“The woman sitting there on her chafing horse stared back at him”
The woman drew up her horse in front of the door through which the dog had darted. She saw the man, and her clutch of the rein tightened. Clayton looked up at her, and, standing in the doorway, while the dog, having completed its bloody work panted out past him with furious haste, he put his strong right hand against the side of the door, with a faltering motion, as if he felt the need of aid to sustain him from falling.
The woman sitting there on her chafing horse stared back at him, while the clamor of the hounds broke over them. Her face had flushed more than even the excitement of the chase warranted; yet he knew she was marvellously beautiful, as he looked at her full rounded throat and chin, at her olive cheeks in which dimples nestled, and into her great dark eyes, that held now a surprised light. Her hair was as dark as her eyes, and even though much hidden beneath her riding hat, it was still a crown of glory. Clayton saw only enough of the blue riding habit to know that it became her; his eyes were drawn to her face.
“Are you living here?” she asked in astonishment, giving a glance at the small house.
“Yes,” he answered huskily. “I thought it as good a place as any, and out of the world; but it seems you found your way here. And Death came riding with you, as usual.”
“Curtis, you’re always ridiculous when you say foolish things! I’ve been wondering where you were. You don’t intend to return to Denver?”
“No.”
“Not even if I wanted you to?”
She looked at him with her fascinating unfathomable eyes, noting his manly presence, his clear-cut dark features, and the stiff, awkward left arm. As she did so the color flamed back into his face.
“No! Not unless—”
“Unless I would consent to be as poky as you are!”
“No, not that. I shouldn’t expect you to take an interest in the things I do. You never did, but I didn’t care for that.”
He stopped as if in hesitation and stood trembling.
“Well, I’m glad I’ve found where you’re living. I suppose your post office address is the town over there by the side of the mountain, where the station is? I shall have something to send you by mail by and by.”
“Yes, my mail comes to the station post office.”
He still trembled and appeared to hesitate.
“It’s queer, how I happened to find you here, isn’t it? I have an acquaintance in that little town, and she invited me down the other day. Some other strangers to the place chanced to be there, and this rabbit hunt was gotten up for our entertainment.”
“A queer form of entertainment!” he observed, with caustic emphasis.
“To you I suppose it isn’t anything short of murder?”
“It’s strange to me how any one can find pleasure in it.”
“I suppose that is as one looks at it. But I must be going. I don’t care to have people see us talking too long together. I’m glad, though, that I found you.”
“Good bye!” he said, his lips bloodless again.
She pulled her horse sharply about, and in another moment was galloping on in the hunt, leaving him standing in the doorway staring after her. He stood thus until the clamor of the dogs sounded faint and she became a mere swaying speck, then he turned back into the house. Justin came in at his heels. He had seen the woman and recognized the pictured face of the photograph.
“Take the rabbit out and bury it somewhere, Justin,” said Clayton wearily.
Then he passed on into his study and closed the door behind him.
A few days later the mail carrier brought him a Denver newspaper of ancient date with ink lines drawn round a divorce notice. The paper had been sent to his address by Sibyl. Clayton read the marked notice carefully, and thrusting the paper into the stove touched a lighted match to it.
CHAPTER V
THE INVASION OF PARADISE
Lemuel Fogg made other visits to Paradise Valley, as the seasons came and went, and Justin learned to look forward with pleasure to his coming. Always he stayed over night, and talked long with Clayton, for whom he had conceived a liking.
Clayton continued to cling to his lonely home. Though more than once tempted to depart he had never been able to make up his mind to do so. He averred to Fogg, and to other acquaintances, that, having been dropped down into Paradise Valley quite by chance, mental and physical inertia held him there; he was lazy, he said, and the indolent life of Paradise Valley had strong attraction for him.
Yet, as his reputation as an excellent doctor spread, he often rode many weary miles to visit a patient. Always the studies went on, and the writing, and the little glass slipping out of and into his pocket made the whole earth radiant with life and beauty. And Justin became a stalwart lad, whose strong handsome face, earnest blue eyes, and attractive personality, won new friends and held old ones.
The few farmers who remained had learned well some lessons with the passing of the years. Ceasing to rely on the uncertain rainfall, they had decreased the areas of their tilled fields and pushed them close to the stream, where the low-lying soil was blest with sufficient sub-irrigation to swell the deep taproots of the alfalfa. They kept small herds of cattle, and some sheep, which they grazed on the bunch grass. The few things they had to sell, honey rifled from the alfalfa blooms by the bees, poultry, eggs and butter, they found a market for in the town, or shipped to Denver.
Sloan Jasper was of those who remained, and Mary, a tall girl now, had taken the place of her mother in the farmer’s home. Mrs. Jasper had given up the struggle with hard climatic conditions, and had passed on, attended in her last illness by the faithful doctor.
With Lemuel Fogg there came, one day, a ranchman named Davison; and in their wake followed herds of bellowing, half-wild cattle, and groups of brisk-riding, shouting cowboys, who rode down the fields in the moist soil by the stream, as they galloped in pursuit of their refractory charges.
The advent of the cattle and the cowboys, the establishment of the Davison ranch, the erection of houses and bunk-rooms, stables and corrals, filled Justin’s life to the brim with excitement. He fraternized with the cowboys, and struck up a warm friendship with Philip Davison’s son Ben, a lively young fellow older than himself, who could ride a horse not only like a cowboy, but like a circus athlete, for he could perform the admirable feat of standing in the saddle with arms folded across his breast while his well-trained broncho tore around the new corral at a gallop.
When the other members of the Davison household came and were domiciled in the new ranch house, Justin found that Lucy Davison, the ranchman’s niece, the “cousin” of whom Ben had talked, was a beautiful girl of Mary’s age, with more than Mary’s charm of manner. She was paler than Mary, and had not her rose-leaf cheeks, but she was more beautiful in her way, and she had something which Mary lacked. Justin did not know what it was, for he was not yet analytical, but he was interested in a wholly new manner. He could not be with her enough, and when he was absent thoughts of her filled his mind and even his dreams.
