The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  “Can you direct me to the Bay State Ranch?” I hazarded. It was my last card, and I let it go with a sigh.

  She pointed a slim, scornful finger at the brand on Shylock’s shoulder.

  “If you are in doubt of the way, Mr. Carleton, your horse will take you home—if you give him his head.”

  That put a crimp in me worse than the look of her eyes, even. I stared at her a minute, and then laughed right out. “The game’s yours, Miss King, and I take off my hat to you for hitting straight and hard,” I said. “Must the feud descend even to the second generation? Is it a fight to the finish, and no quarter asked or given?”

  I had her going then. She blushed—and when I saw the red creep into her cheeks my heart was hardened to repentance. I’d have done it again for the pleasure of seeing her that way.

  “You are taking a good deal for granted, sir,” she said, in her loftiest tone. “We Kings scarcely consider the Carletons worthy our weapons.”

  “You don’t, eh? Then, why did you begin it?” I wanted to know. “If you permit me, you started the row before I spoke, even.”

  “I do not permit you.” Clearly, my lady could be haughty enough to satisfy the most fastidious.

  “Well,” I sighed, “I will go my way. I’m a lover of peace, myself; but since you proclaim war, war it must be. I’m not so ungallant as to oppose a lady’s wishes. Is that gate down there locked?”

  “Figuratively, it’s always locked against the Carletons,” she said.

  “But I want to go through it literally,” I retorted. And she just looked at me from under those lashes, and never answered.

  “Well, the air grows chill in King’s Highway,” I shivered mockingly. “If ever I find you on Bay State soil, Miss King, I shall take much pleasure in teaching you the proper way to treat an enemy.”

  “I shall be greatly diverted, no doubt,” was the scornful reply of her—and just then an old lady came to the door, and I lifted my hand grandly in a precise military salute and rode away, wondering which of us had had the best of it.

  The gate wasn’t locked, and as for taking a drink at the creek, I forgot that I was thirsty. I jogged along toward home, and wondered why Frosty had not told me that King had a daughter. Also, I wondered at her animosity. It never occurred to me that her father, unlike my dad, had probably harped on the Carletons until she had come to think we were in league with the Old Boy himself. Her dad’s game leg would no doubt argue strongly against us, and keep the feud green in her heart—supposing she had one.

  On the whole, I was glad I had traveled King’s Highway. I had discovered a brand-new enemy—and so far in my life enemies had been so scarce as to be a positive diversion. And it was novel and interesting to be so thoroughly hated by a girl. No reason to dodge her net. I rather congratulated myself on knowing one girl who positively refused to smile on demand. She hadn’t, once. I got to wondering, that night, if she had dimples. I meant to find out.

  CHAPTER V

  Into the Lion’s Mouth

  Perry Potter, when he had read the foreman’s note, asked how long since I left camp; when I told him that I was there at daylight, he looked at me queerly and walked off without a word. I didn’t say anything, either.

  I stayed at the ranch overnight, intending to start back the next morning. The round-up would be west of where I had left them, according to the foreman—or wagon-boss, as he is called. Logically, then, I should take the trail that led through Kenmore, the mining-camp owned by King, and which lay in the heart of White Divide ten miles west of King’s Highway. That, I say, was the logical route—but I wasn’t going to take it. I wasn’t a bit stuck on that huddle of corrals and sheds, with the trail winding blindly between, and I wasn’t in love with the girl or with old King; but, all the same, I meant to go back the way I came, just for my own private satisfaction.

  While I was saddling Shylock, in the opal-tinted sunrise, Potter came down and gave me the letter to the wagon-boss, an answer to the one I had brought.

  “Here’s some chuck the cook put up for yuh,” he remarked, handing me a bundle tied up in a flour-sack. “You’ll need it ’fore yuh get through to camp; you’ll likely be longer going than yuh was comin’.”

  “Think so?” I smiled knowingly to myself and left him staring disapprovingly after me. I could easily give a straight guess at what he was thinking.

