Читать книгу Troubled Waters - William MacLeod Raine - Страница 9

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“LARRY SILCOTT on Rocking Chair,” boomed a deep voice through a megaphone.

A girl in one of the front boxes of the grand stand saw a young cow-puncher move with jingling spurs across the wide race track toward the corral beyond. He looked up, easy and debonair as an actor, and raked with his eyes the big crowd watching him. Smile met smile, when his glance came to halt at the eager girl looking down.

Ruth Trovillion’s smile went out like the flame of a blown candle. She had not caught the name announced through the megaphone, but now she recognized him. The last time she had seen this gay youth, now sunning himself so jauntily in the public regard, had been in the orchard of Elkhorn Lodge; he had kissed her impudently, and when their eyes had met hers had flashed hatred at him for the affront he had dared to put upon her.

She turned away, flaming, chin in the air.

“Is he a good rider?” she asked the man sitting beside her.

“Wyoming doesn’t raise better riders than Larry Silcott,” he answered promptly. “He’s an A-1 rider—the best of the lot.”

“You beat him last year, didn’t you?” she challenged.

McCoy did not quite understand her imperious resentment. It seemed to go a little farther than the occasion called for. “That was the luck of the day. I happened——”

“Oh, yes, you happened!” scoffed Ruth. “You could go out and beat him now if you wanted to. Why don’t you ride? Your name is entered. I should think you would defend your championship. Everybody wants to see last year’s winner ride. I haven’t any patience with you.”

Rowan smiled. “I see you haven’t, Miss Ruth. I’ve tried to explain. I like Larry. We’re friends. Besides, I taught him his riding. Looks to me as if it is one of the younger fellow’s turn. Now is a good time for me to quit after I have won two years running.”

The young woman was not convinced, but she dropped the argument. Her resentful eyes moved back to the arena, into which a meek-looking claybank had been driven. It stood with blinking eyes, drooping at the hip, palpably uninterested in the proceedings.

Of a sudden the ears of the bronco pricked, its eyes dilated. A man in chaps was moving toward it, a rope in his hands. The loop of the lariat circled, went whistling forward, fell true over the head of the outlaw horse. The claybank reared, tried to bolt, came strangling to a halt as the loop tightened. A second rope slid into place beside the first. The horse stood trembling while a third man coaxed a blanket over its eyes.

Warily and deftly Silcott saddled, looking well to the cinch.

“All ready,” he told his assistants.

Ropes and blanket were whipped off as he swung to the seat. Rocking Chair stood motionless for a moment, bewildered at the things happening so fast. Then the outlaw realized that a human clothespin was straddling its back. It went whirling upward as if trying to tie itself into a knot. The rider clamped his knees against the sides of the bronco and swung his hat with a joyous whoop.

Rocking Chair had a reputation to live up to. It was a noted fence rower, weaver, and sunfisher. Savagely it whirled, went up in another buck, came down stiff-legged, with arched back. The jolt was like that of a pile driver, but Silcott met it with limp spine, his hat still fanning against the flank of the animal. The outlaw went round and round in a vicious circle. The incubus was still astride of its back. It bolted; jarred to a sudden, sideways halt. Spurs were rowelling its sides cruelly.

Up again it went in a series of furious bucks, one after another, short, sharp, violent. Meanwhile, Silcott, who was a trick rider, went through his little performance. He drank a bottle of ginger ale and flung away the bottle. He took the rein between his teeth and slipped off coat and waistcoat. He rode with his feet out of the stirrups. The grand stand clamoured wild applause. The young cattleman from the Open A N C was easily the hero of the day.

The outlaw horse stopped bucking as suddenly as it had begun. Larry slipped from the saddle in front of the grand stand and stood bowing, a lithe, graceful young figure of supple ease, to the plaudits which rained upon him.

Abruptly Ruth turned to McCoy. “I want you to ride,” she told him in a low voice.

The cattleman hesitated. He did not want to ride. Without saying so in words, he had let the other competitors understand that he did not mean to defend his title. There had been a good deal of pressure to induce him to drag a saddle into the arena but so far he had resisted it.

He turned to decline, but the words died on his lips. The eyes of the girl were stormy; her cheeks flushed. It was plain that for some reason she had set her heart on his winning. Why? His pulses crashed with the swift, tumultuous beating of the red blood in him. Rowan McCoy was not a vain man. It was hard for him to accept the conclusion for which his whole soul longed. But what other reason could there be for her insistence?

