The Collected Westerns of William MacLeod Raine: 21 Novels in One Volume

by Unknown

  "You're asking him to be generous at the expense of the State, Mr. Wadley. Jack couldn't do that. Dinsmore's liberty wasn't a gift of his to give. He was hired by the State--sent out to bring in that particular man. He hadn't any choice but to do it," insisted Arthur.

  Ramona sat in the shadow of the honeysuckle vines. She did not say anything and Ridley could not see her face well. He did not know how grateful she was for his championship of his friend. She knew he was right and her heart throbbed gladly because of it. She wanted to feel that she and her father were wrong and had done an injustice to the man she loved.

  Captain Ellison came down the walk, his spurs jingling. In spite of his years the little officer carried himself jauntily, his wide hat tilted at a rakish angle. Just now he was worried.

  As soon as he knew the subject of conversation, he plunged in, a hot partisan, eager for battle. Inside of two minutes he and Wadley were engaged in one of their periodical semi-quarrels.

  "You're wrong, Clint," the Captain announced dogmatically. "You're wrong, like you 'most always are. You're that bullheaded you cayn't see it. But I'm surprised at you, 'Mona. If Jack had been a private citizen, you wouldn't needed to ask him to turn loose Dinsmore. But he wasn't. That's the stuff my Rangers are made of. They play the hand out. The boy did just right."

  "That's what you say, Jim. You drill these boys of yours till they ain't hardly human. I'm for law an' order. You know that. But I don't go out of my head about them the way you do. 'Mona an' I have got some sense. We're reasonable human bein's." To demonstrate his possession of this last quality Clint brought his fist down on the arm of the chair so hard that it cracked.

  From out of the darkness Ramona made her contribution in a voice not quite steady.

  "We're wrong, Dad. We've been wrong all the time. I didn't see it just at first, and then I didn't want to admit it even to myself. But I'm glad now we are." She turned to Captain Ellison a little tremulously. "Will you tell him, Uncle Jim, that I want to see him?"

  "You're a little gentleman, 'Mona. I always said you were." The Captain reached out and pressed her hand. "I'll tell him when I see him. No tellin' when that'll be. Jack resigned to-day. He's got some fool notion in his head. I'm kinda worried about him."

  The girl's heart fluttered. "Worried? What ... what do you think he's going to do?"

  The Captain shook his head. "Cayn't tell you, because I don't know. But he's up to somethin'. He acted kinda hard an' bitter."

  A barefooted negro boy called in from the gate. "Cap'n Ellison there, sah?"

  He brought a note in and handed it to the officer of Rangers. The Captain ripped open the envelope and handed the sheet inside to Ramona.

  "Run along in an' read it for me, honey. It's too dark to see here."

  The girl ran into the house and lit a lamp. The color washed out of her face as she read the note.

  Come up to the hotel and arrest me, Captain. I held up Yorky, took his keys, and freed Dinsmore. JACK ROBERTS

  Then, in jubilant waves, the blood beat back into her arteries. That was why he had resigned, to pay the debt he owed Homer Dinsmore on her account. He had put himself within reach of the law for her sake. Her heart went out to him in a rush. She must see him. She must see him at once.

  From the parlor she called to Captain Ellison. "You'd better come in and read the note yourself, Uncle Jim. It's important."

  It was so important to her that before the Captain of Rangers was inside the house, she was out the back door running toward the hotel as fast as her lithe limbs could carry her. She wanted to see Jack before his chief did, to ask his forgiveness for having failed him at the first call that came upon her faith.

  She caught up with the colored boy as he went whistling up the road. The little fellow took a message for her into the hotel while she waited in the darkness beside the post-office. To her there presently came Roberts. He hesitated a moment in front of the store and peered into the shadows. She had not sent her name, and it was possible that enemies had decoyed him there.

  "Jack," she called in a voice that was almost a whisper.

