Ironheart

All day the faint far whir of the reaper could have been heard from the house of the Diamond Bar K ranch. The last of the fields had been cut. Much of the grain had been gathered and was ready for the thresher.

The crop was good. Prices would be fair. Clint Reed rode over the fields with the sense of satisfaction it always gave him to see gathered the fruits of the earth. His pleasure in harvesting or in rounding-up beef steers was not only that of the seller looking to his profit. Back of this was the spiritual gratification of having been a factor in supplying the world’s needs. To look at rippling wheat ripening under the sun, to feed the thresher while the fan scattered a cloud of chaff and the grain dropped into the sacks waiting for it, ministered to his mental well-being by justifying his existence. He had converted hundreds of acres of desert into fertile farm land. All his life he had been a producer of essentials for mankind. He found in this, as many farmers do, a source of content. He was paying his way in the world.

To-day Reed found the need of vindication. He was fonder of Betty than he was of anything or anybody else in the world, and he knew that he was at the bar of her judgment. She did not approve of what he had done. This would not have troubled him greatly if he had been sure that he approved of it himself. But like many willful men he sometimes had his bad quarter of an hour afterward.

It was easy enough to make excuses. The Diamond Bar K had been troubled a good deal by vagrants on the transcontinental route. They had robbed the smokehouse only a few weeks before. A gang of them had raided the watermelon patch, cut open dozens of green melons, and departed with such ripe ones as they could find. Naturally he had been provoked against the whole breed of them.

But he had been too hasty in dealing with the young scamp he had thrashed. Clint writhed under an intolerable sense of debt. The boy had fought him as long as he could stand and take it. He had gone away still defiant, and had rescued Betty from a dangerous situation. Dragged back at a rope’s end to the ranch by the luckless Dusty, he had scornfully departed before Reed had a chance to straighten out with him this added indignity. The owner of the Diamond Bar K felt frustrated, as though the vagabond had had the best of him.

He was not even sure that the severe punishment he had meted out to the other tramps had been wise. The man Cig had endured the ordeal unbroken in spirit. His last words before he crept away had been a threat of reprisal. The fellow was dangerous. Clint read it in his eyes. He had given orders to Betty not to leave the ranch for the next day or two without an escort. Yet he still felt uneasy, as though the end of the matter had not come.

It was now thirty hours since he had last seen the hoboes. No doubt they were hundreds of miles away by this time and with every click of the car wheels getting farther from the ranch.

He rode back to the stable, unsaddled, and walked to the house. Betty was in the living-room at the piano. She finished the piece, swung round on the stool, and smiled at him.

“Everything fine and dandy, Dad?”

His face cleared. It was her way of telling him that she was ready to forgive and be forgiven.

“Yes.” Then, abruptly, “Reckon I get off wrong foot first sometimes, honey.”

He was in a big armchair. She went over to him, sat down on his knees, and kissed him. “’S all right, Dad,” she nodded with an effect of boyish brusqueness. Betty, too, had a mental postscript and expressed it. “It’s that boy. Nothing to do about it, of course. He wouldn’t let me do a thing for him, but—Oh, well, I just can’t get him off my mind. Kinda silly of me.”

“Not silly at all,” demurred Clint. “Feel that way myself—only more so.” He cleared his throat for a confession. “Fact is, Bess, he’s managed to put me in a hole. Or else I’ve put myself there. It’s that infernal quick temper of mine. I’d no business to let myself go. Of course, I was figurin’ him just a bum like the others, an’ for that matter he is a tramp—”

“He quoted Shakespeare at me,” inserted Betty, by way of comment.

“I dare say. He’s no ignorant fool. I didn’t mean that. What was it he called me?” The ranchman smiled ruefully. “A local God Almighty on tin wheels! Maybe I do act like one.”

“Sometimes,” agreed Betty.

The smile that went with the word robbed her concurrence of its sting. It was tender and understanding, expressed the world-old superiority of her sex over the blundering male who had always claimed mastership. There were times when Betty was a mother to her father, times when Clint marveled at the wisdom that had found lodgment in the soft young body of this vivid creature who was heritor of his life and yet seemed so strangely and wonderfully alien to it.

