The Fighting Edge
by William MacLeod Raine · English · Gutenberg #26520 · 434,291 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Fighting Edge
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Fighting Edge
Author: William MacLeod Raine
Release date: September 4, 2008 [eBook #26520]
Most recently updated: January 4, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26520
Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIGHTING EDGE ***
Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
THE FIGHTING EDGE
By
WILLIAM MACLEOD RAINE
Author of
"Man-Size," "Gunsight Pass," "Tangled Trails," Etc.
Boston and New York
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1922
----------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY WILLIAM MACLEOD RAINE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
MY MOTHER
----------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Pete's Girl 1
II. "A Spunky Li'l' Devil" 7
III. Pals 12
IV. Clipped Wings 17
V. June asks Questions 25
VI. "Don't You Touch Him!" 33
VII. An Elopement 41
VIII. Blister Gives Advice 50
IX. The White Feather 58
X. In the Image of God 68
XI. June Prays 76
XII. Mollie Takes Charge 86
XIII. Bear Cat Asks Questions 93
XIV. Houck Takes a Ride 100
XV. A Scandal Scotched 106
XVI. Blister as Deus ex Machina 110
XVII. The Back of a Bronc 117
XVIII. The First Day 123
XIX. Dud Qualifies as Court Jester 127
XX. "The Bigger the Hat the Smaller the Herd" 135
XXI. June Discovers a New World 141
XXII. An Alternative Proposed and Declined 145
XXIII. Bob Crawls his Hump Sudden 150
XXIV. In the Saddle 158
XXV. The Rio Blanco puts in a Claim 162
XXVI. Cutting Sign 171
XXVII. Partners in Peril 179
XXVIII. June is Glad 189
XXIX. "Injuns" 194
XXX. A Recruit Joins the Rangers 200
XXXI. "Don't you like me any more?" 207
XXXII. A Cup of Cold Water 214
XXXIII. "Keep A-Comin', Red Haid" 222
XXXIV. An Obstinate Man stands Pat 230
XXXV. Three in a Pit 237
XXXVI. A Hero is Embarrassed 242
XXXVII. A Responsible Citizen 249
XXXVIII. Bear Cat Asleep 253
XXXIX. Bear Cat Awake 258
XL. Big-Game Hunters at Work 262
XLI. In a Lady's Chamber 266
XLII. A Walk in the Park 270
XLIII. Not even Powder-burnt 278
XLIV. Bob holds his Red Haid high 284
XLV. The Outlaw gets a Bad Break 290
XLVI. The End of a Crooked Trail 297
XLVII. The Kingdom of Joy 301
----------------------------------------------------------------------
THE FIGHTING EDGE
----------------------------------------------------------------------
THE FIGHTING EDGE
CHAPTER I
PETE'S GIRL
She stood in the doorway, a patched and ragged Cinderella of the desert.
Upon her slim, ill-poised figure the descending sun slanted a shaft of
glory. It caught in a spotlight the cheap, dingy gown, the coarse
stockings through the holes of which white flesh peeped, the heavy,
broken brogans that disfigured the feet. It beat upon a small head with a
mass of black, wild-flying hair, on red lips curved with discontent, into
dark eyes passionate and resentful at what fate had made of her young
life. A silent, sullen lass, one might have guessed, and the judgment
would have been true as most first impressions.
The girl watched her father drive half a dozen dogies into the mountain
corral perched precariously on the hillside. Soon now it would be dusk.
She went back into the cabin and began to prepare supper.
In the rickety stove she made a fire of cottonwood. There was a
business-like efficiency in the way she peeled potatoes, prepared the
venison for the frying-pan, and mixed the biscuit dough.
June Tolliver and her father lived alone on Piceance[1] Creek. Their
nearest neighbor was a trapper on Eighteen-Mile Hill. From one month's
end to another she did not see a woman. The still repression in the
girl's face was due not wholly to loneliness. She lived on the edge of a
secret she intuitively felt was shameful. It colored her thoughts and
feelings, set her apart from the rest of the world. Her physical
reactions were dominated by it. Yet what this secret was she could only
guess at.
A knock sounded on the door.
June brushed back a rebellious lock of hair from her eyes with the wrist
above a flour-whitened hand. "Come in."
A big dark man stood on the threshold. His glance swept the girl,
searched the room, and came back to her.
"Pete Tolliver live here?"
"Yes. He's lookin' after the stock. Be in soon, likely."
The man closed the door. June dragged a chair from a corner and returned
to her cooking.
From his seat the man watched her. His regard was disturbing. It had a
quality of insistence. His eyes were cold yet devouring. They were
possessive, not clear but opaque. They did not look at her as other eyes
did. She felt the blood burning in her cheeks.
Presently, as she passed from the table to the stove to look at the
sputtering venison, she flashed a resentful glance at him. It did not
touch his effrontery.
"You Pete's girl?" he asked.
"Yes."
"You've grown. Knew you when you was learnin' to crawl."
"In Brown's Park?" The words were out before she could stop them.
"You done said it." He smiled, not pleasantly, she thought. "I'm a real
old friend of yore father."
Curiosity touched with apprehension began to stir in her. For those early
years she had only memory to rely upon. Tolliver never referred to them.
On that subject the barriers were up between the two. Fugitive flashes of
that first home came back to June. She remembered a sweet, dark-eyed
woman nuzzling her little body with kisses after the bath, an hour when
that mother wept as though her heart would break and she had put little
baby arms in tight embrace round her neck by way of comfort. That dear
woman was not in any of the later pictures. A pile of stones on a
hillside in Brown's Park marked the grave.
Between the day of 'Lindy Tolliver's outburst of grief and the child's
next recollection was a gap. The setting of the succeeding memories was a
frame house on a dusty road at the edge of a frontier town. In front of
it jolted big freight wagons, three of them fastened together and drawn
by a double row of oxen so long she could not count them. The place was
Rawlins, Wyoming, and it was an outfitting point for a back country in
Colorado hundreds of miles from the railroad. The chief figure in June's
horizon was a stern-eyed, angular aunt who took the place of both father
and mother and did her duty implacably. The two lived together forever,
it seemed to the child.
June wakened one night from the light of a lamp in her aunt's hand. A man
was standing beside her. He was gaunt and pallid, in his eyes a look of
hunger that reminded her of a hunted coyote. When he took her tightly in
his arms she began to cry. He had murmured, "My li'l' baby, don't you be
scared of yore paw." As mysteriously as he had come to life, so Pete
Tolliver disappeared again.
Afterward there was a journey with a freight outfit which lasted days and
days. June was in charge of a bullwhacker. All she remembered about him
was that he had been kind to her and had expended a crackling vocabulary
on his oxen. The end of the trek brought her to Piceance Creek and a
father now heavily bearded and with long, unkempt hair. They had lived
here ever since.
Did this big man by the window belong to her father's covered past? Was
there menace in his coming? Vaguely June felt that there was.
The door opened and Tolliver stepped in. He was rather under middle-size,
dressed in down-at-the-heel boots, butternut jeans, cotton shirt, and
dusty, ragged slouch hat. The grizzled beard hid the weak mouth, but the
skim-milk eyes, the expression of the small-featured face, betrayed the
man's lack of force. You may meet ten thousand like him west of the
Mississippi. He lives in every village, up every creek, in every valley,
and always he is the cat's-paw of stronger men who use him for good or
ill to serve their ends.
The nester stopped in his tracks. It was impossible for June to miss the
dismay that found outlet in the fallen jaw and startled eyes.
In the stranger's grin was triumphant malice. "You sure look glad to see
me, Pete, and us such old friends too. Le's see, I ain't seen you
since--since--" He stopped, as though his memory were at fault, but June
sensed the hint of a threat in the uncompleted sentence.
Reluctantly Tolliver took the offered hand. His consternation seemed to
have stricken him dumb.
"Ain't you going to introduce yore old pal to the girl?" the big man
asked.
Not willingly, the rancher found the necessary words. "June, meet Mr.
Houck."
June was putting the biscuits in the oven. She nodded an acknowledgment
of the introduction. Back of the resentful eyes the girl's brain was
busy.
"Old side pardners, ain't we, Pete?" Houck was jeering at him almost
openly.
The older man mumbled what might be taken for an assent.
"Branded a heap of cattle, you 'n' me. Eh, Pete?" The stranger settled
deeper in the chair. "Jake Houck an' you could talk over old times all
night. We was frolicsome colts."
Tolliver felt his hand forced. "Put off yore hat and wash up, Jake.
You'll stay to-night, o' course."
"Don't mind if I do. I'm headed for Glenwood. Reckon I'd better put the
horse up first."
The two men left the cabin. When they returned half an hour later, the
supper was on the table. June sat on the side nearest the stove and
supplied the needs of the men. Coffee, hot biscuits, more venison, a
second dish of gravy: no trained waiter could have anticipated their
wants any better. If she was a bit sulky, she had reason for it. Houck's
gaze followed her like a searchlight. It noted the dark good looks of her
tousled head, the slimness of the figure which moved so awkwardly, a
certain flash of spirit in the undisciplined young face.
"How old's yore girl?" the man asked his host.
Tolliver hesitated, trying to remember. "How old are you, June?"
"Going on sixteen," she answered, eyes smouldering angrily.
This man's cool, impudent appraisal of her was hateful, she felt.
He laughed at her manner, easily, insolently, for he was of the type that
finds pleasure in the umbrage of women annoyed by his effrontery. Of the
three the guest was the only one quite at his ease. Tolliver's
ingratiating jokes and the heartiness of his voice rang false. He was
troubled, uncertain how to face the situation that had arisen.
His daughter reflected this constraint. Why did her father fear this big
dominating fellow? What was the relation between them? Why did his very
presence bring with it a message of alarm?
She left them before the stove as soon as the dishes were washed,
retiring to the bedroom at the other end of the log cabin. Far into the
night she heard them talking, in low voices that made an indistinct
murmur. To the sound of them she fell asleep.
-----
[1] Pronounced _Pee-ance_.
CHAPTER II
"A SPUNKY LI'L' DEVIL"
Houck rode away next morning after breakfast, but not before he had made
a promise June construed as a threat.
"Be back soon, girl."
Her eyes were on the corral, from which her father was driving the
dogies. "What's it to me?" she said with sullen resentment.
"More'n you think. I've took a fancy to you. When I come back I'll talk
business."
The girl's eyes did not turn toward him, but the color flooded the dark
cheeks. "With Father maybe. Not with me. You've got no business to talk
over with me."
"Think so? Different here. Take a good look at me, June Tolliver."
"What for?" Her glance traveled over him disdainfully to the hound puppy
chasing its tail. She felt a strange excitement drumming in her veins.
"I've seen folks a heap better worth lookin' at."
"Because I'm tellin' you to." His big hand caught her chin and swung it
back. "Because I'm figurin' on marryin' you right soon."
Her dark eyes blazed. They looked at him straight enough now. "Take yore
hand off'n me. D'you hear?"
He laughed, slowly, delightedly. "You're a spunky li'l' devil. Suits me
fine. Jake Houck never did like jog-trotters in harness."
"Lemme go," she ordered, and a small brown fist clenched.
"Not now, nor ever. You're due to wear the Houck brand, girl."
She struck, hard, with all the strength of her lithe and supple body.
Above his cheek-bone a red streak leaped out where the sharp knuckles had
crushed the flesh.
A second time he laughed, harshly. Her chin was still clamped in a
vice-like grip that hurt. "I get a kiss for that, you vixen." With a
sweeping gesture he imprisoned both of the girl's arms and drew the slim
body to him. He kissed her, full on the lips, not once but half a dozen
times, while she fought like a fury without the least avail.
Presently the man released her hands and chin.
"Hit me again if you like, and I'll c'lect my pay prompt," he jeered.
She was in a passionate flame of impotent anger. He had insulted her,
trampled down the pride of her untamed youth, brushed away the bloom of
her maiden modesty. And there was nothing she could do to make him pay.
He was too insensitive to be reached by words, no matter how she pelted
them at him.
A sob welled up from her heart. She turned and ran into the house.
Houck grinned, swung to the saddle, and rode up the valley. June would
hate him good and plenty, he thought. That was all right. He had her in
the hollow of his hand. All her thoughts would be full of him. After she
quit struggling to escape she would come snuggling up to him with a
girl's shy blandishments. It was his boast that he knew all about women
and their ways.
June was not given to tears. There was in her the stark pioneer blood
that wrested the West in two generations from unfriendly nature. But the
young virgin soul had been outraged. She lay on the bed of her room, face
down, the nails of her fingers biting into the palms of the hands, a lump
in the full brown throat choking her.
She was a wild, free thing of the hills, undisciplined by life. Back of
June's anger and offended pride lurked dread, as yet indefinite and
formless. Who was this stranger who had swaggered into her life and
announced himself its lord and master? She would show him his place,
would teach him how ridiculous his pretensions were. But even as she
clenched her teeth on that promise there rose before her a picture of the
fellow's straddling stride, of the fleering face with its intrepid eyes
and jutting, square-cut jaw. He was stronger than she. No scruples would
hold him back from the possession of his desires. She knew she would
fight savagely, but a chill premonition of failure drenched the girl's
heart.
Later, she went out to the stable where Tolliver was riveting a broken
tug. It was characteristic of the man that all his tools, harness, and
machinery were worn out or fractured. He never brought a plough in out of
the winter storms or mended a leak in the roof until the need was
insistent. Yet he was not lazy. He merely did not know how to order
affairs with any system.
"Who is that man?" June demanded.
He looked up, mildly surprised and disturbed at the imperative in the
girl's voice. "Why, didn't I tell you, honey--Jake Houck?"
"I don't want to know his name. I want to know who he is--all about
him."
Tolliver drove home a rivet before he answered. "Jake's a cowman." His
voice was apologetic. "I seen you didn't like him. He's biggity, Jake
is."
"He's the most hateful man I ever saw," she burst out.
Pete lifted thin, straw-colored eyebrows in questioning, but June had no
intention of telling what had taken place. She would fight her own
battles.
"Well, he's a sure enough toughfoot," admitted the rancher.
"When did you know him?"
"We was ridin' together, a right long time ago."
"Where?"
"Up around Rawlins--thataway."
"He said he knew you in Brown's Park."
The man flashed a quick, uncertain look at his daughter. It appeared to
ask how much Houck had told. "I might 'a' knowed him there too. Come to
think of it, I did. Punchers drift around a heap. Say, how about dinner?
You got it started? I'm gettin' powerful hungry."
June knew the subject was closed. She might have pushed deeper into her
father's reticence, but some instinct shrank from what she might uncover.
There could be only pain in learning the secret he so carefully hid.
There had been no discussion of it between them, nor had it been
necessary to have any. It was tacitly understood that they would have
little traffic with their neighbors, that only at rare intervals would
Pete drive to Meeker, Glenwood Springs, or Bear Cat to dispose of furs he
had trapped and to buy supplies. The girl's thoughts and emotions were
the product largely of this isolation. She brooded over the mystery of
her father's past till it became an obsession in her life. To be brought
into close contact with dishonor makes one either unduly sensitive or
callously indifferent. Upon June it had the former effect.
The sense of inferiority was branded upon her. She had seen girls
giggling at the shapeless sacks she had stitched together for clothes
with which to dress herself. She was uncouth, awkward, a thin black thing
ugly as sin. It had never dawned on her that she possessed rare
potentialities of beauty, that there was coming a time when she would
bloom gloriously as a cactus in a sand waste.
After dinner June went down to the creek and followed a path along its
edge. She started up a buck lying in the grass and watched it go crashing
through the brush. It was a big-game country. The settlers lived largely
on venison during the fall and winter. She had killed dozens of
blacktail, an elk or two, and more than once a bear. With a rifle she was
a crack shot.
But to-day she was not hunting. She moved steadily along the winding
creek till she came to a bend in its course. Beyond this a fishing-rod
lay in the path. On a flat rock near it a boy was stretched, face up,
looking into the blue, unflecked sky.
CHAPTER III
PALS
He was a red-headed, stringy boy between eighteen and nineteen years old.
His hands were laced back of the head, but he waggled a foot by way of
greeting.
"'Lo, June," he called.
"What you doin'?" she demanded.
"Oh, jes' watchin' the grass grow."
She sat down beside him, drawing up her feet beneath the skirt and
gathering the knees between laced fingers. Moodily, she looked down at
the water swirling round the rocks.
Bob Dillon said nothing. He had a capacity for silence that was not
uncompanionable. They could sit by the hour, these two, quite content,
without exchanging a dozen sentences. The odd thing about it was that
they were not old friends. Three weeks ago they had met for the first
time. He was flunkeying for a telephone outfit building a line to Bear
Cat.
"A man stayed up to the house last night," she said at last.
He leaned his head on a hand, turning toward her. The light blue eyes in
the freckled face rested on those of the girl.
Presently she added, with a flare of surging anger, "I hate him."
"Why?"
The blood burned beneath the tan of the brown cheeks. "'Cause."
"Shucks! That don't do any good. It don't buy you anything."
She swung upon him abruptly. "Don't you hate the men at the camp when
they knock you around?"
"What'd be the use? I duck outa the way next time."
Two savage little demons glared at him out of her dark eyes. "Ain't you
got any sand in yore craw, Bob Dillon? Do you aim to let folks run on you
all yore life? I'd fight 'em if 't was the last thing I ever did."
"Different here. I'd get my block knocked off about twice a week. You
don't see me in any scraps where I ain't got a look-in. I'd rather let
'em boot me a few," he said philosophically.
She frowned at him, in a kind of puzzled wonderment. "You're right queer.
If I was a man--"
The sentence died out. She was not a man. The limitations of sex
encompassed her. In Jake Houck's arms she had been no more than an
infant. He would crush her resistance--no matter whether it was physical
or mental--and fling out at her the cruel jeering laughter of one who
could win without even exerting his strength. She would never marry
him--never, never in the world. But--
A chill dread drenched her heart.
Young Dillon was sensitive to impressions. His eyes, fixed on the girl's
face, read something of her fears.
"This man--who is he?" he asked.
"Jake Houck. I never saw him till last night. My father knew him
when--when he was young."
"What's the matter with this Houck? Why don't you like him?"
"If you'd see him--how he looks at me." She flashed to anger. "As if I
was something he owned and meant to tame."
"Oh, well, you know the old sayin', a cat may look at a king. He can't
harm you."
"Can't he? How do you know he can't?" she challenged.
"How can he, come to that?"
"I don't say he can." Looked at in cold blood, through the eyes of
another, the near-panic that had seized her a few hours earlier appeared
ridiculous. "But I don't have to like him, do I? He acted--hateful--if
you want to know."
"How d'you mean--hateful?"
A wave of color swept through her cheeks to the brown throat. How could
she tell him that there was something in the man's look that had disrobed
her, something in his ribald laugh that had made her feel unclean? Or
that the fellow had brushed aside the pride and dignity that fenced her
and ravished kisses from her lips while he mocked? She could not have put
her feeling into words if she had tried, and she had no intention of
trying.
"Mean," she said. "A low-down, mean bully."
The freckled boy watched her with a curious interest. She made no more
sex appeal to him than he did to her, and that was none at all. The first
thing that had moved him in the child was the friendlessness back of her
spitfire offense. She knew no women, no other girls. The conditions of
life kept her aloof from the ones she met casually once or twice a year.
She suspected their laughter, their whispers about the wild girl on
Piceance Creek. The pride with which she ignored them was stimulated by
her sense of inferiority. June had read books. She felt the clothes she
made were hideous, the conditions of her existence squalid; and back of
these externals was the shame she knew because they must hide themselves
from the world on account of the secret.
Bob did not know all that, but he guessed some of it. He had not gone
very far in experience himself, but he suspected that this wild creature
of the hills was likely to have a turbulent and perhaps tragic time of
it. She was very much a child of impulse. Thirstily she had drunk in all
he could tell her of the world beyond the hills that hemmed them in. He
had known her frank, grateful, dreamy, shy, defiant, and once, for no
apparent reason, a flaming little fury who had rushed to eager repentance
when she discovered no offense was meant. He had seen her face bubbling
with mirth at the antics of a chipmunk, had looked into the dark eyes
when they were like hill fires blazing through mist because of the sunset
light in the crotch of the range.
"I reckon Mr. Tolliver won't let this Houck bully _you_ none," the boy
said.
"I ain't scared of him," she answered.
But June knew there would be small comfort for her in the thought of her
father's protection. She divined intuitively that he would be a liability
rather than an asset in any conflict that might arise between her and
Jake Houck.
"If there was anything I could do--but o' course there ain't."
"No," she agreed. "Oh, well, I'm not worryin'. I'll show him when he
comes back. I'm as big as he is behind a gun."
Bob looked at her, startled. He saw she was whistling to keep up her
courage. "Are you sure enough afraid of him?"
Her eyes met his. She nodded. "He said he was coming back to marry
me--good as said I could like it or lump it, he didn't care which."
"Sho! Tha's jus' talk. No girl has to marry a man if she don't want to.
You don't need any gun-play. He can't make his brags good if you won't
have him. It's a free country."
"If he told you to do something--this Jake Houck--you wouldn't think it
was so free," the girl retorted without any life in her voice.
He jumped up, laughing. "Well, I don't expect he's liable to tell me to
do anything. He ain't ever met up with me. I gotta go peel the spuds for
supper. Don't you worry, June. He's bluffin'."
"I reckon," she said, and nodded a careless good-bye.
CHAPTER IV
CLIPPED WINGS
The Cinderella of Piceance Creek was scrupulously clean even though
ragged and unkempt. Every Saturday night she shooed Pete Tolliver out of
the house and took a bath in the tub which usually hung suspended from a
wooden peg driven into the outer wall of the log cabin. Regularly as
Monday came wash day.
On a windy autumn day, with the golden flames of fall burning the foliage
of the hill woods, June built a fire of cottonwood branches near the
brook and plunged with fierce energy into the week's washing. She was a
strong, lithe young thing and worked rapidly. Her methods might not be
the latest or the best, but they won results. Before the sun had climbed
halfway to its zenith she had the clothes on the line.
