Читать книгу The Settling of the Sage - Hal G. Evarts - Страница 5

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Billie Warren heard the steady buzz of a saw and later the ringing strokes of an axe. The men had departed three hours before to be gone for a week on the horse round-up but she had not yet issued from her own quarters. The music of axe and saw was ample evidence that her new and undesired partner was making valuable use of his time. She went outside and he struck the axe in a cross section of pine log as she moved toward him.

"We'll have to get along the best we can," she announced abruptly. "Of course you will have a say in the management of the Three Bar and draw the same amount for yourself that I do."

He sat on a log and twisted a cigarette as he reflected upon this statement.

"I'd rather not do that," he decided. "I don't want to be a drain on the brand—but to help build it up. Suppose I just serve as an extra hand and do whatever necessary turns up—in return for your letting me advise with you on a few points that I happen to have worked out while I was prowling through the country."

"Any way you like," she returned. "It's for you to decide. Any money which you fail to draw now will revert to you in the end so it won't matter in the least."

His reply was irrelevant, a deliberate refusal to notice her ungenerous misinterpretation of his offer.

"Do you mind if I gather a few Three Bar colts round here close and break out my own string before they get back?" he asked.

"Anything you like," she repeated. "I'm not going to quarrel. I've made up my mind to that. I'll be gone the rest of the day."

Five minutes later he saw her riding down the lane. She was not seeking companionship but rather solitude and for hours she drifted aimlessly across the range, sometimes dismounting on some point that afforded a good view and reclining in the warm spring sun. Dusk was falling when she rode back to the Three Bar. As she turned her sorrel, Papoose, into the corral she noticed several four-year-old colts in the pasture lot. As she returned to the house Harris appeared in the door.

"Grub-pile," he announced.

They sat down to a meal of broiled steak, mashed potatoes, hot biscuits, coffee and raspberry jam. She had deliberately absented herself through the noon hour and well past the time for evening meal, confidently expecting to find him impatiently waiting for her to return and prepare food for him.

"You make good biscuits—better than those Waddles stirs up," she said. "Though I'd never dare tell him so." It was the first time she had conceded that there might be even a taint of good in him.

"Well, yes—they're some better than those I usually turn out," he confessed. "Having a lady to feed I flaked the lard in cold instead of just melting it and stirring her in like I most generally do. I'm right glad that you consider them a success."

When the meal was finished she rose without a word and went into her own quarters, convinced that this desertion would certainly call forth a protest; but the man calmly went about the business of washing the dishes as if he had expected nothing else, and presently she heard the door close behind him and immediately afterwards a light appeared in the bunk-house window.

The rattle of pots and pans roused her before daylight. Some thirty minutes later he called to her.

"I've finished," he said. "You'd better eat yours before it gets cold," and the closing of the door announced that he had gone without waiting for an answer. She heard again the sound of saw and axe as he worked up the dry logs into stove lengths. At least he was making good his word to the cook. The sounds ceased when the sun was an hour high and when she looked out to determine the reason she saw him working with four colts in one of the smaller corrals.

He had fashioned a hackamore for each and they stood tied to the corral bars. He left them there and repaired to the big gates of the main corral. The two swinging halves sagged until their ends dragged on the ground when opened or closed, necessitating the expenditure of considerable energy in performing either operation. She watched him tear down the old support wires and replace them with new ones, stretching a double strand from the top of the tall pivot posts to the free ends of the gates. Placing a short stick between the two strands of heavy wire he twisted until the shortening process had cleared the gate ends and they swung suspended, moving so freely that a rider could lean from his saddle and throw them open with ease.

This completed to his satisfaction he fashioned heavy slabs of wood to serve as extra brake-blocks for the chuck wagon. Between the performance of each two self-appointed duties he spent some little time with the colts, handling them and teaching them not to fear his approach, cinching his saddle on first one and then the next, talking to them and handling their heads.

