by Zane Grey
“I told you, didn’t I?... He — he attacked me — when I was just — just — trying to stop the boys fighting—”
“Attacked you?... My Gawd! You must — why, Lordy, he jest ain’t — why—”
Suddenly Linc came out of his trance. “Yes, she’s right, I did, Vince. It’s unforgivable — but I took him — her — for a boy — too close to the street. But what he — I mean she — says about attacking her was only — I just tried to hold her — I mean restrain her. Vince, you’ll have to believe me, I don’t strike girls even when I think they’re&mdash She won’t listen to me, Vince. You seem to know the young lady. Tell her I’m sorry for what she says I did.”
“He apologizes, Lucy,” interposed Vince, most earnestly. “He’s my friend, he’s not drunk — or one of these — you know — kind of cowboys... . Lucy, this is Linc Bradway, from Nebraska. Speak up, Linc, square yoreself.”
But Linc had been struck dumb by that name, Lucy — by the remarkable change he noted in the girl’s expression.
“Oh, Vince — did you — did you say — Linc Bradway?” she faltered, her face paling, her eyes growing large and dark.
“Shore I said Linc Bradway,” declared Vince, puzzled. “Cain’t you folks heah?”
Suddenly the girl’s two gauntleted hands seized Linc’s arm and she leaned impulsively toward him, gazing pleadingly into his eyes. Lincoln caught his breath. He actually thought she meant to kiss him.
“Linc Bradway?...” she breathed. “Oh, what a way for us to meet!... Indeed I know you very well.... I was Jimmy Weston’s girl — Lucy Bandon!”
CHAPTER III
JUST THEN ONE of the ragged boys, a freckled- face imp, tugged at Linc’s coat, and shrilled: “Hey, ya big cowpoke! You spoiled our holdup!”
The Nebraskan, without taking his eyes from the girl’s face, reached into his pocket and gave the lad a silver dollar. With a whoop the three youthful bandits ran off.
“Lucy Bandon! Jimmy Weston’s girl!” stammered Lincoln, dismay mingled with his bewilderment. “You can’t be.... Excuse me, miss, but I’m sure loco, I reckon. Jim wrote me about you. I came as soon as I heard that he — that I — Honest, Lucy, but I’m not the dumbhead you must think I am.”
They stared at each other, oblivious of the gaping Vince. For Linc it was a profoundly moving moment. Jimmy Weston’s girl — the Lucy he had written about so eloquently! A slender girl, scarcely eighteen, a pretty tanned face, paled now, blue eyes set wide apart, dark with excitement, red lips, sweet and tragic, a small bare head covered with golden curls, a lithe form typically western and capable in boy’s garb, yet compellingly feminine — a girl who was clinging to him as though he were a brother. As Linc looked down at this sweet-faced girl, he suddenly found himself wishing that she would cling to him all his life. Mr. Lincoln Bradway of Nebraska was finding it very difficult to keep his wits.
“Lucy!... You are the one person I wanted most to meet,” he cried.
“Linc! I can say that, too.... Jimmy told me all about you. He worshiped you. I’ve heard a thousand tales about you.”
“Poor Jim!... Oh, it’s hard to hear that.... You were engaged to him?”
“No, it never went that far.”
“But, you were in love with him?”
“Hardly that. I liked him very much. I — I guess he was in love with me — until — Perhaps I’d have fallen in love with him some day. But, it — it happened, and—”
“You mean he was shot?”
“No, I don’t mean that.... But I can’t talk to you — not here in the street.”
Bradway came to his senses. “Forgive me. I could talk to you anywhere.... Lucy, I must see you. Please give me an opportunity.”
“I want to see you, too. But it won’t do here in town.... I’m driving out home at once. Alone. Aunt Kit is terribly upset. She is staying here. She sent me home. Please follow me on horseback. West on the trail. That’s the road up there. Catch up with me on the hill.”
Then she was gone, leaving Lincoln standing there as one in a trance. Vince nudged him. “Say, pard, you’d be easy meat for some gent with shootin’ on his mind jest about now. Come out of it.”
“Right, Vince. Thanks. I’m damned if I didn’t clear forget where I am. But, Lordy! What is it that has happened?”
