Book: The Range Dwellers

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At supper-time our crowd got the storekeeper intimidated sufficiently to
open his store and sell us something to eat. The King faction had looked
upon us blackly, though there were too many of us to make it safe
meddling, and none of us were minded to break bread with them. Instead, we
sat around on the counter and on boxes in the store, and ate crackers and
sardines and things like that. I couldn't help remembering my last Fourth,
and the banquet I had given on board the _Molly Stark_--my yacht, named
after the lady known to history, whom dad claims for an ancestress--and
I laughed out loud. The boys wanted to know the cause of my mirth, and so,
with a sardine laid out decently between two crackers in one hand, and a
blue "granite" cup of plebeian beer in the other, I told them all about
that banquet, and some of the things we had to eat and drink--whereat they
laughed, too. The contrast was certainly amusing. But, somehow, I wouldn't
have changed, just then, if I could have done so. That, also, is something
I'm not psychologist enough to explain.

That last waltz with Miss King was like to prove disastrous, for we
swished uncomfortably close to her father, standing scowling at Frosty and
some of the others of our crowd near the door. Luckily, he didn't see us,
and at the far end Miss King stopped abruptly. Her cheeks were pink, and
her eyes looked up at me--wistfully, I could almost say.

"I think, Mr. Carleton, we had better stop," she said hesitatingly. "I
don't believe your enmity is so ungenerous as to wish to cause me
unpleasantness. You surely are convinced now that I am not afraid of you,
so the truce is over."

I did not pretend to misunderstand. "I'm going home at once," I told her
gently, "and I shall take my spectacular crowd along with me; but I'm not
sorry I came, and I hope you are not."

She looked at me soberly, and then away. "There is one thing I should like
to say," she said, in so low a tone I had to lean to catch the words.
"Please don't try to ride through King's Highway again; father hates you
quite enough as it is, and it is scarcely the part of a gentleman to
needlessly provoke an old man."

I could feel myself grow red. What a cad I must seem to her! "King's
Highway shall be safe from my vandal feet hereafter," I told her, and
meant it.

"So long as you keep that promise," she said, smiling a bit, "I shall try
to remember mine enemy with respect."

"And I hope that mine enemy shall sometimes view the beauties of White
Divide from a little distance--say half a mile or so," I answered
daringly.

She heard me, but at that minute that Weaver chap came up, and she began
talking to him as though he was her long-lost friend. I was clearly out of
it, so I told Edith and her mother good night, bowed to "Aunt Lodema" and
got the stony stare for my reward, and rounded up my crowd.

We passed old King in a body, and he growled something I could not hear;
one of the boys told me, afterward, that it was just as well I didn't. We
rode away under the stars, and I wished that night had been four times as
long, and that Beryl King would be as nice to me as was Edith Loroman.




CHAPTER VII.

One Day Too Late!


I suppose there is always a time when a fellow passes quite suddenly out
of the cub-stage and feels himself a man--or, at least, a very great
desire to be one. Until that Fourth of July life had been to me a
playground, with an interruption or two to the game. When dad took such
heroic measures to instil some sense into my head, he interrupted the game
for ten days or so--and then I went back to my play, satisfied with new
toys. At least, that is the way it seemed to me. But after that night,
things were somehow different. I wanted to amount to something; I was
absolutely ashamed of my general uselessness, and I came near writing to
dad and telling him so.

The worst of it was that I didn't know just what it was I wanted to do,
except ride over to that little pinnacle just out from King's Highway, and
watch for Beryl King; that, of course, was out of the question, and
maudlin, anyway.

On the third day after, as Frosty and I were riding circle quite silently
and moodily together, we rode up into a little coulee on the southwestern
side of White Divide, and came quite unexpectedly upon a little
picnic-party camped comfortably down by the spring where we had meant to
slake our own thirst. Of course, it was the Kings' house-party; they were
the only luxuriously idle crowd in the country.

Edith and her mother greeted me with much apparent joy, but, really,
I felt sorry for Frosty; all that saved him from recognition then was the
providential near-sightedness of Mrs. Loroman. I observed that he was
careful not to come close enough to the lady to run any risk.

