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GOOD INDIAN (Part 1)

CHAPTER I

PEACEFUL HART RANCH

It was somewhere in the seventies when old Peaceful Hart woke to a realization that gold-hunting and lumbago do not take kindly to one another, and the fact that his pipe and dim-eyed meditation appealed to him more keenly than did his prospector’s pick and shovel and pan seemed to imply that he was growing old. He was a silent man, by occupation and by nature, so he said nothing about it; but, like the wild things of prairie and wood, instinctively began preparing for the winter of his life. Where he had lately been washing tentatively the sand along Snake River, he built a ranch. His prospector’s tools he used in digging ditches to irrigate his new-made meadows, and his mining days he lived over again only in halting recital to his sons when they clamored for details of the old days when Indians were not mere untidy neighbors to be gossiped with and fed, but enemies to be fought, upon occasion.

They felt that fate had cheated them—did those five sons; for they had been born a few years too late for the fun. Not one of them would ever have earned the title of “Peaceful,” as had his father. Nature had played a joke upon old Peaceful Hart; for he, the mildest-mannered man who ever helped to tame the West when it really needed taming, had somehow fathered five riotous young males to whom fight meant fun—and the fiercer, the funnier.

He used to suck at his old, straight-stemmed pipe and regard them with a bewildered curiosity sometimes; but he never tried to put his puzzlement into speech. The nearest he ever came to elucidation, perhaps, was when he turned from them and let his pale-blue eyes dwell speculatively upon the face of his wife, Phoebe. Clearly he considered that she was responsible for their dispositions.

The house stood cuddled against a rocky bluff so high it dwarfed the whole ranch to pygmy size when one gazed down from the rim, and so steep that one wondered how the huge, gray bowlders managed to perch upon its side instead of rolling down and crushing the buildings to dust and fragments. Strangers used to keep a wary eye upon that bluff, as if they never felt quite safe from its menace. Coyotes skulked there, and tarantulas and “bobcats” and snakes. Once an outlaw hid there for days, within sight and hearing of the house, and stole bread from Phoebe’s pantry at night—but that is a story in itself.

A great spring gurgled out from under a huge bowlder just behind the house, and over it Peaceful had built a stone milk house, where Phoebe spent long hours in cool retirement on churning day, and where one went to beg good things to eat and to drink. There was fruit cake always hidden away in stone jars, and cheese, and buttermilk, and cream.

Peaceful Hart must have had a streak of poetry somewhere hidden away in his silent soul. He built a pond against the bluff; hollowed it out from the sand he had once washed for traces of gold, and let the big spring fill it full and seek an outlet at the far end, where it slid away under a little stone bridge. He planted the pond with rainbow trout, and on the margin a rampart of Lombardy poplars, which grew and grew until they threatened to reach up and tear ragged holes in the drifting clouds. Their slender shadows lay, like gigantic fingers, far up the bluff when the sun sank low in the afternoon.

Behind them grew a small jungle of trees-catalpa and locust among them—a jungle which surrounded the house, and in summer hid it from sight entirely.

With the spring creek whispering through the grove and away to where it was defiled by trampling hoofs in the corrals and pastures beyond, and with the roses which Phoebe Hart kept abloom until the frosts came, and the bees, and humming—birds which somehow found their way across the parched sagebrush plains and foregathered there, Peaceful Hart’s ranch betrayed his secret longing for girls, as if he had unconsciously planned it for the daughters he had been denied.

It was an ideal place for hammocks and romance—a place where dainty maidens might dream their way to womanhood. And Peaceful Hart, when all was done, grew old watching five full-blooded boys clicking their heels unromantically together as they roosted upon the porch, and threw cigarette stubs at the water lilies while they wrangled amiably over the merits of their mounts; saw them drag their blankets out into the broody dusk of the grove when the nights were hot, and heard their muffled swearing under their “tarps” because of the mosquitoes which kept the night air twanging like a stricken harp string with their song.

They liked the place well enough. There were plenty of shady places to lie and smoke in when the mercury went sizzling up its tiny tube. Sometimes, when there was a dance, they would choose the best of Phoebe’s roses to decorate their horses’ bridles; and perhaps their hatbands, also. Peaceful would then suck harder than ever at his pipe, and his faded blue eyes would wander pathetically about the little paradise of his making, as if he wondered whether, after all, it had been worth while.

A tight picket fence, built in three unswerving lines from the post planted solidly in a cairn of rocks against a bowlder on the eastern rim of the pond, to the road which cut straight through the ranch, down that to the farthest tree of the grove, then back to the bluff again, shut in that tribute to the sentimental side of Peaceful’s nature. Outside the fence dwelt sturdier, Western realities.

Once the gate swung shut upon the grove one blinked in the garish sunlight of the plains. There began the real ranch world. There was the pile of sagebrush fuel, all twisted and gray, pungent as a bottle of spilled liniment, where braided, blanketed bucks were sometimes prevailed upon to labor desultorily with an ax in hope of being rewarded with fruit new-gathered from the orchard or a place at Phoebe’s long table in the great kitchen.

There was the stone blacksmith shop, where the boys sweated over the nice adjustment of shoes upon the feet of fighting, wild-eyed horses, which afterward would furnish a spectacle of unseemly behavior under the saddle.

Farther away were the long stable, the corrals where broncho-taming was simply so much work to be performed, hayfields, an orchard or two, then rocks and sand and sage which grayed the earth to the very skyline.

A glint of slithering green showed where the Snake hugged the bluff a mile away, and a brown trail, ankle-deep in dust, stretched straight out to the west, and then lost itself unexpectedly behind a sharp, jutting point of rocks where the bluff had thrust out a rugged finger into the valley.

By devious turnings and breath-taking climbs, the trail finally reached the top at the only point for miles, where it was possible for a horseman to pass up or down.

Then began the desert, a great stretch of unlovely sage and lava rock and sand for mile upon mile, to where the distant mountain ridges reached out and halted peremptorily the ugly sweep of it. The railroad gashed it boldly, after the manner of the iron trail of modern industry; but the trails of the desert dwellers wound through it diffidently, avoiding the rough crest of lava rock where they might, dodging the most aggressive sagebrush and dipping tentatively into hollows, seeking always the easiest way to reach some remote settlement or ranch.

Of the men who followed those trails, not one of them but could have ridden straight to the Peaceful Hart ranch in black darkness; and there were few, indeed, white men or Indians, who could have ridden there at midnight and not been sure of blankets and a welcome to sweeten their sleep. Such was the Peaceful Hart Ranch, conjured from the sage and the sand in the valley of the Snake.

CHAPTER II

GOOD INDIAN

There is a saying—and if it is not purely Western, it is at least purely American—that the only good Indian is a dead Indian. In the very teeth of that, and in spite of the fact that he was neither very good, nor an Indian—nor in any sense “dead”—men called Grant Imsen “Good Indian” to his face; and if he resented the title, his resentment was never made manifest—perhaps because he had grown up with the name, he rather liked it when he was a little fellow, and with custom had come to take it as a matter of course.

Because his paternal ancestry went back, and back to no one knows where among the race of blue eyes and fair skin, the Indians repudiated relationship with him, and called him white man—though they also spoke of him unthinkingly as “Good Injun.”

Because old Wolfbelly himself would grudgingly admit under pressure that the mother of Grant had been the half-caste daughter of Wolfbelly’s sister, white men remembered the taint when they were angry, and called him Injun. And because he stood thus between the two races of men, his exact social status a subject always open to argument, not even the fact that he was looked upon by the Harts as one of the family, with his own bed always ready for him in a corner of the big room set apart for the boys, and with a certain place at the table which was called his—not even his assured position there could keep him from sometimes feeling quite alone, and perhaps a trifle bitter over his loneliness.

Phoebe Hart had mothered him from the time when his father had sickened and died in her house, leaving Grant there with twelve years behind him, in his hands a dirty canvas bag of gold coin so heavy he could scarce lift it, which stood for the mining claim the old man had just sold, and the command to invest every one of the gold coins in schooling.

Old John Imsen was steeped in knowledge of the open; nothing of the great outdoors had ever slipped past him and remained mysterious. Put when he sold his last claim—others he had which promised little and so did not count—he had signed his name with an X. Another had written the word John before that X, and the word Imsen after; above, a word which he explained was “his,” and below the word “mark.” John Imsen had stared down suspiciously at the words, and he had not felt quite easy in his mind until the bag of gold coins was actually in his keeping. Also, he had been ashamed of that X. It was a simple thing to make with a pen, and yet he had only succeeded in making it look like two crooked sticks thrown down carelessly, one upon the other. His face had gone darkly red with the shame of it, and he had stood scowling down at the paper.

“That boy uh mine’s goin’ to do better ’n that, by God!” he had sworn, and the words had sounded like a vow.

When, two months after that, he had faced—incredulously, as is the way with strong men—the fact that for him life was over, with nothing left to him save an hour or so of labored breath and a few muttered sentences, he did not forget that vow. He called Phoebe close to the bed, placed the bag of gold in Grant’s trembling hands, and stared intently from one face to the other.

“Mis’ Hart, he ain’t got—anybody—my folks—I lost track of ’em years ago. You see to it—git some learnin’ in his head. When a man knows books—it’s—like bein’ heeled—good gun—plenty uh ca’t’idges—in a fight. When I got that gold—it was like fightin’ with my bare hands—against a gatlin’ gun. They coulda cheated me—whole thing—on paper—I wouldn’t know—luck—just luck they didn’t. So you take it—and git the boy schoolin’. Costs money—I know that—git him all it’ll buy. Send him—where they keep—the best. Don’t yuh let up—n’er let him—whilst they’s a dollar left. Put it all—into his head—then he can’t lose it, and he can—make it earn more. An’—I guess I needn’t ask yuh—be good to him. He ain’t got anybody—not a soul—Injuns don’t count. You see to it—don’t let up till—it’s all gone.”

Phoebe had taken him literally. And Grant, if he had little taste for the task, had learned books and other things not mentioned in the curriculums of the schools she sent him to—and when the bag was reported by Phoebe to be empty, he had returned with inward relief to the desultory life of the Hart ranch and its immediate vicinity.

His father would probably have been amazed to see how little difference that schooling made in the boy. The money had lasted long enough to take him through a preparatory school and into the second year of a college; and the only result apparent was speech a shade less slipshod than that of his fellows, and a vocabulary which permitted him to indulge in an amazing number of epithets and in colorful vituperation when the fancy seized him.

He rode, hot and thirsty and tired, from Sage Hill one day and found Hartley empty of interest, hot as the trail he had just now left thankfully behind him, and so absolutely sleepy that it seemed likely to sink into the sage-clothed earth under the weight of its own dullness. Even the whisky was so warm it burned like fire, and the beer he tried left upon his outraged palate the unhappy memory of insipid warmth and great bitterness.

He plumped the heavy glass down upon the grimy counter in the dusty far corner of the little store and stared sourly at Pete Hamilton, who was apathetically opening hatboxes for the inspection of an Indian in a red blanket and frowsy braids.

“How much?” The braided one fingered indecisively the broad brim of a gray sombrero.

“Nine dollars.” Pete leaned heavily against the shelves behind him and sighed with the weariness of mere living.

“Huh! All same buy one good hoss.” The braided one dropped the hat, hitched his blanket over his shoulder in stoical disregard of the heat, and turned away.

Pete replaced the cover, seemed about to place the box upon the shelf behind him, and then evidently decided that it was not worth the effort. He sighed again.

“It is almighty hot,” he mumbled languidly. “Want another drink, Good Injun?”

“I do not. Hot toddy never did appeal to me, my friend. If you weren’t too lazy to give orders, Pete, you’d have cold beer for a day like this. You’d give Saunders something to do beside lie in the shade and tell what kind of a man he used to be before his lungs went to the bad. Put him to work. Make him pack this stuff down cellar where it isn’t two hundred in the shade. Why don’t you?”

“We was going to get ice t’day, but they didn’t throw it off when the train went through.”

“That’s comforting—to a man with a thirst like the great Sahara. Ice! Pete, do you know what I’d like to do to a man that mentions ice after a drink like that?”

Pete neither knew nor wanted to know, and he told Grant so. “If you’re going down to the ranch,” he added, by way of changing the subject, “there’s some mail you might as well take along.”

“Sure, I’m going—for a drink out of that spring, if nothing else. You’ve lost a good customer today, Pete. I rode up here prepared to get sinfully jagged—and here I’ve got to go on a still hunt for water with a chill to it—or maybe buttermilk. Pete, do you know what I think of you and your joint?”

“I told you I don’t wanta know. Some folks ain’t never satisfied. A fellow that’s rode thirty or forty miles to get here, on a day like this, had oughta be glad to get anything that looks like beer.”

“Is that so?” Grant walked purposefully down to the front of the store, where Pete was fumbling behind the rampart of crude pigeonholes which was the post-office. “Let me inform you, then, that—”

There was a swish of skirts upon the rough platform outside, and a young woman entered with the manner of feeling perfectly at home there. She was rather tall, rather strong and capable looking, and she was bareheaded, and carried a door key suspended from a smooth-worn bit of wood.

“Don’t get into a perspiration making up the mail, Pete,” she advised calmly, quite ignoring both Grant and the Indian. “Fifteen is an hour late—as usual. Jockey Bates always seems to be under the impression he’s an undertaker’s assistant, and is headed for the graveyard when he takes fifteen out. He’ll get the can, first he knows—and he’ll put in a month or two wondering why. I could make better time than he does myself.” By then she was leaning with both elbows upon the counter beside the post-office, bored beyond words with life as it must be lived—to judge from her tone and her attitude.

“For Heaven’s sake, Pete,” she went on languidly, “can’t you scare up a novel, or chocolates, or gum, or—anything to kill time? I’d even enjoy chewing gum right now—it would give my jaws something to think of, anyway.”

Pete, grinning indulgently, came out of retirement behind the pigeonholes, and looked inquiringly around the store.

“I’ve got cards,” he suggested. “What’s the matter with a game of solitary? I’ve known men to put in hull winters alone, up in the mountains, jest eating and sleeping and playin’ solitary.”

The young woman made a grimace of disgust. “I’ve come from three solid hours of it. What I really do want is something to read. Haven’t you even got an almanac?”

“Saunders is readin’ The Brokenhearted Bride—you can have it soon’s he’s through. He says it’s a peach.”

“Fifteen is bringing up a bunch of magazines. I’ll have reading in plenty two hours from now; but my heavens above, those two hours!” She struck both fists despairingly upon the counter.

“I’ve got gumdrops, and fancy mixed—”

“Forget it, then. A five-pound box of chocolates is due—on fifteen.” She sighed heavily. “I wish you weren’t so old, and hadn’t quite so many chins, Pete,” she complained. “I’d inveigle you into a flirtation. You see how desperate I am for something to do!”

Pete smiled unhappily. He was sensitive about all those chins, and the general bulk which accompanied them.

“Let me make you acquainted with my friend, Good In—er—Mr. Imsen.” Pete considered that he was behaving with great discernment and tact. “This is Miss Georgie Howard, the new operator.” He twinkled his little eyes at her maliciously. “Say, he ain’t got but one chin, and he’s only twenty-three years old.” He felt that the inference was too plain to be ignored.

She turned her head slowly and looked Grant over with an air of disparagement, while she nodded negligently as an acknowledgment to the introduction. “Pete thinks he’s awfully witty,” she remarked. “It’s really pathetic.”

Pete bristled—as much as a fat man could bristle on so hot a day. “Well, you said you wanted to flirt, and so I took it for granted you’d like—”

Good Indian looked straight past the girl, and scowled at Pete.

“Pete, you’re an idiot ordinarily, but when you try to be smart you’re absolutely insufferable. You’re mentally incapable of recognizing the line of demarcation between legitimate persiflage and objectionable familiarity. An ignoramus of your particular class ought to confine his repartee to unqualified affirmation or the negative monosyllable.” Whereupon he pulled his hat more firmly upon his head, hunched his shoulders in disgust, remembered his manners, and bowed to Miss Georgie Howard, and stalked out, as straight of back as the Indian whose blanket he brushed, and who may have been, for all he knew, a blood relative of his.

“I guess that ought to hold you for a while, Pete,” Miss Georgie approved under her breath, and stared after Grant curiously. “‘You’re mentally incapable of recognizing the line of demarcation between legitimate persiflage and objectionable familiarity.’ I’ll bet two bits you don’t know what that means, Pete; but it hits you off exactly. Who is this Mr. Imsen?”

She got no reply to that. Indeed, she did not wait for a reply. Outside, things were happening—and, since Miss Georgie was dying of dullness, she hailed the disturbance as a Heaven-sent blessing, and ran to see what was going on.

Briefly, Grant had inadvertently stepped on a sleeping dog’s paw—a dog of the mongrel breed which infests Indian camps, and which had attached itself to the blanketed buck inside. The dog awoke with a yelp, saw that it was a stranger who had perpetrated the outrage, and straightway fastened its teeth in the leg of Grant’s trousers. Grant kicked it loose, and when it came at him again, he swore vengeance and mounted his horse in haste.

He did not say a word. He even smiled while he uncoiled his rope, widened the loop, and, while the dog was circling warily and watching for another chance at him, dropped the loop neatly over its front quarters, and drew it tight.

Saunders, a weak-lunged, bandy-legged individual, who was officially a general chore man for Pete, but who did little except lie in the shade, reading novels or gossiping, awoke then, and, having a reputation for tender-heartedness, waved his arms and called aloud in the name of peace.

“Turn him loose, I tell yuh! A helpless critter like that—you oughta be ashamed—abusin’ dumb animals that can’t fight back!”

“Oh, can’t he?” Grant laughed grimly.

“You turn that dog loose!” Saunders became vehement, and paid the penalty of a paroxysm of coughing.

“You go to the devil. If you were an able-bodied man, I’d get you, too—just to have a pair of you. Yelping, snapping curs, both of you.” He played the dog as a fisherman plays a trout.

“That dog, him Viney dog. Viney heap likum. You no killum, Good Injun.” The Indian, his arms folded in his blanket, stood upon the porch watching calmly the fun. “Viney all time heap mad, you killum,” he added indifferently.

“Sure it isn’t old Hagar’s?”

“No b’long-um Hagar—b’long-um Viney. Viney heap likum.”

Grant hesitated, circling erratically with his victim close to the steps. “All right, no killum—teachum lesson, though. Viney heap bueno squaw—heap likum Viney. No likum dog, though. Dog all time come along me.” He glanced up, passed over the fact that Miss Georgie Howard was watching him and clapping her hands enthusiastically at the spectacle, and settled an unfriendly stare upon Saunders.

“You shut up your yowling. You’ll burst a blood vessel and go to heaven, first thing you know. I’ve never contemplated hiring you as my guardian angel, you blatting buck sheep. Go off and lie down somewhere.” He turned in the saddle and looked down at the dog, clawing and fighting the rope which held him fast just back of the shoulder—blades. “Come along, doggie—nice doggie!” he grinned, and touched his horse with the spurs. With one leap, it was off at a sharp gallop, up over the hill and through the sagebrush to where he knew the Indian camp must be.

Old Wolfbelly had but that morning brought his thirty or forty followers to camp in the hollow where was a spring of clear water—the hollow which had for long been known locally as “the Indian Camp,” because of Wolfbelly’s predilection for the spot. Without warning save for the beat of hoofs in the sandy soil, Grant charged over the brow of the hill and into camp, scattering dogs, papooses, and squaws alike as he rode.

Shrill clamor filled the sultry air. Sleeping bucks awoke, scowling at the uproar; and the horse of Good Indian, hating always the smell and the litter of an Indian camp, pitched furiously into the very wikiup of old Hagar, who hated the rider of old. In the first breathing spell he loosed the dog, which skulked, limping, into the first sheltered spot he found, and laid him down to lick his outraged person and whimper to himself at the memory of his plight. Grant pulled his horse to a restive stand before a group of screeching squaws, and laughed outright at the panic of them.

“Hello! Viney! I brought back your dog,” he drawled. “He tried to bite me—heap kay bueno1 dog. Mebbyso you killum. Me no hurtum—all time him Hartley, all time him try hard bite me. Sleeping Turtle tell me him Viney dog. He likum Viney, me no kill Viney dog. You all time mebbyso eat that dog—sabe? No keep—Kay bueno. All time try for bite. You cookum, no can bite. Sabe?”

Without waiting to see whether Viney approved of his method of disciplining her dog, or intended to take his advice regarding its disposal, he wheeled and started off in the direction of the trail which led down the bluff to the Hart ranch. When he reached the first steep descent, however, he remembered that Pete had spoken of some mail for the Harts, and turned back to get it.

Once more in Hartley, he found that the belated train was making up time, and would be there within an hour; and, since it carried mail from the West, it seemed hardly worthwhile to ride away before its arrival. Also, Pete intimated that there was a good chance of prevailing upon the dining-car conductor to throw off a chunk of ice. Grant, therefore, led his horse around into the shade, and made himself comfortable while he waited.

CHAPTER III

OLD WIVES TALES

Down the winding trail of Snake River bluff straggled a blanketed half dozen of old Wolfbelly’s tribe, the braves stalking moodily in front and kicking up a gray cloud of dust which enveloped the squaws behind them but could not choke to silence their shrill chatter; for old Hagar was there, and Viney, and the incident of the dog was fresh in their minds and tickling their tongues.

The Hart boys were assembled at the corral, halter-breaking a three-year-old for the pure fun of it. Wally caught sight of the approaching blotch of color, and yelled a wordless greeting; him had old Hagar carried lovingly upon her broad shoulders with her own papoose when he was no longer than her arm; and she knew his voice even at that distance, and grinned—grinned and hid her joy in a fold of her dingy red blanket.

