Square Deal Sanderson - Charles Alden Seltzer (guided reading books txt) 📗

level. He's been working you, making a monkey of you—fooling you. He wants the Double A for himself. He's been hanging around here, passing himself off as your brother, aiming to get on the good side of you—getting you to love him good and hard. Then mebbe he'd tell you, thinking that you'd forgive him. But mebbe that wasn't his game at all. Mebbe he'd figured to grab the ranch and turn you out.

"Now, I'm offering you a whole lot. Mebbe you've thought I was sweet on that Nyland girl. Get that out of your mind. I was only fooling with her—like any man fools with a girl. I want her ranch—that's all. But I don't care a damn about the Double A, I want you. I've had my eye on you right along. Mebbe it won't be marriage right away, but——"

"Alva Dale!"

The girl was on her feet, her eyes blazing.

Dale did not retreat from her; he stood smiling at her, his face wreathed in a huge grin. He was enjoying the girl.

Sanderson slipped along the wall of the house and opened the door. It creaked loudly on its hinges with the movement, causing both Dale and the girl to turn and face it.

Mary Bransford stood rigid as she saw Sanderson standing in the doorway, a flush sweeping swiftly over her face. There was relief in her eyes.

Astonishment and stark, naked fear were in Dale's eyes. He shrank back a step, and looked swiftly at Sanderson's right hand, and when he saw that it held a six-shooter he raised both his own hands, shoulder-high, the palms toward Sanderson.

"So you know it means shootin', eh?" said Sanderson grimly as he stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind him, slamming it shut with his left hand.

"Well, shootin' goes." There was the cold calm of decision in his manner; his eyes were ablaze with the accumulated hate and rage that had been aroused over what he had heard. The grin that he showed to Dale drew his lips into two straight, stiff lines.

"I reckon you think you've earned your red shirt, Dale," he said, "for tellin' tales out of school. Well, you'll get it. There's just one thing will save your miserable hide. You got that seven thousand on you?"

Dale hesitated, then nodded.

Sanderson spoke to Mary Bransford without removing his gaze from Dale:

"Get pen, ink, an' paper."

The girl moved quickly into another room, returning almost instantly with the articles requested.

"Sit down an' write what I tell you to," directed Sanderson.

Dale dropped into a chair beside a center-table, took up the pen, poised it over the paper, and looked at Sanderson.

"I am hereby returning to Deal Sanderson the seven thousand two hundred dollars I stole from, him," directed Sanderson. "I am doing this of my own accord—no one is forcin' me," went on Sanderson. "I want to add that I hereby swear that the charge of drawin' a gun on Silverthorn was a frame-up, me an' Silverthorn an' Maison bein' the guilty parties," finished Sanderson.

"Now," he added, when Dale had written as directed, "sign it."

Dale signed and stood up, his face aflame with rage.

"I'll take the money—now," said Sanderson.

Dale produced it from various pockets, laying it on the table. He said nothing. Mary Bransford stood a little distance away, watching silently.

"Count it, Miss Bransford," said Sanderson when Dale had disgorged the money.

The two men stood silent as the girl fingered the bills. At last she looked at Sanderson and nodded.

The latter grinned. "Everything's regular, now," he said. He looked at Mary. "Do you want him killed, ma'am? He'd be a lot better off dead. You'd be better off, too. This kind of a skunk is always around, botherin' women—when there ain't no men around."

Mary shook her head with a decisive negative.

"Then he won't die, right now," said Sanderson. "He'll pull his freight away from the Double A, though, ma 'am. An' he'll never come back."

He was talking to Dale through the girl, and Dale watched him, scowling.

"If he does come back, you'll tell me, won't you, ma'am? An' then there'll never be an Alva Dale to bother you again—or to go around robbin' honest men, an' tryin' to get them mixed up with the law."

And now he turned from the girl and spoke to Dale:

"You go right back to Okar an' tell Maison an' Silverthorn what has happened here tonight. Show them how the fear of God has got into your heart an' made you yearn to practice the principles of a square deal. Tell them that they'd better get to goin' straight, too, for if they don't there's a guy which was named after a square deal that is goin' to snuff them off this hemisphere middlin' rapid. That's all. You'd better hit the breeze right back to Okar an' spread the good news."

He stood, a grim smile on his face, watching Dale as the latter walked to the door. When Dale stepped out on the porch Sanderson followed him, still regarding the movements of the other coldly and alertly.

Mary heard them—their steps on the boards of the porch; she heard the saddle leather creak as Dale climbed on his horse; she heard the sound of the hoofbeats as the horse clattered out of the ranchhouse yard.

And then for several minutes she stood near the little table in the room, listening vainly for some sound that would tell her of the presence of Sanderson on the porch. None came.

At last, when she began to feel certain that he had gone to the bunkhouse, she heard a step on the porch and saw Sanderson standing in the doorway.

He grinned at her, meeting her gaze fairly.

"Dale told you a heap of truth, ma'am," he said. "I feel more like a man tonight than I've felt for a good many days—an' nights."

