Читать книгу The Dry Ridge Gang - Bertha Muzzy Sinclair - Страница 6

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Near the ranch we overtook Ellie riding with a long-legged, handsome young fellow in fringed leather chaps, big hat and spurs with prongs an inch long. Prongs isn’t the right word, probably, but I’ll start a notebook of dialect and find out what cowboys really call different things. I’ll want my dialect right up to the mark, of course. That’s why I think it will be better maybe not to start work on the real novel until I’ve been here long enough to get the lingo down pat. As fast as I get onto a word or phrase, I’ll use it, and that will make it come easy and natural when I really do start.

So this young cowboy I saw right away was a perfect type for my hero. Dade McArthur was his name and I liked that too. He looked at us as if we were making the proverbial crowd and I was willing to canter on—I mean gallop. But Ray refused to take any hints and kept talking to this Dade McArthur about something—I forget what it was—that sort of shut Ellie and myself out of the conversation. Finally they let their horses lag behind us and lowered their voices a little, and Ellie gave me a glance and touched her horse with the spurs, and we galloped on ahead, leaving those two alone to their confab.

“You seemed to be meditating upon matters of great portent to the human race when you two rode up,” she remarked, when we let the horses slow to a walk where the trail was a bit steep. “Might a mere woman inquire—?”

“She may. I was thinking about those pale blue hills away over there, and what Steve Johnson told me about them. And I was wondering how soon I could get into them and hunt—”

“The Dry Ridge gang, of course,” she cut in upon my sentence. People do that out here quite a lot. Quick on the comeback, to use a phrase of theirs. As soon as they get your meaning, or think they have it, they come right back with their answer. I’ve acquired the habit now myself, more or less.

“You’ve caught the fever,” she said. “Everybody in the country has ideas about how to catch the Dry Ridge gang. It’s just about driving Dad crazy, having Tom, Dick and Harry advising him and making suggestions.”

She was dead wrong, of course; at least, where I was concerned. I had no suggestions whatever to make. I didn’t want anything of the Dry Ridge gang except to collect data for my book. Catching them was no part of my plans. I was perfectly willing to let the other fellow do that. They were just story stuff which I meant to work into my novel of the West. Lord, if an author had to get out and do all the things he puts in a story, how many books would get written?

So I just laughed at her. “Strange as it may sound, I was not thinking of them. If I must confess it, I was picturing myself wading thigh deep in a trout stream up there in those hills. Steve Johnson told me there were some dandies and he promised to take me over and show me where to find them, some Sunday when he has time.”

Then I thought I’d just kid her a little, as she had me. “In this two-gun country where human life has always been held cheaper than horseflesh, and gold was made to be pulled off stage coaches by masked robbers, who invariably respected womanhood and shot the driver off the box, why is it that this Dry Ridge gang is creating such a furore? Robbing a bank is nothing new. That often happens in the East. What have they actually done that is out of the ordinary?”

I was just deviling her, of course. I wanted to learn all I could about them for my story—though I couldn’t tell her that. Even Ray doesn’t suspect that I mean to use this ranch for the setting, changing it enough so it can’t be identified. I certainly don’t want to betray their hospitality, or anything like that. What I write is for my eyes alone and will be used merely as a source of material—not to be recognized in the finished work, yet forming the basis for it. I’m following the story form merely for further practice in the technique.

“What have they done?” she repeated my question. “What haven’t they done, you mean. Well, for one thing, they are the first gang of outlaws that Dad hasn’t been able to round up and send to the pen—and he has been chasing criminals for twenty years now. That is a real distinction, if you ask me.”

“You sound as if you admire them for that.”

“Well, I do. Just between you and me, I think they’re the slickest outfit in the history of Montana. Of course, I’m not speaking of the moral angle. I don’t hold with thieves, whether they steal according to law or against it. But the Dry Ridge gang is too smart for Dad, and that’s going some.”

“Yes,” I said. “Just from what I’ve seen of your dad, I certainly agree with you there.”

“And not only Dad—they’ve got the whole country up in arms against them. And they just laugh and do as they darned please. One blunder will cost them their liberty—their lives too, probably, because they’re outlawed and fair game for any man’s gun. But they don’t blunder, you see. They pull the slickest stunts and do the most daring things—” She gave me a quick, defiant glance “—I could love a man like that, even if he was an outlaw!”

