'Me--Smith'

“THAT LOOK IN YOUR EYES—THAT LOOK AS IF YOU HADN’T NOTHIN’ TO HIDE—IS IT TRUE?” Page 59

“ME-SMITH”

BY

CAROLINE LOCKHART

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

GAYLE HOSKINS

NEW YORK

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1911

By J. B. Lippincott Company

Published February 15, 1911

Second printing, February 25, 1911

Third printing, March 5, 1911

Fourth printing, March 20, 1911

Fifth Printing, June 5, 1911

Sixth Printing, July 1, 1911

Seventh Printing, August 17, 1911

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“ME—SMITH”

I

“ME—SMITH”

A man on a tired gray horse reined in where a dim cattle-trail dropped into a gulch, and looked behind him. Nothing was in sight. He half closed his eyes and searched the horizon. No, there was nothing—just the same old sand and sage-brush, hills, more sand and sage-brush, and then to the west and north the spur of the Rockies, whose jagged peaks were white with a fresh fall of snow. The wind was chill. He shivered, and looked to the eastward. For the last few hours he had felt snow in the air, and now he could see it in the dim, gray mist—still far off, but creeping toward him.

For the thousandth time, he wondered where he was. He knew vaguely that he was “over the line”—that Montana was behind him—but he was riding an unfamiliar range, and the peaks and hills which are the guide-boards of the West meant nothing to him. So far as he knew, he was the only human being within a hundred miles. His lips drew back in a half-grin and exposed a row of upper teeth unusually white and slightly protruding. He was thinking of the meeting with the last person to whom he had spoken within twenty-four hours. He closed one eye and looked up at the sun. Yes, it was just about the same time yesterday that a dude from the English ranch, a dude in knee breeches and shiny-topped riding boots, had galloped confidently toward him. He had dismounted and pretended to be cinching his saddle. When the dude was close enough Smith had thrown down on him with his gun.

“Feller,” he had said, “I guess I’ll have to trade horses with you. And fall off quick, for I’m in kind of a hurry.”

The grin widened as he thought of the dude’s surprised eyes and the dude’s face as he dropped out of the saddle without a word. Smith had stood his victim with his hands above his head while he pulled the saddle from his horse and threw it upon his own. The dude rode a saddle with a double cinch, and the fact had awakened in the Westerner a kind of interest. He had even felt a certain friendliness for the man he was robbing.

“Feller,” he had asked, “do you come from the Mañana country?”

“From Chepstow, Monmouth County, Wales,” the dude had replied, in a shaking voice.

“Where did you get that double-rigged saddle, then?”

“Texas.”

The answer had pleased Smith.

“You ain’t losin’ none on this deal,” he had then volunteered. “This horse that you just traded for is a looker when he is rested, and he can run like hell. You can go your pile on him. Just burn out that lazy S brand and run on your own. You can hold him easy, then. I like a feller that rides a double-rigged saddle in a single-rigged country. S’long, and keep your hands up till I’m out of range.”

“Thank you,” the dude had replied feebly.

When Smith had ridden for a half a mile he had turned to look behind him. The dude was still standing with his hands high above his head.

“I wonder if he’s there yet?” The man on horseback grinned.

He reached in the pocket of his mackinaw coat and took out a handful of sugar.

“You can travel longer on it nor anything,” he muttered.

He congratulated himself that he had filled his pocket from the booze-clerk’s sugar-bowl before the mix came. The act was characteristic of him, as was the forethought which had sent him to the door to pick the best saddle-horse at the hitching-post, before the lead began to fly.

The man suddenly realized that the mist in the east was denser, and spreading. He jabbed the spurs into his horse and sent the jaded animal sliding on its fetlocks down the steep and rocky trail that led into the dry bed of a creek which in the spring flowed bank high. In the bottom he pulled his horse to its haunches and leaned from his saddle to look at a foot-print in a little patch of smooth sand no larger than his two hands. The print had been made by a moccasined foot, and recently; otherwise the wind would have wiped it out.

He threw his leg over the cantle of the saddle and stepped softly to the ground. Dropping the reins, he looked up and down the gulch. Then he drew his rifle from the scabbard and began to hunt for more tracks. As he searched, his movements were no longer those of a white man. His pantomime, stealthy, cautious, was the pantomime of the Indian. He crept up the gulch to a point where it turned sharply. His stealth became the stealth of the coyote. In spite of the leather soles and exaggerated high heels of the boots he wore his movements were absolutely noiseless.

An Indian of middle age, in blue overalls, moccasins, a limp felt hat coming far down over his braided hair, a gaily striped blanket drawn about his shoulders, stood in an attitude of listening, carelessly holding a cheap, single-barrelled shotgun. He had heard the horse sliding down the trail and was waiting for it to appear on the bench above.

The stranger took in the details of the Indian’s costume, but his eye rested longest upon the gay blanket. He might need a blanket with that snow in the air. It looked like a good blanket. It seemed to be thick and was undoubtedly warm.

The Indian saw him the instant he rose from his hiding-place behind a huge sage-brush. Startled, the red man instinctively half raised his gun. The stranger gave the sign of attention, then, touching his breast and lifting his hand slightly, told him in the sign language used by all tribes that “his heart was right”—he was a friend.

The Indian hesitated and lowered his gun, but did not advance. The stranger then asked him where he would find the nearest house, and whether it was that of a white or a red man. In swift pantomime, the Indian told him that the nearest house was the home of a “full-blood,” a woman, a fat woman, who lived five miles to the southeast, in a log cabin, on running water.

Before he turned to go, the stranger again touched his breast and raised his hand above his heart to reiterate his friendship. He took a half-dozen steps, then whirled on his heel. As he did so, he brought his rifle on a line with the Indian’s back, which was toward him. Simultaneously with the report, the Indian fell on his back on the side of the gulch. He drew up his leg, and the stranger, thinking he had raised it for a gun-rest, riddled him with bullets.

The white man’s bright blue eyes gleamed; the pupils were like pin-points. The grin which disclosed his protruding teeth was like the snarl of a dog before it snaps. The expression of the man’s face was that of animal ferocity, pure and simple. He edged up cautiously, but there was no further movement from the Indian. He had been dead when he fell. The white man gave a short laugh when he realized that the raising of the leg had been only a muscular contraction. To save the blanket from the blood which was soiling it, he tore it from the limp, unresisting shoulders, and rubbed it in the dirt to obliterate the stain. He cursed when he saw that a bullet had torn in it two jagged, tell-tale holes.

He glanced at the Indian’s moccasins, then, stooping, ripped one off. He examined it with interest. It was a Cree moccasin. The Indian was far from home. He examined the centre seam: yes, it was sewed with deer-sinew.

“The Crees can tan to beat the world,” he muttered, “but I hates the shape of the Cree moccasin. The Piegans make better.” He tossed it from him contemptuously and picked up the shotgun.

“No good.” He threw it down and straightened the Indian’s head with the toe of his boot. “I despises to lie cramped up, myself.”

Returning to his horse, he removed his saddle, and folded the Indian’s blanket inside of his own. Then he recinched his saddle, and turned his horse’s head to the southeast, where “the full-blood—the woman, the fat woman—lived in a log cabin by running water.”

He glanced over his shoulder as he spurred his horse to a gallop.

“I’m a killer, me—Smith,” he said, and grinned.

II

ON THE ALKALI HILL

There was at least an hour and a half of daylight left when Smith struck a wagon-road. He looked each way doubtfully. The woman’s house was quite as likely to be to the right as to the left; there was no way of telling. While he hesitated, his horse lifted its ears. Smith also thought he heard voices. Swinging his horse to the right, he rode to the edge of the bench where the road made a steep and sudden drop.

At the bottom of the hill he saw a driver on the spring-seat of a round-up wagon urging two lean-necked and narrow-chested horses up the hill. They were smooth-shod, and, the weight of the wagon being out of all proportion to their strength, they fell often in their futile struggles. At the side of the road near the top of the hill the water oozed from an alkali spring, which kept the road perpetually muddy. The horses were straining every nerve and muscle, their eyes bulging and nostrils distended, and still the driver, loudmouthed and vacuously profane, lashed them mercilessly with the stinging thongs of his leather whip. Smith, from the top of the hill, watched him with a sneer on his face.

“He drives like a Missourian,” he muttered.

He could have helped the troubled driver, knowing perfectly well what to do, but it would have entailed an effort which he did not care to make. It was nothing to him whether the round-up wagon got up the hill that night—or never.

Smith thought the driver was alone until he began to back the team to rush the hill once more. Then he heard angry exclamations coming from the rear of the wagon—exclamations which sounded not unlike the buzzing of an enraged bumble-bee. He stretched his neck and saw that which suggested an overgrown hoop-snake rolling down the hill. At the bottom a little mud-coated man stood up. The part of his face that was visible above his beard was pale with anger. His brown eyes gleamed behind mud-splashed spectacles.

“Oscar Tubbs,” he demanded, “why did you not tell me that you were about to back the wagon?”

“I would have did it if I had knowed myself that the team were goin’ to back,” replied Tubbs, in the conciliatory tone of one who addresses the man who pays him his wages.

The man in spectacles groaned. “Three inexcusable errors in one sentence. Oscar Tubbs, you are hopeless!”

“Yep,” replied that person resignedly; “nobody never could learn me nothin’. Onct I knowed——”

“Stop! We have no time for a reminiscence. Have you any reason to believe that we can get up this hill to-night?”

“No chanst of it. These buzzard-heads has drawed every poun’ they kin pull. But I has some reason to believe that if you don’t hist your hoofs out’n that mud-hole, you’ll bog down. You’re up to your pant-leg now. Onct I knowed——”

The little man threw out his hand in a restraining gesture, and Tubbs, foiled again, closed his lips and watched his employer stand back on one leg while he pulled the other out of the mud with a long, sucking sound.

“What for an outfit is that, anyhow?” mused Smith, watching the proceedings with some interest. “He looks like one of them bug-hunters. He’s got a pair of shoulders on him like a drink of water, and his legs look like the runnin’-gears of a katydid.”

So intently were they all engaged in watching the man’s struggles that no one observed a girl on a galloping horse until she was almost upon them. She sat her sturdy, spirited pony like a cowboy. She was about sixteen, with a suggestion of boyishness in her appearance. Her brown hair, worn in a single braid, was bleached to a lighter shade on top, as if she rode always with bared head. Her eyes were gray, in curious contrast to a tawny skin. She was slight to scrawniness, and, one might have thought, insufficiently clad for the time of year.

“Bogged down, pardner?” she inquired in a friendly voice, as she rode up behind and drew rein. “I’ve been in that soap-hole myself. Here, ketch to my pommel, and I’ll snake you out.”

Smiling dubiously he gripped the pommel. The pony had sunk to its knees, and as it leaped to free itself the little man’s legs fairly snapped in the air.

“I thank you, Miss,” he said, removing his plaid travelling cap as he dropped on solid ground. “That was really quite an adventure.”

“This mud is like grease,” said the girl.

“Onct I knowed some mud——” began the driver, but the little man, ignoring him, said:

“We are in a dilemma, Miss. Our horses seem unable to pull our wagon up the hill. Night is almost upon us, and our next camping spot is several miles beyond.”

“This is the worst grade in the country,” replied the girl. “A team that can haul a load up here can go anywhere. What’s the matter with that fellow up there? Why don’t he help?”—pointing to Smith.

“He has made no offer of assistance.”

“He must be some Scissor-Bill from Missouri. They all act like that when they first come out.”

“Onct some Missourians I knowed——”

“Oscar Tubbs, if you attempt to relate another reminiscence while in my employ, I shall make a deduction from your wages. I warn you—I warn you in the presence of this witness. My overwrought nerves can endure no more. Between your inexpiable English and your inopportune reminiscences, I am a nervous wreck!” The little man’s voice ended on high C.

“All right, Doc, suit yourself,” replied Tubbs, temporarily subdued.

“And in Heaven’s name, I entreat, I implore, do not call me ‘Doc’!”

“Sorry I spoke, Cap.”

The little man threw up both hands in exasperation.

“Say, Mister,” said the girl curtly to Tubbs, “if you’ll take that hundred and seventy pounds of yourn off the wagon and get some rocks and block the wheels, I guess my cayuse can help some.” As she spoke, she began uncoiling the rawhide riata which was tied to her saddle.

“I appreciate the kindness of your intentions, Miss, but I cannot permit you to put yourself in peril.” The little man was watching her preparations with troubled eyes.

“No peril at all. It’s easy. Croppy can pull like the devil. Wait till you see him lay down on the rope. That yap up there at the top of the hill could have done this for you long ago. Here, Windy”—addressing Tubbs—“tie this rope to the X, and make a knot that will hold.”

“SHE’S A GAME KID, ALL RIGHT,” SAID SMITH TO HIMSELF AT THE TOP OF THE HILL.

The girl’s words and manner inspired confidence. Interest and relief were in the face of the little man standing at the side of the road.

“Now, Windy, hand me the rope. I’ll take three turns around my saddle-horn, and when I say ’go’ you see that your team get down in their collars.”

“She’s a game kid, all right,” said Smith to himself at the top of the hill.

When the sorrel pony at the head of the team felt the rope grow taut on the saddle-horn, it lay down to its work. The grit and muscle of a dozen horses seemed concentrated in the little cayuse. It pulled until every vein and cord in its body appeared to stand out beneath its skin. It lay down on the rope until its chest almost touched the ground. There was a look of determination that was almost human in its bright, excited eyes as it strained and struggled on the slippery hillside with no word of urging from the girl. She was standing in one stirrup, one hand on the cantle, the other on the pommel, watching everything with keen eyes. She issued orders to Tubbs like a general, telling him when to block the wheels, when to urge the exhausted team to greater efforts, when to relax. Nothing escaped her. She and the little sorrel knew their work. As the man at the roadside watched the gallant little brute struggle, literally inch by inch, up the terrible grade he felt himself choking with excitement and making inarticulate sounds. At last the rear wheels of the wagon lurched over the hill and stood on level ground, while the horses, with spreading legs and heaving sides, gasped for breath.

“Awful tired, ain’t you, Mister?” the girl asked dryly, of the stranger on horseback, as she recoiled her rope with supple wrist and tied it again to the saddle by the buckskin thongs.

“Plumb worn to a frazzle,” Smith replied with cool impudence, as he looked her over in much the same manner as he would have eyed a heifer on the range. “I was whipped for working when I was a boy, and I’ve always remembered.”

“It must be quite a ride—from the brush back there in Missouri where you was drug up.”

“I ranges on the Sundown slope,” he replied shortly.

“They have sheep-camps over there, then?”

Again the slurring insinuation pricked him.

“Oh, I can twist a rope and ride a horse fast enough to keep warm.”

“So?”—the inflection was tantalizing. “Was that horse gentled for your grandmother?”

He eyed her angrily, but checked the reply on his tongue.

“Say, girl, can you tell me where I can find that fat Injun woman’s tepee who lives around here?”

“You mean my mother?”

He looked at her with new interest.

“Does she live in a log cabin on a crick?”

“She did about an hour ago.”

“Is your mother a widder?”

“Lookin’ for widders?”

“I likes widders. It happens frequent that widders are sociable inclined—especially if they are hard up,” he added insolently.

“Oh, you’re ridin’ the grub-line?” Her insolence equalled his own.

“Not yet;” and he took from his pocket a thick roll of banknotes.

“Blood money? Some sheep-herder’s month’s pay, I guess.”

“You’re a good guesser.”

“Not very—you’re easy.”

The girl’s dislike for Smith was as unreasoning and violent as was her liking for the excitable little man whom she had helped up the hill, and whose wagon was now rumbling close at her horse’s heels.

They all travelled together in silence until, after a mile and a half on the flat, the road sloped gradually toward a creek shadowed by willows. On the opposite side of the creek were a ranch-house, stables, and corrals, the extent of which brought a glint of surprise to Smith’s eyes.

“That’s where the widder lives who might be sociable inclined if she was hard up,” said the girl, with a sneer which made Smith’s fingers itch to choke her. “Couldn’t coax you to stop, could I?”

“I aims to stay,” Smith replied coolly.

“Sure—it won’t cost you nothin’.”

The girl waited for the wagon, and, with a change of manner in marked contrast to her impudent attitude toward Smith, invited the little man to spend the night at the ranch.

“We should not be intruders?” he asked doubtfully.

“You won’t feel lonesome,” she answered with a laugh. “We keep a kind of free hotel.”

“Colonel, I cakalate we better lay over here,” broke in Tubbs.

His employer winced at this new title, but nodded assent; so they all forded the shallow stream and entered the dooryard together.

“Mother!” called the girl.

One of the heavy plank doors of the long log-house opened, and a short woman, large-hipped, full-busted—in appearance a typical blanket squaw—stood in the doorway. Her thick hair was braided Indian fashion, her fingers adorned with many rings. The wide girdle about her waist was studded with brass nail-heads, while gaily-beaded moccasins covered her short, broad feet. Her eyes were soft and luminous, like an animal’s when it is content; but there was savage passion too in their dark depths.

“This is my mother,” said the girl briefly. “I am Susie MacDonald.”

“My name is Peter McArthur, madam.”

The little man concealed his surprise as best he could, and bowed.

The girl, quick to note his puzzled expression, explained laconically:

“I’m a breed. My father was a white man. You’re on the reservation when you cross the crick.”

Recovering himself, the stranger said politely:

“Ah, MacDonald—that good Scotch name is a very familiar one to me. I had an uncle——”

“I go show dem where to turn de horses,” interrupted the Indian woman, to whom the conversation was uninteresting. So, without ceremony, she padded away in her moccasins, drawing her blanket squaw-fashion across her face as she waddled down the path.

At the mission the woman had obtained the rudiments of an education. There, too, she had learned to cut and make a dress, after a crude, laborious fashion, and had acquired the ways of the white people’s housekeeping. She was noted for the acumen which she displayed in disposing of the crop from her extensive hay-ranch to the neighboring white cattlemen; and MacDonald, the big, silent Scotch MacDonald who had come down from the north country and married her before the reservation priest, was given the credit for having instilled into her some of his own shrewdness and thrift.

