CHAMPION OF THE WORLD
“LARRY SILCOTT on Rocking Chair,” boomed a deep voice through a
megaphone.
A girl in one of the front boxes of the grand stand saw a young
cow-puncher move with jingling spurs across the wide race track toward
the corral beyond. He looked up, easy and debonair as an actor, and
raked with his eyes the big crowd watching him. Smile met smile, when
his glance came to halt at the eager girl looking down.
Ruth Trovillion’s smile went out like the flame of a blown candle. She
had not caught the name announced through the megaphone, but now she
recognized him. The last time she had seen this gay youth, now sunning
himself so jauntily in the public regard, had been in the orchard of
Elkhorn Lodge; he had kissed her impudently, and when their eyes had met
hers had flashed hatred at him for the affront he had dared to put upon
her.
She turned away, flaming, chin in the air.
“Is he a good rider?” she asked the man sitting beside her.
“Wyoming doesn’t raise better riders than Larry Silcott,” he answered
promptly. “He’s an A-1 rider—the best of the lot.”
“You beat him last year, didn’t you?” she challenged.
McCoy did not quite understand her imperious resentment. It seemed to go
a little farther than the occasion called for. “That was the luck of the
day. I happened——”
“Oh, yes, you happened!” scoffed Ruth. “You could go out and beat him
now if you wanted to. Why don’t you ride? Your name is entered. I should
think you would defend your championship. Everybody wants to see last
year’s winner ride. I haven’t any patience with you.”
Rowan smiled. “I see you haven’t, Miss Ruth. I’ve tried to explain. I
like Larry. We’re friends. Besides, I taught him his riding. Looks to me
as if it is one of the younger fellow’s turn. Now is a good time for me
to quit after I have won two years running.”
The young woman was not convinced, but she dropped the argument. Her
resentful eyes moved back to the arena, into which a meek-looking
claybank had been driven. It stood with blinking eyes, drooping at the
hip, palpably uninterested in the proceedings.
Of a sudden the ears of the bronco pricked, its eyes dilated. A man in
chaps was moving toward it, a rope in his hands. The loop of the lariat
circled, went whistling forward, fell true over the head of the outlaw
horse. The claybank reared, tried to bolt, came strangling to a halt as
the loop tightened. A second rope slid into place beside the first. The
horse stood trembling while a third man coaxed a blanket over its eyes.
Warily and deftly Silcott saddled, looking well to the cinch.
“All ready,” he told his assistants.
Ropes and blanket were whipped off as he swung to the seat. Rocking
Chair stood motionless for a moment, bewildered at the things happening
so fast. Then the outlaw realized that a human clothespin was straddling
its back. It went whirling upward as if trying to tie itself into a
knot. The rider clamped his knees against the sides of the bronco and
swung his hat with a joyous whoop.
Rocking Chair had a reputation to live up to. It was a noted fence
rower, weaver, and sunfisher. Savagely it whirled, went up in another
buck, came down stiff-legged, with arched back. The jolt was like that
of a pile driver, but Silcott met it with limp spine, his hat still
fanning against the flank of the animal. The outlaw went round and round
in a vicious circle. The incubus was still astride of its back. It
bolted; jarred to a sudden, sideways halt. Spurs were rowelling its
sides cruelly.
Up again it went in a series of furious bucks, one after another, short,
sharp, violent. Meanwhile, Silcott, who was a trick rider, went through
his little performance. He drank a bottle of ginger ale and flung away
the bottle. He took the rein between his teeth and slipped off coat and
waistcoat. He rode with his feet out of the stirrups. The grand stand
clamoured wild applause. The young cattleman from the Open A N C was
easily the hero of the day.
The outlaw horse stopped bucking as suddenly as it had begun. Larry
slipped from the saddle in front of the grand stand and stood bowing, a
lithe, graceful young figure of supple ease, to the plaudits which
rained upon him.
Abruptly Ruth turned to McCoy. “I want you to ride,” she told him in a
low voice.
The cattleman hesitated. He did not want to ride. Without saying so in
words, he had let the other competitors understand that he did not mean
to defend his title. There had been a good deal of pressure to induce
him to drag a saddle into the arena but so far he had resisted it.
He turned to decline, but the words died on his lips. The eyes of the
girl were stormy; her cheeks flushed. It was plain that for some reason
she had set her heart on his winning. Why? His pulses crashed with the
swift, tumultuous beating of the red blood in him. Rowan McCoy was not a
vain man. It was hard for him to accept the conclusion for which his
whole soul longed. But what other reason could there be for her
insistence?
During the past few weeks he had been with Ruth Trovillion a great deal.