Mary Jasper hastened to call on Lucy Davison; and in doing so made the acquaintance of that most interesting person, Miss Pearl Newcome, Davison’s housekeeper. Miss Newcome had passed the beauty stage, if indeed she had ever dwelt at all in that delectable period which should come by right to every member of the sex; but she still cherished the romantic illusions of her earlier years, and kept them embalmed, as it were, in sundry fascinating volumes, which were warded and locked in her trunk up stairs. She brought these out at psychological moments, smelling sweetly of cedar and moth balls, and read from them, to Mary’s great delight; for there never were such charming romances in the world, and never will be again, no matter who writes them. Some of them were in the form of pamphlets, yellow and falling to pieces; others were in creaky-backed books; and still others, and these the most read, in cunning bindings of Miss Newcome’s own contriving.
Sitting on the flat lid of the trunk, with one foot tucked under her for comfort, while Mary crouched on the floor with her rose-leaf cheeks in her palms, Pearl Newcome would read whole chapters from “Fanny the Flower Girl, or the Pits and Pitfalls of London,” from “Lady Clare, or Lord Marchmont’s Unhappy Bride,” from “The Doge’s Doom, or the Mysterious Swordsman of Venice,” and many others. The mysterious swordsman in the “Doge’s Doom” was especially entrancing, for he went about at night with a black mask over his face, and made love and fought duels with the greatest imaginable nonchalance. It taxed the memory merely to keep count of his many loves and battles, and it was darkly hinted that he was a royal personage in disguise.
“The Black Mask’s scabbard clanked ominously as he sprang from the gondola to the stone arches below the sombre building, while the moonlight was reflected from his shining coat of mail and from the placid waters of the deep lagoon, showing in the pellucid waves alike the untamed locks that hung about his shoulders and the white frightened face of the slender, golden-haired maiden who leaned toward him with palpitating bosom from the narrow, open window above him.”
When that point was reached Mary clasped her hands tightly across her knees and rocked in aching excitement; for who was to know whether the Black Mask would succeed in getting the lovely maiden out of the clutches of the foul doge who held her a prisoner, or whether some guard concealed in a niche in the wall would not pounce out, having been set there by the shrewd doge for the purpose, and slice the Black Mask’s head off, in spite of the protecting coat of mail?
Aside from her duties as housekeeper, which she never neglected, there was one other thing that could cause Pearl Newcome to surrender voluntarily the joys of that perch on the trunk lid in the midst of her redolent romances with Mary Jasper for an appreciative listener, and that was the voice of Steve Harkness, the ranch foreman. The attraction of the printed page palled when she heard Harkness’s heavy tones, and stopping, with her finger between the leaves, she would step to the window; and sometimes, to Mary’s regret, would go down stairs, where she would cut out a huge triangle of pie and place it on the kitchen table.
Harkness was big and jovial, and in no manner resembled the Black Mask, who was slender, lithe, had a small supple wrist, hair of midnight blackness, and “a voice like the tinkle of many waters.” Harkness’s voice was big and heavy, and his wrist was large and red. But he was usually clean-shaven, scented himself sweetly with cinnamon drops, and was altogether very becoming, in the eyes of Pearl Newcome. And she knew he liked pie. Sometimes Pearl came back to the trunk and continued the dropped romance. That was when Harkness was in a hurry and could not linger in the kitchen to joke and laugh with her. But if time chanced to hang heavily on his hands and no troublesome cowboy or refractory steer claimed his attention, she did not return at all, and Mary, tired of waiting, crept down in disappointment.
Delightful as Mary Jasper and Justin Wingate found the people of the new ranch, Curtis Clayton secluded himself more than ever with his books and his writing, and was not to be coaxed out of his shell even by Justin’s stories of Ben’s marvellous acrobatic and equestrian feats and of Lucy’s brightness and clever talk.
Yet he was drawn out one day by a summons that could not be disobeyed. Harkness had been hurled against the new wire corral by a savage broncho, and Clayton’s services as a surgeon were demanded. He never refused a call like that.
He found Harkness sitting in the kitchen of the ranch house, to which he had come as to a shelter, with Pearl Newcome bending over him, a camphor bottle in one of her hands and a blood-stained cloth in the other. Davison, Fogg, and several cowboys, stood about in helpless awkwardness. Harkness’s face looked white and faint, in spite of its red tan. The sleeve of his flannel shirt had been rolled to the shoulder and a bloody bandage was wound round the arm.
“Nothin’ to make a fuss about,” he said, when he saw Clayton. “I got slung up ag’inst the barbed wire and my arm was ripped open. It’s been bleedin’ some, but that’s good fer it.”
“I shall have to take a number of stitches,” Clayton announced, when he had examined and cleansed the wound. He opened a pouch of his saddle-bags.
“No chloryform ner anything of that kind fer me,” said Harkness, regarding him curiously. “Jist go ahead with your sewin’.”
Clayton obeyed; while Harkness, setting a lighted cigarette between his teeth, talked and laughed with apparent nonchalance.
Brought thus into close contact with the people of the ranch, the shell of Clayton’s exclusiveness was shattered. After that, daily, for some time, he rode or walked over to the ranch house to see how his patient was doing, or Harkness came over to see him. And he found that these people were good to know. They lessened the emptiness which had gnawed. They were human beings, with wholly human hearts. And he needed them quite as much as they needed him.
CHAPTER VI
WHEN LOVE WAS YOUNG
Justin shot up into a tall youth; he was beginning to feel that he was almost a man; and love had come to him, as naturally and simply as the bud changes into the flower. It flushed his face, as he came with Lucy Davison up the path to the arbor seat in the cottonwoods, after a stroll by the stream. Planted when the ranch was established, the trees were now a cool and screening grove. Justin had made for her a crown of the cottonwood leaves, and had set it on her brown hair. As they walked along, hand in hand, he looked at her now and then, with the light of young love in his eyes. He was sure he had never seen a girl so beautiful and it gave him a strange and delightful pleasure just to look at her.
“Tell me more about Doctor Clayton,” she said, dropping down upon the arbor seat. “You told me about that scorched photograph. What is that woman to him, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” he said, as he sat down by her.
“I think she must have been his sweetheart.”
“Just because he couldn’t burn her picture?” “Because he came down here in that queer way and has stayed here ever since. Something happened to separate them.”
“If that is so I ought to be sorry, I suppose, but I can’t; it was a good thing for me; it kept me here, and gave me a chance to—get an education.”
“And we do need a doctor here,” she said, with unnecessary emphasis.
“If he hadn’t come, I’m afraid I should have been sent away when Mr. Wingate died, and then I shouldn’t ever have—met you.”
“Oh, you might have!” she declared, tossing her crowned head coquettishly.
