The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  “That’s what I ought to do,” he said, “but I’m not going to do it, all the same.”

  “Which only goes to prove,” bantered Rock, “that the Double Cross pulls harder than all the preacher could tell you. I wonder if there isn’t a girl at the Double Cross, now!”

  “There is,” Ford confessed, with a grin of embarrassment. “And you shut up.”

  “I just had a hunch there was,” Rock permitted himself to say meekly, before he dropped the subject.

  It was ten minutes before Ford spoke again.

  “I’ll take you up to the house and introduce you to her, Rock, if you’ll behave yourself,” he offered then, with a shyness in his manner that nearly set Rock off in one of his convulsions of mirth. “But the missus isn’t wise—so watch out. And if you don’t behave yourself,” he added darkly, “I’ll knock your block off.”

  “Sure. But my block is going to remain right where it’s at,” Rock assured him, which was a tacit promise of as perfect behavior as he could attain.

  They looked like snow men when they unsaddled, with the powdery snow beaten into the very fabric of their clothing, and Ford suggested that they go first to the bunk-house to thaw out. “I’d sure hate to pack all this snow into Mrs. Kate’s parlor,” he added whimsically. “She’s the kind of housekeeper that grabs the broom the minute you’re gone, to sweep your tracks off the carpet. Awful nice little woman, but—”

  “But not The One,” chuckled Rock, treading close upon Ford’s heels. “And I’ll bet fifteen cents,” he offered rashly, looking up, “that the person hitting the high places for the bunk-house is The One.”

  “How do you know?” Ford demanded, while his eyes gladdened at sight of Josephine, with a Navajo blanket flung over her head, running down the path through the blizzard to the bunk-house kitchen.

  “’Cause she shied when she saw you coming. Came pretty near breaking back on you, too,” Rock explained shrewdly.

  They reached the kitchen together, and Ford threw open the door, and held it for her to pass.

  “I came after some of Mose’s mince-meat,” she explained hastily. “It’s a terrible storm, isn’t it? I’m glad it didn’t strike yesterday. I thought you were going to be gone for several days.”

  Ford, with embarrassed haste to match her own, presented Rock in the same breath with wishing that Rock was elsewhere; for Mose was not in the kitchen, and he had not had more than a few words with her for twenty-four hours. He was perilously close to forgetting his legal halter when he looked at her.

  She was, he thought, about as sweet a picture of a woman as a man need ever look upon, as she stood there with the red Navajo blanket falling back from her dark hair, and with her wide, honest eyes fixed upon Rock. She was blushing, as if she, too, wished Rock elsewhere. She turned impulsively, set down the basin she had been holding in her arm, and pulled the blanket up so that it framed her face bewitchingly.

  “Mose can bring up the mince-meat when he comes—since he isn’t here,” she said hurriedly. “We weren’t looking for you back, but dinner will be ready in half an hour or so, I think.” She pulled open the door and went out into the storm.

  Rock stared at the door, still quivering with the slam she had given it. Then he looked at Ford, and afterward sat down weakly upon a stool, and began dazedly pulling the icicles from his mustache.

  “Well—I’ll—be—cremated!” he said in a whisper.

  “And what’s eating you, Rock?” Ford quizzed gayly. He had seen something in the eyes of Josephine, when he met her, that had set his blood jumping again. “Did Miss Melby—”

  “Miss Melby my granny!” grunted Rock, in deep disgust. “That there is your wife!”

  Ford backed up against the wall and stared at him blankly. Afterward he took a deep breath and went out as though the place was on fire.

  CHAPTER XVII

  What Ford Found at the Top

  Ford Campbell was essentially a man of action; he did not waste ten seconds in trying to deduce the whys and hows of the amazing fact; he would have a whole lifetime in which to study them. He started for the house, and the tracks he made in the loose, shifting snow were considerably more than a yard apart. He even forgot to stamp off the clinging snow and scour his boot-soles upon the porch rug, and when he went striding in, he pushed the door only half shut behind him, so that it swung in the wind and let a small drift collect upon the parlor carpet, until Mrs. Kate, feeling a draught, discovered it, and was shocked beyond words at the sacrilege.

