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Title: The Uphill Climb

Author: B. M. Bower

Illustrator: Charles M. Russell

Release date: December 25, 2004 [eBook #14456]
                Most recently updated: December 19, 2020

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Project Gutenberg Beginners Projects, Jon King,


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THE UPHILL CLIMB

by

B. M. BOWER

Author of _Good Indian_, _Chip, of the Flying U_, etc.

With Illustrations by CHARLES M. RUSSELL

New York
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers

1913







[Illustration: "Hell-o, Ford, where the blazes did you drop down from?"
a welcoming voice yelled. Frontispiece.]




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

   I  "Married! And I Don't Know Her Name!"
  II  Wanted: Information
 III  One Way to Drown Sorrow
  IV  Reaction
   V  "I Can Spare this Particular Girl"
  VI  The Problem of Getting Somewhere
 VII  The Foreman of the Double Cross
VIII  "I Wish You'd Quit Believing in Me!"
  IX  Impressions
   X  In Which the Demon Opens an Eye and Yawns
  XI  "It's Going to Be an Uphill Climb!"
 XII  At Hand-Grips with the Demon
XIII  A Plan Gone Wrong
 XIV  The Feminine Point of View
  XV  The Climb
 XVI  To Find and Free a Wife
XVII  What Ford Found at the Top




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"Hell-o, Ford, where the blazes did you drop down from?" a welcoming
voice yelled. (Frontispiece)

She lifted her head and looked at him, and drew away.

Dick tottered upon the step and went off backward.

"Ford, I'm no coquette," she said straightforwardly.





CHAPTER I

"Married! And I Don't Know Her Name!"


Ford lifted his arms above his head to yawn as does a man who has slept
too heavily, found his biceps stiffened and sore, and massaged them
gingerly with his finger-tips. His eyes took on the vacancy of memory
straining at the leash of forgetfulness. He sighed largely, swung his
head slowly from left to right in mute admission of failure to grasp
what lay just behind his slumber, and thereby discovered other muscles
that protested against sudden movement. He felt his neck with a careful,
rubbing gesture. One hand strayed to his left cheekbone, hovered there
tentatively, wandered to the bridge of his nose, and from there dropped
inertly to the bed.

"Lordy me! I must have been drunk last night," he said aloud,
mechanically taking the straight line of logic from effect to cause, as
much experience had taught him to do.

"You was--and then some," replied an unemotional voice from somewhere
behind him.

"Oh! That you, Sandy?" Ford lay quiet, trying to remember. His
finger-tips explored the right side of his face; now and then he winced
under their touch, light as it was.

"I must have carried an awful load," he decided, again unerringly taking
the backward trail from effect to cause. Later, logic carried him
farther. "Who'd I lick, Sandy?"

"Several." The unseen Sandy gave one the impression of a man smoking and
speaking between puffs. "Can't say just who--you did start in on. You
wound up on--the preacher."

"Preacher?" Ford's tone matched the flicker of interest in his eyes.

"Uhn-hunh."

Ford meditated a moment. "I don't recollect ever licking a preacher
before," he observed curiously.

Life, stale and drab since his eyes opened, gathered to itself the pale
glow of awakening interest. Ford rose painfully, inch by inch, until he
was sitting upon the side of the bed, got from there to his feet, looked
down and saw that he was clothed to his boots, and crossed slowly to
where a cheap, flyspecked looking-glass hung awry upon the wall. His
self-inspection was grave and minute. His eyes held the philosophic calm
of accustomedness.

"Who put this head on me, Sandy?" he inquired apathetically. "The
preacher?"

"I d' know. You had it when you come up outa the heap. You licked the
preacher afterwards, I think."

Sandy was reading a ragged-backed novel while he smoked; his interest in
Ford and Ford's battered countenance was plainly perfunctory.

Outside, the rain fell aslant in the wind and drummed dismally upon the
little window beside Sandy. It beat upon the door and trickled
underneath in a thin rivulet to a shallow puddle, formed where the floor
was sunken. A dank warmth and the smell of wet wood heating to the
blazing point pervaded the room and mingled with the coarse aroma of
cheap, warmed-over coffee.

"Sandy!"

"Hunh?"

"Did anybody get married last night?" The leash of forgetfulness was
snapping, strand by strand. Troubled remembrance peered out from behind
the philosophic calm in Ford's eyes.

"Unh-hunh." Sandy turned a leaf and at the same time flicked the ashes
from his cigarette with a mechanical finger movement. "You did." He
looked briefly up from the page. "That's why you licked the preacher,"
he assisted, and went back to his reading.

A subdued rumble of mid-autumn thunder jarred sullenly overhead. Ford
ceased caressing the purple half-moon which inclosed his left eye and
began moodily straightening his tie.

"Now what'n hell did I do that for?" he inquired complainingly.

"Search _me_," mumbled Sandy over his book. He read half a page
farther. "Do what for?" he asked, with belated attention.

Ford swore and went over and lifted the coffeepot from the stove, shook
it, looked in, and made a grimace of disgust as the steam smote him in
the face. "Paugh!" He set down the pot and turned upon Sandy.

"Get your nose out of that book a minute and talk!" he commanded in a
tone beseeching for all its surly growl. "You say I got married. I kinda
recollect something of the kind. What I want to know is who's the lady?
And what did I do it for?" He sat down, leaned his bruised head upon his
palms, and spat morosely into the stove-hearth. "Lordy me," he grumbled.
"I don't know any lady well enough to marry her--and I sure can't think
of any female lady that would marry me--not even by proxy!"

Sandy closed the book upon a forefinger and regarded Ford with that
blend of pity, amusement, and tolerance which is so absolutely
unbearable to one who has behaved foolishly and knows it. Ford would
not have borne the look if he had seen it; but he was caressing a
bruise on the point of his jaw and staring dejectedly into the meager
blaze which rimmed the lower edge of the stove's front door, and so
remained unconscious of his companion's impertinence.

"Who was the lady, Sandy?" he begged dispiritedly, after a silence.

"Search _me_" Sandy replied again succinctly. "Some stranger that blew
in here with a license and the preacher and said you was her fee-ancy."
(Sandy read romances, mostly, and permitted his vocabulary to profit
thereby.) "You never denied it, even when she said your name was a nomdy
gair; and you let her marry you, all right."

"Are you sure of that?" Ford looked up from under lowering eyebrows.

"Unh-hunh--that's what you done, all right." Sandy's voice was
dishearteningly positive.

"Lordy me!" gasped Ford under his breath.

There was a silence which slid Sandy's interest back into his book. He
turned a leaf and was half-way down the page before he was interrupted
by more questions.

"Say! Where's she at now?" Ford spoke with a certain furtive lowering of
his voice.

"I d' know." Sandy read a line with greedy interest. "She took the
'leven-twenty," he added then. Another mental lapse. "You seen her to
the train yourself."

"The hell I did!" Ford's good eye glared incredulity, but Sandy was
again following hungrily the love-tangle of an unpronounceable count in
the depths of the Black Forest, and he remained perfectly unconscious of
the look and the mental distress which caused it. Ford went back to
studying the meager blaze and trying to remember. He might be able to
extract the whole truth from Sandy, but that would involve taking his
novel away from him--by force, probably; and the loss of the book would
be very likely to turn Sandy so sullen that he would refuse to answer,
or to tell the truth, at any rate; and Ford's muscles were very, very
sore. He did not feel equal to a scuffle with Sandy, just then. He
repeated something which sounded like an impromptu litany and had to do
with the ultimate disposal of his own soul.

"Hunh?" asked Sandy.

Whereupon Ford, being harassed mentally and in great physical discomfort
as well, specifically disposed of Sandy's immortal soul also.

Sandy merely grinned at him. "You don't want to take it to heart like
that," he remonstrated cheerfully.

Ford, by way of reply, painstakingly analyzed the chief deficiencies of
Sandy's immediate relatives, and was beginning upon his grandparents
when Sandy reached barren ground in the shape of three long paragraphs
of snow, cold, and sunrise artistically blended with prismatic
adjectives. He waded through the first paragraph and well into the
second before he mired in a hopeless jumble of unfamiliar polysyllables.
Sandy was not the skipping kind; he threw the book upon a bench and gave
his attention wholly to his companion in time to save his
great-grandfather from utter condemnation.

"What's eating you, Ford?" he began pacifically--for Sandy was a
weakling. "You might be a lot worse off. You're married, all right
enough, from all I c'n hear--but she's left town. It ain't as if you had
to live with her."

Ford looked at him a minute and groaned dismally.

"Oh, I ain't meaning anything against the lady herself," Sandy hastened
to assure him. "Far as I know, she's all right--"

"What I want to know," Ford broke in, impatient of condolence when he
needed facts, "is, who _is_ she? And what did I go and marry her for?"

"Well, you'll have to ask somebody that knows. I never seen her, myself,
except when you was leadin' her down to the depot, and you and her
talked it over private like--the way I heard it. I was gitting a
hair-cut and shampoo at the time. First I heard, you was married. I
should think you'd remember it yourself." Sandy looked at Ford
curiously.

"I kinda remember standing up and holding hands with some woman and
somebody saying: 'I now pronounce you man and wife,'" Ford confessed
miserably, his face in his hands again. "I guess I must have done it,
all right."

Sandy was kind enough when not otherwise engaged. He got up and put a
basin of water on the stove to warm, that Ford might bathe his hurts,
and he made him a very creditable drink with lemon and whisky and not
too much water.

"The way I heard it," he explained further, "this lady come to town
looking for Frank Ford Cameron, and seen you, and said you was him.
So--"

"I ain't," Ford interrupted indignantly. "My name's Ford Campbell and
I'll lick any darned son-of-a-gun--"

"Likely she made a mistake," Sandy soothed. "Frank Ford Cameron, she had
you down for, and you went ahead and married her willing enough. Seems
like there was some hurry-up reason that she explained to you private.
She had the license all made out and brought a preacher down from
Garbin. Bill Wright said he overheard you tellin' her you'd do anything
to oblige a lady--"

"That's the worst of it; I'm always too damned polite when I'm drunk!"
grumbled Ford.

Sandy, looking upon his bruised and distorted countenance and recalling,
perhaps, the process by which Ford reached that lamentable condition,
made a sound like a diplomatically disguised laugh. "Not always," he
qualified mildly.

"Anyway," he went on, "you sure married her. That's straight goods. Bill
Wright and Rock was the witnesses. And if you don't know why you done
it--" Sandy waved his hands to indicate his inability to enlighten Ford.
"Right afterwards you went out to the bar and had another drink--all
this takin' place in the hotel dining-room, and Mother McGrew down with
neuralagy and not bein' present--and one drink leads to another, you
know. I come in then, and the bunch was drinkin' luck to you fast as Sam
could push the bottles along. Then you went back to the lady--and if you
don't know what took place you can search me--and pretty soon Bill said
you'd took her and her grip to the depot. Anyway, when you come back,
you wasn't troubled with no attack of politeness!

"You went in the air with Bill, first," continued Sandy, testing with
his finger the temperature of the water in the basin, "and bawled him
out something fierce for standing by and seeing you make a break like
that without doing something. You licked him--and then Rock bought in
because some of your remarks kinda included him too. I d' know," said
Sandy, scratching his unshaven jaw reflectively, "just how the fight did
go between you 'n' Rock. You was both using the whole room, I know. Near
as I could make out, you--or maybe it was Rock--tromped on Big Jim's
bunion. This cold spell's hard on bunions--and Big Jim went after you
both with blood in his eye.

"After that"--Sandy spread his arms largely--"it was go-as-you-please.
Sam and me was the only ones that kept out, near as I can recollect, and
when it thinned up a bit, you had Aleck down and was pounding the liver
outa him, and Big Jim was whanging away at you, and Rock was clawin' Jim
in the back of the neck, and you was all kickin' like bay steers in
brandin' time. I reached in under the pile and dragged you out by one
leg and left the rest of 'em fighting. They never seemed to miss you
none." He grinned. "Jim commenced to bump Aleck's head up and down on
the floor instead of you--and I knew he didn't have nothing against
Aleck."

"Bill--"

"Bill, he'd quit right in the start." Sandy's grin became a laugh.
"Seems like pore old Bill always gits in bad when you commence on your
third pint. You wasn't through, though, seems like. You was going to
start in at the beginning and en-core the whole performance, and you
started out after Bill. Bill, he was lookin' for a hole big enough to
crawl into by that time. But you run into the preacher. And you licked
him to a fare-you-well and had him crying real tears before I or anybody
else could stop you."

"What'd I lick him for?" Ford inquired in a tone of deep
discouragement.

Sandy's indeterminate, blue-gray eyes rounded with puzzlement.

"Search me," he repeated automatically. But later he inadvertently shed
enlightenment. He laughed, bending double, and slapping his thigh at the
irresistible urge of a mental picture.

"Thought I'd die," he gasped. "Me and Sam was watching from the door.
You had the preacher by the collar, shakin' him, and once in awhile
liftin' him clean off the ground on the toe of your boot; and you kept
saying: 'A sober man, and a preacher--and you'd marry that girl to a
fellow like me!' And then biff! And he'd let out a squawk. 'A drinkin',
fightin', gamblin' son-of-a-gun like me, you swine!' you'd tell him. And
when we finally pulled you loose, he picked up his hat and made a run
for it."

Ford meditated gloomily. "I'll lick him again, and lick him when I'm
sober, by thunder!" he promised grimly. "Who was he, do you know?"

"No, I don't. Little, dried-up geezer with a nose like a kit-fox's and
a whine to his voice. He won't come around here no more."

The door opened gustily and a big fellow with a skinned nose and a
whimsical pair of eyes looked in, hesitated while he stared hard at
Ford, and then entered and shut the door by the simple method of
throwing his shoulders back against it.

"Hello, old sport--how you comin'?" he cried cheerfully. "Kinda wet for
makin' calls, but when a man's loaded down with a guilty conscience--"
He sighed somewhat ostentatiously and pulled forward a chair rejuvenated
with baling-wire braces between the legs, and a cowhide seat. "What's
that cookin'--coffee, or sheep-dip?" he inquired facetiously of Sandy,
though his eyes dwelt solicitously upon Ford's bowed head. He leaned
forward and slapped Ford in friendly fashion upon the shoulder.

"Buck up--'the worst is yet to come,'" he shouted, and laughed with an
exaggeration of cheerfulness. "You can't ever tell when death or
matrimony's goin' to get a man. By hokey, seems like there's no dodgin'
either one."

Ford lifted a bloodshot eye to the other. "And I always counted you for
a friend, Bill," he reproached heavily. "Sandy says I licked you good
and plenty. Well, looks to me like you had it coming, all right."

"Well--I got it, didn't I?" snorted Bill, his hand lifting involuntarily
to his nose. "And I ain't bellering, am I?" His mouth took an abused,
downward droop. "I ain't holdin' any grudge, am I? Why, Sandy here can
tell you that I held one side of you up whilst he was leadin' the other
side of you home! And I am sorry I stood there and seen you get married
off and never lifted a finger; I'm darned sorry. I shoulda hollered
misdeal, all right. I know it now." He pulled remorsefully at his wet
mustache, which very much resembled a worn-out sharing brush.

Ford straightened up, dropped a hand upon his thigh, and thereby
discovered another sore spot, which he caressed gently with his palm.

"Say, Bill, you were there, and you saw her. On the square now--what's
she like? And what made me marry her?"

Bill pulled so hard upon his mustache that his teeth showed; his breath
became unpleasantly audible with the stress of emotion. "So help me, I
can't tell you what she's like, Ford," he confessed. "I don't remember
nothing about her looks, except she looked good to me, and I never seen
her before, and her hair wasn't red--I always remember red hair when I
see it, drunk or sober. You see," he added as an extenuation, "I was
pretty well jagged myself. I musta been. I recollect I was real put out
because my name wasn't Frank Ford--By hokey!" He laid an impressive
forefinger upon Ford's knee and tapped several times. "I never knew your
name was rightly Frank Ford Cameron. I always--"

"It ain't." Ford winced and drew away from the tapping process, as if
his knee also was sensitive that morning.

"You told her it was. I mind that perfectly, because I was so su'prised
I swore right out loud and was so damned ashamed I couldn't apologize.
And say! She musta been a real lady or I wouldn't uh felt that way about
it!" Bill glanced triumphantly from one to the other. "Take it from me,
you married a lady, Ford. Drunk or sober, I always make it a point to
speak proper before the ladies--t'other kind don't count--and when I
make a break, you betcher life I remember it. She's a real lady--I'd
swear to that on a stack uh bibles ten feet high!" He settled back and
unbuttoned his steaming coat with the air of a man who has established
beyond question the vital point of an argument.

"Did I tell her so myself, or did I just let it go that way?" Ford, as
his brain cleared, stuck close to his groping for the essential facts.

"Well, now--I ain't dead sure as to that. Maybe Rock'll remember. Kinda
seems to me now, that she asked you if you was really Frank Ford
Cameron, and you said: 'I sure am,' or something like that. The
preacher'd know, maybe. He musta been the only sober one in the
bunch--except the girl. But you done chased him off, so--"

"Sandy, I wish you'd go hunt Rock up and tell him I want to see him."
Ford spoke with more of his natural spirit than he had shown since
waking.

"Rock's gone on out to Riley's camp," volunteered Bill. "Left this
morning, before the rain started in."

"What was her name--do you know?" Ford went back to the mystery.

"Ida--or was it Jenny? Some darned name--I heard it, when the preacher
was marrying you." Bill was floundering hopelessly in mental fog, but he
persisted. "And I seen it wrote in the paper I signed my name to. I mind
she rolled up the paper afterwards and put it--well, I dunno where, but
she took it away with her, and says to you: 'That's safe, now'--or
'You're safe,' or 'I'm safe,'--anyway, some darned thing was safe. And I
was goin' to kiss the bride--mebbe I did kiss her--only I'd likely
remember it if I had, drunk or sober! And--oh, now I got it!" Bill's
voice was full of elation. "You was goin' to kiss the bride--that was
it, it was you goin' to kiss her, and she slap--no, by hokey, she
didn't slap you, she just--or was it Rock, now?" Doubt filled his eyes
distressfully. "Darn my everlastin' hide," he finished lamely, "there
was some kissin' somew'ere in the deal, and I mind her cryin'
afterwards, but whether it was about that, or--Say, Sandy, what was it
Ford was lickin' the preacher for? Wasn't it for kissin' the bride?"

"It was for marrying him to her," Sandy informed him sententiously.

Ford got up and went to the little window and looked out. Presently he
came back to the stove and stood staring disgustedly down upon the
effusively friendly Bill, leering up at him pacifically.

"If I didn't feel so rotten," he said glumly, "I'd give you another
licking right now, Bill--you boozing old devil. I'd like to lick every
darned galoot that stood back and let me in for this. You'd ought to
have stopped me. You'd oughta pounded the face off me before you let me
do such a fool thing. That," he said bitterly, "shows how much a man can
bank on his friends!"

"It shows," snorted Bill indignantly, "how much he can bank on
himself!"

"On whisky, to let him in for all kinds uh trouble," revised Sandy
virtuously. Sandy had a stomach which invariably rebelled at the second
glass and therefore, remaining always sober perforce, he took to himself
great credit for his morality.

"Married!--and I don't so much as know her name!" gritted Ford, and went
over and laid himself down upon the bed, and sulked for the rest of that
day of rain and gloom.




CHAPTER II

Wanted: Information


Sulking never yet solved a mystery nor will it accomplish much toward
bettering an unpleasant situation. After a day of unmitigated gloom and
a night of uneasy dreams, Ford awoke to a white, shifting world of the
season's first blizzard, and to something like his normal outlook upon
life.

That outlook had ever been cheerful, with the cheerfulness which comes
of taking life in twenty-four-hour doses only, and of looking not too
far ahead and backward not at all. Plenty of persons live after that
fashion and thereby attain middle life with smooth foreheads and cheeks
unlined by thought; and Ford was therefore not much different from his
fellows. Never before had he found himself with anything worse than
bodily bruises to sour life for him after a tumultuous night or two in
town, and the sensation of a discomfort which had not sprung from some
well-defined physical sense was therefore sufficiently novel to claim
all his attention.

It was not the first time he had fought and forgotten it afterwards. Nor
was it a new experience for him to seek information from his friends
after a night full of incident. Sandy he had always found tolerably
reliable, because Sandy, being of that inquisitive nature so common to
small persons, made it a point to see everything there was to be seen;
and his peculiar digestive organs might be counted upon to keep him
sober. It was a real grievance to Ford that Sandy should have chosen the
hour he did for indulging in such trivialities as hair-cuts and
shampoos, while events of real importance were permitted to transpire
unseen and unrecorded. Ford, when the grievance thrust itself keenly
upon him, roused the recreant Sandy by pitilessly thrusting an elbow
against his diaphragm.

Sandy grunted at the impact and sat bolt upright in bed before he was
fairly awake. He glanced reproachfully down at Ford, who stared back at
him from a badly crumpled pillow.

"Get up," growled Ford, "and start a fire going, darn you. You kept me
awake half the night, snoring. I want a beefsteak with mushrooms,
devilled kidneys, waffles with honey, and four banana fritters for
breakfast. I'll take it in bed; and while I'm waiting, you can bring me
the morning paper and a package of Egyptian Houris."

Sandy grunted again, slid reluctantly out into the bitterly cold room,
and crept shivering into his clothes. He never quite understood Ford's
sense of humor, at such times, but he had learned that it is more
comfortable to crawl out of bed than to be kicked out, and that
vituperation is a mere waste of time when matched against sheer
heartlessness and a superior muscular development.

"Y' ought to make your wife build the fires," he taunted, when he was
clothed and at a safe distance from the bed. He ducked instinctively
afterwards, but Ford was merely placing a match by itself on the bench
close by.

"That's one," Ford remarked calmly. "I'm going to thrash every misguided
humorist who mentions that subject to me in anything but a helpful
spirit of pure friendship. I'm going to give him a separate licking for
every alleged joke. I'll want two steaks, Sandy. I'll likely have to
give you about seven distinct wallopings. Hand me some more matches to
keep tally with. I don't want to cheat you out of your just dues."

Sandy eyed him doubtfully while he scraped the ashes from the grate.

"You may want a dozen steaks, but that ain't saying you're going to git
'em," he retorted, with a feeble show of aggression. "And 's far as
licking me goes--" He stopped to blow warmth upon his fingers, which
were numbed with their grasp of the poker. "As for licking me, I guess
you'll have to do that on the strength uh bacon and sour-dough biscuits;
if you do it at all, which I claim the privilege uh doubting a whole
lot."

Ford laughed a little at the covert challenge, made ridiculous by
Sandy's diminutive stature, pulled the blankets up to his eyes, and
dozed off luxuriously; and although it is extremely tiresome to be told
in detail just what a man dreams upon certain occasions, he did dream,
and it was something about being married. At any rate, when the sizzling
of bacon frying invaded even his slumber and woke him, he felt a
distinct pang of disappointment that it was Sandy's carroty head bent
over the frying-pan, instead of a wife with blond hair which waved
becomingly upon her temples.

"Wonder what color her hair is, anyway," he observed inadvertently,
before he was wide enough awake to put the seal of silence on his
musings.

"Hunh?"

"I asked when those banana fritters are coming up," lied Ford, getting
out of bed and yawning so that his swollen jaw hurt him, and relapsed
into his usual taciturnity, which was his wall of defense against
Sandy's inquisitiveness.

He ate his breakfast almost in silence, astonishing Sandy somewhat by
not complaining of the excess of soda in the biscuits. Ford was inclined
toward fastidiousness when he was sober--a trait which caused men to
suspect him of descending from an upper stratum of society; though just
when, or just where, or how great that descent had been, they had no
means of finding out. Ford, so far as his speech upon the subject was
concerned, had no existence previous to his appearance in Montana, five
or six years before; but he bore certain earmarks of a higher
civilization which, in Sandy's mind, rather concentrated upon a
pronounced distaste for soda-yellowed bread, warmed-over coffee, and
scorched bacon. That he swallowed all these things and seemed not to
notice them, struck Sandy as being almost as remarkable as his
matrimonial adventure.

When he had eaten, Ford buttoned himself into his overcoat, pulled his
moleskin cap well down, and went out into the storm without a word to
Sandy, which was also unusual; it was Ford's custom to wash the dishes,
because he objected to Sandy's economy of clean, hot water. Sandy
flattened his nose against the window, saw that Ford, leaning well
forward against the drive of the wind, was battling his way toward the
hotel, and guessed shrewdly that he would see him no more that day.

"He better keep sober till his knuckles git well, anyway," he mumbled
disapprovingly. "If he goes to fighting, the shape he's in now--"

Ford had no intention of fighting. He went straight up to the bar, it is
true, but that was because he saw that Sam was at that moment
unoccupied, save with a large lump of gum. Being at the bar, he drank a
glass of whisky; not of deliberate intent, but merely from force of
habit. Once down, however, the familiar glow of it through his being was
exceedingly grateful, and he took another for good measure.

"H'lo, Ford," Sam bethought him to say, after he had gravely taken
mental note of each separate scar of battle, and had shifted his cud to
the other side of his mouth, and had squeezed it meditatively between
his teeth. "Feel as rocky as you look?"

"Possibly." Ford's eyes forbade further personalities. "I'm out after
information, Sam, and if you've got any you aren't using, I'd advise you
to pass it over; I can use a lot, this morning. Were you sober, night
before last?"

Sam chewed solemnly while he considered. "Tolerable sober, yes," he
decided at last. "Sober enough to tend to business; why?"

With his empty glass Ford wrote invisible scrolls upon the bar. "I--did
you happen to see--my--the lady I married?" He had been embarrassed at
first, but when he finished he was glaring a challenge which shifted the
disquiet to Sam's manner.

"No. I was tendin' bar all evenin'--and she didn't come in here."

Ford glanced behind him at the sound of the door opening, saw that it
was only Bill, and leaned over the bar for greater secrecy, lowering his
voice as well.

"Did you happen to hear who she was?"

Sam stared and shook his head.

"Don't you know anything about her at all--where she came from--and why,
and where she went?"

Sam backed involuntarily. Ford's tone made it a crime either to know
these things or to be guilty of ignorance; which, Sam could not
determine. Sam was of the sleek, oily-haired type of young men, with
pimples and pale eyes and a predilection for gum and gossip. He was
afraid of Ford and he showed it.

"That's just what (no offense, Ford--I ain't responsible) that's what
everybody's wondering. Nobody seems to know. They kinda hoped you'd
explain--"

"Sure!" Ford's tone was growing extremely ominous. "I'll explain a lot
of things--if I hear any gabbling going on about my affairs." He was
seized then with an uncomfortable feeling that the words were mere
puerile blustering and turned away from the bar in disgust.

In disgust he pulled open the door, flinched before the blast of wind
and snow which smote him full in the face and blinded him, and went out
again into the storm. The hotel porch was a bleak place, with snow six
inches deep and icy boards upon which a man might easily slip and break
a bone or two, and with a whine overhead as the wind sucked under the
roof. Ford stood there so long that his feet began to tingle. He was not
thinking; he was merely feeling the feeble struggles of a newborn
desire to be something and do something worth while--a desire which
manifested itself chiefly in bitterness against himself as he was, and
in a mental nausea against the life he had been content to live.

The mystery of his marriage was growing from a mere untoward incident of
a night's carouse into a baffling thing which hung over him like an
impending doom. He was not the sort of man who marries easily. It seemed
incredible that he could really have done it; more incredible that he
could have done it and then have wiped the slate of his memory clean;
with the crowning impossibility that a strange young woman could come
into town, marry him, and afterward depart and no man know who she was,
whence she had come, or where she had gone. Ford stepped suddenly off
the porch and bored his way through the blizzard toward the depot. The
station agent would be able to answer the last question, at any rate.

The agent, however, proved disappointingly ignorant of the matter. He
reminded Ford that there had not been time to buy a ticket, and that the
girl had been compelled to run down the platform to reach the train
before it started, and that the wheels began to turn before she was up
the steps of the day coach.

"And don't you remember turning around and saying to me: 'I'm a poor
married man, but you can't notice the scar,' or something like that?"
The agent was plainly interested and desirous of rendering any
assistance possible, and also rather diffident about discussing so
delicate a matter with a man like Ford.

Ford drummed his fingers impatiently upon the shelf outside the ticket
window. "I don't remember a darned thing about it," he confessed glumly.
"I can't say I enjoy running all around town trying to find out who it
was I married, and why I married her, and where she went afterwards, but
that's just the kinda fix I'm in, Lew. I don't suppose she came here and
did it just for fun--and I can't figure out any other reason, unless she
was plumb loco. From all I can gather, she was a nice girl, and it seems
she thought I was Frank Ford Cameron--which I am not!" He laughed, as a
man will laugh sometimes when he is neither pleased nor amused.

"I might ask McCreery--he's conductor on Fourteen. He might remember
where she wanted to go," the agent suggested hesitatingly. "And say!
What's the matter with going up to Garbin and looking up the record? She
had to get the license there, and they'd have her name, age, place of
residence, and--and whether she's white or black." The agent smiled
uncertainly over his feeble attempt at a joke. "I got a license for a
friend once," he explained hastily, when he saw that Ford's face did not
relax a muscle. "There's a train up in forty minutes--"

"Sure, I'll do that." Ford brightened. "That must be what I've been
trying to think of and couldn't. I knew there was some way of finding
out. Throw me a round-trip ticket, Lew. Lordy me! I can't afford to let
a real, live wife slip the halter like this and leave me stranded and
not knowing a thing about her. How much is it?"

The agent slid a dark red card into the mouth of his office stamp,
jerked down the lever, and swung his head quickly toward the sounder
chattering hysterically behind him. His jaw slackened as he listened,
and he turned his eyes vacantly upon Ford for a moment before he looked
back at the instrument.

"Well, what do you know about that?" he queried, under his breath,
released the ticket from the grip of the stamp, and flipped it into the
drawer beneath the shelf as if it were so much waste paper.

"That's my ticket," Ford reminded him levelly.

"You don't want it now, do you?" The agent grinned at him. "Oh, I forgot
you couldn't read that." He tilted his head back toward the instrument.
"A wire just went through--the court-house at Garbin caught fire in the
basement--something about the furnace, they think--and she's going up in
smoke. Hydrants are froze up so they can't get water on it. That fixes
your looking up the record, Ford."

