The Range Dwellers Part 12

Lord, but I was mad!

Pochette went back to the boat and old King, after nearly getting kicked into the river for hinting that we ought to pay for the damage and trouble we had caused him. Frosty and I weren't in any frame of mind for such a hold-up, and it didn't take him long to find it out.

The bank there was so steep that we had to pack my trunk and what other truck had been brought out from Osage, up to the top by hand. That was another temper-sweetening job. Then we put the wagon together, hitched on the horses, and they managed to get to the top with it, by a scratch. It all took time--and, as for patience, we'd been out of that commodity for so long we hardly knew it by name.

The last straw fell on us just as we were loading up. I happened to look down upon the ferry; and what do you suppose that old devil was doing? He had torn up the back part of the plank floor of the ferry, and had laid it along the sand for a bridge. He had made an incline from boat nose to the bar, and had rough-locked his wagon and driven it down. Just as we looked, he had come to the end of his bridge, and he and Pochette were taking up the planks behind and extending the platform out in front.

Well! maybe you think Frosty and I stood there congratulating the old fox.

Frosty wanted me to kick him, I remember; and he said a lot of things that sounded inspired to me, they hit my feelings off so straight. If we had had the sense to do what old King was doing, we'd have been ten or fifteen miles nearer home than we were.

But, anyway, we were up the bank ahead of him, and we loaded in the last package and drove away from the painful scene at a lope. And you can imagine how we didn't love old King any better, after that experience.

CHAPTER XII.

I Begin to Realize.

If I had hoped that I'd gotten over any foolishness by spending the fall and winter away from White Divide--or the sight of it--I commenced right away to find out my mistake. No sooner did the big ridge rise up from the green horizon, than every scar, and wrinkle, and abrupt little peak fairly shouted things about Beryl King.

She wasn't there; she was back in New York, and that blasted Terence Weaver was back there, too, making all kinds of love to her according to the letters of Edith. But I hadn't realized just how seriously I was taking it, till I got within sight of the ridge that had sheltered her abiding-place and had made all the trouble.

Like a fool I had kept telling myself that I was fair sick for the range; for range-horses and range-living; for the wind that always blows over the prairies, and for the cattle that feed on the hills and troop down the long coulee bottoms to drink at their favorite watering-places. I thought it was the boys I wanted to see, and to gallop out with them in the soft sunrise, and lie down with them under a tent roof at night; that I wanted to eat my meals sitting cross-legged in the gra.s.s, with my plate piled with all the courses at once and my cup of coffee balanced precariously somewhere within reach.

That's what I thought. When things tasted flat in old Frisco, I wasn't dead sure why, and maybe I didn't want to be sure why. When I couldn't get hold of anything that had the old tang, I laid it all to a hankering after round-up.

Even when we drove around the end of White Divide, and got up on a ridge where I could see the long arm that stretched out from the east side of King's Highway, I wouldn't own up to myself that there was the cause of all my bad feelings. I think Frosty knew, all along; for when I had sat with my face turned to the divide, and had let my cigarette go cold while I thought and thought, and remembered, he didn't say a word. But when memory came down to that last ride through the pa.s.s, and to Shylock shot down by the corral, at last to Frosty standing, tall and dark, against the first yellow streak of sunrise, while I rode on and left him afoot beside a half-dead horse, I turned my eyes and looked at his thin, thoughtful face beside me.

His eyes met mine for half a minute, and he had a little twitching at the corners of his mouth. "Chirk up," he said quietly. "The chances are she'll come back this summer."

I guess I blushed. Anyway, I didn't think of anything to say that would be either witty or squelching, and could only relight my cigarette and look the fool I felt. He'd caught me right in the solar plexus, and we both knew it, and there was nothing to say. So after awhile we commenced talking about a new bunch of horses that dad had bought through an agent, and that had to be saddle-broke that summer, and I kept my eyes away from White Divide and my mind from all it meant to me.

The old ranch did look good to me, and Perry Potter actually shook hands; if you knew him as well as I do you'd realize better what such a demonstration means, coming from a fellow like him. Why, even his lips are always shut with a drawstring--from the looks--to keep any words but what are actually necessary from coming out. His eyes have the same look, kind of pulled in at the corners. No, don't ever accuse Perry Potter of being a demonstrative man, or a loquacious one.