“Looks like old Wolfbelly’s back,” Clark observed needlessly. “Donny, if they don’t go to the house right away, you go and tell mum they’re here. Chances are the whole bunch’ll hang around till supper.”

“Say!” Gene giggled with fourteen-year-old irrepressibility. “Does anybody know where Vadnie is? If we could spring ’em on her and make her believe they’re on the warpath—say, I’ll gamble she’d run clear to the Malad!”

“I told her, cross my heart, this morning that the Injuns are peaceful now. I said Good Injun was the only one that’s dangerous—oh, I sure did throw a good stiff load, all right!” Clark grinned at the memory. “I’ve got to see Grant first, when he gets back, and put him wise to the rep he’s got. Vad didn’t hardly swallow it. She said: ‘Why, Cousin Clark! Aunt Phoebe says he’s perfectly lovely!”’ Clark mimicked the girl’s voice with relish.

“Aw—there’s a lot of squaws tagging along behind!” Donny complained disgustedly from his post of observation on the fence. “They’ll go to the house first thing to gabble—there’s old Hagar waddling along like a duck. You can’t make that warpath business stick, Clark—not with all them squaws.”

“Well, say, you sneak up and hide somewhere till yuh see if Vadnie’s anywhere around. If they get settled down talking to mum, they’re good for an hour—she’s churning, Don—you hide in the rocks by the milk-house till they get settled. And I’ll see if—Git! Pikeway, while they’re behind the stacks!”

Donny climbed down and scurried through the sand to the house as if his very life depended upon reaching it unseen. The group of Indians came up, huddled at the corral, and peered through the stout rails.

“How! How!” chorused the boys, and left the horse for a moment while they shook hands ceremoniously with the three bucks. Three Indians, Clark decided regretfully, would make a tame showing on the warpath, however much they might lend themselves to the spirit of the joke. He did not quite know how he was going to manage it, but he was hopeful still. It was unthinkable that real live Indians should be permitted to come and go upon the ranch without giving Evadna Ramsey, straight from New Jersey, the scare of her life.

The three bucks, grunting monosyllabic greetings’ climbed, in all the dignity of their blankets, to the top rail of the corral, and roosted there to watch the horse-breaking; and for the present Clark held his peace.

The squaws hovered there for a moment longer, peeping through the rails. Then Hagar—she of much flesh and more temper—grunted a word or two, and they turned and plodded on to where the house stood hidden away in its nest of cool green. For a space they stood outside the fence, peering warily into the shade, instinctively cautious in their manner of approaching a strange place, and detained also by the Indian etiquette which demands that one wait until invited to enter a strange camp.

After a period of waiting which seemed to old Hagar sufficient, she pulled her blanket tight across her broad hips, waddled to the gate, pulled it open with self-conscious assurance, and led the way soft-footedly around the house to where certain faint sounds betrayed the presence of Phoebe Hart in her stone milk-house.

At the top of the short flight of wide stone steps they stopped and huddled silently, until the black shadow of them warned Phoebe of their presence. She had lived too long in the West to seem startled when she suddenly discovered herself watched by three pair of beady black eyes, so she merely nodded, and laid down her butter-ladle to shake hands all around.

“How, Hagar? How, Viney? How, Lucy? Heap glad to see you. Bueno buttermilk—mebbyso you drinkum?”

However diffident they might be when it came to announcing their arrival, their bashfulness did not extend to accepting offers of food or drink. Three brown hands were eagerly outstretched—though it was the hand of Hagar which grasped first the big tin cup. They not only drank, they guzzled, and afterward drew a fold of blanket across their milk-white lips, and grinned in pure animal satisfaction.

“Bueno. He-e-ap bueno!” they chorused appreciatively, and squatted at the top of the stone steps, watching Phoebe manipulate the great ball of yellow butter in its wooden bowl.

After a brief silence, Hagar shook the tangle of unkempt, black hair away from her moonlike face, and began talking in a soft monotone, her voice now and then rising to a shrill singsong.

“Mebbyso Tom, mebbyso Sharlie, mebbyso Sleeping Turtle all time come along,” she announced. “Stop all time corral, talk yo’ boys. Mebbyso heap likum drink yo’ butter water. Bueno.”

When Phoebe nodded assent, Hagar went on to the news which had brought her so soon to the ranch—the news which satisfied both an old grudge and her love of gossip.

“Good Injun, him all time heap kay bueno,” she stated emphatically, her sloe black eyes fixed unwaveringly upon Phoebe’s face to see if the stab was effective. “Good Injun come Hartley, all time drunk likum pig.

“All time heap yell, heap shoot—kay bueno. Wantum fight Man-that-coughs. Come all time camp, heap yell, heap shoot some more. I fetchum dog—Viney dog—heap dragum through sagebrush—dog all time cry, no can get away—me thinkum kill that dog. Squaws cry—Viney cry—Good Injun”—Hagar paused here for greater effect—“makum horse all time buck—ridum in wikiup—Hagar wikiup—all time breakum—no can fix that wikiup. Good Injun, hee-e-ap kay bueno!” At the last her voice was high and tremulous with anger.

“Good Indian mebbyso all same my boy Wally.” Phoebe gave the butter a vicious slap. “Me heap love Good Indian. You no call Good Indian, you call Grant. Grant bueno. Heap bueno all time. No drunk, no yell, no shoot, mebbyso”—she hesitated, knowing well the possibilities of her foster son—“mebbyso catchum dog—me think no catchum. Grant all same my boy. All time me likum—heap bueno.”

Viney and Lucy nudged each other and tittered into their blankets, for the argument was an old one between Hagar and Phoebe, though the grievance of Hagar might be fresh. Hagar shifted her blanket and thrust out a stubborn under lip.

“Wally boy, heap bueno,” she said; and her malicious old face softened as she spoke of him, dear as her own first-born. “Jack bueno, mebbyso Gene bueno, mebbyso Clark, mebbyso Donny all time bueno.” Doubt was in her voice when she praised those last two, however, because of their continual teasing. She stopped short to emphasize the damning contrast. “Good Injun all same mebbyso yo’ boy Grant, hee-ee-eap kay bueno. Good Injun Grant all time debbil!”

It was at this point that Donny slipped away to report that “Mamma and old Hagar are scrappin’ over Good Injun again,” and told with glee the tale of his misdeeds as recounted by the squaw.

Phoebe in her earnestness forgot to keep within the limitations of their dialect.

“Grant’s a good boy, and a smart boy. There isn’t a better-hearted fellow in the country, if I have got five boys of my own. You think I like him better than I like Wally, is all ails you, Hagar. You’re jealous of Grant, and you always have been, ever since his father left him with me. I hope my heart’s big enough to hold them all.” She remembered then that they could not understand half she was saying, and appealed to Viney. Viney liked Grant.

“Viney, you tell me. Grant no come Hartley, no drunk, no yell, no catchum you dog, no ride in Hagar’s wikiup? You tell me, Viney.”

Viney and Lucy bobbed their heads rapidly up and down. Viney, with a sidelong glance at Hagar, spoke softly.

“Good Injun Grant, mebbyso home Hartley,” she admitted reluctantly, as if she would have been pleased to prove Hagar a liar in all things. “Me thinkum no drunk. Mebbyso ketchum dog—dog kay bueno, mebbyso me killing. Good Injun Grant no heap yell, no shoot all time—mebbyso no drunk. No breakum wikiup. Horse all time kay bueno, Hagar—”

“Shont-isham!” (big lie) Hagar interrupted shrilly then, and Viney relapsed into silence, her thin face growing sullen under the upbraiding she received in her native tongue. Phoebe, looking at her attentively, despaired of getting any nearer the truth from any of them.

There was a sudden check to Hagar’s shrewish clamor. The squaws stiffened to immobility and listened stolidly, their eyes alone betraying the curiosity they felt. Off somewhere at the head of the tiny pond, hidden away in the jungle of green, a voice was singing; a girl’s voice, and a strange voice—for the squaws knew well the few women voices along the Snake.

“That my girl,” Phoebe explained, stopping the soft pat—pat of her butter-ladle.

“Where ketchum yo’ girl?” Hagar forgot her petulance, and became curious as any white woman.

“Me ketchum ’way off, where sun come up. In time me have heap boys—mebbyso want girl all time. My mother’s sister’s boy have one girl, ’way off where sun come up. My mother’s sister’s boy die, his wife all same die, that girl mebbyso heap sad; no got father, no got mother—all time got nobody. Kay bueno. That girl send one letter, say all time got nobody. Me want one girl. Me send one letter, tell that girl come, be all time my girl. Five days ago, that girl come. Her heap glad; boys all time heap glad, my man heap glad. Bueno. Mebbyso you glad me have one girl.” Not that their approval was necessary, or even of much importance; but Phoebe was accustomed to treat them like spoiled children.

Hagar’s lip was out-thrust again. “Yo’ ketchum one girl, mebbyso yo’ no more likum my boy Wally. Kay bueno.”

“Heap like all my boys jus’ same,” Phoebe hastened to assure her, and added with a hint of malice, “Heap like my boy Grant all same.”

“Huh!” Hagar chose to remain unconvinced and antagonistic. “Good Injun kay bueno. Yo’ girl, mebbyso kay bueno.”

“What name yo’ girl?” Viney interposed hastily.

“Name Evadna Ramsey.” In spite of herself, Phoebe felt a trifle chilled by their lack of enthusiasm. She went back to her butter-making in dignified silence.

The squaws blinked at her stolidly. Always they were inclined toward suspicion of strangers, and perhaps to a measure of jealousy as well. Not many whites received them with frank friendship as did the Hart family, and they felt far more upon the subject than they might put into words, even the words of their own language.

Many of the white race looked upon them as beggars, which was bad enough, or as thieves, which was worse; and in a general way they could not deny the truth of it. But they never stole from the Harts, and they never openly begged from the Harts. The friends of the Harts, however, must prove their friendship before they could hope for better than an imperturbable neutrality. So they would not pretend to be glad. Hagar was right—perhaps the girl was no good. They would wait until they could pass judgment upon this girl who had come to live in the wikiup of the Harts. Then Lucy, she who longed always for children and had been denied by fate, stirred slightly, her nostrils aquiver.

“Mebbyso bueno yo’ girl,” she yielded, speaking softly. “Mebbyso see yo’ girl.”

Phoebe’s face cleared, and she called, in mellow crescendo: “Oh, Va-ad-niee?” Immediately the singing stopped.

“Coming, Aunt Phoebe,” answered the voice.

The squaws wrapped themselves afresh in their blankets, passed brown palms smoothingly down their hair from the part in the middle, settled their braids upon their bosoms with true feminine instinct, and waited. They heard her feet crunching softly in the gravel that bordered the pond, but not a head turned that way; for all the sign of life they gave, the three might have been mere effigies of women. They heard a faint scream when she caught sight of them sitting there, and their faces settled into more stolid indifference, adding a hint of antagonism even to the soft eyes of Lucy, the tender, childless one.

“Vadnie, here are some new neighbors I want you to get acquainted with.” Phoebe’s eyes besought the girl to be calm. “They’re all old friends of mine. Come here and let me introduce you—and don’t look so horrified, honey!”

Those incorrigibles, her cousins, would have whooped with joy at her unmistakable terror when she held out a trembling hand and gasped faintly: “H-how do you—do?”

“This Hagar,” Phoebe announced cheerfully; and the old squaw caught the girl’s hand and gripped it tightly for a moment in malicious enjoyment of her too evident fear and repulsion.

“This Viney.”

Viney, reading Evadna’s face in one keen, upward glance, kept her hands hidden in the folds of her blanket, and only nodded twice reassuringly.

“This Lucy.”

Lucy read also the girl’s face; but she reached up, pressed her hand gently, and her glance was soft and friendly. So the ordeal was over.

“Bring some of that cake you baked today, honey—and do brace up!” Phoebe patted her upon the shoulder.

Hagar forestalled the hospitable intent by getting slowly upon her fat legs, shaking her hair out of her eyes, and grunting a command to the others. With visible reluctance Lucy and Viney rose also, hitched their blankets into place, and vanished, soft-footed as they had come.

“Oo-oo!” Evadna stared at the place where they were not. “Wild Indians—I thought the boys were just teasing when they said so—and it’s really true, Aunt Phoebe?”

“They’re no wilder than you are,” Phoebe retorted impatiently.

“Oh, they are wild. They’re exactly like in my history—and they don’t make a sound when they go—you just look, and they’re gone! That old fat one—did you see how she looked at me? As if she wanted to—scalp me, Aunt Phoebe! She looked right at my hair and—”

“Well, she didn’t take it with her, did she? Don’t be silly. I’ve known old Hagar ever since Wally was a baby. She took him right to her own wikiup and nursed him with her own papoose for two months when I was sick, and Viney stayed with me day and night and pulled me through. Lucy I’ve known since she was a papoose. Great grief, child! Didn’t you hear me say they’re old friends? I wanted you to be nice to them, because if they like you there’s nothing they won’t do for you. If they don’t, there’s nothing they will do. You might as well get used to them—”

Out by the gate rose a clamor which swept nearer and nearer until the noise broke at the corner of the house like a great wave, in a tumult of red blanket, flying black hair, the squalling of a female voice, and the harsh laughter of the man who carried the disturbance, kicking and clawing, in his arms. Fighting his way to the milk-house, he dragged the squaw along beside the porch, followed by the Indians and all the Hart boys, a yelling, jeering audience.

“You tell her shont-isham! Ah-h—you can’t break loose, you old she-wildcat. Quit your biting, will you? By all the big and little spirits of your tribe, you’ll wish—”

Panting, laughing, swearing also in breathless exclamations, he forced her to the top of the steps, backed recklessly down them, and came to a stop in the corner by the door. Evadna had taken refuge there; and he pressed her hard against the rough wall without in the least realizing that anything was behind him save unsentient stone.

“Now, you sing your little song, and be quick about it!” he commanded his captive sternly. “You tell Mother Hart you lied. I hear she’s been telling you I’m drunk, Mother Hart—didn’t you, you old beldam? You say you heap sorry you all time tellum lie. You say: ‘Good Injun, him all time heap bueno.’ Say: ‘Good Injun no drunk, no heap shoot, no heap yell—all time bueno.’ Quick, or I’ll land you headforemost in that pond, you infernal old hag!”

“Good Injun hee-eeap kay bueno! Heap debbil all time.” Hagar might be short of breath, but her spirit was unconquered, and her under lip bore witness to her stubbornness.

Phoebe caught him by the arm then, thinking he meant to make good his threat—and it would not have been unlike Grant Imsen to do so.

“Now, Grant, you let her go,” she coaxed. “I know you aren’t drunk—of course, I knew it all the time. I told Hagar so. What do you care what she says about you? You don’t want to fight an old woman, Grant—a man can’t fight a woman—”

“You tell her you heap big liar!” Grant did not even look at Phoebe, but his purpose seemed to waver in spite of himself. “You all time kay bueno. You all time lie.” He gripped her more firmly, and turned his head slightly toward Phoebe. “You’d be tired of it yourself if she threw it into you like she does into me, Mother Hart. It’s got so I can’t ride past this old hag in the trail but she gives me the bad eye, and mumbles into her blanket. And if I look sidewise, she yowls all over the country that I’m drunk. I’m getting tired of it!” He shook the squaw as a puppy shakes a shoe—shook her till her hair quite hid her ugly old face from sight.

“All right—Mother Hart she tellum mebbyso let you go. This time I no throw you in pond. You heap take care next time, mebbyso. You no tellum big lie, me all time heap drunk. You kay bueno. All time me tellum Mother Hart, tellum boys, tellum Viney, Lucy, tellum Charlie and Tom and Sleeping Turtle you heap big liar. Me tell Wally shont-isham. Him all time my friend—mebbyso him no likum you no more.

“Huh. Get out—pikeway before I forget you’re a lady!”

He laughed ironically, and pushed her from him so suddenly that she sprawled upon the steps. The Indians grinned unsympathetically at her, for Hagar was not the most popular member of the tribe by any means. Scrambling up, she shook her witch locks from her face, wrapped herself in her dingy blanket, and scuttled away, muttering maledictions under her breath. The watching group turned and followed her, and in a few seconds the gate was heard to slam shut behind them. Grant stood where he was, leaning against the milk-house wall; and when they were gone, he gave a short, apologetic laugh.

“No need to lecture, Mother Hart. I know it was a fool thing to do; but when Donny told me what the old devil said, I was so mad for a minute—”

Phoebe caught him again by the arm and pulled him forward. “Grant! You’re squeezing Vadnie to death, just about! Great grief, I forgot all about the poor child being here! You poor little—”

“Squeezing who?” Grant whirled, and caught a brief glimpse of a crumpled little figure behind him, evidently too scared to cry, and yet not quite at the fainting point of terror. He backed, and began to stammer an apology; but she did not wait to hear a word of it. For an instant she stared into his face, and then, like a rabbit released from its paralysis of dread, she darted past him and deaf up the stone steps into the house. He heard the kitchen-door shut, and the click of the lock. He heard other doors slam suggestively; and he laughed in spite of his astonishment.

“And who the deuce might that be?” he asked, feeling in his pocket for smoking material.

Phoebe seemed undecided between tears and laughter. “Oh, Grant, Grant! She’ll think you’re ready to murder everybody on the ranch—and you can be such a nice boy when you want to be! I did hope—”

“I don’t want to be nice,” Grant objected, drawing a match along a fairly smooth rock.

“Well, I wanted you to appear at your best; and, instead of that, here you come, squabbling with old Hagar like—”

“Yes—sure. But who is the timid lady?”

“Timid! You nearly killed the poor girl, besides scaring her half to death, and then you call her timid. I know she thought there was going to be a real Indian massacre, right here, and she’d be scalped—”

Wally Hart came back, laughing to himself.

“Say, you’ve sure cooked your goose with old Hagar, Grant! She’s right on the warpath, and then some. She’d like to burn yuh alive—she said so. She’s headed for camp, and all the rest of the bunch at her heels. She won’t come here any more till you’re kicked off the ranch, as near as I could make out her jabbering. And she won’t do your washing any more, mum—she said so. You’re kay bueno yourself, because you take Good Indian’s part. We’re all kay bueno—all but me. She wanted me to quit the bunch and go live in her wikiup. I’m the only decent one in the outfit.” He gave his mother an affectionate little hug as he went past, and began an investigative tour of the stone jars on the cool rock floor within. “What was it all about, Grant? What did yuh do to her, anyway?”

“Oh, it wasn’t anything. Hand me up a cup of that buttermilk, will you? They’ve got a dog up there in camp that I’m going to kill some of these days—if they don’t beat me to it. He was up at the store, and when I went out to get my horse, he tried to take a leg off me. I kicked him in the nose and he came at me again, so when I mounted I just dropped my loop over Mr. Dog. Sleeping Turtle was there, and he said the dog belonged to Viney, So I just led him gently to camp.”

He grinned a little at the memory of his gentleness. “I told Viney I thought he’d make a fine stew, and, they’d better use him up right away before he spoiled. That’s all there was to it. Well, Keno did sink his head and pitch around camp a little, but not to amount to anything. He just stuck his nose into old Hagar’s wikiup—and one sniff seemed to be about all he wanted. He didn’t hurt anything.”

He took a meditative bite of cake, finished the buttermilk in three rapturous swallows, and bethought him of the feminine mystery.

“If you please, Mother Hart, who was that Christmas angel I squashed?”

“Vad? Was Vad in on it, mum? I never saw her.” Wally straightened up with a fresh chunk of cake in his hand. “Was she scared?”

“Yes,” his mother admitted reluctantly, “I guess she was, all right. First the squaws—and, poor girl, I made her shake hands all round—and then Grant here, acting like a wild hyena—”

“Say, please don’t tell me who she is, or where she belongs, or anything like that,” Grant interposed, with some sarcasm. “I smashed her flat between me and the wall, and I scared the daylights out of her; and I’m told I should have appeared at my best. But who she is, or where she belongs—”

“She belongs right here.” Phoebe’s tone was a challenge, whether she meant it to be so or not. “This is going to be her home from now on; and I want you boys to treat her nicer than you’ve been doing. She’s been here a week almost; and there ain’t one of you that’s made friends with her yet, or tried to, even. You’ve played jokes on her, and told her things to scare her—and my grief! I was hoping she’d have a softening influence on you, and make gentlemen of you. And far as I can make out, just having her on the place seems to put the Old Harry into every one of you! It isn’t right. It isn’t the way I expected my boys would act toward a stranger—a girl especially. And I did hope Grant would behave better.”

“Sure, he ought to. Us boneheads don’t know any better—but Grant’s educated.” Wally grinned and winked elaborately at his mother’s back.

“I’m not educated up to Christmas angels that look as if they’d been stepped on,” Grant defended himself.

“She’s a real nice little thing. If you boys would quit teasing the life out of her, I don’t doubt but what, in six months or so, you wouldn’t know the girl,” Phoebe argued, with some heat.

“I don’t know the girl now.” Grant spoke dryly. “I don’t want to. If I’d held a tomahawk in one hand and her flowing locks in the other, and was just letting a war-whoop outa me, she’d look at me—the way she did look.” He snorted in contemptuous amusement, and gave a little, writhing twist of his slim body into his trousers. “I never did like blondes,” he added, in a tone of finality, and started up the steps.

“You never liked anything that wore skirts,” Phoebe flung after him indignantly; and she came very close to the truth.

