The Settling of the Sage Part 4

"You Babe!" the man ordered. "Don't you go leaning on me." He pared down the hoof and fitted the shoe but before nailing it on he released the colt's foot and addressed the girl. "If I'd fight him now while he's spooky and half-scared it would spoil him maybe," he explained.

"I gentle-break mine, too," she said, and the man overlooked the inflection which, as plainly as words, was intended to convey the impression that his ways were effeminate. "If every man used up his time gentling his string he'd never have a day off to work at anything else."

"Why, it don't use up much time," he objected. "They halfway break themselves, standing round with a saddle on and having a man handle them a little between spells of regular work--like cutting firewood and such. And it's a saving of time in the end. There's three hundred odd days every year when a man consumes considerable time fighting every horse he steps up on--if they're broke that way to start."

"So your only reason for not riding them out is to save time," she said.

"If you mean that I'm timid," he observed, "why, I don't know as I'd bother to dispute it." He moved over and sat on his heels facing her, twisting the ever handy cigarette. "Listen," he urged. "Let's you and I try to get along. Now if you'll only make up your mind that I'm not out to grab the Three Bar, not even the half of it that's supposed to be mine--unless you get paid for it--why, we're liable to get to liking each other real well in the end. I'll give you a contract to that effect."

"Which you know would be worthless!" she returned. "The will specifically states that any agreements between us prior to the time of division are to be disregarded. A written contract would have no more value than your unsupported promise and in view of what's happened you don't expect me to place a value on that."

He pulled reflectively at his cigarette and she rather expected another of the irrelevant remarks with which he so often replied to her pointed thrusts.

"No," he said at last. "But it's a fact that I don't want the Three Bar--or rather I do if you should ever decide to sell."

"I never will," she stated positively. "It's always been my home.

I've been away and had a good time; three winters in school and enjoying every second; but there always comes a time when I'm sick to get back, when I know I can't stay away from the Three Bar, when I want to smell the sage and throw my leg across a horse--and ride!"

"I know, Billie," he said softly. "I was raised here, up until I was eight. My feeling is likely less acute than yours but I've always hankered to get back to where the sage and pine trees run together. I mentioned a while back that I was tied up peculiar and stood to lose considerable if I failed to put in two years out here--which wouldn't have been of any particular consequence only that I found out that the Three Bar was going under unless some one put a stop to what's going on. I'll pull it out of the hole, maybe, and hand it back to you."

She was swayed into a momentary belief in his sincerity but steeled herself against it, and in the effort to strengthen the crumbling walls of her dislike she fell back on open ridicule.

"You!" she flared. "And what can you do against it--a man that was raised in squatter country behind a barb-wire fence, who has to gentle his horses before he can sit up on one, who has. .h.i.tched a gun on his belt because he thinks it's the thing to do, and has stowed it in a place where he'd have to tie himself in a knot--or undress--to reach it. And then you talk of pulling the Three Bar out of a hole! Why, there are twenty men within fifty miles of here that would kill you the first move you made."

"There's considerable sound truth in that," he said. He looked down at his gun; it swung on his left side, in front, the b.u.t.t pointing toward the right. "It's easier to work with it sort of out of the way of my hands," he explained and smiled.

She found herself liking him, even in the face of the treachery he had practiced against her father and was correspondingly angry, both with herself and at him. She left him without a word and returned to the house.

He finished putting the shoes on the colt and as he turned him back into the corral he observed a horseman jogging up the lane at a trail trot. He knew the man for Slade, whose home ranch lay forty miles to the south and a little west, the owner of the largest outfit in that end of the State; a man feared by his compet.i.tors, quick to resent an insinuation against his business methods and capable of backing his resentment.

Slade dropped from his horse and accorded Harris only a casual nod as he headed for the house. Slade's face was of a peculiar cast. The black eyes were set very close together in a wide face; his cheek bones were low and oddly protruding, sloping far out to a point below each eye. His small ears were set so close to his skull that the outcropping cheek bones extended almost an inch beyond them to either side. Yet there was a certain fascination about his face and bearing that appealed to the spark of the primitive in women; that last lingering cell that harks fondly back to men in the raw. His age might have been anywhere above twenty-six and under fifty-six.

