“I have every reason to believe that your two missing jumpers took the train for Shoshone last night,” Miss Georgie made answer to Good Indian's account of what had happened since he saw her. “Two furtive-eyed individuals answering your description bought round-trip tickets and had me flag sixteen for them. They got on, all right. I saw them. And if they got off before the next station they must have landed on their heads, because Sixteen was making up time and Shorty pulled the throttle wide open at the first yank, I should judge, from the way he jumped out of town. I've been expecting some of them to go and do their filing stunt—and if the boys have begun to devil them any, the chances are good that they'd take turns at it, anyway. They'd leave someone always on the ground, that's a cinch.
“And Saunders,” she went on rapidly, “returned safe enough. He sneaked in just before I closed the office last night, and asked for a telegram. There wasn't any, and he sneaked out again and went to bed—so Pete told me this morning. And most of the Indians have pulled out—squaws, dogs, papooses, and all—on some fishing or hunting expedition. I don't know that it has anything to do with your affairs, or would even interest you, though. And there has been no word from Peaceful, and they can't possibly get back now till the four-thirty—five.
“And that's all I can tell you, Mr. Imsen,” she finished crisply, and took up a novel with a significance which not even the dullest man could have ignored.
Good Indian stared, flushed hotly, and made for the door.
“Thank you for the information. I'm afraid this has been a lot of bother for you,” he said stiffly, gave her a ceremonious little bow, and went his way stiff-necked and frowning.
Miss Georgie leaned forward so that she could see him through the window. She watched him cross to the store, go up the three rough steps to the platform, and disappear into the yawning blackness beyond the wide-open door.
She did not open the novel and begin reading, even then. She dabbed her handkerchief at her eyes, muttered: “My Heavens, what a fool!” apropos of nothing tangible, and stared dully out at the forlorn waste of cinders with rows of shining rails running straight across it upon ties half sunken in the black desolation, and at the red abomination which was the pump-house squatting beside the dripping tank, the pump breathing asthmatically as it labored to keep the sliding water gauge from standing at the figure which meant reproach for the grimy attendant.
“What a fool—what a fool!” she repeated at the end of ten moody minutes. Then she threw the novel into a corner of the room, set her lower jaw into the square lines of stubbornness, went over to the sleeping telegraph instrument which now and then clicked and twittered in its sleep, called up Shoshone, and commanded the agent there to send down a quart freezer of ice cream, a banana cake, and all the late magazines he could find, including—especially including—the alleged “funny” ones.
“You certainly—are—the prize—fool!” she said, when she switched off the current, and she said it with vicious emphasis. Whereupon she recovered the novel, seated herself determinedly in the beribboned rocker, flipped the leaves of the book spitefully until she found one which had a corner turned down, and read a garden-party chapter much as she used to study her multiplication table when she was ten and hated arithmetic.
A freight was announced over the wire, arrived with a great wheezing and snorting, which finally settled to a rhythmic gasping of the air pump, while a few boxes of store supplies were being dumped unceremoniously upon the platform. Miss Georgie was freight agent as well as many other things, and she went out and stood bareheaded in the sun to watch the unloading.
She performed, with the unthinking precision which comes of long practice, the many little duties pertaining to her several offices, and when the wheels began once more to clank, and she had waved her hand to the fireman, the brakeman, and the conductor, and had seen the dirty flags at the rear of the swaying caboose flap out of sight around the low, sage-covered hill, she turned rather dismally to the parlor end of the office, and took up the book with her former air of grim determination. So for an hour, perhaps.
“Is Miss Georgie Howard at home?” It was Evadna standing in the doorway, her indigo eyes fixed with innocent gayety—which her mouth somehow failed to meet halfway in mirth—upon the reader.
“She is, chicken, and overjoyed at the sight of you!” Miss Georgie rose just as enthusiastically as if she had not seen Evadna slip from Huckleberry's back, fuddle the tie-rope into what looked like a knot, and step lightly upon the platform. She had kept her head down—had Miss Georgie—until the last possible second, because she was still being a fool and had permitted a page of her book to fog before her eyes. There was no fog when she pushed Evadna into the seat of honor, however, and her mouth abetted her eyes in smiling.
“Everything at the ranch is perfectly horrid,” Evadna complained pathetically, leaning back in the rocking-chair. “I'd just as soon be shut up in a graveyard. You can't IMAGINE what it's like, Georgie, since those horrible men came and camped around all over the place! All yesterday afternoon and till dark, mind you, the boys were down there shooting at everything but the men, and they began to shoot back, and Aunt Phoebe was afraid the boys would be hit, and so we all went down and—oh, it was awful! If Grant hadn't come home and stopped them, everybody would have been murdered. And you should have heard how they swore at Grant afterward! They just called him everything they could think of for making them stop. I had to sit around on the other side of the house—and even then I couldn't help hearing most of it.
“And to-day it is worse, because they just go around like a lot of dummies and won't do anything but look mean. Aunt Phoebe was so cross—CROSS, mind you!—because I burnt the jam. And some of the jumpers are missing, and nobody knows where they went—and Marie has got the toothache worse than ever, and won't go and have it pulled because it will HURT! I don't see how it can hurt much worse than it does now—she just goes around with tears running down into the flannel around her face till I could SHAKE her!” Evadna laughed—a self-pitying laugh, and rocked her small person violently. “I wish I could have an office and live in it and telegraph things to people,” she sighed, and laughed again most adorably at her own childishness. “But really and truly, it's enough to drive a person CRAZY, down at the ranch!”
