by Unknown
"You wouldn't send him to prison after doing what he did, would you?"
"Meaning what?"
"You say yourself he helped you against the other outlaws. Then he showed you where to start in finding the buried money. He isn't a bad man. You know how he stood by me when I was a prisoner," she pleaded.
He nodded. "That goes a long way with me, Miss Mackenzie. The governor is a right good friend of mine. I meant to ask him for a pardon. I reckon Neil means to live straight from now on. He promised Leroy he would. He's only a wild cow-puncher gone wrong, and now he's haided right he'll pull up and walk the narrow trail."
"But can you save him from the penitentiary?"
Collins smiled. "He saved me the trouble. Coming through the Canon Del Oro in the night, he ducked. I reckon he's in Mexico now."
"I'm glad."
"Well, I ain't sorry myself, though I helped Bucky hunt real thorough for him."
"Father will be pleased to know you got the treasure back," Alice said presently, after they had ridden a bit in silence.
"And your father's daughter, Miss Alice--is she pleased?"
"What pleases father pleases me." Her voice, cool as the plash of ice water, might have daunted a less resolute man. But this one had long since determined the manner of his wooing and was not to be driven from it.
"I'm glad of that. Your father's right friendly to me," he announced, with composure.
"Indeed!"
"Sho! I ain't going to run away and hide because you look like you don't know I'm in Arizona. What kind of a lover would I be if I broke for cover every time you flashed those dark eyes at me?"
"Mr. Collins!"
"My friends call me Val," he suggested, smiling.
"I was going to ask, Mr. Collins, if you think you can bully me."
"It might be a first rate thing for you if I did, Miss Mackenzie. All your life you haven't done anything but trample on sissy boys. Now, I expect I'm not a sissy boy, but a fair imitation of a man, and I shouldn't wonder but you'd find me some too restless for a door-mat." His maimed hand happened to be resting on the saddle horn as he spoke, and the story of the maiming emphasized potently the truth of his claim.
"Don't you assume a good deal, Mr. Collins, when you imply that I have any desire to master you?"
"Not a bit," he assured her cheerfully. "Every woman wants to boss the man she's going to marry, but if she finds she can't she's glad of it, because then she knows she's got a man."
"You are quite sure I am going to marry you?" she asked gently--too gently, he thought.
"I'm only reasonably sure," he informed her. "You see, I can't tell for certain whether your pride or your good sense is the stronger."
She caught a detached glimpse of the situation, and it made for laughter.
"That's right, I want you should enjoy it," he said placidly.
"I do. It's the most absurd proposal--I suppose you call it a proposal--that ever I heard."
"I expect you've heard a good many in your time.
"We'll not discuss that, if you please."
"I AM more interested in this one," he agreed.
"Isn't it about time to begin on Tucson?"
"Not to-day, ma'am. There are going to be a lot of to-morrows for you and me, and Tucson will have to wait till then."
"Didn't I give you an answer last week?"
"You did, but I didn't take it. Now I'm ready for your sure-enough answer."
She flashed a look at him that mocked his confidence. "I've heard about the vanity of girls, but never in my experience have I met any so colossal as this masculine vanity now on exhibit. Do you really think, Mr. Collins, that all you have to do to win a woman is to look impressive and tell her that you have decided to marry her?"
"Do I look as if I thought that?" he asked her.
"It is perfectly ridiculous--your absurd attitude of taking everything for granted. Well, it may be the Tucson custom, but where I come from it is not in vogue."
"No, I reckon not. Back there a boy persuades girl he loves her by ruining her digestion with candy and all sorts of ice arrangements from soda-fountain. But I'm uncivilized enough to assume you're a woman of sense and not a spoiled schoolgirl."
The velvet night was attuned to the rhythm of her love. She felt herself, in this sea of moon romance, being swept from her moorings. Star-eyed, she gazed at him while she still fought again his dominance.
"You ARE uncivilized. Would you beat me when I didn't obey?" she asked tremulously.
He laughed in slow contentment. "Perhaps; but I'd love you while I did it."
"Oh, you would love me." She looked across under her long lashes, not as boldly as she would have liked, and her gaze fell before his. "I haven t heard before that that was in the compact you proposed. I don't think you have remembered to mention it."
He swung from the saddle and put a hand to her bridle rein.
"Get down," he ordered.
"Why?"
"Because I say so. Get down."
She looked down at him, a man out of a thousand and for her one out of a hundred million. Before she was conscious of willing it she stood beside him. He trailed the reins of the ponies, and in two strides came back to her.
"What--do you--want?"
"I want you. girl." His arm swept round her, and he held her while he looked down into her shining eyes. "So I haven't told you that I love you. Did you need to be told?"
