by B. M. Bower
Billy Louise shifted uneasily in the saddle and pulled her eyebrows together. “If you think you’ve lost some cattle, for heaven’s sake why don’t you say so!” (Ward smiled to himself at her tone.) “If there’s anything I hate, it’s hinting and never coming right out with anything. Have you lost any?”
Charlie turned with a hand on the cantle and faced her with polite reproach. “Peter says we have,” he admitted, with very evident reluctance. “I hardly think so myself. I’d have to count them. I know, of course, how many we’ve bought in the last year.”
“Well, Peter knows more about it than you do,” Billy Louise told him bluntly. “If he has missed any, they’re probably gone.”
“I was in hopes you would be on my side, Miss Louise.” Charlie smiled deprecatingly. “I’ve argued with Aunt Martha and Peter until— But I didn’t know you were a confirmed pessimist as well!”
“You didn’t neglect to put your brand on them, did you?” asked Billy Louise cruelly.
Charlie flushed under the sunburn. “Really, Miss Louise, you’ve no mercy on a tenderfoot, have you?” he protested. “No, they are all branded, really they are. Peter and Aunt Martha saw to that,” he confessed naïvely.
“It seems queer,” said Billy Louise, thinking aloud. “Ward, there certainly is rustling going on around here; and no one seems to know a thing beyond the mere fact that they’re losing cattle. Seabeck has lost some—”
“Oh, are you sure?” Charlie’s eyes widened perceptibly. “I hadn’t heard that. By Jove! It sort of makes a fellow feel shaky about going into cattle very strong, doesn’t it? It—it knocks off the profits like the very deuce, to keep losing one here and there.”
“A fellow has to figure on a certain percentage of loss,” said Ward. “This the new gate?”
“Yes.” Charlie seemed relieved by the diversion. “Just merely a gate, as you see; but we Covers are proud of every little improvement. Aunt Martha comes up here every day, I verily believe, just to look at it and admire it. The poor old soul never had any conveniences that she couldn’t make herself, you know, and she thinks this is great stuff. I put this padlock on it so she can lock herself in, nights when I’m away. She feels better with the gate locked. And then I’ve got a dog that’s as good as a company of soldiers himself. If either of you happen down here when there’s no one about, you will have to introduce yourselves to Cerberus—so named because he guards the gates—not the gate to Hades, please remember. Surbus, Aunt Martha calls him, which is good Idahoese and seems to please him as well as any other. Just speak to him by name—Surbus if you like—and he will be all right, I think.” He held open the gate for them to ride through and gave them a comradely look and smile as they passed.
Ward took in the details of the heavy gate that barred the gorge. He did not know that he betrayed the fact even to the sharp eyes of Billy Louise, but he could not quite bring himself to the point of meeting Charlie Fox anywhere near half-way in his overtures for friendship.
“The weight is so heavy that the gate shuts and latches itself, you see,” Charlie went on, mounting on the inside of the barrier and following cheerfully after them. “But that doesn’t satisfy Aunt Martha. She and Surbus make a special pilgrimage up here every night.”
“She must be pretty nervous.” Ward could not quite see why such precautions were necessary in a country where no man locked his door against the world.
“Well, she is, though you wouldn’t suspect it, would you? When one thinks of the life she has lived, and how she pioneered in here when the country was straight wilderness, and all that. Of course, I didn’t know her before Uncle Jason died—do you think she has changed since, Miss Louise?”
“Lots,” Billy Louise assured him briefly. She was wondering why Ward was so stiff and unnatural with Charlie Fox.
“I think myself that the shock of losing him must have made the difference in her. There’s Surbus; how’s that for a voice? And he’s just as blood-thirsty as he sounds, too. I’d hate to have him tackle me in the gorge, on a dark night. He’s too savage, though it’s only with strangers, and we don’t see many of them. He almost ate Peter up, when he first came. And he gave you quite a scare last spring, didn’t he, Miss Louise?”
“He came within an ace of getting his head shot off,” Billy Louise qualified laconically. “Marthy came out just in the nick of time. I absolutely refuse to be chewed up by any dog; and I don’t care who he belongs to.”