Since she had good soapy suds and plenty of hot water left in the iron
kettle, June decided to scrub the bed covers. Twenty minutes later,
barefooted and barelegged, her skirts tucked up above the knees, the
young washwoman was trampling blankets in the tub. She had no reason to
suppose that anybody was within a mile of her. Wherefore, since the world
was beautiful and mere life a joy, she improvised a child's song of
thanksgiving.
It was a foolish little thing without rhyme or reason. It began nowhere
and finished at the same place. But it lifted straight from the heart and
perhaps it traveled as far heavenward as most prayers. She danced among
the suds as she sang it, brown arms, bare to the elbows, stretched to the
sunlit hills.
Wings--wings--wings!
I can fly, 'way 'way 'way off,
Over the creek, over the pinons.
Goodness, yes! Like a meadow-lark.
Over the hills, clear to Denver,
Where the trains are.
And it's lovely--lovely--lovely.
It was an unschooled, impulsive cry of the heart to the great soul of
life and beauty that lies back of nature. No human eyes or ears were
meant to see or hear the outburst. A shy girl's first day-dreams of her
lover ought no more to be dragged out to the public gaze than this.
Through the quaking asps by the creek narrowed eyes gloated. Out of the
thicket Jake Houck strode with a ribald laugh.
"Right pretty, my dear, but don't you spread them wings an' leave yore
man alone."
The dancing spirit fled her flying feet. She was no longer a daughter of
the skies, attuned to sunshine and laughter and the golden harmony of the
hills. Joy and life were stricken out of her.
He had heard. He had seen. A poignant shame enveloped and scorched the
girl's body. She was a wild thing who lived within herself. It was easy
to put her in the wrong. She felt the mortification of one who has been
caught in some indecent exhibition.
The humiliation was at first for the song and dance. Not till another
moment did she think of the bare legs rising out of the soapsuds. His
smouldering gaze brought them to mind.
Instantly she leaped from the tub, shook down the skirts, snatched up
shoes and stockings, and fled barefooted to the house. A brogan dropped a
few steps from the start. She stopped, as though to pick it up. But Houck
was following. The girl turned and ran like a deer.
Houck retrieved the brogan and followed slowly. He smiled. His close-set
eyes were gleaming. This was an adventure just to his taste.
The door of the cabin was bolted. He knocked.
"Here's yore shoe, sweetheart," he called.
No answer came. He tried the back door. It, too, had the bolt driven
home.
"All right. If it ain't yore shoe I'll take it along with me. So long."
He walked away and waited in the bushes. His expectation was that this
might draw her from cover. It did not.
Half an hour later Tolliver rode across the mesa. He found Houck waiting
for him at the entrance to the corral. Pete nodded a rather surly
greeting. He could not afford to quarrel with the man, but he was one of
the last persons in the world he wanted to see.
"'Lo, Jake," he said. "Back again, eh?"
"Yep. Finished my business. I got to have a talk with you, Pete."
Tolliver slid a troubled gaze at him. What did Jake want? Was it
money--hush money? The trapper did not have fifty dollars to his name,
nor for that matter twenty.
"'S all right, Jake. If there's anything I can do for you--why, all you
got to do's to let me know," he said uneasily.
Houck laughed, derisively. "Sure. I know how fond you are of me, Pete.
You're plumb glad to see me again, ain't you? Jes' a-honin' to talk over
old times, I'll bet."
"I'd as lief forget them days, Jake," Tolliver confessed. "I done turned
over another chapter, as you might say. No need rakin' them up, looks
like."
The big man's grin mocked him. "Tha's up to you, Pete. Me, I aim to be
reasonable. I ain't throwin' off on my friends. All I want's to make sure
they _are_ my friends. Pete, I've took a fancy to yore June. I reckon
I'll fix it up an' marry her."
His cold eyes bored into Tolliver. They held the man's startled, wavering
gaze fixed.
"Why, Jake, you're old enough to be her father," he presently faltered.
"Maybe I am. But if there's a better man anywheres about I'd like to meet
up with him an' have him show me. I ain't but forty-two, Pete, an' I can
whip my weight in wild cats."
The father's heart sank. He knew Houck. The man would get by hook or
crook what he wanted. He could even foretell what his next move would
be.
"She's only a kid, Jake, not thinkin' none about gettin' married. In a
year or two, maybe--"
"I'm talkin' about now, Pete--this week."
Tolliver wriggled, like a trout on the hook. "What does she say? You
spoke of it to her?"
"Sure. She'll like it fine when she gets her mind used to it. I know how
to handle women, Pete. I'm mentionin' this to you because I want you to
use yore influence. See?"
Pete saw, too well. He moistened his lips with the tip of the tongue.
"Why, I don't reckon I could very well do that. A girl's got to make up
her own mind. She's too young to be figurin' on marryin'. Better give her
time."
"No." Houck flung the word out like an oath. "Now. Right away."
The trapper's voice took on a plaintive note, almost a whine. "You was
sayin' yoreself, Jake, that she'd have to get used to it. Looks like it
wouldn't be good to rush--"
"She can get used to it after we're married."
"O' course I want to do what's right by my li'l' June. You do too for
that matter. We wouldn't either one of us do her a meanness."
"I'm going to marry her," Houck insisted harshly.
"When a girl loses her mother she's sure lost her best friend. It's up to
her paw to see she gets a square deal." There was a quaver of emotion in
Tolliver's voice. "I don't reckon he can make up to her--"
A sound came from Houck's throat like a snarl. "Are you tryin' to tell me
that Pete Tolliver's girl is too good for me? Is that where you're
driftin'?"
"Now don't you get mad, Jake," the older man pleaded. "These here are
different times. I don't want my June mixed up with--with them Brown's
Park days an' all."
"Meanin' me?"
"You're twistin' my words, Jake," the father went on, an anxious desire
to propitiate frowning out of the wrinkled face. "I ain't sayin' a word
against you. I'm explainin' howcome I to feel like I do. Since I--bumped
into that accident in the Park--"
Houck's ill-natured laugh cut the sentence. It was a jangled dissonance
without mirth. "What accident?" he jeered.
"Why--when I got into the trouble--"
"You mean when Jas Stuart caught you rustlin' an' you murdered him an'
went to the pen. That what you mean?" he demanded loudly.
Tolliver caught his sleeve. "S-sh! She don't know a thing about it. You
recollect I told you that."
The other nodded, hard eyes gloating over the rancher's distress. "An' o'
course she don't know you broke jail at Canyon City an' are liable to be
dragged back if any one should happen to whisper to the sheriff."
"Not a thing about all that. I wouldn't holler it out thataway if I was
you, Jake," Tolliver suggested, glancing nervously toward the house.
"Maybe I ought to 'a' told her, but I never did. Her maw died of it, an'
I jes' couldn't make out to tell June. You see yoreself how it would be,
Pete. Her a li'l' trick with nobody but me. I ain't no great shakes, but
at that I'm all she's got. I figured that 'way off here, under another
name, they prob'ly never would find me."
"Pretty good guess, Pete Purdy."
"Don' call me that," begged Tolliver.
Houck showed his teeth in an evil grin. "I forgot. What I was sayin' was
that nobody knows you're here but me. Most folks have forgot all about
you. You can fix things so 's to be safe enough."
"You wouldn't give me away, Jake. You was in on the rustlin' too. We was
pals. It was jes' my bad luck I met up with Jas that day. I didn't begin
the shooting. You know that."
"I ain't likely to give away my own father-in-law, am I?"
Again the close-set, hard eyes clamped fast to the wavering ones of the
tortured outlaw. In them Tolliver read an ultimatum. Notice was being
served on him that there was only one way to seal Houck's lips.
That way he did not want to follow. Pete was a weak father, an
ineffective one, wholly unable to give expression to the feeling that at
times welled up in him. But June was all his life now held. He suffered
because of the loneliness their circumstances forced upon her. The best
was what he craved for her.
And Jake Houck was a long way from the best. He had followed rough and
evil trails all his life. As a boy, in his cowpuncher days, he had been
hard and callous. Time had not improved him.
June came to the door of the cabin and called.
"What is it, honey?" Tolliver asked.
"He's got my shoe. I want it."
Pete looked at the brogan sticking out of Jake's pocket. The big fellow
forestalled a question.
"I'll take it to her," he said.
Houck strode to the house.
"So it's yore shoe after all," he grinned.
"Give it here," June demanded.
"Say pretty please."
She flashed to anger. "You're the meanest man I ever did meet."
"An' you're the prettiest barelegged dancer on the Creek," he countered.
June stamped the one shoe she was wearing. "Are you going to give me that
brogan or not?"
"If you'll let me put it on for you."
Furious, she flung round and went back into the house.
He laughed delightedly, then tossed the heavy shoe into the room after
her. "Here's yore shoe, girl. I was only foolin'," he explained.
June snatched up the brogan, stooped, and fastened it.
CHAPTER V
JUNE ASKS QUESTIONS
Houck, an unwelcome guest, stayed at the cabin on Piceance nearly two
weeks. His wooing was surely one of the strangest known. He fleered at
June, taunted her, rode over the girl's pride and sense of decorum, beat
down the defenses she set up, and filled her bosom with apprehension. It
was impossible to score an advantage over his stolid strength and
pachydermous insensibility.
The trapper sweated blood. He neither liked nor trusted his guest, but he
was bound hand and foot. He must sit and watch the fellow moving to his
end, see the gains he made day by day, and offer no effective protest.
For Houck at a word could send him back to the penitentiary and leave
June alone in a world to which her life had been alien.
Pete knew that the cowman was winning the campaign. His assumption that
he was an accepted suitor of June began to find its basis of fact. The
truth could be read in the child's hunted eyes. She was still fighting,
but the battle was a losing one.
Perhaps this was the best way out of a bad situation, Tolliver found
himself thinking. In his rough way Houck was fond of June. A blind man
could see that. Even though he was a wolf, there were moments when his
eyes were tender for her. He would provide well for a wife. If his little
Cinderella could bring herself to like the man, there was always a chance
that love would follow. Jake always had the knack of fascinating women.
He could be very attractive when he wished.
On a happy morning not long since June had sung of her wings. She was a
meadow-lark swooping over the hills to freedom, her throat throbbing with
songs of joy. Sometimes Pete, too, thought of her as a bird, but through
many hours of anguished brooding he had come to know she was a fledgling
with broken wings. The penalty for the father's sins had fallen upon the
child. All her life she must be hampered by the environment his
wrongdoing had built up around them.
Since the beginning of the world masterful men have drawn to them the
eyes and thoughts of women. June was no exception. Among the hours when
she hated Houck were increasing moments during which a naive wonder and
admiration filled her mind. She was primitive, elemental. A little tingle
of delight thrilled her to know that this strong man wanted her and would
fight to win what his heart craved. After all he was her first lover. A
queer shame distressed the girl at the memory of his kisses, for through
all the anger, chagrin, and wounded pride had come to her the first
direct realization of what sex meant. Her alarmed innocence pushed this
from her.
Without scruple Houck used all the weapons at hand. There came a day when
he skirted the edges of the secret.
"What do you mean?" she demanded. "What is it you claim to know about Dad
all so big?"
He could see that June's eyes were not so bold as the words. They winced
from his even as she put the question.
"Ask him."
"What'll I ask? I wouldn't believe anything you told me about him. He's
not like you. He's good."
"You don't have to believe me. Ask him if he ever knew any one called
Pete Purdy. Ask him who Jasper Stuart was. An' where he lived whilst you
was stayin' with yore aunt at Rawlins."
"I ain't afraid to," she retorted. "I'll do it right now."
Houck was sprawled on a bench in front of the cabin. He grinned
impudently. His manner was an exasperating challenge. Evidently he did
not believe she would.
June turned and walked to the stable. The heavy brogans weighted down the
lightness of her step. The shapeless clothes concealed the grace of the
slim figure. But even so there was a vital energy in the way she moved.
Tolliver was mending the broken teeth of a hay-rake and making a poor job
of it.
June made a direct frontal attack. "Dad, did you ever know a man named
Pete Purdy?"
The rancher's lank, unshaven jaw fell. The blow had fallen at last. In a
way he had expected it. Yet his mind was too stunned to find any road of
escape.
"Why, yes--yes, I--yes, honey," he faltered.
"Who was he?"
"Well, he was a--a cowpuncher, I reckon."
"Who was Jasper Stuart, then?"
An explanation could no longer be dodged or avoided. Houck had talked too
much. Tolliver knew he must make a clean breast of it, and that his own
daughter would sit in judgment on him. Yet he hung back. The years of
furtive silence still held him.
"He was a fellow lived in Brown's Park."
"What had you to do with him? Why did Jake Houck tell me to ask you about
him?"
"Oh, I reckon--"
"And about where you lived while I was with Aunt Molly at Rawlins?" she
rushed on.
The poor fellow moistened his dry lips. "I--I'll tell you the whole
story, honey. Mebbe I'd ought to 'a' told you long ago. But someways--"
He stopped, trying for a fresh start. "You'll despise yore old daddy. You
sure will. Well, you got a right to. I been a mighty bad father to you,
June. Tha's a fact."
She waited, dread-filled eyes on his.
"Prob'ly I'd better start at the beginnin', don't you reckon? I never did
have any people to brag about. Father and mother died while I was a li'l'
grasshopper. I was kinda farmed around, as you might say. Then I come
West an' got to punchin' cows. Seems like, I got into a bad crowd. They
was wild, an' they rustled more or less. In them days there was a good
many sleepers an' mavericks on the range. I expect we used a running-iron
right smart when we wasn't sure whose calf it was."
He was trying to put the best face on the story. June could see that, and
her heart hardened toward him. She ignored the hungry appeal for mercy in
his eyes.
"You mean you stole cattle. Is that it?" She was willing to hurt herself
if she could give him pain. Had he not ruined her life?
"Well, I--I--Yes, I reckon that's it. Our crowd picked up calves that
belonged to the big outfits like the Diamond Slash. We drove 'em up to
Brown's Park, an' later acrost the line to Wyoming or Utah."
"Was Jake Houck one of your crowd?"
Pete hesitated.
She cut in, with a flare of childish ferocity. "I'm gonna know the truth.
He's not protecting you any."
"Yes. Jake was one of us. I met up with him right soon after I come to
Colorado."
"And Purdy?"
"Tha's the name I was passin' under. I'd worked back in Missouri for a
fellow of that name. They got to callin' me Pete Purdy, so I kinda let it
go. My father's name was Tolliver, though. I took it--after the
trouble."
"What trouble?"
"It come after I was married. I met yore maw at Rawlins. She was workin'
at the railroad restaurant waitin' on table. For a coupla years we lived
there, an' I wish to God we'd never left. But Jake persuaded 'Lindy I'd
ought to take up land, so we moved back to the Park an' I preempted.
Everything was all right at first. You was born, an' we was right happy.
But Jake kep' a-pesterin' me to go in with him an' do some cattle runnin'
on the quiet. There was money in it--pretty good money--an' yore maw was
sick an' needed to go to Denver. Jake, he advanced the money, an' o'
course I had to work in with him to pay it back. I was sorta driven to
it, looks like."
He stopped to mop a perspiring face with a bandanna. Tolliver was not
enjoying himself.
"You haven't told me yet what the trouble was," June said.
"Well, this fellow Jas Stuart was a stock detective. He come down for the
Cattlemen's Association to find out who was doing the rustlin' in Brown's
Park. You see, the Park was a kind of a place where we holed up. There
was timbered gulches in there where we could drift cattle in an' hide
'em. Then there was the Hole-in-the-Wall. I expect you've heard of that
too."
"Did this Stuart find out who was doing the rustlin'?"
"He was right smart an' overbearin'. Too much so for his own good. Some
of the boys served notice on him he was liable to get dry-gulched if he
didn't take the trail back where he come from. But Jas was right
obstinate an' he had sand in his craw. I'll say that for him. Well, one
day he got word of a drive we was makin'. Him an' his deputies laid in
wait for us. There was shooting an' my horse got killed. The others
escaped, but they nailed me. In the rookus Stuart had got killed. They
laid it on me. Mebbe I did it. I was shooting like the rest. Anyhow, I
was convicted an' got twenty years in the pen."
"Twenty years," June echoed.
"Three--four years later there was a jail break. I got into the hills an'
made my getaway. Travelin' by night, I reached Rawlins. From there I came
down here with a freight outfit, an' I been here ever since."
He stopped. His story was ended. June looked at the slouchy little man
with the weak mouth and the skim-milk, lost-dog eyes. He was so palpably
wretched, so plainly the victim rather than the builder of his own
misfortunes, that her generous heart went out warmly to him.
With a little rush she had him in her arms. They wept together, his head
held tight against her immature bosom. It was the first time she had ever
known him to break down, and she mothered him as women have from the
beginning of time.
"You poor Daddy. Don't I know how it was? That Jake Houck was to blame.
He led you into it an' left you to bear the blame," she crooned.
"It ain't me. It's you I'm thinkin' of, honey. I done ruined yore life,
looks like. I shut you off from meeting decent folks like other girls do.
You ain't had no show."
"Don't you worry about me, Dad. I'll be all right. What we've got to
think about is not to let it get out who you are. If it wasn't for that
big bully up at the house--"
She stopped, hopelessly unable to cope with the situation. Whenever she
thought of Houck her mind came to an _impasse_. Every road of escape it
traveled was blocked by his jeering face, with the jutting jaw set in
implacable resolution.
"It don't look like Jake would throw me down thataway," he bewailed. "I
never done him a meanness. I kep' my mouth shut when they got me an'
wouldn't tell who was in with me. Tha's one reason they soaked me with so
long a sentence. They was after Jake. They kep' at me to turn state's
evidence an' get a short term. But o' course I couldn't do that."
"'Course not. An' now he turns on you like a coyote--after you stood by
him." A surge of indignation boiled up in her. "He's the very worst man
ever I knew--an' if he tries to do you any harm I'll--I'll settle with
him."
Her father shook his unkempt head. "No, honey. I been learnin' for twelve
years that a man can't do wrong for to get out of a hole he's in. If
Jake's mean enough to give me up, why, I reckon I'll have to stand the
gaff."
"No," denied June, a spark of flaming resolution in her shining eyes.
CHAPTER VI
"DON'T YOU TOUCH HIM!"
Inside the big chuck tent of the construction camp the cook was busy
forking steak to tin plates and ladling potatoes into deep dishes.
"Git a move on you, Red Haid," he ordered.
Bob Dillon distributed the food at intervals along the table which ran
nearly the whole length of the canvas top. From an immense coffee pot he
poured the clear brown liquid into tin cups set beside each plate. This
done, he passed out into the sunshine and beat the triangle.
From every tent men poured like seeds squirted from a squeezed lemon.
They were all in a hurry and they jostled each other in their eagerness
to get through the open flap. Straw boss, wood walkers, and ground men,
they were all hungry. They ate swiftly and largely. The cook and his
flunkey were kept busy.
"More spuds!" called one.
"Coming up!" Dillon flung back cheerfully.
"Shoot along more biscuits!" a second ordered.
"On the way!" Bob announced.
The boss of the outfit came in leisurely after the rush. He brought a
guest with him and they sat down at the end of the table.
"Beans!" demanded a line man, his mouth full.
"Headed for you!" promised the flunkey.
The guest of the boss was a big rangy fellow in the early forties. Bob
heard the boss call him "Jake," and later "Houck." As soon as the boy had
a moment to spare he took a good look at the man. He did not like what he
saw. Was it the cold, close-set eyes, the crook of the large nose, or the
tight-lipped mouth gave the fellow that semblance to a rapacious wolf?
As soon as Bob had cleaned up the dishes he set off up the creek to meet
June. The boy was an orphan and had been brought up in a home with two
hundred others. His life had been a friendless one, which may have been
the reason that he felt a strong bond of sympathy for the lonely girl on
Piceance. He would have liked to be an Aladdin with a wonder lamp by
means of which he could magically transform her affairs to good fortune.
Since this could not be, he gave her what he had--a warm fellow-feeling
because of the troubles that worried her.
He found June waiting at their usual place of meeting. Pete Tolliver's
forty-four hung in a scabbard along the girl's thigh. Bob remembered that
she had spoken of seeing a rattlesnake on the trail yesterday.
"'Lo, boy," she called.
"'Lo, June. I met yore friend."
"What friend?"
"Jake Houck. He was down at the camp for dinner to-day--came in with the
boss."
"He's no friend of mine," she said sulkily.
"Don't blame you a bit. Mr. Houck looks like one hard citizen. I'd hate
to cross him."
"He's as tough as an old range bull. No matter what you say or do you
can't faze him," she replied wearily.
"You still hate him?"
"More 'n ever. Most o' the time. He just laughs. He's bound an'
determined to marry me whether or not. He will, too."
Bob looked at her, surprised. It was the first time she had ever admitted
as much. June's slim body was packed with a pantherish resilience. Her
spirit bristled with courage. What had come over her?
"He won't if you don't want him to."
"Won't he?" June was lying on a warm flat rock. She had been digging up
dirt at the edge of it with a bit of broken stick. Now she looked up at
him with the scorn of an experience she felt to be infinitely more
extensive than his. "A lot you know about it."
"How can he? If you an' Mr. Tolliver don't want him to."
"He just will."
"But, June, that don't listen reasonable to me. He's got you buffaloed.
If you make up yore mind not to have him--"
"I didn't say I'd made up my mind not to have him. I said I hated him,"
she corrected.
"Well, you wouldn't marry a fellow you hated," he argued.
"How do you know so much about it, Bob Dillon?" she flared.
"I use what brains I've got. Women don't do things like that. There
wouldn't be any sense in it."
"Well, I'll prob'ly do it. Then you'll know I haven't got a lick o'
sense," she retorted sullenly.