In the corral the Indian woman came upon Smith. He turned his head slowly and looked at her. For a second, two, three seconds, or more, they looked into each other’s eyes. His gaze was confident, masterful, compelling; hers was wondering, until finally she dropped her eyes in the submissive, modest, half-shy way of Indian women.

Smith moistened his short upper lip with the tip of his tongue, while the shadow of a smile lurked at the corner of his mouth. He turned to his saddle, again, and without speaking, she watched him until he had gone into the barn. His saddle lay on the ground, half covering his blankets. Something in this heap caught the woman’s eyes and held them. Swooping forward, she caught a protruding corner between her thumb and finger and pulled a gay, striped blanket from the rest. Lifting it to her nose, she smelled it. Smith saw the act as he came out of the door, but there was neither consternation nor fear in his face. Smith knew Indian women.

III

THE EMPTY CHAIR

Peter McArthur came into the big living-room of the ranch-house bearing tenderly in his arms a long brown sack. He set it upon a chair, and, as he patted it affectionately, he said to the Indian woman in explanation:

“These are some specimens which I have been fortunate enough to find in a limestone formation in the country through which we have just passed. No doubt you will be amused, madam, but the wealth of Crœsus could not buy from me the contents of this canvas sack.”

“I broke a horse for that son-of-a-gun onct. He owes me a dollar and six bits for the job yet,” remarked Tubbs.

The fire of enthusiasm died in McArthur’s eyes as they rested upon his man.

“What for a prospect do you aim to open up in a limestone formation?”

Smith, tipped on the rear legs of his chair, with his head resting comfortably against the unbleached muslin sheeting which lined the walls, winked at Tubbs as he asked the question.

“‘What for a prospect’?” repeated McArthur.

“Yes, ‘prospect’—that’s what I said. You say you’ve got your war-bag full of spec’mens.”

McArthur laughed heartily.

“Ah, my dear sir, I understand. You are referring to mines—to mineral specimens. These are the specimens of which I am speaking.”

Opening the sack, McArthur held up for inspection what looked to be a lump of dried mud.

“This is a magnificent specimen of the crustacean period,” he declared.

The Indian woman looked from the prized object to his animated face; then, with puzzled eyes, she looked at Smith, who touched his forehead with his finger, making a spiral, upward gesture which in the sign language says “crazy.”

The woman promptly gathered up the rag rug she was braiding and moved to a bench in the farthermost corner of the room.

“I can get you a wagon-load of chunks like that.”

“Oh, my dear sir——”

“Smith’s my name.”

“But, Mr. Smith——”

“I trusts no man that ’Misters’ me,” Smith scowled. “Every time I’ve ever been beat in a deal, it’s been by some feller that’s called me ’Mister.’ Jest Smith suits me better.”

“Certainly, if you prefer,” amicably replied McArthur, although unenlightened by the explanation.

He replaced his specimen and tied the sack, convinced that it would be useless to explain to this person that fossils like this were not found by the wagon-load; that perhaps in the entire world there was not one in which the branchiocardiac grooves were so clearly defined, in which the emostigite and the ambulatory legs were so perfectly preserved.

He seemed a singular person, this Smith. McArthur was not sure that he fancied him.

“Say, Guv’ner, what business do you follow, anyhow?” Tubbs asked the question in the tone of one who really wanted to get at the bottom of a matter which had troubled him. “Air you a bug-hunter by trade, or what? I’ve hauled you around fer more’n a month now, and ain’t figgered it out what you’re after. We’ve dug up ant-hills and busted open most of the rocks between here and the North Fork of Powder River, but I’ve never seen you git anything yet that anybuddy’d want.”

In the beginning of their tour, Tubbs’s questions and caustic comment would have given McArthur offense, but a longer acquaintance had taught him that none was intended; that his words were merely those of a man entirely without knowledge upon any subject save those which had come under his direct observation. While Tubbs frequently exasperated him beyond expression, he found at the same time a certain fascination in the man’s incredible ignorance. In many respects his mind was like that of a child, and his horizon as narrow as McArthur’s own, though his companion did not suspect it. The little scientist saw life from the viewpoint of a small college and a New England village; Tubbs knew only the sage-brush plains.

McArthur now replied dryly, but without irritation:

“My real trade—‘job,’ if you prefer—is anthropology. Strictly speaking, I might, I think, be called an anthropologist.”

“Gawd, feller!” ejaculated Smith in mock dismay. “Don’t tip your hand like that. I’m a killer myself, but I plays a lone game. I opens up to no man or woman livin’.”

Tubbs looked slightly ashamed of his employer.

“Pardon me?”

“I say, never give nobody the cinch on you. Many a good man’s tongue has hung him.”

McArthur studied Smith’s unsmiling face in perplexity, not at all sure that he was not in earnest.

They sat in silence after this, even Tubbs being too hungry to indulge in reminiscence.

The odor of frying steak filled the room, and the warmth from the round sheet-iron stove gave Smith, in particular, a delicious sense of comfort. He felt as a cat on a comfortable cushion must feel after days and nights of prowling for food and shelter. The other two men, occupied with their own thoughts, closed their eyes; but not so Smith. Nothing, to the smallest detail, escaped him. He appraised everything with as perfect an appreciation of its value as an auctioneer.

Through the dining-room door which opened into the kitchen, he could see the kitchen range—a big one—the largest made for private houses. Smith liked that. He liked things on a big scale. Besides, it denoted generosity, and he had come to regard a woman’s kitchen as an index to her character. He distinctly approved of the big meat-platter upon which the Chinese cook was piling steak. He eyed the mongrel dog lying at the Indian woman’s feet, and noted that its sides were distended with food. He was prejudiced against, suspicious of, a woman who kept lean dogs.

In the same impersonal way in which he eyed her belongings, he looked at the woman who owned it all. She was far too stout to please his taste, but he liked her square shoulders and the thickness of them; also her hair, which was long for an Indian woman’s. She was too short in the body. He wondered if she rode. He had a peculiar aversion for women short in the body who rode on horseback. This woman could love—all Indian women can do that, as Smith well knew—love to the end, faithfully, like dogs.

In the general analysis of his surroundings, Smith looked at Tubbs, openly sneering as he eyed him. He was like a sheep-dog that never had been trained. And McArthur? Innocent as a yearling calf, and honest as some sky-pilots.

“Glub’s piled!” yelled the cook from the kitchen door. “Come an’ git it.”

Tubbs all but fell off his chair.

At the back door the cook hammered on a huge iron triangle with a poker, in response to which sound a motley half-dozen men filed from a nearby bunk-house at a gait very nearly resembling a trot.

The long dining-table was covered with a red table-cloth, and at each end piles of bread and fried steak rose like monuments. At each place there was a platter, and beside it a steel knife, a fork, and a tin spoon.

The bunk-house crowd wasted no time in ceremony. Poising their forks above the meat-platter in a candid search for the most desirable piece, they alternately stabbed chunks of steak and bread.

Their platters once loaded with a generous sample of all the food in sight, they fell upon it with unconcealed relish. Eating, McArthur observed, was a business; there was no time for the amenities of social intercourse until the first pangs of hunger were appeased. The Chinese cook, too, interested him as he watched him shuffling over the hewn plank floor in his straw sandals. A very different type, this swaggering Celestial, from the furtive-eyed Chinamen of the east. His tightly coiled cue was as smooth and shining as a king-snake, his loose blouse was immaculate, and the flippant voice in which he demanded in each person’s ear, “Coffee? Milk?” was like a challenge. Whatever the individual’s choice might be, he got it in a torrent in his stone-china cup.

There was no attempt at conversation, and only the clatter and rattle of knives, forks, and dishes was heard until a laugh from an adjoining room broke the silence—a laugh that was mirthless, shrill, and horrible.

McArthur sent a startled glance of inquiry about the table. The laugh was repeated, and the sound was even more wild and maniacal. The little man was shocked at the grin which he noted upon each face.

“She ought to take a feather and ile her voice,” observed a guest known as “Meeteetse Ed.”

McArthur could not resist saying indignantly:

“The unfortunate are to be pitied, my dear sir.”

“This is jest a mild spasm she’s havin’ now. You ought to hear her when she’s warmed up.”

McArthur was about to administer a sharper rebuke when the door opened and Susie came out.

“How’s that for a screech?” she demanded triumphantly.

“You’d sure make a bunch of coyotes take fer home,” Meeteetse Ed replied flatteringly.

“You have come in my way not once or twice, but thrice; and now you die! Ha! Ha!” Reaching for a spoon, Susie stabbed Meeteetse Ed on the second china button of his flannel shirt.

“I’d rather die than have you laff in my ear like that,” declared Meeteetse.

“Next time I’m goin’ to learn a comical piece.”

“Any of ’em’s comical enough,” replied a husky voice from the far end of the table. “I broke somethin’ inside of me laffin’ at that one about your dyin’ child.”

“I don’t care,” Susie answered, unabashed by criticism. “Teacher says I’ve got quite a strain of pathos in me.”

“You ought to do somethin’ for it,” suggested a new voice. “Why don’t you bile up some Oregon grape-root? That’ll take most anything out of your blood.”

“Or go to Warm Springs and get your head examined.” This voice was Smith’s.

“Could they help you any?” The girl’s eyes narrowed and there was nothing of the previous good-natured banter in her shrill tones.

Smith flushed under the shout of mocking laughter which followed. He tried to join in it, but the glitter of his blue eyes betrayed his anger.

The incident sobered the table-full, and silence fell once more, until McArthur, feeling that an effort toward conversation was a duty he owed his hostess, cleared his throat and inquired pleasantly:

“Have any fragments ever been found in that red formation which I observed to the left of us, which would indicate that this vicinity was once the home of the mammoth dinosaur?”

Too late he realized that the question was ill-advised. As might be expected, it was Tubbs who broke the awkward silence.

“Didn’t look to me, as I rid along, that it ever were the home of anybuddy. A homestid’s no good if you can’t git water on it.”

McArthur hesitated, then explained: “The dinosaur was a prehistoric reptile,” adding modestly, “I once had the pleasure of helping to restore an armored dinosaur.”

“If ever I gits a rope on one of them things, I’ll box him up and ship him on to you,” said Tubbs generously. Then he inquired as an afterthought: “Would he snap or chaw me up a-tall?”

“What’s a prehysteric reptile?” interrupted Susie.

“This particular reptile was a big snake, with feet, that lived here when this country was a marsh,” McArthur explained simply, for Susie’s benefit.

The guests exchanged incredulous glances, but it was Meeteetse Ed who laughed explosively and said:

“Why, Mister, they ain’t been a sixteenth of an inch of standin’ water on this hull reserve in twenty year.”

“Better haul in your horns, feller, when you’re talkin’ to a real prairie man.” Smith’s contemptuous tone nettled McArthur, but Susie retorted for him.

“Feller,” mocked Susie, “looks like you’re mixed. You mean when he’s talkin’ to a Yellow-back. No real prairie man packs a chip on his shoulder all the time. That buttermilk you was raised on back there in Missoury has soured you some.”

Again an angry flush betrayed Smith’s feeling.

“A Yellow-back,” Susie explained with gusto in response to McArthur’s puzzled look, “is one of these ducks that reads books with buckskin-colored covers, until he gets to thinkin’ that he’s a Bad Man himself. This here country is all tunnelled over with the graves of Yellow-backs what couldn’t make their bluffs stick; fellers that just knew enough to start rows and couldn’t see ’em through.”

“Generally,” said Smith evenly, as he stared unblinkingly into Susie’s eyes, “when I starts rows, I sees ’em through.”

“And any time,” Susie answered, staring back at him, “that you start a row on this ranch, you’ve got to see it through.”

The grub-liners raised their eyes in surprise, for there was unmistakable ill-feeling in her voice. It was unlike her, this antagonistic attitude toward a stranger, for, as they all knew, her hospitality was unlimited, and every passer-by whose horse fed at the big hayrack was regarded and treated as a welcome friend.

There was rarely malice behind the sharp personalities which she flung at random about the table. Knowing no social distinctions, Susie was no respecter of persons. She chaffed and flouted the man who wintered a thousand head of cattle with the same impartiality with which she gibed his blushing cowpuncher. Her good-nature was a byword, as were her generosity and boyish daring. Susie MacDonald was a local celebrity in her way, and on the big hay-ranch her lightest word was law.

But the mere presence of this new-comer seemed to fill her with resentment, making of her an irrepressible young shrew who gloated openly in his angry confusion.

“Speakin’ of Yellow-backs,” said Meeteetse, with the candid intent of being tactful, “reminds me of a song a pardner of mine wrote up about ’em once. Comical? T’—t’—t’—!” He wagged his head as if he had no words in which to describe its incomparable humor. “He had another song that was a reg’lar tear-starter: ‘Whar the Silver Colorady Wends Its Way.’ Ever hear it? It’s about a feller that buried his wife by the silver Colorady, and turned outlaw. This pardner of mine used to beller every time he sung it. He cried like he was a Mormon, and he hadn’t no more wife than a jack rabbit.”

“Some songs is touchin’,” agreed Arkansaw Red.

“This was,” declared Meeteetse. “How she faded day by day, till a pale, white corp’ she lay! If I hadn’t got this cold on me——”

“I hate to see you sufferin’, Meeteetse, but if it keeps you from warblin’——”

He ignored Susie’s implication, and went on serenely:

“Looks like it’s settled on me for life, and it all comes of tryin’ not to be a hog.”

“I hope it’ll be a lesson to you,” said Susie soberly.

“That there Bar C cowpuncher, Babe, comes over the other night, and, the bunk-house bein’ full, I offers him half my blankets. I never put in such a night since I froze to death on South Pass. For fair, I’d ruther sleep with a two-year-ole steer—couldn’t kick no worse than that Babe. Why them blankets was in the air more’n half the time, with him pullin’ his way, and me snatchin’ of ’em back. Finally I gits a corner of a soogan in my teeth, and that way I manages a little sleep. I vows I’d ruther be a hog and git a night’s rest than take in such a turrible bed-feller as him.”

Apropos of the restless Babe, one James Padden observed: “They say he’s licked more’n half the Bar C outfit.”

“Lick ’em!” exclaimed Meeteetse, with enthusiasm. “Why, he could eat ’em! He jest tapped me an easy one and nigh busted my jaw. If he ever reely hit you with that fist of his’n, it ud sink in up to the elbow. I ast him once: ’Babe,’ I says, ‘how big are you anyhow?’ ‘Big?’ he says surprised. ‘I ain’t big. I’m the runt of the family. Pa was thirty-two inches between the eyes, and they fed him with a shovel.’”

Susie giggled at some thought, and then inquired:

“Did anybody ever see that horse he’s huntin’? He says it’s a two-year-old filly that he thinks the world of. It’s brown, with a star in its forehead, and one hip is knocked down. He never hunts anywhere except on that road past the school-house, and he stops at the pump each way—goin’ and comin’. I never saw anybody with such a thirst. He looks in the window while he’s drinkin’, and swallows a gallon of water at a time, and don’t know it.”

“Love is a turrible disease.” Tubbs spoke with the emphasis of conviction. “It’s worse’n lump-jaw er blackleg. It’s dum nigh as bad as glanders. It’s ketchin’, too, and I holds that anybody that’s got it bad ought to be dipped and quarantined. I knowed a feller over in Judith Basin what suffered agonies with it for two months, then shot hisself. There was seven of ’em tyin’ their horses to the same Schoolmarm’s hitchin’-post.”

“Take a long-geared Schoolmarm in a woolly Tam-o’-shanter, and she’s a reg’lar storm-centre,” vouchsafed the husky voice of “Banjo” Johnson.

“They is! They is!” declared Meeteetse, with more feeling than the occasion seemed to warrant.

The knob of a door adjoining the dining-room turned, and the grub-liners straightened in their chairs. Susie’s eyes danced with mischief as she leaned toward Meeteetse and asked innocently:

“They is what?”

But with the opening of the door the voluble Meeteetse seemed to be stricken dumb.

As a young woman came out, Smith stared, and instinctively McArthur half rose from his chair. Believing his employer contemplated flight, Tubbs laid a restraining hand upon his coat-tail, while inadvertently he turned his knife in his mouth with painful results.

The young woman who seated herself in one of the two unoccupied chairs was not of the far West. Her complexion alone testified to this fact, for the fineness and whiteness of it were conspicuous in a country where the winter’s wind and burning suns of summer tan the skins of men and women alike until they resemble leather in color and in texture. Had this young woman possessed no other good feature, her markedly fine complexion alone would have saved her from plainness. But her thick brown hair, glossy, and growing prettily about her temples, was equally attractive to the men who had been used to seeing only the straight, black hair of the Indian women, and Susie’s sun-bleached pigtail, which, as Meeteetse took frequent occasion to remind her, looked like a hair-cinch. Her eyes, set rather too far apart for beauty, were round, with pupils which dilated until they all but covered the blue iris; the eyes of an emotional nature, an imaginative mind. Her other features, though delicate, were not exceptional, but the tout ensemble was such that her looks would have been considered above the average even in a country where pretty girls were plentiful. In her present surroundings, and by contrast with the womenfolk about her, she was regarded as the most beautiful of her sex. Her manner, reserved to the point of stiffness, and paralyzing, as it did, the glibbest masculine tongue among them, was also looked upon as the acme of perfection and all that was desirable in young ladyhood; each individual humbly admitting that while he never before had met a real lady, he knew one when he saw her.

The young woman returned McArthur’s bow with a friendly smile, his action having at once placed him as being “different.” Noting the fact, the grub-liners resolved not to be outdone in future in a mere matter of bows.

While nearly every arm was outstretched with an offer of food, Susie leaned forward and whispered ostentatiously behind her hand to Smith:

“Don’t you make any cracks. That’s the Schoolmarm.”

“I’ve been around the world some,” Smith replied curtly.

“The south side of Billings ain’t the world.”

It was only a random shot, as she did not know Billings or any other town save by hearsay, but it made a bull’s-eye. Susie knew it by the startled look which she surprised from him, and Smith could have throttled her as she snickered.

“Mister McArthur and Mister Tubbs, I’ll make you acquainted with Miss Marshall.”

With elaborate formality of tone and manner, Susie pointed at each individual with her fork while mentioning them by name.

“Miss Marshall,” McArthur murmured, again half rising.

“Much obliged to meet you,” said Tubbs heartily as, bowing in imitation of his employer, he caught the edge of his plate on the band of his trousers and upset it.

