35CHAPTER IIIAN ACCUSATION
The rescued man ate, drank, and from sheer fatigue fell asleep within five minutes of the time he was shown his bedroom.
Since he was not of the easily discouraged kind, the deputy stayed to supper on invitation of Lee. He sat opposite the daughter of his host, and that young woman treated him with the most frigid politeness. The owner of the Bar Double G was quite unaware of any change of temperature. Jack and his little girl had always been the best of friends. So now he discoursed on the price of cows, the good rains, the outrages of the rustlers, and kindred topics without suspecting that the attention of the young man was on more personal matters.
Though born in Arizona, Melissy was of the South. Due westward rolls the tide of settlement, and Beauchamp Lee had migrated from Tennessee after the war, following the line of least resistance to the sunburned territory. Later he had married a woman a good deal younger than himself. She had borne him two children, the elder of whom was36now a young man. Melissy was the younger, and while she was still a babe in arms the mother had died of typhoid and left her baby girl to grow up as best she might in a land where women were few and far. This tiny pledge of her mother’s love Champ Lee had treasured as a gift from Heaven. He had tended her and nursed her through the ailments of childhood with a devotion the most pure of his reckless life. Given to heady gusts of passion, there had never been a moment when his voice had been other than gentle and tender to her.
Inevitably Melissy had become the product of her inheritance and her environment. If she was the heiress of Beauchamp Lee’s courage and generosity, his quick indignation against wrong and injustice, so, too, she was of his passionate lawlessness.
After supper Melissy disappeared. She wanted very much to be alone and have a good cry. Wherefore she slipped out of the back door and ran up the Lone Tree trail in the darkness. Jack thought he saw a white skirt fly a traitorous signal, and at leisure he pursued.
But Melissy was not aware of that. She reached Lone Tree rock and slipped down from boulder to boulder until she came to the pine which gave the place its name. For hours she had been forced to repress her emotions, to make necessary small talk, to arrange for breakfast and other household details. Now she was alone, and the floods of her bitterness were unloosed. She broke down and37wept passionately, for she was facing her first great disillusionment. She had lost a friend, one in whom she had put great faith.
The first gust of the storm was past when Melissy heard a step on the rocks above. She knew intuitively that Jack Flatray had come in search of her, and he was the last man on earth she wanted to meet just now.
“’Lissie!” she heard him call softly; and again, “’Lissie!”
Noiselessly she got to her feet, waiting to see what he would do. She knew he must be standing on the edge of the great rock, so directly above her that if he had kicked a pebble it would have landed beside her. Presently he began to clamber down.
She tiptoed along the ledge and slipped into the trough at the farther end that led to the top. It was a climb she had taken several times, but never in the dark. The ascent was almost perpendicular, and it had to be made by clinging to projecting rocks and vegetation. Moreover, if she were to escape undetected it had to be done in silence.
She was a daughter of the hills, as surefooted as a mountain goat. Handily she went up, making the most of the footholds that offered. In spite of the best she could do the rustling of bushes betrayed her.
Jack came to the foot of the trough and looked up.
“So you’re there, are you?” he asked.
Her foot loosened a stone and sent it rolling down.38
“If I were you I wouldn’t try that at night, ’Liss,” he advised.
She made sure of the steadiness of her voice before she answered. “You don’t need to try it.”
“I said if I were you, girl.”
“But you are not. Don’t let me detain you here, Mr. Flatray,” she told him in a manner of icy precision.
The deputy began the climb too. “What’s the use of being so hostile, little girl?” he drawled. “Me, I came as soon as I could, burning the wind, too.”
She set her teeth, determined to reach the top in time to get away before he could join her. In her eagerness she took a chance that proved her undoing. A rock gave beneath her foot and clattered down. Clinging by one hand and foot, she felt her body swing around. From her throat a little cry leaped. She knew herself slipping.
“Jack!”
In time, and just in time, he reached her, braced himself, and gave her his knee for a foot rest.
“All right?” he asked, and “All right!” she answered promptly.
“We’ll go back,” he told her.
She made no protest. Indeed, she displayed a caution in lowering herself that surprised him. Every foothold she tested carefully with her weight. Once she asked him to place her shoe in the crevice for her. He had never seen her take so much time39in making sure or be so fussy about her personal safety.
Safely on the ledge again, she attempted a second time to dismiss him. “Thank you, Mr. Flatray. I won’t take any more of your time.”
He looked at her steadily before he spoke. “You’re mighty high-heeled, ’Lissie. You know my name ain’t Mr. Flatray to you. What’s it all about? I’ve told you twice I couldn’t get here any sooner.”
She flamed out at him in an upblaze of feminine ferocity. “And I tellyou, that I don’t care if you had never come. I don’t want to see you or have anything to do with you.”
“Why not?” He asked it quietly, though he began to know that her charge against him was a serious one.
“Because I know what you are now, because you have made us believe in you while all the time you were living a lie.”
“Meaning what?”
“I was gathering poppies on the other side of Antelope Pass this afternoon.”
“What has that got to do with me being a liar and a scoundrel,” he wanted to know.
“Oh, you pretend,” she scoffed. “But you know as well as I do.”
“I’m afraid I don’t. Let’s have the indictment.”