For three days there was little communication between the two. It was evident that he had no intention of forcing his society upon her, and her failure to prepare his meals failed to elicit a single sign to show that he had expected otherwise; the contrary was true, in fact, for he invariably prepared enough for two. It was clear that he exercised the same patience toward her that he showed in handling the green four-year-olds; and she was inclined to be a little scornful of his method of gentle-breaking them. She felt her own ability to handle any horse on the range although old Cal Warren had gentled every animal she had wanted for her own and flatly refused to let her mount any others. Waddles was as insistent upon this point as her parent had been, but never had she known a cowhand who took time and pains to gentle his own string.

In the afternoon of the third day she saw him swing to the back of a big bay, easing into the saddle without a jar, and the colt ambled round the corral, rolling his eyes back toward the thing clamped upon him but making no effort to pitch. He dismounted and stripped off the saddle, cinched it on a second horse and let him stand, leading a third out to a snubbing post near the door of the blacksmith shop where he proceeded to put on his first set of shoes.

The girl went out and sat on the sill of the shop door and watched him. The colt pulled back in an effort to release the forefoot that the man held clamped between his leather-clad knees, then changed his tactics and sagged his weight against Harris.

"You Babe!" the man ordered. "Don't you go leaning on me." He pared down the hoof and fitted the shoe but before nailing it on he released the colt's foot and addressed the girl. "If I'd fight him now while he's spooky and half-scared it would spoil him maybe," he explained.

"I gentle-break mine, too," she said, and the man overlooked the inflection which, as plainly as words, was intended to convey the impression that his ways were effeminate. "If every man used up his time gentling his string he'd never have a day off to work at anything else."

"Why, it don't use up much time," he objected. "They halfway break themselves, standing round with a saddle on and having a man handle them a little between spells of regular work—like cutting firewood and such. And it's a saving of time in the end. There's three hundred odd days every year when a man consumes considerable time fighting every horse he steps up on—if they're broke that way to start."

"So your only reason for not riding them out is to save time," she said.

"If you mean that I'm timid," he observed, "why, I don't know as I'd bother to dispute it." He moved over and sat on his heels facing her, twisting the ever handy cigarette. "Listen," he urged. "Let's you and I try to get along. Now if you'll only make up your mind that I'm not out to grab the Three Bar, not even the half of it that's supposed to be mine—unless you get paid for it—why, we're liable to get to liking each other real well in the end. I'll give you a contract to that effect."

"Which you know would be worthless!" she returned. "The will specifically states that any agreements between us prior to the time of division are to be disregarded. A written contract would have no more value than your unsupported promise and in view of what's happened you don't expect me to place a value on that."

He pulled reflectively at his cigarette and she rather expected another of the irrelevant remarks with which he so often replied to her pointed thrusts.

"No," he said at last. "But it's a fact that I don't want the Three Bar—or rather I do if you should ever decide to sell."

"I never will," she stated positively. "It's always been my home. I've been away and had a good time; three winters in school and enjoying every second; but there always comes a time when I'm sick to get back, when I know I can't stay away from the Three Bar, when I want to smell the sage and throw my leg across a horse—and ride!"

"I know, Billie," he said softly. "I was raised here, up until I was eight. My feeling is likely less acute than yours but I've always hankered to get back to where the sage and pine trees run together. I mentioned a while back that I was tied up peculiar and stood to lose considerable if I failed to put in two years out here—which wouldn't have been of any particular consequence only that I found out that the Three Bar was going under unless some one put a stop to what's going on. I'll pull it out of the hole, maybe, and hand it back to you."

She was swayed into a momentary belief in his sincerity but steeled herself against it, and in the effort to strengthen the crumbling walls of her dislike she fell back on open ridicule.

"You!" she flared. "And what can you do against it—a man that was raised in squatter country behind a barb-wire fence, who has to gentle his horses before he can sit up on one, who has hitched a gun on his belt because he thinks it's the thing to do, and has stowed it in a place where he'd have to tie himself in a knot—or undress—to reach it. And then you talk of pulling the Three Bar out of a hole! Why, there are twenty men within fifty miles of here that would kill you the first move you made."

"There's considerable sound truth in that," he said. He looked down at his gun; it swung on his left side, in front, the butt pointing toward the right. "It's easier to work with it sort of out of the way of my hands," he explained and smiled.