“For a girl with a brand-new sweetheart—” Miss Georgie reproved quizzically, and reached for the inevitable candy box.
“A lot of good that does, when he's never there!” flashed Evadna, unintentionally revealing her real grievance. “He just eats and goes—and he isn't even there to eat, half the time. And when he's there, he's grumpy, like all the rest.” She was saying the things she had told herself, on the way up, that she would DIE rather than say; to Miss Georgie, of all people.
“I expect he's pretty worried, chicken, over that land business.” Miss Georgie offered her candy, and Evadna waved the box from her impatiently, as if her spirits were altogether too low for sweets.
“Well, I'm very sure I'M not to blame for those men being there,” she retorted petulantly. “He”—she hesitated, and then plunged heedlessly on—“he acts just as if I weren't anybody at all. I'm sure, if he expects me to be a doll to be played with and then dumped into a corner where I'm to smile and smile until he comes and picks me up again—”
“Now, chicken, what's the use of being silly?” Miss Georgie turned her head slightly away, and stared out of the window. “He's worried, I tell you, and instead of sulking because he doesn't stay and make love—”
“Well, upon my word! Just as if I wanted—”
“You really ought to help him by being kind and showing a little sympathy, instead—”
“It appears that the supply of sympathy—”
“Instead of making it harder for him by feeling neglected and letting him see that you do. My Heavens above!” Miss Georgie faced her suddenly with pink cheeks. “When a man is up against a problem—and carries his life in his hand—”
“You don't know a thing about it!” Evadna stopped rocking, and sat up very straight in the chair. “And even if that were true, is that any reason why he should AVOID me? I'M not threatening his life!”
“He doesn't avoid you. And you're acting sillier than I ever supposed you could. He can't be in two places at once, can he? Now, let's be sensible, chicken. Grant—”
“Oh—h!” There was a peculiar, sliding inflection upon that word, which made Miss Georgie's hand shut into a fist.
“Grant”—Miss Georgie put a defiant emphasis upon it—“is doing all he can to get to the bottom of that jumping business. There's something crooked about it, and he knows it, and is trying to—”
“I know all that.” Evadna interrupted without apology.
“Well, of course, if you DO—then I needn't tell you how silly it is for you to complain of being neglected, when you know his time is all taken up with trying to ferret out a way to block their little game. He feels in a certain sense responsible—”
“Yes, I know. He thinks he should have been watching somebody or something instead of—of being with me. He took the trouble to make that clear to me, at least!” Evadna's eyes were very blue and very bright, but there was no look of an angel in her face.
Miss Georgie pressed her lips together tightly for a minute. When she spoke, she was cheerfully impersonal as to tone and manner.
“Chicken, you're a little goose. The man is simply crazy about you, and harassed to death with this ranch business. Once that's settled—well, you'll see what sort of a lover he can be!”
“Thank you so much for holding out a little hope and encouragement, my dear!” Evadna, by the way, looked anything but thankful; indeed, she seemed to resent the hope and the encouragement as a bit of unwarranted impertinence. She glanced toward the door as if she meditated an immediate departure, but ended by settling back in the chair and beginning to rock again.
“It's a nasty, underhand business from start to finish,” said Miss Georgie, ignoring the remark. “It has upset everybody—me included, and I'm sure it isn't my affair. It's just one of those tricky cases that you know is rotten to the core, and yet you can't seem to get hold of anything definite. My dad had one or two experiences with old Baumberger—and if ever there was a sly old mole of a man, he's one.
“Did you ever take after a mole, chicken? They used to get in our garden at home. They burrow underneath the surface, you know, and one never sees them. You can tell by the ridge of loose earth that they're there, and if you think you've located Mr. Mole, and jab a stick down, why—he's somewhere else, nine times in ten. I used to call them Baumbergers, even then. Dad,” she finished reminiscently, “was always jabbing his law stick down where the earth seemed to move—but he never located old Baumberger, to my knowledge.”
She stopped, because Evadna, without a shadow of doubt, was looking bored. Miss Georgie regarded her with the frown she used when she was applying her mental measuring-stick. She began to suspect that Evadna was, after all, an extremely self-centered little person; she was sorry for the suspicion, and she was also conscious of a certain disappointment which was not altogether for herself.
“Ah, well”—she dismissed analysis and the whole subject with a laugh that was partly yawn—“away with dull care. Away with dull everything. It's too hot to think or feel. A real emotion is as superfluous and oppressive as a—a 'camel petticoat!” This time her laugh was real and infectiously carefree. “Take off your hat, chicken. I'll go beg a hunk of ice from my dear friend Peter, and make some lemonade as is lemonade; or claret punch, if you aren't a blue ribboner, or white-ribboner, or some other kind of a good-ribboner.” Miss Georgie hated herself for sliding into sheer flippancy, but she preferred that extreme to the other, and she could not hold her ground just then at the “happy medium.”
Evadna, however, seemed to disapprove of the flippancy. She did not take off her hat, and she stated evenly that she must go, and that she really did not care for lemonade, or claret punch, either.