“If everybody in Papago County had told me I wouldn’t have believed it,” she cried. “I had to40see it with my own eyes before I could have been convinced.”
“Yes, well what is it you saw with your eyes?”
“You needn’t keep it up. I tell you I saw it all from the time you fired the shot.”
He laughed easily, but without mirth. “Kept tab on me, did you?”
She wheeled from him, gave a catch of her breath, and caught at the rock wall to save herself from falling.
He spoke sharply. “You hurt yourself in the trough.”
“I sprained my ankle a little, but it doesn’t matter.”
He understood now why she had made so slow a descent and he suspected that the wrench was more than she admitted. The moon had come out from under a cloud and showed him a pale, tear-stained face, with a row of even, little teeth set firm against the lower lip. She was in pain and her pride was keeping it from him.
“Let me look at your ankle.”
“No.”
“I say yes. You’ve hurt it seriously.”
“That is my business, I think,” she told him with cold finality.
“I’m going to make it mine. Think I don’t know you, proud as Lucifer when you get set. You’ll lame yourself for life if you’re not careful.”
“I don’t care to discuss it.”41
“Fiddlesticks! If you’ve got anything against me we’ll hear what it is afterward. Right now we’ll give first aid to the injured. Sit down here.”
She had not meant to give way, but she did. Perhaps it was because of the faintness that stole over her, or because the pain was sharper than she could well endure. She found herself seated on the rock shelf, letting him cut the lace out of her shoe and slip it off. Ever so gently he worked, but he could tell by the catches of her breath that it was not pleasant to endure. From his neck he untied the silk kerchief and wrapped it tightly around the ankle.
“That will have to do till I get you home.”
“I’ll not trouble you, sir. If you’ll stop and tell my father that is all I’ll ask.”
“Different here,” he retorted cheerfully. “Just so as to avoid any argument, I’ll announce right now that Jack Flatray is going to see you home. It’s his say-so.”
She rose. None knew better than she that he was a dominating man when he chose to be. She herself carried in her slim body a spirit capable of passion and of obstinacy, but to-night she had not the will to force the fighting.
Setting her teeth, she took a step or two forward, her hand against the rock wall to help bear the weight. With narrowed eyes, he watched her closely, noting the catches of pain that shot through42her breathing. Half way up the boulder bed he interposed brusquely.
“This is plumb foolishness, girl. You’ve got no business putting your weight on that foot, and you’re not going to do it.”
He slipped his arm around her waist in such a way as to support her all he could. With a quick turn of the body she tried to escape.
“No use. I’m going through with this, ’Lissie. Someone has been lying to you about me, and just now you hate the ground I walk on. Good enough. That’s got nothing to do with this. You’re a woman that needs help, and any old time J. F. meets up with such a one he’s on the job. You don’t owe me ’Thank you,’ but you’ve got to stand for me till you reach the house.”
“You’re taking advantage of me because I can’t help myself. Why don’t you go and bring father,” she flung out.
“I’m younger than your father and abler to help. That’s why?”
They reached the top of the bluff and he made her sit down to rest. A pale moon suffused the country, and in that stage set to lowered lights her pallor was accented. From the colorless face shadowy, troubled eyes spoke the misery through which she was passing. The man divined that her pain was more than physical, and the knowledge went to him poignantly by the heart route.43
“What is it, ’Lissie? What have I done?” he asked gently.
“You know. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“But I don’t know.”
“What’s the use of keeping it up? I caught you this afternoon.”
“Caught me doing what?”
“Caught you rustling, caught you branding a calf just after you had shot the cow.”
For an instant her charge struck him dumb. He stared at her as if he thought she had gone suddenly mad.
“What’s that? Say it again,” he got out at last.
“And the cow had the Bar Double G brand, belonged to my father, your best friend,” she added passionately.
He spoke very gently, but there was an edge to his voice that was new to her. “Suppose you tell me all about it.”
She threw out a hand in a gesture of despair. “What’s the use? Nothing could have made me believe it but my own eyes. You needn’t keep up a pretense. I saw you.”
“Yes, so you said before. Now begin at the start and tell your story.”
She had the odd feeling of being put on the defensive and it angered her. How dared he look at her with those cool, gray eyes that still appeared to bore a hole through treachery? Why did her heart44convict her of having deserted a friend, when she knew that the desertion was his?
“While I was gathering poppies I heard a shot. It was so close I walked to the edge of the draw and looked over. There I saw you.”
“What was I doing?”
“You were hogtying a calf.”
“And then?”
“I didn’t understand at first. I thought to slip down and surprise you for fun. But as I got lower I saw the dead cow. Just then you began to brand the calf and I cried out to you.”
“What did I do?”
“You know what you did,” she answered wearily. “You broke for the brush where your horse was and galloped away.”
“Got a right good look at me, did you?”
“Not at your face. But I knew. You were wearing this blue silk handkerchief.” Her finger indicated the one bound around her ankle.
“So on that evidence you decide I’m a rustler, and you’ve only known me thirteen years. You’re a good friend, ’Lissie.”
Her eyes blazed on him like live coals. “Have you forgotten the calf you left with your brand on it?”
She had startled him at last. “With my brand on it?” he repeated, his voice dangerously low and soft.