She found herself liking him, even in the face of the treachery he had practiced against her father and was correspondingly angry, both with herself and at him. She left him without a word and returned to the house.

He finished putting the shoes on the colt and as he turned him back into the corral he observed a horseman jogging up the lane at a trail trot. He knew the man for Slade, whose home ranch lay forty miles to the south and a little west, the owner of the largest outfit in that end of the State; a man feared by his competitors, quick to resent an insinuation against his business methods and capable of backing his resentment.

Slade dropped from his horse and accorded Harris only a casual nod as he headed for the house. Slade's face was of a peculiar cast. The black eyes were set very close together in a wide face; his cheek bones were low and oddly protruding, sloping far out to a point below each eye. His small ears were set so close to his skull that the outcropping cheek bones extended almost an inch beyond them to either side. Yet there was a certain fascination about his face and bearing that appealed to the spark of the primitive in women; that last lingering cell that harks fondly back to men in the raw. His age might have been anywhere above twenty-six and under fifty-six.

He walked through the cookhouse and opened the door of the girl's quarters without the formality of a knock, as if a frequent visitor and sure of his privileges.

"How many times have I told you to knock?" she demanded. "The next time you forget it I'll go out as you come in."

Slade dropped into a chair.

"I never have knocked—not in twelve years," he said.

"It was somewhat different when I was a small girl and you were only a friend of my father," she pointed out. "But now——"

"But now that I've come to see you as a woman it's different?" he inquired. "No reason for that."

She switched the channel of conversation and spoke of the coming round-up, of the poor condition of range stock owing to the severity of the winter; but it was a monologue. For a time the man sat and listened, as if he enjoyed the sound of her voice, contributing nothing to the conversation himself, then suddenly he stirred in his chair and waved a hand to indicate the unimportance of the topics.

"Yes, yes; true enough," he interrupted. "But I didn't come to talk about that. When are you coming home with me, Billie?"

"And you can't come if you insist on talking about that," she countered.

"I'll come," he stated. "Tell me when you're going to move over to the Circle P."

"Not ever," she said. "I'd rather be a man's horse than his wife. Men treat women like little tinsel queens before, and afterwards they answer to save a cook's wages and drudge their lives out feeding a hunch of half-starved hands—or else go to the other extreme. Wives are either work horses or pets. I was raised like a boy and I want to have a say in running things myself."

"You can go your own gait," he pledged.

"I'm doing that now," she returned. "And prefer going on as I am."

Slade rose and moved over to her, taking her hands and lifting her from her chair.

The girl pushed him back with a hand braced against his chest.

"Stop it!" she said. "You're getting wilder every time you come, but you've never pawed at me before. I won't have people's hands on me," and she made a grimace of distaste.

The man reached out again and drew her to him. She wrenched away and faced Slade.

"That will be the last time you'll do that until I give the word," she said. "I don't want the Circle P—or you. When I do I'll let you know!"

He moved toward her again and she refused to back away from him but stood with her hands at her sides.

"If you put a finger on me it's the last lime you'll visit the Three Bar," she calmly announced.

He stood so close as almost to touch her but she failed to lift a hand or move back an inch, and Slade knew that he faced one whose spirit matched his own, perhaps the one person within a hundred miles who did not fear him. He had tamed men and horses—and women; he raised his arms slowly, deliberately, to see if she would flinch away or stand fast and outgame him. She knew that he was harmless to her—and he knew it. He might perpetrate almost any crime on the calendar and come clear; but in this land where women were few they were honored. One whisper from the Three Bar girl that Slade had raised his hand against her and, powerful as he was, the hunt for him would be on, with every man's hand against him.

His arms had half circled her when he whirled, catlike, every faculty cool and alert, as a voice sounded from the door. Both had been too engrossed to notice its noiseless opening.

"I've finished cleaning up round the shop and corrals," Harris said. "Is there any rubbish round the house you'd like to have throwed out and piled in a dry gulch somewheres out of sight?"