“Same here, William,” approved Ward.
Charlie laughed. “I see Surbus is not going to be popular with the neighbors,” he said easily. “I do feel very apologetic over him. But Marthy wanted me to get a dog, and so when a fellow offered me this one, I took him; and as Surbus happened to take a fancy to me, I didn’t realize what a savage brute he is, till he tackled Peter—and then Miss Louise.”
“Well, Miss Louise was perfectly able to defend herself, so you needn’t feel apologetic about that,” said Billy Louise a trifle sharply. She hated Surbus, and she was quite open in her hatred. “If he ever comes at me again, and nobody calls him off, I shall shoot him.” It was not a threat, as she spoke it, but a plain statement of a fact. “You’d better serve notice too, Ward. He’s a nasty beast, and he’d just as soon kill a person as not. He was going to jump for my throat. He was crouched, just ready to spring—and I had my gun out—when Marthy saw us and gave a yell fit to wake the dead. Surbus didn’t jump, and I didn’t shoot. That’s how close he came to being a dead dog.”
She glanced at Ward and then furtively at Charlie Fox. If expression meant anything, Surbus was yet in danger of paying for that assault. She caught Ward’s truculent eye, smiled, and shook her head at him. “We’re pretty fair friends now,” she said. “At least, we don’t try to kill each other whenever we meet. ‘Armed neutrality’ fits our case fine.”
“I think I’ll volunteer under your flag,” said Ward. “I’ll leave Cerberus alone as long as he leaves me and my friends alone. But I’d advise him not to start anything.”
“That’s all Surbus or anyone else can ask. Come on, old fellow! Pardon me,” he added to his companions and rode past them to meet the great, heavy-jowled dog. “Be still, Surbus. We’re all friends, here.”
The dog lifted a non-committal glance to Ward’s face, growled deep in his chest, and dropped behind, nosing the tracks of Blue and Rattler as if he would identify them and fix them in his memory for future use.
Ward had never seen the Cove in summer. He looked about him curiously, struck by the atmosphere of quiet plenty. Over the crude fence hung fruit-laden branches from the jungle within. There was a smell of ripening plums in the air, and the hum of bees. Somewhere in the orchard a wild canary was singing. If he could live down here, he thought, with Billy Louise and none other near, he would ask no odds of the world or of heaven. He glanced at Charlie Fox enviously. Well, he had a fairly well-sheltered place of his own, up there in the hills. He could set out fruit and plants and things and have a little Eden of his own; though of course it couldn’t be like this place, sheltered as it was from harsh winds by that high rock wall, and soaking in sunshine all day long. Still, he could fix his place up a lot, with a little time and thought and a good deal of hard work.
He looked at Billy Louise and saw how the beauty of the place appealed to her, and right there he decided to study horticulture so that he could raise plums and apples and hollyhocks and things.
CHAPTER XI
WAS IT THE DOG?
“That old dame down there thinks a lot of you, William.” Ward had closed the gate and was preparing to remount.
“Well, is there any reason why she shouldn’t?” The tone of Billy Louise was not far from petulant.
“Not a reason. What’s molla, Bill?”
“Nothing that I know of.” Billy Louise lifted her eyes to the rock cabbages on the cliff above them and tried to speak convincingly.
“Yes, there is. Something’s gone wrong. Can’t you tell a pal, Wilhemina?”
“No, I can’t tell a pal—or anybody else. I don’t know. Something’s different, down there. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t like it.” She thought a minute and then smiled with that little twist of the lips Ward liked so much. “Maybe it’s the dog,” she guessed. “I never see his ugly mug that I don’t feel like taking a shot at him. I like dogs, too, as a general thing. He’s got a wicked heart! I know he has. He’d like nothing better than to take a chunk out of me.”
“I’ll go back and kill him; shall I, Bill Loo?”
“No. Some day maybe I’ll get a chance at him myself. I’ve warned Marthy, so—”
“Are you dead sure it’s the dog?” Ward looked at her with that keenness of glance which was hard to meet if one wanted to keep a secret from him.
