Book: The Range Dwellers

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Frosty's idea seemed the only possible way, so we threw away our
cigarettes and got ready for business; the dismembering and carrying
ashore of that road-wagon promised to be no light task. Frosty yelled to
Pochette to come and get busy, and went to work on the rig. It looked to
me like a case where we were all in the same fix, and personal spite
shouldn't count for anything, but King was leaning against the wheel of
his buggy, cramming tobacco into his stubby pipe--the same one apparently
that I had rescued from the pickle barrel--and, seeing the wind scatter
half of it broadcast, as though he didn't care a rap whether he got solid
earth beneath his feet once more, or went floating down the river.
I wanted to propose a truce for such time as it would take to get us all
safe on terra firma, but on second thoughts I refrained. We could get off
without his help, and he was the sort of man who would cheerfully have
gone to his last long sleep at the bottom of that boiling river rather
than accept the assistance of an enemy.

The next couple of hours was a season of aching back, and sloppy feet, and
grunting, and swearing that I don't much care about remembering in detail.
The wind blew till the tears ran down our cheeks. The sand stuck and
clogged every move we made till I used to dream of it afterward. If you
think it was just a simple little job, taking that rig to pieces and
packing it to dry land on our backs, just give another guess. And if you
think we were any of us in a mood to look at it as a joke, you're miles
off the track.

Pochette helped us like a little man--he had to, or we'd have done him up
right there. Old King sat on the ferry-rail and smoked, and watched us
break our backs sardonically--I did think I had that last word in the
wrong place; but I think not. We did break our backs sardonically, and he
watched us in the same fashion; so the word stands as she is.

When the last load was safe on the bank, I went back to the boat. It
seemed a low-down way to leave a man, and now he knew I wasn't fishing for
help, I didn't mind speaking to the old reprobate. So I went up and faced
him, still sitting on the ferry-rail, and still smoking.

"Mr. King," I said politely as I could, "we're all right now, and, if you
like, we'll help you off. It won't take long if we all get to work."

He took two long puffs, and pressed the tobacco down in his pipe. "You go
to hell," he advised me for the second time. "When I want any help from
you or your tribe, I'll let yuh know."

It took me just one second to backslide from my politeness. "Go to the
devil, then!" I snapped. "I hope you have to stay on the damn' bar a
week." Then I went plucking back through the sand that almost pulled the
shoes off my feet every step, kicking myself for many kinds of a fool.
Lord, but I was mad!

Pochette went back to the boat and old King, after nearly getting kicked
into the river for hinting that we ought to pay for the damage and trouble
we had caused him. Frosty and I weren't in any frame of mind for such a
hold-up, and it didn't take him long to find it out.

The bank there was so steep that we had to pack my trunk and what other
truck had been brought out from Osage, up to the top by hand. That was
another temper-sweetening job. Then we put the wagon together, hitched on
the horses, and they managed to get to the top with it, by a scratch. It
all took time--and, as for patience, we'd been out of that commodity for
so long we hardly knew it by name.

The last straw fell on us just as we were loading up. I happened to look
down upon the ferry; and what do you suppose that old devil was doing? He
had torn up the back part of the plank floor of the ferry, and had laid it
along the sand for a bridge. He had made an incline from boat nose to the
bar, and had rough-locked his wagon and driven it down. Just as we looked,
he had come to the end of his bridge, and he and Pochette were taking up
the planks behind and extending the platform out in front.

Well! maybe you think Frosty and I stood there congratulating the old fox.
Frosty wanted me to kick him, I remember; and he said a lot of things that
sounded inspired to me, they hit my feelings off so straight. If we had
had the sense to do what old King was doing, we'd have been ten or
fifteen miles nearer home than we were.

But, anyway, we were up the bank ahead of him, and we loaded in the last
package and drove away from the painful scene at a lope. And you can
imagine how we didn't love old King any better, after that experience.




CHAPTER XII.

I Begin to Realize.


If I had hoped that I'd gotten over any foolishness by spending the fall
and winter away from White Divide--or the sight of it--I commenced right
away to find out my mistake. No sooner did the big ridge rise up from the
green horizon, than every scar, and wrinkle, and abrupt little peak fairly
shouted things about Beryl King.

She wasn't there; she was back in New York, and that blasted Terence
Weaver was back there, too, making all kinds of love to her according to
the letters of Edith. But I hadn't realized just how seriously I was
taking it, till I got within sight of the ridge that had sheltered her
abiding-place and had made all the trouble.

