At last Big Medicine brought his big voice into the awkward silence.  “Honest to grandma, Mrs. Chip,” he said earnestly, “I’d give a lot right now to have old Patsy back—­er—­just to have around, if it made him feel bad to leave.  I reckon maybe that was my fault:  I hadn’t oughta pitched quite so hard, and I had oughta looked where I was throwin’ m’ rider.  I reelize that no cook likes to have a fellow standin’ on his head in a big pan uh bread-sponge, on general principles if not on account uh the bread.  Uh course, we’ve all knowed old Patsy to take just about as great liberties himself with his sponge—­but we’ve got to recollect that it was his dough, by cripes, and that pipe ashes ain’t the same as a fellow takin’ a shampoo in the pan.  No, I reelize that I done wrong, and I’m willin’ to apologize for it right here and now.  At the same time,” he ended dryly, “I will own that I’m dead stuck on little Jakie, and I’d ruther ride for the Flying U and eat Jakie’s grub than any other fate I can think of right now.  Whilst I’m sorry for what I done, yuh couldn’t pry me loose from Jakie with a stick uh dynamite—­and that’s a fact, Mrs. Chip.”

The Little Doctor laughed, pushed back her hair in the way she had, glanced again at the unresponsive faces of the original members of the Happy Family and gave up as gracefully as possible.

“Oh, of course Patsy’s an old crank, and Jakie’s a waxed angel,” she surrendered with a little grimace.  “You think so now, but that’s because you are being led astray by your appetites, like all men.  You just wait:  You’ll be homesick for a sight of that fat, bald-headed, cranky old Patsy bouncing along on the mess-wagon and swearing in Dutch at his horses, before you’re through.  If you’re not so completely gone over to Jakie that you will eat nothing but what he has cooked, come on up to the house.  The Countess is making a twogallon freezer of ice-cream for you, and she has a big pan of angel cake to go with it!  You don’t deserve it—­but come along anyway.”  Which was another endearing way of the Little Doctor’s—­the way of sweetening all her lectures with something very nice at the end.

The Happy Family felt very much ashamed and very sorry that they could not feel kindly toward Patsy, even to please the Little Doctor.  They sincerely wanted to please her and to have her unqualified approval; but wanting Patsy back, or feeling even the slightest regret that he was gone, seemed to them a great deal too much to ask of them.  Since this is a story of cooks and of eating, one may with propriety add, however, that the invitation to ice cream and angel cake, coming though it did immediately after that wonderful supper of Jakie’s, was accepted with alacrity and their usual thoroughness of accomplishment; not for the world would they have offended the Little Doctor by declining so gracious an invitation—­the graciousness being manifested in her smile and her voice rather than in the words she spoke—­leaving out the enchantment which hovers over the very name of angel cake and ice cream.  The Happy Family went to bed that night as complacently uncomfortable as children after a Christmas dinner.