Laramie Holds the Range Part 21

She darted a quick glance at him: "Why, yes, surely," she retorted, "if you want him."

Laramie was tearing out a cigarette paper: "I could look at them without him," he returned calmly.

"I don't see him, anyway," murmured Kate, professing to sweep the crowded course with her eyes.

"Don't look too hard," cautioned Laramie.

"I suppose we might save time," she suggested, ignoring his last remark, "by going without him."

CHAPTER XIV

LEFEVER ASKS QUESTIONS

Those closest to headquarters sometimes know least of what is going on.

That the big celebration at the ranch could have been anything more or less than what it professed to be, did not occur to Kate; nor could anyone actually say that it was more or less. Hawk could contemptuously refuse its overtures; Laramie could for reasons of his own accept them; the Falling Wall rustlers were out for a good time or they would not have been rustling and they would celebrate any time at anybody's expense--except their own; Carpy could believe it was to usher in a better feeling--everyone to his taste.

But the suspicious, because they did not quite understand such a move, harbored their suspicions, and among the doubting was Belle Shockley--shrewd and very much alive to the drift of things since her struggle with a cyclone. Had Belle, instead of Kate, been out at the ranch, things now coming along that Kate failed to see, would have told volumes to her.

But Kate did not feel at liberty to make of Belle a confidant in everything--certainly not in what happened at home; so she neither said anything to Belle nor asked of her any explanation of things that she herself did not understand--such as guarded and more frequent consultations between her father and Van Horn, Pettigrew and Stone; and such as men riding up with a clatter to the ranch-house at night and calling Doubleday out and calling for Van Horn who often now spent the night at the ranch and left before daybreak.

Some of this, Kate saw. She could see how absent-minded her father was. He grew so taciturn she hardly knew him but the reason for it was beyond her. More than she saw, she picked up from Bradley, working then at the ranch. Bradley had taken a liking to Kate and often reminded her of the night he brought her into the Falling Wall country.

Whenever she was in Sleepy Cat, Belle was inquisitive. She always wanted to know what Van Horn was doing, what her father was doing, and then fell back on vaguely general questions about ranches and the range and rustlers. More than once she spoke of strangers in town, Texas men--cowboys and gunmen she called them--who bothered her for meals, and whom she scornfully sent packing.

And Henry Sawdy, too, one of her frequent visitors, was trying to court her, she complained; all this made her suspicious. Of whom? Of what?

Kate asked. Belle could not tell exactly of whom, of what--she was just suspicious: "Why should that big fat man come courting me?" she demanded one day when Kate had come in for lunch.

"You don't think it possible he likes you?" suggested Kate, barely glancing Belle's way, and taking care to make her tone very skeptical.

Belle only snorted contemptuously and turned to her cooking; but as she did so, she gave her wig a punch.

By the merest chance, John Lefever came in a few minutes later. Belle and Kate were at the table. John asked for something to eat. When Belle wanted to be rid of him he refused "no" for an answer:

"You wouldn't send me away without a cup of coffee, would you? No potatoes? Well, I never eat potatoes"--John coughed. "They are fattening." Then he looked up cheerfully as if a new idea had struck him: "What's the matter with a little soft-boiled ice cream?"

The upshot was that he had to be asked to share the lunch which he did with relish, paying his way with his usual foolery. When the plates were emptied and John had officiously asked leave to light a cigarette, he glanced toward the folding bed and asked Belle to play something.

"That's no piano," exclaimed Belle, with contempt. "That's a bed."

John seemed undisturbed: "Curious," he mused, "we used to have an upright piano at home with that same kind of wood, same pattern exactly; you could have that bed made over into a piano, Belle.

Straighten out the springs and you wouldn't have to buy hardly any wire at all."

Belle stared at him: "Where would I sleep if I did?" she demanded.

John threw back his head, blew a delicate puff of smoke toward the ceiling and looked across at his unsympathetic hostess. Then he brought his fist down on the table; "Marry me, Belle, and sleep in a regular bed! What?"

Belle was justly indignant. Kate's laughing made her more indignant.

For John had fairly bubbled his proposal through a laugh of his own.

"I used to sleep in a box like that myself," he went on. "But the year it was so dry the gra.s.shoppers got into it." John coughed again un.o.btrusively. "I raffled that bed off," he continued, low and reminiscently. "A conductor won it. But it didn't fool him. He knew the bed as well as I did; he'd slept in it. So I bought it in again, cheap, and traded it to an old Indian buck--a one-eyed man--for a pony.

Many a time I've laughed, thinking of that bed up on the Reservation.

Those bucks, you know, are desperate gamblers. I understand they've been playing hearts with that blamed bed ever since and putting it on the high man."

At this, John laughed harder than ever, Belle sputtering as she watched him.

Then he turned his amiable face on Kate: "How are you all at the home?"

"Very well."

"What's the news up your way?"

"Not a thing since the Fourth of July."

"Father pretty well?"

"Quite."

"When did you see him last?"

It was an odd question: "Last night--why?" asked Kate in turn.

"He didn't come in town with you today?" countered John.

"He rarely does," said Kate.

John nodded soothing a.s.sent to her explanation: "How's Van Horn?" he asked casually. "And Stone?" he added, with undiminished interest.

"All well," was his echo to her perfunctory answers. "Say, Belle, was Jim Laramie in town yesterday?"

Belle shook her head. "How about the day before?" he asked. Again she said, "no"; and went on with an impatient comment of her own: "You're always asking questions. What for? That's what I want to know."

John laid his cigarette on the rim of his plate and appealed to Kate: "Did you ever in your life see a more unreasonable woman than Belle?

How am I to find things out without asking questions of my friends?

And among them I number you both," he added.

Leaning forward, he spoke on: "Now I'll tell you why I asked those harmless little questions--for I wouldn't ask either of you any other kind. This news will get to each of you, about evening. By morning it will be all over Sleepy Cat and by tomorrow noon across the Spanish Sinks. This morning, early, Van Horn, Tom Stone, Pettigrew with Bradley, and a bunch of Texas men and cowboys rode over into the Falling Wall country and there's been h.e.l.l to pay there every minute since daylight--that's the word I got about half an hour ago, by telephone, from a little ranch away up on the head-waters of the Crazy Woman."

He drew his handkerchief and wiped his brow. "The only man up there--Belle knows that--that I'm any ways interested in, is Jim Laramie. According to what I can hear, Jim is home. That's worrying me just a little.

"What will Jim do? That's what I'm thinking of. How will he stack up if that bunch goes to his ranch on the Turkey? He hates 'em like poison. They've gone up there, you understand," he added, speaking to Kate, as if some further explanation were due a comparative stranger, "to clean out the rustlers. You can imagine it'll be done--or at least attempted--without much talk. There won't be very much talk. I've known for some little time what's been going forward. They tried to get Jim to join them; offered him about anything he wanted; offered to see that the contests on his preemption and homestead be withdrawn; offered him quite a bunch of cattle, I heard; and some money."

Belle's face, her staring eyes and strained expression as she listened, showed how well she knew what the news meant. "What answer did Jim give?" she asked anxiously.

"From what I can pick up," declared John, dropping calmly into the inelegant expression, "he told 'em to go to h.e.l.l.

"That's what I'm worrying about now. Not about their going, but about what Jim will do. What do you think, Belle?"