"We must go on," she murmured weakly. "Frances and Lieutenant O'Connor--"
"--Have their own love-affairs to attend to.
"We'll manage ours and not intrude."
"They might think--"
He laughed in deep delight. "--that we love each other. They're welcome to the thought. I haven't told you that I love you, eh? I tell you now. It's my last trump, and right here I table it. I'm no desert poet, but I love you from that dark crown of yours to those little feet that tap the floor so impatient sometimes. I love you all the time, no matter what mood you're in--when you flash dark angry eyes at me and when you laugh in that slow, understanding way nobody else in God's world has the trick of. Makes no difference to me whether you're glad or mad, I want you just the same. That's the reason why I'm going to make you love me."
"You can't do it." Her voice was very low and not quite steady.
"Why not--I'll show you."
"But you can't--for a good reason."
"Put a name to it."
"Because. Oh, you big blind man--because I love you already." She burlesqued his drawl with a little joyous laugh: "I reckon if you're right set on it I'll have to marry you, Val Collins."
His arm tightened about her as if he would hold her against the whole world. His ardent eyes possessed hers. She felt herself grow faint with a poignant delight. Her lips met his slowly in their first kiss.
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Contents
MAVERICKS
BY WILLIAM MACLEOD RAINE
CHAPTER I
PHYLLIS
Phyllis leaned against the door-jamb and looked down the long road which wound up from the valley and lost itself now and again in the land waves. Miles away she could see a little cloud of dust travelling behind the microscopic stage, which moved toward her almost as imperceptibly as the minute-hand of a clock. A bronco was descending the hill trail from the Flagstaff mine, and its rider announced his coming with song in a voice young and glad.
"My love has breath o' roses, O' roses, o' roses, And cheeks like summer posies All fresh with morning dew,"
floated the words to her across the sunlit open.
If the girl heard, she heeded not. One might have guessed her a sullen, silent lass, and would have done her less than justice. For the storm in her eyes and the curl of the lip were born of a mood and not of habit. They had to do with the gay vocalist who drew his horse up in front of her and relaxed into the easy droop of the experienced rider at rest.
"Don't see me, do you?" he asked, smiling.
Her dark, level gaze
came round and met his sunniness without response.
"Yes, I see you, Tom Dixon."
"And you don't think you see much then?" he suggested lightly.
She gave him no other answer than the one he found in the rigor of her straight figure and the flash of her dark eyes.
"Mad at me, Phyl?" Crossing his arms on the pommel of the saddle he leaned toward her, half coaxing, half teasing.
The girl chose to ignore him and withdrew her gaze to the stage, still creeping antlike toward the hills.
"My love has breath o' roses, O' roses, o' roses,"
he hummed audaciously, ready to catch her smile when it came.
It did not come. He thought he had never seen her carry her dusky good looks more scornfully. With a movement of impatience she brushed back a rebellious lock of blue-black hair from her temple.
"Somebody's acting right foolish," he continued jauntily. "It was all in fun, and in a game at that."
"I wasn't playing," he heard, though the profile did not turn in the least toward him.
"Well, I hated to let you stay a wall-flower."
"I don't play kissing games any more," she informed him with dignity.
"Sho, Phyl! I told you 'twas only in fun," he justified himself. "A kiss ain't anything to make so much fuss over. You ain't the first girl that ever was kissed."
She glanced quickly at him, recalling stories she had heard of his boldness with girls. He had taken off his hat and the golden locks of the boy gleamed in the sunlight. Handsome he surely was, though a critic might have found weakness in the lower part of the face. Chin and mouth lacked firmness.
"So I've been told," she answered tartly.
"Jealous?"
"No," she exploded.
Slipping to the ground, he trailed his rein.
"You don't need to depend on hearing," he said, moving toward her.
"What do you mean?" she flared.
"You remember well enough--at the social down to Peterson's."
"We were children then--or I was."
"And you're not a kid now?"
"No, I'm not."
"Here's congratulations, Miss Sanderson. You've put away childish things and now you have become a woman."
Angrily the girl struck down his outstretched hand.
"After this, if a fellow should kiss you, it would be a crime, wouldn't it?" he bantered.
"Don't you dare try it, Tom Dixon," she flashed fiercely.
Hitherto he had usually thought of her as a school girl, even though she was teaching in the Willow's district. Now it came to him with what dignity and unconscious pride her head was poised, how little the home-made print could conceal the long, free lines of her figure, still slender with the immaturity of youth. Soon now the woman in her would awaken and would blossom abundantly as the spring poppies were doing on the mountain side. Her sullen sweetness was very close to him. The rapid rise and fall of her bosom, the underlying flush in her dusky cheeks, the childish pout of the full lips, all joined in the challenge of her words. Mostly it was pure boyishness, the impish desire to tease, that struck the audacious sparkle to his eyes, but there was, too, a masculine impulse he did not analyse.