Everybody stopped eating during this important ceremony, and now all looked at Smith to see what form his acknowledgment of the coveted introduction to the Schoolmarm would take.

Smith in turn looked expectantly at Susie, who met his eyes with a mocking grin.

“Anything I can reach for you, Mister Smith?” she inquired. “Looks like you’re waitin’ for something.”

Smith’s face and the red table-cloth were much the same shade as he looked annihilation at the little half-breed imp.

Each time that Dora Marshall raised her eyes, they met those of Smith. There was nothing of impertinence in his stare; it was more of awe—a kind of fascinated wonder—and she found herself speculating as to who and what he was. He was not a regular “grub-liner,” she was sure of that, for he was as different in his way as McArthur. He had a personality, not exactly pleasant, but unique. Though he was not uncommonly tall, his shoulders were thick and broad, giving the impression of great strength. His jaw was square, but it evidenced brutality rather than determination. His nose, in contrast to the intelligence denoted by his high, broad forehead, was mediocre, inconsequential, the kind of a nose seldom seen on the person who achieves. The two features were those of the man who conceives big things, yet lacks the force to execute them.

His eyes were unpleasantly bloodshot, but whether from drink or the alkali dust of the desert, it was impossible to determine; and when Susie prodded him they had in them all the vicious meanness of an outlaw bronco. His expression then held nothing but sullen vindictiveness, while every trait of a surly nature was suggested by his voice and manner.

During the Schoolmarm’s covert study of him, he laughed unexpectedly at one of Meeteetse Ed’s sallies. The effect was little short of marvellous; it completely transformed him. An unlooked-for dimple deepened in one cheek, his eyes sparkled, his entire countenance radiated for a moment a kind of boyish good-nature which was indescribably winning. In the brief space, whatever virtues he possessed were as vividly depicted upon his face as were his unpleasant characteristics when he was displeased. So marked, indeed, was his changed expression, that Susie burst out with her usual candor as she eyed him:

“Mister, you ought to laugh all the time.”

Contributing but little toward the conversation, and that little chiefly in the nature of flings at Susie, Smith was yet the dominant figure at the table. While he antagonized, he interested, and although his insolence was no match for Susie’s self-assured impudence, he still impressed his individuality upon every person present.

He was studied by other eyes than Dora’s and Susie’s. Not one of the looks which he had given the former had escaped the Indian woman. With the Schoolmarm’s coming, she had seen herself ignored, and her face had grown as sullen as Smith’s own, while the smouldering glow in her dark eyes betrayed jealous resentment.

“Have a cookie?” urged Susie hospitably, thrusting a plate toward Tubbs. “Ling makes these ’specially for White Antelope.”

“No, thanks, I’ve et hearty,” declared Tubbs, while McArthur shuddered. “I’ve had thousands.”

“Why, where is White Antelope?” Susie looked in surprise at the vacant chair, and asked the question of her mother.

Involuntarily Smith’s eyes and those of the Indian woman met. He read correctly all that they contained, but he did not remove his own until her eyelids slowly dropped, and with a peculiar doggedness she drawled:

“He go way for l’il visit; ’bout two, t’ree sleeps maybe.”

IV

A SWAP IN SADDLE BLANKETS

“Madam,” said McArthur, intercepting the Indian woman the next morning while she was on her way from the spring with a heavy pail, “I cannot permit you to carry water when I am here to do it for you.”

In spite of her surprised protest, he gently took the bucket from her hand.

“Look at that dude,” said Smith contemptuously, viewing the incident through the living-room window. “Queerin’ hisself right along. No more sabe than a cotton-tail rabbit. That’s the worse thing he could do. Feller”—turning to Tubbs—“if you want to make a winnin’ with a woman, you never want to fetch and carry for her.”

“I knows it,” acquiesced Tubbs. “Onct I was a reg’lar doormat fer one, and I only got stomped on fer it.”

“I can wrangle Injuns to a fare-ye-well,” Smith continued. “Over on the Blackfoot I was the most notorious Injun wrangler that ever jumped up; and, feller, on the square, I never run an errant for one in my life.”

“It’s wrong,” agreed Tubbs.

“There’s that dude tryin’ to make a stand-in, and spilin’ his own game all the time by talkin’. You can’t say he talks, neither; he just opens his mouth and lets it say what it damn pleases. Is them real words he gets off, or does he make ’em up as he goes along?”

“Search me.”

“I’ll tip you off, feller: if ever you want to make a strong play at an Injun woman, you don’t want to shoot off your mouth none. Keep still and move around just so, and pretty soon she’ll throw you the sign. Did you ever notice a dog trottin’ down the street, passin’ everybody up till all to once it takes a sniff, turns around, and follers some feller off? That’s an Injun woman.”

“I never had no luck with squaws, and the likes o’ that,” Tubbs confessed. “They’re turrible hands to git off together and poke fun at you.”

As McArthur and the Indian woman came in from the kitchen, he was saying earnestly to her:

“I feel sure that here, madam, I should entirely recover my health. Besides, this locality seems to me such a fertile field for research that if you could possibly accommodate my man and me with board, you may not be conferring a favor only upon me, but indirectly, perhaps, upon the world of science. I have with me my own bath-tub and pneumatic mattress.”

Tubbs, seeing the Indian woman’s puzzled expression, explained:

“He means we’ll sleep ourselves if you will eat us.”

The woman nodded.

“Oh, you can stay. I no care.”

Smith frowned; but McArthur, much pleased by her assent, told Tubbs to saddle a horse at once, that he might lose no time in beginning his investigations.

“If it were my good fortune to unearth a cranium of the Homo primogenus, I should be the happiest man in the world,” declared McArthur, clasping his fingers in ecstasy at the thought of such unparalleled bliss.

“What did I tell you?” said Smith, accompanying Tubbs to the corral. “He’s tryin’ to win himself a home.”

“Looks that way,” Tubbs agreed. “These here bug-hunters is deep.”

The saddle blanket which Tubbs pulled from their wagon and threw upon the ground, with McArthur’s saddle, caught Smith’s eye instantly, because of the similarity in color and markings to that which he had folded so carefully inside his own. This was newer, it had no disfiguring holes, or black stain in the corner.

“What’s the use of takin’ chances?” he asked himself as he looked it over.

While Tubbs was catching the horse in the corral, Smith deftly exchanged blankets, and Tubbs, to whom most saddle blankets looked alike, did not detect the difference.

Upon returning to the house, Smith found the Indian woman wiping breakfast dishes for the cook. She came into the living-room when he beckoned to her, with the towel in her hand. Taking it from her, he wadded it up and threw it back into the kitchen.

“Don’t you know any better not to spoil a cook like that, woman?” he asked, smiling down upon her. “You never want to touch a dish for a cook. Row with ’em, work ’em over, keep ’em down—but don’t humor ’em. You can’t treat a cook like a real man. Ev’ry reg’lar cook has a screw loose or he wouldn’t be a cook. Cookin’ ain’t no man’s job. I never had no use for reg’lar cooks—me, Smith.

“All you women need ribbing up once in awhile,” he added, as, laying his hand lightly on her arm, he let it slide its length until it touched her fingers. He gave them a gentle pressure and resumed his seat against the wall.

The woman’s eyes glowed as she looked at him. His authoritative attitude appealed to her whose ancestors had dressed game, tanned hides, and dragged wood for their masters for countless generations. The growing passion in her eyes did not escape Smith.

In the long silence which followed he looked at her steadily; finally he said:

“Well, I guess I’ll saddle up. You look ‘just so’ to me, woman—but I got to go.”

She laid down the rags of her mat and “threw him the sign” for which he had waited. It said:

“My heart is high; it is good toward you. Talk to me—talk straight.”

He shook his head sadly.

“No, no, Singing Bird; I am headed for the Mexican border—many, many sleeps from here.”

She arose and walked to his side.

He felt a sudden and violent dislike for her flabby, swaying hips, her heavy step, as she moved toward him. He knew that the game was won, and won so easily it was a school-boy’s play.

“Why you go?” she demanded, and the disappointment in her eyes was so intense as to resemble fear. “What you do dere?”

He looked at her through half-closed eyes.

“Did you ever hear of wet horses?”

She shook her head.

“I deals in wet horses—me, Smith.”

The woman stared at him uncomprehendingly.

“Down there on the border,” he explained, “you buy the horses on the Mexico side. You buy ’em when the Mexican boss is asleep in his ’dobe, so there’s no kick about the price. You swim ’em across the Rio Grande and sell ’em to the Americano waitin’ on the other side.”

“You buy de wet horse?”

“No, by Gawd,—I wet ’em!”

“Why you steal?”

He looked at her contemptuously.

“Why does anybody steal? I need the dinero—me, Smith.”

“You want money?”

He laughed.

“I always want money. I never had enough but once in my life, and then I had too much. Gold is hell to pack,” he added reminiscently.

“I have de fine hay-ranch, white man, de best on de reservation. Two, four t’ousand dollars I have when de hay is sold. De ranch is big”—her arms swept the horizon to show its extent. “You stay here and make de bargain with de cattlemen, and I give you so much”—she measured a third of her hand with her forefinger. “If dat is not enough, I give you so much”—she measured the half of her hand with her forefinger. “If dat not enough, I give you all.” She swept the palm of one hand with the other.

Smith dropped his eyelids, that she might not see the triumph shining beneath them.

“I must think, Prairie Flower.”

“No, white man, you no think. You stay!”

Smith, who had arisen, slipped his arm about her ample waist. She pulled aside his Mackinaw coat and laid her head upon his breast.

“The white man’s heart is strong,” she said softly.

“It beats for you, Little Fawn;” and he ran out his tongue in derision.

All the morning she sat on the floor at his feet, braiding the rags for her mat, content to hear him speak occasionally, and to look often into his face with dog-like devotion. It was there Susie saw her when she returned from school earlier in the afternoon than usual, and was beckoned into the kitchen by Ling.

“He’s makin’ a mash,” said Ling laconically, as he jerked his thumb toward the open door of the living-room.

All the girlish vivacity seemed to go out of Susie’s face in her first swift glance. It hardened in mingled shame and anger.

“Mother,” she said sharply, “you promised me that you wouldn’t sit on the floor like an Injun.”

“We’re gettin’ sociable,” said Smith mockingly.

The woman glanced at Smith, and hesitated, but finally got up and seated herself on the bench.

“Why don’t you try bein’ ’sociable’ with the Schoolmarm?” Susie sneered.

“Maybe I will.”

“And maybe you won’t get passed up like a white chip!”

“Oh, I dunno. I’ve made some winnings.”

“I can tell that by your eyes. You got ’em bloodshot, I reckon, hangin’ over the fire in squaw camps. White men can’t stand smoke like Injuns.”

This needle-tongued girl jabbed the truth into him in a way which maddened him, but he said conciliatingly:

“We don’t want to quarrel, kid.”

“You mean you don’t.” Susie slammed the door behind her.

The child’s taunt reawakened his interest in the Schoolmarm. He thought of her riding home alone, and grew restless. Besides, the dulness began to bore him.

“I’ll saddle up, Prairie Flower, and look over the ranch. When I come back I’ll let you know if it’s worth my while to stay.”

Tubbs was sitting on the wagon-tongue, mending harness, when Smith went out,

“Aimin’ to quit the flat?” inquired Tubbs.

“Feller, didn’t that habit of askin’ questions ever git you in trouble?”

“Well I guess so,” Tubbs replied candidly. “See that scar under my eye?”

“I’d invite you along to tell me about it,” said Smith sardonically, “only, the fact is, feller, I’m goin’ down the road to make medicine with the Schoolmarm.”

Tubbs’s eyes widened.

“Gosh!” he ejaculated enviously. “I wisht I had your gall.”

Before Smith swung into the saddle he pulled out a heavy silver watch attached to a hair watch-chain.

“Just the right time,” he nodded.

“Huh?”

“I say, if it was only two o’clock, or three, I wouldn’t go.”

“You wouldn’t? I’ll tell you about me: I’d go if it was twelve o’clock at night and twenty below zero to ride home with that lady.”

“Feller,” said Smith, in a paternal tone, “you never want to make a break at a woman before four o’clock in the afternoon. You might just as well go and lay down under a bush in the shade from a little after daylight until about this time. You wouldn’t hunt deer or elk in the middle of the day, would you? No, nor women—all same kind of huntin’. They’ll turn you down sure; white or red—no difference.”

“Is that so?” said Tubbs, in the awed voice of one who sits at the feet of a master.

“When the moon’s out and the lamps are lit, they’ll empty their sack and tell you the story of their lives. I don’t want to toot my horn none, but I’ve wrangled around some. I’ve hunted big game and humans. Their habits, feller, is much the same.”

While Smith was galloping down the road toward the school-house, Susie was returning from a survey of the surrounding country, which was to be had from a knoll near the house.

“Mother,” she said abruptly, “I feel queer here.” She laid both hands on her flat, childish breast and hunched her shoulders. “I feel like something is goin’ to happen.”

“What happen, you think?” her mother asked listlessly.

“It’s something about White Antelope, I know.”

The woman looked up quickly.

“He go visit Bear Chief, maybe.” There was an odd note in her voice.

“He wouldn’t go away and stay like this without telling you or me. He never did before. He knows I would worry; besides, he didn’t take a horse, and he never would walk ten miles when there are horses to ride. His gun isn’t here, so he must have gone hunting, but he wouldn’t stay all night hunting rabbits; and he couldn’t be lost, when he knows the country as well as you or me.”

“He go to visit,” the Indian woman insisted doggedly.

“If he isn’t home to-morrow, I’m goin’ to hunt him, but I know something’s wrong.”

V

SMITH MAKES MEDICINE WITH THE SCHOOLMARM

Once out of sight of the house, Smith let his horse take its own gait, while he viewed the surrounding country with the thoughtful consideration of a prospective purchaser. As he gazed, its possibilities grew upon him. If water was to be found somewhere in the Bad Lands the location of the ranch was ideal for—certain purposes.

The Bar C cattle-range bounded the reservation on the west; the MacDonald ranch, as it was still called, after the astute Scotch squawman who had built it, was close to the reservation line; and beyond the sheltering Bad Lands to the northeast was a ranch where lived certain friendly persons with whom he had had most satisfactory business relations in the past.

A plan began to take definite shape in his active brain, but the head of a sleepy white pony appearing above the next rise temporarily changed the course of his thoughts, and with his recognition of its rider life took on an added zest.

Dora Marshall, engrossed in thought, did not see Smith until he pulled his hat-brim in salutation and said:

“You’re a thinker, I take it.”

“I find my work here absorbing,” she replied, coloring under his steady look.

He turned his horse and swung it into the road beside her.

“I was just millin’ around and thought I’d ride down the road and meet you.” Further than this brief explanation, he did not seem to feel it incumbent upon him to make conversation. Apparently entirely at his ease in the silence which followed, he turned his head often and stared at her with a frank interest which he made no effort to conceal. Finally he shifted his weight to one stirrup and, turning in his saddle so that he faced her, he asked bluntly:

“That look in your eyes—that look as if you hadn’t nothin’ to hide—is it true? Is it natural, as you might say, or do you just put it on?”

Her astonished expression led him to explain.

“It’s like lookin’ down deep into water that’s so clear you can see the sand shinin’ in the bottom; one of these places where there’s no mud or black spots; nothin’ you can’t see or understand. Sabe what I mean?”

Since she did not answer, he continued:

“I’ve met up with women before now that had that same look, but only at first. It didn’t last; they could put it on and take it off like they did their hats.”

“I don’t know that I am quite sure what you mean,” the girl replied, embarrassed by the personal nature of his questions and comments; “but if you mean to imply that I affect this or that expression, for a purpose, you misjudge me.”

“I was just askin’,” said Smith.

“I think I am always honest of purpose,” the girl went on slowly, “and when one is that, I think it shows in one’s eyes. To be sure, I often fall short of my intentions. I mean to do right, and almost as frequently do wrong.”

“You do?” He eyed her with quick intentness.

“Yes, don’t you? Don’t all of us?”

“I does what I aims to do,” he replied ambiguously.

So she—this girl with eyes like two deep springs—did wrong—frequently. He pondered the admission for a long time. Smith’s exact ideas of right and wrong would have been difficult to define; the dividing line, if there were any, was so vague that it had never served as the slightest restraint. “To do what you aim to do, and make a clean get-away”—that was the successful life.

He had seen things, it is true; there had been incidents and situations which had repelled him, but why, he had never asked himself. There was one situation in particular to which his mind frequently reverted, as it did now. He had known worse women than the one who had figured in it, but for some reason this single scene was impressed upon his mind with a vividness which seemed never to grow less.

He saw a woman seated at an old-fashioned organ in a country parlor. There was a rag-carpet on the floor—he remembered how springy it was with the freshly laid straw underneath it. Her husband held a lamp that she might see the notes, while his other hand was upon her shoulder, his adoring eyes upon her silly face. He, Smith, was rocking in the blue plush chair for which the fool with the calloused hands had done extra work that he might give it to the woman upon her birthday. Each time that she screeched the refrain, “Love, I will love you always,” she lifted her chin to sing it to the man beaming down upon her, while upstairs her trunk was packed to desert him.

Smith always remembered with satisfaction that he had left her in Red Lodge with only the price of a telegram to her husband, in her shabby purse.

“I like your style, girl.” His eyes swept Dora Marshall’s figure as he spoke.

There was a difference in his tone, a familiarity in his glance, which sent the color flying to the Schoolmarm’s cheeks.

“I think we could hit it off—you and me—if we got sociable.”

He leaned toward her and laid his gloved hand upon hers as it rested on the saddle-horn.

The pupils of her eyes dilated until they all but covered the iris as she turned them, blazing, upon Smith.

“Just what do you mean by that?”

There was no mistaking the genuineness nor the nature of the emotion which made her voice vibrate. But Smith considered. Was she deeper—“slicker,” as he phrased it to himself—than he had thought, or had he really misunderstood her? Surprising as was the feeling, he hoped some way, that it was the latter. He looked at her again before he answered gently:

“I didn’t mean to make you hot none, Miss. I’m ignorant in handlin’ words. I only meant to say that I hoped you and me would be good friends.”

His explanation cleared her face instantly.

