Ironheart

Ruth squealed with delight and clapped her hands when Betty told her of the approaching drive to Elk Creek.

“Oh, goody, goody! An’ we’ll take Prince ’n’ Baby Fifi ’n’ Rover. They’ll enjoy the ride too.”

With a smile that took the sting out of her refusal, Betty vetoed this wholesale transportation of puppies. “There isn’t room, dear.”

The child’s face registered disappointment. “I could take ’em on my lap,” she proposed.

Betty reflected a moment, then decided briskly. “We’ll take one to-day, and the others next time.”

“Umpha!” Ruth nodded approbation vigorously, all animation again. “I’ll ’splain it to ’em so’s they won’t have their feelin’s hurted.”

The blue eyes of the little girl inspected judicially the small creatures whose tilted heads and wagging tails appealed to her. To decide which one to take was a matter of grave consideration. Their mistress wanted to do exact justice. She changed her mind several times, but voted at last for Baby Fifi.

“She’s the teentiest, ’n’ o’ course the baby must go,” she told the other two.

They accepted without protest the verdict of the super-goddess who was mistress of their destinies. Apparently they took the occasion as seriously as she did.

“’N’ the delicatest,” she went on. “But if you’re good, ’n’ bee-have, ’n’ everyfing, Mamma’ll bring you somefing awful nice. So you be the goodest children.”

Thus it chanced that Baby Fifi, a clean blue ribbon tied round her neck in honor of the event, looked out from the tonneau of the car upon a panorama of blue sky and bluer mountain and sunbathed foothill moving past in a glory of splendor satisfying to both eye and soul.

They drove to the lower mouth of the cañon. A man with pick and shovel was clearing rocks and débris away from what was evidently to be the line of the ditch. Reed guessed that he was really posted at this point as a sentinel to guard against another possible attack.

The boss of the gang, the man said, was doing some surveying from the top of the wall above the rim of the gorge. A steep and rough road led to the upper mesa.

“Don’t know as you can make it with your car,” the man with the pick added. “It’s a mighty stiff grade when you get past the dugway, ’most all a team can do to get up.”

“We’ll go far as we can,” Reed answered.

He had to go into low long before they reached the dugway. Just beyond it was a stretch of road so precipitous that the car balked. The cowman became convinced that the machine could go no farther.

“Have to walk the rest of the way,” he said.

Betty looked at her little sister dubiously. “It’ll be a hard climb for those little legs, and she’s too heavy to carry far. We’d better leave her in the car.”

“Maybe we had,” assented her father, and added, in a low voice: “If she’ll stay alone.”

“Oh, Ruthie doesn’t mind that. Do you, dearest, a big girl like you? You’ll have Baby Fifi, and we’ll not be gone half an hour.”

Ruth accepted her sister’s judgment without demur. She would rather play with Baby Fifi than tire herself climbing the long hill.

“Stay right in the car, dear. Daddy and Betty won’t be long,” the young woman said, waving a hand as she started.

Betty breasted the slope with the light, free step of a mountaineer. Though slender, she was far from frail. Tested muscles moved with perfect coördination beneath the smooth satiny skin.

At sight of her an eye leveled behind a surveyor’s transit became instantly alive. The man caught his breath and watched eagerly. In her grace was something fawnlike, a suggestion of sylvan innocence and naïveté. Was it the quality of which this was an expression that distinguished her from a score of other nice girls he knew? Did she still retain from the childhood of the race a primal simplicity the others had lost by reason of their environment? What was it Wordsworth had written?—

The glory still haloed her dusky head. It glowed in her warm eyes and sparkled in her smile.

He strode through the kinnikinnick to meet them.

As they approached, Betty was conscious of a sharp stab of joy. This clean-cut, light-footed man was not the shuffling, slouchy tramp she had first met two months earlier. The skin had taken on the bronzed hue of health. The eyes were no longer dull and heavy, but quick with life. The unpleasant, bitter expression had gone from the good-looking face.

Betty knew what had transformed him. He had found again the self-reliance of which he had been robbed. There burned in him once more a bright light of manhood strong and unwavering.

He shook hands with Clint Reed so frankly that she knew he cherished no grudge. There flashed into her mind the hesitant prophecy she had once made, that he might look back on that first day on the Diamond Bar K as a red-letter one. It had come true. Then he had reached the turning of the ways and had been led into the long hard uphill climb toward self-respect.

“Glad to see you,” he said as his fingers met firmly those of the girl. “You’ve come to see how Mr. Merrick is getting along with the project, I suppose.”

“We heard about the trouble here and came to find out the facts first-hand,” Reed answered.

The engineer told what he knew. One of his assistants standing near was drawn into the conversation. The cattleman asked him questions. Betty and the man who called himself Tug Jones found themselves momentarily alone.

