The Plow-Woman Part 14

"Oh, you _do_."

"Yes," very quietly.

"Well, let me tell y', my dear, that you're _dead_ wrong. You're goin'

t' git your duds an' grub t'gether right now; in half a' hour, you leave this cabin."

At this, Marylyn began to sob.

"Come, get a move on," ordered Matthews, threateningly. He knew that if he wished to regain the land, there would be no time better than the present. He began to walk up and down, flinging his arms about to start the circulation.

Dallas turned to comfort Marylyn, putting an arm about her protectingly.

"Hus.h.!.+" she said. "Keep quiet, honey."

"Oh, let's go! let's go!" wailed the younger girl.

Matthews came forward again, and took out his watch, a large, open-faced timepiece hung to a braided buckskin chain. "Now, look a-here," he said peremptorily; "I don't want no more funny business. This claim's mine.

Your old man ain't got a solitary right to it. So you got t' go. I'll give you _jus' ten minutes_." With this, he resumed his pacing, comforting his beat with occasional draughts from a flask.

Dallas strove hard to collect herself. "I can't do anything till dad comes," she called to him, finally. "You want us to leave. Why, we haven't got any place to go; and it's cold----"

"Guess I know _that_," interrupted Matthews. "I'm almost friz."

"And you've got no right to ask us to go till you've paid for this house and the well--and--and my plowing."

"I pay fer nothin' I don't see, and fer no hole in th' ground," he said.

"And as far 's a place to go is concerned"--this with a leer--"there's Shanty Town. Why, the boys'd be tickled t' death t' see y'. Then there's allus room at the Fort when there's good-lookin' gals in the fambly."

Dallas understood the insult. Her grey eyes flamed in her greyer face.

She slammed the window.

Matthews came near, so that his face all but touched the gla.s.s. "Oh, that don't do no good, my dear," he said, raising his voice. "When I get ready, I'll come in."

Marylyn had stilled her weeping to listen to him. Now, pallid with fear, she threw herself upon her sister and again burst forth.

Dallas put her swiftly aside. The face that had been grey was now a tense white. Her eyes were blazing. She sprang to the gun rack and put up her arms.

But the pegs were empty!

CHAPTER IX

A HAND IN THE FUN

"What under the s.h.i.+ning sun!" exclaimed Lounsbury, spilling ground coffee into his boot-tops. He strode to the front of the store, the tin scoop in his hand still held recklessly upside down. A pung was pa.s.sing the grocery--a green pung drawn by a milk-white horse. On its quilt-padded seat were two men. Above them, as they slowly proceeded, sagged a high board cross.

Lounsbury glanced inquiringly about him. His neighbours were also watching the strange sight. At the windows of the bunk-house opposite, and at the openings of other buildings near, were many faces, wide with good-natured grins. As Lounsbury turned to the travellers again his own mouth curved in a smile.

But, all at once, he sobered. The pung was now so far away that the backs of the men were presented to him; and between them, projecting at a slant over the seat, were the curved tops of a pair of crutches.

Jocular opinions of the pa.s.sers-by were being freely exchanged back and forth; he paid no heed to them. The scoop dropped from his hand and clattered upon the floor; he let it lay. Silent and troubled, unaware of the demands of an insistent customer, he looked after the departing sleigh.

At last, he acted. Without waiting even to put on his cap, he started at a run up the street. His race, bareheaded, increased the laughter of those who were still watching. They yelled to him boisterously: "Sic'

'em, Bud!" "Sell 'em somethin', John!" "Drag 'em back an' skin 'em!" But the storekeeper was deaf. Each yard made him more certain of the ident.i.ty of one traveller; his thoughts, as he pursued, were of him. He gained rapidly on the pung. At the edge of the camp, in the trough of a drift, he stopped it.

Lancaster spoke first, for Lounsbury was too spent. "Wal? wal?" he said crabbedly.

"Excuse me," panted the other, giving, in his eagerness, only a glance at David Bond, "excuse me, but I see you're headed from home. I wondered--I thought maybe I could do a turn for the young ladies while you're gone."