Like a fool I had kept telling myself that I was fair sick for the range;
for range-horses and range-living; for the wind that always blows over the
prairies, and for the cattle that feed on the hills and troop down the
long coulee bottoms to drink at their favorite watering-places. I thought
it was the boys I wanted to see, and to gallop out with them in the soft
sunrise, and lie down with them under a tent roof at night; that I wanted
to eat my meals sitting cross-legged in the grass, with my plate piled
with all the courses at once and my cup of coffee balanced precariously
somewhere within reach.

That's what I thought. When things tasted flat in old Frisco, I wasn't
dead sure why, and maybe I didn't want to be sure why. When I couldn't get
hold of anything that had the old tang, I laid it all to a hankering after
round-up.

Even when we drove around the end of White Divide, and got up on a ridge
where I could see the long arm that stretched out from the east side of
King's Highway, I wouldn't own up to myself that there was the cause of
all my bad feelings. I think Frosty knew, all along; for when I had sat
with my face turned to the divide, and had let my cigarette go cold while
I thought and thought, and remembered, he didn't say a word. But when
memory came down to that last ride through the pass, and to Shylock shot
down by the corral, at last to Frosty standing, tall and dark, against the
first yellow streak of sunrise, while I rode on and left him afoot beside
a half-dead horse, I turned my eyes and looked at his thin, thoughtful
face beside me.

His eyes met mine for half a minute, and he had a little twitching at the
corners of his mouth. "Chirk up," he said quietly. "The chances are she'll
come back this summer."

I guess I blushed. Anyway, I didn't think of anything to say that would be
either witty or squelching, and could only relight my cigarette and look
the fool I felt. He'd caught me right in the solar plexus, and we both
knew it, and there was nothing to say. So after awhile we commenced
talking about a new bunch of horses that dad had bought through an agent,
and that had to be saddle-broke that summer, and I kept my eyes away from
White Divide and my mind from all it meant to me.

The old ranch did look good to me, and Perry Potter actually shook hands;
if you knew him as well as I do you'd realize better what such a
demonstration means, coming from a fellow like him. Why, even his lips are
always shut with a drawstring--from the looks--to keep any words but what
are actually necessary from coming out. His eyes have the same look, kind
of pulled in at the corners. No, don't ever accuse Perry Potter of being a
demonstrative man, or a loquacious one.

I had two days at the ranch, getting fitted into the life again; on the
third the round-up started, and I packed a "war-bag" of essentials, took
my last summer's chaps down off the nail in the bunk-house where they had
hung all that time as a sort of absent-but-not-forgotten memento, one of
the boys told me, and started out in full regalia and with an enthusiasm
that was real--while it lasted.

If you never slept on the new grass with only a bit of canvas between you
and the stars; if you have never rolled out, at daylight, and dressed
before your eyes were fair open, and rushed with the bunch over to the
mess-wagon for your breakfast; if you have never saddled hurriedly a
range-bred and range-broken cayuse with a hump in his back and seven
devils in his eye, and gone careening across the dew-wet prairie like a
tug-boat in a choppy sea; if you have never--well, if you don't know what
it's all like, and how it gets into the very bones of you so that the
hankering never quite leaves you when you try to give it up, I'm not going
to tell you. I can't. If I could, you'd know just how heady it made me
feel those first few days after we started out to "work the range."

I was fond of telling myself, those days, that I'd been more scared than
hurt, and that it was the range I was in love with, and not Beryl King at
all. She was simply a part of it--but she wasn't the whole thing, nor even
a part that was going to be indispensable to my mental comfort. I was a
free man once more, and so long as I had a good horse under me, and a
bunch of the right sort of fellows to lie down in the same tent with,
I wasn't going to worry much over any girl.

That, for as long as a week; and that, more than pages of description,
shows you how great is the spell of the range-land, and how it grips a
man.




CHAPTER XIII.

We Meet Once More.


I think it was about three weeks that I stayed with the round-up. I didn't
get tired of the life, or weary of honest labor, or anything of that sort.
I think the trouble was that I grew accustomed to the life, so that the
exhilarating effects of it wore off, or got so soaked into my system that
I began to take it all as a matter of course. And that, naturally, left
room for other things.

