“And scratch my Morgan?” he gaped.
She nodded without looking at his face.
“This means so much to them. It’s the only fun they’ll get for six hard months. Don’t spoil the show!”
He stared at her. He was a little white around the mouth. He said, “Tess, sometimes you are hard to figure out. What is wrong with entering my Morgan? I started with the same things as the other boys. If it meant enough to them, they’d have Morgans too!”
She made an expressive gesture. “Not every man’s luck is cut the same!”
“It was no luck!” he said. There was a flint edge to his tone. “It was the same thing as the reason I am leaving in my Morgan. Because I set out to win and that was the way I played the game!”
For a space she looked across into the dust smoke of the corrals. Then she turned and looked into his eyes. “It is really not a woman’s business,” she admitted.
He scowled, mad at himself, mad that this had come up. He growled. “If it’s going to stand between me and you —”
“No,” she said. “When a woman gets ready to take a man, she takes all the things that go with him, harsh and gentle. You are a hard man, Bart, but this is a hard country. Maybe you are right.”
“You are a sensible woman, Tess,” he told her.
Her eyes went dark with inward feelings. “Don’t ever count on that with a woman, Bart!”
He grinned. “A man can count on that with you!”
Her folks came up and broke the conversation. Friends stopped by, and then through the bustle of people and buggies and horses, she saw Dusty across the way. He had his hat pushed down upon his face so that she could not catch his expression. He was draped on the bars of a waiting pen, smoking, and studying Bart’s gleaming chestnut Morgan. After a space, he came spur dragging by.
He touched his hat, and she thought his face looked pulled and grey. Except for her father, he would have moved along. Spotting him her father yipped, “See here, young fellow, how much damage do you aim to do this here blue-blooded owner in the trick contest today?”
Dusty stopped and darkened and had trouble meeting the old man’s eye. “Why, not much, I reckon,” he said. He considered the dust between his feet. “I’ve done scratched, Pa Goodhue.”
“You’ve what?” the old man hollered.
“Scratched,” Dusty repeated.
The girl sucked in a quick breath and flushed with shame. She heard her father cuss in his throat, and she heard Bart’s grinning snort.
Her father sputtered: “You mean you let this rank furriner hoss scare you out?”
“It is a good horse,” Dusty said. He covertly sought her face. What he saw there put his blush five shades deeper. Her teeth came together with a small sharp sound. She looked at him one blazing instant, then looked away.
He said awkwardly, “Well, you’ll be winning, Bart,” and nodded, and drifted on into the crowd.
Pa Goodhue rumbled, “Can you tie that! Whatever he lacks other ways, I’d have said he had all the grit in Texas! But by gum, he’s done quit cold without a fight!”
“Mebbe he’s not so dumb,” Bart considered largely. “It will save him being bested before the crowd.”
Pa cocked a weathered eye at Bart. “Would you have quit that way in his shoes?”
“I would be sure of having the winning horse to enter,” Bart allowed.
BENEATH outward composure, the girl’s thoughts were lost in a black and seething sea. She had known Dusty Murdoch fifteen years. She had seen him bested before, but she had never seen him quit. As they made their way to the stands, she was dimly aware that others felt the same. The news had gotten around, and nobody could quite understand it. The crowd had been counting on Dusty as the one wrangler who might give Bart Willis a run for his money. There was a feeling that he had let the whole country down. The feeling grew. The boys got so mad thinking about it, that they forgot their anger at Bart Willis for entering a thoroughbred horse.
Vaguely, she knew that the contests were being run off, and that each time Bart walked off with first honors, the stands grew madder at Dusty. Between events, men who had been his life-long friends went out to get drunk. Nobody paid very much attention to the fact that Bart Willis won all first prizes. Their spleen had reached a solid surge of concentration upon Dusty Murdoch.
She had supper with her family and Bart, and answered his remarks of lusty self importance, and she went to the dance at the hotel. But none of this seemed real against the completeness of her shock. Her mind was simply unable to grasp the fact that Dusty had run out like that. He might just as well have backed down on a fist fight.
Her mother went home with the Saxes. She went home with her father along past dawn. She sat tense and rigid in the buckseat, her fingers pulling tightly against each other in her lap.
Once she gave a violent shake of her head. “He couldn’t run out!” she murmured passionately. “Not that way! He’s not yellow!”
Her father made growling noises in his throat. An hour later he growled. “Well, he done it, and that’s that! If there was good reason, we’ll never know it now! But it is good for Bart he did. The boys were set to haze Bart bad, ’cept they forgot it in their bile over Dusty’s trick.”
