CHAPTER IV
McCOY followed a road that led from Bovier’s Camp into the hills. He was annoyed at the altercation with Tait that had flared up in the store. Between the sheep and cattle interests on the Fryingpan there had been a good deal of bickering and recrimination, some night raiding, an occasional interchange of shots. But for the most part there had been so far at least a decent pretense of respect for the law.
Except for Tait a compromise settlement might have been effected. But the big sheepman was not reasonable. Originally a cattleman himself, he had quarrelled violently with all of his range neighbours, and at last gone into sheep out of spite. There was no give-and-take about him. The policy of live and let live did not commend itself to his turbulent temper. What he wanted he intended to take with a high hand.
There were personal reasons why McCoy desired no trouble with him. Rowan had not seen Norma half a dozen times since she had run away with Tait in anger after a quarrel between the lovers. If she regretted her folly, no word to that effect had ever reached McCoy or any other outsider. On the few occasions when she came out into her little neighbourhood world it was with a head still high. Without impertinence, one could do no more than guess at her unhappiness. Upon one thing her former lover was determined: there would be no trouble of his making between him and the man Norma had chosen for a husband.
The cattleman turned up a cañon, followed it to its head, cut across the hills, and descended into the valley of the Fryingpan. The river was high from the spring thaw of the mountain snows. Below him he could see its swirling waters tumbling down in agitated hurry.
On the road in front of him a trap was moving toward the stream. He recognized the straight back of the slim driver as that of the girl he had seen at the post office. Evidently she was taking the cut-off back to the ranch, unaware that the bridge had been washed out by the freshet. Would she turn back or would she try the ford just below the bridge? He touched his horse with the spur and put it to a canter.
The girl drew up and viewed the remains of the bridge, then turned to the ford. Presently she drove slowly down to its edge. After a moment’s apparent hesitation she forced the reluctant horse to take the water. As the wheels sank deeper, as the turbid current swept above the axles and into the bed of the trap, the heart of the young woman failed. She gave a little cry of alarm and tried to turn back.
The man galloping toward the ford shouted a warning: “Keep going! Swing to the right!”
It is likely the driver did not hear his call. She tried to cramp to the left. The horse, frightened, plunged forward into the deep pool below the ford. The force of the stream swept horse and rig down. The girl screamed and started to rise, appalled by the whirling torrent.
Miraculously, a horse and rider appeared beside her. She was lifted bodily from the trap to the arms of a rescuer. For a few moments the cow pony struggled with the waters. It fought hard for a footing, splashed into the shallows nearer shore, and emerged safely at the farther bank.
She found herself lifted to the ground and deserted. The Heaven-sent horseman unfastened the rope at his saddle, swung it round his head, and dropped a large loop over the back of the trap. The other end he tied to the pommel of the saddle. The cow pony obeyed orders, braced its legs, and began to pull. The owner of the animal did not wait for results, but waded deep into the river and seized the bridle of the exhausted buggy horse.
Even then it was a near thing. The Fryingpan fought with a heavy plunging suction to keep its prey. The man and the horses could barely hold their own, far less make headway against the current. As to the girl, she watched the battle with big, fascinated eyes, the blood driven from her heart by terror. Soon it flashed across her brain that these three creatures of flesh and blood could not win, for while they wore out their strength in vain the cruel river pounded down on them with undiminished energy.
She flew to the rope and pulled, digging her heels into the sand for a better purchase. After what seemed to her a long time, almost imperceptibly, at first by fitful starts, the rope moved. McCoy inched his way to the shallower water and a more secure footing. Man, horse, and trap came jerkily to land.
Almost exhausted, the cattleman staggered to his bronco and leaned against its heaving flanks. His eyes met those of the girl. Her tremulous lips were ashen. He guessed that she was keeping a tight rein on a hysterical urge to collapse into tears.
“It’s all right,” he said, and she liked the pleasant smile that went with the words. “We’re all safe now. No harm done. None a-tall.”
“I thought—I was afraid——” She caught her lip between her white teeth.
“Sure. Anybody would be. You oughtn’t to have tried the ford. There should be a sign up there. I’ll get after the road commissioners.”
Ruth knew he was talking to give her time to recover composure. He went on, casually and cheerfully.
“The Fryingpan is mighty deceiving. When she’s in flood she certainly tears along in a hurry. More than one cow-puncher has been drowned in her.”
She managed a smile. “I’ve been complaining because I couldn’t find an adventure. This was a little too serious. I thought, one time, that—that you might not get out.”
“So you pulled me out. That was fine. I won’t forget it.”
The girl looked at the blisters on her soft palms, and again a faint little smile twitched at her face. “Neither shall I for a day or two. I have souvenirs.”
