Читать книгу Clattering Hoofs - William MacLeod Raine - Страница 10

AT THE CIRCLE J R THE GUEST TOOK LIFE EASIER THAN HE had done for many a day. Sandra did not let him get up with the family, but saw that Jim prepared a breakfast for him long after the others had eaten. He lounged about the place and let the sunny hours slip away in pleasant indolence. Sometimes he strolled down to the bunkhouse and chatted with a rider who had broken an ankle when his horse stepped into a gopher hole; or he sat on the corral fence and watched the cowboys top young horses they were breaking to the saddle. Occasionally he sat in a rocking chair on the porch of the big house and read a book called The Three Musketeers, dealing with the remarkable and improbable adventures of an amazing chap called D’Artagnan.

Nelson hovered around him a good deal. The boy was passing through an attack of hero-worship and was drawn to Sloan as a moth to the lamp. The young man had what it takes to win a boy—a touch of recklessness, cool courage, an easy indifferent grace, and back of him a life lived dangerously. Moreover, he knew exactly how to treat a boy. He never talked down to him, and he had a flair for “joshing” the youngster without making him conscious of the inferiority of the teens.

Of the Golden Girl he caught only glimpses during the day as she went to and fro about her work. Having been since her mother’s death sole mistress of the ranch, she had charge of buying supplies not only for the main house but for the boys at the bunkhouse as well. Sloan was surprised at the efficiency with which she did her job. He did not at all wonder at the deep liking and respect, amounting almost to reverence, she won from the tough, tanned young men working for her father. In the case of Jim Budd the devotion he showed was almost pathetic. If it would have helped her he would have chopped the fingers from his hand.

After supper Sandra always joined her father and Sloan on the porch. During the past hour cool shadows from the hills had blanketed stretches of the valley and lifted the heat from its dusty floor. The stark bare mountains glowed with jewels, their brilliancy softening to violet and purple lakes in the crotches between the peaks, filling them with mysterious dark pools. After the sun had set, magic began to fill the desert night.

Cape Sloan was very much aware of the girl sitting near him, though she spoke seldom. The young man was inclined to let Ranger carry the conversation, but the cattleman drew him out and forced him to take a share. Sandra observed that their guest was no ignorant cowboy. He could talk well, on many subjects. He had traveled a good deal, not only in the West but as far as Rio de Janeiro and the cattle country of Brazil. But she noticed that his wary and reticent remarks covered a good many elisions about his life. His youth he told about when questioned, and he did not avoid the wanderings of the past two months. But before that there was a gap of five or six years concerning which he said nothing.

Also, there was some secret understanding between him and Jim Budd. She had seen Jim’s startled astonishment at their first meeting and the momentary discomposure of Sloan. When she had talked with Jim about it he denied ever having met their guest before—and she did not believe him. There had been something in the past that both of them wanted to conceal, some dark and unhappy memory rising to plague them now. An evil ghost from Cape Sloan’s wild and turbulent youth had come to life again.

Sandra felt a hint of wariness about his indolent ease. It seemed to her a mask worn by a man always alert and even suspicious. She found confirmation of this view in an incident that occurred the third day of Sloan’s stay at the ranch.

Late in the afternoon a man rode into the yard and dismounted in front of the house. Sandra chanced to be with their guest on the porch. She had just brought out a pitcher of lemonade and a glass for him.

The horseman tied his mount and came up the steps. He was heavy-set, middle-aged, with bleached blue eyes in a deeply tanned face. Scores of tiny wrinkles went out from the outer corners of the eyes like spokes from a hub. His cowboy boots were old and scuffed, his Stetson faded and floppy. Dust had sifted into the creases of the corduroy trousers and coat. The checked shirt had been washed so often that all the life had gone out of the color.

He said, smiling at the girl: “My throat’s dry as a lime kiln, Miss Sandra. Does that rate me a drink of yore lemonade?”

She nodded. “It’s ice-cold. I’ll get a glass for you. This is Mr. Sloan, sheriff.” To Cape she said, “Sheriff Norlin.”

There was the slightest steely hardening in Sloan’s eyes. She would not have noticed it if she had not been watching. The men looked at each other steadily as they shook hands. What they said had nothing to do with what they were thinking.

Norlin mopped his face with a bandanna, after he had murmured “Pleased to meet you,” and mentioned that it was nice to get in the shade after being cooked by a blistering sun for four-five hours. The younger man remarked that he didn’t ever remember it being hotter at this time of year.

Sandra went in for a glass and when she returned Norlin was telling Sloan that Lopez had been forced to abandon the stolen herd just this side of the line. A troop of cavalry had come on the raiders by chance and sent them scuttling into the brush. That was good, Sloan said. And how about Scarface? Had they heard anything of him?