Her eyes came open wide. Suddenly she felt the world as a living place again. Her mind came back to life. She turned and put strong fingers digging into her father’s arm. She uttered, “Pa! Do you think he did it to save Bart?”
He stared at her. For a space, hope flamed up into his eyes. Then he scowled with thought and shook his head. “Not even Dusty’s that loco! And anyhow, there’s no way now to know. He’d never get a chance to prove up that crazy again, so how could you tell?”
“I aim to ride over and ask him flat,” she said. “Even if he lies, I’ll know!”
He spit neatly between the horses and then allowed, “Didn’t you hear? News come in last night of a new silver strike up in the Cristobals. Somebody said Dusty was at the stage office and heard it first, and was the first one to streak out of town.”
The hopeful light dimmed out of the girl’s eyes. Long afterward she murmured listlessly, “Maybe he’ll strike it rich.”
“If he does,” her father commented dryly, “it will be the first thing he ever struck right!”
It was three weeks later that Bart Willis rode over on his fine Morgan. He had supper and a cigar, and then he said weightily, “I have put my affairs in order and I’m off to ride the silver tide.”
Pa chewed on his free cigar and announced, “I been waitin’ for that. You wouldn’t be the first or the last. But you will get in there after others have worn their flesh off proving, and still before they strip the ground!”
Ma sat there with her knitting and without looking up, commented, “You are a smart man, Bart.”
Bart glanced with a shade of uncertainty at Tess. He said, “But mebbe not smart enough.”
Ma looked up sharply, and then thought of things to do inside, and jerked Pa off after her to help. Bart sat forward with his elbows on his knees watching Tess against the creeping dusk. He said finally, “Tess, I am going up there to drop my rope upon a decent stake. I am not after all the money in the world. I will be content to play fast and quit with the first decent pot.”
She wondered what Dusty was doing that minute. He would play for the limit and lose, of course. He always did. Aloud, she said, “You will get your pot, Bart. You never miss.”
He made a gesture. “If I don’t, I have my spread to come back to. But if I do —” He paused and his voice dropped. He said, “Tess, I will go East to find bigger game. But I would like to take you.”
He had never asked her for an answer before. Now he was asking her and she felt the spasmodic throbbing of her heart. She looked off at Dusty’s mesa and watched the last deep reds and purples of sundown splash across its top. Then the mesa was gobbled by the night.
She dropped her head in a single motion. She said low, but determined, of
voice, “Bart, when you come back, I will have your answer.”
He stood up and nodded. Relief beat out of him in great waves. “Time enough,” he granted. “I was afraid yore heart had ridden north.” He took the last draw of his cigar and flipped it out into the dust. He said, “I could take a trimming, but I would not like to think of you tied to a man who quit.”
She turned her head and studied him through the murky shadows. Curiously, she asked, “Would anything in the world have made you do what Dusty did, Bart?”
“Nothing,” he answered. “Not if my best friend’s life hung upon it!”
HE TOOK a step across the balcony and stood above her. He said, “Tess, I hold nothing personal against Dusty Murdoch. But these are the small signs that paint the picture of a man’s character and life. He may come back rich, and if so, I hope you will remember.”
She murmured, “I’ll remember, Bart,” and came to her feet, and let him take her in his arms. She kissed him, and remained pliant but unfired while the crest of his long-contained feelings burst and subsided. Then patting him upon the shoulder, she sent him off upon his trail. She gave one long sigh and then tenderly put away her poignant memories of Dusty...
Three months later Bart Willis came back driving a four-in-hand and the biggest private coach the valley had ever seen.
“You hit pay dirt right off?” Pa Goodhue asked excitedly over coffee that sundown.
Bart threw back his head and laughed. The light glittered on the diamond horseshoe in his tie. “Let the others dig!” he boomed at that. “There was silver there, T. L., some of that dirt was richer than a silver dollar! But the sure money was in trading. I made my killing and got out. It was an overnight boom, and the fields were already playing out.”
“Purty good killin’, I take it,” Pa remarked.
“Good enough,” Bart winked, “so I will never need another man’s help as long as I live!”
He looked across the table at Tess. His eyes held the lights of a man thoroughly pleased with himself. Suddenly, he held out his hand in a stream of sunset light. “This,” he said, “is an example.”
He opened his hand and a blaze of brilliant light fired up from his palm. Perfect silence held the room, broken by the girl’s gasp. The diamond was bigger than the finger it would be worn upon.
Ma gasped, “Land’s sakes!” And then, “You young folks skedaddle outside if you got things to talk!”
They went out and walked through that pitifully meager garden to the pond, and sat there watching it catch the reflection of the sunset sky. Bart said with a simplicity she would not have expected, “It is yores Tess, if you will take it.”
