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The Ranch at the Wolverine

by B. M. Bower · English · Gutenberg #28356 · 561,612 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Ranch at the Wolverine

Author: B. M. Bower


        
Release date: March 19, 2009 [eBook #28356]
                Most recently updated: January 4, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28356

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RANCH AT THE WOLVERINE ***




Produced by Al Haines










[Illustration: Cover art]





THE RANCH AT

THE WOLVERINE



By B. M. BOWER


Author of "The Lonesome Land," Etc.




A. L. BURT COMPANY, PUBLISHERS

114-120 East Twenty-third Street ----  New York

Published by Arrangement with Little, Brown and Company




Copyright, 1914,

BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

_All rights reserved_




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

      I.  LET US START AT THE BEGINNING
     II.  A STORM AND A STRANGER
    III.  A BOOK, A BANNOCK, AND A BED
     IV.  "OLD DAME FORTUNE'S USED ME FOR A FOOTBALL"
      V.  MARTHY BURIES HER DEAD AND GREETS HER NEPHEW
     VI.  A MATTER OF TWELVE MONTHS OR SO
    VII.  WARD HUNTS WOLVES
   VIII.  HELP FOR THE COW BUSINESS
     IX.  WHEN EMOTIONS ARE BOTTLED
      X.  THIS PAL BUSINESS
     XI.  WAS IT THE DOG?
    XII.  THE LITTLE DEVILS OF DOUBT
   XIII.  THE CORRAL IN THE CANYON
    XIV.  EACH IN HIS OWN TRAIL
     XV.  "YOU WON'T GET ME AGAIN"
    XVI.  "I'M GOING TO TAKE YOU OUT AND HANG YOU"
   XVII.  "SO-LONG, BUCK!"
  XVIII.  FORTUNE KICKS AGAIN
    XIX.  THE BRAVE BUCKAROO
     XX.  "WE BEEN SORRY FOR YOU"
    XXI.  SEVEN LEAN KINE
   XXII.  THE BILLY OF HER
  XXIII.  BILLY LOUISE GETS A SURPRISE
   XXIV.  THE HOOKIN'-COUGH MAN
    XXV.  THE WOLF JOKE
   XXVI.  "HM-MM!"
  XXVII.  MARTHY
 XXVIII.  ALL RIGHT AND COMFY




_The Ranch at the Wolverine_


CHAPTER I

LET US START AT THE BEGINNING

Four trail-worn oxen, their necks bowed to the yoke of patient
servitude, should really begin this story.  But to follow the trail
they made would take several chapters which you certainly would
skip--unless you like to hear the tale of how the wilderness was tamed
and can thrill at the stern history of those who did the taming while
they fought to keep their stomachs fairly well filled with food and
their hard-muscled bodies fit for the fray.

There was a woman, low-browed, uncombed, harsh of voice and speech and
nature, who drove the four oxen forward over lava rock and rough
prairie and the scanty sage.  I might tell you a great deal about
Marthy, who plodded stolidly across the desert and the low-lying hills
along the Blackfoot; and of her weak-souled, shiftless husband whom she
called Jase, when she did not call him worse.

They were the pioneers whose lurching wagon first forded the singing
Wolverine stream just where it greens the tiny valley and then slips
between huge lava-rock ledges to join the larger stream.  Jase would
have stopped there and called home the sheltered little green spot in
the gray barrenness.  But Marthy went on, up the farther hill and
across the upland, another full day's journey with the sweating oxen.

They camped that night on another little, singing stream, in another
little valley, which was not so level or so green or so wholly pleasing
to the eye.  And that night two of the oxen, impelled by a surer
instinct than their human owners, strayed away down a narrow, winding
gorge and so discovered the Cove and feasted upon its rich grasses.  It
was Marthy who went after them and who recognized the little, hidden
Eden as the place of her dreams--supposing she ever had dreams.  So
Marthy and Jase and the four oxen took possession, and with much labor
and many hard years for the woman, and with the same number of years
and as little labor as he could manage on the man's part, they tamed
the Cove and made it a beauty spot in that wild land.  A beauty spot,
though their lives held nothing but treadmill toil and harsh words and
a mental horizon narrowed almost to the limits of the grim, gray, rock
wall that surrounded them.

Another sturdy-souled couple came afterwards and saw the Wolverine and
made for themselves a home upon its banks.  And in the rough little log
cabin was born the girl-child I want you to meet; a girl-child when she
should have been a boy to meet her father's need and great desire; a
girl-child whose very name was a compromise between the parents.  For
they called her Billy for sake of the boy her father wanted, and Louise
for the girl her mother had longed for to lighten that terrible
loneliness which the far frontier brings to the women who brave its
stern emptiness.

Do you like children?  In other words, are you human?  Then I want you
to meet Billy Louise when she was ten and had lived all her life among
the rocks and the sage and the stunted cedars and huge, gray hills of
Idaho.  Meet her with her pink sunbonnet hanging down the back of her
neck and her big eyes taking in the squalidness of Marthy's crude
kitchen in the Cove, and her terrible directness of speech hitting
squarely the things she saw that were different from her own immaculate
home.  Of course, if you don't care for children, you may skip a
chapter and meet her later when she was eighteen--but I really wish you
would consent to know her at ten.


"Mommie makes cookies with a raising in the middle.  She gives me two
sometimes when the Bill of me has been workin' like the deuce with dad;
one for Billy and one for Louise.  When I'm twelve, Mommie's goin' to
let the Louise of me make cookies all myself and put a raising on top.
I'll put two on top of one and bring it over for you, Marthy.  And--"
Billy Louise was terribly outspoken at times--"I'll put four raisings
on another one for Jase, 'cause he don't have any nice times with you.
Don't you ever make cookies with raisings on 'em, Marthy?  I'm hungry
as a coyote--and I ain't used to eating just bread and the kinda butter
you have.  Mom says you don't work it enough.  She says you are too
scared of water, and the buttermilk ain't all worked out, so that's why
it tastes so funny.  Does Jase like that kind of butter, Marthy?"

"If your mother had to do the outside work as well as the inside, mebbe
she wouldn't work her butter so awful much, either.  I dunno whether
Jase likes it or not.  He eats it," Marthy stated grimly.

Billy Louise sighed.  "Well, of course he's awful lazy.  Daddy says so.
I guess I won't put but one raising on Jase's cookie when I'm twelve.
Has Jase gone fishing again, Marthy?"

A gleam of satisfaction brightened Marthy's hard, blue eyes.  "No, he
ain't.  He's in the root suller.  You want some bread and some nice,
new honey, Billy Louise?  I jest took it outa the hive this morning.
When you go home, I'll send some to your maw if you can carry it."

"Sure!  I can carry anything that's good.  If you put it on thick, so I
can't taste the bread, I'll eat it.  Say, you like me, don't you,
Marthy?"

"Yes," said Marthy, turning her back on the slim, wide-eyed girl, "I
like yuh, Billy Louise."

"You sound like you wish you didn't," Billy Louise remarked.  Even at
ten Billy Louise was keenly sensitive to tones and glances and that
intangible thing we call atmosphere.  "Are you sorry you like me?"

"No-o, I ain't sorry.  A person's got to like something that's alive
and human, or--" Marthy was clumsy with words, and she was always
coming to the barrier between her powers of expression and the thoughts
that were prisoned and dumb.  "Here's your bread 'n' honey."

"What makes you sound that way, Marthy?  You sound like you had tears
inside, and they couldn't get out your eyes.  Are you sad?  Did you
ever have a little girl, Marthy?"

"What makes you ask that?"  Marthy sat heavily down upon a box beside
the rough kitchen table and looked at Billy Louise queerly, as if she
were half afraid of her.

"I dunno--but that's the way mommie sounds when she says something
about angel-brother.  Did you ever--"

"Billy Louise, I'm going to tell you this oncet, and then I don't want
you to ast me any more questions, nor talk about it.  You're the
queerest young one I ever seen, but you don't hurt folks on
purpose--I've learnt that much about yuh."  Marthy half rose from the
box, and with her dingy, patched apron shooed an investigative hen out
of the doorway.  She knew that Billy Louise was regarding her fixedly
over the huge, uneven slice of bread and honey, and she felt vaguely
that a child's grave, inquiring eyes may be the hardest of all eyes to
meet.

"I never meant--"

"I know yuh never, Billy Louise.  Now don't tell your maw this.  Long
ago--long before your maw ever found you, or your paw ever found your
ranch on the Wolverine, I had a little girl, 'bout like you.  She was a
purty child--her hair was like silk, and her eyes was blue, and--we was
Mormons, and we lived down clost to Salt Lake.  And I seen so much
misery amongst the women-folks--you can't understand that, but mebby
you will when you grow up.  Anyway, when little Minervy kep' growin'
purtyer and sweeter, I couldn't stand it to think of her growin' up and
bein' a Mormon's wife.  I seen so many purty girls...  So I made up my
mind we'd move away off somewheres, where Minervy could grow up jest as
sweet and purty as she was a mind to, and not have to suffer fer her
sweetness and her purtyness.  When you grow up, Billy Louise, you'll
know what I mean.  So me and Jase packed up--we kinda had to do it on
the sly, on account uh the bishops--and we struck out with a four-ox
team.

"We kep' a-goin' and kep' a-goin', fer I was scared to settle too
clost.  I seen how they keep spreadin' out all the time, and I wanted
to git so fur away they wouldn't ketch up.  And we got into bad
country, where there wasn't no water skurcely.  We swung too fur north,
and got into the desert back there.  And over next them three buttes
little Minervy took sick.  We tried to git outa the desert--we headed
over this way.  But before we got to Snake river she--died, and I had
to leave 'er buried back there.  We come on.  I hated the church worse
than ever, and I wanted to git clear away from 'em.  Why, Billy Louise,
we camped one night by the Wolverine, right about where your paw's got
his big corral!  We didn't stay there, because it was an Injun
camping-ground then, and they wasn't no use getting mixed up in no
fuss, first thing.  In them days the Injuns wasn't so peaceable as they
be now.  So we come on here and settled in the Cove.

"And so--I like yuh," said Marthy, in a tone that was half defiance,
"because I can't help likin' yuh.  You're growin' up sweet and purty,
jest like I wanted my little Minervy to grow up.  In some ways you
remind me of her, only she was quieter and didn't take so much notice
of things a young one ain't s'posed to notice.  Now I don't want you
askin' no more questions about her, 'cause I ain't going to talk about
it ag'in; and if yuh pester me, I'll send yuh home and tell your maw to
keep yuh there.  If you're the nice girl I think yuh be, you'll be good
to Marthy and not talk about--"

Billy Louise opened her eyes still wider, and licked the honey off one
whole corner of the slice without really tasting anything.  Marthy's
square, uncompromising chin was actually quivering.  Billy Louise was
stricken dumb by the spectacle.  She wanted to go and put her arms
around Marthy's neck and kiss her; only Marthy's neck had a hairy mole,
and there was no part of her face which looked in the least degree
kissable.  Still, Billy Louise felt herself all hot inside with remorse
and sympathy and affection.  Physical contact being impossible because
of her fastidious instincts, and speech upon the subject being so
sternly forbidden, Billy Louise continued to lick honey and stare in
fascinated silence.

"I'll wash the dishes for you, Marthy," she offered irrelevantly at
last, as a supreme sacrifice upon the altar of sympathy.  When that
failed to stop the slow procession of tears that was traveling down the
furrows of Marthy's cheeks, she added ingratiatingly: "I'll put six
raisings on the cookie I'm going to make for you."

Whereupon Marthy did an unprecedented, an utterly amazing thing.  She
got up and gathered Billy Louise into her arms so unexpectedly that
Billy Louise inadvertently buried her nose in the honey she had not yet
licked off the bread.  Marthy held her close pressed to her big, flabby
bosom and wept into her hair in a queer, whimpering way that somehow
made Billy Louise think of a hurt dog.  It was only for a minute that
Marthy did this; she stopped almost as suddenly as she began and went
outside, wiping her eyes and her nose impartially upon her dirty apron.

Billy Louise sat paralyzed with the mixture of unusual emotions that
assailed her.  She was exceedingly sticky and uncomfortable from honey
and tears, and she shivered with repugnance at the odor of Marthy's
unbathed person.  She was astonished at the outburst from phlegmatic
Marthy Meilke, and her pity was now alloyed with her promise to wash
all those dirty dishes.  Billy Louise felt that she had been a trifle
hasty in making promises.  There was not a drop of water in the house
nor a bit of wood, and Billy Louise knew perfectly well that the
dishpan would have a greasy, unpleasant feeling under her fastidious
little fingers.

She sighed heavily.  "Well, I s'pose I might just as well get to work
at 'em," she said aloud, as was her habit--being a child who had no
playmates.  "I hate to dread a thing I hate."

She looked at the messy slice of sour bread and threw it out to the
speckled hen that had returned and was standing with one foot lifted
tentatively--ready for a forward step if the fates seemed kind--and was
regarding Billy Louise fixedly with one yellow eye.  "Take it and go!"
cried the donor, impatient of the scrutiny.  She picked up the wooden
pail and went down to the creek behind the house, by a pathway bordered
thickly with budding rosebushes and tall lilacs.

Billy Louise first of all washed her face slowly and with a methodic
thoroughness which characterized her--having lived for ten full years
with no realization of hours and minutes as a measure for her actions.
She dried her face quite as deliberately upon her starched calico
apron.  Then she spent a few minutes trying to catch a baby trout in
her cupped palms.  Never had Billy Louise succeeded in catching a baby
trout in her hands; therefore she never tired of trying.  Now, however,
that rash promise nagged at her and would not let her enjoy the game as
completely as usual.  She took the wooden pail, and squatting on her
heels in the wet sand, waited until a small school swam incautiously
close to the bank, and scooped suddenly, with a great splash.  She
caught three tiny, speckled fish the length of her little finger, and
she let the half-full pail rest in the shallow stream while she watched
the fry swimming excitedly round and round within.

There was no great fun in that.  Billy Louise could catch baby trout in
a pail at home, from the waters of the Wolverine, whenever she liked.
Many a time she had kept them in a big bottle until she tired of
watching them, or they died because she forgot to change the water
often enough.  She could not get even a languid enjoyment out of them
now, because she could not for a minute forget that she had promised to
wash Marthy's dishes--and Marthy always had so many dirty dishes!  And
Marthy's dishpan was so greasy!  Billy Louise gave a little shudder
when she thought of it.

"I wish her little girl hadn't died," she said, her mind swinging from
effect back to cause.  "I could play with her.  And she'd wash the
dishes herself.  I'm going to name my new little pig Minervy.  I wish
she hadn't died.  I'd show her my little pig, if Marthy'd let her come
over to our place.  We could both ride on old Badger; Minervy could
ride behind me, and we'd go places together."  Billy Louise
meditatively stirred up the baby trout with a forefinger.  "We'd go up
the canyon and have the caves for our play-houses.  Minervy could have
the secret cave away up the hill, and I'd have the other one across
from it; and we'd have flags and wigwag messages like daddy tells about
in the war.  And we'd play the rabbits are Injuns, and the coyotes are
big-Injun-chiefs sneaking down to see if the forts are watching.  And
whichever seen a coyote first would wigwag to the other one..."  A baby
trout, taking advantage of the pail tipping in the current, gave a flip
over the edge and interrupted Billy Louise's fancies.  She gave the
pail a tilt and spilled out the other two fish.  Then she filled it as
full as she could carry and started back to pay the price of her
sympathy.

"I don't see what Minervy had to go and die for!" she complained,
dodging a low-hanging branch of bloom-laden lilac.  "She could wash the
dishes and I'd wipe 'em--and I s'pose there ain't a clean dish-towel in
the house, either!  Marthy's an awful slack housekeeper."

Billy Louise, being a young person with a conscience--of a sort--washed
the dishes, since she had given her word to do it.  The dishpan was
even more unpleasant than experience had foretold for her; and of
Marthy's somewhat meager supply there seemed not one clean dish in the
house.  The sympathy of Billy Louise therefore waned rapidly; rather,
it turned in upon itself.  So that by the time she felt morally free to
spend the rest of the afternoon as she pleased, she was not at all
sorry for Marthy for having lost Minervy; instead, she was sorry for
herself for having been betrayed into rashness and for being deprived
of a playmate.

"I don't s'pose Marthy doctored her right, at all," she considered
pitilessly, as she returned down the lilac-bordered path.  "If she had,
I guess she wouldn't have died.  I'll bet she never gave her a speck of
sage tea, like mommie always does when I'm sick--only I ain't ever,
thank goodness.  I'm just going to ask Jase if Marthy did."

On the way to the root cellar, which was dug into the creek-bank well
above high-water mark, Billy Louise debated within herself the ethics
of speaking to Jase upon a forbidden subject.  Jase had been Minervy's
father, and therefore knew of her existence, so that mentioning Minervy
to him could not in any sense be betraying a secret.  She wondered if
Jase felt badly about it, as Marthy seemed to do.  On the heels of that
came the determination to test his emotional capacity.

At the root cellar her attention was diverted.  The cellar door was
fastened on the outside, with the iron hasp used to protect the store
of vegetables from the weather.  Jase must be gone.  She was turning
away when she heard him clear his throat with that peculiar little
hacking, rasping noise which sounded exactly as one would expect a Jase
to sound.  Billy Louise puckered her eyebrows, pressed her lips
together understandingly--and disapprovingly--and opened the door.

Jase, humped over a heap of sprouting potatoes, blinked up
apathetically into the sudden flood of sweet, spring air and sunshine.
"Why, hello, Billy Louise," he mumbled, his eyes brightening a bit.

"Say, you was locked in here!"  Billy Louise faced him puzzled.  "Did
you know you was locked in?"

"Yes-s, I knowed it.  Marthy, she locked the door."  Jase reached out a
bony hand covered with carrot-colored hairs and picked up a shriveling
potato with long, sickly sprouts proclaiming life's persistence in
perpetuating itself under adverse circumstances.  He broke off the
sprouts with a wipe of his dirty palm and threw the potato into a heap
in the corner.

"What for?" Billy Louise demanded, watching Jase reach languidly out
for another potato.

"She seen me diggin' bait," Jase said tonelessly.  "I did think some of
ketchin' a mess of fish before I went to sproutin' p'tatoes, but Marthy
she don't take no int'rest in nothin' but work."

"Are the fish biting good?"  Billy Louise glanced toward the wider
stream, where it showed through a gap in the alders.

"Yes-s, purty good now.  I caught a nice mess the other day; but
Marthy, she don't favor my goin' fishin'."  The lean hands of Jase
moved slowly at his task.  Billy Louise, watching him, wondered why he
did not hurry a little and finish sooner.  Still, she could not
remember ever seeing Jase hurry at anything, and the Cove with its
occupants was one of her very earliest memories.

"Say, I'll dig some more bait, and then we'll go fishing; shall we?"

"I--dunno as I better--"  Jase's hand hovered aimlessly over the potato
pile.  "I got quite a lot sprouted, though--and mebby--"

"I'll lock you in till I get the bait dug," suggested Billy Louise
craftily.  "And you work fast; and then I'll let you out, and we'll
lock the door agin, so Marthy'll think you're in there yet."

"You're sure smart to think up things," Jase admired, smiling
loose-lipped behind his scraggly beard, that was fading with the years.
"I dunno but what it'd serve Marthy right.  She ain't got no call to
lock the door on me.  She hates like sin t' see me with a fish-pole in
m' hand--but she's always et her share uh the messes I ketch.  She
ain't a reasonable woman, Marthy ain't.  You git the bait.  I'll show
Marthy who's boss in this Cove!"

He might have encouraged himself into defying Marthy to her face, in
another five minutes of complaining.  But the cellar door closed upon
him with a slam.  Billy Louise was not interested in his opinion of
Marthy; with her, opinions were valueless if not accompanied by action.

"I never thought to ask him about Minervy," occurred to her while she
was relentlessly dragging pale, fleshly fishworms from the loose black
soil of Marthy's onion bed.  "But I know she was mean to Minervy.
She's awful mean to Jase--locking him up in the root cellar just 'cause
he wanted to go fishing.  If I was Jase I wouldn't sprout a single old
potato for her.  My goodness, but she'll be mad when she opens the
cellar door and Jase ain't in there; I--guess I'll go home early,
before Marthy finds it out."

She really meant to do that, but the fish were hungry fish that day,
and the joy of having a companion to exclaim with her over every hard
tug--even though that companion was only Jase--enticed her to stay on
and on, until a whiff of frying pork on the breeze that swept down the
Cove warned Billy Louise of the near approach of supper-time.

"I guess mebby I might as well go back to the suller," Jase remarked,
his defiance weakening as he climbed the bank.  "You come and lock the
door agin, Billy Louise, and Marthy won't know I ain't been there all
the time.  She'll think you caught the fish."  He looked at her with a
weak leer of conscious cunning.

Billy Louise, groping vaguely for the sunbonnet that was dangling
between her straight shoulder-blades, stared at him with wide eyes that
held disillusionment and with it a contempt all the keener because it
was the contempt of a child, whose judgment is merciless.

"I should thing you'd be ashamed!" she said at last, forgetting that
the idea had been born in her own brain.  "Cowards do things and then
sneak about it.  Daddy says so.  I don't care if Marthy is mad 'cause I
let you out, and I don't care if she knows we went fishing.  I thought
you wanted Marthy to see she ain't so smart, locking you up in the
cellar.  I ain't going to bake you a single cookie with raisings on it,
like I was going to."

"Marthy's got a sharp tongue in 'er head," Jase wavered, his eyes
shifting from Billy Louise's uncompromising stare.

