CHAPTER XIV

CHING FOO

After the men finished breakfast they surrounded the horse herd and began roping out their mounts for the day. Oriole hastened her own meal so as to watch this activity.

They made a circle around the horses, a rope stretching from each to each on three sides, and the night and day wrangler--the men having the particular care of the ponies--mounted and guarding the fourth arc of the circle.

The bobtail were back at the camp before the roping was done, and they got out their own fresh mounts. Everybody was busy--drivers getting the mules for the wagons out of the herd, men saddling animals that objected strenuously to being put to work again, and all shouting and skylarking.

Just about as the camp was cleaned up and the herd was released in care of the day wrangler, while the mules started with the chuck and bed wagons (the latter piled high with bed-rolls), a buckboard rattled in from the northwest. It was one from headquarters that Mr. Langdon had sent for the night before after their adventure with the mad cow. Yet for Oriole's part she would not have minded at all riding before the ranchman on his saddle.

"I'm just _crazy_," she said to Nurse Brown, "to ride one of these cunning little ponies all by my lonesome. Will it take long for me to learn, do you suppose?"

"You are a smart child," answered the Western woman. "Of course you will learn to ride easily enough. Why, these twins will be cavorting about the ranch on leather, come a year from now. At least, Myron will."

Before noon the party was in sight of the two-story, sprawling building which had been built in Indian times and marked then one of the most advanced posts of the pioneer era. The upper story advanced beyond the walls of the lower all around the structure. Nurse Brown showed Oriole the plugged holes in the upper flooring that had originally been made for the thrusting through of rifles. The Three-bar hacienda had withstood several stiff attacks by Indians in the old days.

"Nothing like that now," she said, smiling at Oriole's wondering face. "We are just as civilized here as they are in Boston."

"Only they don't wear the same kind of clothes in Boston that you do here," returned the girl, smiling suddenly. "Just think what folks would say if Lenny went riding into Boston--or into Littleport! My! wouldn't folks run to see him?"

There were many curious things and much to interest the girl in and about the ranch house. But the most curious, she thought, was Ching Foo. As it chanced, Oriole Putnam had never before seen a Chinaman. Of course, there must have been Chinamen in Bahia, for they are everywhere in the civilized countries. But Oriole had never seen one before she sailed for the States; and most certainly no Chinese laundryman had penetrated to Littleport.

Ching Foo was an old-time Chinaman, with hairless face and an oiled queue. He had not cut this hirsute adornment with the coming in of the Chinese Republic. And he had lived so long at the Three-bar that he considered himself as much a part of the household as Harvey Langdon himself.

The old cook, in his clean blue denim blouse and voluminous trousers, appeared on the wide veranda when the buckboard arrived with the party from the East. He stood with his hands buried in his sleeves, his round black eyes twinkling.

"Hello, Ching Foo!" cried Harvey Langdon. "See what we got? You saby these twins? How do they look to you?"

"Yes. This number-one tlins b'long you," returned the cook, his yellow face cracking into a smile. "Vellee fine tlins. More bet' you keepee lil' boy, lil' gel allee same home. That they b'long," added the Chinaman more gravely. "You saby Ching Foo?"

"I understand you," laughed Harvey Langdon. "You think they will be better off at home. I reckon you are right."

"Sure. I talkee stlaight talkee. I go now catchee one piece big, fat chicken. Make vellee good stew. You saby? Gettee tlins fat."

He trotted off at once to put his words into effect. Ching Foo's main thought in life was cooking for the purpose of making people fat! Oriole at first did not understand much of the cook's pidgin English; but it was not long before she made quite a friend of the old Chinaman. And she had a particular object in thus getting into Ching Foo's good graces.

She had by no means forgotten what Teddy Ford had said regarding Ching Foo's secret knowledge of the robbery at the ranch. Oriole had heard further particulars of the incident coming across the continent; but nothing to explain it.

The old silver that had been brought from England by some ancestor of Harvey Langdon, and which was worth a deal of money because of its antiquity in addition to its intrinsic value, had disappeared from the ranch in a most mysterious way.

In the first place, the chest in which it was kept was very heavy. It was a greater weight than one man could carry. Sadie Brown, the children's nurse, told Oriole this.

"And yet Mr. Langdon believes that poor boy took it?" cried Oriole.

"Harvey Langdon believes that boy knows who took it--and that he had a share in the robbery. Oh, yes. Ted Ford is without doubt a young scamp."

"Oh!" cried Oriole, "I don't want to believe that, Nurse Brown."

"Most of these boys that hang around a ranch are bad ones. Tough as they can be," declared Sadie Brown.

Oriole's opinion was not in the least changed by this statement. She did not think Teddy Ford was "tough" at all.

