Penny of Top Hill Trail

by Maniates, Belle Kanaris

  “I didn’t let her go any further. I told her I cared and I cared all the more since I had heard her story; and that she was honest, or she wouldn’t have told me about herself. What did I care what she had been or done? Her life was going to begin right then with me. I couldn’t budge her. I talked and pleaded, and at last she gave in—a little. She said she’d think it over and meet me at the little park in the morning, and then she’d talk some more about it.

  “So we parted until morning came. But I made up my mind that if she wouldn’t consent, I’d simply kidnap her and bring her up here to Mrs. Kingdon.

  “I was on hand bright and early at the park next morning, and after a while a slovenly slip of a girl came up to me and asked my name. I told her. She gave me a note and then started off like a skyrocket, but I’m some spry myself and I caught her and held her till I’d read the note. It was from her and she said she couldn’t give me the worst of the bargain. That she was going to try hard to see if she could make good and live without stealing, and when she was sure, she’d send word to me through Mr. Reilly, and if I never heard, I could know she had failed and for me to forget her.

  “‘Where is she?’ I asked the girl, who was squirming like an eel.

  “‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘She’s left town.’

  “‘I don’t believe it!’ I said.

  “‘Yes, she has,’ said the girl. ‘She pawned all her togs—that new white dress and the swell shoes and her new suit and hat to get money to make a getaway.’

  “I might as well have tried to hang on to a fish as to hold that slippery little street Arab. She broke away and ran. I was after her, but it was no use. She knew the ins and outs of the alleys like a rat and I lost her. You see, I didn’t know my girl’s last name. When I asked her, she said: ‘Call me Marta.’ I didn’t care about knowing her last name then, because I was so keen to give her my own name.

  “I was just about crazy. I hunted all over the part of the city where I’d left her the first night. Then I went to see Reilly, but he didn’t know who she was. I made him see what it meant to me to find her, and he promised to try his best and to forward at once any letter that came to him. If I don’t hear after a while, when work gets slack so you can spare me, I’m going to Chicago and go through it with a fine tooth comb. Reilly will help me follow every girl by the name of Marta that’s ever lived there.”

  Kurt’s eyes, full of infinite pity and regret, turned to Jo as he broke the little pause that followed.

  “She is doubtless a poor little stray of a girl and luck has been against her, but, Jo, put all thoughts of marrying her away, just as she has. Wait—” he hurried on, seeing the anger kindling in the lad’s eyes—“if it were any other offense—But a thief! ‘Once a thief, always a thief,’ is the truest saying I know. Your love couldn’t—”

  “It didn’t make any change in my feelings when she told me,” said Joe staunchly. “She could steal anything I had.”

  “It might not change your feelings, but it should change your intentions. Do you mean you’d marry—” Kurt had an incredulous expression on his face.

  “In a second, if she’d have me. I’d buy her everything she wanted so she wouldn’t have to steal.”

  “But after you were married and people found out what she was, you’d be ashamed—”

  “Ashamed! I’d put my little thief on a throne, and whoever dared to try to take her off would get it in the neck.”

  The car speeded up again. The man at the wheel saw the utter futility of further expostulation.

  “I’ll leave it to time and cow-punching,” he thought sagely. “Time and work are the best healers, especially for the young. Preaching is of no avail.”

  Night came on. Jo looked up at a little lone star which was trying to make its light shine without a properly darkened background.

  “That’s a poor little orphan star—like her. I’ll look for it every night now. I wish I hadn’t blabbed to Kurt. He hasn’t a nose for orange blossoms.”

  In the fortnight that followed, Jo worked indefatigably, but his heart and his thoughts were back in Chicago, except when now and then his eyes turned to a fertile little beauty-spot valleyed between the hills. For here he had located an imaginary cottage—his cottage and hers. This mirage, of course, always showed a little slip of a girl standing in the doorway. To the surprise and dismay of his associates Jo the spender became Jo the saver that his dream might come true.

  He offered no addendum to the revelation he had made to Kurt. They met often, but in ranch life discourse is not frequent, and Jo instinctively felt that his recital of Love’s Young Dream had fallen upon unsympathetic ears, while the foreman, unversed in the Language of Love, was mystified by the lad’s silence.

  Three weeks later the “man without a nose for orange blossoms” was again in town. As acting sheriff of the county lately, Kurt had dropped in to see the jailer.

  “How’s business, Bender? Any new boarders?” he asked.

  “Yes; a gal run in for stealing. Didn’t find the goods on her; but she’s a sly one with the record of being a lifelong thief. She strayed up here from Chicago.”

  “What’s her name?” he asked casually.

  “Marta Sills.”

  “I wonder if it could be Jo’s Marta,” the acting sheriff thought suddenly. “She may have followed him up here.”

  He walked back to the hotel, trying to decide whether he should tell Jo. If she should prove to be his girl, her arrest up here should show him that his love hadn’t worked the miracle he expected. Jo had been a little more quiet since his return, but he gave no signs of pining away, and maybe if nothing revived his interest, it might die a natural death. The story Jo had told him of the little waif had made a deep impression upon him, however.