Aunt Lodema tilted her chin at me, and Beryl--to tell the truth,
I couldn't make up my mind about Beryl. When I first rode up to them, and
she looked at me, I fancied there was a welcome in her eyes; after that
there was anything else you like to name. I looked several times at her
to make sure, but I couldn't tell any more what she was thinking than one
can read the face of a Chinaman. (That isn't a pretty comparison, I know,
but it gives my meaning, for, of all humans, Chinks are about the hardest
to understand or read.) I was willing, however, to spend a good deal of
time studying the subject of her thoughts, and got off my horse almost as
soon as Mrs. Loroman and Edith invited me to stop and eat lunch with them.
That Weaver fellow was not present, but another man, whom they introduced
as Mr. Tenbrooke, was sitting dolefully on a rock, watching a maid
unpacking eatables. Edith told me that "Uncle Homer"--which was old man
King--and Mr. Weaver would be along presently. They had driven over to
Kenmore first, on a matter of business.

Frosty, I could see, was not going to stay, even though Edith, in a polite
little voice that made me wonder at her, invited him to do so. Edith was
not the hostess, and had really no right to do that.

I tried to get a word with Miss Beryl, found myself having a good many
words with Edith, instead, and in fifteen minutes I became as thoroughly
disgusted with unkind fate as ever I've been in my life, and suddenly
remembered that duty made further delay absolutely impossible. We rode
away, with Edith protesting prettily at what she was pleased to call my
bad manners.

For the rest of the way up that coulee Frosty and I were even more silent
and moody than we had been before. The only time we spoke was when Frosty
asked me gruffly how long those people expected to stay out here. I told
him a week, and he grunted something under his breath about female
fortune-hunters. I couldn't see what he was driving at, for I certainly
should never think of accusing Edith and her mother of being that especial
brand of abhorrence, but he was in a bitter mood, and I wouldn't argue
with him then--I had troubles of my own to think of. I was beginning to
call myself several kinds of a fool for letting a girl--however wonderful
her eyes--give me bad half-hours quite so frequently; the thing had never
happened to me before, and I had known hundreds of nice
girls--approximately. When a fellow goes through a co-ed course, and has a
dad whom the papers call financier, he gets a speaking-acquaintance with a
few girls. The trouble with me was, I never gave the whole bunch as much
thought as I was giving to Beryl King--and the more I thought about her,
the less satisfaction there was in the thinking.

I waited a day or two, and then practically ran away from my work and rode
over to that little butte. Some one was sitting on the same flat rock, and
I climbed up to the place with more haste than grace, I imagine. When
I reached the top, panting like the purr of the _Yellow Peril_--my
automobile--when it gets warmed up and going smoothly, I discovered that
it was Edith Loroman sitting placidly, with a camera on her knees, doing
things to the internal organs of the thing. I don't know much about
cameras, so I can't be more explicit.

"If it isn't Ellie, looking for all the world like the _Virginian_ just
stepped down from behind the footlights!" was her greeting. "Where in the
world have you been, that you haven't been over to see us?"

"You must know that the palace of the King is closed against the
Carletons," I, said, and I'm afraid I said it a bit crossly; I hadn't
climbed that unmerciful butte just to bandy commonplaces with Edith
Loroman, even if we were old friends. There are times when new enemies are
more diverting than the oldest of old friends.

"Well, you could come when Uncle Homer is away--which he often is," she
pouted. "Every Sunday he drives over to Kenmore and pokes around his
miners and mines, and often Terence and Beryl go with him, so you could
come--"

"No, thank you." I put on the dignity three deep there. "If I can't come
when your uncle is at home, I won't sneak in when he's gone. I--how does
it happen you are away out here by yourself?"

"Well," she explained, still doing things to the camera, "Beryl came out
here yesterday, and made a sketch of the divide; I just happened to see
her putting it away. So I made her tell me where she got that view-point,
and I wanted her to come with me, so I could get a snap shot; it _is_
pretty, from here. But she went over to the mines with Mr. Weaver, and
I had to come alone. Beryl likes to be around those dirty mines--but I
can't bear it. And, now I'm here, something's gone wrong with the thing,
so I can't wind the film. Do you know how to fix it, Ellie?"

I didn't, and I told her so, in a word. Edith pouted again--she has a
pretty mouth that looks well all tied up in a knot, and I have a slight
suspicion that she knows it--and said that a fellow who could take an
automobile all to pieces and put it together again ought to be able to fix
a kodak. That's the way some women reason, I believe--just as though cars
and kodaks are twin brothers.

