The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  At supper-time our crowd got the storekeeper intimidated sufficiently to open his store and sell us something to eat. The King faction had looked upon us blackly, though there were too many of us to make it safe meddling, and none of us were minded to break bread with them. Instead, we sat around on the counter and on boxes in the store, and ate crackers and sardines and things like that. I couldn’t help remembering my last Fourth, and the banquet I had given on board the Molly Stark—my yacht, named after the lady known to history, whom dad claims for an ancestress—and I laughed out loud. The boys wanted to know the cause of my mirth, and so, with a sardine laid out decently between two crackers in one hand, and a blue “granite” cup of plebeian beer in the other, I told them all about that banquet, and some of the things we had to eat and drink—whereat they laughed, too. The contrast was certainly amusing. But, somehow, I wouldn’t have changed, just then, if I could have done so. That, also, is something I’m not psychologist enough to explain.

  That last waltz with Miss King was like to prove disastrous, for we swished uncomfortably close to her father, standing scowling at Frosty and some of the others of our crowd near the door. Luckily, he didn’t see us, and at the far end Miss King stopped abruptly. Her cheeks were pink, and her eyes looked up at me—wistfully, I could almost say.

  “I think, Mr. Carleton, we had better stop,” she said hesitatingly. “I don’t believe your enmity is so ungenerous as to wish to cause me unpleasantness. You surely are convinced now that I am not afraid of you, so the truce is over.”

  I did not pretend to misunderstand. “I’m going home at once,” I told her gently, “and I shall take my spectacular crowd along with me; but I’m not sorry I came, and I hope you are not.”

  She looked at me soberly, and then away. “There is one thing I should like to say,” she said, in so low a tone I had to lean to catch the words. “Please don’t try to ride through King’s Highway again; father hates you quite enough as it is, and it is scarcely the part of a gentleman to needlessly provoke an old man.”

  I could feel myself grow red. What a cad I must seem to her! “King’s Highway shall be safe from my vandal feet hereafter,” I told her, and meant it.

  “So long as you keep that promise,” she said, smiling a bit, “I shall try to remember mine enemy with respect.”

  “And I hope that mine enemy shall sometimes view the beauties of White Divide from a little distance—say half a mile or so,” I answered daringly.

  She heard me, but at that minute that Weaver chap came up, and she began talking to him as though he was her long-lost friend. I was clearly out of it, so I told Edith and her mother good night, bowed to “Aunt Lodema” and got the stony stare for my reward, and rounded up my crowd.

  We passed old King in a body, and he growled something I could not hear; one of the boys told me, afterward, that it was just as well I didn’t. We rode away under the stars, and I wished that night had been four times as long, and that Beryl King would be as nice to me as was Edith Loroman.

  CHAPTER VII

  One Day Too Late!

  I suppose there is always a time when a fellow passes quite suddenly out of the cub-stage and feels himself a man—or, at least, a very great desire to be one. Until that Fourth of July life had been to me a playground, with an interruption or two to the game. When dad took such heroic measures to instil some sense into my head, he interrupted the game for ten days or so—and then I went back to my play, satisfied with new toys. At least, that is the way it seemed to me. But after that night, things were somehow different. I wanted to amount to something; I was absolutely ashamed of my general uselessness, and I came near writing to dad and telling him so.

  The worst of it was that I didn’t know just what it was I wanted to do, except ride over to that little pinnacle just out from King’s Highway, and watch for Beryl King; that, of course, was out of the question, and maudlin, anyway.

  On the third day after, as Frosty and I were riding circle quite silently and moodily together, we rode up into a little coulée on the southwestern side of White Divide, and came quite unexpectedly upon a little picnic-party camped comfortably down by the spring where we had meant to slake our own thirst. Of course, it was the Kings’ house-party; they were the only luxuriously idle crowd in the country.

  Edith and her mother greeted me with much apparent joy, but, really, I felt sorry for Frosty; all that saved him from recognition then was the providential near-sightedness of Mrs. Loroman. I observed that he was careful not to come close enough to the lady to run any risk.