She sat with her heart thumping like drumbeats in her breast. After a long space she murmured, “I must tell you this, Bart... I haven’t forgotten him as much as I should.”
He gave her shoulder a squeeze of understanding. He said, “If there were a chance for him, I’d say so for yore sake. But he failed, Tess. He failed up there as he has at everything else. He had already sold his saddle and been dead broke ten days before I left.”
She took a long, deep breath. She said quietly, “Tell me, did he accept money? You would offer it, of course.”
“No,” he answered with a perplexed respect. “No, he was running on short rations, if any, but that he did not do. I offered it and he told me where I could go.”
She turned and looked levelly into his eyes. Reaching over, she pressed his hand. She asked in her straightforward way, “Bart, will you keep the ring a month? Just to give him that chance to come back, so that I know for certain?”
He grinned at her with all of his self confidence. “Why, yes,” he nodded. “I am that sure.”
She waited, but she was riding out daily with Bart, and in three weeks she was closing the doors upon the past. The sad and tender feelings were still there for Dusty, but almost buried. Life with Bart would not be tempestuous, but it would not be so bad.
She concluded that on the day when she rode alone into town. She was at the watering trough when she heard the strange cow prod talking with Timmers, the blacksmith. The cow prod said. “This Murdoch was half loco with short rations, and you’d think the first thing he’d head for would be eats. But no, by gum, he took the money for his hoss and went hightailing for the nearest ladies’ shoe store!”
SOMETHING stirred within the girl, and burst into brilliant light, and then subsided into black sadness. Jerking her pony’s head, she turned back out the street. Even half starved and burning up with failure, she’d expect him to still be Dusty and half whacky. But why did it have to be another woman?
Bitterly, she rode out through the hills and rode in filled with misery that evening. Her mother met her at the door, with that air of news of which she disapproved. She said finally, “There is a message here from Dusty.”
For an instant, the girl’s whole being froze. Then she steeled herself and went through into the house. It was a package, and opening it, she found a pair of silver slippers.
They were of fine Cordova leather. They must have cost an outrageous price. But more than that, they were a woman’s luxury such as that poor country had never seen. In one shoe was a pencilled note. It read:
Tess, like yore ma said, Bart will go places. Good luck. I hope you wear these at yore wedding. Dusty.
The girl turned with sudden animation on her mother. “Where is he?”
“I dunno,” Ma Goodhue said. “Strange puncher dropped that here. Said he picked up Dusty footing it down trail from Denver.”
“Footing it?” the girl repeated. That meant he hadn’t even saved enough money to buy a buzzard bait, spavined cayuse! It probably meant he was half dead!
Suddenly, the girl wheeled out the door, and in a moment was thundering out of the yard. Dusty’s shack was six miles across. She reached it just as the sinking sun was turning the mesa into a gold and purple sea.
No solitary sound came from the shack. But looking in, she saw him sprawled out on his bunk. His clothes were in tatters.
The skin hung from the gauntness of his face. The bottoms of his boots were clean out, and his feet were solid welts of blood.
She became conscious that she still held those silver slippers. Now she looked at them, and all the things that they meant held a special meaning. In those slippers Dusty had sent her the last thought and security he had in life. They were not a diamond ring, but they were something more. They were the horse and the food a weary, hungry man had to get back home!
Crossing the room, she stooped and brushed her lips upon his fevered brow. “Dusty,” she whispered into his ear. “You won the contest!”
He stirred in fevered dreaming and mumbled, “No, I was scratched! If they don’t scratch me, the boys will give Bart hell!”
That, then, was the reason he had walked out! To save the man he thought she had chosen embarrassment, and maybe worse. Kneeling by his side she lifted her head and uttered a little prayer. The last light of sundown blazed in the door and shimmered upon the wetness of her eyes.
Four days later she had him able to sit up. They were sitting outside where they could look down upon the whole world. She was saying happily, “We’ll likely starve!”
“Oh, I’ll get out and work that herd,” he said optimistically. “Mebbe I’ll begin tomorrow.”
But a herd took time to build, even when a man worked it, and in the meantime, better luck befell them. A. K. Yokum, the man to whom he had sold his horse in Denver, sent down a message that any man who could train a bush mustang like Dusty’s horse, deserved to handle better stock! He was sending down a cavvy of Morgans for Dusty to breed and train.
“You see?” Dusty told her when the messenger had left. “It all comes of planning it that way!”
“You —!” she said and drew back her hand. But it was hard to whack a man when he was kissing you like that. It was hard to do anything but think of how near to missing this you’d been.
THE END
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Thomas Calvert, Rangeland Romances #2
Rangeland Romances #2 Page 2