by B. M. Bower
“So I got Rossman started, quite a while back. He thought as I did, that Carl was acting mighty funny. I was with Carl more than you was, and I could tell he had something laying heavy on his mind. But then, the rest of us had things laying pretty heavy on our minds, too, that wasn’t guilt; so there wasn’t any way to tell what was bothering Carl.” Lite made no attempt to answer the question she had asked.
“Now, here’s this wire Rossman sent me. You don’t want to get the wrong idea, Jean, and feel too bad about this. You don’t want to think you had anything to do with it. Carl was gradually building up to something of this kind,—has been for a long time. His coming over to the ranch nights, looking for that letter that he had hunted all over for at first, shows he wasn’t right in his mind on the subject. But—”
“Well, heavens and earth, Lite!” Jean’s tone was exasperated more than it was worried. “Why don’t you say what you want to say? What’s it all about? Let me read that telegram and be done with it. I—I should think you’d know I can stand things, by this time. I haven’t shown any weak knees, have I?”
“Well, I hate to pile on any more,” Lite muttered defensively. “But you’ve got to know this. I wish you didn’t, but—”
Jean did not say any more. She reached over and with her free hand took the telegram from him. She did not pull away the hand Lite was holding, however, and the heart of him gave an exultant bound because she let it lie there quiet under his own. She pinched her brows together over the message, and let it drop into her lap. Her head went back against the towel covered head-rest, and for a minute her eyes closed as if she could not look any longer upon trouble.
Lite waited a second, pulled her head over against his shoulder, and picked up the telegram and read it through slowly, though he could have repeated it word for word with his eyes shut.
L Avery,
En Route Train 23, S. L. & D. R. R.
Carl Douglas suicided yesterday, leaving letter confessing murder of Croft. Had just completed transfer of land and cattle to your name. Am taking steps placing matter before governor immediately expect him to act at once upon pardon. Bring your man my office at once deposition may be required.
J. W. ROSSMAN.
“Now, I told you not to worry about this,” Lite reminded the girl firmly. “Looks to me like it takes a load off our hands,—Carl’s doing what he done. Saves us dragging it all through court again; and, Jean, it’ll let your dad out a whole lot quicker. Sounds kinda cold-blooded, maybe, but if you could look at it as good news,—that’s the way it strikes me.”
Jean did not say a word, just then. She did what you might not expect Jean to do, after all her strong-mindedness and her independence: She made an uncertain movement toward sitting up and facing things calmly, man-fashion; then she leaned and dropped her very independent brown head back upon Lite’s shoulder, and behind her handkerchief she cried quietly while Lite held her close.
“Now, that’s long enough to cry,” he whispered to her, after a season of mental intoxication such as he had never before experienced. “I started out three years ago to be the boss. I ain’t been working at it regular, as you might say, all the time. But I’m going to wind up that way. I hate to turn you over to your dad without some little show of making good at the job.”
Jean gave a little gurgle that may have been related to laughter, and Lite’s lips quirked with humorous embarrassment as he went on.
“I don’t guess,” he said slowly, “that I’m going to turn you over at all, Jean. Not altogether. I guess I’ve just about got to keep you. It—takes two to make a home, and—I’ve got my heart set on us making a home outa the Lazy A again; you and me, making a home for us and your dad. How—how does that sound to you, Jean?”
Jean was wiping her eyes as unobtrusively as she might. She did not answer.
“How does it sound, you and me making a home together?” Lite was growing pale, and his hands trembled. “Tell me.”
“It sounds—good,” said Jean unsteadily.
For several minutes Lite did not say a word. They sat there holding hands quite foolishly, and stared out at the drenched desert.
“Soon as your dad comes,” he said at last, very simply, “we’ll be married.” He was silent another minute, and added under his breath like a prayer, “And we’ll all go—home.”
