by Unknown
"Because I'm not a hound. I can't blackmail a woman."
"How do you mean?"
"I mean that you've found work here for me because I saw what you did over by Antelope Pass. We made a bargain. Oh, not in words, but a bargain just the same! You were to keep my secret because I knew yours. I release you from your part of it. Give me up if you think it is your duty. I'll not tell what I know."
"That wasn't how you talked the other day."
"No. It's how I talk now. I'm a hunted man, wanted for murder. I make you a present of the information."
"You make me a present of what I already know, Mr. Diller, alias Morse, alias Bellamy."
"You guessed it the first day?"
"Yes."
"And meant to keep quiet about it?"
"Yes, I meant to shelter you from the punishment you deserve." She added with a touch of bitter self-scorn: "I was doing what I had to do."
"You don't have to do it any longer." He looked straight at her with his head up. "And how do you know what I deserve? Who made you a judge about these facts? Grant for the sake of argument I killed him. Do you know I wasn't justified?"
His fierce boldness put her on the defense. "A man sure of his cause does not run away. The paper said this Shep Boone was shot from ambush. Nothing could justify such a thing. When you did that----"
"I didn't. Don't believe it, Miss Lee."
"He was shot from behind, the paper said."
"Do I look like a man who would kill from ambush?"
She admitted to herself that this clear-eyed Southerner did not look like an assassin. Life in the open had made her a judge of such men as she had been accustomed to meet, but for days she had been telling herself she could no longer trust her judgment. Her best friend was a rustler. By a woman's logic it followed that since Jack Flatray was a thief this man might have committed all the crimes in the calendar.
"I don't know." Then, impulsively, "No, you don't, but you may be for all that."
"I'm not asking anything for myself. You may do as you please after I've gone. Send for Mr. Flatray and tell him if you like."
A horse cantered across the plaza toward the store. Bellamy turned quickly to go.
"I'm not going to tell anyone," the girl called after him in a low voice.
Norris swung from the saddle. "Who's our hurried friend?" he asked carelessly.
"Oh, a new rider of ours. Name of Morse." She changed the subject. "Are you--do you think you know who the rustler is?"
His cold, black eyes rested in hers. She read in them something cruel and sinister. It was as if he were walking over the grave of an enemy.
"I'm gathering evidence, a little at a time."
"Do I know him?"
"Maybe you do."
"Tell me."
He shook his head. "Wait till I've got him cinched."
"You told father," she accused.
He laughed in a hard, mirthless fashion. "That cured me. The Lee family is from Missouri. When I talk next time I'll have the goods to show."
"I know who you mean. You're making a mistake." Her voice seemed to plead with him.
"Not on your life, I ain't. But we'll talk about that when the subject is riper. There will be a showdown some day, and don't you forget it. Well, Charley is calling me. So long, Miss Three-Quarters-Past-Seventeen." He went jingling down the steps and swung to the saddle. "I'll not forget the ad, and when I find the right man I'll ce'tainly rope and bring him to you."
"The rustler?" she asked innocently.
"No, not the rustler, the gent between eighteen and forty-eight, object matrimony."
"I don't want to trouble you," she flung at him with her gay smile.
"No trouble at all. Fact is, I've got him in mind already," he assured her promptly.
"Oh!" A pulse of excitement was beating in her throat.
"You don't ask me who he is," suggested Norris boldly, crouched in the saddle with his weight on the far stirrup.
She had brought it upon herself, but now she dodged the issue. "'Most anyone will do, and me going on eighteen."
"You're wrong, girl. Only one out of a thousand will do for your master."
"Master, indeed! If he comes to the Bar Double G he'll find he is at the wrong address. None wanted, thank you."
"Most folks don't want what's best for them, I allow. But if they have luck it sometimes comes to them."
"Luck!" she echoed, her chin in the air.
"You heard me right. What you need is a man that ain't afraid of you, one to ride close herd on you so as to head off them stampede notions of yours. Now this lad is the very one. He is a black-haired guy, and when he says a thing----"
Involuntarily she glanced at his sleek black head. Melissy felt a sudden clamor of the blood, a pounding of the pulses.
"--he most generally means it. I've wrangled around a heap with him and there's no manner of doubt he's up to specifications. In appearance he looks like me. Point of fact, he's a dead ringer for me."
She saw her chance and flashed out. "Now you're flattering him. There can't be two as--as fascinating as Señor Norris," she mocked.
His smoldering eyes had the possessive insolence she resented and yet found so stimulating.
"Did I say there were two?" he drawled.
It was his parting shot. With a touch of the spur he was off, leaving her no time for an adequate answer.
There were no elusions and inferences about Philip Norris when he wanted to be direct. He had fairly taken her breath away. Melissy's instinct told her there was something humiliating about such a wooing. But picturesque and unconventional conduct excuse themselves in a picturesque personality. And this man had that if nothing else.
She told herself she was angry at him, that he took liberties far beyond those of any of the other young men. Yet, somehow, she went into the house smiling. A color born of excitement burned beneath her sparkling eyes. She had entered into her heritage of womanhood and the call of sex was summoning her to the adventure that is old as the garden where Eve met Adam.
CHAPTER V
THE TENDERFOOT TAKES UP A CLAIM
Mr. Diller, alias Morse, alias Bellamy, did not long remain at the Bar Double G as a rider. It developed that he had money, and, tenderfoot though he was, the man showed a shrewd judgment in his investments. He bought sheep and put them on the government forest reserve, much to the annoyance of the cattlemen of the district.
