Out of the Depths

by Bennet, Robert Ames

  “Tenderfoot?” replied Gowan, his mouth like a straight gash across his lean jaws. “How about his drawing on me––and how about your yearling? That bullet went just where it ought to ’ve gone with his hat down on his head.”

  There was no jesting even of the grimmest quality in the puncher’s look and tone. He was very cool and quiet––and his Colt’s was leveled for another shot.

  The hunter thrust up his hands as high as he could reach.

  “You––you surely can’t intend to murder me!” he stammered, staring from the puncher to the cowman. “I’ll pay ransom––anything you ask! Don’t let him shoot me! I’m Lafayette Ashton––I’ll pay thousands––anything! My father is George Ashton, the great financier!”

  “New York?” queried Knowles.

  “No, no, Chicago! He––If only you’ll write to him!”

  The girl burst into a ringing laugh. “Oh!” she cried, the moment she could speak, “Oh, Daddy! don’t you see? He really thinks we’re a bunch of wild and woolly bandits!”

  The hunter looked uncertainly from her dimpled face to Gowan’s ready revolver. Turning sharply about to the cowman, he caught him in a reluctant grin. With a sudden spring, he placed the girl between himself and the scowling puncher. Behind this barrier of safety he swept off his hat and bowed to the girl with an exaggerated display of politeness that hinted at mockery.

  “So it’s merely a cowboy joke,” he said. “I bend, not to the Queen of the Outlaws, but to the Princess of the Cows!”

  Her dimples vanished. She looked over his head with the barest shade of disdain in her expression.

  “The joke came near to being on us,” she said. “Kid, put up your gun. A tenderfoot who has enough nerve and no more sense than to draw when you have the drop on him, you’ve hazed him enough.”

  Gowan sullenly reloaded his Colt’s and replaced it in its holster.

  “That’s right,” said Knowles; but he turned sharply upon the offender. “Look here, Mr. Ashton, if that’s your name––there’s still the matter of this yearling. Shooting stock in a cattle country isn’t any laughing matter.”

  “But, I say,” replied the hunter, “I didn’t know it was your cow, really I didn’t.”

  “Doesn’t make any difference whose brand was on the calf. Even if it had been a maverick––”

  “But that’s it!” interrupted Ashton. “I didn’t see the brand––only glimpses of the beast in the chaparral. I thought it a deer until after it fell and I came up to look.”

  “You shore did,” jeered Gowan. “That’s why you was hurrying to yank off the hide. No chance of proving a case on you with the brand down in Deep Cañon.”

  “Indeed no,” replied Ashton, drawing a trifle closer to the girl’s stirrup. “You are quite wrong––quite. I was dressing the animal to take it to my camp. Because I had mistaken it for a deer was no reason why I should leave it to the coyotes.”

  “What business you got hunting deer out of season?” questioned Knowles.

  “Pardon me, but are you the game warden?” asked Ashton, with a supercilious smile.

  “Never you mind about that,” rejoined the cowman. “Just you answer my question.”

  Ashton shrugged, and replied in a bored tone: “I fail to see that it is any of your affair. But since you are so urgent to learn––I prefer to enjoy my sport before the rush of the open season.”

  “Don’t you know it’s against the law?” exclaimed the girl.

  “Ah––as to that, a trifling fine––” drawled the hunter, again shrugging.

  “Humph!” grunted Knowles. “A fine might get you off for deer. Shooting stock, though, is a penitentiary offense––when the criminal is lucky enough to get into court.”

  “Criminal!” repeated Ashton, flushing. “I have explained who I am. My father could buy out this entire cattle country, and never know it. I’ll do it myself, some day, and turn the whole thing into a game preserve.”

  “When you do,” warned Gowan, “you’d better hunt a healthier climate.”

  “What we’re concerned with now,” interposed Knowles, “is this yearling.”

  “The live or the dead one, Daddy?” asked the girl, her cheeks dimpling.

  “What d’you––Aw––haw! haw! haw!––The live or the dead one! Catch that, Kid? The live or the dead one! Haw! haw! haw!”

  The cowman fairly roared with laughter. Neither of the young men joined in his hilarious outburst. Gowan waited, cold and unsmiling. Ashton stiffened with offended dignity.

