by Grey, Zane
"Hettie, I'm sorry you had to ask me that," he returned, contritely. "But you hurt so. . . . And I thought you just a--a sentimental girl--that you'd forget."
"Forget HIM? Never," she whispered. "Have you forgotten?"
"If I ever do may God forgive me," replied Ben, poignantly.
"Ben, I know your secret, and I think Ina knows, too," went on Hettie, earnestly. "We are dear friends--nay, we're sisters.
She's so good--so lovable. . . . We have talked often. You remember when Ina came home from college--when you were a poor wild- horse hunter of the hills and father almost hated you--remember how Ina and I plotted for you and Nevada. How we fought for you!"
"Ah, Hettie--I do remember," said Ben, dreamily.
"Well, Ina and I know what ails you. It's loss of your pard, Nevada!"
"No, Hettie dear, NOT all loss of mine," burst out Ben, passionately. "I'm not so selfish as that. I could stand loss.
But what has grieved and shamed me--and, well, broken my heart--is that Nevada saved me, made all my good fortune, my happiness, possible, by sacrificing himself. Father forgave me, took me back home to mother and you. Hart Blaine was proud to give me--ME, the lonely wild-horse hunter--his talented and beautiful daughter, the richest girl in all this valley of rich ranchers. I had fame, family, home, love, happiness beyond belief. Then father died, leaving me rich. I should say leaving us rich, for half of all this wonderful ranch is yours, Hettie. Next little Blaine came to bless me--my boy! . . . And Nevada went back to where he came from. God only knows where that is. I've spent a lot of money searching the West for a lean-faced rider who drawled his Texas accent--and answered to the name Nevada. And I can't find him."
"Some day you will, Ben," she whispered, thrillingly.
"Always I believed I would," went on Ben, whose tongue, once loosed, seemed in haste to unburden itself. "I lived on that hope.
But it's four years now. Four years. And that Forlorn River Ranch of ours is now worth a fortune. Half of that is Nevada's. Half of the Mule Deer Flat Ranch is Nevada's. He's worth money. . . . Why didn't he come back? The whole country rose up to bless him for killing Less Setter and his two accomplices. Why didn't he ever write? Just a line--a word to let me know he was alive and hadn't forgotten. Oh, damn him--damn him!"
"Hush--Ben," returned Hettie, almost faltering. "You don't mean to damn Nevada. . . . Don't you understand that the reason he disappeared like that, and became as one dead to you, was not because he feared the law might hold him for killing those wicked men who had trapped you. No! But because he feared we would find out who he really was. Oh, I know, Ben. That was it. Nevada had been bad. How bad I dare not imagine. . . . Don't you remember that day when he rode so furiously into the crowd to face Setter?
How the mere sight of him froze them with terror. . . . Oh, Ben, I fear Nevada had been some great and terrible gunman. . . . That gentle, soft-voiced boy who was afraid to touch me with his little finger! Oh, the mystery, the pity of it!"
"Gunman?" queried Ben, almost harshly. "I reckon so. I think I guessed it, he was so strange with guns. He handled a gun so marvellously. But what was that to me? . . . He could be Billy the Kid, or Plummer, or Wess Hardin, or Kingfisher, or Jim Lacy, or any other desperado I ever heard the name of--and what would I care?"
"Ben, dear, you quite overlooked something," rejoined Hettie, bravely, while she felt the hot blood mount to cheek and temple.
"Nevada loved not only you--but me too . . . and I--I loved him."
"Well, now, Hettie," replied Ben, strangely softened, "I reckon that's no news, though you never declared it so--so openly. But even though that was true, why should it make such a difference?"
"The boy came of a good family," replied Hettie. "He had fine instincts. And one of them was an instinct to disappear when there was danger of my learning who he really was. There can be no other reason. He had pride. And he loved me so--so well, he couldn't bear to shame me."
"Damn him, anyway!" burst out Ben, again. "He's broken your heart, too."
"Not yet," replied Hettie, in strong vibrating tones.
"Hettie, did that son-of-a-gun make love to you?" queried Ben, struggling with his resentment and remorse.
"Did--he?" murmured she, with a little broken laugh. "Ben, when he found out I cared--he--he made the most terrible love to me. . . .
