The Fighting Shepherdess

by Lockhart, Caroline

  Hugh would as well have slapped her. She scattered the manicure articles in her lap as she sprang up and stamped a tiny foot at him:

  “She is impossible! Unspeakable! And I believe you are in love with her!”

  For an instant Disston looked at her with an expression which was at once angry and startled, but before he had framed an answer Teeters appeared in the doorway behind them and said soberly:

  “Looks like somethin’ serious is startin’ over yonder.” He nodded toward the mountains.

  “What do you mean?” Disston asked quickly.

  “One of Kate’s sheep wagons was blowed up a few nights ago, and there’s a story circulatin’ that somebody’s goin’ to shoot up the Outfit.”

  Disston’s face wore a frown of concentration.

  “Teeters,” in sudden decision, “I’m going up to see her. She may need us.”

  “But isn’t it dangerous?” Mrs. Rathburn protested.

  “Not unless he’s mistook for one of the Outfit, then they might try a chunk of lead on him,” Teeters reassured her.

  Miss Rathburn, having recovered her poise together with her drawl, was regarding the high luster on her nails when Disston came up on the porch before leaving.

  “I am sorry I was rude, Beth,” he said earnestly.

  “Were you?” indifferently. “I hadn’t noticed it.”

  “I did a contemptible thing to that girl once,” he continued, “and I feel that the least I can do to make amends is to refuse to allow her to be spoken of slightingly in my presence.”

  “Quite right, Hughie. You are a credit to our southern chivalry.” Miss Rathburn suppressed a yawn with the tips of her pink tapering fingers.

  “When I come back,” he spoke propitiatingly, “the day after to-morrow, probably we’ll go and see that petrified tree of which Teeters told us.”

  “A lovely bribe,” languidly, “but don’t hurry, for mother and I are leaving to-morrow.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Certainly.”

  “I won’t believe it.”

  “You always were incredulous, Hughie.”

  “I don’t suppose I can convince you that I am very fond of you, and that I shall feel badly if you leave like this?”

  This was more like it:—Miss Rathburn lowered her beautiful lashes.

  “You haven’t tried, have you?” she asked softly.

  She looked very desirable at the moment—pink and white and soft and fluffy—all that the traditions of his family demanded in a woman. He knew perfectly what was expected of him, and there was every reason why he should ask her to marry him, and none at all why he should not, yet somehow when he opened his lips to ask, “Will you let me?” the words choked him. He said, instead, with the utmost cordiality:

  “Don’t you dare do anything so unfriendly as to leave without saying good-bye to me. Will you promise to wait until I return?”

  If she had obeyed her impulse she would have shrieked at him:

  “No! no! no! Not a minute, if you go to see that woman!” She would have liked to make him choose between them, but she dared not put him to the test for fear that she would place herself in a position from which her pride would not allow her to recede.

  Beth wept in chagrin and rage while Disston rode away buoyantly, marvelling at his own light-heartedness, tingling with the old-time eagerness which used to come to him the moment he was in the saddle with his horse’s head turned toward Bitter Creek.

  He had stubbornly fought his desire to visit Kate again. What was the use, he demanded of himself sternly. She did not want to see him and virtually had said so. She had changed radically; she cared only for her sheep—even Teeters admitted that much. Anything beyond a warm friendship between them was, of course, impossible. She was not of his world, she did not “belong,” and had no desire to. She could no more preside at a dinner table or pour tea gracefully, as would be expected of his wife, than Beth could shear a sheep or earmark one.

  These things and many others he had told himself a thousand times to stop the longing he had to saddle his horse and go to her. What a weakling he was, he thought contemptuously, that he could not put her out of his mind and do the obviously right and proper thing by asking Beth to marry him, and so end forever this disquieting conflict within him—a conflict that had not been in his calculations when he had planned a happy summer.

