's--all right!"

That did well enough--seeing the Little Doctor did not get a look
at Chip's face, which was white and drawn, with sunken, haggard eyes
staring into the dark over her head. He kissed her hastily and told her
he must go, and that he'd hurry back as soon as he could. So he went
half running down the path and passed the Countess and the Old Man
without a word; piled onto his horse and went off up the hill road
again.

They could not get it out of their minds that the Kid must have ridden
up on the bluff to meet his mother, had been too early to meet her--for
the Little Doctor had come home rather later than she expected to
do--and had wandered off to visit the boys, perhaps, or to meet his
Daddy Chip who was over there some where on the bench trying to figure
out a system of ditches that might logically be expected to water the
desert claims of the Happy Family--if they could get the water.

They firmly believed that the kid had gone up on the hill, and so they
hunted for him up there. The Honorable Blake ha