  “Poor little brat!” he thought. “What chance does her kind have? I suppose I ought to give her one. There is one person in the world who might be able to reform her, and I’d put her in that person’s charge if it weren’t for wrecking Jo’s life.”

  All through the afternoon while transacting the business that had brought him to town, his heart and his head were having a wrestling match, the former being at the disadvantage of being underworked.

  “I’ll go up and take a look at her,” he suddenly decided. “Maybe I can tell from Jo’s description whether she is his Marta or not.”

  On his way to the jail he was accosted by a big, jovial man.

  “Don’t know where I can get an extra helper, do you, Kurt? Simpson, my right-hand, has gone back to Canada to enlist.”

  “How providential!” thought Kurt.

  “Why, yes; Mr. Westcott,” he replied: “We’re well up with our work, and I could spare Jo Gary for a few weeks.”

  “Jo Gary! May Heaven bless you! When can I get him?”

  “Going out home now?”

  “Yes; on my way.”

  “Stop at the ranch and take him along with you. Tell him I said to go. It’ll be all right with Kingdon.”

  Westcott renewed his blessings upon Kurt and drove on.

  At the jail Kurt looked in on the latest arrival. She was sitting at a table in Bender’s back office, her head bowed in her hands. There was something appealing in the drooping of her shoulders and in her shabby attire.

  “Now Jo is disposed of, she shall have her chance, anyway,” he decided.

  Without speaking to the girl, he sought Bender and they held a brief consultation.

  * * *

  CHAPTER II

  “Aren’t we going to stop at all, Mr. Sheriff Man?”

  A soft, plaintive note in the voice made Kurt Walters turn the brake of an old, rickety automobile and halt in the dust-white road, as he cast a sharply scrutinizing glance upon the atom of a girl who sat beside him. She was a dejected, dusty, little figure, drooping under the jolt of the jerking car and the bright rays of hills-land sunshine. She was young—in years; young, too, in looks, as Kurt saw when she raised her eyes which were soft and almond-shaped;
but old, he assumed, in much that she should not have been.

  She had found it a long, hard ride across the plains, and the end of her endurance had been prefaced by frequent sighs, changes of position and softly muffled exclamations, all seemingly unnoted by the man beside her, whose deep-set eyes had remained fixed on the open space ahead, his slim, brown hands gripping the wheel, his lean, sinewy body bending slightly forward.

  His tenseness relaxed; a startled, remorseful look came into his eyes as he saw two tears coursing down her cheeks. They were unmistakably real tears,—though, as he was well aware, they came from physical causes alone. Still, they penetrated the armor of unconcern with which he had girded himself.

  “What for?” he asked curtly.

  “What for!” she echoed, her mouth quivering into pathetic droops. “For rest, of course. You may be used to this kind of locomotion, but I’m not very well upholstered, and I’m shaken to bits. Fact is, I’m just all pegged out, old man. Have a heart, and stop for repairs. What’s your rush, anyway? I can’t get loose hereabouts, and I haven’t anywhere to go, anyhow. Didn’t mind getting ‘took’ at all, at all. How many more miles is it to the end of your trail? This is a trail, isn’t it?”

  “A great many miles,” he replied, “and it was on your account more than any other that I was hurrying to get to the—”

  “Jail,” she answered supinely, as he hesitated.

  “No,” he said grimly. “I was going to take you home—for to-night, anyway.”

  “Home! Oh, how you startle me! I didn’t know there was any of those home-stuff places left except in the movies. I never was much stuck on home, so you needn’t be afraid to call it ‘jail’ for fear of hurting my feelings.”

  “You can’t work on my sympathy that way,” he said coldly.

  “Dear me!” she replied with a silly, little giggle. “I gave up trying to work the sympathy racket long ago. Everyone’s too smart nowadays. Honest, I’ve no longings for home. I feel sorry for anyone who’s tied down to one. Why don’t you kick over the traces and come off your trail and see what’s on the other side of your hills? I’d hate to take root here. Say, Mr. Sheriff Man, you look a good sort, even if you have played you were deaf and dumb for the whole of this awful ride. Let’s sidetrack the trail and go—home—by moonlight.”

  His eyes remained rigid and relentless, but there was a slight twitching of his strongest feature, the wide, mobile mouth.

  He looked at his watch.

  “We can wait for a few minutes,” he said in a matter of fact voice.

  “Please, may I get out and stretch?” she asked pleadingly.

  Taking silence for consent, she climbed out of the car.

  “Do you want a drink?” he asked, as he poured some water from an improvised Thermos bottle into a traveling cup.

  “Thanks for those first kind words,” she exclaimed, taking the cup from him and drinking eagerly.

  “Why didn’t you say you were thirsty?” he asked in a resentful tone, without looking at her. He had, in fact, studiously refrained from looking at her throughout the journey.

  “I’m not used to asking for anything,” she answered with a chuckle. “I take what comes my way. ‘Taking’ is your job, too, isn’t it?”

  “To hell with my job!” he broke out fiercely. “I’d never have taken it if I knew it meant this.”

  “It’s your own fault,” she retorted. “It wouldn’t have been ‘this’ if you hadn’t been so grouchy. We could have had a chummy little gabfest, if you hadn’t been bunging holes in the landscape with your lamps all the way.”