  Ford went into the dining-room, crossed it in just three strides, and ran his quarry to earth in the kitchen, where she was distraitly setting out biscuit materials. He started toward her, realized suddenly that the all-observing Buddy was at his very heels, and delayed the reckoning while he led that terrible man-child to his mother.

  “I wish you’d close-herd this kid for about four hours,” he told Mrs. Kate bluntly, and left her looking scared and unconsciously posing as protective motherhood, her arm around the outraged Robert Chester Mason. Mrs. Kate was absolutely convinced that Ford was at last really drunk and “on the rampage,” and she had a terrible vision of slain girlhood in the kitchen, so that she was torn between mother-love and her desire to protect Phenie. But Ford had looked so threateningly at her and Buddy that she could not bring herself to attract his attention to the child or herself. Phenie had plenty of spirit; she could run down to the bunk-house—Mrs. Kate heard a door slam then, and shuddered. Phenie, she judged swiftly, had locked herself into the pantry.

  Phenie had. Or, to be exact, she had run in and slammed the door shut in Ford’s very face, and she was leaning her weight against it. Mrs. Kate, pressing the struggling Buddy closer to her, heard voices, a slight commotion, and then silence. She could bear no more. She threw a shawl over her head, grasped Buddy firmly by the arm, and fled in terror to the bunk-house.

  The voices were a brief altercation between Ford and Josephine, on the subject of opening the door, before it was removed violently from its hinges. The commotion was when Josephine, between tears and laughter, failed to hold the door against the pressure of a strong man upon the other side, and, suddenly giving over the attempt, was launched against a shelf and dislodged three tin pans, which she barely saved from falling with a great clatter to the floor. The silence—the silence should explain itself; but since humanity is afflicted with curiosity, and demands details, this is what occurred immediately after Josephine had been kissed four times for her stubbornness, and the pans had been restored to their proper place.

  “Say! Are you my wife?” was the abrupt question which Ford asked, and kissed her again while he waited for an answer.

  “Why, yes—what makes you ask that? Of course I am; that is—” Josephine twisted in his arms, so that she could look into his face. She did not laugh at him, however. She was staring at him with that keen, measuring look which had so incensed him, when he had first met her. “I don’t understand you at all, Ford,” she said at last, with a frown of puzzlement. “I never have, for that matter. I’d think I was beginning to, and then you would say or do something that would put me all at sea. What do you mean, anyway?”

  Ford told her what he meant; told her humbly, truthfully, with never an excuse for himself. And it speaks well for the good sense of Josephine that she heard him through with neither tears, laughter, nor anger to mar his trust in her.

  “Of course, I knew you had been drinking, that night,” she said, when his story was done, and his face was pressed lightly against the white parting in her soft, brown hair. “I saw it, after—after the ceremony. You—you were going to kiss me, and I caught the odor of liquor, and I felt that you wouldn’t have done that if you had been yourself; it frightened me, a little. But you talked perfectly straight, and I never knew you weren’t the man—Frank Cameron—until you came here. Then I saw you couldn’t be he. Chester had known you when Frank was at home with his mother—I compared dates and was sure of that—and he called you Ford Campbell. So
then I saw what a horrible blunder I’d made, and I was worried nearly to death! But I couldn’t see what I could do about it, and you didn’t—”

  “Say, what about this Frank Cameron, anyway?” Ford demanded, with true male jealousy. “What did you want to marry him for? You couldn’t have known him, or—”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t understand—” Josephine gave a little, impatient turn of the head, “unless you knew his mother. I did know Frank, a long time ago, when I was twelve or thirteen, and when I saw you, I thought he’d changed a lot. But it was his mother; she was the dearest thing, but—queer. Sort of childish, you know. And she just worshiped Frank, and used to watch for the postman—oh, it was too pitiful! Sometimes I’d write a letter myself, and pretend it was from him, and read it to her; her eyes were bad, so it was easy—”

  “Where was this Frank?” Ford interrupted.