He walked through the cookhouse and opened the door of the girl's quarters without the formality of a knock, as if a frequent visitor and sure of his privileges.

"How many times have I told you to knock?" she demanded. "The next time you forget it I'll go out as you come in."

Slade dropped into a chair.

"I never have knocked--not in twelve years," he said.

"It was somewhat different when I was a small girl and you were only a friend of my father," she pointed out. "But now----"

"But now that I've come to see you as a woman it's different?" he inquired. "No reason for that."

She switched the channel of conversation and spoke of the coming round-up, of the poor condition of range stock owing to the severity of the winter; but it was a monologue. For a time the man sat and listened, as if he enjoyed the sound of her voice, contributing nothing to the conversation himself, then suddenly he stirred in his chair and waved a hand to indicate the unimportance of the topics.

"Yes, yes; true enough," he interrupted. "But I didn't come to talk about that. When are you coming home with me, Billie?"

"And you can't come if you insist on talking about that," she countered.

"I'll come," he stated. "Tell me when you're going to move over to the Circle P."

"Not ever," she said. "I'd rather be a man's horse than his wife. Men treat women like little tinsel queens before, and afterwards they answer to save a cook's wages and drudge their lives out feeding a hunch of half-starved hands--or else go to the other extreme. Wives are either work horses or pets. I was raised like a boy and I want to have a say in running things myself."

"You can go your own gait," he pledged.

"I'm doing that now," she returned. "And prefer going on as I am."

Slade rose and moved over to her, taking her hands and lifting her from her chair.

The girl pushed him back with a hand braced against his chest.

"Stop it!" she said. "You're getting wilder every time you come, but you've never pawed at me before. I won't have people's hands on me,"

and she made a grimace of distaste.

The man reached out again and drew her to him. She wrenched away and faced Slade.

"That will be the last time you'll do that until I give the word," she said. "I don't want the Circle P--or you. When I do I'll let you know!"

He moved toward her again and she refused to back away from him but stood with her hands at her sides.

"If you put a finger on me it's the last lime you'll visit the Three Bar," she calmly announced.

He stood so close as almost to touch her but she failed to lift a hand or move back an inch, and Slade knew that he faced one whose spirit matched his own, perhaps the one person within a hundred miles who did not fear him. He had tamed men and horses--and women; he raised his arms slowly, deliberately, to see if she would flinch away or stand fast and outgame him. She knew that he was harmless to her--and he knew it. He might perpetrate almost any crime on the calendar and come clear; but in this land where women were few they were honored. One whisper from the Three Bar girl that Slade had raised his hand against her and, powerful as he was, the hunt for him would be on, with every man's hand against him.

His arms had half circled her when he whirled, catlike, every faculty cool and alert, as a voice sounded from the door. Both had been too engrossed to notice its noiseless opening.

"I've finished cleaning up round the shop and corrals," Harris said.

"Is there any rubbish round the house you'd like to have throwed out and piled in a dry gulch somewheres out of sight?"

He stood in the door, half facing them, his left side quartering toward Slade. To the girl it appeared that the strange pose was for the purpose of enabling him to take a quick step to the right and spring outside if Slade should make a move and she felt a tinge of scorn at his precaution even though she knew that it would avail him nothing if Slade's deadly temper were roused by the insult. Slade, who had killed many, would add Harris to his list before he could move.

Slade's understanding of the quartering position and the odd sling of Harris's gun was entirely different and as he s.h.i.+fted his feet until he faced the man in the door, his movements were slow and deliberate, nothing that could be misconstrued.

"Who summoned you in here?" he demanded.

Harris did not reply but stood waiting for some word from the girl.

She had a sudden sick dread that Slade would kill him and was surprised at the sentiment, for no longer than an hour before she had wished him dead. She made belated answer to his original question.

"No," she said. "Go on out, please."

He turned his back on Slade and went out.

"And you," she said to Slade, "you'd best be going too. We've been too good neighbors to quarrel--unless you come over again with the same idea you did to-day."

At sunset the girl called to Harris and he repaired to the house and found her putting a hot meal for two on the end of the long pine table, the first time she had deigned to eat with him since that first meal.

"There's no use of our going on like this," she said. "We've two years of it to face; so it's best to get on some kind of a neutral footing."