"You ce'tainly beat my time," he said, puzzled. "I've heard you say more
mean things about him than everybody else put together, an' now you're
talkin' about marryin' him. Why? What's yore reason?"
She looked up. For a moment the morose eyes met his. They told nothing
except a dogged intention not to tell anything.
But the boy was no fool. He had thought a good deal about the lonely life
she and her father led. Many men came into this country three jumps ahead
of the law. It was not good form to ask where any one came from unless he
volunteered information about antecedent conditions. Was it possible that
Jake Houck had something on Tolliver, that he was using his knowledge to
force June into a marriage with him? Otherwise there would be no
necessity for her to marry him. As he had told her, it was a free land.
But if Houck was coercing her because of her fears for Tolliver, it was
possible this might be a factor in determining June to marry him.
"Don't you do it, June. Don't you marry him. He didn't look good to me,
Houck didn't," Dillon went on. He was a little excited, and his voice had
lifted.
A man who came at this moment round the bend of the creek was grinning
unpleasantly. His eyes focused on Dillon.
"So I don't look good to you. Tha's too bad. If you'll tell me what you
don't like about me I'll make myself over," jeered Houck.
Bob was struck dumb. The crooked smile and the stab of the eyes that went
with it were menacing. He felt goose quills running up and down his
spine. This man was one out of a thousand for physical prowess.
"I didn't know you was near," the boy murmured.
"I'll bet you didn't, but you'll know it now." Houck moved toward Dillon
slowly.
"Don't you, Jake Houck! Don't you touch him!" June shrilled.
"I got to beat him up, June. It's comin' to him. D'you reckon I'll let
the flunkey of a telephone camp interfere in my business? Why, he ain't
half man-size."
Bob backed away warily. This Colossus straddling toward him would thrash
him within an inch of his life. The boy was white to the lips.
"Stop! Right now!" June faced Houck resolutely, standing between him and
his victim.
The big fellow looked at the girl, a slim, fearless little figure with
undaunted eyes flinging out a challenge. He laughed, delightedly, then
brushed her aside with a sweep of his arm.
Her eyes blazed. The smouldering passion that had been accumulating for
weeks boiled up. She dragged out the six-shooter from its holster.
"I won't have you touch him! I won't! If you do I'll--I'll--"
Houck stopped in his stride, held fast by sheer amazement. The revolver
pointed straight at him. It did not waver a hair's breadth. He knew how
well she could shoot. Only the day before she had killed a circling hawk
with a rifle. The bird had dropped like a plummet, dead before it struck
the ground. Now, as his gaze took in the pantherish ferocity of her tense
pose, he knew that she was keyed up for tragedy. She meant to defend the
boy from him if it resulted in homicide.
It did not occur to him to be afraid. He laughed aloud, half in
admiration, half in derision.
"I b'lieve you would, you spunky li'l wild cat," he told her in great
good humor.
"Run, Bob," called June to the boy.
He stood, hesitating. His impulse was to turn and fly, but he could not
quite make up his mind to leave her alone with Houck.
The cowman swung toward the girl.
"Keep back!" she ordered.
Her spurt of defiance tickled him immensely. He went directly to her, his
stride unfaltering.
"Want to shoot up poor Jake, do you? An' you an' him all set for a
honeymoon. Well, go to it, June. You can't miss now."
He stood a yard or so from her, easy and undisturbed, laughing in genuine
enjoyment. He liked the child's pluck. The situation, with its salty tang
of danger, was wholly to his taste.
But he had disarmed the edge of June's anger and apprehension. His
amusement was too real. It carried the scene from tragedy to farce.
June's outburst had not been entirely for the sake of Bob. Back of the
immediate cause was the desire to break away from this man's dominance.
She had rebelled in the hope of establishing her individual freedom. Now
she knew this was vain. What was the use of opposing one who laughed at
her heroics and ignored the peril of his position? There was not any way
to beat him.
She pushed the six-shooter back into its holster and cried out at him
bitterly. "I think you're the devil or one of his fiends."
"An' I think you're an angel--sometimes," he mocked.
"I hate you!" she said, and two rows of strong little white teeth snapped
tight.
"Sho! Tha's just a notion you got. You like me fine, if you only knew it,
girl."
She was still shaken with the emotion through which she had passed. "You
never were nearer death, Jake Houck, than right now a minute ago."
His back to Dillon, the cowman gave a curt command. "Hit the trail,
boy--sudden."
Bob looked at June, whose sullen eyes were fighting those of her father's
guest. She had forgotten he was there. Without a word Bob vanished.
"So you love me well enough to shoot me, do you?" Houck jeered.
"I wish I could!" she cried furiously.
"But you can't. You had yore chance, an' you couldn't. What you need is a
master, some one you'll have to honor an' obey, some one who'll look
after you an' take the devil outa you. Meanin' me--Jake Houck.
Understand?"
"I won't! I won't!" she cried. "You come here an' bully me
because--because of what you know about Father. If you were half a
man--if you were white, you wouldn't try to use that against me like you
do."
"I'm using it for you. Why, you li'l' spitfire, can't you see as Jake
Houck's wife you get a chance to live? You'll have clothes an' shoes an'
pretties like other folks instead o' them rags you wear now. I aim to be
good to you, June."
"You _say_ that. Don't I know you? I'd 'most rather be dead than married
to you. But you keep pesterin' me. I--I--" Her voice broke.
"If you don' know what's best for you, I do. To-morrow I got to go to
Meeker. I'll be back Thursday. We'll ride over to Bear Cat Friday an' be
married. Tha's how we'll fix it."
He did not take her in his arms or try to kiss her. The man was wise in
his generation. Cheerfully, as a matter of course, he continued:
"We'll go up to the house an' tell Tolliver it's all settled."
She lagged back, sulkily, still protesting. "It's not settled, either.
You don't run everything."
But in her heart she was afraid he had stormed the last trench of her
resistance.
CHAPTER VII
AN ELOPEMENT
Bob Dillon was peeling potatoes outside the chuck tent when he heard a
whistle he recognized instantly. It was a very good imitation of a
meadow-lark's joyous lilt. He answered it, put down the pan and knife,
and rose.
"Where you going?" demanded the cook.
"Back in a minute, Lon," the flunkey told him, and followed a cow trail
that took him up the hill through the sage.
"I never did see a fellow like him," the cook communed aloud to himself.
"A bird calls, an' he's got to quit work to find out what it wants. Kinda
nice kid, too, if he is queer."
Among the pinons at the rock rim above Bob found June. He had not seen
her since the day when she had saved him from a thrashing. The boy was
not very proud of the way he had behaved. If he had not shown the white
feather, he had come dangerously close to it.
"How are cases, June?"
His eyes, which had been rather dodging hers, came to rest on the girl at
last. One glance told him that she was in trouble.
"I don' know what to do, Bob," she broke out. "Jake will be back
to-day--by dinner-time, I reckon. He says I've got to go with him to Bear
Cat an' be married to-morrow."
Dillon opened his lips to speak, but he said nothing. He remembered how
he had counseled her to boldness before and failed at the pinch. What
advice could he give? What could he say to comfort his friend?
"Haven't you got any folks you could go to--some one who would tell Houck
where to head in at?"
She shook her head. "My father's all I've got."
"Won't he help you?"
"He would, but--I can't ask him. I got to pretend to him I'd just as lief
marry Jake."
"Why have you?"
"I can't tell you why, Bob. But that's how it is."
"And you still hate Houck?"
"Ump-ha. Except--sometimes." She did not explain that elusive answer.
"But it don't matter about how I feel. When he comes back I've got to do
like he says."
June broke down and began to weep. The boy's tender heart melted within
him.
"Don't you. Don't you," he begged. "We'll find a way, li'l' pardner. We
sure will."
"How?" she asked, between sobs. "There ain't--any way--except to--to
marry Jake."
"You could run away--and work," he suggested.
"Who'd give me work? And where could I go that he wouldn't find me?"
Practical details stumped him. Her objections were valid enough. With her
inexperience she could never face the world alone.
"Well, le's see. You've got friends. Somewhere that you could kinda hide
for a while."
"Not a friend. We--we don't make friends," she said in a small, forlorn
voice with a catch in it.
"You got one," he said stoutly. "Maybe he don't amount to much, but--" He
broke off, struck by an idea. "Say, June, why couldn't you run off with
me? We'd go clear away, where he wouldn't find us."
"How could I run off with you?" A pink flood poured into her face.
"You're not my brother. You're no kin."
"No, but--" He frowned at the ground, kicking at a piece of moss with his
toe to help him concentrate. Again he found an idea. "We could get
married."
This left her staring at him, speechless.
He began to dress his proposal with arguments. He was a humble enough
youth who had played a trifling part in life. But his imagination soared
at seeing himself a rescuer of distressed maidens. He was a dreamer of
dreams. In them he bulked large and filled heroic roles amply.
June was a practical young person. "What d' you want to marry me for?"
she demanded.
He came to earth. He did not want to marry her. At least he had not
wanted to until the moment before. If he had been able to give the reason
for his suggestion, it would probably have been that her complete
isolation and helplessness appealed to the same conditions in himself and
to a certain youthful chivalry.
"We're good pals, ain't we?" was the best he could do by way of answer.
"Yes, but you don't--you don't--"
Beneath the tan of her dark cheeks the blood poured in again. It was as
hard for her to talk about love as for him. She felt the same shy, uneasy
embarrassment, as though it were some subject taboo, not to be discussed
by sane-minded people.
His freckled face matched hers in color. "You don't have to be thataway.
If we like each other, an' if it looks like the best thing to do--why--"
"I couldn't leave Dad," she said.
"You'll have to leave him if you marry Jake Houck."
That brought her to another aspect of the situation. If she ran away with
Bob and married him, what would Houck do in regard to her father? Some
deep instinct told her that he would not punish Tolliver for it if she
went without his knowledge. The man was ruthless, but he was not
needlessly cruel.
"What would we do? Where would we go--afterward?" she asked.
He waved a hand largely into space. "Anywhere. Denver, maybe. Or
Cheyenne. Or Salt Lake."
"How'd we live?"
"I'd get work. No trouble about that."
She considered the matter, at first unsentimentally, as a workable
proposition. In spite of herself she could not hold quite to that aspect
of the case. Her blood began to beat faster. She would escape Houck. That
was the fundamental advantage of the plan. But she would see the world.
She would meet people. Perhaps for the first time she would ride on a
train. Wonderful stories had been told her by Dillon, of how colored men
cooked and served meals on a train rushing along forty miles an hour, of
how they pulled beds down from the roof and folks went to sleep in little
rooms just as though they were at home. She would see all the lovely
things he had described to her. There was a court-house in Denver where
you got into a small room and it traveled up with you till you got out
and looked down four stories from a window.
"If we go it'll have to be right away," she said. "Without tellin'
anybody."
"Yes," he agreed.
"I could go back to the house an' get my things."
"While I'm gettin' mine. There's nobody at the camp but Lon, an' he
always sleeps after he gets through work. But how'll we get to Bear
Cat?"
"I'll bring the buckboard. Dad's away. I'll leave him a note. Meet you in
half an hour on Twelve-Mile Hill," she added.
It was so arranged.
June ran back to the house, hitched the horses to the buckboard, and
changed to her best dress. She made a little bundle of her other clothes
and tied them in a bandanna handkerchief.
On a scrap of coarse brown wrapping-paper she wrote a short note:
Dear Dad,
I'm going away with Bob Dillon. We're going to be married. Don't
blame me too much. Jake Houck drove me to it. I'll write you soon.
Don't forget to take the cough medicine when you need it.
June
She added a postscript.
I'll leave the team at Kilburn's Corral.
Unexpectedly, she found herself crying. Tears splashed on the writing.
She folded the note, put it in the empty coffee pot, and left this on the
table.
June had no time just now for doubts. The horses were half-broken
broncos. They traveled the first hundred yards tied in a knot, the
buckboard sometimes on four wheels, but more often on two.
At the top of the hill she managed to slacken them enough for Bob to jump
in. They were off again as though shot from a bow. June wound the reins
round her hands and leaned back, arms and strong thin wrists taut. The
colts flew over the ground at a gallop.
There was no chance for conversation. Bob watched the girl drive. He
offered no advice. She was, he knew, a better teamster than himself. Her
eyes and mind were wholly on the business in hand.
A flush of excitement burned in June's cheeks. Tolliver never would let
her drive the colts because of the danger. She loved the stimulation of
rapid travel, the rush of the wind past her ears, the sense of
responsibility at holding the lines.
Bob clung to the seat and braced himself. He knew that all June could do
was to steady the team enough to keep the horses in the road. Every
moment he expected a smash, but it did not come. The colts reached the
foot of Twelve-Mile safely and swept up the slope beyond. The driver took
a new grip on the lines and put her weight on them. It was a long hill.
By the time they reached the top the colts were under control and ready
to behave for the rest of the day.
The sparkling eyes of June met those of Bob. "Great, ain't it?"
He nodded, but it had not been fun for him. He had been distinctly
frightened. He felt for June the reluctant admiration gameness compels
from those who are constitutionally timid. What manner of girl was this
who could shave disaster in such a reckless fashion and actually enjoy
it?
At the edge of the town they exchanged seats at June's suggestion and Bob
drove in. It was mid-afternoon by the sun as he tied the horses to the
rack in front of the larger of the two general stores.
"You stay here," the boy advised. "I'll get things fixed, then come back
an' let you know."
He had only a hazy idea of the business details of getting married, but
he knew a justice of the peace could tell him. He wandered down the
street in search of one.
Half a dozen cowpunchers bent on sport drifted in his direction. One of
them was riding down the dusty road. To the horn of his saddle a rope was
tied. The other end of it was attached to a green hide of a steer
dragging after him.
The punchers made a half-circle round Bob.
One grinned and made comment. "Here's one looks ripe, fellows. Jes'
a-honin' for a ride, looks like."
"Betcha he don't last ten jumps," another said.
Before Bob could offer any resistance or make any protest he had been
jubilantly seized and dumped down on the hide.
"Let 'er go," some one shouted.
The horse, at the touch of the spur, jumped to a gallop. Bob felt a
sudden sick sense of helplessness. The earth was cut out from under him.
He crouched low and tried to cling to the slippery hide as it bounced
forward. Each leap of the bronco upset him. Within three seconds he had
ridden on his head, his back, and his stomach. Wildly he clawed at the
rope as he rolled over.
With a yell the rider swung a corner. Bob went off the hide at a tangent,
rolling over and over in the yellow four-inch-deep dust.
He got up, dizzy and perplexed. His best suit looked as though it had
been through a long and severe war.
A boyish puncher came up and grinned at him in the friendliest way.
"Hello, fellow! Have a good ride?"
Bob smiled through the dust he had accumulated. "It didn't last long."
"Most generally it don't. Come in to Dolan's an' have a drink." He
mentioned his name. It was Dud Hollister.
"Can't." Bob followed an impulse. "Say, how do you get married?" he
asked, lowering his voice.
"I don't," Dud answered promptly. "Not so long as I'm in my right mind."
"I mean, how do I?" He added sheepishly, "She's in the buckboard."
"Oh!" Dud fell to sudden sobriety. This was serious business. "I'd get a
license at the cou't-house. Then go see Blister Haines. He's the J. P."
Bob equipped himself with a license, returned to June, and reported
progress.
The bride-to-be was simmering with indignation. In those days she had not
yet cultivated a sense of humor.
"I saw what they did to you--the brutes," she snapped.
"Sho! That wasn't nothin', June. The boys was only funnin'. Well, I got
things fixed. We gotta go to the J. P."
The justice was having forty winks when they entered his office. He was
enormously fat, a fact notable in a country of lean men. Moreover, he had
neither eyebrows nor hair, though his face announced him not more than
thirty in spite of its triple chin. Mr. Haines was slumped far down in a
big armchair out of which he overflowed prodigally. His feet were on a
second chair.
Bob wakened him ruthlessly. He sat up blinking. Bob started to speak. He
stopped him with a fat uplifted hand.
"I r-reckon I know what _you_ want, y-young man," he said.
CHAPTER VIII
BLISTER GIVES ADVICE
Blister Haines, J. P., was by way of being a character. His waggish
viewpoint was emphasized by a slight stutter.
"S-so you want to h-hitch up to double trouble, do you?" he asked.
"We want to get married," Bob said.
"S-same thing," the fat man wheezed, grinning. "C-come right in an' I'll
tie you tighter 'n a d-drum."
"I've only got six dollars," the bridegroom explained.
"No matter a-tall. My f-fee is jus' six d-dollars," the justice announced
promptly.
Bob hesitated. June nudged him and whispered. The husband-elect listened,
nodded, and spoke up.
"I'll pay you two dollars."
Blister looked at the bride reproachfully. "L-lady, if you ain't worth
s-six dollars to him you ain't worth a c-cent. But I'll show you how good
a sport I am. I'll m-make you a wedding present of the j-job. Got any
witnesses?"
"Do we have to have witnesses?" asked Bob helplessly. Getting married was
a more formidable and formal affair than he had supposed.
"Sure. I'll dig 'em up."
The justice waddled to the door of the saloon adjoining and stuck his
head inside. A row of cowpunchers were lined up in front of the bar.
"Y-you, Dud Hollister an' Tom Reeves, I'm servin' a subpoena on you lads
as w-witnesses at a w-weddin'," he said in the high wheeze that sounded
so funny coming from his immense bulk.
"Whose wedding?" demanded Reeves, a lank youth with a brick-red face, the
nose of which had been broken.
"N-none of yore darned business."
"Do we get to kiss the bride?"
"You h-hotfoot it right to my office or I'll throw you in the c-calaboose
for c-contempt of court, Tom Reeves."
The puncher turned to Hollister, grinning. "Come along, Dud. Might 's
well learn how it's done, ol' Sure-Shot."
The range-riders jingled into the office at the heels of the justice.
Blister inquired for the names of the principals and introduced the
witnesses to them. The gayety and the audacity of the punchers had
vanished. They ducked their heads and drew back a foot each in a scrape
that was meant to be a bow. They were almost as embarrassed as June and
Bob. Which is saying a good deal.
June had not realized what an ordeal it would be to stand up before
strangers in her dingy dress and heavy cracked brogans while she promised
to love, honor, and obey. She was acutely conscious of her awkwardness,
of the flying, rebellious hair, of a hole in a stocking she tried to keep
concealed. And for the first time, too, she became aware of the solemnity
of what she was doing. The replies she gave were low and confused.
Before she knew it the ceremony was over.
Blister closed the book and dropped it on a chair.
"Kiss yore wife, man," he admonished, chuckling.
Bob flushed to the roots of his hair. He slid a look at June, not sure
whether she would want him to do that. Her long dark lashes had fallen to
the dusky cheeks and hid the downcast eyes.
His awkward peck caught her just below the ear.
The bridegroom offered the justice two dollars. Blister took it and
handed it to June.
"You keep it, ma'am, an' buy yorese'f somethin' for a p-pretty. I'd jes'
b-blow it anyhow. Hope you'll be r-real happy. If this yere young
s-scalawag don't treat you h-handsome, Tom an' Dud'll be glad to ride
over an' beat him up proper 'most any time you give 'em the high sign. Am
I right, boys?"
"Sure are," they said, grinning bashfully.
"As j-justice of the peace for Garfield County, S-state of C-colorado,
I'm entitled to k-kiss the bride, but mos' generally I give her one o'
these heart-to-heart talks instead, onloadin' from my chest some f-free
gratis g-good advice," the fat man explained in his hoarse wheeze. "You
got to r-remember, ma'am, that m-marriage ain't duck soup for n-neither
the one nor the other of the h-high contractin' parties thereto. It's a
g-game of give an' take, an' at that a h-heap more give than take."
"Yes, sir," murmured June tremulously, looking down at the hole in her
stocking.
"Whilst I n-never yet c-committed matrimony in my own p-person, me being
ample provided with t-trouble an' satisfied with what griefs I already
got, yet I've run cows off an' on, an' so have had workin' for me several
of this sex you've now got tangled up with, ma'am," Blister sailed on
cheerfully. "I'll say the best way to keep 'em contented is to feed 'em
good, treat 'em as if they was human, an' in general give 'em a more or
less free rein, dependin' on their g-general habits an' cussedness. If
that don't suit a p-puncher I most usually h-hand him his hat an' say,
'So long, son, you 'n' me ain't c-consanguineously constructed to ride
the same range; no hard feelin's, but if you're w-wishful to jog on to
another outfit I'll say adios without no tears.' You can't g-get rid of
yore husband that easy, ma'am, so I'll recommend the g-good grub,
s-seventy-five s-smiles per diem, an' the aforesaid more or less f-free
rein."
Again June whispered, "Yes, sir," but this time her honest eyes lifted
and went straight into his.
"An' you." The justice turned his batteries on the groom. "You w-wanta
recollect that this r-road you've done chose ain't no easy one to
t-travel. Tenderfoot come in the other day an' w-wanted to know what kind
of a road it was to S-stinking Creek. I tell him it's a g-good road.
Yesterday he come rarin' in to f-find out what I told him that for.
'Fellow,' I says, 'Fellow, any r-road you can g-get over is a good road
in this country.' It's t-thataway with marriage, son, an' don't you
forget it a h-holy minute. Another thing, this being u-united in wedlock
ain't no sinecure."
"Ain't no which kind of a sin?" inquired Reeves.
Dud Hollister grinned admiringly. "Blister sure ropes an' hogties a heap
of longhorn words."
The justice scratched his bald poll and elucidated. "A s-sinecure, boys,
is when a f-fellow rides the g-grub line habitual an' don't rope no
d-dogies for his stack o' wheats an' c-coffee." He wagged a fat
forefinger at Bob. "You gotta quit hellin' around now an' behave yorese'f
like a respectable m-married man. You gotta dig in an' work. At that you
'n' the little lady will have yore flareups. When you do, give her the
best of it an' you'll never be sorry. Tha's all."