Ford stared hard at him. "Well, I might hunt up the preacher and ask
him," he said, his tone dropping again to dull discouragement.

The agent chuckled. "From all I hear," he observed rashly, "you've made
that same preacher mighty hard to catch!"

Ford drummed upon the shelf and scowled at the smoke-blackened window,
beyond which the snow was sweeping aslant. Upon his own side of the
ticket window, the agent pared his nails with his pocket-knife and
watched him furtively.

"Oh, hell! What do I care, anyway?" Revulsion seized Ford harshly. "I
guess I can stand it if she can. She came here and married me--it isn't
my funeral any more than it is hers. If she wants to be so darned
mysterious about it, she can go plumb--to--New York!" There were a few
decent traits in Ford Campbell; one was his respect for women, a respect
which would not permit him to swear about this wife of his, however
exasperating her behavior.

"That's the sensible way to look at it, of course," assented the agent,
who made it a point to agree always with a man of Ford's size and
caliber, on the theory that amiability means popularity, and that
placation is better than plasters. "You sure ought to let her do the
hunting--and the worrying, too. You aren't to blame if she married you
unawares. She did it all on her own hook--and she must have known what
she was up against."

"No, she didn't," flared Ford unexpectedly. "She made a mistake, and I
wanted to point it out to her and help her out of it if I could. She
took me for some one else, and I was just drunk enough to think it was a
joke, I suppose, and let it go that way. I don't believe she found out
she tied up to the wrong man. It's entirely my fault, for being drunk."

"Well, putting it that way, you're right about it," agreed the adaptable
Lew. "Of course, if you hadn't been--"

"If whisky's going to let a fellow in for things like this, it's time to
cut it out altogether." Ford was looking at the agent attentively.

"That's right," assented the other unsuspectingly. "Whisky is sure
giving you the worst of it all around. You ought to climb on the
water-wagon, Ford, and that's a fact. Whisky's the worst enemy you've
got."

"Sure. And I'm going to punish all of it I can get my hands on!" He
turned toward the door. "And when I'm good and full of it," he added as
an afterthought, "I'm liable to come over here and lick you, Lew, just
for being such an agreeable cuss. You better leave your mother's address
handy." He laughed a little to himself as he pulled the door shut behind
him. "I bet he'll keep the frost thawed off the window to-day, just to
see who comes up the platform," he chuckled.

He would have been more amused if he had seen how the agent ducked
anxiously forward to peer through the ticket window whenever the door of
the waiting room opened, and how he started whenever the snow outside
creaked under the tread of a heavy step; and he would have been
convulsed with mirth if he had caught sight of the formidable billet of
wood which Lew kept beside his chair all that day, and had guessed its
purpose, and that it was a mute witness to the reputation which one Ford
Campbell bore among his fellows. Lew was too wise to consider for a
moment the revolver meant to protect the contents of the safe. Even the
unintelligent know better than to throw a lighted match into a keg of
gunpowder.

Ford leaned backward against the push of the storm and was swept up to
the hotel. He could not remember when he had felt so completely baffled;
the incident of the girl and the ceremony was growing to something very
like a calamity, and the mystery which surrounded it began to fret him
intolerably; and the very unusualness of a trouble he could not settle
with his fists whipped his temper to the point of explosion. He caught
himself wavering, nevertheless, before the wind-swept porch of the hotel
"office." That, too, was strange. Ford was not wont to hesitate before
entering a saloon; more often he hesitated about leaving.

"What's the matter with me, anyway?" he questioned himself impatiently.
"I'm acting like I hadn't a right to go in and take a drink when I feel
like it! If just a slight touch of matrimony acts like that with a man,
what can the real thing be like? I always heard it made a fool of a
fellow." To prove to himself that he was still untrammeled and at
liberty to follow his own desire, he stamped across the porch, threw
open the door, and entered with a certain defiance of manner.

Behind the bar, Sam was laughing with his mouth wide open so that his
gum showed shamelessly. Bill and Aleck and Big Jim were leaning heavily
upon the bar, laughing also.

"I'll bet she's a Heart-and-Hander, tryin' a new scheme to git a man.
Think uh nabbing a man when he's drunk. That's a new one," Sam brought
his lips close enough together to declare, and chewed vigorously upon
the idea,--until he glanced up and saw Ford standing by the door. He
turned abruptly, caught up a towel, and began polishing the bar with the
frenzy of industry which never imposes upon one in the slightest degree.

Bill glanced behind him and nudged Aleck into caution, and in the
silence which followed, the popping of a piece of slate-veined coal in
the stove sounded like a volley of small-caliber pistol shots.




CHAPTER III

One Way to Drown Sorrow


Ford walked up to the bar, with a smile upon his face which Sam
misunderstood and so met with a conciliatory grin and a hand extended
toward a certain round, ribbed bottle with a blue-and-silver label. Ford
waved away the bottle and leaned, not on the bar but across it, and
clutching Sam by the necktie, slapped him first upon one ear and next
upon the other, until he was forced by the tingling of his own fingers
to desist. By that time Sam's green necktie was pulled tight just under
his nose, and he had swallowed his gum--which, considering the size of
the lump, was likely to be the death of him.

Ford did not say a word. He permitted Sam to jerk loose and back into a
corner, and he watched the swift crimsoning of his ears with a keen
interest. Since Sam's face had the pasty pallor of the badly scared,
the ears appeared much redder by contrast than they really were. Next,
Ford turned his attention to the man beside him, who happened to be
Bill. For one long minute the grim spirit of war hovered just over the
two.

"Aw, forget it, Ford," Bill urged ingratiatingly at last. "You don't
want to lick anybody--least of all old Bill! Look at them knuckles! You
couldn't thump a feather bed. Anyway, you got the guilty party when you
done slapped Sam up to a peak and then knocked the peak off. Made him
swaller his cud, too, by hokey! Say, Sam, my old dad used to feed a cow
on bacon-rinds when she done lost her cud. You try it, Sam. Mebby it
might help them ears! Shove that there trouble-killer over this way,
Sammy, and don't look so fierce at your uncle Bill; he's liable to turn
you across his knee and dust your pants proper." He turned again to
Ford, scowling at the group and at life in general, while the snow
melted upon his broad shoulders and trickled in little, hurrying drops
down to the nearest jumping-off place. "Come, drownd your sorrer," Bill
advised amiably. "Nobody said nothing but Sammy, and I'll gamble he
wishes he hadn't, now." If his counsel was vicious, his smile was
engaging--which does not, in this instance, mean that it was beautiful.

Ford's fingers closed upon the bottle, and with reprehensible
thoroughness he proceeded to drown what sorrows he then possessed.
Unfortunately he straightway produced a fresh supply, after his usual
method. In two hours he was flushed and argumentative. In three he had
whipped Bill--cause unknown to the chronicler, and somewhat hazy to Ford
also after it was all over. By mid-afternoon he had Sammy entrenched in
the tiny stronghold where barreled liquors were kept, and scared to the
babbling stage. Aleck had been put to bed with a gash over his right eye
where Ford had pointed his argument with a beer glass, and Big Jim had
succumbed to a billiard cue directed first at his most sensitive bunion
and later at his head. Ford was not using his fists, that day, because
even in his whisky-brewed rage he remembered, oddly enough, his skinned
knuckles.

Others had come--in fact, the entire male population of Sunset was
hovering in the immediate vicinity of the hotel--but none had conquered.
There had been considerable ducking to avoid painful contact with flying
glasses from the bar, and a few had retreated in search of bandages and
liniment; the luckier ones remained as near the storm-center as was safe
and expostulated. To those Ford had but one reply, which developed into
a sort of war-chant, discouraging to the peace-loving listeners.

"I'm a rooting, tooting, shooting, fighting son-of-a-gun--_and a good
one!_" Ford would declaim, and with deadly intent aim a lump of coal,
billiard ball, or glass at some unfortunate individual in his audience.
"Hit the nigger and get a cigar! You're just hanging around out there
till I drink myself to sleep--but I'm fooling you a few! I'm watching
the clock with one eye, and I take my dose regular and not too frequent.
I'm going to kill off a few of these smart boys that have been talking
about me and my wife. She's a lady, my wife is, and I'll kill the first
man that says she isn't." (One cannot, you will understand, be too
explicit in a case like this; not one thousandth part as explicit as
Ford was.)

"I'm going to begin on Sam, pretty quick," he called through the open
door. "I've got him right where I want him." And he stated, with
terrible exactness, his immediate intentions towards the bartender.

Behind his barricade of barrels, Sam heard and shivered like a gun-shy
collie at a turkey shoot; shivered until human nerves could bear no
more, and like the collie he left the storeroom and fled with a yelp of
sheer terror. Ford turned just as Sam shot through the doorway into the
dining-room, and splintered a beer bottle against the casing; glanced
solemnly up at the barroom clock and, retreating to the nearly denuded
bar, gravely poured himself another drink; held up the glass to the
dusk-filmed window, squinted through it, decided that he needed a little
more than that, and added another teaspoonful. Then he poured the
contents of the glass down his throat as if it were so much water, wiped
his lips upon a bar towel, picked a handful of coal from the depleted
coal-hod, went to the door, and shouted to those outside to produce
Sam, that he might be killed in an extremely unpleasant manner.

The group outside withdrew across the street to grapple with the problem
before them. It was obviously impossible for civilized men to sacrifice
Sam, even if they could catch him--which they could not. Sam had bolted
through the dining-room, upset the Chinaman in the kitchen, and fallen
over a bucket of ashes in the coal-shed in his flight for freedom. He
had not stopped at that, but had scurried off up the railroad track. The
general opinion among the spectators was that he had, by this time,
reached the next station and was hiding in a cellar there.

Bill Wright hysterically insisted that it was up to Tom Aldershot, who
was a deputy town marshal. Tom, however, was working on the house he
hoped to have ready for his prospective bride by Thanksgiving, and hated
to be interrupted for the sake of a few broken heads only.

"He ain't shooting up nobody," he argued from the platform, where he was
doing "inside work" on his dining-room while the storm lasted. "He
never does cut loose with his gun when he's drunk. If I arrested him,
I'd have to take him clear up to Garbin--and I ain't got time. And it
wouldn't be nothin' but a charge uh disturbin' the peace, when I got him
there. Y'oughta have a jail in Sunset, like I've been telling yuh right
along. Can't expect a man to stop his work just to take a man to
jail--not for anything less than murder, anyhow."

Some member of the deputation hinted a doubt of his courage, and Tom
flushed.

"I ain't scared of him," he snorted indignantly. "I should say not! I'll
go over and make him behave--as a man and a citizen. But I ain't going
to arrest him as an officer, when there ain't no place to put him." Tom
reluctantly threw down his hammer, grumbling because they would not wait
till it was too dark to drive nails, but must cut short his working day,
and went over to the hotel to quell Ford.

Ingress by way of the front door was obviously impracticable; the
marshal ducked around the corner just in time to avoid a painful
meeting with a billiard ball. Mother McGrew had piled two tables against
the dining-room door and braced them with the mop, and stubbornly
refused to let Tom touch the barricade either as man or officer of the
law.

"Well, if I can't get in, I can't do nothing," stated Tom, with
philosophic calm.

"He's tearing up the whole place, and he musta found all them extra
billiard balls Mike had under the bar, and is throwin' 'em away," wailed
Mrs. McGrew, "and he's drinkin' and not payin'. The damage that man is
doin' it would take a year's profits to make up. You gotta do something,
Tom Aldershot--you that calls yourself a marshal, swore to pertect the
citizens uh Sunset! No, sir--I ain't a-goin' to open this door, neither.
I'm tryin' to save the dishes, if you want to know. I ain't goin' to let
my cups and plates foller the glasses in there. A town full uh men--and
you stand back and let one crazy--"

Tom had heard Mrs. McGrew voice her opinion of the male population of
Sunset on certain previous occasions. He left her at that point, and
went back to the group across the street.

At length Sandy, whose imagination had been developed somewhat beyond
the elementary stage by his reading of romantic fiction, suggested
luring Ford into the liquor room by the simple method of pretending an
assault upon him by way of the storeroom window, which could be barred
from without by heavy planks. Secure in his belief in Ford's friendship
for him, Sandy even volunteered to slam the door shut upon Ford and lock
it with the padlock which guarded the room from robbery. Tom took a chew
of tobacco, decided that the ruse might work, and donated the planks for
the window.

It did work, up to a certain point. Ford heard a noise in the storeroom
and went to investigate, caught a glimpse of Tom Aldershot apparently
about to climb through the little window, and hurled a hammer and
considerable vituperation at the opening. Whereupon Sandy scuttled in
and slammed the door, according to his own plan, and locked it. There
was a season of frenzied hammering outside, and after that Sunset
breathed freer, and discussed the evils of strong drink, and washed down
their arguments by copious draughts of the stuff they maligned.

Later, they had to take him out of the storeroom, because he insisted
upon knocking the bungs out of all the barrels and letting the liquor
flood the floor, and Mike McGrew's wife objected to the waste, on the
ground that whisky costs money. They fell upon him in a body, bundled
him up, hustled him over to the ice-house, and shut him in; and within
ten minutes he kicked three boards off one side and emerged breathing
fire and brimstone like the dragons of old. He had forgotten about
wanting to kill Sam; he was willing--nay, anxious--to murder every male
human in Sunset.

They did not know what to do with him after that. They liked Ford when
he was sober, and so they hated to shoot him, though that seemed the
only way in which they might dampen his enthusiasm for blood. Tom said
that, if he failed to improve in temper by the next day, he would try
and land him in jail, though it did seem rigorous treatment for so
common a fault as getting drunk. Meanwhile they kept out of his way as
well as they could, and dodged missiles and swore. Even that was
becoming more and more difficult--except the swearing--because Ford
developed a perfectly diabolic tendency to empty every store that
contained a man, so that it became no uncommon sight to see a back door
belching forth hurrying figures at the most unseasonable times. No man
could lift a full glass, that night, and feel sure of drinking the
contents undisturbed; whereat Sunset grumbled while it dodged.

It may have been nine o'clock before the sporadic talk of a jail
crystallized into a definite project which, it was unanimously agreed,
could not too soon be made a reality.

They built the jail that night, by the light of bonfires which the
slightly wounded kept blazing in the intervals of standing guard over
the workers; ready to give warning in case Ford appeared as a war-cloud
on their horizon. There were fifteen able-bodied men, and they worked
fast, with Ford's war-chant in the saloon down the street as an
incentive to speed. They erected it close to Tom Aldershot's house,
because the town borrowed lumber from him and they wanted to save
carrying, and because it was Tom's duty to look after the prisoner, and
he wanted the jail handy, so that he need not lose any time from his
house-building.

They built it strong, and they built it tight, without any window save a
narrow slit near the ceiling; they heated it by setting a stove outside
under a shelter, where Tom could keep up the fire without the risk of
going inside, and ran pipe and a borrowed "drum" through the jail high
enough so that Ford could not kick it. And to discourage any thought of
suicide by hanging, they ceiled the place tightly with Tom's matched
flooring of Oregon pine. Tom did not like that, and said so; but the
citizens of Sunset nailed it on and turned a deaf ear to his complaints.

Chill dawn spread over the town, dulling the light of the fires and
bringing into relief the sodden tramplings in the snow around the jail,
with the sharply defined paths leading to Tom Aldershot's lumber-pile.
The watchers had long before sneaked off to their beds, for not a sign
of Ford had they seen since midnight. The storm had ceased early in the
evening and all the sky was glowing crimson with the coming glory of the
sun. The jail was almost finished. Up on the roof three crouching
figures were nailing down strips of brick-red building paper as a fair
substitute for shingles, and on the side nearest town the marshal and
another were holding a yard-wide piece flat against the wall with
fingers that tingled in the cold, while Bill Wright fastened it into
place with shingle nails driven through tin disks the size of a
half-dollar.

Ford, partly sober after a sleep on the billiard table in the hotel
barroom, heard the hammering, wondered what industrious soul was up and
doing carpenter work at that unseemly hour, and after helping himself to
a generous "eye-opener" at the deserted bar, found his cap and went over
to investigate. He was much surprised to see Bill Wright working, and
smiled to himself as he walked quietly up to him through the soft,
step-muffling snow.

"What you doing, Bill--building a chicken house?" he asked, a quirk of
amusement at the corner of his lips.

Bill jumped and came near swallowing a nail; so near that his eyes
bulged at the feel of it next his palate. Tom Aldershot dropped his end
of the strip of paper, which tore with a dull sound of ripping, and
remarked that he would be damned. Necks craned, up on the roof, and
startled eyes peered down like chipmunks from a tree. Some one up there
dropped a hammer which hit Bill on the head, but no one said a word.

"You act like you were nervous, this morning," Ford observed, in the
tone which indicates a conscious effort at good-humored ignorance.
"Working on a bet, or what?"

"What!" snarled Bill sarcastically. "I wisht, Ford, next time you bowl
up, you'd pick on somebody that ain't too good a friend to fight back!
I'm gittin' tired, by hokey--"

"What--did I lick you again, Bill?" Ford's smile was sympathetic to a
degree. "That's too bad, now. Next time you want to hunt a hole and
crawl into it, Bill. I don't want to hurt you--but seems like I've kinda
got the habit. You'll have to excuse me." He hunched his shoulders at
the chill of the morning and walked around the jail, inspecting it with
half-hearted interest.

"What is this, anyway?" he inquired of Tom. "Smoke-house?"

"It's a jail," snapped Tom. "To put you into if you don't watch your
dodgers. What 'n thunder you want to carry on like you did last night,
for? And then go and sober up just when we've got a jail built to put
you into! That ain't no way for a man to do--I'll leave it to Bill if it
is! I've a darned good mind to swear out a warrant, anyway, Ford, and
pinch you for disturbin' the peace! That's what I ought to do, all
right." Tom beat his hands about his body and glared at Ford with his
ultra-official scowl.

"All right, if you want to do it." Ford's tone embellished the reply
with a you-take-the-consequences sort of indifference. "Only, I'd advise
you never to turn me loose again if you do lock me up in this coop
once."

"I know I wouldn't uh worked all night on the thing if I'd knowed you
was goin' to sleep it off," Bill complained, with deep reproach in his
watery eyes. "I made sure you was due to keep things agitated around
here for a couple uh days, at the very least, or I never woulda drove a
nail, by hokey!"

"It is a darned shame, to have a nice, new jail and nobody to use it
on," sympathized Ford, his eyes half-closed and steely. "I'd like to
help you out, all right. Maybe I'd better kill you, Bill; they _might_
stretch a point and call it manslaughter--and I could use the bounty to
help pay a lawyer, if it ever come to a head as a trial."

Whereat Bill almost wept.

Ford pushed his hands deep into his pockets and walked away, sneering
openly at Bill, the marshal, the jail, and the town which owned it, and
at wives and matrimony and the world which held all these vexations.

He went straight to the shack, drank a cup of coffee, and packed
everything he could find that belonged to him and was not too large for
easy carrying on horseback; and when Sandy, hovering uneasily around
him, asked questions, he told him briefly to go off in a corner and lie
down; which advice Sandy understood as an invitation to mind his own
affairs.

Like Bill, Sandy could have wept at the ingratitude of this man. But he
asked no more questions and he made no more objections. He picked up the
story of the unpronounceable count who owned the castle in the Black
Forest and had much tribulation and no joy until the last chapter, and
when Ford went out, with his battered, sole-leather suitcase and his
rifle in its pigskin case, he kept his pale eyes upon his book and
refused even a grunt in response to Ford's grudging: "So long, Sandy."




CHAPTER IV

Reaction


Even when a man consistently takes Life in twenty-four-hour doses and
likes those doses full-flavored with the joys of this earth, there are
intervals when the soul of him is sick, and Life becomes a nauseous
progression of bleak futility. He may, in his revulsion against it,
attempt to end it all; he may, in sheer disgust of it, take his doses
stronger than ever before, as if he would once for all choke to death
that part of him which is fine enough to rebel against it; he may even
forswear, in melancholy penitence, that which has served to give it
flavor, and vow him vows of abstemiousness at which the grosser part of
him chuckles ironically; or, he may blindly follow the first errant
impulse for change of environment, in the half-formed hope that new
scenes may, without further effort on his part, serve to make of him a
new man--a man for whom he can feel some respect.

Ford did none of these things, however. The soul-sick incentive was
there, and if he had been a little less of a reasoning animal and a
little less sophisticated, he would probably have forsworn strong drink
just as he forswore all responsibility for his inadvertent marriage. His
reason and his experience saved him from cluttering his conscience with
broken vows, although he did yield to the impulse of change to the
extent of leaving Sunset while yet the inhabitants were fortifying
themselves for the ardors of the day with breakfast and some wild
prophecies concerning Ford's next outbreak.

Apprehension over Bill's immediate future was popular amongst his
friends, Ford's sardonic reference to manslaughter and bounty being
repeated often enough in Bill's presence to keep that peace-loving
gentleman in a state of trepidation which he sought to hide behind vague
warnings.

"He better think twicet before he comes bothering around me, by hokey!"
Bill would mutter darkly. "I've stood a hull lot from Ford; I like 'im,
when he's himself. But I've stood about as much as a man can be expected
to stand. And he better look out! That's all I got to say--he better
look out!" Bill himself, it may be observed incidentally, spent the
greater portion of that day in "looking out." He was careful not to sit
down with his back to a door, for instance, and was keenly interested
when a knob turned beneath unseen fingers, and plainly relieved when
another than Ford entered his presence. Bill's mustache was nearly
pulled from its roots, that day--but that is not important to the story,
which has to do with Ford Campbell, sometime the possessor of a neat
legacy in coin, later a rider of the cattle ranges, last presiding
genius over the poker table in Scotty's back room in Sunset, always an
important factor--and too often a disturbing element--in any community
upon which he chose to bestow his dynamic presence.

Scotty hoped that Ford would show up for business when the lamps were
lighted, that night. There had been some delicacy on the part of Ford's
acquaintances that day in the matter of calling upon him at the shack.
They believed--and hoped--that Ford was "sleeping it off," and there was
a unanimous reluctance to disturb his slumbers. Sandy, indulging himself
in the matter of undisturbed spinal tremors over "The Haunted Chamber,"
had not left shelter, save when the more insistent shiverings of chilled
flesh recalled him from his pleasurable nerve-crimplings and drove him
forth to the woodpile. So that it was not until evening was well
advanced that Sunset learned that Ford was no longer a potential menace
within its meager boundaries. Bill took a long breath, observed
meaningly that "He'd _better_ go--whilst his credit's good, by hokey!"
and for the first time that day sat down with his back toward an outer
door.

Ford was not worrying about Sunset half as much as Sunset was worrying
about him. He was at that moment playing pinochle half-heartedly with a
hospitable sheep-herder, under the impression that, since his host had
frankly and profanely professed a revulsion against solitaire and a
corresponding hunger for pinochle, his duty as a guest lay in
satisfying that hunger. He played apathetically, overlooked several
melts he might have made, and so lost three games in succession to the
gleeful herder, who had needed the diversion almost as much as he needed
a hair-cut.

His sense of social responsibility being eased thereby, Ford took his
headache and his dull disgust with life to the wall side of the herder's
frowsy bunk, and straightway forgot both in heavy slumber, leaving to
the morrow any definite plan for the near future--the far future being
as little considered as death and what is said to lie beyond.

That day had done for him all he asked of it. It had put him thirty
miles and more from Sunset, against which he felt a resentment which it
little deserved; of a truth it was as inoffensive a hamlet as any in
that region, and its sudden, overweening desire for a jail was but a
legitimate impulse toward self-preservation. The fault was Ford's, in
harassing the men of Sunset into action. But several times that day, and
again while he was pulling the stale-odored blankets snugly about his
ears, Ford anathematized the place as "a damned, rotten hole," and was
as nearly thankful as his mood would permit, when he remembered that it
lay far behind him and was likely to be farther before his journeyings
were done.

Sleep held him until daylight seeped in through the one dingy window.
Ford awoke to the acrid smell of scorched bacon, thought at first that
Sandy was once more demonstrating his inefficiency as a cook, and when
he remembered that Sandy's name was printed smudgily upon that page of
his life which he had lately turned down as a blotted, unlearned lesson
is pushed behind an unwilling schoolboy, he began to consider seriously
his next step.

Outside, the sheep were blatting stridently their demand for breakfast.
The herder bolted coffee and coarse food until he was filled, and went
away to his dreary day's work, telling Ford to make himself at home, and
flinging back a hope of further triumphs in pinochle, that night.

Ford washed the dishes, straightened the blankets in the bunk, swept
the grimy floor as well as he could with the stub of broom he found,
filled the wood-box and then, being face to face with his day and the
problem it held, rolled a cigarette, and smoked it in deep meditation.

He wanted to get away from town, and poker games, and whisky, and the
tumult it brewed. Something within him hungered for clean, wind-swept
reaches and the sane laughter of men, and Ford was accustomed to doing,
or at least trying to do, the thing he wanted to do. He was not getting
into the wilderness because of any inward struggle toward right living,
but because he was sick of town and the sordid life he had lived there.

Somewhere, back toward the rim of mountains which showed a faint violet
against the sky to the east, he owned a friend; and that friend owned a
stock ranch which, Ford judged, must be of goodly extent; two weeks
before, hearing somehow that Ford Campbell was running a poker game in
Sunset, the friend had written and asked him to come and take charge of
his "outfit," on the plea that, his foreman having died, he was
burdened with many cares and in urgent need of help.

Ford, giving the herder's frying-pan a last wipe with the dish-cloth,
laughed at the thought of taking the responsibility offered him in that
letter. It occurred to him, however, that the Double Cross (which was
the brand-name of Mason's ranch) might be a pleasant place to visit. It
was long since he had seen Ches--and there had been a time when one bed
held the two of them through many a long, weary night; when one
frying-pan cooked the scanty food they shared between them. And there
had been a season of grinding days and anxious, black nights between,
when the one problem, to Ford, consisted of getting Ches Mason out of
the wild land where they wandered, and getting him out alive. The
problem Ford solved and at the solution men wondered. Afterward they had
drifted apart, but the memory of those months would hold them together
with a bond which not even time could break--a bond which would pull
taut whenever they met.

Ford set down the frying-pan and went to the door and looked out. A
chinook had blown up in the night, and although the wind was chill, the
snow had disappeared, save where drifts clung to the hollows, shrinking
and turning black beneath the sweeping gusts; sodden masses which gave
to the prairie a dreary aspect of bleak discomfort. But Ford was well
pleased at the sight of the brown, beaten grasses. Impulse was hardening
to decision while he stared across the empty land toward the violet rim
of hills; a decision to ride over to the Double Cross, and tell Ches
Mason to his face that he was a chump, and have a smoke with the old
Turk, anyway. Ches had married, since that vividly remembered time when
adventure changed to hardship and hazard and walked hand in hand with
them through the wild places. Ford wondered fleetingly if matrimony had
changed old Ches; probably not--at least, not in those essential
man-traits which appeal to men. Ford suddenly hungered for the man's
hearty voice, where kindly humor lurked always, and for a grip of his
hand.

It was like him to forget all about the herder and the promise of
pinochle that night. He went eagerly to the decrepit little shed which
housed Rambler, his long-legged, flea-bitten gray; saddled him
purposefully and rode away toward the violet hills at the trail-trot
which eats up the miles with the least effort.

That night, although he slept in a hamlet which called itself a town,
his purpose kept firm hold of him, and he rode away at a decent hour the
next morning,--and he rode sober. He kept his face toward the hills, and
he did not trouble himself with any useless analysis of his unusual
temperateness. He was going to blow in to the Double Cross some time
before he slept that night, and have a talk with Ches. He had a pint of
fairly good whisky in his pocket, in case he felt the need of a little
on the way, and beyond those two satisfactory certainties he did not
attempt to reason. They were significant, in a way, to a man with a
tendency toward introspection; but Ford was interested in actualities
and never stopped to wonder why he bought a pint, rather than a quart,
or why, with Ches Mason in his mind, he declined to "set in" to the
poker game which was running to tempting jackpots, the night before; or
why he took one glass of wine before he mounted Rambler and let it go at
that. He never once dreamed that the memory of cheerful, steady-going
Ches influenced him toward starting on his friendly pilgrimage the Ford
Campbell whom Mason had known eight years before; a very different Ford
Campbell, be it said, from the one who had caused a whole town to
breathe freer for his absence.

Of his wife Ford had thought less often and less uncomfortably since he
left the town wherein had occurred the untoward incident of his
marriage. He was not unaccustomed to doing foolish things when he was
drunk, and as a rule he made it a point to ignore them afterwards. His
mysterious, matrimonial accident was beginning to seem less of a real
catastrophe than before, and the anticipation of meeting Ches Mason was
rapidly taking precedence of all else in his mind.

So, with almost his normal degree of careless equanimity, he faced again
the rim of hills--nearer they were now, with a deeper tinge that was
almost purple where the shadows lined them here and there. Somewhere out
that way lay the Double Cross ranch. Forty miles, one man told him it
was; another, forty-three. At best it was far enough for the shortened
daylight of one fall day to cover the journey. Ford threw away the stub
of his after-breakfast cigarette and swung into the trail at a lope.




CHAPTER V

"I Can Spare this Particular Girl"


Ford's range-trained vision told him, while yet afar off, that the lone
horse feeding upon a side hill was saddled and bridled, with reins
dragging; the telltale, upward toss of its head when it started on to
find a sweeter morsel was evidence enough of the impeding bridle, even
before he was near enough to distinguish the saddle.

Your true range man owns blood-relationship with the original Good
Samaritan; Ford swung out of the trail and untied his rope as a matter
of course. The master of the animal might have turned him loose to feed,
but if that were the case, he had strayed farther than was ever
intended; the chances, since no human being was in sight, were all
against design and in favor of accident. At any rate Ford did not
hesitate. It is not good to let a horse run loose upon the range with a
saddle cinched upon its back, as every one knows.

Ford was riding along the sheer edge of a water-worn gully, seeking a
place where he might safely jump it--or better, a spot where the banks
sloped so that he might ride down into it and climb the bank
beyond--when he saw a head and pair of shoulders moving slowly along,
just over the brow of the hill where fed the stray. He watched, and when
the figure topped the ridge and started down the slope which faced him,
his eyes widened a trifle in surprise.

