The Collected Westerns of William MacLeod Raine: 21 Novels in One Volume

by Unknown

  "You're taking advantage of me because I can't help myself. Why don't you go and bring father," she flung out.

  "I'm younger than your father and abler to help. That's why?"

  They reached the top of the bluff and he made her sit down to rest. A pale moon suffused the country, and in that stage set to lowered lights her pallor was accented. From the colorless face shadowy, troubled eyes spoke the misery through which she was passing. The man divined that her pain was more than physical, and the knowledge went to him poignantly by the heart route.

  "What is it, 'Lissie? What have I done?" he asked gently.

  "You know. I don't want to talk about it."

  "But I don't know."

  "What's the use of keeping it up? I caught you this afternoon."

  "Caught me doing what?"

  "Caught you rustling, caught you branding a calf just after you had shot the cow."

  For an instant her charge struck him dumb. He stared at her as if he thought she had gone suddenly mad.

  "What's that? Say it again," he got out at last.

  "And the cow had the Bar Double G brand, belonged to my father, your best friend," she added passionately.

  He spoke very gently, but there was an edge to his voice that was new to her. "Suppose you tell me all about it."

  She threw out a hand in a gesture of despair. "What's the use? Nothing could have made me believe it but my own eyes. You needn't keep up a pretense. I saw you."

  "Yes, so you said before. Now begin at the start and tell your story."

  She had the odd feeling of being put on the defensive and it angered her. How dared he look at her with those cool, gray eyes that still appeared to bore a hole through treachery? Why did her heart convict her of having deserted a friend, when she knew that the desertion was his?

  "While I was gathering poppies I heard a shot. It was so close I walked to the edge of the draw and looked over. There I saw you."

  "What was I doing?"

  "You were hogtying a calf."

  "And then?"

  "I didn't understand at first. I thought to slip down and surprise you for fun. But as I got lower I saw the dead cow. Just then you began to brand the calf and I cried out to you."

  "What did I do?"

  "You know what you did," she answered wearily. "You broke for the brush where your horse was and galloped away."

  "Got a right good look at me, did you?"

  "Not at your face. But I knew. You were wearing this blue silk handkerchief." Her finger indicated the one bound around her ankle.

  "So on that evidence you decide I'm a rustler, and you've only known me thirteen years. You're a good friend, 'Lissie."

  Her eyes blazed on him like live coals. "Have you forgotten the calf you left with your brand on it?"

  She had startled him at last. "With my brand on it?" he repeated, his voice dangerously low and soft.

  "You know as well as I do. You had got the F just about finished when I called. You dropped the running iron and ran."

  "Dropped it and ran, did I? And what did you do?"

  "I reheated the iron and blurred the brand so that nobody could tell what it had been."

  He laughed harshly without mirth. "I see. I'm a waddy and a thief, but you're going to protect me for old times' sake. That's the play, is it? I ought to be much obliged to you and promise to reform, I reckon."

  His bitterness stung. She felt a tightening of the throat. "All I ask is that you go away and never come back to me," she cried with a sob.

  "Don't worry about that. I ain't likely to come back to a girl that thinks I'm the lowest thing that walks. You're not through with me a bit more than I am with you," he answered harshly.

  Her little hand beat upon the rock in her distress. "I never would have believed it. Nobody could have made me believe it. I--I--why, I trusted you like my own father," she lamented. "To think that you would take that way to stock your ranch--and with the cattle of my father, too."

  His face was hard as chiseled granite. "Distrust all your friends. That's the best way."

  "You haven't even denied it--not that it would do any good," she said miserably.

  There was a sound of hard, grim laughter in his throat. "No, and I ain't going to deny it. Are you ready to go yet?"

  His repulse of her little tentative advance was like a blow on the face to her.

  She made a movement to rise. While she was still on her knees he stooped, put his arms around her, and took her into them. Before she could utter her protest he had started down the trail toward the house.

  "How dare you? Let me go," she ordered.

  "You're not able to walk, and you'll go the way I say," he told her shortly in a flinty voice.

  Her anger was none the less because she realized her helplessness to get what she wanted. Her teeth set fast to keep back useless words. Into his stony eyes her angry ones burned. The quick, irregular rise and fall of her bosom against his heart told him how she was struggling with her passion.

  Once he spoke. "Tell me where it was you saw this rustler--the exact place near as you can locate it."

  She answered only by a look.

  The deputy strode into the living room of the ranch with her in his arms. Lee was reading a newspaper Jack had brought with him from Mesa. At sight of them he started up hurriedly.

  "Goddlemighty, what's the matter, Jack?"

  "Only a ricked ankle, Champ. Slipped on a stone," Flatray explained as he put Melissy down on the lounge.

