The Heart of a Girl
Jim Allen was the sole owner and proprietor of Allen Hacienda. His
ranch, the Bar One, stretched for miles up and down the Sweetwater
Valley. Bounded on the east and west by the foot-hills, the tract was
one of the garden spots of Arizona. Southward lay the Sweetwater Ranch,
owned by Jack Payson. Northward was the home ranch of the Lazy K, an
Ishmaelitish outfit, ever at petty war with the other settlers in the
district. It was a miscellaneous and constantly changing crowd,
recruited from rustlers from Wyoming, gamblers from California,
half-breed outlaws from the Indian Territory; in short, "bad men" from
every section of the Western country. They had a special grudge
against Allen and Payson, whom they held to be accountable for the
sudden disappearance, about a year before, of their leader, Buck McKee,
a half-breed from the Cherokee Strip. However, no other leader had
arisen equal to that masterful spirit, and their enmity expressed
itself only in such petty depredations as changing brands on stray
cattle from the Bar One and Sweetwater Ranches, and the slitting of the
tongues of young calves, so that they would be unable to feed properly,
and, as a result, be disowned by their mothers, whereupon the Lazy K
outfit would slap its brand on them as mavericks.
Allen was a Kentuckian who had served in the Confederate Army as one of
Morgan's raiders, and so had received, by popular brevet, the title of
colonel. At the close of the war he had come to Arizona with his young
wife, Josephine, and had founded a home on the Sweetwater. He was now
one of the cattle barons of the great Southwest. Prosperity had not
spoiled him. Careless in his attire, cordial in his manner, he was a
man who was loved and respected by his men, from the newest tenderfoot
to the veteran of the bunkhouse. His wife, however, was not so highly
regarded, for she had never been able to recognize changes in time or
location and so was in perpetual conflict with her environment. She
attempted to make the free and independent cowboys of the Arizona
plains "stand around" like the house servants of the Kentucky
Bluegrass; and she persisted in the effort to manage her husband by the
feminine artifice of weeping. In days of her youth and beauty this had
been very effective, but now that these had passed, it was productive
only of good-humored raillery from him, and mirth from the bystanders.
"No wonder Jim has the finest ranch in Arizony," the cowboys were wont
to say, "with Josephine a irrigatin' it all the time."
Allen Hacienda was certainly a garden spot in that desert country. The
building was of the old Mexican style, an architecture found, by
centuries of experience, to be suited best to the climate and the
materials of the land. The house was only one story in height. The
rooms and outbuildings sprawled over a wide expanse of ground. The
walls were of native stone and adobe clay; over them clambered
grape-vines. In front of the home Mrs. Allen had planted a garden. A
'dobe wall cut off the house from the corral and the bunk-house. A
heavy girder spanned the distance from the low roof to the top of the
barrier. Latticework, supporting a grape-vine, formed, with a girder, a
gateway through which one could catch from the piazza a view of a
second cultivated plot. Palms and flowering cacti added color and life
to the near prospect. Through the arbor a glimpse of the Tortilla
Mountains, forty miles away, held the eye. The Sweetwater, its path
across the plains outlined by the trees fringing its banks, flowed past
the ranch. Yucca palms and sahuaroes threw a scanty shade over the
garden.
Shortly after the arrival of the Allens in Arizona they were blessed
with a daughter, the first white child born in that region. They
waited for a Protestant clergyman to come along before christening her,
and, as such visits were few and far between, the child was beginning
to talk before she received a name. From a "cunning" habit she had of
repeating last words of questions put to her, her father provisionally
dubbed her Echo, which name, when the preacher came, he insisted upon
her retaining.
As Echo grew older, in order that she might have a companion, Colonel
Allen went to Kentucky and brought back with him a little orphan girl,
who was a distant relative of his wife. Polly Hope her name was, and
Polly Hope she insisted on remaining, though the Allens would gladly
have adopted her.
Colonel Allen trained the girls in all the craft of the plains, just as
if they were boys. He taught them to ride astride, to shoot, to rope
cattle. They accompanied him everywhere he went, cantering on broncos
by the side of his Kentucky thoroughbred. Merry, dark-eyed,
black-haired Echo always rode upon the off side, and saucy Polly, with
golden curls, blue eyes, and tip-tilted nose, upon the near. The
ex-Confederate soldier dubbed them, in military style, his "right and
left wings." As the three would "make a raid" upon Florence, the
county town, the inhabitants did not need to look out of doors to
ascertain who were coming, for the merriment of the little girls gave
sufficient indication. "Here comes Jim Allen ridin' like the
destroyin' angel," said young Sheriff Hoover, on one of these
occasions, "I know him by the rustlin' of his 'wings.'"
