As Morgan Anderson had predicted, the condition of Gard’s foot next day
was such as to make him a captive. The cattleman, surveying it after
Jacinta had given the patient his breakfast, prescribed rest, and
forbade any thought of leaving the rancho inside of a week.
“You say you came to see me on business,” he said, as he stood looking
down upon Gard where he lay in bed in a big, low-ceiled room of the
casa, “Well, I’m off to the upper range to-day, to pick out some
work-cattle. I shall not be able to talk business till night; so that
settles to-day.”
“You’re mighty good,” was Gard’s reply, “but that business o’ mine is
only to ask you a question that you can answer in half a minute. You
mustn’t think it’s some matter of consequence—to anybody but me, that
is,” he added.
“All right; so much the better. It’ll keep, and we can keep you.”
Morgan Anderson had taken a liking to his unexpected guest, and made him
welcome with true western hospitality. It was long since Gard had talked
with a man of his stamp, and the mere sound of Anderson’s pleasant, easy
voice was a joy to him. It was good just to lie there and listen; at the
same time, he was concerned about his foot. He wanted to be up and about
Kate Hallard’s business. He had not calculated that the delivery of the
deed which he had found in Arnold’s coat-pocket two years before, would
involve him as it had done.
He had come back to civilization with a strong purpose. He meant to make
every effort to reinstate himself in the eyes of the law, and he
realized that he must do all that he could before some chance
recognition should work to hinder his efforts. Nevertheless, he told
himself, the claim of this woman came first. Kate Hallard had no one to
fend for her, and the responsibility, in this particular matter, had
been laid on him, Gabriel Gard.
Later in the forenoon, when Anderson had ridden away with his men, Wing
Chang, the Chinese cook, acting upon the _patron’s_ instructions,
established Gard in a long steamer-chair, under the cottonwoods beside
the casa. Hither, when he was settled, came Helen, bearing a little tray
on which were biscuits and a grape-fruit. Gard smiled as he saw her
coming around a corner of the casa, and answered her greeting with a
cheery “good-morning.”
“I wondered where you’d got to,” he began, and stopped, suddenly, the
quick color rushing to his face.
“Now I just beg your pardon, Miss,” he stammered, in piteous confusion,
“I mistook—I thought—I thought you were your little sister.”
“I am,” laughed Helen, putting the tray on a chair by his side.
“No, no: you mustn’t move your foot”—for Gard was struggling forward in
his steamer-chair.
“If you do,” she threatened, “I shall have to scold you harder than I
did yesterday.”
He sank back, a look in his face of mingled chagrin and wonder. Helen
was arrayed in white, the simplest sort of a shirt-waist suit, with a
touch of brown at neck and belt and shoes; but to his bewildered senses
she was a radiant vision of unguessed daintiness and beauty. There was
something incredible, to him, in the idea of this unearthly being
offering him food. He glanced from her to the tray, and back again.
“I don’t know what that is,” he said, indicating the grape-fruit, “and I
ain’t sure I know what you are. I thought yesterday you were a little
girl, and now you seem like a young lady; and I don’t seem right sure
you won’t turn into a fairy in a minute, and run away.”
“Oh, Oh!” Helen cried, “What three-fold flattery!”
Then it was her turn to experience a shock; for, as she stood looking
down upon him, it suddenly became apparent to her that this man was
young.
She had thought nothing about the matter, in the excitement of
yesterday’s encounter, and when she had walked beside him, seeing his
bearded face in her brief, upward glances, she had taken it for granted
that he was middle-aged, at least. There was something disconcerting
about the unexpected revelation of youth in those eager brown eyes, in
the clear olive of the face above the strong, short beard, and in the
firm curve of red lips just visible under the moustache. She could think
of no further retort to his pretty speech, and busied herself with
showing him how to eat the grape-fruit, wondering, vaguely, where he
could have been, in the desert, not to have encountered _pomelos_.