“You know as well as I do. You had got the F45just about finished when I called. You dropped the running iron and ran.”
“Dropped it and ran, did I? And what did you do?”
“I reheated the iron and blurred the brand so that nobody could tell what it had been.”
He laughed harshly without mirth. “I see. I’m a waddy and a thief, but you’re going to protect me for old times’ sake. That’s the play, is it? I ought to be much obliged to you and promise to reform, I reckon.”
His bitterness stung. She felt a tightening of the throat. “All I ask is that you go away and never come back to me,” she cried with a sob.
“Don’t worry about that. I ain’t likely to come back to a girl that thinks I’m the lowest thing that walks. You’re not through with me a bit more than I am with you,” he answered harshly.
Her little hand beat upon the rock in her distress. “I never would have believed it. Nobody could have made me believe it. I—I—why, I trusted you like my own father,” she lamented. “To think that you would take that way to stock your ranch—and with the cattle of my father, too.”
His face was hard as chiseled granite. “Distrust all your friends. That’s the best way.”
“You haven’t even denied it—not that it would do any good,” she said miserably.
There was a sound of hard, grim laughter in his46throat. “No, and I ain’t going to deny it. Are you ready to go yet?”
His repulse of her little tentative advance was like a blow on the face to her.
She made a movement to rise. While she was still on her knees he stooped, put his arms around her, and took her into them. Before she could utter her protest he had started down the trail toward the house.
“How dare you? Let me go,” she ordered.
“You’re not able to walk, and you’ll go the way I say,” he told her shortly in a flinty voice.
Her anger was none the less because she realized her helplessness to get what she wanted. Her teeth set fast to keep back useless words. Into his stony eyes her angry ones burned. The quick, irregular rise and fall of her bosom against his heart told him how she was struggling with her passion.
Once he spoke. “Tell me where it was you saw this rustler—the exact place near as you can locate it.”
She answered only by a look.
The deputy strode into the living room of the ranch with her in his arms. Lee was reading a newspaper Jack had brought with him from Mesa. At sight of them he started up hurriedly.
“Goddlemighty, what’s the matter, Jack?”
“Only a ricked ankle, Champ. Slipped on a stone,” Flatray explained as he put Melissy down on the lounge.47
In two minutes the whole house was upset. Hop Ling was heating water to bathe the sprain. A rider from the bunkhouse was saddling to go for the doctor. Another was off in the opposite direction to buy some liniment at Mammoth.
In the confusion Flatray ran up his horse from the pasture, slapped on the saddle, and melted into the night.
An hour later Melissy asked her father what had become of him.
“Doggone that boy, I don’t know where he went. Reckon he thought he’d be in the way. Mighty funny he didn’t give us a chanct to tell him to stay.”
“Probably he had business in Mesa,” Melissy answered, turning her face to the wall.
“Business nothing,” retorted the exasperated rancher. “He figured we couldn’t eat and sleep him without extra trouble. Ain’t that a fine reputation for him to be giving the Bar Double G? I’ll curl his hair for him onct I meet up with him again.”
“If you would put out the light, I think I could sleep, dad,” she told him in the least of voices.
“Sure, honey. Has the throbbing gone out of the ankle?” he asked anxiously.
“Not entirely, but it’s a good deal better. Good-night, dad.”
“If Doc comes I’ll bring him in,” Lee said after he had kissed her.
“Do, please.”48
But after she was left alone Melissy did not prepare herself for sleep. Her wide open eyes stared into the darkness, while her mind stormily reviewed the day. The man who for years had been her best friend was a scoundrel. She had proved him unworthy of her trust, and on top of that he had insulted her. Hot tears stung her eyes—tears of shame, of wounded self-love, of mortification, and of something more worthy than any of these.
She grieved passionately for that which had gone out of her life, for the comradeship that had been so precious to her. If this man were a waddy, who of all her friends could she trust? She could have forgiven him had he done wrong in the heat of anger. But this premeditated evil was beyond forgiveness. To make it worse, he had come direct from the doing of it to meet her, with a brazen smile on his lips and a lie in his heart. She would never speak to him again—never so long as she lived.
49CHAPTER IVTHE MAN WITH THE CHIHUAHUA HAT
A little dust cloud was traveling up the trail toward the Bar Double G, the center of which presently defined itself as a rider moving at a road gait. He wore a Chihuahua hat and with it the picturesque trappings the Southwest borrows on occasion from across the border. Vanity disclosed itself in the gold-laced hat, in the silver conchos of the fringed chaps, in the fine workmanship of the saddle and bit. The man’s finery was overdone, carried with it the suggestion of being on exhibition. But one look at the man himself, sleek and graceful, black-haired and white-toothed, exuding an effect of cold wariness in spite of the masked smiling face, would have been enough to give the lie to any charge of weakness. His fopperies could not conceal the silken strength of him. One meeting with the chill, deep-set eyes was certificate enough for most people.
Melissy, sitting on the porch with her foot resting on a second chair, knew a slight quickening of the blood as she watched him approach.
“Good evenin’, Miss M’lissy,” he cried, sweeping his sombrero as low as the stirrup.50
“Buenos tardes,SeñorNorris,” she flung back gayly.