Skirts to the tops of her shoes betrayed her a woman. She limped
painfully, so that Ford immediately pictured to himself puckered
eyebrows and lips pressed tightly together. "And I'll bet she's crying,
too," he summed up aloud. While he was speaking, she stumbled and fell
headlong.

When he saw that she made no attempt to rise, but lay still just as she
had fallen, Ford looked no longer for an easy crossing. He glanced up
and down the washout, saw no more promising point than where he was,
wheeled and rode back twenty yards or so, turned and drove deep his
spurs.

It was a nasty jump, and he knew it all along. When Rambler rose gamely
to it, with tensed muscles and forefeet flung forward to catch the bank
beyond, he knew it better. And when, after a sickening minute of
frenzied scrambling at the crumbling edge, they slid helplessly to the
bottom, he cursed his idiocy for ever attempting it.

Rambler got up with a pronounced limp, but Ford had thrown himself from
the saddle and escaped with nothing worse than a skinned elbow. They
were penned, however, in a box-like gully ten feet deep, and there was
nothing to do but follow it to where they might climb out. Ford was
worried about the girl, and made a futile attempt to stand in the saddle
and from there climb up to the level. But Rambler, lame as he was,
plunged so that Ford finally gave it up and started down the gulch,
leading Rambler by the reins.

There were many sharp turns and temper-trying windings, and though it
narrowed in many places so that there was barely room for them to pass,
it never grew shallower; indeed, it grew always deeper; and then,
without any warning, it stopped abruptly upon a coulée's rim, with
jumbled rocks and between them a sheer descent to the slope below. Ford
guessed then that he was boxed up in one of the main waterways of the
foot-hills he had been skirting for the past hour or so, and that he
should have ridden up the gulch instead of down it.

He turned, though the place was so narrow that Rambler's four feet
almost touched one another and his rump scraped the bank, as Ford pulled
him round, and retraced his steps. It was too rough for riding, even if
he had not wanted to save the horse, and he had no idea how far he must
go before he could get out. Ford, at that time, was not particularly
cheerful.

He must have gone a mile and more before he reached the point where, by
hard scrambling, he attained level ground upon the same side as the
girl. Ten minutes he spent in urging Rambler up the bank, and when the
horse stood breathing heavily beside him, Ford knew that, for all the
good there was in him at present, he might as well have left him at the
bottom. He walked around him, rubbing leg and shoulder muscles until he
located the hurt, and shook his head when all was done. Then he started
on slowly, with Rambler hobbling painfully after him. Ford knew that
every rod would aggravate that strained shoulder and that a stop would
probably make it impossible for the horse to go on at all.

He was not quite sure, after all those windings where he could not see,
just where it was he had seen the girl, but he recognized at last the
undulating outline of the ridge over which she had appeared, and made
what haste he could up the slope. The grazing horse was no longer in
sight, though he knew it might be feeding in a hollow near by.

He had almost given up hope of finding her, when he turned his head and
saw her off to one side, lying half concealed by a clump of low rose
bushes. She was not unconscious, as he had thought, but was crying
silently, with her face upon her folded arms and her hat askew over one
ear. He stooped and touched her upon the shoulder.

She lifted her head and looked at him, and drew away with a faint,
withdrawing gesture, which was very slight in itself but none the less
eloquent and unmistakable. Ford backed a step when he saw it and closed
his lips without speaking the words he had meant to say.

[Illustration: She lifted her head and looked at him, and drew away.]

"Well, what do you want?" the girl asked ungraciously, after a minute
spent in fumbling unseen hairpins and in straightening her hat. "I don't
know why you're standing there like that, staring at me. I don't need
any help."

"Appearances are deceitful, then," Ford retorted. "I saw you limping
over the hill, after your horse, and I saw you fall down and stay down.
I had an idea that a little help would be acceptable, but of course--"

"That was an hour ago," she interrupted accusingly, with a measuring
glance at the sun, which was settling toward the sky-line.

"I had trouble getting across that washout down there. I don't know
this part of the country, and I went down it instead of up. What are you
crying about--if you don't need any help?"

She eyed him askance, and chewed upon a corner of her lip, and flipped
the upturned hem of her riding skirt down over one spurred foot with a
truly feminine instinct, before she answered him. She seemed to be
thinking hard and fast, and she hesitated even while she spoke. Ford
wondered at the latent antagonism in her manner.

"I was crying because my foot hurts so and because I don't see how I'm
going to get back to the ranch. I suppose they'll hunt me up if I stay
away long enough--but it's getting toward night, and--I'm scared to
death of coyotes, if you must know!"

Ford laughed--at her defiance, in the face of her absolute helplessness,
more than at what she said. "And you tell me you don't need any help?"
he bantered.

"I might borrow your horse," she suggested coldly, as if she grudged
yielding even that much to circumstance. "Or you might catch mine for
me, I suppose."

"Sure. But you needn't hate me because you're in trouble," he hinted
irrelevantly. "I'm not to blame, you know."

"I--I hate to ask help from--a stranger," she said, watching him from
under her lashes. "And I can't help showing what I feel. I hate to feel
under an obligation--"

"If that's all, forget it," he assured her calmly. "It's a law of the
open--to help a fellow out in a pinch. When I headed for here, I thought
it was a man had been set afoot."

She eyed him curiously. "Then you didn't know--"

"I thought you were a man," he repeated. "I didn't come just because I
saw it was a girl. You needn't feel under any obligation whatever. I'm a
stranger in the country and a stranger to you. I'm perfectly willing to
stay that way, if you prefer. I'm not trying to scrape acquaintance on
the strength of your being in trouble; but you surely don't expect a
man to ride on and leave a woman out here on the bald prairie--do you?
Especially when she's confessed she's afraid of the dark--and coyotes!"

She was staring at him while he spoke, and she continued to stare after
he had finished; the introspective look which sees without seeing, it
became at last, and Ford gave a shrug at her apparent obstinacy and
turned away to where Rambler stood with his head drooped and his eyes
half closed. He picked up the reins and chirped to him, and the horse
hesitated, swung his left foot painfully forward, hobbled a step, and
looked at Ford reproachfully.

"Your horse is crippled as badly as I am, it would seem," the girl
observed, from where she sat watching them.

"I strained his shoulder, trying to make him jump that washout. That was
when I first got sight of you over here. We went to the bottom and it
took me quite a while to find a way out. That's why I was so long
getting here." Ford explained indifferently, with his back to her,
while he rubbed commiseratingly the swelling shoulder.

"Oh." The girl waited. "It seems to me you need help yourself. I don't
see how you expect to help any one else, with your horse in that
condition," she added. And when he still did not speak, she asked: "Do
you know how far it is to the nearest ranch?"

"No. I told you I'm a stranger in this country. I was heading for the
Double Cross, but I don't know just--"

"We're eight miles, straight across, from there; ten, the way we would
have to go to get there. There are other washouts in this country--which
it is unwise to attempt jumping, Mr.--"

"Campbell," Ford supplied shortly.

"I beg your pardon? You mumbled--"

"Campbell!" Ford was tempted to shout it but contented himself with a
tart distinctness. A late, untoward incident had made him somewhat
touchy over his name, and he had not mumbled.

"Oh. Did you skin your face and blacken your eye, Mr. Campbell, when
you tried to jump that washout?"

"No." Ford did not offer any explanation. He remembered the scars of
battle which were still plainly visible upon his countenance, and he
turned red while he bent over the fore ankles of Rambler, trying to
discover other sprains. He felt that he was going to dislike this girl
very much before he succeeded in getting her to shelter. He could not
remember ever meeting before a woman under forty with so unpleasant a
manner and with such a talent for disagreeable utterances.

"Then you must have been fighting a wildcat," she hazarded.

"Pardon me; is this a Methodist experience meeting?" he retorted,
looking full at her with lowering brows. "It seems to me the only
subject which concerns us mutually is the problem of getting to a ranch
before dark."

"You'll have to solve it yourself. I never attempt puzzles." The girl,
somewhat to his surprise, showed no resentment at his rebuff. Indeed, he
began to suspect her of being secretly amused. He began also mentally
to accuse her of not being too badly hurt to walk, if she wanted to;
indeed, his skepticism went so far as to accuse her of deliberately
baiting him--though why, he did not try to conjecture. Women were queer.
Witness his own late experience with one.

Being thus in a finely soured mood, Ford suggested that, as she no doubt
knew the shortest way to the nearest ranch, they at least make a start
in that direction.

"How?" asked the girl, staring up at him from where she sat beside the
rose bushes.

"By walking, I suppose--unless you expect me to carry you." Ford's tone
was not in any degree affable.

"I fancy it would be asking too great a favor to suggest that you catch
my horse for me?"

Ford dropped Rambler's reins and turned to her, irritated to the point
where he felt a distinct desire to shake her.

"I'd far rather catch your horse, even if I had to haze him all over
the country, than carry you," he stated bluntly.

"Yes. I suspected that much." She had plucked a red seed-ball off the
bush nearest her and was nibbling daintily the sweet pulp off the
outside.

"Where is the horse?" Ford was holding himself rigidly hack from an
outburst of temper.

"Oh, I don't know, I'm sure." She picked another seed-ball and began
upon it. "He should be somewhere around, unless he has taken a notion to
go home."

Ford said something under his breath and untied his rope from the
saddle. He knew about where the horse had been feeding when he saw him,
and he judged that it would naturally graze in the direction of
home--which would probably be somewhere off to the southeast, since the
trail ran more or less in that direction. Without a word to the girl, or
a glance toward her, he started up the hill, hoping to get his bearings
and a sight of the horse from the top. He could not remember when he had
been so angry with a woman. "If she was a man," he gritted as he
climbed, "I'd give her a thrashing or leave her out there, just as she
deserves. That's the worst of dealing with a woman--she can always hand
it to you, and you've got to give her a grin and thank-you, because she
ain't a man."

He glanced back, then, and saw her sitting with her head dropped forward
upon her hands. There was something infinitely pitiful and lonely in her
attitude, and he knitted his brows over the contrast between it and her
manner when he left her. "I don't suppose a woman knows, herself, what
she means, half the time," he hazarded impatiently. "She certainly
didn't have any excuse for throwing it into me the way she did; maybe
she's sorry for it now."

After that his anger cooled imperceptibly, and he hurried a little
faster because the day was waning with the chill haste of mid-autumn,
and he recalled what she had said at first about being afraid of
coyotes. And, although the storm of three days ago had been swept into
mere memory by that sudden chinook wind, and the days were once more
invitingly warm and hazily tranquil, night came shiveringly upon the
land and the unhoused thought longingly of hot suppers and the glow of a
fire.

The girl's horse was, he believed, just disappearing into a deep
depression half a mile farther on; but when he reached the place where
he had seen it, there was nothing in sight save a few head of cattle and
a coyote trotting leisurely up the farther slope. He went farther down
the shallow coulée, then up to the high level beyond, his rope coiled
loosely over one arm with the end dragging a foot behind him. But there
was nothing to be seen from up there, except that the sun was just a red
disk upon the far-off hills, and that the night was going to be
uncomfortably cool if that wind kept blowing from the northwest.

He began to feel slightly uneasy about the girl, and to regret wasting
any time over her horse, and to fear that he might not be able to get
close enough to rope the beast, even if he did see him.

He turned back then and walked swiftly through the dusk toward the
ridge, beyond which she and Rambler were waiting. But it was a long
way--much farther than he had realized until he came to retrace his
steps--and the wind blew up a thin rift of clouds which made the
darkness come quickly. He found it difficult to tell exactly at which
point he had crossed the ridge, coming over; and although experience in
the open develops in a man a certain animal instinct for directions
handed down by our primitive ancestry, Ford went wide in his anxiety to
take the shortest way back to his unwilling protégée. The westering
slope was lighter, however, and five minutes of wandering along the
ridge showed him a dim bulk which he knew was Rambler. He hurried to the
place, and the horse whinnied shrilly as he approached.

"I looked as long as I could see, almost, but I couldn't locate your
horse," Ford remarked to the dark shadow of the rose bushes. "I'll put
you on mine. It will be slow going, of course--lame as he is--but I
guess we can manage to get somewhere."

He waited for the chill, impersonal reply. When she did not speak, he
leaned and peered at the spot where he knew she must be. "If you want to
try it, we'd better be starting," he urged sharply. "It's going to be
pretty cold here on this side-hill."

When there was silence still--and he gave her plenty of time for
reply--Ford stooped and felt gropingly for her, thinking she must be
asleep. He glanced back at Rambler; unless the horse had moved, she
should have been just there, under his hands; or, he thought, she may
have moved to some other spot, and be waiting in the dark to see what he
would do. His palms touched the pressed grasses where she had been, but
he did not say a word. He would not give her that satisfaction; and he
told himself grimly that he had his opinion of a girl who would waste
time in foolery, out here in the cold--with a sprained ankle, to boot.

He pulled a handful of the long grass which grows best among bushes. It
was dead now, and dry. He twisted it into a makeshift torch, lighted and
held it high, so that its blaze made a great disk of brightness all
around him. While it burned he looked for her, and when it grew to
black cinders and was near to scorching his hand, he made another and
looked farther. He laid aside his dignity and called, and while his
voice went booming full-lunged through the whispering silence of that
empty land, he twisted the third torch, and stamped the embers of the
second into the earth that it might not fire the prairie.

There was no dodging the fact; the girl was gone. When Ford was
perfectly sure of it, he stamped the third torch to death with vicious
heels, went back to the horse, and urged him to limp up the hill. He did
not say anything then or think anything much; at least, he did not think
coherently. He was so full of a wordless rage against the girl, that he
did not at first feel the need of expression. She had made a fool of
him.

He remembered once shooting a big, beautiful, blacktail doe. She had
dropped limply in her tracks and lain there, and he had sauntered up and
stood looking at her stretched before him. He was out of meat, and the
doe meant all that hot venison steaks and rich, brown gravy can mean to
a man meat-hungry. While he unsheathed his hunting knife, he gloated
over the feast he would have, that night. And just when he had laid his
rifle against a rock and knelt to bleed her, the deer leaped from under
his hand and bounded away over the hill. He had not said a word on that
occasion, either.

This night, although the case was altogether different and the
disappearance of the girl was in no sense a disaster--rather a relief,
if anything--he felt that same wordless rage, the same sense of utter
chagrin. She had made a fool of him. After awhile he felt his jaws
aching with the vicelike pressure of his teeth together.

They topped the ridge, Rambler hobbling stiffly. Ford had in mind a
sheltering rim of sandstone at the nearest point of the coulée he had
crossed in searching for the girl's horse, and made for it. He had
noticed a spring there, and while the water might not be good, the
shelter would be welcome, at any rate.

He had the saddle off Rambler, the shoulder bathed with cold water from
the spring, and was warming his wet hands over a little fire when the
first gleam of humor struck through his anger and lighted for a moment
the situation.

"Lordy me! I must be a hoodoo, where women are concerned," he said,
kicking the smoking stub of a bush into the blaze. "Soon as one crosses
my trail, she goes and disappears off the face of the earth!" He fumbled
for his tobacco and papers. It was a "dry camp" he was making that
night, and a smoke would have to serve for a supper. He held his book of
papers absently while he stared hard at the fire.

"It ain't such a bad hoodoo," he mused. "I can spare this particular
girl just as easy as not; and the other one, too, for that matter."

After a minute spent in blowing apart the thin leaves and selecting a
paper:

"Queer where she got to--and it's a darned mean trick to play on a man
that was just trying to help her out of a fix. Why, I wouldn't treat a
stray dog that way! Darn these women!"




CHAPTER VI

The Problem of Getting Somewhere


Dawn came tardily after a long, cheerless night, during which the wind
whined over the prairie and the stars showed dimly through a shifting
veil of low-sweeping clouds. Ford had not slept much, for hunger and
cold make poor bedfellows, and all the brush he could glean on that
barren hillside, with the added warmth of his saddle-blanket wrapped
about him, could no more make him comfortable than could cigarettes
still the gnawing of his hunger.

When he could see across the coulée, he rose from where he had been
sitting with his back to the ledge and his feet to the meager fire,
brooding over all the unpleasant elements in his life thus far,
particularly the feminine element. He folded the saddle-blanket along
its original creases and went over to where Rambler stood dispiritedly
with his back humped to the cold, creeping wind and his tail whipping
between his legs when a sudden gust played with it. Ford shivered, and
beat his gloved hands about his body, and looked up at the sky to see
whether the sun would presently shine and send a little warmth to this
bleak land where he wandered. He blamed the girl for all of this
discomfort, and he told himself that the next time a woman appeared
within his range of vision he would ride way around her. They invariably
brought trouble; of various sorts and degrees, it is true, but trouble
always. It was perfectly safe, he decided, to bank on that. And he
wished, more than ever, that he had not improvidently given that pint of
whisky to a disconsolate-looking sheep-herder he had met the day before
on his way out from town; or that he had put two flasks in his pocket
instead of one. In his opinion a good, big jolt right now would make a
new man of him.

Rambler, as he had half expected, was obliged to do his walking with
three legs only; which is awkward for a horse accustomed to four
exceedingly limber ones, and does not make for speed, however great
one's hurry. Ford walked around him twice, scooped water in his hands,
and once more bathed the shoulder--not that he had any great faith in
cold water as a liniment, but because there was nothing else that he
could do, and his anxiety and his pity impelled service of some sort. He
rubbed until his fingers were numb and his arm aching, tried him again,
and gave up all hope of leading the horse to a ranch. A mile he might
manage, if he had to but ten! He rubbed Rambler's nose commiseratingly,
straightened his forelock, told him over and over that it was a darned
shame, anyway, and finally turned to pick up his saddle. He could not
leave that lying on the prairie for inquisitive kit-foxes to chew into
shoestrings, however much he might dread the forty-pound burden of it on
his shoulders. He was stooping to pick it up when he saw a bit of paper
twisted and tied to the saddle-horn with a red ribbon.

"Lordy me!" he ejaculated ironically. "The lady left a note on my
pillow--and I never received it in time! Now, ain't that a darned
shame?" He plucked the knot loose, and held up the ribbon and the note,
and laughed.

"'When this reaches you, I shall be far away, though it breaks my heart
to go and this missive is mussed up scandalous with my bitter tears.
Forgive me if you can, and forget me if you have to. It is better thus,
for it couldn't otherwise was,'" he improvised mockingly, while his
chilled fingers fumbled to release the paper, which was evidently a leaf
torn from a man's memorandum book. "Lordy me, a letter from a lady!
Ain't that sweet!"

When he read it, however, the smile vanished with a click of the teeth
which betrayed his returning anger. One cold, curt sentence bidding him
wait until help came--that was all. His eye measured accusingly the wide
margin left blank under the words; she had not omitted apology or
explanation for lack of space, at any rate. His face grew cynically
amused again.

"Oh, certainly! I'd roost on this side-hill for a month, if a lady told
me to," he sneered, speaking aloud as he frequently did in the solitude
of the range land. He glanced from ribbon to note, ended his indecision
by stuffing the note carelessly into his coat pocket and letting the
ribbon drop to the ground, and with a curl of the lips which betrayed
his mental attitude toward all women and particularly toward that woman,
picked up his saddle.

"I can't seem to recollect asking that lady for help, anyway," he summed
up before he dismissed the subject from his mind altogether. "I was
trying to help her; it sure takes a woman to twist things around so they
point backwards!"

He turned and glanced pityingly at Rambler, watching him with ears
perked forward inquiringly. "And I crippled a damned good horse trying
to help a blamed poor specimen of a woman!" he gritted. "And didn't get
so much as a pleasant word for it. I'll sure remember that!"

Rambler whinnied after him wistfully, and Ford set his teeth hard
together and walked the faster, his shoulders slightly bent under the
weight of the saddle. His own physical discomfort was nothing, beside
the hurt of leaving his horse out there practically helpless; for a
moment his fingers rested upon the butt of his six-shooter, while he
considered going back and putting an end to life and misery for
Rambler. But for all the hardness men had found in Ford Campbell, he was
woman-weak where his horse was concerned. With cold reason urging him,
he laid the saddle on the ground and went back, his hand clutching
grimly the gun at his hip. Rambler's nicker of welcome stopped him
half-way and held him there, hot with guilt.

"Oh, damn it, I can't!" he muttered savagely, and retraced his steps to
where the saddle lay. After that he almost trotted down the coulée, and
he would not look back again until it struck him as odd that the
nickerings of the horse did not grow perceptibly fainter. With a queer
gripping of the muscles in his throat he did turn, then, and saw
Rambler's head over the little ridge he had just crossed. The horse was
making shift to follow him rather than be left alone in that strange
country. Ford waited, his lashes glistening in the first rays of the
new-risen sun, until the horse came hobbling stiffly up to him.

"You old devil!" he murmured then, his contrite tone contrasting oddly
with the words he used. "You contrary, ornery, old devil, you!" he
repeated softly, rubbing the speckled nose with more affection than he
had ever shown a woman. "You'd tag along, if--if you didn't have but one
leg to carry you! And I was going to--" He could not bring himself to
confess his meditated deed of mercy; it seemed black-hearted treachery,
now, and he stood ashamed and humbled before the dumb brute that nuzzled
him with such implicit faith.

It was slow journeying, after that. Ford carried the saddle on his own
back rather than burden the horse with it, and hungry as he was, he
stopped often and long, and massaged the sprained shoulder faithfully
while Rambler rested it, with all his weight on his other legs and his
nose rooting gently at Ford's bowed head.

A stray rider assured him that he was on the right trail, but it was
past noon when he thankfully reached the Double Cross, threw his saddle
down beside the stable door, and gave Rambler a chance at the hay in the
corral.




CHAPTER VII

The Foreman of the Double Cross


"Hell-o, Ford, where the blazes did you drop down from?" a welcoming
voice yelled, when he was closing the gate of the corral behind him and
thinking that it was like Ches Mason to have a fine, strong corral and
gate, and then slur the details by using a piece of baling wire to
fasten it. The last ounce of disgust with life slid from his mind when
he heard the greeting, and he turned and gripped hard the gloved hand
thrust toward him. Ches Mason it was--the same old Ches, with the same
humorous wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, the same kindliness, the
same hearty faith in the world as he knew it and in his fellowmen as he
found them--the unquestioning faith that takes it for granted that the
other fellow is as square as himself. Ford held his hand while he
permitted himself a swift, reckoning glance which took in these
familiar landmarks of the other's personality.

"Don't seem to have hurt you much--matrimony," he observed whimsically,
as he dropped the hand. "You look just like you always did--with your
hat on." In the West, not to say in every other locality, there is a
time-honored joke about matrimony, for certain strenuous reasons,
producing premature baldness.

Ches grinned and removed his hat. Eight years had heightened his
forehead perceptibly and thinned the hair on his temples. "You see what
it's done to me," he pointed out lugubriously. "You ain't married
yourself, I suppose? You look like you'd met up with some kinda
misfortune." Mason was regarding Ford's scarred face with some
solicitude.

"Just got tangled up a little with my fellow-citizens, in Sunset," Ford
explained drily. "I tried to see how much of the real stuff I could get
outside of, and then how many I could lick." He shrugged his shoulders a
little. "I did quite a lot of both," he added, as an afterthought.

Mason was rubbing his jaw reflectively and staring hard at Ford. "The
wife's strong on the temperance dope," he said hesitatingly. "I reckon
you'll want to bunk down with the boys till you grow some hide on your
face--there's lady company up at the house, and--"

"The bunk-house for mine, then," Ford cut in hastily. "No lady can get
within gunshot of me; not if I see her coming in time!" Though he smiled
when he said it, there was meaning behind the mirth.

Mason pulled a splinter from a corral rail and began to snap off little
bits with his fingers. "Kate will go straight up in the air with me if
she knows you're here and won't come to the house, though," he
considered uneasily. "She's kept a big package of gratitude tucked away
with your name on it, ever since that Alaska deal. And lemme tell you,
Ford, when a woman as good as Kate goes and gets grateful to a
man--gosh! Had your dinner?"

"Not lately, I haven't," Ford declared. "I kinda remember eating, some
time in the past; it was a long time ago, though."

Mason laughed and tagged the answer as being the natural exaggeration
of a hungry man. "Well, come along and eat, then--if you haven't
forgotten how to make your jaws go. I've got Mose Freeman cooking for
me; you know Mose, don't you? Hired him the day after the Fourth; the
Mitten outfit fired him for getting soused and trying to clean out the
camp, and I nabbed him before they had time to forgive him. Way they had
of disciplining him--when he'd go on a big tear they'd fire him for a
few days and then take him back. But they can't git him now--not if I
can help it. A better cook never throwed dishwater over a guy-rope than
that same old Mose, but--" He stopped and looked at Ford hesitantly.
"Say! I hate like the deuce to tie a string on you as soon as you hit
the ranch, Ford, but--if you've got anything along, you won't spring it
on Mose, will you? A fellow's got to watch him pretty close, or--"

"I haven't got a drop." Ford's tone was reprehensibly regretful.

"You do look as if you'd put it all under your belt," Mason retorted
dryly. "Left anything behind?"

"Some spoiled beauties, and a nice new jail that was built by my
admiring townspeople, with my name carved over the door. I didn't stay
for the dedication services. Sunset was getting all fussed up over me
and I thought I'd give them a chance to settle their nerves; loss of
sleep sure plays hell with folks when their nerves are getting frazzly."
He smiled disarmingly at Mason.

"I'd kinda lost track of you, Ches, till I got your letter. I've been
traveling pretty swift, and that's no lie. I meant to write, but--you
know how a man gets to putting things off. And then I took a notion to
ride over this way, and sample your grub for a day or so, and abuse you
a little to your face, you old highbinder!"

"Sure. I've been kinda looking for you, too. But--I wish you hadn't
quite so big an assortment of battle-signs, Ford. Kate's got ideals and
prejudices--and she don't know all your little personal traits. She's
heard a lot about you, of course. We was married right after we came
outa the North, you know, and of course--Well, you know how a woman sops
up adventure stories; and seeing you was the star performer--"

"And that's a lie," Ford put in modestly, albeit a trifle bluntly.

"No, it ain't. She got the truth. And she's so darned grateful," he
added lugubriously, "that I don't know how to square your record with
that face! Unless we can rig up some yarn about a holdup--" He paused
just outside the mess-house door and eyed Ford questioningly. "We
might--"

"No, you don't. If you've gone and lied to her, and made me out a little
tin angel, you deserve what's coming. Anyway, I won't stay long, and
I'll stop down here with the boys. Call me Jack Jones and let it go at
that. Honest, Ches, I don't want to get mixed up with no more females.
I'm plumb scared of 'em. Lordy me, that coffee sure does smell good to
me!"

Mason looked at him doubtfully, saw that Ford was, for the time being,
absolutely devoid of anything remotely approaching penitence for his
sins, or compunction over his appearance, or uneasiness over "Kate's"
opinion of him. He was hungry. And since it is next to impossible to
whip up the conscience of a man whose thoughts are concentrated upon his
physical needs, Mason was wise enough to wait, though the one point
which he considered of vital importance to them both--the question of
Ford's acceptance or refusal of the foremanship of the Double Cross--had
not yet been touched upon.

While Ford ate with a controlled voraciousness which spoke eloquently of
his twenty-four hours of fasting and exposure, Mason gossiped
inattentively and studied the man.

Eight years leave their impress of mental growth or deterioration upon a
man. Outwardly Ford was not much changed since Mason had come with him
out of Alaska and lost sight of him afterwards. There was the maturity
which the man of thirty possessed and which the virile young fellow of
twenty-one had lacked. There was the same straight glance, the same
atmosphere of squareness and mental poise. Those were qualities which
Mason set down as valuable factors in his estimate of the man. Besides,
there were other signs which did not make so pleasant a reading.

Eight years--and a few of them, at least, had been spent wastefully in
tearing down what the other years had built; Mason had heard that Ford
was "going to the dogs," and that by the short trail men blazed for
themselves centuries ago and which those who came after have made a
highway--the whisky trail. Mason had heard, now and then, of ten
thousand dollars coming to Ford upon the death of his father and going
almost as suddenly as it had come. That, at least, had been the rumor.
Also he had heard, just lately, that Ford had taken to gambling as a
profession and to terrorizing Sunset periodically as a pastime. And
Mason remembered the Ford Campbell who had carried him on his back out
of a wild place in Alaska, and had nearly starved himself that the sick
man's strength might not fail him utterly. He had remembered--had Ches
Mason; and, being one of those tenacious souls who cling to friendship
and to a resilient faith in the good that is in the worst of us, he had
thrown out a tentative life-line, as it were, and hoped that Ford might
clutch it before he became quite submerged in the sodden morass of
inebriety.

Ford may or may not have grasped eagerly at the line. At any rate he was
there in the mess-house of the Double Cross, and he was not quite so
sodden as Mason had feared to find him--provided he found him at all. So
much, at least, was encouraging, and for the rest, Mason was content to
wait.

Mose, recognizing Ford at once, had asked him, with a comical attempt at
secrecy, if he had anything to drink. When Ford shook his head, Mose
stifled a sigh and went back to his dishwashing, not more than half
convinced and inclined toward resentfulness. That a "booze-fighter" like
Ford Campbell should come only a day's ride from town and not be fairly
well supplied with whisky was too remarkable to be altogether plausible.
He eyed the two sourly while they talked, and he did not bring forth one
of the fresh pies he had baked, as he had meant to do.

It was not until Ford was ready to light his after-dinner cigarette
that Mason led the way into the next room, which held the bunks and
general belongings of the men, and closed the door so that they might
talk in confidence without fear of Mose's loose tongue. Ford immediately
pulled off his boots, laid himself down upon one of the bunks, doubled a
pillow under his head, and began to eye Mason quizzically. Then he said:

"Say, you kinda played your hand face down, didn't you, Ches, when you
wrote and asked me to come out here and take charge? Eight years is a
long time to expect a man to stay right where he was when you saw him
last. You've lost a whole lot of horse sense since I knew you."

"Well, what about it? You came, I notice." Mason grinned and would not
help Ford otherwise to an understanding.

