Prairie Flowers Part 11

"Most of it splashed in over the side--see, when the waves break."

"Maybe," a.s.sented the Texan, carelessly, but in the darkness he stooped and with his fingers located a crack where the planking had been forced apart, through which the river water gushed copiously. Without a word he stepped to the girl's saddle and took down the rope. "We've got to get off here," he insisted, "where'd we be if some big tree like the one that knocked me cold would drift down on us?" As he talked he pa.s.sed the loop of the rope over his head and made it fast about his shoulders, and allowing ten or twelve feet of slack, knotted it securely to a ring in the end of the boat. "There, now I can get onto the rock an' by using the pole for a crow-bar, I can pry us off, then if I get left I'll just trail along on this rope until I can pull myself in."

The man's first effort resulted only in breaking a couple of feet from the end of his lever, but finally, by waiting to heave on his bar at the moment a wave pounded the side, he had the satisfaction of seeing the craft move slowly, inch by inch toward the deeper water. A moment later the man thanked his stars that he had thought of the rope, for without warning the boat lifted on a huge wave and slipped from the rock where it was instantly seized by the current and whirled down stream with a force that jerked him from his feet. Taking a deep breath, he clutched the line, and easily pulled himself to the boat, where the girl a.s.sisted him over the side.

They were entirely at the mercy of the river, now, for in the suddenness of their escape from the rock, the Texan had been unable to save the pole. Groping in the water for his boot he began to bail earnestly, and as Alice attempted to locate the other boot her hand came in contact with the inrus.h.i.+ng stream of water. "Oh, it _is_ leaking!" she cried in dismay. "I can feel it pouring through the bottom!"

"Yes, I found the leak back there on the rock. If we both bail for all we're worth maybe we can keep her afloat."

Alice found the other boot and for what seemed interminable hours the two bailed in silence. But despite their efforts, the water gained.

Nearly half full, the boat floated lower and more sluggishly. Waves broke over the side with greater frequency, adding their bit to the stream that flowed in through the bottom. At length, the girl dropped her boot with a sigh that was half a sob: "I can't lift another bootful," she murmured; "my shoulders and arms ache so--and I feel--faint."

"Just you prop yourself up in the corner an' rest a while," advised the Texan, with forced cheerfulness, "I can handle it all right, now."

Wearily, the girl obeyed. At the bow and stern of the square-ended boat, the bottom curved upward so that the water was not more than six or eight inches deep where she sank heavily against the rough planking, with an arm thrown over the gunwale. Her eyes closed, and despite the extreme discomfort of her position, utter weariness claimed her, and she sank into that borderland of oblivion that is neither restful sleep, nor impressionable wakefulness.

It may have been minutes later, or hours, that the voice of the Texan brought her jerkily erect. Vaguely she realized that she could see him dimly, and that his arm seemed to be pointing at something. With a sense of great physical effort, she managed to follow the direction of the pointing arm, and then he was speaking again: "It's breakin' daylight!

An' we're close to sh.o.r.e!" Alice nodded indifferently. It seemed, somehow, a trivial thing. She was conscious of a sense of annoyance that he should have rudely aroused her to tell her that it was breaking daylight, and that they were close to sh.o.r.e. Her eyes closed slowly, and her head sank onto the arm that lay numb and uncomfortable along the gunwale.

The Texan was on his feet, eagerly scanning his surroundings that grew momentarily more distinct in the rapidly increasing light. The farther sh.o.r.e showed dimly and the man emitted a low whistle of surprise. "Must be a good four or five miles wide," he muttered, as his eyes took in the broad expanse of water that rolled between. He saw at a glance that he was well out of the main channel, for all about him were tiny islands formed by the summits of low b.u.t.tes and ridges while here and there the green tops of willows protruded above the surface of the water swaying crazily in the current.

"Some flood!" he muttered, and turned his attention to the nearer bank.

The boat floated sluggishly not more than fifty or sixty feet from the steep slope that rose to a considerable height. "Driftin' plumb along the edge of the bench," he opined, "if I only had the pole." He untied the rope by which he had dragged himself aboard from the rock, and coiled it slowly, measuring the distance with his eye. "Too short by twenty feet," he concluded, "an' nothin' to tie to if I was near enough." He glanced downward with concern. The boat was settling lower and lower. The gunwales were scarcely a foot above the water. "She'll be divin' out from under us directly," he muttered. "I wonder how deep it is?" Hanging the coiled rope on the horn of the saddle he slipped over the edge, but although he let down to the full reach of his arms his feet did not touch bottom and he drew himself aboard again. The boat was moving very slowly, drifting lazily across a bit of slack water that had backed into the mouth of a wide coulee. Fifty yards away, at the head of the little bay formed by the backwater, the Texan saw a bit of level, gra.s.s-covered beach. Glancing helplessly at his rope, he noticed that the horse was gazing hungrily at the gra.s.s, and in an instant, the man sprang into action. Catching up his boots he secured them to the saddle by means of a dangling pack string, and hastily uncoiling the rope he slipped the noose over the horn of the saddle. The other end he knotted and springing to the girl's side shook her roughly. "Wake up! Wake up!