“What, in Heaven's name, DO you care for—besides yourself?” flared Miss Georgie, quite humanly exasperated. “There, chicken—the heat always turns me snappy,” she repented instantly. “Please pinch me.” She held out a beautiful, tapering forearm, and smiled.
“I'm the snappy one,” said Evadna, but she did not smile as she began drawing on her gauntlets slowly and deliberately.
If she were waiting for Miss Georgie to come back to the subject of Grant, she was disappointed, for Miss Georgie did not come to any subject whatever. A handcar breezed past the station, the four section-men pumping like demons because of the slight down grade and their haste for their dinner.
Huckleberry gave one snort and one tug backward upon the tie rope and then a coltish kick into the air when he discovered that he was free. After that, he took off through the sagebrush at a lope, too worldly-wise to follow the trail past the store, where someone might rush out and grab him before he could dodge away. He was a wise little pinto—Huckleberry.
“And now, I suppose I'll have the pleasure of walking home,” grumbled Evadna, standing upon the platform and gazing, with much self-pity, after her runaway.
“It's noon—stay and eat dinner with me, chicken. Some of the boys will bring him back after you the minute he gets to the ranch. It's too hot to walk.” Miss Georgie laid a hand coaxingly upon her arm.
But Evadna was in her mood of perversity. She wouldn't stay to dinner, because Aunt Phoebe would be expecting her. She wouldn't wait for Huckleberry to be brought back to her, because she would never hear the last of it. She didn't mind the heat the least bit, and she would walk. And no, she wouldn't borrow Miss Georgie's parasol; she hated parasols, and she always had and always would. She gathered up her riding-skirt, and went slowly down the steps.
Miss Georgie could be rather perverse herself upon occasion. She waited until Evadna was crunching cinders under her feet before she spoke another word, and then she only called out a flippant, “Adios, senorita!”
Evadna knew no Spanish at all. She lifted her shoulders in what might be disdain, and made no reply whatever.
“Little idiot!” gritted Miss Georgie—and this time she was not speaking of herself.
Saunders, limp and apathetic and colorless, shuffled over to the station with a wheelbarrow which had a decrepit wheel, that left an undulating imprint of its drunken progress in the dust as it went. He loaded the boxes of freight with the abused air of one who feels that Fate has used him hardly, and then sidled up to the station door with the furtive air which Miss Georgie always inwardly resented.
She took the shipping bill from him with her fingertips, reckoned the charges, and received the money without a word, pushing a few pieces of silver toward him upon the table. As he bent to pick them up clawing unpleasantly with vile finger-nails—she glanced at him contemptuously, looked again more attentively, pursed her lips with one corner between her teeth, and when he had clawed the last dime off the smooth surface of the table, she spoke to him as if he were not the reptile she considered him, but a live human.
“Horribly hot, isn't it? I wishIcould sleep till noon. It would make the days shorter, anyway.”
“I opened up the store, and then I went back to bed,” Saunders replied limply. “Just got up when the freight pulled in. Made so blamed much noise it woke me. I seem to need a good deal of sleep.” He coughed behind his hand, and lingered inside the door. It was so unusual for Miss Georgie to make conversation with him that Saunders was almost pitifully eager to be agreeable.
“If it didn't sound cruel, this weather,” said Miss Georgie lightly, still looking at him—or, more particularly, at the crumpled, soiled collar of his coarse blue shirt—“I'd advise you to get out of Hartley once a day, if it was no more than to take a walk. Though to be sure,” she smiled, “the prospect is not inviting, to say the least. Put it would be a change; I'd run up and down the track, if I didn't have to stick here in this office all day.”
“I can't stand walking,” Saunders whined. “It makes me cough.” To illustrate, he gave another little hack behind his hand. “I went up to the stable yesterday with a book, and laid down in the hay. And I went to sleep, and Pete thought I was lost, I guess.” He grinned, which was not pleasant, for he chewed tobacco and had ugly, discolored teeth into the bargain.
“I like to lay in the hay,” he added lifelessly. “I guess I'll take my bed up there; that lean-to is awful hot.”
“Well, you're lucky that you can do exactly as you please, and sleep whenever you please.” Miss Georgie turned to her telegraph instrument, and began talking in little staccato sparks of electricity to the agent at Shoshone, merely as a hint to Saunders to take himself away.
“Ain't been anything for me?” he asked, still lingering.
Miss Georgie shook her head. He waited a minute longer, and then sidled out, and when he was heard crunching over the cinders with his barrow-load of boxes, she switched off the current abruptly, and went over to the window to watch him.
“Item,” she began aloud, when he was quite gone, her eyes staring vacantly down the scintillating rails to where they seemed to meet in one glittering point far away in the desert. “Item—” But whatever the item was, she jotted it down silently in that mental memorandum book which was one of her whims. “Once I put a thing in that little blue book of mine,” she used to tell her father, “it's there for keeps. And there's the advantage that I never leave it lying around to be lost, or for other people to pick up and read to my everlasting undoing. It's better than cipher—for I don't talk in my sleep.”
The four-thirty-five train came in its own time, and brought the two missing placer miners. But it did not bring Baumberger, nor Peaceful Hart, nor any word of either. Miss Georgie spent a good deal of time staring out of the window toward the store that day, and when she was not doing that she was moving restlessly about the little office, picking things up without knowing why she did so, and laying them down again when she discovered them in her hands and had no use for them. The ice cream came, and the cake, and the magazines; and she left the whole pile just inside the door without undoing a wrapping.