  “I told you that the shooting of the animal was unintentional,” he said. “I shall settle the affair by paying you the price usually asked for veal.”

  “You will?” said the cowman, looking down at the indignant tenderfoot with a twinkle in his mirth-reddened eyes. “Well, we don’t usually sell veal on the range. But I’ll let you have this yearling at cutlet prices. Fifty dollars is the figure.”

  “Why, Daddy,” interrupted the girl, “half that would be––”

  “On the hoof, yes; but he’s buying dressed veal,” broke in the cowman, and he smiled grimly at the culprit. “Fifty dollars is cheap for a deer hunter who goes round shooting up the country out of season. He can take his choice––pay for his veal or make a trip to the county seat.”

  “That’s talking, Mr. Knowles,” approved Gowan. “We’ll corral him at Stockchute in that little log calaboose. He’ll have a peach of a time talking the jury out of sending him up for rustling.”

  “This is an outrage––rank robbery!” complained Ashton. “Of course you know I will pay rather than be inconvenienced by an interruption of my hunting.” He thrust his slender hand into his pocket, and drew it out empty.

  “Dead broke!” jeered Gowan.

  Ashton shrugged disdainfully. “I have money at my camp. If that is not enough to pay your blackmail, my valet has gone back to the railway with my guide for a remittance of a thousand dollars, which must have come on a week ago.”

  “Your camp is at the waterhole on Dry Fork,” stated Knowles. “Saw a big smoke over there––tenderfoot’s fire. Well, it’s only five miles, and we can ride down that way. We’ll go to your camp.”

  “Ye-es?” murmured Ashton, his ardent eyes on the girl. “Miss––er––Chuckie, it is superfluous to remark that I shall vastly enjoy a cross-country ride with you.”

  “Oh, really!” she replied.

  Heedless of her ironical tone, he turned a supercilious glance on Knowles. “Yes, and at the same time your papa and his hired man can take advantage of the opportunity to deliver my veal.”

  “What’s that?” growled the cowman, flushing hotly.

  But the girl burst into such a peal of laughter that his scowl relaxed to an uncertain smile.

  “Well, what’s the joke, honey?” he asked.

  “Oh! oh! oh!” she cried, her blue eyes glistening with mirthful tears. “Don’t you see he’s got you, Daddy? You didn’t sell him his meat on the hoof. You’ve got to dress and deliver his cutlets.”

  “By––James!” vowed Gowan. “Before I’ll butcher for such a knock-kneed tenderfoot I’ll see him, in––”

  “Hold your hawsses, Kid,” put in Knowles. “The joke’s on me. You go on and look for that bunch of strays, if you want to. But I’m not going to back up when Chuckie says I’m roped in.”

  Gowan looked fixedly at Ashton and the girl, swore under his breath, and swung to the ground. He came down beside the calf with the waddling step of one who has lived in the saddle from early childhood. Knowles joined him, and they set to work on the calf without paying any farther heed to the tenderfoot.

  Ashton, after fastidiously wiping his hands on a wisp of grass, placed his hunting knife in his belt and his rifle in its saddle sheath. He next picked up his pistol, but after a single glance at the side plate, smashed in by Gowan’s first shot, he dropped the ruined weapon and rather hurriedly mounted his pony.

  The girl had faced away from the partly butchered carcass.
As Ashton rode around alongside, her pony started to walk away. Instead of reining in, she glanced demurely at Ashton, and called over her shoulder: “Daddy, we’ll be riding on ahead. You and Kid have the faster hawsses.”

  “All right,” acquiesced Knowles, without pausing in his work.

  Gowan said nothing; but he glanced up at the jaunty back of the tenderfoot with a look of cold enmity.

  * * *

  CHAPTER III

  QUEEN OF WHAT?

  Heedless of the men behind him, Ashton rode off with his ardent gaze fixed admiringly upon his companion. The more he looked at her the more astonished and gratified he was to have found so charming a girl in this raw wilderness.

  As a city man, he might have considered the healthy color that glowed under the tan of her cheeks a trifle too pronounced, had it not been offset by the delicate mold of her features. Her eyes were as blue as alpine forget-me-nots.

