CHAPTER III
The desert was a marvel of mauve and yellow and rose-color, under a canopy of blue. The sun was not too hot, and the air was vital and sustaining. Helen Anderson, riding over the hard plain, sniffed it joyously. She loved the smell of the desert, that intangible, indescribable odor that is yet so permeating: one of the fixed facts of the region. She had missed it, hungrily, during four years of exile from the Palo Verde.
She lifted her eyes to the sapphire-blue mountains on the horizon and laughed aloud for sheer joy, with a sense of physical well-being, as her vision ranged from these to nearer scenes. She was passing a Papago’s hut, a tiny structure of cream-colored adobe, with a dark roof of thatch. The hut itself was hardly larger than its own big chimney, and squatted on the yellow sand, in its little patch of shade, was an Indian woman.
She wore a skirt of dark blue stuff, and a white reboso was wound about the upper part of her bodyand carried over her dark hair. Her dusky arms were bare, and her brown hands patted and shaped and smoothed a pot of red clay, soon to be baked in the little kiln where a fire was already glowing.
Helen called a gay greeting to her and she looked up, showing her white teeth in a broad smile. Then she paused in her deft handling of the wet, red clay, to flip a bit gently at the inquisitive nose of Patsy, Helen’s fox terrier, who was minded to investigate the pottery operations. Helen called the dog and lifted her pony to a gallop. So the three went scampering off in a wild race over the level sand. A mile was measured before the girl drew rein again, with a blissful sigh of pure happiness.
“And to think,” she told herself, with a little feeling of unreality about it all, “that back in New England there is snow on the ground, and fire in the furnaces, and people who must be out of doors are thumping their arms, to keep warm, and telling one another what a glorious, bracing climate they have.”
She fell into a brown study and her reins lay loose upon the pony’s neck while she went back over the four happy years she had spent in the land of snow. How strange it seemed that so short a while ago the east, New England, even college itself, had been to her mere names. Then, for fouryears, they had been such happy entities. What a beautiful memory her whole college life was!
“And now,” she mused, “it seems as if it were all fading back into the dream again, yet I know things are as real, back there, as they ever were, and the real me, that Radcliffe helped make, is here in a real place, with the realest sort of things to do.
“For one thing,” she said, half aloud, “I can keep right on making Father glad I’m home for good, and showing him that he need not worry about me.”
That thought checked a growing wistfulness in her mood. Morgan Andersonwasglad to have his girl back, even though he had his well-defined doubts as to the desert being the best place for her. Her college years had been weary years to the lonely man, and his happiness in the new order was a beautiful part of Helen’s home-coming.
The girl could scarcely remember her mother. There had always been Jacinta, her half-Spanish nurse, now the household factotum, in the background of her childish years. In the foreground was the well-loved figure of her father, who had been her friend and constant companion. It was he who had taught her to read and to write, and to do plane and solid geometry: to ride hard, to shoot straight, and to tell the truth. Beyond these her education, other than what old Jacinta could impart,had been received at the hands of one of the cowboys on the range, a college graduate with a love for the plains.
Aunt Everett had been horrified at this arrangement. Aunt Everett was her father’s relative, who, on two formidable occasions, had descended upon the rancho and undertaken to revolutionize the household. This she did out of a sense of duty to Helen, who, she declared, was growing up in sheer savagery and ignorance.
Helen was twenty years old when Aunt Everett paid her second, and last, visit. It was then the momentous decision was reached that the girl should go to college. It was for the sake of his own youthful dream of Harvard, that had never come true, that Morgan Anderson had fixed upon Radcliffe, and Helen’s four beautiful years had become a fact.
She sighed again, recalling those years.
“They were so lovely,” she murmured, “and they have sent me back—how is it old Marcus Aurelius phrased it?—‘free from all discontent with that to which thou returnest.’
“Free from discontent?” she cried, taking in another deep, long breath of the buoyant air, “I should say I am! I was never in my life so aboundingly happy!”
The pony was walking slowly, and as Helenlooked about she became aware that Patsy was not in attendance upon them.
She halted, anxiously, the dog was a recent acquisition, given her by Sandy Larch, on her return from college, she was training him to keep with her. This was the first time she had really forgotten him. She reproached herself as she rode back over the way they had come, for letting her wits go wool-gathering.
She called the terrier, reining in from time to time, but there was no response, and becoming at last thoroughly alarmed, she dismounted, dropping the pony’s reins over his head to the ground, and started on foot to investigate among the cacti.
“He’s found a gopher-hole somewhere,” she said to herself, as she went whistling about among the greasewood and cacti.
She ceased to whistle, presently, vexed at Patsy’s lack of response, and continued her search in silence until, rounding a cactus-grown knoll, strewn with loose stone, she suddenly halted, warned by a familiar, burring sound that for an instant made her heart jump.