Oh, I can never forget--never get over it!"
"Well!" ejaculated her brother, amazed out of his own pain. "How and when did he ever get the chance?"
"Wouldn't you like to know?" asked Hettie, archly.
"And you--my little sixteen-year-old sister! . . . Who can ever tell about a girl?"
"Ben, didn't Ina Blaine love YOU when she was five years old--and ten--and fourteen?" queried Hettie. "And at eighteen after she'd been away from you four years?"
"Thank the Lord, she did. I've never begun to understand it. But it's beautiful, wonderful. . . . Did my pard, Nevada, ever know you, too, had that strange, glorious thing--woman's love--for him?"
"Yes, Nevada knew," replied Hettie, eloquently. "He knew he had my faith, too. . . . And, Ben, THAT is why I've never lost him. I know. It's the way a woman feels. Nevada is not dead. He is not false to me--to what I believed he had become. And somewhere, somehow, he will come back to me--to us."
"My God! that's good to hear!" exclaimed Ben, with fervent emotion.
"You strike me right in the heart, Hettie."
"I'm glad. I've wanted to speak for long," replied Hettie, simply.
"And there's another thing that touches us closely."
"What's that?" he asked, anxiously, as she gazed solemnly up at him, and hesitated.
"Mother is failing. Haven't you noticed it?"
Ben nodded his head sorrowfully. "I reckon I try not to see, but I do."
"She has brightened up since spring came," went on Hettie. "Mother loves the sun, the trees, the flowers, the birds. She likes to be outdoors. Winter is long and cold here. It rains and snows and sleets. She dreads the icy wind. Honestly, Ben, I don't think it's grief for father. She has gotten over that. I believe this valley is bad for her. It's bad for me, too, in winter."
"I've been afraid of that very thing," declared her brother, thoughtfully. "But there's a possibility of some organic disease."
"Mother's not old," said Hettie. "She ought to live many years yet. But we must do something to help her. Ben, I suggest you take her to San Francisco. Get the opinion and advice of some up- to-date physician. Take Ina with you. Blaine will be safe with me. I'll run the ranch, never fear."
"By George! it's a great idea," declared Ben, with amazing enthusiasm. He leaped down off the corral fence, then turned to help Hettie. "Ina will be tickled. She'll get her brother Marvie to stay with you."
"Ben, I actually believe you've decided already," replied Hettie, suddenly feeling radiant.
"Reckon I have, and I'll bet you Ina squeals with joy. Let's go tell her this minute."
Hettie peeped through the corral fence at California Red.
"Good-by, you beautiful, stand-off wild thing!" she cried. "Some day some one will come and he'll tame you to eat out of my hand."
With arms locked, Hettie and Ben hurried down the lane, eager with the import of new hopes, happier than they had been for a long time. It was Ben now who talked, while Hettie kept silent. She thrilled with the consciousness that she had roused Ben from a creeping sad abstraction that had grown more noticeable of late.
Ben not only missed his old friend, Nevada, but also the wild-horse- hunting life which had been his sole occupation for years before his marriage, and which had been the cause of the alienation from his father.
Ina was in the yard, gathering violets, which certainly matched the blue of her spring dress and the color of her eyes. Little Blaine babbled at sight of his father and ran as fast as his short fat legs could carry him.
"Well, good-mawnin', you-all!" said Ina, gayly. "Say, you look excited." . . . Then she kissed Hettie and continued, "
Many happy, happy returns of the day."
Ben snatched the boy up and, holding him on his arm, he confronted Ina with a smile that held great portent.
"How soon can you get ready for a trip to San Francisco?" he asked, quite naturally, as if he were in the habit of speaking so every day.
"What! Oh, I knew something was up," she cried, the color flashing to her beautiful face. "How soon? . . . Fifteen minutes!"
"Ha! Ha! I thought you'd hit the saddle and ride that idea pronto," said Ben, happily. "But you needn't be so swift as that."
"Ben, are you really going to take me to Frisco?" asked Ina, eagerly.
"Yes. It's all settled. But--"
"You darling," she cried, kissing him. "I wanted to go somewhere.