I had two days at the ranch, getting fitted into the life again; on the third the round-up started, and I packed a "war-bag" of essentials, took my last summer's chaps down off the nail in the bunk-house where they had hung all that time as a sort of absent-but-not-forgotten memento, one of the boys told me, and started out in full regalia and with an enthusiasm that was real--while it lasted.

If you never slept on the new gra.s.s with only a bit of canvas between you and the stars; if you have never rolled out, at daylight, and dressed before your eyes were fair open, and rushed with the bunch over to the mess-wagon for your breakfast; if you have never saddled hurriedly a range-bred and range-broken cayuse with a hump in his back and seven devils in his eye, and gone careening across the dew-wet prairie like a tug-boat in a choppy sea; if you have never--well, if you don't know what it's all like, and how it gets into the very bones of you so that the hankering never quite leaves you when you try to give it up, I'm not going to tell you. I can't. If I could, you'd know just how heady it made me feel those first few days after we started out to "work the range."

I was fond of telling myself, those days, that I'd been more scared than hurt, and that it was the range I was in love with, and not Beryl King at all. She was simply a part of it--but she wasn't the whole thing, nor even a part that was going to be indispensable to my mental comfort. I was a free man once more, and so long as I had a good horse under me, and a bunch of the right sort of fellows to lie down in the same tent with, I wasn't going to worry much over any girl.

That, for as long as a week; and that, more than pages of description, shows you how great is the spell of the range-land, and how it grips a man.

CHAPTER XIII.

We Meet Once More.

I think it was about three weeks that I stayed with the round-up. I didn't get tired of the life, or weary of honest labor, or anything of that sort.

I think the trouble was that I grew accustomed to the life, so that the exhilarating effects of it wore off, or got so soaked into my system that I began to take it all as a matter of course. And that, naturally, left room for other things.

I know I'm no good at a.n.a.lysis, and that's as close as I can come to accounting for my welching, the third week out. You see, we were working south and west, and getting farther and farther away from--well, from the part of country that I knew and liked best. It's kind of lonesome, leaving old landmarks behind you; so when White Divide dropped down behind another range of hills and I couldn't turn in my saddle almost any time and see the jagged, blue sky-line of her, I stood it for about two days. Then I rolled my bed one morning, caught out two horses from my string instead of one, told the wagon-boss I was going back to the ranch, and lit out--with the whole bunch grinning after me. As they would have said, they were all "dead next," but were good enough not to say so. Or, perhaps, they remembered the boxing-lessons I had given them in the bunk-house a year or more ago.

I did feel kind of sneaking, quitting them like that; but it's like playing higher than your logical limit: you know you're doing a fool thing, and you want to plant your foot violently upon your own person somewhere, but you go right ahead in the face of it all. They didn't have to tell me I was acting like a calf that has lost his mother in the herd.

(You know he is p.r.o.ne to go mooning back to the last place he was with her, if it's ten miles.) I knew it, all right. And when I topped a hill and saw the high ridges and peaks of White Divide stand up against the horizon to the north, I was so glad I felt ashamed of myself and called one Ellis Carleton worse names than I'd stand to hear from anybody else.

Still, to go back to the metaphor, I kept on shoving in chips, just as if I had a chance to win out and wasn't the biggest, softest-headed idiot the Lord ever made. Why, even Perry Potter almost grinned when I came riding up to the corral; and I caught the fellow that was kept on at the ranch, lowering his left lid knowingly at the cook, when I went in to supper that first night. But I was too far gone then to care much what anybody thought; so long as they kept their mouths shut and left me alone, that was all I asked of them. Oh, I was a heroic figure, all right, those days.

On a day in June I rode dispiritedly over to the little b.u.t.te just out from the mouth of the pa.s.s. Not that I expected to see her; I went because I had gotten into the habit of going, and every nice morning just simply _pulled_ me over that way, no matter how much I might want to keep away.

That argues great strength of character for me, I know, but it's unfortunately the truth.