A few yards away from her was the terrier, rigid, immovable, the hair along his back, even the loose skin between his shoulders, stiffly erect. His lips were drawn back from his white teeth; his ears were pricked forward, and his whole body shudderedwith the vibration of his low, continuous growling.
Near the dog, lying prone, his face turned toward her, Helen saw a man, and still beyond him, alert, motionless, save for the minute quiver of that ominous, buzzing tail, a huge rattler was coiled, its cold, wicked little eyes fixed upon the dog.
“I must not scream; I must not faint,” the horrified girl told herself, trying to stand steady, and to think quick.
If the dog or the snake saw her neither made any sign. They glared, unmoving, at each other, across the helpless man. Neither dared attack, or retreat, and Helen knew that any move on either her part or the man’s, would cause the snake to strike—the dog to spring.
The man lay exactly in the storm-center, when trouble should come, and it seemed as though neither dog nor snake could much longer maintain the horrid statu quo. Patsy’s low growling was dreadful to hear, and the snake’s steady rattle brought the sweat of sheer fright to her forehead.
She glanced again at the man and his gaze met hers steadily. It was clear that he was alive to the full peril of his position, yet there was no sign of agitation in his face. Rather, his glance seemed meant to reassure her. Shamed by her own fears,Helen summoned her faculties to meet the situation.
She had grown up in the desert. She had known rattlesnakes before ever she went to college, and her four years of sophistication had not crowded out that earlier knowledge. Her brain seemed suddenly to clear, her nerves to harden. She knew what could be done, if she could but trust Patsy to hold steady. She remembered Sandy Larch’s boast, that the dog was game. Now was the time to show it, if he was.
“Steady, Patsy; steady, boy; quiet; quiet, boy!”
Over and over she whispered the words, oh, so gently, that she might not startle the young dog, and all the while she was slowly, slowly, raising her right hand, in which was her riding-whip. She was too thorough a plainswoman to use such a thing on a horse, but she carried it to use in training the terrier.
“Steady, Patsy; down, boy; down!”
The whip was extended in front of her, now, and she was moving it gently from side to side. The snake had caught sight of it, and was following it with its eyes, swaying in unison with the whip’s motion.
Never staying the steady movement of her arm, Helen crept forward, whispering reassurance to the dog, until at last, still waving the whip, shedropped to one knee and slipped her fingers under his collar. He stopped his growling and nestled to her with a little whimper. When she commanded him to charge he dropped to his belly and lay perfectly still, his eyes fixed upon the snake.
“If you can manage to turn the thing’s head a bit, little girl;—” it was the man who spoke, in a low, level voice—“so he can’t notice what I’m doing, I’ll fix him.”
With a little nod, Helen stood up and began moving sidewise, still swinging the whip. Thoroughly hypnotized, the snake swayed with its movement, those beady little eyes never leaving it. The rattler did not see the stealthy glide of the man’s hand, or the gleaming steel that was presently leveled at that flat, venomous head. An instant after there was a sharp report, and the snake was whipping the desert in its death struggle as Helen again caught the terrier by the collar. The man essayed to rise, and sank back with a sharp exclamation of pain.
“I guess I’ve hurt my foot,” he said, answering Helen’s look of inquiry.
“I—my horse took to pitching, and slung me here,” he went on, sitting up. “I can’t think what got the fellow, or me either,” he added, with a look of chagrin. “I never thought I needed a bucking-strap; but it seems as if I did.”
He spoke lightly, partly to hearten the girl, who was white and shaken, after her horrid experience, and partly to draw her attention from the victim of his shot, now stretched on the desert.
Another effort and he got to his feet; but the first attempt to step brought him to one knee, frowning with pain.
“And I don’t suppose there’s a stick in sight, that would give me any support,” he said, looking about.
“I’m afraid not,” Helen answered, following his glance; and then she remembered.
“I can bring up my horse,” she cried. “I left him by the mesquite when I dismounted to look for Patsy, here.”
“Patsy’s sure an enterprising little dog,” the man said, smiling, “I don’t just know whether I have to thank him for stirring up the little difficulty a while ago, or for keeping it from being worse before you came.”
“I’m afraid it was he that roused the rattler,” replied Helen, ruefully. “He is young, yet, and has his sense to get.”
The man laughed. “I was a little stunned when my horse landed me here,” he explained, shyly. “First thing I knew I was sort of waking-up, and that was the tableau I beheld. I didn’t do much that was strenuous, from then on.”
Helen was wondering, curiously, who the man could be. He was evidently not a cowboy, or a prospector, and she knew that if he were a cattleman or a mining expert, a stranger in that part of the country, he would naturally have been the hacienda’s guest. Such visitors in the neighborhood were always for her father. Perhaps he was on his way to him, now.
“Were you going to the Palo Verde?” she asked, impulsively. “I am Helen Anderson. Father will be sorry you have had an accident.”