She crumpled a cottonwood leaf in her fingers. With a boldness that gripped his throat he slipped his hand along the back of the arbor seat.
“And if—if I had never met you?”
“Then you wouldn’t have known me!”
“No, I suppose not; but, as you said, I might have; it seems to me that something would have drawn me to you, wherever you were.”
The hot color dyed her fair cheeks. Her brown eyes dropped and were veiled by their dark lashes. A strand of the brown hair blown in a tangle across the oval of her face, the delicate curve of the white throat, the yielding touch of her body as he pressed his extended arm close up against it, intoxicated his youthful senses.
“I don’t want to think how it would have been if I had never known you,” he declared earnestly. “We have been good friends a long time, Lucy.”
“We’re good friends now, aren’t we?”
“Yes, but I want it to be something more than just friends.”
He pressed his arm closer about her and bent toward her.
“I hope you won’t mind my saying it; but I do love you, and have from—from the very first. I didn’t understand so well what it meant then, but now I know—I know that I love you, and love you, and love you!” The arm tightened still more. “And—and if you would only say that you love me, too, and that—”
She lifted her face to his. A dash of tears shone in the brown eyes.
“I—I have—hurt your feelings!”
“No, Justin.”
The sight of those tears, and her tremulous lips, so moved him that, with an impulsive motion, and a courage he would not have thought possible, he stooped and kissed her.
“If you would only say that you do love me,” he urged.
“I do love you, Justin,” she said, with girlish earnestness, “and you ought to know that I do.”
“I have always dreamed of this,” he declared, putting both arms about her and drawing her close against his heart. “I have always dreamed of this; that we might love each other, and be always together. I think that has been in my heart since the day I first saw you.”
He held her tightly now, as if thus he would keep her near him forever.
“Have you truly loved me always?” she asked, after a long silence.
“Always; ever since I knew you!”
“But you—you did care for Mary, before I came?”
“I always liked Mary.”
“And you like her now?”
“Yes, but I love you; and that is very different.”
She sat quite still, but picked at the leaf of the cotton wood. He seemed so strong and so masterful that the touch of his hands and the pressure of his arms gave her a delightful sense of weakness and dependence, a hitherto unknown feeling.
“You never cared for Mary as—as you do me?”
“I truly never loved Mary at all; I liked her, and we used to have great fun together. But we were only children then, you know!”
She saw one of the hands that enfolded her; the sleeve of his coat was drawn up slightly, disclosing the clear white of the skin and the deep line of tan at the wrist. She ventured to look at his face—the side of it turned toward her; it was as tanned as his hand. Something more than admiration shone in her brown eyes.
“And now you think you are a big man!”
“I am older,” he said, simply.
“And was that—that the reason why you tamed my mustang that day, so that he wouldn’t be killed? Because you loved me? I’ve wondered about that.”
“That was the reason; but I was anxious, too, to save him.”
She was silent again, as if pondering this.
“I’ve thought that might be the reason; and, you won’t laugh at me if I tell you, that’s why I’ve ridden him so much since. Uncle Philip didn’t want me to go near him after that. But I would; and I’ve ridden him ever since; though Pearl has told me a dozen times that he would throw me and kill me. But I was going to ride him if I could, because—because you conquered him—for me.”
He kissed her again, softly.
“You musn’t take too many risks with the mustang; for—for some time, you know, you are going to marry me, I hope?”
She did not answer.
“It’s a long way off, that some time, but—”
She did not look at him.
“Yes, some time, if I can,” she said timidly.
“If you can?”
“If Uncle Philip will let me.”
“He’s only your guardian, and you’ll be of age by and by.”
“It seems a good while yet.”
“But it will come.”
“Yes, it will come.”
“I’ll wait until that some time,” he promised in a low voice.
Time sped swiftly beneath the cottonwoods. To the boy and girl in the morning glow of love hours are minutes. They did not know they had so many things to talk over. Every subject was colored with a new light and had a new relationship. But love itself was uppermost, on their lips and in their hearts.
Justin bore away from that arbor seat a conflicting sense of exaltation and unworthiness. The warm inner light that illumined him flowed out upon the world and brightened it. He walked with a sense of buoyancy. There was a tang in the air and a glow in the sky before unknown.
Meeting Ben Davison he had a new sense of comradeship with him; and though Ben talked of the young English setter he had recently purchased, and sought to show off the good points of the dog, Justin was thinking of Ben himself, who was a cousin to Lucy, and now shared in some degree her superior merits.
Also, when Philip Davison came out of the ranch house and walked toward the horse corrals, the glance of his blue eyes seemed brighter and kindlier, his manner more urbane and noble, and the simple order he gave to Ben concerning work to be done fell in kindlier tone. Though Davison’s words bit like acid sometimes, Justin was resolved now to remember always that he was Lucy’s uncle and guardian.
Walking homeward, Justin looked now and then at the ranch house. He had seen Lucy flutter into it like a bird; she was in that house now, he reflected, brightening it with her presence. The house, the grounds, and more than all the cottonwood grove, became sacred.
CHAPTER VII
WILLIAM SANDERS
The feeling which hallowed the mere local surroundings of love held its place tenaciously in Justin’s heart and seemed not likely to pass away. It was no sickly sentimentality, but had the power to strengthen his inner life and add to his growing manliness.
Justin was employed on the ranch now, and though there were many distasteful things connected with the work, he desired to remain, because it gave him so many opportunities to be near Lucy Davison. The necessary cruelties connected with the rearing and handling of cattle on a great range sickened him at times; for a love that was almost a worship of all life, the lower forms equally with the higher, had been instilled by Clayton into every fibre of his being. To Justin now even the elements seemed to stir with consciousness. Did not certain chemicals exhibited by Clayton rush together into precipitates and crystals, as if they loved and longed to be united, and did not so common a thing as fire throw out tentacles of flame, and grapple with the wood as if hungry? And who was to say that the precipitates and crystals and the fire did not know? Certainly not ignorant man.
With this love of every form of life there grew a manly gentleness, broken strangely at times by outbursts of temper, so that often it seemed whimsical.
Riding forth one day, in cowboy attire, along the line fence that held in the cattle from the cultivated valley lands, he came upon Philip Davison engaged in angry controversy with a young man of somewhat shabby appearance. The shrewd little eyes of this man observed Justin closely. Beside the fence was a dirty prairie schooner, from which the man had descended, and to it two big raw-boned farm horses were hitched. Eyeing Justin the man pushed back his hat, then awkwardly extended his hand.
