"Well?"
"Couldn't help—what I did."
"You're a nicely brought up young woman—about as savage as the rest of your wolf breed," jeered Weaver.
Yet he exulted in her—in the impulse of ferocity that had made her strike swiftly, regardless of risk to herself, at the man who had hounded and harried her kin to the feud that was now raging. Her shy, untamed beauty would not itself have attracted him; but in combination with her fierce courage it made to him an appeal which he conceded grudgingly.
"What in Heaven's name brought you back after you had once got away?" Weaver asked.
The girl looked at Keller without answering.
"I reckon I can tell you that, seh," explained that young man. "She figured you would jump on me as the guilty party. It got on her conscience that she had left an innocent man to stand for it. I shouldn't wonder but she got to seeing a picture of you-all hanging me or shooting me up. So she came back to own up, if she saw you had caught me."
Weaver nodded. "That's the way I figure it, too. Gamest thing I ever saw a woman do," he said in an undertone to Keller, with whom he was now standing a little apart.
The latter agreed. "Never saw the beat of it. She's scared stiff, too. Makes it all the pluckier. What will you do with her?"
"Take her along with me back to the ranch."
"I wouldn't do that," said the young man quickly.
"Wouldn't you?" Weaver's hard gaze went over him haughtily. "When I want your advice, I'll ask you for it, young man. You're in luck to get off scot-free yourself. That ought to content you for one day."
"But what are you going to do with her? Surely not have her imprisoned for attacking you?"
"I'll do as I dashed please, and don't you forget it, Mr. Keller. Better mind your own business, if you've got any."
With which Buck Weaver turned on his heel, and swung slowly to the saddle. His arm was paining him a great deal, but he gave no sign of it. He expected his men to game it out when they ran into bad luck, and he was stoic enough to set them an example without making any complaints.
The little group of riders turned down the trail, passed through the gateway that led to the valley below, and wound down among the cow-backed hills toward the ranch roofs, which gleamed in the distance. They were the houses of the Twin Star outfit, the big concern owned by Buck Weaver, whose cattle fed literally upon a thousand hills.
It suited Buck's ironic humor to ride beside the girl who had just attempted his life. He bore her no resentment. Had the offender been a man, Buck would have snuffed out his life with as little remorse as he would a guttering candle. But her sex and her youth, and some quality of charm in her, had altered the equation. He meant to show her who was master, but he would choose a different method.
What sport to tame the spirit of this wild desert beauty until she should come like one of her own sheep dogs at his beck and call! He had never yet met the woman he could not dominate. This one, too, would know a good many new emotions before she rejoined her tribe in the hills.
He swung from the saddle at the ranch plaza, and greeted her with a deep bow that mocked her.
"Welcome, Miss Sanderson, to the best the Twin Star outfit has to offer. I hope you will enjoy your visit, which is going to be a long one."
To a Mexican woman, who had come out to the porch in answer to his call, he delivered the girl, charging her duty in two quick sentences of Spanish. The woman nodded her understanding, and led Phyllis inside.
Weaver noticed with delight that his captive's eye met his steadily, with the defiant fierceness of some hunted wild thing. Here was a woman worth taming, even though she was still a girl in years. His exultant eye, returning from the last glimpse of the lissom figure as it disappeared, met the gaze of Keller. That young man was watching him with an odd look of challenge on his usually impassive face.
The cattleman felt the spur of a new antagonism stirring his blood. There was something almost like a sneer on his lips as he spoke:
"Sorry to lose your company, Mr. Keller. But if you're homesteading, of course, we'll have to let you go back to the hills right away. Couldn't think of keeping you from that spring plowing that's waiting to be done."
"You're putting up a different line of talk from what you did. How about that charge of rustling against me, Mr. Weaver? Don't you want to hold me while you investigate it?"
"No, I reckon not. Your lady friend gives you a clean bill of health. She may or may not be lying. I'm not so sure myself. But without her the case against you falls."
Keller knew himself dismissed cavalierly, and, much as he would have liked to stay, he could find no further excuse to urge. He could hardly invite himself to be either the guest or the prisoner of a man who did not want him.
"Just as you say," he nodded, and turned carelessly to his pony.
Yet he was quite sure it would not be as Weaver said if he could help it. He meant to take a hand in the game, no matter what the other might decree. But for the present he acquiesced in the inevitable. Weaver was technically within his rights in holding her until he had communicated with the sheriff. A generous foe might not have stood out for his pound of flesh, but Buck was as hard as nails. As for the reputation of the girl, it was safe at the Twin Star ranch. Buck's sister, a maiden lady of uncertain years, was on hand to play chaperone.
Larrabie swung to the saddle. His horse's hoofs were presently flinging dirt toward the Twin Star as he loped up to the hills.
* * *
CHAPTER VIII
MISS-GOING-ON-EIGHTEEN
Time had been when the range was large enough for all, when every man's cattle might graze at will from horizon to horizon. But with the push of settlement to the frontier had come a change. The feeding ground became overstocked. One outfit elbowed another, and lines began to be drawn between the runs of different owners. Water holes were seized and fenced, with or without due process of law.