CHAPTER XXVI
HOW HAPPINESS RETURNED TO THE LAZY A
When Lite rapped with his knuckles on the door of the room where she was waiting, Jean stood with her hands pressed tightly over her face, every muscle rigid with the restraint she was putting upon herself. For Lite this three-day interval had been too full of going here and there, attending to the manifold details of untangling the various threads of their broken life-pattern, for him to feel the suspense which Jean had suffered. She had not done much. She had waited. And now, with Lite and her dad standing outside the door, she almost dreaded the meeting. But she took a deep breath and walked to the door and opened it.
“Hello, dad,” she cried with a nervous gaiety. “Give your dear daughter a kiss!” She had not meant to say that at all.
Tall and gaunt and gray and old; lines etched deep ground his bitter mouth; pale with the tragic prison pallor; looking out at the world with the somber eyes of one who has suffered most cruelly,—Aleck Douglas put out his thin, shaking arms and held her close. He did not say anything at all; and the kiss she asked for he laid softly upon her hair.
Lite stood in the doorway and looked at the two of them for a moment. “I’m going down to see about—things. I’ll be back in a little while. And, Jean, will you be ready?”
Jean looked up at him understandingly, and with a certain shyness in her eyes. “If it’s all right with dad,” she told him, “I’ll be ready.”
“Lite’s a man!” Aleck stated unsmilingly, with a trace of that apathy which had hurt Jean so in the warden’s office. “I’m glad you’ll have him to take care of you, Jean.”
So Lite closed the door softly and went away and left those two alone.
In a very few words I can tell you the rest. There were a few things to adjust, and a few arrangements to make. The greatest adjustment, perhaps, was when Jean begged off from that contract with the Great Western Company. Dewitt did not want to let her go, but he had read a marked article in a Montana paper that Lite mailed to him in advance of their return, and he realized that some things are greater even than the needs of a motion-picture company. He was very nice, therefore, to Jean. He told her by all means to consider herself free to give her time wholly to her father—and her husband. He also congratulated Lite in terms that made Jean blush and beat a hurried retreat from his office, and that made Lite grin all the way to the hotel. So the public lost Jean of the Lazy A almost as soon as it had learned to welcome her.
Then there was Pard, that had to leave the little buckskin and take that nerve-racking trip back to the Lazy A. Lite attended to that with perfect calm and a good deal of inner elation. So that detail was soon adjusted.
At the Lazy A there was a great deal to do before the traces of its tragedy were wiped out. We’ll have to leave them doing that work, which was only a matter of time, after all, and not nearly so hard to accomplish as their attempts to wipe out from Aleck’s soul the black scar of those three years. I think, on the whole, we shall leave them doing that work, too. As much as human love and happiness could do toward wiping out the bitterness they would accomplish, you may be sure,—give them time enough.
ROWDY OF THE “CROSS L”
CHAPTER 1
Lost in a Blizzard
“Rowdy” Vaughan—he had been christened Rowland by his mother, and rechristened Rowdy by his cowboy friends, who are prone to treat with much irreverence the names bestowed by mothers—was not happy. He stood in the stirrups and shook off the thick layer of snow which clung, damp and close-packed, to his coat. The dull yellow folds were full of it; his gray hat, pulled low over his purple ears, was heaped with it. He reached up a glove
d hand and scraped away as much as he could, wrapped the long-skirted, “sour-dough” coat around his numbed legs, then settled into the saddle with a shiver of distaste at the plight he was in, and wished himself back at the Horseshoe Bar.
Dixie, standing knee-deep in a drift, shook himself much after the manner of his master; perhaps he, also, wished himself back at the Horseshoe Bar. He turned his head to look back, blinking at the snow which beat insistently in his eyes; he could not hold them open long enough to see anything, however, so he twitched his ears pettishly and gave over the attempt.
“It’s up to you, old boy,” Rowdy told him resignedly. “I’m plumb lost; I never was in this damn country before, anyhow—and I sure wish I wasn’t here now. If you’ve any idea where we’re at, I’m dead willing to have you pilot the layout. Never mind Chub; locating his feed when it’s stuck under his nose is his limit.”
Chub lifted an ear dispiritedly when his name was spoken; but, as was usually the case, he heard no good of himself, and dropped his head again. No one took heed of him; no one ever did. His part was to carry Vaughan’s bed, and to follow unquestionably where Vaughan and Dixie might lead. He was cold and tired and hungry, but his faith in his master was strong; the responsibility of finding shelter before the dark came down rested not with him.
