第 7 页

That had been his belief. Now, a clear-eyed young woman with honesty in her voice, had said certain biting things to him, and he was astonished to find that the structure of his belief was wavering.

Also, he had been forced to alter his opinion of her—his judgment. What he had believed her to be, shallow, flippant, a female corsair who raised the black flag when sallying forth to battle, she was, obviously, not. Her flippancy was a mask, a medium through which she released the breezy, bubbling spirits of her nature, and behind which she concealed a sturdy, militant, and honest womanhood which had leaped to battle when the virtue of her sex had been questioned.

He understood the fighting spirit, the instinct to defend that which, since it dwelt in her own heart, she felt must abide in the hearts of the majority of women; but he had been perplexed over her exhibition of emotion, the tears that had come to her eyes when she had defended herself. The sight of them had stirred him, and during the night he had provided an explanation for them. She had defended her sex courageously, not because she believed all of them to be blameless, but because she did not want him to believe that she was of the type he condemned. And because she had seen from his eyes that he did not believe, her emotions had overcome her. For the first time in years he accused himself, and felt mean and uncomfortable.

He was surprised to see her riding toward the Diamond Bar ranchhouse early the next morning. He was in the stable, saddling Meteor, intending to ride to Bozzam City, and he watched her until she dismounted at the porch, greeted Aunt Emily and Jane, and went into the house.

He finished saddling the horse, put the bridle on him, and then, remembering that he had promised Billings to bring an extra cinch buckle to where the foreman was camped with the outfit in the big basin, he stepped into the blacksmith shop. When he came out, intending to ride away, reluctant to meet Miss Harkless, he saw her sitting on her pony near the stable door. She smiled unaffectedly when she noted his quickening eyes.

“Don’t be startled,” she said. “I am quite harmless, I assure you, in spite of my exhibition of temper, yesterday.”

There, he knew, was his pardon; she was a generous foe. He felt the blood rush to his face, and he half-expected to see her laughing at him. But her voice was low and grave:

“Now, don’t apologize. Let us forget it—won’t you?”

“Willingly.” He felt a queer gratefulness warming him, a strange elation. “If you haven’t any plans for the morning, you might ride down into the basin with me; it won’t take more than an hour or two.” He had decided, if she accepted, to forego the trip to Bozzam City, and when he saw a light glow in her eyes he knew that Bozzam City would not be stirred by a visit from him that day.

They rode out of the stable yard, chatting, their horses loping companionably. Descending the long slope of the mesa they reined in a little, but down in the basin they raced their animals for an exhilarating gallop through the deep saccatone grass. Finding the Diamond Bar outfit, they delivered the cinch buckle to Billings, wheeled their horses and set out for the return trip. When they reached a grove of beeches and fir-balsam that rose, dark and inviting, at the foot of the slope leading to the mesa, Gawne proposed a halt. He helped her down. She declined his invitation for a rest on the grass slope of a small hill that permitted a good view of the basin, but leaned against the saddle skirt and stirrup on her pony and looked at him, her eyes glowing with knowledge and purpose.

“You have been outrageously frank with me,” she said; “I am going to be the same with you. Do you still love Marie Calvert?”

“God!” The exclamation came from him with a dynamic force that made his voice crack like a pistol shot. Sheer, naked astonishment was in his grimmed lips and his widened eyes. Before Kathleen could move he had her hands in his. The grip made her wince and cringe and she cried out feebly that he was hurting her. She divined at this moment something of the intensity of the passion with which he could love—and hate.

She saw him regain his self-control, and in an instant he was composed, though his face was pale and his eyes were questioning hers with an intentness that made her gasp.

“What do you know of Marie Calvert?”

“I know that she is, was, your wife.”

“Would you mind telling me how you discovered that?” He was watching her closely, and now a faint ironic smile twisted his lips.

“It was not a discovery. You did not know that Marie Calvert had left Wyoming, that she now is in San Francisco—and very unhappy.”

A flash of fierce exultation lighted his eyes, and Kathleen knew that no love dwelt in his heart for the woman who had betrayed him.

“We seem doomed to confine our talks to sordid subjects,” he said, laughing. “Why shouldn’t we discuss philosophy, economics, art, letters, or something a bit more conventional?”