  I jogged along as leisurely as I could without fretting Shylock, and, once clear of the home field, headed straight for King’s Highway. It wasn’t the wisest course I could take, perhaps, but it was like to prove the most exciting, and I never was remarkable for my wisdom. It seemed to me that it was necessary to my self-respect to return the way I came—and I may as well confess that I hoped Miss King was an early riser. As it was, I killed what time I could, and so spent a couple of hours where one would have sufficed.

  Half a mile out from the mouth of the pass, I observed a human form crowning the peak of a sharp-pointed little butte that rose up out of the prairie; since the form seemed to be in skirts, I made for the spot. Shylock puffed up the steep slope, and at last stopped still and looked back at me in utter disgust; so I took the hint and got off, and led him up the rest of the way.

  “Good morning. We meet on neutral ground,” I greeted when I was close behind her. “I propose a truce.”

  She jumped a bit, and looked very much astonished to see me there so close. If it had been some other girl—say Ethel Mapleton—I’d have suspected the genuineness of that surprise; as it was, I could only think she had been very much absorbed not to hear me scrambling up there.

  “You’re an early bird,” she said dryly, “to be so far from home.” She glanced toward the pass, as though she would like to cut and run, but hated to give me the satisfaction.

  “Well,” I told her with inane complacency, “you will remember that ‘it’s the early bird that catches the worm.’”

  “What a pretty speech!” she commented, and I saw what I’d done, and felt myself turn a beautiful purple. Compare her to a worm!

  But she laughed when she saw how uncomfortable I was, and after that I was almost glad I’d said it; she did have dimples—two of them—and—

  The laugh, however, was no sign of incipient amiability, as I very soon discovered. She turned her back on me and went imperturbably on with her sketching; she was trying to put on paper the lights and shades of White Divide—and even a desire to be chivalrous will not permit me to lie and say that she was making any great success of it. I don’t believe the Lord ever intended her for an artist.

  “Aren’t you giving King’s Highway a much wider mouth than it’s entitled to?” I asked mildly, after watching her for a minute.

  “I should not be surprised,” she told me haughtily, “if you some day wished it still wider.”

  “There wouldn’t be the chance for fighting, if it was; and I take great pleasure in keeping the feud going.”

  “I thought you were anxious for a truce,” she said recklessly, shading a slope so that it looked like the peak of a roof.

  “I am,” I retorted shamelessly. “I’m anxious for anything under the sun that will keep you talking to me. People might call that a flirtatious remark, but I plead not guilty; I wouldn’t know how to flirt, even if I wanted to do so.”

  She turned her head and looked at me in a way that I could not misunderstand; it was plain, unvarnished scorn, and a ladylike anger, and a few other unpleasant things.

  It made me think of a certain star in “The Taming of the Shrew.”

  “Fie, fie! unknit that threatening, unkind brow,

  And dart not scornful glances from those eyes,

  To wound thy neighbor and thine enemy,”

  I declaimed, with rather a free adaptation to my own need.

  Her brow positively refused to unknit. “Have you nothing to do but spout bad quotations from Shakespeare on a hilltop?” she wanted to know, in a particularly disagreeable tone.

  “Plenty; I have yet to win
that narrow pass,” I said.

  “Hardly today,” she told me, with more than a shade of triumph. “Father is at home, and he heard of your trip yesterday.”

  If she expected to scare me by that! “Must our feud include your father? When I met him a month ago, he gave me a cordial invitation to stop, if I ever happened this way.”

  She lifted those heavy lashes, and her eyes plainly spoke unbelief.

  “It’s a fact,” I assured her calmly. “I met him one day in Laurel, and was fortunate enough to perform a service which earned his gratitude. As I say, he invited me to come and see him; I told him I should be glad to have him visit me at the Bay State Ranch, and we embraced each other with much fervor.”

  “Indeed!” I could see that she persisted in doubting my veracity.

  “Ask your father if we didn’t,” I said, much injured. I knew she wouldn’t, though.

  A scrambling behind us made me turn, and there was Perry Potter climbing up to us, his eyes sharper than ever, and his face so absolutely devoid of expression that it told me a good deal. I’ll lay all I own he was a good bit astonished at what he saw! As for me, I could have kicked him back to the bottom of the hill—and I probably looked it.

