Penny of Top Hill Trail

by Maniates, Belle Kanaris

  She turned from the window to hear the message Kingdon had just received from the telegraph office in town. An old-time friend had asked him to join a party of men at a ranch a hundred miles distant. His wife urged him to follow his apparent inclination.

  “It’ll do you good, Louis, to see more of your kind again.”

  “I wouldn’t consider it if you didn’t have such good company,” he said, with a whimsical smile in Pen’s direction.

  The following morning, Jo drove Mrs. Kingdon, Pen and the children to town to see Kingdon off. When his train had pulled out, they went to the postoffice and Francis was sent in for the mail.

  “A letter for you, mother,” he said, running up to the car. “It’s Aunt Helen’s writing.”

  An anxious look came into Margaret Kingdon’s eyes as she read.

  “Doris is ill, and my sister wants me to come to her,” she explained to Pen. “She is quite helpless in a sick room and Doris asks for me. There is a train east in an hour and you can send my luggage on to me. I’ll return as soon as Doris is convalescent.”

  “I will do all I can to help with the children,” promised Pen.

  “I know you will. And Jo can stop at Mrs. Merlin’s and take her to Top Hill. She always presides in my absence. She is a good housekeeper and is never disagreeable or officious.”

  “Jo says Mrs. Merlin shinnies on her own side,” added Billy.

  “Jo is right,” replied his mother.

  At the station Mrs. Kingdon drew Pen aside.

  “You must tell Kurt, you know,” she cautioned.

  Pen looked plaintive, but the conductor’s “all aboard” call ended the conversation.

  “We’ll say our prayers and our lessons like mother told us,” said Francis as they motored home, “but of course we can’t be too good all the time. I am going to ride a horse, a real horse—not a pony.”

  “I am going to sit up late nights,” declared Billy.

  “And I shall wear your clothes and play I am a boy,” Betty informed him.

  “Well,” thought Pen, “after all these Declarations of Independence, I feel I must get in the forbidden fruit game, too. I know what I’ll do. I’ll not tell Kurt—not right away, at least.”

  Half way to the ranch they stopped at Mrs. Merlin’s cottage.

  “She certainly looks the part of propriety to perfection,” thought Pen, as she surveyed the tall, angular, spectacled woman, who came to the car, and whose grim features relaxed slightly after a keen glance at the young girl.

  “I’ll have four children this time instead of three,” she said.

  “What would she think,” reflected Pen, “if Kind Kurt should tell her what kind of a child the fourth one is!”

  Back at Top Hill, Pen packed the luggage to be expressed to Mrs. Kingdon, and Jo made another trip to town, planning to go from there to Westcott’s.

  At dinner time Kurt arrived, and Pen chuckled as she easily read his dismay at the situation.

  “He’s foreseeing and dreading all sorts of terrible things I may do or am capable of doing. Just because he is looking for trouble, I have no desire to give it. I’ll play a new role and show him what a tame, good little girl I can be; maybe I’ll like being one and it’ll turn out to be a real reform. It would be awfully odd if he found his pedalled ideal in The Thief!”

  She was conscious of his searching eyes upon her. She looked demurely down. In a soft, subdued voice she read little stories to the children, and when their bedtime hour came, she went upstairs with them.

  Later she joined him on the library veranda where he was smoking his pipe, for it was one of the few nights when it was warm enough for such indulgence.

  She went up to him unfalteringly.

  “I have put myself on honor while Mrs. Kingdon is away,” she said gravely. “I will try hard to do as you want me to do, but it will be easier for me if you will trust me.”

  Her eyes looked out so very straight, with none of the worldly wisdom he had seen in them the day she had been transferred to his guardianship, that he found himself incapable of harboring any further doubt of her sincerity.

  “I will,” he said staunchly; “I will trust you as she does.”

  They sat together in the moonlight without further converse and in the reposeful silence a mutual understanding was born.

  Presently she went inside and played some old-time airs on the piano with the caressing, lingering touch of those who play by ear.