  In half a dozen long strides he was beside her. She wasted no time in preliminaries.

  "We were wrong, Dad and I. I told Uncle Jim to tell you to come to me ... and then your note to him came. Jack, do you ... still like me?"

  He answered her as lovers have from the beginning of time--with kisses, with little joyous exclamations, with eyes that told more than words. He took her into his arms hungrily in an embrace of fire and passion. She wept happily, and he wiped away her tears.

  They forgot time in eternity, till Ellison brought them back to earth. He was returning from the hotel with Wadley, and as he passed they heard him sputtering.

  "Why did he send for me, then, if he meant to light out? What in Sam Hill--?"

  Jack discovered himself to the Captain, and incidentally his sweetheart.

  "Well, I'll be doggoned!" exclaimed Ellison. "You youngsters sure beat my time. How did you get here, 'Mona?"

  Clint made prompt apologies. "I was wrong, boy. I'd ought to know it by this time, for they've all been dinnin' it at me. Shake, an' let's make a new start."

  In words it was not much, but Jack knew by the way he said it that the cattleman meant a good deal more than he said. He shook hands gladly.

  "Looks to me like Jack would make that new start in jail," snapped the Captain. "I don't expect he can go around jail-breaking with my prisoners an' get away with it."

  "I'll go to jail with him, then," cried 'Mona quickly.

  "H'mp!" The Ranger Captain softened. "It wouldn't be a prison if you were there, honey."

  Jack slipped his hand over hers in the semi-darkness. "You're whistlin', Captain."

  "I reckon you 'n' me will take a trip down to Austin to see the Governor, Jim," Wadley said. "Don't you worry any about that prison, 'Mona."

  The girl looked up into the eyes of her lover. "We're not worrying any, Dad," she answered, smiling.

  CHAPTER XLVI

  LOOSE THREADS

  The Governor had been himself a cattleman. Before that he had known Ellison and Wadley during the war. Therefore he lent a friendly ear to the tale told him by his old-time friends.

  Clint did most of the talking, one leg thrown across the arm of a leather-bound chair in the library of the Governor's house. The three men were smoking. A mint julep was in front of each.

  The story of Jack Roberts lost nothing in the telling. Both of the Panhandle men were now partisans of his, and when the owner of the A T O missed a point the hawk-eyed little Captain was there to stress it.

  "That's all right, boys," the Governor at last broke in. "I don't doubt he's all you say he is, but I don't see that I can do anything for him. If he's in trouble because he deliberately helped a murderer to escape--"

  "You don't need to do a thing, Bob," interrupted Wadley. "That's just the point. He's in no trouble unless you make it for him. All you've got to do is shut yore eyes. I spent three hours with a pick makin' a hole in the jail wall so as it would look like the prisoner escaped. I did a real thorough job. Yorky, the jailer, won't talk. We got that all fixed. There'll be no trouble a-tall unless you want the case against Jack pushed."

  "What was the use of comin' to me at all, then? Why didn't you boys keep this under your hats?" the Governor asked.

  Wadley grinned. "Because of Jim's conscience. You see, Bob, he fills his boys up with talk about how the Texas Rangers are the best police force in the world. That morale stuff! Go through an' do yore duty. Play no favorites an' have no friends when you're on the trail of a criminal. Well, he cayn't ignore what young Roberts has done. So he passes the buck to you."

  The Governor nodded appreciation of Ellison's difficulty. "All right, Jim. You've done your duty in reporting it. Now I'll forget all about it. You boys go home and marry those young people soon as they're ready."

  The Panhandle cattleman gave a whoop. "That'll be soon as I can draw up partnership papers for
me 'n' Jack as a weddin' present for him an' Mona."

  * * * * *

  They were married at Clarendon. All the important people of the Panhandle attended the wedding, and it was generally agreed that no better-looking couple ever faced the firing line of a marriage ceremony.

