I'll stick with the bunch, cross my
heart, and I'll come back tonight if you're scared 'theut me. Honest to
gran'ma, I've got to go and help the bunch lick the stuffen' outa them
nesters, Doctor Dell."

The Little Doctor looked at him strangely, hugged him tight--and let
him go. Chip would be with them, and he would bring the Kid home safely,
and--the limitations of dooryard play no longer sufficed; her fledgling
had found what his wings were for, and the nest was too little, now.

"We'll take care of him," Andy promised her understandingly. "If Chip
don't come up, this afternoon, I'll bring him home myself. Don't you
worry a minute about him."

"I'd tell a man she needn't!" added the Kid patronizingly.

"I suppose he's a lot safer with you boys than he is here at the
ranch--unless one of us stood over him all the time, or we tied him up,"
she told Andy gamely. "I feel like a hen trying to raise a duck! Go on,
Buck--but give mother a kiss first."

The Kid kissed her violently and with a haste that betrayed where his
thoughts were, in spite of the fact that never before had his mother
called him Buck.

To her it was a supreme surrender of his babyhood--to him it was merely
his due. The Little Doctor sighed and watched him ride away beside
Andy. "Children are such self-centred little beasts!" she told J. G.
rue-fully. "I almost wish he was a girl."

"Ay? If he was a girl he wouldn't git lost, maybe, but some feller'd
take him away from yuh just the same. The Kid's all right. He's just the
kind you expect him to be and want him to be. You're tickled to death
because he's like he is. Doggone it, Dell, that Kid's got the real stuff
in him! He's a dead ringer fer his dad--that ought to do yuh."

"It does," the Little Doctor declared. "But it does seem as if he might
be contented here with me for a little while--after such a horrible
time--"

"It wasn't horrible to him, yuh want to recollect. Doggone it, I wish
that Blake would come back. You write to him, Dell, and tell him how
things is stacking up. He oughta be here on the ground. No tellin' what
them nesters'll build up next."

So the Old Man slipped back into the old channels of worry and thought,
just as life itself slips back after a stressful period. The little
Doctor sighed again and sat down to write the letter and to discuss with
the Old Man what she should say.

There was a good deal to say. For one thing, more contests had been
filed and more shacks