That Girl Montana

by Ryan, Marah Ellis

  “You write an order for that child, and tell the woman to give it to me,” said ’Tana, decidedly, and looked around for something to write with. A sheet of paper was found, and she went to Harvey for a pencil.

  “’Most ready to go?” he asked, looking at her anxiously.

  She nodded her head, and shut the door.

  “But I can’t write now; my hands are too weak,” complained the woman. “I can’t.”

  “You’ve got to!” answered the girl; and, taking her in her strong young hands, she raised her up higher on the pillow. “There is the paper and pencil—now write.”

  “It will kill me to lay like this.”

  “No matter if it does; you write.”

  “You’re not a woman at all; you’re like iron—white iron,” whined the other. “Any woman with a heart—” and the weak tears came in her eyes.

  “No, I have no heart to be touched by you,” answered the girl. “You had a chance to live a decent life, and you wouldn’t take it. You had an honest man to trust you and take care of you, and you paid him with deceit. Don’t expect pity from me; but write that order.”

  She tried to write but could not, and the girl took the pencil.

  “I will write it, and you can sign it,” she said; “that will do as well.”

  Thus it was accomplished, and the woman was again laid lower in the bed.

  “You are terrible hard on—on folks that ain’t just square,” she said. “You needn’t be so proud; you ain’t dead yet yourself. You don’t know what may happen to you.”

  “I know,” said the girl, coldly, “that if I ever brought children into the world, to be thrown on strangers’ hands and brought up in the streets to live your sort of life, I would expect a very practical sort of hell prepared for me. Have you anything more to tell me? I’m going.”

  “Oh—h! I wish you hadn’t said that about hell. I’m dreadful afraid of hell,” moaned the woman.

  “Yes,” said the girl; “you ought to be.”

  “How hard you are! And the doctor said I would die to-night.”

  Then she lay still quite a while, and when she spoke again, her voice seemed weaker.

  “You have that order for Gracie, and you are so hard-hearted. I don’t know what you will do—and I don’t want her to grow up like me.”

  “That is the first womanly thing I have heard you say,” replied the girl.

  She went over to the bed and took the woman’s hands in hers, looking at her earnestly.

  “Your child shall have a beautiful and a good home,” she said, reassuringly. “I am going for her myself to-morrow, and she will never lack care again. Have you any other word to give me?”

  The woman shook her head, and then as ’Tana turned away, she said:

  “Not unless you would kiss me. You are not like other women; but—will you kiss me?”

  And, with the pressure of the dying kiss on her lips, ’Tana went out the door.

  “Please give her every care money can secure for her,” she said to the woman at the door; while the man, minus the pipe, was there to open it.

  “Mr. Harvey, can I trouble you to look after it for me? You know the doctor and can learn all that is needed. Have the bills sent to me; and let me know when it is all—over.”

  They reached the theater just as the curtain went down on the last act, and she remained in the carriage until her own party came out.

  “I can hardly thank you enough for coming after me to-night,” she said, as she shook hands very cordially with Harvey. “You can never be a mere acquaintance to me again. You are my friend.”

  “Have I ignorantly done some good?” he asked, and she smiled at him.

  “Yes—more than you know—more than I can tell you.”

  “Then may I hope not to be forgotten when you are in Italy?”

  “Oh!” and the color flushed over all the pallor caught from that deathbed. “But I—I don’t think I will go to Italy after all, Mr. Harvey. I have changed my mind about that, and think I will go back to the Kootenai hills instead.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXVII.

  LIFE AT TWIN SPRINGS.

  Over all the land of the Kootenai the sun of early June was shining. Trees of wild fruits were white with blossoms, as if from far above on the mountains the snows had blown down and settled here and there on the new twigs of green.

  And high up above the camp of the Twin Springs, Overton and Harris sat looking over the wide stretches of forest, and the younger man looked troubled.

  “I think your fear is all an empty affair,” he said, in an argumentative tone. “You eat well and sleep well. What gives you the idea you are to be called in soon?”

  “Several things,” said the other, slowly, and his speech was yet indistinct; “but most of all the feel of my feet and legs. A week ago my feet turned cold; this week the coldness is up to my knees, and it won’t go away. I know what it means. When it gets as high as my heart I’ll be done for. That won’t take long, Dan; and I want to see her first.”

  “She can’t help you.”

  “Yes, she can, too. You don’t know. Dan, send for her.”

  “Things are all different with her now,” protested the other. “She’s with friends who are not of the diggings or the ranges, Joe. She is going to marry Max Lyster; and, altogether, is not the same little girl who made our coffee for us down there in the flat. You must not expect that she will change all her new, happy life to run back here just because you want to talk to her.”

  “She’ll come if you telegraph I want her,” insisted Harris. “I know her better than you do, Dan. The fine life will never spoil her. She would be happier here to-day in a canoe than she would be on a throne. I know her best.”

  “She wasn’t very happy before she left here.”

  “No,” he agreed; “but there were reasons, Dan. Why are you so set against her coming back?”

  “Set against it? Oh, no.”

  “Yes, you are. Mrs. Huzzard and all the camp would be only too glad to see her; but you—you say no. What’s your reason?”