  Though she sat astride and the soft coils of her chestnut hair were covered with a broad-brimmed felt hat, he was puzzled to find that there really was nothing of the Wild West cowgirl in her costume and bearing. Her modest gray riding dress was cut in the very latest style. If her manner differed from that of most young ladies of his acquaintance, it was only in her delightful frankness and total absence of affectation. Yet she could not be a city girl on a visit, for she sat her horse with the erect, long-stirruped, graceful, yielding seat peculiar to riders of the cattle ranges.

  “Do you know,” he gave voice to his curiosity, as she directed their course slantingly down the ridge away from Deep Cañon, “I am simply dying to learn, Miss Chuckie––”

  “Perhaps you had better make it ‘Miss Knowles,’” she suggested, with a quiet smile that checked the familiarity of his manner.

  “Ah, yes––pardon me!––‘Miss Knowles,’ of course,” he murmured. “But, you know, so unusual a name––”

  “You mean Chuckie?” she asked. “It formerly was quite common in the West––was often used as a nickname. My real name is Isobel. I understand that Chuckie comes from the Spanish Chiquita.”

  “Chiquita!” he exclaimed. “But that is not a regular name. It is only a term of endearment, like Nina. And you say Chuckie comes from Chiquita? Chiquita––dear one!”

  His large dark eyes glowed at her brilliant with audacious admiration. Her color deepened, but she replied with perfect composure: “You see why I prefer to be addressed as ‘Miss Knowles’––by you.”

  “Yet you permitted that common cowpuncher to call you Miss Chuckie.”

  The girl smiled ironically. “For one thing, Mr. Ashton, I have known Kid Gowan over eight years, and, for another, he is hardly a common cowpuncher.”

  “He looks ordinary enough to me.”

  “Well, well!” she rallied. “I should have thought that even to the innocent gaze of a tenderfoot––Let me hasten to explain that the common or garden variety of cowshepherd is to be distinguished in many respects from his predecessor of the Texas trail.”

  “Texas trail?” he rejoined. “Now I know you’re trying to string me. This Gowan can’t be much older than I am.”

  The girl dropped her bantering tone, and answered soberly: “He is only twenty-five, and yet he is a full generation older than you. He was born and raised in a cow camp. He is one of the few men of the type that remain to link the range of today with the vanished world of the cattle frontier.”

  “Yet you say that the fellow is only my age?”

  “In years, yes. But in type he belongs to the generation that is past––the generation of longhorns, long drives, long Colt’s, and short lives; of stampedes, and hats like yours, badmen, and Injins.”

  “Surely you cannot mean that this––You called him ‘Kid.’”

  “Kid Gowan,” she confirmed. “Yes, he holds to the old traditions even in that. There are six notches on the hilt of his ‘gun,’ if you count the two little ones he nicked for his brace of Utes.”

  “What! He is a real Indian fighter, like Kit Carson?”

  “Oh, no, it was merely a band of hide hunters that came over the line from Utah, and Mr. Gowan helped the game warden run them back to their reservation.”

  “He actually killed two of them?”

  “Yes,” replied the girl, her gravity deepening to a concerned frown. “The worst of it is that I’m not altogether certain it was necessary. Men out here, as a rule, think much too little of the life of an Indian.”

  “Ah!” murmured Ashton. “Two Indians. But didn’t you speak of six notches?”

  “Six,” confirmed the girl, her brow partly clearing. “The others were different. Three were rustlers. The sheriff’s posse overtook them. Both sides were firing. Kid circled around and shot three. He happened to have a long-range rifle. Daddy says they threw up their hands when the first one fell; but Kid explained to me that he was too far away to see it.”

  “Ah!” murmured Ashton the second time, and he put up his hand to the hole in the front of his sombrero.

  “The last was two years ago,” went on the girl. “There was a dispute over a maverick. Kid was tried and acquitted on his plea of self-defense. There were no witnesses. He claimed that the other man drew first. Two empty shells were found in the other man’s revolver, and only one in Kid’s. That cleared him.”

  Ashton took off his hat and stared at the holes where the heavy forty-four bullet had gone in and gone out. He was silent.