“I am sorry if I misunderstood you; but one or two unpleasant experiences in this country have made me quick—too quick, perhaps—to take offense.”

“There’s lots just lookin’ for game like you. No better nor brutes,” said Smith virtuously, entirely sincere in his sudden indignation against these licentious characters.

Yes, the Schoolmarm had rebuffed him, as Susie had prophesied, but the effect of it upon him was such as neither he nor she had reckoned. As they rode along a swift, overpowering infatuation for Dora Marshall grew upon him. He felt something like a flame rising within him, burning him, bewildering him with its intensity. She seemed all at once to possess every attribute of the angels, from mere prettiness her face took on a radiant beauty which dazzled him, and when she spoke her lightest word held him breathless. As the mountain towers above the foothills, so, of a sudden, she towered above all other women. He had known sensations—all, he had believed, that it was possible to experience; but this one, strange, overwhelming, dazed him with its violence.

Love frequently comes like this to people in the wilds, to those who have few interests and much time to think. The emotional side of their natures has been held in check until a trifle is sometimes sufficient to loose a torrent which nothing can then divert or check.

She asked him to loop her latigo, which was trailing, and his hand shook as he fumbled with the leather strap.

“Gawd!” he swore in bewilderment as he returned to his own horse, wiping his forehead with the back of his gauntlet, “what feelin’ is this workin’ on me? Am I gettin’ locoed, me—Smith?”

“I’m glad I’ve found a friend like you,” said the Schoolmarm impulsively. “One needs friends in a country like this.”

“A friend!” It sounded like a jest to Smith. “A friend!” he repeated with an odd laugh. Then he raised his hand, as one takes an oath, and whatever of whiteness was left in Smith’s soul illumined his face as he added: “Yes, to a killin’ finish.”

If Smith had met Dora among many, the result might have been the same in the end, but here, in the isolation, she seemed from the first the centre of everything, the alpha and omega of the universe, and his passion for her was as great as though it were the growth of many months instead of less than twenty-four hours. The depth, the breadth, of it could not quickly be determined, nor the lengths to which it would take him. It was something new to be reckoned with. To what extent it would control him, neither Smith nor any one else could have told. He knew only that it now seemed the most real, the most sincere, the best thing which had ever come into his life.

Dora Marshall knew nothing of men like Smith, or of natures like those of the men of the mountains and ranges, who paid her homage. Her knowledge of life and people was drawn from the limited experiences of a small, Middle West town, together with a year at a Middle West co-ed college, and as a result of the latter the Schoolmarm cherished a fine belief in her worldly wisdom, whereas, in a measure, her lack of it was one of her charms. Susie, in her way, was wiser.

The Schoolmarm’s attitude toward her daily life was the natural outcome of a romantic nature and an imaginative mind. She saw herself as the heroine of an absorbing story, the living of which story she enjoyed to the utmost, while every incident and every person contributed to its interest. Quite unconsciously, with unintentional egotism, the Schoolmarm had a way of standing off and viewing herself, as it were, through the rosy glow of romance. Yet she was not a complex character—this Schoolmarm. She had no soaring ambitions, though her ideals for herself and for others were of the best. To do her duty, to help those about her, to win and retain the liking of her half-savage little pupils, were her chief desires.

She had her share of the vanity of her sex, and of its natural liking for admiration and attention, yet in the freedom of her unique environment she never overstepped the bounds of the proprieties as she knew them, or violated in the slightest degree the conventionalities to which she had been accustomed in her rather narrow home life. It was this reserve which inspired awe in the men with whom she came in contact, used as they were to the greater camaraderie of Western women.

In her unsophistication, her provincial innocence, Dora Marshall was exactly the sort to misunderstand and to be misunderstood, a combination sometimes quite as dangerous in its results, and as provocative of trouble, as the intrigues of a designing woman.

“I reckon you think I’m kind of a mounted bum, a grub-liner, or something like that,” said Smith after a time.

“To be frank, I have wondered who you are.”

“Have you? Have you, honest?” asked Smith delightedly.

“Well—you’re different, you know. I can’t explain just how, but you are not like the others who come and go at the ranch.”

“No,” Smith replied with some irony; “I’m not like that there Tubbs.” He added laconically, “I’m no angel, me—Smith.”

The Schoolmarm laughed. Smith’s denial was so obviously superfluous.

“There was a time when I’d do ’most any old thing,” he went on, unmindful of her amusement. “It was only a few years ago that there was no law north of Cheyenne, and a feller got what he wanted with his gun. I got my share. I come from a country where they sleep between sheets, but I got a lickin’ that wasn’t comin’ to me, and I quit the flat when I was thirteen. I’ve been out amongst ’em since.”

The desire to reform somebody, which lies dormant in every woman’s bosom, began to stir in the Schoolmarm’s.

“But you—you wouldn’t ’do any old thing’ now, would you?”

Smith hesitated, and a variety of expressions succeeded one another upon his face. It was an awkward moment, for, under the uplifting influence of the feeling which possessed him, he had an odd desire to tell this girl only the truth.

“I wouldn’t do some of the things I used to do,” he replied evasively.

The Schoolmarm beamed encouragement.

“I’m glad of that.”

“I used to kill Injuns for fifty dollars a head, but I wouldn’t do it now,” he said virtuously, adding: “I’d get my neck stretched.”

“You’ve killed people—Indians—for money!” The Schoolmarm looked at him, wide-eyed with horror.

“They was clutterin’ up the range,” Smith explained patiently, “and the cattlemen needed it for their stock. I’d ’a’ killed ’em for nothin’, but when ’twas offered, I might as well get the bounty.”

The Schoolmarm scarcely knew what to say; his explanation seemed so entirely satisfactory to himself.

“I’m glad those dreadful days have gone.”

“They’re gone all right,” Smith answered sourly. “They make dum near as much fuss over an Injun as a white man now, and what with jumpin’ up deputies at every turn in the road, ’tain’t safe. Why, I heard a judge say a while back that killin’ an Injun was pure murder.”

“I appreciate your confidence—your telling me of your life,” said the Schoolmarm, in lieu of something better.

She found him a difficult person with whom to converse. They seemed to have no common meeting-ground, yet, while he constantly startled and shocked, he also fascinated her. In one of those illuminating flashes to which the Schoolmarm was subject, she saw herself as Smith’s guiding-star, leading him to the triumphant finish of the career which she believed his unique but strong personality made possible.

It was Smith’s turn to look at her. Did she think he had told her of his life? The unexpected dimple deepened in Smith’s cheek, and as he laughed the Schoolmarm, again noting the effect of it, could not in her heart believe that he was as black as he had painted himself.

“I wisht our trails had crossed sooner, but, anyhow, I’m on the square with you, girl. And if ever you ketch me ’talkin’ crooked,’ as the Injuns say, I’ll give you my whole outfit—horse, saddle, blankets, guns, even my dog-gone shirt. Excuse me.”

The Schoolmarm glowed. Her woman’s influence for good was having its effect! This was a step in the right direction—a long step. He would be “on the square” with her—she liked the way he phrased it. Already her mind was busy with air-castles for Smith, which would have made that person stare, had he known of them. An inkling of their nature may be had from her question:

“Would you like to study, to learn from books, if you had the opportunity?”

“I learned my letters spellin’ out the brands on cattle,” he said frankly, “and that, with bein’ able to write my name on the business end of a check, and common, everyday words, has always been enough to see me through.”

“But when one has naturally a good mind, like yours, don’t you think it is almost wicked not to use it?”

“I got a mind all right,” Smith replied complacently. “I’m kind of a head-worker in my way, but steady thinkin’ makes me sicker nor a pup. I got a headache for two days spellin’ out a description of myself that the sheriff of Choteau County spread around the country on handbills. It was plumb insultin’, as I figgered it out, callin’ attention to my eyes and ears and busted thumb. I sent word to him that I felt hos-tile over it. Sheriffs’ll go too far if you don’t tell ’em where to get off at once in awhile.”

The Schoolmarm ignored the handbill episode and went on:

“Besides, a lack of education is such a handicap in business.”

“The worst handicap I has to complain of,” said Smith grimly, “is the habit people has got into of sending money-orders through the mail, instead of the cash. It keeps money out of circulation, besides bein’ discouragin’ and puttin’ many a hard-workin’ hold-up on the bum.”

“But,” she persisted, the real meaning of Smith’s observations entirely escaping her, “even the rudiments of an education would be such a help to you, opening up many avenues that now are closed to you. What I want to say is this: that if you intend to stop for a time at the ranch, I will be glad to teach you. Susie and I have an extra session in the evening, and I will be delighted to have you join us.”

It had not dawned upon Smith that she had questioned him with this end in view. He looked at her fixedly, then, from the depths of his experience, he said:

“Girl, you must like me some.”

Dora flushed hotly.

“I am interested,” she replied.

“That’ll do for now;” and Smith wondered if the lump in his throat was going to choke him. “Will I join that night-school of yours? Will I? Watch me! Say,” he burst out with a kind of boyish impulsiveness, “if ever you see me doin’ anything I oughtn’t, like settin’ down when I ought to stand up, or standin’ up when I ought to set down, will you just rope me and take a turn around a snubbin’-post and jerk me off my feet?”

“We’ll get along famously if you really want to improve yourself!” exclaimed the Schoolmarm, her eyes shining with enthusiasm. “If you really and truly want to learn.”

“Really and truly I do,” Smith echoed, feeling at the moment that he would have done dressmaking or taken in washing, had she bid him.

Once more the world looked big, alluring, and as full of untried possibilities as when he had “quit the flat” at thirteen.

“Have you noticed me doin’ anything that isn’t manners?” he asked in humble anxiety. “Don’t be afraid of hurtin’ my feelin’s,” he urged, “for I ain’t none.”

“If you honestly want me to tell you things, I will; but it seems so—so queer upon such a very short acquaintance.”

“Shucks! What’s the use of wastin’ time pretendin’ to get acquainted, when you’re acquainted as soon as you look at each other? What’s the use of sashayin’ around the bush when you meet up with somebody you like? You just cut loose on me, girl.”

“It’s only a little thing, in a way, and not in itself important perhaps; yet it would be, too, if circumstances should take you into the world. It might make a bad impression upon strangers.”

Smith looked slightly alarmed. He wondered if she suspected anything about White Antelope. At the moment, he could think of nothing else he had done within the last twenty-four hours, which might prejudice strangers.

“I noticed at the table,” the Schoolmarm went on in some embarrassment, “that you held your fork as though you were afraid it would get away from you. Like this”—she illustrated with her fist.

“Like a ranch-hand holdin’ onto a pitch-fork,” Smith suggested, relieved.

“Something,” she laughed. “It should be like this. Anyway,” she declared encouragingly, “you don’t eat with your knife.”

Smith beamed.

“Did you notice that?”

“Naturally, in a land of sword-swallowers, I would;” the Schoolmarm made a wry face.

“Once I run with a high-stepper from Bowlin’ Green, Kentucky, and she told me better nor that,” he explained. “She said nothin’ give a feller away like his habit of handlin’ tools at the table. She was a lady all right, but she got the dope habit and threw the lamp at me. The way I quit her didn’t trouble me. None of ’em ever had any holt on me when it come to a show-down; but you, girl, you——”

“Look!”

Her sharp exclamation interrupted him, and, following her gesture, he saw a flying horseman in the distance, riding as for his life, while behind him two other riders quirted their horses in hot pursuit.

“Is it a race—for fun?”

“I don’t think it,” Smith replied dryly, noting the direction from which they came. “It looks like business.”

He knew that the two behind were Indians. He could tell by the way they used their quirts and sat their horses. Neither was there any mistaking the bug-hunter on his ewe-necked sorrel, which, displaying unexpected bursts of speed, was keeping in the lead and heading straight for the ranch-house. With one hand McArthur was clinging to the saddle-horn, and with the other was clinging quite as tightly to what at a distance appeared to be a carbine.

“He’s pulled his gun—why don’t he use it?” Smith quickened his horse’s gait.

He knew that the Indians had learned White Antelope’s fate. That was a lucky swap Smith had made that morning. He congratulated himself that he had not “taken chances.” He wondered how effective McArthur’s denial would prove in the face of the evidence furnished by the saddle-blanket. Personally, Smith regarded the bug-hunter’s chances as slim.

“They’ll get him in the corral,” he observed.

“Oh, it’s Mr. McArthur!” Dora cried in distress.

Smith looked at her in quick jealousy.

“Well, what of it?” In her excitement, the gruffness of his tone passed unobserved.

“Come,” she urged. “The Indians are angry, and he may need us.”

Hatless, breathless, pale, McArthur rolled out of his saddle and thrust a long, bleached bone into Tubbs’s hand.

“Keep it!” he gasped. “Protect it! It may be—I don’t say it is, but it may be—a portion of the paroccipital bone of an Ichthyopterygian!” Then he turned and faced his pursuers.

Infuriated, they rode straight at him, but he did not flinch, and the horses swerved of their own accord.

Susie had run from the house, and her mother had followed, expectancy upon her stolid face, for, like Smith, she had guessed the situation.

The Indians circled, and, returning, pointed accusing fingers at McArthur.

“He kill White Antelope!”

By this time, the grub-liners had reached the corral, among them four Indians, all friends of the dead man. Their faces darkened.

“White Antelope is dead in a gulch!” cried his accusers. “He is shot to pieces—here, there, everywhere!”

A murmur of angry amazement arose. White Antelope, the kindly, peaceable Cree, who had not an enemy on the reservation!

“This is dreadful!” declared McArthur. “Believe me”—he turned to them all—“I had but found the corpse myself when these men rode up. The Indian was cold; he certainly had been dead for hours. Besides,” he demanded, “what possible motive could I have?”

“Them as likes lettin’ blood don’t need a motive.” The sneering voice was Smith’s.

“But you, sir, met us on the hill. You know the direction from which we came.”

“It’s easy enough to circle.”

“But why should I go back?” cried McArthur.

“They say there’s that that draws folks back for another look.”

Smith’s insinuations, the stand he took, had its effect upon the Indians, who, hot for revenge, needed only this to confirm their suspicions. One of the Indians on horseback began to uncoil his rawhide saddle-rope. All save McArthur understood the significance of the action. They meant to tie him hand and foot and take him to the Agency, with blows and insults plentiful en route.

They edged closer to him, every savage instinct uppermost, their faces dark and menacing. McArthur, his eyes sweeping the circle, felt that he had not one friend, not one, in the motley, threatening crowd fast closing in upon him; for Tubbs, hearing himself indirectly included in the accusation, had discreetly, and with perceptible haste, withdrawn.

The Indian swung from his saddle, rope in hand, and advanced upon McArthur with unmistakable purpose; but he did not reach the little scientist, for Susie darted from the circle, her flashing gray eyes looking more curiously at variance than ever with her tawny skin.

“No, no, Running Rabbit!” She pushed him gently backward with her finger-tips upon his chest.

There was a murmur of protest from the crowd, and it seemed to sting her like a spur. Susie was not accustomed to disapproval. She turned to where the murmurs came loudest—from the white grub-liners, who were eager for excitement.

“Who are you,” she cried, “that you should be so quick to accuse this stranger? You, Arkansaw Red, that skipped from Kansas for killin’ a nigger! You, Jim Padden, that shot a sheep-herder in cold blood! You, Banjo Johnson, that’s hidin’ out this minute! Don’t you all be so darned anxious to hang another man, when there’s a rope waitin’ somewhere for your own necks!

“And lemme tell you”—she took a step toward them. “The man that lifts a finger to take this bug-hunter to the Agency can take his blankets along at the same time, for there’ll never be a bunk or a seat at the table for him on this ranch as long as he lives. Where’s your proof against this bug-hunter? You can’t drag a man off without something against him—just because you want to hang somebody!”

Some sound from Smith attracted her attention; she wheeled upon him, and, with her thin arm outstretched as she pointed at him in scorn, she cried shrilly:

“Why, I’d sooner think you did it, than him!”

There was not so much as the flicker of an eyelid from Smith.

“I know you’d sooner think I did it than him,” he said, playing upon the word. “You’d like to see me get my neck stretched.”

His bravado, his very insolence, was his protection.

“And maybe I’ll have the chanst!” she retorted furiously.

Turning from him to the Indians, her voice dropped, the harsh language taking on the soft accent of the squaws as she spoke to them in their own tongue. Like many half-breeds, Susie seldom admitted that she either understood or could speak the Indian language. She had an amusing fashion of referring even to her relatives as “those Injuns”; but now, with hands outstretched, she pleaded:

“We are all Indians together in this—friends of White Antelope! Our hearts are down; they are heavy—so. You all know that he came from the great Cree country with my father, and he has told us many times stories of the big north woods, where they hunted and trapped. You know how he watched me when I was little, and sat with his hand upon my head when I had the big fever. He was like no one else to me except my father. He was wise and good.

“I could kill with my own hand the man who killed White Antelope. I want his blood as much as you. I’d like to see a stake driven through his black heart on White Antelope’s grave. But let us not be too quick because the hate is hot in us. My heart tells me that the white man talks straight. Let us wait—wait until we find the right one, and when we do we will punish in our own way. You hear? In our own way!”

Smith understood something of her plea, and for the second time he paid her courage tribute.

“She’s a game kid all right,” he said to himself, and a half-formed plan for utilizing her gameness began to take definite shape.

That she had won, he knew before Running Rabbit recoiled his rope. After a moment’s talk among themselves, the Indians went to hitch the horses to the wagon, to bring White Antelope’s body home.

Smith was well aware that he had only to point to the saddle blanket, the barest edge of which showed beneath the leather skirts of McArthur’s saddle, to make Susie’s impassioned defense in vain. Why he did not, he was not himself sure. Perhaps it was because he liked the feeling of power, of knowing that he held the life of the despised bug-hunter in the hollow of his hand; or perhaps it was because it would serve his purpose better to make the accusation later. One thing was certain, however, and that was that he had not held his tongue through any consideration for McArthur.

VI

THE GREAT SECRET

It was the day they buried White Antelope that Smith approached Yellow Bird, a Piegan, who was among the Indians paying visits of indefinite length to the MacDonald ranch. “Eddie” Yellow Bird, he was called at the Blackfoot mission where he had learned to read and write—though he would never have been suspected of these accomplishments, since to all appearances he was a “blanket Indian.”