He began to arrange the disordered harness, rebuckling a strap here and pulling the leather into place there. Dark eyes under long, curved lashes observed him as he moved, lean-loined and broad of shoulder, the bronze of the eternal outdoors burned into his hands and neck and lean face.
“My name is Trovillion; Ruth Trovillion,” she said shyly. “I’m staying at Elkhorn Lodge, or the Dude Ranch, as you people call it.”
He shook hands without embarrassment. “My name is Rowan McCoy.”
Level eyes, with the blue of Western skies in them, looked straight into hers. A little wave of emotion beat through her veins. She knew, warned by the sure instinct of her sex, that this man who had torn her from the hands of death was to be no stranger in her life.
“I think I saw you at the store to-day. And I’ve heard of you, from Mr. Flanders.”
“Yes.”
She abandoned that avenue of approach, and came to a more personal one—came to it with a face of marble except for the live eyes.
“But for you I would have drowned,” she said, and shuddered.
“Maybe so; maybe not.”
“Yes. I couldn’t have got out alone,” she insisted. “Of course I can’t thank you. There’s no use trying. But I’ll never forget—never as long as I live.”
About her there was a proud, delicate beauty that charmed him. She was at once so slender and so vital. Her face was like a fine, exquisitely cut cameo.
“All right,” he agreed cheerfully. “Honours are easy then, Miss Trovillion. I lifted you out and you pulled me out.”
“Oh, you cansaythat! As if I did anything that counted.” The fount of her feelings had been touched, and she was still tremulous. It was impossible for her to dismiss this adventure as casually as he seemed ready to do. After all, it had been the most tremendous hazard of her young, well-sheltered life.
When he had made sure the trap was fit for the road, McCoy turned to his companion and helped her in. She drove slowly. The cattleman rode beside her. He was going out of his way, but he found for himself a sufficient excuse. She was a slim slip of a girl who had lived her nineteen or twenty years in cities far from the primitive dangers of the wild. Probably she was unstrung from her experience and might collapse. Anyhow, he was not going to take the chance of it.
CHAPTER V
STILL at the age when she was frankly the centre of her own universe, Ruth Trovillion had an abundant sense of romance. There was no intention in her decided young mind of treading a road worn dusty by the feet of the commonplace. On occasion a fine rapture filled her hours. She was still reacting to the ecstatic shock of youth’s early-morning plunge into the wonderful river of life.
Rowan McCoy had impressed himself upon her imagination. He had not come into her life with jingling spurs, garnished like Larry Silcott with all the picturesque trimmings of the frontier. Larry was too free, too fresh, she thought. But McCoy, quiet, competent son of the hard-riding West, depended on no adventitious aid of costume. He was as indigenous and genuine as one of his own hill cattle. Ruth had admirers in plenty, but they dwindled to non-heroic proportions before his brown virility, his gentle, reticent strength.
Quietly she gathered information about him. The owner of the Circle Diamond was a leader in the community by grace of natural fitness. Tim Flanders, who kept the Elkhorn Lodge, summed him up for Ruth in two sentences:
“He’s a straight-up rider, Mac is. He’ll do to take along.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked his young guest.
“You can tie to him. He’ll go through. There’s no yellow in Rowan McCoy.”
She thought over that a good deal. Her judgment concurred. So far as it went, the verdict of Flanders was sound. But it did not go far enough. During the ride to the ranch she had discovered that the cattleman had a capacity for silence. Ruth found herself fascinated by the desire to push through to the personality behind the wall of reserve.
For some time she was given no chance. It was ten days after the rescue before she saw him again.
She went on her way with what patience she could, enjoying the activities of the “dude” ranch. She rode, fished, and picnicked in the hills with the other guests. Two days were spent in climbing Big Twin Peak. In the evenings she read to her aunt while that lady indefatigably knitted. The surface of her mind was absorbed by the details of the life arranged for her. McCoy was not on the horizon of her movements, but he was very much in the map of her thoughts. She did not hear his name mentioned. To these well-to-do people from the East spending a pleasant vacation in Wyoming he did not exist. But it was impossible for Ruth to get this quiet, steady-eyed man out of her mind.
Why did he not come to see her? Yet, even as she asked herself the question, Ruth found an adequate answer. She had very little vanity. Probably she had not interested him. There was no real reason why he should call unless he wanted to do so.
Then one day, unexpectedly, she met him on a hill trail.
“Why haven’t you been to see me?” she asked, with the directness that characterized her at times.
Yet she quaked at her own audacity. He might think even though he would be too courteous to say so, that he did not care to waste the time.
He thought a moment before he committed himself to words. He had wanted to come, but he had passed through an experience which made him very reserved with women. He never called on any, nor did he go to dances or merrymakings.
“I’ve been pretty busy, Miss Trovillion,” he said.
