Trailin'!

A TOUCH OF CRIMSON

At the end of three hours he awoke as sharply as though an alarm were clamouring at his ear.  There was no elaborate preparation for renewed activities.  A single yawn and stretch and he was again on his feet.  Since the boy was not in sight he cooked himself an enormous meal, devoured it, and went out to the mustang.

The roan greeted him with a volley from both heels that narrowly missed the head of Nash, but the cowpuncher merely smiled tolerantly.

“Feelin’ fit agin, eh, damn your soul?” he said genially, and picking up a bit of board, fallen from the side of the shed, he smote the mustang mightily along the ribs.  The mustang, as if it recognized the touch of the master, pricked up one ear and side-stepped.  The brief rest had filled it with all the old, vicious energy.

For once more, as soon as they rode clear of the door, there ensued a furious struggle between man and beast.  The man won, as always, and the roan, dropping both ears flat against its neck, trotted sullenly out across the hills.

In that monotony of landscape, one mile exactly like the other, no landmarks to guide him, no trail to follow, however faintly worn, it was strange to see the cowpuncher strike out through the vast distances of the mountain-desert with as much confidence as if he were travelling on a paved street in a city.  He had not even a compass to direct him but he seemed to know his way as surely as the birds know the untracked paths of the air in the seasons of migration.

Straight on through the afternoon and during the long evening he kept his course at the same unvarying dog-trot until the flush of the sunset faded to a stern grey and the purple hills in the distance turned blue with shadows.  Then, catching the glimmer of a light on a hillside, he turned toward it to put up for the night.

In answer to his call a big man with a lantern came to the door and raised his light until it shone on a red, bald head and a portly figure.  His welcome was neither hearty nor cold; hospitality is expected in the mountain-desert.  So Nash put up his horse in the shed and came back to the house.

The meal was half over, but two girls immediately set a plate heaped with fried potatoes and bacon and flanked by a mighty cup of jetblack coffee on one side and a pile of yellow biscuits on the other.  He nodded to them, grunted by way of expressing thanks, and sat down to eat.

Beside the tall father and the rosy-faced mother, the family consisted of the two girls, one of them with her hair twisted severely close to her head, wearing a man’s blue cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up to a pair of brown elbows.  Evidently she was the boy of the family and to her fell the duty of performing the innumerable chores of the ranch, for her hands were thick with work and the tips of the fingers blunted.  Also she had that calm, self-satisfied eye which belongs to the workingman who knows that he has earned his meal.

Her sister monopolized all the beauty and the grace, not that she was either very pretty or extremely graceful, but she was instinct with the challenge of femininity like a rare scent.  It lingered about her, it enveloped her ways; it gave a light to her eyes and made her smile exquisite.  Her clothes were not of much finer material than her sister’s, but they were cut to fit, and a bow of crimson ribbon at her throat was as effective in that environment as the most costly orchids on an evening gown.

She was armed in pride this night, talking only to her mother, and then in monosyllables alone.  At first it occurred to Steve that his coming had made her self-conscious, but he soon discovered that her pride was directed at the third man at the table.  She at least maintained a pretence of eating, but he made not even a sham, sitting miserably, his mouth hard set, his eyes shadowed by a tremendous frown.  At length he shoved back his chair with such violence that the table trembled.

“Well,” he rumbled, “I guess this lets me out.  S’long.”

And he strode heavily from the room; a moment later his cursing came back to them as he rode into the night.

“Takes it kind of hard, don’t he?” said the father.

And the mother murmured:  “Poor Ralph!”

“So you went an’ done it?” said the mannish girl to her sister.

“What of it?” snapped the other.

“He’s too good for you, that’s what of it.”

“Girls!” exclaimed the mother anxiously.  “Remember we got a guest!”

“Oh,” said she of the strong brown arms, “I guess we can’t tell him nothin’; I guess he had eyes to be seein’ what’s happened.”  She turned calmly to Steve.

“Lizzie turned down Ralph Boardman—­poor feller!”

“Sue!” cried the other girl.

“Well, after you done it, are you ashamed to have it talked about?  You make me sore, I’ll tell a man!”

“That’s enough, Sue,” growled the father.

“What’s enough?”

“We ain’t goin’ to have no more show about this.  I’ve had my supper spoiled by it already.”

“I say it’s a rotten shame,” broke out Sue, and she repeated, “Ralph’s too good for her.  All because of a city dude—­a tenderfoot!”

In the extremity of her scorn her voice drawled in a harsh murmur.

“Then take him yourself, if you can get him!” cried Lizzie.  “I’m sure I don’t want him!”

Their eyes blazed at each other across the table, and Lizzie, having scored an unexpected point, struck again.

“I think you’ve always had a sort of hankerin’ after Ralph—­oh, I’ve seen your eyes rollin’ at him.”

The other girl coloured hotly through her tan.

“If I was fond of him I wouldn’t be ashamed to let him know, you can tell the world that.  And I wouldn’t keep him trottin’ about like a little pet dog till I got tired of him and give him up for the sake of a greenhorn who”—­her voice lowered to a spiteful hiss—­“kissed you the first time he even seen you!”

In vain Lizzie fought for her control; her lip trembled and her voice shook.

“I hate you, Sue!”

“Sue, ain’t you ashamed of yourself?” pleaded the mother.

“No, I ain’t!  Think of it; here’s Ralph been sweet on Liz for two years an’ now she gives him the go-by for a skinny, affected dude like that feller that was here.  And he’s forgot you already, Liz, the minute he stopped laughing at you for bein’ so easy.”

“Ma, are you goin’ to let Sue talk like this—­right before a stranger?”

“Sue, you shut up!” commanded the father.

“I don’t see nobody that can make me,” she said, surly as a grown boy.  “I can’t make any more of a fool out of Liz than that tenderfoot made her!”

“Did he,” asked Steve, “ride a piebald mustang?”

“D’you know him?” breathed Lizzie, forgetting the tears of shame which had been gathering in her eyes.

“Nope.  Jest heard a little about him along the road.”

“What’s his name?”

Then she coloured, even before Sue could say spitefully:  “Didn’t he even have to tell you his name before he kissed you?”

“He did!  His name is—­Tony!”

“Tony!”—­in deep disgust.  “Well, he’s dark enough to be a dago!  Maybe he’s a foreign count, or something, Liz, and he’ll take you back to live in some castle or other.”

But the girl queried, in spite of this badinage:  “Do you know his name?”

“His name,” said Nash, thinking that it could do no harm to betray as much as this, “is Anthony Bard, I think.”

“And you don’t know him?”

“All I know is that the feller who used to own that piebald mustang is pretty mad and cusses every time he thinks of him.”

“He didn’t steal the hoss?”

This with more bated breath than if the question had been:  “He didn’t kill a man?” for indeed horse-stealing was the greater crime.

Even Nash would not make such an accusation directly, and therefore he fell back on an innuendo almost as deadly.

“I dunno,” he said non-committally, and shrugged his shoulders.

With all his soul he was concentrating on the picture of the man who conquered a fighting horse and flirted successfully with a pretty girl the same day; each time riding on swiftly from his conquest.  The clues on this trail were surely thick enough, but they were of such a nature that the pleasant mind of Steve grew more and more thoughtful.