  “Joe, not many months ago you tried to make me suspicious of her,” said Overton, not moving his eyes from a distant blue peak of the hills. “You remember the day you fell in a heap? Well, I’ve never asked you your reasons for that; though I’ve thought of it considerably. You changed your mind about her afterward, and trusted her with the plan of this gold field down here. Now, you had reasons for that, too; but I never have asked you what they are. Do the same for me, will you?”

  The other man did not answer for a little while, but he watched Dan’s moody face with a great deal of kindness in his own.

  “You won’t tell me?” he said at last. “Well, that’s all right. But one of the reasons I want her back is to make clear to you all the unexplained things of last summer. There were things you should have been told—that would have made you two better friends, would have broken down the wall there always seemed to be between you—or nearly always. (She wouldn’t tell you, and I couldn’t.) It left her always under a cloud to you, and she felt it. Many a time, Dan, she has knelt beside me and cried over her troubles to me—and they were troubles, too!—telling them all to me just because I couldn’t speak and tell them again. And I won’t, unless she lets me. But I don’t want to go over the range and know that you two, all your lives, will be apart and cold to each other on account of suspicions I could clear away.”

  “Suspicions? No, I have no suspicions against her.”

  “But you have had many a troubled hour because of that man found dead in her room, and his visit to her the night before, and that money she asked for that he was after. All such things that you could not clear her of in your own mind, when you cleared her of murder—they are things I want straightened out before I leave, Dan. You have both been good friends to me, and I don’t want any bar between you.”

  “What does all that matter now, Joe? She is out of our lives, and in a happier one some one else
is making for her. I am not likely ever to see her again. She won’t come back here.”

  “I know her best; she will come if she is needed. I need her for once; and if you don’t send for her, I will, Dan. Will you send?”

  But Overton got up and walked away without answering. Harris thought he would turn back after a little while, but he did not. He watched him out of sight, and he was still going higher up in the hills.

  “Trying to walk away from his desire for her,” thought Joe, sadly. “Well, he never will. He thinks I don’t know. Poor Dan!”

  Then he whistled to a man down below him, and the man came and helped him down to camp, for his feet had grown helpless again in that strange chill of which he had spoken.

  Mrs. Huzzard met him at the door of a sitting room, gorgeous as an apartment could well be in the Northern wilderness. All the luxuries obtainable were there; for, as Harris had to live so much of his time indoors, Overton seemed determined that he should get benefit from his new fortune in some way. The finest of furs and of weavings furnished the room, and a dainty little stand held a tea service of shell-pink china, from which the steam floated cheerily.

  And Lorena Jane herself partook of the general air of prosperity, as she drew forward a great cushioned chair for the invalid and brought him a cup of fragrant tea.

  “I just knew you was tired the minute I saw you coming down that hill,” she said, filling a cup herself and sitting down to enjoy it. “I knew a cup of tea would do you good, for you ain’t quite so brisk as you was a few weeks ago.”

  “No,” he agreed, and gulped down the beverage with a dubious expression on his face. He very much preferred whisky as a tonic; but as Mrs. Huzzard was bound to use that new tea service every day for his benefit, he submitted without a protest and enjoyed most the number of cups she disposed of.

  “I suppose, now, you got sight from up there on the hill of the two young folks going boat riding?” she remarked, with attempted indifference; and he looked at her questioningly.

  “Oh, I mean Lavina and the captain! Yes, he did get up ambition enough to paddle a boat and ask her to ride in it; and away they went, giddy as you please!”

  “I thought you had a high regard for the captain?” remarked Harris.

  “Who? Me? Well, as Mr. Overton’s relation, of course I show him respect,” and her tone was almost as pompous as that of the captain used to be. “But I must say, sir, that to admire a man—for me to admire a man—he must have a certain lot of push and ambition. He must be a real American, who don’t depend on the record of his dead relations to tell you how great he is—a man who will dig either gold or potatoes if he needs them, and not be afraid of spoiling his hands.”

  “Somebody like this new lucky man, McCoy,” suggested Harris, and she smiled complacently but did not answer.

  And out on the little creek, sure enough, Lavina and the captain were gliding with the current, and the current had got them into dangerous waters.

  “And you won’t say yes, Lavina?” he asked, and she tapped her foot impatiently on the bottom of the boat.

  “I told you yes twenty-five years ago, Alf Leek,” she answered.

  He sighed helplessly. His old aggressive manner was all gone. The tactics he would adopt for any other woman were useless with this one. She knew him like a book. She had him completely cowed and miserable. No longer did he regale admiring friends with tales of the late war, and incidentally allow himself to be thought a hero. One look from Lavina would freeze the story of the hottest battle that ever was fought.

  To be sure, she had as yet refrained from using words against him; but how long would she refrain? That question he had asked himself until, in despair, a loop-hole from her quiet vengeance had occurred to him, and he had asked her to marry him.

  “You never could—would marry any one else,” he said, pleadingly.

  “Oh, couldn’t I?”

  “And I couldn’t, either, Lavina,” he continued, looking at her sentimentally. But Lavina knew better.

