The Range Dwellers Part 4

I stayed at the ranch overnight, intending to start back the next morning.

The round-up would be west of where I had left them, according to the foreman--or wagon-boss, as he is called. Logically, then, I should take the trail that led through Kenmore, the mining-camp owned by King, and which lay in the heart of White Divide ten miles west of King's Highway.

That, I say, was the logical route--but I wasn't going to take it.

I wasn't a bit stuck on that huddle of corrals and sheds, with the trail winding blindly between, and I wasn't in love with the girl or with old King; but, all the same, I meant to go back the way I came, just for my own private satisfaction.

While I was saddling Shylock, in the opal-tinted sunrise, Potter came down and gave me the letter to the wagon-boss, an answer to the one I had brought.

"Here's some chuck the cook put up for yuh," he remarked, handing me a bundle tied up in a flour-sack. "You'll need it 'fore yuh get through to camp; you'll likely be longer going than yuh was comin'."

"Think so?" I smiled knowingly to myself and left him staring disapprovingly after me. I could easily give a straight guess at what he was thinking.

I jogged along as leisurely as I could without fretting Shylock, and, once clear of the home field, headed straight for King's Highway. It wasn't the wisest course I could take, perhaps, but it was like to prove the most exciting, and I never was remarkable for my wisdom. It seemed to me that it was necessary to my self-respect to return the way I came--and I may as well confess that I hoped Miss King was an early riser. As it was, I killed what time I could, and so spent a couple of hours where one would have sufficed.

Half a mile out from the mouth of the pa.s.s, I observed a human form crowning the peak of a sharp-pointed little b.u.t.te that rose up out of the prairie; since the form seemed to be in skirts, I made for the spot.

Shylock puffed up the steep slope, and at last stopped still and looked back at me in utter disgust; so I took the hint and got off, and led him up the rest of the way.

"Good morning. We meet on neutral ground," I greeted when I was close behind her. "I propose a truce."

She jumped a bit, and looked very much astonished to see me there so close. If it had been some other girl--say Ethel Mapleton--I'd have suspected the genuineness of that surprise; as it was, I could only think she had been very much absorbed not to hear me scrambling up there.

"You're an early bird," she said dryly, "to be so far from home." She glanced toward the pa.s.s, as though she would like to cut and run, but hated to give me the satisfaction.

"Well," I told her with inane complacency, "you will remember that 'it's the early bird that catches the worm.'"

"What a pretty speech!" she commented, and I saw what I'd done, and felt myself turn a beautiful purple. Compare her to a worm!

But she laughed when she saw how uncomfortable I was, and after that I was almost glad I'd said it; she _did_ have dimples--two of them--and--

The laugh, however, was no sign of incipient amiability, as I very soon discovered. She turned her back on me and went imperturbably on with her sketching; she was trying to put on paper the lights and shades of White Divide--and even a desire to be chivalrous will not permit me to lie and say that she was making any great success of it. I don't believe the Lord ever intended her for an artist.

"Aren't you giving King's Highway a much wider mouth than it's ent.i.tled to?" I asked mildly, after watching her for a minute.

"I should not be surprised," she told me haughtily, "if you some day wished it still wider."

"There wouldn't be the chance for fighting, if it was; and I take great pleasure in keeping the feud going."

"I thought you were anxious for a truce," she said recklessly, shading a slope so that it looked like the peak of a roof.

"I am," I retorted shamelessly. "I'm anxious for anything under the sun that will keep you talking to me. People might call that a flirtatious remark, but I plead not guilty; I wouldn't know how to flirt, even if I wanted to do so."

She turned her head and looked at me in a way that I could not misunderstand; it was plain, unvarnished scorn, and a ladylike anger, and a few other unpleasant things.

It made me think of a certain star in "The Taming of the Shrew."

"Fie, fie! unknit that threatening, unkind brow, And dart not scornful glances from those eyes, To wound thy neighbor and thine enemy,"

I declaimed, with rather a free adaptation to my own need.