“I thought you must belong there,” he said, simply, “and I was going to tell you my name. It’s Gard—not a very long one,” with a smile, “and Iwasgoing to the Palo Verde, though your father doesn’t know me. I wanted to see him on business.”
“Then the best thing we can do,” Helen said, briskly, “is to get there at once. I’m going to ask you to keep Master Patsy here, while I go for the horse.”
She was already speeding down the knoll, and a moment later she returned leading Dickens, the pony, who had stood patiently where she left him.
For a time it looked as though the stranger was not going to get into the saddle. Dickens was restless and nervous over his awkward approaches, and the pain in Gard’s foot was excruciating, butafter many agonized attempts he finally mounted. He was white and faint, after the effort, but he smiled resolutely down upon the girl while he adjusted the stirrup he could use.
“I am glad you ride this way,” he said, indicating her military tree. “I thought I’d have to sit in one of those queer dishes ladies usually ride on.”
Helen laughed. “If I waited to have horses gentled to the side-saddle,” she answered, “I should never get anything to ride. It’s the only way, here in the desert, and Father always thought it was the safer way.”
She was walking beside the pony, her broad-brimmed felt hat pushed back, that she might look up at her guest. “I used a side-saddle back east,” she added.
“I think this way is a lot better,” Gard replied. He wished she would look up again. It seemed to him that his eyes had never beheld anything more delicious than her upturned face, with its background of broad hat-brim.
He could only glimpse it when she looked straight ahead, as she was doing now. Her nose had a little tilt, that made him think her always just about to look up, and kept him in a pleasant state of expectation. He could not see her mouth and chin without leaning forward, and he shrank, shyly, from doing that, but he studied the firm browncheek, where just a touch of deep color came and went, and the neat sweep of fair hair back into the shadow of the broad hat, and he had noted when she looked up that her eyes were gray, looking out friendly-wise under level brows.
“You were a mighty plucky little girl to tackle that rattler,” he said, with a sudden realization of her courage. Her short riding-habit misled him and he did not think of her as grown up.
Helen stiffened, resentful of what seemed like a too familiar address. Then she recognized his mistake, with a curious little sense of pleasure in it.
“That was nothing,” she answered, with a lighthearted laugh, “Sandy Larch taught me the trick. I played that way with more than one rattler when”—“when I was a child,” she had been about to say, but she changed it, and added, “before I went away to school.” “No use dragging in ‘college’” she told herself. “He might think I was trying to seem important.”
“I know Sandy Larch,” Gard said. “He’s a good man.”
“So are you,” was the thought that flashed through the girl’s mind as she glanced upward again. She dismissed it instantly, with a feeling of astonishment at herself. She was not given to speculate in such wise on the quality of chance acquaintances.
“Sandy’s just Sandy,” she replied. “One of the best friends I ever had. I can’t remember the time when he wasn’t on hand looking after me.”
There was silence for a while, till Gard spoke again.
“I hate to make you walk,” he apologized, “You’ll be all tuckered out.”
“Not a bit,” she declared, stoutly. “You must be new to the desert, if you don’t know what miles people can walk here, without getting tired.”
The bronze of his face was tinged with a faint red.
“No,” said he, “I ain’t new to the desert. Not much I ain’t new; even—” with a mortified laugh—“if I did let my bronco throw me. I guess, though, I’m new to little girls,” he continued. “Seem’s if you ought to be tired. You don’t look so very big.”
“I’m strong, though.” Somehow, his assumption that she was a little girl gave Helen a pleasant sense of ease in his company. She glanced up at him again, and was startled to see how pale he had grown, under his tan. His forehead was knit with pain, and his teeth were set against one lip.
“I wish I could do something for you!” she cried, in quick sympathy. “But we’re nearly there; and Father’s as good as a doctor, any day.”
“It’s all right,” he muttered. “I was just a fool.I thought I’d see if I couldn’t get down and walk; so I tried putting that foot in the stirrup.”
“That was a clever thing to do,” Helen scolded, “I see you do not know how to believe people when they say they are not tired.”
She quickened her pace, that he might see how far she was from weariness.
“I’m sorry,” he said, humbly. “I didn’t mean to do anything to set you running off like that.”
No reply. They went on again in a silence that lasted for several moments.
“Ain’t you going to forgive me?” he asked, presently.
Helen considered; not what he had said however. She was more deeply interested in deciding why his “ain’t” was not offensive to her college-bred ears.
“After all,” she thought, deliberating it, “those things do not matter so much when people themselves are real.”
“I won’t do it again,” the voice beside her pleaded, in an exaggeration of penitence, and she laughed, looking up at him.
“I didn’t think you’d be such a hard-hearted little girl,” Gard said, reproachfully.
“I am not,” she replied. “I am only sensible. You should believe what people tell you.”
He made no reply. He was trying to decide how old the child could be.
“I guess,” he thought, with an effort to recall little girls he had seen—ah, how long ago it was that he had seen any!—“she’s most likely about twelve. She’ll be mighty pretty when she grows up.”
