CHAPTER XXXIBULLETS FROM SPYGLASS MOUNTAIN
IF Joshua Cole had not fully decided on his trip East while the seeing was poor on Spyglass Mountain, what Shanty Madge told him when he talked over his plan with her made an added reason for going.
She rode to his cabin door one morning, crinkly bronze-gold hair outstanding in the breeze, chromatic cheeks aglow. Joshua was busy with his books, but Madge was one disturbance always to be tolerated.
“Hello, kid astronomer,” she greeted him. “Get your nose out of that book and come out here and talk to me.”
He obeyed the preëmptory command, glad as a dog that answers its mistress’ call.
“Not working this morning?”
“No, I’m sick of work. Get Argo and let’s go for a ride.”
Joshua decided that he too was sick of work, and followed Madge to the lakeside with his saddle on his back.
Despite the capricious mood that the girl had assumed, it seemed to Joshua that she had something serious on her mind this morning. She had nothing at all to say while he threw his saddle on the gray’s back and cinched it. She was silent, too, after he had mounted and they were galloping around the lake toward G-string.
“Let’s slow ’em down and find out what’s troubling you,” he suggested finally.
She reined in promptly, and their ponies followed the water’s edge at the cow-pony walking-trot.
“You’ve really made up your mind to go East?” she asked, after a brief continuance of her silence.
“I don’t know when I’ll have a better opportunity,” he replied. “The seeing on the mountain is rotten because of these high spring winds. I have lots of time to get at the work on my claim. I’ve got money—later maybe I’ll not have. I’m mighty curious to solve the mystery that seems to surround me. And I want to see my brother and bring him back, if he’s not doing well and wants to come. Many good excuses for going right now. I’ll stay only a couple of weeks, or three maybe, and be back in plenty of time for the big night in June. I’ll just turn Argo loose to pick up his living about the lake. You’ll slant an eye at him occasionally, won’t you?”
For nearly half a minute Shanty Madge was mute. Then, not looking at her companion, she said:
“But I can’t look out for Argo for you. I—I’m afraid Ma and I won’t be here.”
“Won’t be here?”
“Yes—we’ve decided to go to Los Angeles for a time. One of the homesteaders, Mr. Smiley—I guess you’ve met him—will be glad to hire the mules for his spring work. So we—so Ma and I thought we’d go.”
“But I thought you were so anxious to get ahead with your plowing!”
“There’s lots of time. I’ll not seed anything this year, anyway. And you must remember thatyou’vedone nothing much but build a cabin onyourclaim.”
“That part’s all right,” Joshua conceded. “But knowing your keenness to be up and doing, I’m a little surprised at the suddenness of this idea. What is the big idea, anyway, Madge?”
“Well,” she answered, “Ma and I were in these mountains long before you were, and I at least have not been outonce since we came. I thought that while you were away would be a good time to go.”
Joshua glowed within. Her words implied that if he were not there she would be lonesome.
“And besides, Ma and I want to buy some things.”
“I can haul anything special that you want from Spur,” he suggested. He had suddenly remembered that Jack Montgomery was still in Los Angeles.
“You could carry in under your arm what Ma and I want to get,” she informed him. “And besides, a man could never buy them—and you wouldn’t find them at Spur. You don’t know much about women, poet-astronomer. We get more fun out of buying things, or merely just pawing over them on the counters, and getting all fussed up with indecision over what we’d better choose, than any man can imagine. And then usually we buy the wrong thing and have to exchange it—and get more thrills.”
Another silence fell. Throughout its duration Madge looked across the sunny waters of the lake. Then she suddenly turned her reddish-brown eyes on Joshua and told the truth.
“I had a letter from Mary Montgomery last mail day. She has invited us down. She’s Jack’s only sister and doesn’t care for camp life. But we like her, and she likes us. And—and we’ve decided to accept her invitation.”
“Oh,” breathed Joshua. And after a lengthy pause: “Is—is Jack going to be in camp this spring?”
“Not very much, Mary wrote. He’s no keener for camp life than she is. He lives with his mother and sister in a swell apartment in the city.”
“A swell apartment, huh? Madge, I don’t like that word swell. I don’t know that I ever heard you use it before. It sounds like— Well, you reminded me of a restaurant cashier after a night of joy-riding—that’s all.”
“Precious lot you know about joy-riding and restaurant cashiers! You read that in some story.”