  “You would, if anybody would have you,” she retorted. “I know I reached here just in time to keep poor Lorena Jane from being made a victim of. You would have been a tyrant over her, with your great pretensions, if I hadn’t stopped it. You always were tyrannical, Alf Leek; and the only time you’re humble as you ought to be is when you meet some one who can tyrannize over you. You are one of the sort that needs it.”

  “That’s why I asked you to marry me,” he remarked, meekly.

  And after a moment she said:

  “Well, thinking of it from that point of view, I guess I will.”

  Far up on the heights, a man lying there alone saw the canoe with the man and the woman in it, and it brought back to him keen rushes of memory from the summer time that had been. It was only a year ago that ’Tana had stepped into his canoe, and gone with him to the new life of the settlement. How brave she had been! how daring! He liked best to remember her as she had been then, with all the storms and sunshine of her face. He liked to remember that she had said she would be cook for him, but for no other man. Of course her words were a child’s words, soon forgotten by her. But all her words and looks and their journeys made him love the land he had known her in. They were all the treasures he had with which to comfort his loneliness.

  And when in the twilight he descended to the camp, Joe—or his own longings—had won.

  “I will send the telegram for you, old fellow,” he said, and that was all.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  AGAIN ON THE KOOTENAI.

  Another canoe, with a woman in it, skimmed over the waters in the twilight that evening—a woman with all the gladness of youth in her bright eyes, and an eagerness for the north country that far outstripped the speed of the boat.

  Each dark tree-trunk as it loomed up from the shores, each glint of the after-glow as it lighted the ripples, each whisper of the fresh, soft wind of the mountains, was to her as a special welcome. All of them touched her with the sense of a friendship that had been faithful. That she was no more to them than any of the strangers who came and went on the current, she could not believe; for they all meant so much, so very much to her.

  She asked for a paddle, that she might once more feel against her strength the strong rush of the mountain river. She caressed its waves and reached out her hands to the bending boughs, and laughter and sighs touched her lips.

  “Never again!” she whispered, as if a promise was being made; “never again! my wilderness!”

  The man who had charge of the canoe—a stalwart, red-whiskered man of perhaps forty-five—looked at her a good deal in a cautious way. She was so unlike any of the girls he had ever seen—so gay, so free of speech with each stranger or Indian who came their way; so daintily garbed in a very correct creation of some city tailor; and, above all, so tenderly careful of a child who slept among the rugs at her feet, and looked like a bit of pink blossom against the dark furs.

  “You are a stranger here, aren’t you?” she asked the man. “I saw no one like you running a boat here last summer.”

  “No, no,” he said, slowly; “I didn’t then. My camp is east of Bonner’s Ferry, quite a ways; but I get around here sometimes, too. I don’t run a boat only for myself; but when they told me a lady wanted to get to Twin Springs, I didn’t allow no scrub Indians to take her if my boat was good enough.”

  “It is a lovely boat,” she said, admiringly; “the prettiest I ever saw on this river, and it is very good of you to bring me yourself. That is one of the things makes me realize I am in the West once more—to be helped simply because I am a girl alone. And you didn’t even know my name when you offered to bring me.”

  “No, but I did before I left shore,” he answered; “and then I counted myself kind of lucky. I—I’ve heard so much about you, miss, from folks up at Twin Springs; from one lady there in particular—Mrs. Huzzard.”

  “Oh! so you know her, do you?” she asked, and wondered at the self-conscious lo
ok with which he owned up that he did—a little.

  “A little? Oh, that is not nearly enough,” she said, good-naturedly. “Lorena Jane is worth knowing a good deal of.”

  “That’s my opinion, too,” he agreed; “but a fellow needs some help sometimes, if he ain’t over handy with the gift of gab.”

  “Well, now, I should not think you would need much help,” she answered. “You ought to be the sort she would make friends with quick enough.”

  “Oh, yes—friends,” he said, and sent the canoe on with swifter, stronger strokes. The other boat, paddled by Indians and carrying baggage, was left far behind.

  “You make this run often?” she asked, with a little wonder as to who the man was. His dress was much above the average, his boat was a beautiful and costly thing, and she had not learned, in the haste of her departure, who her boatman was.

  “Not very often. Haven’t been up this way for two weeks now.”

  “But that is often,” she said. “Are you located in this country?”

  “Well—yes, I have been. I struck a silver lode across the hills in yon direction. I’ve sold out and am only prospecting around just now, not settled anywhere yet. My name is McCoy.”

  “McCoy!” and like a flash she remembered the post-script of Mrs. Huzzard’s letter. “Oh, yes—I’ve heard of you.”

  “You have? Well, that’s funny. I didn’t know my name had got beyond the ranges.”

  “Didn’t you? Well, it got across the country to Manhattan Island—that’s where I was when it reached me,” and she smiled quizzically. “You know Mrs. Huzzard writes me letters sometimes.”

  “And do you mean—did she—”

  “Yes, she did—mentioned your name very kindly, too,” she said, as he hesitated in a confused way. Then, with all the gladness of home-coming in her heart and her desire that no heart should be left heavy, she added: “And, really, as I told you before, I don’t think you need much help.”