“These are from over the border,” she explained. “One of the boys
smuggled them in last week; think how wicked we are! But by New Year’s
we shall have some of our very own.”
“They’re mighty good,” Gard said, with no idea of what the fruit tasted
like. He was still wrestling with the awesome fact that Helen had
prepared it, and was teaching him to eat it. He took more sugar when she
told him to, though years of abstinence from sugar had blunted his taste
for it, and he shook his head with very proper commiseration when she
told him of the way eastern folk spoil the fruit in preparing it.
“I never was back there,” he said, “I was raised on the prairie; but
this is good enough for me.”
He looked beyond the fringe of cottonwoods, out across the plain,
quivering in the mid-forenoon heat.
“Don’t you like it?” he asked.
“I love it! It’s so big, and beautiful, in spite of its dreadfulness;
it’s so _positive_!” Helen was sitting on the ground, her hands in her
lap, her eyes turned toward the far mountains. Gard considered her
words.
“Positive:” he repeated, thoughtfully, “Yes: it’s sure that. There ain’t
any half-way place,” he added, drawing a deep breath. “A man, he gets
big, or he gets little, living in it.”
“Oh!” cried she; “you must have been a long time in the desert to find
that out!”
She went on, with youthful, unconscious arrogance: “I’ve lived here all
my life; but I never realized that until after I came back from college
this last time.”
“Have you been here long?” she added.
“I haven’t been ’round the level much,” Gard answered, and after a pause
he added:
“I’ve been in the mountains most of the time.”
“Then you must have been prospecting: I hope you struck pay dirt?”
“I did.”
“Good! So you _are_ a mining-man—I wondered.”
She had wondered about him. Gard turned the thought over in his mind,
the while he told her something of his discovery in the mountains. It
seemed a marvelous thing that she should have thought of him at all.
Almost unconsciously he began telling her of finding his claim; of
working it; and of Jinny.
Helen listened with rapt interest. She knew that men did go off into the
mountains as she supposed Gard must have done. She had talked with
prospectors, in her lifetime, but never with one like this.
“I suppose you will be wonderfully rich when you begin working your
claim in earnest,” she said, at last, slowly, “Shall you like that?”
“I think so. There are some things I want a good deal”—Ah, how much he
wanted them: the right to freedom; the right to hold up his head among
men. Gard’s desire for this was increasing with every moment that he sat
talking to this fair, unconscious girl. As he looked at her, sitting
before him on the sparse grass, it came home to him with fearful force
that it would be hard to have friends if his past life must always be a
secret from them.
“I suppose there are,” Helen was saying, half wistfully, “Money brings
so many opportunities to a man.”
“Not unless he’s a real man to start with,” replied Gard.
“There’s a lot to be thought about,” he went on. “I used to think that
to give a man plenty to eat, and wear, and good things round him; nice,
beautiful things such as we read about—and I guess that you’ve always
seen,” he explained,—“would help make a better man of him.
“I don’t believe it’s altogether so,” he went on, following a train of
thought that he had often mulled over, in the glade, “All the good
things that you can put a man into won’t make any better man of him, if
when he didn’t have ’em he wasn’t trying to make a better man of
himself.”
Helen pondered his saying in some surprise.
“I never thought of it that way before,” she said, at last, “but it
seems as if it ought to be true.”
“I guess it’s true enough,” Gard frowned a little, deep in thought.
“Jinny and I, we used to figure out ’twas, when we talked things over.”
He smiled into his companion’s eyes.
“When I think, sometimes, of what men’ll do for money, though,”
continued he, “I ’most feel ’s if I didn’t want any of it.”
“But it seems cleaner money, somehow,” Helen interrupted, “it’s
different when a man digs it out of the earth. He doesn’t rob, or
defraud anybody, then; and think of all it can do!”
“Yes.” There was a slow twinkle in Gard’s eyes as he spoke. “There’s
solid satisfaction to me in thinking that one o’ these days, if I want
to, I can get Jinny a solid gold collar.”