I knew she was back--or that she should be back, if nothing had happened to upset their plans. Edith had written me that they were all coming, and that they would have two cars, this summer, instead of just one, and that they expected to stay a month. She and her mother, and Beryl and Aunt Lodema, Terence Weaver--deuce take him!--and two other fellows, and a Gertrude--somebody--I forget just who. Edith hoped that I would make my peace with Uncle Homer, so they could see something of me. (If I had told her how easy it was to make peace with "Uncle Homer," and how he had turned me down, she might not have been quite so sure that it was all my bull-headedness.) She complained that Gertrude was engaged to one of the fellows, and so was awfully stupid; and Beryl might as well be--

I tore up the letter just there, and the wind, which was howling that day, caught the pieces and took them over into North Dakota; so I don't know what else Edith may have had to tell me. I'd read enough to put me in a mighty nasty temper at any rate, so I suppose its purpose was accomplished. Edith is like all the rest: If she can say anything to make a man uncomfortable she'll do it, every time.

This day, I remember, I went mooning along, thinking hard things about the world in general, and my little corner of it in particular. The country was beginning to irritate me, and I knew that if something didn't break loose pretty soon I'd be off somewhere. Riding over to little b.u.t.tes, and not meeting a soul on the way or seeing anything but a bare rock when you get there, grows monotonous in time, and rather gets on the nerves of a fellow.

When I came close up to the b.u.t.te, however, I saw a flutter of skirts on the pinnacle, and it made a difference in my gait; I went up all out of breath, scrambling as if my life hung on a few seconds, and calling myself a different kind of fool for every step I took. I kept a.s.suring myself, over and over, that it was only Edith, and that there was no need to get excited about it. But all the while I knew, down deep down in the thumping chest of me, that it wasn't Edith. Edith couldn't make all that disturbance in my circulatory system, not in a thousand years.

She was sitting on the same rock, and she was dressed in the same adorable riding outfit with a blue wisp of veil wound somehow on her gray felt hat, and the same blue roan was dozing, with dragging bridle-reins, a few rods down the other side of the peak. She was sketching so industriously that she never heard me coming until I stood right at her elbow.

It might have been the first time over again, except that my mental att.i.tude toward her had changed a lot.

"That's better; I can see now what you're trying to draw," I said, looking down over her shoulder--not at the sketch; it might have been a sea view, for all I knew--but at the pink curve of her cheek, which was growing pinker while I looked.

She did not glance up, or even start; so she must have known, all along, that I was headed her way. She went on making a lot of marks that didn't seem to fit anywhere, and that seemed to me a bit wobbly and uncertain.

I caught just the least hint of a smile twitching the corner of her mouth--I wanted awfully to kiss it!

"Yes? I believe I have at last got everything--King's Highway--in the proper perspective and the proper proportion," she said, stumbling a bit over the alliteration--and no wonder. It was a sentence to stampede cattle; but I didn't stampede. I wanted, more than ever, to kiss--but I won't be like Barney, if I can help it.

"It's too far off--too unattainable," I criticized--meaning something more than her sketch of the pa.s.s. "And it's too narrow. If a fellow rode in there he would have to go straight on through; there wouldn't be a chance to turn back."

"Ergo, a fellow shouldn't ride in," she retorted, with a composure positively wicked, considering my feelings. "Though it does seem that a fellow rather enjoys going straight on through, regardless of anything; promises, for instance."

That was the gauntlet I'd been hoping for. From the minute I first saw her there it flashed upon me that she was astonished and indignant that night when she saw Frosty and me come charging through the pa.s.s, after me telling her I wouldn't do it any more. It looked to me like I'd have to square myself, so I was glad enough of the chance.

"Sometimes a fellow has to do things regardless of--promises,"

I explained. "Sometimes it's a matter of life and death. If a fellow's father, for instance--"

"Oh, I know; Edith told me all about it." Her tone was curious, and while it did not encourage further explanations or apologies, it also lacked absolution of the offense I had committed.

I sat down in the gra.s.s, half-facing her to better my chance of a look into her eyes. I was consumed by a desire to know if they still had the power to send crimply waves all over me. For the rest, she was prettier even than I remembered her to be, and I could fairly see what little sense or composure I had left slide away from me. I looked at her fatuously, and she looked speculatively at a sharp ridge of the divide as if that sketch were the only thing around there that could possibly interest her.

"Why do you spend every summer out here in the wilderness?" I asked, feeling certain that nothing but speech could save me from going hopelessly silly.