The Bandit of Hell's Bend - Edgar Rice Burroughs (reading tree .txt) 📗

he blurted suddenly. “I never aimed for to do it. I wasn’t goin’ to drink too much no more after what I’d promised you. I’m right sorry. Do you think that, maybe, you-you might forgive me-and give me another chance?”

His voice was pleading and he was very much in earnest. The girl knew how difficult it was for a rough man like Bull to say what he had just said and she felt a sudden compassion for him.

“It made me sorry, too, Bull,” she said. “I trusted you and I hated to be so disappointed in you.”

“Please don’t say you don’t trust me, Miss,” he begged. “I want you to trust me more’n anything else.”

“I want to trust you, Bull,” and then, impulsively: “I do trust you!”

He reached across the interval between them and laid his rough hand upon her soft one.

“I love you, Diana,” he said, very simply and with a quiet dignity that was unmarred by any hesitancy or embarrassment.

She started to speak, but he silenced her with a gesture.

“Don’t say anything about it, please,” he urged. “I don’t expect you to love me; but there’s nothing wrong about my loving you. I just wanted you to know it so that you’d always know where I stood and that you could always call on me for anything. With yer dad an’ all the other men around that loves you there isn’t much likelihood that you’ll ever need me more’n another, but it makes me feel better to know that you know now. We won’t talk about it no more, Miss. We both understand. It’s the reason I didn’t quit when yer dad busted me.”

“I’m glad you told me, Bull,” she said. “It’s the greatest honor that any man can bestow upon a girl. I don’t love any man, Bull, that way; but if ever I do he’ll know it without my telling him. I’ll do something that will prove it-a girl always does. Some times, though, the men are awfully blind, they say.”

“I wouldn’t be blind,” said Bull. “I’d know it, I think, if a girl loved me.”

“The right one will, some day,” she assured him.

He shook his head. “I hope so, Miss.”

She flushed, sensing the unintentional double Entendre he had caught in her words. She wondered why she flushed.

They rode on in silence. She was sorry that Bull loved her, but she was glad that, loving her, he had told her of his love. He was just a common cowhand, unlettered, rough, and occasionally uncouth, but of these things she did not think, for she had known no other sort, except her father and an occasional visitor from the East, since childhood. Had she cared for him she would not have been ashamed. She looked up at him with a smile.

“Don’t call me ‘Miss,’ Bull, please-I hate it.”

“You want me to call you by your first name?” he inquired.

“The other men do,” she said, “and you did–a moment ago.”

“It slipped out that time.” He grinned sheepishly.

“I like it.”

“All right Miss,” he said.

The girl laughed aloud, joyishly.

“All right, Diana, I mean,” lie corrected himself.

“That’s better.”

So Diana Henders, who was really a very sensible girl, instead of merely playing with fire, made a big one of a little one, all very unintentionally, for how was she to know that to Bull the calling of her Diana instead of Miss was almost as provocative to his love as Would have been the personal contact of a kiss to an ordinary man?

As they approached the ranch house at the end of their ride they saw a buckboard to which two bronchos were harnessed hitched to the tie rail beneath the cottonwoods outside the office door.

“Whose outfit is that?” asked Diana. “I never saw it before.”

“The Wainrights from the north side o’ the hills. I seen ‘em in town about a week ago.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard of them. They’re from the East. Mr. Wainright don’t like the country north of the mountains.”

“He’s lookin’ fer range on this side,” said Bull. “Like as not that’s what lie’s here fer now. They ain’t enough water fer no more outfits though, nor enough feed neither.”

They drew rein at the corral and dismounted.

Thanks, Bull,” said the girl, as she passed him her bridle reins. “We’ve had a lovely ride.”

”Thanks-Diana.”

That was all he said, but the way he spoke her name was different from the way any other man had ever spoken it. She was sorry now that she had asked him to call her Diana.

As she was passing the office to go to her room her father called to her.

“Come in, Di; I want you to meet some new neighbors,” and when she had entered, “My daughter, Mr. Wainright.”

Diana extended her hand to a fat man with close-set eyes, and then her father presented the younger Wainright.

“Mr. Jefferson Wainright, Jr., Diana,” he said.

The son was a well-groomed-appearing, nice-looking young fellow of twenty-one or twenty-two. Perhaps his costume was a trifle too exaggerated to be in good taste, but he had only fallen into the same mistake that many another wealthy young Easterner has done before and since upon his advent to the cow-country. From silver-banded sombrero to silver-encrusted spurs there was no detail lacking.

“By gollies, he looks like a Christmas tree,” had been Texas Pete’s observation the first time that he had seen him. “All they forgot was the candles.”

“You live north of the. mountains?” inquired Diana, politely.

“Yep,” replied the elder Wainright; “but we don’t calc’late to stay there. We’re from Mass’chusetts-Worcester-blanketsmade a fortune in ‘em-made ‘em for the gover’ment mostly. Jeff got it in his head he wanted to go into the cattle business-come by it natch’ral I allow. I used to be in the livery stable business before I bought the mills-so when he graduated from Harvard a year ago we come out here-don’t like it tother side the mountains-so I calc’lates to come over here.”

“I was just explaining to Mr. Wainright that there is scarcely enough feed or water for another big outfit on this side,” interjected Mr. Henders.

“Don’t make any difference-set your price-but set it right. I’ll buy you out. I c’d buy half this territory I calc’late-if I had a mind to-but the price’s got to be right. Ol’ Jeff Wainright’s got a name for bein’ a pretty shrewd trader-fair’n honest, though-fair’n honest. Just name your price-how much for the whole shebang-buildins, land, cattle-everything?”

Elias Henders laughed good-naturedly. “I’m afraid they’re not for sale, Mr. Wainright.”

“Tut, tut! I’ll get ‘em-you’ll sell-of Jeff Wainright’s always got everything he went after. Well, son, I calc’late we’d better be goin’.”

“You’ll have dinner with us first, of course,” insisted Diana; “it must be almost ready now.”

“Well, I don’t mind if we do,” returned the elder Wainright, and so they stayed for the noonday meal.

Diana found the younger Wainright a pleasant, affable companion. He was the first educated man near her own age that she had ever met and his conversation and his ways, so different from those of the rough vaqueros of her little world, made a profound impression upon her. He could talk interestingly from the standpoint of personal experience of countless things of which she had only secondhand knowledge acquired from books and newspapers. Those first two hours with him thrilled her with excitement-they opened a new world of wondrous realities that she had hitherto thought of more as unattainable dreams than things which she herself might some day experience.

If he had inherited something of his father’s egotism she forgot it in the contemplation of his finer qualities and in the pleasure she derived from association with one somewhere near her own social status in life. That the elder Wainright was impossible she had sensed from the first, but the son seemed of different fiber and no matter what his antecedents, he must have acquired something of permanent polish through his college associations.

The disquieting effect of the Wainrights’ visit was apparent elsewhere than at the ranch house. There was gloom at the bunkhouse.

“Doggone his hide!” exclaimed Texas Pete.

“Whose?” inquired Shorty.

“My of man’s. If he hadn’t gone an’ got hung he might’a’ sent me to Havaad. What chanct has a feller got agin one o’ them paper-collared, cracker-fed dudes anyway!”