Читать книгу The Raider - Charles Alden Seltzer - Страница 3

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It was not until Ellen came in sight of the cabin that the awesome and austere history of the Ballinger family assailed her memory. The background of her ancestry was peopled with solemn-visaged men and women who watched her with formidable disapprobation. They were dignified ancestors whose mode of living was as sacred as a religious ritual. They never did anything wrong. They were moral, staid, and undemonstrative. The men were stiff necked; the women never permitted an adventurous gaze to stir the jealousy of their wedded mates. No scandal marred the fair record of the Ballinger family.

No scandal until now. At least Ellen’s father, Matthew M. Ballinger, had insisted that she was disgracing the family, and of course he ought to know for he was more familiar with the family history than Ellen.

Ellen was not interested in the family history as much as she was interested in knowing what was going on in the courageous heart which had sent her to search for Jim Kellis’s cabin. She had ridden twenty miles into the wilderness seeking it. And here it was, standing in a grove of pine and air balsam not more than a hundred yards from where she sat on her pony. The wilderness through which she had been riding encompassed the grove. It spread an endless number of miles to the purple mountains southward, eastward, and westward. This wilderness was featured by rugged cliffs and crags that appeared suddenly; it was dotted here and there by bastioned towers of polychromatic granite, slender spires and huge battlements. The dun earth was gashed by wild gorges, sandy arroyos, barrancas.

It had seemed to her that something had followed her from the instant she had left her father’s ranch house. The something was invisible. An atmosphere. A threat or a menace. An imponderable something like a whisper which is stilled at its inception. Ellen grimly wondered if it were the Family breathing its disapproval.

Well, of the family there still remained her father and a brother. Her mother she had never known. Her mother had not been a Ballinger and in dying while giving birth to Ellen she had escaped the rigorous, silent scrutiny of the family, and perhaps the blame for Ellen’s unconventional escapades.

Ellen had refused to inherit the dignity and the austerity of her ancestors, and back East in a long gallery where the walls were adorned with the portraits of beautiful ladies, she had often mocked at their solemn faces.

Something of theirs she had inherited at least—their beauty. And yet she was not entirely conscious that she possessed it. For now, sitting on her pony, while her cheeks crimsoned with embarrassment, she was not vainly thinking of how delighted Jim Kellis would be to see her again, but of how eager she was to look upon him.

She hadn’t seen Jim Kellis in five years. She had been twenty and Kellis twenty-three when he had come West. He had belonged to her “set,” and he had been improvident and weak. Yet she had loved him then and during the separation she had invested him with the character of a hero. He had been the only man of her acquaintance who had had the courage to journey to a new country. He had been weak and careless, yet he had grit enough to endure hardship and loneliness in an attempt to fight back to his former position. She loved Jim for that. The others, being merely men, were nothing to her. She wanted Jim Kellis and she meant to have him in spite of the solemn-visaged ancestors who at this moment seemed to be standing in the background wagging their heads at her.

She was not usually conscious of her ancestors. There had been many times when she had calmly ignored her father’s advice. As in the present.

“No woman of the Ballinger family ever chased after a man!” Matthew M. Ballinger had told her.

“Would that explain why the men they did get were so spiritless?” she naïvely asked. “I shouldn’t care to have a man unless I wanted him badly enough to make an effort to catch him.”

“Are you sure Jim Kellis wants you?” questioned Ballinger.

“I am not sure. He told me he wanted me. But I want him. That is why I am going to him,” she told her father on the day following their arrival at the Hour Glass ranch.

“Has Kellis kept you informed of what he has been doing?” asked Ballinger.

“He has written me letters.”

“You know where he may be found?”

“Yes.”

“This is the first time you have been out here with me,” said her father. “You know nothing whatever about the country. I’ll send Jim Peters with you.” Jim Peters was the Hour Glass foreman.

“I’m going alone. Thank you for offering Peters, Dad.”

Ballinger’s lips tightened. In his business organization there were five thousand men with business brains who accepted his suggestions and commands with deferential bows. But his daughter stood straight and looked him squarely in the eye and declined to be guided by him.

He flushed, turned away.

“All right then,” he said. He faced her again.