Blister slid a hand furtively into a drawer of the desk, groped for a
moment, then flung a handful of rice over bride and groom.
The newly married couple left the office hurriedly. They did not look at
each other. An acute shyness had swept over both of them. They walked to
the buckboard, still without speaking.
June opened a perspiring little brown palm in which lay two warm silver
dollars. "Here's yore money," she said.
"It's yours. He gave it to you," Bob answered, swallowing hard. "For a
weddin' present."
"Well, I ain't no pockets. You keep it for me."
The transfer was accomplished, neither of them looking into the eyes of
the other.
Blister Haines, flanked on each side by one of the witnesses, rolled past
on his way to the bar of the Bear Cat House. His throat was dry and he
proposed to liquidate his unusual exertion. He always celebrated a
wedding by taking a few drinks. Any excuse was a good excuse for that. He
waved a hand toward the newlyweds in greeting.
Bob answered by lifting his own. He had not taken three drinks in his
life, but he felt that he would like one now. It might cheer him up a
little.
What in the world was he to do with June? Where could he take her for the
night? And after that what would they do? He had not money enough to pay
stage fare to get them away. He did not know anybody from whom he could
borrow any. Yet even if he found work in Bear Cat, they dared not stay
here. Houck would come "rip-raring" down from the hills and probably
murder him.
Anyhow, it would not do for him to act as though he were stumped. He
managed a smile.
"We'd better take the team to the corral, then go get something to eat,
June. I'm sure enough hungry. Ain't you?"
She nodded. Even to go to the hotel or a restaurant for dinner was an
adventure for her, so little of experience had her life offered.
As they walked from the barn to the Bear Cat House, the girl-bride was
still dumb. The marriage ceremony had brought home to her the solemnity
of what she had done. She had promised to love, honor, and obey this boy,
to care for him in sickness and in health, till death came to part them.
What did she know about him? What manner of man had she married? The
consequences of the step they had taken began to appall her. She would
have to live with him in all the intimacies of married life, cook for
him, wash his clothes, sit opposite him at the table three times a day
for fifty years. He was to be the father of her children, and she knew
nothing whatever about him except that he was gentle and friendly.
From under long curving lashes she stole a shy look at him. He was her
husband, this stranger. Would she be able to please him? June thought of
what Blister Haines had said. She was a pretty good cook. That was one
thing. And she would try not to let herself sulk or be a spitfire. Maybe
he would not get tired of her if she worked real hard to suit him.
The hotel was an adobe building. In the doorway stood a woman leaning
against the jamb. She was smoking a cigar. June looked twice at her
before she believed her eyes.
The woman took the cigar from between her lips. "Are you the children
Blister Haines just married?" she asked bluntly.
"We--we've just been married by Mr. Haines," Bob replied with an attempt
at dignity.
The blue eyes of the woman softened as she looked at June--softened
indescribably. They read instantly the doubt and loneliness of the child.
She threw the cigar into the street and moved swiftly toward the bride. A
moment before she had been hard and sexless, in June's virgin eyes almost
a monstrosity. Now she was all mother, filled with the protective
instinct.
"I'm Mollie Gillespie--keep the hotel here," she explained. "You come
right in an' I'll fix up a nice room for you, my dearie. You can wash up
after yore ride and you'll feel a lot better. I'll have Chung Lung cook
you both a bit of supper soon as he comes back to the kitchen. A good
steak an' some nice French frys, say. With some of the mince pie left
from dinner and a good cup of coffee." Mollie's arm was round June,
petting and comforting her.
June felt and repressed an impulse to tears. "You're mighty good," she
gulped.
The landlady of the Bear Cat House bustled the girl into a room and began
to mother her. Bob hung around the door. He did not know whether he was
expected to come in or stay out, though he knew which he wanted to do.
Mollie sent him about his business. "Scat!" she snapped. "Get outa here,
Mr. Husband, an' don't you show up till five o'clock prompt. Hear me?"
Bob heard and vanished like a tin-canned pup. He was the most relieved
youth in Bear Cat. At least he had a reprieve. Mrs. Gillespie would know
what to do and how to do it.
If being a married man was like this, he did not wonder that Dud
Hollister and Blister Haines felt the way they did toward that holy
estate.
CHAPTER IX
THE WHITE FEATHER
At the appointed time Bob sneaked back to the hotel. He hung around the
lobby for a minute or two, drifted into the saloon and gambling annex,
and presently found himself hanging over the bar because he did not know
what else to do with himself.
Was he to go to the room after June and bring her to supper? Or was he to
wait until she came out? He wished he knew.
Mollie caught sight of him and put a flea in his ear. "What d' you think
you're doing here, young fellow, me lad? Get outa this den of iniquity
an' hustle back to the room where the little lady is waitin' for you.
Hear me?" she snorted.
A minute later Bob was knocking timidly on the door of room 9. A small
voice told him to come in. He opened the door.
June shyly met the eyes of her husband. "Mrs. Gillespie said maybe you'd
want to wash up before supper."
"I reckon that'd be a good idee," he said, shifting from one foot to the
other.
Did she expect him to wash here? Or what?
June poured water into the basin and found a towel.
Not for a five-dollar bill would Bob have removed his coat, though there
had never been a time in his young life when he would have welcomed more
a greenback. He did not intend to be indelicate while alone with a young
woman in a bedroom. The very thought of it made him scarlet to the roots
of his red hair.
After he had scrubbed himself till his face was like a shining apple,
June lent him a comb. She stole a furtive look at him while he was
standing before the small cracked mirror. For better or worse he was her
man. She had to make the best of him. A sense of proprietorship that was
almost pride glowed faintly in her. He was a nice boy, even if he was so
thin and red and freckled. Bob would be good to her. She was sure of
that.
"Mrs. Gillespie said she reckoned she could fix you up a job to help the
cook," the bride said.
"You mean--to-night or for good?"
"Right along, she said."
Bob did not welcome the suggestion. There was an imperative urge within
him to get away from Bear Cat before Jake Houck arrived. There was no use
dodging it. He was afraid of the fellow's vengeance. This was a country
where men used firearms freely. The big man from Brown's Park might shoot
him down at sight.
"I don't reckon we'd better stay here," he answered uneasily. "In a
bigger town I can get a better job likely."
"But we haven't money enough to go on the stage, have we?"
"If there was a bull team going out mebbe I could work my way."
"W-e-ll." She considered this dubiously. "If we stayed here Mrs.
Gillespie would let me wash dishes an' all. She said she'd give me two
dollars a week an' my board. Tha's a lot of money, Bob."
He looked out of the window. "I don't want trouble with Jake Houck.
It--it would worry you."
"Yes, but--" June did not quite know how to say what was in her mind. She
had an instinctive feeling that the way to meet trouble was to face it
unafraid and not to run away from it. "I don't reckon we'd better show
Jake we're scared of him--now. O' course he'll be mad at first, but he's
got no right to be. Jes' 'cause he kep' a-pesterin' me don't give him no
claim on me."
"No, but you know what he is an' how he acts."
"I'll go where you want to go. I jes' thought, seein' how good to us Mrs.
Gillespie has been, that maybe--"
"Well, we'll talk it over after supper," Bob said. "I'm for lighting out
myself. To Laramie or Cheyenne, say."
As they had not eaten since breakfast they were a pair of hungry young
animals. They did full justice to the steak, French frys, mince pie, and
coffee Mrs. Gillespie had promised.
They hung for a moment awkwardly outside the dining-room. Both of them
were looking for an excuse to avoid returning to their room yet.
"Like to look the town over?" Bob asked.
June accepted eagerly.
They walked up the single business street and looked in the windows. The
young husband bought his bride a paper sack of chocolates and they ate
them as they strolled. Somehow they did not feel half as shy of each
other in the open as when shut up together between the walls of a
bedroom.
Dusk was beginning to fall. It veiled the crude and callow aspects of the
frontier town and filled the hollows of the surrounding hills with a soft
violet haze.
Bob's eyes met the dark orbs of June. Between them some communication
flashed. For the first time a queer emotion clutched at the boy's heart.
An intoxicating thrill pulsed through his veins. She was his wife, this
shy girl so flushed and tender.
His hand caught hers and gave it a little comforting pressure. It was his
first love gesture and it warmed her like wine.
"You're right good to me," she murmured.
She was grateful for so little. All her life she had been starved for
love and friendship just as he had. Bob resolved to give them to her in a
flood. A great tide of sympathy flowed out from him to her. He would be
good to her. He wished she knew now how well he meant to look after her.
But he could not tell her. A queer shame tied his tongue.
From a blacksmith shop a man stepped.
"Say, fellow, can I see you a minute?" he asked.
It was Dud Hollister. He drew Bob back into the smithy.
"Big guy in town lookin' for you. He's tankin' up. You heeled?"
Bob felt as though his heart had been drenched with ice water. Houck was
here then. Already.
"No, I--I don't carry a gun," he replied, weakly.
"Here's mine. Shoots just a mite high, but she's a good old friend." Dud
pressed a six-shooter on Dillon.
The boy took it reluctantly. The blood in his veins ran cold. "I dunno. I
reckon mebbe I better not. If I talked to him, don't you think--?"
"Talk, hell! He's out for blood, that guy is. He's made his brags right
over the bar at Dolan's what all he's gonna do to you. I'm no gunman,
understand. But a fellow's got to look out for number one. I'd let him
have it soon as I seen him. Right off the reel."
"Would you?"
"Surest thing you know. He's a bad actor, that fellow is."
"If I went to the marshal--"
Dud's eye held derision. "What good'd that do? Simp ain't gonna draw
cards _till after some one's been gunned_. He don't claim to be no
mind-reader, Simp don't."
"I'm not lookin' for trouble," Bob began to explain.
"Fellow, it's lookin' for you," cut in Dud. "You hold that gun right
under yore coat, an' when you meet up with Mr. Hook or whoever he is,
don't you wait to ask 'What for?' Go to fannin'."
Bob rejoined June. His lips were bloodless. He felt a queer weakness in
the knees.
"What did he want?" asked June.
"Houck's here--lookin' for me," the wretched boy explained.
"What's that you've got under yore coat?" she demanded quickly.
"It's a--a gun. He made me take it. Said Houck was tellin' how he'd--do
for me."
The fear-filled eyes of the boy met the stricken ones of his bride. She
knew now what she had before suspected and would not let herself
believe.
If it was possible she must help him to avoid a meeting with Houck. She
could not have him shamed. Her savage young pride would not permit the
girl to mate with one who proved himself a coward at a crisis of his
life. It was necessary to her self-respect that she save his.
"We'd better go back to the hotel," she said. "You can stay in our room,
and I'll send for Jake an' talk with him downstairs."
"I don't reckon I'd better do that," Bob protested feebly. "He
might--hurt you. No tellin'."
June ignored this. "Did you hear whether Dad's with him?" she asked.
"No."
"Where is Jake?"
"He was at Dolan's drinking when that Dud Hollister seen him."
"I'll have him come right away--before he's had too much. Dad says he
used to be mean when he was drinkin'."
The hotel was in the same block as Dolan's, a hundred feet beyond it.
They were passing the saloon when the door was pushed open and a man came
out. At sight of them he gave a triumphant whoop.
"Got ya!" he cried.
The look on his face daunted Bob. The boy felt the courage dry up within
him. Mouth and throat parched. He tried to speak and found he could not.
June took up the gage, instantly, defiantly. "You've got nothing to do
with us, Jake Houck. We're married."
The news had reached him. He looked at her blackly. "Married or single,
you're mine, girl, an' you're going with me."
"My husband will have a word to say about that," June boasted bravely.
Houck looked at his rival, and a sinister, mocking smile creased the hard
face. "I'm plumb scared of him," he jeered.
"We g-got a right to get married, Mr. Houck," Bob said, teeth chattering.
"You hadn't ought to make us trouble."
"Speaks up right brave, don't he?"
"He's as brave as you are, Jake Houck, even if he ain't a bully," the
bride flamed.
"So?" Houck moved a step or two toward Dillon.
The hand under the coat shook as though the boy had a chill.
"What you got there--in yore hand?" demanded Houck.
The revolver came to light.
Houck stuck his hands in his trouser pockets, straddled out his feet, and
laughed derisively. "Allowin' for to kill me, eh?"
"No, sir." The voice was a dry whisper. "I'd like to talk this over
reasonable, Mr. Houck, an' fix it up so's bygones would be bygones. I
ain't lookin' for trouble."
"I sure believe that." Houck turned to June. "It wouldn't be safe for me
to leave you with this desperate character who goes around with a
six-shooter not lookin' for trouble. I'm aimin' to take you with me, like
I said."
Her eyes clashed with his and gave way at last. "You always act like
you're God Almighty," she cried passionately. "Are you hard o' hearing?
I'm married to Bob Dillon here."
"I ain't heard him raise any objections to yore goin'," Houck taunted.
"Tolliver said for me to bring you, an' I'll do it."
June spoke to Bob, her voice trembling. "Tell him where to get off at,"
she begged.
"Mr. Houck, June's my wife. She's made her choice. That ends it," Bob
said unsteadily.
The cold, cruel eyes of the ex-rustler gripped those of Dillon and held
them. "End it, does it? Listen. If you're any kind of a man a-tall you'd
better shoot me right now. I'm gonna take her from you, an' you're goin'
to tell her to go with me. Understand?"
"He'll not tell me any such a thing," June protested. But her heart sank.
She was not sure whether her husband would grovel. If he did--if he
did--
The jeering voice went on taunting its victim. "If I was you I'd use that
gun or I'd crawl into a hole. Ain't you got any spunk a-tall? I'm tellin'
you that June's goin' with me instead o' you, an' that you're goin' to
tell her to go. Tha's the kind of a man she married."
"No, Mr. Houck, I don't reckon--"
Houck moved forward, evenly, without haste, eyes cold as chilled steel
and as unyielding. "Gimme that gun, if you ain't goin' to use it." He
held out a hand.
"Don't, Bob," begged June, in a panic of dismay.
While his heart fluttered with apprehension Bob told himself, over and
over, that he would not hand the revolver to Houck. He was still saying
it when his right arm began to move slowly forward. The weapon passed
from one to the other.
June gave a sobbing sound of shame and despair. She felt like a swimmer
in a swift current when the deep waters are closing over his head.
"Now tell her you ain't good enough for her, that you've got no sand in
yore craw, and she's to go with me," ordered Houck.
"No." Young Dillon's voice came dry from a throat like cotton.
The big man caught Bob's wrist and slowly twisted. The boy gave an
agonized howl of pain. June was white to the lips, but she made no
attempt to interfere. It was too late. Bob must show the stuff that was
in him. He must go through to a fighting finish or he must prove himself
a weakling.
"If you give her up now, you're a yellow dog, Dillon," his tormentor
sneered. "Stick it out. Tell me to go to red-hot blazes."
He took an extra turn on the wrist. Bob writhed and shrieked. Tiny beads
of perspiration stood on his forehead. "You're killin' me!" he screamed.
"Wish you'd gunned me when you had a chance, don't you?" Houck spat at
him. "Too late now. Well, what's it to be?" Again he applied the
torture.
The boy begged, pleaded, then surrendered. "I can't stand it! I'll do
anything you say."
"Well, you know yore li'l' piece. Speak it right up," ordered the
cattleman.
Bob said it, with his eyes on the ground, feeling and looking like a
whipped cur. "You better go with him, June. I--I'm no good." A sob choked
him. He buried his face in his hands.
Houck laughed harshly. "You hear him, June."
In a small dead voice June asked a question. "Do you mean that, Bob--that
I'm to go with him--that you give me up?"
Her husband nodded, without looking up.
No man can sacrifice his mate to save his own hide and still hold her
respect. June looked at him in a nausea of sick scorn. She turned from
him, wasting no more words.
She and Houck vanished into the gathering darkness.
CHAPTER X
IN THE IMAGE OF GOD
Houck's jeering laugh of triumph came back to the humiliated boy. He
noticed for the first time that two or three men were watching him from
the door of the saloon. Ashamed to the depths of his being, he hung his
head dejectedly. All his life he would be a marked figure because Jake
had stamped the manhood out of him, had walked off with his bride of an
hour.
In the country of the open spaces a man must have sand. Courage is the
basis upon which the other virtues are built, the fundamental upon which
he is most searchingly judged. Let a man tell the truth, stick to his
pal, and fight when trouble is forced on him, and he will do to ride the
river with, in the phrase of the plains.
Bob had lost June. She would, of course, never look at him again. To have
failed her so miserably cut deep into his pride and self-respect. With
her he had lost, too, the esteem of all those who lived within a radius
of fifty miles. For the story would go out to every ranch and cow-camp.
Worst of all he had blown out the dynamic spark within himself that is
the source of life and hope.
He did not deceive himself. Houck had said he was going to take June to
her father. But he had said it with a cynical sneer on his lips. For the
girl to be Jake's wife would have been bad enough, but to be his victim
without the protection of legality would be infinitely worse. And that
was the lot to which June was destined. She had fought, but she could
fight no longer.
Fate had played her a scurvy trick in the man she had chosen. Another
husband--Dud Hollister, for instance--would have battled it out for her
to a finish, till he had been beaten so badly he could no longer crawl to
his feet. If Bob had done that, even though he had been hopelessly
overmatched, he would have broken Houck's power over June. All the wild,
brave spirit of her would have gone out to her husband in a rush of
feeling. The battle would have been won for them both. The thing that had
stung her pride and crushed her spirit was that he had not struck a blow
for her. His cowardice had driven her to Jake Houck's arms because there
was no other place for her to go.
Their adventure had ended in tragedy both for her and for him. Bob sank
down on a dry-goods box and put his twitching face in his hands. He had
flung away both his own chance for happiness and hers. So far as he was
concerned he was done for. He could never live down the horrible thing he
had done.
He had been rather a frail youth, with very little confidence in himself.
Above all else he had always admired strength and courage, the qualities
in which he was most lacking. He had lived on the defensive, oppressed by
a subconscious sense of inferiority. His actions had been conditioned by
fear. Life at the charitable institution where he had been sent as a
small child fostered this depression of the ego and its subjection to
external circumstances. The manager of the home ruled by the rod. Bob had
always lived in a sick dread of it. Only within the past few months had
he begun to come into his own, a heritage of health and happiness.
Dud Hollister came to him out of Dolan's saloon. "Say, fellow, where's my
gun?" he asked.
Bob looked up. "He--took it."
"Do I lose my six-shooter?"
"I'll fix it with you when I get the money to buy one."
The boy looked so haggard, his face so filled with despair, that Dud was
touched in spite of himself.
"Why in Mexico didn't you give that bird a pill outa the gun?" he asked.
"I don't know. I'm--no good," Bob wailed.
"You said it right that time. I'll be doggoned if I ever saw such a thing
as a fellow lettin' another guy walk off with his wife--when he ain't
been married hardly two hours yet. Say, what's the matter with you
anyhow? Why didn't you take a fall outa him? All he could 'a' done was
beat you to death."
"He hurt me," Bob confessed miserably. "I--was afraid."
"Hurt you? Great jumpin' Jupiter. Say, fellows, listen to Miss--Miss
Roberta here. He hurt him, so he quit on the job--this guy here did. I
never heard the beat o' that."
"If you'll borrow one of yore friends' guns an' blow my brains out you'll
do me a favor," the harried youth told Hollister in a low voice.
Hollister looked at him searchingly. "I might, at that," agreed the
puncher. "But I'm not doin' that kind of favor to-day. I'll give you a
piece of advice. This ain't no country for you. Hop a train for Boston,
Mass., or one o' them places where you can take yore troubles to a fellow
with a blue coat. Tha's where you belong."
Up the street rolled Blister Haines, in time to hear the cowpuncher's
suggestion. Already the news had reached the justice of what had taken
place. He was one of those amiable busybodies who take care of other
people's troubles for them. Sometimes his efforts came to grief and
sometimes they did not.
"Hit the trail, you lads," he ordered. "I'll l-look out for this
b-business. The exc-c-citement's all over anyhow. Drift."
The range-riders disappeared. At best the situation was an embarrassing
one. It is not pleasant to be in the company of one who has just shown
himself a poltroon and is acutely aware of it.
Blister took Dillon into his office. He lowered himself into the biggest
chair carefully, rolled a cigarette, and lit up.
"Tell me about it," he ordered.
"Nothin' to tell." Bob leaned against the table and looked drearily at
the floor. The world had come to an end for him. That was all. "He showed
up an' took June from me--made me tell her to go along with him."
"How did he do that? Did he cover you with a gun?"
"No. I had the gun--till he took it from me." He gave the explanation he
had used twice already within the hour. "I'm no good."
Blister heaved himself up from the chair and waddled closer to the boy.
He shook a fat forefinger in his face. He glared at him fiercely.
"Say, where you from?"
"Austin, Texas, when I was a kid."
"Well, damn you, Texas man, I w-want to t-tell you right now that you're
talkin' blasphemy when you say you're n-no good. The good Lord made you,
didn't He? D-d' you reckon I'm goin' to let you stand up there an' claim
He did a pore job? No, sir. Trouble with you is you go an' bury yore
talent instead of w-whalin' the stuffin' outa that Jake Houck fellow."
"I wish I was dead," Bob groaned, drooping in every line of his figure.
"I wish I'd never been born."
"Blasphemy number two. Didn't He make you in His image? What right you
got wishin' He hadn't created you? Why, you pore w-worm, you're only a
mite lower than the angels an' yore red haid's covered with glory."
Blister's whisper of a voice took unexpectedly a sharp edge. "Snap it up!
That red haid o' yours. Hear me?"
Bob's head came up as though a spring had been released.
"B-better. K-keep it up where it belongs. Now, then, w-what are you
aimin' for to do?"
Bob shook his head. "Get outa this country, like Hollister said. Find a
hole somewheres an' pull it in after me."
"No, sir. Not none. You're gonna stay right here--in the country round
Bear Cat--where every last man, woman, an' k-kid will know how you ate
d-dirt when Houck told you to."
