Cow-Country by B. M. Bower (best color ereader txt) 📗

looked from one to the other, gave a snort and added impatiently, “Aw, fork your horses and don't stand there looking like a couple of damn fools!”

Whereupon Jerry shook his head dissentingly, grinned and gave Eddie so emphatic an impulse toward his horse that the kid went sprawling.

“Guess We're up against it, all right—but I do wish yo 'd lose that badge!” Jerry surrendered, and flipped the bridle reins over the neck of his horse. “Horn toad is right, the way you're scabbling around amongst them rocks,” he called light-heartedly to the kid. “Ever see a purtier sunrise? I never!”

I don't know what they thought of the sunset. Gorgeous it was, with many soft colors blended into unnamable tints and translucencies, and the songs of birds in the thickets as they passed. Smoky, Sunfish and Stopper walked briskly, ears perked forward, heads up, eyes eager to catch the familiar landmarks that meant home. Bud's head was up, also, his eyes went here and there, resting with a careless affection on those same landmarks which spelled home. He would have let Smoky's reins have a bit more slack and would have led his little convoy to the corrals at a gallop, had not hope begun to tremble and shrink from meeting certainty face to face. Had you asked him then, I think Bud would have owned himself a coward. Until he had speech with home-folk he would merely be hoping that Marian was there; but until he had speech with them he need not hear that they knew nothing of her. Bud—like, however, he tried to cover his trepidation with a joke.

“We'll sneak up on 'em,” he said to Ed and Jerry when the roofs of house and stables came into view.

“Here's where I grew up, boys. And in a minute or two more you'll see the greatest little mother on earth—and the finest dad,” he added, swallowing the last of his Scotch stubbornness.

“And Sis, I hope,” Eddie said wistfully. “I sure hope she's here.”

Neither Jerry nor Bud answered him at all. Smoky threw up his head suddenly and gave a shrill whinny, and a horse at the corrals answered sonorously.

“Say! That sounds to me like Boise!” Eddie exclaimed, standing up in his stirrups to look.

Bud turned pale, then flushed hotly. “Don't holler!” he muttered, and held Smoky back a little. For just one reason a young man's heart pounds as Bud's heart pounded then. Jerry looked at him, took a deep breath and bit his lip thoughtfully. It may be that Jerry's heartbeats were not quite normal just then, but no one would ever know.

They rode slowly to a point near the corner of the table, and there Bud halted the two with his lifted hand. Bud was trembling a little—but he was smiling, too. Eddie was frankly grinning, Jerry's face was the face of a good poker-player—it told nothing.

In a group with their backs to them stood three: Marian, Bud's mother and his father. Bob Birnie held Boise by the bridle, and the two women were stroking the brown nose of the horse that moved uneasily, with little impatient head-tossings.

“He doesn't behave like a horse that has made the long trip he has made,” Bud's mother observed admiringly. “You must be a wonderful little horsewoman, my dear, as well as a wonderful little woman in every other way. Buddy should never have sent you on such a trip—just to bring home money, like a bank messenger! But I'm glad that he did! And I do wish you would consent to stay—such an afternoon with music I haven't had since Buddy left us. You could stay with me and train for the concert work you intend doing. I'm only an old ranch woman in a slat sunbonnet—but I taught my Buddy—and have you heard him?”

“An old woman in a slat sunbonnet—oh, how can you? Why, you're the most wonderful woman in the whole world.” Marian's voice was almost tearful in its protest. “Yes—I have heard—your Buddy.”

“'T is the strangest way to go about selling a horse that I ever saw,” Bob Birnie put in dryly, smoothing his beard while he looked at them. “We'd be glad to have you stay, lass. But you've asked me to place a price on the horse, and I should like to ask ye a question or two. How fast did ye say he could run?”

Marian laid an arm around the shoulders of the old lady in a slat sunbonnet and patted her arm while she answered.

“Well, he beat everything in the country, so they refused to race against him, until Bud came with his horses,” she replied. “It took Sunfish to outrun him. He 's terribly fast, Mr. Birnie. I—really, I think he could beat the world's record—if Bud rode him!”

Just here you should picture Ed and Jerry with their hands over their mouths, and Bud wanting to hide his face with his hat.

Bob Birnie's beard behaved oddly for a minute, while he leaned and stroked Boise's flat forelegs, that told of speed. “Wee-ll,” he hesitated, soft-heartedness battling with the horse-buyer's keenness, “since Bud is na ere to ride him, he'll make a good horse for the roundup. I'll give ye “—more battling—“a hundred and fifty dollars for him, if ye care to sell—”

“Here, wait a minute before you sell to that old skinflint!” Bud shouted exuberantly, dismounting with a rush. The rush, I may say, carried him to the little old lady in the slat sunbonnet, and to that other little lady who was staring at him with wide, bright yes. Bud's arms went around his mother. Perhaps by accident he gathered in Marian also—they were standing very close, and his arms were very long—and he was slow to discover his mistake.

“I'll give you two hundred for Boise, and I'll throw in one brother, and one long-legged, good-for-nothing cowpuncher—”

“Meaning yourself, Buddy?” came teasingly from he slat sunbonnet, whose occupant had not been told just everything. “I'll be surprised if she'll have you, with that dirty face and no shave for a week and more. But if she does, you're luckier than you deserve, for riding up on us like this! We've heard all about you, Buddy—though you were wise to send this lassie to gild your faults and make a hero of you!”

Now, you want to know how Marian managed to live through that. I will say that she discovered how tenaciously a young man's arms may cling when he thinks he is embracing merely his mother; but she freed herself and ran to Eddie, fairly pulled him off his horse, and talked very fast and incoherently to him and Jerry, asking question after question without waiting for a reply to any of them. All this, I suppose, in the hope that they would not hear, or, hearing, would not understand what that terrible, wonderful little woman was saying so innocently.

But you cannot faze youth. Eddie had important news for Sis, and he felt that now was the time to tell it before Marian blushed any redder, so he pulled her face up to his, put his lips so close to her ear that his breath tickled, and whispered—without any preface whatever that she could marry Bud any time now, because she was a widow.

“Here! Somebody—Bud—quick! Sis has fainted! Doggone it, I only told her Lew's dead and she can marry you—shucks! I thought she'd be