His foot still hurt, cruelly, in consequence of his rash experiment, but fortunately they were at the rancho. A few moments later they had reached the casa, where Morgan Anderson took charge of his guest with skilful good-will. Like all cattlemen, he was fairly expert at attending to hurts; could set a bone, on a pinch, and it did not take him long to discover that one of the small bones of Gard’s foot was dislocated. With Sandy Larch’s aid he set the matter to rights, and bandaged the foot in a way that would have done credit to professional skill.
He would not hear of his patient’s riding back to Sylvania that day.
“Not a bit of it!” he cried, when Gard proposed it. “That’s going to be one unmercifully sore foot by to-morrow; and suppose—”
He checked himself before voicing the suggestion that another accident might possibly put the foot badly out of commission. He had the plainsman’s idea that a horseman should stay with his mount; so he merely said that he wanted to keep an eye on the foot.
“You can’t be sure one of the little bones may not be broken,” he explained, “and anyway, we’re mighty glad to see folks here; so I guess we’ll have to keep you.” And Gard, more willing than at the moment he realized, accepted the invitation.
It was Manuel Gordo who, riding in from the upper range, saw the stranger’s horse, lathered and excited, wandering afield, and threw a rope over him. When he got the bronco to the Palo Verde corrals and took off the saddle, he gave a low, comprehending whistle. Under the blanket, well back, but yet where a rider’s weight would press, was a bit of cholla, the vicious fish-hook cactus of the desert, so disposed as to cause the horse exquisite pain.
Manuel swore a rolling Mexican oath as the thing caught his fingers, and stamped it into the desert before giving attention to the bronco’s back. This, later, he showed to Sandy Larch, with a vivid explanation.
“The blame cowards!” the foreman commented. “So they thought they’d git ’im that way, did they? It seemed mighty queer to me that he couldn’t sit anything four-legged he was likely to git in the ord’nary run, in Sylvania; but that pinto must ’a’ raged considerable with that on its back.”
“Who you think do-a that?” Manuel asked, and the foreman told him of the scene in the HappyFamily Saloon. “Some o’ that gang’s been tryin’ to get even,” he finished, and Manuel growled assent.
“I—I see that señor before to-day,” he ventured, hesitating, “He one good man.”
“Where ’d you ever meet up with ’im?” demanded Sandy. “Where ’d he come from?”
“Quién sabe?” Manuel’s shoulders lifted. “It is at Sylvania I see heem,” he added, non-committally, and understanding dawned upon the foreman.
“You did, eh?” he laughed, “An’ he got after you an’ made you quit that spree you was headed on, I bet. That what you come home so quick for? How’d he round you up?”
The Mexican grinned, shamefacedly, and Sandy laughed again.
“He’s sure a sin-buster,” he commented, admiringly, “But he done you a good turn that time, Manuel. Thepatron’d given me orders to everlastingly fire you next time you showed up after a spree, an’ I’d ’a’ sure done it if you hadn’t ’a’ been on hand that mornin’ same ’s usual!”
Manuel was busy smearing axle-grease on the bronco’s back, to keep the flies from its hurts.
“The señor, he good man all right,” he said, not turning around, and Sandy Larch, being shrewd, walked away without further comment.
CHAPTER IV
As Morgan Anderson had predicted, the condition of Gard’s foot next day was such as to make him a captive. The cattleman, surveying it after Jacinta had given the patient his breakfast, prescribed rest, and forbade any thought of leaving the rancho inside of a week.
“You say you came to see me on business,” he said, as he stood looking down upon Gard where he lay in bed in a big, low-ceiled room of the casa, “Well, I’m off to the upper range to-day, to pick out some work-cattle. I shall not be able to talk business till night; so that settles to-day.”
“You’re mighty good,” was Gard’s reply, “but that business o’ mine is only to ask you a question that you can answer in half a minute. You mustn’t think it’s some matter of consequence—to anybody but me, that is,” he added.
“All right; so much the better. It’ll keep, and we can keep you.”
Morgan Anderson had taken a liking to his unexpectedguest, and made him welcome with true western hospitality. It was long since Gard had talked with a man of his stamp, and the mere sound of Anderson’s pleasant, easy voice was a joy to him. It was good just to lie there and listen; at the same time, he was concerned about his foot. He wanted to be up and about Kate Hallard’s business. He had not calculated that the delivery of the deed which he had found in Arnold’s coat-pocket two years before, would involve him as it had done.
He had come back to civilization with a strong purpose. He meant to make every effort to reinstate himself in the eyes of the law, and he realized that he must do all that he could before some chance recognition should work to hinder his efforts. Nevertheless, he told himself, the claim of this woman came first. Kate Hallard had no one to fend for her, and the responsibility, in this particular matter, had been laid on him, Gabriel Gard.