"I couldn't do that," the boy pleaded. "Why, I wouldn't have a chance.
I'd know what they were sayin' all the time."
"Sure you'd know it. Tha's the price you g-gotta pay for g-grovelin'.
Don't you see yore only chance is to go out an' make good before the
folks who know how you've acted? Sneak off an' keep still about what you
did, amongst s-strangers, an' where do you get off? You know all yore
life you're only a worm. The best you can be is a bluff. You'd be
d-duckin' outa makin' the fight you've gotta make. That don't get you
anywhere a-tall. No, sir. Go out an' reverse the verdict of the court.
Make good, right amongst the people who're keepin' tabs on yore record.
You can do it, if you c-clamp yore j-jaw an' remember that yore red haid
is c-covered with g-glory an' you been given dominion."
"But--"
"S-snap it up!" squeaked Blister.
The red head came up again with a jerk.
"Keep it up."
"What'll I do? Where'll I find work?"
"Out on the range. At the K Bar T, or the Keystone, or the Slash Lazy D.
It don't m-matter where."
"I can't ride."
"Hmp! Learn, can't you? Dud Hollister an' Tom Reeves wasn't neither one
of them born on a bronc's back. They climbed up there. So can you. You'll
take the dust forty times. You'll get yore bones busted an' yore red haid
cut open. But if you got the guts to stick, you'll be ridin' 'em slick
one o' these here days. An' you'll come out a m-man."
A faint glow began to stir in the boy's heart. Was there really a chance
for him to reverse the verdict? Could he still turn over a leaf and make
another start?
"You'll have one heluva time for a while," Blister prophesied. "Take 'em
by an' large an' these lads chasin' cows' tails are the salt o' the
earth. They'll go farther with you an' stick longer than anybody else you
ever met up with. Once they know you an' like you. But they'll be right
offish with you for a while. Kinda polite an' distant, I expect. S-some
overbearin' g-guy will start runnin' on you, knowin' it'll be safe. It'll
be up to you to m-make it mighty onsafe for him. Go through to a finish
that once an' the boys will begin sizin' you up an' wonderin' about you.
Those show-me lads will have to get evidence about 'steen times before
they'll believe."
"I'll never be able to stick it. I'm such a--so timid," Dillon groaned.
The justice bristled. "H-hell's bells! What's ailin' you, Texas man? I
tell you that you're made in His image. Bite on that thought hard
whenever you're up against it an' want to hide yorese'f in a hole. Every
time you get too s-scared to play yore hand out, you're playin' it low
down on yore C-creator."
Bob came to another phase of the situation. "What about--June?"
"Well, what about her?"
"She's gone with Houck. He'll not take her home."
"What d' you m-mean not take her home? Where'll he take her?"
"I don't know. That's it. I'm responsible for her. I brought her here. He
means to--to make her live with him."
"Keep her by force--that what you're drivin' at?"
"No-o. Not exactly. He's got a hold over her father somehow. She's worn
out fightin' him. When she ran away with me she played her last card.
She'll have to give up now. He's so big an' strong, such a bulldog for
gettin' his way, that she can't hold him off. June ain't seventeen yet.
She's gettin' a mighty rotten deal, looks like. First off, livin' alone
the way she an' Tolliver do, then Houck, then me, an' finally Houck
again."
"I'll notify Tolliver how things are," Blister said. "Get word to him
right away. We'll have to take a lead from him about June."
"I was thinkin'--"
"Onload it."
"Mrs. Gillespie was so kind to her. Maybe she could talk to June an' take
her at the hotel--if June an' Houck haven't gone yet."
"You said something then, boy. I'll see Mollie right away. She'll sure
fix it."
They were too late. The wrangler at Kilburn's corral had already seen
Houck hitch up and drive away with June, they presently learned.
CHAPTER XI
JUNE PRAYS
When June turned away from her husband of an hour she abandoned hope. She
had been like a child lost in the forest. A gleam of light from a window
had cheered her for a moment, but it had flickered out and left her in
the darkness.
In one sense June was innocent as an infant. She knew nothing of feminine
blandishments, of the coquetry which has become so effective a weapon in
the hands of modern woman when she is not hampered by scruples. But she
had lived too close to nature not to be aware of carnal appetite.
It is a characteristic of frontier life that one learns to face facts.
June looked at them now, clear-eyed, despair in her heart. As she walked
beside Jake to the corral, as she waited for him to hitch up the broncos,
as she rode beside him silently through the gathering night, the girl's
mind dwelt on that future which was closing in on her like prison walls.
Not for an instant did she deceive herself. Houck did not mean to take
her to Tolliver. She knew that his conscience would acquit him of blame
for what he meant to do. He had given her a chance to marry him, and she
had made it impossible. That was not his fault. He would take her to
Brown's Park with him when he returned. Probably they were on the way
there now.
After the plunging broncos had steadied down, Jake spoke. "You're well
shet of him. He's no good, like he said himself. A man's got to have
guts. You'd 'a' had to wear the breeches, June." The long whip curved out
inexorably. "Git over there, Buckskin."
Houck drove like a master. After one wild bolt the dancing ponies had
sensed that a strong hand was at the reins. They accepted the fact
placidly. June watched his handling of the lines sullenly, a dull
resentment and horror in her heart. He would subdue her as easily as he
had the half-broken colts, sometimes bullying, sometimes mocking,
sometimes making love to her with barbaric ardor. There were times when
his strength and ruthlessness had fascinated June, but just now she felt
only horror weighted by a dull, dead despair.
No use to fight longer. In a world filled with Jake Houck there was no
free will. She was helpless as a wolf in a trap.
They drove through a country of sagebrush hills. The moon came out and
carpeted the slopes with silver lace. Deep within June was a born love of
beauty as it found expression in this land of the Rockies. But to-night
she did not taste the scent of the sage or see the veil of mist that had
transformed the draws magically to fairy dells.
"Where you goin'?" she asked at last. "You said you'd take me to Dad."
He laughed, slipped a strong arm round her shoulders, and drew her
closer. "Found yore tongue at last, June girl, eh? We're going home--to
my place up in Brown's Park."
She made a perfunctory protest. It was, she knew, quite useless, and her
heart was not in it. No words she used, no appeal she could make, would
touch this man or change his intentions.
"You got no right to take me there. I'm not yore slave. I want to go to
Dad."
"Tha's right," he mocked. "I'm _yore_ slave, June. What's the use of
fighting? I'm so set on you that one way or another I'm bound to have
you."
She bit her lip, to keep from weeping. In the silvery night, alone with
him, miles from any other human being, she felt woefully helpless and
forlorn. The years slipped away. She was a little child, and her heart
was wailing for the mother whose body lay on the hillside near the
deserted cabin in Brown's Park. What could she do? How could she save
herself from the evil shadow that would blot the sunshine from her life?
Somewhere, in that night of stars and scudding clouds, was God, she
thought. He could save her if He would. But would He? Miracles did not
happen nowadays. And why would He bother about her? She was such a trifle
in the great scheme of things, only a poor ragged girl from the back
country, the daughter of a convict, poor hill trash, as she had once
heard a woman at Glenwood whisper. She was not of any account.
Yet prayers welled out in soundless sobs from a panic-stricken heart. "O
God, I'm only a li'l' girl, an' I growed up without a mother. I'm right
mean an' sulky, but if you'll save me this time from Jake Houck, I'll
make out to say my prayers regular an' get religion first chance comes
along," she explained and promised, her small white face lifted to the
vault where the God she knew about lived.
Drifts floated across the sky blown by currents from the northwest. They
came in billows, one on top of another, till they had obscured most of
the stars. The moon went into eclipse, reappeared, vanished behind the
storm scud, and showed again.
The climate of the Rockies, year in, year out, is the most stimulating on
earth. Its summer breezes fill the lungs with wine. Its autumns are
incomparable, a golden glow in which valley and hill bask lazily. Its
winters are warm with sunshine and cold with the crisp crackle of frost.
Its springs--they might be worse. Any Coloradoan will admit the climate
is superlative. But there is one slight rift in the lute, hardly to be
mentioned as a discord in the universal harmony. Sudden weather changes
do occur. A shining summer sun vanishes and in a twinkling of an eye the
wind is whistling snell.
Now one of these swept over the Rio Blanco Valley. The clouds thickened,
the air grew chill. The thermometer was falling fast.
Houck swung the team up from the valley road to the mesa. Along this they
traveled, close to the sage-covered foothills. At a point where a draw
dipped down to the road, Houck pulled up and dismounted. A gate made of
three strands of barbed wire and two poles barred the wagon trail. For
already the nester was fencing the open range.
As Houck moved forward to the gate the moon disappeared back of the
banked clouds. June's eye swept the landscape and brightened. The sage
and the brush were very thick here. A grove of close-packed quaking asps
filled the draw. She glanced at Jake. He was busy wrestling with the loop
of wire that fastened the gate.
God helps those that help themselves, June remembered. She put down the
lines Houck had handed her, stepped softly from the buckboard, and
slipped into the quaking asps.
A moment later she heard Jake's startled oath. It was certain that he
would plunge into the thicket of saplings in pursuit. She crept to one
side of the draw and crouched low.
He did not at once dive in. From where she lay hidden, June could hear
the sound of his footsteps as he moved to and fro.
"Don't you try to make a fool of Jake Houck, girl," he called to her
angrily. "I ain't standin' for any nonsense now. We got to be movin'
right along. Come outa there."
Her heart was thumping so that she was afraid he might hear it. She held
herself tense, not daring to move a finger lest she make a rustling of
leaves.
"Hear me, June! Git a move on you. If you don't--" He broke off, with
another oath. "I'll mark yore back for you sure enough with my whip when
I find you."
She heard him crashing into the thicket. He passed her not ten feet away,
so close that she made out the vague lines of his big body. A few paces
farther he stopped.
"I see you, girl. You ain't foolin' me any. Tell you what I'll do. You
come right along back to the buckboard an' I'll let you off the lickin'
this time."
She trembled, violently. It seemed that he did see her, for he moved a
step or two in her direction. Then he stopped, to curse, and the rage
that leaped into the heavy voice betrayed the bluff.
Evidently he made up his mind that she was higher up the draw. He went
thrashing up the arroyo, ploughing through the young aspens with a great
crackle of breaking branches.
June took advantage of this to creep up the side of the draw and out of
the grove. The sage offered poorer cover in which to hide, but her
knowledge of Houck told her that he would not readily give up the idea
that she was in the asps. He was a one-idea man, obstinate even to
pigheadedness. So long as there was a chance she might be in the grove he
would not stop searching there. He would reason that the draw was so
close to the buckboard she must have slipped into it. Once there, she
would stay because in it she could lie concealed.
Her knowledge of the habits of wild animals served June well now. The
first instinct was to get back to the road and run down it at full speed,
taking to the brush only when she heard the pursuit. But this would not
do. The sage here was much heavier and thicker than it was nearer Bear
Cat. She would find a place to hide in it till he left to drive back and
cut her off from town. There was one wild moment when she thought of
slipping down to the buckboard and trying to escape in it. June gave this
up because she would have to back it along the narrow road for fifteen or
twenty yards before she could find a place to turn.
On hands and knees she wound deeper into the sage, always moving toward
the rim-rock at the top of the hill. She was still perilously close to
Houck. His muffled oaths, the thrashing of the bushes, the threats and
promises he stopped occasionally to make; all of these came clear to her
in spite of the whistling wind.
It had come on to rain mistily. June was glad of that. She would have
welcomed a heavy downpour out of a black night. The rim-rock was close
above. She edged along it till she came to a scar where the sandstone had
broken off and scorched a path down the slope. Into the hollow formed by
two boulders resting against each other she crawled.
For hours she heard Jake moving about, first among the aspens and later
on the sage hill. The savage oaths that reached her now and again were
evidence enough that the fellow was in a vile temper. If he should find
her now, she felt sure he would carry out his vow as to the horsewhip.
The night was cold. June shivered where she lay close to the ground. The
rain beat in uncomfortably. But she did not move till Houck drove away.
Even then she descended to the road cautiously. He might have laid a trap
for her by returning on foot in the darkness. But she had to take a
chance. What she meant to do was clear in her mind. It would require all
her wits and strength to get safely back to town.
She plodded along the road for perhaps a mile, then swung down from the
mesa to the river. The ford where Jake had driven across was farther
down, but she could not risk the crossing. Very likely he was lying in
wait there.
June took off her brogans and tied them round her neck. She would have
undressed, but she was afraid of losing the clothes while in the stream.
It was dark. She did not know the river, how deep it was or how strong
the current. As she waded slowly in, her courage began to fail. She might
never reach the other shore. The black night and the rain made it seem
very far away.
She stopped, thigh deep, to breathe another prayer to the far-away God of
her imagination, who sat on a throne in the skies, an arbitrary emperor
of the universe. He had helped her once to-night. Maybe He would again.
"O God, don't please lemme drown," she said aloud, in order to be quite
sure her petition would be heard.
Deeper into the current she moved. The water reached her waist. Presently
its sweep lifted her from the bottom. She threw herself forward and began
to swim. It did not seem to her that she was making any headway. The
heavy skirts dragged down her feet and obstructed free movement of them.
Not an expert swimmer, she was soon weary. Weights pulled at the arms as
they swept back the water in the breast-stroke. It flashed through her
mind that she could not last much longer. Almost at the same instant she
discovered the bank. Her feet touched bottom. She shuffled heavily
through the shallows and sank down on the shore completely exhausted.
Later, it was in June's mind that she must have been unconscious. When
she took note of her surroundings she was lying on a dry pebbly wash
which the stream probably covered in high water. Snowflakes fell on her
cheek and melted there. She rose, stiff and shivering. In crossing the
river the brogans had washed from her neck. She moved forward in her
stocking feet. For a time she followed the Rio Blanco, then struck
abruptly to the right through the sagebrush and made a wide circuit.
It was definitely snowing now and the air was colder. June's feet were
bleeding, though she picked a way in the grama-grass and the tumbleweed
to save them as much as possible. Once she stepped into a badger hole
covered with long buffalo grass and strained a tendon.
She had plenty of pluck. The hardships of the frontier had instilled into
her endurance. Though she had pitied herself when she was riding beside
Jake Houck to moral disaster, she did not waste any now because she was
limping painfully through the snow with the clothes freezing on her body.
She had learned to stand the gaff, in the phrase of the old bullwhacker
who had brought her down from Rawlins. It was a part of her code that
physical pain and discomfort must be trodden under foot and disregarded.
A long detour brought her back to the river. She plodded on through the
storm, her leg paining at every step. She was chilled to the marrow and
very tired. But she clamped her small strong teeth and kept going.
The temptation to give up and lie down assailed her. She fought against
it, shuffling forward, stumbling as her dragging feet caught in the snow.
She must be near Bear Cat now. Surely it could not be far away. If it was
not very close, she knew she was beaten.
After what seemed an eternity of travel a light gleamed through the snow.
She saw another--a third.
She zigzagged down the road like a drunkard.
CHAPTER XII
MOLLIE TAKES CHARGE
Bear Cat was a cow-town, still in its frankest, most exuberant youth. Big
cattle outfits had settled on the river and ran stock almost to the Utah
line. Every night the saloons and gambling-houses were filled with
punchers from the Diamond K, the Cross Bar J, the Half Circle Dot, or any
one of a dozen other brands up or down the Rio Blanco. They came from
Williams's Fork, Squaw, Salt, Beaver, or Piney Creeks. And usually they
came the last mile or two on the dead run, eager to slake a thirst as
urgent as their high spirits.
They were young fellows most of them, just out of their boyhood, keen to
spend their money and have a good time when off duty. Always they made
straight for Dolan's or the Bear Cat House. First they downed a drink or
two, then they washed off the dust of travel. This done, each followed
his own inclination. He gambled, drank, or frolicked around, according to
the desire of the moment.
Dud Hollister and Tom Reeves, with Blister Haines rolling between them,
impartially sampled the goods at Dolan's and at Mollie Gillespie's. They
had tried their hand at faro, with unfortunate results, and they had sat
in for a short session at a poker game where Dud had put too much faith
in a queen full.
"I sure let my foot slip that time," Dud admitted. "I'd been playin'
plumb outa luck. Couldn't fill a hand, an' when I did, couldn't get it to
stand up. That last queen looked like money from home. I reckon I
overplayed it," he ruminated aloud, while he waited for Mike Moran to
give him another of the same.
Tom hooked his heel on the rail in front of the bar. "I ain't made up my
mind yet that game was on the level. That tinhorn who claimed he was from
Cheyenne ce'tainly had a mighty funny run o' luck. D' you notice how his
hands jes' topped ours? Kinda queer, I got to thinkin'. He didn't hold
any more'n he had to for to rake the chips in. I'd sorta like a look-see
at the deck we was playin' with."
Blister laughed wheezily. "You w-won't get it. N-never heard of a hold-up
gettin' up a petition for better street lights, did you? No, an' you
n-never will. An' you never n-noticed a guy who was aimin' to bushwhack
another from the brush go to clearin' off the sage first. He ain't
l-lookin' for no open arguments on the m-merits of his shootin'. Not
none. Same with that Cheyenne bird an' his stocky pal acrost the table.
They're f-figurin' that dead decks tell no tales. The one you played with
is sure enough s-scattered every which way all over the floor along with
seve-real others." The fat justice of the peace murmured "How!" and
tilted his glass.
If Blister did not say "I told you so," it was not because he might not
have done it fairly. He had made one comment when Dud had proposed
sitting in to the game of draw.
"H-how much m-mazuma you got?"
"Twenty-five bucks left."
"If you s-stay outa that game you'll earn t-twenty-five bucks the
quickest you ever did in yore life."
Youth likes to buy its experience and not borrow it. Dud knew now that
Blister had been a wise prophet in his generation.
The bar at Gillespie's was at the front of the house. In the rear were
the faro and poker tables, the roulette wheels, and the other
conveniences for separating hurried patrons from their money. The Bear
Cat House did its gambling strictly on the level, but there was the usual
percentage in favor of the proprietor.
Mollie was sitting in an armchair on a small raised platform about
halfway back. She kept a brisk and business-like eye on proceedings. No
puncher who had gone broke, no tenderfoot out of luck, could go hungry in
Bear Cat if she knew it. The restaurant and the bar were at their service
just as though they had come off the range with a pay-check intact. They
could pay when they had the money. No books were kept. Their memories
were the only ledgers. Few of these debts of honor went unpaid in the
end.
But Mollie, though tender-hearted, knew how to run the place. Her
brusque, curt manner suited Bear Cat. She could be hail-fellow or hard as
flint, depending on circumstances. The patrons at Gillespie's remembered
her sex and yet forgot it. They guarded their speech, but they drank with
her at the bar or sat across a poker table from her on equal terms. She
was a good sport and could lose or win large sums imperturbably.
Below her now there floated past a tide of hot-blooded youth eager to
make the most of the few hours left before the dusty trails called. Most
of these punchers would go back penniless to another month or two of hard
and reckless riding. But they would go gayly, without regret, the
sunshine of irrepressible boyhood in their hearts. The rattle of chips,
the sound of laughter, the murmur of conversation, the even voice of the
croupier at the roulette table, filled the hall.
Jim Larson, a cowman from down the river, sat on the edge of the
platform.
"The Boot brand's puttin' a thousand head in the upper country this fall,
Mollie. Looks to me like bad business, but there's a chance I'm wrong at
that. My bet is you can't run cows there without winter feed. There won't
many of 'em rough through."
"Some'll drift down to the river," Mollie said, her preoccupied eyes on
the stud table where a slight altercation seemed to be under way. Her
method of dealing with quarrels was simple. The first rule was based on
one of Blister Haines's paradoxes. "The best way to settle trouble is not
to have it." She tried to stop difficulties before they became acute. If
this failed, she walked between the angry youths and read the riot act to
them.
"Some will," admitted Larson. "More of 'em won't."
Mollie rose, to step down from the platform. She did not reach the stud
table. A commotion at the front door drew her attention. Mrs. Gillespie
was a solid, heavy-set woman, but she moved with an energy that carried
her swiftly. She reached the bar before any of the men from the
gambling-tables.
A girl was leaning weakly against the door-jamb. Hat and shoes were gone.
The hair was a great black mop framing a small face white to the lips.
The stocking soles were worn through. When one foot shifted to get a
better purchase for support, a bloodstained track was left on the floor.
The short dress was frozen stiff.
The dark, haunted eyes moved uncertainly round the circle of faces
staring at her. The lips opened and made the motions of speech, but no
sound came from them. Without any warning the girl collapsed.
Dud Hollister's arm was under the ice-coated head in an instant. He
looked up at Mollie Gillespie, who had been only a fraction of a second
behind him.
"It's the li'l' bride," he said.
She nodded. "Brandy an' water, Mike. Quick! She's only fainted. Head not
so high, Dud. Tha's right. We'll get a few drops of this between her
teeth.... She's comin' to."
June opened her eyes and looked at Mollie. Presently she looked round and
a slow wonder grew in them. "Where am I?" she murmured.
"You're at the hotel--where you'll be looked after right, dearie." Mrs.
Gillespie looked up. "Some one get Doc Tuckerman. An' you, Tom, hustle
Peggie and Chung Lung outa their beds if they're not up. There's a fire
in my room. Tell her to take the blankets from the bed an' warm 'em. Tell
Chung to heat several kettles o' water fast as he can. Dud, you come
along an' carry her to the stove in the lobby. The rest o' you'll stay
right here."
Mollie did not ask any questions or seek explanation. That could wait.
The child had been through a terrible experience and must be looked after
first.
From the lobby Dud presently carried June into the bedroom and departed.
A roaring fire was in the stove. Blankets and a flannel nightgown were
hanging over the backs of chairs to warm. With the help of the
chambermaid Peggie, the landlady stripped from the girl the frozen dress
and the wet underclothes. Over the thin, shivering body she slipped the
nightgown, then tucked her up in the blankets. As soon as Chung brought
the hot-water jugs she put one at June's feet and another close to the
stomach where the cold hands could rest upon it.