Smith spoke the Piegan tongue almost as fluently as his own, so he and Yellow Bird quickly became compadres, relating to each other stories of their prowess, of horses they had run off, of cattle they had stolen, and hinting, Indian fashion, with significant intonations and pauses, at crimes of greater magnitude.

“How is your heart to-day, friend? Is it strong?”

“Weak,” replied Yellow Bird jestingly, touching his breast with a fluttering hand.

“It would be stronger if you had red meat in your stomach,” Smith suggested significantly.

“The bacon is not for Indians,” agreed Yellow Bird.

“But the woman would have no cattle left if she killed only her own beef.”

“Many people stop here—strangers and friends,” Yellow Bird admitted.

“There is plenty on the range.” Smith looked toward the Bar C ranch.

“He is a dog on the trail, that white man, when his cattle are stolen,” Yellow Bird replied doubtfully.

“I’ve killed dogs—me, Smith—when they got in my way. Yellow Bird, are you a woman, that you are afraid?”

“Wolf Robe, who stole only a calf, sits like this”—Yellow Bird looked at Smith sullenly through his spread fingers.

“You have talked with the forked tongue, Yellow Bird. You are not a Piegan buck of the great Blackfoot nation; you are a woman. Your fathers killed men; you are afraid to kill cattle.” Smith turned from him contemptuously.

“My heart is as strong as yours. I am ready.”

It was dusk when Smith returned and held out a blood-stained flour sack to the squaw.

“Liver. A two-year ole.”

The squaw’s eyes sparkled. Ah, this was as it should be! Her man provided for her; he brought her meat to eat. He was clever and brave, for it was other men’s meat he brought her to eat. MacDonald had killed only his own cattle, and secretly it had shamed her, for she mistook his honesty for lack of courage. To steal was legitimate; it was brave; something to be told among friends at night, and laughed over. Susie, she had observed with regret, was honest, like her father. She patted the back of Smith’s hand, and looked at him with dog-like, adoring eyes as they stood in the log meat-house, where fresh quarters hung.

“I’d do more nor this for you, Prairie Flower;” and, laying his hand upon her shoulder, he pressed it with his finger-tips.

“Say, but that’s great liver!” Tubbs reached half the length of the table and helped himself a third time. “That’d make a man fight his grandmother. Who butchered it?”

“Me,” Smith answered.

“It tastes like slow elk,” said Susie.

“Maybe you oughtn’t to eat it till you’re showed the hide,” Smith suggested.

“Maybe I oughtn’t,” Susie retorted. “I didn’t see any fresh hide a-hangin’ on the fence. We always hangs our hides.”

“I never hangs my hides. I cuts ’em up in strips and braids ’em into throw-ropes. It’s safer.”

The grub-liners laughed at the inference which Smith so coolly implied.

The finding of White Antelope’s body, and its subsequent burial, had delayed the opening of Dora’s night-school, so Smith, for reasons of his own, had spent much of his time in the bunk-house, covertly studying the grub-liners, who passed the hours exchanging harrowing experiences of their varied careers.

A strong friendship had sprung up between Susie and McArthur. While Susie liked and greatly admired the Schoolmarm, she never yet had opened her heart to her. Beyond their actual school-work, they seemed to have little in common; and it was a real disappointment and regret to the Schoolmarm that, for some reason which she could not reach, she had never been able to break through the curious reserve of the little half-breed, who, superficially, seemed so transparently frank. Each time that she made the attempt, she found herself repulsed—gently, even tactfully, but repulsed.

Dora Marshall did not suspect that these rebuffs were due to an error of her own. In the beginning, when Susie had questioned her naïvely of the outside world, she had permitted amusement to show in her face and manner. She never fully recognized the fact that while Susie to all appearances, intents, and purposes was Anglo-Saxon, an equal quantity of Indian blood flowed in her veins, and that this blood, with its accompanying traits and characteristics, must be reckoned with.

As a matter of fact, Susie was suspicious, unforgiving, with all the Indians’ sensitiveness to and fear of ridicule. She meant never again to entertain the Schoolmarm by her ignorant questions, although she yearned with all a young girl’s yearning for some one in whom to confide—some one with whom she could discuss the future which she often questioned and secretly dreaded.

With real adroitness Susie had tested McArthur, searching his face for the glimmer of amusement which would have destroyed irredeemably any chance of real comradeship between them. But invariably McArthur had answered her questions gravely; and when her tears had fallen fast and hot at White Antelope’s grave, she had known, with an intuition both savage and childish, that his sympathy was sincere. She had felt, too, the genuineness of his interest when, later, she had repeated to him many of the stories White Antelope had told her of the days when he and her father had trapped and hunted together in the big woods to the north.

So to-night, when the living-room was deserted by all save her mother, at work on her rugs in the corner, Susie confided to him her Great Secret, and McArthur, some way, felt strangely flattered by the confidence. He had no desire to laugh; indeed, there were times when the tears were perilously close to the surface. He had been a shy, lonely student, and quite as lonely as a man, yet through the promptings of a heart sympathetic and kind and with the fine instinct of gentle birth, he understood the bizarre little half-breed in a way which surprised himself.

There was a settee on one side of the room, made of elk-horns and interwoven buckskin thongs, and it was there, in the whisper which makes a secret doubly alluring, that Susie told him of her plans; but first she brought from some hiding-place outside a long pasteboard box, carefully wrapped and tied.

McArthur, puffing on the briar-wood pipe which he was seldom without, waited with interest, but without showing curiosity, for he felt that, in a way, this was a critical moment in their friendship.

“If you didn’t see me here on the reservation, would you know I was Injun?” Susie demanded, facing him.

McArthur regarded her critically.

“You have certain characteristics—your rather high cheek-bones, for instance—and your skin has a peculiar tint.”

“I got an awful complexion on me,” Susie agreed, “but I’m goin’ to fix that.”

“Then, your movements and gestures——”

“That’s from talkin’ signs, maybe. I can talk signs so fast that the full-bloods themselves have to ask me to slow up. But, now, if you saw me with my hair frizzled—all curled up, like, and pegged down on top of my head—and a red silk dress on me with a long skirt, and shiny shoes coming to a point, and a white hat with birds and flowers staked out on it, and maybe kid gloves on my hands—would you know right off it was me? Would you say, ‘Why, there’s that Susie MacDonald—that breed young un from the reservation’?”

“No,” declared McArthur firmly; “I certainly never should say, ‘Why, there’s that Susie MacDonald—that breed young un from the reservation.’ As a matter of fact,” he went on gravely, “I should probably say, ‘What a pity that a young lady so intelligent and high-spirited should frizz her hair’!”

“Would you?” insisted Susie delightedly.

“Undoubtedly,” McArthur replied, with satisfying emphasis.

“And how long do you think it would take me to stop slingin’ the buckskin and learn to talk like you?—to say big words without bitin’ my tongue and gettin’ red in the face?”

“Do I use large words frequently?” McArthur asked in real surprise.

“Whoppers!” said Susie.

“I do it unconsciously.” McArthur’s tone was apologetic.

“Sure, I know it.”

“I shrink from appearing pedantic,” said McArthur, half to himself.

“So do I,” Susie declared mischievously. “I don’t know what it is, but I shrink from it. Do you think I could learn big words?”

“Of course.” McArthur wondered where all these questions led.

“Did you ever notice that I’m kind of polite sometimes?”

“Frequently.”

“That I say ’If you please’ and ’Thank you,’ and did you notice the other morning when I asked Old Man Rulison how his ribs was getting along that Arkansaw Red kicked in, and said I was sorry the accident happened?”

McArthur nodded.

“Well, I didn’t mean it.” She giggled. “That was just my manners that I was practisin’ on him. He was onery, and only got what was comin’ to him; but if you’re goin’ to be polite, seems like you dassn’t tell the truth. But Miss Marshall says that ’Thank you,’ ‘If you please,’ and ‘Good morning, how’s your ribs?’ are kind of pass-words out in the world that help you along.”

“Yes, Susie; that’s true.”

“So I’m tryin’ to catch onto all I can, because”—her eyes dilated, and she lowered her voice—“I’m goin’ out in the world pretty soon.”

“To school?”

She shook her head.

“I’m goin’ to hunt up Dad’s relations; and when I find ’em, I don’t want ’em to be ashamed of me, and of him for marryin’ into the Injuns.”

“They need never be ashamed of you, Susie.”

“Honest? Honest, don’t you think so?” She looked at him wistfully. “I’d try awful hard not to make breaks,” she went on, “and make ’em feel like cachin’ me in the cellar when they saw company comin’. It’s just plumb awful to be lonesome here, like I am sometimes; to be homesick for something or somebody—for other kind of folks besides Injuns and grub-liners, and Schoolmarms that look at you as if you was a new, queer kind of bug, and laugh at you with their eyes.

“Dad’s got kin, I know; for lots of times when I would go with him to hunt horses, he would say, ‘I’ll take you back to see them some time, Susie, girl.’ But he never said where ’back’ was, so I’ve got to find out myself. Wouldn’t it be awful, though”—and her chin quivered—“if after I’d been on the trail for days and days, and my ponies were foot-sore, they wasn’t glad to see me when I rode up to the house, but hinted around that horse-feed was short and grub was scarce, and they couldn’t well winter me?”

“They wouldn’t do that,” said McArthur reassuringly. “Nobody named MacDonald would do that.”

Susie began to untie the pasteboard box which contained her treasures.

“Nearly ever since Dad died, I’ve been getting ready to go. I don’t mean that I would leave Mother for keeps—of course not; but after I’ve found ’em, maybe I can coax ’em to come and live with us. I used to ask White Antelope every question I could think of, but all he knew was that after they’d sold their furs to the Hudson Bay Company, they sometimes went to a lodge in Canada called Selkirk, where almost everybody there was named MacDonald or MacDougal or Mackenzie or Mac something. Lots of his friends there married Sioux and went to the Walla Walla valley, and maybe I’ll have to go there to find somebody who knew him; but first I’ll go to Selkirk.

“I’ll take a good pack-outfit, and Running Rabbit to find trails and wrangle horses. See—I’ve got my trail all marked out on the map.”

She unfolded a worn leaf from a school geography.

“It looks as if it was only a sleep or two away, but White Antelope said it was the big ride—maybe a hundred sleeps. And lookee”—she unfolded fashion plates of several periods. “I’ve even picked out the clothes I’ll buy to put on when I get nearly to the ranch where they live. I can make camp, you know, and change my clothes, and then go walkin’ down the road carryin’ this here parasol and wearin’ this here white hat and holdin’ up this here long skirt like Teacher on Sunday.

“Won’t they be surprised when they open the door and see me standin’ on the door-step? I’ll say, ‘How do you do? I’m Susie MacDonald, your relation what’s come to visit you.’ I think this would be better than showin’ up with Running Rabbit and the pack-outfit, until I’d kind of broke the news to ’em. I’d keep Running Rabbit cached in the brush till I sent for him.

“You see, I’ve thought about it so much that it seems like it was as good as done; but maybe when I start I won’t find it so easy. I might have to ride clear to this Minnesota country, or beyond the big waters to the New York or Connecticut country, mightn’t I?”

“You might,” McArthur replied soberly.

“But I’d take a lot of jerked elk, and everybody says grub’s easy to get if you have money, I’d start with about nine ponies in my string, so it looks like I ought to get through?”

She waited anxiously for McArthur to express his opinion.

He wondered how he could disillusionize her, shatter the dream which he could see had become a part of her life. Should he explain to her that when she had crossed the mountains and left behind her the deserts which constituted the only world she knew, and by which, with its people, she judged the country she meant to penetrate, she would find herself a bewildered little savage in a callous, complex civilization where she had no place—wondered at, gibed at, defeated of her purpose?

“Are you sure you have no other clues—no old letters, no photographs?”

She was about to answer when a tapping like the pecking of a snowbird on a window-sill was heard on the door.

Susie opened it.

In ludicrous contrast to the timid rap, a huge figure that all but filled it was framed in the doorway.

It was “Babe” from the Bar C ranch; “Baby” Britt, curly-haired, pink-cheeked, with one innocent blue eye dark from recent impact with a fist, which gave its owner the appearance of a dissipated cherub.

“Evenin’,” he said tremulously, his eyes roving as though in search of some one.

“I lost a horse——” he began.

“Brown?” interrupted Susie, with suspicious interest. “With a star in the forehead?”

“Yes.”

“One white stockin’?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Roached mane?”

“Ye-ah.”

“Kind of a rat-tail?”

“Yep.”

“Left hip knocked down?”

“Babe” nodded.

“Saddle-sore?”

“That’s it. Where did you see him?”

“I didn’t see him.”

“Aw-w-w,” rumbled “Babe” in disgust.

“Teacher!”

Dora Marshall’s door opened in response to Susie’s lusty call.

“Have you seen a brown horse with a star in its forehead, roached mane——”

“Aw, g’wan, Susie!” In confusion, “Babe” began to remove his spurs, thereby serving notice upon the Schoolmarm that he had “come to set a spell.”

So the Schoolmarm brought her needlework, and while she explained to Mr. Britt the exact shadings which she intended to give to each leaf and flower, that person sat with his entranced eyes upon her white hands, with their slender, tapering fingers—the smallest, the most beautiful hands, he firmly believed, in the whole world.

It was not easy to carry on a spirited conversation with Mr. Britt. At best, his range of topics was limited, and in his present frame of mind he was about as vivacious as a deaf mute. He was quite content to sit with the high heels of his cowboy boots—from which a faint odor of the stable emanated—hung over the rung of his chair, and to watch the Schoolmarm’s hand plying the needle on that almost sacred sofa-pillow.

“Your work must be very interesting, Mr. Britt,” suggested Dora.

“I dunno as ’tis,” replied Mr. Britt.

“It’s so—so picturesque.”

Mr. Britt considered.

“I shouldn’t say it was.”

“But you like it?”

“Not by a high-kick!”

If there was one thing upon which Mr. Britt prided himself more than another, it was upon knowing how to temper his language to his company.

“Why do you stick to it, then?”

“Don’t know how to do anything else.”

“You don’t get much time to read, do you?”

“Oh, yes; P’lice Gazette comes reg’lar.”

“But you have no church or social privileges?”

“What’s that?”

“I say, you have no entertainment, no time or opportunity for amusement, have you?”

“Oh, my, yes,” Mr. Britt declared heartily. “We has a game of stud poker nearly every Sunday mornin’, and races in the afternoon.”

“Ain’t he sparklin’?” whispered Susie across the room to Dora, who pretended not to hear.

“You are fond of horses?” inquired the Schoolmarm, desperately.

“Oh, I has nothin’ agin ’em.” He qualified his statement by adding: “Leastways, unless they come from the Buffalo Basin country. Then I shore hates ’em.” At last Mr. Britt was upon a subject upon which he could talk fluently and for an indefinite length of time. “You take that there Buffalo Basin stock,” he went on earnestly, “and they’re nothin’ but inbred cayuse outlaws. They’re treach’rous. Oneriest horses that ever wore hair. Can’t gentle ’em—simply can’t be done. They’ve piled me up more times than any horses that run. Sunfishers—the hull of ’em; rare up and fall over backwards. ’Tain’t pleasant ridin’ a horse like that. Wheel on you quicker’n a weasel; shy clean acrost the road at nothin’; kick—stand up and strike at you in the corral. It’s irritatin’. Hard keepers, too. Maybe you’ve noticed that blue roan I’m ridin’. Well, sir, the way I’ve throwed feed into that horse is a scandal, and the more he eats the worse he looks. Besides, it spoils them Buffalo Basin buzzard-heads to eat. Give ’em three square meals, and you can’t hardly ride ’em. They ain’t stayers, neither; no bottom, seems-like. Forty miles, and that horse of mine is played out. What for a horse is that? Is that a horse? Not by a high-kick! Gimme a buckskin with a black line down his back, and zebra stripes on his legs—high back, square chest—say, then you got a horse!”

It was apparent enough that Mr. Britt had not commenced to exhaust the subject of the Buffalo Basin stock. As a matter of fact, he had barely started; but the sound of horses coming up the path, and a whoop outside, caused a suspension of his conversation.

Something heavy was thrown against the door, and when Susie opened it a roll of roped canvas rolled inside, while the lamplight fell upon the grinning faces of two Bar C cowpunchers.

“What’s that?” The Schoolmarm looked wonderingly at the bundle.

“Aw-w-w!” Mr. Britt replied, in angry confusion. “It’s my bed. I’ll put a crimp in them two for this.” He shouldered his blankets sheepishly and went out.

VII

CUPID “WINGS” A DEPUTY SHERIFF

Riding home next morning with his bed on a borrowed pack-horse, morose, his mind occupied with divers plans for punishing the cowpunchers who had spoiled his evening and made him ridiculous before the Schoolmarm, “Babe” came upon something in a gulch which caused him to rein his horse sharply and swing from the saddle.

With an ejaculation of surprise, he pulled a fresh hide from under a pile of rock, it having been partially uncovered by coyotes. The brand had been cut out, and with the sight of this significant find, the two cowpunchers, their obnoxious joke, even the Schoolmarm, were forgotten; for there was a new thief on the range, and a new thief meant excitement and adventure.

Colonel Tolman’s deep-set eyes glittered when he heard the news. As Running Rabbit had said, on the trail of a cattle-thief he was as relentless as a bloodhound. He could not eat or sleep in peace until the man who had robbed him was behind the bars. The Colonel was an old-time Texas cattleman, and his herds had ranged from the Mexican border to the Alberta line. He had made and lost fortunes. Disease, droughts, and blizzards had cleaned him out at various times, and always he had taken his medicine without a whimper; but the loss of so much as a yearling calf by theft threw him into a rage that was like hysteria.

His hand shook as he sat down at his desk and wrote a note to the Stockmen’s Association, asking for the services of their best detective. It meant four days of hard riding to deliver the note, but the Colonel put it into “Babe’s” hand as if he were asking him to drop it in the mail-box around the corner.

“Go, and git back,” were his laconic instructions, and he turned to pace the floor.

When “Babe” returned some eight days later, with the deputy sheriff, he found the Colonel striding to and fro, his wrath having in no wise abated. The cowboy wondered if his employer had been walking the floor all that time.