"Daddy says when you do a thing that's mean, do it and take your
medicine," Billy Louise retorted.  "The boy of me that belongs to dad
ain't a sneak, Jase Meilke.  And," she added loftily, "the girl of me
that belongs to mommie is a perfeck lady.  Good day, Mr. Meilke.  Thank
you for a pleasant time fishing."

Whereupon the perfect lady part switched short skirts up the path and
held a tousled head high with disdain.

Jase, thus deserted, went shambling back to the cellar and fell to
sprouting potatoes with what might almost be termed industry.

It pained Jase later to discover that Marthy was not interested in the
open door, but in the very small heap of potatoes which he had
"sprouted" that afternoon.  There was other work to be done in the
Cove, and there were but two pairs of hands to do it; that one pair was
slow and shiftless and inefficient was bitterly accepted by Marthy, who
worked from sunrise until dark to make up for the shirking of those
other hands.

It was the trail experience over again, and it was an experience that
dragged through the years without change or betterment.  Marthy wanted
to "get ahead."  Jase wanted to sit in the sun with his knees drawn up,
just--I don't know what, but I suppose he called it thinking.  When he
felt unusually energetic, he liked to dangle an impaled worm over a
trout pool.  Theoretically he also wanted to get ahead and to have a
fine ranch and lots of cattle and a comfortable home.  He would plan
these things sometimes in an expansive mood, whereupon Marthy would
stare at him with her hard, contemptuous look until Jase trailed off
into mumbling complaints into his beard.  He was not as able-bodied as
she thought he was, he would say, with vague solemnity.  Some uh these
days Marthy'd see how she had driven him beyond his strength.

When one is a Marthy, however, with ambitions and a tireless energy and
the persistence of a beaver, and when one listens to vague mutterings
for many hard laboring years, one grows accustomed to the complainings
and fails to see certain warning symptoms of which even the complainer
is only vaguely aware.

She kept on working through the years, and as far as was humanly
possible she kept Jase working.  She did not soften, except toward
Billy Louise, who rode sometimes over from her father's ranch on the
Wolverine to the flowery delights of the Cove.  The place was a perfect
jungle of sweetness, seven months of each year; for Marthy owned and
indulged a love of beauty, even if she could not realize her dream of
prosperity.  Wherever was space in the house-yard for a flower or a
fruit tree or a berry bush, Marthy planted one or the other.  You could
not see the cabin from April until the leaves fell in late October,
except in a fragmentary way as you walked around it.  You went in at a
gate of pickets which Marthy herself had split and nailed in place; you
followed a narrow, winding path through the sweet jungle--and if you
were tall, you stooped now and then to pass under an apple branch.  And
unless you looked up at the black, lava-rock rim of the bluff which
cupped this Eden incongruously, you would forget that just over the
brim lay parched plain and barren mountain.

When Billy Louise was twelve, she had other ambitions than the making
of cookies with "raisings" on them.  She wanted to do something big,
though she was hazy as to the particular nature of that big something.
She tried to talk it over with Marthy, but Marthy could not seem to
think beyond the Cove, except that now and then Billy Louise would
suspect that her mind did travel to the desert and Minervy's grave.
Marthy's hair was growing streaked with yellowish gray, though it never
grew less unkempt and dusty looking.  Her eyes were harder, if
anything, except when they rested on Billy Louise.

When she was thirteen, Billy Louise rode over with a loaf of bread she
had baked all by herself, and she put this problem to Marthy:

"I've been thinking I'd go ahead and write poetry, Marthy--a whole book
of it with pictures.  But I do love to make bread--and people have to
eat bread.  Which would you be, Marthy; a poet, or a cook?"

Marthy looked at her a minute, lent her attention briefly to the
question, and gave what she considered good advice.

"You learn how to cook, Billy Louise.  Yuh don't want to go and get
notions.  Your maw ain't healthy, and your paw likes good grub.  Po'try
is all foolishness; there ain't any money in it."

"Walter Scott paid his debts writing poetry," said Billy Louise
argumentatively.  She had just read all about Walter Scott in a
magazine which a passing cowboy had given her; perhaps that had
something to do with her new ambition.

"Mebby he did and mebby he didn't.  I'd like to see our debts paid off
with po'try.  It'd have to be worth a hull lot more 'n what I'd give
for it."

"Oh.  Have you got debts too, Marthy?"  Billy Louise at thirteen was
still ready with sympathy.  "Daddy's got lots and piles of 'em.  He
bought some cattle and now he talks to mommie all the time about debts.
Mommie wants me to go to Boise to school, next winter, to Aunt Sarah's.
And daddy says there's debts to pay.  I didn't know you had any,
Marthy."

"Well, I have got.  We bought some cattle, too--and they ain't done 's
well 's they might.  If I had a man that was any good on earth, I could
put up more hay.  But I can't git nothing outa Jase but whines.  Your
paw oughta send you to school, Billy Louise, even if he has got debts.
I'd 'a' sent--"

She stopped there, but Billy Louise knew how she finished the sentence
mentally.  She would have sent Minervy to school.

"Your paw ain't got any right to keep you outa school," Marthy went on
aggressively.  "Debts er no debts, he'd see 't you got schoolin'--if he
was the right kinda man."

"Daddy is the right kinda man.  He ain't like Jase.  He says he wishes
he could, but he don't know where the money's coming from."

"How much's it goin' to take?" asked Marthy heavily.

"Oh, piles."  Billy Louise spoke airily to hide her pride in the
importance of the subject.  "Fifty dollars, I guess.  I've got to have
some new clothes, mommie says.  I'd like a blue dress."

"And your paw can't raise fifty dollars?"  Marthy's tone was plainly
belligerent.

"Got to pay interest," said Billy Louise importantly.

Marthy said not another word about debts or the duties of parents.
What she did was more to the point, however, for she hitched the mules
to a rattly old buckboard next day and drove over to the MacDonald
ranch on the Wolverine.  She carried fifty dollars in her pocket--and
that was practically all the money Marthy possessed, and had been saved
for the debts that harassed her.  She gave the money to Billy Louise's
mother and said that it was a present for Billy Louise, and meant for
"school money."  She said that she hadn't any girl of her own to spend
the money on, and that Billy Louise was a good girl and a smart girl,
and she wanted to do a little something toward her schooling.

A woman will sacrifice more pride than you would believe, if she sees a
way toward helping her children to an education.  Mrs. MacDonald took
the money, and she promised secrecy--with a feeling of relief that
Marthy wished it.  She was astonished to find that Marthy had any
feelings not directly connected with work or the shortcomings of Jase,
but she never suspected that Marthy had made any sacrifice for Billy
Louise.

So Billy Louise went away to school and never knew whose money had made
it possible to go, and Marthy worked harder and drove Jase more
relentlessly to make up that fifty dollars.  She never mentioned the
matter to anyone.  The next year it was the same; when, in August, she
questioned Billy Louise clumsily upon the subject of finances, and
learned that "daddy" still talked about debts and interest and didn't
know where the money was coming from, she drove over again with money
for the "schooling."  And again she extracted a promise of silence.

She did this for four years, and not a soul knew that it cost her
anything in the way of extra work and extra harassment of mind.  She
bought more cattle and cut more hay and went deeper into debt; for as
Billy Louise grew older and prettier and more accustomed to the ways of
town, she needed more money, and the August gift grew proportionately
larger.  The mother was thankful beyond the point of questioning.  An
August without Marthy and Marthy's gift of money would have been a
tragedy; and so selfish is mother-love sometimes that she would have
accepted the gift even if she had known what it cost the giver.

At eighteen, then, Billy Louise knew some things not taught by the wide
plains and the wild hills around her.  She was not spoiled by her
little learning, which was a good thing.  And when her father died
tragically beneath an overturned load of poles from the mountain at the
head of the canyon, Billy Louise came home.  The Billy of her tried to
take his place, and the Louise of her attempted to take care of her
mother, who was unfitted both by nature and habit to take care of
herself.  Which was, after all, a rather big thing for anyone to
attempt.




CHAPTER II

A STORM AND A STRANGER

Jase began to complain of having "all-gone" feelings during the winter
after Billy Louise came home and took up the whole burden of the
Wolverine ranch.  He complained to Billy Louise, when she rode over one
clear, sunny day in January; he said that he was getting old--which was
perfectly true--and that he was not as able-bodied as he might be, and
didn't expect to last much longer.  Billy Louise spoke of it to Marthy,
and Marthy snorted.

"He's able-bodied enough at mealtimes, I notice," she retorted.  "I've
heard that tune ever since I knowed him; he can't fool me!"

"Not about the all-goneness, have you?"  Billy Louise was preparing to
wipe the dishes for Marthy.  "I know he always had 'cricks' in
different parts of his anatomy, but I never heard about his feeling
all-gone, before.  That sounds mysterious, don't you think?"

"No; and he never had nothin' the matter with his anatomy, neither; his
anatomy's just as sound as mine.  Jase was born lazy, is all ails him."

"But, Marthy, haven't you noticed he doesn't look as well as he used
to?  He has a sort of gray look, don't you think?  And his eyes are so
puffy underneath, lately."

"No, I ain't noticed nothing wrong with him that ain't always been
wrong."  Marthy spoke grudgingly, as if she resented even the
possibility of Jase's having a real ailment.  "He's feelin' his years,
mebby.  But he ain't no call to; Jase ain't but three years older 'n I
be, and I ain't but fifty-nine last birthday.  And I've worked and
slaved here in this Cove fer twenty-seven years, now; what it is I've
made it.  Jase ain't ever done a hand's turn that he wasn't obliged to
do.  I've chopped wood, and I've built corrals and dug ditches, and
Jase has puttered around and whined that he wasn't able-bodied enough
to do no heavy lifting.  That there orchard out there I planted and
packed water in buckets to it till I got the ditch through.  Them
corrals down next the river I built.  I dug the post-holes, and Jase
set the posts in and held 'em steady while I tamped the dirt!  In
winter I've hauled hay and fed the cattle; and Jase, he packed a bucket
uh slop, mebby, to the pigs!  If he ain't as able-bodied as I be, it's
because he ain't done nothing to git strong on.  He can't come around
me now with that all-gone feeling uh his; I know Jase Meilke like a
book."

There was more that she said about Jase.  Standing there, a squat,
unkempt woman with a seamed, leathery face and hard eyes now quite
faded to gray, she told Billy Louise a good deal of the bitterness of
the years behind; years of hardship and of slavish toil and no love to
lighten it.  She spoke again of Minervy, and the name brought back to
Billy Louise poignant memories of her own lonely childhood and of her
"pretend" playmate.

Half shyly, because she was still sometimes touched with the
inarticulateness of youth, Billy Louise told Marthy a little of that
playmate.  "Why, do you know, every time I rode old Badger anywhere,
after that day you told me about Minervy, I used to pretend that
Minervy rode behind me.  I used to talk to her by the hour and take her
places.  And up our canyon is a cave that I used to play was Minervy's
cave.  I had another one, and I used to go over and visit Minervy.  And
I had another pretend playmate--a boy--and we used to have adventures.
It's a queer place; I just found that cave by accident.  I don't
believe there's another person in the country who knows it's there at
all.  Well, that's Minervy's cave to me yet.  And, Marthy--" Billy
Louise giggled a little and eyed the old woman with a sidelong look
that would have set a young man's blood a-jump--"I hope you won't be
mad; I was just a kid, and I didn't know any better.  But just to show
you how much I thought: I had a little pig, and I named it Minervy,
after you told me about her.  And mommie told me that was no name for
it; it was--it wasn't a girl pig, mommie said.  So I called it
Man-ervy, as the next best thing."  She gave Marthy another wasted
glance from the corners of her eyes.  "Oh, Marthy!" she cried
remorsefully, setting down the gravy bowl that she might pat Marthy on
her fat, age-rounded shoulder.  "What a little beast I am!  I shouldn't
have told that; but honest, I thought it was an honor.  I--I just
worshiped that pig!"

Jase maundered in at that moment, and Marthy, catching up a corner of
her dirty apron--Billy Louise could not remember ever seeing Marthy in
a perfectly clean dress or apron--wiped away what traces of emotion her
weathered face could reveal.  Also, she turned and glared at Jase with
what Billy Louise considered a perfectly uncalled-for animosity.  In
reality, Marthy was covertly looking for visible symptoms of the
all-goneness.  She shut her harsh lips together tightly at what she
saw; Jase certainly was puffy under his watery, pink-rimmed eyes, and
the withered cheeks above his thin graying beard really did have a
pasty, gray look.

"D' you turn them calves out into the corral?" she demanded, her voice
harder because of her secret uneasiness.

"I was goin' to, but the wind's changed into the north, 'n' I thought
mebby you wouldn't want 'em out."  Jase turned back aimlessly to the
door.  His voice was getting cracked and husky, and the deprecating
note dominated pathetically all that he said.  "You'll have to face the
wind goin' home," he said to Billy Louise.  "More 'n likely you'll be
facin' snow, too.  Looks bad, off that way."

"You go on and turn them calves out!" Marthy commanded him harshly.
"Billy Louise ain't goin' home if it storms; I sh'd think you'd know
enough to know that."

"Oh, but I'll have to go, anyway," the girl interrupted.  "Mommie can't
be there alone; she'd worry herself to death if I didn't show up by
dark.  She worries about every little thing since daddy died.  I ought
to have gone before--or I oughtn't to have come.  But she was worrying
about you, Marthy; she hadn't seen or heard of you for a month, and she
was afraid you might be sick or something.  Why don't you get someone
to stay with you?  I think you ought to."

She looked toward the door, which Jase had closed upon his departure.
"If Jase should--get sick, or anything--"

"Jase ain't goin' to git sick," Marthy retorted glumly.  "Yuh don't
want to let him worry yuh, Billy Louise.  If I'd worried every time he
yowled around about being sick, I'd be dead or crazy by now.  I dunno
but maybe I'll have somebody to help with the work, though," she added,
after a pause during which she had swiped the dish-rag around the sides
of the pan once or twice, and had opened the door and thrown the water
out beyond the doorstep like the sloven she was.  "I got a nephew that
wants to come out.  He's been in a bank, but he's quit and wants to git
on to a ranch.  I dunno but I'll have him come, in the spring."

"Do," urged Billy Louise, perfectly unconscious of the potentialities
of the future.  "I hate to think of you two down here alone.  I don't
suppose anyone ever comes down here, except me--and that isn't often."

"Nobody's got any call to come down," said Marthy stolidly.  "They sure
ain't going to come for our comp'ny and there ain't nothing else to
bring 'em."

"Well, there aren't many to come, you know," laughed Billy Louise,
shaking out the dish towel and spreading it over two nails, as she did
at home.  "I'm your nearest neighbor, and I've got six miles to
ride--against the wind, at that.  I think I'd better start.  We've got
a halfbreed doing chores for us, but he has to be looked after or he
neglects things.  I'll not get another chance to come very soon, I'm
afraid; mommie hates to have me ride around much in the winter.  You
send for that nephew right away, why don't you, Marthy?"  It was like
Billy Louise to mix command and entreaty together.  "Really, I don't
think Jase looks a bit well."

"A good strong steepin' of sage'll fix him all right, only he ain't
sick, as I see.  You take this shawl."

Billy Louise refused the shawl and ran down the twisted path fringed
with long, reaching fingers of the hare berry bushes.  At the stable
she stopped for an aimless dialogue with Jase and then rode away, past
the orchard whose leafless branches gave glimpses of the low,
sod-roofed cabin, with Marthy standing rather disconsolately on the
rough doorstep watching her go.

Absently she let down the bars in the narrowest place in the gorge and
lifted them into their rude sockets after she had led her horse
through.  All through the years since Marthy had gone down that rocky
gash in search of Buck and Bawley, no human being had entered or left
the Cove save through that narrow opening.  The tingle of romance which
swept always the nerves of the girl when she rode that way fastened
upon her now.  She wished the Cove belonged to her; she thought she
would like to live in a place like that, with warlike Indians all
around and that gorge to guard day and night.  She wished she had been
Marthy, discovering that place and taming it, little by little, in
solitary achievement the sweeter because it had been hard.

"It's a bigger thing," said Billy Louise aloud to her horse, "to make a
home here in this wilderness, than to write the greatest poem in the
world or paint the greatest picture or--anything.  I wish..."

Blue was climbing steadily out of the gorge, twitching an ear backward
with flattering attention when his lady spoke.  He held it so for a
minute, waiting for that sentence to be finished, perhaps; for he was
wise beyond his kind--was Blue.  But his lady was staring at the rock
wall they were passing then, where the winds and the cold and heat had
carved jutting ledges into the crude form of cabbages; though Billy
Louise preferred to call them roses.  Always they struck her with a new
wonder, as if she saw them for the first time.  Blue went on, calmly
stepping over this rock and, around that as if it were the simplest
thing in the world to find sure footing and carry his lady smoothly up
that trail.  He threw up his head so suddenly that Billy Louise was
startled out of her aimless dreamings, and pointed nose and ears toward
the little creek-bottom above, where Marthy had lighted her camp-fire
long and long ago.

A few steps farther, and Blue stopped short in the trail to look and
listen.  Billy Louise could see the nervous twitchings of his muscles
under the skin of neck and shoulders, and she smiled to herself.
Nothing could ever come upon her unaware when she rode alone, so long
as she rode Blue.  A hunting dog was not more keenly alive to his
surroundings.

"Go on, Blue," she commanded after a minute.  "If it's a bear or
anything like that, you can make a run for it; if it's a wolf, I'll
shoot it.  You needn't stand here all night, anyway."

Blue went on, out from behind the willow growth that hid the open.  He
returned to his calm, picking a smooth trail through the scattered
rocks and tiny washouts.  It was the girl's turn to stare and
speculate.  She did not know this horseman who sat negligently in the
saddle and looked up at the cedar-grown bluff beyond, while his horse
stood knee-deep in the little stream.  She did not know him; and there
were not so many travelers in the land that strangers were a matter of
indifference.

Blue welcomed the horse with a democratic nicker and went forward
briskly.  And the rider turned his head, eyed the girl sharply as she
came up, and nodded a cursory greeting.  His horse lifted its head to
look, decided that it wanted another swallow or two, and lowered its
muzzle again to the water.

Billy Louise could not form any opinion of the man's age or
personality, for he was encased in a wolfskin coat which covered him
completely from hatbrim to ankles.  She got an impression of a thin,
dark face, and a sharp glance from eyes that seemed dark also.  There
was a thin, high nose, and beyond that Billy Louise did not look.  If
she had, the mouth must certainly have reassured her somewhat.

Blue stepped nonchalantly down into the stream beside the strange horse
and went across without stopping to drink.  The strange horse moved on
also, as if that were the natural thing to do--which it was, since
chance sent them traveling the same trail.  Billy Louise set her teeth
together with the queer little vicious click that had always been her
habit when she felt thwarted and constrained to yield to circumstances,
and straightened herself in the saddle.

"Looks like a storm," the fur-coated one observed, with a perfectly
transparent attempt to lighten the awkwardness.

Billy Louise tilted her chin upward and gazed at the gray sweep of
clouds moving sullenly toward the mountains at her back.  She glanced
at the man and caught him looking intently at her face.

He did not look away immediately, as he should have done, and Billy
Louise felt a little heat-wave of embarrassment, emphasized by
resentment.

"Are you going far?" he queried in the same tone he had employed before.

"Six miles," she answered shortly, though she tried to be decently
civil.

"I've about eighteen," he said.  "Looks like we'll both get caught out
in a blizzard."

Certainly, he had a pleasant enough voice--and after all it was not his
fault that he happened to be at the crossing when she rode out of the
gorge.  Billy Louise, in common justice, laid aside her resentment and
looked at him with a hint of a smile at the corners of her lips.

"That's what we have to expect when we travel in this country in the
winter," she replied.  "Eighteen miles will take you long after dark."

"Well, I was sort of figuring on putting up at some ranch, if it got
too bad.  There's a ranch somewhere ahead, on the Wolverine, isn't
there?"

"Yes."  Billy Louise bit her lip; but hospitality is an unwritten law
of the West--a law not to be lightly broken.  "That's where I live.
We'll be glad to have you stop there, of course."

The stranger must have felt and admired the unconscious dignity of her
tone and words, for he thanked her simply and refrained from looking
too intently at her face.

Fine siftings of snow, like meal flung down from a gigantic sieve,
swept into their faces as they rode on.  The man turned his face toward
her after a long silence.  She was riding with bowed head and face half
turned from him and the wind alike.

"You'd better ride on ahead and get in out of this," he said curtly.
"Your horse is fresh.  It's going to be worse and more of it, before
long; this cayuse of mine has had thirty miles or so of rough going."

"I think I'd better wait for you," she said primly.  "There are bad
places where the trail goes close to the bluff, and the lava rock will
be slippery with this snow.  And it's getting dark so fast that a
stranger might go over."

"If that's the case, the sooner you are past the bad places the better.
I'm all right.  You drift along."

Billy Louise speculated briefly upon the note of calm authority in his
voice.  He did not know, evidently, that she was more accustomed to
giving commands than to obeying them; her lips gave a little quirk of
amusement at his mistake.

"You go on.  I don't want a guide."  He tilted his head peremptorily
toward the blurred trail ahead.

Billy Louise laughed a little.  She did not feel in the least
embarrassed now.  "Do you never get what you don't want?" she asked him
mildly.  "I'd a lot rather lead you past those places than have you go
over the edge," she said, "because nobody could get you up, or even go
down and bury you decently.  It wouldn't be a bit nice.  It's much
simpler to keep you on top."