  “There was something I forgot to put in that note,” he said evenly, just touching the brim of his hat in acknowledgment of the girl’s presence. “I wrote another one. I’d like Ballard to get it as soon as you can make camp—conveniently.” His eyes looked through me almost as if I weren’t there.

  My desire to kick him grew almost into mania. I took the note, saw at a glance that it was addressed to me, and said: “All right,” in a tone quite different from the one I had been using to tease Miss King.

  He gave me another sharp look, and went back the way he had come, leaving me standing there glaring after him. Miss King, I noticed, was sketching for dear life, and her cheeks were crimson.

  When Potter had got to the bottom and was riding away, I unfolded the note and read:

  Don’t be a fool. For God’s sake, have some sense and keep away from King’s Highway.

  I laughed, and Miss King looked up inquiringly. Following an impulse I’ve never yet been able to classify, I showed her the note.

  She read it calmly—I might say indifferently. “He is quite right,” she said coldly. “I, too—if I cared enough—would advise you to keep away from King’s Highway.”

  “But you don’t care enough to advise me, and so I shall go,” I said—and I had the satisfaction of seeing her teeth come down sharply on her lower lip. I waited a minute, watching her.

  “You’re very foolish,” she said icily, and went at her sketching again.

  I waited another minute; during that time she succeeded in making the pass look weird indeed, and a fearsome place to enter. I got reckless.

  “You’ve spoiled that sketch,” I said, stooping and taking it gently from her. “Give it to me, and it shall be a flag of truce with which I shall win my way through unscathed.”

  She started to her feet then, and her anger was worth facing for the glow it brought to eyes and cheeks, and the tremble that came to her lips.

  “Mr. Carleton, you are perfectly detestable!” she cried.

  “Miss King, you are perfectly adorable!” I returned, folding the sketch very carefully, so that it would slip easily into my pocket. “With so authentic a map of the enemy’s stronghold, what need I fear? I go—but, on my honor, I shall shortly return.”

  She stood with her fingers clasped tightly in front of her, and watched me lead Shylock down that butte—on the side toward the pass, if you are still in doubt of my intentions. When I say she watched me, I am making a guess; but I felt that she was, and it would be hard to disabuse my mind of that belief. And when I started, her fingers had been clinging tightly together. At the bottom I turned and waved my hat—and I know she saw that, for she immediately whirled and took to studying the southern sky-line. So I left her and galloped straight into the lion’s den—to use an old simile.

  I passed through the gate and up to the house, Shylock pacing easily along as though we both felt assured of a welcome. Old King met me at his door as I was going by; I pulled up and gave him my very cheeriest good morning. He looked at me from under shaggy, gray eyebrows.

  “You’ve got your gall, young man, to come this way twice in twenty-four hours,” he said grimly.

  “You can turn around and go back the way you came in.”

  “You asked me to call,” I reminded him mildly. “You were not at home yesterday, so I came again.”

  He glanced uneasily over his shoulder, and drew the door shut between himself and whoever was within. “You damn’ cur,” he growled, “yuh know yuh ain’t no friend uh the Kings.”

  “I know you’re all mighty unneighborly,” I said, making me a cigarette in the way that cowboys do. “I asked a young lady—your daughter, I suppose—for a drink of water. She told me to go to the creek.”

  He laughed at that; evidently he approved of his daughter’s attitude. “Beryl knows how to deal with the likes uh you,” he muttered relishfully. “And she hates the Carletons bad as I do. Get off my place, young man, and do it quick!”

  “Sure!” I assented cheerfully, and jabbed the spurs into Shylock—taking good care that he was beaded north instead of south. And it’s a fact that, ticklish as was the situation, my first thought was: “So her name’s Beryl, is it? Mighty pretty name, and fits her, too.”

  King wasn’t thinking anything so sentimental, I’ll wager. He yelled to two or three fellows, as I shot by them near the first corral: “Round up that thus-and-how”—I hate to say the words right out—“and bring him back here!” Then he sent a bullet zipping past my ear, and from the house came a high, nasal squawk which, I gathered, came from the old party I had seen the day before.