“‘Pears like a lot. So you are Jim Weston’s pard? By golly, this is jest like a story. I knowed Jim, not close, but the same as other cowpokes you meet in town.”
“You seem to know Lucy?”
“I should smile, we was always good friends.”
“That girl couldn’t be — what I almost thought,” muttered Linc, as if accusing himself. “What a low-down suspicious hombre I am! Why Jim never gave me half an idea what a wonderful person she is!”
“Pard, I’ve no idea what you almost thought, but I’ll tell you that Lucy Bandon is as clean and sweet as a desert flower — as different from her aunt Kit Bandon as day is from night,” declared Vince, fervently.
“So Kit Bandon is her aunt!”
“Yep... say! Linc, you an’ Lucy jest about fell into each other’s arms.”
“Nonsense. But it got me. Jim’s girl — Kit Bandon’s niece! — she asked me to follow her. We’ll have to get a move on. We’ll go back to Bill’s and saddle the horses. Ride out of town up the brook, and hit the road over the hill. But not together. You trail me a couple of miles back.... Come, let’s rustle.”
Vince was out of breath and panting hard when they reached the livery stable. “Wal — if you — ain’t — a walkin’ cowboy!” he gasped. “I’ll never — keep up — with you — on my feet.”
“Fact is, I always could outwalk most any cowboy. But my wind isn’t so good — especially here in South Pass. Every time I get it back, something happens to knock it out of me again.”
In a few minutes Linc was mounted on the bay, with saddle and stirrups that fit him. It felt good to hear the creak of leather again. But it wasn’t only because he was in the saddle again that made him want to whoop and holler. “Watch me, Vince, and when I top the ridge ahead, you come on. And if you got eyes keep them peeled from this moment.”
“All right, boss, I shore have eyes. But what’m I supposed to look for?”
“How do I know, you dumbhead. Look for everything.”
With that none-too-explicit command Linc rode out and on across the flat between the slope of the hill and the edge of the town. Long before he got to the brook beyond the last house he espied Lucy, seated in a buckboard driving two black horses, climbing the winding road that led to the west. He watched her until she drove out of sight. The Nebraskan was deep in thought. Riding along between the brook and the high placer-mined bank Linc looked for a ford. When he found one he crossed the stream and rode along the other bank among the willows until he gained the open. The slope was gradual, here and there, indented by gullies choked with brush and dwarf pine trees. Lincoln took a zigzag route up to the road, and from there soon reached the summit of the Pass. The Pass was a fairly level saddle, probably four miles wide, stretched from north to south. Beyond this, outcroppings of rock ledges, strips and thickets of pine, and increasing areas of gray sage led to the low-spreading foothills, which gradually reached higher and higher to black-belted mountains that in turn rose to form the base of the snow-clad peaks, glittering in the sun, towering into the blue sky. Southward Lincoln could not see where the Pass ended in that direction. But far beyond the undulating gray prairie, dark foothills heaved up in the distance, and tips of white appeared remote and unsubstantial.
“Big country beyond this Pass,” he soliloquized, and realized that he was eager to get his first glimpse of the famed Sweetwater Valley. “Well, here I am, forking a horse on the old Oregon Trail. And if I can believe my eyes, there roll some prairie schooners westward bound! But what’s become of Lucy’s buckboard?”
He already was half through the Pass without having caught sight of Lucy Bandon’s team of blacks. He lost interest in the landsc
ape as he wondered how he could have missed her. He put Bay from trot to pace to lope, finding each gait easy, yet ground- gaining, and he spared a moment to delight in his new horse.
Suddenly he swung round a rocky outcropping and he saw Lucy. She had slowed down. Even at a distance he saw her looking back. He raised his hand. Again he felt the mounting wave of excitement and emotion that had held him tongue-tied an hour ago. As he gained on the buckboard he realized that he was not going to be able to remain calm and self-contained. His object had been to meet this girl simply to learn from her all he could about what had happened to Jim Weston. But that motive had taken second place now to his interest in the girl herself. A few moments later when he reined Bay in abreast of the girl, he still was far from being calm and collected.
“Oh, I thought something might have stopped you,” cried the smiling girl on the seat of the buckboard. “And when I did see you at last, I thought you’d never catch me.”