  “Where did you learn to play?” he asked wonderingly.

  She looked up, slightly startled. She hadn’t heard him come in and her thoughts had been far away from Top Hill.

  “I never did learn,” she said, rising from the piano. “I play by ear. I see it is late. I must go upstairs. Good night, Mr. Walters.”

  “Good night, Pen,” he said kindly.

  He returned to the porch and pipe and lost himself in a haze of dreams—such dreams as had been wont to come to him in his younger days when he had been a cow-puncher pure and simple. Gathered about a roaring camp fire that lighted up the rough and boisterous faces of his companions, he had seemed as one of them, but later when they had gone to well-earned slumber and it had been his turn to guard the long lines of cattle in the cool of the cottonwoods, he had used to gaze into the mysteries of a desert moon slowly drifting through a cerulean sky and dream a boy’s dream of the woman who was to come to him.

  As he grew older and came more into contact with the world, he was brought to an overwhelming realization that the woman of his dreams did not exist. The knowledge made an ache in his heart, but to-night he was again longing with the primary instinct that would not be killed,—longing for the One.

  Pen went to bed and to sleep. The next day she was a perfect model of a young housewife. She helped the children with their little lessons, filled all the vases, trained some vines, and then with some needlework went out on the veranda. At the table she listened and responded interestedly to Mrs. Merlin’s bromidic remarks, was gentle with the children and most flatteringly deferential to Kurt. Of her former banter and coquetry toward him there was no trace. After the children had gone to bed, she played cribbage with Mrs. Merlin while Kurt read the papers.

  When she was undressing that night she examined her shoulders in the mirror very closely.

  “There should be little wings sprouting. I was never even make-believe good before. The relapse will be a winner when it comes. If I could only steady down to something like a normal life. But I never shall.”

  She was standing pensively by a rosebush the next morning feeling appallingly weary of well-doing when Kurt in his riding clothes suddenly appeared before her.

  “Would you like to ride this morning?” he asked. “Work is slack just now.”

  With a rush of joy she got into her boyish looking outfit and mounted the horse he had chosen for her, a thoroughbred animal but one far different from those she had tried out on field day. She was very careful not to try to outride the foreman, or to perform any of her marvels of horsemanship. They had a long exhilarating ride over the foothills, and she felt the blood leaping again in her arteries at the turning from the comfortable channels of house life into the lure of the open.

  “I was never meant for indoors,” she thought. “I think I can stand it up here a while longer if he’ll give me more of this exercise.”

  That night as they sat in the library alone, he lost his habitual reticence and talked—through her guidance—of himself and his life.

  “Does it satisfy you always,” she asked. “Wouldn’t you like the power of ruling fates and fortunes in a city way?”

  “No;” he replied, almost fiercely. “When a man has circled the herd and risen in his stirrups to throw a lariat and watched through the night by the light of camp fires, nothing else calls to him quite the same way. I couldn’t endure to live a bottled up life—the life of cities. Men of my kind are branded; they may wander, but they always come back. After you once get on intimate terms with t
he mountain and the blue overhead, other things don’t satisfy.”

  She drew him into further conversation regarding his former life, responding briefly but with an undercurrent of interest that put him on good terms with himself.

  In the days that followed, these rides became frequent, and despite the fact that they seldom spoke, they unconsciously grew into a closeness of companionship which saved her from the ennui of unwonted domestic environment. The intense vitality of the young foreman attracted her, and she began to have a friendly sympathy for him, and even to feel a tranquil satisfaction in his reposeful silence. At times she was sorely tempted to show him the same little impish self she had portrayed on their first ride up the trail, and sometimes her conscience would sting her that she had failed to confide in him as Mrs. Kingdon had advised, but his gray eyes looked out so very straight and with such calm kindliness—the gaze of a man who has lived the simple life in the open—and with so little affinity to the eyes of the world-wise, that she found herself incapable of carrying out her intentions.