  There was a difference of opinion as to whether the ex-line-rider deserved his good luck. Jumbo Wilkins was one of those who argued mightily that there was no luck about it.

  "That doggoned Tex wore his bronc to a shadow waitin' on Miss 'Mona an' rescuin' her from trouble. She plumb had to marry him to git rid of him," he explained. "I never saw the beat of that boy's gall. Six months ago he was ridin' the line with me. Now he's the segundo of the whole outfit an' has married the daughter of the boss to boot."

  Jumbo was on hand with a sack of rice and an old shoe when the bride and groom climbed into the buckboard to drive to the ranch. His admiration found vent in one last shout as the horses broke into a run:

  "Oh, you Tex! Let 'em go, son!"

  THE END

  * * *

  Contents

  THE BIG-TOWN ROUND-UP

  by WILLIAM MACLEOD RAINE

  FOREWORD

  The driver of the big car throttled down. Since he had swung away from the dusty road to follow a wagon track across the desert, the speedometer had registered many miles. His eyes searched the ground in front to see whether the track led up the brow of the hill or dipped into the sandy wash.

  On the breeze there floated to him the faint, insistent bawl of thirsty cattle. The car leaped forward again, climbed the hill, and closed in upon a remuda of horses watched by two wranglers.

  The chauffeur stopped the machine and shouted a question at the nearest rider, who swung his mount and cantered up. He was a lean, tanned youth in overalls, jumper, wide sombrero, high-heeled boots, and shiny leather chaps. A girl in the tonneau appraised with quick, eager eyes this horseman of the plains. Perhaps she found him less picturesque than she had hoped. He was not there for moving-picture purposes. Nothing on horse or man held its place for any reason except utility. The leathers protected the legs of the boy from the spines of the cactus and the thorns of the mesquite, the wide flap of the hat his face from the slash of catclaws when he drove headlong through the brush after flying cattle. The steel horn of the saddle was built to check a half-ton of bolting hill steer and fling it instantly. The rope, the Spanish bit, the tapaderas, all could justify their place in his equipment.

  "Where's the round-up?" asked the driver.

  The coffee-brown youth gave a little lift of his head to the right. He was apparently a man of few words. But his answer sufficed. The bawling of anxious cattle was now loud and persistent.

  The car moved forward to the edge of the mesa and dropped into the valley. The girl in the back seat gave a little scream of delight. Here at last was the West she had read about in books and seen on the screen.

  This was Cattleland's hour of hours. The parada grounds were occupied by two circles of cattle, each fenced by eight or ten horsemen. The nearer one was the beef herd, beyond this--and closer to the mouth of the cañon from which they had all recently been driven--was a mass of closely packed cows and calves.

  The automobile swept around the beef herd and drew to a halt between it and the noisier one beyond. In a fire of mesquite wood branding-irons were heating. Several men were busy branding and marking the calves dragged to them from the herd by the horsemen who were roping the frightened little blatters.

  It was a day beautiful even for Arizona. The winey air called potently to the youth in the girl. Such a sky, such atmosphere, so much life and color! She could not sit still any longer. With a movement of her wrist she opened the door and stepped down from the car.

  A man sitting beside the chauffeur turned in his seat. "You'd better stay where you are, honey." He had an idea that this was not exactly the scene a girl of seventeen ought to see at close range.

  "I want to get the kinks out of my muscles, Dad," the girl called back. "I'll not go far."

  She walked along a ridge that ran from the mesa into the valley like an outstretched tongue. Her hands were in the pockets of her fawn-colored coat. There was a touch of unstudied jauntiness in the way the tips of her golden curls escaped from beneath the little brown toque she wore. A young man guarding the beef herd watched her curiously. She moved with the untamed, joyous freedom of a sun-worshiper just emerging from the morning of the world. Something in the poise of the light, boyish figure struck a spark from his imagination.

