To her surprise, for the first time since the surgeons’ last visit, Jack laughed.  It was an amusing group, the wild-cat in the chicken-coop with its body-guard of dirty, grinning little Mexicans, and Norman circling excitedly around them, explaining that Lupe asked a dollar for it, but that he could only give fifty cents, and for Jack to make him understand.

Jack did make him understand, and conducted the trade to Norman’s entire satisfaction.  Then recognizing Lupe as one of the boys he had seen around the office, he began to question him in Mexican about the mines and the men.  Then it developed that Lupe was the son of one of the men who had been saved by Jack’s quick warning, and when the boy repeated what some of the miners had said about him, Jack grew red and did not translate it all.  The part he did translate was to the effect that the men wanted him back at the mine.  They were having trouble with the “fat boss,” their name for the new manager.

The little transaction and talk with the boys seemed to cheer Jack up so much that Mary mentally apologized to the wild-cat for her inhospitable reception, and electrified Norman by an offer to help him build a more suitable cage for it than the coop in which it was confined.  Norman, who had unbounded faith in Mary’s ability as a carpenter, accepted her offer joyfully.  She wasn’t like some girls he had known.  When she drove a nail it held things together, and whatever she built would be strong enough to hold any beast he might choose to put in it.

[ILLUSTRATION “WHEN SHE DROVE A NAIL IT HELD THINGS TOGETHER.”]

“Now, if I could get a couple of coyotes and a badger and a fox or two,” he remarked, “I’d be fixed.”

Mary, who was sorting over a pile of old boards back of the woodshed, paused in alarm.

“It strikes me, young man,” she said, a trifle sarcastically, “that the more some people get the more they want.  Your wishes seem to be on the Jack’s Bean-stalk scale.  They grow to reach the sky in a single night.  Suppose you did have those things, you wouldn’t be satisfied.  It would be a zebra and a giraffe and a jungle tiger next.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” he declared.  “I wouldn’t know how to take care of them, but I do know how to feed the things that live around here.”

“What do you want them for?”

“Well, you know what Huldah said about summer campers.  There’s always a lot of boys along, and if I had a sort of menagerie they’d want to come over and play circus, and then they’d let me in on their ball-games and things.  It’s awful lonesome with school out and Billy Downs gone back East.  There’s so few fellows here my age, and Jack won’t let me play much with the little Mexicans.  They aren’t much fun anyhow when I can’t talk their lingo.”

Mary straightened up, hammer in hand, and squinted her eyes thoughtfully, a way she had when something puzzled her.  It had not occurred to her that Norman had social longings like her own which Lone-Rock failed to satisfy.  He watched her anxiously.  That preoccupied squint always meant that interesting developments would follow.