  One night when the men had arranged to have another dance, Pen paid unusual attention to her dress. She came downstairs, a slight little figure in a soft, flower-sprigged, old-fashioned muslin (designed originally for bedroom windows and donated by Mrs. Kingdon), her hair softly brought to the crown of her head, with little curling rings about her brow. A freshness like the first faint fragrance of young spring seemed to hover about her. Kurt surveyed her with a look akin to adoration. Then his eyes dropped.

  “Don’t dance with the boys to-night,” he said abruptly.

  “I must play the ingénue part for which I am costumed,” she thought.

  “Mrs. Kingdon told me,” she said gently, “that the boys had so few opportunities for partners, I must divide my dances equally.”

  “There’s a party of tourists—teachers—at Westcott’s. I’ve asked them over. The boys can dance with them.”

  “Well,” she assented graciously, “I’ll just dance with Betty and Francis and Billy—”

  “And me,” he finished.

  “Thank you. I didn’t know that you danced.”

  In the dance hall she looked eagerly about, hoping that Jo might have been invited, but she was disappointed.

  “I am not dancing,” she thought, when Kurt was guiding her over the floor. “I am just being deliciously carried about. It’s very restful, but not exhilarating. Oh, Jo, where art thou? It was like drinking champagne to dance with you, but I suppose continuous champagne is bad for one.”

  Later that night when she was taking off her dancing slippers her thoughts were still of the man with whom she had danced so many times.

  “He’s kind and good and strong—a suppressed strength. He looks passion-proof; but if he ever falls in love! And what a triumph for a thief to capture an adamantine heart! But I don’t want that kind—nor any kind.”

  Down in the bunkhouse, Kurt was recalling the feel of her little hand that had left a trail like fire upon his arm and had filled him with a sensation of ecstasy. A new divine sweetness seemed born into the air. He looked out of his window up into a star-flecked sky and renewed his old vow of allegiance to The Woman.

  * * *

  CHAPTER VII

  The next day Francis carried out his cherished intention of being a “bit bad,” and in violation of orders, surreptitiously mounted a “real horse” instead of his well-behaved little pony, and set out on adventure bound.

  The horse, surprised at his burden, cantered casually along at first; then, resenting the intrusion, began to toss his head, snort and curvet about. The lad, a little frightened but game, kept his seat and the horse, seemingly ashamed to trifle longer with so small a foe, resumed his easy canter, though at a swifter pace than Francis was wont to ride. All might have ended well, had not Kurt in his home-made car suddenly sounded a blatant horn as he came around a curve. To his vision was disclosed a plunging horse and a small, fair-haired atom of a boy clinging to his neck. There was a forward plunge and the horse thundered on like mad along a narrow slant of road with never a slackening of speed.

  Kurt cranked up for pursuit, but his crude craft was not built on speed lines, and he saw the distance fast eaten up between him and the frenzied horse. Then, with tiger swiftness, Kingdon’s car, a motor of make, passed him, Gene at the wheel, Pen beside him. The sight gave him no hope. They could doubtless overtake the horse, but they could not stop him and if they could, the boy would be thrown.

  Pen’s clear young voice came like a clarion call:

  “Stick tight, Francis! Burr-tight! We’ll get you all right.”

  Gene steered the car to the cliff side of the road to prevent the peril of a plunge by the horse.

  When the long, low racing car was nearly up to the Mazeppa flier, a thrill ran through Kurt as he saw Pen step out on the running board. He forgot the boy’s danger as he divined her purpose.

  The car closed in on the horse. The girl leaned far out, snatched the boy from the horse and climbed back into the car which now slowed up.

  It was done in a second, so swiftly, so aptly that Kurt could only sit and gape with the sort of fore-knowledge that it must come out all right, as one gazes at a thrilling scene in a motion picture. When he came alongside the car, Gene looked up with a challenging grin. Francis, though pale and breathing quickly, wore a triumphant look. Pen’s expression was entirely normal.

  Kurt tried to speak, but his voice was dry in his throat.