He said something, but Billy Louise could not hear what it was; she
suspected him of swearing.  She rode on in silence.

"Blue's a dandy horse on bad trails and in the dark," she observed
companionably at last.  "He simply can't lose his footing or his way."

"Yes?  That's nice."

Billy Louise felt like putting out her tongue at him, for the cool
remoteness of his tone.  It would serve him right to ride on and let
him break his neck over the bluff if he wanted to.  She shut her teeth
together and turned her face away from him.

So, in silence and with no very good feeling between them, they went
precariously down the steep hill (the hill up which Marthy and the oxen
and Jase had toiled so laboriously, twenty-seven years before) and
across the tiny flat to where the cabin window winked a welcome at them
through the storm.




CHAPTER III

A BOOK, A BANNOCK, AND A BED

Blue led the way straight to the low, dirt-roofed stable of logs and
stopped with his nose against the closed door.  Billy Louise herself
was deceived by the whirl of snow and would have missed the stable
entirely if the leadership had been hers.  She patted Blue gratefully
on the shoulder when she unsaddled him.  She groped with her fingers
for the wooden peg in the wall where the saddle should hang, failed to
find it, and so laid the saddle down against the logs and covered it
with the blanket.

"Just turn your horse in loose," she directed the man shortly.  "Blue
won't fight, and I think the rest of the horses are in the other part.
And come on to the house."

It pleased her a little to see that he obeyed her without protest; but
she was not so pleased at his silence, and she led the way rather
indignantly toward the winking eye which was the cabin's window.

At the sound of their feet on the wide doorstep, her mother pulled open
the door and stood fair in the light, looking out with the anxious look
which had lived so long in her face that it had lines of its own
chiseled deep in her forehead and at the sides of her mouth.

"Is that you, Billy Louise?  Oh, ain't Peter Howling Dog with you?
What makes you so terrible late, Billy Louise?  Come right in,
stranger.  I don't know your name, but I don't need to know it.  A
storm like this is all the interduction a fellow needs, I guess."  She
smiled, at that.  She had a nice smile, with a little resemblance to
Billy Louise, except that the worried, inquiring look never left her
eyes; as if she had once waited long for bad news, and had met everyone
with anxious, eager questioning, and her eyes had never changed
afterwards.  Billy Louise glanced at her with her calm, measuring look,
making the contrast very sharp between the two.

"What about Peter?" she asked.  "Isn't he here?"

"No, and he ain't been since an hour or so after you left.  He saddled
up and rode off down the river--to the reservation, I reckon."

"Then the chores aren't done, I suppose."  Billy Louise went over and
took a lantern down from its nail, turning up the wick so that she
could light it with the candle.  "Go up to the fire and thaw out," she
invited the man.  "We'll have supper in a few minutes."

Instead he reached out and took the lantern from her as soon as she had
lighted it.  "You go to the fire yourself," he said.  "I'll do what's
necessary outside."

"Why-y--"  Billy Louise, her fingers still clinging to the lantern,
looked up at him.  He was staring down at her with that intent look she
had objected to on the trail, but she saw his mouth, and the little
smile that hid just back of his lips.  She smiled back without knowing
it.  "I'll have to go along, anyway.  There are cows to milk and you
couldn't very well find the cow-stable alone."

"Think not?"

Billy Louise had been perfectly furious at that tone, out on the trail.
Now that she could see his lips and their little twitching to keep back
the smile, she did not mind the tone at all.  She had turned away to
get the milk pails, and now she gave him a sidelong look, of the kind
that had been utterly wasted upon Marthy.  The man met it and
immediately turned his attention to the lantern wick, which needed nice
adjustment before its blaze quite pleased him; he was not a Marthy to
receive such a look unmoved.

Together they went out again into the storm they had left so eagerly.
Billy Louise showed him where was the pitchfork and the hay, and then
did the milking while he piled full the mangers.  After that they went
together and turned the shivering work horses into the stable from the
corral where they huddled, rumps to the storm; and the man lifted great
forkfuls of hay and carried it into their stalls, while Billy Louise
held the lantern high over her head like a western Liberty.  They did
not talk much, except when there was need for speech; but they were
beginning to feel a little glow of companionship by the time they were
ready to fight their way against the blizzard to the house, Billy
Louise going before with the lantern, while the man followed close
behind, carrying the two pails of milk that was already freezing in
little crystals to the tin.

"Did you get everything done?  You must be half froze--and starved into
the bargin."  Mrs. MacDonald, as is the way of some women who know the
weight of isolation, had a habit of talking with a nervous haste at
times, and of relapsing into long, brooding silences afterwards.  She
talked now, while she pulled a pan of hot, brown biscuits from the
oven, poured the tea, and turned crisp, browned potatoes out of a
frying-pan into a deep, white bowl.  She wondered, over and over, why
Peter Howling Dog had left and why he did not return.  She said that
was the way, when you depended on Indians for anything.  She did wish
there was a white man to be had.  She asked after Marthy and Jase and
gave Billy Louise no opportunity to tell her anything.

Billy Louise glanced often at the man, who did not look in the least as
she had fancied, except that he really did have a high nose and
terribly keen eyes with something behind the keenness that baffled her.
And his mouth was pleasant, especially when that smile hid just behind
his lips; also, she liked his hair, which was thick and brown, with
hints of red in it here and there, and a strong inclination to curl
where it was longest.  She had known he was tall when he stepped into
the light of the door; now she saw that he was slim to the point of
leanness, with square shoulders and a nervous quickness when he moved.
His fingers were never idle; when he was not eating, he rolled bits of
biscuit into tiny, soggy balls beside his plate, or played a soft
tattoo with his fork.

"I didn't quite catch your name, mister," her mother said finally.
"But take another biscuit, anyway."

"Warren is my name," returned the man, with that hidden smile because
she had never before given him any opportunity to tell it.  "Ward
Warren.  I've got a claim over on Mill Creek."

Billy Louise gave a little gasp and distractedly poured two spoons of
sugar in her tea, although she hated it sweetened.

I've got to tell you why, even at the price of digression.  Long ago,
when Billy Louise was twelve or so, and lived largely in a dream world
of her own with Minervy for her "pretend" playmate, she had one day
chanced upon a paragraph in a paper that had come from town wrapped
around a package of matches.  It was all about Ward Warren.  The name
caught her fancy, and the text of the paragraph seized upon her
imagination.  Until school filled her mind with other things, she had
built adventures without end in which Ward Warren was the central
figure.  Up the canyon at the caves, she sometimes pretended that Ward
Warren had abducted Minervy and that she must lead the rescue.
Sometimes, when she rode in the hills, Ward Warren abducted her and led
her into strange places where she tried to shiver in honest dread.
Often and often, however, Ward Warren was a fugitive who came to her
for help; then she would take him to Minervy's cave and hide him,
perhaps; or she would mount her horse and lead him, by devious ways, to
safety, and upon some hilltop from which she could point out the route
he must follow, she would bid him a touching adieu and beseech him, in
the impossible language of some old romancer, to go and lead a
blameless life.  Sitting there at the table opposite him, stirring the
sugar heedlessly into her tea, one favorite exhortation returned from
her dream-world, clear as if she had just spoken it aloud.  "Go, and
sin no more; and if perchance you will in some distant far land send me
a kind thought, that will be reward enough for what I have done this
day.  Farewell, Ward Warren--Kismet."

The lips of Billy Louise smiled and stopped just short of laughter, and
she looked across at Ward Warren as if she expected him to laugh also
at that frightfully virtuous though stilted adieu.  She found him
looking straight at her in that intent fashion that seemed as if he
would see through and all around her and her thoughts.  He was not
smiling at all.  His mouth was pulled into a certain bitter
understanding; indeed, he looked exactly as if Billy Louise had dealt
him a deliberate affront which he could neither parry nor fling back at
her, but must endure with what stoicism he might.

Billy Louise blushed guiltily, took an unpremeditated swallow of tea,
and grimaced over the sickish sweetness of it.  She got up and emptied
the tea into the slop bucket, and loitered over the refilling of the
cup so that when she returned to the table she was at least outwardly
calm.  She felt another quick, keen glance from across the table, but
she helped herself composedly to the cream and listened to her mother
with flattering attention.

"Jase has got all-gone feelings now, mommie," she remarked irrelevantly
during a brief pause and relapsed into silence again.  She knew that
was good for at least five minutes of straight monologue, with her
mother in that talking mood.  She finished her supper while Warren
listened abstractedly to a complete biography of the Meilkes and
learned all about Marthy's energy and Jase's shiftlessness.

"Ward Warren!"  Billy Louise was saying to herself.  "Did you ever in
your life--it's exactly as if Minervy should come to life and walk in.
Ward Warren!  There couldn't possibly be two Ward Warrens; it's such an
odd name.  Well!"

Then she went mentally over that paragraph.  She wished she did not
remember every single word of it, but she did.  And she was afraid to
look at him after that.  And she wanted to, dreadfully.  She felt as
though he belonged to her.  Why, he was her old playmate!  And she had
saved his life hundreds of times, at immense risks to herself; and he
had always been her devoted slave afterwards, and never failed to
appear at the precise moment when she was beset by Indians or robbers
or something, and in dire need.  The blood he had shed in her behalf!
At that point Billy Louise startled herself and the others by suddenly
laughing out loud at the memory of one time when Ward Warren had killed
enough Indians to fill a deep washout so that he might carry her across
to the other side!

"Is there anything funny about Jase Meilke dying, Billy Louise?" her
mother asked her in a perfectly shocked tone.

"No--I was thinking of something else."  She glanced at the man eyeing
her so distrustfully from across the table and gurgled again.  It was
terribly silly, but she simply could not help seeing Ward Warren calmly
filling that washout with dead Indians so that he might carry her
across it in his arms.  The more she tried to forget that, the funnier
it became.  She ended by leaving the table and retiring precipitately
to her own tiny room in the lean-to where she buried her face as deep
as it would go in a puffy pillow of wild duck feathers.

He, poor devil, could not be expected to know just what had amused her
so; he did know that it somehow concerned himself, however.  He took up
his position--mentally--behind the wall of aloofness which stood
between himself and an unfriendly world, and when Billy Louise came out
later to help with the dishes, he was sitting absorbed in a book.

Billy Louise got out her algebra and a slate and began to ponder the
problem of a much-handicapped goat's feeding-ground.  Ward Warren read
and read and read and never looked up from the pages.  Never in her
life had she seen a man read as he read; hungrily, as a starved man
eats; rapidly, his eyes traveling like a shuttle across the page; down,
down--flip a leaf quickly and let the shuttle-glance go on.  Billy
Louise let her slate, with the goat problem unsolved, lie in her lap
while she watched him.  When she finally became curious enough to
decipher the name of the book--she had three or four in that dull,
brown binding--and saw that he was reading _The Ring and the Book_, she
felt stunned.  She read Browning just as she drank sage tea; it was
supposed to be good for her.  Her English teacher had given her that
book.  She never would have believed that any living human could read
it as Ward Warren was reading it now; avidly, absorbedly, lost to his
surroundings--to her own presence, if you please!  Billy Louise glanced
at her mother.  That lady, having discovered that her guest's gloves
needed mending, was working over them with pieces of Indian-tanned
buckskin and beeswaxed thread, the picture of domestic content.

Billy Louise sighed.  She shifted her chair.  She got up and put a
heavy chunk of wood on the fire and glanced over her shoulder at the
man to see if he were going to take the hint and offer to help.  She
came back and stood close to him while she selected, with great
deliberation, a book from the shelf beside his head.  And Ward Warren,
perfectly normal and not over twenty-five or so, pushed his chair out
of her way with a purely mechanical movement, and read and read, and
actually was too absorbed to feel her nearness.  And he really was
reading _The Ring and the Book_; Billy Louise was rude enough to look
over his shoulder to make sure of that.  She gave up, then, and though
she picked a book at random from the shelf, she did not attempt to read
it.  She went to her room and made it ready for their guest, and after
that she went to bed in her mother's room; and she thought and thought
and did a lot of wondering about Life and about Ward Warren.  She heard
him go to bed, after a long while, and she wondered if he had finished
the book first.

The next morning the blizzard raged so that he stayed as a matter of
course.  Peter Howling Dog had not returned, so Warren did the chores
and would not let Billy Louise help with anything.  He filled the
wood-box, piled great chunks of wood by the fireplace, and saw that the
water-pails were full to the icy brims.  He talked a little, and Billy
Louise discovered that he was quick to see a joke, and that he simply
could not be caught napping, but had always a retort ready for her.
That was true until after dinner, when he picked up a book again.  When
that happened, he was dead to the world bounded by the coulee walls,
and he did not show any symptoms of consciousness until he had reached
the last page, just when the light was growing dim and blurring the
lines so that he must hold the pages within six inches of his eyes.  He
closed the book with a long breath, placed it accurately upon the shelf
where it had stood since Billy Louise came home from school, and picked
up his hat and gloves.  It was time to wade out through the snow and
feed the stock and bring in more wood.

"I wish we could get him to stay all winter, instead of that Peter
Howling Dog," Mrs. MacDonald said anxiously, after he had gone out.  "I
just know Peter's off drinking.  I don't think he's a safe man to have
around, Billy Louise.  I didn't when you hired him.  I haven't felt
easy a minute with him on the place.  I wish you'd hire Mr. Warren,
Billy Louise.  He's nice and quiet--"

"And he's got a ranch of his own.  He doesn't strike me as a man who
wants a job milking two cows and carrying slop to the pigs, mommie."

"Well, I'd feel a lot easier if we had him instead of that breed; only
we ain't even got the breed, half the time.  This is the third time
he's disappeared, in the two months we've had him.  I really think you
ought to speak to Mr. Warren, Billy Louise."

"Speak to him yourself.  You're the one that wants him," Billy Louise
answered somewhat sharply.  She adored her mother; but if she had to
run the ranch, she did wish her mother would not interfere and give
advice just at the wrong time.

"Well, you needn't be cross about it; you know yourself that Peter
can't be depended on a minute.  There he went off yesterday and never
fed the pigs their noon slop, and I had to carry it out myself.  And my
lumbago has bothered me ever since, just like it was going to give me
another spell.  You can't be here all the time, Billy Louise--leastways
you ain't; and Peter--"

"Oh, good gracious, mommie!  I told you to hire the man if you want
him.  Only Ward Warren isn't--"

Ward Warren pushed open the door and looked from one to the other, his
eyes two question marks.  "Isn't--what?" he asked and shut the door
behind him with the air of one who is ready for anything.

"Isn't the kind of man who wants to hire out to do chores," Billy
Louise finished and looked at him straight.  "Are you?  Mommie wants to
hire you."

"Oh.  Well, I was just about to ask for the job, anyway."  He laughed,
and the distrust left his eyes.  "As a matter of fact, I was going over
to Jim Larson's to hang out for the rest of the winter and get away
from the lonesomeness of the hills.  The old Turk's a pretty good
friend of mine.  But it looks to me as if you two needed something
around that looks like a man a heap more than Jim does.  I know Peter
Howling Dog to a fare-you-well; you'll be all to the good if he forgets
to come back.  So if you'll stake me to a meal now and then, and a
place to sleep, I'll be glad to see you through the winter--or until
you get some white man to take my place."  He took up the two
water-pails and waited, glancing from one to the other with that
repressed smile which Billy Louise was beginning to look for in his
face.

Now that matters had approached the point of decision, her mother stood
looking at her helplessly, waiting for her to speak.  Billy Louise drew
herself up primly and ended by contradicting the action.  She gave him
the sidelong glance which he was least prepared to withstand--though in
justice to Billy Louise, she was absolutely unconscious of its general
effectiveness--and twisted her lips whimsically.

"We'll stake you to a book, a bannock, and a bed if you want to stay,
Mr. Warren," she said quite soberly.  "Also to a pitchfork and an axe,
if you like, and regular wages."

His eyes went to her and steadied there with the intent expression in
them.  "Thanks.  Cut out the wages, and I'll take the offer just as it
stands," he told her and pulled his hat farther down on his head.
"She's going to be one stormy night, lay-dees," he added in quite
another tone, on his way to the door.  "Five o'clock by the town clock,
and al-ll's well!"  This last in still another tone, as he pushed out
against the swooping wind and pulled the door shut with a slam.  They
heard him whistling a shrill, rollicking air on his way to the creek;
at least, it sounded rollicking, the way he whistled it.

"That's _The Old Chisholm Trail_ he's whistling," Billy Louise observed
under her breath, smiling reminiscently.  "The very song I used to
pretend he always sang when he came down the canyon to rescue Minervy
and me!  But of course--I knew all the time he's a cowboy; it said so--"

The whistling broke and he began to sing at the top of a clear,
strong-lunged voice, that old, old trail song beloved of punchers the
West over:

  "Oh, it's cloudy in the West and a-lookin' like rain,
  And my damned old slicker's in the wagon again,
  Coma ti yi youpy, youpy-a, youpy-a,
  Coma ti yi youpy, youpy-a!"


"What did you say, Billy Louise?  I'm sure it's a comfort to have him
here, and you see he was glad and willing--"

But Billy Louise was holding the door open half an inch, listening and
slipping back into the child-world wherein Ward Warren came singing
down the canyon to rescue her and Minervy.  The words came gustily from
the creek down the slope:

  "No chaps, no slicker, and a-pourin' down rain,
  And I swear by the Lord I'll never night-herd again,
  Coma ti yi youpy, youpy-a, youpy-a,
  Coma ti yi youpy, youpy-a!

  "Feet in the stirrups and seat in the saddle,
  I hung and rattled with them long-horn cattle,
  Coma ti yi--"


"Do shut the door, Billy Louise!  What you want to stand there like
that for?  And the wind freezing everything inside!  I can feel a
terrible draught on my feet and ankles, and you know what that leads
to."

So Billy Louise closed the door and laid another alder root on the
coals in the fireplace, the while her mind was given over to dreamy
speculations, and the words of that old trail song ran on in her memory
though she could no longer hear him singing.  Her mother talked on
about Peter and the storm and this man who had ridden straight from the
land of daydreams to her door, but the girl was not listening.

"Now ain't you relieved, yourself, that he's going to stay?"

Billy Louise, kneeling on the hearth and staring abstractedly into the
fire, came back with a jerk to reality.  The little smile that had been
in her eyes and on her lips fled back with the dreams that had brought
it.  She gave her shoulders an impatient twitch and got up.

"Oh--I guess he'll be more agreeable to have around than Peter," she
admitted taciturnly; which was as close to her real opinion of the man
as a mere mother might hope to come.




CHAPTER IV

"OLD DAME FORTUNE'S USED ME FOR A FOOTBALL"

Ward Warren sat before the fireplace with a cigarette long gone cold in
his fingers and stared into the blaze until the blaze died to
bright-glowing coals, and the coals filmed and shrank down into the bed
of ashes.  Billy Louise had spoken to him twice, and he had not
answered.  She had swept all around him, and he had shifted his feet
out of her way, and later his chair, like a man in his sleep who turns
from an unaccustomed light or draws the covers over shoulders growing
chilled, without any real consciousness of what he does.  Billy Louise
put away the broom, hung the dustpan on its nail behind the door, and
stood looking at Ward curiously and with some resentment; this was not
the first time he had gone into fits of abstraction as deep as his
absorption in the books he read so hungrily.  He had been at the
Wolverine a month, and they were pretty well acquainted by now and
inclined to friendliness when Ward threw off his moodiness and his air
of holding himself ready for some affront which he seemed to expect.
But for all that the distrust never quite left his eyes, and there were
times like this when he was absolutely oblivious to her presence.

Billy Louise suddenly lost patience.  She stooped and picked up a bit
of bark the size of her thumb and threw it at Ward, with a little,
vexed twist of her lips.  She had a fine accuracy of aim--she hit him
on the nape of the neck, just where his hair came down in a queer
little curly "cow-lick" in the middle.

Ward jumped up and whirled, and when he faced Billy Louise he had a gun
gripped in the fingers that had held the cigarette so loosely.  In his
eyes was the glare which a man turns upon his deadliest enemy, perhaps,
but seldom indeed upon a girl.  So they faced each other, while Billy
Louise backed against the wall and took two sharp breaths.

Ward relaxed; a shamed flush reddened his whole face.  He shoved the
gun back inside the belt of his trousers--Billy Louise had never
dreamed that he carried any weapon save his haughty aloofness of
manner--and with a little snort of self-disgust dropped back into the
chair.  He did not stare again into the fire, however; he folded his
arms upon the high chairback and laid his face down upon them, like a
woman who is hurt to the point of tears and yet will not weep.  His
booted feet were thrust toward the dying coals, his whole attitude
spoke of utter desolation--of a loneliness beyond words.

Billy Louise set her teeth hard together to keep back the tears of
sympathy.  Suffering of any sort always wrung the tender heart of her.
But suffering like this--never in her life had she seen anything like
it.  She had seen her father angry, discouraged, morose.  She had seen
men fight.  She had soothed her mother's grief, which expressed itself
in tears and lamentations.  But this hidden hurt, this stoical
suffering that she had seen often and often in Ward's eyes and that
sent his head down now upon his arms--  She went to him and laid her
two hands on his shoulders without even thinking that this was the
first time she had ever touched him.

"Don't!" she said, half whispering so that she would not waken her
mother, in bed with an attack of lumbago.  "I--I didn't know.  Ward,
listen to me!  Whatever it is, can't you tell me?  You--I'm your
friend.  Don't look as if you--you hadn't a friend on earth!"

Still he did not move or give any sign that he heard.  Billy Louise had
no thought of coquetry.  Her heart ached with pity and a longing to
help him.  She slid one hand up and pinched his ear, just as she would
playfully tweak the ear of a child.