“Lucy, I can’t tell you what I thought. But, all this seems too — too good to be true,” he said as he dismounted and came over, hat in hand, and stood by the front wheel of the rig.
“Isn’t it? But it is happening.... Oh, Linc, I’m so embarrassed over the way I treated you — down in the village — in front of Vince—”
“I deserve it, Lucy. But I want to see you again — often — there’s so much I want to say. How far to your home?”
“Twelve miles from the hill. Halfway across the valley.”
“Only that far? I can never say all I want to say in twelve miles. And I hope you’ll want to say something, too! Won’t you stop a while?”
“I have all day to get home. Perhaps it’ll take that long for me to — to...”
Linc interrupted her gently. “Lucy, I reckon you know why I came out here. I had to come when I heard about him — what they were saying about him. It was a job I have to do. I was going to find out what I could and pay a few visits.... I was going to pay a debt and maybe get killed in paying it. I was going to hunt you up and ask some questions....” He paused. “But, Lucy, I never was prepared for anything like, like—”
“Like what?”
“Like you. Of course I knew from Jimmy’s letters that there was a Lucy — a sweet kid. But I hardly took him seriously. I’m afraid my impressions were not flattering to you.”
“Jim made you his hero — and I’m afraid you became mine, too,” she said simply, gazing straight ahead.
“I’m afraid that I did not appear very heroic in your eyes this morning,” he replied.
“I’m terribly ashamed of the way I acted toward you, Linc,” said Lucy looking down at the reins she was holding in her hands.
Bradway longed to place his hands over those little hands. He felt himself caught up by an almost irresistible tide. It did not seem to matter any longer that this girl there before him had been Jim’s girl, that she was the niece of the Maverick Queen, that she might be connected in some way with his partner’s mysterious death, that he knew almost nothing about her except the few references to a girl named Lucy that Jim had made in his letters. Nothing mattered except that, as he watched Lucy’s hands twisting and untwisting the reins, he felt a great tenderness for her and a sureness that somehow, someway, their fates were bound together. After a long silence that was broken by the shrill nicker of one of the blacks, Linc spoke.
“Suppose I tell you some things about myself that Jimmy never knew?” said the cowboy softly. And at her smiling eagerness he proceeded. He was twenty-three, but much older than his years. He had been born in Missouri somewhere, and his father, whom he had never seen, had been a brother or cousin to the notorious Cole Younger, the elder, a guerrilla after the war, and later a notorious desperado. In fact, Linc had never known either of his parents. A kindly neighbor named Bradway had raised him, and sent him to school. He had taken Bradway for his name. At fourteen he had been thrown upon the world, which for him meant the cattle range. By the time he was sixteen he had landed in Nebraska. There he had become Jim Weston’s partner and there he had ridden the ranges until the news filtered back of Jim’s death and he had pulled up stakes and headed for Wyoming.
“It’s been a hard life, Lucy. And I have had my share of hard knocks. I’ve stopped lead a few times, and there are not many bones in my body that haven’t been broken by horses. I never was much on drinking, though I would get drunk with the cowpokes on occasions. It was my tough luck when I was eighteen to meet a bad hombre — a gun-slinging half-breed — and kill him on the main street of Abiline, in an even break. That wasn’t good for me. It established my status as a killer. Well, I was pretty slick with guns....” He sighed. “Did Jim ever tell you I — I had shot a lot of men?”
“Ten or a dozen, if I remember correctly,” she returned, solemnly. “But don’t look so blue, Linc. Your fights never bothered me, but your love affairs...”
“Lucy!... Jimmy must have exaggerated,” expostulated Linc. “It wasn’t ten or a dozen men I stopped. Not half that many, and I should remember.... Lucy, every time I ever drew on a man it was to save my own life. That I swear.”
“I’m happy to get that straight. But your hundreds of love affairs!” she rejoined teasingly. “That’s a little hard for me to overlook.”
“That’s even worse. I never had any — Oh, maybe one or two which might or might not have become serious. But there was so little time — so few of the right kind of girls. And I was never keen about the dance-hall women.”
“You’re very modest. Jimmy said that was one of your charms.”
“Lucy, please take me seriously,” he begged. “I give you my word. Jim had a fancy for telling tales. And he liked to hear ’em, too. I used to make up affairs just to feed his love of romance.”