“That’s no excuse. I might have got pneumonia from wet feet or gone into a nervous breakdown from the shock. You’ve got no right to pull a girl out of the river and then ride away and forget she ever existed. It’s not good form. They are not doing it this year.”
He laughed at the jaunty impudence of her tilted chin. Somehow she reminded him of a young, singing meadow-lark experimenting with its wings. He suspected shyness back of her audacity. Yet he was surprised at his own answer when he heard it; at least he was surprised at the impulse which had led him to make it.
“Oh, I haven’t forgotten you. I’ll be glad to come to see you, if I may.”
“When?”
“Will this evening do?”
“I’ll be looking for you, Mr. McCoy.”
The cattleman told the simple truth when he said that he had not forgotten her. The girl had been very much in his mind ever since he had left her at the gate of the Lodge. He loved all young, clean life even among animals, and she seemed to him the embodied youth of the world, free and light-footed as a fawn in the misty break of day.
When McCoy reached Elkhorn Lodge after dinner Ruth introduced him to her aunt, a thin, flat-bosomed spinster with the marks of ill health on her face. Miss Morgan and her niece had come to the Rockies for the health of the older woman, and were scheduled to make an indefinite stay. Before the cattleman had talked with her five minutes he knew that Miss Morgan viewed life from a narrow, Puritanic standpoint. He guessed that there was little real sympathy between her and the vivid girl by her side.
In her early years Ruth had been a lonely, repressed little soul. An orphaned child, she had been brought up by this maiden lady, who looked on the leggy, helter-skelter youngster with the tangled flying hair as a burden laid upon her by the Lord. Ruth had been a lawless, wilful little thing, naughty and painfully plain by the standard of her aunt; a difficult little girl to train in the way she should go.
Surprisingly she had blossomed from the ugly-duckling stage into a most attractive girl. Nobody had been more amazed at the transformation than her aunt. The change was not merely external. The manner of Ruth had become gentler, less wilful. As a nurse she had developed patience toward the invalid.
“Do you mind if Mr. McCoy and I ride out to Flat Top for the sunset?” she asked now.
“No, child. I’ll be all right. But don’t stay late,” Miss Morgan assented a little fretfully. It was one of Ruth’s ways to become absorbed in the interest of the moment to forgetfulness of everything else. This was one of the penalties her friends paid for her vivid enthusiasms.
The riders passed a poster tacked to a tree just outside the gates of the ranch. It bore this legend:
Ruth drew up to read it. She turned to her companion. “You’ll ride, I suppose? Mr. Flanders says you’re a famous bronco buster.”
“I don’t reckon I will,” he answered. “Some of the boys entered me, but I’ve decided not to go in this year.”
“Why not?”
“Gettin’ too old to be jolted around so rough,” he replied, smiling. “The younger lads can take their turn.”
“Yes, you look as though you had one foot in the grave,” she derided, with a swift glance at the muscular shoulders above the long, lean body. “Of course you’ll ride. You’ve got to. Aren’t you champion of the world?”
“That’s just a way of talkin’,” he explained. “They have one of these shows each year at Cheyenne. Other places have ’em too. The winners can’t all be champions of the world.”
“But I want to see you ride,” she told him, as though he could not without discourtesy refuse so small a favour.
He dismissed this with a smile.
From Flat Top they watched the sun go down behind a sea of rounded hills. The flame of it was in her blood, the glow of it on her face. She was in love with Wyoming these days, with the cool and crystalline air of its mornings, with the scarfs of heat waving across the desert at noon, with the porphyry mountain peaks edged with fire at even. There was this much of the poet in Ruth Trovillion, that she could go out at dewy dawn and find a miracle in the sunrise.
Impulsively she turned to her companion a face luminous with joy.
“Don’t you just love it all?”
He nodded. The picture struck a spark from his imagination. By some trick of light and shade she seemed the heart of the sunset, a golden, glowing creature of soft, warm flesh through which an ardent soul quivered and palpitated with vague yearnings and inarticulate desires.
Into the perfect peace of a harmonious world jarred a raucous shout. From a hill pocket back of Flat Top came a cloud of dust. In the falling light a dim, gray mass poured out upon the mesa. It moved with a soft rustle of small, padded feet, of wool fleeces rubbing against each other.
A horseman cantered into view and caught sight of McCoy. With a jeering laugh he shouted a greeting:
“Fine sheep weather these days, McCoy. How about cows?”
The eyes of the cattleman blazed. The girl noticed the swift flush under the tan of the cheeks, the lips that closed like a steel trap. It was plain that the man rode himself with a strong rein.
“I’m still waiting in the door of my sheep wagon for you and your friends,” scoffed the drunken voice. “And my wagon is a whole lot nearer the Circle Diamond than it was. One of these days I’ll drive up to your door like I promised.”