"I didn't come to hog-tie that foreman job, you chump. I just merely
want to tell you that you'll get into all kinds of trouble, some day, if
you go laying yourself wide open like that. Why, it's plumb crazy to
offer a job like that to a fellow you haven't seen for as long as you
have me. And if you heard anything about me, it's a cinch it wasn't what
would recommend me to any Sunday-school as a teacher of their Bible
class! How did you know I wouldn't take it? And let you in for--"

"Well, you're here, and I've seen you. The job's still waiting for you.
You can start right in, to-morrow morning." Ches got out his pipe and
began to fill it as calmly and with as much attention to the small
details as if he were not mentally tensed for the struggle he knew was
coming; a struggle which struck much deeper than the position he was
offering Ford.

Ford almost dropped his cigarette in his astonishment. "Well, you damn'
fool!" he ejaculated pityingly.

"Why? I thought you knew enough--you punched cows for the Circle for
four or five years, didn't you? Nelson told me you were his top hand
while you stayed with him, and that you ran the outfit one whole summer,
when--"

"That ain't the point." A hot look had crept into Ford's face--a tinge
which was not a flush--and a glow into his eyes. "I know the
cow-business, far as that goes. It's me; you can't--why, Lordy me! You
ought to be sent to Sulphur Springs and get your think-tank hoed out.
Any man that will offer a foreman's job to a--a--"

"'A rooting, tooting, shooting, fighting son-of-a-gun, and a good one!'"
assisted Mason equably. "'The only original go-getter--' Sure. That's
all right."

The flush came slowly and darkened Ford's cheeks and brow and throat. He
threw his half-smoked cigarette savagely at the hearth of the rusty
box-stove, and scowled at the place where it fell. "Well, ain't that
reason enough?" he demanded harshly, after a minute.

Mason had been studying that flush. He nodded assent to some question he
had put to himself, and crowded tobacco into his pipe. "No reason at
all, one way or the other. I need a foreman--one I can depend on. I've
got to make a trip out to the Coast, this fall, and I've got to leave
somebody here I can trust."

Ford shot him a quick, questioning glance, and bit his lip. "That," he
said more calmly, "is just what I'm driving at. You can't trust me. You
can't depend on me, Ches."

"Oh, yes I can," Mason contradicted blandly. "It's just because I can
that I want you."

"You can't. You know damn' well you can't! Why, you--don't you know I've
got the name of being a drunkard, and a--a bad actor all around? I'm not
like I was eight years ago, remember. I've traveled a hard old trail
since we bucked the snow together, Ches--and it's been mostly down
grade. I was all right for awhile, and then I got ten thousand dollars,
and it seemed a lot of money. I bought a fellow out--he had a ranch and
a few head of horses--so he could take his wife back East to her mother.
She was sick. I didn't want the darned ranch. And so help me, Ches,
that's the only thing I've done in the last four years that I hadn't
ought to be ashamed of. The rest of the money I just simply blew.
I--well, you see me; you didn't want to take me up to the house to meet
your wife, and I don't blame you. You'd be a chump if you did. And this
is nothing out of the ordinary. I've got my face bunged up half the
time, seems like." He thumped the pillow into a different position,
settled his head against it, and looked at Mason with his old, whimsical
smile. "So when you talk about that foreman job, and depending on me,
you're--plumb delirious. I was going to write and tell you so, but I
kept putting it off. And then I took a notion I'd hunt you up and give
you some good advice. You're a good fellow, Ches, but the court ought to
appoint a guardian for you."

"I'll stick around for three or four weeks," Mason observed, in the
casual tone of one who is merely discussing the details of an everyday
affair, "till the calves are all gathered. We're a little late this
year, on account of old Slow dying right in round-up time. We got most
of the beef shipped--all I care about gathering, this fall. I've got
most all young stock, and it won't hurt to let 'em run another season;
there ain't many. I'll let you take the wagons out, and I'll go with you
till you get kinda harness-broke. And--"

"I told you I don't want the job." Ford's mouth was set grimly.

"You tried to tell me what I want and what I don't want," Mason
corrected amiably. "Now I've got my own ideas on that subject. This here
outfit belongs to me. I like to pick my men to suit myself; and if I
want a certain man for foreman, I guess I've got a right to hire him--if
he'll let himself be hired. I've picked my man. It don't make any
difference to me how many times he played hookey when he was a kid, or
how many men he's licked since he growed up. I've hired him to help run
the Double Cross, and run it right; and I ain't a bit afraid but what
he'll make good." He smiled and knocked the ashes gently from his pipe
into the palm of his hand, because the pipe was a meerschaum just
getting a fine, fawn coloring around the base of the bowl, and was dear
to the heart of him. "Down to the last, white chip," he added slowly,
"he'll make good. He ain't the kind of a man that will lay down on his
job." He got up and yawned, elaborately casual in his manner.

"You lay around and take it easy this afternoon," he said. "I've got to
jog over to the river field; the boys are over there, working a little
bunch we threw in yesterday. To-morrow we can ride around a little, and
kinda get the lay of the land. You better go by-low, right now--you look
as if it wouldn't do you any harm!" Whereupon he wisely took himself off
and left Ford alone.

The door he pulled shut after him closed upon a mental battle-ground.
Ford did not go "by-low." Instead, he rolled over and lay with his face
upon his folded arms, alive to the finger-tips; alive and fighting. For
there are times when the soul of a man awakes and demands a reckoning,
and reviews pitilessly the past and faces the future with the veil of
illusion torn quite away--and does it whether the man will or no.




CHAPTER VIII

"I Wish You'd Quit Believing in Me!"


A distant screaming roused Ford from his bitter mood of introspection.
He raised his head and listened, his heavy-lidded eyes staring blankly
at the wall opposite, before he sprang off the bunk, pulled on his
boots, and rushed from the room. Outside, he hesitated long enough to
discover which direction he must take to reach the woman who was
screaming inarticulately, her voice vibrant with sheer terror. The sound
came from the little, brown cottage that seemed trying modestly to hide
behind a dispirited row of young cottonwoods across a deep, narrow
gully, and he ran headlong toward it. He crossed the plank footbridge in
a couple of long leaps, vaulted over the gate which barred his way, and
so reached the house just as a woman whom he knew must be Mason's
"Kate," jerked open the door and screamed "Chester!" almost in his
face. Behind her rolled a puff of slaty blue smoke.

Ford pushed past her in the doorway without speaking; the smoke told its
own urgent tale and made words superfluous. She turned and followed him,
choking over the pungent smoke.

"Oh, where's Chester?" she wailed. "The whole garret's on fire--and I
can't carry Phenie--and she's asleep and can't walk anyway!" She rushed
half across the room and stopped, pointing toward a closed door, with
Ford at her heels.

"She's in there!" she cried tragically. "Save her, quick--and I'll find
Chester. You'd think, with all the men there are on this ranch, there'd
be some one around--oh, and my new piano!"

She ran out of the house, scolding hysterically because the men were
gone, and Ford laughed a little as he went to the door she had
indicated. When his fingers touched the knob, it turned fumblingly under
another hand than his own; the door opened, and he confronted the girl
whom he had tried to befriend the day before. She had evidently just
gotten out of bed, and into a flimsy blue kimono, which she was holding
together at the throat with one hand, while with the other she steadied
herself against the wall. She stared blankly into his eyes, and her face
was very white indeed, with her hair falling thickly upon either side in
two braids which reached to her hips.

Ford gave her one quick, startled glance, said "Come on," quite
brusquely, and gathered her into his arms with as little sentiment as he
would have bestowed upon the piano. His eyes smarted with the smoke,
which blinded him so that he bumped into chairs on his way to the door.
Outside he stopped, and looked down at the girl, wondering what he
should do with her. Since Kate had stated emphatically that she could
not walk, it seemed scarcely merciful to deposit her on the ground and
leave her to her own devices. She had closed her eyes, and she looked
unpleasantly like a corpse; and there was an insistent crackling up in
the roof, which warned Ford that there was little time for the weighing
of fine points. He was about to lay her on the bare ground, for want of
a better place, when he glimpsed Mose running heavily across the
bridge, and went hurriedly to meet him.

"Here! You take her down and put her in one of the bunks, Mose," he
commanded, when Mose confronted him, panting a good deal because of his
two hundred and fifty pounds of excess fat and a pair of
down-at-the-heel slippers which hampered his movements appreciably. Mose
looked at the girl and then at his two hands.

"I can't take her," he lamented. "I got m'hands full of aigs!"

Ford's reply was a sweep of the girl's inert figure against Mose's
outstretched hands, which freed them effectually of their burden of
eggs. "You darned chump, what's eggs in a case like this?" he cried
sharply, and forced the girl into his arms. "You take her and put her on
a bunk. I've got to put out that fire!"

So Mose, a reluctant knight and an awkward one, carried the girl to the
bunk-house, and left Ford free to save the house if he could.
Fortunately the fire had started in a barrel of old clothing which had
stood too close to the stovepipe, and while the smoke was stifling, the
flames were as yet purely local. And, more fortunately still, that day
happened to be Mrs. Mason's wash-day and two tubs of water stood in the
kitchen, close to the narrow stairway which led into the loft. Three or
four pails of water and some quick work in running up and down the
stairs was all that was needed. Ford, standing in the low, unfinished
loft, looked at the rafter which was burnt half through, and wiped his
perspiring face with his coat sleeve.

"Lordy me!" he observed aloud, "I sure didn't come any too soon!"

"Oh, it's all out! I don't know how I ever shall thank you in this
world! With Phenie in bed with a sprained ankle so she couldn't walk,
and the men all gone, I was just wild! I--why--" Kate, standing upon the
stairs so that she could look into the loft, stopped suddenly and stared
at Ford with some astonishment. Plainly, she had but then discovered
that he was a stranger--and it was quite as plain that she was taking
stock of his blackened eyes and other bruises, and that with the
sheltered woman's usual tendency to exaggerate the disfigurements.

"That's all right; I don't need any thanks." Ford, seeing no other way
of escape, approached her steadily, the empty bucket swinging in his
hand. "The fire's all out, so there's nothing more I can do here, I
guess."

"Oh, but you'll have to bring Josephine back!" Kate's eyes met his
straightforward glance reluctantly, and not without reason; for Ford had
dark, greenish purple areas in the region of his eyes, a skinned cheek,
and a swollen lip; his chin was scratched and there was a bruise on his
forehead where, on the night of his marriage, he had hit the floor
violently under the impact of two or three struggling male humans.
Although they were five days old--six, some of them--these divers
battle-signs were perfectly visible, not to say conspicuous; so that
Kate Mason was perhaps justified in her perfectly apparent diffidence in
looking at him. So do we turn our eyes self-consciously away from a
cripple, lest we give offense by gazing upon his misfortune.

"_I_ can't carry her, and she can't walk--her ankle is sprained
dreadfully. So if you'll bring her back to the house, I'll be ever so
much--"

"Certainly; I'll bring her back right away." Ford came down the stairs
so swiftly that she retreated in haste before him, and once down he did
not linger; indeed, he almost ran from the house and from her
embarrassed gratitude. On the way to the bunk-house it occurred to him
that it might be no easy matter, now, for Mason to conceal Ford's
identity and his sins. From the way in which she had stared wincingly at
his battered countenance, he realized that she did, indeed, have ideals.
Ford grinned to himself, wondering if Ches didn't have to do his smoking
altogether in the bunk-house; he judged her to be just the woman to wage
a war on tobacco, and swearing, and muddy boots, and drinking out of
one's saucer, and all other weaknesses peculiar to the male of our
species. He was inclined to pity Ches, in spite of his mental
acknowledgment that she was a very nice woman indeed; and he was half
inclined to tell Mason when he saw him that he'd have to look further
for a foreman.

He found the girl lying upon a bunk just inside the door, still with
closed eyes and that corpse-like look in her face. He was guilty of
hoping that she would remain in that oblivious state for at least five
minutes longer, but the hope was short-lived; for when he lifted her
carefully in his arms, her eyes flew open and stared up at him intently.

Ford shut his lips grimly and tried not to mind that unwinking gaze
while he carried her out and up the path, across the little bridge and
on to the house, and deposited her gently upon her own bed. He had not
spoken a word, nor had she. So he left her thankfully to Kate's tearful
ministrations and hurried from the room.

"Lordy me!" he sighed, as he closed the door upon them and went back to
the bunk-house, which he entered with a sigh of relief. One tribute he
paid her, and one only: the tribute of feeling perturbed over her
presence, and of going hot all over at the memory of her steady stare
into his face. She was a queer girl, he told himself; but then, so far
as he had discovered, all women were queer; the only difference being
that some women were more so than others.

He sat down on the bunk where she had lain, and speedily forgot the girl
and the incident in facing the problem of that foremanship. He could not
get away from the conviction that he was not to be trusted. He did not
trust himself, and there was no reason why any man who knew him at all
should trust him. Ches Mason was a good fellow; he meant well, Ford
decided, but he simply did not realize what he was up against. He meant,
therefore, to enlighten him further, and go his way. He was almost sorry
that he had come.

Mason, when Ford confronted him later at the corral and bluntly stated
his view of the matter, heard him through without a word, and did not
laugh the issue out of the way, as he had been inclined to do before.

"I'll be all right for a month, maybe," Ford finished, "and that's as
long as I can bank on myself. I tell you straight, Ches, it won't work.
You may think you're hiring the same fellow that came out of the North
with you--but you aren't. Why, damn it, there ain't a man I know that
wouldn't give you the laugh if they knew the offer you've made me! They
would, that's a fact. They'd laugh at you. You're all right, Ches, but I
won't stand for a deal like that. I can't make good."

Mason waited until he was through. Then he came closer and put both
hands on Ford's shoulders, so that they stood face to face, and he
looked straight into Ford's discolored eyes with his own shining a
little behind their encircling wrinkles.

"You can make good!" he said calmly. "I know it. All you need is a
chance to pull up. Seeing you won't give yourself one, I'm giving it to
you. You'll do for me what you won't do for yourself, Ford--and if
there's a yellow streak in you, I never got a glimpse of it; and the
yellow will sure come to the surface of a man when he's bucking a
proposition like you and me bucked for two months. You didn't lay down
on that job, and you were just a kid, you might say. Gosh, Ford, I'd
bank on you any old time--put you on your mettle, and I would! You can
make good here--and damn it, you will!"

"I wish I was as sure of that as you seem to be," Ford muttered
uneasily, and turned away. Mason's easy chuckle followed him, and Ford
swung about and faced him again.

"I haven't made any cast-iron promise--"

"Did I ask you to make any?" Mason's voice sharpened.

"But--Lordy me, Ches! How do you know I--"

"I know. That's enough."

"But--maybe I don't want the darned job. I never said--"

Mason was studying him, as a man studies the moods of an untamed horse.
"I didn't think you'd dodge," he drawled, and the blood surged
answeringly to Ford's cheeks. "You do want it."

"If I should happen to get jagged up in good shape, about the first
thing I'd do would be to lick the stuffing out of you for being such a
simple-minded cuss," Ford prophesied grimly, as one who knows well
whereof he speaks.

"Ye-es--but you won't get jagged."

"Oh, Lord! I wish you'd quit believing in me! You used to have some
sense," Ford grumbled. But he reached out and clenched his fingers upon
Mason's arm so tight that Mason set his teeth, and he looked at him
long, as if there was much that he would like to put into words and
could not. "Say! You're white clear down to your toes, Ches," he said
finally, and walked away hurriedly with his hat jerked low over his
eyes.

Mason looked after him as long as he was in sight, and afterwards took
off his hat, and wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead. "Gosh!"
he whispered fervently. "That was nip and tuck--but I got him, thank the
Lord!" Whereupon he blew his nose violently, and went up to his supper
with his hands in his pockets and his humorous lips pursed into a
whistle.

Before long he was back, chuckling to himself as he bore down upon Ford
in the corral, where he was industriously rubbing Rambler's sprained
shoulder with liniment.

"The wife says you've got to come up to the house," he announced
gleefully. "You've gone and done the heroic again, and she wants to do
something to show her gratitude."

"You go back and tell your wife that I'm a bold, bad man and I won't
come." Ford, to prove his sincerity, sat down upon the stout manger
there, and crossed his legs with an air of finality.

"I did tell her," Mason confessed sheepishly. "She wanted to know who
you was, and I told her before I thought. And she wanted to know what
was the matter with your face, 'poor fellow,' and I told her that,
too--as near as I knew it. I told her," he stated sweepingly, "that
you'd been on a big jamboree and had licked fourteen men hand-running.
There ain't," he confided with a twinkle, "any use at all in trying to
keep a secret from your wife; not," he qualified, "from a wife like
Kate! So she knows the whole darned thing, and she's sore as the deuce
because I didn't bring you up to the house right away when you came. She
thinks you're sufferin' from them wounds and she's going to doctor 'em.
That's the way with a woman--you never can tell what angle she's going
to look at a thing from. You're the man that packed me down out of the
Wrangel mountains on your back, and that's enough for her--dang it, Kate
thinks a lot of me! Besides, you done the heroic this afternoon. You've
got to come."

"There ain't anything heroic in sloshing a few buckets of water on a
barrel of burning rags," Ford belittled, seeking in his pockets for his
cigarette papers.

"How about rescuing a lady?" Mason twitted. "You come along. I want you
up there myself. Gosh! I want somebody I can talk to about something
besides dresses and the proper way to cure sprained ankles, and whether
the grocer sent out the right brand of canned peaches. Women are all
right--but a man wants some one around to talk to. You ain't married!"

"Oh. Ain't I?" Ford snorted. "And what if I ain't?"

"Say, there's a mighty nice girl staying with us; the one you rescued.
She's laid up now--got bucked off, or fell off, or something yesterday,
and hurt her foot--but she's a peach, all right. You'll--"

"I know the lady," Ford cut in dryly. "I met her yesterday, and we
commenced hating each other as soon as we got in talking distance. She
sent me to catch her horse, and then she pulled out before I got back.
She's a peach, all right!"

"Oh. You're the fellow!" Mason regarded him attentively. "Now, I don't
believe she said a word to Kate about that, and she must have known who
it was packed her out of the house. I wonder why she didn't say anything
about it to Kate! But she wasn't to blame for leaving you out there,
honest she wasn't. I went out to hunt her up--Kate got kinda worried
about her--and she told me about you, and we did wait a little while.
But it was getting cold, and she was hurt pretty bad and getting kinda
wobbly, so I put her on my horse and brought her home. But she left a
note for you, and I sent a man back after you with a horse. He come back
and said he couldn't locate you. So we thought you'd gone to some other
ranch." He stopped and looked quizzically at Ford. "So you're the man!
And you're both here for the winter--at least, Kate says she's going to
keep her all winter. Gosh! This is getting romantic!"

"Don't you believe it!" Ford urged emphatically. "I don't want to bump
into her again; a little of her company will last me a long while!"

"Oh, you won't meet Jo to-night; Josephine, her name is. She's in bed,
and will be for a week or so, most likely. You've just got to come,
Ford. Kate'll be down here after you herself, if I go back without
you--and she'll give me the dickens into the bargain. I want you to get
acquainted with my kid--Buddy. He's down in the river field with the
boys, but he'll be back directly. Greatest kid you ever saw, Ford! Only
seven, and he can ride like a son-of-a-gun, and wears chaps and spurs,
and can sling a loop pretty good, for a little kid! Come on!"

"Wel-ll, all right--but Lordy me! I do hate to, Ches, and that's a fact.
Women I'm plumb scared of. I never met one in my life that didn't hand
me a package of trouble so big I couldn't see around it. Why--" He shut
his teeth upon the impulse to confide to Mason his matrimonial
mischance.

"These two won't. My wife's the real goods, once you get to know her; a
little fussy, maybe, over some things--most all women are. But she's all
right, you bet. And Josephine's the proper stuff too. A little abrupt,
maybe--"

"Abrupt!" Ford echoed, and laughed over the word. "Yes, she is what you
might call a little--abrupt!"




CHAPTER IX

Impressions


Josephine waited languidly while Kate chose a second-best cushion from
the couch and, lifting the bandaged foot as gently as might be, placed
it, with many little pats and pulls, under the afflicted member.
Josephine screwed her lips into a soundless expression of pain, smiled
afterwards when Kate glanced at her commiseratingly, and pulled a long,
dark-brown braid forward over her chest.

"Do you want tea, Phenie?--or would you rather have chocolate to-day? I
can make chocolate just as easy as not; I think I shall, anyway. Buddy
is so fond of it and--"

"Is that man here yet?" Josephine's tone carried the full weight of her
dislike of him.

"I don't know why you call him 'that man,' the way you do," Kate
complained, turning her mind from the momentous decision between tea
and chocolate. "Ford's simply fine! Chester thinks there's no one like
him; and Buddy just tags him around everywhere. You can always,"
asserted Kate, with the positiveness of the person who accepts
unquestioningly the beliefs of others, living by faith rather than
reason, "depend upon the likes and dislikes of children and dogs, you
know."

"Has the swelling gone out of his eyes?" Josephine inquired pointedly,
with the irrelevance which seemed habitual to her and Kate when they
conversed.

"Phenie, I don't think it's kind of you to harp on that. Yes, it has, if
you want to know. He's positively handsome--or will be when the--when
his nose heals perfectly. And I don't think that's anything one should
hold against Ford; it seems narrow, dear."

"The skinned place?" Josephine's tone was perfectly innocent, and her
fingers were busy with the wide, black bow which becomingly tied the end
of the braid.

"Phenie! If you hadn't a sprained ankle, and weren't such a dear in
every other respect, I'd shake you! It isn't fair. Because Ford was
pounced upon by a lot of men--sixteen, Chester told me--"

"I suppose he counted the dead after the battle, and told Ches
truthfully--"

"Phenie, that sounds catty! When you get down on a man, you're perfectly
unmerciful, and Ford doesn't deserve it. You shouldn't judge men by the
narrow, Eastern standards. I know it's awful for a man to drink and
fight. But Ford wasn't altogether to blame. They got him to drinking
and," she went on with her voice lowered to the pitch at which women are
wont to relate horrid, immoral things, "--I wouldn't be surprised if
they put something in it! Such things are done; I've heard of men being
drugged and robbed and all sorts of things. And I'm just as much of an
advocate for temperance as you are, Phenie--and I think Ford was just
right to fight those men. There are," she declared wisely,
"circumstances where it's perfectly just and right for a man to fight. I
can imagine circumstances under which Chester would be justified in
fighting--"

"In case sixteen men should hold his nose and pour drugged whisky down
his throat?" Phenie inquired mildly, curling the end of her braid over a
slim forefinger.

Mrs. Kate made an inarticulate sound which might almost be termed a
snort, and walked from the room with her head well up and a manner which
silently made plain to the onlooker that she might say many things which
would effectually crush her opponent, but was magnanimously refraining
from doing so.

Josephine did not even pay her the tribute of looking at her; she had at
that moment heard a step upon the porch, and she was leaning to one side
so that she might see who was coming into the dining-room. As it
happened, it was Mason himself. Miss Josephine immediately lost interest
in the arrival and took to tracing with her finger the outline of a
Japanese lady with a startling coiffure and an immense bow upon her
spine, who was simpering at a lotus bed on Josephine's kimono. She did
not look up until some one stepped upon the porch again.

This time it was Ford, and he stopped and painstakingly removed the last
bit of soil from his boot-soles upon the iron scraper which was attached
to one end of the top step; when that duty had been performed, he paid
further tribute to the immaculate house he was about to enter, by wiping
his feet upon a mat placed with mathematical precision upon the porch,
at the head of the steps. Josephine watched the ceremonial, and studied
Ford's profile, and did not lay her head back upon the cushion behind
her until he disappeared into the dining-room. Then she stared at a
colored-crayon portrait of Buddy which hung on the wall opposite, and
her eyes were the eyes of one who sees into the past.

Buddy, when he opened the door and projected himself into the room,
startled her into a little exclamation.

"Dad says he'll carry you out to the table and you can have a whole side
to yourself," he announced without preface. "They'll just pick up your
chair, and pack chair and all in, and set you down as ee-asy--do you
want to eat out there with us?"

Josephine hesitated for two seconds. "All right," she consented then, in
a supremely indifferent tone which was of course quite wasted on Buddy,
who immediately disappeared with a whoop.

"Come on, dad--she says yes, all right, she'll come," he announced
gleefully. Buddy was Josephine's devoted admirer, at this point in their
rather brief acquaintance; which, according to his mother's well-known
theory, was convincing proof of her intrinsic worth--Mrs. Kate having
frequently strengthened her championship of Ford to his detractor, Miss
Josephine, by pointing out that Buddy was fond of him.

Josephine spent the brief interval in tucking back locks of hair and in
rearranging the folds of her long, Japanese kimono, and managed to fall
into a languidly indifferent attitude by the time Chester opened the
door. Behind him came Ford; Miss Josephine moved her lips and tilted her
head in a perfunctory greeting, and afterward gave him no more
attention than if he had been a Pullman porter assisting with her
suitcases. For the matter of that, she gave quite as much attention as
she received from him--and Mason's lips twitched betrayingly at the
spectacle.

Through dinner they seemed mutually agreed upon ignoring each other as
much as was politely possible, which caused Mason to watch them with
amusement, and afterwards relieve his feelings by talking about them to
Kate in the kitchen.

"Gosh! Jo and Ford are sure putting up a good bluff," he chuckled, while
he selected the freshest dish towel from the rack behind the pantry
door. "They'd be sticking out their tongues at each other if they was
twenty years younger; pity they ain't, too; it would be a relief to 'em
both!"

"Phenie provokes me almost past endurance!" Mrs. Kate complained,
burying two plump forearms in a dishpan of sudsy hot water, and bringing
up a handful of silver. "It's because Ford had been fighting when he
came here, and she knows he has been slightly addicted to liquor. She
looks down on him, and I don't think it's fair. If a man wants to
reform, I believe in helping him instead of pushing him father down."
(Mrs. Kate had certain little peculiarities of speech; one was an
italicized delivery, and another was the omission of an r now and then.
She always said "father" when she really meant "farther.") "There's a
lot that one can do to help. I believe in showing trust and confidence
in a man, when he's trying to live down past mistakes. I think it was
just fine of you to make him foreman here! If Phenie would only be nice
to him, instead of turning up her nose the way she does! You see
yourself how she treats Ford, and I just think it's a shame! I think
he's just splendid!"

"She don't treat him any worse than he does her," observed Mason, just
to the core. "Seems to me, if I was single, and a girl as pretty as
Jo--"

"Well, I'm glad Ford has got spunk enough not to care," Mrs. Kate
interposed hastily. "Phenie's pretty, of course--but it takes more than
that to attract a man like Ford. You can't expect him to like her when
she won't look at him, hardly; it makes me feel terribly, because he's
sure to think it's because he--I've tried to make her see that it isn't
right to condemn a man because he has made one mistake. He ought to be
encouraged, instead of being made to feel that he is a--an outcast,
practically. And--"

"Jo don't like Ford, because she's stuck on Dick," stated a shrill,
positive young voice behind them, and Mrs. Kate turned sharply upon her
offspring. "They was waving hands to each other just now, through the
window. I seen 'em," Buddy finished complacently. "Dick was down fixing
the bridge, and--"

"Buddy, you run right out and play! You must not listen to older people
and try to talk about some-thing you don't understand."

"Aw, I understand them two being stuck on each other," Buddy maintained
loftily. "And I seen Dick--"

"Chase yourself outdoors, like your mother said; and don't butt in on--"

"Chester!" reproved Mrs. Kate, waving Buddy out of the kitchen. "How
can you expect the child to learn good English, when you talk to him
like that? Run along, Buddy, and play like a good boy." She gave him a
little cake to accelerate his departure and to turn his mind from
further argument, and after he was gone she swung the discussion to
Buddy and his growing tendency toward grappling with problems beyond his
seven years. Also, she pointed out the necessity for choosing one's
language carefully in his presence.

Mason, therefore, finished wiping the dishes almost in silence, and left
the house as soon as he was through, with the feeling that women were
not by nature intended to be really companionable. He had, for instance,
been struck with the humorous side of Ford and Josephine's perfectly
ridiculous antipathy, and had lingered in the kitchen because of a
half-conscious impulse to enjoy the joke with some one. And Mrs. Kate
had not taken the view-point which appealed to him, but had been
self-consciously virtuous in her determination to lend Ford a helping
hand, and resentful because Josephine failed to feel also the urge of
uplifting mankind.

Mason, poor man, was vaguely nettled; he did not see that Ford needed
any settlement-worker encouragement. If he was let alone, and his moral
regeneration forgotten, and he himself treated just like any other man,
Mason felt that Ford would thereby have all the encouragement he needed.
Ford was once more plainly content with life, and was taking it in
twenty-four-hour doses again; healthful doses, these, and different in
every respect from those days spent in the sordid round of ill-living in
town; nor did he flay his soul with doubts lest he should disappoint
this man who trusted him so rashly and so implicitly. Ford was busy at
work which appealed to the best of him. He was thrown into companionship
with men who perforce lived cleanly and naturally, and with Ches Mason,
who was his friend. At meals he sometimes gave thought to Mrs. Kate, and
frequently to Josephine. The first he admired impersonally for her
housewifely skill, and smiled at secretly for her purely feminine
outlook upon life and her positive views upon subjects of which she knew
not half the alphabet. He had discovered that Mason did indeed refrain
from smoking in the house because she discountenanced tobacco; and since
she had a talent for making a man uncomfortably aware of her disapproval
by certain wordless manifestations of scorn for his weaknesses, Ford
also took to throwing away his cigarette before he crossed the bridge on
his way to her domain. He did not, however, go so far as Ches, who kept
his tobacco, pipe, and cigarette papers in the stable, and was always
borrowing "the makings" from his men.