"Ward, you mustn't.  I've seen you think and think and look as if you
hadn't a friend on earth.  You mustn't.  I suppose you've got lots of
friends who'd stand by you through anything.  Anyway, you've got me,
and--I understand all about it."  She whispered those last words, and
her heart thumped heavily with trepidation after she had spoken.

Ward raised his head, caught one of her hands and held it fast while he
looked deep into her eyes.  He was searching, questioning, measuring,
and he was doing it without uttering a word.  The plummet dropped
straight into the clear, sweet depths of her soul.  If it did not reach
the bottom, he was satisfied with the soundings he took.  He drew a
deep breath and gave her hand a little squeeze and let it go.

"Did I scare you?  I'm sorry," he said, speaking in a hushed tone
because of the woman in the next room.  "I was thinking about a man I
may meet some day; and if I do meet him, the chances are I'll kill him.
I--didn't--I forgot where I was--"  He threw out a hand in a gesture
that amply completed explanation and apology and fumbled in his pocket
for tobacco and papers.  Abstractedly he began the making of a
cigarette.

Billy Louise put wood on the fire, pulled up a square, calico-padded
stool, and sat down.  She waited, and she had the wisdom to wait in
complete silence.

Ward leaned forward with a twig in his hand, got it ablaze, and lighted
his cigarette.  He did not look at Billy Louise until he had taken a
whiff or two.  Then he stared at her for a full minute, and ended by
flipping the charred twig playfully into her lap, and laughing a little
because she jumped.

"What made you catch your breath when I told my name that night I
came?" he asked quizzically, but with a tensity behind the lightness of
his tone and behind the little smile in his eyes as well.  "Where had
you ever heard of me before?"

Billy Louise gasped again, sent a lightning-thought into the future,
and answered more casually than she had hoped she could.

"When I was a kid I ran across the name--somewhere--and I used it to
play with--"

"Yes?"

"You know--I was always making believe different things.  I never had
anyone to play with in my life, so I had a pretend-girl, named Minervy.
And I had you.  I used to have you rescue us from Indians and things,
but mostly you were a road-agent or a robber, and when you weren't
holding me or Minervy for ransom, I was generally leading you over some
most ungodly trails, saving you from posses and things.  I used," said
Billy Louise, forcing a laugh, "to have some wild old times with you,
believe me!  So when you told your name, why--it was just like--you
know; it was exactly like having a doll come to life!"

He eyed her fixedly until she tingled with nervousness.

"Yes--and what about--understanding all about it?  Do you?"  He drew in
his under lip, let it go, and drew it again between his teeth, while he
frowned at her thoughtfully.  "Do you understand all about it?" he
insisted, leaning toward her and never once taking that boring gaze
from her face.

"I--well, I--do--some of it anyway."  Billy Louise lifted a hand
spasmodically to her throat.  This was digging deeper into the agonies
of life than she had ever gone before.  "What was in the paper," she
whispered later, as if his eyes were drawing it from her by force.

"What was that?  What did it say?"

"I--I--what difference does it make, what it said?"  Billy Louise
turned imploring eyes upon him.  Her breath was coming fast and uneven.
"It doesn't matter--to me--in the least.  It--didn't say much.
I--can't tell exactly--"  She was growing white around the mouth.  The
horror of being compelled to say, out loud--and to him!

"I didn't know there was a woman in the world like you," Ward said
irrelevantly and looked into the fire.  "I thought women were just soft
things a man had to take care of and carry along through life, a dead
weight when they weren't worse.  I never knew a woman could be a
friend--the kind of friend a man can be."  He threw his cigarette into
the fire and watched the paper shrivel swiftly and the tobacco turn
into a thin, blue smoke-spiral.

"Life's a queer thing," he said, taking a different angle.  "I started
out with big notions about the things I'd do.  Maybe I started wrong,
but for a kid with nobody to point the trail for him, I don't think I
did so worse--till old Dame Fortune spotted me in the crowd and
proceeded to use me for a football."  He leaned an elbow on one knee
and stared hard at a burning brand that was getting ready to fall and
send up a stream of sparks.  Then he turned his head quite unexpectedly
and looked at Billy Louise.  "What was it you read?" he asked abruptly.

"I--don't like to--say it," she whispered unsteadily.

"Well, you needn't.  I'll say it for you, when I come to it.  There's a
lot before that."

Ward Warren had never before opened his soul to any human; not
completely.  Perhaps, sitting that evening in the deepening dusk, with
the firelight lighting swiftly the brooding face of the girl and
afterward veiling it softly with shadows, perhaps even then there were
desolate places in his life which his words did not touch.  But so much
as a man may put into words, Ward told her; more, a great deal more,
than he would ever tell to any other woman as long as he lived.  More
perhaps than he would ever tell to any man.  And in it all there was no
word of love.  It was of what lay behind him that he talked.  The low,
even murmur of his voice was broken by long, brooding silences, when
the two stared into the shifting flames and saw there the things his
words had conjured.  Sometimes the eyes of Billy Louise were soft with
sympathy.  Sometimes they were wide and held the light of horror.
Once, with a small sob that had no tears, she reached out and clutched
his arm.  "Oh, don't!" she gasped.  "Don't go on telling--I--I can't
bear to listen to that!"

"It isn't nice for a woman to listen to, I guess," Ward gritted.  "I
know it was hell to stand, but--"  He was silent so long after that,
and his eyes grew so intent and so somber while he stared, that Billy
Louise pulled at his sleeve to recall him.

"Skip that part and tell me--"

Ward took up the story and told her much; more than she had ever
dreamed could be.  I can't repeat any of it; what he said was for Billy
Louise to know and none other.

It was late when she finally rose from the stool and lighted the lamp
because her mother woke and called to her.  Ward went out to turn the
horses into the stable and fasten the door.  He should have sheltered
them two hours before.  Billy Louise should long ago have made tea and
toast for her mother, for that matter.  But when life's big, bitter
problems confront one, little things are usually forgotten.

They came back to everyday realities, though the spell which Ward's
impulsive unburdening had woven still wrapped them in that close
companionship of complete understanding.  They played checkers for an
hour or so and then went to bed.  Billy Louise lay in a waking
nightmare because of all the hard things she had heard about life.
Ward stared up into the dark and could not lose himself in sleep,
because he had opened the door upon the evil places in his memory and
let out all the trooping devils that lived there.

After that, though there was never any word of love between them, Billy
Louise, with the sure instinct of a woman innately pure, watched
unobtrusively for signs of those fits of bitter brooding; watched and
drove them off with various weapons of her own.  Sometimes she
cheerfully declared that she was bored to death, and wasn't Ward just
dying for a game of "rob casino"?  Sometimes she simply teased him into
retaliation.  Frequently she insisted that he repeat the things he had
learned by heart, of poetry or humorous prose, for his memory was
almost uncanny in its tenacity.  She discovered quite early, and by
accident, that she had only to shake her head in a certain way and
declaim: "Ah, Tam, noo, Tam, thou'lt get thy faring--In hell they'll
roast thee like a herring,"--she had only to say that to make him laugh
and repeat the whole of _Tam O'Shanter's Ride_ with a perfectly
devilish zest for poor Tam's misfortunes, and an accent which made her
suspect who were his ancestors.

Billy Louise meant only to wean him from his bitterness against Life,
and to convince him, by a somewhat roundabout method since at heart she
was scared to death of his aloofness, that he was not "old lady
Fortune's football" as he sometimes pessimistically declared.  At
thirteen she had mixed him with her dreams and led him by difficult
trails to safety from the imaginary enemies that pursued him.  At
nineteen she unconsciously mixed him with her life and led him--more
surely than in her dreams, and by a far more difficult trail, had she
only known it--safe away from the devils of memory and a distrust of
life that pursued him more relentlessly than any human foe.

She only meant to wean him from pessimism and rebuild within him a
healthy appetite for life.  If she did more than that, she did not know
it then; for Ward Warren had learned, along with other hard lessons,
the art of keeping his thoughts locked safely away, and of using his
face as a mask to hide even the doorway to his real self.  Only his
eyes turned traitors sometimes when he looked at Billy Louise; though
she, being a somewhat self-centered young person, never quite read what
they tried to betray.

She took him up the canyon and showed him her cave and Minervy's.  And
she had the doubtful satisfaction of seeing him doubled over the
saddle-horn in a paroxysm of laughter when she led him to the
historical washout and recounted the feat of the dead Indians with
which he had made a safe passing for her.

"Well, they did it in history," she defended at last, her cheeks redder
than was perfectly normal.  "I read about it--at Waterloo when the Duke
of Wellington--wasn't it?  You needn't laugh as if it couldn't be done.
It was that sunken-road business put it into my head in the first
place; and I think you ought to feel flattered."

"I do," gasped Ward, wiping his eyes.  "Say, I was some bandit, wasn't
I, William Louisa?"

Billy Louise looked at him sidewise.  "No, you weren't any bandit at
all--then.  You were a kind scout, that time.  I was here, all
surrounded by Indians and saying the Lord's prayer with my hair all
down my back like mommie's Rock of Ages picture--will you shut up
laughing?--and you came riding up that draw over there on a big, black
horse named Sultan (You needn't snort; I still think Sultan's a dandy
name for a horse!).  And you hollered to me to get behind that rock,
over there.  And I quit at 'Forgive us our debts'--daddy always had so
many!--and hiked for the rock.  And you commenced shooting--  Oh, I'm
not going to tell you a single other pretend!"  She sulked then, which
was quite as diverting as the most hair-raising "pretend" she had ever
told him and held Ward's attention unflaggingly until they were half
way home.

"Sing the _Chisholm Trail_," she commanded, when her temper was
sunshiny again.  This had been a particularly moody day for Ward, and
Billy Louise felt that extra effort was required to rout the
memory-devils.  "Daddy knew a little of it, and old Jake Summers used
to sing more, but I never did hear it all."

"Ladies don't, as a general thing," Ward replied, biting his lips.

"Why?  I know there's about forty verses, and some of them are kind of
sweary ones; but go ahead and sing it.  I don't mind damn now and then."

This sublime innocence was also diverting, even to a man haunted by the
devils of memory.  Ward's lips twitched, and a flush warmed his
cheek-bones at the mere thought of singing it all in her presence.
"I'll sing all of _Sam Bass_, if you like," he temporized, with a grin.

"Oh, I hate _Sam Bass_!  We had a Dutchman working for us when I was
just a kid, and he was forever bawling out: 'Sa-am Pass was porn in
Injiany, it was-s hiss natiff ho-o-ome!'"

Billy Louise was a pretty good mimic.  She had Ward doubled over the
horn again and shouting so that the canyon walls roared echoes for
three full minutes.  "I've always wanted to hear the _Chisholm Trail_.
I know how it was sung from Mexico north on the old cattle-trails, and
how every ambitious puncher who had enough imagination and could make a
rhyme, added a verse or so, till it's really a--a classic of the
cow-camps."

"Ye-es--it sure is all that."  Ward eyed her furtively.

"And with that memory of yours, I simply know that you can sing every
single word of it," Billy Louise went on pitilessly--and innocently.
"You're a cowpuncher yourself, and you must have heard it all, at one
time and another; and I don't believe you ever forgot a thing in your
life."  She caught her breath there, conscience-stricken, and added
hastily and imperiously, "So go on--begin at the beginning and sing it
all.  I'll keep tab and see if you sing forty verses."  And she
prompted coaxingly:

  "Come along, boys, and listen to my tale,
  I'll tell you of my troubles on the old Chisholm trail,
  Coma ti yi--"

and nodded her head approvingly when Ward took up the ditty where she
left off and sang it with the rollicking enthusiasm which only a man
who has soothed restless cattle on a stormy night can put into the
doggerel.

He did not sing the whole forty verses, for good and sufficient reasons
best known to punchers themselves.  But, with swift, shamed skipping of
certain lines and some hasty revisions, he actually did sing thirty,
and Billy Louise was so engrossed that she forgot to count them and
never suspected the omissions; for some of the verses were quite
"sweary" enough to account for his hesitation.

The singing of those thirty verses brought a reminiscent mood upon the
singer.  For the rest of the way, which they rode at a walk, Ward sat
very much upon one side of the saddle, with his body facing Billy
Louise and his foot dangling free of the stirrup, and told her tales of
trail-herds, and the cow-camps, and of funny things that had happened
on the range.  His "I remember one time" opened the door to a more
fascinating world than Billy Louise's dream-world, because this other
world was real.

So, from pure accident, she hit upon the most effective of all weapons
with which to fight the memory-devils.  She led Ward to remembering the
pleasanter parts of his past life and to telling her of them.

When spring came at last, and he rode regretfully back to his claim on
Mill Greek, he was not at all the morose Ward Warren who had ridden
down to the Wolverine that stormy night in January.  The distrust had
left his eyes, and that guarded remoteness was gone from his manner.
He thought and he planned as other men thought and planned, and looked
into the future eagerly, and dreamed dreams of his own; dreams that
brought the hidden smile often to his lips and his eyes.

Still, the thing those dreams were built upon was yet locked tight in
his heart, and not even Billy Louise, whose instinct was so keen and so
sure in all things else, knew anything of them or of the bright-hued
hope they were built upon.  Fortune's football was making ready to
fight desperately to become captain of the game, that he might be
something more to Billy Louise.




CHAPTER V

MARTHY BURIES HER DEAD AND GREETS HER NEPHEW

Jase did not move or give his customary, querulous grunt when Marthy
nudged him at daylight, one morning in mid-April.  Marthy gave another
poke with her elbow and lay still, numbed by a sudden dread.  She moved
cautiously out of the bed and half across the cramped room before she
turned her head toward him.  Then she stood still and looked and
looked, her hard face growing each moment more pinched and stony and
gray.

Jase had died while the coyotes were yapping their dawn-song up on the
rim of the Cove.  He lay rigid under the coarse, gray blanket, the
flesh of his face drawn close to the bones, his skimpy, gray beard
tilted upward.

Marthy's jaw set into a harsher outline than ever.  She dressed with
slow, heavy movements and went out and fed the stock.  In stolid calm
she did the milking and turned out the cows into the pasture.  She
gathered an apron full of chips and started a fire, just as she had
done every morning for twenty-nine years, and she put the coffee-pot on
the greasy stove and boiled the brew of yesterday--which was also her
habit.

She sat for some time with her head leaning upon her grimy hand and
stared unseeingly out upon a peach-tree in full bloom, and at a pair of
busy robins who had chosen a convenient crotch for their nest.  Finally
she rose stiffly, as if she had grown older within the last hour, and
went outside to the place where she had been mending the irrigating
ditch the day before; she knocked the wet sand off the shovel she had
left sticking in the soft bank and went out of the yard and up the
slope toward the rock wall.

On a tiny, level place above the main ditch and just under the wall,
Marthy began to dig, setting her broad, flat foot uncompromisingly upon
the shoulder of the shovel and sending it deep into the yellow soil.
She worked slowly and methodically and steadily, just as she did
everything else.  When she had dug down as deep as she could and still
manage to climb out, and had the hole wide enough and long enough, she
got awkwardly to the grassy surface and sat for a long while upon a
rock, staring dumbly at the gaunt, brown hills across the river.

She returned to the cabin at last, and with the manner of one who
dreads doing what must be done, she went in where Jase lay stiff and
cold under the blankets.

Early that afternoon, Marthy went staggering up the slope, wheeling
Jase's body before her on the creaky, home-made wheelbarrow.  In the
same harsh, primitive manner in which they both had lived, Marthy
buried her dead.  And though in life she had given him few words save
in command or upbraiding, with never a hint of love to sweeten the days
for either, yet she went whimpering away from that grave.  She broke
off three branches of precious peach blossoms and carried them up the
slope.  She stuck them upright in the lumpy soil over Jase's head and
stood there a long while with tear-streaked face, staring down at the
grave and at the nodding pink blossoms.


Billy Louise rode singing down the rocky trail through the deep, narrow
gorge, to where the hawthorn and choke-cherries hid the opening to the
cove.  Just on the edge of the thickest fringe, she pulled up and broke
off tender branches of cherry bloom, then went on, still singing softly
to herself because the air was sweet with spring odors, the sunshine
lay a fresh yellow upon the land, and because the joy of life was in
her blood and, like the birds, she had no other means of expression at
hand.  Blue's feet sank to the fetlocks in the rich, black soil of the
little meadow that lay smooth to the tumbling sweep of the river behind
its own little willow fringe.  His ears perked forward, his eyes
rolling watchfully for strange sights and sounds, he stepped softly
forward, ready to wheel at the slightest alarm and gallop back up the
gorge to more familiar ground.  It was long since Billy Louise had
turned his head down the rocky trail, and Blue liked little the gloom
of the gorge and the sudden change to soft, black soil that stopped
just short of being boggy in the wet places.  Where the trail led into
a marshy crossing of the big, irrigating ditch that brought the stream
from far up the gorge to water meadow and orchard, Blue halted and cast
a look of disapproval back at his rider.  Billy Louise stopped singing
and laughed at him.

"I guess you can go where a cow can go, you silly thing.  Mud's a heap
easier than lava rock, if you only knew it, Blue.  Get along with you."

Blue lowered his head, snuffed suspiciously at the water-filled tracks,
and would have turned back.  Mud he despised instinctively, since he
had nearly mired on the creek bank when he was a sucking colt.

"Blue!  Get across that ditch, or I'll beat you to death!"  The voice
of Billy Louise was soft with a caressing note at the end, so that the
threat did not sound very savage, after all.  She sniffed at the branch
of cherry blossoms and reined the horse back to face the ditch.  And
Blue, who had a will of his own, snorted and wheeled, this time in
frank rebellion against her command.

"Oh, will you?  Well, you'll cross that ditch, you know, sooner or
later--so you might just as well--"  Blue reared and whirled again,
plunging two rods back toward the cherry thicket.

Billy Louise set her teeth against her lower lip, slid her rawhide
quirt from slim wrist to firm hand-grip, and proceeded to match Blue's
obstinacy with her own; and since the obstinacy of Billy Louise was
stronger and finer and backed by a surer understanding of the thing she
was fighting against, Blue presently lifted himself, leaped the ditch
in one clean jump, and snorted when he sank nearly to his knees in the
soft, black soil beyond.

From there to the pink drift of peach bloom against the dull brown of
the bluff, Blue galloped angrily, leaving deep, black prints in the
soft green of the meadow.  So they came headlong upon Marthy, just as
she was knocking the yellow clay of the grave from her irrigating
shovel against the pole fence of her pig-pen.

"Why, Marthy!"  Once before in her life Billy Louise had seen Marthy's
chin quivering like that, and big, slow tears sliding down the network
of lines on Marthy's leathery cheeks.  With a painful slump her spirits
went heavy with her sympathy.  "Marthy!"

She knew without a word of explanation just what had happened.  From
Marthy's bent shoulders she knew, and from her tear-stained face, and
from the yellow soil clinging still to the shovel in her hand.  The
wide eyes of Billy Louise sent seeking glances up the slope where the
soil was yellow; went to the long, raw ridge under the wall, with the
peach blossoms standing pitifully awry upon the western end.  Her eyes
filled with tears.  "Oh, Marthy!  When was it?"

"In the night, sometime, I guess."  Marthy's voice had a harsh
huskiness.  "He was--gone--when I woke up.  Well--he's better off than
I be.  I dunno what woulda become of him if I'd went first."  There, at
last, was a note of tenderness, stifled though it was and fleeting.
"Git down, Billy Louise, and come in.  I been kinda lookin' for yuh to
come, ever sence the weather opened up.  How's your maw?"

Spoken sympathy was absolutely impossible in the face of that stoical
acceptance of life's harsh law.  Marthy turned toward the gate, taking
the shovel and the wheelbarrow in with her.  Billy Louise glanced
furtively at the raw, yellow ridge under the rock wall and rode on to
the stable.  She pulled off the saddle and bridle and turned Blue into
the corral before she went slowly--and somewhat reluctantly--to the
cabin, squat, old, and unkempt like its mistress, but buried deep in
the renewed sweetness of bloom-time.

"The fruit's comin' on early this year," said Marthy from the doorway,
her hands on her hips.  "They's goin' to be lots of it, too, if we
don't git a killin' frost."  So she closed the conversational door upon
her sorrow and pointed the way to trivial, every-day things.

"What are you going to do now, Marthy?"  Billy Louise was perfectly
capable of opening a conversational door, even when it had been closed
decisively in her face.  "You can't get on here alone, you know.  Did
you send for that nephew?  If you haven't, you must hire somebody
till--"

"He's comin'.  That letter you sent over last month was from him.  I
dunno when he'll git here; he's liable to come most any time.  I ain't
going to hire nobody.  I kin git along alone.  I might as well of been
alone--"  Even harsh Marthy hesitated and did not finish the sentence
that would have put a slight upon her dead.

"I'll stay to-night, anyway," said Billy Louise.  "Just a week ago I
hired John Pringle and that little breed wife of his for the summer.  I
couldn't afford it," she added, with a small sigh, "but Ward had to go
back to his claim, and mommie needs someone in the house.  She hasn't
been a bit well, all winter.  And I've turned all the stock out for the
summer and have to do a lot of riding on them; it's that or let them
scatter all over the country and then have to hire a rep for every
round-up.  I can't afford that, I haven't got cattle enough to pay; and
I like to ride, anyway.  I've got them pretty well located along the
creek, up at the head of the canyons.  The grass is coming on fine, so
they don't stray much.  Are you going to turn your cattle out, Marthy?
I see you haven't yet."