At five o'clock she rose abruptly from the rocker, in which she had just deposited herself with irritated emphasis, and wired her chief for leave of absence until seven.
“It's important, Mr. Gray. Business which can't wait,” she clicked urgently. “I'll be back before Eight is due. Please.” Miss Georgie did not often send that last word of her own volition. All up and down the line she was said to be “Independent as a hog on ice”—a simile not pretty, perhaps, nor even exact, but frequently applied, nevertheless, to self-reliant souls like the Hartley operator.
Be that as it may, she received gracious permission to lock the office door from the outside, and she was not long in doing so, and heaved a great sigh of relief when it was done. She went straight to the store, and straight back to where Pete Hamilton was leaning over a barrel redolent of pickled pork. He came up with dripping hands and a treasure-trove of flabby meat, and while he was dangling it over the barrel until the superfluous brine dripped away, she asked him for a horse.
“I dunno where Saunders is again,” he said, letting his consent be taken for granted. “But I'll go myself and saddle up, if you'll mind the store. Soon as I finish waitin' on this customer,” he added, casting a glance toward a man who sat upon the counter and dangled his legs while he apathetically munched stale pretzels and waited for his purchases.
“Oh, I can saddle, all right, Pete. I've got two hours off, and I want to ride down to see how the Harts are getting along. Exciting times down there, from all accounts.”
“Maybe I can round up Saunders. He must be somewheres around,” Pete suggested languidly, wrapping the pork in a piece of brown paper and reaching for the string which dangled from the ball hung over his head.
“Saunders is asleep, very likely. If he isn't in his room, never mind hunting him. The horse is in the stable, I suppose. I can saddle better than Saunders.”
Pete tied the package, wiped his hands, and went heavily out. He returned immediately, said that Saunders must be up at the stable, and turned his attention to weighing out five pounds of white beans.
Miss Georgie helped herself to a large bag of mixed candy, and put the money in the drawer, laid her key upon the desk for safe-keeping, repinned her white sailor hat so that the hot wind which blew should not take it off her head, and went cheerfully away to the stable.
She did not saddle the horse at once. She first searched the pile of sweet-smelling clover in the far end, made sure that no man was there, assured herself in the same manner of the fact that she was absolutely alone in the stable so far as humans were concerned, and continued her search; not for Saunders now, but for sagebrush. She went outside, and looked carefully at her immediate surroundings.
“There's hardly a root of it anywhere around close,” she said to herself. “Nor around the store, either—nor any place where one would be apt to go ordinarily.”
She stood there meditatively for a few minutes, remembered that two hours do not last long, and saddled hurriedly. Then, mounting awkwardly because of the large, lumpy bag of candy which she must carry in her hands for want of a pocket large enough to hold it, she rode away to the Indian camp.
The camp was merely a litter of refuse and the ashes of various campfires, with one wikiup standing forlorn in the midst. Miss Georgie never wasted precious time on empty ceremony, and she would have gone into that tent unannounced and stated her errand without any compunction whatever. Put Peppajee was lying outside, smoking in the shade, with his foot bandaged and disposed comfortably upon a folded blanket. She tossed him the bag of candy, and stayed upon her horse.
“Howdy, Peppajee? How your foot? Pretty well, mebbyso?”
“Mebbyso bueno. Sun come two time, mebbyso walk all same no snake biteum.” Peppajee's eyes gloated over the gift as he laid it down beside him.
“That's good. Say, Peppajee,” Miss Georgie reached up to feel her hatpins and to pat her hair, “I wish you'd watch Saunders. Him no good. I think him bad. I can't keep an eye on him. Can you?”
“No can walk far.” Peppajee looked meaningly at his bandages. “No can watchum.”
“Well, but you could tell somebody else to watch him. I think he do bad thing to the Harts. You like Harts. You tell somebody to watch Saunders.”
“Indians pikeway—ketchum fish. Come back, mebbyso tellum watchum.”
Miss Georgie drew in her breath for further argument, decided that it was not worth while, and touched up her horse with the whip. “Good-by,” she called back, and saw that Peppajee was looking after her with his eyes, while his face was turned impassively to the front.
“You're just about as satisfying to talk to as a stump,” she paid tribute to his unassailable calm. “There's four bits wasted,” she sighed, “to say nothing of the trouble I had packing that candy to you—you ungrateful old devil.” With which unladylike remark she dismissed him from her mind as a possible ally.
At the ranch, the boys were enthusiastically blistering palms and stiffening the muscles of their backs, turning the water away from the ditches that crossed the disputed tracts so that the trespassers there should have none in which to pan gold—or to pretend that they were panning gold. Since the whole ranch was irrigated by springs running out here and there from under the bluff, and all the ditches ran to meadow and orchard and patches of small fruit, and since the springs could not well be stopped from flowing, the thing was not to be done in a minute.
And since there were four boys with decided ideas upon the subject—ideas which harmonized only in the fundamental desire to harry the interlopers, the thing was not to be done without much time being wasted in fruitless argument.
Wally insisted upon running the water all into a sandy hollow where much of it would seep away and a lake would do no harm, the main objection to that being that it required digging at least a hundred yards of new ditch, mostly through rocky soil.
Jack wanted to close all the headgates and just let the water go where it wanted to—which was easy enough, but ineffective, because most of it found its way into the ditches farther down the slope.