Still McCoy said nothing, but the muscles stood out on his clamped jaws like ropes. The sheepman rode closer, turned insolent eyes on the girl. From his ribald, hateful mirth she shrank back with a sense of degradation.
Tait turned his horse and galloped away. He shouted an order to a herder. A dog passed silently in and out of the gray mass, which moved across the mesa like an agitated wave of the sea.
The girl asked a question: “Has he crossed the dead line?”
“Yes.” Then: “What do you know about the dead line?” asked her companion, surprised.
“Oh, I have eyes and ears.” She put herself swiftly on his side. “I think you’re right. He’s bad—hateful. Your cattle were here first. He brought sheep in to spite you and his other neighbours. Isn’t that true?”
“Yes.”
McCoy wondered how much more this uncannily shrewd young person knew about the relations between him and Tait. Did she know, for instance, the story of how Norma Davis had jilted him to marry the sheepman?
“What will you do? Will you fight for the range?”
“Yes.” This was a subject the cattleman could not discuss. He dismissed it promptly. “Hadn’t we better be moving toward the ranch, Miss Trovillion?”
They rode back together in the gathering dusk.
CHAPTER VI
“LARRY SILCOTT on Rocking Chair,” boomed a deep voice through a megaphone.
A girl in one of the front boxes of the grand stand saw a young cow-puncher move with jingling spurs across the wide race track toward the corral beyond. He looked up, easy and debonair as an actor, and raked with his eyes the big crowd watching him. Smile met smile, when his glance came to halt at the eager girl looking down.
Ruth Trovillion’s smile went out like the flame of a blown candle. She had not caught the name announced through the megaphone, but now she recognized him. The last time she had seen this gay youth, now sunning himself so jauntily in the public regard, had been in the orchard of Elkhorn Lodge; he had kissed her impudently, and when their eyes had met hers had flashed hatred at him for the affront he had dared to put upon her.
She turned away, flaming, chin in the air.
“Is he a good rider?” she asked the man sitting beside her.
“Wyoming doesn’t raise better riders than Larry Silcott,” he answered promptly. “He’s an A-1 rider—the best of the lot.”
“You beat him last year, didn’t you?” she challenged.
McCoy did not quite understand her imperious resentment. It seemed to go a little farther than the occasion called for. “That was the luck of the day. I happened——”
“Oh, yes, you happened!” scoffed Ruth. “You could go out and beat him now if you wanted to. Why don’t you ride? Your name is entered. I should think you would defend your championship. Everybody wants to see last year’s winner ride. I haven’t any patience with you.”
Rowan smiled. “I see you haven’t, Miss Ruth. I’ve tried to explain. I like Larry. We’re friends. Besides, I taught him his riding. Looks to me as if it is one of the younger fellow’s turn. Now is a good time for me to quit after I have won two years running.”
The young woman was not convinced, but she dropped the argument. Her resentful eyes moved back to the arena, into which a meek-looking claybank had been driven. It stood with blinking eyes, drooping at the hip, palpably uninterested in the proceedings.
Of a sudden the ears of the bronco pricked, its eyes dilated. A man in chaps was moving toward it, a rope in his hands. The loop of the lariat circled, went whistling forward, fell true over the head of the outlaw horse. The claybank reared, tried to bolt, came strangling to a halt as the loop tightened. A second rope slid into place beside the first. The horse stood trembling while a third man coaxed a blanket over its eyes.
Warily and deftly Silcott saddled, looking well to the cinch.
“All ready,” he told his assistants.
Ropes and blanket were whipped off as he swung to the seat. Rocking Chair stood motionless for a moment, bewildered at the things happening so fast. Then the outlaw realized that a human clothespin was straddling its back. It went whirling upward as if trying to tie itself into a knot. The rider clamped his knees against the sides of the bronco and swung his hat with a joyous whoop.
Rocking Chair had a reputation to live up to. It was a noted fence rower, weaver, and sunfisher. Savagely it whirled, went up in another buck, came down stiff-legged, with arched back. The jolt was like that of a pile driver, but Silcott met it with limp spine, his hat still fanning against the flank of the animal. The outlaw went round and round in a vicious circle. The incubus was still astride of its back. It bolted; jarred to a sudden, sideways halt. Spurs were rowelling its sides cruelly.
Up again it went in a series of furious bucks, one after another, short, sharp, violent. Meanwhile, Silcott, who was a trick rider, went through his little performance. He drank a bottle of ginger ale and flung away the bottle. He took the rein between his teeth and slipped off coat and waistcoat. He rode with his feet out of the stirrups. The grand stand clamoured wild applause. The young cattleman from the Open A N C was easily the hero of the day.
The outlaw horse stopped bucking as suddenly as it had begun. Larry slipped from the saddle in front of the grand stand and stood bowing, a lithe, graceful young figure of supple ease, to the plaudits which rained upon him.