Sitting at ease in the saddle, he leisurely looked her over with eyes that smoldered behind half-shuttered lids. To most of her world she was in spirit still more boy than woman, but before his bold, possessive gaze her long lashes wavered to the cheeks into which the warm blood was beating. Her long, free lines were still slender with the immaturity of youth, her soul still hesitating reluctantly to cross the border to womanhood toward which Nature was pushing her so relentlessly. From a fund of experience Philip Norris read her shrewdly, knew how to evoke the latent impulses which brought her eagerly to the sex duel.
“Playing off for sick,” he scoffed.
“I’m not,” she protested. “Never get sick. It’s just a sprained ankle.”
“Sho! I guess you’re Miss Make Believe; just harrowing the feelings of your beaux.”
“The way you talk! I haven’t got any beaux. The boys are just my friends.”
“Oh, just friends! And no beaux. My, my! Not a single sweetheart in all this wide open country. Shall I go rope you one and bring him in,compadre?”
“No!” she exploded. “I don’t want any. I’m not old enough yet.” Her dancing eyes belied the words.
“Now I wouldn’t have guessed it. You look to51me most ready to be picked.” He rested his weight on the farther stirrup and let his lazy smile mock her. “My estimate would be sixteen. I’ll bet you’re every day of that.”
“I only lack three months of being eighteen,” she came back indignantly.
“You don’t say! You’ll ce’tainly have to be advertising for a husband soon, Miss Three-Quarters-Past-Seventeen. Maybe an ad in the Mesa paper would help. You ain’t so awful bad looking.”
“I’ll let you write it. What would you say?” she demanded, a patch of pink standing out near the curve of the cheek bone.
He swung from the saddle and flung the reins to the ground. With jingling spurs he came up the steps and sat on the top one, his back against a pillar. Boldly his admiring eyes swept her.
“Nina, I couldn’t do the subject justice. Honest, I haven’t got the vocabulary.”
“Oh, you!” Laughter was in the eyes that studied him with a side tilt of the chin. “That’s a fine way to get out of it when your bluff is called.”
He leaned back against the post comfortably and absorbed the beauty of the western horizon. The sun had just set behind a saddle of the Galiuros in a splash of splendor. All the colors of the rainbow fought for supremacy in a brilliant-tinted sky that blazed above the fire-girt peaks. Soon dusk would slip down over the land and tone the hues to a softer harmony. A purple sea would flow over the52hills, to be in turn displaced by a deep, soft violet. Then night, that night of mystery and romance which transforms the desert to a thing of incredible wonder!
“Did your father buy this sunset with the ranch? And has he got a guarantee that it will perform every night?” he asked.
“Did you ever see anything like it?” she cried. “I have looked at them all my life and I never get tired.”
He laughed softly, his indolent, sleepy look on her. “Some things I would never get tired of looking at either.”
Without speaking she nodded, still absorbing the sunset.
“But it wouldn’t be that kind of scenery,” he added. “How tall are you,muchacha?”
Her glance came around in surprise. “I don’t know. About five foot five, I think. Why?”
“I’m working on that ad. How would this do? ‘Miss Three-Quarters-Past-Seventeen wants to meet up with gentleman between eighteen and forty-eight. Object, matrimony. Description of lady: Slim, medium height, brunette, mop of blue-black hair, the prettiest dimple you ever saw——’”
“Now I know you’re making fun of me. I’m mad.” And the dimple flashed into being.
“‘—mostly says the opposite of what she means, has a——’”53
“I don’t. I don’t”
“‘—has a spice of the devil in her, which——’”
“Now, Iammad,” she interrupted, laughing.
“‘—which is excusable, since she has the reddest lips for kissing in Arizona.’”
He had gone too far. Her innocence was in arms. Norris knew it by the swiftness with which the smile vanished from her face, by the flash of anger in the eyes.
“I prefer to talk about something else, Mr. Norris,” she said with all the prim stiffness of a schoolgirl.
Her father relieved the tension by striding across from the stable. With him came a bowlegged young fellow in plain leathers. The youngster was Charley Hymer, one of the riders for the Bar Double G.
“You’re here at the right time, Norris,” Lee said grimly. “Charley has just come down from Antelope Pass. He found one of my cows dead, with a bullet hole through the forehead. The ashes of a fire were there, and in the brush not far away a running iron.”
The eyes of Norris narrowed to slits. He was the cattle detective of the association and for a year now the rustlers had outgeneraled him. “I’ll have you take me to the spot, Charley. Get a move on you and we’ll get there soon as the moon is up.”
Melissy gripped the arms of her chair tightly with both hands. She was looking at Norris with a new expression, a kind of breathless fear. She54knew him for a man who could not be swerved from the thing he wanted. For all his easy cynicism, he had the reputation of being a bloodhound on the trail. Moreover, she knew that he was no friend to Jack Flatray. Why had she left that running iron as evidence to convict its owner? What folly not to have removed it from the immediate scene of the crime!
The cattle detective and her father had moved a few steps away and were talking in low tones. Melissy became aware of a footfall. The man who called himself Morse came around the corner of the house and stopped at the porch steps.
“May I speak to you a moment, Miss Lee?” he said in a low voice.
“Of course.”
The voice of Norris rose to an irritated snarl. “Tell you I’ve got evidence, Lee. Mebbe it’s not enough to convict, but it satisfies me a-plenty that Jack Flatray’s the man.”