Gene and Clark did not much care how the thing was done—so long as it was done their way. At least, that is what they said.
It was Good Indian who at length settled the matter. There were five springs altogether; he proposed that each one make himself responsible for a certain spring, and see to it that no water reached the jumpers.
“And I don't care a tinker's dam how you do it,” he said. “Drink it all, if you want to. I'll take the biggest—that one under the milk-house.” Whereat they jeered at him for wanting to be close to Evadna.
“Well, who has a better right?” he challenged, and then inconsiderately left them before they could think of a sufficiently biting retort.
So they went to work, each in his own way, agreeing mostly in untiring industry. That is how Miss Georgie found them occupied—except that Good Indian had stopped long enough to soothe Evadna and her aunt, and to explain that the water would really not rise much higher in the milk-house, and that he didn't believe Evadna's pet bench at the head of the pond would be inaccessible because of his efforts.
Phoebe was sloshing around upon the flooded floor of her milk-house, with her skirts tucked up and her indignation growing greater as she gave it utterance, rescuing her pans of milk and her jars of cream. Evadna, upon the top step, sat with her feet tucked up under her as if she feared an instant inundation. She, also, was giving utterance to her feminine irritation at the discomfort—of her aunt presumably, since she herself was high and dry.
“And it won't do a BIT of good. They'll just knock that dam business all to pieces to-night—” She was scolding Grant.
“Swearing, chicken? Things must be in a great state!”
Grant grinned at Miss Georgie, forgetting for the moment his rebuff that morning. “She did swear, didn't she?” he confirmed wickedly. “And she's been working overtime, trying to reform me. Wanted to pin me down to 'my goodness!' and 'oh, dear!'—with all this excitement taking place on the ranch!”
“I wasn't swearing at all. Grant has been shoveling sand all afternoon, building a dam over by the fence, and the water has been rising and rising till—” She waved her hand gloomily at her bedraggled Aunt Phoebe working like a motherly sort of gnome in its shadowy grotto. “Oh, if I were Aunt Phoebe, I should just shake you, Grant Imsen!”
“Try it,” he invited, his eyes worshiping her in her pretty petulance. “I wish you would.”
As Miss Georgie went past them down the steps, her face had the set look of one who is consciously and deliberately cheerful under trying conditions.
“Don't quarrel, children,” she advised lightly. “Howdy, Mrs. Hart? What are they trying to do—drown you?”
“Oh, these boys of mine! They'll be the death of me, what with the things they won't do, and the things they WILL do. They're trying now to create a water famine for the jumpers, and they're making their own mother swim for the good of the cause.” Phoebe held out a plump hand, moist and cold from lifting cool crocks of milk, and laughed at her own predicament.
“The water won't rise any more, Mother Hart,” Grant called down to her from the top step, where he was sitting unblushingly beside Evadna. “I told you six inches would be the limit, and then it would run off in the new ditch. You know I explained just why—”
“Oh, yes, I know you explained just WHY,” Phoebe cut in disconsolately and yet humorously, “but explanations don't seem to help my poor milk-house any. And what about the garden, and the fruit, if you turn the water all down into the pasture? And what about the poor horses getting their feet wet and catching their death of cold? And what's to hinder that man Stanley and his gang from packing water in buckets from the lake you're going to have in the pasture?”
She looked at Miss Georgie whimsically. “I'm an ungrateful, bad-tempered old woman, I guess, for they're doing it because it's the only thing they can do, since I put my foot down on all this bombarding and burning good powder just to ease their minds. They've got to do something, I suppose, or they'd all burst. And I don't know but what it's a good thing for 'em to work off their energy digging ditches, even if it don't do a mite of good.”
Good Indian was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, murmuring lover's confidences behind the shield of his tilted hat, which hid from all but Evadna his smiling lips and his telltale, glowing eyes. He looked up at that last sentence, though it is doubtful if he had heard much of what she had been saying.
“It's bound to do good if it does anything,” he said, with an optimism which was largely the outgrowth of his beatific mood, which in its turn was born of his nearness to Evadna and her gracious manner toward him. “We promised not to molest them on their claims. But if they get over the line to meddle with our water system, or carry any in buckets—which they can't, because they all leak like the deuce”—he grinned as he thought of the bullet holes in them—“why, I don't know but what someone might object to that, and send them back on their own side of the line.”
He picked up a floating ribbon-end which was a part of Evadna's belt, and ran it caressingly through his fingers in a way which set Miss Georgie's teeth together. “I'm afraid,” he added dryly, his eyes once more seeking Evadna's face with pure love hunger, “they aren't going to make much of a stagger at placer mining, if they haven't any water.” He rolled the ribbon up tightly, and then tossed it lightly toward her face. “ARE they, Goldilocks?”
“Are they what? I've told you a dozen times to stop calling me that. I had a doll once that I named Goldilocks, and I melted her nose off—she was wax—and you always remind me of the horrible expression it gave to her face. I'd go every day and take her out of the bureau-drawer and look at her, and then cry my eyes out. Won't you come and sit down, Georgie? There's room. Now, what was the discussion, and how far had we got? Aunt Phoebe, I don't believe it has raised a bit lately. I've been watching that black rock with the crack in it.” Evadna moved nearer to Good Indian, and pulled her skirts close upon the other side, thereby making a space at least eight inches wide for Miss Georgie's accommodation.
