She supplied his wants while they chatted.
“Jogged off your range quite a bit, haven’t you?” she suggested.
“Some. I’ll take two bits’ worth of that smokin’, nina.”
She shook her head. “I’m no little girl. Don’t you know I’m now half past eighteen?”
“My—my. That ad didn’t do a mite of good, did it?”
“Not a bit.”
“And you growing older every day.”
“Does my age show?” she wanted to know anxiously.
The scarce veiled admiration of his smoldering eyes drew the blood to her dusky cheeks. Something vigilant lay crouched panther-like behind the laughter of his surface badinage.
“You’re standing it well, honey.”
The color beat into her face, less at the word than at the purring caress in his voice. A year ago she had been a child. But in the Southland flowers ripen fast. Adolescence steals hard upon the heels of infancy, and, though the girl had never wakened to love, Nature was pushing her relentlessly toward a womanhood for which her unschooled impulses but scantily safeguarded her.
She turned toward the shelves. “How many air-tights did you say?”
“I didn’t say.” He leaned forward across the counter. “What’s the hurry, little girl?”
“My name is Melissy Lee,” she told him over her shoulder.
“Mine is Phil Norris. Glad to give it to you, Melissy Lee,” the man retorted glibly.
“Can’t use it, thank you,” came her swift saucy answer.
“Or to lend it to you—say, for a week or two.”
She flashed a look at him and passed quickly from behind the counter. Her father was just coming into the store.
“Will you wait on Mr. Norris, dad? Hop wants to see me in the kitchen.”
Norris swore softly under his breath. The last thing he had wanted was to drive her away. It had been nearly a year since he had seen her last, but the picture of her had been in the coals of many a night camp fire.
The cattle detective stayed to dinner and to supper. He and her father had their heads together for hours, their voices pitched to a murmur. Melissy wondered what business could have brought him, whether it could have anything to do with the renewed rustling that had of late annoyed the neighborhood. This brought her thoughts to Jack Flatray. He, too, had almost dropped from her world, though she heard of him now and again. Not once had he been to see her since the night she had sprained her ankle.
Later, when Melissy was watering the roses beside the porch, she heard the name of Morse mentioned by the stock detective. He seemed to be urging upon her father some course of action at which the latter demurred. The girl knew a vague unrest. Lee did not need his anger against Morse incensed. For months she had been trying to allay rather than increase this. If Philip Norris had come to stir up smoldering fires, she would give him a piece of her mind.
The men were still together when Melissy told her father good-night. If she had known that a whisky bottle passed back and forth a good many times in the course of the evening, the fears of the girl would not have been lightened. She knew that in the somber moods following a drinking bout the lawlessness of Beauchamp Lee was most likely to crop out.
As for the girl, now night had fallen—that wondrous velvet night of Arizona, which blots out garish day with a cloak of violet, purple-edged where the hills rise vaguely in the distance, and softens magically all harsh details beneath the starry vault—she slipped out to the summit of the ridge in the big pasture, climbing lightly, with the springy ease born of the vigor her nineteen outdoor years had stored in the strong young body. She wanted to be alone, to puzzle out what the coming of this man meant to her. Had he intended anything by that last drawling remark of his in the store? Why was it that his careless, half insulting familiarity set the blood leaping through her like wine? He lured her to the sex duel, then trampled down her reserves roughshod. His bold assurance stung her to anger, but there was a something deeper than anger that left her flushed and tingling.
Both men slept late, but Norris was down first. He found Melissy superintending a drive of sheep which old Antonio, the herder, was about to make to the trading-post at Three Pines. She was on her pony near the entrance to the corral, her slender, lithe figure sitting in a boy’s saddle with a businesslike air he could not help but admire. The gate bars had been lifted and the dog was winding its way among the bleating gray mass, which began to stir uncertainly at its presence. The sheep dribbled from the corral by ones and twos until the procession swelled to a swollen stream that poured forth in a torrent. Behind them came Antonio in his sombrero and blanket, who smiled at his mistress, shouted an “Adios, señorita,” and disappeared into the yellow dust cloud which the herd left in its wake.