The household was again increased a few years later by the generous
response of the Allens to an appeal from a Children's Aid Society in an
Eastern city to give a home to two orphaned brothers, Richard and
Henry Lane. "Dick" and "Buddy" (shortened in time to Bud), as they
were called, being taken young, quickly adapted themselves to their new
environment, and by the time they arrived at manhood had proved
themselves the equals of any cowboy on the range in horsemanship and
kindred accomplishments. Dick, the elder brother, was a steady,
reliable fellow, modest as he was brave, and remarkably quick-witted
and resourceful in emergencies. He gave his confidence over readily to
his fellows, but if he ever found himself deceived, withdrew it
absolutely. It was probably this last characteristic that attracted to
him Echo Allen's especial regard, for it was also her distinguishing
trait. "You have got to act square with Echo," her father was wont to
say, "for if you don't you'll never make it square with her afterward."
Bud was a generous-hearted, impetuous boy, who responded warmly to
affection. He repaid his elder brother's protecting care with a loyalty
that knew no bounds. The Colonel, who was a strict disciplinarian,
frequently punished him in his boyhood for wayward acts, and the little
fellow made no resistance--only sobbed in deep penitence. Once,
however, when Uncle Jim, as the boys and Polly called him, felt
compelled to apply to rod to Dick--unjustly, as it afterward
appeared--Bud burst into a tempest of passionate tears, and, leaping
upon the Colonel's back, clung there clawing and striking like a
wildcat until Allen was forced to let Dick go. It is shrewdly
indicative of the Colonel's character that not only did he refrain from
punishing Bud on that occasion, but, when floggings were subsequently
due the little fellow, laid on the rod less heavily out of regard for
the loyalty to his brother he had then displayed.
This attack also won the admiration of Polly Hope, who was something of
a spitfire herself. A little jealous of Dick for the chief place he
held in Bud's affection, she openly claimed the younger brother as her
sweetheart, and attempted to constitute him her knight--though with
repeated discouragements, for Bud was a bashful lad, and, though he had
a true affection for the girl, boylike concealed it by a show of
indifference.
The tender relations of these boys and girls persisted naturally into
young manhood and womanhood. No word of love passed between Dick and
Echo until that time when the "nesting impulse," the desire to have a
home of his own, prompted the young man to go out into the world and
win his fortune. For a year he had acted as foreman of the Allen
ranch, working in neighborly cooperation with Jack Payson, of
Sweetwater Ranch, a man of about his own age. The two young men became
the closest of comrades. When the fever of adventure seized upon Lane,
and he became dissatisfied with the plodding career of a wage-earner,
Payson insisted on mortgaging Sweetwater Ranch for three thousand
dollars and in lending Dick the money for a year's prospecting in the
mountains of Sonora, Mexico, in search of a fabulous rich "Lost Mine of
the Aztecs."
Traditions of lost mines are plentiful in Arizona and northern Mexico.
First taken up by the Spanish invaders of three hundred years ago from
the native Indians, they have been passed down to each subsequent
influx of white men. The directions are always vague. The inquirer
cannot pin his informant down to any definite data. Over the mountains
always lies the road. Hundreds of lives have been sacrificed, and
cruelty unparalleled practised upon innocent men women, and children,
by gold-seekers in their lust for conquest. Prosperous Indian villages
have been laid waste, and whole bands of adventurers have gone into the
desert in the search of these mines, never to return.
When the time for Lane's departure came Echo wept at the thought of
losing for so long a time the close companion of her childhood and the
sympathetic confidant of her youthful thoughts and aspirations. Dick,
in whom friendship for Echo had long before ripened into conscious
love, took her tears as evidence that she was similarly affected toward
him, and he allowed all the suppressed passion of his nature full vent
in a declaration of love. The girl was deeply moved by this revelation
of the heart of a strong man made tender as a woman's by a power
centering in her own humble self, and, being utterly without experience
of the emotion even in its protective form of calf-love, which is the
varioloid of the genuine infection, she imagined through sheer sympathy
that she shared his passion. So she assented with maidenly reserve to
his plea that she promise to marry him when he should return and
provide a home for her. Her more cautious mother secured a
modification of this pledge by limiting the time that Echo should wait
for him to one year. If at the expiration of that period Lane did not
return to claim her promise, or did not write making satisfactory
arrangements for continuance of the engagement, Echo was to be
considered free to marry whom she chose.
Soon after Lane's departure Mrs. Allen persuaded the Colonel to send
Echo east to a New England finishing-school for girls, where her mother
hoped that her budding love for Lane might be nipped in the frigid
atmosphere of intellectual culture, if not, indeed, supplanted by a
saving interest in young men in general, and, perhaps, in some
particular scion of a blue-blooded Boston family.