"No, I ain't yit.  I dunno.  I was going to sell 'em down to jest what
the pasture'll keep.  I'm gittin' too old to look after 'em.  But I
dunno--  When Charlie gits here, mebby--"

"Oh, is that the nephew?  I didn't know his name."  Billy Louise was
talking aimlessly to keep her thoughts away from the pitifulness of the
sordid little tragedy in this beauty-spot and to drive that blank,
apathetic look from Marthy's hard eyes.

"Charlie Fox, his name is.  I hope he turns out a good worker.  I've
never had a chance to git ahead any; but if Charlie'll jest take holt,
I'll mebby git some comfort outa life yit."

"He ought, to, I'm sure.  And everyone thinks you've done awfully well,
Marthy.  What can I do now?  Wash the dishes and straighten things up,
I guess."

"You needn't do nothin' you ain't a mind to do, Billy Louise.  I don't
want you to think you got to slop around washin' my dirty dishes.  I'm
goin' on down into the medder and work on a ditch I'm puttin' in.  You
jest do what you're a mind to."  She picked up the shovel and went off
down the jungly path, herself the ugliest object in the Cove, where she
had created so much beauty.

Again the sympathetic soul of Billy Louise had betrayed her into
performing an extremely disagreeable task.  Shudderingly she looked
into the unpleasant bedroom, and comprehending all of the sordidness of
the tragedy, spent half an hour with her teeth set hard together while
she dragged out dingy blankets and hung them over the fence under a
voluptuous plum-tree.  The next hour was so disagreeably employed that
she wondered afterward how even her sympathy could have driven her to
the things she did.  She carried more water, after she had scrubbed
that bedroom, and opened the window with the aid of the hammer, and set
the tea-kettle on to heat the dish-water.  Then, because her mind was
full of poor, dead Jase, she took the branches of wild cherry and
hawthorn blossoms she had gathered coming down the gorge and went up
the slope to lay them on his grave.

She sat down on the rock where Marthy had rested after digging the
grave, and with her chin in her two cupped palms, stared out across the
river at the heaped bluffs and down at the pink-and-white patch of
fruit-trees.  She was trying, as the young will always try, to solve
the riddle of life; and she was baffled and unhappy because she could
not find any answer at all that pleased both her ideals and her reason.
And then she heard a man's voice lifted up in riotous song, and she
turned her head toward the opening of the gorge and listened, her eyes
brightening while she waited.

  "Foot in the stirrup and hand on the horn,
  Best damn cowboy ever was born,
  Coma ti yi youpy, youpy-a, youpy-a,
  Coma ti yi youpy, youpy-a!"


Billy Louise, with her chin still in her palms, smiled and hummed the
tune under her breath; that shows how quickly we throw off the burdens
of our neighbors.  "Wonder what he's doing down here?" she asked
herself, and smiled again.

  "I'll sell my outfit soon as I can,
  I won't punch cattle for no damn' man,
  Coma ti yi youpy, youpy-a, youpy-a,
  Coma ti yi youpy, youpy-a!

  "I'm goin' back to town to draw my money,
  I'm going back to town to see my honey,
  Coma ti yi--"


Ward came into sight through the little meadow, riding slowly, with
both hands clasped over the horn of the saddle, his hat tilted back on
his head, and his whole attitude one of absolute content with life.  He
saw Billy Louise almost as soon as she glimpsed him--and she had been
watching that bit of road quite closely.  He flipped the reins to one
side and turned from the trail to ride straight up the slope to where
she was.

Billy Louise, with a self-reproachful glance at the grave, ran down the
slope to meet him--an unexpected welcome which made Ward's heart leap
in his chest.

"Oh, Ward, for heaven's sake don't be singing that come-all-ye at the
top of your voice, like that.  Don't you--"

"Now I was given to understand that you liked that same come-all-ye.
Have you been educating your musical taste in the last week, Miss
William Louisa?"  Ward stopped his horse before her, and with his hands
still clasped over the saddle-horn, looked down at her with that hidden
smile--and something else.

"No, I haven't.  I don't have to educate myself to the point where I
know the _Chisholm Trail_ isn't a proper kind of funeral hymn, Ward
Warren."  Billy Louise glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice
instinctively, as we all do when death has come close and stopped.
"Jase died last night; that's his grave up there.  Isn't it perfectly
pitiful?  Poor old Marthy was here all solitary alone with him.
And--Ward!  She dug that grave her own self, and took him up and buried
him--and, Ward!  She--she wheeled him up in the--_wheelbarrow_!  She
had to, of course.  She couldn't carry him.  But isn't it awful?"  Her
hands were up, patting and smoothing the neck of his horse, and her
face was bent to hide the tears that stood in her eyes, and the quiver
of her mouth.

Ward drew in his lip, bit it, and let it go.  He was a man, and he had
seen much of tragedy and trouble; also, he did not know Marthy or Jase.
His chief emotion was one of resentment against anything that brought
tears to Billy Louise; she had not hidden them from him; they were the
first and most important element in that day's happenings, so far as he
was concerned.  He leaned and flipped the end of his reins lightly down
on her bare head.

"William Louisa, if you cry about it, I'll--do something shocking, most
likely.  Yes, it's awful; a whole lot of life is awful.  But it's done,
and Mrs. Martha appears to be a woman with a whole lot of grit, so the
chances are she'll carry her load like a man.  She'll be horribly
lonesome, down here!  They lived alone, didn't they?"

"Yes, and they didn't seem to love each other much."  Billy Louise was
not one to gloss over hard facts, even in the face of that grave.
"Marthy was always kicking about him, and he about her.  But all the
same they belonged together; they had lived together more years than we
are old.  And she's going to miss him awfully."

Several minutes they stood there, talking, while Billy Louise patted
the horse absently, and Ward looked down at her and did not miss one
little light or shadow in her face.  He had been alone a whole week,
thinking of her, remember, and his eyes were hungry to the point of
starvation.

"You saw mommie, of course; you came from home?"

"No, I did not.  I got as far as the creek and saw Blue's tracks coming
down; so I just sort of trailed along, seeing it was mommie's daughter
I felt most like talking to."

"Mommie's daughter" laughed a little and instinctively made a change in
the subject.  She did not see anything strange in the fact that Ward
had observed and recognized Blue's tracks coming into the gorge.  She
would have observed and recognized instantly the tracks made by his
horse, anywhere.  Those things come natural to one who has lived much
in the open; and there is a certain individuality in the hoof-prints of
a horse, as any plainsman can testify.

"I've got to go in and wash the dishes," she said, stepping back from
him.  "Of course nothing was done in the cabin, and I've been doing a
little house-cleaning.  I guess the dish-water is hot by this time--if
it hasn't all boiled away."

Ward, as a matter of course, tied his horse to the fence and went into
the cabin with her.  He also asked her to stake him to a dish-towel,
which she did after a good deal of rummaging.  He stood with his hat on
the back of his head, a cigarette between his lips, and wiped the
dishes with much apparent enjoyment.  He objected strongly to Billy
Louise's assertion that she meant to scrub the floor, but when he found
her quite obdurate, he changed his method without in the least degree
yielding his point, though for diplomatic reasons he appeared to yield.

He carried water from the creek and filled the tea-kettle, the big iron
pot, and both pails.  Then, when Billy Louise had turned her back upon
him, while she looked in a dark corner for the mop, he suddenly seized
her under the arms and lifted her upon the table; and before she had
finished her astonished gaspings, he caught up a pail of water and
sloshed it upon the floor under her.  Then he grinned in his triumph.

"William Louisa, if you get your feet wet, your mommie will take a club
to you," he reminded her sternly.  Whereupon he took the broom and
proceeded to give that floor a real man's scrubbing, refusing to
quarrel with Billy Louise, who scolded like a cross old woman from the
table--except when she simply had to stop and laugh heartily at his
violent method of cleaning.

Ward sloshed and swept and scrubbed.  He dug into the corners with a
grim thoroughness that won reluctant approbation from the young woman
on the table with her feet tucked under her, and he made her forget
poor old Jase up on the hillside.  He scrubbed viciously behind the
door until the water was little better than a thin, black mud.

"You want to come up to my claim some time," he said, looking over his
shoulder while he rested a minute.  "I'll show you how a man keeps
house, William Louisa.  Once a week I pile my two stools on the table,
put the cat up on the bunk--and she looks just about as comfortable and
happy as mommie's daughter looks right now--and get busy with the broom
and good creek water."  He resettled his hat on the back of his head
and went to work again.  "Mill Creek goes dry down below, on the days
when little Wardie cleans his cabin," he assured her gravely, and
damming up a muddy pool with the broom, he yanked open the door and
swept out the water with a perfectly unnecessary flourish, just because
he happened to be in a very exuberant mood.

Billy Louise gave a squeal of consternation and then sat absolutely
still, staring round-eyed through the doorway.  Ward stepped back--even
his composure was slightly jarred--and twisted his lips amusedly.

"Hello," he said, after a few blank seconds.  "You missed some of it,
didn't you?"  His tone was mildly commiserating.  "Will you come in?"

"N-o-o, thank you, I don't believe I will."  The speaker looked in,
however, saw Billy Louise perched upon the table, and took off his hat.
He was well plastered with dirty water that ran down and left streaks
of mud behind.  "I must have gotten off the road," he said.  "I'm
looking for Mr. Jason Meilke's ranch."

Billy Louise tucked her feet farther under her skirts and continued to
stare dumbly.  Ward, glancing at her from the corner of his eyes,
stepped considerately between her and the stranger so that his broad
shoulders quite hid her from the man's curious stare.

"You've struck the right place," he said calmly.  "This is it."  He
picked up another pail of water and sloshed it upon the wet floor to
rinse off the mud.

"Is--ah--Mrs. Meilke in?"  One could not accuse the young man of
craning, but he certainly did try to get another glimpse of the person
on the table and failed because of Ward.

"She's down in the meadow," Billy Louise murmured.

"She's down in the meadow," Ward repeated to the bespattered young man.
"You just go down past the stable and follow on down--" he waved a hand
vaguely before he took up the broom again.  "You'll find her, all
right," he added encouragingly.

"Oh, Ward!  That must be Marthy's nephew.  What will he think?"

"Does it matter such a h-- a deuce of a lot what he thinks?"  Ward went
on with his interrupted scrubbing.

"His name is Charlie Fox, and he's been to college and he worked in a
bank," Billy Louise went on nervously.  "He's going to live here with
Marthy and run the ranch.  What must he have thought!  To have you
sweep all that dirty water on him--"

"Oh, not all!" Ward corrected cheerfully.  "Quite a lot missed him."

Billy Louise giggled.  "What does he look like, Ward?  You stood
squarely in the way, so I--"

"He looked," said Ward dispassionately, "like a pretty mad young man
with nose, eyes, and a mouth, and a mole in front of his left ear."

"He was real polite," said Billy Louise reprovingly, "and his voice is
nice."

"Yes?  I mind-read a heap of cussing.  The politeness was all on top."
Ward chuckled and swept more water outside.  "I expect you saved me a
licking that time, Miss William the Conqueror."

"Can you think of any more names to call me, besides my own, I wonder?"
Billy Louise leaned and inspected the floor like a chicken preparing to
hop off its roost.

"Heaps more."  The glow in Ward's eyes was dangerous to their calm
friendship.  "Want to hear them?"

"No, I don't.  I want to get off this table before that college youth
comes back to be shocked silly again.  I want to see if he's
really--got a mole in front of his ear!"

"You know what inquisitiveness did to old lady Lot, don't you?
However--"  He lifted her in his arms and set her down outside the
door.  "There, Wilhemina; trot along and see the nice young man."

Billy Louise sat down on the wheelbarrow, remembered its latest
service, and got up hastily.  "I won't go a step," she asserted
positively.

Ward had not wanted her to go.  He gave her a smile and finished off
his scrubbing with the mop, which he handled with quite surprising
skill for a young man who seemed more at home in the saddle than
anywhere else.

"I'm awfully glad he came, anyway."  Billy Louise pulled down a budded
lilac branch and sniffed at it.  "I won't have to stay all night, now.
I was going to."

"In that case, the young man is welcome as a gold mine.  Here they
come--he and Mrs. Martha.  You'll have to introduce me, Bill-the-Conk;
I have never met the lady."  Ward hastily returned the mop to its
corner, rolled down his sleeves, and picked up his gloves.  Then he
stepped outside and waited beside Billy Louise, looking not in the
least like a man who has just wiped a lot of dishes and scrubbed a
floor.

The nephew, striding along behind Marthy and showing head and shoulders
above her, seemed not to resent any little mischance, such as muddy
water flirted upon him from a broom.  He grinned reminiscently as he
came up, shook hands with the two of them, and did not let his glance
dwell too long or too often upon Billy Louise, nor too briefly upon
Ward.

"You've got a splendid place here, Aunt Martha," he told the old woman
appreciatively.  "I'd no idea there was such a little beauty-spot down
here.  This is even more picturesque than that homey-looking ranch we
passed a few miles back, down in that little valley.  I was hoping that
was your ranch when I first saw it; and when I found it wasn't, I came
near stopping, anyway.  I'm glad I resisted the temptation, now.  This
is worth coming a long way to see."

"I ain't never had a chance to do all I wanted to with it," said
Marthy, with the first hint of apology Billy Louise had ever heard from
her.  "I only had one pair of hands to work with--"

"We'll fix that part.  Don't you worry a minute.  You're going to sit
in a rocking-chair and give orders, from now on.  And if I can't make
good here, I ought to be booted all the way up that spooky gorge.
Isn't that right?"  He turned to Warren with a certain air of
appraisement behind the unmistakable cordiality of his voice.

"A man ought to make good here, all right," Ward agreed neutrally.
"It's a fine place."

"It ain't as fine as I'd like to see it," began Marthy depreciatingly.

"As you will see it, let's say--if that doesn't sound too conceited
from a tenderfoot," supplemented the nephew, and laid his hand upon her
shoulder with a gentle little pat.  "Folks, I don't want to seem too
exuberantly sure of myself, but--" he waved a carefully-kept hand
eloquently at the luxuriance around him, "--I'm all fussed up over this
place, honest.  I thought I was coming to a shack in the middle of the
sage-brush; I was primed to buckle down and make good even in the
desert.  And bumping into this sort of thing without warning has gone
to my alleged brain a bit.  What I don't know about ranching would fill
a library; but there's this much, anyway.  There won't be any more
ditch-digging for a certain game little lady in this Cove."  He gave
the shoulder another pat, and he smiled down at her in a way that made
Billy Louise blink.  And Marthy, who had probably never before been
called a game little lady, came near breaking down and crying before
them all.

When Ward went to the stable after Blue, half an hour later, Charlie
Fox went with him.  His manner when they were alone was different; not
so exuberantly cheerful--more frank and practical.

"Honest, it floored me completely to see what that poor old woman has
been up against down here," he told Warren, stuffing tobacco into a
silver-rimmed, briar pipe while Ward saddled Blue.  "I don't know a
hell of a lot about this ranch game; but if that old lady can put it
across, I guess I can wobble along somehow.  Too bad the old man cashed
in just now; but Aunt Martha as good as told me he wasn't much force,
so maybe I can play a lone hand here as easy as I could have done with
him.  Live near here?"

"Fifteen miles or so."  Ward was not in his most expansive mood,
chiefly for the reason that this man was a stranger, and of strangers
he was inclined to fight shy.

"Oh, well--it might have been fifty.  I know how you fellows measure
distances out here.  I'm likely to need a little coaching, now and
then, if I live up to what I just now told the old lady."

"From all I know of her, you won't need to go out of the Cove for
advice."

"Well, that's right, judging from the looks of things.  A woman that
can go up against a proposition like she did to-day and handle it
alone, is no mental weakling; to say nothing of the way this ranch
looks.  All right, Warren; I'll make out alone, I reckon."

Afterwards, when Ward thought it over, he remembered gratefully that
Charlie Fox had refrained from attempting any discussion of Billy
Louise or from asking any questions even remotely personal.  He knew
enough about men to appreciate the tactful silences of the stranger,
and when Billy Louise, on the way home, predicted that the nephew was
going to be a success, Ward did not feel like qualifying the verdict.

"He's going to be a godsend to the old lady," he said.  "He seems to
have his sights raised to making things come easier for her from now
on."

"Well, she certainly deserves it.  For a college young man--the
ordinary, smart young man who comes out here to astonish the
natives--he's almost human.  I was so afraid that Marthy'd get him out
here and then discover he was a perfect nuisance.  So many men are."




CHAPTER VI

A MATTER OF TWELVE MONTHS OR SO

Out in the wide spaces, where homes are but scattered oases in the
general emptiness, life does not move uniformly, so far as it concerns
incidents or acquaintanceships.  A man or a ranch may experience
complete isolation, and the unbroken monotony which sometimes
accompanies it, for a month at a time.  Summer work or winter storm may
be the barrier temporarily raised, and life resolves itself into a
succession of days and nights unbroken by outside influences.  They
leave their mark upon humans--these periods of isolation.  For better,
for worse, the man changes slowly with the months; he grows more bovine
in his phlegmatic acceptance of his environment, or he becomes restless
and fired with a surplus energy of ambition, or he falls to dreaming
dreams; whatever angle he takes, he changes, imperceptibly perhaps, but
inevitably.

Then the monotony is broken and sometimes with violence.  Incident
rushes in upon the heels of incident, and life becomes as tumultuous as
the many moods of nature when it has a wide, open land for a playground.

That is why, perhaps, so much of western life is painted with broad
strokes and raw colors.  You are given the crowded action, the
unleashing of emotions and temperaments that have smoldered long under
the blanket of solitary living.  You are shown an effect without being
given the cause of that effect.  You pronounce the West wild, and you
never think of the long winters that bred in silence and brooding
solitude those storm-periods which seem so primitively savage; of the
days wherein each nature is thrown upon its own resources, with nothing
to feed upon but itself and its own personal interests.  And so
characters change, and one wonders why.

There was Billy Louise, with her hands and her mind full of the
problems her father had died still trying to solve.  She did not in the
least realize that she was attempting anything out of the ordinary when
she took a half-developed ranch in the middle of a land almost as wild
as it had been when the Indians wandered over it unmolested, a few
cattle and horses and a bundle of debts to make her head swim, and set
herself the problem of increasing the number of cattle and eliminating
the debts, and of wresting prosperity out of a condition of
picturesquely haphazard poverty.  She went about it with the pathetic
confidence of youth and ignorance.  She rode up and down the canyons
and over the higher, grassier ridges, to watch the cattle on their
summer range and keep them from straying.  She went with John Pringle
after posts and helped him fence certain fertile slopes and hollows for
winter grazing.  She drove the rickety old mower through the waving
grass along the creek bottom and hummed little, contented tunes while
she watched the grass sway and fall evenly when the sickle shuttled
through.  She put on her gymnasium bloomers and drove the hay wagon,
and felt only a pleasurable thrill of excitement when John Pringle
inadvertently pitched an indignant rattlesnake up to her with a forkful
of hay.  She killed the snake with her pitchfork and pinched off the
rattles, proud of their size and number.

When she sold seven fat, three-year-old steers that fall and paid a
note twice renewed, managing besides to buy the winter supply of "grub"
and a sewing-machine and a set of silver teaspoons for her mother, oh,
but she was proud!

Ward rode down to the ranch that night, and Billy Louise showed him the
note with its red stamp, oblong and imposing and slightly blurred on
the "paid" side.  Ward was almost as proud as she, if looks and tones
went for anything, and he helped Billy Louise a good deal by telling
her just how much she ought to pay for the yearlings old Johnson, over
on Snake River, had for sale.  Also he told her how much hay it would
take to winter them--though she knew that already--and just what
percentage of profit she might expect from a given number in a given
period of time.

He spoke of his own work and plans, as well.  He was going into cattle,
also, as fast as possible, he said.  In a few years the sheep would
probably come in and crowd them out, but in the meantime there was
money in cattle--and the more cattle, the more money.  He was going to
work for wages till the winter set in.  He didn't know when he would
see Billy Louise, he said, but he would stop on his way back.

To them that short visit was something more than an incident.  It gave
Ward new stuff for his dreams and new fuel for the fire of ambition.
To Billy Louise it also furnished new dream material.  She rode the
hills and saw in fancy whole herds of cattle where now wandered
scattered animals.  She dreamed of the time when Ward and Charlie Fox
and she would pool their interests and run a wagon of their own, and
gather their stock from wide ranges.  She was foolish, in that; but
that is what she liked to dream.

Mentioning Charlie Fox calls to mind the fact that he was changing more
than any of them.  Billy Louise did not see him very often, but when
she did it was with a deepening impression of his unflagging tenderness
to Marthy--a tenderness that manifested itself in many little,
unassuming thoughtfulnesses--and of his good-humor and his energy and
several other qualities which one must admire.

"Mommie, that nephew goes at everything just as if it were a game," she
said after one visit.  "You know what that cabin has always been: dark
and dirty and not a comfortable chair to sit down in, or a book or
magazine or anything?  Well, I'm just going to take you over there some
day and let you see the difference.  He's cut two more windows and
built on an addition with a porch, if you please.  And he has a
bookcase he made himself, just stuffed with books and magazines.  And
he made Marthy a rocking-chair, mommie, and--she wears a white apron,
and has her hair combed, and sits and rocks!  Honest to goodness, you
wouldn't think she was the same woman."