“How does Champ like being in the sheep business,” Norris said to the girl.
Melissy did not remove her eyes from the vanishing herd, but a slight frown puckered her forehead. She chose to take this as a criticism of her father and to resent it.
“Why shouldn’t he be?” she said quietly, answering the spirit of his remark.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he protested, with his frank laugh.
“Then if you didn’t mean it so, I shan’t take it that way;” and her smile met his.
“Here’s how I look at this sheep business. Some ranges are better adapted for sheep than cattle, and you can’t keep Mary’s little lamb away from those places. No use for a man to buck against the thing that’s bound to be. Better get into the band-wagon and ride.”
“That’s what father thought,” the girl confessed. “He never would have been the man to bring sheep in, but after they got into the country he saw it was a question of whether he was going to get the government reserve range for his sheep, or another man, some new-comer like Mr. Morse, for his. It was going to be sheep anyhow.”
“Well, I’m glad your father took the chance he saw.” He added reminiscently: “We got to be right good friends again last night before we parted.”
She took the opening directly. “If you’re so good a friend of his, you must not excite him about Mr. Morse. You know he’s a Southerner, and he is likely to do something rash—something we shall all be sorry for afterward.”
“I reckon that will be all right,” he said evasively.
Her eyes swept to his. “You won’t get father into trouble will you?”
The warm, affectionate smile came back to his face, so that as he looked at her he seemed a sun-god. But again there was something in his gaze that was not the frankness of a comrade, some smoldering fire that strangely stirred her blood and yet left her uneasy.
“I’m not liable to bring trouble to those you love, girl. I stand by my friends.”
Her pony began to move toward the house, and he strode beside, as debonair and gallant a figure as ever filled the eye and the heart of a woman. The morning sun glow irradiated him, found its sparkling reflection in the dark curls of his bare head, in the bloom of his tanned cheeks, made a fit setting for the graceful picture of lingering youth his slim, muscular figure and springy stride personified. Small wonder the untaught girl beside him found the merely physical charm of him fascinating. If her instinct sometimes warned her to beware, her generous heart was eager to pay small heed to the monition except so far as concerned her father.
After breakfast he came into the office to see her before he left.
“Good-by for a day or two,” he said, offering his hand.
“You’re coming back again, are you?” she asked quietly, but not without a deeper dye in her cheeks.
“Yes, I’m coming back. Will you be glad to see me?”
“Why should I be glad? I hardly know you these days.”
“You’ll know me better before we’re through with each other.”
She would acknowledge no interest in him, the less because she knew it was there. “I may do that without liking you better.”
And suddenly his swift, winning
smile flashed upon her. “But you’ve got to like me. I want you to.”
“Do you get everything you want?” she smiled back.
“If I want it enough, I usually do.”
“Then since you get so much, you’ll be better able to do without my liking.”
“I’m going to have it too.”
“Don’t be too sure.” She had a feeling that things were moving too fast, and she hailed the appearance of her father with relief. “Good morning, dad. Did you sleep well? Mr. Norris is just leaving.”
“Wait till I git a bite o’ breakfast and I’ll go with you, Phil,” promised Lee. “I got to ride over to Mesa anyhow some time this week.”
The girl watched them ride away, taking the road gait so characteristic of the Southwest. As long as they were in sight her gaze followed them, and when she could see nothing but a wide cloud of dust travelling across the mesa she went up to her room and sat down to think it out. Something new had come into her life. What, she did not yet know, but she tried to face the fact with the elemental frankness that still made her more like a boy than a woman. Sitting there before the looking-glass, she played absently with the thick braid of heavy, blue-black hair which hung across her shoulder to the waist. It came to her for the first time to wonder if she was pretty, whether she was going to be one of the women that men desire. Without the least vanity she studied herself, appraised the soft brown cheeks framed with ebon hair, the steady, dark eyes so quick to passion and to gaiety, the bronzed throat full and rounded, the supple, flowing grace of the unrestrained body.