June was still shaking as though she never would get warm. A faint mist
of tears obscured her sight. "Y-you're awful good to me," she whispered,
teeth chattering.
The doctor approved of what had been done. He left medicine for the
patient. "Be back in five minutes," he told Mrs. Gillespie outside the
room. "Want some stuff I've got at the office. Think I'll stay for a few
hours and see how the case develops. Afraid she's in for a bad spell of
pneumonia."
He did not leave the sick-room after his return until morning. Mollie
stayed there, too. It was nearly one o'clock when Blister Haines knocked
gently at the door.
"How's the li'l' lady?" he asked in his high falsetto, after Mollie had
walked down the passage with him.
"She's a mighty sick girl. Pneumonia, likely."
"Tell doc not to let her die. If he needs another doctor some of us'll
h-hustle over to Glenwood an' g-get one. Say, Mrs. Gillespie, I reckon
there's gonna be trouble in town to-night."
She said nothing, but her blue eyes questioned him.
Blister's next sentence sent her moving toward the saloon.
CHAPTER XIII
BEAR CAT ASKS QUESTIONS
A man bow-legged into Gillespie's and went straight to the bar. "Gimme a
drink--something damned hot," he growled.
He was a big, broad-shouldered fellow, hook-nosed, with cold eyes set
close. Hair and eyebrows were matted with ice and a coat of sleet covered
his clothes. Judging from voice and manner, he was in a vile humor.
A young fellow standing near was leaning with his back against the bar,
elbows resting on it. One heel was hooked casually over the rail.
"Anything been seen of a strange girl in town to-night?" the newcomer
asked. "She ain't right in her head an' I was takin' her to her dad's
place when she slipped away. I'm worried about her, out in this storm."
The cowpuncher looked at him coldly, eye to eye. "I'd say you got a
license to be. If she's lost out to-night she's liable to be frozen to
death before mo'ning."
"Yes," agreed Houck, and his lids narrowed. What did this young fellow
mean? There was something about his manner both strange and challenging.
If he was looking for a fight, Houck knew just where he could be
accommodated.
"In which case--"
The puncher stopped significantly.
"In which case--?" Houck prompted.
"--it might be unlucky for the guy that took her out an' lost her."
"What's yore name, fellow?" Jake demanded.
"Fellow, my name's Dud Hollister," promptly answered the other. "D'you
like it?"
"Not much. Neither it nor you."
Houck turned insolently back to the bar for his drink.
Mike was stirring into the glass of liquor cayenne pepper which he was
shaking from a paper. He was using as a mixer the barrel of a
forty-five.
The salient jaw of Houck jutted out. "What monkey trick are you tryin' to
play on me?" he asked angrily.
"You wanted it hot," Mike replied, and the bartender's gaze too was cold
and level.
It seemed to the former rustler that here was a second man ready to
fasten a quarrel on him. What was the matter with these fellows anyhow?
Another puncher ranged himself beside Hollister. "Who did this bird claim
he was, Dud?" he asked out loud, offensively.
"Didn't say. Took that li'l' bride out in this storm an' left her there.
Expect he'll be right popular in Bear Cat."
Houck smothered his rage. This was too serious to be settled by an
explosion of anger and an appeal to arms.
"I tell you she hid whilst I was openin' a gate. I been lookin' for her
six hours. Thought maybe she'd come to town. My idee is to organize a
search party an' go out after her. Quick as we can slap saddles on broncs
an' hit the trail."
Fragments of the facts had drifted out to the boys from the sick-room.
Dud tried an experiment. "Where'll we hunt for her--up toward Piceance?"
Houck deliberated before answering. If he were to tell the truth--that
she had escaped from him in the hills nine miles down the river--these
men would know he had been lying when he said he was taking June to her
father. If he let the search party head toward Piceance, there would be
no chance for it to save the girl. The man was no coward. To his credit,
he told the truth.
A half-circle of hostile faces hemmed him in, for the word had spread
that this was the man who had carried off June Tolliver. He was the focus
of a dozen pairs of eyes. Among the cattlemen of the Old West you will
still look into many such eyes, but never among city dwellers will you
find them. Blue they are for the most part or gray-blue, level, direct,
unfearing; quiet and steady as steel, flinging no flags of flurry,
tremendously sure of themselves. They can be very likable eyes, frank and
kind, with innumerable little lines of humor radiating from the corners;
or they can be stern and chill as the Day of Judgment.
Jake Houck found in them no gentleness. They judged him, inexorably,
while he explained.
"Where was you takin' her?" asked Larson, of the Wagon Rod outfit.
In spite of his boldness, of the dominating imperiousness by means of
which he had been used to ride roughshod over lesser men, Houck felt a
chill sensation at his heart. They were too quiet--too quiet by half.
"We was to have been married to-day," he said surlily. "This Dillon boy
got her to run off with him. He was no good. I rode hell-for-leather into
town to head 'em off."
Blister brought him back to the question of the moment. "An' you were
t-takin' her--?"
"To Brown's Park."
"Forcin' her to go. Was that it?" Hollister broke in.
"No, sir. She went of her own accord."
"Asked you to take her there, mebbe?"
"None o' yore damn business."
"How old is she, Mr. Houck?" Larson questioned.
"I dunno."
"I do. Sixteen coming Christmas," said Dud. "Dillon told me."
"An' how old are you, Mr. Houck?" the quiet, even voice of the owner of
the Wagon Rod pursued.
"I d'no as that's got anything to do with it, but I'm forty-three," Jake
retorted defiantly.
"You meant to live with her?"
"I meant to treat her right," was the sullen reply.
"But livin' with her, an' her another man's wife."
"No, sir. That fake marriage with Dillon don't go. She was promised to
me." He broke out suddenly in anger: "What's eatin' you all? Why don't
you go out an' help me find the girl? These whatfors an' whyfors can
wait, I reckon."
Blister dropped a bomb. "She's found."
"Found!" Houck stared at the fat man. "Who found her? Where? When?"
"Coupla hours ago. Here in this r-room. Kinda funny how she'd swim the
river a night like this an' walk eight-ten miles barefoot in the snow,
all to get away from you, an' her goin' with you of her own accord."
"It wasn't eight miles--more like six."
"Call it six, then. Fact is, Mr. Houck, she was mighty scared of you--in
a panic of terror, I'd say."
"She had no call to be," the Brown's Park settler replied, his voice
heavy with repressed rage. "I'm tellin' you she wasn't right in her
head."
"An' you was takin' advantage of that to make this li'l' girl yore--to
ruin her life for her," Hollister flung back.
In all his wild and turbulent lifetime Jake Houck had never before been
brought to task like this. He resented the words, the manner, the quiet
insistence of these range men. An unease that was not quite fear, but was
very close to it, had made him hold his temper in leash. Now the savage
in him broke through.
"You're a bunch of fool meddlers, an' I'm through explainin'. You can go
to hell 'n' back for me," he cried, and followed with a string of
crackling oaths.
The eyes of the punchers and cattlemen met one another. No word was
spoken, but the same message passed back and forth a score of times.
"I expect you don't quite understand where you're at, Mr. Houck," Larson
said evenly. "This is mighty serious business for you. We aim to give you
a chance to tell yore story complete before we take action."
"Action?" repeated Houck, startled.
"You're up against it for fair," Reeves told him. "If you figure on
gettin' away with a thing like that in a white man's country you've sure
got another guess comin'. I don't know where you're from or who you are,
but I know where you're going."
"D-don't push on the reins, Tom," the justice said. "We aim to be
reasonable about this, I reckon."
"Sure we do." Dud countered with one of Blister's own homely apothegms.
"What's the use of chewin' tobacco if you spit out the juice? Go through,
I say. There's a cottonwood back of the kitchen."
"You're fixin' for to hang me?" Houck asked, his throat and palate gone
suddenly dry.
"You done guessed it first crack," Tom nodded.
"Not yet, boys," protested Haines in his whispering falsetto. "I reckon
we'd ought to wait an' see how the girl comes out."
"Why had we?" demanded a squat puncher from the Keystone. "What
difference does it make? If ever any one needed stringin' up, it's the
guy here. He's worse than Douglas or any other Injun ever was. Is it yore
notion we'd oughta sit around with our hands in our pockets, Blister,
while reptiles like this Houck make our girls swim the river at night an'
plough barefoot through snowstorms? I ain't that easy-dispositioned
myself."
"Shorty's sure whistlin'. Same here," another chap-clad rider chipped
in.
"An' here."
Blister dropped into the background inconspicuously and vanished. He
appeared to be in a minority of one, not counting Houck, and he needed
reenforcements.
"We'll hear what Mr. Houck has to say before we pass judgment," Larson
said.
But Houck, looking into the circle of grim faces that surrounded him,
knew that he was condemned. Nothing that he could say would make any
difference. He shrugged his heavy shoulders.
"What's the use? You've done made up yore minds."
He noticed that the younger fellows were pressing closer to him. Pretty
soon they would disarm him. If he was going to make a fight for his life,
it had to be now. His arm dropped to his side, close to the butt of the
revolver he carried.
He was too late. Hollister jumped for his wrist and at the same time Mike
flung himself across the bar and garroted him. He struggled fiercely to
free himself, but was dragged down to the floor and pinioned. Before he
was lifted up his hands were tied behind him.
Unobserved, the front door of the barroom had opened. An ice-coated
figure was standing on the threshold.
Houck laughed harshly. "Come right in, Tolliver. You'll be in time to
take a hand in the show."
The little trapper's haggard eyes went round in perplexity. "What's the
trouble?" he asked mildly.
"No trouble a-tall," answered the big prisoner hardily. "The boys are
hangin' me. That's all."
CHAPTER XIV
HOUCK TAKES A RIDE
Tolliver rubbed a hand uncertainly over a bristly chin. "Why, what are
they doin' that for, Jake?"
"Are you the Tolliver girl's father?" asked Larson.
"Yes, sir."
"Then we got bad news for you. She's sick."
"Sick?" the trapper's lips trembled.
"A mighty sick girl. This man here--this Houck, if that's what he calls
himself--took her away from the young fellow she'd married and started up
to Brown's Park with her. Somehow she gave him the slip, swam the river,
an' came back to town barefoot through the snow. Seems she lost her shoes
while she was crossin' the Blanco."
The color washed away beneath the tan of the father's face. "Where's she
at?"
"Here--at the hotel. Mrs. Gillespie an' Doc Tuckerman are lookin' after
her."
"I'd like to go to her right away."
"Sure. Dud, you know where the room is. Take Mr. Tolliver there."
"Pete." Houck's voice was hoarse, but no longer defiant. In this little
man, whom he had always bullied and dominated, whose evil genius he had
been, lay his hope of life. "Pete, you ain't a-going to leave yore old
pardner to be hanged."
Tolliver looked bleakly at him. The spell this man had woven over him
twenty-odd years ago was broken forever. "I'm through with you, Jake," he
said.
"You ain't intendin' to lift a hand for me?"
"Not a finger."
"Won't you tell these men howcome it I rode down to Bear Cat after
June?"
The Piceance Creek man's jaw tightened. His small eyes flashed hate.
"Sure, I'll tell 'em that. About two-three weeks ago Houck showed up at
my place an' stayed overnight. I knew him when we was both younger, but I
hadn't seen him for a long time. He took a notion to my June. She didn't
want to have a thing to do with him, but he bullied her, same as he did
me. June she found out he knew something about me, an' she was afraid to
make him mad. I reckon finally he got some kinda promise outa her. He had
some business at Meeker, an' he was comin' back to the ranch yestiddy.
Then he aimed to bring her here to get married."
He was looking steadily at Houck. Pete had found at last the courage to
defy him. He could tell anything he liked about the escape from Canyon
City.
"I was away all day lookin' over my traps an' fixin' them up. When I
reached home I found two notes. I got 'em here somewheres." Tolliver
fumbled in his coat pockets, but did not find them. "One was from June.
She said she was runnin' away to marry the Dillon boy. The other was from
Jake Houck. He'd got to the house before I did, found her note to me, an'
lit out after her. Soon's I could run up a horse I hit the trail too."
"Threw me down, eh, Pete?" Houck said bitterly. "Well, there's two can
play at that."
Tolliver did not flinch. "Go to it, soon as you've a mind to. I don't owe
you a thing except misery. You wrecked my life. I suffered for you an'
kept my mouth padlocked. I was coyote enough to sit back an' let you
torment my li'l' girl because I was afraid for to have the truth come out
an' hurt her. I'd ought to have gone after you with a forty-five. I'm
through. They can't hang you any too soon to suit me. If they don't--an'
if my June don't get well--I'll gun you sure as God made li'l' apples."
He turned and walked out of the room with Dud Hollister.
In the passage they met Mollie Gillespie and Blister Haines. The first
words the landlady heard were from Houck.
"No, sir, I've got nothing to say. What'd be the use? You've made up yore
minds to go through with this thing. A fool could see that. Far as
Tolliver goes, I reckon I'll go it alone an' not do any beefin' about
him. He threw me down hard, but he was considerable strung up about June.
Wouldn't do any good for me to tell what I know."
"Not a bit," assented Reeves. "Might as well game it out."
Houck's hard, cold eye looked at him steadily. "Who said anything about
not gaming it out? If you're expectin' me to beg an' crawl you've got
hold of the wrong man. I'm a damned tough nut an' don't you forget it.
Whenever you're ready, gents."
From the door Mrs. Gillespie spoke. "What's all this?"
She became at once the center of attention. The punchers grouped around
Houck were taken by surprise. They were disconcerted by this unexpected
addition to the party. For though Mrs. Gillespie led an irregular life,
no woman on the river was so widely loved as she. The mother of Bear Cat,
the boys called her. They could instance a hundred examples of the
goodness of her heart. She never tired of waiting on the sick, of giving
to those who were needy. It was more than possible she would not approve
the summary vengeance about to be executed upon the Brown's Park man.
The prisoner was the first to answer. "Just in time, ma'am. The boys are
stagin' an entertainment. They're fixin' to hang me. If you'll accept an
invite from the hangee I'll be glad to have you stay an'--"
"Hanging him? What for? What's he done?"
Tom Reeves found his voice. "He's the fellow done dirt to the li'l'
Tolliver girl, ma'am. We've had a kinda trial an'--"
"Fiddlesticks!" interrupted the woman. She swept the group with an
appraising eye. "I'm surprised to see you in this, Larson. Thought you
had more sense. Nobody would expect anything better of these flyaway
boys."
The owner of the Wagon Rod brand attempted defense, a little sheepishly.
"What would you want us to do, Mollie? This fellow treated the girl
outrageous. She's liable to die because--"
"Die! Nonsense! She's not going to die any more than this Houck is." She
looked the Brown's Park man over contemptuously with chill, steady eyes.
"He's a bad egg. It wouldn't hurt my feelings any if you rode him outa
town on a rail, but I'm not going to have you-all mixed up in a lynching
when there's no need for it."
Larson stole a look around the circle of faces. On the whole he was glad
Mrs. Gillespie had come. It took only a few minutes to choke the life out
of a man, but there were many years left in which one might regret it.
"O' course, if you say Miss Tolliver ain't dangerous sick, that makes a
difference," he said.
"Don't see it," Tom Reeves differed. "We know what this fellow aimed to
do, an' how he drove her to the river to escape him. If you ask me, I'll
say--"
"But nobody's askin' you, Tom," Mollie cut into his sentence sharply.
"You're just a fool boy chasin' cows' tails for thirty dollars a month.
I'm not going to have any of this nonsense. Bear Cat's a law-abidin'
place. We're all proud of it. We don't let bad-men strut around an' shoot
up our citizens, an' we don't let half-grown punchers go crazy an' start
hangin' folks without reason. Now do we?" A persuasive smile broke out on
the harsh face and transformed it. Every waif, every under-dog, every
sick woman and child within fifty miles had met that smile and warmed to
it.
Reeves gave up, grinning. "I ain't such a kid either, Mrs. Gillespie, but
o' course you got to have yore way. We all know that. What d' you want us
to do with this bird?"
"Turn him over to Simp an' let him put the fellow in the jail. There's
just as good law right here as there is anywhere. I'd hate to have it go
out from here that Bear Cat can't trust the officers it elects to see
justice done. Don't you boys feel that way too?"
"Can't we even ride him outa town on a rail? You done said we might."
Mrs. Gillespie hesitated. Why not? It was a crude and primitive
punishment, but it would take drastic treatment to get under the hide of
this sneering bully who had come within an ace of ruining the life of
June Tolliver. The law could not touch him. He had not abducted her. She
had gone of her own volition. Unfulfilled intentions are not criminal
without an overt act. Was he to escape scot free? She had scoffed at the
idea that June might die. But in her heart she was not so sure. The fever
was growing on her. It would be days before the crisis was reached.
"Will you promise, honest injun, not to kill or maim him, not to do
anything that will injure him permanent?"
"Yes, ma'am. We'll jes' jounce him up some."
"All agree to that?"
They did.
"Will you go along with the boys, Jim?" She smiled. "Just to see they're
not too--enthusiastic."
The owner of the Wagon Rod said he would.
Mollie nodded. "All right, boys. The quicker the sooner."
Fifteen minutes later Jake Houck went out of town on a rail.
CHAPTER XV
A SCANDAL SCOTCHED
Before the door of the room opened Tolliver heard the high-pitched voice
of his daughter.
"If you'd only stood up to him, Bob--if you'd shot him or fought him ...
lemme go, Jake. You got no right to take me with you. Tell you I'm
married.... Yes, sir, I'll love, honor, an' obey. I sure will--in
sickness an' health--yes, sir, I do...."
The father's heart sank. He knew nothing about illness. A fear racked him
that she might be dying. Piteously he turned to the doctor, after one
look at June's flushed face.
"Is she--is she--?"
"Out of her head, Mr. Tolliver."
"I mean--will she--?"
"Can't promise you a thing yet. All we can do is look after her and hope
for the best. She's young and strong. It's pretty hard to kill anybody
born an' bred in these hills. They've got tough constitutions. Better
take a chair."
Tolliver sat down on the edge of a chair, nursing his hat. His leathery
face worked. If he could only take her place, go through this fight
instead of her. It was characteristic of his nature that he feared and
expected the worst. He was going to lose her. Of that he had no doubt. It
would be his fault. He was being punished for the crimes of his youth and
for the poltroonery that had kept him from turning Jake out of the
house.
June sat up excitedly in bed and pointed to a corner of the room. "There
he is, in the quaking asps, grinnin' at me! Don't you come nearer, Jake
Houck! Don't you! If you do I'll--I'll--"
Dr. Tuckerman put his hand gently on her shoulder. "It's all right, June.
Here's your father. We won't let Houck near you. Better lie down now and
rest."
"Why must I lie down?" she asked belligerently. "Who are you anyhow,
mister?"
"I'm the doctor. You're not quite well. We're looking after you."
Tolliver came forward timorously. "Tha's right, June. You do like the
doctor says, honey."
"I'd just as lief, Dad," she answered, and lay down obediently.
When she was out of her head, at the height of the fever, Mrs. Gillespie
could always get her to take the medicine and could soothe her fears and
alarms. Mollie was chief nurse. If she was not in the room, after June
had begun to mend, she was usually in the kitchen cooking broths or
custards for the sick girl.
June's starved heart had gone out to her in passionate loyalty and
affection. No woman had ever been good to her before, not since the death
of her aunt, at least. And Mollie's goodness had the quality of sympathy.
It held no room for criticism or the sense of superiority. She was a
sinner herself, and it was in her to be tender to others who had fallen
from grace.
To Mollie this child's innocent trust in her was exquisitely touching.
June was probably the only person in the world except small children who
believed in her in just this way. It was not possible that this faith
could continue after June became strong enough to move around and talk
with the women of Bear Cat. Though she had outraged public opinion all
her life, Mollie Gillespie found herself tugged at by recurring impulses
to align herself as far as possible with respectability.
For a week she fought against the new point of view. Grimly she scoffed
at what she chose to consider a weakness.
"This is a nice time o' day for you to try to turn proper, Mollie
Gillespie," she told herself plainly. "Just because a chit of a girl goes
daffy over you, is that any reason to change yore ways? You'd ought to
have a lick o' sense or two at yore age."
But her derision was a fraud. She was tired of being whispered about. The
independent isolation of which she had been proud had become of a sudden
a thing hateful to her.
She went to Larson as he was leaving the hotel dining-room on his next
visit to town.
"Want to talk with you. Come outside a minute."
The owner of the Wagon Rod followed.
"Jim," she said, turning on him abruptly, "you've always claimed you
wanted to marry me." Her blue eyes searched deep into his. "Do you mean
that? Or is it just talk?"
"You know I mean it, Mollie," he answered quietly.
"Well, I'm tired of being a scandal to Bear Cat. I've always said I'd
never get married again since my bad luck with Hank Gillespie. But I
don't know. If you really want to get married, Jim."
"I've always thought it would be better."
"I'm not going to quit runnin' this hotel, you understand. You're in town
two-three days a week anyhow. If you like you can build a house here an'
we'll move into it."
"I'll get busy _pronto_. I expect you want a quiet wedding, don't you?"
"Sure. We can go over to Blister's office this afternoon. You see him an'
make arrangements. Tell him I don't want the boys to know anything about
it till afterward."
An hour later they stood before Justice Haines. Mollie thought she
detected a faint glimmer of mirth in his eye after the ceremony. She
quelled it promptly.
"If you get gay with me, Blister--"
The fat man's impulse to smile fled. "Honest to goodness, Mrs.
Gillespie--"
"Larson," she corrected.
"Larson," he accepted. "I w-wish you m-many happy returns."
She looked at him suspiciously and grunted "Hmp!"
