The Last Straw Part 54

She ran down the stairs, out to the corral and saddled her sorrel horse.

CHAPTER XXV

A MOUNTAIN PORTIA

It was a long ride from the HC to the round-up camp but the sorrel was not spared. The impulse that sent Jane Hunter through the last hours of darkness had only acc.u.mulated strength before the resistance which had held it back through those dragging days. She was on her way to her lover, to explain in a word the situation that had caused the breach between them; she had fought down the pride of which that resistance was made and now her every thought, her every want was to make Beck know that it was humiliation and injured pride rather than infidelity which had sent him away.

Thought that she had failed to stand self possessed before Bobby Cole--a burning, shaming thought yesterday--was relegated to an obscure place in her consciousness. She had fallen short of the poise her lover would have her retain, but that did not matter ... not now.

Without Beck's love there was nothing for her, she had come to believe and she experienced a strange, little-girl feeling, fleeing toward the protecting arms that could comfort and hold her safe from the blackness that was elsewhere.

She leaned low on the sorrel's neck and called to him and he ran through the dying night breathing excitedly as her impatience was communicated to him. Dawn yawned in the east and the mountains took shape. The road became discernable before her. She drew the excited horse down to a trot and forced herself to force him to conserve some of his splendid energy.... Then urged him forward, a moment later, at a stretching run....

The round-up camp was moving that day. The riders were up and the first had swung off for the work of the morning before she pulled her horse to a stop beside the chuck wagon.

"He ain't here, ma'am," Oliver replied to her query for Beck.

"Not here?"--sharply, for she sensed from him that something was wrong.

"No. He left yesterday. He told me to head this ride. He--"

"And where did he go?" she broke in, voice not just steady.

"I don't know, ma'am." The man studied her face intently, seeing the confusion there, adding it to the evidence he had collected to piece out a theory. "I thought maybe he said something to you about quitting."

"_Quitting!_ You don't mean that!"

"It looks like it, ma'am. I didn't know just how to take what he said.

It seems like somethin' 's got him worried. He wasn't like himself. You wouldn't know him.

"He said that future plans for this outfit didn't interest him. He said he was leavin' and it wasn't likely he'd be back but it wasn't so much what he said as it was th' way he said it that made me think he was goin' to drift. We all know he's got some pretty active enemies but it wasn't like Beck to run away from 'em. Still....

"He left me in charge an' said I was to take orders from you. He ain't showed up since and Lord knows where he'd go except out of the country."

Out of the country! The words made her hear but vaguely the story of the ruined Tank and the questions about the work that Oliver put to her. Out of the country! He had gone, then, thinking that her love had not been a fast love, that she was wholly unworthy. He had taken his chance and had lost and that loss had taken from him even the desire to stay and face the men who would drive him out of the country because he had defended her!

Later Jane found herself riding homeward, the sorrel at a walk, her mind numb and heavy. Last night it had been a question of love against her pride; she had sacrificed the latter only to find that that sacrifice had been made too late.

She wanted, suddenly, to quit ... to quit trying ... thinking....

She canvased the situation: she was alone, without an understanding individual upon whom to lean. She was the target for great forces of evil which sought to undermine her very determination to exist in that country. A faint wave of resentment made itself felt at that. They would continue their war and upon a lone woman! She realized her position more keenly than she had before, when Beck had been s.h.i.+elding her. Now she stood unprotected. If she were to exist she _must stand alone!_

Her mind went back to that time when d.i.c.k Hilton had told her that she could not stand alone and her resentment became a degree more p.r.o.nounced.

The lethargy, the hopelessness clung but behind it was something else, a realization that she had not lost utterly. She had lost the love she had found, but had she failed to gain anything? Yesterday it seemed that the ripest fruits of experience were hers; she had position--menaced, but still hers--she had love. Months before she had abandoned the quest of love, seeking only to stand alone. She might go back to her outlook of those days, put aside the call of her heart and seek only for place; she could make that search intelligently now!

She sat at her desk, a spirit of resignation coming as a sort of comfort. If she had lost love, had she lost all that there was in life?