Later in the forenoon, when Anderson had ridden away with his men, Wing Chang, the Chinese cook, acting upon thepatron’sinstructions, established Gard in a long steamer-chair, under the cottonwoods beside the casa. Hither, when he was settled, came Helen, bearing a little tray on which were biscuits and a grape-fruit. Gard smiled as he saw her coming around a corner of thecasa, and answered her greeting with a cheery “good-morning.”
“I wondered where you’d got to,” he began, and stopped, suddenly, the quick color rushing to his face.
“Now I just beg your pardon, Miss,” he stammered, in piteous confusion, “I mistook—I thought—I thought you were your little sister.”
“I am,” laughed Helen, putting the tray on a chair by his side.
“No, no: you mustn’t move your foot”—for Gard was struggling forward in his steamer-chair.
“If you do,” she threatened, “I shall have to scold you harder than I did yesterday.”
He sank back, a look in his face of mingled chagrin and wonder. Helen was arrayed in white, the simplest sort of a shirt-waist suit, with a touch of brown at neck and belt and shoes; but to his bewildered senses she was a radiant vision of unguessed daintiness and beauty. There was something incredible, to him, in the idea of this unearthly being offering him food. He glanced from her to the tray, and back again.
“I don’t know what that is,” he said, indicating the grape-fruit, “and I ain’t sure I know what you are. I thought yesterday you were a little girl, and now you seem like a young lady; and I don’t seem right sure you won’t turn into a fairy in a minute, and run away.”
“Oh, Oh!” Helen cried, “What three-fold flattery!”
Then it was her turn to experience a shock; for, as she stood looking down upon him, it suddenly became apparent to her that this man was young.
She had thought nothing about the matter, in the excitement of yesterday’s encounter, and when she had walked beside him, seeing his bearded face in her brief, upward glances, she had taken it for granted that he was middle-aged, at least. There was something disconcerting about the unexpected revelation of youth in those eager brown eyes, in the clear olive of the face above the strong, short beard, and in the firm curve of red lips just visible under the moustache. She could think of no further retort to his pretty speech, and busied herself with showing him how to eat the grape-fruit, wondering, vaguely, where he could have been, in the desert, not to have encounteredpomelos.
“These are from over the border,” she explained. “One of the boys smuggled them in last week; think how wicked we are! But by New Year’s we shall have some of our very own.”
“They’re mighty good,” Gard said, with no idea of what the fruit tasted like. He was still wrestling with the awesome fact that Helen had prepared it, and was teaching him to eat it. He took more sugar when she told him to, though years of abstinencefrom sugar had blunted his taste for it, and he shook his head with very proper commiseration when she told him of the way eastern folk spoil the fruit in preparing it.
“I never was back there,” he said, “I was raised on the prairie; but this is good enough for me.”
He looked beyond the fringe of cottonwoods, out across the plain, quivering in the mid-forenoon heat.
“Don’t you like it?” he asked.
“I love it! It’s so big, and beautiful, in spite of its dreadfulness; it’s sopositive!” Helen was sitting on the ground, her hands in her lap, her eyes turned toward the far mountains. Gard considered her words.
“Positive:” he repeated, thoughtfully, “Yes: it’s sure that. There ain’t any half-way place,” he added, drawing a deep breath. “A man, he gets big, or he gets little, living in it.”
“Oh!” cried she; “you must have been a long time in the desert to find that out!”
She went on, with youthful, unconscious arrogance: “I’ve lived here all my life; but I never realized that until after I came back from college this last time.”
“Have you been here long?” she added.
“I haven’t been ’round the level much,” Gard answered, and after a pause he added:
“I’ve been in the mountains most of the time.”
“Then you must have been prospecting: I hope you struck pay dirt?”
“I did.”
“Good! So youarea mining-man—I wondered.”
She had wondered about him. Gard turned the thought over in his mind, the while he told her something of his discovery in the mountains. It seemed a marvelous thing that she should have thought of him at all. Almost unconsciously he began telling her of finding his claim; of working it; and of Jinny.
Helen listened with rapt interest. She knew that men did go off into the mountains as she supposed Gard must have done. She had talked with prospectors, in her lifetime, but never with one like this.
“I suppose you will be wonderfully rich when you begin working your claim in earnest,” she said, at last, slowly, “Shall you like that?”
“I think so. There are some things I want a good deal”—Ah, how much he wanted them: the right to freedom; the right to hold up his head among men. Gard’s desire for this was increasing with every moment that he sat talking to this fair, unconscious girl. As he looked at her, sitting before him on the sparse grass, it came home to himwith fearful force that it would be hard to have friends if his past life must always be a secret from them.
“I suppose there are,” Helen was saying, half wistfully, “Money brings so many opportunities to a man.”
“Not unless he’s a real man to start with,” replied Gard.
“There’s a lot to be thought about,” he went on. “I used to think that to give a man plenty to eat, and wear, and good things round him; nice, beautiful things such as we read about—and I guess that you’ve always seen,” he explained,—“would help make a better man of him.