“So you’re Justin, air ye—the little boy I met one’t? I reckon you don’t know me? I wouldn’t knowed you, but fer hearin’ the name.”
Justin acknowledged that the man’s face was unfamiliar.
“Well, I’m William Sanders!” He plucked a spear of grass and began to splinter it with his teeth. “I landed hyer some seasons ago with Mr. Fogg, and stayed all night with the doctor over there. Mebbe you’ll remember me now. I’ve thought of you a good many times sense then. You’ve growed a lot. I was thinkin’ about you t’other day while on my way hyer; and a fortune teller I went to in Pueblo picked you out straight off, from the cards she told with. She showed me the jack of hearts, and said that was the young feller I had in mind. Sing’lar, wasn’t it?”
Justin recalled this young man now, and shook his hand heartily.
“It was singular,” he admitted.
“We’ll have to talk over old times by and by,” said Sanders, amiably.
But Davison was not pleased to see Sanders, whom he had never met before. Sanders, it appeared, had bought a quarter-section of land not far from the stream, and had now come to occupy it. Trouble had arisen over the fact that it was included in a large area of mortgaged and government land which Davison had fenced for his cattle. Sanders was demanding that he should cut the fence.
“Cut it and let me git my land,” he insisted, “er I’ll cut it fer ye. I know my rights under the law.”
“You can’t farm there, and you know you can’t,” said Davison, in a tone of expostulation. “This is simply a piece of blackmail. You want me to pay you not to trouble me about the fence. But I won’t do it. If I did I’d have dozens of men landed on me demanding the same thing. You know that nothing but bunch grass will grow on that land.”
Though he chewed placidly on the grass spear, Sanders’ little eyes glittered.
“Cut the fence and let me git to my land, er I’ll cut it fer ye!”
His love for Lucy, which extended now to Philip Davison as a warm regard and intense boyish admiration, would have inclined Justin to the ranchman’s side; but it was clear that Sanders was in the right and Davison in the wrong.
“I’ll see you again, Mr. Sanders,” he said; and rode on while the two men were still wrangling. It was remarkable, he thought, that Sanders should have remembered him so long, and more remarkable that a fortune teller who had never seen him should be able to describe him even in a dim and uncertain way.
Farther along he encountered Ben, ranging the mesa with dog and gun, training his young English setter. It was Ben’s duty to ride the line on this particular day; but Ben had shirked, and Justin had been assigned to his place. The current opinion of the cowboys was that Ben was shiftless and unreliable.
“What’s that hayseed mouthing about?” Ben asked.
“He has bought some land in there, and wants your father to cut the fence so that he can get to it.”
“These farmers are always making trouble,” Ben growled.
Then his face flushed.
“Why didn’t you stand up with me against that granger the other day, when I told him that his horses, and not ours, had damaged his crops?”
Justin desired to think well of Ben and remain on terms of friendship with him because of Lucy.
“I couldn’t very well,” he urged, “for I saw our horses in his millet, myself.”
“Well, he didn’t; he was in town that day. He would have believed you, if you had said they were his horses. You might have backed me up, instead of flinching; I’d have done as much for you.”
“You’ve got a handsome dog there!” said Justin.
“Oh, that setter’s going to be fine when I get him broke,” Ben asserted, with enthusiasm. “I only wish we had some Eastern quails here. Harkness put you on this line today, did he? I wanted to train my setter; so I told him I wasn’t well, and slipped out of it.”
As the dog was now far ahead, Ben hastened to overtake him, and Justin rode on, thinking of Ben, of Lucy, and of William Sanders. Ben’s easy disregard of certain things he had been taught to consider essentials troubled him. He wanted to think well of Ben.
When Justin learned the outcome of the controversy between Davison and Sanders he was somewhat astonished. Sanders’ truculence had made him think the man would persist in his demands; but Sanders had agreed to fence his own land, if Davison would but give him a right of way to it.
Within a week Justin understood why. Sanders, visiting the ranch-house to see Davison, had also seen Lucy. He became a familiar visitor, where his presence was not desired. If Lucy rode out, William Sanders invariably chanced to be in the trail going in the same direction. If she remained at home he came to the house to get Davison’s advice as to the best manner of constructing a fence, and Lucy’s advice concerning the proper furnishing of a dug-out for a single man who expected to live alone and do his own cooking.
Lucy came to Justin with the burden of her woes.
“He follows me round all the time, just as if he were my dog!”
“You ought to feel flattered,” said Justin, though he was himself highly indignant. “I don’t suppose you want me to say anything to him about it?”
“Oh, no—no!” she gasped, terrified by the threat concealed behind the words.
“I’ve noticed he hasn’t come near me since our meeting down by the line fence. He told me then that he wanted to have a talk about old times, but he hasn’t seemed in any hurry to begin it.”
As Justin rode away in an angry mood Lucy Davison looked at his receding figure with some degree of uneasiness. Justin had on a few occasions showed a decidedly inflammable temper. Ordinarily mild in word and manner, borrowing much of that mildness doubtless from Clayton, when he gave way to a sudden spasm of rage it was likely to carry him beyond the bounds of reason.
The provocation came in a most unexpected, and at the time inexplicable, way. Justin, riding along the trail by the stream, saw Lucy come out from the shadows of the young cottonwoods near Sloan Jasper’s and walk in his direction, as if to join him. The sight of her there filled his sky with brightness and the music of singing birds. He pricked up his broncho and turned it from the trail.
As he did so he beheld William Sanders appear round the end of the cottonwood grove, mounted on one of his big, raw-boned horses. Riding up to Lucy, Sanders slipped from his saddle and walked along by her side. Justin’s anger burned. It was apparent to him, great as was the separating distance, that Sanders’ presence and words were distasteful to her. She stopped and seemed about to turn back to the grove. Justin saw Sanders put out his hand as if to detain her. As he did so she stooped; then she screamed, and fell forward, apparently to avoid him.
Justin drove his broncho from a trot into a wild gallop. His anger increased to smoking rage. It passed to ungovernable fury, when he beheld Sanders catch the screaming girl in his arms, lift her to the back of his horse, and scramble up behind her in the saddle. Justin yelled at him.
“Stop—stop, you villain!”