“Very well, I will take you seriously,” she returned, but there was still a gleam of humor in her eyes. “We’ll cut off the road here — over to that point where you see the rocks and trees. There’s the finest view of Sweetwater Valley that I know of.”
As they followed an unused road through the sage to some tall gray rocks and a clump of pines, Linc looked back over the road he had come. Even before they reached the spot Bradway could see that the land fell away sharply. Presently, however, the view was obstructed by the trees. Lucy drew up behind a thicket, where the horses and buckboard were not visible from the road. Lincoln dismounted to tie Bay to a sapling.
“Were you expecting someone?” the girl inquired. “I saw you looking back.”
“I told Vince to follow me,” he said.
“We’ll watch for him.... Come. It makes me excited and happy to think of showing you my Wyoming.”
“Wait a moment, please,” said Linc, taking her hand and holding her back. She stared up at him, but did not withdraw her hand. “Now it’s your turn to tell me about yourself. That’s more important than all the scenery in the world.”
“Is it?... My story is almost as filled with loneliness as yours.... I don’t remember any mother, only my aunt. She took me when her sister died. That was in Kentucky. I went to school in Louisville for five years. I was twelve when we came west. In a prairie schooner. Oh, I loved it.... First we lived on a ranch near Cheyenne.... Then some man followed Kit.... She shot him! She’s ‘most as bad with a gun as you are! She’s killed two other men since we came to South Pass several years ago. A gambler and a cattleman.”
“Kit Bandon!” exclaimed Lincoln. “That handsome-looking girl a killer?”
“She looks twenty-five, but Aunt Kit is older. You’d better not mention her age to her face.”
“Well!... I guess there are times when you just have to use a gun,” he said. “But enough of Miss Bandon; I want to know more about you.”
“There isn’t much more.... Aunt Kit’s a strange woman. But she was always good and loving to me until we came to South Pass. She suddenly got interested in gambling. She really owns the Leave It, you know. Then she bought a ranch out on the Sweetwater, and took to cattle raising. Naturally that bro
ught cowboys. I was the only girl around. They seemed to like me. She would have none of that.... Then Jimmy came. I met him by accident, same as you, only he wasn’t so rude!...” Lucy smiled mischievously. “After that we met often enough to get to like each other before Aunt Kit found out. She was terribly angry. She forbade me seeing Jimmy. But I couldn’t keep him from waylaying me out on the ranch or there in town. In spite of his feeling for me, though, Jim became as infatuated with Aunt Kit as all the other cowboys were. We quarreled. He took to gambling and drinking. He grew strange and morose, no more the happy-go-lucky cowboy I had grown to like. We made up. I forgave him because he swore not... he swore to keep a promise to me. And he broke it. I never saw him again. Soon after that he — he was shot.... Sort of a pitiful little story, isn’t it?”
“Pitiful and tragic,” replied Lincoln, with constricted throat. “Poor Lucy! And poor Jim! If I had only come out here with him! But that’s spilled milk now.... Thanks for confiding in me, Lucy. Now come. Show me your valley.”
She led him between two rocks to the rim of a bluff that sloped precipitously down into a gray gulf.
Bradway, still thinking of Lucy’s unhappy story, was not at all prepared for what he saw. The colorful valley seemed to leap up at him, confounding his senses. The girl was watching him, anxious that he share her enthusiasm for her Wyoming.
The scaly slope on which they stood fell away a thousand feet or more to a gray sage floor that spread for miles to the west. A winding green line of trees traced the course of the river which snaked the length of the valley. The stream which here and there glinted in the sunlight must be the Sweetwater. Lincoln followed its meandering course down the valley as far as eyes could see until it became lost in gray-purple obscurity. South of this dim line he knew spread a limitless red desert.
The cowboy brought his gaze back to the rim of the precipice. Beyond the rim stretched leagues and leagues of sage that rolled to the far side of the valley. The western rampart of the vast Sweetwater Valley rose blue-gray and mauve against the distant sky. As far as he could see to north and south the near wall of the valley was broken by rocky capes and bold palisades which cast their deep shadows on the valley floor. There were no trees to soften the stern majesty of the valley wall that stretched before his eyes for perhaps a hundred miles.