So also was Kate, for that matter.  No sooner was her beloved Chester out of sight over the hill a mile away, than Mrs. Kate dried her wifely tears and laid hold of her scepter with a firmness that amused Ford exceedingly.  She ordered Dick up to work in the depressed-looking area before the house, which she called her flower garden, a task which Dick seemed perfectly willing to perform, by the way—­although his assistance would have been more than welcome at other work than tying scraggly rose bushes and protecting them from the winter already at hand.

As to Buddy, he surely would have resented, more keenly than the women, the implication that he needed any one to take care of him.  Buddy’s allegiance to Ford was wavering, at that time.  Dick had gone to some trouble to alter an old pair of chaps so that Buddy could wear them, and his star was in the ascendant; a pair of chaps with fringes were, in Buddy’s estimation, a surer pledge of friendship and favor than the privilege of feeding a lame horse.

Buddy was rather terrible, sometimes.  He had a way of standing back unnoticed, and of listening when he was believed to be engrossed in his play.  Afterward he was apt to say the things which should not be said; in other words, he was the average child of seven, living without playmates, and so forced by his environment to interest himself in the endless drama played by the grown-ups around him.  Buddy, therefore, was not unusually startling, one day at dinner, when he looked up from spatting his potato into a flat cake on his plate.

“What hill you going to climb, Ford?” was his manner of exploding his bomb.  “Bald pinnacle?  I can climb that hill myself.”

“I don’t know as I’m going to climb any hills at all,” Ford said indulgently, accepting another helping of potato salad from Mrs. Kate.

“You told dad before he went to gran’ma’s house you was going to climb a big, long hill, and he was more sure than sensible.”  He giggled and showed where two front teeth were missing from among their fellows.  “Dad told him he’d make it, but he’d have to dig in his toes and hang on by his eye-winkers,” he added to the two women.  “Gee!  I’d like to see Ford hang onto a hill by his eye-winkers.  Jo could do it—­she’s got winkers six feet long.”

Miss Josephine had been looking at Ford’s face going red, as enlightenment came to him, but when she caught a quick glance leveled at her lashes, she drooped them immediately so that they almost touched her cheeks.  Bud gave a squeal and pointed to her with his fork.

“Jo’s blushing!  I guess she’s ashamed because she’s got such long winkers, and Ford keeps looking at ’em all the time.  Why don’t you shave ’em off with dad’s razor?  Then Ford would like you, maybe.  He don’t now.  He told dad—­”

“Robert Chester Mason, do you want me to get the hairbrush?” This, it need not be explained, from Mrs. Kate, in a voice that portended grave disaster.