Abruptly Ruth turned to McCoy. “I want you to ride,” she told him in a low voice.
The cattleman hesitated. He did not want to ride. Without saying so in words, he had let the other competitors understand that he did not mean to defend his title. There had been a good deal of pressure to induce him to drag a saddle into the arena but so far he had resisted it.
He turned to decline, but the words died on his lips. The eyes of the girl were stormy; her cheeks flushed. It was plain that for some reason she had set her heart on his winning. Why? His pulses crashed with the swift, tumultuous beating of the red blood in him. Rowan McCoy was not a vain man. It was hard for him to accept the conclusion for which his whole soul longed. But what other reason could there be for her insistence?
During the past few weeks he had been with Ruth Trovillion a great deal. He had ridden with her, climbed Old Baldy by her side, eaten picnic lunches as her companion far up in flower-strewn mountain parks. He had taught her to shoot, to fish, to make camp. They had been gay and wholesome comrades for long summer days. The new and secret thing that had come into his life he had hidden from her as if it had been a sin. The desire of his heart was impossible, he had always told himself. How could it be otherwise? This fine, spirited young creature, upon whom was stamped so ineradicably the look of the thoroughbred, would go back to her own kind when the time came. Meanwhile, let him make the best of his little day of sunshine.
“I told the boys I wasn’t expecting to ride,” he parried. “It has been rather understood that I wouldn’t.”
“But if I ask you?” she demanded.
There was no resisting that low, imperious appeal.
He looked straight into her eyes. “If you ask it, I’ll ride.”
“I do ask it.”
He rose. “It’s your say-so, little partner. I’ll let the committee know.”
The eyes of the girl followed him, a brown, sun-baked man, quiet and strong and resolute. Her glance questioned shyly what manner of man this was, after all, who had imposed himself so greatly upon her thoughts. He was genuine. So much she knew. He did not need the gay trappings of Larry Silcott to brand him a rider of the hills, foursquare to every wind that blew. Behind the curtain of his reticence she had divined some vague hint of a woman in his life. Now a queer little thrill of jealousy, savage and primeval, claimed her for the first time. She knew her own power over Rowan McCoy. It hurt her to feel that another girl had once possessed it, too.
A cow-puncher from Laramie, in yellow wool chaps and a shirt of robin’s-egg blue, took the stage after Silcott. He drew a roan with a red-hot devil of malice in its eye. The bronco hunched itself over to the fence in a series of jarring bucks, and jammed the leg of the rider against a post. The Laramie youth, beside himself with pain, caught at the saddle horn to save his seat. The nearest judge fired a revolver to tell him he was out of the running. He had “touched leather.”
His successor took the dust ignominiously in a clean tumble. He got up, looked ruefully at the bronco that had unseated him, and went his bowlegged way back to meet the derisive condolences of forty grinning punchers.
“Too bad the judges didn’t have the ground plowed up for you, Shorty. It would ’a’ been a heap softer,” murmured one.
“If I’d only remembered to ride on my spurs like you done, Wade, I needn’t have fallen at all,” came back Shorty with genial malice at his tormentor.
Whereat the laugh was on Wade, who had been detected earlier in the day digging his spurs into the cinch to help him stick to the saddle.
“Rowan McCoy on Tenderfoot,” announced the leather-lunged megaphone man.
A wave of interest swept through the grand stand. Everybody had wanted to see the champion ride. Now they were going to get the chance. The announcement caused a stir even among the hard-bitten riders at the entrance to the corral. For McCoy was not only a famous bronco buster; he was a man whose personality had won him many friends and some enemies.
The owner of the Circle Diamond rode like a centaur. He tried no tricks, no fancy business to win the applause of the spectators. But he held his seat with such ease and mastery that his long, lithe body might have been a part of the horse. His riding was characteristic of him—straight and strong and genuine.
The outlaw tried its wicked best, and no bronco in the Rockies was better known than Tenderfoot for the fighting devil that slumbered in its heart. Neither side bucking nor pitching, sunfishing nor weaving could shake the lean-loined, broad-shouldered figure from his seat. It was not merely that McCoy could not be unseated; there was never a moment when there was any doubt of whether man or beast was master. Even when the bronco flung itself backward, McCoy was in the saddle again before the animal was on its feet.
The eyes of Ruth never left the fighting pair. She leaned forward, fascinated, lost to everything in the world but the duel that was being fought out in front of her. They were a splendid pair of animals, each keyed to the highest notch of efficiency. But the one in the saddle was something more. His perfect poise was no doubt instinctive, born of long experience. His skill had become automatic. Yet back of this she sensed mind, a will that flashed along the reins to the brute beneath. Slowly Tenderfoot answered to its master, acknowledged the dominion of the man.