Ford also followed Mason's example in sterilizing his vocabulary
whenever he crossed that boundary between the masculine and feminine
element on the ranch, the bridge. Mrs. Kate did not approve of slang.
Ford found himself carefully eliminating from his speech certain
grammatical inaccuracies in her presence, and would not so much as split
an infinitive if he remembered in time. It was trying, to be sure. Ford
thanked God that he still retained a smattering of the rules he had
reluctantly memorized in school, and that he was not married (at least,
not uncomfortably so), and that he was not compelled to do more than eat
his meals in the house. Mrs. Kate was a nice woman; Ford would tell any
man so in perfect sincerity. He even considered her nice looking, with
her smooth, brown hair which was never disordered, her fine, clear skin,
her white teeth, her clear blue eyes, and her immaculate shirt-waists.
But she was not a comfortable woman to be with; an ordinary human
wearied of adjusting his speech, his manners, and his morals to her
standard of propriety. Ford, quietly studying matrimony from the
well-ordered example before him, began to congratulate himself upon not
being able to locate his own wife--since accident had afflicted him with
one. When he stopped, during these first busy days at the Double Cross,
to think deeply or seriously upon the mysterious entanglement he had
fallen into, he was inclined to the opinion that he had had a narrow
escape. The woman might have remained in Sunset--and Ford flinched at
the thought.

As to Josephine, Ford's thoughts dwelt with her oftener than they did
with Mrs. Kate. The thought of her roused a certain resentment which
bordered closely upon dislike. Still, she piqued his interest; for a
week she was invisible to him, yet her presence in the house created a
tangible atmosphere which he felt but could not explain. His first sight
of her--beyond a fleeting glimpse once or twice through the window--had
been that day when he had helped Mason carry her and her big chair into
the dining-room. The brief contact had left with him a vision of the
delicate parting in her soft, brown hair, and of long, thick lashes
which curled daintily up from the shadow they made on her cheeks. He did
not remember ever having seen a woman with such eyelashes. They impelled
him to glance at her oftener than he would otherwise have done, and to
wonder, now and then, if they did not make her eyes seem darker than
they really were. He thought it strange that he had not noticed her
lashes that day when he carried her from the house and back again--until
he remembered that at first his haste had been extreme, and that when
he took her from the bunk-house she had stared at him so that he would
not look at her.

He did not know that Ches Mason was observant of his rather frequent
glances at her during the meal, and he would have resented Mason's
diagnosis of that particular symptom of interest. Ford would, if put to
the question, have maintained quite sincerely that he was perfectly
indifferent to Josephine, but that she did have remarkable eyelashes,
and a man couldn't help looking at them.

After all, Ford's interest was centered chiefly upon his work. They were
going to start the wagons out again to gather the calves for weaning,
and he was absorbed in the endless details which fall upon the shoulders
of the foreman. Even the fascination of a woman's beauty did not follow
him much beyond the bridge.

Mason, hurrying from the feminine atmosphere at the house, found him
seriously discussing with Buddy the diet and general care of Rambler,
who had been moved into a roomy box stall for shelter. Buddy was to
have the privilege of filling the manger with hay every morning after
breakfast, and every evening just before supper. Upon Buddy also
devolved the duty of keeping his drinking tub filled with clean water;
and Buddy was making himself as tall as possible during the conference,
and was crossing his heart solemnly while he promised, wide-eyed, to
keep away from Rambler's heels.

"I never knew him to kick, or offer to; but you stay out of the stall,
anyway. You can fill his tub through that hole in the wall. And you let
Walt rub him down good every day--you see that he does it, Bud! And when
he gets well, I'll let you ride him, maybe. Anyway, I leave him in your
care, old-timer. And it's a privilege I wouldn't give every man. I think
a heap of this horse." He turned at the sound of footsteps, and lowered
an eyelid slowly for Mason's benefit. "Bud's going to have charge of
Rambler while we're gone," he explained seriously. "I want to be sure
he's in good hands."

The two men watched Buddy's departure for the house, and grinned over
the manifest struggle between his haste to tell his mother and Jo, and
his sense of importance over the trust.

"A kid of your own makes up for a whole lot," Mason observed
abstractedly, reaching up to the narrow shelf where he kept his tobacco.
"I wish I had two or three more; they give a man something to work for,
and look ahead and plan for."

Ford, studying his face with narrowed eyelids, was more than ever
thankful that he was not hampered by matrimony.




CHAPTER X

In Which the Demon Opens an Eye and Yawns


A storm held the Double Cross wagons in a sheltered place in the hills,
ten miles from the little town where Ford had spent a night on his way
to the ranch a month before. Mason, taking the inaction as an excuse,
rode home to his family and left Ford to his own devices with no
compunctions whatever. He should, perhaps, have known better; but he was
acting upon his belief that nothing so braces a man as the absolute
confidence of his friends, and to have stayed in camp on Ford's account
would, according to Mason's code, have been an affront to Ford's
manifest determination to "make good."

It is true that neither had mentioned the matter since the day of Ford's
arrival at the ranch; men do not, as a rule, harp upon the deeper issues
within their lives. For that month, it had been as though the subject
of intemperance concerned them as little as the political unrest of a
hot-tempered people beyond the equator. They had argued the matter to a
more or less satisfactory conclusion, and had let it rest there.

Ford had ridden with him a part of the way, and when they came to a
certain fork in the trail, he had sent a whimsically solemn message to
Buddy, had pulled the collar of his coat closer together under his chin,
and had faced the wind with a clean conscience, and with bowed head and
hat pulled low over his brows. There were at least three perfectly valid
reasons why Ford should ride into town that day. He wanted heavier socks
and a new pair of gloves; he was almost out of tobacco, and wanted to
see if he could "pick up" another man so that the hours of
night-guarding might not fall so heavily upon the crew. Ford had been
standing the last guard himself, for the last week, to relieve the
burden a little, and Mason had been urgent on the subject of another
man--or two, he suggested, would be better. Ford did his simple
shopping, therefore, and then rode up to the first saloon on the one
little street, and dismounted with a mind at ease. If idle men were to
be found in that town, he would have to look for them in a saloon; a
fact which every one took for granted, like the shortening of the days
as winter approached.

Perhaps he over-estimated his powers of endurance, or under-estimated
the strength of his enemy. Certain it is that he had no intention of
drinking whisky when he closed the door upon the chill wind; and yet, he
involuntarily walked straight up to the bar. There he stuck. The
bartender waited expectantly. When Ford, with a sudden lift of his head,
turned away to the stove, the man looked after him curiously.

At the stove Ford debated with himself while he drew off his gloves and
held his fingers to the welcome heat which emanated from a red glow
where the fire burned hottest within. He had not made any promise to
himself or any one else, he remembered. He had simply resolved that he
would make good, if it were humanly possible to do so. That, he told
himself, did not necessarily mean that he should turn a teetotaler out
and out. Taking a drink, when a man was cold and felt the need of it,
was not--

At that point in the argument two of his own men entered, stamping
noisily upon the threshold. They were laughing, from pure animal
satisfaction over the comforts within, rather than at any tangible cause
for mirth, and they called to Ford with easy comradeship. Dick
Thomas--the Dick whom Buddy had mentioned in connection with
Josephine--waved his hand hospitably toward the bar.

"Come on, Campbell," he invited. He may have seen the hesitancy in
Ford's face, for he laughed. "I believe in starting on the inside and
driving the frost out," he said.

The two poured generously from the bottle which the bartender pushed
within easy reach, and Ford watched them. There was a peculiar lift to
Dick's upper lip--the lift which comes when scorn is the lever. Ford's
eyes hardened a little; he walked over and stood beside Dick, and he
took a drink as unemotionally as if it had been water. He ordered
another round, threw a coin upon the bar, and walked out. He had rather
liked Dick, in an impersonal sort of way, but that half-sneer clung
disagreeably to his memory. A man likes to be held the master--be the
slave circumstance, danger, an opposing human, or his own appetite; and
although Ford was not the type of man who troubles himself much about
the opinions of his fellows, it irked him much that Dick or any other
man should sneer at him for a weakling.

He went to another saloon, found and hired a cow-puncher strayed up from
Valley County, and when Dick came in, a half-hour later, Ford went to
the bar and deliberately "called up the house." He had been minded to
choose a mineral water then, but he caught Dick's mocking eye upon him,
and instead took whisky straight, and stared challengingly at the other
over the glass tilted against his lips.

After that, the liquor itself waged relentless war against his good
resolutions, so that it did not need the urge of Dick's fancied
derision to send him down the trail which the past had made familiar. He
sat in to a poker game that was creating a small zone of subdued
excitement at the far end of the room, and while he was arranging his
stacks of red, white, and blue chips neatly before him, he was
unpleasantly conscious of Dick's supercilious smile. Never mind--he was
not the first foreman who ever played poker; they all did, when the mood
seized them. Ford straightened his shoulders instinctively, in defiance
of certain inner misgivings, and pushed forward his ante of two white
chips.

Jim Felton came up and stood at his shoulder, watching the game in
silence; and although he did not once open his lips except to let an
occasional thin ribbon of cigarette smoke drift out and away to mingle
with the blue cloud which hung under the ceiling, Ford sensed a certain
good-will in his nearness, just as intangibly and yet as surely as he
sensed Dick's sardonic amusement at his apparent lapse.

With every bet he made and won he felt that silent approbation behind
him; insensibly it steadied Ford and sharpened his instinct for reading
the faces of the other players, so that the miniature towers of red
chips and blue grew higher until they threatened to topple--whereupon
other little towers began to grow up around them. And the men in the
saloon began to feel the fascination of his success, so that they
grouped themselves about his chair and peered down over his shoulder at
the game.

Ford gave them no thought, except a vague satisfaction, now and then,
that Jim Felton stuck to his post. Later, when he caught the dealer, a
slit-eyed, sallow-skinned fellow with fingers all too nimble, slipping a
card from the bottom of the deck, and gave him a resounding slap which
sent him and his cards sprawling all over that locality, he should have
been more than ever glad that Jim was present.

Jim kept back the gambler's partner and the crowd and gave Ford
elbow-room and some moral support, which did its part, in that it
prevented any interference with the chastisement Ford was administering.

It was not a fight, properly speaking. The gambler, once Ford had
finished cuffing him and stating his opinion of cheating the while,
backed away and muttered vague threats and maledictions. Ford gathered
together what chips he felt certain were his, and cashed them in with a
certain grim insistence of manner which brooked no argument. After that
he left the saloon, with Jim close behind him.

"If you're going back to camp now, I reckon I'll ride along," said Jim,
at his elbow. "There's just nice time to get there for supper--and I
sure don't want to miss flopping my lip over Mose's beefsteak; that
yearling we beefed this morning is going to make some fine eating, if
you ask me." His tone was absolutely devoid of anything approaching
persuasion; it simply took a certain improbable thing as a commonplace
fact, and it tilted the balance of Ford's intentions.

He did not go on to the next saloon, as he had started to do, but
instead he followed Jim to the livery stable and got his horse, without
realizing that Jim had anything to do with the change of impulse. So
Ford went to camp, instead of spending the night riotously in town as he
would otherwise have done, and contented himself with cursing the game,
the gambler who would have given a "crooked deal," the town, and all it
contained. A mile out, he would have returned for a bottle of whisky;
but Jim said he had enough for two, and put his horse into a lope. Ford,
swayed by a blind instinct to stay with the man who seemed friendly,
followed the pace he set and so was unconsciously led out of the way of
further temptation. And so artfully was he led, that he never once
suspected that he did not go of his own accord.

Neither did he suspect that Jim's stumbling and immediate spasm of
regretful profanity at the bed-wagon where they unsaddled, was the
result of two miles of deep cogitation, and calculated to account
plausibly for not being able to produce a full flask upon demand. Jim
swore volubly and said he had "busted the bottle" by falling against the
wagon wheel; and Ford, for a wonder, believed and did not ask for proof.
He muddled around camp for a few indecisive minutes, then rolled
himself up like a giant cocoon in his blankets, and slept heavily
through the night.

He awoke at daylight, found himself fully clothed and with a craving for
whisky which he knew of old, and tried to remember just what had
occurred the night before; when he could not recall anything very
distinctly, he felt the first twinge of fear that he had known for
years.

"Lordy me! I wonder what kinda fool I made of myself, anyway!" he
thought distressfully. Later, when he discovered more money in his
pockets than his salary would account for, and remembered playing poker,
and having an argument of some sort with some one, his distress grew
upon him. In reality he had not done anything disgraceful, according to
the easy judgment of his fellows; but Ford did not know that, and he
flayed himself unmercifully for a spineless, drunken idiot whom no man
could respect or trust. It seemed to him that the men eyed him askance;
though they were merely envious over his winnings and inclined to admire
the manner in which he had shown his disapproval of the dealer's
attempt at cheating.

He dreaded Mason's return, and yet he was anxious to see him and tell
him, once for all, that he was not to be trusted. He held aloof from Jim
and he was scantily civil to Dick Thomas, whose friendship rang false.
He pushed the work ahead while the air was still alive with swirls of
mote-like snowflakes, and himself bore the brunt of it just to dull that
gnawing self-disgust which made his waking hours a mental torment.

Before, when disgust had seized upon him in Sunset, it had been an
abstract rebellion against the futility of life as he was living it.
This was different: This was a definite, concrete sense of failure to
keep faith with himself and with Mason; the sickening consciousness of a
swinish return to the wallow; a distrust of himself that was beyond any
emotion he had ever felt in his life.

So, for a week of hard work and harder thinking. Mason sent word by a
migratory cowboy, who had stopped all night at the ranch and whom he had
hired and sent on to camp, that he would not return to the round-up,
and that Ford was to go ahead as they had planned. That balked Ford's
determination to turn the work over to Mason and leave the country, and,
after the first day of inner rebellion, he settled down insensibly to
the task before him and let his own peculiar moral problem wait upon his
leisure. He did not dream that the cowboy had witnessed his chastisement
of the gambler and had gleefully, and in perfect innocence, recounted
the incident at the Double Cross ranch, and that Mason had deliberately
thrown Ford upon his own resources in obedience to his theory that
nothing so braces a man as responsibility.

Ford went about his business with grim industry and a sureness of
judgment born of his thorough knowledge of range work. There was the
winnowing process which left the bigger, stronger calves in charge of
two men, at a line camp known locally as Ten Mile, and took the younger
ones on to the home ranch, where hay and shelter were more plentiful and
the loss would be correspondingly less.

Not until the last cow of the herd was safe inside the big corral
beyond the stables, did Ford relax his vigilance and ride over to where
Ches Mason and Buddy were standing in the shelter of the stable, waiting
to greet him.

"Good boy!" cried Mason, when Ford dismounted and flung the stirrup up
over the saddle, that he might loosen the latigo and free his steaming
horse of its burden. "I didn't look for you before to-morrow night, at
the earliest. But I'm mighty glad you're here, let me tell you. That
leaves me free to hit the trail to-morrow. I've got to make a trip home;
the old man's down with inflammatory rheumatism, and they want me to
go--haven't been home for six years, so I guess they've got a license to
put in a bid for a month or two of my time, huh? I didn't want to pull
out, though, till you showed up. I'm kinda leery about leaving the women
alone, with just a couple of sow-egians on the ranch. Bud, you go get a
pan of oats for old Schley. Supper's about ready, Ford. Have the boys
shovel some hay into the corral, and we'll leave the bunch there till
morning. Say, the wagons didn't beat you much; they never pulled in
till after three. Mose says the going's bad, on them dobe patches."

Not much of an opening, that, for saying what Ford felt he was in duty
bound to say. He was constrained to wait until a better opportunity
presented itself--and, as is the way with opportunity, it did not seem
as if it would ever come of its own accord. There was Buddy, full of
exciting anecdotes about Rambler, and how he had rubbed the liniment on,
all alone, and Rambler never kicked or did a thing; and how he and
Josephine rode clear over to Jenson's and got caught in the storm and
almost got lost--only Buddy's horse knew the way home. And, later, there
was Mrs. Kate's excellent supper and gracious welcome, and an evening
devoted to four-handed cribbage--with Josephine and Mason as implacable
adversaries--and a steady undercurrent of latent hostility between him
and the girl, which prevented his thinking much about himself and his
duty to Mason. There was everything, in fact, to thwart a man's
resolution to discharge honorably a disagreeable duty, and to distract
his attention.

Ford went to bed with the baffled sense of being placed in a false
position against his will; and, man-like, he speedily gave over thinking
of that, and permitted his thoughts to dwell upon a certain face which
owned a perfectly amazing pair of lashes, and upon a manner
tantalizingly aloof, with glimpses now and then of fascinating
possibilities in the way of comradeship, when the girl inadvertently
lowered her guard in the excitement of close playing.




CHAPTER XI

"It's Going to Be an Uphill Climb!"


Ford was no moral weakling except, perhaps, when whisky and he came to
hand-grips. He had made up his mind that Mason must be told of his
backsliding, and protected from the risk of leaving a drunkard in charge
of his ranch. And when he saw that the opportunity for opening the
subject easily did not show any sign of presenting itself, he grimly
interrupted Mason in the middle of a funny story about Josephine and
Buddy and Kate, involving themselves in a three-cornered argument to the
complete discomfiture of the women.

"I tell you, Ford, that kid's a corker! Kate's got all kinds of book
theories about raising children, but they don't none of 'em work, with
Bud. He gets the best of her right along when she starts to reason with
him. Gosh! You can't reason with a kid like Bud; you've got to take him
on an equal footing, and when he goes too far, just set down on him and
no argument about it. Kate's going to have her hands full while I'm
gone, if--"

"She sure will, Ches, unless you get somebody here you can depend on,"
was the way in which Ford made his opportunity. "You've got the idea,
somehow, that cutting out whisky is like getting rid of a mean horse.
It's something you don't--"

"Oh, don't go worrying over that, no more," Mason expostulated hastily.
"Forget it. That's the quickest cure; try Christian Science dope on it.
The more you worry about it, the more--"

"But wait till I tell you! That day I went to town, and you came on
home, I got drunk as a fool, Ches. I don't know what all I did, but I
know--"

"Well, I know--more about it than you do, I reckon," Mason cut in dryly.
"I was told five different times, by one stranger and four of these here
trouble-peddlin' friends that clutter the country. That's all right,
Ford. A little slip like that--" He held out his hand for Ford's sack of
tobacco.

"I ain't the least bit uneasy over that, old man. I'm just as sure as I
stand here that you're going to pull up, all right."

"I know you are, Ches." Ford's voice was humble. "That's the hell of it.
You're more sure than sensible--but--But look at it like I was a
stranger, Ches. Just forget you ever knew me when I was kinda half-way
decent. You ain't a fool, even if you do act like one. You know what I'm
up against. I'm going to put up the damnedest fight I've got in me, but
I don't want you to take any gamble on it. Maybe I'll win, and then
again maybe I won't. Maybe I'll go down and out. I don't know--I don't
feel half as sure of myself as I did before I made that bobble in town.
Before that, I did kinda have an idea that all there was to it was to
quit. I thought, once I made up my mind, that would settle it. But
that's just the commencement; you've got to fight something inside of
you that's as husky a fighter as you are. You've got to--"

"There!" Mason reached out and tapped him impressively on the arm with a
match he was about to light. "Now you've got the bull right by the
horns! You ain't so darned sure of yourself now--and so I'm dead willing
to gamble on you. I ain't a bit afraid to go off and let you have full
swing."

"Well, I hope you won't feel like kicking me all over the ranch when you
get back," Ford said, after a long pause, during which Mason's whole
attention seemed centered upon his cigarette. "It's going to be an
uphill climb, old-timer--and a blamed long hill at that. And it's going
to be pretty darned slippery, in places."

"I sabe that, all right," grinned Mason. "But I sabe you pretty well,
too. You'll dig in your toes and hang on by your eye-winkers if you have
to. But you'll get up, all right; I'll bank on that.

"Speaking of booze-fighters," he went on, without giving Ford a chance
to contradict him, "I wish you'd keep an eye on old Mose. Now, there's a
man that'll drink whisky as long as it's made, if he can get it. I
wouldn't trust that old devil as far as I can throw him, and that's a
fact. I have to watch pretty close, to keep it off the ranch, and him
on. It's the only way to get along with him--he's apt to run amuck, if
he gets full enough; and good cooks are as scarce as good foremen." A
heartening smile went with the last sentence.

"If he does make connections with the booze, don't can him, Ford, if you
can help it. Just shut him up somewhere till he gets over it. There's
nothing holds good men with an outfit like the right kind of grub--and
Mose sure can cook. The rest of the men you can handle to suit yourself.
Slim and Johnnie are all right over at Ten Mile--you made a good stab
when you picked them two out--and you will want a couple of fellows here
besides Walt, to feed them calves. When the cows are throwed back on the
range and the fences gone over careful--I ought to have tended to that
before, but I got to putting it off--you can pay off what men you don't
need or want."

There was no combating the friendship of a man like that. Ford mentally
squared his shoulders and set his feet upon the uphill trail.

He realized to the full the tribute Mason paid to his innate
trustworthiness by leaving him there, master of the ranch and guardian
of his household god--and goddess, to say nothing of Josephine, whom
Mason openly admired and looked upon as one of the family.

Of a truth, it would seem that she had really become so. Ford had
gathered, bit by bit, the information that she was quite alone in the
world, so far as immediate relatives were concerned, and that she was
Kate's cousin, and that Kate insisted that this was to be her home, from
now on. Josephine's ankle was well enough now so that she was often to
be met in unexpected places about the ranch, he discovered. And though
she was not friendly, she was less openly antagonistic than she had
been--and when all was said and done, eminently able to take care of
herself.

So also was Kate, for that matter. No sooner was her beloved Chester out
of sight over the hill a mile away, than Mrs. Kate dried her wifely
tears and laid hold of her scepter with a firmness that amused Ford
exceedingly. She ordered Dick up to work in the depressed-looking area
before the house, which she called her flower garden, a task which Dick
seemed perfectly willing to perform, by the way--although his assistance
would have been more than welcome at other work than tying scraggly rose
bushes and protecting them from the winter already at hand.

As to Buddy, he surely would have resented, more keenly than the women,
the implication that he needed any one to take care of him. Buddy's
allegiance to Ford was wavering, at that time. Dick had gone to some
trouble to alter an old pair of chaps so that Buddy could wear them, and
his star was in the ascendant; a pair of chaps with fringes were, in
Buddy's estimation, a surer pledge of friendship and favor than the
privilege of feeding a lame horse.

Buddy was rather terrible, sometimes. He had a way of standing back
unnoticed, and of listening when he was believed to be engrossed in his
play. Afterward he was apt to say the things which should not be said;
in other words, he was the average child of seven, living without
playmates, and so forced by his environment to interest himself in the
endless drama played by the grown-ups around him. Buddy, therefore, was
not unusually startling, one day at dinner, when he looked up from
spatting his potato into a flat cake on his plate.

"What hill you going to climb, Ford?" was his manner of exploding his
bomb. "Bald pinnacle? I can climb that hill myself."

"I don't know as I'm going to climb any hills at all," Ford said
indulgently, accepting another helping of potato salad from Mrs. Kate.

"You told dad before he went to gran'ma's house you was going to climb a
big, long hill, and he was more sure than sensible." He giggled and
showed where two front teeth were missing from among their fellows. "Dad
told him he'd make it, but he'd have to dig in his toes and hang on by
his eye-winkers," he added to the two women. "Gee! I'd like to see Ford
hang onto a hill by his eye-winkers. Jo could do it--she's got winkers
six feet long."

Miss Josephine had been looking at Ford's face going red, as
enlightenment came to him, but when she caught a quick glance leveled
at her lashes, she drooped them immediately so that they almost touched
her cheeks. Bud gave a squeal and pointed to her with his fork.

"Jo's blushing! I guess she's ashamed because she's got such long
winkers, and Ford keeps looking at 'em all the time. Why don't you shave
'em off with dad's razor? Then Ford would like you, maybe. He don't now.
He told dad--"

"Robert Chester Mason, do you want me to get the hairbrush?" This, it
need not be explained, from Mrs. Kate, in a voice that portended grave
disaster.

"I guess we can get along without it, mamma," Buddy answered her, with
an ingratiating smile. Even in the first seven years of one's life, one
learns the elementary principles of diplomacy. He did not retire from
the conversation, but he prudently changed the subject to what he
considered a more pleasant channel.

"Dick likes you anyway, Jo," he informed her soothingly. "He likes you,
winkers and all. I can tell, all right. When you go out for a ride he
gives me nickels if I tell him where--"

"Robert Ches--"

"Oh, all right." Buddy's tone was wearily tolerant. "A man never knows
what to talk about to women, anyway. I'd hate to be married to
'em--wouldn't you, Ford?"

"A little boy like you--" began his mother, somewhat pinker of cheeks
than usual.

"I guess I'm pretty near a man, now." He turned his eyes to Ford,
consciously ignoring the feminine members of his family. "If I had a
wife," he stated calmly, "I'd snub her up to a post and then I'd talk to
her about anything I damn pleased!"

Mrs. Kate rose up then in all the terrifying dignity of outraged
motherhood, grasped Buddy by the wrist, and led him away, in the
direction of the hairbrush, if one would judge by Buddy's reluctance to
go.

"So you are going to climb the--Big Hill, are you?" Miss Josephine
observed, when the two were quite alone. "It is to be hoped, Mr.
Campbell, that you won't find it as steep as it looks--from the bottom."

Ford was not an adept at reading what lies underneath the speech of a
woman. To himself he accented the last three words, so that they
overshadowed all the rest and made her appear to remind him where he
stood--at the bottom.

"I suppose a hollow does look pretty high, to a man down a well," he
retorted, glancing into his teacup because he felt and was resisting an
impulse to look at her.

"One can always keep climbing," she murmured, "and never give up--" Miss
Josephine, also, was tilting her teacup and looking studiously into it
as if she would read her fortune in the specks of tea leaves there.

"Like the frog in the well--that climbed one jump and fell back two!" he
interrupted, but she paid no attention, and went on.

"And the reward for reaching the top--"

"Is there supposed to be a reward?" Ford could not tell why he asked
her that, nor why he glanced stealthily at her from under his eyebrows
as he awaited her reply.

"There--might--there usually is a reward for any great
achievement--and--" Miss Josephine was plainly floundering where she had
hoped to float airily upon the surface.

"What's the reward for--climbing hills, for instance?" He looked at her
full, now, and his lips were ready to smile.

Miss Josephine looked uneasily at the door. "I--really, I
never--investigated the matter at all." She gave a twitch of shoulders
and met his eyes steadily. "The inner satisfaction of having climbed the
hill, I suppose," she said, in the tone of one who has at last reached
firm ground. "Will you have more tea, Mr. Campbell?"

Her final words were chilly and impersonal, but Ford left the table,
smiling to himself. At the door he met Dick, whom Buddy had mentioned
with disaster to himself. Dick saw the smile, and within the room he saw
Miss Josephine sitting alone, her chin resting in her two palms and her
eyes fixed upon vacancy.

"Hello," Ford greeted somewhat inattentively. "Do you want me for
anything, Dick?"

"Can't say I do," drawled Dick, brushing past Ford in the doorway.

Ford hesitated long enough to give him a second glance--an attentive
enough glance this time--and went his way; without the smile, however.

"Lordy me!" he said to himself, when his foot touched the bridge, but he
did not add anything to the exclamation. He was wondering when it was
that he had begun to dislike Dick Thomas; a long while, it seemed to
him, though he had never till just now quite realized it, beyond
resenting his covert sneer that day in town. He had once or twice since
suspected Dick of a certain disappointment that he himself was not
foreman of the Double Cross, and once he had asked Mason why he hadn't
given the place to Dick.

"Didn't want to," Mason had replied succinctly, and let it go at that.

If Dick cherished any animosity, however, he had not made it manifest
in actual hostility. On the contrary, he had shown a distinct
inclination to be friendly; a friendliness which led the two to pair off
frequently when they were riding, and to talk over past range
experiences more or less intimately. Looking back over the six weeks
just behind him, Ford could not remember a single incident--a sentence,
even--that had been unpleasant, unless he clung to his belief in Dick's
contempt, and that he had since set down to his own super-sensitiveness.
And yet--

"He's got bad eyes," he concluded. "That's what it is; I never did like
eyes the color of polished steel; nickel-plated eyes, I call 'em; all
shine and no color. Still, a man ain't to blame for his eyes."

Then Dick overtook him with Buddy trailing, red-eyed, at his heels, and
Ford forgot, in the work to be done that day, all about his
speculations. He involved himself in a fruitless argument with Buddy,
upon the subject of what a seven-year-old can stand in the way of
riding, and yielded finally before the quiver of Buddy's lips. They were
only going over on Long Ridge, anyway, and the day was fine, and Buddy
had frequently ridden as far, according to Dick. Indeed, it was Dick's
easy-natured, "Ah, let the kid go, why don't you?" which gave Ford an
excuse for reconsidering.

And Buddy repaid him after his usual fashion. At the supper table he
looked up, round-eyed, from his plate.

"Gee, but I'm hungry!" he sighed. "I eat and eat, just like a horse
eating hay, and I just can't fill up the hole in me."

"There, never mind, honey," Mrs. Kate interposed hastily, fearing worse.
"Do you want more bread and butter?"

"Yes--you always use bread for stuffing, don't you? I want to be
stuffed. All the way home my b--my stomerch was a-flopping against my
backbone, just like Dick's. Only Dick said--"

"Never mind what Dick said." Mrs. Kate thrust the bread toward him, half
buttered.

"Dick's mad, I guess. He's mad at Ford, too."

Buddy regarded his mother gravely over the slice of bread.

"First I've heard of it," Ford remarked lightly. "I think you must be
mistaken, old-timer."

But Buddy never considered himself mistaken about anything, and he did
not like being told that he was, even when the pill was sweetened with
the term "old-timer." He rolled his eyes at Ford resentfully.

"Dick is mad! He got mad when you galloped over where Jo's red ribbon
was hanging onto a bush. I saw him a-scowling when you rolled it up and
put it in your shirt pocket. Dick wanted that ribbon for his bridle; and
you better give it to him. Jo ain't your girl. She's Dick's girl. And
you have to tie the ribbon of your bestest girl on your bridle. That's
why," he added, with belated gallantry, "I tie my own mamma's ribbons on
mine. And," he returned with terrible directness to the real issue,
"Jo's Dick's girl, 'cause he said so. I heard him tell Jim Felton she's
his steady, all right--and you are his girl, ain't you, Jo?"

His mother had tried at first to stop him, had given up in despair, and
was now sitting in a rather tragic calm, waiting for what might come of
his speech.

Josephine might have saved herself some anxious moments, if she had been
so minded; perhaps she would have been minded, if she had not caught
Ford's eyes fixed rather intently upon her, and sensed the expectancy in
them. She bit her lip, and then she laughed.