They laughed together over this bit of foolishness, feeling, suddenly,
that they were very good friends. It was almost with a little sense of
something unwelcome that Helen, looking across the level plain, saw a
horseman in the distance, coming toward the rancho-gate.
“Some one is coming,” she said, studying the approaching figure. “I
wonder who it can be; Daddy isn’t expecting anyone.”
Gard turned his head and they watched together.
“It isn’t one of the men,” commented Helen. “He looks cityfied, doesn’t
he?”
It was no careless cowboy figure that they watched. Whoever it was rode
compactly, elbows down, and the horse was not running, but coming at an
easy ’lope.
“Why!” the girl exclaimed, after a moment or two, “I believe it’s Mr.
Westcott!”
The name set Gard’s heart pounding, but he kept his quiet pose in the
steamer-chair, and only the faintest flutter of distended nostrils
betrayed the emotion that was surging within him.
He had no real fear that Westcott might recognize him. The lawyer, as it
happened, had seen him but twice; once at Phoenix, just after his
arrest, and again on the occasion of that memorable visit to Blue Gulch.
Nevertheless, Gard was thankful that he was warned of the new-comer’s
approach.
“Do you know him?” Helen asked, still watching the rider, and Gard
answered, promptly enough, that he had heard of him.
“He’s stopping at the corrals,” said Helen, presently. “I hope there’s
some one there to take his horse.”
She started off, with a backward glance and a smile for her invalid, and
presently Gard saw her going toward the corrals, followed by Wing Chang.
She walked with a light, springing step that seemed to him must be
peculiar to her alone. He had seen girls, back in Iowa, but they had not
walked like that.
“There ain’t anybody like her,” he said, half aloud, replying to his own
thought. Then he remembered that happy glance, and smile, and a shiver
of pain ran through him.
“Heaven help me,” he muttered, “She wouldn’t have looked like that if
she’d known.”
Helen, in the meantime, was greeting Westcott, who walked up to the casa
with her, leaving his horse for Chang to unsaddle and turn in. He had
come up to Sylvania to see a man, he explained, and when he got where
the man was, why the man was not there. He showed his handsome, even
teeth in a merry smile at his own jest, and somehow managed to convey to
Helen the idea that the man “wasn’t there” for the reason that he was
afraid to meet him, Ashley Westcott.
“It’s just a game of bluff some smart Aleck is trying to play on me,” he
added, with pleasant carelessness; “It isn’t of much importance, except
as it gives me the excuse I’m always glad of, to ride out here. I shall
have to wait over, a day or two, to give the fellow a chance to make
good, I dare say.”
His eyes narrowed when he was introduced to Gard. Kate Hallard had
written to him, three days before, and the letter had brought him to
Sylvania in a hurry. He had seen Mrs. Hallard and, therefore, Gard’s
name had significance for him.
He seated himself in the chair from which Jacinta had long since removed
the tray, and made a casual inquiry about Gard’s hurt. Gard explained it
briefly, giving, to Helen’s immense relief, none of the details.
“I was in Sylvania this morning,” Westcott remarked, taking the glass of
ice and the bottle of ginger ale that Jacinta brought him. “Came up from
Tucson, and got that brute of a stage at Bonesta.”
“It _is_ a horrid ride,” Helen commented.
Gard said nothing, and Westcott and Helen chatted indifferently for a
few moments of matters common enough, the news and talk of the
territory, yet as new to Gard, in large measure, as though he had been a
foreigner. The lawyer turned to him again, irritated by his silent
scrutiny.
“I saw your friend Mrs. Hallard in Sylvania,” he said, “She was a good
deal worried to know what had become of you.”
Gard’s eyes flashed, but his reply was given in a low, even tone.
“That was mighty kind of her,” he said, “I calculated to be on hand—we
reckoned you’d be coming soon. When you go back you can ease her mind,
and let her know I’m all right.”