“I don’t believe it’s altogether so,” he went on, following a train of thought that he had often mulled over, in the glade, “All the good things that you can put a man into won’t make any better man of him, if when he didn’t have ’em he wasn’t trying to make a better man of himself.”
Helen pondered his saying in some surprise.
“I never thought of it that way before,” she said, at last, “but it seems as if it ought to be true.”
“I guess it’s true enough,” Gard frowned a little, deep in thought. “Jinny and I, we used to figure out ’twas, when we talked things over.” He smiled into his companion’s eyes.
“When I think, sometimes, of what men’ll dofor money, though,” continued he, “I ’most feel ’s if I didn’t want any of it.”
“But it seems cleaner money, somehow,” Helen interrupted, “it’s different when a man digs it out of the earth. He doesn’t rob, or defraud anybody, then; and think of all it can do!”
“Yes.” There was a slow twinkle in Gard’s eyes as he spoke. “There’s solid satisfaction to me in thinking that one o’ these days, if I want to, I can get Jinny a solid gold collar.”
They laughed together over this bit of foolishness, feeling, suddenly, that they were very good friends. It was almost with a little sense of something unwelcome that Helen, looking across the level plain, saw a horseman in the distance, coming toward the rancho-gate.
“Some one is coming,” she said, studying the approaching figure. “I wonder who it can be; Daddy isn’t expecting anyone.”
Gard turned his head and they watched together.
“It isn’t one of the men,” commented Helen. “He looks cityfied, doesn’t he?”
It was no careless cowboy figure that they watched. Whoever it was rode compactly, elbows down, and the horse was not running, but coming at an easy ’lope.
“Why!” the girl exclaimed, after a moment or two, “I believe it’s Mr. Westcott!”
The name set Gard’s heart pounding, but he kept his quiet pose in the steamer-chair, and only the faintest flutter of distended nostrils betrayed the emotion that was surging within him.
He had no real fear that Westcott might recognize him. The lawyer, as it happened, had seen him but twice; once at Phoenix, just after his arrest, and again on the occasion of that memorable visit to Blue Gulch. Nevertheless, Gard was thankful that he was warned of the new-comer’s approach.
“Do you know him?” Helen asked, still watching the rider, and Gard answered, promptly enough, that he had heard of him.
“He’s stopping at the corrals,” said Helen, presently. “I hope there’s some one there to take his horse.”
She started off, with a backward glance and a smile for her invalid, and presently Gard saw her going toward the corrals, followed by Wing Chang. She walked with a light, springing step that seemed to him must be peculiar to her alone. He had seen girls, back in Iowa, but they had not walked like that.
“There ain’t anybody like her,” he said, half aloud, replying to his own thought. Then he remembered that happy glance, and smile, and a shiver of pain ran through him.
“Heaven help me,” he muttered, “She wouldn’t have looked like that if she’d known.”
Helen, in the meantime, was greeting Westcott, who walked up to the casa with her, leaving his horse for Chang to unsaddle and turn in. He had come up to Sylvania to see a man, he explained, and when he got where the man was, why the man was not there. He showed his handsome, even teeth in a merry smile at his own jest, and somehow managed to convey to Helen the idea that the man “wasn’t there” for the reason that he was afraid to meet him, Ashley Westcott.
“It’s just a game of bluff some smart Aleck is trying to play on me,” he added, with pleasant carelessness; “It isn’t of much importance, except as it gives me the excuse I’m always glad of, to ride out here. I shall have to wait over, a day or two, to give the fellow a chance to make good, I dare say.”
His eyes narrowed when he was introduced to Gard. Kate Hallard had written to him, three days before, and the letter had brought him to Sylvania in a hurry. He had seen Mrs. Hallard and, therefore, Gard’s name had significance for him.
He seated himself in the chair from which Jacinta had long since removed the tray, and made a casual inquiry about Gard’s hurt. Gard explained it briefly, giving, to Helen’s immense relief, none of the details.
“I was in Sylvania this morning,” Westcott remarked, taking the glass of ice and the bottle of ginger ale that Jacinta brought him. “Came up from Tucson, and got that brute of a stage at Bonesta.”
“Itisa horrid ride,” Helen commented.
Gard said nothing, and Westcott and Helen chatted indifferently for a few moments of matters common enough, the news and talk of the territory, yet as new to Gard, in large measure, as though he had been a foreigner. The lawyer turned to him again, irritated by his silent scrutiny.
“I saw your friend Mrs. Hallard in Sylvania,” he said, “She was a good deal worried to know what had become of you.”
Gard’s eyes flashed, but his reply was given in a low, even tone.
“That was mighty kind of her,” he said, “I calculated to be on hand—we reckoned you’d be coming soon. When you go back you can ease her mind, and let her know I’m all right.”