Gradually a wave of color crept into her cheeks as she sat there with her chin on her little doubled hand. It was the charm of this Apollo of the plains that had set free such strange thoughts in her head. Why should she think of him? What did it matter whether she was good-looking? She shook herself resolutely together and went down to the business of the day.
It was not long after midnight the next day that Champ Lee reached the ranch. His daughter came out from her room in her night-dress to meet him.
“What kept you, Daddy?” she asked.
But before he could answer she knew. She read the signs too clearly to doubt that he had been drinking.
* * *
CHAPTER VI
“HANDS UP”
Melissy had been up the Cañ del Oro for wild poppies in her runabout and had just reached the ranch. She was disposing of her flowers in ollas when Jim Budd, waiter, chambermaid, and odd jobs man at the Bar Double G, appeared in the hall with a frightened, mysterious face.
“What’s the matter, Jim? You and Hop Ling been quarrelling again?” she asked carelessly.
“No’m, that ain’t it. It’s wusser’n that. I got to tell you-all su’thin’ I hearn yore paw say.”
The girl looked up quickly at him. “What do you mean, Jim?”
“That Mistah Norris he come back whilst you wus away, and him and yore paw wus in that back room a-talkin’ mighty confidential.”
“Yes, and you listened. Well?”
Jim swelled with offended dignity. “No’m, I didn’t listen neither. I des natcherally hearn, ’count of that hole fer the stovepipe what comes through the floor of my room.”
“But what was it you heard?” she interrupted impatiently.
“I wus a-comin’ to that. Plum proverdenshul, I draps into my room des as yore paw wus sayin’, ’Twenty thousand dollars goin’ down to the Fort on the stage to-day?’ ’Cose I pricks up my ears then and tuk it all in. This yere Norris had foun’ out that Mistah Morse was shippin’ gold from his mine to-day on the Fort Allison stage, and he gits yore paw to go in with him an’ hold it up. Yore paw cussed and said as how ’t wus his gold anyhow by rights.”
The girl went white and gave a little broken cry. “Oh, Jim! Are you sure?”
“Yas’m, ’cose I’m suah. Them’s his ve’y words. Hope to die if they ain’t. They wus drinkin’, and when ’t wus all fixed up that ’t wus to be at the mouth of the Box Cañon they done tore an old black shirt you got for a dust-rag and made masks out of it and then rode away.”
“Which way did they go?”
“Tow’ds the Box Cañon Miss M’lissy.”
A slender, pallid figure of despair, she leaned against the wall to support the faintness that had so suddenly stolen the strength from her limbs, trying desperately to think of some way to save her father from this madness. She was sure he would bungle it and be caught eventually, and she was equally sure he would never let himself be taken alive. Her helplessness groped for some way out. There must be some road of escape from this horrible situation, and as she sought blindly for it the path opened before her.
“Where is Hop?” she asked quickly.
“A-sleepin’ in his room, ma’am.”
“Go to the store and tend it till I come back, Jim. I may be an hour, or mebbe two, but don’t you move out of it for a moment. And don’t ever speak of any of this, not a word, Jim.”
“No’m, ’cose I won’t.”
His loyalty she did not doubt an instant, though she knew his simple wits might easily be led to indiscretion. But she did not stay to say more now, but flew upstairs to the room that had been her brother’s before he left home. Scarce five minutes elapsed before she reappeared transformed. It was a slim youth garbed as a cowpuncher that now slipped along the passage to the rear, softly opened the door of the cook’s room, noiselessly abstracted the key, closed the door again as gently, and locked it from the outside. She ran into her own room, strapped on her revolver belt, and took her empty rifle from its case. As she ran through the room below the one Jim occupied, she caught sight of a black rag thrown carelessly into the fireplace and stuffed it into her pocket.