Melissy was frozen to a tense attention. Her whole mind was on what passed between the detective and her father. Otherwise she would have noticed the swift change that transformed the tenderfoot.
The rancher answered with impatient annoyance. “You’re ’way off, Norris. I don’t care anything about your evidence. The idea is plumb ridiculous. Twenty odd years I’ve known him. He’s the best they make, a pure through and through. Not a55crooked hair in his head. I’ve eat out of the same frying pan too often with that boy not to know what he is. You go bury those suspicions of yours immediate. There’s nothing to them.”
Norris grumbled objections as they moved toward the stable. Melissy drew a long breath and brought herself back to the tenderfoot.
He stood like a coiled spring, head thrust far forward from the shoulders. The look in his black eyes was something new to her experience. For hate, passion, caution were all mirrored there.
“You know Mr. Norris,” she said quickly.
He started. “What did you say his name was?” he asked with an assumption of carelessness.
“Norris—Philip Norris. He is a cattle detective.”
“Never heard of Mr. Norris before in my life,” he answered, but it was observable that he still breathed deep.
She did not believe him. Some tie in their buried past bound these two men together. They must have known each other in the South years ago, and one of them at least was an enemy of the other. There might come a day when she could use this knowledge to save Jack Flatray from the punishment dogging his heels. Melissy filed it away in her memory for future reference.
“You wanted to speak to me,” she suggested.
“I’m going away.”
“What for?”56
“Because I’m not a hound. I can’t blackmail a woman.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean that you’ve found work here for me because I saw what you did over by Antelope Pass. We made a bargain. Oh, not in words, but a bargain just the same! You were to keep my secret because I knew yours. I release you from your part of it. Give me up if you think it is your duty. I’ll not tell what I know.”
“That wasn’t how you talked the other day.”
“No. It’s how I talk now. I’m a hunted man, wanted for murder. I make you a present of the information.”
“You make me a present of what I already know, Mr. Diller, alias Morse, alias Bellamy.”
“You guessed it the first day?”
“Yes.”
“And meant to keep quiet about it?”
“Yes, I meant to shelter you from the punishment you deserve.” She added with a touch of bitter self-scorn: “I was doing what I had to do.”
“You don’t have to do it any longer.” He looked straight at her with his head up. “And how do you know what I deserve? Who made you a judge about these facts? Grant for the sake of argument I killed him. Do you know I wasn’t justified?”
His fierce boldness put her on the defense. “A man sure of his cause does not run away. The paper said this Shep Boone was shot from ambush.57Nothing could justify such a thing. When you did that——”
“I didn’t. Don’t believe it, Miss Lee.”
“He was shot from behind, the paper said.”
“Do I look like a man who would kill from ambush?”
She admitted to herself that this clear-eyed Southerner did not look like an assassin. Life in the open had made her a judge of such men as she had been accustomed to meet, but for days she had been telling herself she could no longer trust her judgment. Her best friend was a rustler. By a woman’s logic it followed that since Jack Flatray was a thief this man might have committed all the crimes in the calendar.
“I don’t know.” Then, impulsively, “No, you don’t, but you may be for all that.”
“I’m not asking anything for myself. You may do as you please after I’ve gone. Send for Mr. Flatray and tell him if you like.”
A horse cantered across the plaza toward the store. Bellamy turned quickly to go.
“I’m not going to tell anyone,” the girl called after him in a low voice.
Norris swung from the saddle. “Who’s our hurried friend?” he asked carelessly.
“Oh, a new rider of ours. Name of Morse.” She changed the subject. “Are you—do you think you know who the rustler is?”
His cold, black eyes rested in hers. She read in58them something cruel and sinister. It was as if he were walking over the grave of an enemy.
“I’m gathering evidence, a little at a time.”
“Do I know him?”
“Maybe you do.”
“Tell me.”
He shook his head. “Wait till I’ve got him cinched.”
“You told father,” she accused.
He laughed in a hard, mirthless fashion. “That cured me. The Lee family is from Missouri. When I talk next time I’ll have the goods to show.”
“I know who you mean. You’re making a mistake.” Her voice seemed to plead with him.
“Not on your life, I ain’t. But we’ll talk about that when the subject is riper. There will be a showdown some day, and don’t you forget it. Well, Charley is calling me. So long, Miss Three-Quarters-Past-Seventeen.” He went jingling down the steps and swung to the saddle. “I’ll not forget the ad, and when I find the right man I’ll ce’tainly rope and bring him to you.”
“The rustler?” she asked innocently.
“No, not the rustler, the gent between eighteen and forty-eight, object matrimony.”
“I don’t want to trouble you,” she flung at him with her gay smile.
“No trouble at all. Fact is, I’ve got him in mind already,” he assured her promptly.59
“Oh!” A pulse of excitement was beating in her throat.
“You don’t ask me who he is,” suggested Norris boldly, crouched in the saddle with his weight on the far stirrup.
She had brought it upon herself, but now she dodged the issue. “’Most anyone will do, and me going on eighteen.”
“You’re wrong, girl. Only one out of a thousand will do for your master.”
“Master, indeed! If he comes to the Bar Double G he’ll find he is at the wrong address. None wanted, thank you.”