“My name is Ralston,” said the tall young deputy, as he stood before the old cattleman.

“Ralston?” The Colonel rose on his toes a trifle to peer into his face.

“Not Dick Ralston’s boy?”

The six-foot deputy smiled.

“The same, sir.”

The Colonel’s hand shot out in greeting.

“Anybody of that name is pretty near like kin to me. Many’s the time your dad and I have eaten out of the same frying-pan.”

“So I’ve heard him say.”

“Does he know you’re down here on this job?”

The young man shook his head soberly.

“No.”

The Colonel looked at him keenly.

“Had a falling out?”

“No; scarcely that; but we couldn’t agree exactly upon some things, so I struck out for myself when I came home from college.”

“No future for you in this sleuthing business,” commented the old man tersely. “Why didn’t you go into cattle with your dad?”

“That’s where we disagreed, sir. I wanted to buy sheep, and he goes straight into the air at the very word.”

The Colonel laughed.

“I can believe that.”

“Over there the range is going fast, and it’s fight and scrap and quarrel all the time to keep the sheep off what little there is left; and then you ship and bottom drops out of the market as soon as your cattle are loaded. There’s nothing in it; and while I don’t like sheep any better than the Governor, there’s no use in hanging on and going broke in cattle because of a prejudice.”

“Dick’s stubborn,”—the Colonel nodded knowingly—“and I don’t believe he’ll ever give in.”

“No; I don’t think he will, and I’m sorry for his sake, because he’s getting too old to worry.”

“Worry? Cattle’s nothing but worry!—which reminds me of what you are here for.”

“Have you any suspicions?”

“No. I don’t believe I can help you any. The Injuns been good as pie since we sent Wolf Robe over the road. Don’t hardly think it’s Injuns. Don’t know what to think. Might be some of these Mormon outfits going north. Might be some of these nesters off in the hills. Might be anybody!”

“Is he an old hand?”

“Looks like it. Cuts the brand out and buries the hide.” The Colonel began pacing the floor. “Cattle-thieves are people that’s got to be nipped in the bud muy pronto. There ought to be a lynching on every cattle-range once in seven years. It’s the only way to hold ’em level. Down there on the Rio Grande we rode away and left fourteen of ’em swinging over the bluff. It’s got to be done in all cattle countries, and since they’ve started in here—well, a hanging is overdue by two years.” The Colonel ejected his words with the decisive click of a riot-gun.

So Dick Ralston, Jr., rode the range for the purpose of getting the lay of the country, and, on one pretext or another, visited the squalid homes of the nesters, but nowhere found anybody or anything in the least suspicious. He learned of the murder of White Antelope, and of the “queer-actin’” bug-hunter and his pal, who had been accused of it. It was rather generally believed that McArthur was a desperado of a new and original kind. While it was conceded that he seemed to have no way of disposing of the meat, and certainly could not kill a cow and eat it himself, it was nevertheless declared that he was “worth watching.”

While the hangers-on at the MacDonald ranch were all known to have records, no particular suspicion had attached to them in this instance, because the squaw was known to kill her own beef, and no shadow of doubt had ever fallen upon the good name of the ranch.

The trapping of cattle-thieves is not the work of a day or a week, but sometimes of months; and when evidence of another stolen beef was found upon the range, Ralston realized that his efforts lay in that vicinity for some time to come. He decided to ride over to the MacDonald ranch that evening and have a look at the bad hombre who masqueraded as a bug-hunter—bug-hunter, it should be explained, being a Western term for any stranger engaged in scientific pursuits.

While Ralston was riding over the lonely road in the moonlight, Dora was arranging the dining-room table for her night-school, which had been in session several evenings. Smith was studying grammar, of which branch of learning Dora had decided he stood most in need, while Susie groaned over compound fractions.

Tubbs, with his chair tilted against the wall, looked on with a tolerant smile. In the kitchen, paring a huge pan of potatoes for breakfast, Ling listened with such an intensity of interest to what was being said that his ears seemed fairly to quiver. From her bench in the living-room, the Indian woman braided rags and darted jealous glances at teacher and pupil. Smith, his hair looking like a bunch of tumble-weed in a high wind, hung over a book with a look of genuine misery upon his face.

“I didn’t have any notion there was so much in the world I didn’t know,” he burst out. “I thought when I’d learnt that if you sprinkle your saddle-blanket you can hold the biggest steer that runs, without your saddle slippin’, I’d learnt about all they was worth knowin’.”

“It’s tedious,” Dora admitted.

“Tedious?” echoed Smith in loud pathos. “It’s hell! Say, I can tie a fancy knot in a bridle-rein that can’t be beat by any puncher in the country, but darn me if I can see the difference between a adjective and one of these here adverbs! Once I thought I knowed something—me, Smith—but say, I don’t know enough to make a mark in the road!”

Closing his eyes and gritting his teeth, he repeated:

“‘I have had, you have had, he has had.’”

“If you would have had about six drinks, I think you could git that,” observed Tubbs judicially, watching Smith’s mental suffering with keen interest.

“Don’t be discouraged,” said Dora cheerfully, seating herself beside him. “Let’s take a little review. Do you remember what I told you about this?”

She pointed to the letter a marked with the long sound.

Smith ran both hands through his hair, while a wild, panic-stricken look came upon his face.

“Dog-gone me! I know it’s a a, but I plumb forget how you called it.”

Tubbs unhooked his toes from the chair-legs and walked around to look over Smith’s shoulder.

“Smith, you got a great forgitter,” he said sarcastically. “Why don’t you use your head a little? That there is a Bar A. You ought to have knowed that. The Bar A stock run all over the Judith Basin.”

“Don’t you remember I told you that whenever you saw that mark over a letter you should give it the long sound?” explained Dora patiently.

“Like the a in ‘aig,’” elucidated Tubbs.

“Like the a in ‘snake,’” corrected the Schoolmarm.

“Or ’wake,’ or ’skate,’ or ‘break,’” said Smith hopefully.

“Fine!” declared the Schoolmarm.

“I knowed that much myself,” said Tubbs enviously.

“If you’ll pardon me, Mr. Tubbs,” said Dora, in some irritation, “there is no such word as ‘knowed.’”

“Why don’t you talk grammatical, Tubbs?” Smith demanded, with alacrity.

“I talks what I knows,” said Tubbs, going back to his chair.

“Have you forgotten all I told you about adjectives?”

“Adjectives is words describin’ things. They’s two kinds, comparative and superlative,” Smith replied promptly. He added. “Adjectives kind of stuck in my craw.”

“Can you give me examples?” Dora felt encouraged.

“You got a horrible pretty hand,” Smith replied, without hesitation. “‘Horrible pretty’ is a adjective describin’ your hand.”

Dora burst out laughing, and Tubbs, without knowing why, joined in heartily.

“Tubbs,” continued Smith, glaring at that person, “has got the horriblest mug I ever seen, and if he opens it and laffs like that at me again, I aims to break his head. ’Horriblest’ is a superlative adjective describin’ Tubbs’s mug.”

To Smith’s chagrin and Tubbs’s delight, Dora explained that “horrible” was a word which could not be used in conjunction with “pretty,” and that its superlative was not “horriblest.”

Smith buried his head in his hands despondently.

“If I was where I could, I’d get drunk!”

“It’s nothing to feel so badly about,” said Dora comfortingly. “Let’s go back to prepositions. Can you define a preposition?”

Smith screwed up his face and groped for words, but before he found them Tubbs broke in:

“A preposition is what a feller has to sell that nobody wants,” he explained glibly. “They’s copper prepositions, silver-lead prepositions, and onct I had a oil preposition up in the Swift Current country.”

Smith reached inside his coat and pulled out the carved, ivory-handled six-shooter which he wore in a holster under his arm. He laid it on the table beside his grammar, and looked at Tubbs.

“Feller,” he said, “I hates to make a gun-play before the Schoolmarm, but if you jump into this here game again, I aims to try a chunk of lead on you.”

“If book-learnin’ ud ever make me as peevish as it does you,” declared Tubbs, rising hastily, “I hopes I never knows nothin’.”

Tubbs slammed the door behind him as he went to seek more amiable company in the bunk-house.

Save for the Indian woman, Smith and Dora were now practically alone; for Ling had gone to bed, and Susie was oblivious to everything except fractions. Smith continued to struggle with prepositions, adjectives, and adverbs, but he found it difficult to concentrate his thoughts on them with Dora so close beside him. He knew that his slightest glance, every expression which crossed his face, was observed by the Indian woman; and although he did his utmost not to betray his feelings, he saw the sullen, jealous resentment rising within her.

She read aright the light in his eyes; besides, her intuitions were greater than his powers of concealment. When she could no longer endure the sight of Smith and the Schoolmarm sitting side by side, she laid down her work and slipped out into the star-lit night, closing the door softly behind her.

Smith’s judgment told him that he should end the lesson and go after her, but the spell of love was upon him, overwhelming him, holding him fast in delicious thraldom. He had not the strength of will just then to break it.

Dora had been reading “Hiawatha” aloud each evening to Susie, Tubbs, and Smith, so when she finally closed the grammar, she asked if he would like to hear more of the Indian story, as he called it, to which he nodded assent.

Dora read well, with intelligence and sympathy; her trained voice was flexible. Then, too, she loved this greatest of American legends. It appealed to her audience as perhaps no other poem would have done. It was real to them, it was “life,” their life in a little different environment and told in a musical rhythm which held them breathless, enchanted.

Dora had reached the story of “The Famine.” She knew the refrain by heart, and the wail of old Nokomis was in her voice as she repeated from memory:

The pathos of the lines never failed to touch Dora anew. Her voice broke, and, pausing to recover herself, she glanced at Smith. There were tears in his eyes. The brutal chin was quivering like that of a tender-hearted child.

“The man that wrote that was a chief,” he said huskily. “It hurts me here—in my neck.” He rubbed the contracted muscles of his throat. “I’d feel like that, girl, if you should die.”

He repeated softly, and choked:

The impression which the poem made upon Smith was deep. It was a constant surprise to him also. The thoughts it expressed, the sensations it described, he had believed were entirely original with himself. He had not conceived it possible that any one else could feel toward a woman as he felt toward Dora. Therefore, when the poet put many of his heart-throbs into words, they startled him, as though, somehow, his own heart were photographed and held up to view.

Susie had finished her lesson, and, cramped from sitting, was walking about the living-room to rest herself, while this conversation was taking place. Her glance fell upon a gaudy vase on a shelf, and some thought came to her which made her laugh mischievously. She emptied the contents of the vase into the palm of her hand and, closing the other over it, tiptoed into the dining-room and stood behind Smith.

Dora and he, engrossed in conversation, paid no attention to her. She put her cupped palms close to Smith’s ear and, shaking them vigorously, shouted:

“Snakes!”

The result was such as Susie had not anticipated.

With a shriek which was womanish in its shrillness, Smith sprang to his feet, all but upsetting the lamp in his violence. Unmixed horror was written upon his face.

The girl herself shrank back at what she had done; then, holding out several rattles for inspection, she said:

“Looks like you don’t care for snakes.”

“You—you little——”

Only Susie guessed the unspeakable epithet he meant to use. Her eyes warned him, and, too, he remembered Dora in time. He said instead, with a slight laugh of confusion:

“Snakes scares me, and rat-traps goin’ off.”

The color had not yet returned to his face when a knock came upon the door.

In response to Susie’s call, a tall stranger stepped inside—a stranger wide of shoulder, and with a kind of grim strength in his young face.

From the unnatural brightness of the eyes of Susie and of Smith, and their still tense attitudes, Ralston sensed the fact that something had happened. He returned Smith’s unpleasant look with a gaze as steady as his own. Then his eyes fell upon Dora and lingered there.

She had sprung to her feet and was still standing. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes luminous, and the soft lamplight burnishing her brown hair made the moment one of her best. Smith saw the frank admiration in the stranger’s look.

“May I stop here to-night?” He addressed Dora.

He had the characteristic Western gravity of manner and expression, the distinguishing definiteness of purpose. Though the quality of his voice, its modulation, bespoke the man of poise and education, the accent was unmistakably of the West.

“There’s a bunk-house.” It was Smith who answered.

His unuttered epithet still rankled; Susie turned upon him with insulting emphasis:

“And you’d better get out to it!”

“Are you the boss here?” The stranger put the question to Smith with cool politeness.

“What I say goes!”

Smith looked marvellously ugly.

Susie leaned toward him, and her childish face was distorted with anger as she shrieked:

“Not yet, Mister Smith!”

Involuntarily, Dora and the stranger exchanged glances in the awkward silence which followed. Then, more to relieve her embarrassment than for any other reason, Ralston said quietly, “Very well, I will do as this—gentleman suggests,” and withdrew.

“Good-night,” said Dora, gathering up her books; but neither Smith nor Susie answered.

With both hands deep in his trousers’ pockets, Smith was smiling at Susie, with a smile which was little short of devilish; and the girl, throwing a last look of defiance at him, also left the room, violently slamming behind her the door of the bed-chamber occupied by her mother and herself.

For a full minute Smith stood as they had left him—motionless, his eyelids drooping. Rousing himself, he went to the window and looked into the moonlight-flooded world outside. Huddled in a blanket, a squat figure sat on a fallen cottonwood tree.

Smith eyed it, then asked himself contemptuously:

“Ain’t that pure Injun?”

Taking his hat, he too stepped into the moonlight.

The woman did not look up at his approach, so he stooped until his cheek touched hers.

“What’s the matter, Prairie Flower?”

“My heart is under my feet.” Her voice was harsh.

In the tone one uses to a sulky child, he said:

“Come into the house.”

“You no like me, white man. You like de white woman.”

Smith reached under the blanket and took her hand.

“Why don’t you marry de white woman?”

He pressed her hand tightly against his heart.

“Come into the house, Prairie Flower.”

Her face relaxed like that of a child when it smiles through its tears. And Smith, in the hour when the first real love of his life was at its zenith, when his heart was so full of it that it seemed well nigh bursting, walked back to the house with the squaw clinging tightly to his fingers.

VIII

THE BUG-HUNTER ELUCIDATES

The same instinct which made Ralston recognize Susie as his friend told him that Smith was his enemy; though, verily, that person who would have construed as evidences of esteem and budding friendship Smith’s black looks when Ralston presumed to talk with Dora, even upon the most ordinary topics, would have been dull of comprehension indeed.

While no reason for remaining appeared to be necessary at the MacDonald ranch, Ralston hinted at hunting stray horses; and casually expressed a hope that he might be able to pick up a bunch of good ponies at a reasonable figure—which explanation was entirely satisfactory to all save Smith. The latter frequently voiced the opinion that Ralston lingered solely for the purpose of courting the Schoolmarm, an opinion which the grub-liners agreed was logical, since they too, along with the majority of unmarried males for fifty miles around, cherished a similar ambition.

Dora had long since ceased to consider as extraordinary the extended visits which strangers paid to the ranch; therefore, she saw nothing unusual in the fact that Ralston stayed on.

If furtive-eyed and restless passers-by arrived after dark, slept in the hay near their unsaddled horses, and departed at dawn, assuredly no person at the MacDonald ranch was rude enough to ask reasons for their haste. Its hospitality was as boundless, as free, as the range itself; and if upon leaving any guest had happened to express gratitude for food and shelter, it is doubtful if any incident could more have surprised Susie and her mother, unless, mayhap, it might have been an offer of payment for the same.

Ralston told himself that, since he could remain without comment, the ranch was much better situated for his purpose than Colonel Tolman’s home; but the really convincing point in its favor, though one which he refused to recognize as influencing him in the least, was that he was nearer Dora by something like eight miles than he would have been at the Bar C. Then, too, though there was nothing tangible to justify his suspicions, Ralston believed that his work lay close at hand.

Like Colonel Tolman, he had come to think that it was not the Indians who were killing; and the nesters, though a spiritless, shiftless lot, had always been honest enough. But the bunk-house on the MacDonald ranch was often filled with the material of which horse and cattle thieves are made, and Ralston hoped that he might get a clue from some word inadvertently dropped there.

He often thought that he never had seen a more heterogeneous gathering than that which assembled at times around the table. And with Longfellow in the dining-room, ethnological dissertations in one end of the bunk-house, and personal reminiscences and experiences in gun-fights and affairs of the heart in the other end, there was afforded a sufficient variety of mental diversion to suit nearly any taste.

McArthur in the rôle of desperado seemed preposterous to Ralston; yet he remembered that Ben Reed, a graduate of a theological seminary, who could talk tears into the eyes of an Apache, was the slickest stock thief west of the Mississippi. He was well aware that a pair of mild eyes and gentle, ingenuous manners are many a rogue’s most valuable asset, and though the bug-hunter talked frankly of his pilgrimages into the hills, there was always a chance that his pursuit was a pose, his zeal counterfeit.

One evening which was typical of others, Ralston sat on the edge of his bunk, rolling an occasional cigarette and listening with huge enjoyment to the conversation of a group around the sheet-iron stove, of which McArthur was the central figure.

McArthur, riding his hobby enthusiastically, quite forgot the character of his listeners, and laid his theories regarding the interchange of mammalian life between America and Asia during the early Pleistocene period, before Meeteetse Ed, Old Man Rulison, Tubbs, and others, in the same language in which he would have argued moot questions with colleagues engaged in similar research. The language of learning was as natural to McArthur as the vernacular of the West was to Tubbs, and in moments of excitement he lapsed into it as a foreigner does into his native tongue under stress of feeling.

“I maintain,” asserted McArthur, with a gesture of emphasis, “that the Paleolithic man of Europe followed the mastodon to North America and here remained.”

Meeteetse Ed, whose cheeks were flushed, laid his hot hand upon his forehead and declared plaintively as he blinked at McArthur:

“Pardner, I’m gittin’ a headache from tryin’ to see what you’re talkin’ about.”

“Air you sayin’ anything a-tall,” demanded Old Man Rulison, suspiciously, “or air you joshin’?”

“Them’s words all right,” said Tubbs. “Onct I worked under a section boss over on the Great Northern what talked words like them. He believed we sprung up from tuds and lizards—and the likes o’ that. Yes, he did—on the square.”

“There are many believers in the theory of evolution,” observed McArthur.