“That’s just like Dad to leave evidence lying around,” she said to herself, for even in the anxiety that was flooding her she kept her quiet commonsense.
After searching the horizon carefully to see that nobody was in sight, she got into the rig and drove round the corral to the irrigating ditch. This was a wide lateral of the main canal, used to supply the whole lower valley with water, and just now it was empty. Melissy drove down into its sandy bed and followed its course as rapidly as she could. If she were only in time! If the stage had not yet passed! That was her only fear, the dread of being too late. Not once did the risk of the thing she intended occur to her. Physical fear had never been part of her. She had done the things her brother Dick had done. She was a reckless rider, a good shot, could tramp the hills or follow the round-up all day without knowing fatigue. If her flesh still held its girlish curves and softness, the muscles underneath were firm and compact. Often for her own amusement and that of her father she had donned her brother’s chaps, his spurs, sombrero, and other paraphernalia, to masquerade about the house in them. She had learned to imitate the long roll of the vaquero’s stride, the mannerisms common to his class, and even the heavy voice of a man. More than once she had passed muster as a young man in the shapeless garments she was now wearing. She felt confident that the very audacity of the thing would carry it off. There would be a guard for the treasure box, of course, but if all worked well he could be taken by surprise. Her rifle was not loaded, but the chances were a hundred to one that she would not need to use it.
For the first time in his life the roan got the whip from his mistress.
“Git up, Bob. We’ve got to hurry. It’s for dad,” she cried, as they raced through the sand and sent it flying from the wheels.
The Fort Allison stage passed within three miles of the Lee ranch on its way to Mesa. Where the road met in intersection with the ditch she had chosen as the point for stopping it, and no veteran at the business could have selected more wisely, for a reason which will hereafter appear. Some fifty yards below this point of intersection the ditch ran through a grove of cottonwoods fringing the bank. Here the banks sloped down more gradually, and Melissy was able to drive up one side, turn her rig so that the horse faced the other way, and draw down into the ditch again in or
der that the runabout could not be seen from the road. Swiftly and skilfully she obliterated the track she had made in the sandy bank.
She was just finishing this when the sound of wheels came to her. Rifle in hand, she ran back along the ditch, stooping to pass under the bridge, and waited at the farther side in a fringe of bushes for the coming of the stage.
Even now fear had no place in the excitement which burned high in her. The girl’s wits were fully alert, and just in time she remembered the need of a mask. Her searching fingers found the torn black shirt in a pocket and a knife in another. Hastily she ripped the linen in half, cut out eyeholes, and tied the mask about her head. With perfectly steady hands she picked up the rifle from the ground and pushed the muzzle of it through the bushes.
Leisurely the stage rolled up-grade toward the crossing. The Mexican driver was half asleep and the “shotgun messenger” was indolently rolling a cigarette, his sawed-off gun between his knees. Alan McKinstra was the name of this last young gentleman. Only yesterday he had gone to work for Morse, and this was the first job that had been given him. The stage never had been held up since the “Monte Cristo” had struck its pay-streak, and there was no reason to suppose it would be. Nevertheless, Morse proposed to err on the side of caution.
“I reckon the man that holds down this job don’t earn his salt, José. It’s what they call a sinecure,” Alan was saying at the very instant the summons came.
“Throw up your hands!”
Sharp and crisp it fell on Alan’s ears. He sat for a moment stunned, the half-rolled cigarette still between his fingers. The driver drew up his four horses with a jerk and brought them to a huddled halt.
“Hands up!” came again the stinging imperative.
Now, for the first time, it reached Alan’s consciousness that the stage was actually being held up. He saw the sun shining on the barrel of a rifle and through the bushes the masked face of a hidden cowpuncher. His first swift instinct was to give battle, and he reached for the shotgun between his knees. Simultaneously the driver’s foot gave it a push and sent the weapon clattering to the ground. José at least knew better than to let him draw the road agent’s fire while he sat within a foot of the driver. His hands went into the air, and after his Alan’s and those of the two passengers.
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