  It was physical attraction, he argued, together with the interest aroused by her unusual personality, which drew him to Kate—a passing fancy, a curious, inexplicable infatuation; but, he assured himself stoutly, not at all the foundation upon which to build for permanency. Yet as he rode towards the mountains with his eyes fixed upon the low pass to which Teeters had directed him, he experienced the first real thrill of carefree happiness that had come to him since his arrival.

  The trail was a long and a hard one. His horse lost a shoe and limped badly, so, as the day waned, he walked frequently to spare the animal. He was tired, but too eager to be conscious of it. He wondered what she would be doing when he found her, and whether he could surprise something like the old-time welcome from her. How her eyes used to sparkle when he rode up to her! He smiled to himself as he recalled her smile—frank, beaming, her face radiant with undisguised pleasure.

  Kate was sitting on a rock on the backbone of a ridge when he drew in sight of her—a dark picturesque silhouette against the sky. The sheep fed below, and her horse, with a bedroll across its back, nibbled not far away.

  Hugh stopped and looked at the lonely figure sitting motionless in the opaline-tinted light of the sunset, her chin sunk in her palm, her shoulders drooping. The tears rose to the man’s eyes unexpectedly. It was not right, such solitude for a woman, he told himself vehemently.

  It was singular, too, he reflected, how the mere sight of her revitalized him. Life took on a sudden interest, a zest that it never had elsewhere. He supposed it was because she was herself so vital. A feeling of exultation now swept over him—he forgot his fatigue, that he was hungry, and was conscious only of the fact that he was going to be near her, to talk to her uninterruptedly—for hours, maybe. After that he would go back content, ask Beth to marry him, and recover from this fever, this unreasoning, uncontrollable longing to see Kate again, which made him weak to imbecility.

  Thinking her own thoughts, Kate stared at the ground, or at the sheep feeding quietly below her. Her rifle leaned against the rock upon which she was sitting. Occasionally she searched the juniper-covered sides of an adjacent mountain where an enemy could find convenient hiding, but mostly she sat looking at the ground at her feet.

  She had taken over the valuable buck herd in the face of Bowers’s protest, and was the first to graze on the top of the mountain, though the other bands were now also close to the summit. If more trouble was coming, it would very likely come quickly. They were fighters, these Rambouillets, she was thinking as she looked at them absently, and recalled an instance where a herd of them had battered a full-grown coyote to a jelly. They had surrounded him and by bunting him in the ribs, back and forth between them like a football, had stopped only when there was not a whole bone left in his carcass. However, she reflected, the coyotes were mostly puppies yapping at the entrance of their den at this time of year, and the last wolf had been cleaned out of the mountains, so there really was not much danger from any source save these human enemies.

  But even a fighting Rambouillet was not proof against a 30-30. Instinctively her eyes swept the surrounding country for some unfamiliar moving object. Well, that was what she was there for—to protect them. She did not expect any quarter because she was a woman—or intend to give any. She meant to shoot to kill, if she had the opportunity.

  It was in this survey that Kate saw Disston and recognized him instantly. She had a notion that even if her eyesight had failed her, her heart would have told her, for it jumped as if she had been badly frightened. She felt dizzy for a moment after she verified her first look—the world swam, as though sh
e had been blinded. If she had followed her impulse, she would have held out her arms and ran to meet him crying, “Hughie! Hughie!” But her impulses, she remembered in time, always came back like boomerangs to hurt her, if she followed them, so, instead, she endeavored to pull herself together by recalling that he had been six weeks at Teeters’ without coming to see her but the one time when he had brought that girl to laugh at her. Why had he come now, she wondered.

  Kate’s pride had come to be her strongest ally and she summoned it all in this emergency, so when Disston climbed to her, finally, leading his limping horse, she was awaiting him calmly, her enigmatic smile upon her face, which was but a shade paler than usual. Her composure chilled and disappointed him; he could not know that she had clasped her hands tightly about her knee to hide their trembling.