With the establishment of forest reserves a new policy dominated the government. Sanderson had been one of the first to avail himself of it by leasing the public demesne for his stock. Later, learning that the mountain parks were to be thrown open as a pasturage for sheep, he had bought three thousand and driven them up, having first arranged terms with the forestry service.
Buck Weaver, fighting the government reserve policy with all his might, resented fiercely the attitude of Sanderson. A sharp, bitter quarrel had resulted, and had left a smoldering bad feeling that flamed at times into open warfare. Upon the wholesome Malpais country had fallen the bitterness of a sheep and cattle feud.
The riders of the Twin Star outfit had thrice raided the Sanderson flocks. Lambing sheep had been run cruelly. One herd had been clubbed over a precipice, another decimated with poison. In return, the herders shot and hamstrung Twin Star cows. A herder was held up and beaten by cowboys. Next week a vaquero galloped home to the Twin Star ranch with a bullet through his leg. This was the situation at the time when the owner of the big ranch brought Phyllis a prisoner to its hospitality.
Nothing could have been more pat to his liking. He was, in large measure, the force behind the law in San Miguel county. The sheriff whom he had elected to office would be conveniently deaf to any illegality there might be in his holding the girl, would if necessary give him an order to hold her there until further notice. The attempt to assassinate him would serve as excuse enough for a proceeding even more highhanded than this. Her relatives could scarce appeal to the law, since the law would then step in and send her to the penitentiary. He could use her position as a hostage to force her stiff-necked father to come to terms.
But it was characteristic of the man that his reason for keeping her was, after all, less the advantage he might gain by it than the pleasure he found in tormenting her and her family. To this instinct of the jungle beast was added the interest she had inspired in him. Untaught of life she was, no doubt, a child of the desert, in some ways primitive as Eve; but he perceived in her the capacity for deep feelin
g, for passion, for that kind of fierce, dauntless endurance it is given some women to possess.
Miss Weaver took charge of the comfort of her guest. Her manner showed severe disapproval of this girl so lost to the feelings of her sex as to have attempted murder. That she was young and pretty made matters worse. Alice Weaver always had worshipped her brother, by the law of opposites perhaps. She was as drab and respectable as Boston. All her tastes ran to humdrum monotony. But turbulent, lawless Buck, the brother whom she had brought up after the death of their mother, held her heart in the hollow of his hard, careless hand.
"Have you had everything you wish?" she would ask Phyllis in a frigid voice.
"I want to be taken home."
"You should have thought of that before you did the dreadful thing you did."
"You are holding me here a prisoner, then?"
"An involuntary guest, my brother puts it. Until the sheriff can make other arrangements."
"You have no right to do it without notifying my father. He is at Noches with my brother."
"Mr. Weaver will do as he thinks best about that." The spinster shut her lips tight and walked from the room.
Supper was brought to Phyllis by the Mexican woman. In spite of her indignation she ate and slept well. Nor did her appetite appear impaired next morning, when she breakfasted in her bedroom. Noon found her promoted to the family dining room. Weaver carried his arm in a sling, but made no reference to the fact. He attempted conversation, but Phyllis withdrew into herself and had nothing more friendly than a plain "No" or "Yes" for him. His sister was presently called away to arrange some household difficulty. At once Phyllis attacked the big man lounging in his chair at his ease.
"I want to go home. I've got to be at the schoolhouse to-morrow morning," she announced.
"It won't hurt you any to miss a few days' schooling, my dear. You'll learn more here than you will there, anyhow," he assured her pleasantly. Buck was cracking two walnuts in the palm of his hand and let his lazy smile drift her way only casually.
She stamped her foot. "I tell you I'm the teacher. It is necessary I should be there."
"You a schoolmarm!" he repeated, in surprise. "How old are you?"
Her dress was scarcely below her shoe tops. She still had the slimness of immature girlhood, the adorable shy daring of some uncaptured wood nymph.
"Does that matter to you, sir?"
"How old?" he reiterated.
"Going-on-eighteen," she answered—not because she wanted to, but because somehow she must. There was something compelling about this man's will. She would have resisted it had she not wanted to gain her point about going home.
"So you teach the kids their A B C's, do you? And you just out of them yourself! How many scholars have you?"
"Fourteen."
"And they all love teacher, of course. Would you take me for a scholar, Miss Going-On-Eighteen?"
"No!" she flamed.
"You'd find me right teachable. And I would promise to love you, too."
Color came and went in her face beneath the brow. How dared he mock her so! It humiliated and embarrassed and angered her.
"Are you going to let me go back to my school?" she demanded.
"I reckon your school will have to get along without you for a few days. Your fourteen scholars will keep right on loving you, I expect. 'To memory dear, though far from eye.' Or, if you like, I'll send my boys up into the hills, and round up the whole fourteen here for you. Then school can keep right here in the house. How about that? Ain't that a good notion, Miss Going-On-Eighteen?"
She could stand his ironic mockery no longer. She faced him, fearless as a tiger: "You villain!"
With that, turning on her heel, she passed swiftly into her little bedroom, and slammed the door. He heard the key turn in the lock.