“I can't sit anywhere,” said Miss Georgie, looking at her watch. “By the way, chicken, did you have to walk all the way home?”
Evadna looked sidelong at Good Indian, as if a secret had been betrayed. “No,” she said, “I didn't. I just got to the top of the grade when a squaw came along, and she was leading Huckleberry. A gaudy young squaw, all red and purple and yellow. She was awfully curious about you, Grant. She wanted to know where you were and what you were doing. I hope you aren't a flirtatious young man. She seemed to know you pretty well, I thought.”
She had to explain to her Aunt Phoebe and Grant just how she came to be walking, and she laughed at the squaw's vivid costume, and declared she would have one like it, because Grant must certainly admire colors. She managed, innocently enough, to waste upon such trivialities many of Miss Georgie's precious minutes.
At last that young woman, after glancing many times at her watch, and declining an urgent invitation to stay to supper, declared that she must go, and tried to give Good Indian a significant look without being detected in the act by Evadna. But Good Indian, for the time being wholly absorbed by the smiles of his lady, had no eyes for her, and seemed to attach no especial meaning to her visit. So that Miss Georgie, feminine to her finger-tips and oversensitive perhaps where those two were concerned, suddenly abandoned her real object in going to the ranch, and rode away without saying a word of what she had come to say.
She was a direct young woman who was not in the habit of mincing matters with herself, or of dodging an issue, and she bluntly called herself a fool many times that evening, because she had not said plainly that she would like to talk with Grant “and taken him off to one side—by the ear, if necessary—and talked to him, and told him what I went down there to tell him,” she said to herself angrily. “And if Evadna didn't like it, she could do the other thing. It does seem as if girls like that are always having the trail smoothed down for them to dance their way through life, while other people climb over rocks—mostly with packs on their shoulders that don't rightly belong to them.” She sighed impatiently. “It must be lovely to be absolutely selfish—when you're pretty enough and young enough to make it stick!” Miss Georgie was, without doubt, in a nasty temper that night.
The hot days dropped, one by one, into the past like fiery beads upon a velvety black cord. Miss Georgie told them silently in the meager little office, and sighed as they slipped from under her white, nervous fingers. One—nothing happened that could be said to bear upon the one big subject in her mind, the routine work of passing trains and dribbling business in the express and freight departments, and a long afternoon of heat and silence save for the asthmatic pump, fifty yards down the main track. Two—this exactly like the first, except that those inseparables, Hagar, Viney, and Lucy, whom Miss Georgie had inelegantly dubbed “the Three Greases,” appeared, silent, blanket-enshrouded, and perspiring, at the office door in mid-afternoon. Half a box of soggy chocolates which the heat had rendered a dismally sticky mass won from them smiles and half-intelligible speech. Fishing was poor—no ketchum. Three—not even the diversion of the squaws to make her forget the dragging hours. Nothing—nothing—nothing, she told herself apathetically when that third day had slipped upon the black cord of a soft, warm night, star-sprinkled and unutterably lonely as it brooded over the desert.
On the morning of the fourth day, Miss Georgie woke with the vague sense that something had gone wrong. True railroader as she had come to be, she thought first that there had been a wreck, and that she was wanted at the telegraph instrument. She was up and partly dressed before the steps and the voices which had broken her sleep had reached her door.
Pete Hamilton's voice, trembling with excitement, called to her.
“What is it? What has happened?” she cried from within, beset by a hundred wild conjectures.
“Saunders—somebody shot Saunders. Wire for a doctor, quick as yuh can. He ain't dead yet—but he's goin' t' die, sure. Hurry up and wire—” Somebody at the store called to him, and he broke off to run lumberingly in answer to the summons. Miss Georgie made haste to follow him.
Saunders was lying upon a blanket on the store platform, and Miss Georgie shuddered as she looked at him.
He was pasty white, and his eyes looked glassy under his half-closed lids. He had been shot in the side—at the stable, he had gasped out when Pete found him lying in the trail just back of the store. Now he seemed beyond speech, and the little group of section-hands, the Chinese cook at the section-house, and the Swede foreman, and Pete seemed quite at a loss what to do.
“Take him in and put him to bed,” Miss Georgie commanded, turning away. “See if he's bleeding yet, and—well, I should put a cold compress on the wound, I think. I'll send for a doctor—but he can't get here till nine o'clock unless you want to stand the expense of a special. And by that time—”
Saunders moved his head a trifle, and lifted his heavy lids to look at her, which so unnerved Miss Georgie that she turned and ran to the office. When she had sent the message she sat drumming upon the table while she waited for an answer.
“G-r-a-n-” her fingers had spelled when she became conscious of the fact, flushed hotly, and folded her hands tightly together in her lap.
“The doctor will come—Hawkinson, I sent for,” she announced later to Pete, holding out the telegram. She glanced reluctantly at the wrinkled blanket where Saunders had lain, caught a corner of her under lip between her teeth, and, bareheaded though she was, went down the steps and along the trail to the stable.
“I've nearly an hour before I need open the office,” she said to herself, looking at her watch. She did not say what she meant to do with that hour, but she spent a quarter of it examining the stable and everything in it. Especially did she search the loose, sandy soil in its vicinity for tracks.