  “I stuck on, didn’t I?” clamored Francis in satisfied tone.

  Then Kurt recovered and began to reprimand the lad, but a certain sparkle in Pen’s eyes as she clasped the lad to her restrained him.

  He turned upon Gene.

  “Did you know she was going to do that?”

  “Sure!” was the confident reply. “I knew she could do it.”

  He flung Kingdon’s racer into motion and slid on down the white ribbon of road to the ranch, while Kurt’s little machine rattled and creaked and jolted along.

  “He’ll be sore at coming in after the black flag,” chuckled Gene. “Kurt ain’t used to being second, but I don’t often get a chance at this car.”

  Kurt didn’t come up to the house all that day until long after the dinner hour. He found Pen alone in the invitingly-furnished sitting room, the amber light from a shaded lamp bringing out the gleaming gold in her hair.

  She looked up with a shy smile of welcome, and instantly he felt the charm a woman could bring to a room like this—a room full of rest and harmony—a haven to a man wearied from the day’s work.

  He sat by the table opposite her—too content to desire his pipe.

  “Where are they all?” he asked presently.

  “Francis was tired and repentant after the excitement wore off and was quite ready to go to bed early. Billy and Betty followed suit. Mrs. Merlin has a headache.”

  “How did you come to be riding with Gene this morning?” he asked abruptly.

  “Mrs. Merlin asked us to go to her cottage for some things she needed. She thought Gene wouldn’t be able to find them.”

  The natural tone of her reply and her utter lack of surprise or resentment at his question quite appeased him.

  “It’s a little cool to-night,” he said suddenly. “Wouldn’t you like to have a fire?”

  She thought it would be nice, and interestedly watched him build one in the big fireplace.

  He formed a fortress of logs with the usual huge one for a background. When he had a fire to his liking he came and sat beside her.

  “That was wonderful—what you did this morning,” he said abruptly.

  “No; it was simply instinctive.”

  “It was a hair-breadth thing to do, but very brave.”

  “It wasn’t bravery,” she denied after a moment’s reflection. “It was—I can’t tell you just what it was.”

  “It made me bless the fate that led me to you that day.”

  “Then,” she said lightly, but coloring confus
edly, “I am glad I was able to do it—to repay you and Mrs. Kingdon in part. But where have you been all day?”

  “I have been down in the farthest field.”

  “Working?”

  “Yes; and thinking. Thinking of you—and what you did.”

  “Where did you have dinner?”

  “I have had none. I am only just aware that I would like some. I came through the kitchen on my way in, but the cook didn’t seem to be about.”

  “They are having some sort of entertainment in the mess hall.”

  “I am glad you didn’t go,” he said impetuously.

  “I thought you would rather I didn’t go,” she replied docilely. “I will try to find you something to eat. Will you come and help me? Cook says you are a champion coffee maker.”

  They went through the kitchen into a smaller room.

  “Betty calls this the ‘kitchen yet!’ But can you cook?” said Kurt.

  “I am glad I won’t be called upon to prove it. The larder’s well larded, and I will set this little table while you make the coffee.”

  By the time the coffee was made, she had set forth an inviting little supper. She sat opposite him and poured the coffee. It seemed to him some way that it was the coziest meal he had eaten since his home days—the early home days before his mother died and he had gone to the prunish aunt.

  “We must leave things as we found them,” she told him when they could no longer make excuse for lingering.

  “I feel in a very domestic mood,” he said, as he wiped the few dishes.

  “Do you know I have a very hearthy feeling myself. I know why a cat purrs. Everything is shipshape now. I’ll say good night, and—”

  “Come back to the fire,” he entreated. “I want to smoke.”

  Back in the library Pen made herself comfortable on one of the window seats, pulling up the shade to let the moonlight stream in.

  He followed and sat beside her, watching in silence the pensive, young profile, the straight little features, the parted lips, as she gazed away over the moonlit hills. He felt a strange yearning tenderness.