Читать книгу Troubled Waters - William MacLeod Raine - Страница 7
ОглавлениеA RIDE
STILL at the age when she was frankly the centre of her own universe, Ruth Trovillion had an abundant sense of romance. There was no intention in her decided young mind of treading a road worn dusty by the feet of the commonplace. On occasion a fine rapture filled her hours. She was still reacting to the ecstatic shock of youth’s early-morning plunge into the wonderful river of life.
Rowan McCoy had impressed himself upon her imagination. He had not come into her life with jingling spurs, garnished like Larry Silcott with all the picturesque trimmings of the frontier. Larry was too free, too fresh, she thought. But McCoy, quiet, competent son of the hard-riding West, depended on no adventitious aid of costume. He was as indigenous and genuine as one of his own hill cattle. Ruth had admirers in plenty, but they dwindled to non-heroic proportions before his brown virility, his gentle, reticent strength.
Quietly she gathered information about him. The owner of the Circle Diamond was a leader in the community by grace of natural fitness. Tim Flanders, who kept the Elkhorn Lodge, summed him up for Ruth in two sentences:
“He’s a straight-up rider, Mac is. He’ll do to take along.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked his young guest.
“You can tie to him. He’ll go through. There’s no yellow in Rowan McCoy.”
She thought over that a good deal. Her judgment concurred. So far as it went, the verdict of Flanders was sound. But it did not go far enough. During the ride to the ranch she had discovered that the cattleman had a capacity for silence. Ruth found herself fascinated by the desire to push through to the personality behind the wall of reserve.
For some time she was given no chance. It was ten days after the rescue before she saw him again.
She went on her way with what patience she could, enjoying the activities of the “dude” ranch. She rode, fished, and picnicked in the hills with the other guests. Two days were spent in climbing Big Twin Peak. In the evenings she read to her aunt while that lady indefatigably knitted. The surface of her mind was absorbed by the details of the life arranged for her. McCoy was not on the horizon of her movements, but he was very much in the map of her thoughts. She did not hear his name mentioned. To these well-to-do people from the East spending a pleasant vacation in Wyoming he did not exist. But it was impossible for Ruth to get this quiet, steady-eyed man out of her mind.
Why did he not come to see her? Yet, even as she asked herself the question, Ruth found an adequate answer. She had very little vanity. Probably she had not interested him. There was no real reason why he should call unless he wanted to do so.
Then one day, unexpectedly, she met him on a hill trail.
“Why haven’t you been to see me?” she asked, with the directness that characterized her at times.
Yet she quaked at her own audacity. He might think even though he would be too courteous to say so, that he did not care to waste the time.
He thought a moment before he committed himself to words. He had wanted to come, but he had passed through an experience which made him very reserved with women. He never called on any, nor did he go to dances or merrymakings.
“I’ve been pretty busy, Miss Trovillion,” he said.
“That’s no excuse. I might have got pneumonia from wet feet or gone into a nervous breakdown from the shock. You’ve got no right to pull a girl out of the river and then ride away and forget she ever existed. It’s not good form. They are not doing it this year.”
He laughed at the jaunty impudence of her tilted chin. Somehow she reminded him of a young, singing meadow-lark experimenting with its wings. He suspected shyness back of her audacity. Yet he was surprised at his own answer when he heard it; at least he was surprised at the impulse which had led him to make it.
“Oh, I haven’t forgotten you. I’ll be glad to come to see you, if I may.”
“When?”
“Will this evening do?”
“I’ll be looking for you, Mr. McCoy.”
The cattleman told the simple truth when he said that he had not forgotten her. The girl had been very much in his mind ever since he had left her at the gate of the Lodge. He loved all young, clean life even among animals, and she seemed to him the embodied youth of the world, free and light-footed as a fawn in the misty break of day.
When McCoy reached Elkhorn Lodge after dinner Ruth introduced him to her aunt, a thin, flat-bosomed spinster with the marks of ill health on her face. Miss Morgan and her niece had come to the Rockies for the health of the older woman, and were scheduled to make an indefinite stay. Before the cattleman had talked with her five minutes he knew that Miss Morgan viewed life from a narrow, Puritanic standpoint. He guessed that there was little real sympathy between her and the vivid girl by her side.
In her early years Ruth had been a lonely, repressed little soul. An orphaned child, she had been brought up by this maiden lady, who looked on the leggy, helter-skelter youngster with the tangled flying hair as a burden laid upon her by the Lord. Ruth had been a lawless, wilful little thing, naughty and painfully plain by the standard of her aunt; a difficult little girl to train in the way she should go.
Surprisingly she had blossomed from the ugly-duckling stage into a most attractive girl. Nobody had been more amazed at the transformation than her aunt. The change was not merely external. The manner of Ruth had become gentler, less wilful. As a nurse she had developed patience toward the invalid.