The winter has been so long, so confining. Klamath Falls was my hope. But San Francisco! Oh!"
"Ina, I'm sorry I don't think of such things," replied Ben, ruefully. "I guess I'd fallen into a rut. You must thank Hettie."
Whereupon Ina most heartily embraced Hettie, and then, coming down to earth, she said: "Let's go in to breakfast. You can tell me there all about this grand idea."
"We'll tell you now," said Ben. "The trip to Frisco is on mother's account and we mustn't discuss it before her. The fact is, Ina, mother is failing. Something wrong with her. Hettie suggested we take her to San Francisco to see a competent physician. Blaine will be safe with Hettie and so will the ranch. What do you say, dearest?"
"I say it's a happy and wise suggestion," returned Ina, with a nod of commendation toward Hettie. "This damp cold Tule Lake does not agree with mother."
The only hitch in the plans formulated by Ben and Hettie concerned the coming of Marvie Blaine to stay at the Ide ranch. Hart Blaine would not allow his son to go.
"That boy can't run a mowin' machine, let alone a ranch," old Blaine had said to Ben.
There was trouble between Marvie and his father, for which, in Ben's opinion, both were equally to blame.
"Sure reminds me of my scrap with dad," remarked Ben to Hettie.
"Only _I_ was right and dad was wrong. Marvie refused to go to college. Reckon he's not so different from me. He likes horses and the open country."
"Some day Marvie will run off just as you did, Ben Ide," Hettie had answered.
So Hettie was left alone in the Ide homestead with little Blaine and the two women servants. She rather welcomed the solitude. She found how much her mother had taken of time and thought. Part of the day she had the servants take care of Blaine while she devoted herself to the many set tasks at hand and the new ones always arising. After supper, when Blaine had been put to bed, she had hours to be alone and think before her own rest claimed her.
The running of the ranch had at first seemed something that would be pleasure, rather than work. She discovered presently that it was not only work, but an extremely embarrassing and exasperating task. There were eighteen hands employed on the lake ranch, and as many more out in the hills. Most of these employees were young men of the valley, unmarried, and very desirous of changing that state of single blessedness. Some had been schoolmates of Hettie's. And there were several riders, long, lean, rangy fellows from the South, with whom Hettie grew most annoyed. They continually found reasons to ride in to the ranch. Some of the excuses were ridiculous in the extreme. These droll boys of the open range paid court to her, wholly oblivious of her rebuffs. In two weeks' time the whole contingent was in love with Hettie or trying to make her believe so. And the plowing, the planting, the movement of stock, the hauling of supplies, the herding of cattle, in fact all tasks pertaining to the operation of Ben Ide's ranches, had to be talked over elaborately with the temporary mistress.
Hettie had fun out of it, except in the case of the several lean- faced, quiet-eyed riders from the hills. They made love to her.
Moreover, they reminded her of Nevada, and that inflamed her lonely, hungry heart.
If Nevada had come to mind often in the past, what did he do now but haunt every hour? She saw him in every one of the range riders. Yet how incomparably he bestrode a horse! Hettie saw his lean, fine still face, so clean cut and brown, with the sleepy eyes that yet could wake to flame and also smile with a light she had never seen in any other. His old black sombrero, with bullet holes in the crown, when laid aside had appeared a disreputable thing, but on his head it had seemed picturesque and beautiful. His old silk scarf with the checks of red, the yellow vest with the string of a little tobacco pouch always hanging out of a pocket, the worn leather wristbands, the high top-boots with their scalloped edges, and their long bright jingling spurs--how well she remembered them, how vividly they were limned in the eye of her memory! Then, as something inevitable at the end of reminiscence, something that seemed an inseparable part of Nevada, she recalled the dark and heavy gun he had always worn. It had bumped against her as she walked beside him. When he had taken her in his arms, even in the sweet madness of that moment, she had felt the gun hard and cold against her.
The years had brought Hettie stronger and deeper love for Nevada.
As she looked back now she remembered her open aversion to his gun, and to the something about him that hinted of its deadly use. She had been a callow, sentimental girl, sickened at the thought of bloodshed, hostile toward the spirit and skill that had eventually saved her brother from ruin and perhaps herself from the villainous Setter.