Vaughan pressed his chilled knees against Dixie’s ribs, but the hand upon the reins was carefully non-committal; so that Dixie, having no suggestion of his master’s wish, ventured to indulge his own. He turned tail squarely to the storm and went straight ahead. Vaughan put his hands deep into his pockets, snuggled farther down into the sheepskin collar of his coat, and rode passive, enduring.
They brought up against a wire fence, and Vaughan, rousing from his apathy, tried to peer through the white, shifting wall of the storm. “You’re a swell guide—not,” he remarked to the horse. “Now you, you hike down this fence till you locate a gate or a corner, or any darned thing; and I don’t give a cuss if the snow does get in your eyes. It’s your own fault.”
Dixie, sneezing the snow from his nostrils, turned obediently; Chub, his feet dragging wearily in the snow, trailed patiently behind. Half an hour of this, and it seemed as if it would go on forever.
Through the swirl Vaughan could see the posts standing forlornly in the snow, with sixteen feet of blizzard between; at no time could he distinguish more than two or three at once, and there were long minutes when the wall stood, blank and shifting, just beyond the first post.
Then Dixie lifted his head and gazed questioningly before him, his ears pointed forward—sentient, strained—and whinnied shrill challenge. He hurried his steps, dragging Chub out of the beginnings of a dream. Vaughan straightened and took his hands from his pockets.
Out beyond the dim, wavering outline of the farthest post came answer to the challenge. A mysterious, vague shape grew impalpably upon the strained vision; a horse sneezed, then nickered eagerly. Vaughan drew up and waited.
“Hello!” he called cheerfully. “Pleasant day, this. Out for your health?”
The shape hesitated, as though taken aback by the greeting, and there was no answer. Vaughan, puzzled, rode closer.
“Say, don’t talk so fast!” he yelled. “I can’t follow yuh.”
“Who—who is it?” The voice sounded perturbed; and it was, moreover, the voice of a woman.
Vaughan pulled up short and swore into his collar. Women are not, as a rule, to be met out on the blank prairie in a blizzard. His voice, when he spoke again, was not ironical, as it had been; it was placating.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I thought it was a man. I’m looking for the Cross L; you don’t happen to know where it is, do yuh?”
“No—I don’t,” she declared dismally. “I don’t know where any place is. I’m teaching school in this neighborhood—or in some other. I was going to spend Sunday with a friend, but this storm came up, and I’m—lost.”
“Same here,” said Rowdy pleasantly, as though being lost was a matter for congratulation.
“Oh! I was in hopes—”
“So was I, so we’re even there. We’ll have to pool our chances, I guess. Any gate down that way—or haven’t you followed the fence?”
“I followed it for miles and miles—it seemed. It must be some big field of the Cross L; but they have so very many big fields!”
“And you couldn’t give a rough guess at how far it is to the Cross L?”—insinuatingly.
He could vaguely see her shake of head. “Ordinarily it should be about six miles beyond Rodway’s, where I board. But I haven’t the haziest idea of where Rodway’s place is, you see; so that won’t help you much. I’m all at sea in this snow.” Her voice was rueful.
“Well, if you came up the fence, there’s no use going back that way; and there’s sure nothing made by going away from it.—that’s the way I came. Why not go on the way you’re headed?”
“We might as well, I suppose,” she assented; and Rowdy turned and rode by her side, grateful for the plurality of the pronoun which tacitly included him in her wanderings, and meditating many things. For one, he wondered if she were as nice a girl as her voice sounded. He could not see much of her face, because it was muffled in a white silk scarf. Only her eyes showed, and they were dark and bright.
When he awoke to the fact that the wind, grown colder, beat upon her cruelly, he dropped behind a pace and took the windy side, that he might shield her with his body. But if she observed the action she gave no sign; her face was turned from him and the wind, and she rode without speaking. After long plodding, the line of posts turned unexpectedly a right angle, and Vaughan took a long, relieved breath.