"Marthy always seemed to me more like a man than a woman," said her
mother.  "She didn't have nothing domestic in her whole make-up, far as
I could see.  Her cooking--"

"Well, mommie, Marthy cooks real well now.  Charlie praises up her
bread, and she takes lots of pains with it.  And she just fusses with
her flowers and lets him run the ranch; and, mommie, she just worships
Charlie!  The way she sits and looks at him when he's talking--you can
see she almost says prayers to him.  She does let her dishpan stay
greasy--I don't suppose you can change a person completely--but
everything is lots cleaner than it used to be before Charlie came.
He's going to buy more cattle, too, he says.  Young stock, mostly.  He
says there's no sense in anybody being poor, in such a country as this.
He says he intends to make Marthy rich; Aunt Martha, he calls her.  I'm
certainly going to take you over to see her, mommie, the very first
nice day when I don't have a million other things to do."  Billy Louise
sighed and pushed her hair back impatiently.  "I wish I were a man and
as smart as Charlie Fox," she added, with the plaintive note that now
sometimes crept into her voice when she realized of a sudden how great
a load she was carrying.

"A man can get out and do things.  And a woman--why, even Ward seems to
think it's perfectly wonderful, mommie, that we don't just about
starve, with me running the ranch!  I know he does.  Every time I do a
thing right or pay off a note or anything, he looks as if--"

"I wouldn't be a mite surprised, Billy Louise," said her mother, with a
flash of amused comprehension, "if you kinda misread Ward sometimes.
Them eyes of his are pretty keen, and they see a whole lot; but they
ain't easy to read, for all that.  I guess Ward don't think it's
anything surprising that you're getting along so well, Billy Louise.  I
surmise he knows you're a better manager than a lot of men are."

"I'm not the manager Charlie Fox is, though."  Billy Louise was frankly
envious.

"He didn't have any more to do with than I've got, and he's
accomplished a lot more.  And, besides, he started in green at the
whole business."  She rested her chin in her cupped palms and stared
disconsolately at the high-piled hills behind which the sun was setting
gloriously.  "He's going to pipe water into the house, mommie," she
observed, after a silence.  "I wish--"

"Well, he's welcome.  I don't want no water piped in here, Billy
Louise, and tastin' of the pipe.  I'd rather carry it and have it sweet
and fresh.  Don't you go worrying because you can't do everything
Charlie Fox does.  Likely as not he's pilin' up the debts instead of
payin' 'em off as you're doing."

"I don't know; I don't believe he is, though.  I think he's just
managing right and making every dollar count.  He got calves from
Seabeck, up the river, cheaper than I did from Johnson, mommie.  He
rode all over the country and looked up range conditions and prices.
He didn't say so, but he made me feel foolish because I just bought the
first ones I saw, without waiting to look around first.  But--Ward said
it was a good buy, and he ought to know; only, the fact remains that
Charlie has done better.  I guess it isn't experience that counts,
altogether.  Charlie Fox has got brains!"

"Land alive!  I guess he ain't the only one, Billy Louise.  You're
doing better than your father done, and he wasn't any Jase Meilke kind
of a man, but a good, hard worker always.  You don't want to get all
outa conceit with yourself just because Charlie Fox is gitting along
all right.  I don't know as it's so wonderful.  Marthy was always
forehanded, and she made money there and never spent any to speak of.
Though I shouldn't carry the idea she's stingy, after the way she--"

If Billy Louise had not been so absorbed with her own discontent, she
might have wondered at her mother's sudden silence.  But she did not
even notice it.  She was comparing two young men and measuring them
with certain standards of her own, and she was not quite satisfied with
the result.  She had seen Charlie Fox spring up with a perfectly
natural courtesy and hand Marthy a chair when she entered the room
where he had been discussing books with Billy Louise.  She had seen him
stand beside his own chair until Marthy was seated and then had heard
him deftly turn the conversation into a channel wherein Marthy had also
an interest.  Parlor politeness--and something more; something
infinitely finer and better than mere obedience to certain conventional
rules.

She had seen that and more, and she had a vivid picture of Ward,
sitting absorbed in a book which he never afterwards mentioned, and
letting her or her mother lift heavy pieces of wood upon the fire
within arm's reach of him; sitting with his hat tilted back upon his
head and a cigarette gone cold in his fingers, and perhaps not replying
at all when he was spoken to.  She had never considered him uncouth or
rude; he was Ward Warren, and these were certain individual traits
which he possessed and which seemed a part of him.  She had sensed
dimly that some natures are too big and too strong for petty rules of
deportment, and that Ward might sit all day in the house with his hat
on his head and still be a gentleman of the finer sort.  And yet, now
that Charlie Fox had come and presented an example of the world's
standard, Billy Louise could not, for the life of her, help wishing
that Ward was different.  And there were other things; things which
Billy Louise was ashamed to recognize as influencing her in any way,
and yet which did influence her.  For instance, Ward lived to himself
and for himself, and not always wisely or well.  He was arrogant in his
opinions--Billy Louise had rather admired what she had called his
strength, but it had become arrogance now--and his scorn was swift and
keen for blunderings.  And there was Charlie, always thinking and
planning for Marthy and putting her wishes first; wanting to make sure
that he himself had not blundered, and with a conservative estimate of
himself that was refreshingly modest.  And--

"Ain't that Ward coming, Billy Louise?  Seems to me it looks like
him--the way he rides."

Billy Louise started guiltily and looked up toward the trail, now piled
deep with shadows.  It was Ward, all right, and his voice, lifted in a
good-humored shout, brought Billy Louise to her feet and sent her down
the slope to the stable, where he had stopped as a matter of course.

When he turned and smiled at her through the dusk and said, "'Lo,
Bill," in a voice that was like a spoken kiss, a certain young woman
hated herself for a weak-souled traitor and mentally called Charlie Fox
a popinjay, which was merely shifting injustice to another
resting-place.

"Are you plumb tickled to death to see me, William?"

"Oh, no; but I guess I can stand it!"

A smile to go with both sentences, and a strong undercurrent of
something unnamed in their tones--who wanted the pasteurized milk and
distilled water of a perfectly polite form of greeting?  Not Billy
Louise, if one might judge from that young woman's face and voice and
manner.  Not Ward, though he was perfectly unconscious of having been
weighed or measured or judged by any standard at all.

And yet, when Charlie Fox rode down to the Wolverine a week or so
later, tied his horse under the shed, and came up to the cabin as
though he knew of no better place in all the world; when he greeted
mommie as though she were something precious in his sight, and talked
with her about the things she was most interested in, and actually made
her feel as if he were immensely interested also, Billy Louise simply
could not help admiring him and liking him for his frank good-nature
and his kindness.  She had never before met a man just like Charlie
Fox, though she had known many who were what Ward once called
"parlor-broke."  She felt when she was with him that he had a strength
to match Ward's strength; only, this strength was tamed and trained and
smoothed so that it did not obtrude upon one's notice.  It was not
every young man who would come out into the wilderness and roughen his
hands on an irrigating shovel and live a cramped, lonely life, for the
sake of a harsh, illiterate old woman like Marthy Meilke.  She did not
believe Ward would do that.  He would have to feel some tie stronger
than the one between Marthy and her nephew before he would change his
life and his own plans for anyone.

It was not until Charlie was leaving that he gave Billy Louise a hint
that his errand was not yet accomplished.  She walked down with him to
where his horse was tied and so gave him a chance to speak what was in
his mind.

"You know, I hate to mention little worries before your mother," he
said.  "Those pathetic eyes of hers make me ashamed to bother her with
a thing.  But I am worried, Miss Louise.  I came over to ask you if
you've seen anything of four calves of ours.  I know you ride a good
deal, through the hills.  They disappeared a week ago, and I can't find
any trace of them.  I've been looking all through the hills, but I
can't locate them."

Billy Louise had not seen them, either, and she begged for particulars.
"I don't see how they could get away from your Cove," she said, "unless
your bars were down."

"The bars were all right.  It was last Friday, I think.  I'm not sure.
They were in the little meadow above the house, you see.  I was away
that night, and Aunt Martha is a little hard of hearing.  She wouldn't
hear anything unless there were considerable noise.  I came home the
next forenoon--I was over to Seabeck's--and the bars were in place
then.  Aunt Martha had not been up the gorge, nor had anyone come to
the ranch while I was gone.  So you see, Miss Louise, here's a very
pretty mystery!"

He laughed, but Billy Louise saw by his eyes that he did not laugh very
deeply, and that he was really worried.  "I must have made a mistake
and bought mountain sheep instead of calves," he said and laughed
again.  "They couldn't have gone through those bars or over them; and I
did have a spark of intelligence and looked along the river for tracks,
you know.  They had not been near the river, which has soft banks along
there.  They watered from the little creek that comes down the gorge.
Miss Louise, do you have flying cattle in Idaho?"

"You think they were driven off, don't you?"  Billy Louise asked a
question with the words, and made a statement of it with her tone,
which was a trick of hers.

Charlie Fox shook his head, but his eyes did not complete the denial.
"Miss Louise, I'd work every other theory to death before I'd admit
that possibility!  I don't know all of my neighbors so very well, but I
should hesitate a long, long time--"

"It needn't have been a neighbor.  There are lots of strange men
passing through the country.  Did you look for tracks?"

"I--did not.  I didn't want to admit that possibility.  I decline to
admit it now."  The chin of Charlie Fox squared perceptibly, so that
Billie Louise caught a faint resemblance to Marthy in his face.  "I saw
a man accused of a theft once," he said.  "The evidence was--or
seemed--absolutely unassailable.  And afterward he was exonerated
completely; it was just a horrible mistake.  But he left school under a
cloud.  His life was ruined by the blunder.  I'd have to know
absolutely before I'd accuse anyone of stealing those calves, Miss
Louise.  I'd have to see them in a man's corral, with his brand on
them--I believe that's the way it's done, out here--and even then--"

"Where have you looked?"  There were reasons why this particular
subject was painful to Billy Louise.  "And are you sure they didn't get
out of that pasture and wander on down the Cove, among all those
willows?  It's a perfect jungle, away down.  Are you sure they aren't
with the rest of the cattle?  I don't see how they could leave the
Cove, unless they were driven out."  She caught a twinkle of amusement
in his eyes and stopped short.  Of course, a mere girl should not take
it for granted that a man had failed to do all that might be done.  And
Billy Louise had a swift conviction that she would never think of
talking like this to Ward.  She flushed a little; and still, Charlie
Fox was a tenderfoot.  She was justified in asking those questions, and
in her heart she knew it.

"Yes, I thought of that--strange as it may seem."  Charlie's voice was
unoffended.  On the contrary, he seemed glad that she took so keen an
interest in his affairs.  "It has been a week, you know, since they
flew the coop.  I did hunt every foot of that Cove, twice over.  I
drove every hoof of stock up and corraled them, and made sure these
four were not in the herd.  Then I hunted through every inch of that
willow jungle and all along the bluff and the river; Miss Louise, I put
in three days at it, from sunrise till it was too dark to see.  Then I
began riding outside.  There isn't a trace of them anywhere.  I had
just bought them from Seabeck, you know.  I drove them home, and
because they were tired, and so was I, I just left them in that upper
meadow as I came down the gorge.  I hadn't branded them yet.  I--I know
I've made an awful botch of the thing, Miss Louise," he confessed,
turning toward her with an honest distress and a self-flaying humility
in his eyes that wiped from Billy Louise's mind any incipient tendency
toward contempt.  "But you see I'm green at this ranch game.  And I
never dreamed those calves weren't perfectly safe in there.  The fence
was new and strong; I built it new this fall, you know.  And the bars
are absolutely bars to any stock larger than a rabbit.  Of course," he
added, with a deprecating note, "four calves are only four calves.
But--it's the sense of failure that gets me hardest, Miss Louise.  Aunt
Martha trusted me to take care of things.  Her confidence in me fairly
takes my nerve.  And losing four fine, big heifer calves at one whack
is no way to get rich; is it, Miss Louise?"  He laughed, and again the
laugh did not go deep, or reach his eyes.

"I hate to bother you with this, and I don't want you to think I have
come whining for sympathy," he said, after a minute of moody silence.
"But seeing they were not branded yet--with our brand--I thought
perhaps you had run across them and paid no attention, thinking they
belonged to Seabeck."

Billy Louise smiled a little to herself.  If he had not been quite so
"green at the ranch game," he would have mentioned brands at first, as
the most important point, instead of tacking on the information
casually after ten minutes of other less vital details.

"Were they vented?" she asked, suppressing the smile so that it was
merely a twitch of the lips which might mean anything.

"I--yes, I think they were.  That's what you call it when the former
owner puts his brand in a different place to show that his ownership
has ceased, isn't it?  Seabeck puts his brand upside down--"

"I know Seabeck's vent," Billy Louise cut in.  There was no need of
letting such a fine fellow display more ignorance on the subject.  "And
I should have noticed it if I had seen four calves vented fresh and not
rebranded.  Why in the world didn't you stick your brand on at the same
time?"  Billy Louise was losing patience with his greenness.

"I didn't have my branding iron with me," Charlie answered humbly.  "I
have done that before, when I bought those other cows and calves.  I--"

"You'd better pack your iron, next time," she retorted.  "If you can't
get a little bunch of calves ten miles without losing them--"

"But you must understand, I did!  I took them home and turned them into
the Cove.  I know--I'm an awful chump at this.  There are things that I
can do," he declared whimsically, "or I should want to kick myself to
death.  I can ladle out money the year round through a bank wicket and
not be shy a cent at the end of the year.  And I can strike out man
after man--when I'm in good form; why, I've pitched whole games and
never walked a man!  And I can--but what's the use?  I can't drive the
cows up from pasture, it seems, without losing all the milk.  And I can
make a little, gray-eyed girl out here in the sagebrush look upon me
with pitying contempt for my asinine ignorance.  Hang it, why does a
fellow have to learn fresh lessons for everything he undertakes?  Why
can't there be a universal course that fits one for every trade?"

"There is," said Billy Louise dryly.  "You take that in the School of
Experience, don't you?"

He laughed ruefully.  "Horatio!  It certainly does cost something,
though.  I've certainly paid enough--"

"In worry, maybe.  The calves may not be absolutely lost, you know.
Why, I lost a big steer last spring and never found him till I was
going to sell a few head.  Then he turned up, the biggest and fattest
one in the bunch.  You can't tell; they get themselves in queer places
sometimes.  I'll come over to-morrow, if I can, and take a look at that
pasture and all around.  And I'll keep a good lookout for the calves."

Many men would have objected to the unconscious patronage of her tone.
That Charlie Fox did not, but accepted the spirit of helpfulness in her
words, lifted him out of the small-natured class.

"It's awfully good of you," he said.  "You know a lot more about the
bovine nature than I do, for all I put in every spare minute studying
the subject.  I'm taking four different stock journals now, Miss
Louise.  I'll bet I know a lot more about the different strains of
various breeds than you do, Miss Cattle-queen.  But I'm beginning to
see that we only know what we learn by experience.  I've a new book on
the subject of heredity of the cattle.  I'm going home and see if
Seabeck hasn't stumbled upon a strain that can be traced back to your
native mountain sheep."

Billy Louise laughed and said good-by, and stood leaning over the gate
watching him as he zigzagged up the hill, stopping his horse often to
breathe.  The wagon road took a round-about course, longer and less
steep.  At the top, just before he rounded a huge pimple on the face of
the bluff, he stopped and looked down, saw her standing there, and
waved his hat.  His horse stood sidewise upon the trail for easier
footing, and the man's head and shoulders were silhouetted sharply
against the deep, clear blue of the sky.  Billy Louise felt a little,
unnamed thrill as she stared up at him.  Her lips curved into
tenderness.  Clean, frank, easy-natured he was, as she had come to know
him.  It was like coming into a sunny spot to be with him.  And then
she sighed, with that vague feeling of dissatisfaction with herself.
She felt crude and awkward and dull of wit.  Her mother, Marthy,
Ward--all the persons she knew--were crude and awkward and ignorant
beside Charlie Fox.  And she had had the temerity, the insufferable
effrontery, to criticize him and patronize him over those four calves!

"He can strike out three men in succession," she murmured.  "And he
pitched whole games and never walked a man."  She gave him a final wave
of the hand, as he turned to climb on out of sight.  "And I don't even
know what he was talking about--though I think it was baseball.  And I
was awfully snippy about those calves he lost."

She began to wonder, then, about those calves.  Vented and not
rebranded, they would be easy game for any man who first got his own
brand on them.  She meant to get a description of them when she saw
Charlie again--it was like his innocence to forget the most essential
details!--and she meant to keep her eyes open.  If Charlie were right
about the calves not being anywhere in the Cove, then they had been
driven out of it, stolen.  Billy Louise turned dejectedly away from the
fence and went down to a shady nook by the creek, where she had always
liked to do her worrying and hard thinking.

She stooped and tried to catch a baby trout in her cupped palms, just
as she used to try when she was a child.  If those four calves were
stolen, then there was a "rustler" in the country.  And if there were,
then no one's stock was safe.  The deduction was terribly simple and as
exact as the smallest sum in addition.  And Billy Louise could not
afford to pay toll to a rustler out of her forty-seven head of cattle.

The next day she rode early to the Cove and learned some things from
Marthy which she had not gleaned from Charlie.  She learned that two of
the calves were a deep red, except for a wide, white strip on the nose
of one and white hind feet on the other; that another was spotted on
the hindquarters, and that the fourth was white, with large, red
blotches.  She had known cattle all her life.  She would know these, if
she saw them anywhere.

She also discovered for herself that they could not have broken out of
that pasture, and that the river bank was impassable, because of high,
thick bushes and miry mud in the open spaces.  She had a fight with
Blue over these latter places and demonstrated beyond doubt that they
were miry, by getting him in to the knees in spite of his violent
objections.  They left deep tracks behind them when they got out.  The
calves had not gone investigating the bank, for there was not a trace
anywhere.  And the bluff was absolutely unscalable.  Billy Louise
herself would have felt doubtful of climbing out that way.  The gray
rim-rock stood straight and high at the top, with never a crevice, so
far as she could see.  And the gorge was barred, so that it was
impossible to go that way without lifting heavy poles out of deep
sockets and sliding them to one side.

"I've got an idea about a gate here," Charlie confided suddenly.
"There won't be any more mysteries like this.  I'm going to fix a
swinging gate in place of these bars, Miss Louise.  I shall have it
swing uphill, like this; and I'll have a weight arranged so that it
will always close itself, if one is careless enough to ride on and
leave it open.  I have it all worked out in my alleged brain.  I shall
do it right away, too.  Aunt Marthy is rather nervous about this gorge,
now.  Every evening she walks up here herself to make sure the bars are
closed."

"You may as well make up your mind to it," said Billy Louise
irrelevantly, in a tone of absolute certainty.  "Those calves were
driven out of the gorge.  That means stolen.  You needn't accuse anyone
in particular; I don't suppose you could.  But they were stolen."

Charlie frowned and glanced up speculatively at the bluff's rim.

"Oh, your mountain-sheep theory is no good," Billy Louise giggled.  "I
doubt if a lizard, even, would try to leave the Cove over the bluff."
Which certainly was a sweeping statement, when you consider a lizard's
habits.  "A mountain sheep couldn't, anyway."

"They're hummers to climb--"

"But calves are not, Mr. Fox!  Not like that.  You know yourself they
were stolen; why not admit it?"

"Would that do any good--bring them back?" he countered, looking up at
her.

"N-o, but I do hate to see a person deliberately shut his eyes in front
of a fact.  We may as well admit to ourselves that there is a rustler
in the country.  Then we can look out for him."

Charlie's eyes had the troubled look.  "I hate to think that.  Aunt
Martha insists that is what we are up against, but--"

"Well, she knows more about it than you do, believe me.  If you'll let
down the bars, Mr. Fox, I'll hit the trail.  And if I find out
anything, I'll let you know at once."

When she rode over the bleak upland she caught herself wishing that she
might talk the thing over with Ward.  He would know just what ought to
be done.  But winter was coming, and she would drive her stock down
into the fields she had ready.  They would be safe there, surely.
Still, she wished Ward would come.  She wanted to talk it over with a
man who understood and who knew more about such things than she did.




CHAPTER VII

WARD HUNTS WOLVES

The fate of the four heifer calves became permanently wrapped in the
blank fog of mystery.  Billy Louise watched for them when she rode out
in the hills, and spent a good deal of time heretofore given over to
dreaming in trying to solve the riddle of their disappearance.  Charlie
Fox insisted upon keeping to the theory that they had merely strayed.
Marthy grumbled sometimes over the loss, and Ward--well, Ward did not
put in an appearance again that fall or winter and so did not hear of
the incident.

November brought a long, tiresome storm of snow and sleet and chill
winds, which even the beasts would not face, except when they were
forced.  After that there were days of chilly sunlight, nights of black
frost, and more wind and rain and snow.  Each little ranch oasis
withdrew into itself and settled down to pass the winter in physical
comfort and mental isolation.  Even Billy Louise seldom rode abroad
unless she was compelled to, which was not often.  The stage which
passed through the Wolverine basin twice a week left scanty mail in the
starch-box which Billy Louise had herself nailed to a post nearest the
trail.  Now and then a chance traveler pulled thankfully out of the
trail, stopped for a warm dinner or a bed, and afterwards went his way.
But from October until the hills were green, there was never a sight of
Ward, and Billy Louise changed her mood and her opinion of him three or
four times a week.