The plan succeeded in part only. The companionship of her
schoolfellows, her music and art-lessons, her books (during the limited
periods allotted to serious study and reading), and, above all, her
attrition at receptions with another order of men than that she had
known in the rough, uncultured West, occupied her mind so fully that
poor Dick Lane, who was putting a thought of Echo Allen in every blow
of his pick, received only the scraps of her attention.
Dick had few opportunities to mail a letter, and none of them for
receiving one. Unpractised in writing, his epistolary compositions
were crude in the extreme, being wholly confined to bald statements of
fact. Had he been as tender on paper as he was in his words and
accents when he kissed away her tears at parting, her regard for him
would have had fuel to feed on and might have kindled into genuine
love. As it was, she was forced to admit that, in comparison, with the
brilliant university men with whom she conversed, Dick Lane,
intellectually, was as quartz to diamond.
On the other band, she contrasted Dick in the essential point of
manliness most favorably with the male butterflies of society that
hovered around her. What one of them was so essentially chivalrous as
the Western man; so modest, so self-sacrificing, so brave and resolute
and resourceful? Dick Lane, or Jack Payson, for that matter, in all
save the adventitious points of education and culture was the higher
type of manhood, and Jack, at least, if not poor Dick, could hold his
own in mental and artistic perception with the brightest, most cultured
of Harvard graduates.
At the end of the year she came back home to await Dick's return from
the wilds of Mexico. There was great anxiety about his safety, for
Geronimo, attacked by Crook in the Apache stronghold of the Tonto
Basin, had escaped to the mountains of northwestern Mexico with his
band of fierce Chiricahuas.
Now Dick Lane had not been heard from in this region. When he neither
made appearance nor sent a message upon the day appointed for his
return, his brother, Bud, was for setting out instantly to find him and
rescue him if he were in difficulties.
Then it was that Echo Allen discovered the true nature of her affection
for her lover, that it was sisterly regard, differing only in degree,
but not in kind, from that which she felt for his brother. She joined
with Polly in opposing Bud's going, urging his recklessness as a
reason. "You are certain to be killed," she said, "and I cannot lose
you both." Jack Payson, for whom Bud was working, then came forward
and offered to accompany him, and keep him with bounds. Again there
was a revelation of her heart Echo, and one that terrified her with a
sense of disloyalty. It was Jack she really loved, noble, chivalric,
wonderful Jack Payson, whom, with a Southern intensity of feeling, she
had unconsciously come to regard as her standard of all that makes for
manhood. Plausible objections could not be urged against his
sacrificing himself for his friend. With an irresistible impulse she
cast herself upon his breast and said: "I cannot BEAR to see you go."
Payson gently disengaged her arms.
"I must, Echo. It is what Dick would do for me if I were in his place."
However, while Payson and Bud were preparing for their departure, Buck
McKee appeared in the region and reported that Dick Lane had been
killed by the Apaches. He told with convincing details of how he had
met Lane as each was returning from a successful prospecting trip in
the Ghost Range, and how they had sunk their differences in standing
together against an attack of the Indians. He extolled Dick's bravery,
relating how, severely wounded, he had stood off the savages to enable
himself to escape.
When he handed over Dick's watch to Echo--for he had learned on his
return that she was betrothed to Lane--as a last token from her lover,
no doubt remained in the minds of his hearers of the truth of his
story, and Payson and Bud Lane gave up their purposed expedition.
The owner of Sweetwater Ranch, while accepting McKee's account, could
not wholly forget the half-breed's former evil reputation, and was
reserved in his reception of the advances of the ex-rustler who was
anxious to curry favor. Warm-hearted, impulsive Bud, however, whose
fraternal loyalty had increased under his bereavement to the supreme
passion of life, took the insinuating half-breed into the aching
vacancy made by his brother's death. The two became boon companions,
to the great detriment of the younger man's morals. McKee had plenty
of money which he spent liberally, gambling and carousing in company
with Bud. Polly was wild with indignation at her sweetheart's
desertion, and savagely upbraided him for his conduct whenever they
met, which may be inferred, grew less and less frequently. It was in
revenge she made advances to another man who long "loved her from afar."
This was William Henry Harrison Hoover, sheriff of the county, known as
"Slim" Hoover by the humorous propensity of men on the range to give
nicknames on the principle of contraries, for he was fattest man in
Pinal County. Slim was one of those fleshy men who have nerves of
steel and muscles of iron. A round, boyish face, twinkling blue eyes,
flaming red hair gave him an appearance entirely at variance with his
personality. A vein of sentiment made him all the more lovable. His
associates--ranchers, men of the plains, soldiers, and the owners and
frequenters of the frontier barroom--respected him greatly.