  A vaquero was cantering toward the fire with a calf in his wake. Another cowpuncher dropped the loop of his lariat on the ground, gave it a little upward twist as the calf passed over it, jerked taut the riata, and caught the animal by the hind leg. In a moment the victim lay stretched on the ground. In the gathering gloom the girl could not quite make out what the men were doing. To her sensitive nostrils drifted an acrid odor of burnt hair and flesh, the wail of an animal in pain. One of the men was using his knife on the ears of the helpless creature. She heard another say something about a crop and an underbit. Then she turned away, faint and indignant. Three big men torturing a month-old calf--was this the brave outdoor West she had read about and remembered from her childhood days? Tears of pity and resentment blurred her sight.

  As she stood on the spit of the ridge, a slim, light figure silhouetted against the skyline, the young man guarding the beef herd called something to her that was lost in the bawling of the cattle. From the motion of his hand she knew that he was telling her to get back to the car. But the girl saw no reason for obeying the orders of a range-rider she had never seen before and never expected to see again. Nobody had ever told her that a rider is fairly safe among the wildest hill cattle, but a man on foot is liable to attack at any time when a herd is excited.

  She turned her shoulder a little more definitely to the man who had warned her and looked across the parada grounds to the hills swimming in a haze of violet velvet. Her heart throbbed to a keen delight in them, as it might have done at the touch of a dear friend's hand long absent. For she had been born in the Rockies. They belonged to her and she to them. Long years in New York had left her still an alien.

  A shout of warning startled her. Above the bellowing of the herd she heard another yell.

  "Hi-yi-ya-a!"

  A red-eyed steer, tail up, was crashing through the small brush toward the branders. There was a wild scurry for safety. The men dropped iron and ropes and fled to their saddles. Deflected by pursuers, the animal turned. By chance it thundered straight for the girl on the sand spit.

  She stood paralyzed for a moment.

  Out of the gathering darkness a voice came to her sharp and clear. "Don't move!" It rang so vibrant with crisp command that the girl, poised for flight, stood still and waited in white terror while the huge steer lumbered toward her.

  A cowpony, wheeled as on a dollar, jumped to an instant gallop. The man riding it was the one who had warned her back to the car. Horse and ladino pounded over the ground toward her. Each stride brought them closer to each other as they converged toward the sand spit. It came to her with a gust of panicky despair that they would collide on the very spot where she stood. Yet she did not run.

  The rider, lifting his bronco forward at full speed, won by a fraction of a second. He guided in such a way as to bring his horse between her and the steer. The girl noticed that he dropped his bridle rein and crouched in the saddle, his eyes steadily upon her. Without slackening his pace in the least as he swept past, the man stooped low, caught the girl beneath the armpits, and swung her in front of him to the back of the horse. The steer pounded past so close behind that one of its horns grazed the tail of the cowpony.

  It was a superb piece of horsemanship, perfectly timed, as perfectly executed.

  The girl lay breathless in the arms of the man, her heart beating against his, her face buried in his shoulder. She was dazed, half fainting from the reaction of her fear. The next she remembe
red clearly was being lowered into the arms of her father.

  He held her tight, his face tortured with emotion. She was the very light of his soul, and she had shaved death by a hair's breadth. A miracle had saved her, but he would never forget the terror that had gripped him. Naturally, shaken, as he was, his relief found vent in scolding.

  "I told you to stay by the car, honey. But you're so willful. You've got to have your own way. Thank God you're safe. If . . . if . . ." His voice broke as he thought of what had so nearly been.

  The girl snuggled closer to him, her arms round his neck. His anxiety touched her nearly, and tears flooded her eyes.

  "I know, Dad. I . . . I'll be good."

  A young man descended from the car, handsome, trim, and well got up. He had been tailored by the best man's outfitter in New York. Nobody on Broadway could order a dinner better than he. The latest dances he could do perfectly. He had the reputation of knowing exactly the best thing to say on every occasion. Now he proceeded to say it.