“That’s it—that’s the word. That’s what he was.” Then, in the tone of one who hands out a clincher, Tubbs demanded: “Look here, Doc, if that’s so why ain’t all these ponds and cricks around here a-hatchin’ out children?”

“Guess that’ll hold him for a minute,” Meeteetse Ed whispered to his neighbor.

But instead of being covered with confusion by this seemingly unanswerable argument, McArthur gazed at Tubbs in genuine pity.

“Let me consider how I can make it quite clear to you. Perhaps,” he said thoughtfully, “I cannot do better than to give you Herbert Spencer’s definition. Spencer defines evolution, as nearly as I can remember his exact words, as an integration of matter and concomita, dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite heterogeneity to a definite, incoherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation. Materialistic, agnostic, and theistic evolution——”

Meeteetse Ed fell off his chair in a mock faint and crashed to the floor.

Susie, who had entered, saw McArthur’s embarrassment, and refused to join in the shout of laughter, though her eyes danced.

“Don’t mind him,” she said comfortingly, as she eyed Meeteetse, sprawled on his back with his eyes closed. “He’s afraid he’ll learn something. He used to be a sheep-herder, and I don’t reckon he’s got more’n two hundred and fifty words in his whole vocabulary. Why, I’ll bet he never heard a word of more’n three syllables before. Get up, Meeteetse. Go out in the fresh air and build yourself a couple of them sheep-herder’s monuments. It’ll make you feel better.”

The prostrate humorist revived. Susie’s jeers had the effect of a bucket of ice-water, for he had not been aware that this blot upon his escutcheon—the disgraceful epoch in his life when he had earned honest money herding sheep—was known.

“My enthusiasm runs away with me when I get upon this subject,” said McArthur, in blushing apology to the group. “I am sorry that I have bored you.”

“No bore a-tall,” declared Old Man Rulison magnanimously. “You cut loose whenever you feel like it: we kin stand it as long as you kin.”

After McArthur had gone to his pneumatic mattress in the patent tent pitched near the bunk-house, Ralston said to Susie:

“You and the bug-hunter are great friends, aren’t you?”

“You bet! We’re pardners. Anybody that gets funny with him has got me to fight.”

“Oh, it’s like that, is it?” Ralston laughed.

“We’ve got secrets—the bug-hunter and me.”

“You’re rather young for secrets, Susie.”

“Nobody’s too young for secrets,” she declared. “Haven’t you any?”

“Sure,” Ralston nodded.

“I like you,” Susie whispered impulsively. “Let’s swap secrets.”

He looked at her and wished he dared. He would have liked to tell her of his mission, to ask her help; for he realized that, if she chose, no one could help him more. Like Smith, he recognized that quality in her they each called “gameness,” and even more than Smith he appreciated the commingling of Scotch shrewdness and Indian craft. He believed Susie to be honest; but he had believed many things in the past which time had not demonstrated to be facts. No, the chance was too great to take; for should she prove untrustworthy or indiscreet, his mission would be a failure. So he answered jestingly:

“My secrets are not for little girls to know.”

Susie gave him a quick glance.

“Oh, you don’t look as though you had that kind,” and turned away.

Ralston felt somehow that he had lost an opportunity. He could not rid himself of the feeling the entire evening; and he made up his mind to cultivate Susie’s friendship. But it was too late; he had made a mistake not unlike Dora’s. Susie had felt herself rebuffed, and, like the Schoolmarm, Ralston had laughed at her with his eyes. It was a great thing—a really sacred thing to Susie—this secret that she had offered him. The telling of it to McArthur had been so delightful an experience that she yearned to repeat it, but now she meant never to tell any one else. Any way, McArthur was her “pardner,” and it was enough that he should know. So it came about that afterwards, when Ralston sought her company and endeavored to learn something of the workings of her mind, he found the same barrier of childish reserve which had balked Dora, and no amount of tact or patience seemed able to break it down.

The young deputy sheriff’s interest in Dora increased in leaps and bounds. He experienced an odd but delightful agitation when he saw the sleepy white pony plodding down the hill, and the sensation became one easily defined each time that he observed Smith’s horse ambling in the road beside hers. The feeling which inspired Tubbs’s disgruntled comment, “Smith rides herd on the Schoolmarm like a cow outfit in a bad wolf country,” found an echo in Ralston’s own breast. Truly, Smith guarded the Schoolmarm with the vigilance of a sheep-dog.

He saw a possible rival in every new-comer, but most of all he feared Ralston; for Smith was not too blinded by prejudice to appreciate the fact that Ralston was handsome in a strong, man’s way, younger than himself, and possessed of the advantages of education which enabled him to talk with Dora upon subjects that left him, Smith, dumb. Such times were wormwood and gall to Smith; yet in his heart he never doubted but that he would have Dora and her love in the end. Smith’s faith in himself and his ability to get what he really desired was sublime. The chasm between himself and Dora—the difference of birth and education—meant nothing to him. It is doubtful if he recognized it. He would have considered himself a king’s equal; indeed, it would have gone hard with royalty, had royalty by any chance ordered Smith to saddle his horse. He judged by the standards of the plains: namely, gameness, skill, resourcefulness; to him, there were no other standards. After all, Dora Marshall was only a woman—the superior of other women, to be sure, but a woman; and if he wanted her—why not?

He would have been amazed, enraged through wounded vanity, if it had been possible for him to see himself from Dora’s point of view: a subject for reformation; a test for many trite theories; an erring human to be reclaimed by a woman’s benign influence. Naturally, these thoughts had not suggested themselves to Smith.

Ralston looked forward eagerly to the evening meal, since it was almost the only time at which he could exchange a word with Dora. Breakfast was a hurried affair, while both she and Susie were absent from the midday dinner. The shy, fluttering glances which he occasionally surprised from her, the look of mutual appreciation which sometimes passed between them at a quaint bit of philosophy or naïve remark, started his pulses dancing and set the whole world singing a wordless song of joy.

Somehow, eating seemed a vulgar function in the Schoolmarm’s presence, and he wished with all his heart that the abominable grammar lessons which filled her evenings might some time end; in which case he would be able to converse with her when not engaged in rushing bread and meat to and fro.

His most carefully laid plans to obtain a few minutes alone with her were invariably thwarted by Smith. And from the heights to which he had been transported by some more than passing friendly glance at the table, he was dragged each evening to the depths by the sight of Dora and Smith with their heads together over that accursed grammar.

He commenced to feel a distaste for his bunk-house associates, and took to wandering out of doors, pausing most frequently in his meanderings just outside the circle of light thrown through the window by the dining-room lamp. Dora’s guilelessness in believing that Smith’s interest in his lessons was due to a desire for knowledge did not make the tableau less tantalizing to Ralston, but it would have been against every tenet in his code to suggest to Dora that Smith was not the misguided diamond-in-the-rough which she believed him.

Smith, on the contrary, had no such scruples. He lost no opportunity to sneer at Ralston. When he discovered Dora wearing one of the first flowers of spring, which Ralston had brought her, Smith said darkly:

“That fresh guy is a dead ringer for a feller that quit his wife and five kids in Livingston and run off with a biscuit-shooter.”

Dora laughed aloud. The clean-cut and youthful Ralston deserting a wife and five children for a “biscuit-shooter” was not a convincing picture. That she did not receive his insinuation seriously but added fuel to the unreasoning jealousy beginning to flame in Smith’s breast.

Yet Smith treated Ralston with a consideration which was surprising in view of the wanton insults he frequently inflicted upon those whom he disliked. Susie guessed the reason for his superficial courtesy, and Ralston, perhaps, suspected it also. In his heart, Smith was afraid. First and always, he was a judge of men—rather, of certain qualities in men. He knew that should he give intentional offense to Ralston, he would be obliged either to retract or to back up his insult with a gun. Ralston would be the last man to accept an affront with meekness.

Smith did not wish affairs to reach this crisis. He did not want to force an issue until he had demonstrated to his own satisfaction that he was the better man of the two with words or fists or weapons. But once he found the flaw in Ralston’s armor, he would speedily become the aggressor. Such were Smith’s tactics. He was reckless with caution; daring when it was safe.

The rôle he was playing gave him no concern. Though the Indian woman’s spells of sullenness irritated him, he conciliated her with endearing words, caresses, and the promise of a speedy marriage. He appeased her jealousy of Dora by telling her that he studied the foolish book-words only that he might the better work for her interests; that he was fitting himself to cope with the shrewd cattlemen with whom there were constant dealings, and that when they were married, the Schoolmarm should live elsewhere. Like others of her sex, regardless of race or color, the Indian woman believed because she wanted to believe.

Just where his actions were leading him, Smith did not stop to consider. He had no fear of results. With an overweening confidence arising from past successes, he believed that matters would adjust themselves as they always had. Smith wanted a home, and the MacDonald cattle, horses, and hay; but more than any of them he wanted Dora Marshall. How he was going to obtain them all was not then clear to him, but that when the time came he could make a way, he never for a moment doubted.

Smith’s confidence in himself was supreme. If he could have expressed his belief in words, he might have said that he could control Destiny, shape events and his own life as he liked. He had been shot at, pursued by posses, all but lynched upon an occasion, and always he had escaped in some unlooked-for manner little short of miraculous. As a result, he had come to cherish a superstitious belief that he bore a charmed life, that no real harm could come to him. So he courted each woman according to her nature as he read it, and waited blindly for success.

IX

SPEAKING OF GRASSHOPPERS——

It was Saturday, and, there being no school, both Susie and Dora were at home. Ralston was considering in which direction he should ride that day when Susie came to him and after saying to Smith with elaborate politeness, “Excuse me, Mr. Smith, for whispering, but I have something very private and confidential to say to Mr. Ralston,” she shielded her mouth with her hand and said:

“Teacher and I are going fishing. We are going up on the side-hill now to catch grasshoppers for bait, and I thought maybe you’d like to help, and to fish with us this afternoon.” She tittered in his ear.

Susie’s action conveyed two things to Ralston’s mind: first, that he had not been so clever as he had supposed in dissembling his feelings; and second, that Susie, recognizing them, was disposed to render him friendly aid.

Smith noted Ralston’s brightening eye with suspicion, jumping to the very natural conclusion that only some pleasing information concerning the Schoolmarm would account for it. When, a few minutes later, he saw the three starting away together, each with a tin or pasteboard box, he realized that his surmise was correct.

Glowering, Smith walked restlessly about the house, ignoring the Indian woman’s inquiring, wistful eyes, cursing to himself as he wandered through the corrals and stables, hating with a personal hatred everything which belonged to Ralston: his gentle-eyed brown mare; his expensive Navajo saddle-blanket; his single-rigged saddle; his bridle with the wide cheek pieces and the hand-forged bit. It would have been a satisfaction to destroy them all. He hated particularly the little brown mare which Ralston brushed with such care each morning. Smith’s mood was black indeed.

But Ralston, as he walked between Dora and Susie to the side-hill where the first grasshoppers of spring were always found, felt at peace with all the world—even Smith—and it was in his heart to hug the elfish half-breed child as she skipped beside him. Dora’s frequent, bubbling laughter made him thrill; he longed to shout aloud like a schoolboy given an unexpected holiday.

Each time that his eyes sought Dora’s, shadowed by the wide brim of her hat, her eyelids drooped, slowly, reluctantly, as though they fell against her will, while the color came and went under her clear skin in a fashion which filled him with delighted wonder.

It may be said that there are few things in life so absorbing as catching grasshoppers. While Ralston previously had recognized this fact, he never had supposed that it contained any element of pleasure akin to the delights of Paradise. To chase grasshoppers by oneself is one thing; to pursue them in the company of a fascinating schoolmarm is another; and when one has in his mind the thought that ultimately he and the schoolmarm may chance to fall upon the same grasshopper, the chase becomes a sport for the gods to envy.

Anent grasshoppers. While the first grasshopper of early spring has not the devilish agility of his August descendant, he is sufficiently alert to make his capture no mean feat. It must be borne in mind that the grasshopper is not a fool, and that he appears to see best from the rear. Though he remains motionless while the enemy is slipping stealthily upon him, it by no means follows that he is not aware of said enemy’s approach. The grasshopper has a more highly developed sense of humor than any other known insect. It is an established fact that after a person has fallen upon his face and clawed at the earth where the grasshopper was but is not, the grasshopper will be seen distinctly to laugh from his coign of vantage beyond reach.

Furthermore, it is quite impossible to fathom the mind of the grasshopper, his intentions or habits; particularly those of the small, gray-pink variety. He is as erratic in his flight as a clay pigeon, though it is tolerably safe to assume that he will not jump backward. He may not jump at all, but, with a deceptive movement, merely sidle under a sage-leaf. Where questions concerning his personal safety are concerned, he shows rare judgment, appearing to recognize exactly the psychological moment in which to fly, jump, or sit still.

No sluggard, be it known, can hope to catch grasshoppers with any degree of success. It requires an individual nimble of mind and body, whose nerves are keyed to a tension, who is dominated by a mood which refuses to recognize the perils of snakes, cactus, and prairie-dog holes; forgetful of self and dignity, inured to ridicule. Such a one is justified in making the attempt.

The large, brownish-black, grandfatherly-looking grasshopper is the most easily captured, though not so satisfactory for bait as the pea-green or the gray-pink. It was to the first variety that Dora and Ralston devoted themselves, while Susie followed the smaller and more sprightly around the hill till she was out of sight.

Ralston became aware that no matter in which direction the grasshopper he had marked for his own took him, singularly enough he always ended in pursuit of Dora’s. As a matter of fact, her grasshopper looked so much more desirable than his, that he could not well do otherwise than abandon the pursuit of his own for hers.

Her low “Oh, thank you so much!” was so heartfelt and sincere when he pushed the insect through the slit in her pasteboard box that he truly believed he would have run one all the way to the Middle Fork of Powder River only to hear her say it again. And then her womanly aversion to inflicting pain, her appealing femininity when she brought a bulky-bodied, tobacco-chewing grasshopper for him to pinch its head into insensibility! He liked this best of all, for, of necessity, their fingers touched in the exchange, and he wondered a little at his strength of will in refraining from catching her hand in his and refusing to let go.

Finally a grasshopper of abnormal size went up with a whir. Big he was, in comparison with his kind, as the monster steer in the side-show, the Cardiff giant, or Jumbo the mammoth.

“Oh!” cried Dora; “we must have him!” and they ran side by side in wild, determined pursuit.

The insect sailed far and fast, but they could not lose sight of him, for he was like an aeroplane in flight, and when in an ill-advised moment he lit to gather himself, they fell upon him tooth and nail—to use a phrase. Dora’s hand closed over the grasshopper, and Ralston’s closed over Dora’s, holding it tight in one confused moment of delicious, tongue-tied silence.

Her shoulder touched his, her hair brushed his cheek. He wished that they might go on holding down that grasshopper until the end of time. She was panting with the exertion, her nose was moist like a baby’s when it sleeps, and he noticed in a swift, sidelong glance that the pupils of her eyes all but covered the iris.

“He—he’s wiggling!” she said tremulously.

“Is he?” Ralston asked fatuously, at a loss for words, but making no move to lift his hand.

“And there’s a cactus in my finger.”

“Let me see it.” Immediately his face was full of deep concern.

He held her fingers, turning the small pink palm upward.

“We must get it out,” he declared firmly. “They poison some people.”

He wondered if it was imagination, or did her hand tremble a little in his? His relief was not unmixed with disappointment when the cactus spine came out easily.

“They hurt—those needles.” He continued to regard the tiny puncture with unabated interest.

“Tra! la! la!” sang Susie from the brow of the hill. “Old Smith is comin’.”

Ralston dropped Dora’s hand, and they both reddened, each wondering how long Susie had been doing picket duty.

“Out for your failin’ health, Mister Smith?” inquired Susie, with solicitude.

“I’m huntin’ horses, and hopin’ to pick up a bunch of ponies cheap,” he replied with ugly significance as he rode by.

And while the soft light faded from Ralston’s eyes, the color leaped to his face; unconsciously his fists clenched as he looked after Smith’s vanishing back. It was the latter’s first overt act of hostility; Ralston knew, and perhaps Smith intended it so, that the clash between them must now come soon.

X

MOTHER LOVE AND SAVAGE PASSION CONFLICT

It was Sunday, a day later, when Susie came into the living-room and noticed her mother sewing muskrat around the top of a moccasin. It was a man’s moccasin. The woman had made no men’s moccasins since her husband’s death. The sight chilled the girl.

“Mother,” she asked abruptly, “what do you let that hold-up hang around here for?”

“Who you mean?” the woman asked quickly.

“That Smith!” Susie spat out the word like something offensive.

The Indian woman avoided the girl’s eyes.

“I like him,” she answered.

“Mother!”

“Maybe he stay all time.” Her tone was stubborn, as though she expected and was prepared to resist an attack.

“You don’t—you can’t—mean it!”. Susie’s thin face flushed scarlet with shame.

“Sa-ah,” the woman nodded, “I mean it;” and Susie, staring at her in a kind of terror, saw that she did.

“Oh, Mother! Mother!” she cried passionately, dropping on the floor at the woman’s feet and clasping her arms convulsively about the Indian woman’s knees. “Don’t—don’t say that! We’ve always been a little different from the rest. We’ve always held our heads up. People like us and respect us—both Injuns and white. We’ve never been talked about—you and me—and now you are going to spoil it all!”

“I get tied up to him right,” defended the woman sullenly.

“Oh, Mother!” wailed the child.

“We need good white man to run de ranch.”

“But Smith—do you think he’s good? Good! Is a rattlesnake good? Can’t you see what he is, Mother?—you who are smarter than me in seeing through people? He’s mean—onery to the marrow—and some day sure—sure—he’ll turn, and strike his fangs into you.”

“He no onery,” the woman replied, in something like anger.

“It’s his nature,” Susie went on, without heeding her. “He can’t help it. All his thoughts and talk and schemes are about something crooked. Can’t you tell by the things he lets drop that he ought to be in the ’pen’? He’s treacherous, ungrateful, a born thief. I saw him take Tubbs’s halter, and there was the regular thief look in his eyes when he cut his own name on it. I saw him kick a dog, and he kicked it like a brute. He kicked it in the ribs with his toe. Men—decent men—kick a dog with the side of their foot. I saw his horse fall with him, and he held it down and beat it on the neck with a chain, where it wouldn’t show. He’d hold up a bank or rob a woman; he’d kill a man or a prairie-dog, and think no more of the one than the other.