  Aunt Lodema tilted her chin at me, and Beryl—to tell the truth, I couldn’t make up my mind about Beryl. When I first rode up to them, and she looked at me, I fancied there was a welcome in her eyes; after that there was anything else you like to name. I looked several times at her to make sure, but I couldn’t tell any more what she was thinking than one can read the face of a Chinaman. (That isn’t a pretty comparison, I know, but it gives my meaning, for, of all humans, Chinks are about the hardest to understand or read.) I was willing, however, to spend a good deal of time studying the subject of her thoughts, and got off my horse almost as soon as Mrs. Loroman and Edith invited me to stop and eat lunch with them. That Weaver fellow was not present, but another man, whom they introduced as Mr. Tenbrooke, was sitting dolefully on a rock, watching a maid unpacking eatables. Edith told me that “Uncle Homer”—which was old man King—and Mr. Weaver would be along presently. They had driven over to Kenmore first, on a matter of business.

  Frosty, I could see, was not going to stay, even though Edith, in a polite little voice that made me wonder at her, invited him to do so. Edith was not the hostess, and had really no right to do that.

  I tried to get a word with Miss Beryl, found myself having a good many words with Edith, instead, and in fifteen minutes I became as thoroughly disgusted with unkind fate as ever I’ve been in my life, and suddenly remembered that duty made further delay absolutely impossible. We rode away, with Edith protesting prettily at what she was pleased to call my bad manners.

  For the rest of the way up that coulée Frosty and I were even more silent and moody than we had been before. The only time we spoke was when Frosty asked me gruffly how long those people expected to stay out here. I told him a week, and he grunted something under his breath about female fortune-hunters. I couldn’t see what he was driving at, for I certainly should never think of accusing Edith and her mother of being that especial brand of abhorrence, but he was in a bitter mood, and I wouldn’t argue with him then—I had troubles of my own to think of. I was beginning to call myself several kinds of a fool for letting a girl—however wonderful her eyes—give me bad half-hours quite so frequently; the thing had never happened to me before, and I had known hundreds of nice girls—approximately. When a fellow goes through a co-ed course, and has a dad whom the papers call financier, he gets a speaking-acquaintance with a few girls. The trouble with me was, I never gave the whole bunch as much thought as I was giving to Beryl King—and the more I thought about her, the less satisfaction there was in the thinking.

  I waited a day or two, and then practically ran away from my work and rode over to that little butte. Some one was sitting on the same flat rock, and I climbed up to the place with more haste than grace, I imagine. When I reached the top, panting like the purr of the Yellow Peril—my automobile—when it gets warmed up and going smoothly, I discovered that it was Edith Loroman sitting placidly, with a camera on her knees, doing things to the internal organs of the thing. I don’t know much about cameras, so I can’t be more explicit.

  “If it isn’t Ellie, looking for all the world like the Virginian just stepped down from behind the footlights!” was her greeting. “Where in the world have you been, that you haven’t been over to see us?”

  “You must know that the palace of the King is closed against the Carletons,” I said, and I’m afraid I said it a bit crossly; I hadn’t climbed that unmerciful butte just to bandy commonplaces with Ed
ith Loroman, even if we were old friends. There are times when new enemies are more diverting than the oldest of old friends.

  “Well, you could come when Uncle Homer is away—which he often is,” she pouted. “Every Sunday he drives over to Kenmore and pokes around his miners and mines, and often Terence and Beryl go with him, so you could come—”

  “No, thank you.” I put on the dignity three deep there. “If I can’t come when your uncle is at home, I won’t sneak in when he’s gone. I—how does it happen you are away out here by yourself?”