"He's square as Slim" was the best recommendation ever given of a man
in that region.
Pinal County settlers had made Slim sheriff term after term because he
was the one citizen supremely fitted for the place. He had ridden the
range and "busted" broncos before election. After it he hunted
wrong-doers. Right was right and wrong was wrong to him. There was no
shading in the meaning. All he asked of men was to ride fast, shoot
straight, and deal squarely in any game. He admitted that murder,
horse-stealing, and branding another man's calves were subjects for the
unwritten law. But in his code this law meant death only after a fair
trial, with neighbors for a jury. He was not scrupulous that a judge
should be present. His duties were ended when he brought in his
prisoner.
Hoover's rule had been marked by the taming of bad men in Florence, and
a truce declared in the guerrilla warfare between the cattlemen and the
sheepmen on the range.
Slim's seemingly superfluous flesh was really of great advantage to
him: it served as a mask for his remarkable athletic abilities, and so
lulled the outlaws with whom he had to deal into a false sense of
superiority and security.
Slow and lethargic in his ordinary movements, in an emergency he was
quick as a panther, never failing to get the drop on his man.
Furthermore, his fat exerted a beneficial influence on his character in
keeping him humble-minded. Being the most popular man in the county,
he would probably have been swollen with vanity had there been any
space left vacant for it in his huge frame. He was especially admired
by the women, but was at ease only in the company of those who were
married. It was his fate to see the few girls of the region, with
every one of whom, by turns, he was in love, grow up to marry each some
less diffident wooer.
"Dangnation take it!" he used to say, "I don't git up enough spunk to
cut a heifer out o' the herd until somebody else has roped her and
slapped his brand onto her. Talk about too many irons in the fire,
why, I've only got one, and it's het up red all the time waitin' fer
the right chanct to use it; but some how I never git it out o' the
coals. Hell! what's the use, anyhow? Nobody loves a fat man."
Slim was inordinately puffed up by Polly's preference of him, which she
showed by all sorts of feminine tyrannies, and he was forced
continually to slap his huge paunch to remind himself of what he
considered his disabling deformity. "Miss Polly," he would
apostrophize the absent lady, "you don't know what a volcano of
seethin' fiery love this here mountain of flesh is that your walkin'
over. Some day I'll erupt, and jest eternally calcify you, if you
don't look out!"
The sheriff took no stock in Buck McKee's professed reformation, and
was greatly worried over the influence he had acquired over Bud Lane,
who had before this been Slim's protege. Accordingly, he readily
conspired with her to break off the relations between the former outlaw
and the young horse-wrangler, but thus far had met with no success.
Payson, feeling himself absolved by the death of Dick Lane from all
obligations to his friend, began openly to woo Echo Allen, but without
presuming upon the revelation of her love for him which she had made at
his proposition to go into the desert to Lane's rescue. She responded
to his courteous advances as frankly and naturally as a bud opens to
the gentle wooing of the April sun. Softened by her grief for Dick as
for a departed brother, as the flower is by the morning dew, the petals
of her affection opened and laid bare her heart of purest gold. The
gentle, diffident girl expanded into a glorious woman, conscious of her
powers, and proud and happy that she was fulfilling the highest
function of womanhood, that of loving and aiding with her love a noble
man.
Jack Payson, however, failed to get the proper credit for this sudden
flowering of Echo's beauty and charm. These were ascribed to her
year's schooling in the East, and her proud mother was offended by the
way in which she accepted the young ranchman's advances. "You hold
yourself too cheap," she said. "It is at least due to the memory of
poor Dick Lane" (whom, now that he was safely dead, she idealized as a
type of perfect manhood) "that you make Jack wait as long as you did
him." When Payson reasonably objected to this delay by pointing out he
was fully able to support a wife, as Lane had not been, and proposed,
with Echo's assent, six months as the limit of waiting, Mrs. Allen
resorted to her expedient--tears.
"BOO-HOO! you are going to take away my only daughter!"
The Colonel, however, though he had loved Dick as if he were his own
son, was delighted to the bottom of his hospitable soul that it was a
man not already in the family circle who was to marry Echo, especially
when he was a royal fellow like Jack Payson; so he arranged a
compromise between the time proposed by Mrs. Allen and that desired by
the lovers, and the date of the wedding was fixed nine months ahead.
"It will fall in June," said the old fellow, who knew exactly how to
handle his fractious wife; "the month when swell folks back in the East
do all their hitchin' up. Why, come to think of it, it was the very
month I ran off with you in, though I didn't know, then that we was
elopin' so strictly accordin' to the Book of Etikwet."