Ward, as a matter of fact, had a very good reason for his absence.  He
was working for a rancher over on the other side of the mountains, and
when he got leave of absence, it was merely that he might ride to his
claim and sleep there a night in compliance with the law, and see that
nothing was disturbed.  He was earning forty dollars a month, which he
could not afford to jeopardize by any prolonged absence; and he was to
take part of his pay in cows.  Also, he had made arrangements to keep
his few head of stock with the rancher's for a nominal sum, which
barely saved Ward from the humiliation of feeling that the man was
giving him something for nothing.  Junkins, the rancher, was a good
fellow, and he had a fair sense of values.  He knew that he could pay
Ward these wages and let him winter his stock there--I believe Ward had
seven or eight head at that time--and still make a fair profit on his
labor.  For Ward stuck to his work, and he worked fast, with the drive
of his nervous energy and the impatience he always felt toward any
obstacle.  Junkins considered privately that Ward was giving him the
work of two men, while he had the appetite of one.  So that it was to
his interest to induce Ward to stay until spring opened and gave him
plenty to do on his own claim; and such was Ward's anxiety to acquire
some property and a certain financial security, that he put behind him
the temptation to ride down to the Wolverine until he was once more his
own master.  He had sold his time to Junkins.  He would not pilfer the
hours it would take to ride twenty miles and back again, even to see
Billy Louise; which proves that he was no moral weakling, whatever else
he might be.

Then, in April, he left Junkins and drove home a nice little bunch of
ten cows and a two-year-old and two yearlings.  One of the cows had a
week-old calf, and there would be more before long.  Ward sang the
whole of _Chisholm Trail_ at the top of his voice, as he drifted the
cattle slowly up the long hill to the top of the divide, from where he
could look down over lower hills into his own little creek-bottom.

  "With my knees in the saddle and my seat in the sky,
  I'll quit punching cows in the sweet by-and-by,"

he finished exuberantly and promised himself that he would ride down to
the Wolverine the very next day "and see how the folks came through the
winter."  He wanted to tell William Louisa that he was some cowman
himself, these days.  He thought he had made a pretty good showing in
the last twelve months; for when he first met her, at the Cedar Creek
ford, he hadn't owned a hoof except the four which belonged to Rattler,
his horse.  He thought that maybe, if the play came right and he didn't
lose his nerve, he might tell William Louisa something else!  It seemed
to him that he had earned the right now.

He rode three miles oblivious to his surroundings, while he went
carefully over his acquaintance--no, his friendship--with Billy Louise
and tried to guess what she would say when he told her what he had
wanted to tell her for a year; what he had been hungry to tell her.
Sometimes he smiled a little, and sometimes he looked gloomy.  He ended
by hurrying the cattle down the canyon so that he might ride on to the
Wolverine that night.  It would be tough on Rattler, but then, what's a
range cayuse made for, anyway?  Rattler had had a snap, all winter; he
could stand a hard deal once, for a change.  It would do the old skate
good to lift himself over fifty miles once more.

Whether it did Rattler any good or not, it put new heart into Ward to
ride down the bluff and see the wink of the cabin window once more.  He
smiled suddenly to himself, threw back his shoulders, and lifted up his
voice in the doggerel that had come to be a sort of bond between the
two.

  "I'm on my best horse and a-comin' on the run,
  Best blamed cowboy that ever pulled a gun,"

he shouted gleefully.  A yellow square opened in the cabin's side, and
a figure stood outlined against the shining background.  Ward laughed
happily.

"Coma ti yi youpy, youpy-a, youpy-a," he sang uproariously.

Billy Louise turned her head toward the interior of the cabin and then
left the light and merged into the darkness without.  Ward risked a
broken neck and went down the last bit of slope as if he were trying to
head a steer.  By the time he galloped up to the gate, Billy Louise was
leaning over it.  He could see her form dimly there.

"'Lo, Bill," he said softly and slid out of the saddle and went up to
her.  "How you was, already?"  Again his voice was like a kiss.

"'Lo, Ward!" (in a tone that returned the kiss).  "Don't know whether
the stopping's good to-night or not.  We've quit taking in tramps.
Where the dickens have you been for the last ten years?"  And that, on
top of a firm conviction in Billy's Louise's mind that she did not care
whether Ward ever crossed her trail again, and that when he did, he
would have to do a lot of explaining before she would thaw to anything
approaching friendliness.  Oh, well, we all change our minds sometimes.

"I felt like it was twenty," Ward affirmed.  "Do I get any supper,
William?  I like to have ridden my horse to a standstill getting here
to-night; know that?  I hope you appreciate the fact."

"It's a wonder you wouldn't have started a little sooner, then," Billy
Louise retorted.  "Along about Christmas, for instance."

"Wasn't my fault I didn't, William.  Think I've got nothing to do but
chase around the country calling on young ladies?  I've been a wage
slave, Bill-Loo.  Come on while I put up my horse.  Poor devil, I drove
cattle from Junkins' place with him, and they weren't what you could
call trail-broke, either.  And then I came on down here.  I've been in
the saddle since daylight, young lady; and Rattler's been under it."

"Well, I'm very sure that it is not my fault," Billy Louise disclaimed,
as she walked beside him to the stable.

"I'm not so sure of that!  I might produce some pretty strong evidence
that the last twenty miles is your fault.  Say, you didn't know I've
gone into the cow business myself, did you, William?  I've been working
like one son-of-a-gun all fall and winter, and I'm in the cattle-king
class--to the extent of twelve head.  I knew you were crazy to hear the
glad tidings, so I tried to kill off a horse to get here and tell you.
You and me'll be running a wagon and full crew in another year, don't
you reckon?  And send reps over into Wyoming and around, to look after
our interests!"  He laughed at himself with a perfect understanding of
his own insignificance as a cattle-owner, and Billy Louise laughed with
him, though not at him, for it seemed to her that Ward had done well,
considering his small opportunities.

To be sure, in these days when civilization travels by million-dollar
milestones, and the hero of a ten-dollar story scorns any enterprise
which requires less than five figures to name its profits, Ward and
Billy Louise and Charlie Fox--and all their neighbors--do not amount to
much.  But it is a fact that real men and women in the real world
beyond the horizon work hard and fight real battles for a very small
success compared with Big Interests and the modern storyman.  And I'm
telling you of some real people in a real world out in the sagebrush
country, where not even a story hero may consistently become a
millionaire in ten chapters.  There is no millionaire material in the
sagebrush country, you know, unless it is planted there by the Big
Interests; and the Big Interests do not plant in barren soil.  So if
twelve head of cattle look too trifling to mention, I can't help it.
Ward worked mighty hard for those few animals, and saved and schemed,
and denied himself much pleasure.  Therefore, he did as well as any man
under the circumstances could do and be honest.

He did not do so very well when it came to telling Billy Louise
something.  Twice during his visit he had to admit to himself that the
play came right to tell her.  And both times Ward shied like a horse in
the moonlight.  For all that he sang about half the way home, the next
day, and for the rest of the way he built castles; which proves that
his visit had not been disappointing.

He rode out into the pasture where his cattle were grazing and sat
looking at them while he smoked a cigarette.  And while he smoked, that
small herd grew and multiplied before the eyes of his imagination,
until he needed a full crew of riders to take care of them.  He shipped
a trainload of beef to Chicago before he threw away the cigarette stub,
and he laughed to himself when he rode back to the log cabin in the
grove of quaking aspens.

"I'm getting my money's worth out of that bunch, just in the fun of
planning ahead," he realized, while he whittled shavings from the edge
of a cracker-box to start his supper fire.  "A few cows and calves make
the best day-dream material I've struck yet; wish I had more of the
same.  I'd make old Dame Fortune put a different brand on me, pronto.
She could spell it with an F, but it wouldn't be football.  If the
cards fall right," he mused, when the fire was hot and crackling, and
he was slicing bacon with his pocket-knife, "I'll get the best of her
yet.  And--"  His coffee-pail boiled over and interrupted him.  He
burned his fingers before he slid the pail to a cooler spot, and after
that he thought of the joys of having a certain gray-eyed girl for his
housekeeper, and for a time he forgot about his newly acquired herd.

And then his day-dreams received a severer jolt, and one more lasting.
He began to realize something that he had always known: that there is
something more to the cattle business than branding the calves and
selling the beef.

When the first calf went to dull the hunger of the wolves that howled
o'nights among the rocks and stunted pines on Bannock Butte, Ward swore
a good deal and resolved to ride with his rifle tied on the saddle
hereafter.  Also, he went back immediately, got a little fat, blue
bottle of strychnine, and returned and "salted" the small remnant of
the carcass.  It was no part of his dreams to have the profit chewed
off his little herd by wolves.

When the second calf was pulled down in spite of the mother's defense,
within half a mile of his cabin, Ward postponed a trip he had meant to
make to the Wolverine and went out on the trail of the wolves.  In the
loose soil of the lower ridge he tracked them easily and rode at a
shuffling trot along the cow-trail they had followed, his eyes keen for
some further sign of them.  He guessed that there would be at least one
den farther up in the gulch that opened out ahead, and if he could find
it and get the pups--well, the bounty on one litter would even his
loss, even if he were not lucky enough to get one of the old ones.  He
had a shovel tied to the saddle under his left leg, to use in case he
found a den.

So, planning a crusade against these enemies to his enterprise, he
picked his way slowly up the side of the deep gully that had a little
stream wandering through rocks at the bottom.  His eyes, that Billy
Louise had found so quick and keen, noted every little jutting shelf of
rock, every badger hole, every bush.  It looked like a good place for
dens of wolf or coyote.  And with the sun shining down warm on his
shoulders, and the meadow larks singing from swaying weeds, and rabbits
scuttling away through the rocks now and then, Ward began to forget the
ill-luck that had brought him out and to enjoy the hunt for its own
sake.

Farther along there were so many places that would bear investigation
that he left Rattler on a level spot, and with his rifle and
six-shooter, went forward on foot, climbing over ledges of rock,
forcing his way through green-budded, wild-rose bushes or sliding down
loose, gravelly slopes.

One place--a tiny cave under a huge bowlder--looked promising.  There
were wolf tracks going in and out, plenty of them.  But there were no
bones or offal anywhere around, and Ward decided that it was not a
family residence, but that the wolves had perhaps invaded the nest of
some other animal.  He went on hopefully.  That side of the gulch was
cobwebbed with tracks.

Then, quite accidentally, he glanced across to the far side, his eyes
attracted to something which had moved.  He could see nothing at first,
though from the corner of his eye he had certainly caught a flicker of
movement over there.  Yellow sand, gray rocks and bushes, and above a
curlew circling, with long beak outstretched before, and long, red legs
stretched out behind.  He almost believed he had but caught the swift
passing of a cloud shadow over there and was on the point of climbing
farther up his own slope, to where a yawning hole in the hill showed
signs of being pawed and trampled.  Then an outline slowly defined
itself among a jumble of rocks; head, sloping back, two points for
ears.  It might be a rock, but it began to look more and more like a
wolf sitting up on its haunches watching him fixedly.

Even while Ward lifted his rifle and got the ivory bead snugly fitted
into the notch of the rear sight with his eye, he would not have bet
two-bits that he was aiming at an animal.  He pulled the trigger with a
steady crooking of his forefinger and the whole gulch clamored with the
noise.  The object over there leaped high, came down heavily, and
rolled ten feet down the hill to another level, where it bounded three
or four times convulsively, slid a few feet farther, and lay still
behind a bush.

"Got you that time, you old Turk, if you did nearly fool me playing you
were part of the scenery."  Ward slid recklessly down to the bottom,
sought a narrow place, jumped the creek, and climbed exultantly to
where the wolf lay twisted on its back, its eyes half open and glazed,
its jaws parted in a sardonic grin.  Ward grinned also as he looked at
it.  He gave the carcass a poke with his boot-toe and glanced up the
hill toward the rocks.

"Maybe you were playing lookout for the bunch," he said, "and then
again, maybe you ain't hooked up with a family; though from the looks,
you ain't weaned your pups yet--till just now."  Leaving the wolf where
she lay, he climbed to the rocks where he had first seen her.  They lay
high piled, but he could see daylight through every open space and so
knew there was no den.  The base rested solidly on the yellow earth.

Ward stood and looked at the slope below.  To the right and half-way
down was a ten-foot ledge, and below that outcropped a steep bank of
earth.  He could not see what lay immediately below, but while he was
still staring, a pointed, gray nose topped by pert, gray ears poked
cautiously over the bank, hovered there sniffing, and dropped back out
of sight.

"You little son-of-a-gun!" he exclaimed and dug in his heels on the
sharp descent.  "I've got you right where I want you, now."

The den was tunneled into the earth just over another ledge, which
underlay the bank there, and gave a sheer drop of ten or fifteen feet
to the slope below, where a thick fringe of blossoming cherry bushes
grew close and hid the ledge so completely that the den had been
perfectly concealed from across the gulch.  It was a case where the
shovel was needed.  Ward "flagged" the den by throwing his coat down
before the opening and went back to where Rattler waited.  He was
jubilant over his good luck.  With an average litter of pups, and the
old wolf besides, the bounty would make those two calves the most
profitable animals in the bunch, reckoned on the basis of money
invested in them.

With the shovel he enlarged the tunnel, and between strokes he heard
the whimpering of the pups.  The sound sobered his face to a pitying
determination.  Poor little devils, it was not their fault that they
were born to be a menace rather than a help to mankind.  He was sorry
for their terror, while he dug back to where they huddled against the
farthest wall of their nest.  He worked fast that he might the sooner
end their discomfort, and his forehead was puckered into a frown at the
harsh law of life that it must preserve its existence at the expense of
some other life.  Yet he dug back and back, burrowing into the bank
toward the whimpering.  It was farther than he had thought, but the
soil was a loose sand and gravel, and he made good headway.

Then, laying down his shovel, he reached into a hysterical squirm of
soft hair and sharp little teeth that snapped at his gloved hand.  One
by one he hauled them out, whining, biting, struggling like the little
savages they were.  One by one he sent them into oblivion with a sharp
tap of the shovel.  There were eight, just big enough to make little,
investigative trips outside the den when all was quiet.  Ward was glad
he had found them and wiped them out of existence, but it had not been
pleasant work.

He wiped the perspiration off his face with his handkerchief, pushed
his hat to the back of his head, and sat down on the ledge beside the
pile of dirt he had thrown out.  He felt the need of a smoke, after all
that exertion.

It was while he was smoking and resting that he first became conscious
of the pile of dirt as something more than the obstacle between himself
and the wolf-pups.  He blew a little cloud of smoke from his mouth,
leaned and lifted a handful of sand, picked something out of it, and
looked at it intently.  He said "Humph!" skeptically.  Then he turned
his head and stared at the ledge above and to the right of him, twisted
half around and scanned the steep slope immediately above the earth
bank, and then looked at the gulch beneath him.  He took his cigarette
from his lips, said, "Well, I'll be darned!" and put it back again.
With his forefinger he turned over a small, rusty lump the size of a
pea, wiped it upon his sleeve, and bent over it eagerly, holding it so
that the light struck it revealingly.  His face glowed.  Save the want
of tenderness in his eyes, he looked as though Billy Louise stood
before him; the same guarded gladness, the same intent eagerness.

Ward sprawled over that pile of gravel and sand and searched with his
fingers, as young girls search a thick bank of clover for the magic
four leaves.  He found one other small lump that he kept, but beyond
that his search was barren of result.  Still, that glow remained in his
face.  Finally he roused himself as though he realized that he was
behaving foolishly.  He made himself another cigarette and smoked it
fast, keeping pace with his shuttling thoughts.  And by the time the
paper tube was burned down to an inch-long stub, he had won back his
manner of imperturbable calm; only his eyes betrayed a hidden
excitement.

"Looks like there's money in wolves," he said aloud and laughed a
little.  "Old Lady Fortune, you want to watch out, or I'm liable to get
the best of you yet!  Looks like I've got a hand to draw to, now.
Youp-_ee-ee_!"  His forced imperturbability exploded in the yell, and
after that he moved briskly.

"I've got to play safe on this," he warned himself, while he scalped
the last of the pups.  "No use getting rattled.  If she's good as she
looks, she's fine.  She'll help boost my little bunch of cattle, and
that's all I want.  I ain't going to go hog-wild over it, like so many
do."

He went over and skinned the mother wolf, and with the pelts in a
strong-smelling bundle, returned to the sand pile and filled his
neckerchief as full as he could tie it.  Then he went down into the
gulch, jumped the creek with his load--and got a foot wet where his
boot leaked along the sole--and climbed hurriedly up to where Rattler
waited and dozed in the sunshine, with the reins dropped to the ground.

Rattler objected to those fresh wolf-skins, and Ward lifted a
disciplinary boot-toe to his ribs.  His mood did not accept patiently
any unnecessary delay in getting home, and he succeeded in making
Rattler aware of his mood.  Rattler laid back his ears and took the
trail in long, rabbit-jumps for spite, risking his own and his master's
bones unchecked and unchided.  The pace pleased Ward, and to the risk
he gave no thought.  He was reconstructing his air-castles on broader
lines and smiling now and then to himself.




CHAPTER VIII

HELP FOR THE COW BUSINESS

He had no goldpan of his own, since this was not a mining country, and
his ambition had run in a different channel.  He, therefore, took the
tin washbasin down to the creek and dumped the sand into it.  Then,
squatting on his boot-heels at the edge of the stream, he filled the
basin with water and rocked it gently with a rotary motion that proved
him no novice at the work.  His eyes were sharper and more intent in
their gaze than Billy Louise had ever seen them, and, though his
movements were unhurried, they were full of eagerness held in leash.

Several times he refilled the basin, and the amount of sand grew less
and less, until there remained only a few spoonfuls of coarse gravel
and a sediment that clung to the bottom of the basin and moved
sluggishly around and around.  He picked out the tiny pebbles one by
one and threw them in the creek.  He peered sharply at a small bit and
held it in his fingers, while he bent his face close to the pan, his
eyes two gimlets boring into the contents.

He got up stiffly, backed, and sat down upon the low bank with his feet
far apart and his shoulders bent, while he stared at the little bit of
mineral in his fingers.

"Coarse gold, and not such a hell of a lot," he pronounced to himself
with careful impartiality.  "But it's pay dirt, and if there's enough
of it, it'll help a lot at this end of the cow business."  He sat there
a long time, thinking and planning and holding himself sternly to cold
reality, rejecting every possibility that had the slightest symptom of
being an air-castle.  He did not intend to let this thing turn his head
or betray him into any foolishness whatsoever.  He was going to look at
the thing cold-bloodedly and put his imagination in cold storage for
the present.

His first impulse--to ride straight to the Wolverine and show Billy
Louise these three tiny nuggets--he rejected as a bit of foolishness.
He was perfectly willing to trust Billy Louise with any secret he
possessed, but he knew that he would be feeding her imagination with
dangerous fuel.  She would begin dreaming and building castles and
prospecting for herself, very likely; and that trail led oftenest to
black disappointment.  If he made good, he would tell her--when he told
her something else.  And if the whole thing were just a fluke, a stray
deposit of a little gold that did not amount to anything, then it would
be best for her to know nothing about it.  Ward felt in himself, at
that moment, the keen foretaste of bitter disappointment which would
follow such a certainty.  He did not want Billy Louise exposed to that
pain.

He would tell her about the wolves, of course.  It was pretty hard not
to tell her everything that concerned himself, but the streak of native
reticence in his nature had been strengthened by the vicissitudes of
the life he had lived.  While Billy Louise had found the sole weak
point which made that reticence scarcely a barrier to full confidence,
still he knew that he would keep this from her if he made up his mind
to it.

He would not tell anybody.  He raised his head and looked at the hills
where his cattle would feed, and pictured it cluttered with
gold-hunters, greedy, undesirable interlopers doomed to disappointment
in the long run.  Ward had seen the gold fever sweep through a
community and spoil life for the weak ones who took to chasing the
will-o'-the-wisp of sudden wealth.  Tramps of the pick-and-pan
brigade--they should not come swarming into these hills on any
wild-goose chase, if he could help it.  And he could and should.  This
was not, properly speaking, a gold country.  He knew it.  The rock
formations did not point to any great deposit of the mineral, and if he
had found one, it was a fluke, an accident.  He resolved that his first
consideration should be the keeping of his secret for the mental
well-being of his fellows.

Ward did not put it quite so altruistically.  His thoughts formed into
sentences.

"This is cattle country.  If men want to hunt gold, they can do their
hunting somewhere else.  They can't go digging up the whole blamed
country just on the chance of finding another pocket like this one.
I'm in the cattle business myself.  If I find any gold, it'll go into
cattle and stay there; and there won't be any long-haired freaks
pestering around here if I can help it, and I reckon maybe I can, all
right.

"I'd sure like to talk it over with Billy, but what she don't know
won't worry her; and I don't know yet what I've gone up against.  Maybe
old Dame Fortune's just played another joke on me--played me for a fool
again.  I'll take a chance, but I won't give that little girl down
below there anything to spoil her sleep."

Ward's memory was like glue, and while it held things he would give
much to forget, still it served him well.  He had ridden past a tiny,
partly caved-in dugout, months ago, where some wandering prospector had
camped while he braved the barrenness of the bills and streams
hereabout.  Ward had dismounted and glanced into the cavelike hut.
Now, after he had eaten a few mouthfuls of dinner, he rode straight
over to that dugout and got the goldpan he remembered to have seen
there.  It was not in the best condition, of course.  It was battered
and bent, but it would do for the present.

By the time he reached the wolf den, the sun was nearing the western
rim of hills, but Ward had time to examine the locality more carefully
than he had done at first and to wash a couple of pans of gravel.  The
test elated him perceptibly; for while there did not seem to be the
makings of a millionaire in that gravel bank, he judged roughly that he
could make a plumber's wages if he worked hard enough--and that looked
pretty good to a fellow who had worked all his life for forty dollars a
month.  "Two-bits a pan, just about," he put it to himself.  "And I'll
have to pack the dirt down here to the creek; but I'll dig a nice
little bunch of cattle out of that gravel bank before snow flies, or I
miss my guess a mile."