He had ridden with her, climbed Old Baldy by her side, eaten picnic
lunches as her companion far up in flower-strewn mountain parks. He had
taught her to shoot, to fish, to make camp. They had been gay and
wholesome comrades for long summer days. The new and secret thing that
had come into his life he had hidden from her as if it had been a sin.
The desire of his heart was impossible, he had always told himself. How
could it be otherwise? This fine, spirited young creature, upon whom was
stamped so ineradicably the look of the thoroughbred, would go back to
her own kind when the time came. Meanwhile, let him make the best of his
little day of sunshine.
“I told the boys I wasn’t expecting to ride,” he parried. “It has been
rather understood that I wouldn’t.”
“But if I ask you?” she demanded.
There was no resisting that low, imperious appeal.
He looked straight into her eyes. “If you ask it, I’ll ride.”
“I do ask it.”
He rose. “It’s your say-so, little partner. I’ll let the committee
know.”
The eyes of the girl followed him, a brown, sun-baked man, quiet and
strong and resolute. Her glance questioned shyly what manner of man this
was, after all, who had imposed himself so greatly upon her thoughts. He
was genuine. So much she knew. He did not need the gay trappings of
Larry Silcott to brand him a rider of the hills, foursquare to every
wind that blew. Behind the curtain of his reticence she had divined some
vague hint of a woman in his life. Now a queer little thrill of
jealousy, savage and primeval, claimed her for the first time. She knew
her own power over Rowan McCoy. It hurt her to feel that another girl
had once possessed it, too.
A cow-puncher from Laramie, in yellow wool chaps and a shirt of
robin’s-egg blue, took the stage after Silcott. He drew a roan with a
red-hot devil of malice in its eye. The bronco hunched itself over to
the fence in a series of jarring bucks, and jammed the leg of the rider
against a post. The Laramie youth, beside himself with pain, caught at
the saddle horn to save his seat. The nearest judge fired a revolver to
tell him he was out of the running. He had “touched leather.”
His successor took the dust ignominiously in a clean tumble. He got up,
looked ruefully at the bronco that had unseated him, and went his
bowlegged way back to meet the derisive condolences of forty grinning
punchers.
“Too bad the judges didn’t have the ground plowed up for you, Shorty. It
would ’a’ been a heap softer,” murmured one.
“If I’d only remembered to ride on my spurs like you done, Wade, I
needn’t have fallen at all,” came back Shorty with genial malice at his
tormentor.
Whereat the laugh was on Wade, who had been detected earlier in the day
digging his spurs into the cinch to help him stick to the saddle.
“Rowan McCoy on Tenderfoot,” announced the leather-lunged megaphone man.
A wave of interest swept through the grand stand. Everybody had wanted
to see the champion ride. Now they were going to get the chance. The
announcement caused a stir even among the hard-bitten riders at the
entrance to the corral. For McCoy was not only a famous bronco buster;
he was a man whose personality had won him many friends and some
enemies.
The owner of the Circle Diamond rode like a centaur. He tried no tricks,
no fancy business to win the applause of the spectators. But he held his
seat with such ease and mastery that his long, lithe body might have
been a part of the horse. His riding was characteristic of him—straight
and strong and genuine.
The outlaw tried its wicked best, and no bronco in the Rockies was
better known than Tenderfoot for the fighting devil that slumbered in
its heart. Neither side bucking nor pitching, sunfishing nor weaving
could shake the lean-loined, broad-shouldered figure from his seat. It
was not merely that McCoy could not be unseated; there was never a
moment when there was any doubt of whether man or beast was master. Even
when the bronco flung itself backward, McCoy was in the saddle again
before the animal was on its feet.
The eyes of Ruth never left the fighting pair. She leaned forward,
fascinated, lost to everything in the world but the duel that was being
fought out in front of her. They were a splendid pair of animals, each
keyed to the highest notch of efficiency. But the one in the saddle was
something more. His perfect poise was no doubt instinctive, born of long
experience. His skill had become automatic. Yet back of this she sensed
mind, a will that flashed along the reins to the brute beneath. Slowly
Tenderfoot answered to its master, acknowledged the dominion of the man.
Its pitching became less violent, its bucking halfhearted. At a signal
from one of the judges, McCoy slipped from the saddle. Without an
instant’s delay, without a single glance at the storm-tossed grand
stand, the rider strode across the arena and disappeared. He did not
know that Ruth Trovillion was beating her gloved hands excitedly along
with five thousand other cheering spectators. He could not guess how her
heart had stood still when the bronco toppled backward, nor how it had
raced when his toes found again the stirrups as the horse struggled to
its feet.
The judges conferred for a few minutes before the megaphone man
announced that the championship belt went to McCoy, second prize to
Silcott. Once more the grand stand gave itself to eager applause of the
decision.