  “I wanted to surprise you,” he said regretfully.

  “You have.”

  “You don’t show it.”

  “Then I’m improving.”

  “I liked you as you were, Kate—warm-hearted, impulsive.” He dropped the bridle reins and sat down beside her.

  “That got me nothing,” she replied curtly.

  A shadow crossed his face.

  “And you don’t care for anything that doesn’t get you something?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you,” he said after a silence.

  “I’m not ‘me’ any longer,” she responded. “I made myself over to suit my environment. I get along better.”

  “What has changed you so much, Kate—what in particular?”

  She hesitated a moment, then answered coldly:

  “Nothing in particular—everything.”

  “You mean you don’t want to tell me?”

  “What’s the use?” indifferently.

  “I might help you.”

  “How?”

  “In ways that friends can help each other.”

  “I’ve tried that,” she answered dryly.

  “You’ve grown so self-sufficient that you make me feel superfluous and helpless.”

  “A clinging vine that has nothing to cling to sprawls on the ground, doesn’t it?”

  Since he did not answer immediately, she reminded him:

  “Better loosen your horse’s cinch; he’ll feed better.”

  He glanced at her oddly as he obeyed her. How practical she was! What she said was the right and sensible thing, of course, but was she, as she seemed, quite without sentiment?

  He returned to his place beside her and they sat without speaking, watching the colors change on a bank of sudslike clouds and the shadows deepen in the gulches. It never occurred to the new Kate to make conversation, so she was unembarrassed by the silence. Save for an occasional whimsical soliloquy, she seldom spoke without a definite purpose nowadays. To Disston, who remembered her faculty for finding something interesting or amusing in everything about which to chatter, the difference was noticeable.

  It saddened him, the change in her, yet he was conscious that she still retained her strong attraction for him. With nerves relaxed, content, he had an absurd notion that he could sit beside her on that rock indefinitely, without speaking, and be happy.

  Kate did not ask him the purpose of his visit, for her etiquette was the etiquette of the ranges, which does not countenance questions, and Disston, absorbed in the beauty of the sunset and his own thoughts, was in no mood to introduce the unpleasant subject of the dynamiting of the sheep wagon.

  The pink deepened on gypsum cliffs and sandstone buttes of the distant Bad Lands, while purple shadows crept over the green foothills and blackened the canyons.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” he said, finally, in a half whisper.

  “Yes,” she replied, huskily, wondering if Heaven itself had anything like this to offer.

  It seemed as though without his volition his hand sought hers and covered it.

  She left it so for a moment, then took hers away and got up abruptly.

  “They are working up to the bed-ground and will lie down pretty soon. When they’re settled, I’ll go to camp and get you something to eat.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, casual. She stooped, and, picking up a pebble, tossed it at two bucks that were butting each other violently:

  “Here—you! Stop it! You give me a headache to look at you.”

  He did not even interest her, that was evident. Disston tried to assure himself that he would not have it otherwise, that anything else would be a misfortune in the circumstances; but self-deception was useless—his feelings were not a matter for argument or logic, they were of the heart, not the head, when he was near her, and his mind had nothing to do with them.

  She walked away a little and stood apart with her face to the sunset, a lonely figure, silent, aloof, fitting perfectly into the picture. Disston tried to analyze his feelings, the emotions she inspired in him as he looked at her, but his lines of thought with their many ramifications always came back to the starting point—to the sure knowledge that he wanted her tremendously, that he yearned and hungered for her with every fiber of his nature.

  She was the last woman in the world who would seem to need protection, yet he had a savage primitive desire to protect her, to put his arm about her and defy the world, if need be.