He stood in the door, half facing them, his left side quartering toward Slade. To the girl it appeared that the strange pose was for the purpose of enabling him to take a quick step to the right and spring outside if Slade should make a move and she felt a tinge of scorn at his precaution even though she knew that it would avail him nothing if Slade's deadly temper were roused by the insult. Slade, who had killed many, would add Harris to his list before he could move.

Slade's understanding of the quartering position and the odd sling of Harris's gun was entirely different and as he shifted his feet until he faced the man in the door, his movements were slow and deliberate, nothing that could be misconstrued.

"Who summoned you in here?" he demanded.

Harris did not reply but stood waiting for some word from the girl. She had a sudden sick dread that Slade would kill him and was surprised at the sentiment, for no longer than an hour before she had wished him dead. She made belated answer to his original question.

"No," she said. "Go on out, please."

He turned his back on Slade and went out.

"And you," she said to Slade, "you'd best be going too. We've been too good neighbors to quarrel—unless you come over again with the same idea you did to-day."

At sunset the girl called to Harris and he repaired to the house and found her putting a hot meal for two on the end of the long pine table, the first time she had deigned to eat with him since that first meal.

"There's no use of our going on like this," she said. "We've two years of it to face; so it's best to get on some kind of a neutral footing."

For her own peace of mind she had tried to smother her dislike of him and he was very careful to avoid any topic that would rekindle it. They washed the dishes together, and from that hour their relations, to all outward appearance, were friendly or at least devoid of open hostility. They no longer ate separately; she did not avoid him during the day, and the second evening she prepared two places at her own table in the big living room before the fireplace.

"It's so empty out there," she explained.

"With only the two of us at a table built for twenty."

He lingered for an hour's chat before her fire and each evening thereafter was the same. But he knew that she was merely struggling to make the best of a matter that was distasteful, that her opinion of him was unaltered. Her bitterness could not be entirely concealed, and she frequently touched on some fresh point that added to her distrust of his present motives and confirmed her belief in his double-dealing in the past. There were so many of these points; his refusal to accept her offer to give him his half-interest if he would stay off the place; his weak insinuations that there was some reason why he must spend two years on the Three Bar; his prowling the country for a year spying on the methods she followed in running the outfit, half of which would soon be his; his buying the school section and filing on a quarter of land, the location blocking the lower end of the Three Bar valley. Whenever she mentioned one of these he refused to take issue with her. And one night she touched on still another point.

"What was the reason for your first idea—of coming here under another name?" she demanded.

"I thought maybe others knew I'd been left a part interest," he said, "and it might be embarrassing. The way it is, with only the two of us knowing the inside, I can stay on as a regular hand until the time is up."

"You're so plausible," she said. "You put it as a favor to me. Did it ever strike you that if the truth were known it might also be uncomfortable for you?"

He smiled across at her and once more she frowned as she discovered that he was likeable for all his underhandedness.

"Worse than that—suicidal," he admitted.

"If you mentioned what you think of me, that I've framed to rob you by law, you wouldn't be bothered with me for long." He laughed softly and stretched his feet toward the fire. "Look at it any way you like and I'm in bad shape to deal you any misery," he pointed out. "If you'd drop a hint that I'm an unwelcome addition it would only be a matter of days until I'd fail to show up for meals. If you view it from that angle you can see I'm setting on the powder can."

She did see it, but had not so clearly realized it till he pointed it out, and for the first time she wavered in her conviction that he had come simply to deprive her of her rights. But the thought that her father would not easily have willed away the home place to another without being unduly influenced served to reinstate her distrust along with a vague resentment for his having shaken it by throwing himself so openly on her mercy.

"You probably thought to overcome that by reaching the point the whole thing so patently aims for," she said. "And you calculated well—arriving at a time when we'd be alone for a week. The whole scheme was based on that idea and I've been patiently wondering why you don't rush matters and invite me to marry you."

He rose and flicked the ash from his cigarette into the fireplace.

"I do invite you—right now," he said, and in her surprise she left her chair and stood facing him. "I'd like real well to have you, Billie."

"That's the final proof," she said. "I'm surprised that you didn't tell me the first day."

"So am I," he said.