CHAPTER IV

THE CHRISTMAS ANGEL

Phoebe watched the two unhappily, sighed when they disappeared around the corner of the house, and set her bowl of butter upon the broad, flat rock which just missed being overflowed with water, and sighed again.

“I’m afraid it isn’t going to work,” she murmured aloud; for Phoebe, having lived much of her life in the loneliness which the West means to women, frequently talked to herself. “She’s such a nice little thing—but the boys don’t take to her like I thought they would. I don’t see as she’s having a mite of influence on their manners, unless it’s to make them act worse, just to shock her. Clark used to take off his hat when he come into the house most every time. And great grief! Now he’d wear it and his chaps and spurs to the table, if I didn’t make him take them off. She’s nice—she’s most too nice. I’ve got to give that girl a good talking to.”

She mounted the steps to the back porch, tried the kitchen door, and found it locked. She went around to the door on the west side, opposite the gate, found that also secured upon the inside, and passed grimly to the next.

“My grief! I didn’t know any of these doors could be locked!” she muttered angrily. “They never have been before that I ever heard of.” She stopped before Evadna’s window, and saw, through a slit in the green blind, that the old-fashioned bureau had been pulled close before it. “My grief!” she whispered disgustedly, and retraced her steps to the east side, which, being next to the pond, was more secluded. She surveyed dryly a window left wide open there, gathered her brown-and-white calico dress close about her plump person, and crawled grimly through into the sitting-room, where, to the distress of Phoebe’s order-loving soul, the carpet was daily well-sanded with the tread of boys’ boots fresh from outdoors, and where cigarette stubs decorated every window-sill, and the stale odor of Peaceful’s pipe was never long absent.

She went first to all the outer rooms, and unlocked every one of the outraged doors which, unless in the uproar and excitement of racing, laughing boys pursuing one another all over the place with much slamming and good-natured threats of various sorts, had never before barred the way of any man, be he red or white, came he at noon or at midnight.

Evadna’s door was barricaded, as Phoebe discovered when she turned the knob and attempted to walk in. She gave the door an indignant push, and heard a muffled shriek within, as if Evadna’s head was buried under her pillow.

“My grief! A body’d think you expected to be killed and eaten,” she called out unsympathetically. “You open this door! Vadnie Ramsey. This is a nice way to act with my own boys, in my own house! A body’d think—”

There was the sound of something heavy being dragged laboriously away from the barricaded door; and in a minute a vividly blue eye appeared at a narrow crack.

“Oh, I don’t see how you dare to l-live in such a place, Aunt Phoebe!” she cried tearfully, opening the door a bit wider. “Those Indians—and that awful man—”

“That was only Grant, honey. Let me in. There’s a few things I want to say to you, Vadnie. You promised to help me teach my boys to be gentle—it’s all they lack, and it takes gentle women, honey—”

“I am gentle,” Evadna protested grievedly. “I’ve never once forgotten to be gentle and quiet, and I haven’t done a thing to them—but they’re horrid and rough, anyway—”

“Let me in, honey, and we’ll talk it over. Something’s got to be done. If you wouldn’t be so timid, and would make friends with them, instead of looking at them as if you expected them to murder you—I must say, Vadnie, you’re a real temptation; they can’t help scaring you when you go around acting as if you expected to be scared. You—you’re too—” The door opened still wider, and she went in. “Now, the idea of a great girl like you hiding her head under a pillow just because Grant asked old Hagar to apologize!”

Evadna sat down upon the edge of the bed and stared unwinkingly at her aunt. “They don’t apologize like that in New Jersey,” she observed, with some resentment in her voice, and dabbed at her unbelievably blue eyes with a moist ball of handkerchief.

“I know they don’t, honey.” Phoebe patted her hand reassuringly. “That’s what I want you to help me teach my boys—to be real gentlemen. They’re pure gold, every one of them; but I can’t deny they’re pretty rough on the outside sometimes. And I hope you will be—”

“Oh, I know. I understand perfectly. You just got me out here as a—a sort of sandpaper for your boys’ manners!” Evadna choked over a little sob of self-pity. “I can just tell you one thing, Aunt Phoebe, that fellow you call Grant ought to be smoothed with one of those funny axes they hew logs with.”

Phoebe bit her lips because she wanted to treat the subject very seriously. “I want you to promise me, honey, that you will be particularly nice to Grant; particularly nice. He’s so alone, and he’s very proud and sensitive, because he feels his loneliness. No one understands him as I do—”

“I hate him!” gritted Evadna, in an emphatic whisper which her Aunt Phoebe thought it wise not to seem to hear.

Phoebe settled herself comfortably for a long talk. The murmur of her voice as she explained and comforted and advised came soothingly from the room, with now and then an interruption while she waited for a tardy answer to some question. Finally she rose and stood in the doorway, looking back at a huddled figure on the bed.

“Now dry your eyes and be a good girl, and remember what you’ve promised,” she admonished kindly. “Aunt Phoebe didn’t mean to scold you, honey; she only wants you to feel that you belong here, and she wants you to like her boys and have them like you. They’ve always wanted a sister to pet; and Aunt Phoebe is hoping you’ll not disappoint her. You’ll try; won’t you, Vadnie?”

“Y—yes,” murmured Vadnie meekly from the pillow. “I know you will.” Phoebe looked at her for a moment longer rather wistfully, and turned away. “I do wish she had some spunk,” she muttered complainingly, not thinking that Evadna might hear her. “She don’t take after the Ramseys none—there wasn’t anything mushy about them that I ever heard of.”

“Mushy! Mushy!” Evadna sat up and stared at nothing at all while she repeated the word under her breath. “She wants me to be gentle—she preached gentleness in her letters, and told how her boys need it, and then—she calls it being mushy!”

She reached mechanically for her hair-brush, and fumbled in a tumbled mass of shining, yellow hair quite as unbelievable in its way as were her eyes—Grant had shown a faculty for observing keenly when he called her a Christmas angel—and drew out a half-dozen hairpins, letting them slide from her lap to the floor. “Mushy!” she repeated, and shook down her hair so that it framed her face and those eyes of hers. “I suppose that’s what they all say behind my back. And how can a girl be nice without being mushy?” She drew the brush meditatively through her hair. “I am scared to death of Indians,” she admitted, with analytical frankness, “and tarantulas and snakes—but—mushy!”

Grant stood smoking in the doorway of the sitting-room, where he could look out upon the smooth waters of the pond darkening under the shade of the poplars and the bluff behind, when Evadna came out of her room. He glanced across at her, saw her hesitate, as if she were meditating a retreat, and gave his shoulders a twitch of tolerant amusement that she should be afraid of him. Then he stared out over the pond again. Evadna walked straight over to him.

“So you’re that other savage whose manners I’m supposed to smooth, are you?” she asked abruptly, coming to a stop within three feet of him, and regarding him carefully, her hands clasped behind her.

“Please don’t tease the animals,” Grant returned, in the same impersonal tone which she had seen fit to employ—but his eyes turned for a sidelong glance at her, although he appeared to be watching the trout rise lazily to the insects skimming over the surface of the water.

“I’m supposed to be nice to you—par-tic-ularly nice—because you need it most. I dare say you do, judging from what I’ve seen of you. At any rate, I’ve promised. But I just want you to understand that I’m not going to mean one single bit of it. I don’t like you—I can’t endure you!—and if I’m nice, it will just be because I’ve promised Aunt Phoebe. You’re not to take my politeness at its face value, for back of it I shall dislike you all the time.”

Grant’s lips twitched, and there was a covert twinkle in his eyes, though he looked around him with elaborate surprise.

“It’s early in the day for mosquitoes,” he drawled; “but I was sure I heard one buzzing somewhere close.”

“Aunt Phoebe ought to get a street roller to smooth your manners,” Evadna observed pointedly.

“Instead it’s as if she hung her picture of a Christmas angel up before the wolf’s den, eh?” he suggested calmly, betraying his Indian blood in the unconsciously symbolic form of expression. “No doubt the wolf’s nature will be greatly benefited—his teeth will be dulled for his prey, his voice softened for the nightcry—if he should ever, by chance, discover that the Christmas angel is there.”

“I don’t think he’ll be long in making the discovery.” The blue of Evadna’s eyes darkened and darkened until they were almost black. “Christmas angel,—well, I like that! Much you know about angels.”

Grant turned his head indolently and regarded her.

“If it isn’t a Christmas angel—they’re always very blue and very golden, and pinky-whitey—if it isn’t a Christmas angel, for the Lord’s sake what is it?” He gave his head a slight shake, as if the problem was beyond his solving, and flicked the ashes from his cigarette.

“Oh, I could pinch you!” She gritted her teeth to prove she meant what she said.

“It says it could pinch me.” Grant lazily addressed the trout. “I wonder why it didn’t, then, when it was being squashed?”

“I just wish to goodness I had! Only I suppose Aunt Phoebe—”

“I do believe it’s got a temper. I wonder, now, if it could be a live angel?” Grant spoke to the softly swaying poplars.

“Oh, you—there now!” She made a swift little rush at him, nipped his biceps between a very small thumb and two fingers, and stood back, breathing quickly and regarding him in a shamed defiance. “I’ll show you whether I’m alive!” she panted vindictively.

“It’s alive, and it’s a humming-bird. Angels don’t pinch.” Grant laid a finger upon his arm and drawled his solution of a trivial mystery. “It mistook me for a honeysuckle, and gave me a peck to make sure.” He smiled indulgently, and exhaled a long wreath of smoke from his nostrils. “Dear little humming-birds—so simple and so harmless!”

“And I’ve promised to be nice to—that!” cried Evadna, in bitterness, and rushed past him to the porch.

Being a house built to shelter a family of boys, and steps being a superfluity scorned by their agile legs, there was a sheer drop of three feet to the ground upon that side. Evadna made it in a jump, just as the boys did, and landed lightly upon her slippered feet.

“I hate you—hate you—hate you!” she cried, her eyes blazing up at his amused face before she ran off among the trees.

“It sings a sweet little song,” he taunted, and his laughter followed her mockingly as she fled from him into the shadows.

“What’s the joke, Good Injun? Tell us, so we can laugh too.” Wally and Jack hurried in from the kitchen and made for the doorway where he stood.

From under his straight, black brows Grant sent a keen glance into the shade of the grove, where, an instant before, had flickered the white of Evadna’s dress. The shadows lay there quietly now, undisturbed by so much as a sleepy bird’s fluttering wings.

“I was just thinking of the way I yanked that dog down into old Wolfbelly’s camp,” he said, though there was no tangible reason for lying to them. “Mister!” he added, his eyes still searching the shadows out there in the grove, “we certainly did go some!”

CHAPTER V

“I DON’T CARE MUCH ABOUT GIRLS”

“There’s no use asking the Injuns to go on the warpath,” Gene announced disgustedly, coming out upon the porch where the rest of the boys were foregathered, waiting for the ringing tattoo upon the iron triangle just outside the back door which would be the supper summons. “They’re too lazy to take the trouble—and, besides, they’re scared of dad. I was talking to Sleeping Turtle just now—met him down there past the Point o’ Rocks.”

“What’s the matter with us boys going on the warpath ourselves? We don’t need the Injuns. As long as she knows they’re hanging around close, it’s all the same. If we could just get mum off the ranch—”

“If we could kidnap her—say, I wonder if we couldn’t!” Clark looked at the others tentatively.

“Good Injun might do the rescue act and square himself with her for what happened at the milk-house,” Wally suggested dryly.

“Oh, say, you’d scare her to death. There’s no use in piling it on quite so thick,” Jack interposed mildly. “I kinda like the kid sometimes. Yesterday, when I took her part way up the bluff, she acted almost human. On the dead, she did!”

“Kill the traitor! Down with him! Curses on the man who betrays us!” growled Wally, waving his cigarette threateningly.

Whereupon Gene and Clark seized the offender by heels and shoulders, and with a brief, panting struggle heaved him bodily off the porch.

“Over the cliff he goes—so may all traitors perish!” Wally declaimed approvingly, drawing up his legs hastily out of the way of Jack’s clutching fingers.

“Say, old Peppajee’s down at the stable with papa,” Donny informed them breathlessly. “I told Marie to put him right next to Vadnie if he stays to supper—and, uh course, he will. If mamma don’t get next and change his place, it’ll be fun to watch her; watch Vad, I mean. She’s scared plum to death of anything that wears a blanket, and to have one right at her elbow—wonder where she is—”

“That girl’s got to be educated some if she’s going to live in this family,” Wally observed meditatively. “There’s a whole lot she’s got to learn, and the only way to learn her thorough is—”

“You forget,” Grant interrupted him ironically, “that she’s going to make gentlemen of us all.”

“Oh, yes—sure. Jack’s coming down with it already. You oughta be quarantined, old-timer; that’s liable to be catching.” Wally snorted his disdain of the whole proceeding. “I’d rather go to jail myself.”

Evadna by a circuitous route had reached the sitting-room without being seen or heard; and it was at this point in the conversation that she tiptoed out again, her hands doubled into tight little fists, and her teeth set hard together. She did not look, at that moment, in the least degree “mushy.”

When the triangle clanged its supper call, however, she came slowly down from her favorite nook at the head of the pond, her hands filled with flowers hastily gathered in the dusk.

“Here she comes—let’s get to our places first, so mamma can’t change Peppajee around,” Donny implored, in a whisper; and the group on the porch disappeared with some haste into the kitchen.

Evadna was leisurely in her movements that night. The tea had been poured and handed around the table by the Portuguese girl, Marie, and the sugar-bowl was going after, when she settled herself and her ruffles daintily between Grant and a braided, green-blanketed, dignifiedly loquacious Indian.

The boys signaled each another to attention by kicking surreptitiously under the table, but nothing happened. Evadna bowed a demure acknowledgment when her Aunt Phoebe introduced the two, accepted the sugar-bowl from Grant and the butter from Peppajee, and went composedly about the business of eating her supper. She seemed perfectly at ease; too perfectly at ease, decided Grant, who had an instinct for observation and was covertly watching her. It was unnatural that she should rub elbows with Peppajee without betraying the faintest trace of surprise that he should be sitting at the table with them.

“Long time ago,” Peppajee was saying to Peaceful, taking up the conversation where Evadna had evidently interrupted it, “many winters ago, my people all time brave. All time hunt, all time fight, all time heap strong. No drinkum whisky all same now.” He flipped a braid back over his shoulder, buttered generously a hot biscuit, and reached for the honey. “No brave no more—kay bueno. All time ketchum whisky, get drunk all same likum hog. Heap lazy. No hunt no more, no fight. Lay all time in sun, sleep. No sun come, lay all time in wikiup. Agent, him givum flour, givum meat, givum blanket, you thinkum bueno. He tellum you, kay bueno. Makum Injun lazy. Makum all same wachee-typo” (tramp). “All time eat, all time sleep, playum cards all time, drinkum whisky. Kay bueno. Huh.” The grunt stood for disgust of his tribe, always something of an affectation with Peppajee.

“My brother, my brother’s wife, my brother’s wife’s—ah—” He searched his mind, frowning, for an English word, gave it up, and substituted a phrase. “All the folks b’longum my brother’s wife, heap lazy all time. Me no likum. Agent one time givum plenty flour, plenty meat, plenty tea. Huh. Them damn’ folks no eatum. All time playum cards, drinkum whisky. All time otha fella ketchum flour, ketchum meat, ketchum tea—ketchum all them thing b’longum.” In the rhetorical pause he made there, his black eyes wandered inadvertently to Evadna’s face. And Evadna, the timid one, actually smiled back.

“Isn’t it a shame they should do that,” she murmured sympathetically.

“Huh.” Peppajee turned his eyes and his attention to Peaceful, as if the opinion and the sympathy of a mere female were not worthy his notice. “Them grub all gone, them Injuns mebbyso ketchum hungry belly.” Evadna blushed, and looked studiously at her plate.

“Come my wikiup. Me got plenty flour, plenty meat, plenty tea. Stay all time my wikiup. Sleepum my wikiup. Sun come up”—he pointed a brown, sinewy hand toward the east—“eatum my grub. Sun up there”—his finger indicated the zenith—“eatum some more. Sun go ’way, eatum some more. Then sleepum all time my wikiup. Bimeby, mebbyso my flour all gone, my meat mebbyso gone, mebbyso tea—them folks all time eatum grub, me no ketchum. Me no playum cards, all same otha fella ketchum my grub. Kay bueno. Better me playum cards mebbyso all time.

“Bimeby no ketchum mo’ grub, no stopum my wikiup. Them folks pikeway. Me tellum ‘Yo’ heap lazy, heap kay bueno. Yo’ all time eatum my grub, yo’ no givum me money, no givum hoss, no givum notting. Me damn’ mad all time yo’. Yo’ go damn’ quick!’” Peppajee held out his cup for more tea. “Me tellum my brother,” he finished sonorously, his black eyes sweeping lightly the faces of his audience, “yo’ no come back, yo’—”

Evadna caught her breath, as if someone had dashed cold water in her face. Never before in her life had she heard the epithet unprintable, and she stared fixedly at the old-fashioned, silver castor which always stood in the exact center of the table.

Old Peaceful Hart cleared his throat, glanced furtively at Phoebe, and drew his hand down over his white beard. The boys puffed their cheeks with the laughter they would, if possible, restrain, and eyed Evadna’s set face aslant. It was Good Indian who rebuked the offender.

“Peppajee, mebbyso you no more say them words,” he said quietly. “Heap kay bueno. White man no tellum where white woman hear. White woman no likum hear; all time heap shame for her.”

“Huh,” grunted Peppajee doubtingly, his eyes turning to Phoebe. Times before had he said them before Phoebe Hart, and she had passed them by with no rebuke. Grant read the glance, and answered it.

“Mother Hart live long time in this place,” he reminded him. “Hear bad talk many times. This girl no hear; no likum hear. You sabe? You no make shame for this girl.” He glanced challengingly across the table at Wally, whose grin was growing rather pronounced.

“Huh. Mebbyso you boss all same this ranch?” Peppajee retorted sourly. “Mebbyso Peacefu’ tellum, him no likum.”

Peaceful, thus drawn into the discussion, cleared his throat again.

“Wel-l-l—we don’t cuss much before the women,” he admitted apologetically “We kinda consider that men’s talk. I reckon Vadnie’ll overlook it this time.” He looked across at her beseechingly. “You no feelum bad, Peppajee.”

“Huh. Me no makum squaw-talk.” Peppajee laid down his knife, lifted a corner of his blanket, and drew it slowly across his stern mouth. He muttered a slighting sentence in Indian.

In the same tongue Grant answered him sharply, and after that was silence broken only by the subdued table sounds. Evadna’s eyes filled slowly until she finally pushed back her chair and hurried out into the yard and away from the dogged silence of that blanketed figure at her elbow.

She was scarcely settled, in the hammock, ready for a comforting half hour of tears, when someone came from the house, stood for a minute while he rolled a cigarette, and then came straight toward her.

She sat up, and waited defensively. More baiting, without a doubt—and she was not in the mood to remember any promises about being a nice, gentle little thing. The figure came close, stooped, and took her by the arm. In the half—light she knew him then. It was Grant.

“Come over by the pond,” he said, in what was almost a command. “I want to talk to you a little.”

“Does it occur to you that I might not want to talk t to you?” Still, she let him help her to her feet.

“Surely. You needn’t open your lips if you don’t want to. Just lend me your ears, and be silent that ye may hear.’ The boys will be boiling out on the porch, as usual, in a minute; so hurry.”

“I hope it’s something very important,” Evadna hinted ungraciously. “Nothing else would excuse this high-handed proceeding.”

When they had reached the great rock where the pond had its outlet, and where was a rude seat hidden away in a clump of young willows just across the bridge, he answered her.

“I don’t know that it’s of any importance at all,” he said calmly. “I got to feeling rather ashamed of myself, is all, and it seemed to me the only decent thing was to tell you so. I’m not making any bid for your favor—I don’t know that I want it. I don’t care much about girls, one way or the other. But, for all I’ve got the name of being several things—a savage among the rest—I don’t like to feel such a brute as to make war on a girl that seems to be getting it handed to her right along.”

He tardily lighted his cigarette and sat smoking beside her, the tiny glow lighting his face briefly now and then.

“When I was joshing you there before supper,” he went on, speaking low that he might not be overheard—and ridiculed—from the house, “I didn’t know the whole outfit was making a practice of doing the same thing. I hadn’t heard about the dead tarantula on your pillow, or the rattler coiled up on the porch, or any of those innocent little jokes. But if the rest are making it their business to devil the life out of you, why—common humanity forces me to apologize and tell you I’m out of it from now on.”

“Oh! Thank you very much.” Evadna’s tone might be considered ironical. “I suppose I ought to say that your statement lessens my dislike of you—”

“Not at all.” Grant interrupted her. “Go right ahead and hate me, if you feel that way. It won’t matter to me—girls never did concern me much, one way or the other. I never was susceptible to beauty, and that seems to be a woman’s trump card, always—”

“Well, upon my word!”

“Sounds queer, does it? But it’s the truth, and so what’s the use of lying, just to be polite? I won’t torment you any more; and if the boys rig up too strong a josh, I’m liable to give you a hint beforehand. I’m willing to do that—my sympathies are always with the under dog, anyway, and they’re five to one. But that needn’t mean that I’m—that I—” He groped for words that would not make his meaning too bald; not even Grant could quite bring himself to warn a girl against believing him a victim of her fascinations.