Helen looked puzzled. She was not familiar with Sylvania, although it
was the post office town of the rancho, but she knew, in a vague way,
who Mrs. Hallard was. It would have been difficult not to know, when
there were but half a dozen white women within a radius of fifty miles.
She could not think of her, however, as a friend of this new
acquaintance. She had seen Mrs. Hallard once, and Westcott’s apparently
chance remark had exactly the effect he had calculated. It troubled her,
and disturbed the atmosphere of friendliness which he had dimly felt
between the girl and Gard, when he saw them together.
“It seems curious to find Mr. Gard here,” the lawyer went on, addressing
Helen. “He is just the man I came to Sylvania to see. You can bank on it
I did not expect to meet him when I rode this way.”
He overshot his mark, that time, going too far in his anxiety to produce
an impression unfavorable to Gard. Helen’s hospitality was touched, and
her sympathy enlisted for her guest. Whatever his friendship for Mrs.
Hallard, of whom she really knew nothing definite, she did not believe
that the man who sat there regarding them both with serene eyes, would
ever be afraid to meet Ashley Westcott.
She looked from one to the other, and Gard smiled as he answered the
lawyer’s remark, speaking to her rather than to the other.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m the man. I told Mrs. Hallard,” he added, glancing
at Westcott, “to tell you to see me.”
“I shall, all right,” the lawyer replied, pointedly, and turned to ask
Helen some question about her father. She was glad of the diversion, and
went into detail about his errand to the upper range.
“We’re going to have an orchard,” she explained, “Father had some trees
put in three or four years ago; I believe he must have sat and held
their heads all the while I was away, and watered them with a teaspoon.”
The others joined in her laugh at the vision conjured up of Morgan
Anderson playing nurse to desert trees.
“They are only a few grape-fruit, and a date palm or two,” Helen went
on, “but they have kindled his ambition, and now he is planning for
oranges, and apricots.”
“Has he got the trees yet?” Gard asked.
“Mercy, no! Our needs are still more elemental than that. He has gone
after some cattle to ‘gentle’ for plowing. Can’t you just see those
wild-eyed long-horns figuring in pastoral idyls on the plain?”
Westcott grinned, but before either man could comment Wing Chang
appeared from the direction of the adobe structure that served him for
kitchen, and beckoned Helen to a domestic conference.
“Wing Chang’s official beck is equal to a royal summons,” she said,
lightly, “so I shall have to be excused for a season.”
When she had departed the two men regarded each other for a little
space. Westcott took out paper and tobacco, offering them to Gard. The
latter declined them and the lawyer began rolling himself a cigarette.
“I take it you’re an attorney, Mr. Gard?” he began, in a tone of
careless query, as he struck a match.
At Gard’s negative he held the little taper alight in his finger for an
instant, while he stared in surprise.
“Oh,” he said, recovering himself quickly, and lighting his cigarette,
“I thought you must be. I rather figured,”—with a laugh which he meant
to be irritating, “that you were a young attorney, or a new-comer in the
territory, and trying to scare up business.” He puffed a cloud of smoke
into the air and regarded his companion through it, with veiled eyes.
“’Twas rather natural, don’t you think?” he persisted, with a sneer,
“considering the nature of the little game up at Sylvania?”
Still Gard did not speak. He had put his well foot to the ground, and
curled the other leg up that he might lean forward, and he sat regarding
Westcott with quiet attention.
“I suppose you know, anyway,” the latter finally said, with a very good
assumption of contempt, “Anybody with a headpiece might, whether he’s a
lawyer or not, that neither my client nor I need feel obliged to pay any
attention to the matter.”
Gard seemed to turn the remark over in his mind.
“Then what made you come up here?” he finally asked.
“That’s easy,” Westcott answered, scornfully. “I wanted to see who was
trying to make a fool of poor Kate Hallard. I don’t wish her any harm,
and I wanted to put her wise that she’s being used by some sharper, in a
queer game.”
“I guess you’ll think better o’ that before we get through, Mr.
Westcott,” Gard said, with deliberation.