No, not that! There was something else she had found in these months: She had found _herself!_

Tom Beck was gone, his love for her was dead, miles were between them, and she believed she knew him well enough to understand that he had put her forever behind him. She had lost the true fulfillment of life, perhaps, but something remained. And the question came: Why not make the best of it? Why not keep what remains? Why not fight for it? Why not _stand alone?_

Oh, she had not known the strength that had been born of Beck's resistance to her wooing! That morning she believed that she could quit, that she could drift aimlessly, buffeted by vagrant influences, but now she knew that she could not. A compelling force had been started within her which would not down, a driving impulse to keep on, to salvage her self respect, to wrest from life what remained.

And in this she recognized that quality which Beck had planted in her, which he had nourished and coaxed and made to grow. To keep on would be rite offered at the shrine of her love for him ... though he was gone....

For a moment she cried and after that hope was born. He might return; she might even follow and make him understand. She set that back, resolutely. Tom Beck was gone from her life, she told herself, but his influence remained. That could never go; by error she had lost final achievement: love. By error she had been thrown back upon herself, her own resources, her own will.

The war that was waged upon her had been a terrifying thing yesterday; now it was even more horrible for it sought to take from her the last thing that remained to be desired, and that could not be!

She wiped her eyes angrily and repeated aloud:

"That cannot _be!_"

She must fight on alone; fight harder than she ever had fought in her life before. It was up to her, now, to remain fast in the face of efforts to dislodge her.

Jane paced the floor nervously, in quick, swinging strides. There was the burning of hay, the breaking of ditches; there was the shooting down of Two-Bits, the destruction of Cathedral Tank, there was the presence in the Hole of the nester and his daughter. At thought of Bobby a sharp pang shot through her. There was a woman who could dominate! There, perhaps, was the key to the puzzle.

Beck had intimated that her enemies found a nucleus in the nester's outfit; the Reverend had been outspoken in his suspicion; she had confided in Riley that she suspected something of the sort. Cole himself was a negligible quant.i.ty but the girl was not. The catamount might hold Jane Hunter's fate in her hand ... the hand that had struck her!

On her desk lay the envelope in which had been Beck's note; beside it the locket. She paused, picked up the trinket and studied it as it lay on her small palm. Slowly she lifted it to her lips, clutched it tightly and then with a catch of breath fastened it about her neck, where it nestled as though coming home again.

She needed her luck, he had written! Oh yes, she needed her luck!

And even then a rider was speeding across the hills toward her, las.h.i.+ng his horse, cras.h.i.+ng through brush, leaping down timber, clattering over treacherous ledges to save time: and other men were riding on Jimmy Oliver's orders, bringing the cow-boys in off their circles, a.s.sembling them in Devil's Hole where a group of men stood silent and sullen....

Oh, she would fight on, desperate in her determination to crowd thought of a lost love from her life! She welcomed combat for it would be as a balm to that gaping wound of loss.

Later she saw the rider come into the ranch on his lathered horse. He flung off at the bunk house and, a moment later, came running toward her with Curtis at his side.

Alarmed, Jane met them at the door with a query on her lips.

"They want you in the Hole, ma'am," Curtis said.

"What's the trouble?"--for it could be nothing but trouble which would bring men in such haste and she had a crisp fear that it pertained to Beck.

"They've got Cole down there with a lot of your calves an' he's put his brand on 'em. Webb's there, too, an' Hepburn. They're holdin' 'em all for you to come," the messenger said. He was excited, he breathed rapidly and added: "Oliver an' Riley agreed you ought to come. It's your property ... an' it's your fight."

Her fight! Her fight, indeed! Perhaps this was a drawing to a head of the forces that had been arrayed against her. The man had mentioned Webb and Hepburn as though he considered their presence of significance.

A pinto, this time, bore her away from the ranch, the man, tense and silent, riding beside her. She did not speak as they scrambled up the point and gained high country nor did she look at him as they set into a gallop again. An indistinct haze was coming in the west with a looming thunder head protruding from it here and there. The wind in their faces was hot and fitful. The scarf about her neck fluttered erratically.

Jane had little attention for the detail of that ride. This was her fight and she raced to meet it with an eagerness born of necessity to retain what she might of the happiness she had made hers. And as she rode Tom Beck, pieces cut from his chaps bound about his feet to protect them on the long journey by foot, his retrieved canteen over his shoulder, limped into the camp, heard the cook's vague, disconnected story of the discovery that had been made in the Hole, borrowed boots, saddled a horse and rode swiftly across the hills.