The Range Dwellers by B. M. Bower (best books to read all time txt) 📗

streak of sunrise, while I rode on and left him afoot beside a half-dead horse, I turned my eyes and looked at his thin, thoughtful face beside me.

His eyes met mine for half a minute, and he had a little twitching at the corners of his mouth. "Chirk up," he said quietly. "The chances are she'll come back this summer."

I guess I blushed. Anyway, I didn't think of anything to say that would be either witty or squelching, and could only relight my cigarette and look the fool I felt. He'd caught me right in the solar plexus, and we both knew it, and there was nothing to say. So after awhile we commenced talking about a new bunch of horses that dad had bought through an agent, and that had to be saddle-broke that summer, and I kept my eyes away from White Divide and my mind from all it meant to me.

The old ranch did look good to me, and Perry Potter actually shook hands; if you knew him as well as I do you'd realize better what such a demonstration means, coming from a fellow like him. Why, even his lips are always shut with a drawstring—from the looks—to keep any words but what are actually necessary from coming out. His eyes have the same look, kind of pulled in at the corners. No, don't ever accuse Perry Potter of being a demonstrative man, or a loquacious one.

I had two days at the ranch, getting fitted into the life again; on the third the round-up started, and I packed a "war-bag" of essentials, took my last summer's chaps down off the nail in the bunk-house where they had hung all that time as a sort of absent-but-not-forgotten memento, one of the boys told me, and started out in full regalia and with an enthusiasm that was real—while it lasted.

If you never slept on the new grass with only a bit of canvas between you and the stars; if you have never rolled out, at daylight, and dressed before your eyes were fair open, and rushed with the bunch over to the mess-wagon for your breakfast; if you have never saddled hurriedly a range-bred and range-broken cayuse with a hump in his back and seven devils in his eye, and gone careening across the dew-wet prairie like a tug-boat in a choppy sea; if you have never—well, if you don't know what it's all like, and how it gets into the very bones of you so that the hankering never quite leaves you when you try to give it up, I'm not going to tell you. I can't. If I could, you'd know just how heady it made me feel those first few days after we started out to "work the range."

I was fond of telling myself, those days, that I'd been more scared than hurt, and that it was the range I was in love with, and not Beryl King at all. She was simply a part of it—but she wasn't the whole thing, nor even a part that was going to be indispensable to my mental comfort. I was a free man once more, and so long as I had a good horse under me, and a bunch of the right sort of fellows to lie down in the same tent with, I wasn't going to worry much over any girl.

That, for as long as a week; and that, more than pages of description, shows you how great is the spell of the range-land, and how it grips a man.

CHAPTER XIII. We Meet Once More.

I think it was about three weeks that I stayed with the round-up. I didn't get tired of the life, or weary of honest labor, or anything of that sort. I think the trouble was that I grew accustomed to the life, so that the exhilarating effects of it wore off, or got so soaked into my system that I began to take it all as a matter of course. And that, naturally, left room for other things.

I know I'm no good at analysis, and that's as close as I can come to accounting for my welching, the third week out. You see, we were working south and west, and getting farther and farther away from—well, from the part of country that I knew and liked best. It's kind of lonesome, leaving old landmarks behind you; so when White Divide dropped down behind another range of hills and I couldn't turn in my saddle almost any time and see the jagged, blue sky-line of her, I stood it for about two days. Then I rolled my bed one morning, caught out two horses from my string instead of one, told the wagon-boss I was going back to the ranch, and lit out—with the whole bunch grinning after me. As they would have said, they were all "dead next," but were good enough not to say so. Or, perhaps, they remembered the boxing-lessons I had given them in the bunk-house a year or more ago.

I did feel kind of sneaking, quitting them like that; but it's like playing higher than your logical limit: you know you're doing a fool thing, and you want to plant your foot violently upon your own person somewhere, but you go right ahead in the face of it all. They didn't have to tell me I was acting like a calf that has lost his mother in the herd. (You know he is prone to go mooning back to the last place he was with her, if it's ten miles.) I knew it, all right. And when I topped a hill and saw the high ridges and peaks of White Divide stand up against the horizon to the north, I was so glad I felt ashamed of myself and called one Ellis Carleton worse names than I'd stand to hear from anybody else.

Still, to go back to the metaphor, I kept on shoving in chips, just as if I had a chance to win out and wasn't the biggest, softest-headed idiot the Lord ever made. Why, even Perry Potter almost grinned when I came riding up to the corral; and I caught the fellow that was kept on at the ranch, lowering his left lid knowingly at the cook, when I went in to supper that first night. But I was too far gone then to care much what anybody thought; so long as they kept their mouths shut and left me alone, that was all I asked of them. Oh, I was a heroic figure, all right, those days.