“You needn’t stutter. I’m not really stupid. You don’t like me any better than I like you. I can see that. We’re to be as decent as possible to each other—you from ‘common humanity,’ and I because I promised Aunt Phoebe.”

“We-e-l!—that’s about it, I guess.” Grant eyed her sidelong.” Only I wouldn’t go so far as to say I actually dislike you. I never did dislike a girl, that I remember. I never thought enough about them, one way or the other.” He seemed rather fond of that statement, he repeated it so often.” The life I live doesn’t call for girls. Put that’s neither here nor there. What I wanted to say was, that I won’t bother you any more. I wouldn’t have said a word to you tonight, if you hadn’t walked right up to me and started to dig into me. Of course, I had to fight back—the man who won’t isn’t a normal human being.”

“Oh, I know.” Evadna’s tone was resentful. “From Adam down to you, it has always been ‘The woman, she tempted me.’ You’re perfectly horrid, even if you have apologized. ‘The woman, she tempted me,’ and—”

“I beg your pardon; the woman didn’t,” he corrected blandly. “The woman insisted on scrapping. That’s different.”

“Oh, it’s different! I see. I have almost forgotten something I ought to say, Mr. Imsen. I must thank you for—well, for defending me to that Indian.”

“I didn’t. Nobody was attacking you, so I couldn’t very well defend you, could I? I had to take a fall out of old Peppajee, just on principle. I don’t get along very well with my noble red cousins. I wasn’t doing it on your account, in particular.”

“Oh, I see.” She rose rather suddenly from the bench. “It wasn’t even common humanity, then—”

“Not even common humanity,” he echoed affirmatively. “Just a chance I couldn’t afford to pass up, of digging into Peppajee.”

“That’s different.” She laughed shortly and left him, running swiftly through the warm dusk to the murmur of voices at the house.

Grant sat where she left him, and smoked two cigarettes meditatively before he thought of returning to the house. When he finally did get upon his feet, he stretched his arms high above his head, and stared for a moment up at the treetops swaying languidly just under the stars.

“Girls must play the very deuce with a man if he ever lets them get on his mind,” he mused. “I see right now where a fellow about my size and complexion had better watch out.” But he smiled afterward, as if he did not consider the matter very serious, after all.

CHAPTER VI

THE CHRISTMAS ANGEL PLAYS GHOST

At midnight, the Peaceful Hart ranch lay broodily quiet under its rock-rimmed bluff. Down in the stable the saddle-horses were but formless blots upon the rumpled bedding in their stalls—except Huckleberry, the friendly little pinto with the white eyelashes and the blue eyes, and the great, liver-colored patches upon his sides, and the appetite which demanded food at unseasonable hours, who was now munching and nosing industriously in the depths of his manger, and making a good deal of noise about it.

Outside, one of the milch cows drew a long, sighing breath of content with life, lifted a cud in mysterious, bovine manner, and chewed dreamily. Somewhere up the bluff a bobcat squalled among the rocks, and the moon, in its dissipated season of late rising, lifted itself indolently up to where it could peer down upon the silent ranch.

In the grove where the tiny creek gurgled under the little stone bridge, someone was snoring rhythmically in his blankets, for the boys had taken to sleeping in the open air before the earliest rose had opened buds in the sunny shelter of the porch. Three feet away, a sleeper stirred restlessly, lifted his head from the pillow, and slapped half-heartedly at an early mosquito that was humming in his ear. He reached out, and jogged the shoulder of him who snored.

“Say, Gene, if you’ve got to sleep at the top of your voice, you better drag your bed down into the orchard,” he growled. “Let up a little, can’t yuh?”

“Ah, shut up and let a fellow sleep!” mumbled Gene, snuggling the covers up to his ears.

“Just what I want you to do. You snore like a sawmill. Darn it, you’ve got to get out of the grove if yuh can’t—”

“Ah-h-ee-ee!” wailed a voice somewhere among the trees, the sound rising weirdly to a subdued crescendo, clinging there until one’s flesh went creepy, and then sliding mournfully down to silence.

“What’s that?” The two jerked themselves to a sitting position, and stared into the blackness of the grove.

“Bobcat,” whispered Clark, in a tone which convinced not even himself.

“In a pig’s ear,” flouted Gene, under his breath. He leaned far over and poked his finger into a muffled form. “D’yuh hear that noise, Grant?”

Grant sat up instantly. “What’s the matter?” he demanded, rather ill-naturedly, if the truth be told.

“Did you hear anything—a funny noise, like—”

The cry itself finished the sentence for him. It came from nowhere, it would seem, since they could see nothing; rose slowly to a subdued shriek, clung there nerve-wrackingly, and then wailed mournfully down to silence. Afterward, while their ears were still strained to the sound, the bobcat squalled an answer from among the rocks.

“Yes, I heard it,” said Grant. “It’s a spook. It’s the wail of a lost spirit, loosed temporarily from the horrors of purgatory. It’s sent as a warning to repent you of your sins, and it’s howling because it hates to go back. What you going to do about it?”

He made his own intention plain beyond any possibility of misunderstanding. He lay down and pulled the blanket over his shoulders, cuddled his pillow under his head, and disposed himself to sleep.

The moon climbed higher, and sent silvery splinters of light quivering down among the trees. A frog crawled out upon a great lily—pad and croaked dismally.

Again came the wailing cry, nearer than before, more subdued, and for that reason more eerily mournful. Grant sat up, muttered to himself, and hastily pulled on some clothes. The frog cut himself short in the middle of a deep-throated arr-rr-umph and dove headlong into the pond; and the splash of his body cleaving the still surface of the water made Gene shiver nervously. Grant reached under his pillow for something, and freed himself stealthily from a blanketfold.

“If that spook don’t talk Indian when it’s at home, I’m very much mistaken,” he whispered to Clark, who was nearest. “You boys stay here.”

Since they had no intention of doing anything else, they obeyed him implicitly and without argument, especially as a flitting white figure appeared briefly and indistinctly in a shadow-flecked patch of moonlight. Crouching low in the shade of a clump of bushes, Grant stole toward the spot.

When he reached the place, the thing was not there. Instead, he glimpsed it farther on, and gave chase, taking what precautions he could against betraying himself. Through the grove and the gate and across the road he followed, in doubt half the time whether it was worth the trouble. Still, if it was what he suspected, a lesson taught now would probably insure against future disturbances of the sort, he thought, and kept stubbornly on. Once more he heard the dismal cry, and fancied it held a mocking note.

“I’ll settle that mighty quick,” he promised grimly, as he jumped a ditch and ran toward the place.

Somewhere among the currant bushes was a sound of eery laughter. He swerved toward the place, saw a white form rise suddenly from the very ground, as it seemed, and lift an arm with a slow, beckoning gesture. Without taking aim, he raised his gun and fired a shot at it. The arm dropped rather suddenly, and the white form vanished. He hurried up to where it had stood, knelt, and felt of the soft earth. Without a doubt there were footprints there—he could feel them. But he hadn’t a match with him, and the place was in deep shade.

He stood up and listened, thought he heard a faint sound farther along, and ran. There was no use now in going quietly; what counted most was speed.

Once more he caught sight of the white form fleeing from him like the very wraith it would have him believe it. Then he lost it again; and when he reached the spot where it disappeared, he fell headlong, his feet tangled in some white stuff. He swore audibly, picked himself up, and held the cloth where the moon shone full upon it. It looked like a sheet, or something of the sort, and near one edge was a moist patch of red. He stared at it dismayed, crumpled the cloth into a compact bundle, tucked it under his arm, and ran on, his ears strained to catch some sound to guide him.

“Well, anyhow, I didn’t kill him,” he muttered uneasily as he crawled through a fence into the orchard. “He’s making a pretty swift get-away for a fellow that’s been shot.”

In the orchard the patches of moonlight were larger, and across one of them he glimpsed a dark object, running wearily. Grant repressed an impulse to shout, and used the breath for an extra burst of speed. The ghost was making for the fence again, as if it would double upon its trail and reach some previously chosen refuge. Grant turned and ran also toward the fence, guessing shrewdly that the fugitive would head for the place where the wire could be spread about, and a beaten trail led from there straight out to the road which passed the house. It was the short cut from the peach orchard; and it occurred to him that this particular spook seemed perfectly familiar with the byways of the ranch. Near the fence he made a discovery that startled him a little.

“It’s a squaw, by Jove!” he cried when he caught an unmistakable flicker of skirts; and the next moment he could have laughed aloud if he had not been winded from the chase. The figure reached the fence before him, and in the dim light he could see it stoop to pass through. Then it seemed as if the barbs had caught in its clothing and held it there. It struggled to free itself; and in the next minute he rushed up and clutched it fast.

“Why don’t you float over the treetops?” he panted ironically. “Ghosts have no business getting their spirit raiment tangled up in a barbed-wire fence.”

It answered with a little exclamation, with a sob following close upon it. There was a sound of tearing cloth, and he held his captive upright, and with a merciless hand turned her face so that the moonlight struck it full. They stared at each other, breathing hard from more than the race they had run.

“Well—I’ll—be—” Grant began, in blank amazement.

She wriggled her chin in his palm, trying to free herself from his pitiless staring. Failing that, she began to sob angrily without any tears in her wide eyes.

“You—shot me, you brute!” she cried accusingly at last. “You—shot me!” And she sobbed again.

Before he answered, he drew backward a step or two, sat down upon the edge of a rock which had rolled out from a stone-heap, and pulled her down beside him, still holding her fast, as if he half believed her capable of soaring away over the treetops, after all.

“I guess I didn’t murder you—from the chase you gave me. Did I hit you at all?”

“Yes, you did! You nearly broke my arm—and you might have killed me, you big brute! Look what you did—and I never harmed you at all!” She pushed up a sleeve, and held out her arm accusingly in the moonlight, disclosing a tiny, red furrow where the skin was broken and still bleeding. “And you shot a big hole right through Aunt Phoebe’s sheet!” she added, with tearful severity.

He caught her arm, bent his head over it—and for a moment he was perilously near to kissing it; an impulse which astonished him considerably, and angered him more. He dropped the arm rather precipitately; and she lifted it again, and regarded the wound with mournful interest.

“I’d like to know what right you have to prowl around shooting at people,” she scolded, seeing how close she could come to touching the place with her fingertips without producing any but a pleasurable pain.

“Just as much right as you have to get up in the middle of the night and go ahowling all over the ranch wrapped up in a sheet,” he retorted ungallantly.

“Well, if I want to do it, I don’t see why you need concern yourself about it. I wasn’t doing it for your benefit, anyway.”

“Will you tell me what you did do it for? Of all the silly tomfoolery—”

An impish smile quite obliterated the Christmas-angel look for an instant, then vanished, and left her a pretty, abused maiden who is grieved at harsh treatment.

“Well, I wanted to scare Gene,” she confessed. “I did, too. I just know he’s a cowardy-cat, because he’s always trying to scare me. It’s Gene’s fault—he told me the grove is haunted. He said a long time ago, before Uncle Hart settled here, a lot of Indians waylaid a wagon-train here and killed a girl, and he says that when the moon is just past the full, something white walks through the grove and wails like a lost soul in torment. He says sometimes it comes and moans at the corner of the house where my room is. I just know he was going to do it himself; but I guess he forgot. So I thought I’d see if he believed his own yarns. I was going to do it every night till I scared him into sleeping in the house. I had a perfectly lovely place to disappear into, where he couldn’t trace me if he took to hunting around—only he wouldn’t dare.” She pulled down her sleeve very carefully, and then, just as carefully, she pushed it up again, and took another look.

“My best friend told me I’d get shot if I came to Idaho,” she reminded herself, with a melancholy satisfaction.

“You didn’t get shot,” Grant contradicted for the sake of drawing more sparks of temper where temper seemed quaintly out of place, and stared hard at her drooping profile. “You just got nicely missed; a bullet that only scrapes off a little skin can’t be said to hit. I’d hate to hit a bear like that.”

“I believe you’re wishing you had killed me! You might at least have some conscience in the matter, and be sorry you shot a lady. But you’re not. You just wish you had murdered me. You hate girls—you said so. And I don’t know what business it is of yours, if I want to play a joke on my cousin, or why you had to be sleeping outside, anyway. I’ve a perfect right to be a ghost if I choose—and I don’t call it nice, or polite, or gentlemanly for you to chase me all over the place with a gun, trying to kill me! I’ll never speak to you again as long as I live. When I say that I mean it. I never liked you from the very start, when I first saw you this afternoon. Now I hate and despise you. I suppose I oughtn’t to expect you to apologize or be sorry because you almost killed me. I suppose that’s just your real nature coming to the surface. Indians love to hurt and torture people! I shouldn’t have expected anything else of you, I suppose. I made the mistake of treating you like a white man.”

“Don’t you think you’re making another mistake right now?” Grant’s whole attitude changed, as well as his tone. “Aren’t you afraid to push the white man down into the dirt, and raise up—the indian?”

She cast a swift, half-frightened glance up into his face and the eyes that glowed ominously in the moonlight.

“When people make the blunder of calling up the Indian,” he went on steadily, “they usually find that they have to deal with—the Indian.”

Evadna looked at him again, and turned slowly white before her temper surged to the surface again.

“I didn’t call up the Indian,” she defended hotly; “but if the Indian wants to deal with me according to his nature—why, let him! But you don’t act like other people! I don’t know another man who wouldn’t have been horrified at shooting me, even such a tiny little bit; but you don’t care at all. You never even said you were sorry.”

“I’m not in the habit of saying all I think and feel.”

“You were quick enough to apologize, after supper there, when you hadn’t really done anything; and now, when one would expect you to be at least decently sorry, you—you—well, you act like the savage you are! There, now! It may not be nice to say it, but it’s the truth.”

Grant smiled bitterly. “All men are savages under the skin,” he said. “How do you know what I think and feel? If I fail to come through with the conventional patter, I am called an Indian—because my mother was a half-breed.” He threw up his head proudly, let his eyes rest for a moment upon the moon, swimming through a white river of clouds just over the tall poplar hedge planted long ago to shelter the orchard from the sweeping west winds; and, when he looked down at her again, he caught a glimpse of repentant tears in her eyes, and softened.

“Oh, you’re a girl, and you demand the usual amount of poor-pussy talk,” he told her maliciously. “So I’m sorry. I’m heartbroken. If it will help any, I’ll even kiss the hurt to make it well—and I’m not a kissing young man, either, let me tell you.”

“I’d die before I’d let you touch me!” Her repentance, if it was that, changed to pure rage. She snatched the torn sheet from him and turned abruptly toward the fence. He followed her, apparently unmoved by her attitude; placed his foot upon the lower wire and pressed it into the soft earth, lifted the one next above it as high as it would go, and thus made it easier for her to pass through. She seemed to hesitate for a moment, as though tempted to reject even that slight favor, then stooped, and went through.

As the wires snapped into place, she halted and looked back at him.

“Maybe I’ve been mean—but you’re been meaner,” she summed up, in self-justification. “I suppose the next thing you will do will be to tell the boys. Well, I don’t care what you do, so long as you never speak to me again. Go and tell them if you want to—tell. Tell, do you hear? I don’t want even the favor of your silence!” She dexterously tucked the bundle of white under the uninjured arm, caught the loose folds of her skirt up in her hands, and ran away up the path, not once stopping to see whether he still followed her.

Grant did not follow. He stood leaning against the fence-post, and watched her until her flying form grew indistinct in the shade of the poplar hedge; watched it reappear in a broad strip of white moonlight, still running; saw it turn, slacken speed to a walk, and then lose itself in the darkness of the grove.

Five minutes, ten minutes, he stood there, staring across the level bit of valley lying quiet at the foot of the jagged-rimmed bluff standing boldly up against the star-flecked sky. Then he shook himself impatiently, muttered something which had to do with a “doddering fool,” and retraced his steps quickly through the orchard, the currant bushes, and the strawberry patch, jumped the ditch, and so entered the grove and returned to his blankets.

“We thought the spook had got yuh, sure.” Gene lifted his head turtlewise and laughed deprecatingly. “We was just about ready to start out after the corpse, only we didn’t know but what you might get excited and take a shot at us in the dark. We heard yuh shoot—what was it? Did you find out?”

“It wasn’t anything,” said Grant shortly, tugging at a boot.

“Ah—there was, too! What was it you shot at?” Clark joined in the argument from the blackness under the locust tree.

“The moon,” Grant told him sullenly. “There wasn’t anything else that I could see.”

“And that’s a lie,” Gene amended, with the frankness of a foster-brother. “Something yelled like—”

“You never heard a screech-owl before, did you, Gene?” Grant crept between his blankets and snuggled down, as if his mind held nothing more important than sleep.

“Screech-owl my granny! You bumped into something you couldn’t handle—if you want to know what I think about it,” Clark guessed shrewdly. “I wish now I’d taken the trouble to hunt the thing down; it didn’t seem worth while getting up. But I leave it to Gene if you ain’t mad enough to murder whatever it was. What was it?”

He waited a moment without getting a reply.

“Well, keep your teeth shut down on it, then, darn yuh!” he growled. “That’s the Injun of it—I know you! Screech-owl—huh! You said when you left it was an Indian—and that’s why we didn’t take after it ourselves. We don’t want to get the whole bunch down on us like they are on you—and if there was one acting up around here, we knew blamed well it was on your account for what happened today. I guess you found out, all right. I knew the minute you heaved in sight that you was just about as mad as you can get—and that’s saying a whole lot. If it was an Indian, and you killed him, you better let us—”

“Oh, for the lord’s sake, will you shut up!” Grant raised to an elbow, glared a moment, and lay down again.

The result proved the sort of fellow he was. Clark shut up without even trailing off into mumbling to himself, as was his habit when argument brought him defeat.

CHAPTER VII

MISS GEORGIE HOWARD, OPERATOR

“Where is the delightful Mr. Good Indian off to?” Evadna stopped drumming upon the gatepost and turned toward the person she heard coming up behind her, who happened to be Gene. He stopped to light a match upon the gate and put his cigarette to work before he answered her; and Evadna touched tentatively the wide, blue ribbon wound round her arm and tied in a bow at her elbow, and eyed him guardedly.

“Straight up, he told me,” Gene answered sourly. “He’s sore over something that happened last night, and he didn’t seem to have any talk to give away this morning. He can go to the dickens, for all I care.”

“What—happened last night?” Evadna wore her Christmas-angel expression; and her tone was the sweet, insipid tone of childlike innocence.

Gene hesitated. It seemed a sheer waste of opportunity to tell her the truth when she would believe a falsehood just as readily; but, since the truth happened to be quite as improbable as a lie, he decided to speak it.

“There was a noise when the moon had just come up—didn’t you hear it? The ghost I told you about. Good Injun went after it with a gun, and I guess they mixed, all right, and he got the worst of it. He was sure on the fight when he came back, and he’s pulled out this morning—”

“Do you mean to tell me—did you see it, really?”

“Well, you ask Clark, when you see him,” Gene hinted darkly. “You just ask him what was in the grove last night. Ask him what he heard.” He moved closer, and laid his hand impressively upon her arm. Evadna winced perceptibly. “What yuh jumping for? You didn’t see anything, did you?”

“No; but—was there really something?” Evadna freed herself as unobtrusively as possible, and looked at him with wide eyes.

“You ask Clark. He’ll tell you—maybe. Good Injun’s scared clean off the ranch—you can see that for yourself. He said he couldn’t be hired to spend another night here. He thinks it’s a bad sign. That’s the Injun of it. They believe in spirits and signs and things.”

Evadna turned thoughtful. “And didn’t he tell you what he—that is, if he found out—you said he went after it—”

“He wouldn’t say a blamed thing about it,” Gene complained sincerely. “He said there wasn’t anything—he told us it was a screech-owl.”

“Oh!” Evadna gave a sigh of relief. “Well, I’m going to ask Clark what it was—I’m just crazy about ghost stories, only I never would dare leave the house after dark if there are funny noises and things, really. I think you boys must be the bravest fellows, to sleep out there—without even your mother with you!”

She smiled the credulous smile of ignorant innocence and pulled the gate open.

“Jack promised to take me up to Hartley today,” she explained over her shoulder. “When I come back, you’ll show me just where it was, won’t you, Gene? You don’t suppose it would walk in the grove in the daytime, do you? Because I’m awfully fond of the grove, and I do hope it will be polite enough to confine its perambulations entirely to the conventional midnight hour.”

Gene did not make any reply. Indeed, he seemed wholly absorbed in staring after her and wondering just how much or how little of it she meant.

Evadna looked back, midway between the gate and the stable, and, when she saw him standing exactly as she had left him, she waved her hand and smiled. She was still smiling when she came up to where Jack was giving those last, tentative twitches and pats which prove whether a saddle is properly set and cinched; and she would not say what it was that amused her. All the way up the grade, she smiled and grew thoughtful by turns; and, when Jack mentioned the fact that Good Indian had gone off mad about something, she contented herself with the simple, unqualified statement that she was glad of it.

Grant’s horse dozed before the store, and Grant himself sat upon a bench in the narrow strip of shade on the porch. Evadna, therefore, refused absolutely to dismount there, though her errand had been a post-office money order. Jack was already on the ground when she made known her decision; and she left him in the middle of his expostulations and rode on to the depot. He followed disapprovingly afoot; and, when she brought her horse to a stand, he helped her from the saddle, and took the bridle reins with an air of weary tolerance.

“When you get ready to go home, you can come to the store,” he said bluntly. “Huckleberry wouldn’t stand here if you hog-tied him. Just remember that if you ever ride up here alone—it might save you a walk back. And say,” he added, with a return of his good-natured grin, “it looks like you and Good Injun didn’t get acquainted yesterday. I thought I saw mum give him an introduction to you—but I guess I made a mistake. When you come to the store, don’t let me forget, and I’ll do it myself.”