Her brow positively refused to unknit. "Have you nothing to do but spout bad quotations from Shakespeare on a hilltop?" she wanted to know, in a particularly disagreeable tone.

"Plenty; I have yet to win that narrow pa.s.s," I said.

"Hardly to-day," she told me, with more than a shade of triumph. "Father is at home, and he heard of your trip yesterday."

If she expected to scare me by that! "Must our feud include your father?

When I met him a month ago, he gave me a cordial invitation to stop, if I ever happened this way."

She lifted those heavy lashes, and her eyes plainly spoke unbelief.

"It's a fact," I a.s.sured her calmly. "I met him one day in Laurel, and was fortunate enough to perform a service which earned his grat.i.tude. As I say, he invited me to come and see him; I told him I should be glad to have him visit me at the Bay State Ranch, and we embraced each other with much fervor."

"Indeed!" I could see that she persisted in doubting my veracity.

"Ask your father if we didn't," I said, much injured. I knew she wouldn't, though.

A scrambling behind us made me turn, and there was Perry Potter climbing up to us, his eyes sharper than ever, and his face so absolutely devoid of expression that it told me a good deal. I'll lay all I own he was a good bit astonished at what he saw! As for me, I could have kicked him back to the bottom of the hill--and I probably looked it.

"There was something I forgot to put in that note," he said evenly, just touching the brim of his hat in acknowledgment of the girl's presence. "I wrote another one. I'd like Ballard to get it as soon as you can make camp--conveniently." His eyes looked through me almost as if I weren't there.

My desire to kick him grew almost into mania. I took the note, saw at a glance that it was addressed to me, and said: "All right," in a tone quite different from the one I had been using to tease Miss King.

He gave me another sharp look, and went back the way he had come, leaving me standing there glaring after him. Miss King, I noticed, was sketching for dear life, and her cheeks were crimson.

When Potter had got to the bottom and was riding away, I unfolded the note and read:

Don't be a fool. For G.o.d's sake, have some sense and keep away from King's Highway.

I laughed, and Miss King looked up inquiringly. Following an impulse I've never yet been able to cla.s.sify, I showed her the note.

She read it calmly--I might say indifferently. "He is quite right," she said coldly. "I, too--if I cared enough--would advise you to keep away from King's Highway."

"But you don't care enough to advise me, and so I shall go," I said--and I had the satisfaction of seeing her teeth come down sharply on her lower lip. I waited a minute, watching her.

"You're very foolish," she said icily, and went at her sketching again.

I waited another minute; during that time she succeeded in making the pa.s.s look weird indeed, and a fearsome place to enter. I got reckless.

"You've spoiled that sketch," I said, stooping and taking it gently from her. "Give it to me, and it shall be a flag of truce with which I shall win my way through unscathed."

She started to her feet then, and her anger was worth facing for the glow it brought to eyes and cheeks, and the tremble that came to her lips.

"Mr. Carleton, you are perfectly detestable!" she cried.

"Miss King, you are perfectly adorable!" I returned, folding the sketch very carefully, so that it would slip easily into my pocket. "With so authentic a map of the enemy's stronghold, what need I fear? I go--but, on my honor, I shall shortly return."

She stood with her fingers clasped tightly in front of her, and watched me lead Shylock down that b.u.t.te--on the side toward the pa.s.s, if you are still in doubt of my intentions. When I say she watched me, I am making a guess; but I felt that she was, and it would be hard to disabuse my mind of that belief. And when I started, her fingers had been clinging tightly together. At the bottom I turned and waved my hat--and I know she saw that, for she immediately whirled and took to studying the southern sky-line. So I left her and galloped straight into the lion's den--to use an old simile.

I pa.s.sed through the gate and up to the house, Shylock pacing easily along as though we both felt a.s.sured of a welcome. Old King met me at his door as I was going by; I pulled up and gave him my very cheeriest good morning. He looked at me from under s.h.a.ggy, gray eyebrows.