On a day in June I rode dispiritedly over to the little butte just out from the mouth of the pass. Not that I expected to see her; I went because I had gotten into the habit of going, and every nice morning just simply pulled me over that way, no matter how much I might want to keep away. That argues great strength of character for me, I know, but it's unfortunately the truth.

I knew she was back—or that she should be back, if nothing had happened to upset their plans. Edith had written me that they were all coming, and that they would have two cars, this summer, instead of just one, and that they expected to stay a month. She and her mother, and Beryl and Aunt Lodema, Terence Weaver—deuce take him!—and two other fellows, and a Gertrude—somebody—I forget just who. Edith hoped that I would make my peace with Uncle Homer, so they could see something of me. (If I had told her how easy it was to make peace with "Uncle Homer," and how he had turned me down, she might not have been quite so sure that it was all my bull-headedness.) She complained that Gertrude was engaged to one of the fellows, and so was awfully stupid; and Beryl might as well be—

I tore up the letter just there, and the wind, which was howling that day, caught the pieces and took them over into North Dakota; so I don't know what else Edith may have had to tell me. I'd read enough to put me in a mighty nasty temper at any rate, so I suppose its purpose was accomplished. Edith is like all the rest: If she can say anything to make a man uncomfortable she'll do it, every time.

This day, I remember, I went mooning along, thinking hard things about the world in general, and my little corner of it in particular. The country was beginning to irritate me, and I knew that if something didn't break loose pretty soon I'd be off somewhere. Riding over to little buttes, and not meeting a soul on the way or seeing anything but a bare rock when you get there, grows monotonous in time, and rather gets on the nerves of a fellow.

When I came close up to the butte, however, I saw a flutter of skirts on the pinnacle, and it made a difference in my gait; I went up all out of breath, scrambling as if my life hung on a few seconds, and calling myself a different kind of fool for every step I took. I kept assuring myself, over and over, that it was only Edith, and that there was no need to get excited about it. But all the while I knew, down deep down in the thumping chest of me, that it wasn't Edith. Edith couldn't make all that disturbance in my circulatory system, not in a thousand years.

She was sitting on the same rock, and she was dressed in the same adorable riding outfit with a blue wisp of veil wound somehow on her gray felt hat, and the same blue roan was dozing, with dragging bridle-reins, a few rods down the other side of the peak. She was sketching so industriously that she never heard me coming until I stood right at her elbow.

It might have been the first time over again, except that my mental attitude toward her had changed a lot.

"That's better; I can see now what you're trying to draw," I said, looking down over her shoulder—not at the sketch; it might have been a sea view, for all I knew—but at the pink curve of her cheek, which was growing pinker while I looked.

She did not glance up, or even start; so she must have known, all along, that I was headed her way. She went on making a lot of marks that didn't seem to fit anywhere, and that seemed to me a bit wobbly and uncertain. I caught just the least hint of a smile twitching the corner of her mouth—I wanted awfully to kiss it!

"Yes? I believe I have at last got everything—King's Highway—in the proper perspective and the proper proportion," she said, stumbling a bit over the alliteration—and no wonder. It was a sentence to stampede cattle; but I didn't stampede. I wanted, more than ever, to kiss—but I won't be like Barney, if I can help it.

"It's too far off—too unattainable," I criticized—meaning something more than her sketch of the pass. "And it's too narrow. If a fellow rode in there he would have to go straight on through; there wouldn't be a chance to turn back."

"Ergo, a fellow shouldn't ride in," she retorted, with a composure positively wicked, considering my feelings. "Though it does seem that a fellow rather enjoys going straight on through, regardless of anything; promises, for instance."

That was the gauntlet I'd been hoping for. From the minute I first saw her there it flashed upon me that she was astonished and indignant that night when she saw Frosty and me come charging through the pass, after me telling her I wouldn't do it any more. It looked to me like I'd have to square myself, so I was glad enough of the chance.

"Sometimes a fellow has to do things regardless of—promises," I explained. "Sometimes it's a matter of life and death. If a fellow's father, for instance—"

"Oh, I know; Edith told me all about it." Her tone was curious, and while it did not encourage further explanations or apologies, it also lacked absolution of the offense I had committed.

I sat down in the grass, half-facing her to better my chance of a look into her eyes. I was consumed by a desire to know if they still had the power to send crimply waves all over me. For the rest, she was prettier even than I remembered her to be, and I could fairly see what little sense or composure I had left slide away from me. I looked at her fatuously, and she looked speculatively at a sharp ridge of the divide as if that sketch were the only thing around there that could possibly interest