From the color in her cheeks and the light that danced in her eyes, I’m inclined to think she meant what she said.

“And would you go and be a lady bandit?” I laughed and made a joke of it, but really I wanted to see how she’d react. I’ve got to study that girl, I can see that. She can give me lots of pointers on my heroine. She’s the type that’s always springing something unexpected.

Well, that look of banked fires in her eyes suddenly flamed up into something pretty startling. “Yes, I’d do that too, if I loved the bandit chief,” she retorted almost fiercely. “If I were a boy, and Dad had kept me on a picket rope the way he’s done—well, I should probably have joined the Dry Ridge gang long ago!”

“Now you’re just stringing me along,” I grinned wisely.

“I am not,” she declared. “At least they do something. They don’t just eat and sleep and wear clothes and jog along in a rut worn deep by conventions made before they were born. They have the courage and the initiative to get out of the rut and live.”

That tickled me, I’d never heard a girl talk like that before. But I glanced over my shoulder to make sure that Ray wasn’t close enough to hear her, before I egged her on.

“Do you call it living, this robbing banks and so on?”

“I call anything living that calls for brains and backbone and—and dynamic energy. I detest this three-meals-a-day existence, this dead monotony of doing nothing that hasn’t been done millions of times before, by millions of people, and will be done millions of times after we are gone. I don’t particularly admire stealing money and shooting people,—no. But I would do even that before I would be a plodder, if I were a man.”

I still thought she was joking; or if she wasn’t, it was my fault and I’d better turn it off as a joke and get that fire tamed down in her eyes—get her laughing.

“Would you call it living, Miss Whitcome, to run down this gang, and by your superior wit and courage and dynamic energy bring them to justice?”

I landed, that time, though not in the way I had intended. She didn’t laugh. She caught her lip between her teeth and stared straight ahead of her, with the look that saw only what was going on in her own mind.

“I’d call that a heaven-sent opportunity to prove something to Dad I’ve been trying all my life to prove and never have been able to do,” she said at last, almost under her breath. “As for bringing the Dry Ridge gang to justice, I don’t know about that. I’d have to decide just what and where justice is. So far as I’ve been able to discover, it’s only a name we set up to worship—this justice thing. But to corral them and let the law take them and show them who’s boss—yes, that would be living, too. And it would show Dad—”

“Show him what?”

“Show him a girl has a right to make a place for herself in the world. Show him she may have the same ability a man has. He has failed so far to catch that gang—yes, I’d like to test my wits on them. If I could out-think them, that would be something no one else has been able to do, so far.”

I saw that I had made a botch of the joke angle. I tried again. I said, “I’m beginning to suspect you of harboring revolutionary ideas. You may even be a suffragette, for all I know!” And I looked at her with exaggerated dismay.

She made me feel like a fool. She neither laughed nor gave any sign of indignation, but gave me a pitying glance.

“If you’d ever taken the trouble to think things out for yourself, instead of blandly accepting the answer to the riddle that is written down in the book, you’d have revolutionary ideas yourself,” she told me bluntly. “Certainly I believe women should have the right to vote. Why not, for heaven’s sake?”

I had no desire to argue about woman’s suffrage. I dodged that question. But it didn’t matter—she was not to be sidetracked from her grievance, if that’s what it was.

“I wanted to go away to college when Ray went,” she said. “He hasn’t all the brains in the family. I was always ahead of him in school. But Dad wouldn’t hear of such a thing. He said it was a d. waste of money, sending girls to college. He said a man might spend good money stuffing their heads with book learning, and then they’d up and marry, and that was the end of it. Just as if a wife mustn’t know anything except how to cook and raise babies!”

“Well—”

“Oh, I know it endangers the prestige of the dominant male to have his wife as well educated as himself. You’d say the same thing to a daughter of your own, I’ve no doubt,” she snubbed me. “Dad thought he was terribly broad-minded when he said that if I were deformed, or anything like that, or so homely no man would want to marry me, I might go to school all my life, for all he cared. But seeing I’m at least passably attractive, I’d better learn to cook and keep house.

“I’d have gone anyway and earned my own way washing dishes, if I couldn’t do any better—but there was Mother. I couldn’t make a row and then go off and leave her to bear the brunt, you see. So naturally I stayed.”