In a minute it'll be too late!" Half lifting her to her feet he hastily explained his plan, as he talked he tore the brilliant scarf from his neck and tied it firmly about his own wrist and hers. Making her take firm hold about his neck he seized the knotted rope with one hand, while with the other he reached for the ax and brought the handle down with a crash against the horse's flank. The sudden blow caused the frightened animal to leap clean over the low gunwale. He went completely out of sight, but a moment later his head appeared, and snorting, and thras.h.i.+ng about, he struck out for sh.o.r.e. When the slack was out of the line the Texan threw his arm about the girl's waist, and together they leaped over the side in the wake of the swimming horse. Even with the small amount of slack that remained, the jerk when the line pulled taut all but loosened the Texan's hold. Each moment seemed an eternity, as the weight of both hung upon the Texan's one-handed grip. "Hold for all you're worth!" he gasped, and he felt her arms tighten about him, relinquished the hold on her waist and with a mighty effort gripped the rope with the hand thus freed. Even with two hands it was no mean task to maintain his hold, for the current slight as it was, swung them down so the pull was directly against it. The Texan felt the girl's grasp on his neck weaken. He shouted a word of encouragement, but it fell on deaf ears, her hands slipped over his shoulders, and at the same instant the man felt the strain of her weight on his arm as the scarf seemed to cut into the flesh. The Texan felt himself growing numb. He seemed to be slipping--slipping--from some great height--slipping slowly down a long, soft incline. In vain he struggled to check the slow easy descent. He was slipping faster, now--fairly shooting toward the bottom. Somehow he didn't seem to care. There were rocks at the bottom--this he knew--but the knowledge did not worry him. Time enough to worry about that when he struck--but this smooth, easy slide was pleasant. Cras.h.!.+ There was a blinding flash of light. Fountains of stars played before his eyes like fireworks on the Fourth of July. An agonizing pain shot through his body--and then--oblivion.

A buckskin horse, with two water-soaked boots las.h.i.+ng his flanks and trailing a lariat rope from the horn of his saddle, dashed madly up a coulee. The pack string broke and the terrifying thing that lashed him on, fell to the ground with a thud. The run became a trot, and the trot a walk. When the coulee widened into a gra.s.sy plain, he warily circled the rope that dragged from the saddle, and deciding it was harmless, fell eagerly to eating the soggy buffalo gra.s.s that carpeted the ground.

While back at the mouth of the coulee lay two unconscious forms, their bodies partly awash in the lapping waves of the rising river.

CHAPTER X

JANET MCWHORTER

The Texan stirred uneasily. Vaguely, he sensed that something was wrong.

His head ached horribly but he didn't trouble to open his eyes. He was in the corral lying cramped against the fence where the Red King had thrown him, and with bared teeth, and forefeet pawing the air, the Red King was coming toward him. Another moment and those terrible hoofs would be striking, cutting, trampling him into the trodden dirt of the corral. Why didn't someone haze him off? Would they sit there on the fence and see him killed? "Whoa, boy--Whoa!" In vain he struggled to raise an arm--it was held fast, and his legs were pinned to the ground by a weight! He struggled violently, his eyes flew open and--there was no Red King, no corral--only a gra.s.sed slope strewn with rocks against one of which his head rested. But why was he tied? With great effort he rolled over. The weight that held his legs s.h.i.+fted, and he found that one of his arms was free. He sat up and stared, and instantly recollection of the events of the night, brutally vivid, crowded his brain. There was no slow, painful tracing step by step, of the happenings of the past twelve hours. The whole catenation in proper sequence presented itself in one all-embracing vision--a scene painted on canvas, rather than the logical continuity of a screen picture.

The unconscious form of the girl lay across his legs. Her temple, and part of her cheek that lay within range of his vision were white with the pallor of death, and the hand that stretched upward toward his own, showed blue and swollen from the effect of the tightly knotted scarf.

Swiftly the man untied the knots, and staggering to his feet, raised the limp form and half-carried, half-dragged it to a tiny plateau higher up the slope. Very gently he laid the girl on the gra.s.s, loosened her s.h.i.+rt at the throat, and removed her wet boots. Her hands and feet were ice cold, and he chafed them vigorously. Gradually, under the rubbing the sluggish blood flowed. The blue look faded from her hand and a slight tinge of colour crept into her cheeks. With a sigh of relief, the Texan grasped her by the shoulder and shook her roughly. After a few moments her eyelids fluttered slightly, and her lips moved. The shaking continued, and he bent to catch the muttered words:

"Win----"

"Yeh, Win'll be 'long, directly. Come, wake up!"