  “Oh, I don’t know! I never did know. Somewhere out West, we thought. I used to make believe the letters came from Helena, or Butte, because that was where she heard from him last. He was always promising to come home—in the letters. That used to make her so much better,” she explained naïvely. “And sometimes she’d be able to go out in the yard and fuss with her flowers, after one like that. But he never came, and so she got the notion that he was wild and a spendthrift. I suppose he was, or he’d have written, or something. She had lots and lots of money and property, you know.

  “Well,” Josephine took one of Ford’s hand and patted it reassuringly, “she got the notion that I must marry Frank, when he came home. I tried to reason her out of that, and it only made her worse. It grew on her, and I got so I couldn’t bear to write any more letters, and that made it worse still. She made a will that I must marry Frank within a year after she died, or he wouldn’t get anything but a hundred dollars—and she was worth thousands and thousands.” Josephine snuggled closer. “She was shrewd, too. I was not to get anything except a few trinkets. And if we didn’t marry, the money would all go to an old ladies’ home.

  “So, when she died, I felt as if I ought to do something, you see. It didn’t seem right to let him lose the property, even if he wouldn’t write to his mother. So I had the lawyers try to find him. I thought I could marry him, and let him get the property, and then—well, I counted on getting a divorce.” She looked up quickly into Ford’s face.

  “And you know you did promise not to bother me—just to desert me, you see, so I could get a divorce in a year. I thought I’d come and live with Kate till the year was up, and then get a divorce, and go back home to work. My father left me enough to squeak along on, you see, if I lived in the country. Aunt Ida—that’s Frank’s mother—paid me a salary for staying with her and looking after her house and her rents and things. And then, when you followed me out here, I was furious! Just simply furious!” She bent her head and set her teeth gently into the fleshy part of Ford’s thumb, and Ford flinched. It happened to be the sore one.

  “Well, but that doesn’t explain how you got your loop on me, girlie—though I sure am glad that you did!”

  “Why, don’t you see, the time was almost up, just for all the world like a play. ‘Only one day more—and I must save the pa-apers!’ So the lawyer Aunt Ida had for years, heard that Frank was—or had been—at Garbin. I rushed out here, and heard that there was a Cameron (only they must have meant Campbell) at Sunset. So I got a license, and the Reverend Sanderson, and took the evening train down there. At the hotel I asked for Mr. Cameron, and they sent you in. And you know the rest, you—you old fraud! How you palmed yourself off on me—”

  “I never did! I must have just been in one of my obliging moods; and a man would have to be mighty rude and unkind not to say yes to a pretty girl when—”

  That is as far as the discussion went, with anything like continuity or coherence even. Later, however, Josephine did protest somewhat muffledly: “But, Ford, I married you under the name of Frank Cameron, so I don’t believe—and anyway—I’d like a real wedding—and a ring!”

  Mrs. Kate, having been solemnly assured by Rock that Ford was sober and as nearly in his right mind as a man violently in love can be (Rock made it plain, by implication at least, that he did not consider that very near), ventured into the kitchen just then. She still looked scared and uncertain, until, through the half-open door of the pantry, she heard soft, whispery sounds like kissing—when the kissing is a rapture rather than a ceremony. Mrs. Kate had only been married eight years or so, and she had a good memory. She backed from the kitchen on her toes, and pulled the door shut with the caution of a thief. She did more; she permitted dinner to be an hour late, rather than disturb those two in the pantry.

  * * * *

  The uphill climb was no climb at all, after that. For when a man has found the one woman in the world, and with her that elusive thing we call happiness, even the demon must perforce sheathe his claws and retire, discomfited, to the pit whence he came.

  There was a period of impatient waiting, because Josephine and Mrs. Kate both stoutly maintained that the “real wedding” could not take place until Chester came back. After that, there was a Mrs. foreman at the Double Cross until spring. And after that, there was a new ranch and a new house and a new home where happiness came and dwelt unhindered.

  JEAN OF THE LAZY A (Part 1)

  CHAPTER I

  HOW TROUBLE CAME TO THE LAZY A

  Without going into a deep, psychological discussion of the elements in men’s souls that breed events, we may say with truth that the Lazy A ranch was as other ranches in the smooth tenor of its life until one day in June, when the finger of fate wrote bold and black across the face of it the word that blotted out prosperity, content, warm family ties,—all those things that go to make life worth while.