As nearly as he could figure, he had chanced upon a split channel.  For
ages, he judged, the water had run upon that ledge, leaving the streak
of gravel and what little gold it had carried down from the mountains.
Then some freshet had worn over the edge of the break in the rock until
the ledge and its deposit was left high and dry on the side of the
gulch, while the creek flowed through the gully it had formed below.
It might not be the correct explanation, but it satisfied Ward and
encouraged him to believe that the streak of pay gravel lay along the
ledge within easy reach.

He tried to trace the ledge up and down the gulch and to estimate the
probable extent of that pay streak.  Then he gave it up in
self-defense.  "I've got to watch my dodgers," he admonished himself,
"or I'll go plumb loco and imagine I'm a millionaire.  I'll pan what I
can get at and let it go at that.  And I've got to count what gold
shows up in the sack--and no more.  Good Lord!  I can't afford to make
a fool of myself at this stage of the game!  I've got to sit right down
on my imagination and stick to hard-boiled facts."

He went home in a very good humor with himself and the world, for all
that.  So far as he could see, the thing that had been bothering him
was settled most satisfactorily.  He had wanted to spend the summer on
his claim, making improvements and watching over his cattle.  There was
fence to build and some hay to cut; and he would like to build another
room on to the cabin.  Ward had certain fastidious instincts, and he
rebelled inwardly at eating, sleeping, and cooking all in one small
room.  But he had not been able to solve the problem of earning a
living while he did all this--to say nothing of buying supplies.  And
he really needed a team and tools, if he meant to put up any hay.

Now, with that pay gravel within reach, and the gold running
twenty-five cents to the pan, and the occasional tiny nuggets jumping
up the yield now and then, he could go ahead and do the things he
wanted to do.  And he could dream about having a certain gray-eyed girl
for his wife, without calling himself names afterward.

So he set to work the next morning in dead earnest with pick, shovel,
and pan, to make the most of his little find.  He shoveled the dirt and
gravel into a gunny sack, threw the sack as far as he could over the
ledge at the end, where it was not hidden and cluttered with the
cherry-trees and service berries below, and when it stopped rolling, he
carried it the rest of the way.  Then he panned it in the little creek,
watching like a hawk for nuggets and the finer gold.  It was
back-breaking work, and he felt that he earned every cent he got.  But
the cents were there, in good gold, and he was perfectly willing to
work for what he received in this world.

After a couple of weeks he stopped long enough to make a hurried trip
to Hardup, a little town forty miles farther up in the hills.  In the
little bank there he exchanged his gold harvest for coin of the realm,
and he was well satisfied with the result.  It was not a fortune, nor
was he likely to find one in the hills.  But he bought a team, wagon,
and harness with the money, and he had enough left over for a
two-months' grubstake and plenty of Durham and papers and a few
magazines.  That left him just enough silver to pay Rattler's bill at
the livery stable.  Nothing startling, but still not bad--that wolf-den
find.

He had a lot of trouble getting his wagon to his claim, but by
judicious driving and the liberal use of a log-chain for a rough lock,
he managed to land the whole outfit in the little flat before the cabin
without any mishap.  After that he settled down to work the thing
systematically.

One day he would pan the sandy gravel, and the next day he would rest
his back digging post-holes or something comparatively easy.  He worked
from daybreak until it was too dark to see, and he never left his claim
except when he went to wash gold up in the gulch.  The world moved on,
and he neither knew nor cared how it moved; for the time being his
world had narrowed amazingly.  If Billy Louise had not been down there
in that other world, he would scarcely have given it a thought, so
absorbed was he in the delightful task of putting a good, solid
foundation under his favorite air-castle.  That fascinated him, held
him to his work in spite of his hunger to see her and talk with her and
watch the changing lights in her eyes and the fleeting expressions of
her face.

Some day he hoped he would have her with him always.  He put it
stronger than that: Some day he would have her with him, there in that
little valley he had chosen; riding with him over those hills that
smiled and seemed to stand there waiting for their invasions, with the
echoes ready to fling back his exultant voice when he called to her or
sang for her or laughed at her; ready to imitate enviously her voice
when she laughed back at him.  He wanted that day to come soon, and so
with days and hours and minutes he became a miser and would not spend
them in the luxury of a visit to her.  It seemed to him that his
longing for her measured itself by the enormous appetite he had for
work, that summer.

Week followed week as he followed that thin, fluctuating streak of pay
gravel along the ledge.  Sometimes it was rich enough to set the pulse
pounding in his temples; sometimes it was so poor that he was disgusted
to the point of abandoning the work.  But every day he worked, it
yielded him something--though there was a week when he averaged about
fifty cents a day and lived with a scowl on his face--and he kept at it.

He went out in June and bought a mower and rake and then spent precious
days getting them into his valley.  There was no road, you see, and he
was compelled to haul them in a wagon, through country where nature
never meant four wheels to pass.  He hired a man for a month--one of
those migratory individuals who works for a week or a month in one
place and then wanders on till his money is spent--and he drove that
man as relentlessly as he drove himself.  Together they accomplished
much, while the goldpan lay hidden under a buck brush and Ward's waking
moments were filled with an uneasy sense of wasted time.  Still, it was
for the good of his ranch and his cattle and his air-castle that he
toiled in the gulch, and it was necessary that he should put up what
hay he could.  There would be calves to feed next winter, he hoped; and
when the hardest storms came, his horse would need a little.  The rest
of the stock would have to rustle; and that was why he had chosen this
nook among the hills, where the wind would sweep the high slopes bare
of snow, and the gulches would give shelter with their heavy thickets
of quaking aspens and willow and alder.

He was thankful when the creek bottom was shaved clean of grass, and
the stack beside his corral was of a satisfying length and height.  The
summer had been kind to the grass-growth, and his hay crop was larger
than he had expected.  A few days had remained of the month, and Ward
had used them to extend his fence so as to give more pasturage to his
calves in mild weather.  After that he paid the man, directed him to
the nearest point on the stage road, and breathed thanks that he was
alone again, and could go back to his plan of digging a nice little
hunch of cattle out of that bank before snow flew.




CHAPTER IX

WHEN EMOTIONS ARE BOTTLED

One day, when the sun was warm and the breeze that filtered down the
gorge was pleasantly cool, Ward straightened his aching back, waded out
to dry ground, and sat down to rest a few minutes and make a smoke.
His interest in the work had oozed steadily since sunrise, and left
nothing but the back-breaking toil.  He had found a nugget the size of
a hazelnut in the second pan that morning, so it was not discouragement
that had made his monotonous movements grow slow and reluctant.  Until
he had smoked half the cigarette, he himself did not know what it was
that ailed him.  Then he flung up his head quite suddenly and gave a
snort of understanding.

"Hang the gold!  I'm going visiting for a change."

He concealed the goldpan and his pick, shovel, and sacks in the clump
of service berries and chokeberries that grew at the foot of the ledge
and hid from view the bank where he dug out his pay dirt.  That did not
take more than two or three minutes, and he made them up after he had
swung into the saddle on the farther hillside.  It was not a good
trail, and except for his first exultant ride home that way, he had
ridden it at a walk.  Now he made Rattler trot where loping was too
risky; and so he came clattering down the steep trail into the little
flat beside his cabin.  He would have something to eat, and feed
Rattler a little hay, and then ride on to the Wolverine.  And now that
he had yielded to his hunger to see the one person in the world for
whom he felt any tenderness, he grudged every minute that separated him
from her.  He loosened the cinch with one or two yanks and left the
saddle on Rattler, to save time.  He turned him loose in the hay corral
with the bridle off, rather than spend the extra minutes it would take
to put him in a stall and carry him a forkful of hay.  He thought he
would not bother to start a fire and boil coffee; he would eat the
sour-dough bread and fried rabbit hams he had taken with him for lunch,
and he would start down the creek in half an hour.  He imagined himself
an extremely sensible young man and considerate of his horse's comfort,
to give him thirty precious minutes in which to eat hay.  It was not
absolutely necessary; Rattler could travel forty miles instead of
twenty without another mouthful, so far as that was concerned.  Ward
was simply behaving in a perfectly normal manner and was not letting
his feelings get the better of him in the slightest degree.  As to his
impromptu vacation, he was certainly entitled to it; he ought to have
taken one long ago, he told himself virtuously.  He had panned dirt all
day, the Fourth of July; that was last week, he believed.  And he had
not made more than two dollars, either.  No, he was not behaving
foolishly at all.  He had himself well in hand.

Then he flung open the door of his cabin and went white with sheer
astonishment.

"'Lo, Ward!"  Billy Louise had been standing behind the door, and she
jumped out at him, laughing, just as if she were ten years old instead
of nearly twenty.

Ward tried to say, "'Lo, Bill," in return, but the words would not
come.  His lips trembled too much, and his voice was pinched out in his
throat.  His mind refused to tell him what he ought to do; but his arms
did not wait upon his paralyzed mental processes.  They shot out of
their own accord, caught Billy Louise, and brought her close against
his pounding heart.  Ward was startled and a little shocked at what he
had done, but he held her closer and closer, until Billy Louise was
gasping from something more than surprise.

Next, Ward's lips joined the mutiny against his reason, and laid
themselves upon the parted, panting lips of Billy Louise, as though
that was where they belonged.

Billy Louise had probably not expected anything like that, though of a
truth one can never safely guess at what is in the mind of a girl.  She
tried to pull herself free, and when she could make no impression upon
the grip of those arms--they had been growing muscles of iron
manipulating that goldpan, remember!--she very sensibly yielded to
necessity and stood still.

"Stop, Ward!  You--I--you haven't any right to--"

"Well, give me the right, then."  Ward managed to find voice enough to
make the demand, and then he kissed her many times before he attempted
to say another word.  Lord, but he had been hungry for her, these last
three months!

"You'll give me the right, won't you, Wilhemina?" he murmured against
her ear, brushing a lock of hair away with his lips.  "You know you
belong to me, don't you?  And I belong to you--body and soul.  You know
that, don't you?  I've known it ever since the world was made.  I knew
it when God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light.  You were
it."

"You sill-y thing."  Billy Louise did not seem to know whether she
wanted to laugh or cry.  "What do you think you're talking about,
anyway?"

"About the way the world was made."  Ward loosened his clasp a little
and looked down deep into her eyes.  "My world, I mean."  He bent and
kissed her again, gravely and very, very tenderly.  "Oh, Wilhemina, you
know--" he waited, gazing down with that intent look which had a new
softness behind it--"you know there's nothing in this world but you.
As far as I'm concerned, there isn't.  There never will be."

Billy Louise reached up her hands to his shoulders and tried to give
him a shake.  "Is that why you've stuck yourself in these hills for
three whole months and never come near?  You fibber!"

"That's why, lady-girl.  I've been sticking here, working like one
son-of-a-gun--for you.  So I could have you sooner."  He lifted his
bent head and looked around the little cabin like a man who has just
wakened to his surroundings.  "I knocked off work a little while ago,
and I was going to see you.  I couldn't stand it any longer.  And--here
you iss!" he went on, giving her shoulders a little squeeze.  "A
straight case of 'two souls with but a single thought,' don't you
reckon?"

Billy Louise, by a visible effort, brought the situation down to earth.
She twisted herself free and went over to the stove and saved a
frying-pan of potatoes from burning to a crisp.

"I don't know about your soul," she said, glancing back at him.  "I
happen to have two or three thoughts in mine.  One is that I'm half
starved.  The second is that you're not acting a bit nice, under the
circumstances; no perfectly polite young man makes love to a girl when
she is supposedly helpless and under his protection."  She stopped
there to wrinkle her nose at him and twist her mouth humorously.  "The
third thought is that if you don't behave, I shall go straight home and
never be nice to you again.  And," she added, getting back of the
coffee-pot--which looked new--"the rest of my soul is one great big
blob of question-marks.  If you can eat and talk at the same time, you
may tell me what this frantic industry is all about.  If you can't,
I'll have to wait till after dinner; not even my curiosity is going to
punish my poor tummy any longer."  She pulled a pan of biscuits from
the oven, lifted them out one at a time with dainty little nabs because
they were hot, and stole a glance now and then at Ward from under her
eyebrows.

Ward stood and looked at her until the food was all on the table.  He
was breathing unnaturally, and his jaws were set hard together.  When
she pushed a box up to the table and sat down upon it, and rested her
elbows on the oilcloth and looked straight at him with her chin nested
in her two palms, he drew a long breath, hunched his shoulders with
some mental surrender, and grinned wryly.

"So be it," he yielded, throwing his hat upon the bunk.  "I kinda
overplayed my hand, anyway.  I most humbly ask your pardon!"  He bowed
farcically and took up the wash-basin from its bench just outside the
door.

"You see, William Louisa," he went on quizzically, when he had seated
himself opposite her and was helping himself to the potatoes, "when a
young lady invades strange territory, and hides behind strange doors,
and jumps out at an unsuspecting but terribly well-meaning young man,
she's apt to get a surprise.  When emotions are bottled--"

"Never mind the bottled emotions.  I'd like some potatoes, if you don't
want them all.  I see you haven't the faintest idea how to treat a
guest.  Charlie Fox would have died before he would help himself and
set down the dish away out of my reach.  You could stick pins into him
till he howled, but you couldn't make him be rude to a lady."

"I'd sure like to," muttered Ward ambiguously and handed her every bit
of food within his reach.

"You can talk and eat at the same time, I see.  So tell me what you've
been doing all this while."  Billy Louise spoke lightly, even
flippantly, but her eyes were making love to him shyly, whether she
knew it or not.

"Working," answered Ward promptly and briefly.  He was thinking at the
rate of a million thoughts a minute, it seemed to him, and he was
afraid to let go of himself and say what he thought.  One thing he knew
beyond all doubt, and that was that he must be careful or he would see
his air-castle blow up in small fragments and come down a hopeless
ruin.  He needed time to think, and Billy Louise was not giving him
even a minute.  So he clutched at two decisions which instinct told him
might help him win to safety: He would not make love, and he would not
tell Billy Louise about the gold.

"Working!  Well, so have I.  But working at what?  Did you hire out to
Junkins again?  I thought you said you wouldn't till fall."  Billy
Louise was watching Ward rather closely, perhaps to see how far she
might trust his recovered inscrutability.  "Why don't you show some
human inquisitiveness about my being here?" she asked irrelevantly,
just as Ward was hastily choosing how he would answer her without
saying too much.

"It wouldn't be polite to be inquisitive about a lady, would it?" Ward
retorted, thankful for the change of subject.

"N-no--but, then, you never bother about being just polite!  Charlie
Fox would--"

"Charlie Fox would think you came to see him," Ward asserted
uncharitably.  "My head isn't swelled to that extent.  Why did you
come, anyway?"

"To see you."  Billy Louise lost her nerve when she saw the light leap
into his eyes.  "To see whether you were dead or not," she revised
hastily, "so mommie would stop worrying about you.  Mommie has pestered
the life out of me for the last month, thinking you might be sick or
hurt or something.  So--I was riding up this way, anyway, and--"

"I see I'll have to ride down and prove to mommie that I'm very much
alive.  I'm sure glad to know that somebody takes an interest in me--as
if I were a real human."  Ward's eyes watched furtively her face, but
Billy Louise refused even to nibble at the bait.

"Why didn't you come before, then?  You know mommie likes to have you."

"How about mommie's child?"  Ward's look was dangerous to his good
resolutions.

"Listen here, Ward."  Billy Louise took refuge behind her terrible
frankness.  "If you make love, I won't like you half as well.  Don't
you know that all the time when I used to play with my pretend Ward
Warren, he--he never made love?"  A dimple tried to show itself in her
cheek and was sent about its business with a twist of her lips.  "My
pretend Ward was lovely; he liked me to pieces, but he never came right
out and said so.  He--he skated around the subject--"  Billy Louise
illustrated the skating process by drawing her forefinger in a wide
circle around her cup.  "He made love--with his eyes--and he kissed me
with his--voice--but he never spoiled it with words."

Ward grunted a word that sounded like "damchump."

"Nothing of the kind!"  Billy Louise flew to the defense of her
"pretend."  "He knew just exactly how a girl likes to be made love to.
And, anyway, you've been doing the selfsame thing yourself, Ward
Warren, till just now.  And--"

"Oh, have I?"

"Yes, you have.  And I might have known better than to--to startle you.
You always, eternally, do something nobody'd ever dream of your doing.
The first time, when I threw that chip, you pulled a gun on me--"  The
voice of Billy Louise squeezed down to a wisp of a whisper.  Her eyes
were remorseful.  "Oh, Ward, I didn't mean to--to--"

"It's all right.  I've got it coming."  It was as if a mask had dropped
before Ward's features.  Even his eyes looked strange and hard in that
face of set muscles, though the thin, bitter lips and quivering
nostrils showed that there was feeling behind it all.  "I see where
you're right, William.  You needn't be afraid; I won't make love again."

Billy Louise looked as though she wanted to beat something--herself,
most likely.  She stared as they stare who watch from the dock while a
loved one slips farther and farther away on a voyage from which there
may be no return; only Billy Louise was not one to watch and do nothing
else.

"Now, Ward, don't be silly."  The fright in her voice was overlaid with
a sharpened tenderness.  "You know perfectly well I didn't mean that.
You're only proving that in the human problem you're raised to--  Stop
looking darning-needles at that coffee-pot and listen here!"  Billy
Louise leaned over the table and caught at his nearest hand, which was
a closed fist.  With her own little fingers digging persistently into
the tensed muscles, she pried the fist open.  "Ward, behave yourself,
or I'll go straight home!"  She held his straightened fingers in her
own and drew a sharp breath because they lay inert--dead things so far
as any response came to her clasp; the first and middle fingers
yellowed a little from cigarettes, the nails soft and pink from much
immersion in water.  A tale they told, if Billy Louise had been paying
attention.

"Ward, you certainly are--the limit!  You know as well as I do that
that doesn't make a particle of difference.  If I had been a boy
instead of a girl, and had bucked the world for a living, I'd probably
have done worse; and, anyway, it doesn't matter!"  Her voice rose as if
she were growing desperate.  "I--I--like you--to pieces, Ward, and
I'd--I'd rather marry you--than anyone else.  But I don't want to think
about that for a long while.  I don't want to be engaged, or--or any
different than the way we've been.  It was good to be just pals.  It
was like my pretend Ward.  I--I always wanted him--to love me, but I
wouldn't play that he--told me, Ward.  Oh, don't you see?"  She shut
her teeth hard together, because if she hadn't she would have been
crying in another ten seconds.

"I see."  Ward spoke dully, evenly, and he still stared at the
coffee-pot with that gimlet gaze of his that made Billy Louise want to
scream.  "I see a whole lot that I'd been shutting my eyes to.  Why
don't you feel insulted--"

"Ward Warren, if you're going to act like a--a--"  I suspect that Billy
Louise, in her desperation, was tempted to use a swear word, but she
resisted the temptation.  She got up and went around to him, hesitated
while she looked down at his set face, drew a long breath, and blinked
back some tears of self-reproach because of the devils of memory she
had unwittingly turned loose to jibe at this man.

"This is why," she said softly; and leaning, she pressed her lips down
upon his bitter ones and let them lie there for a dozen heart-beats.

Ward's face relaxed, and his eyes went to hers with the hungry
tenderness she had seen so often there.  He leaned his head against her
and threw up an arm to clasp her close.  He did not say a word.

"After I have kissed a man," said Billy Louise, struggling back to her
old whimsical manner, "it won't be a bit polite for him to have any
doubts of my feelings toward him, or my belief in him, or his belief in
himself."  Her fingers tangled themselves in his hair, just where the
wave was the most pronounced.

She had drawn the poison.  Now she set herself to restore a perfectly
normal atmosphere.

"He's going to be just exactly the same good pal he was before," she
went on, speaking softly.  "And he's going to bring some water so I can
wash the dishes, and then bring Blue so I can go home, and he isn't
going to say a single thing more about--anything that matters two
whoops."

Ward's clasp tightened and then grew loose.  He drew a long breath and
let her go.

"You do like me--a little bit, don't you?"  His eyes were like the eyes
of the damned asking for water.

"I like you two little bits."  Billy Louise took his face between her
two palms and smiled down at him bravely, with the pure candor that was
a part of her.  "But I don't want us to be anything but pals; not for a
long while.  It's so good, just being friends.  And once we get away
from that point, we can't go back to it again, ever.  And I'm sure it's
good enough to be worth while making it last as long as we can.  So
now--"

"It's going to be quite a contract, Wilhemina."  Ward still looked at
her with his heart in his eyes.

"Oh, no, it won't!  You've had lots of practice," Billy Louise assured
him confidently and began putting the few dishes in a neat little pile.
"And, anyway, you are perfectly able to handle any kind of a contract.
All you need do is make up your mind.  And that's made up already.  So
the next thing on the programme is to bring a bucket of water.  Did you
notice anything different about your cabin?   I thought you bragged to
me about being such a good housekeeper!  Why, you hadn't swept the
floor, even, since goodness knows when.  And I've made up a bundle of
your dirty shirts and things that I found under the bed, and I'm going
to take them home and let Phoebe wash them.  She can do them this
evening and have them ready for you to bring back to-morrow.  When I
was a kid and went to see Marthy and Jase, I used to promise them
cookies with 'raisings' in the middle.  I thought there was nothing
better in the world.  I was just thinking--I'll maybe bake you some
cookies with raising

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