  In two minutes the whole house was upset. Hop Ling was heating water to bathe the sprain. A rider from the bunkhouse was saddling to go for the doctor. Another was off in the opposite direction to buy some liniment at Mammoth.

  In the confusion Flatray ran up his horse from the pasture, slapped on the saddle, and melted into the night.

  An hour later Melissy asked her father what had become of him.

  "Doggone that boy, I don't know where he went. Reckon he thought he'd be in the way. Mighty funny he didn't give us a chanct to tell him to stay."

  "Probably he had business in Mesa," Melissy answered, turning her face to the wall.

  "Business nothing," retorted the exasperated rancher. "He figured we couldn't eat and sleep him without extra trouble. Ain't that a fine reputation for him to be giving the Bar Double G? I'll curl his hair for him onct I meet up with him again."

  "If you would put out the light, I think I could sleep, dad," she told him in the least of voices.

  "Sure, honey. Has the throbbing gone out of the ankle?" he asked anxiously.

  "Not entirely, but it's a good deal better. Good-night, dad."

  "If Doc comes I'll bring him in," Lee said after he had kissed her.

  "Do, please."

  But after she was left alone Melissy did not prepare herself for sleep. Her wide open eyes stared into the darkness, while her mind stormily reviewed the day. The man who for years had been her best friend was a scoundrel. She had proved him unworthy of her trust, and on top of that he had insulted her. Hot tears stung her eyes--tears of shame, of wounded self-love, of mortification, and of something more worthy than any of these.

  She grieved passionately for that which had gone out of her life, for the comradeship that had been so precious to her. If this man were a waddy, who of all her friends could she trust? She could have forgiven him had he done wrong in the heat of anger. But this premeditated evil was beyond forgiveness. To make it worse, he had come direct from the doing of it to meet her, with a brazen smile on his lips and a lie in his heart. She would never speak to him again--never so long as she lived.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE MAN WITH THE CHIHUAHUA HAT

  A little dust cloud was traveling up the trail toward the Bar Double G, the center of which presently defined itself as a rider moving at a road gait. He wore a Chihuahua hat and with it the picturesque trappings the Southwest borrows on occasion from across the border. Vanity disclosed itself in the gold-laced hat, in the silver conchos of
the fringed chaps, in the fine workmanship of the saddle and bit. The man's finery was overdone, carried with it the suggestion of being on exhibition. But one look at the man himself, sleek and graceful, black-haired and white-toothed, exuding an effect of cold wariness in spite of the masked smiling face, would have been enough to give the lie to any charge of weakness. His fopperies could not conceal the silken strength of him. One meeting with the chill, deep-set eyes was certificate enough for most people.

  Melissy, sitting on the porch with her foot resting on a second chair, knew a slight quickening of the blood as she watched him approach.

  "Good evenin', Miss M'lissy," he cried, sweeping his sombrero as low as the stirrup.

  "Buenos tardes, Señor Norris," she flung back gayly.

  Sitting at ease in the saddle, he leisurely looked her over with eyes that smoldered behind half-shuttered lids. To most of her world she was in spirit still more boy than woman, but before his bold, possessive gaze her long lashes wavered to the cheeks into which the warm blood was beating. Her long, free lines were still slender with the immaturity of youth, her soul still hesitating reluctantly to cross the border to womanhood toward which Nature was pushing her so relentlessly. From a fund of experience Philip Norris read her shrewdly, knew how to evoke the latent impulses which brought her eagerly to the sex duel.

  "Playing off for sick," he scoffed.

  "I'm not," she protested. "Never get sick. It's just a sprained ankle."

  "Sho! I guess you're Miss Make Believe; just harrowing the feelings of your beaux."

  "The way you talk! I haven't got any beaux. The boys are just my friends."

  "Oh, just friends! And no beaux. My, my! Not a single sweetheart in all this wide open country. Shall I go rope you one and bring him in, compadre?"

  "No!" she exploded. "I don't want any. I'm not old enough yet." Her dancing eyes belied the words.

  "Now I wouldn't have guessed it. You look to me most ready to be picked." He rested his weight on the farther stirrup and let his lazy smile mock her. "My estimate would be sixteen. I'll bet you're every day of that."

  "I only lack three months of being eighteen," she came back indignantly.

  "You don't say! You'll ce'tainly have to be advertising for a husband soon, Miss Three-Quarters-Past-Seventeen. Maybe an ad in the Mesa paper would help. You ain't so awful bad looking."

  "I'll let you write it. What would you say?" she demanded, a patch of pink standing out near the curve of the cheek bone.

  He swung from the saddle and flung the reins to the ground. With jingling spurs he came up the steps and sat on the top one, his back against a pillar. Boldly his admiring eyes swept her.

  "Nina, I couldn't do the subject justice. Honest, I haven't got the vocabulary."

  "Oh, you!" Laughter was in the eyes that studied him with a side tilt of the chin. "That's a fine way to get out of it when your bluff is called."