Our conversation, as I remember it now, was decidedly flat and dull.
I kept thinking of Beryl being there the day before--and I never knew; of
her being off somewhere to-day with that Weaver fellow--and I knew it and
couldn't do a thing. I hardly know which was the more unpleasant to dwell
upon, but I do know that it made me mighty poor company for Edith. I sat
there on a near-by rock and lighted cigarettes, only to let them go out,
and glowered at King's Highway, off across the flat, as if it were the
mouth of the bottomless pit. I can't wonder that Edith called me a bear,
and asked me repeatedly if I had toothache, or anything.

By and by she had her kodak in working order again, and took two or three
pictures of the divide. Edith is very pretty, I believe, and looks her
best in short walking-costume. I wondered why she had not ridden out to
the butte; Beryl had, the time I met her there, I remembered. She had a
deep-chested blue roan that looked as if he could run, and I had noticed
that she wore the divided skirt, which is so popular among women who ride.
I don't, as a rule, notice much what women have on--but Beryl King's feet
are altogether too small for the least observant man to pass over. Edith's
feet were well shod, but commonplace.

"I wish you'd let me have one of those pictures when they're done,"
I told her, as amiably as I could.

She pushed back a lock of hair. "I'll send you one, if you like, when
I get home. What address do you claim, in this wilderness?"

I wrote it down for her and went my way, feeling a badly used young man,
with a strong inclination to quarrel with fate. Edith had managed, during
her well-meant efforts at entertaining me, to couple Mr. Weaver's name all
too frequently with that of her cousin. I found it very depressing--a good
many things, in fact, were depressing that day.

I went back to camp and stuck to work for the rest of that week--until
some of the boys told me that they had seen the Kings' guests scooting
across the prairie in the big touring-car of Weaver's, evidently headed
for Helena.

After that I got restless again, and every mile the round-up moved south
I took as a special grievance; it put that much greater distance between me
and King's Highway--and I had got to that unhealthy stage where every
mile wore on my nerves, and all I wanted was to moon around that little
butte. I believe I should even have taken a morbid pleasure in watching
the light in her window o' nights, if it had been at all practicable.




CHAPTER VIII

A Fight and a Race for Life.


It was between the spring round-up and the fall, while the boys were
employed in desultory fashion at the home ranch, breaking in new horses
and the like, and while I was indefatigably wearing a trail straight
across country to that little butte--and getting mighty little out of it
save the exercise and much heart-burnings--that the message came.

A man rode up to the corrals on a lather-gray horse, coming from Kenmore,
where was a telephone-station connected from Osage. I read the message
incredulously. Dad sick unto death? Such a thing had never
happened--_couldn't_ happen, it seemed to me. It was unbelievable; not to
be thought of or tolerated. But all the while I was planning and scheming
to shave off every superfluous minute, and get to where he was.

I held out the paper to Perry Potter, "Have some one saddle up Shylock,"
I ordered, quite as if he had been Rankin. "And Frosty will have to go
with me as far as Osage. We can make it by to-morrow noon--through King's
Highway. I mean to get that early afternoon train."

The last sentence I sent back over my shoulder, on my way to the house.
Dad sick--dying? I cursed the miles between us. Frisco was a long, a
terribly long, way off; it seemed in another world.

By then I was on my way back to the corral, with a decent suit of clothes
on and a few things stuffed into a bag, and with a roll of money--money
that I had earned--in my pocket. I couldn't have been ten minutes, but it
seemed more. And Frisco was a long way off!

"You'd better take the rest of the boys part way," Potter greeted dryly as
I came up.

I brushed past him and swung up into the saddle, feeling that if I stopped
to answer I might be too late. I had a foolish notion that even a long
breath would conspire to delay me. Frosty was already on his horse, and
I noticed, without thinking about it at the time, that he was riding a
long-legged sorrel, "Spikes," that could match Shylock on a long chase--as
this was like to be.

We were off at a run, without once looking back or saying good-by to a man
of them; for farewells take minutes in the saying, and minutes meant--more
than I cared to think about just then. They were good fellows, those
cowboys, but I left them standing awkwardly, as men do in the face of
calamity they may not hinder, without a thought of whether I should ever
see one of them again. With Frosty galloping at my right, elbow to elbow,
we faced the dim, purple outline of White Divide.

Already the dusk was creeping over the prairie-land, and little sleepy
birds started out of the grasses and flew protesting away from our rush
past their nesting-places. Frosty spoke when we had passed out of the
home-field, even in our haste stopping to close and tie fast the gate
behind us.