"Win--dear--I'm--so--sleepy."

She was asleep again as the words left her lips and the man, squatting on his heels, nodded approval. "That's what I wanted to know--that she ain't drowned. If there'd been any water in her lungs she'd have coughed."

He stood up and surveyed his surroundings. At the water's edge, not a hundred feet below the spot where the horse had dragged them against the rocks, the flat-boat lay heavily aground. Relieved of its burden, it had been caught in the slowly revolving back current that circled the tiny bay, and had drifted ash.o.r.e. Removing the scarf from his wrist, he knotted it into place and descended to the boat where he fished his hat from the half-filled hull. The handle of the ax caught his eye and searching his pockets, he examined his supply of matches, and cast the worthless sticks from him with an oath: "Heads plumb soaked off, or I could build her a fire!"

As he ascended the bank the sun just topped the rim of the bench. Its rays felt grateful to the chilled man as he stood looking down at the sleeping girl. "It'll dry her, an' warm her up, while I'm huntin' that d.a.m.n cayuse," he muttered. "The quicker she gets to some ranch house, the better it'll be. I wish I knew where I'm at."

Once more he descended to the water's edge, and searched the ground. It was but the work of a moment to pick up the trail of the galloping horse, and he followed it up the coulee, making his way gingerly in his stockinged feet among the loose stones and patches of p.r.i.c.kly pears.

"Wish I'd left my boots in the boat, but I figured old Powder Face would stop when he got to sh.o.r.e instead of smas.h.i.+n' us again' the rocks an' lightin' out like the devil was after him--he's old enough to know better. An' I wonder how in h.e.l.l she come to be ridin' him? Powder Face is one of Dad's own special horses."

The coulee wound interminably. The cowboy glanced at his feet where a toe protruded from a hole in his sock, and seating himself on a boulder he removed the socks and crammed them into his pocket. "Wouldn't be nothin' left of 'em but legs in a little bit," he grumbled, and instinctively felt for his tobacco and papers. He scowled at the soggy ma.s.s and replaced them. "Ain't got a match even if I did dry the tobacco. I sure feel like I'd died an' went to h.e.l.l!"

He continued along the coulee limping painfully across stretches of sharp stones and avoiding the innumerable patches of p.r.i.c.kly pears with which the floor of the valley was dotted. Rounding a sharp spur of rock that protruded into the ravine, he halted abruptly and stared at his boots which lay directly in his path. He grinned as he examined the broken thong. "I've be'n cussin' busted pack-strings all my life," he muttered, "but this particular string has wiped out the whole score again' 'em." Removing his leather chaps, he seated himself, drew on his socks, and inserted a foot into a boot. In vain he pulled and tugged at the straps. The wet leather gripped the damp sock like a vise. He stood up and stamped and pulled but the foot stuck fast at the ankle of the boot. Withdrawing the foot, he fished in his hip pocket and withdrew a thin piece of soap from the folds of a red cotton handkerchief. Once again he sat down and proceeded to rub the soap thickly upon the heels and insteps of his socks and inside of his boots, whereupon, after much pulling and stamping, he stood properly shod and drew on his chaps.

A short distance farther on, a cattle trail zigzagged down the steep side of the coulee. The Texan paused at the foot of it. "Reckon I'll just climb up onto the bank an' take a look around. With that rope trailin' along from the saddle horn, that d.a.m.n cayuse might run his fool head off."

From the rim of the coulee, the man gazed about him, searching for a familiar landmark. A quarter of a mile away, a conical b.u.t.te rose to a height of a hundred feet above the level of the broken plain, and the Texan walked over and laboriously climbed its steep side. He sank down upon the topmost pinnacle and studied the country minutely. "Just below the edge of the bad lands," he muttered. "The Little Rockies loom up plain, an' the Bear Paws an' Judiths look kind of dim. I'm way off my range down here. This part of the country don't look like it had none too thick of a population." In vain his eyes swept the vast expanse of plain for the sight of a ranch house. He rose in disgust. "I've got to find that d.a.m.n cayuse an' get _her_ out of this, somehow." As he was about to begin the descent his eye caught a thin thread of smoke that rose, apparently from a coulee some three or four miles to the eastward.

"Maybe some nester's place, or maybe only an' Injun camp, but whatever it is, my best bet is to hit for it. I might be all day trailin' Powder Face. Whoever it is, they'll have a horse or two, an' believe me, they'll part with 'em." He scrambled quickly down to the bench and started in the direction of the smoke, and as he walked, he removed the six-gun from its holster and after wiping it carefully, made sure that it was in working condition.