“Oh, thank you, Jack—but it isn’t necessary,” chirped Evadna, and left him with the smile which he had come to regard with vague suspicion of what it might hide of her real feelings.

Two squaws sat cross-legged on the ground in the shade of the little red depot; and them she passed by hastily, her eyes upon them watchfully until she was well upon the platform and was being greeted joyfully by Miss Georgie Howard, then in one of her daily periods of intense boredom.

“My, my, but you’re an angel of deliverance—and by rights you should have a pair of gauze wings, just to complete the picture,” she cried, leading her inside and pushing her into a beribboned wicker rocker. “I was just getting desperate enough to haul in those squaws out there and see if I couldn’t teach ’em whist or something.” She sat down and fingered her pompadour absently. “And that sure would have been interesting,” she added musingly.

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” Evadna began primly. “I only came for a money order—Aunt Phoebe’s sending for—”

“Never mind what you came for,” Miss Georgie cut in decisively, and laughed. “The express agent is out. You can’t get your order till we’ve had a good talk and got each other tagged mentally—only I’ve tagged you long ago.”

“I thought you were the express agent. Aunt Phoebe said—”

“Nice, truthful Aunt Phoebe! I am, but I’m out—officially. I’m several things, my dear; but, for the sake of my own dignity and self-respect, I refuse to be more than one of them at a time. When I sell a ticket to Shoshone, I’m the ticket agent, and nothing else. Telegrams, I’m the operator. At certain times I’m the express agent. I admit it. But this isn’t one of the times.”

She stopped and regarded her visitor with whimsical appraisement. “You’ll wait till the agent returns, won’t you?” And added, with a grimace: “You won’t be in the way—I’m not anything official right now. I’m a neighbor, and this is my parlor—you see, I planted you on that rug, with the books at your elbow, and that geranium also; and you’re in the rocker, so you’re really and truly in my parlor. I’m over the line myself, and you’re calling on me. Sabe? That little desk by the safe is the express office, and you can see for yourself that the agent is out.”

“Well, upon my word!” Evadna permitted herself that much emotional relief. Then she leaned her head against the cherry-colored head-rest tied to the chair with huge, cherry-colored bows, and took a deliberate survey of the room.

It was a small room, as rooms go. One corner was evidently the telegraph office, for it held a crude table, with the instruments clicking spasmodically, form pads, letter files, and mysterious things which piqued her curiosity. Over it was a railroad map and a makeshift bulletin board, which seemed to give the time of certain trains. And small-paned windows gave one sitting before the instruments an unobstructed view up and down the track. In the corner behind the door was a small safe, with door ajar, and a desk quite as small, with, “Express Office: Hours, 8 A.M. to 6 P.M.” on a card above it.

Under a small window opening upon the platform was another little table, with indications of occasional ticket-selling upon it. And in the end of the room where she sat were various little adornments—“art” calendars, a few books, fewer potted plants, a sewing-basket, and two rugs upon the floor, with a rocker for each. Also there was a tiny, square table, with a pack of cards scattered over it.

“Exactly. You have it sized up correctly, my dear.” Miss Georgie Howard nodded her—head three times, and her eyes were mirthful. “It’s a game. I made it a game. I had to, in self-defense. Otherwise—” She waved a hand conspicuous for its white plumpness and its fingers tapering beautifully to little, pink nails immaculately kept. “I took at the job and the place just as it stands, without anything in the way of mitigation. Can you see yourself holding it down for longer than a week? I’ve been here a month.”

“I think,” Evadna ventured, “it must be fun.”

“Oh, yes. It’s fun—if you make fun of it. However, before we settle down for a real visit, I’ve a certain duty to perform, if you will excuse my absence for a moment. Incidentally,” she added, getting lazily out of the chair, “it will illustrate just how I manage my system.”

Her absence was purely theoretical. She stepped off the rug, went to the “express office,” and took a card from the desk. When she had stood it upright behind the inkwell, Evadna read in large, irregular capitals:

“OUT. WILL BE BACK LATER.”

Miss Georgie Howard paid no attention to the little giggle which went with the reading, but stepped across to the ticket desk and to the telegraph table, and put similar cards on display. Then she came back to the rug, plumped down in her rocker with a sigh of relief, and reached for a large, white box—the five pounds of chocolates which she had sent for.

“I never eat candy when I’m in the office,” she observed soberly. “I consider it unprofessional. Help yourself as liberally as your digestion will stand—and for Heaven’s sake, gossip a little! Tell me all about that bunch of nifty lads I see cavorting around the store occasionally—and especially about the polysyllabic gentleman who seems to hang out at the Peaceful Hart ranch. I’m terribly taken with him. He—excuse me, chicken. There’s a fellow down the line hollering his head off. Wait till I see what he wants.”

Again she left the rug, stepped to the telegraph instrument, and fingered the key daintily until she had, with the other hand, turned down the “out” card. Then she threw the switch, rattled an impatient reply, and waited, listening to the rapid clicking of the sounder. Her eyes and her mouth hardened as she read.

“Cad!” she gritted under her breath. Her fingers were spiteful as they clicked the key in answer. She slammed the current off, set up the “out” notice again, kicked the desk chair against the wall, and came back to the “parlor” breathing quickly.

“I think it must be perfectly fascinating to talk that way to persons miles off,” said Evadna, eying the chittering sounder with something approaching awe. “I watched your fingers, and tried to imagine what it was they were saying—but I couldn’t even guess.”

Miss Georgie Howard laughed queerly. “No, I don’t suppose you could,” she murmured, and added, with a swift glance at the other: “They said, ‘You go to the devil.’” She held up the offending hand and regarded it intently. “You wouldn’t think it of them, would you? But they have to say things sometimes—in self-defense. There are two or three fresh young men along the line that can’t seem to take a hint unless you knock them in the head with it.”

She cast a malevolent look at the clicking instrument. “He’s trying to square himself,” she observed carelessly. “But, unfortunately, I’m out. He seems on the verge of tears, poor thing.”

She poked investigatingly among the chocolates, and finally selected a delectable morsel with epicurean care.

“You haven’t told me about the polysyllabic young man,” she reminded. “He has held my heart in bondage since he said to Pete Hamilton yesterday in the store—ah—” She leaned and barely reached a slip of paper which was lying upon a row of books. “I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget it,” she explained parenthetically. “He said to Pete, in the store, just after Pete had tried to say something funny with the usual lamentable failure—um—‘You are mentally incapable of recognizing the line of demarcation between legitimate persiflage and objectionable familiarity.’ Now, I want to know what sort of a man, under fifty and not a college professor, would—or could—say that without studying it first. It sounded awfully impromptu and easy—and yet he looks—well, cowboyish. What sort of a young man is he?”

“He’s a perfectly horrid young man.” Evadna leaned to help herself to more chocolates. “He—well, just to show you how horrid, he calls me a—a Christmas angel! And—”

“Did he!” Miss Georgie eyed her measuringly between bites. “Tag him as being intelligent, a keen observer, with the ability to express himself—” She broke off, and turned her head ungraciously toward the sounder, which seemed to be repeating something over and over with a good deal of insistence. “That’s Shoshone calling,” she said, frowning attentively. “They’ve got an old crank up there in the office—I’d know his touch among a million—and when he calls he means business. I’ll have to speak up, I suppose.” She sighed, tucked a chocolate into her cheek, and went scowling to the table. “Can’t the idiot see I’m out?” she complained whimsically. “What’s that card for, I wonder?”

She threw the switch, rattled a reply, and then, as the sounder settled down to a steady click-clickety-click-click, she drew a pad toward her, pulled up the chair with her foot, sat down, and began to write the message as it came chattering over the wire. When it was finished and the sounder quiet, her hand awoke to life upon the key. She seemed to be repeating the message, word for word. When she was done, she listened, got her answer, threw off the switch with a sweep of her thumb, and fumbled among the papers on the table until she found an envelope. She addressed it with a hasty scrawl of her pencil, sealed it with a vicious little spat of her hand, and then sat looking down upon it thoughtfully.

“I suppose I’ve got to deliver that immediately, at once, without delay,” she said. “There’s supposed to be an answer. Chicken, some queer things happen in this business. Here’s that weak-eyed, hollow-chested Saunders, that seems to have just life enough to put in about ten hours a day reading ‘The Duchess,’ getting cipher messages like the hero of a detective story. And sending them, too, by the way. We operators are not supposed to think; but all the same—” She got her receipt-book, filled rapidly a blank line, tucked it under her arm, and went up and tapped Evadna lightly upon the head with the envelope. “Want to come along? Or would you rather stay here? I won’t be more than two minutes.”

She was gone five; and she returned with a preoccupied air which lasted until she had disposed of three chocolates and was carefully choosing a fourth.

“Chicken,” she said then, quietly, “do you know anything about your uncle and his affairs?” And added immediately: “The chances are ten to one you don’t, and wouldn’t if you lived there till you were gray?”

“I know he’s perfectly lovely,” Evadna asserted warmly. “And so is Aunt Phoebe.”

“To be sure.” Miss Georgie smiled indulgently. “I quite agree with you. And by the way, I met that polysyllabic cowboy again—and I discovered that, on the whole, my estimate was incorrect. He’s emphatically monosyllabic. I said sixteen nice things to him while I was waiting for Pete to wake up Saunders; and he answered in words of one syllable; one word, of one syllable. I’m beginning to feel that I’ve simply got to know that young man. There are deeps there which I am wild to explore. I never met any male human in the least like him. Did you? So absolutely—ah—inscrutable, let us say.”

“That’s just because he’s part Indian,” Evadna declared, with the positiveness of youth and inexperience. “It isn’t inscrutability, but stupidity. I simply can’t bear him. He’s brutal, and rude. He told me—told me, mind you—that he doesn’t like women. He actually warned me against thinking his politeness—if he ever is polite, which I doubt—means more than just common humanity. He said he didn’t want me to misunderstand him and think he liked me, because he doesn’t. He’s a perfect savage. I simply loathe him!”

“I’d certainly see that he repented, apologized, and vowed eternal devotion,” smiled Miss Georgie. “That should be my revenge.”

“I don’t want any revenge. I simply want nothing to do with him. I don’t want to speak to him, even.”

“He’s awfully good—looking,” mused Miss Georgie.

“He looks to me just like an Indian. He ought to wear a blanket, like the rest.”

“Then you’re no judge. His eyes are dark; but they aren’t snaky, my dear. His hair is real wavy, did you notice? And he has the dearest, firm mouth. I noticed it particularly, because I admire a man who’s a man. He’s one. He’d fight and never give up, once he started. And I think”—she spoke hesitatingly—“I think he’d love—and never give up; unless the loved one disappointed him in some way; and then he’d be strong enough to go his way and not whine about it. I do hate a whiner! Don’t you?”

A shadow fell upon the platform outside the door, and Saunders appeared, sidling deprecatingly into the room. He pulled off his black, slouched hat and tucked it under his arm, smoothed his lank, black hair, ran his palm down over his lank, unshaven face with a smoothing gesture, and sidled over to the telegraph table.

“Here’s the answer to that message,” he said, in a limp tone, without any especial emphasis or inflection. “If you ain’t too busy, and could send it right off—it’s to go C.O.D. and make ’em repeat it, so as to be sure—”

“Certainly, Mr. Saunders.” Miss Georgie rose, the crisp, businesslike operator, and went to the table. She took the sheet of paper from him with her finger tips, as if he were some repulsive creature whose touch would send her shuddering, and glanced at the message. “Write it on the regular form,” she said, and pushed a pad and pencil toward him. “I have to place it on file.” Whereupon she turned her back upon him, and stood staring down the railroad track through the smoke-grimed window until a movement warned her that he was through.

“Very well—that is all,” she said, after she had counted the words twice. “Oh—you want to wait for the repeat.”

She laid her fingers on the key and sent the message in a whirl of chittering little sounds, waited a moment while the sounder spoke, paused, and then began a rapid clicking, which was the repeated message, and wrote it down upon its form.

“There—if it’s correct, that’s all,” she told him in a tone of dismissal, and waited openly for him to go. Which he did, after a sly glance at Evadna, a licking of pale lips, as if he would speak but lacked the courage, and a leering grin at Miss Georgie.

He was no sooner over the threshold than she slammed the door shut, in spite of the heat. She walked to the window, glanced down the track again, turned to the table, and restlessly arranged the form pads, sticking the message upon the file. She said something under her breath, snapped the cover on the inkwell, sighed, patted her pompadour, and finally laughed at her own uneasiness.

“Whenever that man comes in here,” she observed impatiently, “I always feel as if I ought to clean house after him. If ever there was a human toad—or snake, or—ugh! And what does he mean—sending twenty-word messages that don’t make sense when you read them over, and getting others that are just a lot of words jumbled together, hit or miss? I wish—only it’s unprofessional to talk about it—but, just the same, there’s some nasty business brewing, and I know it. I feel guilty, almost, every time I send one of those cipher messages.”

“Maybe he’s a detective,” Evadna hazarded.

“Maybe.” Miss Georgie’s tone, however, was extremely skeptical. “Only, so far as I can discover, there’s never been anything around here to detect. Nobody has been murdered, or robbed, or kidnapped that I ever heard of. Pete Hamilton says not. And—I wonder, now, if Saunders could be watching somebody! Wouldn’t it be funny, if old Pete himself turned out to be a Jesse James brand of criminal? Can you imagine Pete doing anything more brutal than lick a postage stamp?”

“He might want to,” Evadna guessed shrewdly, “but it would be too much trouble.”

“Besides,” Miss Georgie went on speculating, “Saunders never does anything that anyone ever heard of. Sweeps out the store, they say—but I’d hate to swear to that. I never could catch it when it looked swept—and brings the mail sack over here twice a day, and gets one to take back. And reads novels. Of course, the man’s half dead with consumption; but no one would object to that, if these queer wires hadn’t commenced coming to him.”

“Why don’t you turn detective yourself and find out?” Plainly, Evadna was secretly laughing at her perturbed interest in the matter.

“Thanks. I’m too many things already, and I haven’t any false hair or dark lantern. And, by the way, I’m going to have the day off, Sunday. Charlie Green is coming up to relieve me. And—couldn’t we do something?” She glanced wearily around the little office. “Honest, I’d go crazy if I stayed here much longer without a play spell. I want to get clear out, away from the thing—where I can’t even hear a train whistle.”

“Then you shall come down to the ranch the minute you can get away, and we’ll do something or go somewhere. The boys said they’d take me fishing—but they only propose things so they can play jokes on me, it seems to me. They’d make me fall in the river, or something, I just know. But if you’d like to go along, there’d be two of us—”

“Chicken, we’ll go. I ought to be ashamed to fish for an invitation the way I did, but I’m not. I haven’t been down to the Hart ranch yet; and I’ve heard enough about it to drive me crazy with the desire to see it. Your Aunt Phoebe I’ve met, and fallen in love with—that’s a matter of course. She told me to visit her just any time, without waiting to be invited especially. Isn’t she the dearest thing? Oh! that’s a train order, I suppose—sixteen is about due. Excuse me, chicken.”

She was busy then until the train came screeching down upon the station, paused there while the conductor rushed in, got a thin slip of paper for himself and the engineer, and rushed out again. When the train grumbled away from the platform and went its way, it left man standing there, a fish-basket slung from one shoulder, a trout rod carefully wrapped in its case in his hand, a box which looked suspiciously like a case of some bottled joy at his feet, and a loose-lipped smile upon his face.

“Howdy, Miss Georgie?” he called unctuously through the open door.

Miss Georgie barely glanced at him from under her lashes, and her shoulders indulged themselves in an almost imperceptible twitch.

“How do you do, Mr. Baumberger?” she responded coolly, and very, very gently pushed the door shut just as he had made up his mind to enter.

CHAPTER VIII

THE AMIABLE ANGLER

Baumberger—Johannes was the name he answered to when any of his family called, though to the rest of the world he was simply Baumberger—was what he himself called a true sport. Women, he maintained, were very much like trout; and so, when this particular woman calmly turned her back upon the smile cast at her, he did not linger there angling uselessly, but betook himself to the store, where his worldly position, rather than his charming personality, might be counted upon to bring him his meed of appreciation.

Good Indian and Jack, sitting side by side upon the porch and saying very little, he passed by with a careless nod, as being not worth his attention. Saunders, glancing up from the absorbing last chapter of “The Brokenhearted Bride,” also received a nod, and returned it apathetically. Pete Hamilton, however, got a flabby handshake, a wheezy laugh, and the announcement that he was down from Shoshone for a good, gamy tussle with that four-pounder he had lost last time.

“And I don’t go back till I get him—not if I stay here a week,” he declared, with jocular savagery. “Took half my leader and my pet fly—I got him with a peacock-bodied gray hackle that I revised to suit my own notions—and, by the great immortal Jehosaphat, he looked like a whale when he jumped up clear of the riffle, turned over, and—” His flabby, white hand made a soaring movement to indicate the manner in which the four-pounder had vanished.

“Better take a day off and go with me, Pete,” he suggested, getting an unwieldy-looking pipe from the pocket of his canvas fishing-coat, and opening his eyes at a trout-fly snagged in the mouthpiece. “Now, how did that fly come there?” he asked aggrievedly, while he released it daintily for all his fingers looked so fat and awkward. He stuck the pipe in the corner of his mouth, and held up the fly with that interest which seems fatuous to one who has no sporting blood in his veins.

“Last time I used that fly was when I was down here three weeks ago—the day I lost the big one. Ain’t it a beauty, eh? Tied it myself. And, by the great immortal Jehosaphat, it fetches me the rainbows, too. Good mind to try it on the big one. Don’t see how I didn’t miss it out of my book—I must be getting absent-minded. Sign of old age, that. Failing powers and the like.” He shook his head reprovingly and grinned, as if he considered the idea something of a joke. “Have to buck up—a lawyer can’t afford to grow absent-minded. He’s liable to wake up some day and find himself without his practice.”

He got his fly-book from the basket swinging at his left hip, opened it, turned the leaves with the caressing touch one gives to a cherished thing, and very carefully placed the fly upon the page where it belonged; gazed gloatingly down at the tiny, tufted hooks, with their frail-looking five inches of gut leader, and then returned the book fondly to the basket.

“Think I’ll go on down to the Harts’,” he said, “so as to be that much closer to the stream. Daylight is going to find me whipping the riffles, Peter. You won’t come along? You better. Plenty of—ah—snake medicine,” he hinted, chuckling so that the whole, deep chest of him vibrated. “No? Well, you can let me have a horse, I suppose—that cow-backed sorrel will do—he’s gentle, I know. I think I’ll go out and beg an invitation from that Hart boy—never can remember those kids by name—Gene, is it, or Jack?”

He went out upon the porch, laid a hand upon Jack’s shoulder, and beamed down upon him with what would have passed easily for real affection while he announced that he was going to beg supper and a bed at the ranch, and wanted to know, as a solicitous after-thought, if Jack’s mother had company, or anything that would make his presence a burden.

“Nobody’s there—and, if there was, it wouldn’t matter,” Jack assured him carelessly. “Go on down, if you want to. It’ll be all right with mother.”

“One thing I like about fishing down here,” chuckled Baumberger, his fat fingers still resting lightly upon Jack’s shoulder, “is the pleasure of eating my fish at your house. There ain’t another man, woman, or child in all Idaho can fry trout like your mother. You needn’t tell her I said so—but it’s a fact, just the same. She sure is a genius with the frying-pan, my boy.”

He turned and called in to Pete, to know if he might have the sorrel saddled right away. Since Pete looked upon Baumberger with something of the awed admiration which he would bestow upon the President, he felt convinced that his horses were to be congratulated that any one of them found favor in his eyes.

Pete, therefore, came as near to roaring at Saunders as his good nature and his laziness would permit, and waited in the doorway until Saunders had, with visible reluctance, laid down his book and started toward the stable.

“Needn’t bother to bring the horse down here, my man,” Baumberger called after him. “I’ll get him at the stable and start from there. Well, wish me luck, Pete—and say! I’ll expect you to make a day of it with me Sunday. No excuses, now. I’m going to stay over that long, anyhow. Promised myself three good days—maybe more. A man’s got to break away from his work once in a while. If I didn’t, life wouldn’t be worth living. I’m willing to grind—but I’ve got to have my playtime, too. Say, I want you to try this rod of mine Sunday. You’ll want one like it yourself, if I’m any good at guessing. Just got it, you know—it’s the one I was talking to yuh about last time I was down.

“W-ell—I reckon my means of conveyance is ready for me—so long, Peter, till Sunday. See you at supper, boys.”

He hooked a thumb under the shoulder-strap of his basket, pulled it to a more comfortable position, waved his hand in a farewell, which included every living thing within sight of him, and went away up the narrow, winding trail through the sagebrush to the stable, humming something under his breath with the same impulse of satisfaction with life which sets a cat purring.

Some time later, he appeared, in the same jovial mood, at the Hart ranch, and found there the welcome which he had counted upon—the welcome which all men received there upon demand.

When Evadna and Jack rode up, they found Mr. Baumberger taking his ease in Peaceful’s armchair on the porch, discussing, with animated gravity, the ins and outs of county politics; his fishing-basket lying on its flat side close to his chair, his rod leaning against the house at his elbow, his heavy pipe dragging down one corner of his loose-lipped mouth; his whole gross person surrounded by an atmosphere of prosperity leading the simple life transiently and by choice, and of lazy enjoyment in his own physical and mental well-being.

