by B. M. Bower
Jim Bleeker and a fellow they called Spikes moved over to the Bridger place with as many calves as the hay there would feed, and two men were sent down to the line-camp to winter. Two were kept at the Double-Crank Ranch to feed the calves and make themselves generally useful—the quietest, best boys of the lot they were, because they must eat in the house and Billy was thoughtful of the women.
So the Double-Crank settled itself for the long winter and what it might bring of good or ill.
Billy was troubled over more things than one. He could not help seeing that Flora was worrying a great deal over her father, and that the relations between herself and Mama Joy were, to put it mildly and tritely, strained. With the shadow of what sorrow might be theirs, hidden away from them in the frost-prisoned North, there was no dancing to lighten the weeks as they passed, and the women of the range land are not greatly given to “visiting” in winter. The miles between ranches are too long and too cold and uncertain, so that nothing less alluring than a dance may draw them from home. Billy thought it a shame, and that Flora must be terribly lonesome.
It was a long time before he had more than five minutes at a stretch in which to talk privately with her. Then one morning he came in to breakfast and saw that the chair of Mama Joy was empty; and Flora, when he went into the kitchen afterward, told him with almost a relish in her tone that Mrs. Bridger—she called her that, also with a relish—was in bed with toothache.
“Her face is swollen on one side till she couldn’t raise a dimple to save her life,” she announced, glancing to see that the doors were discreetly closed. “It’s such a relief, when you’ve had to look at them for four years. If I had dimples,” she added, spitefully rattling a handful of knives and forks into the dishpan, “I’d plug the things with beeswax or dough, or anything that I could get my hands on. Heavens! How I hate them!”
“Same here,” said Billy, with guilty fervor. It was treason to one of his few principles to speak disparagingly of a woman, but it was in this case a great relief. He had never before seen Flora in just this explosive state, and he had never heard her say “Heavens!” Somehow, it also seemed to him that he had never seen her so wholly lovable. He went up to her, tilted her head back a little, and put a kiss on the place where dimples were not. “That’s one uh the reasons why I like yuh so much,” he murmured. “Yuh haven’t got dimples or yellow hair or blue eyes—thank the Lord! Some uh these days, girlie, I’m going t’ pick yuh up and run off with yuh.”
Her eyes, as she looked briefly up at him, were a shade less turbulent. “You’d better watch out or she will be running off with you!” she said, and drew gently away from him. “There! That’s a horrid thing to say, Billy Boy, but it isn’t half as horrid as—And she watches me and wants to know everything we say to each other, and is—” She stopped abruptly and turned to get hot water.
“I know it’s tough, girlie.” Charming Billy, considering his ignorance of women, showed an instinct for just the sympathy she needed. “I haven’t had a chance to speak to yuh, hardly, for months—anything but common remarks made in public. How long does the toothache last as a general thing?” He took down the dish towel from its nail inside the pantry door and prepared to help her. “She’s good for today, ain’t she?”
“Oh, yes—and I suppose it does hurt, and I ought to be sorry. But I’m not. I’m glad of it. I wish her face would stay that way all winter! She’s so fussy about her looks she won’t put her nose out of her room till she’s pretty again. Oh, Billy Boy, I wish I were a man!”
“Well, I don’t!” Billy disagreed. “If yuh was,” he added soberly, “and stayed as pretty as yuh are now, she’d—” But Billy could not bring himself to finish the sentence.
“Do you think it’s because you’re so pretty that she—”
Flora smiled reluctantly. “If I were a man I could swear and swear!”
“Swear anyhow,” suggested Billy encouragingly. “I’ll show yuh how.”
“And father away off in Klondyke,” she said irrelevantly, passing over his generous offer, “and—and dead, for all we know! And she doesn’t care—at all! She—”
Sympathy is good, but it has a disagreeable way of bringing all one’s troubles to the front rather overwhelmingly. Flora suddenly dropped a plate back into the pan, leaned her face against the wall by the sink and began to cry in a tempestuous manner rather frightened Charming Billy Boyle, who had never before seen a grown woman cry real tears and sob like that.