In utter disregard of him and his shouted command Sanders plunged his spurs into the flanks of his big horse, and began to ride away from the cottonwoods at top speed. Lucy lay limp in his arms.
“I’ll have his life!” Justin cried, longing now for one of the cowboy revolvers he had made it a practice, on the advice of Clayton, never to carry; and he drove the broncho into furious pursuit of the big horse that was bearing Lucy and Sanders away.
The light, clean-limbed broncho, unimpeded by a cumbersome double weight, began to gain in the mad race. Justin ploughed its sides mercilessly with the spurs, struck it with his hands, and yelled at it, to increase its speed.
“Go, go!” he cried; “we must catch that scoundrel quick!”
His line of action when that was accomplished was not formulated, further than that he knew he would hurl himself on Sanders, tear him from the saddle, and punish him as it seemed he deserved.
Steadily the separating distance was decreased. Sanders still sent the big horse on, almost without a backward glance. He held Lucy tightly in his arms. Apparently she had fainted, for Justin could not observe that she struggled to release herself.
Again Justin bellowed a command to Sanders to halt. He was close upon the big horse now. Sanders turned in his saddle heavily, for the weight of the girl impeded his movements. Justin fancied he could see the man’s little eyes glitter, as they did that day when he delivered his ultimatum to Davison.
“You go to hell!” he bellowed back.
The momentary slacking of his rein caused his horse to stumble, and it fell to the ground.
Justin galloped up in an insanity of blazing wrath. Lucy, hurled from the back of the horse with Sanders, sprang up with a cry, and ran toward Justin. Sanders, having picked himself up uninjured, stared at her. His flushed face whitened and his little eyes showed a singular and ominous gleam.
“Take her,” he said, hoarsely; “damn you, take her—I was doin’ the best I could!”
Lucy’s face was white—piteously white; her dry hot eyes gushed with tears, and a sob choked in her throat.
“Justin—Justin, it was not—his fault—nothing he did; it was the snake; see, it bit me, here!” She thrust forward her hand. “Near the wrist, there; and—and it is swelling fast, fast! We—we must—get to Doctor Clayton’s quick—quick!”
Justin staggered under the revulsion of feeling. He caught the shaking and terrified girl in his arms.
“Help me—get her into the saddle, Sanders,” he begged, stammering the words. “And—and I ask your pardon! Later I will tell you what I—but now I need you to—”
Sanders sprang to his assistance.
“Better take my horse; he’s bigger!”
“The broncho is faster,” said Justin. “That’s right. Now—that’s right!”
He climbed shakily into the saddle. He felt his very brain reeling. Then the broncho leaped forward. Sanders struck it a smart blow to hurry it on; and stood looking at them, as they galloped wildly on toward Clayton’s, which had been his own destination.
“Damn him!” he cried hoarsely. His little eyes glittered and his lips foamed. “I was doin’ the best I could, and I would have made it all right.” He clenched his fists. “I would 'a’ been his friend—and helped him; but now—”
The sentence, the threat, died, gurgling, in his throat.
As for Justin, he had no thought now but to reach Doctor Clayton’s in the quickest time possible. He did not spare the broncho. Yet, even in these minutes of whirling excitement, when anxiety, fright, love, chagrin, and regret, fought within him for the mastery, he did not forget some of the things learned of Clayton. He took out his handkerchief, rolled it into a cord with hands and teeth, and with hands and teeth knotted it round the bitten arm just above the two small punctures made by the teeth of the rattlesnake.
The arm was already swollen, and he thought it was becoming discolored. At times burning tears gushed from his eyes in a way to blind him and keep him from seeing anything clearly. Lucy lay in his arms as if dead. For aught he knew she might even then be dying. The poison of the rattlesnake had been injected near the great artery of the wrist, as she stooped in her embarrassment to pluck a flower, and it would be speedy in its malignant effects. With that terrible fear upon him, Justin blamed himself ceaselessly for the delay he had wrought in the mistaken notion that Sanders was acting with sinister intent. If that brief delay should aid to a fatal result he knew he should go mad or kill himself.
When Lucy stirred, or moaned, he bent over her with wild words of inquiry. Her eyes were closed, and she was very white.
“We are almost there—almost there!” he cried.
Yet how long the distance seemed!
Clayton came to the door, when he heard the clatter of hoofs. He wore a faded smoking jacket and had a black skull cap perched on the top of his head. His half lounging manner changed when he saw the trembling broncho, dripping sweat and panting with labored breath from the strain of its terrible run, and saw Justin climbing heavily out of the saddle with Lucy. When her feet touched the ground she stood erect, but tottered, clinging weakly to Justin’s arm. She made a brave effort to walk, as Clayton hurried to her side. He saw the knotted handkerchief and the swollen arm, and knew what had happened.
“Into the house,” he said, tenderly supporting her. “Don’t be frightened, Lucy—don’t be frightened! Justin, help me on the other side—ah, that’s right! A little girl was here only the other day, from the Purgatoire, who had been bitten hours before, and I had her all right in a little while. So, there’s really nothing to be alarmed about.”
Clayton’s cheering words were a stimulant. Yet the battle was not fought out. Before victory was announced, word had gone to the ranch-house and to Jasper’s. Philip Davison came, with Harkness and Pearl Newcome, and Mary Jasper rode in on her pony, wild-eyed and tremulous. Among others who arrived was William Sanders.
Justin found him in the yard, out by the grass-grown cellar, where he stood in a subdued manner, holding the reins of his raw-boned horse. His manner changed and his little eyes burned when he saw Justin.
“I don’t keer to have you speak to me,” he said, abruptly. “I reckon from this on our ways lays in different directions. I don’t know what you thought I was up to, but I was doin’ the best I could to git that girl to this place in a hurry. You chipped in. I s’pose you think it was all right, and that you helped matters?”
“I have already asked your pardon, and I ask it again. I see now that I was a fool. We’ll forget the whole thing, if you’re willing.”
Justin held out his hand in an amicable manner.
Sanders disdained to take it.
“I’m not willin’ to fergit it, myself. I wanted to think well of you, rememberin’ when I first come to this house, and some other things, but that’s past. You made me look and feel cheaper than thirty cents Mexican, and I ain’t expectin’ to fergit it.”
He turned away, and walked along the edge of the old cellar, leading his horse. That William Sanders had in him all the elements of a vicious hater was shown then, and many times afterward. He did not speak to Justin again that day; and when the announcement came that Clayton had won his hard fight and Lucy was on the high road to recovery, he mounted and rode away.
