Young Norcross, much as he admired Berrie, was not seeking to exchange
her favor for her lover's enmity, and he rode away with an uneasy feeling
of having innocently made trouble for himself, as well as for a fine,
true-hearted girl. "What a good friendly talk we were having," he said,
regretfully, "and to think she is to marry that big, scowling brute. How
could she turn Landon down for a savage like that?"
He was just leaving the outer gate when Belden came clattering up and
reined his horse across the path and called out: "See here, you young
skunk, you're a poor, white-livered tenderfoot, and I can't bust you as I
would a full-grown man, but I reckon you better not ride this trail any
more."
"Why not?" inquired Wayland.
Belden glared. "Because I tell you so. Your sympathy-hunting game has
just about run into the ground. You've worked this baby dodge about long
enough. You're not so almighty sick as you put up to be, and you'd better
hunt some other cure for lonesomeness, or I'll just about cave your chest
in."
All this was shockingly plain talk for a slender young scholar to listen
to, but Norcross remained calm. "I think you're unnecessarily excited,"
he remarked. "I have no desire to make trouble. I'm considering Miss
Berea, who is too fine to be worried by us."
His tone was conciliating, and the cowman, in spite of himself, responded
to it. "That's why I advise you to go. She was all right till you came.
Colorado's a big place, and there are plenty other fine ranges for men of
your complaint--why not try Routt County? This is certain, you can't stay
in the same valley with my girl. I serve notice of that."
"You're making a prodigious ass of yourself," observed Wayland, with calm
contempt.
"You think so--do you? Well, I'll make a jack-rabbit out of you if I find
you on this ranch again. You've worked on my girl in some way till she's
jest about quit me. I don't see how you did it, you measly little pup,
but you surely have turned her against me!" His rage burst into flame as
he thought of her last words. "If you were so much as half a man I'd
break you in two pieces right now; but you're not, you're nothing but a
dead-on-the-hoof lunger, and there's nothing to do but run you out. So
take this as your final notice. You straddle a horse and head east and
keep a-ridin', and if I catch you with my girl again, I'll deal you a
whole hatful of misery--now that's right!"
Thereupon, with a final glance of hate in his face, he whirled his horse
and galloped away, leaving Norcross dumb with resentment, intermingled
with wonder.
"Truly the West is a dramatic country! Here I am, involved in a lover's
wrath, and under sentence of banishment, all within a month! Well, I
suppose there's nothing to do but carry out Belden's orders. He's the
boss," he said as he rode on. "I wonder just what happened after I left?
Something stormy, evidently. She must have given him a sharp rebuff, or
he wouldn't have been so furious with me. Perhaps she even broke her
engagement with him. I sincerely hope she did. She's too good for him.
That's the truth."
And so, from point to point, he progressed till with fine indignation he
reached a resolution to stay and meet whatever came. "I certainly would
be a timorous animal if I let myself be scared into flight by that big
bonehead," he said at last. "I have as much right here as he has, and the
law must protect me. It can't be that this country is entirely
barbaric."
Nevertheless, he felt very weak and very much depressed as he rode up the
street of the little town and dismounted at the hotel. The sidewalks were
littered with loafing cowboys and lumber-jacks, and some of them quite
openly ridiculed his riding-breeches and his thin legs. Others merely
grinned, but in their grins lay something more insulting than words. "To
them I am a poor thing," he admitted; but as he lifted his eyes to the
mighty semicircular wall of the Bear Tooth Range, over which the daily
storm was playing, he forgot his small worries. What gorgeous pageantry!
What life-giving air! "If only civilized men and women possessed this
glorious valley, what a place it would be!" he exclaimed, and in the heat
of his indignant contempt he would have swept the valley clean.
As his eyes caught the flutter of the flag on its staff above the Forest
Service building, his heart went out to the men who unselfishly wrought
beneath that symbol of federal unity for the good of the future. "That is
civilized," he said; "that is prophetic," and alighted at the door in a
glow of confidence.
Nash, who was alone in the office, looked up from his work. "Come in," he
called, heartily. "Come in and report."
"Thank you. I'd like to do so; and may I use your desk? I have a letter
to write."
"Make yourself at home. Take any desk you like. The men are all out on
duty."
"You're very kind," replied Wayland, gratefully. There was something
reassuring in this greeting, and in the many signs of skill and
scientific reading which the place displayed. It was like a bit of
Washington in the midst of a careless, slovenly, lawless mountain town,
and Norcross took his seat and wrote his letter with a sense of
proprietorship.
"I'm getting up an enthusiasm for the Service just from hearing Alec
Belden rave against it," he said a few minutes later, as he looked up
from his letter.