“I tell you, Mother, as sure as I sit here on the floor at your feet, begging you, he’s going to bring us trouble; he’s going to deal us misery! I feel it! I know it!”

“You no like de white man.”

“That’s right; I don’t like the white man. He wants a good place to stay; he wants your horses and cattle and hay; and—he wants the Schoolmarm. He’s making a fool of you, Mother.”

“He no make fool of me,” she answered complacently. “He make fool of de white woman, maybe.”

“Look out of the window and see for yourself.”

They arose together, and the girl pointed to Smith and Dora, seated side by side on the cottonwood log.

“Did he ever look at you like that, Mother?”

“He make fool of de white woman,” she reiterated stubbornly, but her face clouded.

“He makes a fool of himself, but not of her,” declared Susie. “He’s crazy about her—locoed. Everybody sees it except her. Believe me, Mother, listen to Susie just this once.”

“He like me. I stick to him;” but she went back to her bench. The unfamiliar softness of Smith’s face hurt her.

The tears filled Susie’s eyes and ran down her cheeks. Her mother’s passion for this hateful stranger was stronger than her mother-love, that silent, undemonstrative love in which Susie had believed as she believed that the sun would rise each morning over there in the Bad Lands, to warm her when she was cold. She buried her face in her mother’s lap and sobbed aloud.

The woman had not seen Susie cry since she was a tiny child, save when her father and White Antelope died, and the numbed maternal instinct stirred in her breast. She laid her dark, ringed fingers upon Susie’s hair and stroked it gently.

“Don’t cry,” she said slowly. “If he make fool of me, if he lie when he say he tie up to me right, if he like de white woman better den me, I kill him. I kill him, Susie.” She pointed to a bunch of roots and short dried stalks which hung from the rafters in one corner of the room. “See—that is the love-charm of the Sioux. It was gifted to me by Little Coyote’s woman—a Mandan. It bring de love, and too much—it kill. If he make fool of me, if he not like me better den de white woman, I give him de love-charm of de Sioux. I fix him! I fix him right!”

Out on the cottonwood log Smith and the Schoolmarm had been speaking of many things; for the man could talk fluently in his peculiar vernacular, upon any subject which interested him or with which he was familiar.

The best of his nature, whatever of good there was in him, was uppermost when with Dora. He really believed at such times that he was what she thought him, and he condemned the shortcomings of others like one speaking from the lofty pinnacle of unimpeachable virtue.

In her presence, new ambitions, new desires, awakened, and sentiments which he never had suspected he possessed revealed themselves. He was happy in being near her; content when he felt the touch of her loose cape on his arm.

It never before had occurred to Smith that the world through which he had gone his tumultuous way was a beautiful place, or that there was joy in the simple fact of being strongly alive. When the sage-brush commenced to turn green and the many brilliant flowers of the desert bloomed, when the air was stimulating like wine and fragrant with the scents of spring, it had meant little to Smith beyond the facts that horse-feed would soon be plentiful and that he could lay aside his Mackinaw coat. The mountains suggested nothing but that they held big game and were awkward places to get through on horseback, while the deserts brought no thoughts save of thirst and loneliness and choking alkali dust. Upon a time a stranger had mentioned the scenery, and Smith had replied ironically that there was plenty of it and for him to help himself!

But this spring was different—so different that he asked himself wonderingly if other springs had been like it; and to-day, as he sat in the sunshine and looked about him, he saw for the first time grandeur in the saw-toothed, snow-covered peaks outlined against the dazzling blue of the western sky. For the first time he saw the awing vastness of the desert, and the soft pastel shades which made their desolation beautiful. He breathed deep of the odorous air and stared about him like a blind man who suddenly sees.

During a silence, Smith looked at Dora with his curiously intent gaze; his characteristic stare which held nothing of impertinence—only interest, intense, absorbing interest—and as he looked a thought came to him, a thought so unexpected, so startling, that he blinked as if some one had struck him in the face. It sent a bright red rushing over him, coloring his neck, his ears, his white, broad forehead.

He thought of her as the mother of children—his children—bearing his name, miniatures of himself and of her. He never had thought of this before. He never had met a woman who inspired in him any such desire. He followed the thought further. What if he should have a permanent home—a ranch that belonged to him exclusively—“Smith’s Ranch”—where there were white curtains at the windows, and little ones who came tumbling through the door to greet him when he rode into the yard? A place where people came to visit, people who reckoned him a person of consequence because he stood for something. He must have seen a place like it somewhere, the picture was so vivid in his mind.

The thought of living like others never before had entered into the scheme of his calculations. Since the time when he had “quit the flat” back in the country where they slept between sheets, the world had been lined up against him in its own defense. Life had been a constant game of hare and hounds, with the pack frequently close at his heels. He had been ever on the move, both for reasons of safety and as a matter of taste. His point of view was the abnormal one of the professional law-breaker: the world was his legitimate prey; the business of his life was to do as he pleased and keep his liberty; to outwit sheriffs and make a clean get-away. To be known among his kind as “game” and “slick,” was the only distinction he craved. His chiefest ambition had been to live up to his title of “Bad Man.” In this he had found glory which satisfied him.

“Well,” Dora asked at last, smiling up at him, “what is it?”

Smith hesitated; then he burst out:

“Girl, do I stack up different to you nor anybody else? Have you any feelin’ for me at all?”

“Why, I think I’ve shown my interest in trying to teach you,” she replied, a little abashed by his vehemence.

“What do you want to teach me for?” he demanded.

“Because,” Dora declared, “you have possibilities.”

“Why don’t you teach Meeteetse Ed and Tubbs?”

Dora laughed aloud.

“Candidly, I think it would be a waste of time. They could never hope to be much more than we see them here. And they are content as they are.”

“So was I, girl, until our trails crossed. I could ride without grub all day, and sing. I could sleep on a saddle-blanket like a tired pup, with only a rock for a wind-break and my saddle for a pillow. Now I can’t sleep in a bed. It’s horrible—this mixed up feelin’—half the time wantin’ to holler and laugh and the other half wantin’ to cry.”

“I don’t see why you should feel like that,” said Dora gravely. “You are getting along. It’s slow, but you’re learning.”

“Oh, yes, I’m learnin’,” Smith answered grimly—“fast.”

He saw her wondering look and went on fiercely.

“Girl, don’t you see what I mean? Don’t you sabe? My feelin’ for you is more nor friendship. I can’t tell you how I feel. It’s nothin’ I ever had before, but I’ve heard of it a-plenty. It’s love—that’s what it is! I’ve seen it, too, a-plenty.

“There’s two things in the world a feller’ll go through hell for—just two: love and gold. I don’t mean money, but gold—the pure stuff. They’ll waller through snow-drifts, they’ll swim rivers with the ice runnin’, they’ll crawl through canyons and over trails on their hands and knees, they’ll starve and they’ll freeze, they’ll work till the blood runs from their blistered hands, they’ll kill their horses and their pardners, for gold! And they’ll do it for love. Yes, I’ve seen it a-plenty, me—Smith.

“Things I’ve done, I’ve done, and they don’t worry me none,” he went on, “but lately I’ve thought of Dutch Joe. I worked him over for singin’ a love-song, and I wisht I hadn’t. He’d held up a stage, and was cached in my camp till things simmered down. It was lonesome, and I’d want to talk; but he’d sit back in the dark, away from the camp-fire, and sing to himself about ’ridin’ to Annie.’ How the miles wasn’t long or the trail rough if only he was ’ridin’ to Annie.’ Sittin’ back there in the brush, he sounded like a sick coyote a-hollerin’. It hadn’t no tune, and I thought it was the damnedest fool song I ever heard. After he’d sung it more’n five hundred times, I hit him on the head with a six-shooter, and we mixed. He quit singin’, but he held that gretch against me as long as he lived.

“I thought it was because he was Dutch, but it wasn’t. ’Twas love. Why, girl, I’d ride as long as my horse could stand up under me, and then I’d hoof it, just to hear you say, ‘Smith, do you think it will rain?’”

“Oh, I never thought of this!” cried Dora, as Smith paused.

Her face was full of distress, and her hands lay tightly clenched in her lap.

“Do you mean I haven’t any show—no show at all?” The color fading from Smith’s face left it a peculiar yellow.

“It never occurred to me that you would misunderstand, or think anything but that I wanted to help you. I thought that you wanted to learn so that you would have a better chance in life.”

“Did you—honest? Are you as innocent as that, girl?” he asked in savage scepticism. “Did you believe that I’d set and study them damned verbs just so I’d have a better chanct in life?”

“You said so.”

“Oh, yes, maybe I said so.”

“Surely, surely, you don’t think I would intentionally mislead you?”

“When a woman wants a man to dress or act or talk different, she generally cares some.”

“And I do ‘care some’!” Dora cried impulsively. “I believe that you are not making the best of yourself, of your life; that you are better than your surroundings; and because I do believe in you, I want to help you. Don’t you understand?”

Her explanation was not convincing to Smith.

“Is it because I don’t talk grammar, and you think you’d have to live in a log-house and hang out your own wash?”

Dora considered.

“Even if I cared for you, those things would have weight,” she answered truthfully. “I am content out here now, and like it because it is novel and I know it is temporary; but if I were asked to live here always, as you suggest, in a log-house and hang out my own wash, I should have to care a great deal.”

“It’s because I haven’t a stake, then,” he said bitterly.

“No, not because you haven’t a stake. I merely say that extreme poverty would be an objection.”

“But if I should get the dinero—me, Smith—plenty of it? Tell me,” he demanded fiercely—“it’s the time to talk now—is there any one else? It’s me for the devil straight if you throw me! You’d better take this gun here, plant it on my heart, and pull the trigger. Because if I live—I’m talkin’ straight—what I have done will be just a kid’s play to what I’ll do, if I ever cut loose for fair. Don’t throw me, girl! Give me a show—if there ain’t any one else! If there is, I’m quittin’ the flat to-day.”

Dora was silent, panic-stricken with the responsibility which he seemed to have thrust upon her, almost terrified by the thought that he was leaving his future in her hands—a malleable object, to be shaped according to her will for good or evil.

A certain self-contained, spectacled youth, whose weekly letters arrived with regularity, rose before her mental vision, and as quickly vanished, leaving in his stead a man of a different type, a man at once unyielding and gentle, both shy and bold; a man who seemed to typify in himself the faults and virtues of the raw but vigorous West. Though she hesitated, she replied:

“No, there is no one.”

And Ralston, fording the stream, lifted his eyes midway and saw Smith raise Dora’s hand to his lips.

XI

THE BEST HORSE

There was a subtle change in Ralston, which Dora was quick to feel. He was deferential, as always, and as eager to please; but he no longer sought her company, and she missed the quick exchange of sympathetic glances at the table. It seemed to her, also, that the grimness in his face was accentuated of late. She found herself crying one night, and called it homesickness, yet the small items of news contained in the latest letter from the spectacled youth had irritated her, and she had realized that she no longer regarded church fairs, choir practice, and oyster suppers as “events.”

She wondered how she had offended Ralston, if at all; or was it that he thought her bold, a brazen creature, because she had let him keep her hand so long upon the memorable occasion of the grasshopper hunt? She blushed in the darkness at the thought, and the tears slipped down her cheeks again as she decided that this must be so, since there could be no other explanation. Before she finally slept, she had fully made up her mind that she would show him by added reserve and dignity of manner that she was not the forward hoyden he undoubtedly believed her. And as a result of this midnight decision, the Schoolmarm’s “Good-morning, Mr. Ralston,” chilled that person like a draught from cold storage.

Susie noticed the absence of their former cordiality toward each other; and the obvious lack of warmth filled Smith with keen satisfaction. He had no notion of its cause; it was sufficient that it was so.

As their conversation daily became more forced, the estrangement more marked, Ralston’s wretchedness increased in proportion. He brooded miserably over the scene he had witnessed; troubled, aside from his own interest in Dora, that she should be misled by a man of Smith’s moral calibre. While he had delighted in her unworldly, childlike belief in people and things, in this instance he deeply regretted it.

Ralston understood perfectly the part which Smith desired to play in her eyes. He had heard through Dora the stories Smith had told her of wild adventures in which he figured to advantage, of reckless deeds which he hinted would be impossible since falling under her influence. He posed as a brand snatched from the burning, and conveyed the impression that his salvation was a duty which had fallen in her path for her to perform. That she applied herself to the task of elevating Smith with such combined patience and ardor, was the grievance of which Ralston had most to complain.

In his darker moments he told himself that she must have a liking for the man far stronger than he had believed, to have permitted the liberty which he had witnessed, one which, coming from Smith, seemed little short of sacrilege. His unhappiness was not lessened by the instances he recalled where women had married beneath them through this mistaken sense of duty, pity, or less commendable emotions.

Upon one thing he was determined, and that was never again to force his attentions upon her, to take advantage of her helplessness as he had when he had held her hand so tightly and, as he now believed, against her wishes. Although she did not show it, she must have thought him a bumpkin, an oaf, an underbred cur. He groaned as he ransacked his vocabulary for fitting words.

If only something would arise to reveal Smith’s character to her in its true light! But this was too much to hope. In his depression, it seemed to Ralston that the sun would never shine for him again, that failure was written on him like an I. D. brand, that sorrow everlasting would eat and sleep with him. In this mood, after a brief exchange of breakfast civilities, far worse than none, he walked slowly to the corral to saddle, cursing Smith for the braggart he knew he was and for the scoundrel he believed him to be.

Smith, it seemed, was riding that morning also, for when Ralston led his brown mare saddled and bridled from the stable, Smith was tightening the cinch on his long-legged gray—the horse he had taken from the Englishman. The Schoolmarm, in her riding clothes, ran down the trail, calling impartially:

“Will one of you please get my horse for me? He broke loose last night and is over there in the pasture.”

For reply, both Ralston and Smith swung into their saddles.

“I aims to get that horse. There’s no call for you to go, feller.”

Above all else, it was odious to Ralston to be addressed by Smith “feller.”

“If you happen to get to him first,” he answered curtly. “And I’d like to suggest that my name is Ralston.”

By way of answer, Smith dug the spurs cruelly into the thin-skinned blooded gray. Ralston loosened the reins on his brown mare, and it was a run from the jump.

Each realized that the inevitable clash had come, that no pretense of friendliness would longer be possible between them, that from now on they would be avowed enemies. As for Ralston, he was glad that the crisis had arrived; glad of anything which would divert him for ever so short a time from his own bitter thoughts; glad of the test which he could meet in the open, like a man.

The corral gate was open, and this led into a lane something like three-quarters of a mile in length, at the end of which was another gate, opening into the pasture where the runaway pony had crawled through the loose wire fence.

The brown mare had responded to Ralston’s signal like the loyal, honest little brute she was. The gravel flew behind them, and the rat-a-tat-tat of the horses’ hoofs on the hard road was like the roll of a drum. They were running neck and neck, but Ralston had little fear of the result, unless the gray had phenomenal speed.

Ralston knew that whoever reached the gate first must open it. If he could get far enough in the lead, he could afford to do so; if not, he meant to “pull” his horse and leave it to Smith. The real race would be from the gate to the pony.

The gray horse could run—his build showed that, and his stride bore out his appearance. Yet Ralston felt no uneasiness, for the mare had still several links of speed to let out—“and then some,” as he phrased it. The pace was furious even to the gate; they ran neck and neck, like a team, and the face of each rider was set in lines of determination. Ralston quickly saw that in the short stretch he would be unable to get sufficiently in the lead to open the gate in safety. So he pulled his horse a little, wondering if Smith would do the same. But he did not. Instead, he spurred viciously, and, to Ralston’s amazement, he went at the gate hard. Lifting the gray horse’s head, he went over and on without a break!

It was a chance, but Smith had taken it! He never had tried the horse, but it was from the English ranch, where he knew they were bred and trained to jump. His mocking laugh floated back to Ralston while he tore at the fastenings of the gate and hurled it from him.

Ralston measured the gap between them and his heart sank. It looked hopeless. The only thing in his favor was that it was a long run, and the gray might not have the wind or the endurance. The little mare stood still, her nose out, her soft eyes shining. As he lifted the reins, he patted her neck and cried, breathing hard:

“Molly, old girl, if you win, it’s oats and a rest all your life!”

He could have sworn the mare shared his humiliation.

The saddle-leathers creaked beneath him at the leap she gave. She lay down to her work like a hound, running low, her neck outstretched, her tail lying out on the breeze. Game, graceful, reaching out with her slim legs and tiny hoofs, she ate up the distance between herself and the gray in a way that made even Ralston gasp. And still she gained—and gained! Her muscles seemed like steel springs, and the unfaltering courage in her brave heart made Ralston choke with pride and tenderness and gratitude. Even if she lost, the race she was making was something to remember always. But she was gaining inch by inch. The sage-brush and cactus swam under her feet. When Ralston thought she had done her best, given all that was in her, she did a little more.

Smith knew, too, that she was gaining, though he would not turn his head to look. When her nose was at his horse’s rump, he had it in his heart to turn and shoot her as she ran. She crept up and up, and both Smith and Ralston knew that the straining, pounding gray had done its best. The work was too rough for its feet. There was too much thoroughbred in it for lava-rock and sage-brush hummocks. Blind rage consumed Smith as he felt the increasing effort of each stride and knew that it was going “dead” under him. He used his spurs with savage brutality, but the brown mare’s breath was coming hot on his leg. The gray horse stumbled; its breath came and went in sobs. Now they were neck and neck again. Then it was over, the little brown mare swept by, and Ralston’s rope, cutting the air, dropped about the neck of the insignificant, white “digger” that had caused it all.

“I guess you’re ridin’ the best horse to-day,” said Smith, as he dropped from the saddle to retie his latigo.

He gave the words a peculiar emphasis and inflection which made the other man look at him.

“Molly and I have a prejudice against taking dust,” Ralston answered quietly.

“It happens frequent that a feller has to get over his prejudices out in this country.”

“That depends a little upon the fellow;” and he turned Molly’s head toward the ranch, with the pony in tow.

Smith said nothing more, but rode off across the hills with all the evil in his nature showing in his lowering countenance.