I know I'm no good at analysis, and that's as close as I can come to
accounting for my welching, the third week out. You see, we were working
south and west, and getting farther and farther away from--well, from the
part of country that I knew and liked best. It's kind of lonesome, leaving
old landmarks behind you; so when White Divide dropped down behind another
range of hills and I couldn't turn in my saddle almost any time and see
the jagged, blue sky-line of her, I stood it for about two days. Then
I rolled my bed one morning, caught out two horses from my string instead
of one, told the wagon-boss I was going back to the ranch, and lit
out--with the whole bunch grinning after me. As they would have said,
they were all "dead next," but were good enough not to say so. Or,
perhaps, they remembered the boxing-lessons I had given them in the
bunk-house a year or more ago.

I did feel kind of sneaking, quitting them like that; but it's like
playing higher than your logical limit: you know you're doing a fool
thing, and you want to plant your foot violently upon your own person
somewhere, but you go right ahead in the face of it all. They didn't have
to tell me I was acting like a calf that has lost his mother in the herd.
(You know he is prone to go mooning back to the last place he was with
her, if it's ten miles.) I knew it, all right. And when I topped a hill
and saw the high ridges and peaks of White Divide stand up against the
horizon to the north, I was so glad I felt ashamed of myself and called
one Ellis Carleton worse names than I'd stand to hear from anybody else.

Still, to go back to the metaphor, I kept on shoving in chips, just as if
I had a chance to win out and wasn't the biggest, softest-headed idiot the
Lord ever made. Why, even Perry Potter almost grinned when I came riding
up to the corral; and I caught the fellow that was kept on at the ranch,
lowering his left lid knowingly at the cook, when I went in to supper that
first night. But I was too far gone then to care much what anybody
thought; so long as they kept their mouths shut and left me alone, that
was all I asked of them. Oh, I was a heroic figure, all right, those days.

On a day in June I rode dispiritedly over to the little butte just out
from the mouth of the pass. Not that I expected to see her; I went because
I had gotten into the habit of going, and every nice morning just simply
_pulled_ me over that way, no matter how much I might want to keep away.
That argues great strength of character for me, I know, but it's
unfortunately the truth.

I knew she was back--or that she should be back, if nothing had happened
to upset their plans. Edith had written me that they were all coming, and
that they would have two cars, this summer, instead of just one, and that
they expected to stay a month. She and her mother, and Beryl and Aunt
Lodema, Terence Weaver--deuce take him!--and two other fellows, and a
Gertrude--somebody--I forget just who. Edith hoped that I would make my
peace with Uncle Homer, so they could see something of me. (If I had told
her how easy it was to make peace with "Uncle Homer," and how he had
turned me down, she might not have been quite so sure that it was all my
bull-headedness.) She complained that Gertrude was engaged to one of the
fellows, and so was awfully stupid; and Beryl might as well be--

I tore up the letter just there, and the wind, which was howling that day,
caught the pieces and took them over into North Dakota; so I don't know
what else Edith may have had to tell me. I'd read enough to put me in a
mighty nasty temper at any rate, so I suppose its purpose was
accomplished. Edith is like all the rest: If she can say anything to make
a man uncomfortable she'll do it, every time.

This day, I remember, I went mooning along, thinking hard things about the
world in general, and my little corner of it in particular. The country
was beginning to irritate me, and I knew that if something didn't break
loose pretty soon I'd be off somewhere. Riding over to little buttes, and
not meeting a soul on the way or seeing anything but a bare rock when you
get there, grows monotonous in time, and rather gets on the nerves of a
fellow.

When I came close up to the butte, however, I saw a flutter of skirts on
the pinnacle, and it made a difference in my gait; I went up all out of
breath, scrambling as if my life hung on a few seconds, and calling myself
a different kind of fool for every step I took. I kept assuring myself,
over and over, that it was only Edith, and that there was no need to get
excited about it. But all the while I knew, down deep down in the
thumping chest of me, that it wasn't Edith. Edith couldn't make all that
disturbance in my circulatory system, not in a thousand years.

She was sitting on the same rock, and she was dressed in the same adorable
riding outfit with a blue wisp of veil wound somehow on her gray felt hat,
and the same blue roan was dozing, with dragging bridle-reins, a few rods
down the other side of the peak. She was sketching so industriously that
she never heard me coming until I stood right at her elbow.