He did what he could. He put his arms around her and held her close, and patted her hair and called her girlie, and laid his brown cheek against her wet one and told her to never mind and that it would be all right anyway, and that her father was probably picking away in his mine right then and wishing she was there to fry his bacon for him.
“I wish I was, too,” she murmured, weaned from her weeping and talking into his coat. “If I’d known how—she—really was, I wouldn’t ever have stayed. I’d have gone with father.”
“And where would I come in?” he demanded selfishly, and so turned the conversation still farther from her trouble.
The water went stone cold in the dishpan and the fire died in the stove so that the frost spread a film over the thawed centre of the window panes. There is no telling when the dishes would have been washed that day if Mama Joy had not begun to pound energetically upon the floor—with the heel of a shoe, judging from the sound. Even that might not have proved a serious interruption; but Dill put his head in from the dining room and got as far as “That gray horse, William—” before he caught the significance of Flora perched on the knee of “William” and retreated hastily.
So Flora went to see what Mama Joy wanted, and Billy hurried somewhat guiltily out to find what was the matter with the gray horse, and practical affairs once more took control.
After that, Billy considered himself an engaged young man. He went back to his ditty and inquired frequently:
“Can she make a punkin pie, Billy boy, Billy Boy?”
and was very nearly the old, care-free Charming Billy of the line-camp. It is true that Mama Joy recovered disconcertingly that afternoon, and became once more ubiquitous, but Billy felt that nothing could cheat him of his joy, and remained cheerful under difficulties. He could exchange glances of much secret understanding with Flora, and he could snatch a hasty kiss, now and then, and when the chaperonage was too unremitting she could slip into his hands a hurriedly penciled note, filled with important nothings. Which made a bright spot in his life and kept Flora from thinking altogether of her father and fretting for some news of him.
Still, there were other things to worry him and to keep him from forgetting that the law of nature, which he had before defined to his own satisfaction, still governed the game. Storm followed storm with a monotonous regularity that was, to say the least, depressing, though to be sure there had been other winters like this, and not even Billy could claim that Nature was especially malignant.
But with Brown’s new fence stretching for miles to the south and east of the open range near home, the drifting cattle brought up against it during the blinding blizzards and huddled there, freezing in the open, or else plodded stolidly along beside it until some washout or coulée too deep for crossing barred their way, so that the huddling and freezing was at best merely postponed. Billy, being quite alive to the exigencies of the matter, rode and rode, and with him rode Dill and the other two men when they had the leisure—which was not often, since the storms made much “shoveling” of hay necessary if they would keep the calves from dying by the dozen. They pushed the cattle away from the fences—to speak figuratively and colloquially—and drove them back to the open range until the next storm or cold north wind came and compelled them to repeat the process.
If Billy had had unlimited opportunity for lovemaking, he would not have had the time, for he spent hours in the saddle every day, unless the storm was too bitter for even him to face. There was the line-camp with which to keep in touch; he must r
ide often to the Bridger place—or he thought he must—to see how they were getting on. It worried him to see how large the “hospital bunch” was growing, and to see how many dark little mounds dotted the hollows, except when a new-fallen blanket of snow made them white—the carcasses of the calves that had “laid ’em down” already.
“Yuh ain’t feeding heavy enough, boys,” he told them once, before he quite realized how hard the weather was for stock.
“Yuh better ride around the hill and take a look at the stacks,” suggested Jim Bleeker. “We’re feeding heavy as we dare, Bill. If we don’t get a let-up early we’re going to be plumb out uh hay. There ain’t been a week all together that the calves could feed away from the sheds. That’s where the trouble lays.”
Billy rode the long half-mile up the coulée to where the hay had mostly been stacked, and came back looking sober. “There’s no use splitting the bunch and taking some to the Double-Crank,” he said. “We need all the hay we’ve got over there. Shove ’em out on the hills and make ’em feed a little every day that’s fit, and bank up them sheds and make ’em warmer. This winter’s going to be one of our old steadies, the way she acts so far. It’s sure a fright, the way this weather eats up the hay.”