Joshua’s heart was filled with bitterness, but it did not show in his tolerant dark-gray eyes as he studied her averted face.
“Well, I can’t hold you,” he said at last. “When are you going?”
“To-morrow—on the stage.”
“Oh, to-morrow!”
“Yes. We—I hadn’t much chance to tell you before to-day.”
“No—not much”—from Joshua, absently. A space of silence, then: “Let’s let ’em out a little.”
As they galloped along knee to knee Joshua’s dullness continued to grow. Had Madge showed him the letter from Mary Montgomery, or told him of its contents earlier, he would not have suffered such forebodings. He had been to the post office with her on the foregoing mail day. She had read the letter before mounting the black for the ride back home. She had not even told him who the letter was from. He even would not have felt miserable over the fact that it was the Montgomerys who had invited her and that she was to be under the same roof with Jack down there, had she made the announcement in her usual buoyant way. But she had been secretive, and his were the pangs that the jealous lover suffers mutely.
They swung away from the road as it swept up to the little mining community of G-string. Piñon slopes, gentle at first, that followed one another in graduated scallops until they became a series of steep ridges, led the way to Spyglass Mountain. Over and about these the riders traced a course, traveling parallel to the route that they had come, but a mile inland from the lake. This was a round thatthey frequently made because of the diversity of the scenery offered. Here and there they crossed tiny hidden grassy spots, where only bunchgrass grew, unsuccored by any moisture save that which remained from the winter snows. Now they rode ridges and looked down cañons that were amazingly steep and grim, which sprawled eventually to the yellow desert nearly three-quarters of a mile below them. Sagebrush slopes, rubble slides, piñon groves, yucca-studded levels; an eminence where they paused their ponies and gazed for many minutes over an endless sweep of dark-green forest to the west; another summit which gave view of the mocking yellow desert stretching to the north and south, and bounded on the east by hazy pink buttes that seemed to float a quarter of their height above the earth; up and down, over rocky hills and into wedge-shaped cañons, until a steep slope before them became a flung-out apron that invited them to climb Spyglass Mountain, towering above its neighbor peaks—all this was offered them on that round by the Master of that untarnished land.
And as they reached the hem of the apron and looked up into the grim old lady’s face they saw a body of horsemen winding about among clumps of sage and rocky obstacles.
They were Lee Sweet and four of his cowhands; and they stopped their horses on a shelf that overlooked the cabins of the Mundys and Joshua Cole, and sat looking down the mountain’s side.
Then one of them dismounted. There was no mistaking the gigantic body, the half-moon of ropelike whiskers, the black Columbia-shape Stetson, or the green-and-purple plaid of the flannel shirt. Lee Sweet stood by his horse’s side a moment or two, apparently talking, and then a rifle, butt up, crept above the horse’s neck as Sweet pulled it from its scabbard.
“Let’s try to hide,” said Joshua calmly. “We’re about to learn something, I think.”
There was no cover close. Indeed, it seemed remarkable that the horsemen above had not seen Madge and Joshua, but apparently they had not. The two swung about and sought the obscurity of a clump of yuccas perhaps a hundred feet away, but before they reached it they heard the bark of a rifle, and the echoes went galloping off on the other side of Spyglass Mountain.
They looked back. Lee Sweet was sitting flat on the ground, his left elbow resting on his knee, the rifle aimed down the mountainside. Then the two rounded the yucca clump and left their saddles, to steal back through the trees and watch. And as they looked out Sweet’s rifle spoke again.
The vaqueros who accompanied him had moved their ponies farther back from the shelf, leading their employer’s animal. Only Sweet remained, and now Joshua and Madge saw that a scant screen of sagebrush probably hid him from any one who might be below. Again there came a thin puff of smoke, and a third bullet went whistling to the lowlands.
Shanty Madge’s face was white, but she had said nothing since the discovery of the cowmen. Cole of Spyglass Mountain leaned against the rough trunk of a yucca, his neck craned around it. Madge saw the spasmodic inflation and deflation of his thin Grecian nostrils, and his gray-blue eyes were intense. But in them was no sign of fear or hatred. His thin, long-fingered hand against the yucca palm was as steady as if it were caressing the tube of the telescope on Spyglass Mountain. And the wraith of a smile, tolerant, whimsical, had settled upon his lips.