“What are you going to do when you find Kellis?” he asked.

“Marry him.”

“To-night?”

“Of course.”

Ballinger frowned.

“There is a justice over at Randall. It’s thirty miles from here. A new town. I’ve never been over there, but I hear it’s tough. You could have Kellis take you there. If you don’t find Kellis you’d better ride right back here. Don’t you want me to have Jim Peters come after you to-night? If you have gone on to Randall to marry Kellis of course Peters could come right back.”

There should have been a certain wistfulness in Ballinger’s eyes just now. What Ellen imagined she saw was a gleam of mockery.

“I’ll manage without Peters,” she said. “Thank you again, Dad.”

Ballinger ejaculated something that sounded like “Bah!”, and left her.

Now she sat gazing at the cabin which she felt belonged to Kellis. She sat in the saddle, half expecting that presently Kellis would hail her and come running toward her. His eyes, naturally, would be alight with amazement and delight.

However, Kellis did not appear, and no sound came from the cabin.

There was no sound anywhere. A flat, dead silence surrounded Ellen, seemed to press in upon her, to enfold her. The sky was white and cloudless. There was no breeze and the leaves of the trees dropped inertly. The denizens of the thickets were quiet. When Ellen’s pony had sagged to a halt all motion had ceased.

Yet the invisible menace which had followed her all day seemed to surround her. It seemed to be in the atmosphere; a brooding calm, as if nature was waiting patiently and grimly for something to happen.

A great deal of dust had accumulated upon Ellen’s riding habit, which she had brought with her from the East. The cloth was brown, matching her hair and her eyes and blending harmoniously with the peach bloom of perfect health that shone in her cheeks. There was the great calm of self-confidence in her mannerisms; intelligence and not too much worldliness was in her gaze as she waited in the silence.

She was positive she hadn’t made a mistake in direction, for while Jim Kellis’s letters had been more or less sketchy they had explained fully enough about the trail that led from the Hour Glass to the cabin where he professed to lead a “lonely existence.” She had made no mistake, for there was the flat he had written about; there was the river wandering through the centre of it, and there was the cabin with its log walls and its roof of adobe.

She rode forward through the trees to a small door-yard in front of the cabin, where she pulled her pony down and sat motionless in the saddle, staring.

There was a small porch built of poles. It had an adobe roof and its floor was of earth packed to a rock-like consistency and cracked with the dryness. A bench with a pail and a tin basin stood against the wall under the porch. From one of the slender porch columns to a tree about fifty feet distant was stretched a line from which were suspended several nondescript pieces of cloth which had evidently been washed and thrown over the line to dry. The water in which the pieces of cloth had been washed had been thrown upon the ground near the edge of the porch. It was steaming in the sun and its odour was unpleasant. Sitting on a grass matting which was spread over a section of the earth floor of the porch was a dark-skinned young woman holding a child of three or four.

The young woman was handsome. Her face was oval, her eyes were black and lustrous. Her coarse black hair was combed smoothly back from her forehead and coiled in glistening curves at the nape of her neck. A bright coloured mantilla was lying loosely upon her shoulders, disclosing a necklace of turquoise stones. She wore a loose dress of violent green and red cloth which was caught together at the waist with a coloured embroidered girdle. Grass cloth slippers were on her feet. The child was arrayed like the mother.

Neither moved. The mother watched Ellen with uncompromising steadiness in which there was no suggestion of warmth; the child stared with frank curiosity.

“I beg your pardon,” said Ellen. “It seems I have made a mistake, after all. Perhaps you will be able to direct me? I am looking for a man named Jim Kellis.”

The woman’s eyes gleamed, chilled.

“What you want weeth Jim Kellis?”

“Why I merely wish to see him.”

“What for?”

“My reasons for wishing to see him cannot concern you,” said Ellen.

“Jim Kellis my man,” stated the woman, jealously, defensively.

Ellen gasped. The peach-bloom colour fled from her cheeks.

“Your man!” she said in a weak voice. “Do you mean to say that Jim Kellis is your husband?”

The woman nodded vigorously.

“He marry me before the Padre four year ago,” she answered. “Now you tell me what you want weeth him?” she added.

“Nothing,” returned Ellen.