“Why?” Billy Louise’s tone did not invite further questioning.
“Oh, nothing! I just wondered.”
“You don’t like Charlie; anybody can see that.”
“Yes? Foxy’s a real nice young man.”
“But you don’t like him. You never do like anybody—”
“No?” Ward’s smile dared her to persist in the accusation. “In that case I’ve no business to be fooling around here when there’s work to be done. That Cove down there has roused a heap of brand-new wants in me, Wilhemina. Gotta have an orchard up on Mill Creek, lady-fair. Gotta have a flower garden and things that climb all over the house and smell nice. Gotta have four times as much meadow as I’ve got now, and a house full of books and pictures and things, and more cattle and horses, and a yellow canary in a yellow cage singing his head off out on the porch. Gotta work like one son-of-a-gun, Wilhemina, to get all those things and get ’em quick, so I can stand some show of—getting what I really do want.”
“Well, am I keeping you?” Billy Louise was certainly in a villainous mood.
“You are,” Ward affirmed quite calmly. “Only for you, I’d be hustling like the mischief right this minute along the get-rich trail. Say, Bill, I don’t believe it’s the dog!” He looked at her with the smile hiding just behind his lips and his eyes. And behind the smile, if one’s insight were keen enough to see it, was a troubled anxiety. He shifted the pail of currants to the other arm and spoke again:
“What is it, Wilhemina? Something’s bothering you. Can’t you tell a fellow what it is?”
“No, I can’t.” Billy Louise spoke crossly. “I’ve got a headache. I’ve been riding ever since this morning, and I should think that’s reason enough. I wish to goodness you’d let me alone. Go on back to work, if you’re so crazy about working; I’m sure I don’t want to hinder you in any of your get-rich-quick schemes!” She shut her teeth together with a click, jerked Blue angrily into the trail when he had merely stepped out of it to avoid a rock, and managed to make him as conscious of her mood as was Ward.
Ward eyed her unobtrusively with his face set straight ahead. He glanced down at the pail of currants, which was heavy, and at the trail, which was long and lonely. He twisted his lips in brief sarcasm—for he had a temper of his own—and rode on with his neck set very stiff and his eyes a trifle harder than they had ever been before when Billy Louise rode alongside. He did not turn off at the ford—and Billy Louise betrayed by a quick glance at him that she had half expected him to desert her there—but crossed it beside her and rode on up the hill.
He had made up his mind that he would not speak to her again until she wiped out, by apology or a change of manner, that last offensive remark of hers. He hoped she realized that he was only going with her to carry the currants, and he hoped she realized also that, if she had been any other person who had spoken to him like that, he would have dumped the currants on the ground and ridden off and left her to her own devices.
He did not once speak to Billy Louise on the way to the Wolverine; but his silence changed gradually from stubbornness to pure abstraction, as they rode leisurely along the dusty trail with the sunset glowing before them. He almost forgot the actual presence of Billy Louise, and he did actually forget her mood. He was planning just how and where he should plant his orchard, and he was mentally building an addition to the cabin and screening a porch wide enough to hang a hammock inside, and he was seeing Billy Louise luxuriously swinging in that hammock while he sat close, and smoked and teased and gloried in his possession of her companionship.
His thoughts shuttled to his little mine, though he seldom dignified it by that title. He speculated upon the amount of gold he might yet hope to wash out of that gravel streak, though he had held himself sternly back from such mental indulgence all the spring. He felt that he was going to need every grain of gold he could glean. He wanted his wife—he glowed at the mere thinking of that name—to have the nicest little home in the country. He decided that it would be pleasanter than the Cove, all things considered; he had a fine view of the rugged hills from his cabin, and he imagined the Cove must be pretty hot during the days, with that high rock wall shutting off the wind and reflecting the sun. His own place was sheltered, but still it was not set down in the bottom of a well. She had liked it. She had said…
They rode over the crest of the bluff and down the steep trail into the Wolverine. However cloudy the atmosphere between the two, the ride had seemed short—so short that Ward felt the jar of surprise when he looked down and saw the cabin below them. He glanced at Billy Louise, guessed from her somber face that the villainous mood still held her, and sighed a little. He was not deeply concerned by her mood. He understood her too well to descend into any slough of despondence because she was cross. Then he remembered the reason she had given—the reason he had not believed at the time. They were down by the gate, then.