  He leaned back against the post comfortably and absorbed the beauty of the western horizon. The sun had just set behind a saddle of the Galiuros in a splash of splendor. All the colors of the rainbow fought for supremacy in a brilliant-tinted sky that blazed above the fire-girt peaks. Soon dusk would slip down over the land and tone the hues to a softer harmony. A purple sea would flow over the hills, to be in turn displaced by a deep, soft violet. Then night, that night of mystery and romance which transforms the desert to a thing of incredible wonder!

  "Did your father buy this sunset with the ranch? And has he got a guarantee that it will perform every night?" he asked.

  "Did you ever see anything like it?" she cried. "I have looked at them all my life and I never get tired."

  He laughed softly, his indolent, sleepy look on her. "Some things I would never get tired of looking at either."

  Without speaking she nodded, still absorbing the sunset.

  "But it wouldn't be that kind of scenery," he added. "How tall are you, muchacha?"

  Her glance came around in surprise. "I don't know. About five foot five, I think. Why?"

  "I'm working on that ad. How would this do? 'Miss Three-Quarters-Past-Seventeen wants to meet up with gentleman between eighteen and forty-eight. Object, matrimony. Description of lady: Slim, medium height, brunette, mop of blue-black hair, the prettiest dimple you ever saw----'"

  "Now I know you're making fun of me. I'm mad." And the dimple flashed into being.

  "'--mostly says the opposite of what she means, has a----'"

  "I don't. I don't"

  "'--has a spice of the devil in her, which----'"

  "Now, I am mad," she interrupted, laughing.

  "'--which is excusable, since she has the reddest lips for kissing in Arizona.'"

  He had gone too far. Her innocence was in arms. Norris knew it by the swiftness with which the smile vanished from her face, by the flash of anger in the eyes.

  "I prefer to talk about something else, Mr. Norris," she said with all the prim stiffness of a schoolgirl.

  Her father relieved the tension by striding across from the stable. With him came a bowlegged young fellow in plain leathers. The youngster was Charley Hymer, one of the riders for the Bar Double G.

  "You're here at the right time, Norris," Lee said grimly. "Charley has just come down from Antelope Pass. He found one of my cows dead, with a bullet hole through the forehead. The ashes of a fire were there, and in the brush not far away a running iron."

  The eyes of Norris narrowed to slits. He was the cattle detective of the association and for a year now the rustlers had outgeneraled him. "I'll have you take me to the spot, Charley. Get a move on you and we'll get there soon as the moon is up."

  Melissy gripped the arms of her chair tightly with both hands. She was looking at Norris with a new expression, a kind of breathless fear. She knew him for a man who could not be swerved from the thing he wanted. For all his easy cynicism, he had the reputation of being a bloodhound on the trail. Moreover, she knew that he was no friend to Jack Flatray. Why had she left that running iron as evidence to convict its owner? What folly not to have removed it from the immediate scene of the crime!

  The cattle detective and her father had moved a few steps away and were talking in low tones. Melissy became aware of a footfall. The man who called himself Morse came around the corner of the house and stopped at the porch steps.

  "May I speak to you a moment, Miss Lee?" he said in a low voice.

  "Of course."

  The voice of Norris rose to an irritated snarl. "Tell you I've got evidence, Lee. Mebbe it's not enough to convict, but it satisfies me a-plenty that Jack Flatray's the man."

  Melissy was frozen to a tense attention. Her whole mind was on what passed between the detective and her father. Otherwise she would have noticed the swift change that transformed the tenderfoot.

  The rancher answered with impatient annoyance. "You're 'way off, Norris. I don't care anything about your evidence. The idea is plumb ridiculous. Twenty odd years I've known him. He's the best they make, a pure through and through. Not a crooked hair in his head. I've eat out of the same frying pan too often with that boy not to know what he is. You go bury those suspicions of yours immediate. There's nothing to them."

  Norris grumbled objections as they moved toward the stable. Melissy drew a long breath and brought herself back to the tenderfoot.

  He stood like a coiled spring, head thrust far forward from the shoulders. The look in his black eyes was something new to her experience. For hate, passion, caution were all mirrored there.

  "You know Mr. Norris," she said quickly.

  He started. "What did you say his name was?" he asked with an assumption of carelessness.

  "Norris--Philip Norris. He is a cattle detective."

  "Never heard of Mr. Norris before in my life," he answered, but it was observable that he still breathed deep.

  She did not believe him. Some tie in their buried past bound these two men together. They must have known each other in the South years ago, and one of them at least wa
s an enemy of the other. There might come a day when she could use this knowledge to save Jack Flatray from the punishment dogging his heels. Melissy filed it away in her memory for future reference.

  "You wanted to speak to me," she suggested.

  "I'm going away."

  "What for?"