“Point is that I didn’t measure up to my chance and he did,” Reed went on gloomily. “It don’t set well with me, honey. After I’d thrashed him till he couldn’t stand, he goes right away an’ fights for you because you’re a woman. Makes me look pretty small, I’ll say. I’d like to take him by the hand and tell him so. But he wouldn’t have it that way. I’ve got to play my cards the way he’s dealt ’em. Can’t say I blame him, either.”

“No, he had a right to refuse to have anything more to do with us after the way we’d treated him.”

“Mostly we get second chances in this life, but we don’t always, Bess. Oh, well, no use crying over spilt milk. What’s done’s done.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Don’t worry, Dad. I did my best to get him to stay—went down on my knees almost. But he wouldn’t. There’s something queer about him. What is it? He acts as though he doesn’t care what becomes of him, as though he’s let go somehow. Did you notice that?”

“Going to the devil fast as he can, looked like to me.”

This was probably accurate enough as a summary, but it did not explain why to Betty. She dismissed the subject for the moment, because Ruth came into the room followed by Bridget.

The child was in her nightgown and had come to kiss them before going to bed. She ran to her father, threw her arms around his neck, and gave him a great bear hug. Long since she had forgotten his harshness of the morning.

But he had neither forgotten nor forgiven himself. In the first place, he had been unjust. The injunction against going to the barn had not been a blanket one. It had applied only to that part of the building where the blooded stallion was kept in a box stall. He had hurt her feelings as a vent to his annoyance at what had taken place by the creek a half-hour earlier. It was pretty small business, he admitted, to take out his self-disgust on an innocent four-year-old.

He held Ruth close in his arms while Bridget waited smilingly and the little one confided to him plans about the puppies.

“’N’ I’m gonna have Lon make me a wagon, ’n’ I’ll drive it jus’ like Betty does the team, ’n’ I fink I’ll call the puppies Prince ’n’ Rover ’n’ Baby Fifi ’n’—’n’ everyfing,” she concluded all in a breath.

“That’ll be bully,” the father agreed, stroking the soft flaxen curls fondly. He wondered reproachfully why it was that he could turn on those he loved, as he had done on the child this morning. He had never done it before with Ruth, and he resolved he never would again.

Ruth kissed Betty good-night and went out of the room in the arms of Bridget, held close to her ample bosom, kicking and squealing with delight because she was being tickled in the ribs.

As soon as Betty was in her own room, alone with her thoughts and the rest of the world shut out, her mind went back to the problem of the boy who had so early made such shipwreck of his life. She puzzled over this while she was preparing for bed and afterward while she lay between the white sheets, barred squares from the window frames checkering the moonlight on the linen. What in the world could cause a man, educated, clean-fibered, strong, to let go of life like that?

It could not be a woman. In spite of her youth, she knew this by instinct. A game man did not give up because of blows dealt to him from the outside. The surrender had to come from within. No wounds at the hands of another can subdue the indomitable soul. Young though she was, she knew that. Books of fiction might say the contrary, but she had a sure conviction they were wrong. What was it Browning said?—“...Incentives come from the soul’s self.” Well, the converse of it must also be true.

Somewhere in this boy—she persisted in thinking of him as a boy, perhaps because his great need so filled her with the desire to help him—there must be a weak strain. It was not, could not be, a vile one. She held to that steadily and surely, without any of the passionate insistence that doubt engenders. Ragged and dusty though he was physically, on the drift to destruction, cynically self-condemned, he was yet essentially clean and fine, a strain of the thoroughbred in him. That was her judgment, and she was prepared to wager all she had on the truth of it.

Betty did not sleep. Thoughts drifted through her mind as fleecy clouds do across a summer sky. The magnet of them was this youth who had already drunk so deeply of life’s bitterness. He extraordinarily stimulated her interest.

It must have been near midnight that she heard quick voices and lifted her head to the cry of “Fire!” Sketchily she dressed and ran downstairs. The blaze was in the lower meadow where the wheat was gathered for the thresher. A great flame leaped skyward and filled the night with its reflection.

One of the men from the bunkhouse was running toward the unpent furnace. She caught up a saddle blanket from the porch and followed. In the lurid murk figures like marionettes moved to and fro. As she ran, she saw that there were three fires, not only one. This surprised her, for the distance between two of them was at least one hundred and fifty yards. It was strange that in this windless night a spark had traveled so far.