CHAPTER VIII
AND MARY WENT TO DENVER
Mary Jasper did not know that she went to Denver because she had read Pearl Newcome’s romances; but so it was. She was in love with Ben, and expected to become his wife by and by, but her day-dreams were of conquests and coronets.
The alluringly beautiful lace of Sibyl had reappeared in Paradise Valley. On her first visit, long before, Sibyl had marked the rare dark beauty of Mary Jasper. Mary was now a fair flower bursting into rich bloom, and wherever a fair flower grows some covetous hand is stretched forth to pluck it.
Though Sibyl had flung Curtis Clayton aside with as little compunction as if his pure heart were no more than the gold on the draggled wings of the butterfly crushed in the road, curiosity and vanity had drawn her again and again to the little railroad town at the base of the flat-topped mountain. There in the home of an acquaintance she had found means to gratify her curiosity concerning the life led by Clayton, and could feed her vanity with the thought that he had immured himself because of her.
Twice she had seen him, having taken rides through the valley for the purpose; once beholding him from afar, watching him as he strolled near the willows by the stream, unconscious of her surveillance, his bent left arm swinging as he walked. On the second occasion they had met face to face in the trail, while he was on his way to the town to inspect some books he had ordered conditionally. Sibyl was on a mettlesome bay, and he on his quick-stepping buckskin broncho. She towered above him from the back of the larger horse. He lifted his hat with a gentle gesture, flushing, and holding the reins tightly in his stiff left hand.
“You are looking well!” she cried gaily. It touched her to know that he still carried himself erect, that he was still a handsome, pleasant-eyed man, whom any woman might admire. “And really I’ve been thinking you were moping down here, and suffering from loneliness and hopeless love!”
“Love is no longer hopeless, when it is dead!” he declared, voicing an indifference he did not feel. Her light laugh fell like the sting of a whip. “Oh, dear me! Is it so serious as that? But of course I don’t believe anything you say. Love is a bright little humming-bird of a boy, who never dies. Truly, it must be lonesome down here, in this poky place. I can’t understand why you stay here. You might come to Denver!” She looked at him archly, half veiling her dark eyes with their lustrous lashes, while her horse pawed fretfully at the bank. “I mean it, Curtis. You could be as far from me in Denver as you are down here, if you wished to be. You know that as well as I do.”
“I don’t think I could,” he said, and though his voice showed pain it showed resolution. “I find this a very good place. I like the quiet.”
“So that no one will ever trouble you while you’re studying or writing! You’ll be a great author or scientist some day, I don’t doubt.”
He did not answer.
“Well, good bye, Curtis. I’m not so bad as I seem, perhaps; you don’t see any horns or cloven hoof about me, do you?” She waved her hand. “And I’m glad to know you’re looking so well, and are so contented and happy!”
She gave her horse a cut with her riding whip and galloped away.
How many more times Sibyl Dudley (she had taken her maiden name) came to the little town by the mountain Curtis Clayton did not know, and never sought to discover; but one day he was almost startled, when Justin brought him news that Mary Jasper had accompanied Sibyl to Denver, and was to remain there with her.
Clayton at once mounted his horse and rode up the valley in the waning afternoon, to where Sloan Jasper’s house squatted by the stream in the midst of a green plume of cottonwoods of his own planting. He found Jasper in a stormy temper. There had been heavy August rains and a cloud-burst. The sluggish stream had overleaped its banks, smearing the alfalfa fields with sticky yellow mud and a tangle of weedy drift, in addition to softening the soil until it was a spongy muck. Hundreds of cattle had ploughed through the softened soil during the night, for the storm had torn out a section of fence and let them drift into the cultivated area of the valley. Standing with Jasper was Clem Arkwright.
“Glorious, sublime!” Arkwright was saying.
He had taken off his hat, and stood in reverent attitude before the lighted mountain, a young, red-faced, pudgy man, with thick mustache. Though Sloan Jasper was not gifted with keen discernment he felt the attitude to be that of the Pharisee proclaiming his own excellence rather than that of his Maker. Arkwright seemed to be saying to him, “Behold one who has been endowed with a capacity which you lack, the capacity to appreciate and enjoy this sublime picture!”
All the way up the valley trail Curtis Clayton had been delighting in the beauty of that evening scene. The misty clouds lingering after the storm had hung white draperies about the wide shoulders of the mountain. Into these the descending sun had hurled a sheaf of fire-tipped arrows, and straightway the white draperies had burned red in streaks and the whole top of the mountain had flamed. The colors were fading now.
“Glorious, sublime!” Arkwright repeated.
“The sunlight on that mountain don’t interest me a little bit, Arkwright,” said Jasper, with curt emphasis; “what I want to know is how I’m going to protect myself? You say there ain’t any herd law. You’re a justice-of-the-peace, and I reckon a lawyer, or a half of a one. We can have a herd law passed, can’t we? And what’s to keep me from shootin’ them steers when I catch ’em in here? Powder and lead air cheap, and that’s what I’ll do; and then I’ll let Davison do the sum’. I ain’t got nothin’ much, and he’ll find it hard work to git blood out of a turnip. Let him do the sum’, and see if he can collect damages; you say I can’t.”
“You’re hopeless, Jasper!
“'A primrose by the river’s brim, A yellow primrose was to him— And it was nothing more!’”
Arkwright made the quotation and sighed, as Clayton rode up. “But see the fading light on those clouds! Was there ever anything like it? What does it make you think of?”
“It makes me think that if I had my way I could improve on nature a bit in this valley; I wouldn’t send all the rain in a bunch and jump the river out of its banks and roll it over everything, but distribute it a little through some of the other months of the year.”
Arkwright turned his pudgy form about.
“Ah, Doctor! Glad to see you. You ought to get over to the town oftener. You wouldn’t care to ride up this evening, I suppose? The sunlight is going, and I must be going, too.”
Clayton did not care to ride to town. When Arkwright was gone he questioned Jasper concerning the occasion of his visit.
“I reckon he come down for a word with Ben Davison; I don’t know what else. He and Ben air gittin’ thick as fleas lately. It’s my opinion that Ben’s gamblin’ away his wages up there in the town with him, but I don’t know; and I don’t care. I’d be glad to have both of ’em keep away from me. Look at that millet, Doctor; just look at it! Ruined by Davison’s cattle; and Arkwright tells me I can’t do anything, because there ain’t any herd law in this county. But I can shoot ’em; and I’ll do it next time they git in here, see if I don’t.”