“Fortunate I was here when you came,” the young man said. “Another man is taking charge. Mr. Merrick is putting me somewhere else. I don’t know where, but I report for duty at once.”

Betty took from her handbag a clipping from a newspaper. She had written the date of publication on the headlines. It was about nine months before that time.

She handed the slip of paper to him.

“Did you ever hear of Captain Thurston K. Hollister?” the girl asked, on a note of tremulousness.

He looked during what seemed a long silence at the picture of the officer in uniform and the caption beneath it.

“Where did you get this?” he asked at last.

“I found it covering our pantry shelf, where it had been ever since spring.”

“And you’ve brought it to me because you think I’m Hollister?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad,” she said.

“I don’t know quite what you mean. Why are you glad?”

“From that first day I knew you were—somebody. Can’t I be glad to learn I was right?”

He read the clipping, and as his eyes moved down the column there came over his face a touch of the sardonic bitterness she knew of old.

“I deserve a cross, don’t I?”

“Two of them!” she cried impetuously.

He looked into her ardent, generous eyes. “Oh, half a dozen,” he mocked.

But she noticed the mordant flash was gone. What she did not know was that her faith had exorcised it.

“Two,” the girl insisted, an underlying flush of color in the dark cheeks. “One for this.” She touched the paper he was holding.

“And the other?” he asked, not yet caught up with her leaping thought.

A qualm of fear shook her courage. Ought she to speak of it? Was she one of those who “rush in”? It was his personal business, and he had a right to resent any mention of it by her. But the desire was strong in her to say just a word and then close the subject for always.

“For that braver thing you’ve been doing every day since I saw you last,” she said in a low voice.

He, too, flushed beneath the tan of the cheeks. Their eyes held fast an instant.

When he spoke, it was to say with studied lightness, “You and your father didn’t walk up, did you?”

Betty was relieved. It is an embarrassing thing to talk with a man about those hidden things of his life that are important to him. She felt almost as though she had escaped from some peril.

“No, the car’s on the road halfway up the hill. We couldn’t make it. Ruth’s waiting for us there,” she answered, hurrying to follow the lead he had given. “She has her favorite little puppy in the car with her. We thought the climb up might be a little too much for her.”

Hollister walked back with them to the car. He talked with her father about the outrage that had resulted in the death of poor Coyle. Betty walked beside the men, saying nothing. She was acutely conscious of the presence of the sunburnt young fellow beside her. His rags had given place to a serviceable khaki that modeled itself to the clean lines of his figure. He walked firmly and lightly, with character. It was observable that he had shaved not many hours since. There was a faint line of golden hair along the cheekbone at the place where the stroke of the razor had terminated. He was not wearing a hat. The girl liked the way his copper-red hair crisped in short curls over his forehead.

“Jake Prowers, that’s who,” her father was saying. “He’ll maybe hide behind Black. That’s the way the old wolf does business.”

“He doesn’t look like a wolf.” This from Hollister.

“No. More like a sheep. But don’t let that fool you. He’s the most dangerous man in this county. Jake pulled this off to serve notice that it wasn’t safe to work here in the cañon. Might have been a dozen men killed. A lot he cares for that. You’ll find his tracks are covered, too. He won’t show at all, an’ there won’t be evidence enough to convict Black or anybody else.”

Betty heard with her surface mind what they were saying, but the undercurrent of it was considering something else. Was Hollister offended at her? Had he meant to rebuff her for presumption? There had been a certain rigor in his inscrutable face when he had turned the conversation. Already she was castigating herself for officiousness. Did he think her bold, unmaidenly? Well, he had a right to think it. Whatever had possessed her to say what she had? She had meant well, of course, but that can be said of half the fools of the world in their folly.

Baby Fifi came prancing up the road to meet them with ineffective puppy barks of welcome.

Betty picked up the small dog and questioned it. “Did Ruth send you to meet us? And did you both have a good time while we were away?”

The child was not in the car. Betty smiled at her father. Both of them knew the ways of Mistress Ruth. Presently she would pounce on them from behind that rock just above the road with piping shrieks of glee.

“Where can she be, Dad?” Betty asked, in a voice intended to carry.

“I wonder. You don’t suppose—”

Clint did not finish his sentence. His gaze had fastened on a cigarette stub lying on the running-board of the car. It had not been there when they left. He was sure of that.

“Some one’s been here,” he said quickly.

Betty caught the note of tenseness in his voice. Her eyes followed his to the bit of cigarette. She was not frightened. There was nothing to be afraid of. Nobody in these hills would hurt Ruth. None the less, her heart action quickened.

“Ruth!” she called.

There came no answer.

Clint called, sharply, imperatively. “Come out, Ruth! No nonsense!”

The child did not appear. Hollister clambered up and looked back of the big rock. She was not there. They searched the hillside, shouting as they did so.

Ruth was not to be found. The echo of their alarmed voices was the only answer.