CHAPTER XVI
BLISTER AS DEUS EX MACHINA
Blister Haines found an old pair of chaps for Bob Dillon and lent him a
buckskin bronco. Also, he wrote a note addressed to Harshaw, of the Slash
Lazy D, and gave it to the boy.
"He'll put you to ridin', Ed will. The rest's up to you. D-don't you
forget you're made in the l-likeness of God. When you feel like crawlin'
into a hole s-snap that red haid up an' keep it up."
Bob grew very busy extricating a cockle burr from the mane of the
buckskin. "I'll never forget what you've done for me, Mr. Haines," he
murmured, beet red.
"Sho! Nothin' a-tall. I'm always lookin' for to get a chance to onload
advice on some one. Prob'ly I was meant to be a grandma an' got mixed in
the shuffle. Well, boy, don't weaken. When in doubt, hop to it."
"Yes, sir. I'll try."
"Don't w-worry about things beforehand. Nothin's ever as bad as you
figure it's goin' to be. A lickin' don't last but a few minutes, an' if
you get b-busy enough it's the other fellow that's liable to absorb it.
Watch that r-rampageous scalawag Dud Hollister an' do like he does."
"Yes, sir."
"An' don't forget that every m-mornin' begins a new day. Tha's all,
son."
Bob jogged down the road on this hazard of new fortune.
It chanced that Dud was still in town. Blister found him and half a dozen
other punchers in front of the hotel.
"Betcha! Drinks for the crowd," the justice heard him say.
"Go you," Reeves answered, eyes dancing. "But no monkey business. It's to
be a straight-away race from the front of the hotel clear to the
blacksmith shop."
"To-day. Inside of ten minutes, you said," Shorty of the Keystone
reminded Hollister. "An' this Sunday, you recollect."
Dud's gaze rested on a figure of a horseman moving slowly up the road
toward them. The approaching rider was the Reverend Melanchthon T.
Browning, late of Providence, Rhode Island. He had come to the frontier
to teach it the error of its ways and bring a message of sweetness and
light to the unwashed barbarians of the Rockies. He was not popular. This
was due, perhaps, to an unfortunate manner. The pompous little man
strutted and oozed condescension.
"W-what's up?" asked Blister.
"Dud's bettin' he'll get the sky pilot to race him from here to Monty's
place," explained Reeves. "Stick around. He'll want to borrow a coupla
dollars from you to buy the drinks."
It was Sunday afternoon. The missionary was returning from South Park,
where he had been conducting a morning service. He was riding Tex
Lindsay's Blue Streak, borrowed for the occasion.
"What deviltry you up to now, Dud?" Blister inquired.
"Me?" The young puncher looked at him with a bland face of innocence.
"Why, Blister, you sure do me wrong."
Dud sauntered to the hitching-rack, easy, careless, graceful. He selected
a horse and threw the rein over its head. The preacher was just abreast
of the hotel.
The puncher swung to the saddle and brought the pony round. A wild whoop
came from his throat. The roan, touched by a spur, leaped to a canter.
For an instant it was side by side with Blue Streak. Then it shot down
the road.
Blue Streak was off in an eyeflash. It jumped to a gallop and pounded
after the roan. The Reverend Melancthon T. Browning was no rider. His
feet lost the stirrups. A hymn-book went off at a wild tangent.
Coat-tails flew into the air. The exponent of sweetness and light leaned
forward and clung desperately to the mane, crying, "Whoa! Stop! Desist!"
But Blue Streak had no intention of desisting as long as the roan was in
front. Tex Lindsay's horse was a racer. No other animal was going to pass
it. The legs of the dark horse stretched for the road. It flew past the
cowpony as though the latter had been trotting. The Reverend Melancthon
stuck to the saddle for dear life.
At the blacksmith shop Dud pulled up. He rode back at a road gait to the
hotel. His companions greeted him with shouts of gayety.
"Where's the parson?" some one asked.
"Between here an' 'Frisco somewheres. He was travelin' like he was in a
hurry when I saw him last. Who pays for the drinks?"
"I do, you darned ol' Piute," shouted Reeves joyously. "I never will
forget how the sky pilot's coat-tails spread. You could 'a' played
checkers on 'em. D'you reckon we'd ought to send a wreckin' crew after
Melancthon T. Browning?"
"Why, no. The way he was clamped to that Blue Streak's back you couldn't
pry him loose with a crowbar."
"Here he c-comes now," Blister announced.
When the home missionary reached the hotel he found a grave and decorous
group of sympathizers.
"I was surely right careless, sir, to start thataway so onexpected," Dud
apologized. "I hope you didn't get jounced up much."
"Some one had ought to work you over for bein' so plumb wooden-haided,
Dud," the puncher from the Keystone reproved him. "Here was Mr. Browning
ridin' along quiet an' peaceable, figurin' out how he could improve us
Rio Blanco savages, an' you come rip-rarin' along an' jar up all his
geography by startin' that fool horse of his'n."
Dud hung his head. "Tha's right. It was sure enough thoughtless of me,"
he murmured.
The preacher looked at the offender severely. He did not yet feel quite
equal to a fitting reprimand. "You see the evil effects of letting that
vile stuff pass your lips. I hope this will be a lesson to you, young
man. If I had not kept my presence of mind I might have been thrown and
severely injured."
"Yes, sir," agreed Dud in a small, contrite voice.
"Makin' the preacher race on Sunday, too," chided Reeves. "Why, I
shouldn't wonder but what it might get out an' spread scandalous. We'll
all have to tell folks about it so's they'll get the right of it."
Melancthon squirmed. He could guess how the story would be told. "We'll
say no more about it, if you please. The young man is sorry. I forgive
him. His offense was inadvertent even though vexatious. If he will profit
by this experience I will gladly suffer the incommodious ride."
After the missionary had gone and the bet been liquidated, Blister drew
Hollister to one side. "I'm guessin' that when you get back to the ranch
you'll find a new rider in the bunkhouse, Dud."
The puncher waited. He knew this was preliminary matter.
"That young fellow Bob Dillon," explained the fat man.
"If you're expectin' me to throw up my hat an' shout, Blister, I got to
disappoint you," Dud replied. "I like 'em man-size."
"I'm p-puttin' him in yore charge."
"You ain't either," the range-rider repudiated indignantly.
"To m-make a man of him."
"Hell's bells! I'm no dry nurse to fellows shy of sand. He can travel a
lone trail for all of me."
"Keep him kinda encouraged."
"Why pick on me, Blister? I don't want the job. He ain't there, I tell
you. Any fellow that would let another guy take his wife away from him
an' not hang his hide up to dry--No, sir, I got no manner o' use for him.
You can't onload him on me."
"I've been thinkin' that when you are alone with him some t-time you'd
better devil him into a fight, then let him whale the stuffin' outa you.
That'll do him a l-lot of good--give him confidence."
Hollister stared. His face broke slowly to a grin. "I got to give it to
you, Blister. I'll bet there ain't any more like you at home. Let him
lick me, eh? So's to give him confidence. Wallop me good an' plenty, you
said, didn't you? By gum, you sure enough take the cake."
"Won't hurt you any. You've give an' took plenty of 'em. Think of him."
"Think of me, come to that."
"L-listen, Dud. That boy's what they call c-c-constitutionally timid.
There's folks that way, born so a shadow scares 'em. But he's
s-s-sensitive as a g-girl. Don't you make any mistake, son. He's been
eatin' his h-heart out ever since he crawled before Houck. I like that
boy. There's good s-stuff in him. At least I'm makin' a bet there is.
Question is, will it ever get a chance to show? Inside of three months
he'll either win out or he'll be headed for hell, an' he won't be
travelin' at no drift-herd gait neither."
"Every man's got to stand on his own hind laigs, ain't he?" Hollister
grunted. He was weakening, and he knew it.
"He needs a friend, worst way," Blister wheezed. "'Course, if you'd
rather not--"
"Doggone yore hide, you're always stickin' me somehow," stormed the
cowboy. "Trouble with me is I'm so soft I'm always gettin' imposed on. I
done told you I didn't like this guy a-tall. That don't make no more
impression on you than a cold runnin'-iron would on a cow."
"M-much obliged, Dud. I knew you'd do it."
"I ain't said I'd do it."
"S-some of the boys are liable to get on the prod with him. He'll have to
play his own hand. Tha's reasonable. But kinda back him up when you get a
chance. That notion of lettin' him lick you is a humdinger. Glad you
thought of it."
"I didn't think of it, an' I ain't thinkin' of it now," Dud retorted.
"You blamed old fat skeezicks, you lay around figurin' out ways to make
me trouble. You're worse than Mrs. Gillespie for gettin' yore own way.
Hmp! Devil him into a fight an' then let him hand me a lacin'. I reckon
not."
"He'll figure that since he can lick you, he can make out to look after
himself with the other boys."
"He ain't licked me yet, an' that's only half of it. He ain't a-goin'
to."
Fuming at this outrageous proposition put up to him, the puncher jingled
away and left his triple-chinned friend.
Blister grinned. The seed he had scattered might have fallen among the
rocks and the thorns, but he was willing to make a small bet with himself
that some of it had lit on good ground and would bear fruit.
CHAPTER XVII
THE BACK OF A BRONC
The bunkhouse of the Slash Lazy D received Bob Dillon gravely and with
chill civility. He sat on his bunk that first evening, close enough to
touch a neighbor on either hand, and was left as completely out of the
conversation as though he were a thousand miles away. With each other the
riders were jocular and familiar. They "rode" one another with familiar
jokes. The new puncher they let alone.
Bob had brought some cigars with him. He offered them eagerly to the
chap-clad youth on his right. "Take one, won't you? An' pass the others
round."
The name of the cowboy was Hawks. He looked at the cigars with disfavor.
"I reckon I'll not be carin' for a cigar to-night, thank you," he said
slowly.
"Perhaps the others--if you'll pass them."
Hawks handed the cigars to a brick-red Hercules patching his overalls.
From him they went to his neighbor. Presently the cheroots came back to
their owner. They had been offered to every man in the room and not one
had been taken.
Bob's cheeks burned. Notice was being served on him that the pleasant
give-and-take of comradeship was not for him. The lights went out early,
but long into the night the boy lay awake in torment. If he had been a
leper the line could scarcely have been drawn more plainly. These men
would eat with him because they must. They would sleep in the same room.
They would answer a question if he put it directly. But they would
neither give nor accept favors. He was not to be one of them.
Many times in the months that were to follow he was to know the sting of
shame that burned him now at memory of the scene between him and Jake
Houck at Bear Cat. He tossed on the bunk, burying his face in the
blankets in a vain effort to blot out the picture. Why had he not shot
the fellow? Why, at least, had he not fought? If he had done anything,
but what he did do? If he had even stuck it out and endured the pain
without yielding.
In the darkness he lived over every little incident of the evening. When
Hawks had met him he had grinned and hoped he would like the Slash Lazy
D. There had been friendliness in the crinkled, leathery face. But when
he passed Bob ten minutes later the blue eyes had frozen. He had heard
who the new rider was.
He would not stand it. He could not. In the morning he would pack up his
roll and ride back to Bear Cat. It was all very well for Blister Haines
to talk about standing the gaff, but he did not have to put up with such
treatment.
But when morning came Bob set his teeth and resolved to go through with
it for a while anyhow. He could quit at any time. He wanted to be able to
tell the justice that he had given his plan a fair trial.
In silence Bob ate his breakfast. This finished, the riders moved across
to the corral.
"Better rope and saddle you a mount," Harshaw told his new man curtly.
"Buck, you show him the ones he can choose from."
Hawks led the way to a smaller corral. "Any one o' these except the roan
with the white stockings an' the pinto," he said.
Dillon walked through the gate of the enclosure and closed it. He
adjusted the rope, selected the bronco that looked to him the meekest,
and moved toward it. The ponies began to circle close to the fence. The
one he wanted was racing behind the white-stockinged roan. For a moment
it appeared in front. The rope snaked out and slid down its side. Bob
gathered in the lariat, wound it, waited for a chance, and tried again.
The meek bronco shook its head as the rope fell and caught on one ear. A
second time the loop went down into the dust.
Some one laughed, an unpleasant, sarcastic cackle. Bob turned. Four or
five of the punchers, mounted and ready for the day's work, were sitting
at ease in their saddles enjoying the performance.
Bob gave himself to the job in hand, though his ears burned. As a
youngster he had practiced roping. It was a pastime of the boys among
whom he grew up. But he had never been an expert, and now such skill as
he had acquired deserted him. The loop sailed out half a dozen times
before it dropped over the head of the sorrel.
The new rider for the Slash Lazy D saddled and cinched a bronco which no
longer took an interest in the proceedings. Out of the corner of his eye,
without once looking their way, Bob was aware of subdued hilarity among
the bronzed wearers of chaps. He attended strictly to business.
Just before he pulled himself to the saddle Bob felt a momentary qualm at
the solar plexus. He did not give this time to let it deter him. His feet
settled into the stirrups. An instant violent earthquake disturbed his
equilibrium. A shock jarred him from the base of the spine to the neck.
Urgently he flew through space.
Details of the landscape gathered themselves together again. From a
corner of the corral Bob looked out upon a world full of grinning faces.
A sick dismay rose in him and began to submerge his heart. They were glad
he had been thrown. The earth was inhabited by a race of brutal and
truculent savages. What was the use of trying? He could never hold out
against them.
Out of the mists of memory he heard a wheezy voice issuing from a great
bulk of a man--"... yore red haid's covered with glory. Snap it up!" The
words came so clear that for an instant he was startled. He looked round
half expecting to see Blister.
Stiffly he gathered himself out of the snow slush. A pain jumped in the
left shoulder. He limped to the rope and coiled it. The first cast
captured the sorrel.
His limbs were trembling when he dropped into the saddle. With both hands
he clung to the horn. Up went the bronco on its hind legs. It pitched,
bucked, sun-fished. In sheer terror Bob clung like a leech. The animal
left the ground and jolted down stiff-legged on all fours. The impact was
terrific. He felt as though a piledriver had fallen on his head and
propelled his vital organs together like a concertina. Before he could
set himself the sorrel went up again with a weaving, humpbacked twist.
The rider shot from the saddle.
When the scenery had steadied itself for Dillon he noticed languidly a
change in one aspect of it. The faces turned toward him were no longer
grinning. They were watching him expectantly. What would he do now?
They need not look at him like that. He was through. If he got on the
back of that brute again it would kill him. Already he was bleeding at
the nose and ears. Sometimes men died just from the shock of being tossed
about so furiously.
The sorrel was standing by itself at the other end of the corral. Its
head was drooping languidly. The bronco was a picture of injured
innocence.
Bob discovered that he hated it with an impotent lust to destroy. If he
had a gun with him--Out of the air a squeaky voice came to him: "C-clamp
yore jaw, you worm! You been given dominion." And after that, a moment
later, "... made in the image of God."
Unsteadily he rose. The eyes of the Slash Lazy D riders watched him
relentlessly and yet curiously. Would he quit? Or would he go through?
He had an odd feeling that his body was a thing detached from himself. It
was full of aches and pains. Its legs wobbled as he moved. Its head
seemed swollen to twice the normal size. He had strangely small control
over it. When he walked, it was jerkily, as a drunk man sometimes does.
His hand caught at the fence to steady himself. He swayed dizzily. A
surge of sickness swept through his organs. After this he felt better. He
had not consciously made up his mind to try again, but he found himself
moving toward the sorrel. This time he could hardly drag his weight into
the saddle.
The mind of a bronco is unfathomable. This one now pitched weakly once or
twice, then gave up in unconditional surrender. Bob's surprise was
complete. He had expected, after being shaken violently, to be flung into
the mire again. The reaction was instantaneous and exhilarating. He
forgot that he was covered with mud and bruises, that every inch of him
cried aloud with aches. He had won, had mastered a wild outlaw horse as
he had seen busters do. For the moment he saw the world at his feet. A
little lower than the angels, he had been given dominion.
He rode to the gate and opened it. Hawks was looking at him, a puzzled
look in his eyes. He had evidently seen something he had not expected to
see.
Harshaw had ridden up during the bronco-busting. He spoke now to Bob.
"You'll cover Beaver Creek to-day--you and Buck."
Something in the cattleman's eye, in the curtness of his speech, brought
Dillon back to earth. He had divined that his boss did not like him, had
employed him only because Blister Haines had made a personal point of it.
Harshaw was a big weather-beaten man of forty, hard, keen-eyed, square as
a die. Game himself, he had little patience with those who did not stand
the acid test.
Bob felt himself shrinking up. He had not done anything after all,
nothing that any one of these men could not do without half trying. There
was no way to wipe out his failure when a real ordeal had confronted him.
What was written in the book of life was written.
He turned his pony and followed Hawks across the mesa.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE FIRST DAY
In the wake of Hawks Bob rode through the buckbrush. There was small
chance for conversation, and in any case neither of them was in the mood
for talk. Bob's sensitive soul did not want to risk the likelihood of a
rebuff. He was susceptible to atmospheres, and he knew that Buck was
sulky at being saddled with him.
He was right. Buck did not see why Harshaw had put this outcast
tenderfoot on him. He did not see why he had hired him at all. One thing
was sure. He was not going to let the fellow get round him. No, sir. Not
on his tintype he wasn't.
Since it was the only practical way at present to show his disgust and
make the new puncher feel like a fool, Hawks led him through the roughest
country he could find at the fastest feasible gait. Buck was a notably
wild rider in a country of reckless horsemen. Like all punchers, he had
been hurt time and again. He had taken dozens of falls. Two broncos had
gone down under him with broken necks. A third had twisted its leg in a
beaver burrow and later had to be shot. This day he outdid himself.
As young Dillon raced behind him along side hills after dogies fleet as
blacktails, the heart fluttered in his bosom like a frightened bird in a
cage. He did not pretend to keep up with Hawks. The best he could do was
to come loping up after the excitement was over. The range-rider made no
spoken comment whatever, but his scornful blue eyes said all that was
necessary.
The day's work did not differ except in details from that of yesterday
and to-morrow. They headed back two three-year-olds drifting too far
north. They came on a Slash Lazy D cow with a young calf and moved it
slowly down to better feed near the creek. In the afternoon they found a
yearling sunk in a bog. After trying to pull it out by the ears, they
roped its body and tugged together. Their efforts did not budge the
animal. Hawks tied one end of the rope to the saddle-horn, swung up, and
put the pony to the pull. The muscles of the bronco's legs stood out as
it leaned forward and scratched for a foothold. The calf blatted with
pain, but presently it was snaked out from the quagmire to the firm
earth.
They crossed the creek and returned on the other side. Late in the
afternoon they met half a dozen Utes riding their inferior ponies. They
had evidently been hunting, for most of them carried deer. Old Colorow
was at their head.
He grunted "How!" sulkily. The other braves passed without speaking.
Something in their manner sent a shiver up Dillon's spine. He and Hawks
were armed only with revolvers. It would be the easiest thing in the
world for the Indians to kill them if they wished.
Hawks called a cheerful greeting. It suggested the friendliest of
feeling. The instructions given to the punchers were to do nothing to
irritate the Utes just now.
The mental attitude of the Indians toward the cattlemen and cowboys was a
curious one. They were suspicious of them. They resented their presence
in the country. But they felt a very wholesome respect for them. These
leather-chapped youths could outride and outshoot them. With or without
reason, the Utes felt only contempt for soldiers. They were so easily led
into traps. They bunched together when under fire instead of scattering
for cover. They did not know how to read sign on the warmest trail. These
range-riders were different. If they were not as wary as the Utes, they
made up for it by the dash and aplomb with which they broke through
difficulties.
In Bear Cat the day before Bob had heard settlers discuss the unrest of
the Indians. The rumor was that soon they meant to go on the warpath
again. Colorow himself, with a specious air of good will, had warned a
cattleman to leave the country while there was time.
"You mebbe go--mebbe not come back," he had suggested meaningly. "Mebbe
better so. Colorow friend. He speak wise words."
Until the Utes were out of gunshot Bob felt very uneasy. It was not many
years since the Meeker massacre and the ambushing of Major Thornburg's
troops on Milk Creek.
Reeves and Hollister were in the bunkhouse when Bob entered it just
before supper. He heard Dud's voice.
"... don't like a hair of his red haid, but that's how it'll be far as
I'm concerned."
There was a moment's awkward silence. Dillon knew they had been talking
about him. Beneath the deep gold of his blond skin Hollister flushed. Boy
though he was, Dud usually had the self-possession of the Sphinx. But
momentarily he was embarrassed.
"Hello, fellow!" he shouted across the room. "How'd she go?"
"All right, I reckon," Bob answered. "I wasn't much use."
He wanted to ask Dud a question, but he dared not ask it before anybody
else. It hung in his mind all through supper. Afterward he found his
chance. He did not look at Hollister while he spoke.
"Did--did you hear how--Miss Tolliver is?" he asked.
"Doc says he can't tell a thing yet. She's still mighty sick. But Blister
he sent word to you that he'd let you know soon as there is a change."
"Much obliged."
Bob moved away. He did not want to annoy anybody by pressing his
undesirable society upon him.
That night he slept like a hibernating bear. The dread of the morrow was
no longer so heavy upon him. Drowsily, while his eyes were closing, he
recalled the prediction of the fat justice that no experience is as bad
as one's fears imagine it will be. That had been true to-day at least.
Even his fight with the sorrel, the name of which he had later discovered
to be Powder River, was now only a memory which warmed and cheered.
Cowpunchers usually rode in couples. Bob learned next morning that he was
paired with Dud. They were to comb the Crooked Wash country.
CHAPTER XIX
DUD QUALIFIES AS COURT JESTER
It was still dark when Dud Hollister and Bob Dillon waded through the
snow to the corral and saddled their horses.
They jogged across the mesa through the white drifts.
Bob's pony stumbled into a burrow, but pulled out again without damage.
In the years when cattle first came to the Rio Blanco the danger from
falls was greater than it is now, even if the riding had not been harder.
A long thick grass often covered the badger holes.