“I had thought of that; it is the custom. The world seems to demand a mental skirmish of that sort as a prelude to friendship. No doubt it does give one a thrill of exaltation to be able to dissect certain abstruse writings; but are we ever really interested in them? One likes to form one’s own conclusions, and those profound thoughts are the ones that engage us when simple matters, more closely related to our everyday lives, have been disposed of.”

“Which they never are.”

“That is true. That is why so few of us find time to tackle the philosophers—to say nothing of philosophizing on our own account. Where is, what is, the philosophy of love?”

“Or of hate? One does either without mental effort.”

“Well,” she said, smiling at him, “the world could dispense with philosophy, but not with love.”

“Or hate.”

“Why do you insist on that?”

“Because they are bond brothers. Hatred is always lurking in love’s background. It is circumambient, the shadow of love’s light.”

“Well,” she laughed; “we talk of love because it is the big passion of our lives. And it is conventional, because everybody talks of it—at some time in their lives. And now that you have ceased to look tragic we can safely go back to Marie Calvert. I asked you if you still loved her, because she seems so unhappy and wistful. Dal Granville has left her. He—”

“Did he marry her?”

“Immediately after you got the divorce. They came to San Francisco a week later.”

“That’s why I didn’t kill him,” he said coldly; “I knew that a marriage to him would be the worst sort of punishment that could be inflicted upon—both.”

“Well, you ought to be satisfied, in that case,” she said, with a severe look at him. “They were very miserable—they were jangling continually. Granville was jealous; he thought that if Marie could be disloyal to one man she would be to another, and he was suspicious—and brutal.”

“There were no children?”

“By the grace of God—no.” She looked sharply at him.

“She didn’t send you here?” he asked, meeting her gaze. She shook her head negatively.

“When did you first realize that I had been her husband?”

“When I heard your name. I asked my father about you.”

He stared thoughtfully into the timber grove, and when he looked back at Kathleen she was smiling tauntingly at him.

“So upon the deflection of one woman from the path of virtue you base your condemnation of the entire sex. Is that just?”

“I’m only human. Men can hear of such things happening to other men without being infected with the virus of distrust. But when a woman has lain in a man’s arms and he has plumbed her soul and considered it good, and found it bad, it is something of a task to accept another woman on faith.”

“For shame!”

This woman was waving the magic wand of broad charity before his eyes, and its light was driving the dark and morbid narrowness of self-pity from his soul. He was beginning to get flashes of restored faith; he had a swift recollection of his own enthusiastic and fervent trust in women before Marie Calvert had destroyed it, and he laughed and filled his chest with the joy of it. But his eyes chilled as another memory assailed him.

“We have been frank, now let us be complete. I want to try to justify myself in your eyes. Something within me clamors for your good opinion. That is heresy, according to the creed that has been my God for thirteen years—but you seem to have turned everything topsy-turvy. I want you to see why I have thought all women to be alike. When two cases occur in the same family—” He smiled grimly at an expression in her eyes; that “have” was a past tense that told her of the imminence of victory.

“I am going to make it short, and omit some of the harrowing details.” he resumed. “Wesley Gawne was my brother. He married three months before I did. As for that, he must have had some inkling of the hazards of the game, for he tried to warn me off. But I was fool enough to disregard him.

“He married Doris Hammond—her father had a ranch near ours—built a house for her and settled down into harness, quiet, soft-spoken and dependable. He was my only brother, and I loved him. I told you I would omit much detail. I rode over to his ranch one night after dusk and found him lying on the floor. A rifle bullet, fired through a window, had entered his left side, in front, torn its way through the lung, just above the heart, and he was bleeding to death. He died within five minutes after I found him.

“He told me he had seen the man’s face at the instant the shot was fired. It was Watt Hyat, a man from Cheyenne, who had known Doris before she married Wesley. I never saw the man—but I hope to. Wesley heard him talking with Doris; they thought Wesley was dead, but he heard them. It had been a frame-up—the shooting. Doris had been meeting the man clandestinely; Wesley had become suspicious. Wesley had no blame for her; she was too good for him, he said. Too good! What a mockery that term is! He blamed it all on the man, and he asked me to carry his curse and his vengeance to him. I promised, willingly. That’s why I am in this country. I heard Hyat was here. I lost him here. I trailed him for seven years. I’ve been here for six years. That has been my experience with women. Do you wonder—”

“I am so sorry!” she said, her face white and tense with sympathy. “I think I can understand what your feelings were during all those years. I—I can hardly blame you for thinking ill of women. But—don’t you see?” she added, eagerly; “women are not all like that; that would be too terrible!”