Its pitching became less violent, its bucking halfhearted. At a signal from one of the judges, McCoy slipped from the saddle. Without an instant’s delay, without a single glance at the storm-tossed grand stand, the rider strode across the arena and disappeared. He did not know that Ruth Trovillion was beating her gloved hands excitedly along with five thousand other cheering spectators. He could not guess how her heart had stood still when the bronco toppled backward, nor how it had raced when his toes found again the stirrups as the horse struggled to its feet.
The judges conferred for a few minutes before the megaphone man announced that the championship belt went to McCoy, second prize to Silcott. Once more the grand stand gave itself to eager applause of the decision.
Just before the wild-horse race, which was the last event on the program, McCoy made his way to the box where Miss Trovillion was sitting with Tim Flanders, of the Elkhorn Lodge, and his wife.
The girl looked up, her eyes shining. “Congratulations, Mr. Champion of the World.” She felt after a fashion that she had helped to beat the conceited Silcott, the youth who had affronted her with his presumptuous kiss.
“I was lucky,” he said simply.
“You were the best rider.” Then, with a little touch of feminine ferocity: “I knew you would beathim.”
“Silcott? I still think I was lucky.”
Already the grand stand was beginning to empty. Round-up Week was almost over.
“We’d better be getting back to town if we want any supper,” proposed Flanders.
The same idea had suggested itself to several thousand more visitors to Bad Ax. A throng of automobiles was presently creeping toward the gates, every engine racing and every horn squawking. Once outside, the whole plain seemed alive with moving cars, buckboards, wagons, and horses all going swiftly townward in a mad race for hotels and restaurants.
Bad Ax was crowded to its suburbs. Hotels were jammed, rooming houses doing a capacity business. A steady stream of automobiles had poured in all week from Denver and other points. Trains loaded to the vestibules had emptied themselves into the town. The bells of saloon cash registers were ringing continuously. Cow-punchers from Sheridan and Cody jostled shoulders with tourists from New Haven and Kansas City, their worn leathers and faded gray shirts discarded for gaudy costumes that ran the rainbow from sunset orange to violent shades of blue.
The whole town was a welter of barbaric colour. Streamers stretched across from building to building, and “spielers” for side shows bawled the merits of their attraction. Everywhere one met the loud gaiety of youth on a frolic. Young as the night was, merrymakers were surging up and down the streets tossing confetti and blowing horns.
In the crowded streets, after they had found something to eat in a vacant store where the ladies of the Baptist church were serving a supper, McCoy and Miss Trovillion became separated from their friends. Hours later they wandered from the crowd toward the suburb where the young woman and the Flanders family had found rooms.
Unaccountably their animation ebbed when they were alone under the stars. They had been full of laughter and small talk so long as the crowd jostled them. Now they could find neither. In every fibre of him Rowan was aware of the slight, dainty figure moving by his side so lightly. The delicate, penetrating fragrance of her personality came to him with poignant sweetness.
Once his hand crept out and touched her white gown in the darkness. If she knew, she gave no sign.
Her eyes were on the hills which rose sheer back of the town high into the sky line. They seemed to press in closely and to lift her vision to the heavens, to shut out all the little commonplace things of life.
“Do you suppose God made them to wash sin out of the hearts of people?” she asked.
“A night like this does give a fellow queer feelings,” he answered in a low voice. “Have you ever camped in the high hills with the wind blowin’ kinda soft through the pines? I have, alone, often. Makes a fellow feel as though he’d like to begin again with a clean page.”
She nodded. “Yes. I’ve felt it, too, though I never camped alone of course. As though something fine and wonderful and all-powerful was whispering to me and drawing me nearer to eternal things. It must be something in ourselves, don’t you think? It can’t be that the mountains at night are really a kind of Holy of Holies.”
“I reckon,” he agreed. He had never before tried or heard anybody else try to put into words the strange influence of the shadowy range at night upon one camped in the hollow of a draw, an influence which at the same time seemed to reduce one to an atom in an ocean of space and to lift one into the heights of the everlasting verities. He was shy of any expression of his emotions.
They fell into silence, and presently she turned reluctantly back toward the town. He fell into step beside her. Soon now, he knew, they would be caught again into the spirit of the commonplace.
So he spoke, abruptly, to hold in his heart some permanent comfort from the hour when they had been alone with each other and the voices of the world had been very far and faint.
“Why did you want me to ride?”
It was a simple question, but one not so easily answered. She could have told him the truth, that she did not want Larry Silcott to win. But that would have been only part of the truth. She wanted Rowan McCoy to win, wanted it more than she had wished anything for a long time. Yet why? She was not ready to give a candid reason even to herself, far less to him.
Womanlike, she evaded. “Why shouldn’t I want you to win? You’re my friend. I thought——”
He surprised himself almost as much as he did her by his answer. “I’m not yore friend.”