Finally she lifted her skirts as a woman instinctively does at a street crossing, and struck off through the sagebrush, her eyes upon a line of uncertain footsteps as of a drunken man reeling that way. They were not easy to follow—or they would not have been if she had not felt certain of the general direction which they must take. More than once she lost sight of them for several rods, but she always picked them up farther along. At one place she stopped, and stood perfectly still, her skirts held back tightly with both hands, while she stared fascinatedly at a red smear upon a broken branch of sage and the smooth-packed hollow in the sand where he must have lain.
“He's got nerve—I'll say that much for him,” she observed aloud, and went on.
The footprints were plain where he crossed the grade road near the edge of the bluff, but from there on it was harder to follow them because of the great patches of black lava rock lying even with the surface of the ground, where a dozen men might walk abreast and leave no sign that the untrained eye, at least, could detect.
“This is a case for Indians,” she mused, frowning over an open space where all was rock. “Injun Charlie would hunt tracks all day for a dollar or two; only he'd make tracks just to prove himself the real goods.” She sighed, stood upon her tiptoes, and peered out over the sage to get her bearings, then started on at a hazard. She went a few rods, found herself in a thick tangle of brush through which she could not force her way, started to back out, and caught her hair on a scraggly scrub which seemed to have as many prongs as there are briers on a rosebush. She was struggling there with her hands fumbling unavailingly at the back of her bowed head, when she was pounced upon by someone or something through the sage. She screamed.
“The—deuce!” Good Indian brought out the milder expletive with the flat intonation which the unexpected presence of a lady frequently gives to a man's speech. “Lucky I didn't take a shot at you through the bushes. I did, almost, when I saw somebody moving here. Is this your favorite place for a morning ramble?” He had one hand still upon her arm, and he was laughing openly at her plight. But he sobered when he stooped a little so that he could see her face, for there were tears in her eyes, and Miss Georgie was not the sort of young woman whom one expects to shed tears for slight cause.
“If you did it—and you must have—I don't see how you can laugh about it, even if he is a crawling reptile of a man that ought to be hung!” The tears were in her voice as well as her eyes, and there were reproach and disappointment also.
“Did what—to whom—to where, to why?” Good Indian let go her arm, and began helpfully striving with the scraggly scrub and its prongs. “Say, I'll just about have to scalp you to get you loose. Would you mind very much, Squaw-talk-far-off?” He ducked and peered into her face again, and again his face sobered. “What's the matter?” he asked, in an entirely different tone—which Miss Georgie, in spite of her mood, found less satisfying than his banter.
“Saunders—OUCH; I'd as soon be scalped and done with, as to have you pull out a hair at a time—Saunders crawled home with a bullet in his ribs. And I thought—”
“Saunders!” Good Indian stared down at her, his hands dropped upon her head.
Miss Georgie reached up, caught him by the wrists, and held him so while she tilted her head that she might look up at him.
“Grant!” she cried softly. “He deserved it. You couldn't help it—he would have shot you down like a dog, just because he was hired to do it, or because of some hold over him. Don't think I blame you—or that anyone would if they knew the truth. I came out to see—I just HAD to make sure—but you must get away from here. You shouldn't have stayed so long—” Miss Georgie gave a most unexpected sob, and stopped that she might grit her teeth in anger over it.
“You think I shot him.” As Good Indian said it, the sentence was merely a statement, rather than an accusation or a reproach.
“I don't blame you. I suspected he was the man up here with the rifle. That day—that first day, when you told me about someone shooting at you—he came over to the station. And I saw two or three scraps of sage sticking under his shirt-collar, as if he had been out in the brush; you know how it breaks off and sticks, when you go through it. And he said he had been asleep. And there isn't any sage where a man would have to go through it unless he got right out in it, away from the trails. I thought then that he was the man—”
“You didn't tell me.” And this time he spoke reproachfully.
“It was after you had left that I saw it. And I did go down to the ranch to tell you. But I—you were so—occupied—in other directions—” She let go his wrists, and began fumbling at her hair, and she bowed her head again so that her face was hidden from him.
“You could have told me, anyway,” Good Indian said constrainedly.
“You didn't want her to know. I couldn't, before her. And I didn't want to—hurt her by—” Miss Georgie fumbled more with her words than with her hair.
“Well, there's no use arguing about that.” Good Indian also found that subject a difficult one. “You say he was shot. Did he say—”
“He wasn't able to talk when I saw him. Pete said Saunders claimed he was shot at the stable, but I know that to be a lie.” Miss Georgie spoke with unfeeling exactness. “That was to save himself in case he got well, I suppose. I believe the man is going to die, if he hasn't already; he had the look—I've seen them in wrecks, and I know. He won't talk; he can't. But there'll be an investigation—and Baumberger, I suspect, will be just as willing to get you in this way as in any other. More so, maybe. Because a murder is always awkward to handle.”
“I can't see why he should want to murder me.” Good Indian took her hands away from her hair, and set himself again to the work of freeing her. “You've been fudging around till you've got about ten million more hairs wound up,” he grumbled.
“Wow! ARE you deliberately torturing me?” she complained, winking with the pain of his good intentions. “I don't believe he does want to murder you. I think that was just Saunders trying to make a dandy good job of it. He doesn't like you, anyway—witness the way you bawled him out that day you roped—ow-w!—roped the dog. Baumberger may have wanted him to keep an eye on you—My Heavens, man! Do you think you're plucking a goose?”