  “You see, poor Kid has been unfortunate,” remarked the girl, as she headed her pony down over the edge of the mesa. “That time with the rustlers, all the posse were firing, and he just happened to be the one that got the best aim; and the time with the Indians, I’m sure he did not shoot to kill. It just happened that way. He told me so himself.”

  Ashton ran his tongue over his lip. “Yes––I suppose so,” he muttered.

  “Kid has all the good qualities and only a few of the faults of the old-time cowboys,” went on the girl. “He is almost fiercely loyal to Daddy’s interests. That’s why he led a raid on a sheep outfit, four years ago, when almost half of a large flock were run over into Deep Cañon––poor innocent beasts! Daddy was furious with Kid; but there was no legal proof as to who were members of the attacking party, and the sheep were destroying our range. All of Daddy’s cattle would have starved.”

  “He was not punished?” murmured Ashton.

  “Daddy could not be expected to discharge him, could he, when Kid did it to save our range? You see, it was just because he was so very loyal. You must not think from these things that he––It is true he is suspicious of strangers, but he always has been very kind and gentle to me. I am very fond of him.”

  “You are?” exclaimed Ashton, stirred from his uneasy depression. “I should hardly have thought him the kind to interest a girl like you.”

  “Really?” she bantered. “Why not? I have lived on the range ever since I was fourteen.”

  He stared at her incredulously. “Since you were fourteen?”

  “For nine years,” she added, smiling at his astonishment.

  “But––it can’t be,” he protested, his eyes on her stylish costume. “At least, not all the time.”

  She nodded at him encouragingly. “So you can see––a little. Nearly all my winters have been spent in Denver, except one in Europe.”

  “Europe?” he repeated.

  “We didn’t cross in a cattle boat,” she flashed back at him, dimpling mischievously. “Nor did I go as the Queen of the Rancho, or of the Roundup, or even of the Wild and Woolly Outlaw Band.”

  He flushed with mortification. “I am only too well aware, Miss Knowles, how you must regard me.”

  “Oh, I do not regard you at all––as yet,” she bantered. “But of course I could not expect you to know that Daddy’s sister is one of the Sacred Thirty-six.”

  “Sacred––? Is that one of the orders of nuns?”

  “None whatever,” she punned. In the same moment she drew a most solemn looking face. “My
deah Mistah Ashton, I will have you to understand my reference was to that most select coterie which comprises Denver’s Real Society.”

  “Indeed!” he said, with a subtle alteration in his tone and manner. “You say that your aunt is one of––”

  “My aunt by adoption,” she corrected.

  “Adoption?”

  “I am not Daddy’s natural daughter. He adopted me,” explained the girl in her frank way.

  “Yes?” asked Ashton, plainly eager to learn more of her history.

  Without seeming to observe this, she adroitly balked his curiosity––“So, you see, Daddy’s sister is only my aunt by adoption. Still, she has been very, very good to me; though I love Daddy and this free outdoor life so much that I insist on coming back home every spring.”

  “Ah, yes, I see,” he replied. “Really, Miss Knowles, you must think me a good deal of a dub.”

  “Oh, well, allowances should be made for a tenderfoot,” she bantered.

  “At least I recognized your queenliness, even if at first I did mistake what you were queen of,” he thrust back.

  “So you still insist I’m a queen? Of what, pray?”

  “Of Hearts!” he answered with fervor.

  His daring was rewarded with a lovely blush. But she was only momentarily disconcerted.

  “I am not so sure of that,” she replied. “Though it’s not Queen of Spades, because I do not have to work; and it can’t be Diamonds, because Daddy is no more than comfortably well to do––only six thousand head of stock. But as for Hearts––No, I’m sure it must be Clubs; I do so love to knock around. Really, if ever they break up this range, it will break my heart same time.”

  “Break up the range? How do you mean?”

  “Put it under irrigation and turn it into orchards and farms, as they have done so many places here on the Western Slope. You know, Colorado apples and peaches are fast becoming famous even in Europe.”

  “I do not wonder, not in the least––if I am to judge from a certain sample of the Colorado peach,” he ventured.