She looked at him, startled at his brusqueness.
“I’m a man that loves you,” he said roughly.
A tremor passed through her. She was conscious of a strange sweet faintness. The soft eyes veiled themselves beneath dark lashes.
“Have I spoiled everything, little partner?” he asked gently.
“How can I tell—yet?” she whispered, and looked up at him shyly, tremulously.
He knew, as his arms went around her, that he had entered upon the greatest joy of his life.
CHAPTER VII
ROWAN McCOY drove his new car—it was a flivver, though they did not call it that in those days—with the meticulous care of one who still distrusts the intentions of the brute and his own skill at circumventing them.
As he skidded to a halt in front of the store with brakes set hard a woman came out to the porch and nodded to him. She waited until the noise of the engine had died before she spoke:
“Going down to Wagon Wheel, Mac?”
“If I can stay with this gasoline bronc that far. Anything I can do for you, Mrs. Stovall?”
The woman hesitated, her thin lips pressed tight in an habitual expression of dry irony. She moved closer.
“That houn’ Joe Tait has been a-beatin’ up Norma again. She phoned up she wanted to get down to the train. I’ve a fool notion she’s quittin’ him for good.”
The cattleman waited in silence. It was not a habit of his to waste words.
“Wanted I should find someone to take her and her traps to Wagon Wheel. But seems like everybody’s right busy all of a sudden.” A light sarcasm filtered through the thin, cool voice of the postmistress. “Folks just hate to be onneighbourly, but their team has done gone lame or the wife’s sick or the wagon broke a wheel. O’ course it ain’t that any of them’s afraid to mad that crazy gunman, Tait. Nothin’ like that.”
McCoy looked across at the blue-ribbed mountains. Mrs. Stovall noticed that the muscles stood out like ropes on the brown cheeks of his close-gripped jaw. She did not need to ask the reason. Everybody in the Hill Creek country knew the story of Norma Davis and Rowan.
“I’m not asking you to take her, Mac,” the woman ran on sharply. “You got more right to have a flat tire than Pete Henderson has to have——”
“Where is she?” interrupted the man.
“You’ll find her the yon side of the creek.”
Mrs. Stovall knew when she had said enough. Silently she watched him crank the car and drive away. As he disappeared at the rim of the park a faint, grim smile of triumph touched her sunken mouth.
“I ’most knew he’d take her,” she said aloud to herself. “Course there’ll be a rookus between him and Joe Tait, but I reckon that’s his business.”
At intervals during the morning that sardonic smile lit the wrinkled face. It was an odd swing of the pendulum, she thought, that had reversed the situation. Years ago Norma had run away from her lover with good-for-nothing Joe Tait. Now she was escaping from Tait with McCoy by her side. How far would fate carry the ironic jest? Mrs. Stovall was no Puritan. If Norma could unravel some scattered threads of happiness from the tangled skein of her wretched life, Martha Stovall cared little whether she kept within the code or not. No woman was ever more entitled to a divorce than the abused wife of the sheepman.
A woman came out from the cottonwoods beyond the ford to meet McCoy. She was dressed in a cheap gown hopelessly out of date, and she carried a telescope valise with two broken straps.
If any of the bitterness McCoy had felt toward her when his wound was fresh survived the years it must have died now. Life had dealt harshly with her. There had been a time when she was the belle of all this ranch country, when she had bloomed with health and spirits, had been as full of fire as an unbroken bronco. Now her step dragged. The spark of frolicsome deviltry had long been quenched from her eye. Her pride had been dragged in the dust, her courage brutally derided. Even the good looks with which she had queened it were marred. She was on the way to become that unattractive creature, the household drudge. Yet on her latest birthday she had reached only the age of twenty-six.
At recognition of the man in the car she gave a startled little cry:
“You—Rowan!”
It was the first time they had been alone together in seven years, the first time she had directly addressed him since the hour of their quarrel. At the unexpectedness of the meeting emotion welled up in her throat and registered there like the quicksilver in a thermometer.
He tossed her grip into the back of the car, along with his own, and turned to help her to the seat beside the driver. For just an instant she hesitated, then with a bitter, choking little laugh gave way. What else could she do? It was merely another ironic blow of fate that the lover she had discarded should be the man to help her fly from the destiny her wilfulness had invited.
In silence they sat knee to knee while the car rolled the miles. The distant hills and valleys which slid indistinguishably into each other detached themselves as they approached, took on individuality, vanished in the dusty rear.
Neither of them welcomed the chance that had thrown them together again. It shocked the pride of the woman, put her under an obligation to the man against whom she had nursed resentment for years. His presence stressed the degradation into which she seemed to herself to have fallen. For him, too, the meeting was untimely. To-day of all days he wanted to forget the past, to turn over a page that was to begin the story of a new record. Deliberately he had shut the door on the story of his unhappy love for Norma Davis, and with an impish grin fate had flung it open again.