  I went clippety-clip around those sheds and corrals, till I like to have snapped my head off; I knew Shylock could take first money over any ordinary cayuse, and I let him out; but, for all that, I heard them coming, and it sounded as if they were about to ride all over me, they were so close.

  Past the last shed I went streaking it, and my heart remembered what it was made for, and went to work. I don’t feel that, under the circumstances, it’s any disgrace to own that I was scared. I didn’t hear any more little singing birds fly past, so I straightened up enough to look around and see what was doing in the way of pursuit.

  One glance convinced me that my pursuers weren’t going to sleep in their saddles. One of them, on a little buckskin that was running with his ears laid so flat it looked as if he hadn’t any, was widening the loop in his rope, and yelling unfriendly things as he spurred after me; the others were a length behind, and I mentally put them out of the race. The gentleman with the businesslike air was all I wanted to see, and I laid low as I could and slapped Shylock along the neck, and told him to bestir himself.

  He did. We skimmed up that trail like a winner on the home—stretch, and before I had time to think of what lay ahead, I saw that fence with the high, board gate that was padlocked. Right there I swore abominably—but it didn’t loosen the gate. I looked back and decided that this was no occasion for pulling wires loose and leading my horse over them. It was no occasion for anything that required more than a second; my friend of the rope was not more than five long jumps behind, and he was swinging that loop suggestively over his head.

  I reined Shylock sharply out of the trail, saw a place where the fence looked a bit lower than the average, and put him straight at it with quirt and spurs. He would have swung off, but I’ve ridden to hounds, and I had seen hunters go over worse places; I held him to it without mercy. He laid back his ears, then, and went over—and his hind feet caught the top wire and snapped it like thread. I heard it hum through the air, and I heard those behind me shout as though something unlooked-for had happened. I turned, saw them gathered on the other side looking after me blankly, and I waved my hat airily in farewell and went on about my business.

>   I felt that they would scarcely chase me the whole twelve or fifteen miles of the pass, and I was right; after I turned the first bend I saw them no more.

  At camp I was received with much astonishment, particularly when Ballard saw that I had brought an answer to his note.

  “Yuh must ’a’ rode King’s Highway,” he said, looking at me much as Perry Potter had done the night before.

  I told him I did, and the boys gathered round and wanted to know how I did it. I told them about jumping the fence, and my conceit got a hard blow there; with one accord they made it plain that I had done a very foolish thing. Range horses, they assured me, are not much at jumping, as a rule; and wire-fences are their special abhorrence. Frosty Miller told me, in confidence, that he didn’t know which was the bigger fool, Shylock or me, and he hoped I’d never be guilty of another trick like that.

  That rather took the bloom off my adventure, and I decided, after much thought, that I agreed with Frosty: King’s Highway was bad medicine. I amended that a bit, and excepted Beryl King; I did not think she was “bad medicine,” however acid might be her flavor.

  CHAPTER VI

  I ask Beryl King to Dance

  If I were just yarning for the fun there is in it, I should say that I was back in King’s Highway, helping Beryl King gather posies and brush up her repartee, the very next morning—or the second, at the very latest. As a matter of fact, though, I steered clear of that pass, and behaved myself and stuck to work for six long weeks; that isn’t saying I never thought about her, though.

  On the very last day of June, as nearly as I could estimate, Frosty rode into Kenmore for something, and came back with that in his eyes that boded mischief; his words, however, were innocent enough for the most straight-laced.

  “There’s things doing in Kenmore,” he remarked to a lot of us. “Old King has a party of aristocrats out from New York, visiting—Terence Weaver, half-owner in the mines, and some women; they’re fixing to celebrate the Fourth with a dance. The women, it seems, are crazy to see a real Montana dance, and watch the cowboys chasse around the room in their chaps and spurs and big hats, and with two or three six-guns festooned around their middles, the way you see them in pictures. They think, as near as I could find out, that cowboys always go to dances in full war-paint like that—and they’ll be disappointed if said cowboys don’t punctuate the performance by shooting out the lights, every so often.” He looked across at me, and then is when I observed the mischief brewing in his eyes.