They mounted in silence and rode up the slope to the mesa.

“No woman is worth thirteen years of that,” she said, when they had reached the mesa and halted their horses.

“A good one would be,” he said—“and more.”

“And there are none,” she said, lowly, banteringly.

“There are good women.” The conviction was in his eyes; she saw it and her lips curved very faintly with a smile.

“And yet you said—before—”

“Before I knew,” he said, steadily. “I saw a picture of her—one day. She has eyes that look directly at one, and there is no trickery in them. I know it.”

There was surprise in the glance she threw at him; perhaps a little anxiety. And could there have been a little of that jealousy which a woman always feels toward another whom a man has praised?

“One cannot always judge character from a picture,” she told him.

“No?” He laughed, for by this exhibition of jealousy she was easing his conscience from its burden of thirteen years of narrowness. “Hate is the shadow of love,” he taunted—which was enigmatic to her. “Well, then, if one can’t judge from a picture, one may judge from the eyes of the living original.”

“Oh,” she said, her chin in the air; “then you know her?”

He laughed vibrantly, and stared straight at her. “I am looking at her, now,” he said.

But it was not for long. She blushed, set the spurs to her pony and rode rapidly away. He sat long on his horse, staring after her, and when he saw her vanish in some timber that fringed the river, he rode toward the stable, erect, breathing fast.

Five minutes later Scriptus found him there, patting Meteor’s sleek neck.

“I got the beginnin’ of the fourth chapter here. Boss,” said the writer, grinning with embarrassment “The boys—Billings, that is—said I wasn’t to do no range work today—sence I was so het up over writin’ this story. Do you reckon you’d like to have me read her to you?”

“Scriptus,” grinned Gawne, laying a hand on the butt of his pistol. “You hit the breeze for the outfit as fast as your cayuse can carry you. On your way, drop your writing material in the river, and if I ever catch you scribbling again, I’ll bore you, so help me Moses! There won’t be any more foolishness carried on around this ranch. We’re all going to up and up and cheerful. No more worrying about writing, and no more—”

“Broodin’, did you say, Boss?” inquired Scriptus, his head cocked to one side with mock earnestness.

Gawne made a playful movement with his pistol and Scriptus ducked, laughing. An hour later he was at the cow-camp with the outfit crowded around him.

“Shucks!” he told them, “he’s a whole lot hep to the whizzer we’ve bin tryin’ to run in on him. He sabes that my writin’ ain’t in no ways a serious effort, ’cause he knows I could do a heap better—if I tried. He’s been onto me all along, the durn cuss!”

“An’ you reckon as how it’s stopped him broodin’, anyway, don’t you, Scriptus?” said a puncher.

“Stopped him, hell!” laughed Scriptus. “It’s a woman that’s stopped him broodin’. I seen him, from a crack in the stable, blushin’ at her like a man that’s been caught robbin’ his kid’s bank, or somethin’. An’ she blushin’ at him! Stop him! I wonder!”

Over at the Harkless ranchhouse a girl stood on the porch looking toward the Diamond Bar. She also, was wondering; wondering how any woman could be unfaithful to a man whose slumbering eyes masked a fire of love that, she felt, would burn forever and ever for a worthy mate.

CHAPTER IX

BOZZAM’S LONG HAND

Billings, standing in the open doorway of the bunkhouse one morning, saw Gawne and Jane riding northwestward; Gawne on Meteor, Jane on a little Pinto that Billings himself had gentled for her. Billings watched them until they grew small in his vision; then he turned to several of his men who were idling in various ways, the cattle, grazing in the big basin, being visible to them from the windows of the bunkhouse. There was no reason in the world why the men should have been doing guard duty—and Billings was not a hard taskmaster.

“Riddle an’ Jane’s goin’ to Sunshine Gap,” said Billings. “Every season about this time, Riddle takes her. It’s a sort of sacred journey.”

“This is the sixth, ain’t it?” Scriptus looked up from a game of “solitaire”. “What you sayin’ ‘about this time’ for? To my recollection, Gawne’s took the kid to Sunshine Gap on the sixth of June every year since I’ve bin here, an’ that’s five. They ain’t a man, woman, or kid in Bozzam City, or anywhere around here, that don’t know about Gawne takin’ Jane to Sunshine Gap every year on the sixth of June. You’re asleep yet; feel around you.”