For a moment the section-boss did not reply. He was still smarting over Dallas' generals.h.i.+p, and, if anything, was more disgusted and rebellious than when he left the shack. So, in the brief pause, he gave ready ear to the whispering of the yellow harpy. His lids lowered. His lip curled.

"You understand, I'm sure," Lounsbury hastened to say. "I thought they might be alone, that----"

"Thank y'," answered Lancaster, snapping out each word; "thank y', they _is_ alone. An' you'll oblige me a d.a.m.n sight by leavin' 'em thet way."

He settled himself in his seat. "Git ap!" he said to Shadrach. The pung slipped slowly on.

Lounsbury was too taken aback either to follow or to retreat. For a while, he stayed where he was, busily coining forcible phrases for the relief of his mind. As he retraced his steps, the few who saw him were discreetly silent. For the camp knew that there were rare moments when it was best to give him a wide berth.

The interview in the trough of the drift was so brief that David Bond was shut out of it. But had it been longer--had he been given a chance to speak--the result might have been the same. The section-boss had been mute all the way to Clark's. The fact that Dallas had told him to relate the story of the claim was the strongest reason for his not doing so.

David Bond, therefore, was left in ignorance, and had no means of connecting the evil companion of his journey north with the fortunes of the Lancasters. So, as they left Lounsbury behind, he even found some censure in his heart for the storekeeper.

"You were quite right," he said, flicking Shadrach gently. "That young man should pay no visit to your daughters while you are absent.

Yet,"--he could not refrain from putting a reproof where it seemed due--"yet, I regret your manner of addressing him, your oath----"

Lancaster glared. "Oh, you' gran'mother's tortoise-sh.e.l.l cat!" he said wrathfully. For several hours thereafter he added nothing to this.

Back in his store, Lounsbury was mixing brown sugar with white, oolong tea with a green variety, and putting thread in the pickle-barrel.

Simultaneously, he was torturing himself: Had the section-boss left home with no danger threatening? But--the green pung was undoubtedly bound for Bismarck. What was it that had suddenly made him see the necessity of attending to the claim? Along with this came self-arraignment: After all, he should have told Lancaster that a man who claimed the quarter-section on the peninsula had been called from Dodge City.

Lounsbury had been certain that Matthews could not reach Fort Brannon before the spring. But it had never occurred to him that the section-boss would leave his girls alone! Now, he vowed that if any harm befell Dallas and Marylyn, he had only himself to blame.

He buckled on his pistol-belt and padlocked the door. "I don't care whether the old man likes it or not," he declared aloud, "I'm going down there."

As he swung through the camp on his way to the corral, he saw one of Old Michael's helpers coming toward him, picking his steps in the slush. The man motioned, and held out a white something. It was an envelope, grimy and unaddressed.

Lounsbury ripped it open and pulled out a written sheet.

"der mr lunsbery [ran the note] mathuse com las nite in a quere outfit with a krazy preecher the preecher i think is at the landcasters but the other sunuvagun is her i hav a i on him prity kold wether river sollid."

It was partly through the generous employment of his imagination that the storekeeper was able to make out the scrawl, which, though not signed, he knew to be the pilot's. That same imagination enabled him to bring up numberless disturbing--almost terrible--pictures.

The astonished helper gazed after him as he went tearing away in the direction of the horse-herd. "By jingo!" he grumbled; "twenty miles--and he didn't even say treat!"

Soon Lounsbury's favorite saddler, urged on by a quirt, was kicking up a path across the crusted drifts that Shadrach had so recently surmounted.

As the storekeeper cantered swiftly forward, a new question presented itself to him: Was the "preacher" in league with Matthews, and so was carrying the section-boss out of the way? He decided negatively. He had given only a glance to Lancaster's companion, but that, together with the pa.s.sing glimpse from the store, had shown him a venerable man whose piercing eyes held a pious light. He was no scoundrel confederate. He was plainly but a brave, perhaps a fanatic and foolhardy, apostle in the wilderness, and his calling had kept Matthews from confiding in him.

While Lounsbury thus alternately tortured and eased his mind, he had pa.s.sed the sombre clump of cottonwoods where the Indian dead were lashed, and was fast covering the miles that lay between the burial boughs and Fort Brannon.