  “Well,” she explained, still doing things to the camera, “Beryl came out here yesterday, and made a sketch of the divide; I just happened to see her putting it away. So I made her tell me where she got that view-point, and I wanted her to come with me, so I could get a snap shot; it is pretty, from here. But she went over to the mines with Mr. Weaver, and I had to come alone. Beryl likes to be around those dirty mines—but I can’t bear it. And, now I’m here, something’s gone wrong with the thing, so I can’t wind the film. Do you know how to fix it, Ellie?”

  I didn’t, and I told her so, in a word. Edith pouted again—she has a pretty mouth that looks well all tied up in a knot, and I have a slight suspicion that she knows it—and said that a fellow who could take an automobile all to pieces and put it together again ought to be able to fix a kodak. That’s the way some women reason, I believe—just as though cars and kodaks are twin brothers.

  Our conversation, as I remember it now, was decidedly flat and dull. I kept thinking of Beryl being there the day before—and I never knew; of her being off somewhere today with that Weaver fellow—and I knew it and couldn’t do a thing. I hardly know which was the more unpleasant to dwell upon, but I do know that it made me mighty poor company for Edith. I sat there on a near-by rock and lighted cigarettes, only to let them go out, and glowered at King’s Highway, off across the flat, as if it were the mouth of the bottomless pit. I can’t wonder that Edith called me a bear, and asked me repeatedly if I had toothache, or anything.

  By and by she had her kodak in working order again, and took two or three pictures of the divide. Edith is very pretty, I believe, and looks her best in short walking-costume. I wondered why she had not ridden out to the butte; Beryl had, the time I met her there, I remembered. She had a deep-chested blue roan that looked as if he could run, and I had noticed that she wore the divided skirt, which is so popular among women who ride. I don’t, as a rule, notice much what women have on—but Beryl King’s feet are altogether too small for the least observant man to pass over. Edith’s feet were well shod, but commonplace.

  “I wish you’d let me have one of those pictures when they’re done,” I told her, as amiably as I could.

  She pushed back a lock of hair. “I’ll send you one, if you like, when I get home. What address do you claim, in this wilderness?”

  I wrote it down for her and went my way, feeling a badly used young man, with a strong inclination to quarrel with fate. Edith had managed, during her well-meant efforts at entertaining me, to couple Mr. Weaver’s name all too frequently with that of her cousin. I found it very depressing—a good many things, in fact, were depressing that day.

  I went back to camp and stuck to work for the rest of that week—until some of the boys told me that they had seen the Kings’ guests scooting across the prairie in the big touring-car of Weaver’s, evidently headed for Helena.

  After that I got restless again, and every mile the round-up moved south I took as a special grievance; it put that much greater distance between me and King’s Highway—and I had got to that unhealthy stage where every mile wore on my nerves, and all I wanted was to moon around that little butte. I believe I should even have taken a morbid pleasure in watching the light in her window o’ nights, if it had been at all practicable.

  CHAPTER VIII

  A Fight and a Race for Life

  It was between the spring round-up and the fall, while the boys were employed in desultory fashion at the home ranch, breaking in new horses and the like, and while I was indefatigably wearing a trail straight across country to that little butte—and getting mighty little out of it save the exercise and much heart-burnings—that the message came.

  A man rode up to the corrals on a lather-gray horse, coming from Kenmore, where was a telephone-station connected from Osage. I read the message incredulously. Dad sick unto death? Such a thing had never happened—couldn’t happen, it seemed to me. It was unbelievable; not to be thought of or tolerated. But all the while I was planning and scheming to shave off every superfluous minute, and get to where he was.

  I held out the paper to Perry Potter, “Have some one saddle up Shylock,” I ordered, quite as if he had been Rankin. “And Frosty will have to go with me as far as Osage. We can make it by tomorrow noon—through King’s Highway. I mean to get that early afternoon train.”

  The last sentence I sent back over my shoulder, on my way to the house. Dad sick—dying? I cursed the miles between us. Frisco was a long, a terribly long, way off; it seemed in another world.

  By then I was on my way back to the corral, with a decent suit of clothes on and a few things stuffed into a bag, and with a roll of money—money that I had earned—in my pocket. I couldn’t have been ten minutes, but it seemed more. And Frisco was a long way off!