Just before the wild-horse race, which was the last event on the
program, McCoy made his way to the box where Miss Trovillion was sitting
with Tim Flanders, of the Elkhorn Lodge, and his wife.
The girl looked up, her eyes shining. “Congratulations, Mr. Champion of
the World.” She felt after a fashion that she had helped to beat the
conceited Silcott, the youth who had affronted her with his presumptuous
kiss.
“I was lucky,” he said simply.
“You were the best rider.” Then, with a little touch of feminine
ferocity: “I knew you would beat _him_.”
“Silcott? I still think I was lucky.”
Already the grand stand was beginning to empty. Round-up Week was almost
over.
“We’d better be getting back to town if we want any supper,” proposed
Flanders.
The same idea had suggested itself to several thousand more visitors to
Bad Ax. A throng of automobiles was presently creeping toward the gates,
every engine racing and every horn squawking. Once outside, the whole
plain seemed alive with moving cars, buckboards, wagons, and horses all
going swiftly townward in a mad race for hotels and restaurants.
Bad Ax was crowded to its suburbs. Hotels were jammed, rooming houses
doing a capacity business. A steady stream of automobiles had poured in
all week from Denver and other points. Trains loaded to the vestibules
had emptied themselves into the town. The bells of saloon cash registers
were ringing continuously. Cow-punchers from Sheridan and Cody jostled
shoulders with tourists from New Haven and Kansas City, their worn
leathers and faded gray shirts discarded for gaudy costumes that ran the
rainbow from sunset orange to violent shades of blue.
The whole town was a welter of barbaric colour. Streamers stretched
across from building to building, and “spielers” for side shows bawled
the merits of their attraction. Everywhere one met the loud gaiety of
youth on a frolic. Young as the night was, merrymakers were surging up
and down the streets tossing confetti and blowing horns.
In the crowded streets, after they had found something to eat in a
vacant store where the ladies of the Baptist church were serving a
supper, McCoy and Miss Trovillion became separated from their friends.
Hours later they wandered from the crowd toward the suburb where the
young woman and the Flanders family had found rooms.
Unaccountably their animation ebbed when they were alone under the
stars. They had been full of laughter and small talk so long as the
crowd jostled them. Now they could find neither. In every fibre of him
Rowan was aware of the slight, dainty figure moving by his side so
lightly. The delicate, penetrating fragrance of her personality came to
him with poignant sweetness.
Once his hand crept out and touched her white gown in the darkness. If
she knew, she gave no sign.
Her eyes were on the hills which rose sheer back of the town high into
the sky line. They seemed to press in closely and to lift her vision to
the heavens, to shut out all the little commonplace things of life.
“Do you suppose God made them to wash sin out of the hearts of people?”
she asked.
“A night like this does give a fellow queer feelings,” he answered in a
low voice. “Have you ever camped in the high hills with the wind blowin’
kinda soft through the pines? I have, alone, often. Makes a fellow feel
as though he’d like to begin again with a clean page.”
She nodded. “Yes. I’ve felt it, too, though I never camped alone of
course. As though something fine and wonderful and all-powerful was
whispering to me and drawing me nearer to eternal things. It must be
something in ourselves, don’t you think? It can’t be that the mountains
at night are really a kind of Holy of Holies.”
“I reckon,” he agreed. He had never before tried or heard anybody else
try to put into words the strange influence of the shadowy range at
night upon one camped in the hollow of a draw, an influence which at the
same time seemed to reduce one to an atom in an ocean of space and to
lift one into the heights of the everlasting verities. He was shy of any
expression of his emotions.
They fell into silence, and presently she turned reluctantly back toward
the town. He fell into step beside her. Soon now, he knew, they would be
caught again into the spirit of the commonplace.
So he spoke, abruptly, to hold in his heart some permanent comfort from
the hour when they had been alone with each other and the voices of the
world had been very far and faint.
“Why did you want me to ride?”
It was a simple question, but one not so easily answered. She could have
told him the truth, that she did not want Larry Silcott to win. But that
would have been only part of the truth. She wanted Rowan McCoy to win,
wanted it more than she had wished anything for a long time. Yet why?
She was not ready to give a candid reason even to herself, far less to
him.
Womanlike, she evaded. “Why shouldn’t I want you to win? You’re my
friend. I thought——”
He surprised himself almost as much as he did her by his answer. “I’m
not yore friend.”
She looked at him, startled at his brusqueness.
“I’m a man that loves you,” he said roughly.
A tremor passed through her. She was conscious of a strange sweet
faintness. The soft eyes veiled themselves beneath dark lashes.
“Have I spoiled everything, little partner?” he asked gently.
“How can I tell—yet?” she whispered, and looked up at him shyly,
tremulously.
He knew, as his arms went around her, that he had entered upon the
greatest joy of his life.