  Jean, sixteen and a range girl to the last fiber of her being, had gotten up early that morning and had washed the dishes and swept, and had shaken the rugs of the little living-room most vigorously. On her knees, with stiff brush and much soapy water, she had scrubbed the kitchen floor until the boards dried white as kitchen floors may be. She had baked a loaf of gingerbread, that came from the oven with a most delectable odor, and had wrapped it in a clean cloth to cool on the kitchen table. Her dad and Lite Avery would show cause for the baking of it when they sat down, fresh washed and ravenous, to their supper that evening. I mention Jean and her scrubbed kitchen and the gingerbread by way of proving how the Lazy A went unwarned and unsuspecting to the very brink of its disaster.

  Lite Avery, long and lean and silently content with life, had ridden away with a package of sandwiches, after a full breakfast and a smile from the slim girl who cooked it, upon the business of the day; which happened to be a long ride with one of the Bar Nothing riders, down in the breaks along the river. Jean’s father, big Aleck Douglas, had saddled and ridden away alone upon business of his own. And presently, in mid-forenoon, Jean closed the kitchen door upon an immaculately clean house filled with the warm, fragrant odor of her baking, and in fresh shirt waist and her best riding-skirt and Stetson, went whistling away down the path to the stable, and saddled Pard, the brown colt that Lite had broken to the saddle for her that spring. In ten minutes or so she went galloping down the coulee and out upon the trail to town, which was fifteen miles away and held a chum of hers.

  So Lazy A coulee was left at peace, with scratching hens busy with the feeding of half-feathered chicks, and a rooster that crowed from the corral fence seven times without stopping to take breath. In the big corral a sorrel mare nosed her colt and nibbled abstractedly at the pile of hay in one corner, while the colt wabbled aimlessly up and sniffed curiously and then turned to inspect the rails that felt so queer and hard when he rubbed his nose against them. The sun was warm, and cloud-shadows drifted lazily across the coulee with the breeze that blew from the west. You never would dream that this was the last day,—the last few hours even,—when the Lazy A would be the untroubled home of three persons of whose lives it formed so great a part.

  At
noon the hens were hovering their chickens in the shade of the mower which Lite was overhauling during his spare time, getting it ready for the hay that was growing apace out there in the broad mouth of the coulee. The rooster was wallowing luxuriously in a dusty spot in the corral. The young colt lay stretched out on the fat of its side in the sun, sound asleep. The sorrel mare lay beside it, asleep also, with her head thrown up against her shoulder. Somewhere in a shed a calf was bawling in bored lonesomeness away from its mother feeding down the pasture. And over all the coulee and the buildings nestled against the bluff at its upper end was spread that atmosphere of homey comfort and sheltered calm which surrounds always a home that is happy.

  Lite Avery, riding toward home just when the shadows were beginning to grow long behind him, wondered if Jean would be back by the time he reached the ranch. He hoped so, with a vague distaste at finding the place empty of her cheerful presence. Be looked at his watch; it was nearly four o’clock. She ought to be home by half-past four or five, anyway. He glanced sidelong at Jim and quietly slackened his pace a little. Jim was telling one of those long, rambling tales of the little happenings of a narrow life, and Lite was supposed to be listening instead of thinking about when Jean would return home. Jim believed he was listening, and drove home the point of his story.

  “Yes, sir, them’s his very words. Art Osgood heard him. He’ll do it, too, take it from me, Crofty is shore riled up this time.”

  “Always is,” Lite observed, without paying much attention. “I’ll turn off here, Jim, and cut across. Got some work I want to get done yet tonight. So long.”

  He swung away from his companion, whose trail to the Bar Nothing led him straight west, passing the Lazy A coulee well out from its mouth, toward the river. Lite could save a half mile by bearing off to the north and entering the coulee at the eastern side and riding up through the pasture. He wanted to see how the grass was coming on, anyway. The last rain should have given it a fresh start.