  “You’d better take the rest of the boys part way,” Potter greeted dryly as I came up.

  I brushed past him and swung up into the saddle, feeling that if I stopped to answer I might be too late. I had a foolish notion that even a long breath would conspire to delay me. Frosty was already on his horse, and I noticed, without thinking about it at the time, that he was riding a long-legged sorrel, “Spikes,” that could match Shylock on a long chase—as this was like to be.

  We were off at a run, without once looking back or saying good-by to a man of them; for farewells take minutes in the saying, and minutes meant—more than I cared to think about just then. They were good fellows, those cowboys, but I left them standing awkwardly, as men do in the face of calamity they may not hinder, without a thought of whether I should ever see one of them again. With Frosty galloping at my right, elbow to elbow, we faced the dim, purple outline of White Divide.

  Already the dusk was creeping over the prairie-land, and little sleepy birds started out of the grasses and flew protesting away from our rush past their nesting-places. Frosty spoke when we had passed out of the home-field, even in our haste stopping to close and tie fast the gate behind us.

  “You don’t want to run your horse down in the first ten miles, Ellis; we’ll make time by taking it easy at first, and you’ll get there just as soon.” I knew he was right about it, and pulled Shylock down to the steady lope that was his natural gait. It was hard, though, to just “mosey” along as if we were starting out to kill time and earn our daily wage in the easiest possible manner. One’s nerves demanded an unusual pace—a pace that would soothe fear by its very headlong race against misfortune.

  Once or twice it occurred to me to wonder, just for a minute, how we should fare in King’s Highway; but mostly my thoughts stuck to dad, and how it happened that he was “critically ill,” as the message had put it. Crawford had sent that message; I knew from the precise way it was worded—Crawford never said sick—and Crawford was about as conservative a man as one could well be, and be human. He was as unemotional as a properly trained footman; Jenks, our butler, showed more feeling. But Crawford, if he was conservative, was also conscientious. Dad had had him for ten years, and trusted him a million miles farther than he would trust anybody else—for Crawford could no more lie than could the multiplication-table; if he said dad was “critically ill,” that settled it; dad was. I used to tell Barney MacTague, when he thought it queer that I knew so little about dad’s affairs, that dad was a fireproof safe, and Crawford was the combination lock. But perhaps it was the other way around; at any rate, they understood each other perfectly, and no other living man understood either.

  T
he darkness flowed down over the land and hid the farther hills; the sky-line crept closer until White Divide seemed the boundary of the world, and all beyond its tumbled shade was untried mystery. Frosty, a shadowy figure rising and falling regularly beside me, turned his face and spoke again:

  “We ought to make Pochette’s Crossing by daylight, or a little after—with luck,” he said. “We’ll have to get horses from him to go on with; these will be all in, when we get that far.”

  “We’ll try and sneak through the pass,” I answered, putting unpleasant thoughts resolutely behind me. “We can’t take time to argue the point out with old King.”

  “Sneak nothing,” Frosty retorted grimly. “You don’t know King, if you’re counting on that.”

  I came near asking how he expected to get through, then; when I remembered my own spectacular flight, on a certain occasion, I felt that Frosty was calmly disowning our only hope.

  We rode quietly into the mouth of King’s Highway, our horses stepping softly in the deep sand of the trail as if they, too, realized the exigencies of the situation. We crossed the little stream that is the first baby beginning of Honey Creek—which flows through our ranch—with scarce a splash to betray our passing, and stopped before the closed gate. Frosty got down to swing it open, and his fingers touched a padlock doing business with bulldog pertinacity. Clearly, King was minded to protect himself from unwelcome evening callers.

  “We’ll have to take down the wires,” Frosty murmured, coming back to where I waited. “Got your gun handy? Yuh might need it before long.” Frosty was not warlike by nature, and when he advised having a gun handy I knew the situation to be critical.