The Trail of Conflict Part 10

What is he in this country but a guest? If a man came to stay in my home and began a systematic undermining of the ideas and ideals on which that home was built, what do you think I'd do to him?"

"I'll say you'd sure put him out, Chief," with Gerrish's drawl and a little rush of laughter.

"I'll say I would. So quick he'd wonder what struck him. Why should the government put up with their vicious patter? It's bad enough when an honest-to-G.o.d citizen breaks loose and turns red, but for a man who is here by courtesy--well, as I remarked before, there is no place for him on the Double O ranch. Aliens will keep their jobs here only so long as they conform to my ideas of fitness."

"You're right, Steve. I have never thought of agitators in that light but they are a sort of human slow-match timed to fire a mine of discontent, aren't they? And half the time the mine doesn't know what it is blowing-up about. How do the men feel about Ranlett's defection?"

"I haven't asked them. What's the infernal row?" he demanded as they drew rein at the gate of the court. Jerry looked at him in surprise. His tone was that of a man whose nerves were taut to snapping point. She slid from her horse and dropped the reins. Patches loped quietly but determinedly in the direction of the corral and supper. Blue Devil, with a reproachful glance at the deserter, followed daintily in the steps of his master as Courtlandt and the girl entered the garden. The court was a riot of plants and shrubs. The air was sweet with the fragrance of roses just coming into bloom and rent by agitated yelps and a hoa.r.s.e, croaking voice.

When Jerry and Steve reached storm centre they saw a combination of scarlet, blue and green, swaying precariously on the top of a shutter.

It was Jose's parrot, Benito, flinging to the breeze the most vituperative epithets a rich and racy vocabulary could suggest. Below him Goober sat on his haunches. Between barks his tongue dripped, his mouth hung open as though in riotous laughter. His tawny eyes flashed ruby light. Tommy Benson, his finger between the pages of a book, his hair rampant, his blue eyes sparkling with mirth, egged on the two as he quoted from his favorite "Ancient Mariner":

"'The wedding guest sat on a stone, He could not choose but hear; And thus spake on that ancient man, The bright-eyed mariner.'"

His eloquence incited the bird to renewed effort to express his sentiments. Jerry clapped her hands over her ears and dashed into the house. Steve whistled. The dog bounded in his direction, his quarry forgotten in the joy of seeing his master. Courtlandt seized him by the collar.

"What do you mean, you sinner?" he demanded sternly. Goober looked as though he were about to offer an explanation when the gaudy parrot, who had been rocking back and forth on the shutter, croaked:

"Lick him, Bo! Lick him!"

Tommy dropped to the ground and rolled with laughter. Jose came hurrying out of the house. He swept off his hat with a wide bow. His face had the look of a much-shriveled mummy, his solitary tooth waggled precariously as he talked.

"_Que hay! Senor!_ One teeng I tell you. It ees that wild devil of a dog that makes my leetle Benito to curse. _Madre de Dios_, but he ees one--one----"

"You've said it, Jose," encouraged Benson as he sat up and wiped his eyes. He took his knees in an affectionate embrace. "He sure is one little curser, that Benito of yours. Want me to help get him down?"

"No--no, Senor Tommee. He come to me." He reached up and after a few protesting squawks the parti-colored bird settled on the Mexican's shoulder. As Jose left the court with him, the parrot s.h.i.+vered, flapped his wings, winked at Tommy and croaked hoa.r.s.ely:

"What's all the shootin'?"

Tommy gave vent to a whoop of appreciation before he turned to Courtlandt, who was regarding the ranch-house door unseeingly. He gave him a resounding whack on the shoulder as he ranted:

"'How is't with you That you do bend your eye on vacancy?'"

"Quit your histrionics, Tommy. Has Pete Gerrish been here for me?"

"Nope. Nothing doing." Benson stroked Blue Devil's satiny nose and rested his face against it as he asked in a low tone, "Any news of those stray calves?"

Courtlandt's brows met in a quick frown.

"No, but of course we'll find them. It's absurd to think a man can get away with rustling in this enlightened twentieth century, that we've got to revert to shooting and----"

"That's what the majority of the world claimed in 1914," interrupted Benson dryly.

"Don't be a blamed pessimist, Tommy. I'm going to take you off the books and use you outside."

"Oh boy!" he voiced the twentieth century equivalent to the nineteenth century "Great Scott!" in delighted approval. "If you do that and Ranlett has been crooked, he hasn't a prayer. I'm the original Sherlock Holmes. Watch me get him! Pete's boys have all they can do now without turning detectives. You'd think that Gerrish had just been put in charge of a new outfit. He's on location every minute, reestimating the number of head each pasture should carry, weighing up the stock, sifting out the undesirables. Take it from me, old dear, he knows every calf by name, what it's worth now and what it will bring one year from now. He claims that Ranlett has been underselling. I'll ride the fences to-morrow. If you say the word I'll take Jerry along and we'll have a corking time."

"You and Jerry usually have a corking time together, don't you?" Benson showed his teeth in a flas.h.i.+ng smile.

"I'll say we do. I don't like to talk about myself, but----"

Courtlandt laughed.

"You don't care for yourself one little bit, do you, Tommy? By all means take Jerry if she cares to go. Beat it down to the corral with Blue Devil, will you? That is if you dare ride him," Steve amended with a laugh.

Tommy mounted with the agility of a monkey, wheeled his horse and declaimed theatrically:

"I dare do all that may become a man Who dares do more is none!"

CHAPTER IX

"Work is the grandest cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.--CARLYLE."

Jerry nodded approvingly at the quotation above her desk in the office.

It had been hung there in Old Nick's day and was quite as pertinent in her case as it might have been in his. To be sure, their maladies differed. His couldn't by the remotest possibility have been lack of money, she thought with a laugh.