The Texan's course lay "crossways of the country," that is, in order to reach his objective he must needs cross all the innumerable coulees and branches that found their way to the Missouri. And as he had not travelled far back from the river these coulees were deep and their steep sides taxed his endurance to the utmost. At the bottom of each coulee he drank sparingly of the bitter alkali water, and wet the bandage about his throbbing head. After each climb he was forced to rest. A walk of three or four miles in high-heeled riding boots a.s.sumes the proportions of a real journey, even under the most favourable circ.u.mstances, but with the precipitous descents, the steep climbs, and the alkali flats between the coulees, which in dry weather are dazzling white, and hard and level as a floor, now merely grey greasy beds of slime into which he sank to the ankles at each step, the trip proved a nightmare of torture.

At the end of an hour he figured that he had covered half the distance.

He was plodding doggedly, every muscle aching from the unaccustomed strain. His feet, which burned and itched where the irritating soap rubbed into his skin, had swollen until the boots held them in a vise-like grip of torture. At each step he lifted pounds of glue-like mud which clung to the legs of his leather chaps in a thick grey smear.

And each step was a separate, conscious, painful effort, that required a concentration of will to consummate.

And so he plodded, this Texan, who would have cursed the petty mishap of an ill-thrown loop to the imminent d.a.m.nation of his soul, enduring the physical torture in stoic silence. Once or twice he smiled grimly, the cynical smile that added years to the boyish face. "When I see her safe at some ranch, I'll beat it," he muttered thickly. "I'll go somewhere an' finish my jamboree an' then I'll hit fer some fresh range." To his surprise he suddenly found that the mere thought of whisky was nauseating to him. His memory took him back to a college town in his native State. "It used to be that way," he grinned, "when I'd get soused, I couldn't look at a drink for a week. I reckon stayin' off of it for a whole year has about set me back where I started."

He half-climbed, half-fell down the steep side of a coulee and dipped his aching head in the cool water at the bottom. With a stick he sc.r.a.ped the thick smear of grey mud from his chaps and boots, and washed them in the creek. He rose to his feet and stood looking down into a clear little pool. "By G.o.d, I can't go--like that!" he said aloud. "I've got to stay an' face Win! I've got to know that he don't think there's anything--wrong--with her!"

Instead of climbing the opposite slope, he followed down the coulee, for he had seen from the edge that it led into a creek valley of considerable width, above the rim of which rose the thin grey plume of smoke. Near the mouth of the coulee he crawled through a wire fence.

"First time a nester's fence ever looked good to me," he grinned, and at a shallow pool, paused to remove the last trace of mud from his chaps, wash his face and hands, box his hat into the proper peak, and jerk the brilliant scarf into place.

"She can rest up here till I find Win," he said aloud, and stepped into the valley, trying not to limp as he picked his way among the scattered rocks. "Sheep outfit," he muttered, as he noted the close-cropped gra.s.s, and the stacked panels of a lambing pen. Then, rounding a thicket of scrub willows, he came suddenly upon the outfit, itself.

He halted abruptly, as his eyes took in every detail of the scene. A little dirt roofed cabin of logs, a rambling straw thatched sheep shed, a small log barn, and a pole corral in which two horses dozed dreamily.

The haystacks were behind the barn, and even as he looked, a generous forkful of hay rolled over the top of the corral fence, and the horses crossed over and thrust their muzzles into its fragrant depths. A half-dozen weak old ewes snipped half-heartedly at the short buffalo gra.s.s, and three or four young lambs frisked awkwardly about the door-yard on their ungainly legs.

Another forkful of hay rolled over the corral fence, and making his way around the barn, the Texan came abruptly face to face with Miss Janet McWhorter. The girl stood, pitchfork in hand, upon a ledge of the half-depleted haystack and surveyed him calmly, as a startled expression swiftly faded from her large, blue-black eyes. "Well you're the second one this morning; what do _you_ want?"

The Texan noticed that the voice was rich, with low throaty tones and also he noticed that it held a repellent note. There was veiled hostility--even contempt in the peculiar emphasis of the "you." He swept the Stetson from his head: "I'm afoot," he answered, simply, "I'd like to borrow a horse."

The girl jabbed the fork into the hay, gathered her skirts about her, and slipped gracefully from the stack. She walked over and stood directly before him. "This is McWhorter's outfit," she announced, as if the statement were a good and sufficient answer to his plea.

The cowboy looking straight into the blue-black eyes, detected a faint gleam of surprise in their depths, that her statement apparently meant nothing to him. He smiled: "Benton's my name--Tex Benton, range foreman of the Y Bar. And, is this Mrs. McWhorter?"

"The Y Bar!" exclaimed the girl, and Tex noticed that the gleam and surprise hardened into a glance of open skepticism. "Who owns the Y Bar, now?"

"Same man that's owned it for the last twenty years--Mr. Colston."

"You must know him pretty well if you're his foreman?"