"Then it was true—as Dale said—that you are not my brother?" said the girl. She was trying to make her voice sound severe, but only succeeded in making it quaver.

"I ain't your brother."

"And you came here to try to take the ranch away from me—to steal it?"

He flushed. "You've got four thousand of my money there, ma'am. You're to keep it. Mebbe that will help to show what my intentions were. About the rest—your brother an' all—I'll have to tell you. It's a thing you ought to know, an' I don't know what's been keepin' me from tellin' you all along.

"Mebbe it was because I was scared you'd take it hard. But since these sneaks have got to waggin' their tongues it'll have to be told. If you sit down by the table there, I'll tell you why I done what I did."

She took a chair beside the table and faced him, and, standing before her, speaking very gently, but frankly, he related what had occurred to him in the desert. She took it calmly, though there were times when her eyes glowed with a light that told of deep emotion. But she soon became resigned to the death of her brother and was able to listen to Sanderson's story of his motive in deceiving her.

When he related his emotion during their first meeting—when he had told Dale that he was her brother, after yielding to the appeal in her eyes—she smiled.

"There was some excuse for it, after all," she declared.

"An' you ain't blamin' me—so much?" he asked.

"No," she said. She blushed as she thought of the times she had kissed him. He was thinking of her kisses, too, and as their eyes met, each knew what the other was thinking about. Sanderson smiled at her and her eyes dropped.

"It wasn't a square deal for me to take them, then, ma'am," he told her. "But I'm goin' to stay around here an' fight Dale an' his friends to a finish. That is, if you want me to stay. I'd like a straight answer. I ain't hangin' around where I ain't wanted."

Her eyes glowed as she looked at him.

"You'll have to stay, now," she said. "Will is dead, and you will have to stay here and brazen it out. They'd take the Double A from me surely, if you were to desert me. You will have to stay and insist that you are my brother!"

"That's a contract," he agreed. "But"—he looked at her, a flush on his face—"goin' back to them kisses. It wasn't a square deal. But I'm hopin' that a day will come——"

She got up, her face very red. "It is nearly morning," she interrupted.

"Yes," he smiled; "things are only beginnin'."

"You are impudent—and imprudent," she said, looking straight at him.

"An' hopeful," he answered, meeting her eyes.

Fifteen minutes later, stretched out on his bed, Sanderson saw the dawn breaking in the east. It reminded him of the morning he had seen the two riders above him on the edge of the arroyo. As on that other morning, he lay and watched the coming of the dawn. And when later he heard Mary moving about in the kitchen he got up, not having slept a wink, and went out to her.

"Did you sleep well?" she asked.

"How could I," he asked, "with a new day dawnin' for me?"

CHAPTER XVI THE HAND OF THE ENEMY

When in the bunkhouse the next morning Sanderson informed Barney Owen of what had occurred during the night, the latter looked fixedly at Sanderson.

"So she didn't take it hard," he said.

"Was you expectin' her to? For a brother that she hadn't seen in a dozen years—an' which she knows in her secret heart wasn't any good?" retorted Sanderson. "Shootin' your face off in Okar—or anywhere else—don't go any more," added Sanderson. "She's pretendin', publicly, that I'm her brother."

"I'm through talking," declared Owen.

"Or livin'. It's one or the other," warned Sanderson.

Sanderson took the seven thousand dollars that Mary gave him, rode to Lazette—a town fifty miles eastward from the basin—-and deposited the money in a bank there. Then he rode eastward still farther and in another town discovered a young engineer with a grievance against his employers.

The result of this discovery was that on the following morning the young engineer and Sanderson journeyed westward to the basin, arriving at the Double A late in the afternoon of the next day.

On the edge of the plateau after the engineer and, Sanderson had spent three or four days prowling through the basin and the gorge, the engineer spoke convincingly:

"It's the easiest thing in the world! A big flume to the point I showed you, a big main ditch and several laterals will do the trick. I'm with you to the finish!"

Sanderson smiled at the engineer's glowing enthusiasm and told him of the opposition he would meet in developing the project.

"There'll be a heap of schemin', an' mebbe shootin', Williams," Sanderson told him. "Puttin' through this deal won't be any pussy-kitten affair."

"So much the better," laughed the engineer; "I'm fed up on soft snaps and longing for action."

The engineer was thirty; big, square-shouldered, lithe, and capable. He had a strong face and a level, steady eye.

"If you mean business, let's get acquainted," he said. "My front name is Kent."

"Well, Kent, let's get busy," smiled Sanderson. "You go to work on your estimates, order your material, hire your men. I'll see how bad the people in the basin want the water they've been expectin'."

Kent Williams took up his quarters in the bunkhouse and immediately began work, though before he could do much he rode to Okar, telegraphed to Dry Bottom, the town which had been the scene of his previous activity, and awaited the arrival of several capable-looking young men.

In company with the latter he returned to the Double A, and for many days thereafter he and his men ran the transit and drove stakes in the basin and along the gorge.

Sanderson spent much of his time talking with the cattlemen in the basin. They were all eager to have water brought to their ranches, for it would save them the long trip to the river, which was inaccessible in many places, and