"So you won't be friends?"
If he had gone about it the right way he might have found forgiveness easily enough. But this did not happen to be the right way.
"No, I won't." And she gave him her profile again.
"Then we might as well have something worth while to quarrel about," he said, and slipping his arm round her neck, he tilted her face toward him.
With a low cry she twisted free, pushing him from her.
Beneath the fierce glow of her eyes his laughter was dashed. He forgot his expected trivial triumph, for they flashed at him now no childish petulance, but the scorn of a woman, a scorn in the heat of which his vanity withered and the thing he had tried to do stood forth a bare insult.
"How dare you!" she gasped.
Straight up the stairs to her room she ran, turned the lock, and threw herself passionately on the bed. She hated him...hated him...hated him. Over and over again she told herself this, crying it into the pillows where she had hidden her hot cheeks. She would make him pay for this insult some day. She would find a way to trample on him, to make him eat dirt for this. Of course she would never speak to him again--never so long as she lived. He had insulted her grossly. Her turbulent Southern blood boiled with wrath. It was characteristic of the girl that she did not once think of taking her grievance to her hot-headed father or to her brother. She could pay her own debts without involving them. And it was in character, too, that she did not let the inner tumult interfere with her external duties.
As soon as she heard the stage breasting the hill, she was up from the bed as swift as a panther and at her dressing-table dabbing with a kerchief at the telltale eyes and cheeks. Before the passengers began streaming into the house for dinner she was her competent self, had already cast a supervising eye over Becky the cook and Manuel the waiter, to see that everything was in readiness, and behind the official cage had fallen to arranging the mail that had just come up from Noches on the stage.
From this point of vantage she could cast an occasional look into the dining-room to see that all was going well there. Once, glancing through the window, she saw Tom Dixon in conversation with a half-grown youngster in leathers, gauntlets, and spurs. A coin was changing hands from the older boy to the younger, and as soon as the delivery window was raised little Bud Tryon shuffled in to get the family mail and that of Tom. Also he pushed through the opening a folded paper evidently torn from a notebook.
"This here is for you, Phyl," he explained.
She pushed it back. "I'm too busy to read it."
"It's from Tom," he further volunteered.
"Is it?"
She took the paper quietly but with a swift, repressed passion, tore it across, folded the pieces together, rent them again, and tossed the fragments through the window to the floor.
"Do you want the mail for the Gordons, too, Mr. Purdy?" she coolly asked the next in line over the tow head of Bud.
The boy grinned and ducked from his place through the door. Through the open window there drifted to her presently the sound of a smothered curse, followed by the rapid thud of a horse's hoofs. Phyllis did not look, but a wicked gleam came into her black eyes. As well as if she had seen him she beheld a picture of a sulky youth spurring home in dudgeon, a scowl of discontent on his handsome, boyish face. He had come down the mountain trail singing, but no music travelled with him on his return journey. Nor had she alone known this. Without deigning to notice it, she caught a wink and a nod from one vaquero to another. It was certain they would not forget to "rub it in" when next they met Master Tom. She promised herself, as she handed out newspapers and letters to the cowmen, sheep-herders, and miners who had ridden in to the stage station for their mail, to teach that young man his place.
"I'll take a dollar's worth of two's."
Phyllis turned her head in the slow, disdainful fashion she had inherited from her Southern ancestors and without a word pushed the sheet of stamps through the window. That voice, with its hint of sardonic amusement, was like a trumpet call to battle.
"Any mail for Buck Weaver?"
"No," she answered promptly without looking.
"Sure?"
"Yes."
"Couldn't be overlooking any, could you?"
Her eyes met his with the rapier steel of hostility. He was mocking her, for his mail all came to Saguaro. The man was her father's enemy. He had no business here. His coming was of a piece with all the rest of his insolence. Phyllis hated him with the lusty healthy hatred of youth. She had her father's generosity and courage, his quick indignation against wrong and injustice, and banked within her much of his passionate lawlessness.
"I know my business, sir."
Weaver turned from the window and came front to front with old Jim Sanderson. The burning black eyes of the Southerner, set in socket
s of extraordinary depths, blazed from a grim, hostile face. Always when he felt ugliest Sanderson's drawl became more pronounced. His daughter, hearing now the slow, gentle voice, ran quickly round the counter and slipped an arm into that of her father.
"This hyer is an unexpected pleasure, Mr. Weaver," he was saying. "It's been quite some time since I've seen you all in my house before, makin' you'self at home so pleasantly. It's ce'tainly an honor, seh."