  He made no response but began to examine the workings of his car.

  “Does the county furnish it to you?” she asked. “It doesn’t seem as if you’d pick out anything like this. Was it ‘Made in America?’ Funny outfit for a cowboy country, anyway.”

  “Get in,” he commanded curtly. “We must be away.”

  “Oh, please, not yet,” she implored. “It’s so awful hot, and I won’t have all this outdoors for a long time, I suppose. I see there’s a tidy little bit of shade yonder. Let’s go there and rest awhile. I’ll be good; honest, I will, and when I get rested, you can hit a faster gait to even up. I get tired just the same as honest folks do. Come, now, won’t you?”

  In a flash she had taken advantage of this oasis of shade that beckoned enticingly to the passer-by.

  He followed reluctantly.

  “This is Heaven let loose,” she said, lolling luxuriously against the trunk of a tree. “You’re the only nice sheriff man that ever run me in.”

  He sat down near her and looked gloomily ahead.

  “Cheer up!” she urged, after a short silence. “It may not be so bad. Any one would think you were the prisoner instead of poor little me.”

  “I wish I were,” he said shortly.

  She looked at him curiously.

  “Say, what’s eating you, anyway? If you hate your job so, what did you take it for?”

  “It was forced on me. I’m only sworn in as acting sheriff for the county until the sheriff returns.”

  “How long you been ‘it’?”

  “Two weeks. You’re my second—arrest.”

  “Who was the first?”

  “So Long Sam.”

  She sat upright.

  “Are you the man who caught So Long Sam? Every one has been afraid to tackle him. I’d never have thought it of you!”

  “Why?” he asked curiously, not proof against the masculine enjoyment of hearing himself analyzed in spite of his reluctance to talk to her. “Do I seem such a weakling I couldn’t take one man?”

  “No; you look like you’d take a red-hot stove if you wanted to; but they said—Say; is your maiden name ‘Kurt?’ No! It can’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they called the man who took So Long Sam, ‘Kind Kurt.’ You haven’t been over-kind to me till just lately. Whirling me over sands in that awful fore-shortened car.”

  “It must be better,” he said dryly, “than the kind you’ve been used to.”

  “You mean the jail jitney. Do you know, they never yet put me in one. Always conveyed me other ways. Weren’t so bad to me either. I guess maybe your heart is in the right place or you wouldn’t have let me rest and given me the drink, even if you did wait till the eleventh hour. Can’t you look pleasant like you were going to sit for a picture to give to your best girl instead of posing for ‘Just before the battle, Mother’? You look so sorry you came.”

  “I am,” he said angrily. “I guess ‘Kind Kurt’ is a blankety blank fool, as some people say. I’ve been a lot kinder to you than you know. When I heard of your case and Bender pointed you out to me and said he’d got you locked up, I thought you were one of the many young city girls who go wrong because they have no chance to know better. The kind bred in slums, ignorant, ill-fed—the kind who never had a fair show. So I resolved that you should have one. Bender wanted you out of town with the surety that you would never come back.

  “I felt sorry for you. I offered to take you off his hands and bring you out here among the hills, where the best woman in the world would teach you to want to be honest. Do you suppose I’d have done it if I’d known the kind you are—a bright, smart brat who is bad because she wants to be, and boasts of it? There is no hope for your kind.”

  It was the longest speech the acting sheriff had ever made. He had been scarcely conscious that he was talking, but was simply voicing what had been in his thoughts for the last half hour.

  “How old is this ‘best woman in the world’?” asked the girl, seemingly unconcerned in his summing up of her case. “Is she your sweetheart or your wife? If she is either one, you’d better take me back to Bender, or spill me out on the plains here. She won’t be real glad to try to reform a young, good-looking girl like me. I am good-looking, honest, if I was slicked up a little.”

  He looked away, an angry frown on his lean, strong face. She gazed at him curiously for a moment and then la
id a slim, brown hand on his arm.

  “Listen here, Kurt,” she said. “You were right in what you thought about me never having had a fair show. Everything, everyone, including myself, seems to have been against me. I was born with ‘taking ways.’ I couldn’t seem to live them down. Lately things have been going wrong awfully fast. I’ve been sick and no one acted as if I were human up to a short time ago. I didn’t know that was why you took me from Bender’s jail. Honest, I’m not so bad as I talk.”

  He looked at her sceptically. Her eyes, now turned from him, were soft, feminine and without guile. He wouldn’t let himself be hoodwinked.

  “No; there’s no excuse for you,” he declared emphatically. “You are educated. You could have earned an honest living. You didn’t have to steal.”

  “No;” she said slowly and thoughtfully. “I didn’t have to.”

  “Then why do you? Bender told me you had a lifelong record of pilfering.”

  “Lifelong! Kind Kurt, I am young—only twenty.”

  “He said you’d been given a chance over and over again, but that you were hopeless. I—think you are.”

  “I think so, too,” she acknowledged, with a little giggle that brought back his scowl. “You’ve got a white elephant on your hands, Kurt. What are you going to do with me?”