"She's sure got some devil in her," he laughed appreciatively, and he cracked another walnut.
Already he had struck the steel of her quality. She would be his prisoner because she must, but the "no compromise" flag was nailed to her masthead.
"I wonder why you are so fond of me?" he mused aloud next day when he found her as unresponsive to his advances as a block of wood.
He was lying in the sand at her feet, his splendid body relaxed full length at supple ease. Leaning on an elbow, he had been watching her for some time.
Her gaze was on the distant line of hills; on her face that far-away expression which told him that he was not on the map for her. Used as he was to impressing himself upon the imagination of women, this stung his vanity sharply. He liked better the times when her passion flamed out at him.
Now he lost his sardonic mockery in a flash of anger.
"Do you hear me? I asked you a question."
She brought her head round until her eyes rested upon him.
"Will you ask it again, please? I wasn't listening."
"I want to know what makes you hate me so," he demanded roughly.
"Do I hate you?"
He laughed irritably. "What else do you call it? You won't hardly eat at the same table with me. Last night you wouldn't come down to supper. Same way this morning. If I sit down near you, soon you find an excuse to leave. When I speak, you don't answer."
"You are my jailer, not my friend."
"I might be both."
"No, thank you!"
She said it with such quick, instinctive certainty that he ground his teeth in resentment. He was the kind of man that always wanted what he could not get. He began to covet this girl mightily, even while he told himself that he was a fool for his pains. What was she but an untaught, country schoolgirl? It would be a strange irony of fate if Buck Weaver should fall in love with a sheepman's daughter.
"Many people would go far to get my friendship," he told her.
Quietly she looked at him. "The friends of my people are my friends. Their enemies are mine."
"Yet you said you didn't hate me."
"I thought I did, but I find I don't."
"Not worth hating, I suppose?"
She neither corrected nor rejected his explanation.
He touched his wounded arm as he went on: "If you don't hate me, why this compliment to me? I reckon good, genuine hate sent that bullet."
The girl colored, but after a moment's hesitation answered:
"Once I shot a coyote when I saw it making ready to pounce on one of our lambs. I did not hate that coyote."
"Thank you," he told her ironically.
Her gaze went back to the mountains. She had always had a capacity for silence. But it was as extraordinary to her as to him how, in the past few days, she had sloughed the shy timidity of a mountain girl and found the enduring courage of womanhood. Her wits, too, had taken on the edge of maturity. He found that her tongue could strike swiftly and sharply. She was learning to defend herself in all the ways women have acquired by inheritance.
Weaver's jaw set like a vise. Getting to his feet, he looked down at her with the hard, relentless eyes that had made his name a terror.
"Good enough, Miss Phyllis Sanderson. You've chosen your way. I'll choose mine. You've got to learn that I'm master here; and, by God, I'll teach it to you. Before I get through with you, young woman, you'll come running when I snap my fingers. From to-day things will be different. You'll eat your meals with us and not in your room. You'll speak when you're spoken to. Set yourself up against me, and I'll bring you to your knees fast enough. There's no law on the Twin Star Ranch but Buck Weaver's will."
He strode away, almost herculean in figure, and every inch of him forceful. She had never seen such a man, one so virile and, at the same time, so wilful and so masterful. Before he was out of her sight, she got an instance of his recklessness.
A Mexican vaquero was driving some horses into a corral. His master strode up to him, and dragged him from the saddle.
"Didn't I tell you to take the colts down to the long pasture?"
"Si, señor," answered the trembling native.
Weav
er's great fist rose and fell once. The Mexican sank limply down. Without another glance at him, the cattleman flung him aside, and strode to the house.
As the owner of the Twin Star had said, so it was. Thereafter Phyllis sat at the table with him and his sister, while Josephine, the Mexican woman, waited upon them. The girl came and went at his bidding. But she held herself with such a quiet aloofness that his victory was a barren one.
"Do you want to go home?" he taunted her one morning, while at breakfast.
"Is it likely I would want to stay here?" she retorted.
"Why not? What have you to complain of? Aren't you treated well?"
"Yes."
"What, then? Are you afraid?"
"No!" she answered, with a flash of her fine eyes.
"That's good, because you've got to stay here—or go to the pen. You may take your choice."
"You're very generous. I suppose you don't expect to keep me here always," she said scornfully.
"Until my arm gets well. Since you wounded it you ought to nurse it."
"Which I am not doing, even while I am here."
"Anyhow it soothes the temper of the invalid to have you around." He grinned satirically.
"So I judge, from the effects."
"Meaning that I'm always in a rage when I leave you?"
"I notice your men are marked up a good deal these days."
"I'll tell them to thank you for it," he flung back.
Two days later, he scored on her hard for the first time. She came down to breakfast just as two of the Twin Star riders brought a boy into the hall.
She flew instantly into his arms, thereby embarrassing him vastly.
"Phil! How did you come here?"
Her brother nodded toward Curly and Pesky. "They found me outside and got the drop on me."
"You were here looking for me?"
"Yes. Just got back from Noches. Dad is still there. He don't know."
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