During the past few weeks he had been with Ruth Trovillion a great deal. He had ridden with her, climbed Old Baldy by her side, eaten picnic lunches as her companion far up in flower-strewn mountain parks. He had taught her to shoot, to fish, to make camp. They had been gay and wholesome comrades for long summer days. The new and secret thing that had come into his life he had hidden from her as if it had been a sin. The desire of his heart was impossible, he had always told himself. How could it be otherwise? This fine, spirited young creature, upon whom was stamped so ineradicably the look of the thoroughbred, would go back to her own kind when the time came. Meanwhile, let him make the best of his little day of sunshine.

“I told the boys I wasn’t expecting to ride,” he parried. “It has been rather understood that I wouldn’t.”

“But if I ask you?” she demanded.

There was no resisting that low, imperious appeal.

He looked straight into her eyes. “If you ask it, I’ll ride.”

“I do ask it.”

He rose. “It’s your say-so, little partner. I’ll let the committee know.”

The eyes of the girl followed him, a brown, sun-baked man, quiet and strong and resolute. Her glance questioned shyly what manner of man this was, after all, who had imposed himself so greatly upon her thoughts. He was genuine. So much she knew. He did not need the gay trappings of Larry Silcott to brand him a rider of the hills, foursquare to every wind that blew. Behind the curtain of his reticence she had divined some vague hint of a woman in his life. Now a queer little thrill of jealousy, savage and primeval, claimed her for the first time. She knew her own power over Rowan McCoy. It hurt her to feel that another girl had once possessed it, too.

A cow-puncher from Laramie, in yellow wool chaps and a shirt of robin’s-egg blue, took the stage after Silcott. He drew a roan with a red-hot devil of malice in its eye. The bronco hunched itself over to the fence in a series of jarring bucks, and jammed the leg of the rider against a post. The Laramie youth, beside himself with pain, caught at the saddle horn to save his seat. The nearest judge fired a revolver to tell him he was out of the running. He had “touched leather.”

His successor took the dust ignominiously in a clean tumble. He got up, looked ruefully at the bronco that had unseated him, and went his bowlegged way back to meet the derisive condolences of forty grinning punchers.

“Too bad the judges didn’t have the ground plowed up for you, Shorty. It would ’a’ been a heap softer,” murmured one.

“If I’d only remembered to ride on my spurs like you done, Wade, I needn’t have fallen at all,” came back Shorty with genial malice at his tormentor.

Whereat the laugh was on Wade, who had been detected earlier in the day digging his spurs into the cinch to help him stick to the saddle.

“Rowan McCoy on Tenderfoot,” announced the leather-lunged megaphone man.

A wave of interest swept through the grand stand. Everybody had wanted to see the champion ride. Now they were going to get the chance. The announcement caused a stir even among the hard-bitten riders at the entrance to the corral. For McCoy was not only a famous bronco buster; he was a man whose personality had won him many friends and some enemies.

The owner of the Circle Diamond rode like a centaur. He tried no tricks, no fancy business to win the applause of the spectators. But he held his seat with such ease and mastery that his long, lithe body might have been a part of the horse. His riding was characteristic of him—straight and strong and genuine.

The outlaw tried its wicked best, and no bronco in the Rockies was better known than Tenderfoot for the fighting devil that slumbered in its heart. Neither side bucking nor pitching, sunfishing nor weaving could shake the lean-loined, broad-shouldered figure from his seat. It was not merely that McCoy could not be unseated; there was never a moment when there was any doubt of whether man or beast was master. Even when the bronco flung itself backward, McCoy was in the saddle again before the animal was on its feet.

The eyes of Ruth never left the fighting pair. She leaned forward, fascinated, lost to everything in the world but the duel that was being fought out in front of her. They were a splendid pair of animals, each keyed to the highest notch of efficiency. But the one in the saddle was something more. His perfect poise was no doubt instinctive, born of long experience. His skill had become automatic. Yet back of this she sensed mind, a will that flashed along the reins to the brute beneath. Slowly Tenderfoot answered to its master, acknowledged the dominion of the man.

Its pitching became less violent, its bucking halfhearted. At a signal from one of the judges, McCoy slipped from the saddle. Without an instant’s delay, without a single glance at the storm-tossed grand stand, the rider strode across the arena and disappeared. He did not know that Ruth Trovillion was beating her gloved hands excitedly along with five thousand other cheering spectators. He could not guess how her heart had stood still when the bronco toppled backward, nor how it had raced when his toes found again the stirrups as the horse struggled to its feet.

The judges conferred for a few minutes before the megaphone man announced that the championship belt went to McCoy, second prize to Silcott. Once more the grand stand gave itself to eager applause of the decision.