  Beth’s helpless femininity inspired no such passionate chivalry. He saved her annoyances, shielded her, helped her over the rough places, from habit—but this was different. And it had been so, he reflected, from that night at the Prouty House when he would gladly have fought those who had slighted and hurt her, when he would have shed blood, had his judgment not restrained him. Ever since then the least insinuation or slur against Kate had set his blood tingling, and Beth’s ridicule had been one of the hardest things he had found to overlook in her. And, too, the curious serenity, the sense of completeness which came to him when she sat quietly beside him, puzzled him. He wondered if it was only a temporary state of mind, or would it last forever if he were with her. He would conquer himself—of course, he must; and he had proved by his life thus far that he was strong enough to do anything he had to.

  Suddenly Hugh felt a keen desire to know what she was thinking, that she was so long silent, and he asked her. He was not sure that she answered his question when she said prosaically:

  “You had better go on down to camp and feed your horse—it’s over the ridge there; make a fire and put on the tea kettle. I’ll be down in half an hour or three-quarters.”

  Disston lingered to watch her as she pulled the bedroll from her horse; and, clearing a space with her foot, freeing it of sticks and pebbles, spread out the canvas, pulling the “tarp” over a pillow beneath which he noticed a box of cartridges and a six-shooter.

  “For close work,” she said, with a short laugh, observing his interest.

  He did not join her; instead his brows contracted.

  “I can’t bear to think of you going through such hardships.”

  “This isn’t hardship—I’m used to it—I like it. I like to get awake in the night and look at the stars and to feel the wind in my face. When it rains, I pull the tarp over my head, and I love to listen to the patter on it. The sheep ‘bed’ all around me, and some of them lie on the corners, so it’s not lonely.” She said it with a touch of defiance, as though she resented his pity and wished him to believe there was no room for it.

  “You see,” she added, “I’m a typical sheepherder, even to mumbling to myself occasionally.”

  The sheep in the meantime had grazed to the top of the ridge and had spread out over the flat backbone for a few final mouthfuls before pawing their little hollows. Soon they would sink down singly and in pairs, by the dozen and half dozen, with a crackling of joints, their jaws waggling, sniffing, coughing, grunting from overladen stomachs, raising in their restless stirrings a little cloud of dust above the bed-ground.

  As he stood to go, Disston pictured her night after night waiting in patient silence for the sheep to grow quiet and then creeping bet
ween her blankets to sleep among them.

  He left her reluctantly at length, for he had a feeling that, since his time with her was short, each minute that he was away from her was wasted; but as it was her wish, he could do nothing less than comply and, obviously, she did not share his regret. So he followed her directions and was soon at the summer camp, established near a spring one lower ridge over.

  A half hour passed—three-quarters. He smoked and looked at his watch frequently. The stars came out and the moon rose full. The fire burned down and the water cooled in the kettle. Whatever was detaining her? Impatient at first, Disston finally grew worried. He ate a little cold food that he found, and started to walk back to her.

  He was well up the first ridge when a sharp report broke the night-stillness and brought him to an abrupt standstill. It was followed by another, then three, four—a number of shots in succession. It was not loud enough for a 30-30. It was the six-shooter! “For close work!” she had told him tersely.

  If he had been in doubt before as to the exact word to apply to his feelings for Kate, there was no need to hesitate longer. What did it matter that she did not know how to pour tea gracefully and preside at a dinner table? By God—he wanted her, and that was all there was to it!

  He was breathless when he reached the top of the ridge and his heart was pounding with the exertion in the high altitude, but he gave a gasp of relief when he saw her standing in the moonlight with dead and dying sheep around her.

  “What’s the matter?” he called, when his breath came back to him sufficiently.

  “Poison. Somebody has scattered little piles of saltpeter all over the summit. There’s no cure for it, so I shot some of them to put them out of their agony.”

  In his relief at finding her unharmed, the loss of the sheep seemed of no moment and he did not realize what it meant to her until she said with a choke in her voice:

  “They knew just where to hit me. I’ve scrimped and saved and sacrificed to buy those sheep—”

  Her grief sent a flood of tenderness over him. He went to her swiftly, and taking the six-shooter gently from her hand laid it upon the ground.