It was such incidents as these which weaned him again from his singing and his light-heartedness as the weeks passed coldly toward spring. He did not say very much about it to Dill, because he had a constitutional aversion to piling up agony ahead of him; besides, Dill could see for himself that the loss would be heavy, though just how heavy he hadn’t the experience with which to estimate. As March came in with a blizzard and went, a succession of bleak days, into April, Billy knew more than he cared to admit even to himself. He would lie awake at night when the wind and snow raved over the land, and picture the bare open that he knew, with lean, Double-Crank stock drifting tail to the wind. He could fancy them coming up against this fence and that fence, which had not been there a year or two ago, and huddling there, freezing, cut off from the sheltered coulées that would have saved them.
“Damn these nesters and their fences!” He would grit his teeth at his helplessness, and then try to forget it all and think only of Flora.
CHAPTER XIX
“I’m Not Your Wife Yet!”
Billy, coming back from the biggest town in the country, where he had gone to pick up another man or two for the round-up which was at hand, met the Pilgrim face to face as he was crossing the creek to go to the corrals. It was nearing sundown and it was Sunday, and those two details, when used in connection with the Pilgrim, seemed unpleasantly significant. Besides, Billy was freshly antagonistic because of something he had heard while he was away; instead of returning the Pilgrim’s brazenly cheerful “Hello,” he scowled and rode on without so much as giving a downward tilt to his chin. For Charming Billy Boyle was never inclined to diplomacy, or to hiding his feelings in any way unless driven to it by absolute necessity.
When he went into the house he saw that Flora had her hair done in a new way that was extremely pretty, and that she had on a soft, white silk shirt-waist with lots of lace zigzagged across—a waist hitherto kept sacred to dances and other glorious occasions—and a soft, pink bow pinned in her hair; all these things he mentally connected with the visit of the Pilgrim. When he turned to see a malicious light in the round, blue eyes of Mama Joy and a spiteful satisfaction in her very dimples, it suddenly occurred to him that he would certainly have something to say to Miss Flora. It was no comfort to know that all winter the Pilgrim had not been near, because all winter he had been away somewhere—rumor had it that he spent his winters in Iowa. Like the birds, he always returned with the spring.
Billy never suspected that Mama Joy read his face and left them purposely together after supper, though he was surprised when she arose from the table and said:
“Flora, you make Billy help you with the dishes. I’ve got a headache and I’m going to lie down.”
At any rate, it gave him the opportunity he wanted.
“Are yuh going to let the Pilgrim hang around here this summer?” he demanded in his straight-from-the-shoulder fashion while he was drying the first cup.
“You mean Mr. Walland? I didn’t know he ever ‘hung around’.” Flora was not meek, and Billy realized that, as he put it mentally, he had his work cut out for him to pull through without a quarrel.
“I mean the Pilgrim. And I call it hanging around when a fellow keeps running to see a girl that’s got a loop on her already. I don’t want to lay down the law to yuh, Girlie, but that blamed Siwash has got to keep away from here. He ain’t fit for yuh to speak to—and I’d a told yuh before, only I didn’t have any right—”
“Are you sure you have a right now?” The tone of Flora was sweet and calm and patient. “I’ll tell you one thing, Charming Billy Boyle, Mr. Walland has never spoken one word against you. He—he likes you, and I don’t think it’s nice for you—”
“Likes me! Like hell he does!” snorted Billy, not bothering to choose nice words. “He’d plug me in the back like an Injun if he thought he could get off with it. I remember him when I hazed him away from line-camp, the morning after you stayed there, he promised faithful to kill me. Uh course, he won’t, because he’s afraid, but—I don’t reckon yuh can call it liking—”
“Why did you ‘haze him away,’ as you call it, Billy? And kill his dog? It was a nice dog; I love dogs, and I don’t see how any man—”
Billy flushed hotly. “I hazed him away because he insulted you,” he said bluntly, not quite believing in her ignorance.
Flora, her hands buried deep in the soapsuds, looked at him round-eyed. “I never heard of that before,” she said slowly. “When, Billy? And what did he—say?”