“Most folks don’t want what’s best for them, I allow. But if they have luck it sometimes comes to them.”
“Luck!” she echoed, her chin in the air.
“You heard me right. What you need is a man that ain’t afraid of you, one to ride close herd on you so as to head off them stampede notions of yours. Now this lad is the very one. He is a black-haired guy, and when he says a thing——”
Involuntarily she glanced at his sleek black head. Melissy felt a sudden clamor of the blood, a pounding of the pulses.
“—he most generally means it. I’ve wrangled around a heap with him and there’s no manner of doubt he’s up to specifications. In appearance he looks like me. Point of fact, he’s a dead ringer for me.”60
She saw her chance and flashed out. “Now you’re flattering him. There can’t be two as—as fascinating as Señor Norris,” she mocked.
His smoldering eyes had the possessive insolence she resented and yet found so stimulating.
“Did I say there were two?” he drawled.
It was his parting shot. With a touch of the spur he was off, leaving her no time for an adequate answer.
There were no elusions and inferences about Philip Norris when he wanted to be direct. He had fairly taken her breath away. Melissy’s instinct told her there was something humiliating about such a wooing. But picturesque and unconventional conduct excuse themselves in a picturesque personality. And this man had that if nothing else.
She told herself she was angry at him, that he took liberties far beyond those of any of the other young men. Yet, somehow, she went into the house smiling. A color born of excitement burned beneath her sparkling eyes. She had entered into her heritage of womanhood and the call of sex was summoning her to the adventure that is old as the garden where Eve met Adam.
61CHAPTER VTHE TENDERFOOT TAKES UP A CLAIM
Mr. Diller, alias Morse, alias Bellamy, did not long remain at the Bar Double G as a rider. It developed that he had money, and, tenderfoot though he was, the man showed a shrewd judgment in his investments. He bought sheep and put them on the government forest reserve, much to the annoyance of the cattlemen of the district.
Morse, as he now called himself, was not the first man who had brought sheep into the border country. Far up in the hills were several camps of them. But hitherto these had been there on sufferance, and it had been understood that they were to be kept far from the cattle range. The extension of the government reserves changed the equation. A good slice of the range was cut off and thrown open to sheep. When Morse leased this and put five thousand bleaters upon the feeding ground the sentiment against him grew very bitter.
Lee had been spokesman of a committee appointed to remonstrate with him. Morse had met them62pleasantly but firmly. This part of the reserve had been set aside for sheep. If it were not leased by him it would be by somebody else. Therefore, he declined to withdraw his flocks. Champ lost his temper and swore that he for one would never submit to yield the range. Sharp bitter words were passed. Next week masked men drove a small flock belonging to Morse over a precipice.
The tenderfoot retaliated by jumping a mining claim staked out by Lee upon which the assessment work had not been kept up. The cattleman contested this in the courts, lost the decision, and promptly appealed. Meanwhile, he countered by leasing from the forest supervisor part of the run previously held by his opponent and putting sheep of his own upon it.
“I reckon I’ll play Mr. Morse’s own game and see how he likes it,” the angry cattleman told his friends.
But the luck was all with Morse. Before he had been working his new claim a month the Monte Cristo (he had changed the name from its original one of Melissy) proved a bonanza. His men ran into a rich streak of dirt that started a stampede for the vicinity.
Champ indulged in choice profanity. From his point of view he had been robbed, and he announced the fact freely to such acquaintances as dropped into the Bar Double G store.
“Dad gum it, I was aimin’ to do that assessment63work and couldn’t jest lay my hands on the time. I’d been a millionaire three years and didn’t know it. Then this damned Morse butts in and euchres me out of the claim. Some day him and me’ll have a settlement. If the law don’t right me, I reckon I’m most man enough to ’tend to Mr. Morse.”
It was his daughter who had hitherto succeeded in keeping the peace. When the news of the relocation had reached Lee he had at once started to settle the matter with a Winchester, but Melissy, getting news of his intention, had caught up a horse and ridden bareback after him in time to avert by her entreaties a tragedy. For six months after this the men had not chanced to meet.
Why the tenderfoot had first come West—to hide what wounds in the great baked desert—no man knew or asked. Melissy had guessed, but she did not breathe to a soul her knowledge. It was a first article of Arizona’s creed that a man’s past belonged to him alone, was a blotted book if he chose to have it so. No doubt many had private reasons for their untrumpeted migration to that kindly Southwest which buries identity, but no wise citizen busied himself with questions about antecedents. The present served to sift one, and by the way a man met it his neighbors judged him.
And T. L. Morse met it competently. In every emergency with which he had to cope the man “stood the acid.” Arizona approved him a man, without according him any popularity. He was too64dogmatic to win liking, but he had a genius for success. Everything he touched turned to gold.
The Bar Double G lies half way between Mammoth and Mesa. Its position makes it a central point for ranchers within a radius of fifteen miles. Out of the logical need for it was born the store which Beauchamp Lee ran to supply his neighbors with canned goods, coffee, tobacco, and other indispensables; also the eating house for stage passengers passing to and from the towns. Young as she was, Melissy was the competent manager of both of these.
