-made camp upon the creek-bank at the home ranch, and ate things
which they could not name but which pleased wonderfully their palates.
There was a salad to tempt an epicure, and there was a pudding the
like of which they had never tasted. It had a French name which left
them no wiser than before asking for it, and it looked, as Pink
remarked, like a snowbank with the sun shining on it, and it tasted
like going to heaven.

"It makes me plumb sore when I think of all the years I've stood for
Patsy's slops," sighed Cal Emmett, rolling over upon his back because
he was too full for any other position--putting it plainly.

"By golly, I never knowed there was such cookin' in the world," echoed
Slim. "Why, even Mis' Bixby can't cook that good."

"The Countess had ought to come down and take a few lessons," declared
Jack Bates emphatically. "I'm going to take up some uh that pudding
and ask her what she thinks of it."

"Yuh can't," mourned Happy Jack. "There ain't any left--and I never
got more'n a taste. Next time, I'm going to tell Jakie to make it in a
wash tub, and make it full; with some uh you gobblers in camp--"

He looked up and discovered the Little Doctor approaching with Chip.
She was smiling a friendly welcome, and she was curious about the new
cook. By the time she had greeted them all and had asked all the
questions she could think of and had gone over to meet Jakie and to
taste, at the urgent behest of the Happy Family, a tiny morsel of
salad which had been overlooked, it would seem that the triumph of the
new cook was complete and that no one could possibly give a thought to
old Patsy.

The Little Doctor, however, seemed to regret his loss--and that in the
face of the delectable salad and the smile of Jakie. "I do think it's
a shame that Patsy left the way he did," she remarked to the Happy
Family in general, being especially careful not to look toward Big
Medicine. "The poor old fellow _walked_ every step of the way to the
ranch, and Claude"--that was Chip's real name--"says it was
twenty-five or six miles. He was so lame and he looked so old and
so--well, friendless, that I could have _cried_ when he came limping
up to the house! He had walked all night, and he got here just at
breakfast time and was too tired to eat.

"I dosed him and doctored his poor feet and made him go to bed, and he
slept all that day. He wanted to start that night for Dry Lake, but of
course we wouldn't let him do that. He was