“We’ll have the wind on our backs now,” he remarked. “I guess we may as well keep on and see where this fence goes to.”
His tone was too elaborately cheerful to be very cheering. He was wondering if the girl was dressed warmly. It had been so warm and sunny before the blizzard struck, but now the wind searched out the thin places in one’s clothing and ran lead in one’s bones, where should be simply marrow. He fancied that her voice, when she spoke, gave evidence of actual suffering—and the heart of Rowdy Vaughan was ever soft toward a woman.
“If you’re cold,” he began, “I’ll open up my bed and get out a blanket.” He held Dixie in tentatively.
“Oh, don’t trouble to do that,” she protested; but there was that in her voice which hardened his impulse into fixed resolution.
“I ought to have thought of it before,” he lamented, and swung down stiffly into the snow.
Her eyes followed his movement with a very evident interest while he unbuckled the pack Chub had carried since sunrise and drew out a blanket.
“Stand in your stirrup,” he commanded briskly “and I’ll wrap you up. It’s a Navajo, and the wind will have a time trying to find a thin spot.”
“You’re thoughtful.” She snuggled into it thankfully. “I was cold.”
Vaughan tucked it around her with more care than haste. He was pretty uncomfortable himself, and for that reason he was the more anxious that the girl should be warm. It came to him that she was a cute little schoolma’am, all right; he was glad she belonged close around the Cross L. He also wished he knew her name—and so he set about finding it out, with much guile.
“How’s that?” he wanted to know, when he had made sure that her feet—such tiny feet—were well covered. He thought it lucky that she did not ride astride, after the manner of the latter-day young woman, because then he could not have covered her so completely. “Hold on! That windy side’s going to make trouble.” He unbuckled the strap he wore to hold his own coat snug about him, and put it around the girl’s slim waist, feeling idiotically happy and guilty the while. “It don’t come within a mile of you,” he complained; “but it’ll help some.”
Sheltered in the thick folds of the Navajo, she laughed, and the sound of it sent the blood galloping through Rowdy Vaughan’s body so that he was almost warm. He went and scraped the snow out o
f his saddle, and swung up, feeling that, after all, there are worse things in the world than being lost and hungry in a blizzard, with a sweet-voiced, bright-eyed little schoolma’am who can laugh like that.
“I don’t want to have you think I may be a bold, bad robber-man,” he said, when they got going again. “My name’s Rowdy Vaughan—for which I beg your pardon. Mother named me Rowland, never knowing I’d get out here and have her nice, pretty name mutilated that way. I won’t say that my behavior never suggested the change, though. I’m from the Horseshoe Bar, over the line, and if I have my way, I’ll be a Cross L man before another day.” Then he waited expectantly.
“For fear you may think I’m a—a robber-woman,” she answered him solemnly—he felt sure her eyes twinkled, if only he could have seen them—“I’m Jessie Conroy. And if you’re from over the line, maybe you know my brother Harry. He was over there a year or two.”
Rowdy hunched his shoulders—presumably at the wind. Harry Conroy’s sister, was she? And he swore. “I may have met him,” he parried, in a tone you’d never notice as being painstakingly careless. “I think I did, come to think of it.”
Miss Conroy seemed displeased, and presently the cause was forthcoming. “If you’d ever met him,” she said, “you’d hardly forget him.” (Rowdy mentally agreed profanely.) “He’s the best rider in the whole country—and the handsomest. He—he’s splendid! And he’s the only brother I’ve got. It’s a pity you never got acquainted with him.”
“Yes,” lied Rowdy, and thought a good deal in a very short time. Harry Conroy’s sister! Well, she wasn’t to blame for that, of course; nor for thinking her brother a white man. “I remember I did see him ride once,” he observed. “He was a whirlwind, all right—and he sure was handsome, too.”
Miss Conroy turned her face toward him and smiled her pleasure, and Rowdy hovered between heaven and—another place. He was glad she smiled, and he was afraid of what that subject might discover for his straightforward tongue in the way of pitfalls. It would not be nice to let her know what he really thought of her brother.