"A man shouldn't make an assertion of that sort," she said quizzically,
in the direction of Buddy--though her meaning went straight across the
table to another--"unless he has some reason for feeling very sure."

Buddy tried to appear quite clear as to her meaning. "Well, if you are
Dick's girl, then you better make Ford give that ribbon--"

"I have plenty of ribbons, Buddy," Josephine interrupted, smiling at him
still. "Don't you want one?"

"I tie my own mamma's ribbons on my bridle," Buddy rebuffed. "My mamma
is my girl--you ain't. You can give your ribbons to Dick."

"Mamma won't be your girl if you don't stop talking so much at the
table--and elsewhere," Mrs. Kate informed him sternly, with a glance of
trepidation at the others. "A little boy mustn't talk about grown-ups,
and what they do or say."

"What can I talk about, then? The boys talk about their girls all the
time--"

"I wish to goodness I had let you go with your dad. I shall not let you
eat with us, anyway, if you don't keep quiet. You're getting perfectly
impossible." Which even Buddy understood as a protest which was not to
be taken seriously.

Ford stayed long enough to finish drinking his tea, and then he left the
house with what he privately considered a perfectly casual manner. As a
matter of fact, he was extremely self-conscious about it, so that Mrs.
Kate felt justified in mentioning it, and in asking Josephine a question
or two--when she had prudently made an errand elsewhere for Buddy.

Josephine, having promptly disclaimed all knowledge or interest
pertaining to the affair, Mrs. Kate spoke her mind plainly.

"If Ford's going to fall in love with you, Phenie," she said, "I think
you're foolish to encourage Dick. I believe Ford is falling in love with
you. I never thought he even liked you till to-night, but what Buddy
said about that ribbon--"

"I don't suppose Bud knows what he's talking about--any more than you
do," snapped Josephine. "If you're determined that I shall have a love
affair on this ranch, I'm going home." She planted her chin in her two
palms, just as she had done at dinner, and stared into vacancy.

"Where?" asked Mrs. Kate pointedly, and then atoned for it
whole-heartedly. "There, I didn't mean that--only--this is your home.
It's got to be; I won't let it be anywhere else. And you needn't have
any love affair, Phene--you know that. Only you shan't hurt Ford. I
think he's perfectly splendid! What he did for Chester--I--I can't think
of that without getting a lump in my throat, Phene. Think of it! Going
without food himself, because there wasn't enough for two,
and--and--well, he just simply threw away his own chance of getting
through, to give Chester a better one. It was the bravest thing I ever
heard of! And the way he has conquered--?"

"How do you know he has conquered? Rumor says he hasn't. And lots of men
save other men's lives; it's being done every day, and no one hears much
about it. You think it was something extraordinary, just because it
happened to be Chester that was saved. Anybody will do all he can for a
sick partner, when they're away out in the wilds. I haven't a doubt Dick
would have done the very same thing, when it comes to that." Josephine
got up from the table then, and went haughtily into her own room.

Mrs. Kate retired quite as haughtily into the kitchen, and there was a
distinct coolness between them for the rest of the day, and a part of
the next. The chill of it affected Ford sufficiently to keep him away
from the house as much as possible, and unusually silent and unlike
himself when he was with the men.

But, unlike many another, he did not know that his recurrent
dissatisfaction with life was directly traceable to the apparent
intimacy between Josephine and Dick. Ford, if he had tried to put his
gloomy unrest into words, would have transposed his trouble and would
have mistaken effect for cause. In other words, he would have ignored
Josephine and Dick entirely, and would have said that he wanted
whisky--and wanted it as the damned are said to want water.




CHAPTER XII

At Hand-Grips with the Demon


Mose was mad. He was flinging tinware about the kitchen with a fine
disregard of the din or the dents, and whenever the blue cat ventured
out from under the stove, he kicked at it viciously. He was mad at Ford;
and when a man gets mad at his foreman--without knowing that the foreman
has been instructed to bear with his faults and keep him on the pay-roll
at any price--he must, if he be the cook, have recourse to kicking cats
and banging dishes about, since he dare not kick the foreman. For in
late November "jobs" are not at all plentiful in the range land, and
even an angry cook must keep his job or face the world-old economic
problem of food, clothing, and shelter.

But if he dared not speak his mind plainly to Ford, he was not averse to
pouring his woes into the first sympathetic ear that came his way. It
happened that upon this occasion the ear arrived speedily upon the head
of Dick Thomas.

"Matter, Mose?" he queried, sidestepping the cat, which gave a long leap
straight for the door, when it opened. "Cat been licking the butter
again?"

Mose grunted and slammed three pie tins into a cupboard with such force
that two of them bounced out and rolled across the floor. One came
within reach of his foot, and he kicked it into the wood-box, and swore
at it while it was on the way. "And I wisht it was Ford Campbell
himself, the snoopin', stingy, kitchen-grannying, booze-fightin',
son-of-a-sour-dough bannock!" he finished prayerfully.

"He surely hasn't tried to mix in here, and meddle with you?" Dick
asked, helping himself to a piece of pie. You know the tone; it had just
that inflection of surprised sympathy which makes you tell your troubles
without that reservation which a more neutral listener would
unconsciously impel.

I am not going to give Mose's version, because he warped the story to
make it fit his own indignation, and did not do Ford justice. This,
then, is the exact truth:

Ford chanced to be walking up along the edge of the gully which ran past
the bunk-house, and into which empty cans and other garbage were thrown.
Sometimes a can fell short, so that all the gully edge was liberally
decorated with a gay assortment of canners' labels. Just as he had come
up, Mose had opened the kitchen door and thrown out a cream can, which
had fallen in front of Ford and trickled a white stream upon the frozen
ground. Ford had stooped and picked up the can, had shaken it, and heard
the slosh which told of waste. He had investigated further, and decided
that throwing out a cream can before it was quite empty was not an
accident with Mose, but might be termed a habit. He had taken Exhibit A
to the kitchen, but had laughed while he spoke of it. And these were his
exact words:

"Lordy me, Mose! Somebody's liable to come here and get rich off us, if
we don't look out. He'll gather up the cream cans you throw into the
discard and start a dairy on the leavings." Then he had set the can
down on the water bench beside the door and gone away.

"I've been cookin' for cow-camps ever since I got my knee stiffened up
so's't I couldn't ride--and that's sixteen year ago last Fourth--and
it's the first time I ever had any darned foreman go snoopin' around my
back door to see if I scrape out the cans clean!" Mose seated himself
upon a corner of the table with the stiff leg for a brace and the good
one swinging free, and folded his bare arms upon his heaving chest.

"And that ain't all, Dick," he went on aggrievedly. "He went and cut
down the order I give him for grub. That's something Ches never
done--not with me, anyway. Asked me--asked me, what I wanted with so
much choc'late. And I wanted boiled cider for m' mince-meat, and never
got it. And brandy, too--only I didn't put that down on the list; I
knowed better than to write it out. But I give Jim money--out uh my own
pocket!--to git some with, and he never done it. Said Ford told him
p'tic'ler not to bring out nothin' any nearer drinkable than lemon
extract! I've got a darned good mind," he added somberly, "to fire the
hull works into the gully. He don't belong on no cow ranch. Where he'd
oughta be is runnin' the W.C.T.U. So darned afraid of a pint uh
brandy--"

"If I was dead sure your brains wouldn't get to leaking out your mouth,"
Dick began guardedly, "I might put you wise to something." He took a
drink of water, opened the door that he might throw out what remained in
the dipper, and made sure that no one was near the bunk-house before he
closed the door again. Mose watched him interestedly.

"You know me, Dick--I never do tell all I know," he hinted heavily.

"Well," Dick stood with his hand upon the door-knob and a sly grin upon
his face, "I ain't saying a word about anything. Only--if you might
happen to want some--eggs--for your mince pies, you might look good
under the southeast corner of the third haystack, counting from the big
corral. I believe there's a--nest--there."

"The deuce!" Mose brightened understandingly and drummed with his
fingers upon his bare, dough-caked forearm. "Do yuh know who--er--what
hen laid 'em there?"

"I do," said Dick with a rising inflection. "The head he-hen uh the
flock. But if I was going to hunt eggs, I'd take down a chiny egg and
leave it in the nest, Mose."

"But I ain't got--" Mose caught Dick's pale glance resting with what
might be considered some significance upon the vinegar jug, and he
stopped short. "That wouldn't work," he commented vaguely.

"Well, I've got to be going. Boss might can me if he caught me loafing
around here, eating pie when I ought to be working. Ford's a fine
fellow, don't you think?" He grinned and went out, and immediately
returned, complaining that he never could stand socks with a hole in the
toe, and he guessed he'd have to hunt through his war-bag for a good
pair.

Mose, as need scarcely be explained, went immediately to the stable to
hunt eggs; and Dick, in the next room, smiled to himself when he heard
the door slam behind him. Dick did not change his socks just then; he
went first into the kitchen and busied himself there, and he continued
to smile to himself. Later he went out and met Ford, who was riding
moodily up from the river field.

"Say, I'm going to be an interfering kind of a cuss, and put you next to
something," he began, with just the right degree of hesitation in his
manner. "It ain't any of my business, but--" He stopped and lighted a
cigarette. "If you'll come up to the bunk-house, I'll show you something
funny!"

Ford dismounted in silence, led his horse into the stable, and without
waiting to unsaddle, followed Dick.

"We've got to hurry, before Mose gets back from hunting eggs," Dick
remarked, by way of explaining the long strides he took. "And of course
I'm taking it for granted, Ford, that you won't say anything. I kinda
thought you ought to know, maybe--but I'd never say a word if I didn't
feel pretty sure you'd keep it behind your teeth."

"Well--I'm waiting to see what it is," Ford replied non-committally.

Dick opened the kitchen door, and led Ford through that into the
bunk-room. "You wait here--I'm afraid Mose might come back," he said,
and went into the kitchen. When he returned he had a gallon jug in his
hand. He was still smiling.

"I went to mix me up some soda-water for heartburn," he said, "and when
I picked up this jug, Mose took it out of my hand and said it was boiled
cider, that he'd got for mince-meat. So when he went out, I took a
taste. Here: You sample it yourself, Ford. If that's boiled cider, I
wouldn't mind having a barrel!"

Ford took the jug, pulled the cork, and sniffed at the opening. He did
not say anything, but he looked up at Dick significantly.

"Taste it once!" urged Dick innocently. "I'd just like to have you see
the brand of slow poison a fool like Mose will pour down him."

Ford hesitated, sniffed, started to set down the jug, then lifted it and
took a swallow.

"That isn't as bad as some I've seen," he pronounced evenly, shoving in
the cork. "Nor as good," he added conservatively. "I wonder where he got
it."

"Search me--oh, by jiminy, here he comes! I'm going to take a scoot,
Ford. Don't give me away, will you? And if I was you, I wouldn't say
anything to Mose--I know that old devil pretty well. He'll keep mighty
quiet about it himself--unless you jump him about it. Then he'll roar
around to everybody he sees, and claim it was a plant."

He slid stealthily through the outer door, and Ford saw him run down
into the gully and disappear, while Mose was yet half-way from the
stable.

Ford sat on the edge of a bunk and looked at the jug beside him. If Dick
had deliberately planned to tempt him, he had chosen the time well; and
if he had not done it deliberately, there must have been a malignant
spirit abroad that day.

For twenty-four hours Ford had been more than usually restless and
moody. Even Buddy had noticed that, and complained that Ford was cross
and wouldn't talk to him; whereupon Mrs. Kate had scolded Josephine and
accused her of being responsible for his gloom and silence. Since
Josephine's conscience sustained the charge, she resented the accusation
and proceeded deliberately to add to its justice; which did not make
Ford any the happier, you may be sure. For when a man reaches that
mental state which causes him to carry a girl's ribbon folded carefully
into the most secret compartment of his pocketbook, and to avoid the
girl herself and yet feel like committing assault and battery with
intent to kill, because some other man occasionally rides with her for
an hour or two, he is extremely sensitive to averted glances and chilly
tones and monosyllabic conversation.

Since the day before, when she had ridden as far as the stage road with
Dick, when he went to the line-camp, Ford had been fighting the desire
to saddle a horse and ride to town; and the thing that lured him
townward confronted him now in that gray stone jug with the brown neck
and handle.

He lifted the jug, shook it tentatively, pulled out the cork with a jerk
that was savage, and looked around the room for some place where he
might empty the contents and have done with temptation; but there was no
receptacle but the stove, so he started to the door with it, meaning to
pour it on the ground. Mose just then shambled past the window, and Ford
sat down to wait until the cook was safe in the kitchen. And all the
while the cork was out of that jug, so that the fumes of the whisky rose
maddeningly to his nostrils, and the little that he had swallowed
whipped the thirst-devil to a fury of desire.

In the kitchen, Mose rattled pans and hummed a raucous tune under his
breath, and presently he started again for the stable. Dick, desultorily
bracing a leaning post of one of the corrals, saw him coming and
grinned. He glanced toward the bunk-house, where Ford still lingered,
and the grin grew broader. After that he went all around the corral with
his hammer and bucket of nails, tightening poles and braces and,
incidentally, keeping an eye upon the bunk-house; and while he worked,
he whistled and smiled by turns. Dick was in an unusually cheerful mood
that day.

Mose came shuffling up behind him and stood with his stiff leg thrust
forward and his hands rolled up in his apron. Dick could see that he had
something clasped tightly under the wrappings.

"Say, that he-hen--she laid twice in the same place!" Mose announced
confidentially. "Got 'em both--for m'mince pies!" He waggled his head,
winked twice with his left eye, and went back to the bunk-house.

Still Ford did not appear. Josephine came, however, in riding skirt and
gray hat and gauntlets, treading lightly down the path that lay all in a
yellow glow which was not so much sunlight as that mellow haze which we
call Indian Summer. She looked in at the stable, and then came straight
over to Dick. There was, when Josephine was her natural self, something
very direct and honest about all her movements, as if she disdained all
feminine subterfuges and took always the straight, open trail to her
object.

"Do you know where Mr. Campbell is, Dick?" she asked him, and added no
explanation of her desire to know.

"I do," said Dick, with the rising inflection which was his habit, when
the words were used for a bait to catch another question.

"Well, where is he, then?"

Dick straightened up and smiled down upon her queerly. "Count ten before
you ask me that again," he parried, "because maybe you'd rather not
know."

Josephine lifted her chin and gave him that straight, measuring stare
which had so annoyed Ford the first time he had seen her. "I have
counted," she said calmly after a pause. "Where is Mr. Campbell,
please?"--and the "please" pushed Dick to the very edge of her favor, it
was so coldly formal.

"Well, if you're sure you counted straight, the last time I saw him he
was in the bunk-house."

"Well?" The tone of her demanded more.

"He was in the bunk-house--sitting close up to a gallon jug of whisky."
His eyelids flickered. "He's there yet--but I wouldn't swear to the
gallon--"

"Thank you very much." This time her tone pushed him over the edge and
into the depths of her disapproval. "I was sure I could depend upon
you--to tell!"

"What else could I do, when you asked?"

But she had her back to him, and was walking away up the path, and if
she heard, she did not trouble to answer. But in spite of her manner,
Dick smiled, and brought the hammer down against a post with such force
that he splintered the handle.

"Something's going to drop on this ranch, pretty quick," he prophesied,
looking down at the useless tool in his hand. "And if I wanted to name
it, I'd call it Ford." He glanced up the path to where Josephine was
walking straight to the west door of the bunk-house, and laughed sourly.
"Well, she needn't take my word for it if she don't want to, I guess,"
he muttered. "Nothing like heading off a critter--or a woman--in time!"

Josephine did not hesitate upon the doorstep. She opened the door and
went in, and shut the door behind her before the echo of her step had
died. Ford was lying as he had lain once before, upon a bunk, with his
face hidden in his folded arms. He did not hear her--at any rate he did
not know who it was, for he did not lift his head or stir.

Josephine looked at the jug upon the floor beside him, bent and lifted
it very gently from the floor; tilted it to the window so that she could
look into it, tilted her nose at the odor, and very, very gently put it
back where she had found it. Then she stood and looked down at Ford with
her eyebrows pinched together.

She did not move, after that, and she certainly did not speak, but her
presence for all that became manifest to him. He lifted his head and
stared at her over an elbow; and his eyes were heavy with trouble, and
his mouth was set in lines of bitterness.

"Did you want me for something?" he asked, when he saw that she was not
going to speak first.

She shook her head. "Is it--pretty steep?" she ventured after a moment,
and glanced down at the jug.

He looked puzzled at first, but when his own glance followed hers, he
understood. He stared up at her somberly before he let his head drop
back upon his arms, so that his face was once more hidden.

"You've never been in bell, I suppose," he told her, and his voice was
dull and tired. After a minute he looked up at her impatiently. "Is it
fun to stand and watch a man--What do you want, anyway? It doesn't
matter--to you."

"Are you sure?" she retorted sharply. "And--suppose it doesn't. I have
Kate to think of, at least."

He gave a little laugh that came nearer being a snort. "Oh, if that's
all, you needn't worry. I'm not quite that far gone, thank you!"

"I was thinking of the ranch, and of her ideals, and her blind trust in
you, and of the effect on the men," she explained impatiently.

He was silent a moment. "I'm thinking of myself!" he told her grimly
then.

"And--don't you ever--think of me?" She set her teeth sharply together
after the words were out, and watched him, breathing quickly.

Ford sprang up from the bunk and faced her with stern questioning in
his eyes, but she only flushed a little under his scrutiny. Her eyes, he
noticed, were clear and steady, and they had in them something of that
courage which fears but will not flinch.

"I don't want to think of you!" he said, lowering his voice
unconsciously. "For the last month I've tried mighty hard not to think
of you. And if you want to know why--I'm married!"

She leaned back against the door and stared up at him with widening
pupils. Ford looked down and struck the jug with his toe. "That thing,"
he said slowly, "I've got to fight alone. I don't know which is going to
come out winner, me or the booze. I--don't--know." He lifted his head
and looked at her. "What did you come in here for?" he asked bluntly.

She caught her breath, but she would not dodge. Ford loved her for that.
"Dick told me--and I was--I wanted to--well, help. I thought I
might--sometimes when the climb is too steep, a hand will keep one
from--slipping."

"What made you want to help? You don't even like me." His tone was flat
and unemotional, but she did not seem able to meet his eyes. So she
looked down at the jug.

"Dick said--but the jug is full practically. I don't understand how--"

"It isn't as full as it ought to be; it lacks one swallow." He eyed it
queerly. "I wish I knew how much it would lack by dark," he said.

She threw out an impulsive hand. "Oh, but you must make up your mind!
You mustn't temporize like that, or wonder--or--"

"This," he interrupted rather flippantly, "is something little girls
can't understand. They'd better not try. This isn't a woman's problem,
to be solved by argument. It's a man's fight!"

"But if you would just make up your mind, you could win."

"Could I?" His tone was amusedly skeptical, but his eyes were still
somber.

"Even a woman," she said impatiently, "knows that is not the way to win
a fight--to send for the enemy and give him all your weapons, and a plan
of the fortifications, and the password; when you know there's no mercy
to be hoped for!"

He smiled at her simile, and at her earnestness also, perhaps; but that
black gloom remained, looking out of his eyes.

"What made you send for it? A whole gallon!"

"I didn't send for it. That jug belongs to Mose," he told her simply.
"Dick told me Mose had it; rather, Dick went into the kitchen and got
it, and turned it over to me." In spite of the words, he did not give
one the impression that he was defending himself; he was merely offering
an explanation because she seemed to demand one.

"Dick got it and turned it over to you!" Her forehead wrinkled again
into vertical lines. She studied him frowningly. "Will you give it to
me?" she asked directly.

Ford folded his arms and scowled down at the jug. "No," he refused at
last, "I won't. If booze is going to be the boss of me I want to know
it. And I can't know it too quick."

"But--you're only human, Ford!"

"Sure. But I'm kinda hoping I'm a man, too." His eyes lightened a
little while they rested upon her.

"But you've got the poison of it--it's like a traitor in your fort,
ready to open the door. You can't do it! I--oh, you'll never understand
why, but I can't let you risk it. You've got to let me help; give it to
me, Ford!"

"No, You go on to the house, and don't bother about me. You can't
help--nobody can. It's up to me."

She struck her hands together in a nervous rage. "You want to keep it
because you want to drink it! If you didn't want it, you'd hate to be
near it. You'd want some one to take it away. You just want to get
drunk, and be a beast. You--you--oh--you don't know what you're doing,
or how much it means! You don't know!" Her hands went up suddenly and
covered her face.

Ford walked the length of the room away from her, turned and came back
until he faced her where she stood leaning against the door, with her
face still hidden behind her palms. He reached out his arms to her,
hesitated, and drew them back.

"I wish you'd go," he said. "There are some things harder to fight than
whisky. You only make it worse."

"I'll go when you give me that." She flung a hand out toward the jug.

"You'll go anyway!" He took her by the arm, quietly pulled her away from
the door, opened it, and then closed it while, for just a breath or two,
he held her tightly clasped in his arms. Very gently, after that, he
pushed her out upon the doorstep and shut the door behind her. The lock
clicked a hint which she could not fail to hear and understand. He
waited until he heard her walk away, sat down with the air of a man who
is very, very weary, rested his elbows upon his knees, and with his
hands clasped loosely together, he glowered at the jug on the floor.
Then the soul of Ford Campbell went deep down into the pit where all the
devils dwell.




CHAPTER XIII

A Plan Gone Wrong


It was Mose crashing headlong into the old messbox where he kept rattly
basins, empty lard pails, and such, that roused Ford. He got up and went
into the kitchen, and when he saw what was, the matter, extricated Mose
by the simple method of grabbing his shoulders and pulling hard; then he
set the cook upon his feet, and got full in his face the unmistakable
fumes of whisky.

"What? You got another jug?" he asked, with some disgust, steadying Mose
against the wall.

"Ah--I ain't got any jug uh nothin'," Mose protested, rather thickly.
"And I never took them bottles outa the stack; that musta been Dick done
that. Get after him about it; he's the one told me where yuh hid
'em--but I never touched 'em, honest I never. If they're gone, you get
after Dick. Don't yuh go 'n' lay it on me, now!" He was whimpering with
maudlin pathos before he finished. Ford scowled at him thoughtfully.

"Dick told you about the bottles in the haystack, did he?" he asked.
"Which stack was it? And how many bottles?"

Mose gave him a bleary stare. "Aw, you know. You hid 'em there yourself!
Dick said so. I ain't goin' to say which stack, or how many
bottles--or--any other--darn thing about it." He punctuated his phrases
by prodding a finger against Ford's chest, and he wagged his head with
all the self-consciousness of spurious virtue. "Promised Dick I
wouldn't, and I won't. Not a--darn--word about it. Wanted some--for m'
mince-meat, but I never took any outa the haystack." Whereupon he began
to show a pronounced limpness in his good leg, and a tendency to slide
down upon the floor.

Ford piloted him to a chair, eased him into it, and stood over him in
frowning meditation. Mose was drunk; absolutely, undeniably drunk. It
could not have been the jug, for the jug was full. Till then the oddity
of a full jug of whisky in Mose's kitchen after at least twenty-four
hours must have elapsed since its arrival, had not occurred to him. He
had been too preoccupied with his own fight to think much about Mose.

"Shay, I never took them bottles outa the stack," Mose looked up to
protest solemnly. "Dick never told me about 'em, neither. Dick tol'
me--" tapping Ford's arm with his finger for every word, "--'at there
was aigs down there, for m' mince-meat." He stopped suddenly and goggled
up at Ford. "Shay, yuh don't put aigs in--mince-meat," he informed him
earnestly. "Not a darn aig! That's what Dick tol' me--aigs for m'
mince-meat. Oh, I knowed right off what he meant, all right," he
explained proudly. "He didn't wanta come right out 'n' shay what it
was--an' I--got--the--aigs!"

"Yes--how many--eggs?" Ford held himself rigidly quiet.

"Two quart--aigs!" Mose laughed at the joke. "I wisht," he added
pensively, "the hens'd all lay them kinda aigs. I'd buy up all the
shickens in--the whole worl'." He gazed raptly upon the vision the words
conjured. "Gee! Quart aigs--'n' all the shickens in the worl' layin'
reg'lar!"

"Have you got any left?"

"No--honest. Used 'em all up--for m' mince-meat!"

Ford knew he was lying. His eyes searched the untidy tables and the
corners filled with bags and boxes. Mose was a good cook, but his ideas
of order were vague, and his system of housekeeping was the simple one
of leaving everything where he had last been using it, so that it might
be handy when he wanted it again. A dozen bottles might be concealed
there, like the faces in a picture-puzzle, and it would take a
housecleaning to disclose them all. But Ford, when he knew that no
bottle had been left in sight, began turning over the bags and looking
behind the boxes.

He must have been "growing warm" when he stood wondering whether it was
worth while to look into the flour-bin, for Mose gave an inarticulate
snarl and pounced on him from behind. The weight of him sent Ford down
on all fours and kept him there for a space, and even after he was up he
found himself quite busy. Mose was a husky individual, with no infirmity
of the arms and fists, even if he did have a stiff leg, and drunkenness
frequently flares and fades in a man like a candle guttering in the
wind. Besides, Mose was fighting to save his whisky.

Still, Ford had not sent all of Sunset into its cellars, figuratively
speaking, for nothing; and while a man may feel more enthusiasm for
fighting when under the influence of the stuff that cheers sometimes and
never fails to inebriate, the added incentive does not necessarily mean
also added muscular development or more weight behind the punch. Ford,
fighting as he had always fought, be he drunk or sober, came speedily to
the point where he could inspect a skinned knuckle and afterwards gaze
in peace upon his antagonist.

He was occupied with both diversions when the door was pushed open as by
a man in great haste. He looked up from the knuckle into the expectant
eyes of Jim Felton, and over the shoulder of Jim he saw a gloating
certainty writ large upon the face of Dick Thomas. They had been
running; he could tell that by their uneven breathing, and it occurred
to him that they must have heard the clamor when he pitched Mose head
first into the dish cupboard. There had been considerable noise about
that time, he remembered; they must also have heard the howl Mose gave
at the instant of contact. Ford glanced involuntarily at that side of
the room where stood the cupboard, and mentally admitted that it looked
like there had been a slight disagreement, or else a severe seismic
disturbance; and Montana is not what one calls an earthquake country.
His eyes left the generous sprinkle of broken dishes on the floor, with
Mose sprawled inertly in their midst, looking not unlike a broken
platter himself--or one badly nicked--and rested again upon the grinning
face behind the shoulder of Jim Felton.

Ford was ever a man of not many words, even when he had a grievance. He
made straight for Dick, and when he had pushed Jim out of the way, he
reached him violently. Dick tottered upon the step and went off
backward, and Ford landed upon him fairly and with full knowledge and
intent.

[Illustration: Dick tottered upon the step and went off backward.]

Jim Felton was a wise young man. He stood back and let them fight it
out, and when it was over he said never a word until Dick had picked
himself up and walked off, holding to his nose a handkerchief that
reddened rapidly.

"Say, you are a son-of-a-gun to fight," he observed admiringly then to
Ford. "Don't you know Dick's supposed to be abso-lute-ly unlickable?"

"May be so--but he sure shows all the symptoms of being licked right at
present." Ford moved a thumb joint gently to see whether it was really
dislocated or merely felt that way.

"He's going up to the house now, to tell the missus," remarked Jim,
craning his neck from the doorway.

"If he does that," Ford replied calmly, "I'll half kill him next time.
What I gave him just now is only a sample package left on the doorstep
to try." He sat down upon a corner of the table and began to make
himself a smoke. "Is he going up to the house--honest?" He would not
yield to the impulse to look and see for himself.

"We-el, the trail he's taking has no other logical destination," drawled
Jim. "He's across the bridge." When Ford showed no disposition to say
anything to that, Jim came in and closed the door. "Say, what laid old
Mose out so nice?" he asked, with an indolent sort of curiosity. "Booze?
Or just bumps?"

"A little of both," said Ford indifferently, between puffs. He was
thinking of the tale Dick would tell at the house, and he was thinking
of the probable effect upon one listener; the other didn't worry him,
though he liked Mrs. Kate very much.

Jim went over and investigated; discovering that Mose was close to
snoring, he sat upon a corner of the other table, swung a spurred boot,
and regarded Ford interestedly over his own cigarette building. "Say,
for a man that's supposed to be soused," he began, after a silence, "you
act and talk remarkably lucid. I wish I could carry booze like that," he
added regretfully. "But I can't; my tongue and my legs always betray
the guilty secret. Have you got any particular system, or is it just a
gift?"

"No"--Ford shook his head--"nothing like that. I just don't happen to be
drunk." He eyed Jim sharply while he considered within himself. "It
looks to me," he began, after a moment, "as if our friend Dick had
framed up a nice little plant. One way and another I got wise to the
whole thing; but for the life of me, I can't see what made him do it.
Lordy me! I never kicked him on any bunion!" He grinned, as memory
flashed a brief, mental picture of Sunset and certain incidents which
occurred there. But memory never lets well enough alone, and one is
lucky to escape without seeing a picture that leaves a sting; Ford's
smile ended in a scowl.

"Jealousy, old man," Jim pronounced without hesitation. "Of course, I
don't know the details, but--details be darned. If he has tried to hand
you a package, take it from me, jealousy's the string he tied it with. I
don't mind saying that Dick told me when I first rode up to the corral
that you and Mose were both boozing up to beat the band; and right after
that we heard a deuce of a racket up here, and it did look--" He waved
an apologetic hand at Mose and the fragments of pottery which framed
like a "still life" picture on the floor, and let it go at that. "I'm
strong for you, Ford," he added, and his smile was frank and friendly.
"Double Cross is the name of this outfit, but I'm all in favor of
running that brand on the cow-critters and keeping it out of the
bunk-house. If you should happen to feel like elucidating--" he hinted
delicately.

Ford had always liked Jim Felton; now he warmed to him as a real friend,
and certain things he told him. As much about the jug with the brown
neck and handle as concerned Dick, and all he knew of the bottles in the
haystack, while Jim smoked, and swung the foot which did not rest upon
the floor, and listened.