“And got the equivalent of a college education, I’ll bet, reading high-brow books.”

She brushed that aside. “Ray has had four years of college that cost Dad plenty of money, believe me! And now it’s all over, he’s home with a fine assortment of silk socks and not the faintest idea of what he means to do with his education, now he’s got it. I feel sometimes—”

She stopped and looked at me, and gave a laugh which I’d call sardonic in a man. “Kind sir, you see before you a fairly well-behaved young woman who is likely to blow up and start a real revolution in her family unless something happens to give her a normal outlet for her energies! Even robbing a bank or catching the robbers would be a welcome relief.”

That explained what I saw in her eyes that first night I came, that made her look like her father. Maybe something of that sort was what hid behind the twinkle in his eyes, too. I’m going to study the sheriff. But of course I couldn’t speak of that, so I tried again to brighten up the subject.

“What do you suppose the sheriff would say if he knew he had a potential lady bandit right in his own house?”

She laughed. “I do believe he’d pull his handcuffs right out of his hip pocket and tell me to stick out my paws! Dad’s a dear in many ways but he certainly is a good sheriff. He’s the rock of Gibraltar when it comes to his official duties. He’d haul me off to jail if he thought I deserved it; or any one else, except—”

“Your mother,” I supplied, when she failed to go on.

“Well, Mother, of course. And—” she tilted her head backward toward the two behind us “—Ray. Dad worships the ground that boy walks on. It’s really pathetic, because Ray doesn’t understand. To him, Dad is the sheriff—he’s proud of Dad—but also the bank roll. Dad has always paid the bills and never made a row about them, or anything else. He’s a pretty convenient kind of a Dad to have.”

I didn’t say anything. She had hit off Ray’s attitude toward his father exactly. She didn’t seem to resent Ray, either—not in any jealous sense of the word. I began to see that here was a mighty keen girl who could see right through any kind of sham. I began to wonder whether she had weighed me and found how short I am on the many picturesque qualities she seemed to admire. Praising bank robbers for their daring—well, the summer’s still ahead. Maybe something will turn up to show me in a better light.

Ray and the handsome young cowboy overtook us then, and Ellie paired off with him. He was black as a thunderstorm when he came up, but it didn’t take her long to wipe the scowl off his face. I watched them riding along together, a few rods ahead of us, and I’ll admit they made a fine-looking couple together. Probably engaged or something, though her talk to me certainly didn’t sound that way. Still, she may just have been in one of her moods. Clever girl, though. One who does her own thinking, and that speaks well for her mind, even if she thinks wrong.

One thing that talk did for me, and that’s why I wrote down the entire conversation. It gave me a line on Sheriff Whitcome, and I’ve been taking particular notice of his attitude toward his family. Ellie has him doped out right, I can see that. Whenever he looked at Ray, there was something in his eyes that made me gulp. I can’t say that he showed his idolatry of the young whelp in any other way, but his eyes told the story. Funny I hadn’t noticed it before.

I also noticed that he treats Ellie rather casually, too. He seems to take her for granted, though he listens when she speaks and watches her moving around the room. I believe, though, it’s her voice and her figure that attract him, and not so much what she says. There’s something in her voice I can’t put a name to, and she’s a darned graceful girl—even her own father would enjoy looking at her.

But I guess any particular partiality on her dad’s part for Ray is mostly her imagination. The sheriff’s proud of his girl, I’ll bet. But he’s had her around the house all her life, and Ray has been gone for months. I think maybe that’s it. If she says anything more about it, I’m going to tell her that.

The sheriff is worried about that gang again. He said he had got word that they had been seen by a prospector riding into a canyon over in the Little Belt Mountains, and he’s going to ride over there to-morrow himself and see what there is to it. They don’t seem to have been doing anything violent; just riding along. He thinks it’s possible that is where they have their hide-out. He says they could cut across from Dry Ridge easily enough, if they know the country, which they undoubtedly do.

I wish I had the nerve to ask if I might go along. Not to hunt the gang, but just to see the country. I need all the local color I can get. Maybe I could get in some fishing while he hunted his bandits. But I don’t think I’ll make a point of it, but just let events shape themselves.