CHAPTER IX

PEPPAJEE JIM “HEAP SABES”

Peppajee Jim had meditated long in the shade of his wikiup, and now, when the sun changed from a glaring ball of intense, yellow heat to a sullen red disk hanging low over the bluffs of Snake River, he rose, carefully knocked the ashes from his little stone pipe, with one mechanical movement of his arms, gathered his blanket around him, pushed a too-familiar dog from him with a shove of moccasined foot, and stalked away through the sagebrush.

On the brow of the hill, just where the faint footpath dipped into a narrow gully at the very edge, almost, of the bluff, he stopped, and lifted his head for an unconsciously haughty stare at his surroundings.

Beneath him and half a mile or so up the river valley, the mellow green of Peaceful’s orchard was already taking to itself the vagueness of evening shadows. Nearer, the meadow of alfalfa and clover lay like a soft, green carpet of velvet, lined here and there with the irrigation ditches which kept it so. And in the center of the meadow, a small inclosure marked grimly the spot where lay the bones of old John Imsen. All around the man-made oasis of orchards and meadows, the sage and the sand, pushed from the river by the jumble of placer pits, emphasized by sharp contrast what man may do with the most unpromising parts of the earth’s surface, once he sets himself heart and muscle to the task.

With the deliberation of his race, Peppajee stood long minutes motionless, gazing into the valley before he turned with a true Indian shrug and went down into the gully, up the steep slope beyond, and then, after picking his way through a jumble of great bowlders, came out eventually into the dust-ridden trail of the white man. Down that he walked, erect, swift, purposeful, his moccasins falling always with the precision of a wild animal upon the best footing among the loose rocks, stubs of sage-roots, or patches of deep dust and sand beside the wagon-road, his sharp, high-featured face set in the stony calm which may hide a tumult of elemental passions beneath and give no sign.

Where the trail curved out sharply to round the Point o’ Rocks, he left it, and kept straight on through the sage, entered a rough pass through the huge rock tongue, and came out presently to the trail again, a scant two hundred yards from the Hart haystacks. When he reached the stable, he stopped and looked warily about him, but there was no sight or sound of any there save animals, and he went on silently to the house, his shadow stretching long upon the ground before him until it merged into the shade of the grove beyond the gate, and so was lost for that day.

“Hello, Peppajee,” called Wally over his cigarette. “Just in time for supper.”

Peppajee grunted, stopped in the path two paces from the porch, folded his arms inside his blanket, and stood so while his eyes traveled slowly and keenly around the group lounging at ease above him. Upon the bulky figure of Baumberger they dwelt longest, and while he looked his face hardened until nothing seemed alive but his eyes.

“Peppajee, this my friend, Mr. Baumberger. You heap sabe Baumberger—come all time from Shoshone, mebbyso catchum heap many fish.” Peaceful’s mild, blue eyes twinkled over his old meerschaum. He knew the ways of Indians, and more particularly he knew the ways of Peppajee; Baumberger, he guessed shrewdly, had failed to find favor in his eyes.

“Huh!” grunted Peppajee non-commitally, and made no motion to shake hands, thereby confirming Peaceful’s suspicion. “Me heap sabe Man-that-catchum-fish.” After which he stood as before, his arms folded tightly in his blanket, his chin lifted haughtily, his mouth a straight, stern line of bronze.

“Sit down, Peppajee. Bimeby eat supper,” Peaceful invited pacifically, while Baumberger chuckled at the Indian’s attitude, which he attributed to racial stupidity.

Peppajee did not even indicate that he heard or, hearing, understood.

“Bothered much with Injuns?” Baumberger asked carelessly, putting away his pipe. “I see there’s quite a camp of ’em up on the hill. Hope you’ve got good watchdogs—they’re a thieving lot. If they’re a nuisance, Hart, I’ll see what can be done about slapping ’em back on their reservation, where they belong. I happen to have some influence with the agent.”

“I guess you needn’t go to any trouble about it,” Peaceful returned dryly. “I’ve had worse neighbors.”

“Oh—if you’re stuck on their company!” laughed Baumberger wheezily. “‘Every fellow to his taste, as the old woman said when she kissed her cow.’ There may be good ones among the lot,” he conceded politely when he saw that his time-worn joke had met with disfavor, even by the boys, who could—and usually did—laugh at almost anything. “They all look alike to me, I must admit; I never had any truck with ’em.”

“No, I guess not,” Peaceful agreed in his slow way, holding his pipe three inches from his face while he eyed Peppajee quizzically. “Don’t pay to have any truck with ’em while you feel that way about it.” He smoothed down his snow-white beard with his free hand, pushed the pipe-stem between his teeth, and went on smoking.

“I never liked the breed, any way you look at ’em,” Baumberger stated calmly.

“Say, you’ll queer yourself good and plenty, if you keep on,” Wally interrupted bluntly. “Peppajee’s ears aren’t plugged with cotton—are they, Jim?”

Neither Peppajee nor Baumberger made reply of any sort, and Peaceful turned his mild eyes reproachfully toward his untactful son. But the supper summons clanged insistently from the iron triangle on the back porch and saved the situation from becoming too awkward. Even Baumberger let his tilted chair down upon its four legs with a haste for which his appetite was not alone responsible, and followed the boys into the house as if he were glad to escape from the steady, uncompromising stare of the Indian.

“Better come and eat, Peppajee,” Peaceful lingered upon the porch to urge hospitably. “You no get mad. You come eat supper.”

“No!” Peppajee jerked the word out with unmistakable finality. “No eat. Bimeby mebbyso makum big talk yo’.”

Peaceful studied his face, found it stern and unyielding, and nodded assent. “All right. I eat, then I talk with you.” He turned somewhat reluctantly and followed the others inside, leaving Peppajee to pass the time away as pleased him best.

Peppajee stood still for a moment listening to the clatter of dishes from the kitchen, and then with dignity end deliberation seated himself upon the lowest step of the porch, and, pulling his blanket tight around him, resettled his disreputable old sombrero upon his head and stared fixedly at the crimson glow which filled all the west and made even the rugged bluff a wonderful thing of soft, rose tints and shadows of royal purple. Peaceful, coming out half an hour after with Baumberger at his heels, found him so and made a movement to sit down beside him. But Peppajee rose and stalked majestically to the gate, then turned and confronted the two.

“I talk yo’. Mebbyso no talk Man-with-big-belly.” He waited impassively.

“All right, Jim.” Peaceful turned apologetically toward his guest. “Something he wants to tell me, Baumberger; kinda private, I guess. I’ll be back in a minute, anyway.”

“Now don’t mind me at all,” Baumberger protested generously. “Go ahead just as if I wasn’t here—that’s what’ll please me best. I hope I ain’t so much of a stranger you’ve got to stand on ceremony. Go on, and find out what the old buck wants; he’s got something on his mind, that’s sure. Been stealing fruit, maybe, and wants to square himself before you catch him at it.” He laughed his laziest, and began leisurely to fill his pipe.

Peppajee led the way to the stable, where he stopped short and faced Peaceful, his arms folded, one foot thrust forward in the pose he affected when about to speak of matters important.

“Long time ago, when yo’ hair black,” he began deliberately, with a sonorous lingering upon his vowels, “yo’ all time my frien’. I yo’ frien’ all same. Yo’ no likum otha white man. Yo’ all time bueno. Yo’ house all same my wikiup. Me come eat at yo’ house, talk yo’ all same brotha. Yo’ boys all same my boys—all time my frien’. Me speakum all time no lie, mebbyso.”

“No,” Peaceful assented unhesitatingly, “you no tell lies, Peppajee. We good friends, many years.”

“Huh! Man-that-catchum-fish, him no yo’ frien’. Shont-isham. All time him speakum lies—tellum frien’ yo’, no frien’. Yo’ no more tellum stop yo’ wikiup. Kay bueno. Yo’ thinkum frien’. All time him have bad heart for yo’. Yo’ got ranch. Got plenty hay, plenty apple, plenty all thing for eat. All time him think bad for yo’. All time him likum steal yo’ ranch.”

Peaceful laughed indulgently. “You no sabe,” he explained. “Him like my ranch. Him say, long time ago, pay much money for my ranch. Me no sell—me like for keep all time. Baumberger good man. Him no steal my ranch. Me got one paper from government—you sabe?—one paper say ranch all time b’longum me all same. Big white chief say ranch b’longum me all time. I die, ranch b’longum my boys. You sabe?”

Peppajee considered. “Me sabe,” he said at length. “Me sabe paper, sabe ranch all time b’longum yo’. All same, him like for ketchum yo’ ranch. Me hear much talk, him talk Man-that-coughs, tellum him ketchum ranch. Much white man come, so—” He lifted one hand with thumb and fingers outspread, made a downward gesture, and then raised three fingers. “Catchum ranch.”

Peaceful shook his head while he smiled. “No can do that. Mebbyso much men come, heap fight, mebbyso killum me, ranch all same b’longum my boys. Men that fights go to jail, mebbyso hangum.” He indicated by signs his exact meaning.

Peppajee scowled, and shook his head stubbornly. “Me heap sabe. All same, ketchum yo’ ranch. Man-that-catchum-fish kay bueno. Yo’ thinkum frien’, yo’ damfool. Him all same rattlesnake. Plenty foolum yo’. Yo’ see. Yo’ thinkum Peppajee Jim heap big fool. Peaceful Hart, him all time one heap big damfool. Him ketchum yo’ ranch. Yo’ see.” He stopped and stared hard at the dim bulk of the grove, whence came the faint odor of smoke from Baumberger’s pipe.

“Yo’ be smart man,” he added grimly, “yo’ all same kickum dat mans off yo’ ranch.” For emphasis he thrust out a foot vigorously in the direction of the house and the man he maligned, and turned his face toward camp. Peaceful watched until the blanketed form merged into the dusk creeping over the valley, and when it disappeared finally into the short cut through the sage, he shook his gray head in puzzlement over the absurd warning, and went back to talk politics with Baumberger.

CHAPTER X

MIDNIGHT PROWLERS

Came midnight and moonlight together, and with them came also Good Indian riding somewhat sullenly down the trail to the ranch. Sullen because of Evadna’s attitude, which seemed to him permanently antagonistic, and for very slight cause, and which made the ranch an unpleasant abiding place.

He decided that he would not stop at the ranch, but would go on up the valley to where one Abuer Hicks lived by himself in a half-dugout, half-board shack, and by mining a little where his land was untillable, and farming a little where the soil took kindly to fruit and grasses, managed to exist without too great hardship. The pension he received for having killed a few of his fellow-men at the behest of his government was devoted solely to liquid relief from the monotony of his life, and welcome indeed was the man who brought him a bottle of joy between times. Wherefore Good Indian had thoughtfully provided himself with a quart or so and rode with his mind at ease so far as his welcome at the Hicks dwelling place was concerned.

Once again the Peaceful Hart ranch lay in brooding silence under the shadow of the bluff. A few crickets chirped shrilly along the trail, and from their sudden hush as he drew near marked unerringly his passing. Along the spring-fed creek the frogs croaked a tuneless medley before him, and, like the crickets, stopped abruptly and waited in absolute silence to take up their night chant again behind him. His horse stepped softly in the deep sand of the trail, and, when he found that his rider refused to let him stop at the stable-door, shook his head in mute displeasure, and went quietly on. As he neared the silent house, the faint creak of saddle-leather and the rattle of spur-chains against his iron stirrups were smothered in the whispering of the treetops in the grove, so that only the quick hushing of night noises alone betrayed him to any wakeful ear.

He was guilty of staring hard at that corner of the house where he knew Evadna slept, and of scowling over the vague disquiet which the thought of her caused him. No girl had ever troubled his mind before. It annoyed him that the face and voice of Evadna obtruded, even upon his thoughts of other things.

The grove was quiet, and he could hear Gene’s unmistakable snore over by the pond—the only sound save the whispering of the trees, which went on, unmindful of his approach. It was evident, he thought, that the ghost was effectually laid—and on the heels of that, as he rode out from the deep shade of the grove and on past the garden to the meadows beyond, he wondered if, after all, it was again hardily wandering through the night; for he thought he glimpsed a figure which flitted behind a huge rock a few rods in advance of him, and his eyes were not used to playing him tricks.

He gave a twitch of his fingers upon the reins, and turned from the trail to investigate. He rode up to the rock, which stood like an island of shade in that sea of soft moonlight, and, peering into the shadows, spoke a guarded challenge:

“Who’s that?”

A figure detached itself without sound from the blot of darkness there, and stood almost at his stirrup.

“Yo’ Good Injun—me likum for talk yo’.”

Good Indian was conscious of a distinct disappointment, though he kept it from his voice when he answered:

“Oh, it’s you, Peppajee. What you do here? Why you no sleepum yo’ wikiup?”

Peppajee held up a slim, brown hand for silence, and afterward rested it upon the saddle-fork.

“Yo’ heap frien’ Peaceful. Me heap frien’ all same. Mebbyso we talk. Yo’ get down. No can see yo’, mebbyso; yo’ no likum bad man for se—” He stepped back a pace, and let Good Indian dismount; then with a gesture he led him back into the shadow of the rock.

“Well, what’s the row?” Good Indian asked impatiently, and curiously as well.

Peppajee spoke more hastily than was usual. “Me watchum Man-that-catchum-fish. Him hee-eeap kay bueno. Me no sabe why him walk, walk in night—me heap watchum.”

“You mean Baumberger? He’s all right. He comes down here to catchum many fish—trout, up in the Malad, you sabe. Heap friend Peaceful. You no likum?”

“Kay bueno.” Peppajee rested a forefinger upon Good Indian’s arm. “Sun up there,” he pointed high in the west. “Me go all same Hartley. Come stable—Pete stable—me walkum close—no makum noise. Me hear talk. Stoppum—no can see—me hear much bad talk. All time me hear, heap likum for steal dis ranch. Me no sabe”—his tone was doubtful for a space—“all same, me hear stealum this ranch. Man, you callum—”

“Baumberger?” suggested Grant.

“Him. All same Baumberga, him talk Man-that-coughs. All time say stealum ranch. Makum much bad talk, them mans. Me come ranch, me tellum Peaceful, him all time laugh, me. All time shakum head. Mebbyso thinkum I lie—shont-isham!”

“What more you do?” Good Indian, at least, did not laugh.

“Me go camp. Me thinkum, thinkum all time. Dat man have bad heart. Kay bueno. No can sleep—thinkum mebbyso do bad for Peaceful. Come ranch, stop all time dark, all time heap watchum. Bimeby, mebbyso man—all same yo’ callum Baumberga—him come, look, so—” He indicated, by a great craning of neck in all directions, the wariness of one who goes by stealth. “Him walk still all time, go all time ova there.” He swept his arm toward the meadows. “Me go still, for watchum. Yo’ come, mebbyso make heap much noise—kay bueno. Dat mans, him hear, him heap scare. Me tellum, yo’ mebbyso go still.” He folded his arms with a gesture of finality, and stood statue-like in the deep gloom beside the rock.

Good Indian fingered his horse’s mane while he considered the queer story. There must be something in it, he thought, to bring Peppajee from his blankets at midnight and to impel him, unfriendly as he usually seemed, to confide his worry to him at once and without urging. And yet, to steal the Peaceful Hart ranch—the idea was ludicrous. Still, there was no harm in looking around a bit. He sought a sagebrush that suited his purpose, tied his horse to it, stooped, and took the clanking Mexican spurs from his heels, and touched Peppajee on the shoulder.

“All right,” he murmured close to his ear, “we go see.”

Without a word, Peppajee turned, and stole away toward the meadows, keeping always in the shadow of rock or bush, silent-footed as a prowling bobcat. Close behind him, not quite so silent because of his riding-boots, which would strike now and then upon a rock, however careful he was of his footing, went Good Indian.

So they circled the meadow, came into sand and sage beyond, sought there unavailingly, went on to the orchard, and skirted it, keen of eye and ear, struck quietly through it, and came at last to the place where, the night before, Grant had overtaken Evadna—and it surprised him not a little to feel his heart pounding unreasonably against his ribs when he stopped beside the rock where they had sat and quarreled.

Peppajee looked back to see why Grant paused there, and then, wrapping his blanket tightly around him, crawled through the fence, and went on, keeping to the broad belt of shade cast upon the ground by the row of poplars. Where the shade stopped abruptly, and beyond lay white moonlight with the ranch buildings blotching it here and there, he stopped and waited until Good Indian stood close beside him. Even then he did not speak, but, freeing an arm slowly from the blanket folds, pointed toward the stable.

Grant looked, saw nothing, stared harder, and so; feeling sure there must be something hidden there, presently believed that a bit of the shadow at that end which was next the corral wavered, stopped, and then moved unmistakably. All the front of the stable was distinctly visible in the white light, and, while they looked, something flitted across it, and disappeared among the sage beyond the trail.

Again they waited; two minutes, three minutes, five. Then another shadow detached itself slowly from the shade of the stable, hesitated, walked out boldly, and crossed the white sand on the path to the house. Baumberger it was, and he stopped midway to light his pipe, and so, puffing luxuriously, went on into the blackness of the grove.

They heard him step softly upon the porch, heard also the bovine sigh with which he settled himself in the armchair there. They caught the aromatic odor of tobacco smoke ascending, and knew that his presence there had all at once become the most innocent, the most natural thing in the world; for any man, waking on such a night, needs no justification for smoking a nocturnal pipe upon the porch while he gazes dreamily out upon the moon-bathed world around him.

Peppajee touched Grant’s arm, and turned back, skirting the poplars again until they were well away from the house, and there was no possibility of being heard. He stopped there, and confronted the other.

“What for you no stoppum stable?” he questioned bluntly. “What for you no stoppum ranch, for sleepum?”

“I go for stoppum Hicks’ ranch,” said Good Indian, without any attempt at equivocation.

Peppajee grunted. “What for yo’ no stoppum all same Peaceful?”

Good Indian scorned a subterfuge, and spoke truly. “That girl, Evadna, no likum me. All time mad me. So I no stoppum ranch, no more.”

Peppajee grinned briefly and understandingly, and nodded his head. “Me heap sabe. Yo’ all time heap like for catchum that girl, be yo’ squaw. Bimeby that girl heap likum yo’. Me sabe.” He stood a moment staring at the stars peeping down from above the rim-rock which guarded the bluff. “All same, yo’ no go stoppum Hicks,” he commanded. “Yo’ stoppum dis ranch all time. Yo’ all time watchum man—yo’ callum Baumberga.” He seemed to remember and speak the name with some difficulty. “Where him go, yo’ go, for heap watchum. All time mebbyso me watchum Man-that-coughs. Me no sabe catchum ranch—all same, me watchum. Them mans heap kay bueno. Yo’ bet yo’ life!”

A moment he stood there after he was through speaking, and then he was not there. Good Indian did not hear him go, though he had stood beside him; neither could he, catching sight of a wavering shadow, say positively that there went Peppajee.

He waited for a space, stole back to where he could hear any sound from the porch even if he could not see, and when he was certain that Baumberger had gone back to his bed, he got his horse, took him by a roundabout way to the stable, and himself slept in a haystack. At least, he made himself a soft place beside one, and lay there until the sun rose, and if he did not sleep it was not his fault, for he tried hard enough.

That is how Good Indian came to take his usual place at the breakfast table, and to touch elbows with Evadna and to greet her with punctilious politeness and nothing more. That is why he got out his fishing-tackle and announced that he thought he would have a try at some trout himself, and so left the ranch not much behind Baumberger. That is why he patiently whipped the Malad riffles until he came up with the portly lawyer from Shoshone, and found him gleeful over a full basket and bubbling with innocent details of this gamy one and that one still gamier. They rode home together, and together they spent the hot afternoon in the cool depths of the grove.

By sundown Good Indian was ready to call himself a fool and Peppajee Jim a meddlesome, visionary old idiot. Steal the Peaceful Hart ranch? The more he thought of it, the more ridiculous the thing seemed.

CHAPTER XI

“YOU CAN’T PLAY WITH ME”

Good Indian was young, which means that he was not always logical, nor much given to looking very far into the future except as he was personally concerned in what he might see there. By the time Sunday brought Miss Georgie Howard and the stir of preparation for the fishing trip, he forgot that he had taken upon himself the responsibility of watching the obviously harmless movements of Baumberger, or had taken seriously the warnings of Peppajee Jim; or if he did not forget, he at least pushed it far into the background of his mind with the assertion that Peppajee was a meddlesome old fool and Baumberger no more designing than he appeared—which was not at all.

What did interest him that morning was the changeful mood of Evadna; though he kept his interest so well hidden that no one suspected it—not even the young lady herself. It is possible that if Evadna had known that Good Indian’s attitude of calm oblivion to her moods was only a mask, she might have continued longer her rigorous discipline of averted face and frigid tones.

As it was, she thawed toward him as he held himself more aloof, until she actually came to the point of addressing him directly, with a flicker of a smile for good measure; and, although he responded with stiff civility, he felt his blood pulse faster, and suddenly conceived the idea that women are like the creatures of the wild. If one is very quiet, and makes no advance whatever, the hunted thing comes closer and closer, and then a sudden pounce—he caught his breath. After that he was wary and watchful and full of his purpose.

Within ten minutes Evadna walked into the trap. They had started, and were fifty yards up the trail, when Phoebe shouted frantically after them. And because she was yet a timid rider and feared to keep the pace set by the others, it was Evadna who heard and turned back to see what was the trouble. Aunt Phoebe was standing beside the road, waving a flask.