"How does a fellow look out for badger and prairie-dog holes?" Bob asked
his companion as they jogged along at a road gait. "I mean when he's
chasin' dogies across a hill on the jump."
"He don't," Dud answered ungrammatically but promptly. "His bronc 'tends
to that. If you try to guide you're sure enough liable to take a fall."
"But when the hole's covered with grass?"
"You gotta take a chance," Dud said. "They're sure-footed, these
cowponies are. A fellow gets to thinkin' they can't fall. Then down he
goes. He jumps clear if he can an' lights loose."
"And if he can't?"
"He's liable to get stove up. I seen five waddies yesterday in Bear Cat
with busted legs or arms. Doc's fixin' 'em up good as new. In a week or
two they'll be ridin' again."
Bob had seen those same crippled cowboys and he could not quite get them
out of his mind. He knew of two punchers killed within the year from
falls.
"Ridin' for a dogie outfit ain't no sin-cure, as Blister told you while
he was splicin' you 'n' Miss Tolliver," Dud went on. "It's a man-size
job. There's ol' Charley Mason now. He's had his ribs stove in, busted an
arm, shot hisself by accident, got rheumatism, had his nose bit off by a
railroad guy while he was b'iled, an' finally married a female
battle-axe, all inside o' two years. He's the hard luck champeen, though,
Charley is."
It had snowed heavily during the night. The day was "soft," in the phrase
of the pioneer. In places the ground was almost clear. In others the
drifts were deep. From a hillside they looked down into a grove of
cottonwoods that filled a small draw. Here the snow had blown in and was
heavy. Three elk were floundering in the white banks.
Dud waded in and shot two with his revolver. The third was a doe. The
cowponies snaked them out to the open.
"We'll take 'em with us to 'Leven Mile camp," Dud said. "Then we'll carry
'em back to the ranch to-morrow. The Slash Lazy D is needin' meat."
Harshaw had given orders that they were to spend the night at Eleven Mile
camp. The place was a deserted log cabin built by a trapper. Supplies
were kept there for the use of Slash Lazy D riders. Usually some of them
were there at least two or three nights a week. Often punchers from other
outfits put up at the shack. Range favors of this sort were taken as a
matter of course. If the cabin was empty the visiting cowboy helped
himself to food, fire, and shelter. It was expected of him that he would
cut a fresh supply of fuel to take the place of that he had used.
It was getting on toward dusk when they reached Eleven Mile. Bob made a
fire in the tin stove while Dud took care of the horses. He found flour
and lard[2] hanging in pails from the rafters. Coffee was in a tin under
the bunk.
Soon Dud joined him. They made their supper of venison, biscuits, and
coffee. Hollister had just lit a pipe and stretched himself on the bed
when the door opened and sixteen Ute bucks filed gravely in.
Colorow was the spokesman. "Hungry! Heap hungry!" he announced.
Hollister rolled out of the bunk promptly. "Here's where we go into the
barbecue business an' the Slash ranch loses them elk," he told Bob under
cover of replenishing the fire in the stove. "An' I can name two lads
who'll be lucky if they don't lose their scalps. These birds have been
drinkin'."
It took no wiseacre to divine the condition of the Indians. Their whiskey
breaths polluted the air of the cabin. Some of them swayed as they stood
or clutched at one another for support. Fortunately they were for the
moment in a cheerful rather than a murderous frame of mind. They chanted
what was gibberish to the two whites while the latter made their
preparations swiftly. Dud took charge of affairs. He noticed that his
companion was white to the lips.
"I'll knock together a batch of biscuits while you fry the steaks. Brace
up, kid. Throw out yore chest. We better play we're drunk too," he said
in a murmur that reached only Bob.
While Bob sliced the steaks from the elk hanging from pegs fastened in
the mud mortar between the logs of the wall, Dud was busy whipping up a
batch of biscuits. The Indians, packed tight as sardines in the room,
crowded close to see how it was done. Hollister had two big frying-pans
on the stove with lard heating in them. He slapped the dough in,
spattering boiling grease right and left. One pockmarked brave gave an
anguished howl of pain. A stream of sizzling lard had spurted into his
face.
The other Utes roared with glee. The aboriginal sense of humor may not be
highly developed, but it is easily aroused. The friends of the outraged
brave stamped up and down the dirt floor in spasms of mirth. They clapped
him on the back and jabbered ironic inquiries as to his well-being. For
the moment, at least, Dud was as popular as a funny clown in a sawdust
ring.
Colorow and his companions were fed. The stove roared. The frying-pans
were kept full of meat and biscuits. The two white men discarded coats,
vests, and almost their shirts. Sweat poured down their faces. They stood
over the red-hot cook stove, hour after hour, while the Utes gorged. The
steaks of the elk, the hind quarters, the fore quarters, all vanished
into the sixteen distended stomachs. Still the Indians ate, voraciously,
wolfishly, as though they could never get enough. It was not a meal but
an endurance contest.
Occasionally some wag would push forward the pockmarked brave and demand
of Dud that he baptize him again, and always the puncher made motions of
going through the performance a second time. The joke never staled. It
always got a hand, no matter how often it was repeated. At each encore
the Utes stamped their flatfooted way round the room in a kind of
impromptu and mirthful dance. The baptismal jest never ceased to be a
scream.
Dud grinned at Dillon. "These wooden heads are so fond of chestnuts I'm
figurin' on springin' on them the old one about why a hen crosses the
road. Bet it would go big. If they got the point. But I don't reckon they
would unless I had a hen here to show 'em."
The feast ended only when the supplies gave out. Two and a half sacks of
flour disappeared. About fifteen pounds of potatoes went into the pot and
from it into the openings of copper-colored faces. Nothing was left of
the elk but the bones.
"The party's mighty nigh over," Dud murmured. "Wonder what our guests aim
to do now."
"Can't we feed 'em anything more?" asked Bob anxiously.
"Not unless we finish cookin' the pockmarked gent for 'em. I'm kinda
hopin' old Colorow will have sabe enough not to wear his welcome out.
It'd make a ten-strike with me if he'd say 'Much obliged' an' hit the
trail."
Bob had not the heart to jest about the subject, and his attempt to back
up his companion's drunken playacting was a sad travesty. He did not know
much about Indians anyhow, and he was sick through and through with
apprehension. Would they finish by scalping their hosts, as Dud had
suggested early in the evening?
It was close to midnight when the clown of Colorow's party invented a new
and rib-tickling joke. Bob was stooping over the stove dishing up the
last remnants of the potatoes when this buck slipped up behind with the
carving-knife and gathered into his fist the boy's flaming topknot. He
let out a horrifying yell and brandished the knife.
In a panic of terror Bob collapsed to the floor. There was a moment when
the slapstick comedy grazed red tragedy. The pitiable condition of the
boy startled the Ute, who still clutched his hair. An embryonic idea was
finding birth in the drunken brain. In another moment it would have
developed into a well-defined lust to kill.
With one sweeping gesture Dud lifted a frying-pan from the red-hot stove
and clapped it against the rump of the jester. The redskin's head hit the
roof. His shriek of agony could have been heard half a mile. He clapped
hands to the afflicted part and did a humped-up dance of woe. The
carving-knife lay forgotten on the floor. It was quite certain that he
would take no pleasure in sitting down for some few days.
Again a series of spasms of turbulent mirth seized upon his friends. They
doubled up with glee. They wept tears of joy. They howled down his
anguish with approving acclaim while they did a double hop around him as
a vent to their enthusiasm. The biter had been bit. The joke had been
turned against the joker, and in the most primitive and direct way. This
was the most humorous event in the history of the Rio Blanco Utes. It was
destined to become the stock tribal joke.
Dud, now tremendously popular, joined in the dance. As he shuffled past
Bob he growled an order at him.
"Get up on yore hind laigs an' dance. I got these guys going my way. Hop
to it!"
Bob danced, at first feebly and with a heart of water. He need not have
worried. If Dud had asked to be made a blood member of the tribe he would
have been elected by fourteen out of the sixteen votes present.
The first faint streaks of day were in the sky when the Utes mounted
their ponies and vanished over the hill. From the door Dud watched them
go. It had been a strenuous night, and he was glad it was over. But he
wouldn't have missed it for a thousand dollars. He would not have
admitted it. Nevertheless he was immensely proud of himself in the role
of court jester.
Bob sat down on the bunk. He was a limp rag of humanity. In the reaction
from fear he was inclined to be hysterical.
"You saved my life--when--when that fellow--" He stopped, gulping down a
lump in the throat.
The man leaning against the door-jamb stretched his arms and his mouth in
a relaxing yawn. "Say, fellow, I wasn't worryin' none about yore life. I
was plumb anxious for a moment about Dud Hollister's. If old Colorow's
gang had begun on you they certainly wouldn't 'a' quit without takin' my
topknot for a souvenir of an evenin' when a pleasant time was had by
all." He yawned a second time. "What say? Let's hit the hay. I don't aim
for to do no ridin' this mornin'."
A faint sniffling sound came from the bunk.
Dud turned. "What's ailin' you now?" he wanted to know.
Bob's face was buried in his hands. The slender body of the boy was
shaken with sobs.
"I--I--"
"Cut out the weeps, Miss Roberta," snapped Hollister. "What in Mexico 's
eatin' you anyhow?"
"I--I've had a horrible night."
"Don't I know it? Do you reckon it was a picnic for me?"
"You--laughed an' cut up."
"Some one had to throw a bluff. If they'd guessed we were scared stiff
them b'iled Utes sure enough would have massacreed us. You got to learn
to keep yore grin workin', fellow."
"I know, but--" Bob stopped. Dry sobs were still shaking him.
"Quit that," Dud commanded. "I'll be darned if I'll stand for it. You
shut off the waterworks or I'll whale you proper."
He walked out to look at the horses. It had suddenly occurred to him that
perhaps their guests might have found and taken them. The broncos were
still grazing in the draw where he had left them the previous night.
When Dud returned to the cabin young Dillon had recovered his composure.
He lay on the bunk, face to the wall, and pretended to be asleep.
-----
[2] The lard in the White River country was all made in those days of
bear grease and deer tallow mixed.
CHAPTER XX
"THE BIGGER THE HAT THE SMALLER THE HERD"
Combing Crooked Wash that afternoon Bob rode with a heavy and despondent
heart. It was with him while he and Dud jogged back to the ranch in the
darkness. He had failed again. Another man had trodden down the fears to
which he had afterward lightly confessed and had carried off the
situation with a high hand. His admiration put Hollister on a pedestal.
How had the blond puncher contrived to summon that reserve of audacity
which had so captivated the Utes? Why was it that of two men one had
stamina to go through regardless of the strain while another went to
pieces and made a spectacle of himself?
Bob noticed that both in his report to Harshaw and later in the story he
told at the Slash Lazy D bunkhouse, Dud shielded him completely. He gave
not even a hint that Dillon had weakened under pressure. The boy was
grateful beyond words, even while he was ashamed that he needed
protection.
At the bunkhouse Dud's story was a great success. He had a knack of
drawling out his climaxes with humorous effect.
"An' when I laid that red-hot skillet on the nearest area of
Rumpty-Tumpty's geography he ce'tainly went up into the roof like he'd
been fired out of a rocket. When he lit--gentlemen, when he lit he was
the most restless Ute in western Colorado. He milled around the corral
considerable. I got a kinda notion he'd sorta soured on the funny-boy
business. Anyhow, he didn't cotton to my style o' humor. Different with
old Colorow an' the others. They liked to 'a' hollered their fool haids
off at the gent I'd put the new Slash Lazy D brand on. Then they did one
o' them 'Wow-wow-wow' dances round Rumpty-Tumpty, who was still smokin'
like he'd set fire to the cabin."
Cowpunchers are a paradox. They have the wisdom of the ages, yet they are
only grown-up children. Now they filled the night with mirth. Hawks lay
down on his bunk and kicked his feet into the air joyfully. Reeves fell
upon Dud and beat him with profane gayety. Big Bill waltzed him over the
floor, regardless of his good-humored protest.
"Tell us some more, Dud," demanded the cook. "Did yore friend Rumpty put
hisse'f out by sittin' in a snowbank?"
"I don't rightly recollect. Me 'n' Bob here was elected to lead the grand
march an' we had to leave Rumpty-Tumpty be his own fire department. But I
did notice how tender he lowered himself to the back of his hawse when
they lit out in the mawnin'."
Bob saw that Hollister made the whole affair one huge joke. He did not
mention that there had been any chance of a tragic termination to the
adventure. Nor did the other punchers refer to that, though they knew the
strained relations between the whites and the Utes. Riding for a dogie
outfit was a hard life, but one could always get a laugh out of it
somehow. The philosophy of the range is to grin and bear it.
A few days later Bob rode into town with a pack-horse at heel. He was to
bring back some supplies for the ranch. Harshaw had chosen him to go
because he wanted to buy some things for himself. These would be charged
against the Slash Lazy D account at Platt & Fortner's store. Bob would
settle for them with the boss when his pay-check came due.
It was a warm sunny day with a touch of summer still in the air. The blue
stem and the bunch grass were dry. Sage and greasewood had taken on the
bare look of winter. But the pines were still green and the birds
singing.
It was an ordeal for Bob to face Bear Cat. June was better, he had heard.
But it was not his fault she had not died of the experience endured. He
could expect no friendliness in the town. The best he could hope for was
that it would let him alone.
He went straight to the office of Blister Haines. The justice took his
fat legs down from the desk and waved him to a chair.
"How're cases?" he asked.
Bob told his story without sparing himself.
Blister listened and made no comment to the end.
"You're takin' that Ute business too s-serious," he said. "Gettin'
s-scalped 's no picnic. You're entitled to feel some weak at the knees.
I've heard from Dud. He says you stood up fine."
"He told you--?"
"N-no particulars. T-trouble with you is you've got too much imagination.
From yore story I judge you weakened when the danger was over. You gotta
learn to keep up that red haid like I said. When you're scared or all in,
stretch yore grin another inch. You don't need to w-worry. You're doin'
all right."
Bob shook his head. Blister's view encouraged him, though he could not
agree with it.
"Keep yore eye on that Dud Hollister hombre," the justice went on. "He's
one sure enough go-getter."
"Yes," agreed Bob. "He's there every jump of the road. An' he didn't tell
on me either."
"You can tie to Dud," agreed Blister. "Here's the point, son. When you
g-get that sinkin' feelin' in yore tummy it's notice for you to get up on
yore hind laigs an' howl. Be a wolf for a change."
"But I can't. I seem to--to wilt all up."
"Son, you know the answer already. T-throw back yore haid an' remember
you got dominion."
Dillon shifted the conversation, embarrassed eyes on the floor.
"How's--Miss Tolliver?"
"G-gettin' well fast. On the porch yesterday. Everybody in town stopped
to say how g-glad they was to see her out. Been havin' the time of her
life, June has. Mollie's always right good to sick folks, but she
c-ce'tainly makes a pet of June."
"I'm glad. She's through with me, o' course, but I hope her friends look
out for that Jake Houck."
"You don't need to worry about him. He's learnt to keep hands off."
Bob was not quite satisfied to let the matter rest there. In spite of the
fact that he had made an outcast of himself he wanted to reinstate
himself with June.
Hesitantly Bob approached the subject. "Maybe I'd better send her word
I'm glad she come through all right."
Blister's eyes were stony. "Maybe you'd better not. What claim you got to
be remembered by that li'l' girl? You're outa her life, boy."
Bob winced. The harsh truth wounded his sensitive nature. She had been
his friend once. It hurt him to lose her wholly and completely.
He rose. "Well, I gotta go an' get some goods for the ranch, Mr. Haines,"
he said.
"I reckon you'd like to s-slide back easy an' have folks forget," Blister
said. "Natural enough. But it won't be thataway. You'll have to f-fight
like a bulldog to travel back along that trail to a good name. You ain't
really begun yet."
"See you again next time I get to town," Bob said.
He was sorry he had raised the point with Haines of a message to June.
That the justice should reject the idea so promptly and vigorously hurt
his pride and self-esteem.
At Platt & Fortner's he invested in a pair of spurs, a cheap saddle, and
a bridle. The cowboy is vain of his equipment. He would spend in those
days forty dollars for a saddle, ten for boots, twenty-five for a bridle
and silver plated bit, fifteen for spurs, and ten or twelve for a hat. He
owned his own horse and blankets, sometimes also a pack-animal. These
were used to carry him from one job to another. He usually rode the ranch
broncos on the range.
But even if he had been able to afford it Bob would not have bought
expensive articles. He did not make any claim about his ability to punch
cattle, and he knew instinctively that real riders would resent any
attempt on his part to swagger as they did. A remark dropped by Blister
came to mind.
"The b-bigger the hat the smaller the herd, son. Do all yore b-braggin'
with yore actions."
It is often a characteristic of weakness that it clings to strength. Bob
would have given much for the respect and friendship of these clear-eyed,
weather-beaten men. To know that he had forfeited these cut deep into his
soul. The clerk that waited on him at the store joked gayly with two
cowboys lounging on the counter, but he was very distantly polite to
Dillon. The citizens he met on the street looked at him with chill eyes.
A group of schoolboys whispered and pointed toward him.
Bob had walked out from Haines's office in a huff, but as he rode back to
the ranch he recognized the justice of his fat friend's decision. He had
forfeited the right to take any interest in June Tolliver. His nature was
to look always for the easiest way. He never wanted trouble with anybody.
Essentially he was peace-loving even to the point of being spiritless. To
try to slip back into people's good will by means of the less robust
virtues would be just like him.
Probably Blister was right when he had told him to be a wolf. For him,
anything was better than to be a sheep.
He clamped his teeth. He would show the Rio Blanco country whether he had
a chicken heart. He would beat back somehow so that they would have to
respect him whether they wanted to or not. If he made up his mind to it
he could be just as game as Dud Hollister.
He would go through or he would die trying.
CHAPTER XXI
JUNE DISCOVERS A NEW WORLD
Blister had not overstated the case to Bob when he told him that June had
been having the time of her life getting well. She had been a lonely
little thing, of small importance in a country very busy on its own
affairs. The sense of inferiority had oppressed her, due both to the
secret of her father's past and the isolation in which she dwelt. This
had stimulated a sullen resentment and a shy pride which held even
friendly souls at arm's length.
Now she was being petted by everybody with whom she came into contact.
She was pathetically grateful, and the big-hearted men and women of the
frontier were worthy of the feeling. They gave her eager good will and
generous sympathy. Into her room came soups and custards made by the best
cooks on the river. When she was well enough to see visitors the mothers
of Bear Cat came in person.
Through Melancthon Browning the landlady of the hotel shrewdly enlisted
the aid of the most influential women in the community. June needed
clothes. She had not a garment that was not worn out and ragged. But
Mollie recognized the fact that more than these she was in need of the
moral support of the settlers' wives. Mrs. Larson could give her work and
a home, but she could not give her that bulwark of her sex,
respectability. Mollie was an exception to an established rule. She was
liked and respected by other women in spite of her peculiarities. But
this would not be true of her protegee unless the girl was above
criticism. June must never step inside the bar or the gambling-room. She
must find friends among the other girls of the town and take part in
their social activities.
Wherefore Mollie, by timely suggestion, put it into the mind of the
preacher to propose a sewing-bee to his congregation. Tolliver, under
supervision, bought the goods and the women sewed. They made
underclothes, petticoats, nightgowns, and dresses. They selected from the
stock of Platt & Fortner shoes, stockings, and a hat, charging them to
the account of Pete.
It was on her sixteenth birthday that June was taken into an adjoining
room and saw all these treasures laid upon the bed. She did not at first
understand that the two pretty dresses and all the comfortable, well-made
clothes were for her. When this was made clear to her the tears brimmed
to the long-lashed eyes. The starved little Cinderella was greatly
touched. She turned to Mollie and buried her twitching face in a friendly
bosom.
"Now--now--now," Mollie reproved gently, stroking the dark crisp hair.
"This is no way to act, dearie, an' all the ladies so kind to you. You
want to thank 'em, don't you?"
"Yes, but--but--I--I--"
The smothered voice was tearful.
Mollie smiled at the committee. "I reckon she wants me to tell you for
her that she's plumb outa words to let you know how good she thinks
you-all are."
The black head nodded vigorously. "You're the _best_ folks--"
Mrs. Platt, a large and comfortable mother of seven, answered placidly.
"I expect you'll find, dearie, that most folks are good when you get on
the right side of them. Now you try on them clothes an' see if they fit.
We tried 'em on my Mary. She's about your size. You're comin' down to our
house to supper to-night. I want you should get acquainted with the
girls."
June looked at Mollie, who nodded smilingly.
"I'll be terrible glad to come, ma'am," June said.
"Then that's settled. They're nice girls, if I do say it myself that am
their mother."
So June took her first timid steps into the social life of the frontier
town. Shyly she made friends, and with them went to church, to Sunday
School, and to picnics.
It had been definitely decided that she was to wait on table at the hotel
restaurant and not return with her father to Piceance Creek. The plan had
originated with Mollie, but Tolliver had acquiesced in it eagerly. If
June went home with him Houck might reappear on the horizon, but if she
stayed at Bear Cat, buttressed by the support of the town, the man from
Brown's Park would not dare to urge his claim again.
June waited on table at the hotel, but this did not keep her from the
dances that were held in the old army hospital building. There were no
class distinctions in Bear Cat then. There are not many now. No paupers
lived in the county. This still holds good. Except the owners of the big
cattle companies there were no men of wealth. A man was not judged by
what he had or by the kind of work he was doing. His neighbors looked
through externals to see what he was, stripped of all adventitious
circumstance. On that basis solely he was taken into fellowship or cast
out from it.
The girl from Piceance Creek worked hard and was content, even if not
quite happy. If she ever thought of the boy she had married, no reference
to him ever crossed her lips. She was known simply as June by the town.
Strangers called her Miss Tolliver.
There was about her a quiet self-pos
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/26520