Steve had installed her at her desk two weeks ago and had then forgotten her, presumably. Tommy Benson was giving her instructions as to her duties, but even his attentions were episodic. Ranlett had departed swearing vengeance in the good old nineteenth century style and Steve and Gerrish were out from morning till night taking account of stock and checking up. Tommy was riding range and being general utility man.

Neither he nor Steve knew how closely she had remained at her desk. She must make good and she must accomplish it without taking too much of Tommy's time. As Steve had insisted upon paying her a month's salary in advance she had surrept.i.tiously sent for a correspondence course on bookkeeping. She was making Sandy's life miserable because the material, which she expected would make her efficient in twenty-four hours, had not arrived.

Arms on the back of her swivel-chair, one knee in the seat she twisted slowly about. The room inspired the same sense of breathless interest it had the first time she entered it. Two walls were encased in gla.s.s.

Behind the gla.s.s hung a collection of riding equipment and firearms.

Some of the pieces dated back to the epoch-making journey of the pathfinders, Lewis and Clark, some to the first white settlers in the region west of the Mississippi. There were saddles rich in silver filigree which had come from the southwest of the cattle country; there were saddles with short round skirts, open stirrups, narrow and rimmed with iron; some had borders and emblems stamped on the leather, some had dark stains. There were chaps, fringed and unfringed, in infinite variety. There were coiled ropes of rawhide and of well worn gra.s.s; there were guns and knives and tomahawks, there was a stained and tattered Stars and Stripes.

"You fairly ooze atmosphere." Jerry mused aloud, her dreamy brown eyes on the saddles. "If you could speak what couldn't you tell of romance and comedy and tragedy. Herds, bad men, _voyageurs_, rustlers, settlers, prairie-schooners and Indians, you must have seen them all." Her voice had dropped to a whisper. Its tenseness roused her from what was fast becoming a vermilion orgy of imagination. She swung her chair round and dropped into it with a laugh and the reflection, "Pete Gerrish says that when a person talks to himself he's sure in for adventure."

She picked up a typewritten letter and regarded it with vainglorious elation. Not so bad! There was a spiral effect at the end of one sentence but on the whole it was a creditable affair for a person who had never used a typewriter till the week before and who was relying on the hunt-and-punch method for progress. Her already flushed cheeks took on a deeper tinge as she looked at the filing cases. Would she ever acquire a feeling of even bowing acquaintance with them, she wondered; they were most awe-inspiring.

The sun lay warmly on the fields outside, a gay little breeze spiced with pine danced in at the open window, stirred the curls at the nape of the girl's neck and whisked out again. Jerry looked out longingly, shook her head. "Remember, you're a daughter of toil now," she adjured the vagabond impulse which urged her to be up and away on her horse. She resolutely turned her back on the tempting out-of-doors and picked up her letter.

"'Gentlemen,'" she read aloud, "'We are s.h.i.+pping'--now why should I have typed that slipping--'thirty head of Guernseys on the----'" A shadow from the open door fell on her paper. Absorbed in her corrections, she spoke without looking up from her desk:

"You are wanted at the Lower Field, Pete. The Chief just 'phoned that more calves are missing. That----" as no colorful e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n followed her announcement, Gerrish swore with fascinating facility when he was deeply moved, she looked up in surprise. The smile which the thought of Pete had brought stiffened on her lips. She sprang to her feet and pushed back her chair. A man leaned against the door, a giant of a man fully six feet two. In a flash she sized him up. He was of different caliber from the "boys" of the outfit. No one of them would have stood with his hat on in her presence. The stranger's Mexican sombrero, pushed far back on his head, revealed rough red hair; his eyes were a hard blue; his nose suggested the beak of a hawk; his mouth was his best feature, it looked as though it might have been tender before the insidious processes of discouragement and recklessness got in their work. One temple gave the impression of having been knocked in and from the dent to the corner of his lips ran an angry, wrinkled scar. It contributed a curiously saturnine expression to what in youth might have been a pleasing face. From feet to waist his clothing was reminiscent of the army; from the belt up it might have belonged to a rider, even to the gay purple and crimson bandana at his neck. The stranger smiled boldly as his eyes met the girl's. Jerry's heart did a handspring and righted. A fleeting cloud of apprehension dimmed the brilliance of her eyes.

"If you are looking for a job you'll have to come back after five," she volunteered with her best in-charge-of-the-office manner. "The manager is off on the range." She could have cheerfully bitten out her tongue as she noted the smile with which the man received the information.

"I'm no cow-puncher," he answered disdainfully. "I'm not hunting a job here. I'm looking for the railroad. I took the ranch road by mistake, but, now that I am here----" He straightened his great shoulders, pulled his soft hat jauntily over one ear with his big hairy hand, and took a step into the room. "Well, you're too pretty a girl to be left alone, _sabe_? I always had a taste for stenogs."

Jerry's heart did another turn. She hated the man's eyes. Hers flashed to the desk. There was no use trying to telephone, he might stop her; besides, the ranch was an affair of magnificent distances; it would take time for anyone she called to reach the office. Ming and Hopi would be of as much a.s.sistance as two Chinese dolls. She must depend upon herself to get rid of the creature. She swiftly computed the relative splas.h.i.+ng values of the ink-well and the pot of paste. The ink had it. Her hand crept along the desk.

"Don't come any nearer. If you're wise you'll go at once."

"I get you. Here's-your-hat-what's-your-hurry stuff, yes? But I think I'll stay. I've just come up from the border. You're the handsomest white girl I've seen in months. Come on, be friends. I like that gilt-edged effect in your hair and eyes. Take it from me----"

Jerry was white to the lips. She lifted the ink-well.