“Do you mind if Mr. McCoy and I ride out to Flat Top for the sunset?” she asked now.
“No, child. I’ll be all right. But don’t stay late,” Miss Morgan assented a little fretfully. It was one of Ruth’s ways to become absorbed in the interest of the moment to forgetfulness of everything else. This was one of the penalties her friends paid for her vivid enthusiasms.
The riders passed a poster tacked to a tree just outside the gates of the ranch. It bore this legend:
| RIDE ’EM, COWBOYS! | ||
| ANNUAL ROUND-UP AT BAD AX | ||
| July 2, 3, and 4. | ||
| ———— | ||
| Best Bronco Busters, Ropers, | ||
| And Bulldoggers | ||
| From a Dozen States Will Compete | ||
| FOR WORLD’S CHAMPIONSHIP | ||
| ———— | ||
| Pony Races, Indian Dances, Balls, | ||
| and Street Carnival. | ||
| ———— | ||
| Also Fancy Roping and Riding | ||
| ———— | ||
| Don’t Miss This Great Round-Up. | ||
| It’s a Big League Show. | ||
Ruth drew up to read it. She turned to her companion. “You’ll ride, I suppose? Mr. Flanders says you’re a famous bronco buster.”
“I don’t reckon I will,” he answered. “Some of the boys entered me, but I’ve decided not to go in this year.”
“Why not?”
“Gettin’ too old to be jolted around so rough,” he replied, smiling. “The younger lads can take their turn.”
“Yes, you look as though you had one foot in the grave,” she derided, with a swift glance at the muscular shoulders above the long, lean body. “Of course you’ll ride. You’ve got to. Aren’t you champion of the world?”
“That’s just a way of talkin’,” he explained. “They have one of these shows each year at Cheyenne. Other places have ’em too. The winners can’t all be champions of the world.”
“But I want to see you ride,” she told him, as though he could not without discourtesy refuse so small a favour.
He dismissed this with a smile.
From Flat Top they watched the sun go down behind a sea of rounded hills. The flame of it was in her blood, the glow of it on her face. She was in love with Wyoming these days, with the cool and crystalline air of its mornings, with the scarfs of heat waving across the desert at noon, with the porphyry mountain peaks edged with fire at even. There was this much of the poet in Ruth Trovillion, that she could go out at dewy dawn and find a miracle in the sunrise.
Impulsively she turned to her companion a face luminous with joy.
“Don’t you just love it all?”
He nodded. The picture struck a spark from his imagination. By some trick of light and shade she seemed the heart of the sunset, a golden, glowing creature of soft, warm flesh through which an ardent soul quivered and palpitated with vague yearnings and inarticulate desires.
Into the perfect peace of a harmonious world jarred a raucous shout. From a hill pocket back of Flat Top came a cloud of dust. In the falling light a dim, gray mass poured out upon the mesa. It moved with a soft rustle of small, padded feet, of wool fleeces rubbing against each other.
A horseman cantered into view and caught sight of McCoy. With a jeering laugh he shouted a greeting:
“Fine sheep weather these days, McCoy. How about cows?”
The eyes of the cattleman blazed. The girl noticed the swift flush under the tan of the cheeks, the lips that closed like a steel trap. It was plain that the man rode himself with a strong rein.
“I’m still waiting in the door of my sheep wagon for you and your friends,” scoffed the drunken voice. “And my wagon is a whole lot nearer the Circle Diamond than it was. One of these days I’ll drive up to your door like I promised.”
Still McCoy said nothing, but the muscles stood out on his clamped jaws like ropes. The sheepman rode closer, turned insolent eyes on the girl. From his ribald, hateful mirth she shrank back with a sense of degradation.
Tait turned his horse and galloped away. He shouted an order to a herder. A dog passed silently in and out of the gray mass, which moved across the mesa like an agitated wave of the sea.
The girl asked a question: “Has he crossed the dead line?”
“Yes.” Then: “What do you know about the dead line?” asked her companion, surprised.
“Oh, I have eyes and ears.” She put herself swiftly on his side. “I think you’re right. He’s bad—hateful. Your cattle were here first. He brought sheep in to spite you and his other neighbours. Isn’t that true?”
“Yes.”
McCoy wondered how much more this uncannily shrewd young person knew about the relations between him and Tait. Did she know, for instance, the story of how Norma Davis had jilted him to marry the sheepman?
“What will you do? Will you fight for the range?”
“Yes.” This was a subject the cattleman could not discuss. He dismissed it promptly. “Hadn’t we better be moving toward the ranch, Miss Trovillion?”
They rode back together in the gathering dusk.