She found no answer for this but stood silent, knowing that she had suddenly become afraid of him.

"And that's the living truth," he affirmed. "Other men have loved you the first day. You know men well enough to be certain that I wouldn't be tied to one woman for the sake of owning a few head of cows—not if I didn't want her for herself." He waved an arm toward the door. "There's millions of miles of sage just outside," he said. "And millions of cows—and girls."

He moved across to her and stood almost touching her, looking down into her face. When Slade had stood so a few days past she had been coldly indifferent except for a shiver of distaste at the thought of his touching her. Before Harris she felt a weakening, a need of support, and she leaned back from him and placed one hand behind her on the table.

"You judge for yourself whether a man wouldn't be right foolish—with all those things I mentioned being right outside to call him—to marry a woman he didn't want for herself, because she had a few hundred head of cows." He smiled down at her. "Don't pull back from me, Billie; I won't lay a finger on you. But now do you think it's you I want—or the little old Three Bar?"

"You can prove it," she said at last. "Prove it by going away for six months—or three."

He shook his head.

"Not that," he said. "I've told you I was sewed up in a right peculiar way myself—which wouldn't matter a damn if it wasn't for this. I'd have tossed it off in a second if the girl on the Three Bar had turned out to be any other than you. Now I'm going to see it through. The Three Bar is going under—the brand both our folks helped to found—unless some one pulls it out of the hole. Believe me if you can and if you can't—why, you know that one remark about my being unwelcome here will clear the road for you, like I mentioned a few minutes back."

He turned away without touching her and she had not moved when the door closed behind him.

An hour past noon on the following day a drove of horses appeared at the lower extremity of the valley and swept on toward the ranch. As Harris threw open the gates of the big corral he saw her standing in the door of the cookhouse watching the oncoming drove. Riders flanked the bunch well out to each side to steady it. There was a roar of hoofs and a stifling cloud of dust as three hundred half-wild horses clattered past and crowded through the gates, scattering swiftly across the pasture lot back of the corral. A dozen sweat-streaked riders swung from their saddles. There was no chance to distinguish color or kind among them through the dust caked in the week-old growth of beard that covered every face.

One man remained on his mount and followed the horses into the pasture lot, cutting out fifty or more and heading them back into the corral; for Waddles had decreed that they could have the rest of the afternoon off for a jaunt to Brill's Store and they waited only to change mounts before the start.

Calico stood drooping sleepily in one of the smaller corrals and Harris moved toward him, intending to ride over with the rest of the men.

"The boss said for you to ride Blue," Morrow stated as Harris passed the group at the gates of the corral. "He's clear gentle-broke, Blue is."

The men looked up in surprise. Morrow had not been near the house to receive instructions from the girl. The lie had been so apparent as to constitute a direct challenge to the other man.

Harris stood looking at him, then shrugged his shoulders.

"Whatever the boss says goes with me," he returned evenly.

A rangy blue roan swept past with the fifty or so others. At least once every round of the corral he laid back his ears and squealed as he scored some other horse with his teeth, then lashed out with wicked heels.

"I reckon that'll be Blue?" Harris asked of Evans and the lanky one nodded. The men scattered round the corral and each watched his chance to put his rope on some chosen horse. The roan kept others always between himself and any man with a rope but at last he passed Harris with but one horse between. Harris nipped his noose across the back of the intervening horse and over the blue roan's head.

Blue stopped the instant the rope tightened on his neck.

"You've been busted and rope-burnt a time or two," Harris remarked, and he led the horse out to saddle him. The big blue leaned back, crouching on his haunches as the man put on the hackamore. His eyes rolled wickedly as Harris smoothed the saddle blanket and he flinched away with a whistling snort of fear, his nostrils flaring, as the heavy saddle was thrown on his back.

Harris tightened the front cinch and the blue horse braced himself and drew in a long, deep breath.

"That's right, Blue, you swell up and inflate yourself," Harris said. "I'll have to squeeze it out of you." He fastened the hind cinch loosely, then returned to the front and hauled on the latigo until the pressure forced the horse to release the indrawn breath and it leaked out of him with a groaning sigh.