It was one afternoon during the hour the stage stopped to let the passengers dine that Melissy’s wandering eye fell upon Morse seated at one of the tables. Anger mounted within her at the cool impudence of the man. She had half a mind to order him out, but saw he was nearly through dinner and did not want to make a scene. Unfortunately Beauchamp Lee happened to come into the store just as his enemy strolled out from the dining-room.
The ranchman stiffened. “What you been doing in there, seh?” he demanded sharply.
“I’ve been eating a very good dinner in a public café. Any objections?”
“Plenty of ’em, seh. I don’t aim to keep open house for Mr. Morse.”
“I understand this is a business proposition. I expect to pay seventy-five cents for my meal.”65
The eyes of the older man gleamed wrathfully. “As for yo’ six bits, if you offer it to me I’ll take it as an insult. At the Bar Double G we’re not doing friendly business with claim jumpers. Don’t you evah set yo’ legs under my table again, seh.”
Morse shrugged, turned away to the public desk, and addressed an envelope, the while Lee glared at him from under his heavy beetling brows. Melissy saw that her father was still of half a mind to throw out the intruder and she called him to her.
“Dad, José wants you to look at the hoof of one of his wheelers. He asked if you would come as soon as you could.”
Beauchamp still frowned at Morse, rasping his unshaven chin with his hand. “Ce’tainly, honey. Glad to look at it.”
“Dad! Please.”
The ranchman went out, grumbling. Five minutes later Morse took his seat on the stage beside the driver, having first left seventy-five cents on the counter.
The stage had scarce gone when the girl looked up from her bookkeeping to see the man with the Chihuahua hat.
“Buenos tardes, señorita,” he gave her with a flash of white teeth.
“Buenos,” she nodded coolly.
But the dancing eyes of her could not deny their pleasure at sight of him. They had rested upon66men as handsome, but upon none who stirred her blood so much.
He was in the leather chaps of a cowpuncher, gray-shirted, and a polka dot kerchief circled the brown throat. Life rippled gloriously from every motion of him. Hermes himself might have envied the perfect grace of the man.
She supplied his wants while they chatted.
“Jogged off your range quite a bit, haven’t you?” she suggested.
“Some. I’ll take two bits’ worth of that smokin’,nina.”
She shook her head. “I’m no little girl. Don’t you know I’m now half past eighteen?”
“My—my. That ad didn’t do a mite of good, did it?”
“Not a bit.”
“And you growing older every day.”
“Does my age show?” she wanted to know anxiously.
The scarce veiled admiration of his smoldering eyes drew the blood to her dusky cheeks. Something vigilant lay crouched panther-like behind the laughter of his surface badinage.
“You’re standing it well, honey.”
The color beat into her face, less at the word than at the purring caress in his voice. A year ago she had been a child. But in the Southland flowers ripen fast. Adolescence steals hard upon the heels of infancy, and, though the girl had never wakened67to love, Nature was pushing her relentlessly toward a womanhood for which her unschooled impulses but scantily safeguarded her.
She turned toward the shelves. “How many air-tights did you say?”
“I didn’t say.” He leaned forward across the counter. “What’s the hurry, little girl?”
“My name is Melissy Lee,” she told him over her shoulder.
“Mine is Phil Norris. Glad to give it to you, Melissy Lee,” the man retorted glibly.
“Can’t use it, thank you,” came her swift saucy answer.
“Or to lend it to you—say, for a week or two.”
She flashed a look at him and passed quickly from behind the counter. Her father was just coming into the store.
“Will you wait on Mr. Norris, dad? Hop wants to see me in the kitchen.”
Norris swore softly under his breath. The last thing he had wanted was to drive her away. It had been nearly a year since he had seen her last, but the picture of her had been in the coals of many a night camp fire.
The cattle detective stayed to dinner and to supper. He and her father had their heads together for hours, their voices pitched to a murmur. Melissy wondered what business could have brought him, whether it could have anything to do with the renewed rustling that had of late annoyed the68neighborhood. This brought her thoughts to Jack Flatray. He, too, had almost dropped from her world, though she heard of him now and again. Not once had he been to see her since the night she had sprained her ankle.
Later, when Melissy was watering the roses beside the porch, she heard the name of Morse mentioned by the stock detective. He seemed to be urging upon her father some course of action at which the latter demurred. The girl knew a vague unrest. Lee did not need his anger against Morse incensed. For months she had been trying to allay rather than increase this. If Philip Norris had come to stir up smoldering fires, she would give him a piece of her mind.
The men were still together when Melissy told her father good-night. If she had known that a whisky bottle passed back and forth a good many times in the course of the evening, the fears of the girl would not have been lightened. She knew that in the somber moods following a drinking bout the lawlessness of Beauchamp Lee was most likely to crop out.
As for the girl, now night had fallen—that wondrous velvet night of Arizona, which blots out garish day with a cloak of violet, purple-edged where the hills rise vaguely in the distance, and softens magically all harsh details beneath the starry vault—she slipped out to the summit of the ridge in the big pasture, climbing lightly, with the springy ease69born of the vigor her nineteen outdoor years had stored in the strong young body. She wanted to be alone, to puzzle out what the coming of this man meant to her. Had he intended anything by that last drawling remark of his in the store? Why was it that his careless, half insulting familiarity set the blood leaping through her like wine? He lured her to the sex duel, then trampled down her reserves roughshod. His bold assurance stung her to anger, but there was a something deeper than anger that left her flushed and tingling.