“Sweet knows,” he at last observed in his ordinary tones, “that the chances are fifty to one I’m not in my cabin. He can see that Argo is not on his picket rope down by thelake. He also must have noted that your horse is gone. He knows we ride together a lot. He’s just putting a few bullet holes through my cabin roof to warn me, I imagine. What a big, overgrown, innocent child he is! I wonder if he’s drunk—California Bill says he’s mild as a rabbit when he’s sober.”
“But suppose you were in your cabin,” said Madge, her tones rather tense. “That would be a little serious, wouldn’t it?”
“Well, if he hit me it would be.”
“It seems to me you’re pretty calm about this, Joshua. Here you have me as a witness that Sweet fired three times— There’s another shot! You and I have seen Sweet fire four shots in the direction of your cabin. He has threatened to run you out of the mountains. What will you do if, when we get back, you find bullet holes in your roof?”
“What wouldyoudo?” asked Joshua, smiling at her.
“I’d have him arrested for attempt to kill.”
“But I know he’s not trying to kill me. He’s almost sure I’m not there. He even may have seen you and me ride away this morning, and was waiting until he was sure we were far in the hills before putting on this little act.”
“Well, isn’t it a grave misdemeanor, to say the least?”
“Rather, I should say.”
“Well, then! Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”
“Yes, I think I shall,” Joshua chuckled. “I think I’ll tell California Bill on him.”
“Joshua Cole,” said Madge, with lips drawn straight, “is it possible that you are a coward?”
Joshua seemed to deliberate over his answer. “No,” he told her seriously, “I don’t believe I am, Madge. Why? Do you think I’m one?”
“When you were shot,” she reminded him, “you madeno move whatever to find out who waylaid you. You allowed that tramp, The Whimperer, to bully you and steal your most priceless treasure. And when you found him at Ragtown you let him go scot-free. You know in your heart as well as I do that Slim Wolfgang shot you—and he’s at large. It seems to me that you’re entirely too easy-going—a little bittoolong-suffering. I’ve never seen you mad. I’ve never heard you cuss a horse or a mule—or even speak an impetuous word to them. Sometimes I admire your restraint; but just now I am beginning to wonder if— Well, I’m wondering whether you have any masculine traits at all—if you have any pep in you, which is so necessary to holding one’s own in this world—so necessary to success.”
He regarded her gravely, the distant rifleman for the time forgotten.
“Yes, I have masculine traits,” he assured her. “For one thing, I love you devotedly. But, Madge, a student hasn’t time to fight. Misunderstandings, petty wranglings—such things—interrupt his studies. How could I concentrate if I had always on my mind some puny difficulty with my fellowman, which in the end amounts to nothing? My astronomy is the big thing in my life. Everything must give way before that—everything must be sacrificed to that. I must, and will, give up everything else for that.”
“Would you give up me?”
“I’ve already done so, haven’t I, dear?” he asked softly. “If I had accepted Demarest’s offer after I stopped the slide, you would be my wife to-day. I knew what I was doing when I refused. And now you’re going to Los Angeles, to be close to a man who loves you and can give you what you think you want. Yet I refuse to neglect my studies and throw myself into the work on my homestead, which might convince you that I am at least willing to try to earn for you what you want. Yes, Madge, I’ve alreadygiven you up as a sacrifice to the stars. It has to be—I must fulfill my destiny.”
“Fiddlesticks!”
Joshua Cole started to laugh, but checked himself as he remembered the bewhiskered rifleman on the rocky shelf, who for some reason had withheld his fire.
“Fiddlesticks, eh?”—and he smiled broadly. “Yes, fiddlesticks, Madge. Fiddlesticks for you, because you don’t mean what you say; you refuse to listen to your heart. And fiddlesticks for me, because I know I haven’t given you up except for now and the immediate future. Go to Los Angeles. I’m willing that you should go. It may be for the best—even if—even if you should marry Jack. But remember what I told you up there when we finished the building of the trail. You’ll come back to Spyglass Mountain.”
Sweet’s rifle rang out again, and then he walked from the shelf, mounted his horse, and the little cavalcade filed away in the direction they had come.
“I may as well tell you now, Joshua,” said Madge, just a trace of haughtiness in her voice, “that I maynotcome back. I’ll come back to the homestead, of course. But I mean I may not come back to Spyglass Mountain in the meaning that we have given that phrase.”
In reply Joshua only gave her his whimsical smile, and she never knew how troubled was his soul.