Clayton had heard Jasper rave in that way before, and nothing had ever come of it. Other settlers had raved in the same manner, and then realized their helplessness. Looking into Jasper’s angry face, he tried now to speak of Mary.
“I hear that your daughter has gone to Denver, Mr. Jasper!”
Jasper drew himself up, forgetful for the moment of his millet. A look of pride and pain overspread his hairy face.
“Yes, she’s gone there to stay awhile with Mrs. Dudley. I didn’t want her to, but she would go; it makes it mighty lonesome here, but she’ll be happier up there, I reckon. Mrs. Dudley took a likin’ to Mary, and wants to give her a better chance fer an ejication and other things than she can have here. So I reckon it’s all right, though I didn’t see at first how I could git along without her.”
All at once Clayton’s heart seemed to shrivel and shrink. He fumbled with the yellow mane of the broncho and with the reins that swung against its neck. When he spoke after a little, trying to go on, his voice was husky.
“That woman is—”
“Yes, I allow Mrs. Dudley is a fine woman!”
Clayton’s resolution failed utterly.
“And she’s smart,” Jasper declared, “smart as a steel-trap; when she talked with me about takin’ Mary, and what she could do fer her, I could see that. She’s mighty good-lookin’, too; though I don’t think anybody can come up in looks to my Mary. I wisht you could have seen her with some of her new fixin’s on, which Mrs. Dudley bought fer her. She was certainly handsome. And she’s goin’ to enjoy herself there, I don’t doubt. I’ve already had a letter from her, tellin’ me how happy she is. I reckon I ought to be willin’ fer her to have things her mother never had, fer she’s fit fer it, and not have to slave as her mother did, and as I’ve always done. Yes, I reckon I’m glad she’s gone; though ’tis a bit lonesome here, fer I ain’t got anybody with me at all now, you see.”
Though Curtis Clayton had visited Sloan Jasper for the express purpose of uttering a warning against Sibyl, he permitted Jasper to talk on, and the warning words remained unsaid. Jasper was inexpressibily lonely, now that his daughter was gone; yet it was plain that he would not call her back, and equally plain that he knew she would not return if he called never so loudly. And he was trusting that the thing he could not help was the very best thing for the child he loved. Clayton felt that he could not stir up in the heart of this man a useless, peace-destroying, and perhaps a groundless, distrust.
So he rode away as the night shadows were falling, and gathered a great contempt for himself as he returned slowly homeward. He had no right to judge Sibyl, and possibly, very probably, misjudge her, he thought; yet he had a fear, amounting almost to conviction, that she was not a woman to whom should be given the charge and training of such a girl as Mary Jasper. That fear had sent him to Jasper; his retreat seemed a cowardly flight.
As for Mary, she was childishly happy in Denver. The only present cloud on the sky of her life was that her father had not really wished her to go. He had objected stoutly at first, but ever since her mother’s departure from the earthly Paradise, which had been full of all manner of hard labor, to that upper and better one where, her simple faith had assured her, she should toil no more, Mary had contrived to do pretty much as she pleased. Her head was filled with romantic ideas, garnered from Pearl Newcome’s much-read novels. In this matter, as in all others, she had taken her own way, like a high-headed young horse clamping the bit tightly between its teeth and choosing its road in defiance of the guiding rein. And her father had submitted, when he could do nothing else, had admired and praised her in the wonderful new clothing provided for her by Mrs. Dudley, and had driven her to the station with her little trunk packed with pretty trifles. He had kissed her good bye there, bravely enough, with hardly a quiver in his voice, and so she had gone away. She recalled him often now, standing, a pathetic figure, in his cheap clothing, waving his hand to her as she looked from the car window to throw a kiss as a final farewell.
But this picture seldom troubled her long. Denver was too attractive to the girl who had scarcely in her whole life seen a place larger than the little town at the base of the familiar flat-topped mountain. And what a gay, care-free life Denver led, as viewed by her through the eyes of Mrs. Dudley! This was Vanity Fair, though Mary had never even heard that name. Mrs. Dudley kept a carriage, which rolled with shining wheels through the Denver streets to the merry tattoo of trotting hoofs and the glint of silver-mounted harness. A driver sat on the box in blue livery, and the easy sway and jounce of the springs made her feel as if she were being lifted forward on velvet cushions.
Young men and old men turned about to admire her and the woman who sat by her side, as the carriage rolled along. Women looked at them, too, sometimes with shining eyes of envy; looked at the carriage, at the beautiful clothing, and the two bright faces. Mary wore jewels now, and Sibyl had roped her slender neck with a heavy gold thread which bore a neat little locket at its end. Into that locket Mary had put the gnarled wisp of hair which in a moment of devotion at home she had clipped from her father’s head. To wear it now was something of a penance for leaving him in his loneliness.
Sibyl had a “set,” which was very gay and overflowed with parties where cards were played for favors, and in little dances which were said to be very “select.” Gay debonair men and handsomely dressed women attended these dances and parties and made life one never-ending round of merriment. Mary thought she had never known what it was to really live until now. Sibyl delighted in her; the girl’s fresh flower-like face and inevitable gaucherie set off and added to Sibyl’s own attractiveness.
Mary wrote to her father with religious regularity every Sunday. Sunday was a religious day, and the writing of a letter to her father was performed almost as a sacred duty, so that Sunday seemed the appropriate day for it. She wrote also to Ben Davison, more fully than to her father, describing to him the joys of her new mode of life, and appealing to him not to be “savage” about her comments concerning some of the young men she met.
“Dear Ben,” she said in one of her letters, “Sibyl Dudley is a perfect darling. I am surprised that you didn’t know she had been married. I thought you knew all the time. She is divorced now, I think, though she never says anything to me about it. I’m sure there must be a beautiful romance in her life, as lovely as any of those Pearl reads, for sometimes when she thinks I’m busy she sits for a long time perfectly silent, as if thinking of something serious. But in spite of that she is as gay and happy as can be. Yes, she is a darling; and so are you, you old grumpy, grizzly bear! I wish you could send me a pony—not a broncho! It would be such fun to go galloping on my own pony through the streets. I ride a good deal, but these Denver horses are such big things. Mrs. Dudley is a superb horsewoman. Is that right, horsewoman?—it sounds funny, worse than cowboy. Sometimes when we meet people she introduces me as her niece, and the people smile and say how much we look alike. Isn’t that funny, too?”