It might have been the first time over again, except that my mental
attitude toward her had changed a lot.

"That's better; I can see now what you're trying to draw," I said, looking
down over her shoulder--not at the sketch; it might have been a sea view,
for all I knew--but at the pink curve of her cheek, which was growing
pinker while I looked.

She did not glance up, or even start; so she must have known, all along,
that I was headed her way. She went on making a lot of marks that didn't
seem to fit anywhere, and that seemed to me a bit wobbly and uncertain.
I caught just the least hint of a smile twitching the corner of her
mouth--I wanted awfully to kiss it!

"Yes? I believe I have at last got everything--King's Highway--in the
proper perspective and the proper proportion," she said, stumbling a bit
over the alliteration--and no wonder. It was a sentence to stampede
cattle; but I didn't stampede. I wanted, more than ever, to kiss--but
I won't be like Barney, if I can help it.

"It's too far off--too unattainable," I criticized--meaning something more
than her sketch of the pass. "And it's too narrow. If a fellow rode in
there he would have to go straight on through; there wouldn't be a chance
to turn back."

"Ergo, a fellow shouldn't ride in," she retorted, with a composure
positively wicked, considering my feelings. "Though it does seem that a
fellow rather enjoys going straight on through, regardless of anything;
promises, for instance."

That was the gauntlet I'd been hoping for. From the minute I first saw her
there it flashed upon me that she was astonished and indignant that night
when she saw Frosty and me come charging through the pass, after me
telling her I wouldn't do it any more. It looked to me like I'd have to
square myself, so I was glad enough of the chance.

"Sometimes a fellow has to do things regardless of--promises,"
I explained. "Sometimes it's a matter of life and death. If a fellow's
father, for instance--"

"Oh, I know; Edith told me all about it." Her tone was curious, and while
it did not encourage further explanations or apologies, it also lacked
absolution of the offense I had committed.

I sat down in the grass, half-facing her to better my chance of a look
into her eyes. I was consumed by a desire to know if they still had the
power to send crimply waves all over me. For the rest, she was prettier
even than I remembered her to be, and I could fairly see what little
sense or composure I had left slide away from me. I looked at her
fatuously, and she looked speculatively at a sharp ridge of the divide as
if that sketch were the only thing around there that could possibly
interest her.

"Why do you spend every summer out here in the wilderness?" I asked,
feeling certain that nothing but speech could save me from going
hopelessly silly.

She turned her eyes calmly toward me, and--their power had not weakened,
at all events. I felt as if I had taken hold of a battery with all the
current turned on.

"Why, I suppose I like it here in summer. You're here, yourself; don't you
like it?"

I wanted to say something smart, there, and I have thought of a dozen
bright remarks since; but at the time I couldn't think of a blessed thing
that came within a mile of being either witty or epigrammatic. Love-making
was all new to me, and I saw right then that I wasn't going to shine.
I finally did remark that I should like it better if her father would be
less belligerent and more peaceful as a neighbor.

"You told me, last summer, that you enjoyed keeping up the feud," she
reminded, smiling whimsically down at me.

She made a wrong play there; she let me see that she did remember some
things that I said. It boosted my courage a notch.

"But that was last summer," I countered. "One can change one's view-point
a lot in twelve months. Anyway, you knew all along that I didn't mean a
word of it."

"Indeed!" It was evident that she didn't quite like having me take that
tone.

"Yes, 'indeed'!" I repeated, feeling a rebellion against circumstances and
at convention growing stronger within me. Why couldn't I put her on my
horse and carry her off and keep her always? I wondered crazily. That was
what I wanted to do.

"Do you ever mean what you say, I wonder?" she mused, biting her
pencil-point like a schoolgirl when she can't remember how many times
three goes into twenty-seven.

"Sometimes. Sometimes I mean more." I set my teeth, closed my
eyes--mentally--and plunged, insanely, not knowing whether I should come
to the surface alive or knock my head on a rock and stay down. "For
instance, when I say that some day I shall carry you off and find a
preacher to marry us, and that we shall live happily ever after, whether
you want to or not, because I shall _make_ you, I mean every word of
it--and a lot more."

That was going some, I fancy! I was so scared at myself I didn't dare
breathe. I kept my eyes fixed desperately on the mouth of the pass, all
golden-green in the sunshine; and I remember that my teeth were so tight
together that they ached afterward.