“It’s the cream for your coffee,” she cried, going to meet Evadna. “You can slip it into your jacket-pocket, can’t you, honey? Huckleberry is so steady—and you won’t do any wild riding like the boys.”

“I’ve got my veil and a box of bait and two handkerchiefs and a piece of soap,” the girl complained, reaching down for the bottle, nevertheless. “But I can carry it in my hand till I overtake somebody to give it to.”

The somebody proved to be Good Indian, who had found it necessary to stop and inspect carefully the left forefoot of his horse, without appearing aware of the girl’s approach. She ambled up at Huckleberry’s favorite shuffling gait, struck him with her whip—a blow which would not have perturbed a mosquito—when he showed a disposition to stop beside Grant, and then, when Huckleberry reluctantly resumed his pacing, pulled him up, and looked back at the figure stooped over the hoof he held upon his knee. He was digging into the caked dirt inside the hoof with his pocketknife, and, though Evadna waited while she might have spoken a dozen words, he paid not the slightest attention—and that in spite of the distinct shadow of her head and shoulders which lay at his feet.

“Oh—Grant,” she began perfunctorily, “I’m sorry to trouble you—but do you happen to have an empty pocket?”

Good Indian gave a final scrape with his knife, and released the foot, which Keno immediately stamped pettishly into the dust. He closed the knife, after wiping the blade upon his trousers leg, and returned it to his pocket before he so much as glanced toward her.

“I may have. Why?” He picked up the bridle-reins, caught the saddle-horn, and thrust his toe into the stirrup. From under his hat-brim he saw that she was pinching her under lip between her teeth, and the sight raised his spirits considerably.

“Oh, nothing. Aunt Phoebe called me back, and gave me a bottle of cream, is all. I shall have to carry it in my hand, I suppose.” She twitched her shoulders, and started Huckleberry off again. She had called him Grant, instead of the formal Mr. Imsen she had heretofore clung to, and he had not seemed to notice it even.

He mounted with perfectly maddening deliberation, but for all that he overtook her before she had gone farther than a few rods, and he pulled up beside her with a decision which caused Huckleberry to stop also; Huckleberry, it must be confessed, was never known to show any reluctance in that direction when his head was turned away from home. He stood perfectly still while Good Indian reached out a hand.

“I’ll carry it—I’m more used to packing bottles,” he announced gravely.

“Oh, but if you must carry it in your hand, I wouldn’t dream of—” She was holding fast the bottle, and trying to wear her Christmas-angel look.

Good Indian laid hold of the flask, and they stood there stubbornly eying each other.

“I thought you wanted me to carry it,” he said at last, pulling harder.

“I merely asked if you had an empty pocket.” Evadna clung the tighter.

“Now, what’s the use—”

“Just what I was thinking!” Evadna was so impolite as to interrupt him.

Good Indian was not skilled in the management of women, but he knew horses, and to his decision he added an amendment. Instinctively he followed the method taught him by experience, and when he fancied he saw in her eyes a sign of weakening, he followed up the advantage he had gained.

“Let go—because I’m going to have it anyway, now,” he said quietly, and took the flask gently from her hands. Then he smiled at her for yielding, and his smile was a revelation to the girl, and brought the blood surging up to her face. She rode meekly beside him at the pace he himself set—which was not rapid, by any means. He watched her with quick, sidelong glances, and wondered whether he would dare say what he wanted to say—or at least a part of it.

She was gazing with a good deal of perseverance at the trail, down the windings of which the others could be seen now and then galloping through the dust, so that their progress was marked always by a smothering cloud of gray. Then she looked at Grant unexpectedly, met one of his sharp glances, and flushed hotly again.

“How about this business of hating each other, and not speaking except to please Aunt Phoebe?” he demanded, with a suddenness which startled himself. He had been thinking it, but he hadn’t intended to say it until the words spoke themselves. “Are we supposed to keep on acting the fool indefinitely?”

“I was not aware that I, at least, was acting the fool,” she retorted, with a washed-out primness.

“Oh, I can’t fight the air, and I’m not going to try. What I’ve got to say, I prefer to say straight from the shoulder. I’m sick of this standing off and giving each other the bad eye over nothing. If we’re going to stay on the same ranch, we might as well be friends. What do you say?”

For a time he thought she was not going to say anything. She was staring at the dust-cloud ahead, and chewing absently at the corner of her under lip, and she kept it up so long that Good Indian began to scowl and call himself unseemly names for making any overture whatever. But, just as he turned toward her with lips half opened for a bitter sentence, he saw a dimple appear in the cheek next to him, and held back the words.

“You told me you didn’t like me,” she reminded, looking at him briefly, and afterward fumbling her reins. “You can’t expect a girl—”

“I suppose you don’t remember coming up to me that first night, and calling me names, and telling me how you hated me, and—and winding up by pinching me?” he insinuated with hypocritical reproach, and felt of his arm. “If you could see the mark—” he hinted shamelessly.

Evadna replied by pushing up her sleeve and displaying a scratch at least an inch in length, and still roughened and red. “I suppose you don’t remember trying to murder me?” she inquired, sweetly triumphant. “If you could shoot as well as Jack, I’d have been killed very likely. And you’d be in jail this minute,” she added, with virtuous solemnity.

“But you’re not killed, and I’m not in jail.”

“And I haven’t told a living soul about it—not even Aunt Phoebe,” Evadna remarked, still painfully virtuous. “If I had—”

“She’d have wondered, maybe, what you were doing away down there in the middle of the night,” Good Indian finished. “I didn’t tell a soul, either, for that matter.”

They left the meadowland and the broad stretch of barren sand and sage, and followed, at a leisurely pace, the winding of the trail through the scarred desolation where the earth had been washed for gold. Evadna stared absently at the network of deep gashes, evidently meditating very seriously. Finally she turned to Grant with an honest impulse of friendliness.

“Well, I’m sure I’m willing to bury the tomahawk—er—that is, I mean—” She blushed hotly at the slip, and stammered incoherently.

“Never mind.” His eyes laughed at her confusion. “I’m not as bad as all that; it doesn’t hurt my feelings to have tomahawks mentioned in my presence.”

Her cheeks grew redder, if that were possible, but she made no attempt to finish what she had started to say.

Good Indian rode silent, watching her unobtrusively and wishing he knew how to bring the conversation by the most undeviating path to a certain much-desired conclusion. After all, she was not a wild thing, but a human being, and he hesitated. In dealing with men, he had but one method, which was to go straight to the point regardless of consequences. So he half turned in the saddle and rode with one foot free of the stirrup that he might face her squarely.

“You say you’re willing to bury the tomahawk; do you mean it?” His eyes sought hers, and when they met her glance held it in spite of her blushes, which indeed puzzled him. But she did not answer immediately, and so he repeated the question.

“Do you mean that? We’ve been digging into each other pretty industriously, and saying how we hate each other—but are you willing to drop it and be friends? It’s for you to say—and you’ve got to say it now.”

Evadna hung up her head at that. “Are you in the habit of laying down the law to everyone who will permit it?” she evaded.

“Am I to take it for granted you meant what you said?” He stuck stubbornly to the main issue. “Girls seem to have a way of saying things, whether they mean anything or not. Did you?”

“Did I what?” She was wide-eyed innocence again.

Good Indian muttered something profane, and kicked his horse in the ribs. When it had taken no more than two leaps forward, however, he pulled it down to a walk again, and his eyes boded ill for the misguided person who goaded him further. He glanced at the girl sharply.

“This thing has got to be settled right now, without any more fooling or beating about the bush,” he said—and he said it so quietly that she could scarcely be blamed for not realizing what lay beneath. She was beginning to recover her spirits and her composure, and her whole attitude had become demurely impish.

“Settle it then, why don’t you?” she taunted sweetly. “I’m sure I haven’t the faintest idea what there is to settle—in that solemn manner. I only know we’re a mile behind the others, and Miss Georgie will be wondering—”

“You say I’m to settle it, the way I want it settled?”

If Evadna did not intend anything serious, she certainly was a fool not to read aright his ominously calm tone and his tensely quiet manner. She must have had some experience in coquetry, but it is very likely that she had never met a man just like this one. At all events, she tilted her blonde head, smiled at him daringly, and then made a little grimace meant to signify her defiance of him and his unwarranted earnestness.

Good Indian leaned unexpectedly, caught her in his arms, and kissed her three times upon her teasing, smiling mouth, and while she was gasping for words to voice her amazement he drew back his head, and gazed sternly into her frightened eyes.

“You can’t play with me,” he muttered savagely, and kissed her again. “This is how I settle it. You’ve made me want you for mine. It’s got to be love or—hate now. There isn’t anything between, for me and you.” His eyes passed hungrily from her quivering lips to her eyes, and the glow within his own made her breath come faster. She struggled weakly to free herself, and his clasp only tightened jealously.

“If you had hated me, you wouldn’t have stopped back there, and spoken to me,” he said, the words coming in a rush. “Women like to play with love, I think. But you can’t play with me. I want you. And I’m going to have you. Unless you hate me. But you don’t. I’d stake my life on it.” And he kissed her again.

Evadna reached up, felt for her hat, and began pulling it straight, and Good Indian, recalled to himself by the action, released her with manifest reluctance. He felt then that he ought never to let her go out of his arms; it was the only way, it seemed to him, that he could be sure of her. Evadna found words to express her thoughts, and her thoughts were as wholly conventional as was the impulse to straighten her hat.

“We’ve only known each other a week!” she cried tremulously, while her gloved fingers felt inquiringly for loosened hairpins. “You’ve no right—you’re perfectly horrid! You take everything for granted—”

Good Indian laughed at her, a laugh of pure, elemental joy in life and in love.

“A man’s heart does not beat by the calendar. Nature made the heart to beat with love, ages before man measured time, and prattled of hours and days and weeks,” he retorted. “I’m not the same man I was a week ago. Nor an hour ago. What does it matter, I am—the man I am now.” He looked at her more calmly. “An hour ago,” he pointed out, “I didn’t dream I should kiss you. Nor you, that you would let me do it.”

“I didn’t! I couldn’t help myself. You—oh, I never saw such a—a brute!” The tears in her eyes were, perhaps, tears of rage at the swiftness with which he had mastered the situation and turned it in a breath from the safe channel of petty argument. She struck Huckleberry a blow with her whip which sent that astonished animal galloping down the slope before them, his ears laid back and his white eyelashes blinking resentment against the outrage.

Good Indian laughed aloud, spurred Keno into a run, and passed her with a scurry of dust, a flash of white teeth and laughing black eyes, and a wave of his free hand in adieu. He was still laughing when he overtook the others, passed by the main group, and singled out Jack, his particular chum. He refused to explain either his hurry or his mirth further than to fling out a vague sentence about a race, and thereafter he ambled contentedly along beside Jack in the lead, and told how he had won a hundred and sixty dollars in a crap game the last time he was in Shoshone, and how he had kept on until he had “quit ten dollars in the hole.” The rest of the boys, catching a few words here and there, crowded close, and left the two girls to themselves, while Good Indian recounted in detail the fluctuations of the game; how he had seesawed for an hour, winning and losing alternately; and how his luck had changed suddenly just when he had made up his mind to play a five-dollar gold piece he had in his hand and quit.

“I threw naturals three times in succession,” he said, “and let my bets ride. Then I got Big Dick, made good, and threw another natural. I was seeing those Spanish spurs and that peach of a headstall in Fernando’s by that time; seeing them on Keno and me—they’re in the window yet, Jack, and I went in when I first hit town and looked them over and priced them; a hundred and fifty, just about what we guessed he’d hold them at. And say, those conchos—you remember the size of ’em, Jack?—they’re solid silver, hammered out and engraved by hand. Those Mexicans sure do turn out some fine work on their silver fixings!” He felt in his pocket for a match.

“Pity I didn’t let well enough alone,” he went on. “I had the price of the outfit, and ten dollars over. But then I got hoggish. I thought I stood a good chance of making seven lucky passes straight—I did once, and I never got over it, I guess. I was going to pinch down to ten—but I didn’t; I let her ride. And shot craps!”

He drew the match along the stamped saddle-skirt behind the cantle, because that gave him a chance to steal a look behind him without being caught in the act. Good, wide hat-brims have more uses than to shield one’s face from the sun. He saw that Evadna was riding in what looked like a sulky silence beside her friend, but he felt no compunction for what he had done; instead he was exhilarated as with some heady wine, and he did not want to do any thinking about it—yet. He did not even want to be near Evadna. He faced to the front, and lighted his cigarette while he listened to the sympathetic chorus from the boys.

“What did you do then?” asked Gene.

“Well, I’d lost the whole blamed chunk on a pair of measly aces,” he said. “I was pretty sore by that time, I’m telling you! I was down to ten dollars, but I started right in to bring back that hundred and sixty. Funny, but I felt exactly as if somebody had stolen that headstall and spurs right out of my hand, and I just had to get it back pronto. I started in with a dollar, lost it on craps—sixes, that time—sent another one down the same trail trying to make Little Joe come again, third went on craps, fourth I doubled on nine, lost ’em both on craps—say, I never looked so many aces and sixes in the face in my life! It was sure kay bueno, the luck I had that night. I got up broke, and had to strike Riley for money to get out of town with.”

So for a time he managed to avoid facing squarely this new and very important factor which must henceforth have its place in the problem of his life.

CHAPTER XII

“THEM DAMN SNAKE”

Three hundred yards up the river, in the shade of a huge bowlder, round an end of which the water hurried in a green swirl that it might the sooner lie quiet in the deep, dark pool below, Good Indian, picking his solitary way over the loose rocks, came unexpectedly upon Baumberger, his heavy pipe sagging a corner of his flabby mouth, while he painstakingly detached a fly from his leader, hooked it into the proper compartment of his fly-book, and hesitated over his selection of another to take its place. Absorption was writ deep on his gross countenance, and he recognized the intruder by the briefest of flickering glances and the slightest of nods.

“Keep back from that hole, will yuh?” he muttered, jerking his head toward the still pool. “I ain’t tried it yet.”

Good Indian was not particularly interested in his own fishing. The sight of Baumberger, bulking there in the shade with his sagging cheeks and sagging pipe, his flopping old hat and baggy canvas fishing-coat, with his battered basket slung over his slouching shoulder and sagging with the weight of his catch; the sloppy wrinkles of his high, rubber boots shining blackly from recent immersion in the stream, caught his errant attention, and stayed him for a few minutes to watch.

Loosely disreputable looked Lawyer Baumberger, from the snagged hole in his hat-crown where a wisp of graying hair fluttered through, to the toes of his ungainly, rubber-clad feet; loosely disreputable, but not commonplace and not incompetent. Though his speech might be a slovenly mumble, there was no purposeless fumbling of the fingers that chose a fly and knotted it fast upon the leader. There was no bungling movement of hand or foot when he laid his pipe upon the rock, tiptoed around the corner, sent a mechanical glance upward toward the swaying branches of an overhanging tree, pulled out his six feet of silk line with a sweep of his arm, and with a delicate fillip, sent the fly skittering over the glassy center of the pool.

Good Indian, looking at him, felt instinctively that a part, at least, of the man’s nature was nakedly revealed to him then. It seemed scarcely fair to read the lust of him and the utter abandonment to the hazard of the game. Pitiless he looked, with clenched teeth just showing between the loose lips drawn back in a grin that was half-snarl, half-involuntary contraction of muscles sympathetically tense.

That was when a shimmering thing slithered up, snapped at the fly, and flashed away to the tune of singing reel and the dance of the swaying rod. The man grew suddenly cruel and crafty and full of lust; and Good Indian, watching him, was conscious of an inward shudder of repulsion. He had fished all his life—had Good Indian—and had found joy in the sport. And here was he inwardly condemning a sportsman who stood self-revealed, repelling, hateful; a man who gloated over the struggle of something alive and at his mercy; to whom sport meant power indulged with impunity. Good Indian did not try to put the thing in words, but he felt it nevertheless.

“Brute!” he muttered aloud, his face eloquent of cold disgust.

At that moment Baumberger drew the tired fish gently into the shallows, swung him deftly upon the rocks, and laid hold of him greedily.

“Ain’t he a beaut?” he cried, in his wheezy chuckle. “Wait a minute while I weigh him. He’ll go over a pound, I’ll bet money on it.” Gloatingly he held it in his hands, removed the hook, and inserted under the gills the larger one of the little scales he carried inside his basket.

“Pound and four ounces,” he announced, and slid the fish into his basket. He was the ordinary, good-natured, gross Baumberger now. He reached for his pipe, placed it in his mouth, and held out a hand to Good Indian for a match.

“Say, young fella, have you got any stand-in with your noble red brothers?” he asked, after he had sucked life into the charred tobacco.

“Cousins twice or three times removed, you mean,” said Good Indian coldly, too proud and too lately repelled to meet the man on friendly ground. “Why do you ask?”

Baumberger eyed him speculatively while he smoked, and chuckled to himself.

“One of ’em—never mind placing him on his own p’ticular limb of the family tree—has been doggin’ me all morning,” he said at last, and waved a fishy hand toward the bluff which towered high above them. “Saw him when I was comin’ up, about sunrise, pokin’ along behind me in the sagebrush. Didn’t think anything of that—thought maybe he was hunting or going fishing—but he’s been sneakin’ around behind me ever since. I don’t reckon he’s after my scalp—not enough hair to pay—but I’d like to know what the dickens he does mean.”

“Nothing probably,” Good Indian told him shortly, his eyes nevertheless searching the rocks for a sight of the watcher.

“Well, I don’t much like the idea,” complained Baumberger, casting an eye aloft in fear of snagging his line when he made another cast. “He was right up there a few minutes ago.” He pointed his rod toward a sun-ridden ridge above them. “I got a flicker of his green blanket when he raised up and scowled down at me. He ducked when he saw me turn my head—looked to me like the surly buck that blew in to the ranch the night I came; Jim something-or-other. By the great immortal Jehosaphat!” he swore humorously, “I’d like to tie him up in his dirty blanket and heave him into the river—only it would kill all the fish in the Malad.”

Good Indian laughed.

“Oh, I know it’s funny, young fella,” Baumberger growled. “About as funny as being pestered by a mosquito buzzing under your nose when you’re playing a fish that keeps cuttin’ figure eights in a hole the size uh that one there.”

“I’ll go up and take a look,” Good Indian offered carelessly.

“Well, I wish you would. I can’t keep my mind on m’ fishing—just wondering what the deuce he’s after. And say! You tell him I’ll stand him on his off ear if I catch him doggie’ me ag’in. Folks come with yuh?” he remembered to ask as he prepared for another cast into the pool.

“They’re down there getting a campfire built, ready to fry what fish they catch,” Good Indian informed him, as he turned to climb the bluff. “They’re going to eat dinner under that big ledge by the rapids. You better go on down.”

He stood for a minute, and watched Baumberger make a dexterous cast, which proved fruitless, before he began climbing up the steep slope of jumbled bowlders upon which the bluff itself seemed to rest. He was not particularly interested in his quest, but he was in the mood for purposeless action; he still did not want to think.

He climbed negligently, scattering loose rocks down the hill behind him. He had no expectation of coming upon Peppajee—unless Peppajee deliberately put himself in his way—and so there was no need of caution. He stopped once, and stood long minutes with his head turned to catch the faint sound of high-keyed laughter and talk which drifted up to him. If he went higher, he thought, he might get a glimpse of them—of her, to tell his thought honestly. Whereupon he forgot all about finding and expostulating with Peppajee, and thought only a point of the ridge which would give him a clear view downstream.

To be sure, he might as easily have retraced his steps and joined the group, and seen every changing look in her face. But he did not want to be near her when others were by; he wanted her to himself, or not at all. So he went on, while the sun beat hotly down upon him and the rocks sent up dry waves of heat like an oven.

A rattlesnake buzzed its strident warning between two rocks, but before he turned his attention to the business of killing it, the snake had crawled leisurely away into a cleft, where he could not reach it with the stones he threw. His thoughts, however, were brought back to his surroundings so that he remembered Peppajee. He stood still, and scanned carefully the jumble of rocks and bowlders which sloped steeply down to the river, looking for a betraying bit of color or dirty gray hat-crown.

“But I could look my eyes out and welcome, if he didn’t want to be seen,” he concluded, and sat down while he rolled a cigarette. “And I don’t know as I want to see him, anyway.” Still, he did not move immediately. He was in the shade, which was a matter for congratulation on such a day. He had a cigarette between his lips, which made for comfort; and he still felt the exhilarating effects of his unpremeditated boldness, without having come to the point of sober thinking. He sat there, and blew occasional mouthfuls of smoke into the quivering heat waves, and stared down at the river rushing over the impeding rocks as if its very existence depended upon reaching as soon as possible the broader sweep of the Snake.

He finished the first cigarette, and rolled another from sheer force of habit rather than because he really wanted one. He lifted one foot, and laid it across his knee, and was drawing a match along the sole of his boot when his eyes chanced to rest for a moment upon a flutter of green, which showed briefly around the corner of a great square rock poised insecurely upon one corner, as if it were about to hurl its great bulk down upon the river it had watched so long. He held the blazing match poised midway to its destination while he looked; then he put it to the use he had meant it for, pulled his hat-brim down over his right eye and ear to shield them from the burn of the sun, and went picking his way idly over to the place.

“Hul-lo!” he greeted, in the manner of one who refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of a situation which confronts him suddenly. “What’s the excitement?”