“Head still ache, William?” he asked, in the tone which he could make a fair substitute for a caress.
“Yes,” said Billy Louise, and did not look at him.
Ward was inwardly skeptical, but he did not tell her so. He swung off his horse, set down the pail of currants, and took Blue by the bridle.
“You go on in. I’ll unsaddle,” he commanded her quietly. And Billy Louise, after a perceptible hesitation, obeyed him without looking at him or speaking a word.
If Ward resented her manner, which was unreasonably uppish, he could not have chosen a more effective revenge. He talked with Mrs. MacDonald all through supper and paid no attention to Billy Louise. After supper he spied a fairly fresh Boise paper, and underneath that lay the Butte Miner. That discovery settled the evening, so far as he was concerned. If he and Billy Louise had been on the best of terms, it is doubtful if she could have dragged his attention from those papers.
Several times Billy Louise looked at him as though she meditated going over and snatching them away from him, but she resisted the temptation and continued to behave as a nice young woman should behave toward a guest. She left him sitting inside by the lamp, which her mother had lighted for his especial convenience, and went out and sat on the doorstep and stared at the dusky line of hills and at the Big Dipper. She was trying to think out the tangle of tiny, threadlike mysteries that had enmeshed her thoughts and tightened her nerves until she could not speak a decent word to anyone.
She felt that the lives of those around her were weaving puzzle-patterns, and that she must guess the puzzles. And she felt as though part of the patterns had been left out, so that there were ragged points thrusting themselves upon her notice—points that did not point to anything.
She sat with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her cupped palms, and scowled at the Big Dipper as if it held the answer away up there beyond her reach. Where did Ward get the money to do all the things he had done, this spring and summer? If he expected her to believe that wolf story—!
What became of the cattle that had disappeared, by twos and threes and sometimes more, in the last few months? Was there a gang of thieves operating in the country, and where did they stay?
Why had Ward hinted that she did not like Charlie Fox, and why didn’t he himself like Charlie? Why had she felt that weight of depression creep over her when they were leaving the Cove? Why? Why?
Billy Louise tried to bring her cold, common sense to the front. She had found it a most effective remedy for most moods. Now it assured her impatiently that every question—save one—had been born in her own super-sensitive self. That one definite question was the first one she had tried to answer. It kept asking itself, over and over, until in desperation Billy Louise went to bed and tried to forget it in sleep.
Somewhere about midnight—she had heard the clock strike eleven a long while ago—she scared her mother by sitting up suddenly in bed and exclaiming relievedly: “Oh, I know; it’s some new poison! He poisons them!”
“Wake up! For the land’s sake, what are you dreaming about?” Her mother shook her agitatedly by the arm. “Billy Louise! Wake up!”
“All right, mommie.” Billy Louise lay down and snuggled the light blanket over her shoulders. She had been awake and thinking, thinking till she thought she never could stop, but she did not tell mommie that. She went to sleep and dreamed about poisoned wolves till it is a wonder she did not have a real nightmare. The question was answered, and for the time being the answer satisfied her.
Ward was surely an unusual type of young man. He did not seem to remember, the next morning, that there had been any outbreak of bottled emotions on his part the day before, or any ill-temper on the part of Billy Louise, or anything at all out of the ordinary. Billy Louise had prepared herself to apologize—in some roundabout manner which would effect a reconciliation without hurting her pride too much—and she was rather chagrined to discover that Ward seemed neither to expect or to want any apology.
“Sorry I gotta go, William,” he volunteered whimsically soon after breakfast. “But I gotta dig. Say, Wilhemina, if I stay away long enough, will you come after me again?”
“A wise man,” said Billy Louise evasively, “may do a foolish thing once, but only a fool does it twice.”