“I wouldn't be surprised,” he retorted, grinning a little. “Honest! I'm trying to go easy, but this infernal bush has sure got a strangle hold on you—and your hair is so fluffy it's a deuce of a job. You keep wriggling and getting it caught in new places. If you could only manage to stand still—but I suppose you can't.
“By the way,” he remarked casually, after a short silence, save for an occasional squeal from Miss Georgie, “speaking of Saunders—I didn't shoot him.”
Miss Georgie looked up at him, to the further entanglement of her hair. “You DIDN'T? Then who did?”
“Search ME,” he offered figuratively and briefly.
“Well, I will.” Miss Georgie spoke with a certain decisiveness, and reaching out a sage-soiled hand, took his gun from the holster at his hip. He shrank away with a man's instinctive dislike of having anyone make free with his weapons, but it was a single movement, which he controlled instantly.
“Stand still, can't you?” he admonished, and kept at work while she examined the gun with a dexterity and ease of every motion which betrayed her perfect familiarity with firearms. She snapped the cylinder into place, sniffed daintily at the end of the barrel, and slipped the gun back into its scabbard.
“Don't think I doubted your word,” she said, casting a slanting glance up at him without moving her head. “But I wanted to be able to swear positively, if I should happen to be dragged into the witness-box—I hope it won't be by the hair of the head!—that your gun has not been fired this morning. Unless you carry a cleaning rod with you,” she added, “which would hardly be likely.”
“You may search me if you like,” Good Indian suggested, and for an engaged young man, and one deeply in love withal, he displayed a contentment with the situation which was almost reprehensible.
“No use. If you did pack one with you, you'd be a fool not to throw it away after you had used it. No, I'll swear to the gun as it is now. Are you ever going to get my hair loose? I'm due at the office right this minute, I'll bet a molasses cooky.” She looked at her watch, and groaned. “I'd have to telegraph myself back to get there on time now,” she said. “Twenty-four—that fast freight—is due in eighteen minutes exactly. I've got to be there. Take your jackknife and cut what won't come loose. Really, I mean it, Mr. Imsen.”
“I was under the impression that my name is Grant—to friends.”
“My name is 'Dennis,' if I don't beat that freight,” she retorted curtly. “Take your knife and give me a hair cut—quick! I can do it a different way, and cover up the place.”
“Oh, all right—but it's a shame to leave a nice bunch of hair like this hanging on a bush.”
“Tell me, what were you doing up here, Grant? And what are you going to do now? We haven't much time, and we've been fooling when we should have been discussing 'ways and means.'”
“Well, I got up early, and someone took a shot at me again. This time he clipped my hat-brim.” He took off his hat, and showed her where the brim had a jagged tear half an inch deep. “I ducked, and made up my mind I'd get him this time, or know the reason why. So I rode up the other way and back behind the orchard, and struck the grade below the Point o' Rocks, and so came up here hunting him. I kept pretty well out of sight—we've done that before; Jack and I took sneak yesterday, and came up here at sunrise, but we couldn't find anything. I was beginning to think he had given it up. So I was just scouting around here when I heard you rustling the bushes over here. I was going to shoot, but I changed my mind, and thought I'd land on you and trust to the lessons I got in football and the gun. And the rest,” he declaimed whimsically, “you know.
“Now, duck away down—oh, wait a minute.” He gave a jerk at the knot of his neckerchief, flipped out the folds, spread it carefully over her head, and tied it under her chin, patting it into place and tucking stray locks under as if he rather enjoyed doing it. “Better wear it till you're out of the brush,” he advised, “if you don't want to get hung up somewhere again.”
She stood up straight, with a long, deep sigh of relief.
“Now, pikeway,” he smiled. “And don't run bareheaded through the bushes again. You've still got time to beat that train. And—about Saunders—don't worry. I can get to the ranch without being seen, and no one will know I was up here, unless you tell them.”
“Oh, I shall of course!” Miss Georgie chose to be very sarcastic. “I think I shall wire the information to the sheriff. Don't come with me—and leave tracks all over the country. Keep on the lava rock. Haven't you got any sense at all?”
“You made tracks yourself, madam, and you've left a fine lot of incriminating evidence on that bush. I'll have to waste an hour picking off the hair, so they won't accuse you of shooting Saunders.” Good Indian spoke lightly, but they both stopped, nevertheless, and eyed the offending bush anxiously.
“You haven't time,” Miss Georgie decided. “I can easily get around that, if it's put up to me. You go on back. Really, you must!” her eyes implored him.
“Oh, vey-ree well. We haven't met this morning. Good-by, Squaw-talk-far-off. I'll see you later, perhaps.”
Miss Georgie still had that freight heavy on her conscience, but she stood and watched him stoop under an overhanging branch and turn his head to smile reassuringly back at her; then, with a pungent stirring of sage odors, the bushes closed in behind him, and it was as if he had never been there at all. Whereupon Miss Georgie once more gathered her skirts together and ran to the trail, and down that to the station.
She met a group of squaws, who eyed her curiously, but she was looking once more at her watch, and paid no attention, although they stood huddled in the trail staring after her. She remembered that she had left the office unlocked and she rushed in, and sank panting into the chair before her telegraph table just as the smoke of the fast freight swirled around the nose of the low, sage-covered hill to the west.