Just before the wild-horse race, which was the last event on the program, McCoy made his way to the box where Miss Trovillion was sitting with Tim Flanders, of the Elkhorn Lodge, and his wife.

The girl looked up, her eyes shining. “Congratulations, Mr. Champion of the World.” She felt after a fashion that she had helped to beat the conceited Silcott, the youth who had affronted her with his presumptuous kiss.

“I was lucky,” he said simply.

“You were the best rider.” Then, with a little touch of feminine ferocity: “I knew you would beat him.”

“Silcott? I still think I was lucky.”

Already the grand stand was beginning to empty. Round-up Week was almost over.

“We’d better be getting back to town if we want any supper,” proposed Flanders.

The same idea had suggested itself to several thousand more visitors to Bad Ax. A throng of automobiles was presently creeping toward the gates, every engine racing and every horn squawking. Once outside, the whole plain seemed alive with moving cars, buckboards, wagons, and horses all going swiftly townward in a mad race for hotels and restaurants.

Bad Ax was crowded to its suburbs. Hotels were jammed, rooming houses doing a capacity business. A steady stream of automobiles had poured in all week from Denver and other points. Trains loaded to the vestibules had emptied themselves into the town. The bells of saloon cash registers were ringing continuously. Cow-punchers from Sheridan and Cody jostled shoulders with tourists from New Haven and Kansas City, their worn leathers and faded gray shirts discarded for gaudy costumes that ran the rainbow from sunset orange to violent shades of blue.

The whole town was a welter of barbaric colour. Streamers stretched across from building to building, and “spielers” for side shows bawled the merits of their attraction. Everywhere one met the loud gaiety of youth on a frolic. Young as the night was, merrymakers were surging up and down the streets tossing confetti and blowing horns.

In the crowded streets, after they had found something to eat in a vacant store where the ladies of the Baptist church were serving a supper, McCoy and Miss Trovillion became separated from their friends. Hours later they wandered from the crowd toward the suburb where the young woman and the Flanders family had found rooms.

Unaccountably their animation ebbed when they were alone under the stars. They had been full of laughter and small talk so long as the crowd jostled them. Now they could find neither. In every fibre of him Rowan was aware of the slight, dainty figure moving by his side so lightly. The delicate, penetrating fragrance of her personality came to him with poignant sweetness.

Once his hand crept out and touched her white gown in the darkness. If she knew, she gave no sign.

Her eyes were on the hills which rose sheer back of the town high into the sky line. They seemed to press in closely and to lift her vision to the heavens, to shut out all the little commonplace things of life.

“Do you suppose God made them to wash sin out of the hearts of people?” she asked.

“A night like this does give a fellow queer feelings,” he answered in a low voice. “Have you ever camped in the high hills with the wind blowin’ kinda soft through the pines? I have, alone, often. Makes a fellow feel as though he’d like to begin again with a clean page.”

She nodded. “Yes. I’ve felt it, too, though I never camped alone of course. As though something fine and wonderful and all-powerful was whispering to me and drawing me nearer to eternal things. It must be something in ourselves, don’t you think? It can’t be that the mountains at night are really a kind of Holy of Holies.”

“I reckon,” he agreed. He had never before tried or heard anybody else try to put into words the strange influence of the shadowy range at night upon one camped in the hollow of a draw, an influence which at the same time seemed to reduce one to an atom in an ocean of space and to lift one into the heights of the everlasting verities. He was shy of any expression of his emotions.

They fell into silence, and presently she turned reluctantly back toward the town. He fell into step beside her. Soon now, he knew, they would be caught again into the spirit of the commonplace.

So he spoke, abruptly, to hold in his heart some permanent comfort from the hour when they had been alone with each other and the voices of the world had been very far and faint.

“Why did you want me to ride?”

It was a simple question, but one not so easily answered. She could have told him the truth, that she did not want Larry Silcott to win. But that would have been only part of the truth. She wanted Rowan McCoy to win, wanted it more than she had wished anything for a long time. Yet why? She was not ready to give a candid reason even to herself, far less to him.

Womanlike, she evaded. “Why shouldn’t I want you to win? You’re my friend. I thought——”

He surprised himself almost as much as he did her by his answer. “I’m not yore friend.”

She looked at him, startled at his brusqueness.

“I’m a man that loves you,” he said roughly.

A tremor passed through her. She was conscious of a strange sweet faintness. The soft eyes veiled themselves beneath dark lashes.

“Have I spoiled everything, little partner?” he asked gently.

“How can I tell—yet?” she whispered, and looked up at him shyly, tremulously.

He knew, as his arms went around her, that he had entered upon the greatest joy of his life.