The point of her pencil came off with a snap. I heard it, but I was afraid
to look. "Do you? How very odd!" Her voice sounded queer, as if it had
been squeezed dry of every sort of emotion. "And--Edith?"

I looked at her then, fast enough. "Edith?" I stared at her stupidly.
"What the--what's Edith got to do with it?"

"Possibly nothing"--in the same squeezed tone. "Men are
so--er--irresponsible; and you say you don't always mean--Still, when a
man writes pages and _pages_ to a girl every week for nearly a year, one
naturally supposes--"

"Oh, look here!" I was getting desperate enough to be a bit rough with
her. "Edith doesn't care a rap about me, and you know it. And she knows
I don't care, and--and if anybody had anything to say, it would be your Mr.
Terence Weaver."

"_My_ Mr. Terence Weaver?" She was looking down at me sidewise, in a
perfectly maddening way. "You are really very--er--funny, Mr. Carleton."

"Well," I rapped out between my teeth, "I don't _feel_ funny. I feel--"

"No? But, really, you know, you act that way."

I saw she was getting all the best of it--and, in my opinion, that would
kill what little chance a man might have with a girl. I set deliberately
about breaking through that crust of composure, if I did nothing more.

"That depends on the view-point," I grinned. "Would you think it funny if
I carried you off--really, you know--and--er--married you and made you
live happy--"

"You seem to insist upon the happy part of it, which is not at all--"

"Necessary?" I hinted.

"Plausible," she supplied sweetly.

"But would you think it funny, if I did?"

She regarded her broken pencil ruefully--or pretended to--and pinched her
brows together in deep meditation. Oh, she was the most maddening bit of
young womanhood--But, there, no Barney for me.

"I--might," she decided at last. "It _would_ be rather droll, you know,
and I wonder how you'd manage it; I'm not very tiny, and I rather think it
wouldn't be easy to--er--carry me off. Would you wear a mask--a black
velvet mask? I should insist upon black velvet. And would you say:
'Gadzooks, madam! I command you not to scream!' Would you?" She leaned
toward me, and her eyes--well, for downright torture, women are at times
perfectly fiendish.

I caught her hand, and I held it, too, in spite of her. That far I was
master.

"No," I told her grimly. "If I saw that you were going to do anything so
foolish as to scream, I should just kiss you, and--kiss you till you were
glad to be sensible about it."

Well, she tried first to look calmly amused; then she tried to look
insulted, and to freeze me into sanity. She ended, however, by looking a
good bit confused, and by blushing scarlet. I had won that far. I kept her
hand held tight in mine; I could feel it squirm to get away, and it
felt--oh, thunder!

"Let's play something else," she said, after a long minute. "I--I never
did admire highwaymen particularly, and I must go home."

"No, you mustn't," I contradicted. "You must--"

She looked at me with those wonderful, heavy-lashed eyes, and her lips had
a little quiver as if--Oh, I don't know, but I let go her hand, and I felt
like a great, hulking brute that had been teasing a child till it cried.

"All right," I sighed, "I'll let you go this time. But I warn you, little
girl. If--no, _when_ I find you out from King's Highway by yourself again,
that kidnaping is sure going to come off. The Lord intended you to be Mrs.
Ellis Carleton. And forty feuds and forty fathers can't prevent it.
I don't believe in going against the decrees of Providence; a _wise_
Providence."

She bit her lip at the corner. "You must have a little private Providence
of your own," she retorted, with something like her old assurance. "I'm
sure mine never hinted at such a--a fate for me. And one feud is as good
as forty, Mr. Carleton. If you are anything like your father, I can easily
understand how the feud began. The Kings and the Carletons are fond of
their own way."

"Thy way shall be my way," I promised rashly, just because it sounded
smart.

"Thank you. Then there will be no melodramatic abductions in the shadow of
White Divide," she laughed triumphantly, "and I shall escape a most
horrible fate!" She went, still laughing, down to where her horse was
waiting.

I followed--rather, I kept pace with her. "All the same, I dare you to
ride out alone from King's Highway again," I defied. "For, if you do, and
I find you--"

"Good-by, Mr. Carleton. You'd be splendid in vaudeville," she mocked from
her saddle, where she had got with all the ease of a cowboy, without any
help from me. "Black velvet mask and gadzooks, madam--I must certainly
tell Edith. It will amuse her, I'm sure."

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