"Sounds like Dick, all right," he passed judgment, when Ford had
finished. "He counted on your falling for the jug--and oh, my! It was a
beautiful plant. I'd sure hate to have anybody sing 'Yield not to
temptation' at me, if a gallon jug of the real stuff fell into my arms
and nobody was looking." He eyed Ford queerly. "You've got quite a
reputation--" he ventured.

"Well, I earned it," Ford observed laconically.

"Dick banked on it--I'd stake my whole stack of blues on that. And after
you'd torn up the ranch, and pitched the fragments into the gulch, he'd
hold the last trump, with all high cards to keep the lead. Whee!" He
meditated admiringly upon the strategy. "But what I can't seem to
understand," he said frankly, "is why the deuce it didn't work! Is your
swallower out of kilter? If you don't mind my asking!"

"I never noticed that it was paralyzed," Ford answered grimly. He got
up, lifted a lid of the stove, and threw in the cigarette stub
mechanically. Then he bethought him of his interrupted search, and
prodded a long-handled spoon into the flour bin, struck something smooth
and hard, and drew out a befloured, quart bottle half full of whisky.
He wiped the bottle carefully, inspected it briefly, and pitched it into
the gully, where it smashed odorously upon a rock. Jim, watching him,
knew that he was thinking all the while of something else. When Ford
spoke, he proved it.

"Are you any good at all in the kitchen, Jim?" he asked, turning to him
as if he had decided just how he would meet the situation.

"Well, I hate to brag, but I've known of men eating my grub and going
right on living as if nothing had happened," Jim admitted modestly.

"Well, you turn yourself loose in here, will you? The boys will be good
and empty when they come--it's dinner time right now. I'll help you
carry Mose out of the way before I go."

Jim looked as if he would like to ask what Ford meant to do, but he
refrained. There was something besides preoccupation in Ford's face, and
it did not make for easy questioning. Jim did yield to his curiosity to
the extent of watching through a window, when Ford went out, to see
where he was going; and when he saw Ford had the jug, and that he took
the path which led across the little bridge and so to the house, he drew
back and said "Whee-e-e!" under his breath. Then he remarked to the
recumbent Mose, who was not in a condition either to hear or understand:
"I'll bet you Dick's got all he wants, right now, without any
postscript." After which Jim hunted up a clean apron and proceeded, with
his spurs on his heels, his hat on the back of his head, and a smile
upon his lips, to sweep out the broken dishes so that he might walk
without hearing them crunch unpleasantly under his boots. "I'll take
wildcats in mine, please," he remarked once irrelevantly aloud, and
smiled again.




CHAPTER XIV

The Feminine Point of View


When Ford stepped upon the porch with the jug in his hand, he gave every
indication of having definitely made up his mind. When he glimpsed
Josephine's worried face behind the lace curtain in the window, he
dropped the jug lower and held it against his leg in such a way as to
indicate that he hoped she could not see it, but otherwise he gave no
sign of perturbation. He walked along the porch to the door of his own
room, went in, locked the door after him, and put the jug down on a
chair. He could hear faint sounds of dishes being placed upon the table
in the dining-room, which was next to his own, and he knew that dinner
was half an hour late; which was unusual in Mrs. Kate's orderly domain.
Mrs. Kate was one of those excellent women whose house is always
immaculate, whose meals are ever placed before one when the clock
points to a certain hour, and whose table never lacks a salad and a
dessert--though how those feats are accomplished upon a cattle ranch
must ever remain a mystery. Ford was therefore justified in taking the
second look at his watch and in holding it up to his ear, and also in
lifting his eyebrows when all was done. Fifteen minutes by the watch it
was before he heard the silvery tinkle of the tea bell, which was one of
the ties which bound Mrs. Kate to civilization, and which announced that
he might enter the dining-room.

He went in as clean and fresh and straight-backed and quiet as ever he
had done, and when he saw that the room was empty save for Buddy,
perched upon his long-legged chair with his heels hooked over the top
round and a napkin tucked expectantly inside the collar of his blue
blouse, he took in the situation and sat down without waiting for the
women. The very first glance told him that Mrs. Kate had never prepared
that meal. It was, putting it bluntly, a scrappy affair hastily gathered
from various shelves in the pantry and hurriedly arranged haphazard
upon the table.

Buddy gazed upon the sprinkle of dishes with undisguised
dissatisfaction. "There ain't any potatoes," he announced gloomily. "My
own mamma always cooks potatoes. Josephine's the limit! I been working
to-day. I almost dug out a badger, over by the bluff. I got where I
could hear him scratching to get away, and then it was all rocks, so I
couldn't dig any more. Gee, it was hard digging! And I'm just about
starved, if you want to know. And there ain't any potatoes."

"Bread and butter is fine when you're hungry," Ford suggested, and
spread a slice for Buddy, somewhat inattentively, because he was also
keeping an eye upon the kitchen door, where he had caught a fleeting
glimpse of Josephine looking in at him.

"You're putting the butter all in one place," Buddy criticised, with his
usual frankness. "I guess you're drunk, all right. If you're too drunk
to spread butter, let me do it."

"What makes you think I'm drunk?" Ford questioned, lowering his voice
because of the person he suspected was in the kitchen.

"Mamma and Jo was quarreling about it; that's why. And my own mamma
cried, and shut the door, and wouldn't let me go in. And Jo pretty near
cried too, all right. I guess she did, only not when any one was
looking. Her eyes are awful red, anyway." Buddy took great, ravenous
bites of the bread and butter and eyed Ford unwinkingly.

"What's disslepointed?" he demanded abruptly, after he had given himself
a white mustache with his glass of milk.

"Why do you want to know?"

"That's what my own mamma is, and that's what Jo is. Only my own mamma
is it about you, and Jo's it about mamma. Say, did you lick Dick? Jo
told my own mamma she wisht you'd killed him. Jo's awful mad to-day. I
guess she's mad at Dick, because he ain't very much of a fighter. Did
you lick him easy? Did you paste him one in the jaw?"

Josephine entered then with Ford's belated tea. Her eyelids were pink,
as Buddy had told him, and she did not look at him while she filled his
cup.

"Kate has a sick headache," she explained primly, "and I did the best I
could with lunch. I hope it's--"

"It is," Ford interrupted reassuringly. "Everything is fine and dandy."

"You didn't cook any potatoes!" Buddy charged mercilessly. "And Ford's
too drunk to put the butter on right. I'm going to tell my dad that next
time he goes to Oregon I'm going along. This outfit will sure go to the
devil if he stays much longer!"

"Where did you hear that, Bud?" Josephine asked, still carefully
avoiding a glance at Ford.

"Well, Dick said it would go to the devil. I guess," he added on his own
account, with an eloquent look at the table, "it's on the trail right
now."

Ford looked at Josephine, opened his lips to say that it might still be
headed off, and decided not to speak. There was a stubborn streak in
Ford Campbell. She had said some bitter things, in her anger. Perhaps
she had not entirely believed them herself, and perhaps Mrs. Kate had
not been accurately quoted by her precocious young son; she may not have
said that she was disappointed in Ford. They might not have believed
whatever it was Dick told them, and they might still have full
confidence in him, Ford Campbell. Still, there was the stubborn streak
which would not explain or defend. So he left the table, and went into
his own room without any word save a muttered excuse; and that in spite
of the fact that Josephine looked full at him, at last, and with a
wistfulness that moved him almost to the point of taking her in his arms
and kissing away the worry--if he could.

He went up to the table where stood the jug, looked at it, lifted it,
and set it down again. Then he lifted it again and pulled the cork out
with a jerk, wondering if the sound of it had reached through the thin
partition to the ears of Josephine; he was guilty of hoping so. He put
back the cork--this time carefully--walked to the outer door, turned the
key, opened the door, and closed it again with a slam. Then, with a
grim set of the lips, he walked softly into the closet and pulled the
door nearly shut.

He knew there was a chance that Josephine, if she were interested in his
movements, would go immediately into the sitting-room, where she could
see the path, and would know that he had not really left the house. But
she did not, evidently. She sat long enough in the dining-room for Ford
to call himself a name or two and to feel exceedingly foolish over the
trick, and to decide that it was a very childish one for a grown man to
play upon a woman. Then she pushed back her chair, came straight toward
his room, opened the door, and looked in; Ford knew, for he saw her
through the crack he had left in the closet doorway. She stood there
looking at the jug on the table, then went up and lifted it, much as
Ford had done, and pulled the cork with a certain angry defiance.
Perhaps, he guessed shrewdly, Josephine also felt rather foolish at what
she was doing--and he smiled over the thought.

Josephine turned the jug to the light, shut one eye into an adorable
squint, and peered in. Then she set the jug down and pushed the cork
slowly into place; and her face was puzzled. Ford could have laughed
aloud when he saw it, but instead he held his breath for fear she should
discover him. She stood very still for a minute or two, staring at
nothing at all; moved the jug into the exact place where it had stood
before, and went out of the room on her toes.

So did Ford, for that matter, and he was in a cold terror lest she
should look out and see him walking down the path where he should
logically have walked more than five minutes before. He did not dare to
turn and look--until he was outside the gate; then inspiration came to
aid him and he went back boldly, stepped upon the porch with no effort
at silence, opened his door, and went in as one who has a right there.

He heard the click of dishes which told that she was clearing the table,
and he breathed freer. He walked across the room, waited a space, and
walked back again, and then went out with his heart in its proper
position in his chest; Ford was unused to feeling his heart rise to his
palate, and the sensation was more novel than agreeable. When he went
again down the path, there was a certain exhilaration in his step. His
thoughts arranged themselves in clear-cut sentences, as if he were
speaking, instead of those vague, almost wordless impressions which fill
the brain ordinarily.

"She's keeping cases on that jug. She must care, or she wouldn't do
that. She's worried a whole lot; I could see that, all along. Down at
the bunk-house she called me Ford twice--and she said it meant a lot to
her, whether I make good or not. I wonder--Lordy me! A man could make
good, all right, and do it easy, if she cared! She doesn't know what to
think--that jug staying right up to high-water mark, like that!" He
laughed then, silently, and dwelt upon the picture she had made while
she had stood there before the table.

"Lord! she'd want to kill me if she knew I hid in that closet, but I
just had a hunch--that is, if she cared anything about it. I wonder if
she did really say she wished I'd killed Dick?

"Anyway, I can fight it now, with her keeping cases on the quiet. I
know I can fight it. Lordy me, I've got to fight it! I've got to make
good; that's all there is about it. Wonder what she'll think when she
sees that jug don't go down any? Wonder--oh, hell! She'd never care
anything about me. If she did--" His thoughts went hazy with vague
speculation, then clarified suddenly into one hard fact, like a rock
thrusting up through the lazy sweep of a windless tide. "If she did
care, I couldn't do anything. I'm married!"

His step lost a little of its spring, then, and he went into the
bunk-house with much the same expression on his face as when he had left
it an hour or so before.

He did not see Dick that day. The other boys watched him covertly, it
seemed to him, and showed a disposition to talk among themselves. Jim
was whistling cheerfully in the kitchen. He turned his head and laughed
when Ford went in.

"I found a dead soldier behind the sack of spuds," Jim announced, and
produced an empty bottle, mate to the one Ford had thrown into the
gully. "And Dick didn't seem to have any appetite at all, and Mose is
still in Sleepytown. I guess that's all the news at this end of the
line. Er--hope everything is all right at the house?"

"Far as I could see, it was," Ford replied, with an inner sense of
evasion. "I guess we'll just let her go as she looks, Jim. Did you say
anything to the boys?"

Jim reddened under his tan, but he laughed disarmingly. "I cannot tell a
lie," he confessed honestly, "and it was too good to keep to myself. I'm
the most generous fellow you ever saw, when it comes to passing along a
good story that won't hurt anybody's digestion. You don't care, do you?
The joke ain't on you."

"If you'd asked me about it, I'd have said keep it under your hat.
But--"

"And that would have been a sin and a shame," argued Jim, licking a
finger he had just scorched on a hot kettle-handle. "The fellows all
like a good story--and it don't sound any worse because it's on Dick.
And say! I kinda got a clue to where he connected with that whisky. Walt
says he come back from the line-camp with his overcoat rolled up and
tied behind the saddle--and it wasn't what you could call a hot night,
either. He musta had that jug wrapped up in it. I'll bet he sent in by
Peterson, the other day, for it. He was over there, I know. He's sure a
deliberate kind of a cuss, isn't he? Must have had this thing all
figured out a week ago. The boys are all tickled to death at the way he
got it in the neck; they know Dick pretty well. But if you'd told me not
to say anything, I'd have said he stubbed his toe on his shadow and fell
all over himself, and let it go at that."

"Lordy me! Jim, you needn't worry about it; you ought to know you can't
keep a thing like this quiet, on a ranch. It doesn't matter much how he
got that whisky here, either; I know well enough you didn't haul it out.
I'd figured it out about as Walt says.

"Say, it looks as if you'll have to wrastle with the pots and pans till
to-morrow. The lower fence I'll ride, this afternoon; did you get clear
around the Pinnacle field?"

"I sure did--and she's tight as a drum. Say, Mose is a good cook, but
he's a mighty punk housekeeper, if you ask me. I'm thinking of getting
to work here with a hoe!"

So life, which had of late loomed big and bitter before the soul of
Ford, slipped back into the groove of daily routine.




CHAPTER XV

The Climb


Into its groove of routine slipped life at the Double Cross, but it did
not move quite as smoothly as before. It was as if the "hill" which Ford
was climbing suffered small landslides here and there, which threatened
to block the trail below. Sometimes--still keeping to the simile--it was
but a pebble or two kicked loose by Ford's heel; sometimes a bowlder
which one must dodge.

Dick, for instance, must have likened Mose to a real landslide when he
came at him the next day, with a roar of rage and the rolling-pin. Mose
had sobered to the point where he wondered how it had all happened, and
wanted to get his hands in the wool of the "nigger" said to lurk in
woodpiles. He asked Jim, with various embellishments of speech, what it
was all about, and Jim told him and told him truly.

"He was trying to queer you with the outfit, Mose, and that's a fact,"
he finished; which was the only exaggeration Jim was guilty of, for Dick
had probably thought very little of Mose and his ultimate standing with
the Double Cross. "And he was trying to queer Ford--but you can search
me for the reason why he didn't make good, there."

Mose, like many of us, was a self-centered individual. He wasted a
minute, perhaps, thinking of the trick upon Ford; but he spent all of
that forenoon and well into the afternoon in deep meditation upon the
affair as it concerned himself. And the first time Dick entered the
presence of the cook, he got the result of Mose's reasoning.

"Tried to git me in bad, did yuh? Thought you'd git me fired, hey?" he
shouted, as a sort of punctuation to the belaboring.

A rolling pin is considered a more or less fearsome weapon in the hands
of a woman, I believe; when wielded by an incensed man who stands close
to six feet and weighs a solid two hundred pounds, and who has the
headache which follows inevitably in the wake of three pints of whisky
administered internally in the short space of three hours or so, a
rolling-pin should justly be classed with deadly weapons.

Jim said afterward that he never had believed it possible to act out the
rough stuff of the silly supplements in the Sunday papers, but after
seeing Mose perform with that rolling-pin, he was willing to call every
edition of the "funny papers" realistic to a degree. Since it was Jim
who helped pull Mose off, naturally he felt qualified to judge. Jim told
Ford about the affair with sober face and eyes that laughed.

"And where's Dick?" Ford asked him, without committing himself upon the
justice of the chastisement.

"Gone to bed, I believe. He didn't come out with anything worse than
bumps, I guess--but what I saw of them are sure peaches; or maybe
Italian prunes would hit them off closer; they're a fine purple shade. I
ladled Three H all over him."

"I thought Dick was a fighter from Fighterville," grinned Ford, trying
hard to remain non-committal and making a poor job of it.

"Well, he is, when he can stand up and box according to rule, or hit a
man when he isn't looking. But my, oh! This wasn't a fight, Ford; this
was like the pictures you see of an old woman lambasting her son-in-law
with an umbrella. Dick never got a chance to begin. Whee-ee! Mose sure
can handle a rolling-pin some!"

Ford laughed and went up to the house to his supper, and to the
constrained atmosphere which was telling on his nerves more severely
than did the gallon jug in his closet, and the moral effort it cost to
keep that jug full to the neck.

He went in quietly, threw his hat on the bed, and sat down with an air
of discouragement. It was not yet six o'clock, and he knew that Mrs.
Kate would not have supper ready; but he wanted a quiet place in which
to think, and he was closer to Josephine; though he would never have
admitted to himself that her nearness was any comfort to him. He did
admit, however, that the jug with the brown neck and handle pulled him
to the room many times in spite of himself. He would take it from the
corner of the closet and let his fingers close over the cork, but so far
he had never yielded beyond that point. Always he had been able to set
the jug back unopened.

He was getting circles under his eyes, two new creases had appeared on
each side of his whimsical lips, and a permanent line was forming
between his eyebrows; but he had not opened the jug, and it had been in
his possession thirty-six hours. Thirty-six hours is not long, to be
sure, when life runs smoothly with slight incidents to emphasize the
figures on the dial, but it may seem long to the poor devil on the rack.

Just now Ford was trying to forget that a gallon of whisky stood in the
right-hand corner of his closet, behind a pair of half-worn riding-boots
that pinched his instep so that he seldom wore them, and that he had
only to take the jug out from behind the boots, pull the cork, and lift
the jug to his lips--

He caught himself leaning forward and staring at the closet door until
his eyes ached with the strain. He drew back and passed his hand over
his forehead; it ached, and he wanted to think about what he ought to do
with Dick. He did not like to discharge him without first consulting
Mrs. Kate, for he knew that Ches Mason was in the habit of talking
things over with her, and since Mason was gone, she had assumed an air
of latent authority. But Mrs. Kate had looked at him with such
reproachful eyes, that day at dinner, and her voice had sounded so
squeezed and unnatural, that he had felt too far removed from her for
any discussion whatever to take place between them.

Besides, he knew he could prove absolutely nothing against Dick, if Dick
were disposed toward flat denial. He might suspect--but the facts showed
Ford the aggressor, and Mose also. What if Mrs. Kate declined to believe
that Dick had put that jug of whisky in the kitchen, and had afterward
given it to Ford? Ford had no means of knowing just what tale Dick had
told her, but he did know that Mrs. Kate eyed him doubtfully, and that
her conversation was forced and her manner constrained.

And Josephine was worse. Josephine had not spoken to him all that day.
At breakfast she had not been present, and at dinner she had kept her
eyes upon her plate and had nothing to say to any one.

He wished Mason was home, so that he could leave. It wouldn't matter
then, he tried to believe, what he did. He even dwelt upon the desire of
Mason's return to the extent of calculating, with his eyes upon the
fancy calendar on the wall opposite, the exact time of his absence. Ten
days--there was no hope of release for another month, at least, and Ford
sighed unconsciously when he thought of it; for although a month is not
long, there was Josephine refusing to look at him, and there was
Dick--and there was the jug in the closet.

As to Josephine, there was no help for it; he could not avoid her
without making the avoidance plain to all observers, and Ford was proud.
As to Dick, he would not send him off without some proof that he had
broken an unwritten law of the Double Cross and brought whisky to the
ranch; and of that he had no proof. As to his suspicions--well, he
considered that Dick had almost paid the penalty for having roused them,
and the matter would have to rest where it was; for Ford was just. As to
the jug, he could empty it upon the ground and be done with that
particular form of torture. But he felt sure that Josephine was secretly
"keeping cases" on the jug; and Ford was stubborn.

That night Ford did not respond to the tinkle of the tea bell. His head
ached abominably, and he did not want to see Josephine's averted face
opposite him at the table. He lay still upon the bed where he had
finally thrown himself, and let the bell tinkle until it was tired.

They sent Buddy in to see why he did not come. Buddy looked at him with
the round, curious eyes of precocious childhood and went back and
reported that Ford wasn't asleep, but was just lying there mad. Ford
heard the shrill little voice innocently maligning him, and swore to
himself; but, he did not move for all that. He lay thinking and fighting
discouragement and thirst, while little table sounds came through the
partition and made a clicking accompaniment to his thoughts.

If he were free, he was wondering between spells of temptation, would it
do any good? Would Josephine care? There was no answer to that, or if
there was he did not know what it was.

After awhile the two women began talking; he judged that Buddy had left
them, because it was sheer madness to speak so freely before him. At
first he paid no attention to what they were saying, beyond a grudging
joy in the sound of Josephine's voice. It had come to that, with Ford!
But when he heard his name spoken, and by her, he lifted shamelessly to
an elbow and listened, glad that the walls were so thin, and that those
who dwell in thin-partitioned houses are prone to forget that the other
rooms may not be quite empty. They two spent most of their waking hours
alone together, and habit breeds carelessness always.

"Do you suppose he's drunk?" Mrs. Kate asked, and her voice was full of
uneasiness. "Chester says he's terrible when he gets started. I was sure
he was perfectly safe! I just can't stand it to have him like this.
Dick told me he's drinking a little all the time, and there's no telling
when he'll break out, and--Oh, I think it's perfectly terrible!"

"Hsh-sh," warned Josephine.

"He went out, quite a while ago. I heard him," said Mrs. Kate, with rash
certainty. "He hasn't been like himself since that day he fought Dick.
He must be--"

"But how could he?" Josephine's voice interrupted sharply. "That jug
he's got is full yet."

Ford could imagine Mrs. Kate shaking her head with the wisdom born of
matrimony.

"Don't you suppose he could keep putting in water?" she asked pityingly.
Ford almost choked when he heard that!

"I don't believe he would." Josephine's tone was dubious. "It doesn't
seem to me that a man would do that; he'd think he was just spoiling
what was left. That," she declared with a flash of inspiration, "is what
a woman would do. And a man always does something different!" There was
a pathetic note in the last sentence, which struck Ford oddly.

"Don't think you know men, my dear, until you've been married to one for
eight years or so," said Mrs. Kate patronizingly. "When you've been--"

"Oh, for mercy's sake, do you think they're all alike?" Josephine's
voice was tart and impatient. "I know enough about men to know they're
all different. You can't judge one by another. And I don't believe that
Ford is drinking at all. He's just--"

"Just what?--since you know so well!" Mrs. Kate was growing ironical.

"He's trying not to--and worrying." Her voice lowered until it took love
to hear it. Ford did hear, and his breath came fast. He did not catch
Mrs. Kate's reply; he was not in love with Mrs. Kate, and he was engaged
in letting the words of Josephine sink into his very soul, and in
telling himself over and over that she understood. It seemed to him a
miracle of intuition, that she should sense the fight he was making;
and since he felt that way about it, it was just as well he did not know
that Jim Felton sensed it quite as keenly as Josephine--and with a far
greater understanding of how bitter a fight it was, and for that reason
a deeper sympathy.

"I wish Chester was here!" wailed Mrs. Kate, across the glow of his
exultant thoughts. "I'm afraid to say anything to him myself, he's so
morose. It's a shame, because he's so splendid when he's--himself."

"He's as much himself now as ever he was," Josephine defended hotly.
"When he's drinking he's altogether--"

"You never saw him drunk," Mrs. Kate pointed to the weak spot in
Josephine's defense of him. "Dick says--"

"Oh, do you believe everything Dick says? A week ago you were bitter
against Dick and all enthusiasm for Ford."

"You were flirting with Dick then, and you'd hardly treat Ford decently.
And Ford hadn't gone to drink--"

"Will you hush?" There were tears of anger in Josephine's voice. "He
isn't, I tell you!"

"What does he keep that jug in the closet for? And every few hours he
comes up to the house and goes into his room--and he never did that
before. And have you noticed his eyes? He'll scarcely talk any more, and
he just pretends to eat. At dinner to-day he scarcely touched a thing!
It's a sure sign, Phenie."

Ford was growing tired of that sort of thing. It dimmed the radiance of
Josephine's belief in him, to have Mrs. Kate so sure of his weakness. He
got up from the bed as quietly as he could and left the house. He was
even more thoughtful, after that, but not quite so gloomy--if one cared
enough for his moods to make a fine distinction.

Have you ever observed the fact that many of life's grimmest battles and
deepest tragedies scarce ripple the surface of trivial things? We are
always rubbing elbows with the big issues and never knowing anything
about it. Certainly no one at the Double Cross guessed what was always
in the mind of the foreman. Jim thought he was "sore" because of Dick.
Dick thought Ford was jealous of him, and trying to think of some scheme
to "play even," without coming to open war. Mrs. Kate was positive, in
her purely feminine mind--which was a very good mind, understand, but
somewhat inadequate when brought to bear upon the big problems of
life--that Ford was tippling in secret. Josephine thought--just what she
said, probably, upon the chill day when she calmly asked Ford at the
breakfast table if he would let her go with him.

Ford had casually remarked, in answer to a diffident question from Mrs.
Kate, that he was going to ride out on Long Ridge and see if any stock
was drifting back toward the ranch. He hadn't sent any one over that way
for several days. Ford, be it said, had announced his intention
deliberately, moved by a vague, unreasoning impulse.

"Can I go?" teased Buddy, from sheer force of habit; no one ever
mentioned going anywhere, but Buddy shot that question into the
conversation.

"No, you can't. You can't, with that cold," his mother vetoed promptly,
and Buddy, whimpering over his hot cakes, knew well the futility of
argument, when Mrs. Kate used that tone of finality.

"Will you let me go?" Josephine asked unexpectedly, and looked straight
at Ford. But though her glance was direct, it was unreadable, and Ford
mentally threw up his hands after one good look at her, and tried not to
betray the fact that this was what he had wanted, but had not hoped for.

"Sure, you can go," he said, with deceitful brevity. Josephine had not
spoken to him all the day before, except to say good-morning when he
came in to his breakfast. Ford made no attempt to understand her, any
more. He was carefully giving her the lead, as he would have explained
it, and was merely following suit until he got a chance to trump; but he
was beginning to have a discouraged feeling that the game was hers, and
that he might as well lay down his hand and be done with it. Which, when
he brought the simile back to practical affairs, meant that he was
thinking seriously of leaving the ranch and the country just as soon as
Mason returned.

He was thinking of trying the Argentine Republic for awhile, if he
could sell the land which he had rashly bought while he was getting rid
of his inheritance.

She did not offer any excuse for the request, as most women would have
done. Neither did she thank him, with lips or with eyes, for his ready
consent. She seemed distrait--preoccupied, as if she, also, were
considering some weighty question.

Ford pushed back his chair, watching her furtively. She rose with Kate,
and glanced toward the window.

"I suppose I shall need my heaviest sweater," she remarked practically,
and as if the whole affair were too commonplace for discussion. "It does
look threatening. How soon will you want to start?" This without looking
toward Ford at all.

"Right away, if that suits you." Ford was still watchful, as if he had
not quite given up hope of reading her meaning.

She told him she would be ready by the time he had saddled, and she
appeared in the stable door while he was cinching the saddle on the
horse he meant to ride.

"I hope you haven't given me Dude," she said unemotionally. "He's
supposed to be gentle--but he bucked me off that day I sprained my
ankle, and all the excuse he had was that a rabbit jumped out from a
bush almost under his nose. I've lost faith in him since. Oh--it's
Hooligan, is it? I'm glad of that; Hooligan's a dear--and he has the
easiest gallop of any horse on the ranch. Have you tried him yet, Ford?"

The heart of Ford lifted in his chest at her tone and her words, along
toward the last. He forgot the chill of her voice in the beginning, and
he dwelt greedily upon the fact that once more she had called him Ford.
But his joy died suddenly when he led his horse out and discovered that
Dick and Jim Felton were coming down the path, within easy hearing of
her. Ford did not know women very well, but most men are born with a
rudimentary understanding of them. He suspected that her intimacy of
tone was meant for Dick's benefit; and when they had ridden three or
four miles and her share of the conversation during that time had
consisted of "yes" twice, "no" three times, and one "indeed," he was
sure of it.

So Ford began to wonder why she came at all--unless that, also, was
meant to discipline Dick--and his own mood became a silent one. He did
not, he told himself indignantly, much relish being used as a club to
beat some other man into good behavior.

They rode almost to Long Ridge before Ford discovered that Josephine was
stealing glances at his face whenever she thought he was not looking,
and that the glances were questioning, and might almost be called timid.
He waited until he was sure he was not mistaken, and then turned his
head unexpectedly, and smiled into her startled eyes.

"What is it?" he asked, still smiling at her. "I won't bite. Say it, why
don't you?"

She bit her lips and looked away.

"I wanted to ask something--ask you to do something," she said, after a
minute. And then hurriedly, as if she feared her courage might ebb and
leave her stranded, "I wish you'd give me that--jug!"

Sheer surprise held Ford silent, staring at her.

"I don't ask many favors--I wish you'd grant just that one. I wouldn't
ask another."

"What do you want of it?"

"Oh--" she stopped, then plunged on recklessly. "It's getting on my
nerves so! And if you gave it to me, you wouldn't have to fight the
temptation--"

"Why wouldn't I? There's plenty more where that came from," he reminded
her.

"But it wouldn't be right where you could get it any time the craving
came. Won't you let me take it?" He had never before heard that tone
from her; but he fought down the thrill of it and held himself rigidly
calm.

"Oh, I don't know--the jug's doing all right, where it is," he evaded;
what he wanted most was to get at her real object, and, man-like, to
know beyond doubt whether she really cared.

"But you don't--you never touch it," she urged. "I know, because--well,
because every day I look into it! I suppose you'll say I have no right,
that it's spying, or something. But I don't care for that. And I can see
that it's worrying you dreadfully. And if you don't drink any of it, why
won't you let me have it?"

"If I don't drink it; what difference does it make who has it?" he
countered.

"I'm afraid there'll be a time when you'll yield, just because you are
blue and discouraged--or something; whatever mood it is that makes the
temptation hardest to resist. I know myself that things are harder to
endure some days than they are others." She stopped and looked at him in
that enigmatical way she had. "You may not know it--but I've been
staying here just to see whether you fail or succeed. I thought I
understood a little of why you came, and I--I stayed." She leaned and
twisted a wisp of Hooligan's mane nervously, and Ford noticed how the
color came and went in the cheek nearest him.

"I--oh, it's awfully hard to say what I want to say, and not have it
sound different," she began again, without looking at him. "But if you
don't understand what I mean--" Her teeth clicked suggestively.