The roar of the conflagration reminded her of some huge living monster in a fury. Tongues of flame shot heavenward in vain menace to the stars.

“Stand back!” Forbes shouted at her. “All we can do is see it don’t spread.” He was flailing at a line of fire beginning to run in the dry stubble.

“How did it start?” she asked breathlessly.

“Fire-bugs.”

“You mean—on purpose?”

“Yep.”

“The tramps?”

“I ain’t sayin’ who.” He shouted to make his voice heard above the crackle of the bellowing red demon that had been set loose. Already he spoke hoarsely from a throat roughened by smoke.

“Where’s Dad?” she called back.

“Don’t know. Ain’t seen him since I left the house.” Dusty gave information. “Saw him runnin’ toward the creek awhile ago.”

Almost instantly Betty knew why. He, too, must have guessed that this fire had come from no chance spark, but of set design. No doubt he was trying to head off the incendiary.

“Just which way?” she asked the cowpuncher.

Dusty jerked a thumb to the left. The girl turned and moved swiftly in the direction of the fringe of bushes that rose as a vague line out of the darkness. She believed her father’s instinct was true. Whoever had fired the stacks would retreat to the willows and make his escape along the creek bed, hiding in the bushes if the pursuit grew close.

Before she had taken a dozen steps a sound leaped into the night. It was a revolver shot. Fear choked her. She began to run, her heart throbbing like that of a half-grown wild rabbit in the hand. Faint futile little cries broke from her throat. A sure intuition told her what she would find by the creek.

Her father lay on a sand spit close to the willows. He was dragging himself toward the cover of some brush. From the heavy foliage a shot rang out.

Betty flew across the open to her father.

“Look out!” he called sharply to her. “He’s in the willows. Down here.” Reed caught at her arm and pulled her behind him where he lay crouched.

The automatic of the man in ambush barked again. A spatter of sand stung Betty’s face. Almost simultaneously came the bull roar of the foreman’s hoarse voice.

“You’re shot, Daddy,” the girl whimpered.

“Keep still!” he ordered.

A heavy body crashed through the bushes in flight. At the same time came the thump of running feet. Dusty broke into sight, followed by the foreman.

The wounded rancher took command. “He went that way, boys,” he said, and pointed down the creek. “Lit out a minute ago. Hustle back to the house and get guns, then cut down the road in the car and head him off.”

Forbes nodded to Dusty. “You do that. Take the boys with you. Hit the creek at the ford and work up.” He turned to his employer. “How about it, Clint? Where’d he hit you? How bad?”

“In the leg. It’ll wait. You get him, Lon.”

The foreman pushed into the willows and disappeared.

Reed called him back, but he paid no attention. The ranchman fumed. “What’s the matter with the dawg-goned old idiot? No sense a-tall. That’s no way to do. He’ll get shot first thing he knows.”

Her father was so much his usual self that Betty’s terror fell away from her. If he were wounded fatally, he would not act like this.

He had been hit just above the top of his laced boots. Betty uncovered the wound and bathed it with water she brought from the creek in Clint’s hat. Around the wound she bound a large handkerchief she found in his hip pocket.

“Does it hurt much?” she asked, her soft voice mothering him.

“Some. Know I’ve got a leg. Lucky for me you came along. It must ’a’ scared him off. You an’ Lon too.”

“See who he was?”

“Too dark.”

“Think it was the tramps? Or Jake Prowers?”

“The tramps. Not the way Jake pulls off a job. He’s no bungler.”

She sat down and put his head in her lap. “Anything else I can do, Dad? Want a drink?” she asked anxiously.

Reed caught her little hand and pressed it. “Sho! Don’t you go to worryin’ about me, sweetheart. Doc Rayburn, he’ll fix me up good as new. When Lon comes back I’ll have him—”

He stopped. A rough voice was speaking. A foot struck a stone. Vague figures emerged from the gloom, took on distinctness. The big one was Lon Forbes. He walked behind a man who was his prisoner, his great hands clamped to the fellow’s arms.

Betty stood up and waited, her eyes fastened on them as they moved forward. Her heart was going like a triphammer. She knew what she dreaded, and presently that her apprehensions were justified.

The foreman’s prisoner was the tramp who called himself Tug.