Helen looked puzzled. She was not familiar with Sylvania, although it was the post office town of the rancho, but she knew, in a vague way, who Mrs. Hallard was. It would have been difficult not to know, when there were but half a dozen white women within a radius of fifty miles. She could not think of her, however, as a friend of this new acquaintance.She had seen Mrs. Hallard once, and Westcott’s apparently chance remark had exactly the effect he had calculated. It troubled her, and disturbed the atmosphere of friendliness which he had dimly felt between the girl and Gard, when he saw them together.
“It seems curious to find Mr. Gard here,” the lawyer went on, addressing Helen. “He is just the man I came to Sylvania to see. You can bank on it I did not expect to meet him when I rode this way.”
He overshot his mark, that time, going too far in his anxiety to produce an impression unfavorable to Gard. Helen’s hospitality was touched, and her sympathy enlisted for her guest. Whatever his friendship for Mrs. Hallard, of whom she really knew nothing definite, she did not believe that the man who sat there regarding them both with serene eyes, would ever be afraid to meet Ashley Westcott.
She looked from one to the other, and Gard smiled as he answered the lawyer’s remark, speaking to her rather than to the other.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m the man. I told Mrs. Hallard,” he added, glancing at Westcott, “to tell you to see me.”
“I shall, all right,” the lawyer replied, pointedly, and turned to ask Helen some question about her father. She was glad of the diversion, andwent into detail about his errand to the upper range.
“We’re going to have an orchard,” she explained, “Father had some trees put in three or four years ago; I believe he must have sat and held their heads all the while I was away, and watered them with a teaspoon.”
The others joined in her laugh at the vision conjured up of Morgan Anderson playing nurse to desert trees.
“They are only a few grape-fruit, and a date palm or two,” Helen went on, “but they have kindled his ambition, and now he is planning for oranges, and apricots.”
“Has he got the trees yet?” Gard asked.
“Mercy, no! Our needs are still more elemental than that. He has gone after some cattle to ‘gentle’ for plowing. Can’t you just see those wild-eyed long-horns figuring in pastoral idyls on the plain?”
Westcott grinned, but before either man could comment Wing Chang appeared from the direction of the adobe structure that served him for kitchen, and beckoned Helen to a domestic conference.
“Wing Chang’s official beck is equal to a royal summons,” she said, lightly, “so I shall have to be excused for a season.”
When she had departed the two men regarded each other for a little space. Westcott took outpaper and tobacco, offering them to Gard. The latter declined them and the lawyer began rolling himself a cigarette.
“I take it you’re an attorney, Mr. Gard?” he began, in a tone of careless query, as he struck a match.
At Gard’s negative he held the little taper alight in his finger for an instant, while he stared in surprise.
“Oh,” he said, recovering himself quickly, and lighting his cigarette, “I thought you must be. I rather figured,”—with a laugh which he meant to be irritating, “that you were a young attorney, or a new-comer in the territory, and trying to scare up business.” He puffed a cloud of smoke into the air and regarded his companion through it, with veiled eyes. “’Twas rather natural, don’t you think?” he persisted, with a sneer, “considering the nature of the little game up at Sylvania?”
Still Gard did not speak. He had put his well foot to the ground, and curled the other leg up that he might lean forward, and he sat regarding Westcott with quiet attention.
“I suppose you know, anyway,” the latter finally said, with a very good assumption of contempt, “Anybody with a headpiece might, whether he’s a lawyer or not, that neither my client nor I need feel obliged to pay any attention to the matter.”
Gard seemed to turn the remark over in his mind.
“Then what made you come up here?” he finally asked.
“That’s easy,” Westcott answered, scornfully. “I wanted to see who was trying to make a fool of poor Kate Hallard. I don’t wish her any harm, and I wanted to put her wise that she’s being used by some sharper, in a queer game.”
“I guess you’ll think better o’ that before we get through, Mr. Westcott,” Gard said, with deliberation.
“Not much I won’t.” Westcott was admiring the rings he had blown into the air. “Fact is, my friend,” he went on, with an air of easy confidence, “the more I think of your little scheme the less I think of it. In the first place, it won’t work. My client is in possession. That’s nine points, you know. By way of a tenth point, he has a quit claim from Mrs. Hallard—”
“That’s one item,” Gard interrupted, softly, “that I guess you won’t care to dwell on, when the matter comes to be pushed.”
“Pushed!” Westcott ignored the first part of the speech. “I tell you, man,” he cried, “you’ve got nothing that canbepushed! That deed you an’ Kate Hallard pretend to have found hasn’t a leg to stand on. You’d better be careful you don’t get into trouble with it.”
“I’m going to, Mr. Westcott,” the slow, calm tone made the lawyer feel uneasy, he could not have told why.
“If it will save you any trouble, my friend,” he sneered, at the same time keeping a close watch on the other’s face, “I’ll tell you that I saw some time ago, in a Chicago paper, that Jared Oliphant is out of commission—softening of the brain. I suppose you weren’t banking any on him, though?”