Both men slept late, but Norris was down first. He found Melissy superintending a drive of sheep which old Antonio, the herder, was about to make to the trading-post at Three Pines. She was on her pony near the entrance to the corral, her slender, lithe figure sitting in a boy’s saddle with a businesslike air he could not help but admire. The gate bars had been lifted and the dog was winding its way among the bleating gray mass, which began to stir uncertainly at its presence. The sheep dribbled from the corral by ones and twos until the procession swelled to a swollen stream that poured forth in a torrent. Behind them came Antonio in his sombrero and blanket, who smiled at his mistress, shouted an “Adios, señorita,” and disappeared into the yellow dust cloud which the herd left in its wake.
“How does Champ like being in the sheep business,” Norris said to the girl.70
Melissy did not remove her eyes from the vanishing herd, but a slight frown puckered her forehead. She chose to take this as a criticism of her father and to resent it.
“Why shouldn’t he be?” she said quietly, answering the spirit of his remark.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he protested, with his frank laugh.
“Then if you didn’t mean it so, I shan’t take it that way;” and her smile met his.
“Here’s how I look at this sheep business. Some ranges are better adapted for sheep than cattle, and you can’t keep Mary’s little lamb away from those places. No use for a man to buck against the thing that’s bound to be. Better get into the band-wagon and ride.”
“That’s what father thought,” the girl confessed. “He never would have been the man to bring sheep in, but after they got into the country he saw it was a question of whether he was going to get the government reserve range for his sheep, or another man, some new-comer like Mr. Morse, for his. It was going to be sheep anyhow.”
“Well, I’m glad your father took the chance he saw.” He added reminiscently: “We got to be right good friends again last night before we parted.”
She took the opening directly. “If you’re so good a friend of his, you must not excite him about Mr.71Morse. You know he’s a Southerner, and he is likely to do something rash—something we shall all be sorry for afterward.”
“I reckon that will be all right,” he said evasively.
Her eyes swept to his. “You won’t get father into trouble will you?”
The warm, affectionate smile came back to his face, so that as he looked at her he seemed a sun-god. But again there was something in his gaze that was not the frankness of a comrade, some smoldering fire that strangely stirred her blood and yet left her uneasy.
“I’m not liable to bring trouble to those you love, girl. I stand by my friends.”
Her pony began to move toward the house, and he strode beside, as debonair and gallant a figure as ever filled the eye and the heart of a woman. The morning sun glow irradiated him, found its sparkling reflection in the dark curls of his bare head, in the bloom of his tanned cheeks, made a fit setting for the graceful picture of lingering youth his slim, muscular figure and springy stride personified. Small wonder the untaught girl beside him found the merely physical charm of him fascinating. If her instinct sometimes warned her to beware, her generous heart was eager to pay small heed to the monition except so far as concerned her father.
After breakfast he came into the office to see her before he left.72
“Good-by for a day or two,” he said, offering his hand.
“You’re coming back again, are you?” she asked quietly, but not without a deeper dye in her cheeks.
“Yes, I’m coming back. Will you be glad to see me?”
“Why should I be glad? I hardly know you these days.”
“You’ll know me better before we’re through with each other.”
She would acknowledge no interest in him, the less because she knew it was there. “I may do that without liking you better.”
And suddenly his swift, winning smile flashed upon her. “But you’ve got to like me. I want you to.”
“Do you get everything you want?” she smiled back.
“If I want it enough, I usually do.”
“Then since you get so much, you’ll be better able to do without my liking.”
“I’m going to have it too.”
“Don’t be too sure.” She had a feeling that things were moving too fast, and she hailed the appearance of her father with relief. “Good morning, dad. Did you sleep well? Mr. Norris is just leaving.”
“Wait till I git a bite o’ breakfast and I’ll go with you, Phil,” promised Lee. “I got to ride over to Mesa anyhow some time this week.”73
The girl watched them ride away, taking the road gait so characteristic of the Southwest. As long as they were in sight her gaze followed them, and when she could see nothing but a wide cloud of dust travelling across the mesa she went up to her room and sat down to think it out. Something new had come into her life. What, she did not yet know, but she tried to face the fact with the elemental frankness that still made her more like a boy than a woman. Sitting there before the looking-glass, she played absently with the thick braid of heavy, blue-black hair which hung across her shoulder to the waist. It came to her for the first time to wonder if she was pretty, whether she was going to be one of the women that men desire. Without the least vanity she studied herself, appraised the soft brown cheeks framed with ebon hair, the steady, dark eyes so quick to passion and to gaiety, the bronzed throat full and rounded, the supple, flowing grace of the unrestrained body.
Gradually a wave of color crept into her cheeks as she sat there with her chin on her little doubled hand. It was the charm of this Apollo of the plains that had set free such strange thoughts in her head. Why should she think of him? What did it matter whether she was good-looking? She shook herself resolutely together and went down to the business of the day.
It was not long after midnight the next day that Champ Lee reached the ranch. His daughter came74out from her room in her night-dress to meet him.
“What kept you, Daddy?” she asked.
But before he could answer she knew. She read the signs too clearly to doubt that he had been drinking.