“No.” The sheriff rubbed the palm of his hand across an unshaven face meditatively and slanted a searching look at Sloan. “Looks like he has holed up and pulled the hole in after him. I reckon if anybody could give us information ——”

He dropped the sentence there. Sloan was of no help.

“Maybe someone who knows him might give you a line on where his hangouts are,” Cape said smoothly.

Norlin admitted to himself that he was unduly suspicious. He had in his pocket a letter from the deputy sheriff Mosely describing the young man who had sat opposite him at breakfast the morning after the raid. It fitted very accurately this youth who called himself Cape Sloan. The fellow could not have been in two different places at the same time. Yet he did not act just like an innocent man. There was a touch of challenge in his manner that was almost insolent, a sort of a “You-be-damned, prove it if you can” air.

“I’ve brought some sugar,” Sandra told the sheriff, “in case you like your lemonade sweet.”

He sampled the lemonade and said it was just the way he liked it. “Cooler up in the mountains,” he suggested, cocking an eye at the other man.

Sloan recognized this as a trial balloon. “Should think it would be,” he agreed.

“Did you say you came by way of Globe?”

“I didn’t say.” Cape’s voice was cool and indifferent. It invited no further discussion of the subject. “I’ll throw in with the sheriff about the lemonade, Miss Ranger. Best I ever drank.”

“It tastes better because the day is so hot.” She looked into the pitcher. “There’s a dividend left for you.”

“No, no. I’ve had my share. You drink it.”

Sheriff Norlin had an elusive little notion flitting through his mind that he had seen this young man before. There was something faintly familiar about his voice, or was it in his manner of speaking?

“Not yore first visit to this part of the country, Mr. Sloan, I take it,” he said.

“You think I don’t look like a tenderfoot, sheriff.” There was a slight drawling derision in the tone. “I reckon that’s a compliment, coming from an old-timer.”

Sandra was a little annoyed at Cape Sloan. She knew he was taking an impish pleasure in sidestepping the sheriff’s questions even though a frank answer would involve him in no trouble. For some reason he had built up a defense so quick to assert itself that it was almost belligerent.

“I had a letter from Mosely today,” Norlin said. “You’ll be glad to know it clears you, Mr. Sloan.”

“Since I knew it would, I won’t throw my hat up in the air and cheer about it.” the young man answered dryly.

After the sheriff had left, Sandra’s guest offered a drawling comment. “If I’d known my pasear into your country was going to upset so many of your citizens, I reckon I would have brought a letter of introduction from the governor.”

Sandra’s honest eyes met his directly. He had raised the question. She would tell him the truth. “I think you are a good deal to blame yourself. You act like a small boy with a chip on his shoulder. If you were more frank and friendly ——”

“Friendly with the fellows who want to hang me for something I didn’t do?” he inquired with his sardonic smile.

“Sheriff Norlin isn’t trying to hang you,” she said sturdily. “I don’t want to find out anything you don’t want to tell. I’m on your side anyhow. But since I’m not a complete fool I can see you are holding something back.” She raised a hand quickly to head off his interruption. “You have a right to your secrets. That’s not the point. You were dodging Sheriff Norlin’s questions just to irritate him. What difference does it make whether you did or didn’t come through Globe?”

“No difference,” he admitted. “But Norlin had just one legitimate point of interest in me, my connection with the Scarface gang. When he discovered I hadn’t any he ought to have been through. But after he got Mosely’s letter he rode twenty miles to see me.”

“To make sure you fitted the description Mr. Mosely gave of you. That was his duty.”

“After he saw me he still wasn’t satisfied.”

“Because of your . . . evasions.”

He brushed the sheriff out of the picture. “In spite of those . . . evasions . . . you are still for me. Isn’t that what you said?”

His cool hard eyes drilled into her. She felt a pulse of excitement begin to beat in her throat. No balanced judgment would ever decide her feelings toward this man. It was not only that he had done her a great service at much risk to himself. Something reached out from that lean body with the whipcord muscles, from the strong reckless face, that drew her irresistibly to him.

She said, in a low voice: “I think you have been wild and lawless and that there is something . . . shocking . . . in your past. But whatever you have done, you are not evil. A man’s actions, at some crisis, and what he really is, are two different things. I don’t have to be told what is troubling you to know that I am on your side.”

Swiftly she turned and walked into the house. The man’s gaze followed her. He was astonished at what she had said, at the insight which had probed through the incriminating facts to the essential truth. She lived on the other side of a gulf he could not cross. None the less a warm glad excitement filled his breast.

He beat it down, almost savagely. His way of life was chosen. It was one that probably would include violence and bloodshed. There was no room in it for a woman like Sandra Ranger, nor for any of the pleasant and kindly friendships that might temper his ruthlessness. He was in a tight spot from which he did not expect to get out alive. But he had set himself to a task. He meant to go through with it unless his enemies destroyed him first.