Now that she was at the Three-bar and had become acquainted with Ching Foo, she was determined to pump the Chinaman for information regarding the robbery. She remembered that Teddy had believed the cook knew something about it that he had not been willing to tell.

What was it Ching Foo had said to Teddy before the boy ran away from the ranch? Oriole finally recalled the queer language, as she had now become used to Ching Foo's pidgin English:

"Plenty bad mans here. Melican boy get away; mebbe get hurt." Oriole recalled that and his final words to Teddy as well: "Three topside bad man--allee same talkee-talkee. Melican boy look out!"

These mysterious words puzzled Oriole very much--as they at first had puzzled Teddy Ford. She tried her best to get the Chinaman interested in the old story of the lost silver. But Ching Foo seemed to be just as dense as any Celestial, who did not want to express an opinion, ever was. And very tantalizing Oriole found the old man could be. One might as well talk to a wooden man.

"Now," often thought Oriole to herself, "who are the three bad men Mr. Ching Foo meant? Are they here now? Can I find them and watch them? Teddy thought he knew who the Chinaman meant. Their names were Ridley, Shaffer, and Mudd."

She proceeded to put the question to George Belden, the cowpuncher with whom she had already struck up a warm friendship. This man, who was one of Mr. Langdon's most trusted foremen, was frequently at the ranch house. And Oriole soon learned that he came particularly to visit Sadie Brown.

But the twins' nurse treated Mr. Belden very harshly--at least, so Oriole thought. There was a look in Belden's blue eyes when he gazed at Nurse Brown, Oriole observed, like the expression in the eyes of a dog that has been beaten by its master. And certainly Nurse Brown did lash the lanky cowman with her tongue in a most unkind way.

"I think Mr. Belden is real nice," the girl ventured again to say to the nurse. "Do you _have_ to be cross to him?"

"I reckon I've got to be to keep him in his place," said the determined spinster. "If I don't he'll be roping me and carrying me off to a parson whether I want to go or not. He's a terribly positive man."

Oriole thought Belden was quite meek. At least, he was not as fierce looking as some of the other punchers. She was not afraid to ask him on one occasion:

"Are there men on the ranch named Ridley, Shaffer and Mudd? And will you point them out to me, please, Mr. Belden?"

"I want to know what you want to be interduced to _them_ for!" demanded the foreman. "Does beat all! They are as ornery punchers as are on the payroll, if you ask me."

"I guess I'm just curious, Mr. Belden," said Oriole frankly. "And--and I heard about them."

"It's little good anybody would be telling you about those three," replied Belden, eyeing her aslant. "They are off with the herd--at the far end of the range. You didn't see them at the cowcamp that time. I think Sol Perkins has been keeping them away from the ranch house for his own good reasons."

"Are--are they real _bad_ men?" asked Oriole.

"'Tis little good they are. But if you mean do they tote guns and shoot up the neighboring towns," and George Belden grinned, "they do not. They would not be let. But nobody trusts them. They have been with the Three-bar six months; but I think they were run out of whatever place they previously worked at. And they stick together like three old cronies. The other boys don't seem to take to 'em much."

"You don't know a thing really bad against Shaffer and Tom Mudd and Tony Ridley," declared Nurse Brown, breaking into the discussion. She seemed to feel it her duty to oppose almost everything that George Belden said.

"Well, I sure don't know anything good about them," rejoined the foreman. "And I don't reckon Oriole wants to make friends of them."

Oriole was quite sure this was so when, by chance, she caught a view of the three men whose names Teddy Ford had first mentioned in her hearing. But before that the girl had become well enough acquainted with Ching Foo to ask him about the suspected punchers.

She had already told the cook of her acquaintance with Teddy Ford. Although it was so difficult for her, a stranger, to understand Ching Foo's queer speech, she knew that the cook fully understood all that she said. And as Sadie Brown observed, Oriole was by no means tongue-tied.

She told Ching Foo all about the accident on the ice when Teddy had saved the twins and Oriole herself from drowning. And then she wanted to know if the Chinaman really believed Teddy knew about the robbery of the ranch silver.

"You know, Mr. Ching Foo," she said earnestly, "Teddy could not have carried away that chest of plate that Mr. Langdon lost. He just couldn't!"

"All light," said Ching Foo, in his staccato way. "Missy say who did, eh?"

That rather nonplused Oriole.

"How do I know?" she asked. "You were here at the time, and I wasn't. _You_ might know."

"Him not my pidgin," declared Ching Foo, with a blank expression of face.

"Was any of those three men about the ranch the day the silver was stolen?" asked Oriole shrewdly.

Ching Foo wagged his head solemnly in reply.

"Me no see," he said.