Ford leaned to her. "Say it anyway and take a chance," he urged, and his
voice was like a kiss, whether he knew it or not. He did know that she
caught her breath at the words or the tone, and that the color flamed a
deeper tint in her cheek and then faded to a faint glow.

"What I mean is that I appreciate the way you have acted all along.
I--it wasn't an easy situation to meet, and you have met it like a
man--and a gentleman. I was afraid of you at first, and I misunderstood
you completely. I'm ashamed to confess it, but it's true. And I want to
see you make good in this thing you have attempted; and if there's
anything on earth that I can do to help you, I want you to let me do it.
You will, won't you?" She looked at him then with clear, honest eyes.
"It's my way of wanting to thank you for--for not taking any advantage,
or trying to, of--your--position that night."

Ford's own cheeks went hot. "I thought you knew all along that I wasn't
a cur, at least," he said harshly. "I never knew before that you had any
reason to be afraid of me, that night. If I'd known that--but I thought
you just didn't like me, and let it go at that. And what I said I meant.
You needn't feel that you have anything to thank me for; I haven't done
a thing that deserves thanks--or fear either, for that matter."

"I thought you understood, when I left--"

"I didn't worry much about it, one way or the other," he cut in. "I
hunted around for you, of course, and when I saw you'd pulled out for
good, I went over the hill and camped. I didn't get the note till next
morning; and I don't know," he added, with a brief smile, "as that did
much toward making me understand. You just said to wait till some one
came after me. Well, I didn't wait." He laughed and leaned toward her
again. "Now there seems a chance of our being--pretty good friends," he
said, in the caressing tone he had used before, and of which he was
utterly unconscious, "we won't quarrel about that night, will we? You
got home all right, and so did I. We'll forget all about it. Won't we?"
He laid a hand on the horn of her saddle so that they rode close
together, and tried futilely to read what was in her face, since she did
not speak.

Josephine stared blankly at the brown slope before them. Her lips were
set firmly together, and her brows were contracted also, and her gloved
fingers gripped the reins tightly. She paid not the slightest attention
to Ford's hand upon her saddle horn, nor at the steady gaze of his eyes.
Later, when Ford observed the rigidity of her whole pose and sensed that
mental withdrawing which needs no speech to push one off from the more
intimate ground of companionship, he wondered a little. Without in the
least knowing why he felt rebuffed, he took away his hand, and swung his
horse slightly away from her; his own back stiffened a little in
response to the chilled atmosphere.

"Yes," she said at last, "we'll forget all about it, Mr. Campbell."

"You called me Ford, a while ago," he hinted.

"Did I? One forms the habit of picking up a man's given name, out here
in the West, I find. I'm sorry--"

"I don't want you to be sorry. I want you to do it again. All the time,"
he added boldly.

He caught the gleam of her eyes under her heavy lashes, as she glanced
at him sidelong.

"If you go looking at me out of the corner of your eyes," he threatened
recklessly, kicking his horse closer, "I'm liable to kiss you!"

And he did, before she could draw away.

"I've been kinda thinking maybe I'm in love with you, Josephine," he
murmured, holding her close. "And now I'm dead sure of it. And if you
won't love me back why--there'll be something doing, that's all!"

"Yes? And what would you do, please?" Her tone was icy, but he somehow
felt that the ice was very, very thin, and that her heart beat warm
beneath. She drew herself free, and he let her go.

"I dunno," he confessed whimsically. "But Lordy me! I'd sure do
something!"

"Look for comfort in that jug, I suppose you mean?"

"No, I don't mean that." He stopped and considered, his forehead creased
as if he were half angry at the imputation. "I'm pretty sure of where I
stand, on that subject. I've done a lot of thinking, since I hit the
Double Cross--and I've cut out whisky for good.

"I know what you thought, and what Mrs. Kate thinks yet; and I'll admit
it was mighty tough scratching for a couple of days after I got hold of
that jug. But I found out which was master--and it wasn't the booze!" He
looked at her with eyes that shone. "Josie, girl, I took a long
chance--but I put it up to myself this way, when the jug seemed to be on
top. I told myself it was whisky or you; not that exactly, either. It's
hard to say just what I do mean. Not you, maybe--but what you stand for.
What I could get out of life, if I was straight and lived clean, and had
a little woman like you. It may not be you at all; that's as you--"

He stopped as if some one had laid a hand over his mouth. It was not as
she said. It might have been, only for that drunken marriage of his.
Never before had he hated whisky as bitterly as he did then, when he
remembered what it had done for him that night in Sunset, and what it
was doing now. It closed his lips upon what he would have given much to
be able to say; for he was a man with all the instincts of chivalry and
honor--and he loved the girl. It was, he realized bitterly, just because
he did love her so well, that he could not say more. He had said too
much already; but her nearness had gone to his head, and he had
forgotten that he was not free to say what he felt.

Perhaps Josephine mistook his sudden silence for trepidation, or
humility. At any rate she reined impulsively close, and reached out and
caught the hand hanging idly at his side.

"Ford, I'm no coquette," she said straightforwardly, with a blush for
maiden-modesty's sake. "I believe you; absolutely and utterly I believe
you. If you had been different at first--if you had made any overtures
whatever toward--toward lovemaking, I should have despised you. I
never would have loved you in this world! But you didn't. You kept at
such a distance that I--I couldn't help thinking about you and studying
you. And lately--when I knew you were fighting the--the habit--I loved
you for the way you did fight. I was afraid, too. I used to slip into
your room every time you left it, and look--and I just ached to help
you! But I knew I couldn't do a thing; and that was the hardest part.
All I could do was stand back--clear back out of sight, and hope.
And--and love you, too, Ford. I'm proud of you! I'm proud to think that
I--I love a man that is a man; that doesn't sit down and whine because a
fight is hard, or give up and say it's no use. I do despise a moral
weakling, Ford. I don't mind what you have been; it's what you are, that
counts with me. And you're a man, every inch of you. I'm not a bit
afraid you'll weaken. Only," she added half apologetically, "I did want
you to give me the--the jug, because I couldn't bear to see you look so
worried." She gave his fingers an adorable little squeeze, and flung
his hand away from her, and laughed in a way to set his heart pounding
heavily in his chest. "Now you know where I stand, Mr. Man," she cried
lightly, "so let's say no more about it. I bet I can beat you across
this flat!" She laughed again, wrinkled her nose at him impertinently,
and was off in a run.

[Illustration: "Ford, I'm no coquette," she said straightforwardly.]

If she had waited, Ford would have told her. If she had given him a
chance, he would have told her afterward; but she did not. She was
extremely careful not to let their talk become intimate, after that. She
laughed, she raced Hooligan almost to the point of abuse, she chattered
about everything under the sun that came into her mind, except their own
personal affairs or anything that could possibly lead up to the subject.

Ford, for a time, watched for an opening honestly; saw at last the
impossibility of telling her--unless indeed he shouted, "Say, I'm a
married man!" to her without preface or extenuating explanation--and
yielded finally to the reprieve the fates sent him.




CHAPTER XVI

To Find and Free a Wife


Ford spent the rest of that day and all of the night that followed, in
thinking what would be the best and the easiest method of gaining the
point he wished to reach. All along he had been uncomfortably aware of
his matrimonial entanglement and had meant, as soon as he conveniently
could, to try and discover who was his wife, and how best to free
himself and her. He had half expected that she herself would do
something to clear the mystery. She had precipitated the marriage, he
constantly reminded himself, and it was reasonable to expect that she
would do something; though what, Ford could only conjecture.

When he faced Josephine across the breakfast table the next morning, and
caught the shy glance she gave him when Mrs. Kate was not looking, a
plan he had half formed crystallized into a determination. He would not
tell her anything about it until he knew just what he was up against,
and how long it was going to take him to free himself. And since he
could not do anything about it while he rode and planned and gave orders
at the Double Cross, he swallowed his breakfast rather hurriedly and
went out to find Jim Felton.

"Say, Jim," he began, when he ran that individual to earth in the
stable, where, with a pair of sheep shears, he was roaching the mane of
a shaggy old cow pony to please Buddy, who wanted to make him look like
a circus horse, even if there was no hope of his ever acting like one.
"I'm going to hand you the lines and let you drive, for a few days. I've
got to scout around on business of my own, and I don't know just how
long it's going to take me. I'm going right away--to-day."

"Yeah?" Jim poised the shears in air and regarded him quizzically over
the pony's neck. "Going to pass me foreman's privilege--to hire and
fire?" he grinned. "Because I may as well tell you that if you do, Dick
won't be far behind you on the trail."

"Oh, darn Dick. I'll fire him myself, maybe, before I leave. Yes," he
added, thinking swiftly of Josephine as the object of Dick's desires,
"that's what I'll do. Maybe it'll save a lot of trouble while I'm gone.
He's a tricky son-of-a-gun."

"You're dead right; he is," Jim agreed. And then, dryly: "Grandmother
just died?"

"Oh, shut up. This ain't an excuse--it's business. I've just got to go,
and that's all there is to it. I'll fix things with the missus, and tell
her you're in charge. Anyway, I won't be gone any longer than I can
help."

"I believe that, too," said Jim softly, and busied himself with the
shears.

Ford looked at him sharply, in doubt as to just how much or how little
Jim meant by that. He finally shrugged his shoulders and went away to
tell Mrs. Kate, and found that a matter which required more diplomacy
than he ever suspected he possessed. But he did tell her, and he hoped
that she believed the reason he gave for going, and also had some faith
in his assurance that he would be back, probably, in a couple of
days--or as soon afterwards as might be.

"There's nothing but chores to do now around the ranch, and Jack will
ride fence," he explained unnecessarily, to cover his discomfort at her
coldness. "Jim can look after things just as well as I can. There won't
be any need to start feeding the calves, unless it storms; and if it
does, Jim and Jack will go ahead, all right. I'm going to let Dick and
Curly go. We don't need more than two men besides Walt, from now on."

"I wish Chester was here," said Mrs. Kate ambiguously.

Ford did not ask her why she wished that. He told her good-by as hastily
as if he had to run to catch a train, and left her. He hoped he would be
lucky enough to see Josephine--and then he hoped quite as sincerely that
he would not see her, after all. It would be easier to go without her
clear eyes asking him why.

What he meant to do first was to find Rock, and see if he had been
sober enough that night in Sunset to remember what happened at the
marriage ceremony, and could give him some clue as to the woman's
identity and whereabouts. If he failed there, he intended to hunt up the
preacher. That, also, presented certain difficulties, but Ford was in
the mood to overcome obstacles. Once he discovered who the woman was, it
seemed to him that there should be no great amount of trouble in getting
free. As he understood it, he was not the man she had intended to marry;
and not being the man she wanted, she certainly could not be
over-anxious to cling to him.

While he galloped down the trail to town, he went over the whole thing
again in his mind, to see if there might be some simpler plan than the
one he had formed in the night.

"No, sir--it's Rock I've got to see first," he concluded. "But Lord only
knows where I'll find him; Rock never does camp twice in the same place.
Never knew him to stay more than a month with one outfit. But I'll find
him, all right!"

And by one of those odd twists of circumstances which sets men to
wondering if there is such a thing as telepathy and a specifically
guiding hand and the like, it was Rock and none other whom he met fairly
in the trail before he had gone another mile.

"Well, I'll be gol darned!" Ford whispered incredulously to himself, and
pulled up short in the trail to wait for him.

Rock came loping up with elbows flapping loosely, as was his ungainly
habit. His grin was wide and golden as of yore, his hat at the same
angle over his right eyebrow.

"Gawd bless you, brother! May peace ride behind your cantle!" he
declaimed unctuously, for Rock was a character, in his way, and in his
speech was not in the least like other men. "Whither wendest thou?"

"My wending is all over for the present," said Ford, wheeling his horse
short around, that he might ride alongside the other. "I started out to
hunt you up, you old devil. How are you, anyway?"

"It is well with me, and well with my soul--what little I've got--but it
ain't so well with my winter grub-stake. I'm just as tickled to see you
as you ever dare be to meet up with me, and that's no lie. I heard
you've got a stand-in with the Double Cross, and seeing they ain't on to
my little peculiarities, I thought I'd ride out and see if I couldn't
work you for a soft snap. Got any ducks out there you want led to
water?"

"Maybe--I dunno. I just canned two men this morning, before I left."
Ford was debating with himself how best to approach the subject to him
most important.

"Good ee-nough! I can take the place of those two men; eat their share
of grub, do their share of snoring, and shirk their share of work, and
drink their share of booze--oh, lovely! But, in the words of the dead,
immortal Shakespeare, 'What's eating you?' You look to me as if you
hadn't enjoyed the delights of a good, stiff jag since--" He waved a
hand vaguely. "Ain't a scar on you, so help me!" He regarded Ford with
frank curiosity.

"Oh, yes there is. I've got the hide peeled off two knuckles, and one of
my thumbs is just getting so it will move without being greased," Ford
assured him, and then went straight at what was on his mind.

"Say, Rock, I was told that you had a hand in my getting married, back
in Sunset that night."

Rock made his horse back until it nearly fell over a rock; his face
showed exaggerated symptoms of terror.

"I couldn't help it," he wailed. "Spare muh--for muh poor mother's sake,
oh spare muh life!" Whereat Ford laughed, just as Rock meant that he
should do. "You licked Bill twice for that, they tell me," Rock went on,
quitting his foolery and coming up close again. "And you licked the
preacher that night, and--so the tale runneth--like to have put the
whole town on the jinks. Is there anything in particular you'd like to
do to me?"

"I just want you to tell me who I married--if you can." Ford reddened as
the other stared, but he did not stop. "I was so darned full that night
I let the whole business ooze out of my memory, and I haven't been able
to--"

Rock was leaning over the saddle horn, howling and watery-eyed. Ford
looked at him with a dawning suspicion.

"It did strike me, once or twice," he said grimly, "that the whole thing
was a put-up job. If you fellows rigged up a josh like that, and let it
go as far as this, may the Lord have mercy on your souls, for I won't!"

But Rock could only wave him off weakly; so Ford waited until he had
recovered. Even then, it took some talking to convince Rock that the
affair was truly serious and not to be treated any longer as a joke.

"Why, damn it, man, I'm in love with a girl and I want to marry her if I
can get rid of this other darned, mysterious, Tom-fool of a woman," Ford
gritted at last, in sheer desperation. "Or if it's just a josh, by this
and by that I mean to find it out."

Rock sobered then. "It ain't any josh," he said, with convincing
earnestness. "You got married, all right enough. And if it's as you say,
Ford, I sure am sorry for it. I don't know the girl's name. I'd know
her quick enough if I should see her, but I can't tell you who she was."

Ford swore, of course. And Rock listened sympathetically until he was
done.

"That's the stuff; get it out of your system, Ford, and then you'll feel
better. Then we can put our heads together and see if there isn't some
way to beat this combination."

"Could you spot the preacher, do you reckon?" asked Ford more calmly.

"I could--if he didn't see us coming," Rock admitted guardedly. "Name of
Sanderson, I believe. I've seen him around Garbin. He could tell--he
must have some record of it; but would he?"

"Don't you know, even, why she came and glommed onto me like that?"
Ford's face was as anxious as his tone.

"Only what you told me, confidentially, in a corner afterwards," said
Rock regretfully. "Maybe you told it straight, and maybe you didn't;
there's no banking on a man's imagination when he's soused. But the way
you told it to me was this:

"You said the girl told you that she was working for some queer old
party--an old lady with lots of dough; and she made her will and give
her money all to some institution--hospital or some darned thing, I
forget just what, or else you didn't say. Only, if this girl would marry
her son within a certain time, he could have the wad. Seems the son was
something of a high-roller, and the old lady knew he'd blow it in, if it
was turned over to him without any ballast, like; and the girl was
supposed to be the ballast, to hold him steady. So the old lady, or else
it was the girl, writes to this fellow, and he agrees to hook up with
the lady and take the money and behave himself. Near as I could make it
out, the time was just about up before the girl took matters into her
own hand, and come out on a hunt for this Frank Cameron. How she
happened to sink her rope on you instead, and take her turns before she
found out her mistake, you'll have to ask her--if you ever see her
again.

"But this much you told me--and I think you got it straight. The girl
was willing to marry you--or Frank Cameron--so he could get what
belonged to him. She wasn't going to do any more, though, and you told
me"--Rock's manner became very impressive here--"that you promised her,
as a man and a gentleman, that you wouldn't ever bother her, and that
she was to travel her own trail, and she didn't want the money. She just
wanted to dodge that fool will, seems like. Strikes me I'd a let the
fellow go plumb to Guinea, if I was in her place, but women get queer
notions of duty, and the like of that, sometimes. Looks to me like a
fool thing for a woman to do, anyway."

Though they talked a good while about it, that was all the real
information which Ford could gain. He would have to find the minister
and persuade him to show the record of the marriage, and after that he
would have to find the girl.

Before they reached that definite conclusion, the storm which had been
brewing for several days swooped down upon them, and drove Ford to the
alternative of riding in the teeth of it to town, which was not only
unpleasant but dangerous, if it grew any worse, or retracing his steps
to the Double Cross and waiting there until it was over. So that is what
he did, with Rock to bear him willing company.

They met Dick and Curly on the way, and though Ford stopped them and
suggested that they turn back also, neither would do so. Curly intimated
plainly that the joys of town were calling to him from afar, and that
facing a storm was merely calculated to make his destination more
alluring by contrast. "Turn back with two months' wages burning up my
inside pocket? Oh, no!" he laughed, and rode on. Dick did not say why,
but he rode on also. Ford turned in the saddle and looked after them, as
they disappeared in a swirl of fine snow.

"That's what I ought to do," he said, "but I'm not going to do it, all
the same."

"Which only goes to prove," bantered Rock, "that the Double Cross pulls
harder than all the preacher could tell you. I wonder if there isn't a
girl at the Double Cross, now!"

"There is," Ford confessed, with a grin of embarrassment. "And you shut
up."

"I just had a hunch there was," Rock permitted himself to say meekly,
before he dropped the subject.

It was ten minutes before Ford spoke again.

"I'll take you up to the house and introduce you to her, Rock, if you'll
behave yourself," he offered then, with a shyness in his manner that
nearly set Rock off in one of his convulsions of mirth. "But the missus
isn't wise--so watch out. And if you don't behave yourself," he added
darkly, "I'll knock your block off."

"Sure. But my block is going to remain right where it's at," Rock
assured him, which was a tacit promise of as perfect behavior as he
could attain.

They looked like snow men when they unsaddled, with the powdery snow
beaten into the very fabric of their clothing, and Ford suggested that
they go first to the bunk-house to thaw out. "I'd sure hate to pack all
this snow into Mrs. Kate's parlor," he added whimsically. "She's the
kind of housekeeper that grabs the broom the minute you're gone, to
sweep your tracks off the carpet. Awful nice little woman, but--"

"But not The One," chuckled Rock, treading close upon Ford's heels.
"And I'll bet fifteen cents," he offered rashly, looking up, "that the
person hitting the high places for the bunk-house is The One."

"How do you know?" Ford demanded, while his eyes gladdened at sight of
Josephine, with a Navajo blanket flung over her head, running down the
path through the blizzard to the bunk-house kitchen.

"'Cause she shied when she saw you coming. Came pretty near breaking
back on you, too," Rock explained shrewdly.

They reached the kitchen together, and Ford threw open the door, and
held it for her to pass.

"I came after some of Mose's mince-meat," she explained hastily. "It's a
terrible storm, isn't it? I'm glad it didn't strike yesterday. I thought
you were going to be gone for several days."

Ford, with embarrassed haste to match her own, presented Rock in the
same breath with wishing that Rock was elsewhere; for Mose was not in
the kitchen, and he had not had more than a few words with her for
twenty-four hours. He was perilously close to forgetting his legal
halter when he looked at her.

She was, he thought, about as sweet a picture of a woman as a man need
ever look upon, as she stood there with the red Navajo blanket falling
back from her dark hair, and with her wide, honest eyes fixed upon Rock.
She was blushing, as if she, too, wished Rock elsewhere. She turned
impulsively, set down the basin she had been holding in her arm, and
pulled the blanket up so that it framed her face bewitchingly.

"Mose can bring up the mince-meat when he comes--since he isn't here,"
she said hurriedly. "We weren't looking for you back, but dinner will be
ready in half an hour or so, I think." She pulled open the door and went
out into the storm.

Rock stared at the door, still quivering with the slam she had given it.
Then he looked at Ford, and afterward sat down weakly upon a stool, and
began dazedly pulling the icicles from his mustache.

"Well--I'll--be--cremated!" he said in a whisper.

"And what's eating you, Rock?" Ford quizzed gayly. He had seen
something in the eyes of Josephine, when he met her, that had set his
blood jumping again. "Did Miss Melby--"

"Miss Melby my granny!" grunted Rock, in deep disgust. "That there is
your wife!"

Ford backed up against the wall and stared at him blankly. Afterward he
took a deep breath and went out as though the place was on fire.




CHAPTER XVII

What Ford Found at the Top


Ford Campbell was essentially a man of action; he did not waste ten
seconds in trying to deduce the whys and hows of the amazing fact; he
would have a whole lifetime in which to study them. He started for the
house, and the tracks he made in the loose, shifting snow were
considerably more than a yard apart. He even forgot to stamp off the
clinging snow and scour his boot-soles upon the porch rug, and when he
went striding in, he pushed the door only half shut behind him, so that
it swung in the wind and let a small drift collect upon the parlor
carpet, until Mrs. Kate, feeling a draught, discovered it, and was
shocked beyond words at the sacrilege.

Ford went into the dining-room, crossed it in just three strides, and
ran his quarry to earth in the kitchen, where she was distraitly
setting out biscuit materials. He started toward her, realized suddenly
that the all-observing Buddy was at his very heels, and delayed the
reckoning while he led that terrible man-child to his mother.

"I wish you'd close-herd this kid for about four hours," he told Mrs.
Kate bluntly, and left her looking scared and unconsciously posing as
protective motherhood, her arm around the outraged Robert Chester Mason.
Mrs. Kate was absolutely convinced that Ford was at last really drunk
and "on the rampage," and she had a terrible vision of slain girlhood in
the kitchen, so that she was torn between mother-love and her desire to
protect Phenie. But Ford had looked so threateningly at her and Buddy
that she could not bring herself to attract his attention to the child
or herself. Phenie had plenty of spirit; she could run down to the
bunk-house--Mrs. Kate heard a door slam then, and shuddered. Phenie, she
judged swiftly, had locked herself into the pantry.

Phenie had. Or, to be exact, she had run in and slammed the door shut
in Ford's very face, and she was leaning her weight against it. Mrs.
Kate, pressing the struggling Buddy closer to her, heard voices, a
slight commotion, and then silence. She could bear no more. She threw a
shawl over her head, grasped Buddy firmly by the arm, and fled in terror
to the bunk-house.

The voices were a brief altercation between Ford and Josephine, on the
subject of opening the door, before it was removed violently from its
hinges. The commotion was when Josephine, between tears and laughter,
failed to hold the door against the pressure of a strong man upon the
other side, and, suddenly giving over the attempt, was launched against
a shelf and dislodged three tin pans, which she barely saved from
falling with a great clatter to the floor. The silence--the silence
should explain itself; but since humanity is afflicted with curiosity,
and demands details, this is what occurred immediately after Josephine
had been kissed four times for her stubbornness, and the pans had been
restored to their proper place.

"Say! Are you my wife?" was the abrupt question which Ford asked, and
kissed her again while he waited for an answer.

"Why, yes--what makes you ask that? Of course I am; that is--" Josephine
twisted in his arms, so that she could look into his face. She did not
laugh at him, however. She was staring at him with that keen, measuring
look which had so incensed him, when he had first met her. "I don't
understand you at all, Ford," she said at last, with a frown of
puzzlement. "I never have, for that matter. I'd think I was beginning
to, and then you would say or do something that would put me all at sea.
What do you mean, anyway?"

Ford told her what he meant; told her humbly, truthfully, with never an
excuse for himself. And it speaks well for the good sense of Josephine
that she heard him through with neither tears, laughter, nor anger to
mar his trust in her.

"Of course, I knew you had been drinking, that night," she said, when
his story was done, and his face was pressed lightly against the white
parting in her soft, brown hair. "I saw it, after--after the ceremony.
You--you were going to kiss me, and I caught the odor of liquor, and I
felt that you wouldn't have done that if you had been yourself; it
frightened me, a little. But you talked perfectly straight, and I never
knew you weren't the man--Frank Cameron--until you came here. Then I saw
you couldn't be he. Chester had known you when Frank was at home with
his mother--I compared dates and was sure of that--and he called you
Ford Campbell. So then I saw what a horrible blunder I'd made, and I was
worried nearly to death! But I couldn't see what I could do about it,
and you didn't--"

"Say, what about this Frank Cameron, anyway?" Ford demanded, with true
male jealousy. "What did you want to marry him for? You couldn't have
known him, or--"

"Oh, you wouldn't understand--" Josephine gave a little, impatient turn
of the head, "unless you knew his mother. I did know Frank, a long time
ago, when I was twelve or thirteen, and when I saw you, I thought he'd
changed a lot. But it was his mother; she was the dearest thing,
but--queer. Sort of childish, you know. And she just worshiped Frank,
and used to watch for the postman--oh, it was too pitiful! Sometimes I'd
write a letter myself, and pretend it was from him, and read it to her;
her eyes were bad, so it was easy--"

"Where was this Frank?" Ford interrupted.

"Oh, I don't know! I never did know. Somewhere out West, we thought. I
used to make believe the letters came from Helena, or Butte, because
that was where she heard from him last. He was always promising to come
home--in the letters. That used to make her so much better," she
explained naïvely. "And sometimes she'd be able to go out in the yard
and fuss with her flowers, after one like that. But he never came, and
so she got the notion that he was wild and a spendthrift. I suppose he
was, or he'd have written, or something. She had lots and lots of money
and property, you know.

"Well," Josephine took one of Ford's hand and patted it reassuringly,
"she got the notion that I must marry Frank, when he came home. I tried
to reason her out of that, and it only made her worse. It grew on her,
and I got so I couldn't bear to write any more letters, and that made it
worse still. She made a will that I must marry Frank within a year after
she died, or he wouldn't get anything but a hundred dollars--and she was
worth thousands and thousands." Josephine snuggled closer. "She was
shrewd, too. I was not to get anything except a few trinkets. And if we
didn't marry, the money would all go to an old ladies' home.

"So, when she died, I felt as if I ought to do something, you see. It
didn't seem right to let him lose the property, even if he wouldn't
write to his mother. So I had the lawyers try to find him. I thought I
could marry him, and let him get the property, and then--well, I counted
on getting a divorce." She looked up quickly into Ford's face.

"And you know you did promise not to bother me--just to desert me, you
see, so I could get a divorce in a year. I thought I'd come and live
with Kate till the year was up, and then get a divorce, and go back
home to work. My father left me enough to squeak along on, you see, if I
lived in the country. Aunt Ida--that's Frank's mother--paid me a salary
for staying with her and looking after her house and her rents and
things. And then, when you followed me out here, I was furious! Just
simply furious!" She bent her head and set her teeth gently into the
fleshy part of Ford's thumb, and Ford flinched. It happened to be the
sore one.

"Well, but that doesn't explain how you got your loop on me,
girlie--though I sure am glad that you did!"

"Why, don't you see, the time was almost up, just for all the world like
a play. 'Only one day more--and I must save the pa-apers!' So the lawyer
Aunt Ida had for years, heard that Frank was--or had been--at Garbin. I
rushed out here, and heard that there was a Cameron (only they must have
meant Campbell) at Sunset. So I got a license, and the Reverend
Sanderson, and took the evening train down there. At the hotel I asked
for Mr. Cameron, and they sent you in. And you know the rest, you--you
old fraud! How you palmed yourself off on me--"

"I never did! I must have just been in one of my obliging moods; and a
man would have to be mighty rude and unkind not to say yes to a pretty
girl when--"

That is as far as the discussion went, with anything like continuity or
coherence even. Later, however, Josephine did protest somewhat
muffledly: "But, Ford, I married you under the name of Frank Cameron, so
I don't believe--and anyway--I'd like a real wedding--and a ring!"

Mrs. Kate, having been solemnly assured by Rock that Ford was sober and
as nearly in his right mind as a man violently in love can be (Rock made
it plain, by implication at least, that he did not consider that very
near), ventured into the kitchen just then. She still looked scared and
uncertain, until, through the half-open door of the pantry, she heard
soft, whispery sounds like kissing--when the kissing is a rapture rather
than a ceremony. Mrs. Kate had only been married eight years or so, and
she had a good memory. She backed from the kitchen on her toes, and
pulled the door shut with the caution of a thief. She did more; she
permitted dinner to be an hour late, rather than disturb those two in
the pantry.

       *       *       *       *       *

The uphill climb was no climb at all, after that. For when a man has
found the one woman in the world, and with her that elusive thing we
call happiness, even the demon must perforce sheathe his claws and
retire, discomfited, to the pit whence he came.

There was a period of impatient waiting, because Josephine and Mrs. Kate
both stoutly maintained that the "real wedding" could not take place
until Chester came back. After that, there was a Mrs. foreman at the
Double Cross until spring. And after that, there was a new ranch and a
new house and a new home where happiness came and dwelt unhindered.


THE END




STORIES OF RARE CHARM BY
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Included in this volume is "Hell fer-Sartain" and other stories, some of
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_A SPINNER IN THE SUN._

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driftwood that his aunt had taken into her heart and home, and through
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Founded on a fact that all artists realize.


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An unconventional English woman and an inscrutable stranger meet and
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_THE INTRUSION OF JIMMY._ By P.G. Wodehouse. Illustrations by Will Grefe.

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_CHIP, OF THE FLYING U_

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Ananias Green, known as Andy, whose imaginative powers cause many lively
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_HER PRAIRIE KNIGHT_

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_THE RANGE DWELLERS_

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_THE LURE OF DIM TRAILS_

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_THE LONESOME TRAIL_

"Weary" Davidson leaves the ranch for Portland, where conventional city
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atmosphere of the prairie, and the recollection of a pair of large brown
eyes soon compel his return. A wholesome love story.


_THE LONG SHADOW_

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