She had lived and suffered during the four years since Nevada had ridden away, leaving death and calamity behind him. She was a woman now. She saw differently. She divined what she had been to him--how her friendship and love had uplifted him. How great and enduring had her own love become! She was his alone. Separation could never change her.
"What did it matter who Nevada was or what he was before he came to Ben and me?" she mused, sitting by the open window in the dark, listening to the last sleepy honks of wild geese and the melancholy peep-peep of spring frogs. "But he could not see that. Yet he must have known it would not matter to me, so long as he kept himself the Nevada we knew and loved. . . . Would he ever fall to rustling cattle, if that had once been his crime? No! Would he ever drink again? No! Could he sink to the embrace of some bad woman? Never! . . . Will he use again that terrible gun? . . .
Ah, he WILL! I feel it. If not for himself, then for some one. . . . He was flame and lightning to destroy!"
Chapter six.
Hettie's folk did not return from San Francisco on the date they had specified, nor did she receive any letter from them. Every day thereafter she expected them, only to be disappointed. This, added to the increasing perplexity of the duties that had been left to her, and the persistence of her admirers, wore her into such a nervous state that she failed to keep her boast about running the ranch.
One day several strangers from Klamath Falls called upon Hettie.
They were business men, representing an Oregon syndicate, who were buying up land around Tule Lake Valley. There had been considerable speculation in that vicinity since the draining of the lake. The Ides had received offers before, but never anything like the one made by these men. Hettie was shrewd enough to grasp that some situation had arisen, such as the possibility of a railroad from Klamath Falls, to increase the value of the Ide property enormously. She neither refused nor accepted the offer, saying that control of the ranches was in her brother's hand. Her amazement and gratification, however, lingered after their departure. She scarcely ever thought of herself as sharing equally with Ben the fortune their father had left them.
Hettie happened to be out on the farm somewhere when her people returned; and upon coming back to the house, hot and dusty and weary, what was her surprise and joy to be waylaid in the hall by her mother and Ina. It took no second glance to see that the little trip had been happily beneficial, especially to her mother.
When they reached the sitting room, Hettie was on the verge of tears. Sight of Ben then was too much for her, and she ran weeping into his outstretched arms.
"Oh--Ben," she cried, "
I--I fell down on running the ranch! . . .
The silly fools nagged me--to death!"
"Who?" queried Ben, suddenly aghast.
"The boys--and some of the men--too. They just--made my life-- miserable."
"Well! The lazy sons-of-guns!" ejaculated Ben. "I'll fire the whole caboodle of them."
Ina's tender solicitude and Ben's anger at once calmed Hettie.
"Oh no, Ben. It's not so--so bad as that. They only hatched every pretense and excuse to approach me--just to make outrageous love."
Ben's haw-haw mingled with Ina's scream of laughter. Hettie had to accept that mirth with the best grace possible. Her troubles were over, at last, and she could not but forgive the suitors who had so besieged her. The high spirits of Ben and Ina and the certain evidence of her mother's improvement were sufficient to lift Hettie to the heights.
"What'd you bring me from Frisco?" she asked presently, with all a child's eagerness.
"Candy," replied Ben, with a smile.
"A new spring dress and hat--oh, adorable," replied Ina.
"Well, daughter, I fetched you somethin' too," added Mrs. Ide, beaming.
"I--I'm almost glad you went off and left me alone," responded Hettie, gratefully.
Nothing was said during supper about the main object of the journey to San Francisco. Ina told of their trips to the stores, and Ben of their jaunts to seashore and parks and theaters. Later, when Mrs. Ide had retired, Ben took Hettie into Ina's room, where the ecstatic Blaine gloated over his new toys.
"Well, Hettie, your sending us off on this trip means a great change in our lives," began Ben, gravely.
"Oh--Ben!" faltered Hettie.
Here Ina interposed to reprove Ben for his abruptness and lack of tact. Then she added, "Hettie dear, it's nothing to frighten you."
"Winter and spring are too damp and cold for mother," continued Ben. "To keep her here longer will endanger her life."
"Then we certainly won't keep her," replied Hettie, resolutely.
"Exactly. Ina and I got that far, anyway, in our decision."