"You don't want to run your horse down in the first ten miles, Ellis;
we'll make time by taking it easy at first, and you'll get there just as
soon." I knew he was right about it, and pulled Shylock down to the
steady lope that was his natural gait. It was hard, though, to just
"mosey" along as if we were starting out to kill time and earn our daily
wage in the easiest possible manner. One's nerves demanded an unusual
pace--a pace that would soothe fear by its very headlong race against
misfortune.

Once or twice it occurred to me to wonder, just for a minute, how we
should fare in King's Highway; but mostly my thoughts stuck to dad, and
how it happened that he was "critically ill," as the message had put it.
Crawford had sent that message; I knew from the precise way it was
worded--Crawford never said _sick_--and Crawford was about as conservative
a man as one could well be, and be human. He was as unemotional as a
properly trained footman; Jenks, our butler, showed more feeling. But
Crawford, if he was conservative, was also conscientious. Dad had had him
for ten years, and trusted him a million miles farther than he would trust
anybody else--for Crawford could no more lie than could the
multiplication-table; if he said dad was "critically ill," that settled
it; dad was. I used to tell Barney MacTague, when he thought it queer that
I knew so little about dad's affairs, that dad was a fireproof safe, and
Crawford was the combination lock. But perhaps it was the other way
around; at any rate, they understood each other perfectly, and no other
living man understood either.

The darkness flowed down over the land and hid the farther hills; the
sky-line crept closer until White Divide seemed the boundary of the world,
and all beyond its tumbled shade was untried mystery. Frosty, a shadowy
figure rising and falling regularly beside me, turned his face and spoke
again:

"We ought to make Pochette's Crossing by daylight, or a little after--with
luck," he said. "We'll have to get horses from him to go on with; these
will be all in, when we get that far."

"We'll try and sneak through the pass," I answered, putting unpleasant
thoughts resolutely behind me. "We can't take time to argue the point out
with old King."

"Sneak nothing," Frosty retorted grimly. "You don't know King, if you're
counting on that."

I came near asking how he expected to get through, then; when I remembered
my own spectacular flight, on a certain occasion, I felt that Frosty was
calmly disowning our only hope.

We rode quietly into the mouth of King's Highway, our horses stepping
softly in the deep sand of the trail as if they, too, realized the
exigencies of the situation. We crossed the little stream that is the
first baby beginning of Honey Creek--which flows through our ranch--with
scarce a splash to betray our passing, and stopped before the closed gate.
Frosty got down to swing it open, and his fingers touched a padlock doing
business with bulldog pertinacity. Clearly, King was minded to protect
himself from unwelcome evening callers.

"We'll have to take down the wires," Frosty murmured, coming back to where
I waited. "Got your gun handy? Yuh might need it before long." Frosty was
not warlike by nature, and when he advised having a gun handy I knew the
situation to be critical.

We took down a panel of fence without interruption or sign of life at the
house, not more than fifty yards away; Frosty whispered that they were
probably at supper, and that it was our best time. I was foolish enough to
regret going by without chance of a word with Beryl, great as was my
haste. I had not seen her since that day Frosty and I had ridden into
their picnic--though I made efforts enough, the Lord knows--and I was not
at all happy over my many failures.

Whether it was good luck or bad, I saw her rise up from a hammock on the
porch as we went by--for, as I said before, King's house was much closer
to the trail than was decent; I could have leaned from the saddle and
touched her with my quirt.

"Mr. Carleton"--I was fool enough to gloat over her instant recognition,
in the dark like that--"what are you doing here--at this hour? Don't you
know the risk? And your promise--" She spoke in an undertone, as if she
were afraid of being overheard--which I don't doubt she was.

But if she had been a Delilah she couldn't have betrayed me more
completely. Frosty motioned imperatively for me to go on, but I had pulled
up at her first word, and there I stood, waiting for her to finish, that
I might explain that I had not lightly broken my promise; that I was
compelled to cut off that extra sixty miles which would have made me,
perhaps, too late. But I didn't tell her anything; there wasn't time.
Frosty, waiting disapprovingly a length ahead, looked back and beckoned
again insistently. At the same instant a door behind the girl opened with
a jerk, and King himself bulked large and angry in the lamplight. Beryl
shrank backward with a little cry--and I knew she had not meant to do me a
hurt.