Sibyl abounded in “charities,” and had numbers of feeble men and old women who devoutly, or otherwise, blest her shadow as she passed. Under her tutelage Mary also found it pleasant to play Lady Bountiful. It gave her quite as much comfort as the penning of that Sunday letter to her father. Her father had lived a saving and scrimping life and had never given anything to anybody, so that to Mary this was an entirely new and pleasing phase of life’s conduct. It made her feel so superior to bestow with unstinting hand, and be blest for the largess, as if the donor were a veritable gift-showering angel, or luxury-distributing fairy, with red gold on her wings.
All in all, Mary found Denver to be a place of unheard-of delights, in which, especially to those who were not poor and in want, life passed like one of the plays which she sometimes witnessed from a box in the opera house, or after the fashion of the rollicking fanfare of the romances in Pearl Newcome’s wonderful trunk. And it was good, all of it; much better than Paradise Valley, or even the society of Ben Davison, though she was sure that she still loved Ben.
CHAPTER IX
A REVELATION OF CHARACTER
William Sanders did not forget nor forgive.
He ceased to annoy Lucy Davison, and even in time affected to overlook the humiliation to which he felt Justin had subjected him; but deep in his heart he nursed both for Philip Davison and Justin an ineradicable hate, which revealed itself at times in disputes fomented with the farmers.
Sanders’ half-veiled enmity troubled Justin less than the discovery which came to him one day of the innate dishonesty of Ben Davison’s character.
Philip Davison was in one of the bunk rooms, paying off his “hands,” when Justin and Ben arrived from the high mesa where for a month they had been line-riding together. Bronchos stood outside on the trampled grass. Within, where the walls above the rude wooden bunks were hung with bridles and quirts, saddles and ponchos, ropes and spurs, sat Davison, at a small unpainted table, counting out money to his employes and keeping a record of the amounts paid by writing names and sums with a stub pencil in a soiled account book. Davison was fifty years of age now, red-faced, blue-eyed, and bearded. Justin had learned to admire and like him, for there were admirable traits in his character. Though he swore horrible oaths at times, which he complained a man had to do if he handled cattle and cowboys, he had generally been kind to Justin, and he had conceived a fondness for Clayton, whom he respected for his learning and skill as a physician.
Having received his wages from the hands of Philip Davison, Justin went out behind the bunk house, and was counting his bills in the drizzle that was falling, when Ben appeared, his manner nervous and his eyes shining.
“I’m ahead this time!” he said.
Then, to Justin’s astonishment, he lifted one of his boots, and there, sticking to the muddy sole, was a five-dollar bill. He pulled it away with a chuckle, wiped off the mud as well as he could, and added it to the pile in his hands.
Justin stared at him, with a look which Ben resented.
“Some money was on the table and the wind flirted that bill to the floor. I set my boot on it, and when I walked out it walked out with me.”
“You didn’t do that!”
“What’s the difference? Father will never know! And he’s got plenty more where that came from. He only pays me beastly cowboy’s wages, when I’m his own son. So I helped myself, when I saw my chance.”
Justin’s look showed reproof, and Ben flushed in angry irritation.
“You’d tell, would you?”
“That’s stealing!”
A flush of red waved into Ben’s face. Stung by the inner knowledge of his wrong, this blunt condemnation roused the latent devil in him. He leaped at Justin blindly, and struck him in the face.
Justin had never fought any one in his life, nor could he remember that he had ever before been struck in anger. But when that blow fell on his face with stinging force, his head became unaccountably hot, he trembled violently, and with a hoarse cry gurgling from his lips he sprang upon Ben and struck him to the earth with one blow of his fist.
Having done that, he drew back, shaken and dismayed. He had knocked Ben Davison down, when but a moment before they had been friends! He stared at Ben, who had dropped heavily to the ground. Already he was remorseful and almost frightened. Ben scrambled up, cursing.
“I’ll make you pay for that!” he said, wiping a speck of blood from his trembling lips with his hand.
“It—it was your fault! I—”
Philip Davison came round the corner of the building upon this scene, having heard the blows and the fall. He saw Ben’s cut and quivering lip, his clothing wet and muddy, and Justin standing before him with hot, flushed face.
“You struck Ben?” he cried.
Ben was his pride.
Justin looked at him, after an appealing glance at Ben.
“Yes,” he acknowledged, with humility and a feeling of repentant uneasiness. He had gained Ben’s enmity, and he feared he had lost Philip Davison’s regard, which he valued highly.
Ben was crumpling together the wad of bills, and thrust them into his pocket.
“Yes, he struck me, but I hit him first,” he confessed. “We had a little quarrel, a few words, that’s all.”
Though no larger than Justin, he was older, and it humiliated him to confess even this much.
Davison was annoyed and angry.
“Go into the house, Ben,” he commanded; “I’ll see you later.”
When Ben was gone he turned to Justin.
“I’ve tried to do right by you, Justin, and I’ve liked your work; but you must remember that Ben is my son. I can’t think that you had any good reason to strike him.”
“I didn’t intend to strike him,” Justin urged, “and I shouldn’t have done so if he hadn’t struck me first.”
“Well, I won’t have you two quarreling and fighting. Just remember that, will you?”
“He struck me first!” said Justin, sturdily, though deeply troubled by the knowledge that he had offended Philip Davison.
Davison followed Ben into the house, leaving Justin weak and bewildered. He had smothered his sudden explosive rage, yet he still felt its influence. That he could have struck Ben in that way seemed incredible; yet he tried to justify the deed to himself. He was about to walk away, when Ben reappeared and came up to him.
“Justin, you’re a brick, to stand by a fellow that way! You knocked me down, but I don’t hold it against you, for you can keep your mouth shut.”
“You still have that money?”
“Of course.”
“I haven’t changed my opinion about that!”
Ben’s face reddened again.
“What if I did keep it? You’re fussy, and you’re a fool! What is my father’s is mine, or it will be mine some day; I just took a little of it ahead of time, that’s all. It will all be mine, when he goes over the divide.”
Justin was horrified. Ben had expressed reckless and defiant views on many subjects, but nothing like this flippant speculation concerning his father’s death.
“I won’t listen to you when you talk that way,” he declared; and he moved away.