There was no excitement whatever. There was Peppajee, hunched up against the rock in that uncomfortable attitude which permits a man to come at the most intimate relations with the outside of his own ankle, upon which he was scowling in seeming malignity. There was his hunting-knife lying upon a flat stone near to his hand, with a fresh red blotch upon the blade, and there was his little stone pipe clenched between his teeth and glowing red within the bowl. Also there was the ankle, purple and swollen from the ligature above it—for his legging was off and torn into strips which formed a bandage, and a splinter of rock was twisted ingeniously in the wrappings for added tightness. From a crisscross of gashes a sluggish, red stream trickled down to the ankle-bone, and from there drip-dropped into a tiny, red pool in the barren, yellow soil.

“Catchum rattlesnake bite?” queried Good Indian inanely, as is the habit of the onlooker when the scene shouts forth eloquently its explanation, and questions are almost insultingly superfluous.

“Huh!” grunted Peppajee, disdaining further speech upon the subject, and regarded sourly the red drip.

“Want me to suck it?” ventured Good Indian unenthusiastically, eying the wound.

“Huh!” Peppajee removed the pipe, his eyes still upon his ankle. “Plenty blood come, mebbyso.” To make sure, however, he kneaded the swollen flesh about the wound, thus accelerating slightly the red drip.

Then deliberately he took another turn with the rock, sending the buckskin thongs deeper into the flesh, and held the burning pipe against the skin above the wound until Good Indian sickened and turned away his head. When he looked again, Peppajee was sucking hard at the pipe, and gazing impersonally at the place. He bent again, and hid the glow of his pipe against his ankle. His thin lips tightened while he held it there, but the lean, brown fingers were firm as splinters of the rock behind him. When the fire cooled, he fanned it to life again with his breath, and when it winked redly at him he laid it grimly against his flesh.

So, while Good Indian stood and looked on with lips as tightly drawn as the other’s, he seared a circle around the wound—a circle which bit deep and drew apart the gashes like lips opened for protest. He regarded critically his handiwork, muttered a “Bueno” under his breath, knocked the ashes from his pipe, and returned it to some mysterious hiding-place beneath his blanket. Then he picked up his moccasin.

“Them damn’ snake, him no speakum,” he observed disgustedly. “Heap fool me; him biteum”—he made a stabbing gesture with thumb and finger in the air by way of illustration—“then him go quick.” He began gingerly trying to force the moccasin upon his foot, his mouth drawn down with the look of one who considers that he has been hardly used.

“How you get home?” Good Indian’s thoughts swung round to practical things. “You got horse?”

Peppajee shook his head, reached for his knife, and slit the moccasin till it was no more than a wrapping. “Mebbyso heap walk,” he stated simply.

“Mebbyso you won’t do anything of the kind,” Good Indian retorted. “You come down and take a horse. What for you all time watchum Baumberger?” he added, remembering then what had brought them both upon the bluff. “Baumberger all time fish—no more.” He waved his hand toward the Malad. “Baumberger bueno—catchum fish—no more.”

Peppajee got slowly and painfully upon his feet—rather, upon one foot. When Good Indian held out a steadying arm, he accepted it, and leaned rather heavily.

“Yo’ eyes sick,” said Peppajee, and grinned sardonically. “Yo’ eyes see all time Squaw-with-sun-hair. Fillum yo’ eyes, yo’ see notting. Yo’ catchum squaw, bimeby mebbyso see plenty mo’. Me no catchum sick eye. Mebbyso me see heap plenty.”

“What you see, you all time watchum Baumberger?”

But Peppajee, hobbling where he must walk, crawling where he might, sliding carefully where a slanting bowlder offered a few feet of smooth descent, and taking hold of Good Indian’s offered arm when necessity impelled him, pressed his thin lips together, and refused to answer. So they came at last to the ledge beside the rapids, where a thin wisp of smoke waved lazily in the vagrant breeze which played with the ripples and swayed languidly the smaller branches of the nearby trees.

Only Donny was there, sitting disgruntled upon the most comfortable rock he could find, sulking because the others had taken all the fishing-tackle that was of any account, and had left him to make shift with one bent, dulled hook, a lump of fat pork, and a dozen feet of line.

“And I can catch more fish than anybody in the bunch!” he began complainingly and without preface, waving a dirty hand contemptuously at the despised tackle when the two came slowly up. “That’s the way it goes when you take a lot of girls along! They’ve got to have the best rods and tackle, and all they’ll do will be to snag lines and lose leaders and hooks, and giggle alla squeal. Aw—darn girls!”

“And I’m going to pile it on still thicker, Donny!” Good Indian grinned down at him. “I’m going to swipe your Pirate Chief for a while, till I take Peppajee into camp. He’s gentle, and Peppajee’s got a snake-bite. I’ll be back before you get ready to go home.”

“I’m ready to go home right now,” growled Donny, sinking his chin between his two palms. “But I guess the walkin’ ain’t all taken up.”

Good Indian regarded him frowningly, gave a little snort, and turned away. Donny in that mood was not to be easily placated, and certainly not to be ignored. He went over to the little flat, and selected Jack’s horse, saddled him, and discovered that it had certain well-defined race prejudices, and would not let Peppajee put foot to the stirrup. Keno he knew would be no more tractable, so that he finally slapped Jack’s saddle on Huckleberry, and so got Peppajee mounted and headed toward camp.

“You tell Jack I borrowed his saddle and Huckleberry,” he called out to the drooping little figure on the rock. “But I’ll get back before they want to go home.”

But Donny was glooming over his wrongs, and neither heard nor wanted to hear. Having for his legacy a temper cumulative in its heat, he was coming rapidly to the point where he, too, started home, and left no word or message behind; a trivial enough incident in itself, but one which opened the way for some misunderstanding and fruitless speculation upon the part of Evadna.

CHAPTER XIII

CLOUD-SIGN VERSUS CUPID

Few men are ever called upon by untoward circumstance to know the sensations caused by rattlesnake bite, knife gashes, impromptu cauterization, and, topping the whole, the peculiar torture of congested veins and swollen muscles which comes from a tourniquet. The feeling must be unpleasant in the extreme, and the most morbid of sensation-seekers would scarcely put himself in the way of that particular experience.

Peppajee Jim, therefore, had reason in plenty for glowering at the world as he saw it that day. He held Huckleberry rigidly down to his laziest amble that the jar of riding might be lessened, kept his injured foot free from the stirrup, and merely grunted when Good Indian asked him once how he felt.

When they reached the desolation of the old placer-pits, however, he turned his eyes from the trail where it showed just over Huckleberry’s ears, and regarded sourly the deep gashes and dislodged bowlders which told where water and the greed of man for gold had raged fiercest. Then, for the first time during the whole ride, he spoke.

“All time, yo’ sleepum,” he said, in the sonorous, oracular tone which he usually employed when a subject held his serious thought. “Peaceful Hart, him all same sleepum. All same sleepum ’longside snake. No seeum snake, no thinkum mebbyso catchum bite.” He glanced down at his own snake-bitten foot. “Snake bite, make all time much hurt.” His eyes turned, and dwelt sharply upon the face of Good Indian.

“Yo’ all time thinkum Squaw-with-sun-hair. Me tell yo’ for watchum, yo’ no think for watchum. Baumberga, him all same snake. Yo’ think him all time catchum fish. Huh! Yo’ heap big fool, yo’ thinkum cat. Rattlesnake, mebbyso sleepum in sun one time. Yo’ no thinkum bueno, yo’ seeum sleep in sun. Yo’ heap sabe him all time kay bueno jus’ same. Yo’ heap sabe yo’ come close, him biteum. Mebbyso biteum hard, for killum yo’ all time.” He paused, then drove home his point like the true orator. “Baumberga catchum fish. All same rattlesnake sleepum in sun. Kay bueno.”

Good Indian jerked his mind back from delicious recollection of one sweet, swift-passing minute, and half opened his lips for reply. But he did not speak; he did not know what to say, and it is ill-spent time—that passed in purposeless speech with such as Peppajee. Peppajee roused himself from meditation brief as it seemed deep, lifted a lean, brown hand to push back from his eyes a fallen lock of hair, and pointed straight away to the west.

“Las’ night, sun go sleepum. Clouds come all same blanket, sun wrappum in blanket. Cloud look heap mad—mebbyso make much storm. Bimeby much mens come in cloud, stand so—and so—and so.” With pointing finger he indicated a half circle. “Otha man come, heap big man. Stoppum ’way off, all time makeum sign, for fight. Me watchum. Me set by fire, watchum cloud makeum sign. Fire smoke look up for say, ‘What yo’ do all time, mebbyso?’ Cloud man shakeum hand, makeum much sign. Fire smoke heap sad, bend down far, lookum me, lookum where cloud look. All time lookum for Peaceful Hart ranch. Me lay down for sleepum, me dream all time much fight. All time bad sign come. Kay bueno.” Peppajee shook his head slowly, his leathery face set in deep, somber lines.

“Much trouble come heap quick,” he said gravely, hitching his blanket into place upon his shoulder. “Me no sabe—all same, heap trouble come. Much mens, mebbyso much fight, much shootum—mebbyso kill. Peaceful Hart him all time laugh me. All same, me sabe smoke sign, sabe cloud sign, sabe—Baumberga. Heap ka-a-ay bueno!”

Good Indian’s memory dashed upon him a picture of bright moonlight and the broody silence of a night half gone, and of a figure forming sharply and suddenly from the black shadow of the stable and stealing away into the sage, and of Baumberger emerging warily from that same shadow and stopping to light his pipe before he strolled on to the house and to the armchair upon the porch.

There might be a sinister meaning in that picture, but it was so well hidden that he had little hope of ever finding it. Also, it occurred to him that Peppajee, usually given over to creature comforts and the idle gossip of camp and the ranches he visited, was proving the sincerity of his manifest uneasiness by a watchfulness wholly at variance with his natural laziness. On the other hand, Peppajee loved to play the oracle, and a waving wisp of smoke, or the changing shapes in a wind-riven cloud meant to him spirit-sent prophecies not to be ignored.

He turned the matter over in his mind, was the victim of uneasiness for five minutes, perhaps, and then drifted off into wondering what Evadna was doing at that particular moment, and to planning how he should manage to fall behind with her when they all rode home, and so make possible other delicious moments. He even took note of certain sharp bends in the trail, where a couple riding fifty yards, say, behind a group would be for the time being quite hidden from sight and to all intents and purposes alone in the world for two minutes, or three—perhaps the time might be stretched to five.

The ranch was quiet, with even the dogs asleep in the shade. Peppajee insisted in one sentence upon going straight on to camp, so they did not stop. Without speaking, they plodded through the dust up the grade, left it, and followed the dim trail through the sagebrush and rocks to the Indian camp which seemed asleep also, except where three squaws were squatting in the sharply defined, conical shadow of a wikiup, mumbling desultorily the gossip of their little world, while their fingers moved with mechanical industry—one shining black head bent over a half-finished, beaded moccasin, another stitching a crude gown of bright-flowered calico, and the third braiding her hair afresh with leisurely care for its perfect smoothness. Good Indian took note of the group before it stirred to activity, and murmured anxiety over the bandaged foot of Peppajee.

“Me no can watchum more, mebbyso six days. Yo’ no sleepum all time yo’ walk—no thinkum all time squaw. Mebbyso yo’ think for man-snake. Mebbyso yo’ watchum,” Peppajee said, as he swung slowly down from Huckleberry’s back.

“All right. I’ll watchum plenty,” Good Indian promised lightly, gave a glance of passing, masculine interest at the squaw who was braiding her hair, and who was young and fresh-cheeked and bright-eyed and slender, forgot her the instant his eyes left her, and made haste to return to the Malad and the girl who held all his thoughts and all his desire.

That girl was sitting upon the rock which Donny had occupied, and she looked very much as if she were sulking, much as Donny had sulked. She had her chin in a pink palm and was digging little holes in the sand with the tip of her rod, which was not at all beneficial to the rod and did not appear even to interest the digger; for her wonderfully blue eyes were staring at the green-and-white churn of the rapids, and her lips were pursed moodily, as if she did not even see what she was looking at so fixedly.

Good Indian’s eyes were upon her while he was dismounting, but he did not go to her immediately. Instead, he busied himself with unsaddling, and explained to the boys just why he had left so unaccountably. Secretly he was hoping that Evadna heard the explanation, and he raised his voice purposely. But Evadna was not listening, apparently; and, if she had been, the noise of the rapids would have prevented her hearing what he said.

Miss Georgie Howard was frying fish and consistently snubbing Baumberger, who hulked loosely near the campfire, and between puffs at his pipe praised heavily her skill, and professed to own a ravenous appetite. Good Indian heard him as he passed close by them, and heard also the keen thrust she gave in return; and he stopped and half turned, looking at her with involuntary appreciation. His glance took in Baumberger next, and he lifted a shoulder and went on. Without intentionally resorting to subterfuge, he felt an urge to wash his hands, and he chose for his ablutions that part of the river’s edge which was nearest Evadna.

First he stooped and drank thirstily, his hat pushed back, while his lips met full the hurrying water, clear and cold, yet with the chill it had brought from the mountain springs which fed it, and as he lifted his head he looked full at her.

Evadna stared stonily over him to where the water boiled fastest. He might have been one of the rocks, for all the notice she took of him.

Good Indian frowned with genuine puzzlement, and began slowly to wash his hands, glancing at her often in hope that he might meet her eyes. When she did not seem to see him at all, the smile of a secret shared joyously with her died from his own eyes, and when he had dried his hands upon his handkerchief he cast aside his inward shyness in the presence of the Hart boys and Miss Georgie and Baumberger, and went boldly over to her.

“Aren’t you feeling well?” he asked, with tender proprietorship in his tone.

“I’m feeling quite well, thank you,” returned Evadna frigidly, neglecting to look at him.

“What is the matter, then? Aren’t you having a good time?”

“I’m enjoying myself very much—except that your presence annoys me. I wish you’d go away.”

Good Indian turned on his heel and went; he felt that at last Evadna was looking at him, though he would not turn to make sure. And his instinct told him withal that he must ignore her mood if he would win her from it. With a freakish impulse, he headed straight for the campfire and Miss Georgie, but when he came up to her the look she gave him of understanding, with sympathy to soften it, sent him away again without speaking.

He wandered back to the river’s edge—this time some distance from where Evadna sat—and began throwing pebbles at the black nose of a wave-washed bowlder away toward the other side. Clark and Gene, loitered up, watched him lazily, and, picking up other pebbles, started to do the same thing. Soon all the boys were throwing at the bowlder, and were making a good deal of noise over the various hits and misses, and the spirit of rivalry waxed stronger and stronger until it was like any other game wherein full-blooded youths strive against one another for supremacy. They came to the point of making bets, at first extravagant and then growing more and more genuinely in earnest, for we’re gamblers all, at heart.

Miss Georgie burned a frying-panful of fish until they sent up an acrid, blue smoke, while she ran over to try her luck with a stone or two. Even Baumberger heaved himself up from where he was lounging, and strolled over to watch. But Evadna could not have stuck closer to her rock if she had been glued there, and if she had been blind and deaf she would not have appeared more oblivious.

Good Indian grew anxious, and then angry. The savage stirred within him, and counseled immediate and complete mastery of her—his woman. But there was the white man of him who said the thought was brutal and unchivalrous, and reminded the savage that one must not look upon a woman as a chattel, to be beaten or caressed, as the humor seized the master. And, last of all, there was the surface of him laughing with the others, jeering at those who fell short of the mark, and striving his utmost to be first of them all in accuracy.

He even smiled upon Miss Georgie when she hit the bowlder fairly, and, when the stench of the burning fish drifted over to them, he gave his supply of pebbles into her two hands, and ran to the rescue. He caught Evadna in the act of regarding him sidelong, just as a horse sometimes will keep an eye on the man with the rope in a corral; so he knew she was thinking of him, at least, and was wondering what he meant to do next, and the savage in him laughed and lay down again, knowing himself the master.

What he did was to throw away the burnt fish, clean the frying-pan, and start more sizzling over the fire, which he kicked into just the right condition. He whistled softly to himself while he broke dry sticks across his knee for the fire, and when Miss Georgie cried out that she had made three hits in succession, he called back: “Good shot!” and took up the tune where he had left off. Never, for one instant, was he unconscious of Evadna’s secret watchfulness, and never, for one instant, did he let her see that she was in his thoughts.

He finished frying the fish, set out the sandwiches and doughnuts, and pickled peaches and cheese, and pounded upon a tin plate to announce that dinner was ready. He poured the coffee into the cups held out to him, and got the flask of cream from a niche between two rocks at the water’s edge. He said “Too bad,” when it became generally known that the glare of the sun upon the water had given Evadna a headache, and he said it exactly as he would have spoken if Jack, for instance, had upset the sugar.

He held up the broken-handled butcher knife that was in the camp kit, and declaimed tragically: “Is this a dagger that I see before me?” and much more of the kind that was eery. He saw the reluctant dimple which showed fleetingly in Evadna’s cheek, and also the tears which swelled her eyelids immediately after, but she did not know that he saw them, though another did.

He was taken wholly by surprise when Miss Georgie, walking past him afterward on her way to an enticing pool, nipped his arm for attention and murmured:

“You’re doing fine—only don’t overdo it. She’s had just about all she can stand right now. Give her a chance to forgive you—and let her think she came out ahead! Good luck!” Whereupon she finished whatever she pretended to have been doing to her fishing-tackle, and beckoned Wally and Jack to come along.

“We’ve just got to catch that big one,” she laughed, “so Mr. Baumberger can go home and attend to his own business!” It took imagination to feel sure there had been a significant accent on the last of the sentence, and Baumberger must have been imaginative. He lowered his head like a bull meditating assault, and his leering eyes shot her a glance of inquiry and suspicion. But Miss Georgie Howard met his look with a smile that was nothing more than idle amusement.

“I’d like nothing better than to get that four-pounder on my line,” she added. “It would be the joke of the season—if a woman caught him.”

“Bet you couldn’t land him,” chuckled Baumberger, breathing a sigh which might have been relief, and ambled away contentedly. “I may not see you folks again till supper,” he bethought him to call back. “I’m going to catch a dozen more—and then I thought I’d take ’em up to Pete Hamilton; I’m using his horse, yuh see, and—” He flung out a hand to round off the sentence, turned, and went stumbling over a particularly rocky place.

Miss Georgie stood where she was, and watched him with her mouth twisted to one side and three perpendicular creases between her eyebrows. When he was out of sight, she glanced at Evadna—once more perched sulkily upon the rock.

“Head still bad, chicken?” she inquired cheerfully. “Better stay here in the shade—I won’t be gone long.”

“I’m going to fish,” said Evadna, but she did not stir, not even when Miss Georgie went on, convoyed by all the Hart boys.

Good Indian had volunteered the information that he was going to fish downstream, but he was a long time in tying his leader and fussing with his reel. His preparations were finished just when the last straggler of the group was out of sight. Then he laid down his rod, went over to Evadna, took her by the arm, and drew her back to the farther shelter of the ledge.

“Now, what’s the trouble?” he asked directly. “I hope you’re not trying to make yourself think I was only—You know what I meant, don’t you? And you said yes. You said it with your lips, and with your eyes. Did you want more words? Tell me what it is that bothers you.”

There was a droop to Evadna’s shoulders, and a tremble to her mouth. She would not look at him. She kept her eyes gazing downward, perhaps to hide tears. Good Indian waited for her to speak, and when it seemed plain that she did not mean to do so, he yielded to his instinct and took her in his arms.

“Sweetheart!” he murmured against her ear, and it was the first time he had ever spoken the word to any woman. “You love me, I know it. You won’t say it, but I know you do. I should have felt it this morning if you hadn’t cared. You—you let me kiss you. And—”

“And after that you—you rode off and left me—and you went away by yourself, just as if—just as if nothing had happened, and you’ve acted ever since as if—” She bit her lips, turned her face away from him, plucked at his hands to free herself from his clasping arms, and then she laid her face down against him, and sobbed.

Good Indian tried his best to explain his mood and his actions that day, and if he did not make himself very clear—which could scarcely be expected, since he did not quite understand it himself—he at least succeeded in lifting from her the weight of doubt and of depression.

They were astonished when Wally and Jack and Miss Georgie suddenly confronted them and proved, by the number of fish which they carried, that they had been gone longer than ten minutes or so. They were red as to their faces, and embarrassed as to manner, and Good Indian went away hurriedly after the horses, without meeting the quizzical glances of the boys, or replying t to certain pointed remarks which they fired after him.

“And he’s the buckaroo that’s got no use for girls!” commented Wally, looking after him, and ran his tongue meditatively along the loose edge of his cigarette. “Kid, I wish you’d tell me how you done it. It worked quick, anyhow.”

“And thorough,” grinned Jack. “I was thinking some of falling in love with you myself, Vad. Soon as some of the shine wore off, and you got so you acted like a real person.”

“I saw it coming, when it first heaved in sight,” chirped Miss Georgie, in a more cheerful tone than she had used that day; in too cheerful a tone to be quite convincing, if any one there had been taking notice of mere tones.

1 AUTHOR’S NOTE.—The Indians of southern Idaho spoke a somewhat mixed dialect. Bueno (wayno), their word for ‘good,’ undoubtedly being taken from the Spanish language. I believe the word “kay” to be Indian. It means “no”, and thus the “Kay bueno” so often used by them means literally “no good,” and is a term of reproach On the other hand, “heap bueno” is “very good,” their enthusiasm being manifested merely by drawing out the word “heap.” In speaking English they appear to have no other way of expressing, in a single phrase, their like or dislike of an object or person.