"Come on, you fool!" cried Frosty, and struck his horse savagely. I jabbed
in my spurs, and Shylock leaped his length and fled down that familiar
trail to the "gantlet," as I had always called it mentally after that
second passing. But King, behind us, fired three shots quickly, one after
another--and, as the bullets sang past, I knew them for a signal.

A dozen men, as it seemed to me, swarmed out from divers places to dispute
our passing, and shots were being fired in the dark, their starting-point
betrayed by vicious little spurts of flame. Shylock winced cruelly, as we
whipped around the first shed, and I called out sharply to Frosty, still a
length ahead. He turned just as my horse went down to his knees.

I jerked my feet from the stirrups and landed free and upright, which was
a blessing. And it was then that I swung morally far back to the
primitive, and wanted to kill, and kill, with never a thought for parley
or retreat. Frosty, like the stanch old pal he was, pulled up and came
back to me, though the bullets were flying fast and thick--and not wide
enough for derision on our part.

"Jump up behind," he commanded, shooting as he spoke. "We'll get out of
this damned trap."

I had my doubts, and fired away without paying him much attention.
I wanted, more than anything, to get the man who had shot down Shylock.
That isn't a pretty confession, but it has the virtue of being the truth.
So, while Frosty fired at the spurts of red and cursed me for stopping
there, I crouched behind my dead horse and fought back with evil in my
heart and a mighty poor aim.

Then, just as the first excitement was hardening into deliberate
malevolence, came a clatter from beyond the house, and a chorus of
familiar yells and the spiteful snapping of pistols. It was our
boys--thirty of the biggest-hearted, bravest fellows that ever wore spurs,
and, as they came thundering down to us, I could make out the bent, wiry
figure of old Perry Potter in the lead, yelling and shooting wickeder than
any one else in the crowd.

"Ellis!" he shouted, and I lifted up my voice and let him know that, like
Webster, "I still lived." They came on with a rush that the King faction
could not stay, to where I was ambushed between the solid walls of two
sheds, with Shylock's bulk before me and Frosty swearing at my back.

"Horse hit?" snapped Perry Potter breathlessly. "I knowed it. Just like
yuh. Get onto this'n uh mine--he's the best in the bunch--and light
out--if yuh still want t' catch that train."

I came back from the primitive with a rush. I no longer wanted to kill and
kill. Dad was lying "critically ill" in Frisco--and Frisco was a long way
off! The miles between bulked big and black before me, so that I shivered
and forgot my quarrel with King. I must catch that train.

I went with one leap up into the saddle as Perry Potter slid down, thought
vaguely that I never could ride with the stirrups so short, but that there
was not time to lengthen them; took my feet peevishly out of them
altogether, and dashed down, that winding way between King's sheds and
corrals while the Ragged H boys kept King's men at bay, and the unmusical
medley of shots and yells followed us far in the darkness of the pass. At
the last fence, where we perforce drew rein to make a free passage for
our horses, I looked back, like one Mrs. Lot. A red glare lit the whole
sky behind us with starry sparks, shooting up higher into the low-hanging
crimson smoke-clouds. I stared, uncomprehending for a moment; then the
thought of her stabbed through my brain, and I felt a sudden horror. "And
Beryl's back among those devils!" I cried aloud, as I pulled my horse
around.

"_Beryl_"--Frosty laid peculiar stress upon the name I had let
slip--"isn't likely to be down among the sheds, where that fire is. Our
boys are collecting damages for Shylock, I guess; hope they make a good
job of it."

I felt silly enough just then to quarrel with my grandmother; I hate
giving a man cause for thinking me a love-sick lobster, as I'd no doubt
Frosty thought me. I led my horse over the wires he had let down, and we
went on without stopping to put them back on the posts. It was some time
before I spoke again, and, when I did, the subject was quite different;
I was mourning because I hadn't the _Yellow Peril_ to eat up the miles
with.

"What good would that do yuh?" Frosty asked, with a composure I could only
call unfeeling. "Yuh couldn't get a train, anyway, before the one yuh
_will_ get; motors are all right, in their place--but a horse isn't to be
despised, either. I'd rather be stranded with a tired horse than a
broken-down motor."

I did not agree with him, partly because I was not at all pleased with my
present mount, and partly because I was not in amiable mood; so we
galloped along in sulky silence, while a washed-out moon sidled over our
heads and dodged behind cloud-banks quite as if she were ashamed to be
seen. The coyotes got to yapping out somewhere in the dark, and, as we
came among the breaks that border the Missouri, a gray wolf howled close
at hand.

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