Billy stared at her. “I don’t know what he said! I wouldn’t think you’d need to ask. When I came in the cabin—I lied about getting lost from the trail—I turned around and came back, because I was afraid he might come before I could get back, and—when I came in, there was something. I could tell, all right. Yuh sat there behind the table looking like yuh was—well, kinda cornered. And he was—Flora, he did say something, or do something! He didn’t act right to yuh. I could tell. Didn’t he? Yuh needn’t be afraid to tell me, Girlie. I give him a thrashing for it. What was it? I want to know.” He did not realize how pugnacious was his pose, but he was leaning toward her with his face quite close, and his eyes were blue points of intensity. His hands, doubled and pressing hard on the table, showed white at the knuckles.
Flora rattled the dishes in the pan and laughed unsteadily. “Go to work, Billy Boy, and don’t act stagey,” she commanded lightly. “I’ll tell you the exact truth—and that isn’t anything to get excited over. Fred Walland came about three minutes before you did, and of course I didn’t know he belonged there. I was afraid. He pushed open the door, and he was swearing a little at the ice there, where we threw out the dish water. I knew it wasn’t you, and I got back in the corner. He came in and looked awfully stunned at seeing me and said, ‘I beg your pardon, fair one’.” She blushed and did not look up. “He said, ‘I didn’t know there was a lady present,’ and put down the sack of stuff and looked at me for a minute or two without saying a word. He was just going to speak, I think, when you burst in. And that’s all there was to it, Billy Boy. I was frightened because I didn’t know who he was, and he did stare—but, so did you, Billy Boy, when I opened the door and walked in. You stared every bit as hard and long as Fred Walland did.”
“But I’ll bet I didn’t have the same look in my face. Yuh wasn’t scared of me,” Billy asserted shrewdly.
“I was too! I was horribly scared—at first. So if you fought Fred Walland and killed his dog” (the reproach of her tone, then!) “because you imagined a lot that wasn’t true, you ought to go straight and apologize.”
“I don’t think I will! Good Lord! Flora, do yuh think I don’t know the stuff he’s made of? He’s a low-down, cowardly cur—the kind uh man that is always bragging about—”
(Billy stuck there. With her big, innocent eyes looking up at him, he could not say “bragging about the women he’s ruined,” so he changed weakly) “about all he’s done. He’s a murderer that ought by rights t’ be in the pen right now—”
“I think that will do, Billy!” she interrupted indignantly. “You know he couldn’t help killing that man.”
“I kinda believed that, too, till I run onto Jim Johnson up in Tower. You don’t know Jim, but he’s a straight man and wouldn’t lie. Yuh remember, Flora, the Pilgrim told me the Swede pulled a knife on him. I stooped down and looked, and I didn’t see no knife—nor gun, either. And I wasn’t so blamed excited I’d be apt to pass up anything like that; I’ve seen men shot before, and pass out with their boots on, in more excitable ways than a little, plain, old killing. So I didn’t see anything in the shape of a weapon. But when I come back, here lays a Colt forty-five right in plain sight, and the Pilgrim saying, ‘He pulled a gun on me,’ right on top uh telling me it was a knife. I thought at the time there was something queer about that, and about him not having a gun on him when I know he always packed one—like every other fool Pilgrim that comes West with the idea he’s got to fight his way along from breakfast to supper, and sleep with his six-gun under his pillow!”
“And I know you don’t like him, and you’d think he had some ulterior motive if he rolled his cigarette backward once! I don’t see anything but just your dislike trying to twist things—”
“Well, hold on a minute! I got to talking with Jim, and we’re pretty good friends. So he told me on the quiet that Gus Svenstrom gave him his gun to keep, that night. Gus was drinking, and said he didn’t want to be packing it around for fear he might get foolish with it. Jim had it—Jim was tending bar that time in that little log saloon, in Hardup—when the Swede was killed. So it wasn’t the Swedes gun on the ground—and if he borrowed one, which he wouldn’t be apt to do, why didn’t the fellow he got it from claim it?”