“We’re banking on facts,” was Gard’s reply.
“And Sawyer’s skipped the country.”
“Who’s Sawyer?” Gard’s question came quick and sharp, nailing Westcott’s blunder fast. The lawyer looked blank for an instant, then recovered himself.
“Why Kate Hallard seemed to think you were going to get some help through him,” he lied; “but I know Sawyer. You can’t do it.”
“You must have known him,” Gard said, “if you know he witnessed that deed; for Kate Hallard never told you.”
Westcott stared out at the desert. He was playing a desperate game, and he knew it. He would have given much to understand the inscrutable man who sat opposite him. He did not feel that he did understand him, fully; nevertheless, he had his own theories of the stuff men are made of, and presently he leaned forward.
“Look here, Gard,” he said, “This is mighty poor business for a man like you to be in.”
He spoke rapidly; for Miss Anderson had just appeared at the door of the adobe kitchen, still talking to Wing Chang.
“I don’t know what you expect to make by it,” Westcott went on; “but I don’t want Kate Hallard to get into any trouble. She can’t establish that deed. It’s no more use to her than so much blank paper. But I’ve got certain things in view. I’m going into politics in this territory, and there are reasons why I don’t want a thing like this coming up. You know how things get garbled—” He hesitated, and then went on, with a glance in the direction of the girl, who was now approaching.
“Between ourselves,” he said, rapidly, “what’s the reason you and I can’t do business together?”
He regarded his companion narrowly. Helen had stopped, near the casa, and was scanning the desert from under her hand.
“What do you say?” Westcott all but whispered. Gard looked at him a full moment before he spoke:
“I guess we couldn’t do business together,” he said, slowly, “But I guess we shan’t need to, Mr. Westcott; because you’re going to fix this matter up right. You’re going to give Mrs. Hallard back the property you stole from her, or else you’re going to pay her the full value.”
“Or else?”
There was a battle of eyes between the two men. Westcott’s flinched, finally, and sought the horizon.
“There ain’t any other ‘or else,’” Gard said, at last. “It’s going the way I stated.”
Westcott had arisen, sneering, but before he could speak again Helen’s voice broke in upon them:
“They’re coming!” she cried, joining her guests. “You’d think they had a whole drove of cattle, from the noise.”
A cloud of white dust far on the desert had resolved itself into a flurry of men, horses and cattle, coming in on a run. There was a thunder of hoofs, and a chorus of yells, and presently the “gentle” work-cattle were being herded into one of the corrals.
One of the horsemen separated himself from the group and rode on to the casa. This was Morgan Anderson, and he shouted greeting to Westcott as he swung from the saddle. He came into the shade of the cottonwoods firing a volley of genial questions, and giving bits of detail about the morning’s work, until Helen reminded him that it was close upon dinner-time. That meal was taken at noon, at the Palo Verde, so Anderson excused himself to clean up. He was dusty and begrimed from the hot day’s work. He carried Westcott off aswell, to remove the traces of his own long ride, and as Helen had already gone into the house, on some domestic errand, Gard was left alone.
The temporary solitude was welcome, and he lay back in the long chair half dizzied by the thoughts and memories that besieged his brain. Uppermost, for the instant, was an intense, grateful sense of relief. Westcott had so plainly not recognized him that he might consider one source of immediate danger to himself removed. He would probably be able to carry this business through with no other difficulties than lay in the matter itself.
There would be plenty of these. Westcott would see to that. He was evidently fully aware of the position he was in, and would let no scruples stand in the way of protecting himself.
“He’ll do just about anything—” Gard spoke half aloud, then checked himself, recalling that this was not the solitude of the glade.
“He’ll make a big fight,” he thought, “both to keep the property and to escape being punished.”
“Punished!”
The word came home to him with stunning force. The punishment for this crime, if Kate Hallard saw fit to press the matter, was jail!
And Kate Hallard would probably do what he advised.
Sudden fierce exultation leaped into the man’sheart. Beneath his quiet he had been deeply stirred by the encounter with Westcott.
“I wonder how he would like being in jail?” he thought, grimly, and brought himself sternly into line again.
“There ain’t any right of way for me there. I must stop that,” he whispered, the knuckles of his big hands white as wool under the strain of clasping his chair-arms.
The next instant he sat upright, staring out across the hot sand, but seeing only the vision of Helen’s dainty maiden loveliness. The thought of his heart sent the blood from his face.
“I’ve settled my account with Ashley Westcott,” he muttered, “God knows I’ve settledmyaccount; but if that is what he’s aiming to do—”
He shivered, sinking back into his chair. Wing Chang was approaching with a tray of food.
“If that is what it is,” Gard finished to himself, turning to greet the Chinaman, “Then I guess Mr. Ashley Westcott and I will have to open a new account; and he wants to look out.”