“Maybe you’ll hog-tie the whole bunch,” Jack Bates observed irritably, “but if yuh do, you’ll sure be late to meeting, sonny!”

The Happy Family laughed feeble acquiescence.

“I won’t need to,” Weary told them blandly.  “You all gave the schoolma’am leave to put down your names, and its up to you to make good.  If yuh haven’t got nerve enough to stay in the game till the deck’s shuffled yuh hadn’t any right to buy a stack uh chips.”

“Yeah—­that’s right,” Cal Emmett admitted frankly, because shyness and Cal were strangers.  “The Happy Family sure ought to put this thing through a-whirling.  We’ll give ’em vaudeville till their eyes water and their hands are plumb blistered applauding the show.  Happy, you’re it.  You’ve got to do a toe dance.”

Happy Jack grinned in sickly fashion and sought out his red necktie.

“Say, Weary,” spoke up Jack Bates, “ain’t there going to be any female girls in this opera troupe?”

“Sure.  The Little Doctor’s going to help run the thing, and Rena Jackson and Lea Adams are in it—­and Annie Pilgreen.  Her and Happy are down on the program for ‘Under the Mistletoe’, a tableau—­the red fire, kiss-me-quick brand.”

“Aw gwan!” cried Happy Jack, much distressed and not observing Weary’s lowered eyelid.

His perturbed face and manner gave the Happy Family an idea.  An idea, when entertained by the Happy Family, was a synonym for great mental agony on the part of the object of the thought, and great enjoyment on the part of the Family.

“That’s right,” Weary assured him sweetly, urged to further deceit by the manifest approval of his friends.  “Annie’s ready and willing to do her part, but she’s afraid you haven’t got the nerve to go through with it; but the schoolma’am says you’ll have to anyhow, because your name’s down and you told her distinct you’d do anything she asked yuh to.  Annie likes yuh a heap, Happy; she said so.  Only she don’t like the way yuh hang back on the halter.  She told me, private, that she wished yuh wasn’t so bashful.”

“Aw, gwan!” adjured Happy Jack again, because that was his only form of repartee.

“If I had a girl like Annie—­”

“Aw, I never said I had a girl!”

“It wouldn’t take me more than two minutes to convince her I wasn’t as scared as I looked.  You can gamble I’d go through with that living picture, and I’d sure kiss—­”

“Aw, gwan!  I ain’t stampeding clear to salt water ’cause she said ‘Boo!’ at me—­and I don’t need no cayuse t’ show me the trail to a girl’s house—­”

At this point, Weary succeeded in getting a strangle-hold and the discussion ended rather abruptly—­as they had a way of doing in the Flying U bunk-house.

Over at the school-house that night, when Miss Satterly’s little, gold watch told her it was seven-thirty, she came out of the corner where she had been whispering with the Little Doctor and faced a select, anxious-eyed audience.  Even Weary was not as much at ease as he would have one believe, and for the others—­they were limp and miserable.