The heady wilfulness of the girl had given place to the tight-lipped self-repression of a suffering woman. Not once in all the years had she complained to an outsider. But her flight was a confession. The stress of her feeling overflowed into words bitter and stinging.
“You’ve got your revenge, Rowan McCoy. If I treated you shabbily you can say ‘I told you so’ now. They used to say I was too proud. Maybe I was. Well, I’ve been paid for it a thousand times. I’ve got mighty little to be proud of to-day.”
“Norma!” he pleaded in a low voice.
With the instinct of one who bites on an ulcerated tooth to accent the pain, she drew up a loose sleeve and showed him blue-and-yellow bruises.
“Look!” she ordered in an ecstasy of self-contempt. “I’ve hidden this sort of thing for years—and worse—a hundred times worse.”
“The hound!” His strong, clenched teeth smothered the word.
Instantly the mood of the woman changed. She would have none of his sympathy.
“I’m a fool,” she snapped. “I’ve made my bed. I’ll lie in it. This world wasn’t built for women, anyhow. Why should I complain?”
Never a talkative man, McCoy said nothing now.
They had reached the Fryingpan, and the road wound down beside the little river as it tumbled toward the plains over bowlders and around them. The trout were feeding, and occasionally one leaped for a fly, a flash of silver in the sunlight. Both of them recalled vividly the time they had last gone fishing here. They had taken a picnic lunch, and it had been on the way home that a quarrel had flashed between them about the attentions of Joe Tait to her. That night she had eloped.
The woman noticed that McCoy was not wearing to-day the broad-rimmed white felt hat and the wrinkled corduroys that were so much an expression of his personality. He was in a new, dark suit, new shoes, and an up-to-date straw hat. The suitcase that jostled her shabby telescope valise would have done credit to a Chicago travelling salesman.
“You’re going to take the train,” she suggested.
“To Cheyenne,” he answered.
“Why, I’m going to Laramie, if——”
She cut her sentence short. It was not to be presumed that he cared where she was going. Moreover, she could not finish without telling more than she wanted to. But McCoy guessed the condition. She would go if she could borrow at Wagon Wheel the money for a ticket.
They drove into the county seat long before train time.
“Where shall I take you?” he asked.
“To Moody’s, if you will.”
He helped her from the car and carried the valise into the store. Moody was in the cubby-hole that had been cut off from the store for an office. Rowan hailed him cheerfully.
“Look here, Trent. What’s the best price you can give me for those hides?” He walked toward the storekeeper and bargained with him audibly, but he found time to slip in an undertone: “If Mrs. Tait wants any money, give it to her. I’ll be responsible. But don’t tell her I said so.”
Moody grinned dubiously. He was a little embarrassed and not a little curious. “All right, Mac. Whatever you say.”
As Rowan went out of the office Norma timidly entered. Moody was a tight, hard little man, and she did not expect him to let her have the money. If he refused she did not know what she would do.
McCoy strolled down to the station to inquire about the lower he had reserved in the Pullman.
“You’re in luck, Mac,” the station agent told him. “Travel is heavy. There isn’t another berth left—not even an upper. You got the last.”
“Then I’m out of luck, Tim,” smiled the cattleman. “A lady from our part of the country is going to Laramie. Give her my berth, but don’t let her know I had reserved it. The lady is Mrs. Tait.”
A quarter of an hour later Norma Tait, not yet fully recovered from her surprise at the ease with which she had acquired the small roll of bills now in her pocketbook, learned from the station agent that there was one sleeper berth left. She exchanged three dollars for the ticket, and sat down to wait until the Limited arrived. It was a nervous hour she spent before her train drew in, for at any moment her husband might arrive to make trouble. That she saw nothing more of Rowan McCoy before the Limited reached Wagon Wheel was a relief. Tait had always been jealous of him, and would, she knew, jump to the wrong conclusion if he saw them ready to leave together. At the first chance she vanished into the Pullman.
Just as the conductor shouted his “All aboard!” a big, rawboned man galloped up to the station and flung himself from the saddle. He caught sight of McCoy standing by the last sleeper.
“What have you done with my wife?” he roared.
The train began to move. McCoy climbed to the step and looked down contemptuously at the furious man. “Try not to be a fool, Tait,” he advised.
The man running beside the train answered the spirit of the words rather than the letter. “You’re a liar. She’s in that car. You’re running away with her. You sneak, I’m going in to see.”
He caught at the railing to swing himself up.
The cattleman wasted no words. His left fist doubled, shot forward a scant six inches, collided with the heavy chin of Tait. The big sheepman’s head snapped back, and he went down heavily like a sack of meal.