Morse, as he now called himself, was not the first man who had brought sheep into the border country. Far up in the hills were several camps of them. But hitherto these had been there on sufferance, and it had been understood that they were to be kept far from the cattle range. The extension of the government reserves changed the equation. A good slice of the range was cut off and thrown open to sheep. When Morse leased this and put five thousand bleaters upon the feeding ground the sentiment against him grew very bitter.
Lee had been spokesman of a committee appointed to remonstrate with him. Morse had met them pleasantly but firmly. This part of the reserve had been set aside for sheep. If it were not leased by him it would be by somebody else. Therefore, he declined to withdraw his flocks. Champ lost his temper and swore that he for one would never submit to yield the range. Sharp bitter words were passed. Next week masked men drove a small flock belonging to Morse over a precipice.
The tenderfoot retaliated by jumping a mining claim staked out by Lee upon which the assessment work had not been kept up. The cattleman contested this in the courts, lost the decision, and promptly appealed. Meanwhile, he countered by leasing from the forest supervisor part of the run previously held by his opponent and putting sheep of his own upon it.
"I reckon I'll play Mr. Morse's own game and see how he likes it," the angry cattleman told his friends.
But the luck was all with Morse. Before he had been working his new claim a month the Monte Cristo (he had changed the name from its original one of Melissy) proved a bonanza. His men ran into a rich streak o
f dirt that started a stampede for the vicinity.
Champ indulged in choice profanity. From his point of view he had been robbed, and he announced the fact freely to such acquaintances as dropped into the Bar Double G store.
"Dad gum it, I was aimin' to do that assessment work and couldn't jest lay my hands on the time. I'd been a millionaire three years and didn't know it. Then this damned Morse butts in and euchres me out of the claim. Some day him and me'll have a settlement. If the law don't right me, I reckon I'm most man enough to 'tend to Mr. Morse."
It was his daughter who had hitherto succeeded in keeping the peace. When the news of the relocation had reached Lee he had at once started to settle the matter with a Winchester, but Melissy, getting news of his intention, had caught up a horse and ridden bareback after him in time to avert by her entreaties a tragedy. For six months after this the men had not chanced to meet.
Why the tenderfoot had first come West--to hide what wounds in the great baked desert--no man knew or asked. Melissy had guessed, but she did not breathe to a soul her knowledge. It was a first article of Arizona's creed that a man's past belonged to him alone, was a blotted book if he chose to have it so. No doubt many had private reasons for their untrumpeted migration to that kindly Southwest which buries identity, but no wise citizen busied himself with questions about antecedents. The present served to sift one, and by the way a man met it his neighbors judged him.
And T. L. Morse met it competently. In every emergency with which he had to cope the man "stood the acid." Arizona approved him a man, without according him any popularity. He was too dogmatic to win liking, but he had a genius for success. Everything he touched turned to gold.
The Bar Double G lies half way between Mammoth and Mesa. Its position makes it a central point for ranchers within a radius of fifteen miles. Out of the logical need for it was born the store which Beauchamp Lee ran to supply his neighbors with canned goods, coffee, tobacco, and other indispensables; also the eating house for stage passengers passing to and from the towns. Young as she was, Melissy was the competent manager of both of these.
It was one afternoon during the hour the stage stopped to let the passengers dine that Melissy's wandering eye fell upon Morse seated at one of the tables. Anger mounted within her at the cool impudence of the man. She had half a mind to order him out, but saw he was nearly through dinner and did not want to make a scene. Unfortunately Beauchamp Lee happened to come into the store just as his enemy strolled out from the dining-room.
The ranchman stiffened. "What you been doing in there, seh?" he demanded sharply.
"I've been eating a very good dinner in a public café. Any objections?"
"Plenty of 'em, seh. I don't aim to keep open house for Mr. Morse."
"I understand this is a business proposition. I expect to pay seventy-five cents for my meal."
The eyes of the older man gleamed wrathfully. "As for yo' six bits, if you offer it to me I'll take it as an insult. At the Bar Double G we're not doing friendly business with claim jumpers. Don't you evah set yo' legs under my table again, seh."
Morse shrugged, turned away to the public desk, and addressed an envelope, the while Lee glared at him from under his heavy beetling brows. Melissy saw that her father was still of half a mind to throw out the intruder and she called him to her.
"Dad, José wants you to look at the hoof of one of his wheelers. He asked if you would come as soon as you could."
Beauchamp still frowned at Morse, rasping his unshaven chin with his hand. "Ce'tainly, honey. Glad to look at it."
"Dad! Please."
The ranchman went out, grumbling. Five minutes later Morse took his seat on the stage beside the driver, having first left seventy-five cents on the counter.
The stage had scarce gone when the girl looked up from her bookkeeping to see the man with the Chihuahua hat.
"Buenos tardes, señorita," he gave her with a flash of white teeth.
"Buenos," she nodded coolly.
But the dancing eyes of her could not deny their pleasure at sight of him. They had rested upon men as handsome, but upon none who stirred her blood so much.
He was in the leather chaps of a cowpuncher, gray-shirted, and a polka dot kerchief circled the brown throat. Life rippled gloriously from every motion of him. Hermes himself might have envied the perfect grace of the man.
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.