Claim Number One Part 27

"Let me sell you the nails," he requested. "I can give 'em to you as cheap as you can git 'em in Meander."

CHAPTER XIV

"LIKE A WOLF"

Agnes had been on her homestead almost a week. She was making a brave "stagger," as Smith described all amateurish efforts, toward cutting up some dry cottonwood limbs into stove-lengths before her tent on the afternoon that Jerry Boyle rode across the ford.

While she had not forgotten him, she had begun to hope that he had gone back to Comanche, and his sudden appearance there gave her an unpleasant shock. He drew up near her with a friendly word, and dismounted with a cowboy swing to his long body and legs.

"Well, Agnes, you dodged me in Meander," said he. "You've located quite a piece up the river and off the stage-road, haven't you?"

"But not far enough, it seems," she answered, a little weariness in her voice, as of one who turns unwillingly to face at last something which has been put away for an evil day.

"No need for us to take up old quarrels, Agnes," he chided with a show of gentleness.

"I don't want to quarrel with you, Jerry; I never did quarrel with you,"

she disclaimed.

"'Misunderstandings' would be a better word then, I suppose," he corrected. "But you could have knocked me over with a feather when you repudiated me over there at Comanche that day. I suppose I should have known that you were under an alias before I made that break, but I didn't know it, Agnes, believe _me_."

"How could you?" she said, irritably. "That was nothing; let it rest.

But you understand that it was for the sake of others that the alias was--and is--used; not for my own."

"Of course, Agnes. But what do you want to be wasting yourself on this rough country for? There are more suitable places in Wyoming for you than this lonesome spot. What's the object, anyhow?"

"I am building here the City of Refuge," said she, "and its solitude will be its walls."

"Ready for the time when _he_ comes back, I suppose?"

She nodded a.s.sent slowly, as if grudging him that share of the knowledge of her inner life.

"Poor old kid, you've got a job ahead of you!" he commiserated.

A resentful flush crept into her face, but she turned aside, gathering her sticks as if to hide her displeasure. Boyle laughed.

"Pardon the familiarity--'vulgar familiarity' you used to call it--Agnes. But 'what's bred in the bone,' you know."

"It doesn't matter so much when there's no one else around, but it's awkward before people."

"You wouldn't marry me on account of my tongue!" said he with sour reminiscence.

"It wasn't so much that, Jerry," she chided, "and you know it perfectly well."

"Oh, well, if a man does take a drink now and then----" he discounted.

"But many drinks, and frequently, are quite different," she reproved.

"We'll not fuss about it."

"Far from it," she agreed.

"I didn't come down to open old matters, although I suppose you thought that was my intention when you dodged me and stuck so close to that tin-horn doctor up at Meander."

"It's comforting to know you haven't come for--_that_," said she, ignoring his coa.r.s.e reference to Slavens.

"No; things change a good deal in four years' time, even sentiment--and names."

"But it wouldn't be asking too much to expect you to respect some of the changes?"

"I don't suppose," he mused, "that many people around here care whether a man's name is the one he goes by, or whether it's the one he gets his mail under at the post-office at Comanche. That's generally believed to be a man's own business. Of course, he might carry it too far, but that's his own lookout."

"Are you on your way to Comanche?" she asked.

Boyle motioned her to the trunk of the cottonwood whose branches she had been chopping into fuel, with graceful and unspoken invitation to sit down and hear the tale of his projected adventures.

"I've been wearing a pair of these high-heeled boots the past few days for the first time since I rode the range," he explained, "and they make my ankles tired when I stand around."

He seated himself beside her on the fallen log.

"No, I'm not going to Comanche," said he. "I came down here to see you.

They gave me the worst horse in the stable at Meander, and he'll never be able to carry me back there without a long rest. I'll have to make camp by the river."

She glanced at his horse, on the saddle of which hung, cowboy fas.h.i.+on, a bag of grub which also contained a frying-pan and coffeepot, she knew, from having seen many outfits like it in the stores at Comanche. A blanket was rolled behind the high cantle. As for the horse, it seemed as fresh and likely as if it had come three miles instead of thirty. She believed from that evidence that Jerry's talk about being forced to make camp was all contrived. He had come prepared for a stay.

"I got into the habit of carrying those traps around with me when I was a kid," he explained, following her eyes, "and you couldn't drive me two miles away from a hotel without them. They come in handy, too, in a pinch like this, I'm here to tell you."

"It's something like a wise man taking his coat, I suppose."

"Now you've got it," commended Boyle.

"But Smith, who used to drive the stage, could have fixed you up all right," she told him. "He's got a tent to lodge travelers in down by his new store. You must have seen it as you pa.s.sed?"

"Yes; and there's another crook!" said Boyle with plain feeling on the matter. "But I didn't come down here to see Smith or anybody else but you. It's business."

He looked at her with severity in his dark face, as if to show her that all thoughts of tenderness and sentiment had gone out of his mind.

"I'm listening," said she.

"There's a man down here a few miles spreadin' himself around on a piece of property that belongs to me," declared Boyle, "and I want you to help me get him off."

She looked at him in amazement.

"I don't understand what you mean," said she.

"Slavens."