“Not much I won’t.” Westcott was admiring the rings he had blown into
the air. “Fact is, my friend,” he went on, with an air of easy
confidence, “the more I think of your little scheme the less I think of
it. In the first place, it won’t work. My client is in possession.
That’s nine points, you know. By way of a tenth point, he has a quit
claim from Mrs. Hallard—”
“That’s one item,” Gard interrupted, softly, “that I guess you won’t
care to dwell on, when the matter comes to be pushed.”
“Pushed!” Westcott ignored the first part of the speech. “I tell you,
man,” he cried, “you’ve got nothing that can _be_ pushed! That deed you
an’ Kate Hallard pretend to have found hasn’t a leg to stand on. You’d
better be careful you don’t get into trouble with it.”
“I’m going to, Mr. Westcott,” the slow, calm tone made the lawyer feel
uneasy, he could not have told why.
“If it will save you any trouble, my friend,” he sneered, at the same
time keeping a close watch on the other’s face, “I’ll tell you that I
saw some time ago, in a Chicago paper, that Jared Oliphant is out of
commission—softening of the brain. I suppose you weren’t banking any on
him, though?”
“We’re banking on facts,” was Gard’s reply.
“And Sawyer’s skipped the country.”
“Who’s Sawyer?” Gard’s question came quick and sharp, nailing Westcott’s
blunder fast. The lawyer looked blank for an instant, then recovered
himself.
“Why Kate Hallard seemed to think you were going to get some help
through him,” he lied; “but I know Sawyer. You can’t do it.”
“You must have known him,” Gard said, “if you know he witnessed that
deed; for Kate Hallard never told you.”
Westcott stared out at the desert. He was playing a desperate game, and
he knew it. He would have given much to understand the inscrutable man
who sat opposite him. He did not feel that he did understand him, fully;
nevertheless, he had his own theories of the stuff men are made of, and
presently he leaned forward.
“Look here, Gard,” he said, “This is mighty poor business for a man like
you to be in.”
He spoke rapidly; for Miss Anderson had just appeared at the door of the
adobe kitchen, still talking to Wing Chang.
“I don’t know what you expect to make by it,” Westcott went on; “but I
don’t want Kate Hallard to get into any trouble. She can’t establish
that deed. It’s no more use to her than so much blank paper. But I’ve
got certain things in view. I’m going into politics in this territory,
and there are reasons why I don’t want a thing like this coming up. You
know how things get garbled—” He hesitated, and then went on, with a
glance in the direction of the girl, who was now approaching.
“Between ourselves,” he said, rapidly, “what’s the reason you and I
can’t do business together?”
He regarded his companion narrowly. Helen had stopped, near the casa,
and was scanning the desert from under her hand.
“What do you say?” Westcott all but whispered. Gard looked at him a full
moment before he spoke:
“I guess we couldn’t do business together,” he said, slowly, “But I
guess we shan’t need to, Mr. Westcott; because you’re going to fix this
matter up right. You’re going to give Mrs. Hallard back the property you
stole from her, or else you’re going to pay her the full value.”
“Or else?”
There was a battle of eyes between the two men. Westcott’s flinched,
finally, and sought the horizon.
“There ain’t any other ‘or else,’” Gard said, at last. “It’s going the
way I stated.”
Westcott had arisen, sneering, but before he could speak again Helen’s
voice broke in upon them:
“They’re coming!” she cried, joining her guests. “You’d think they had a
whole drove of cattle, from the noise.”
A cloud of white dust far on the desert had resolved itself into a
flurry of men, horses and cattle, coming in on a run. There was a
thunder of hoofs, and a chorus of yells, and presently the “gentle”
work-cattle were being herded into one of the corrals.
One of the horsemen separated himself from the group and rode on to the
casa. This was Morgan Anderson, and he shouted greeting to Westcott as
he swung from the saddle. He came into the shade of the cottonwoods
firing a volley of genial questions, and giving bits of detail about the
morning’s work, until Helen reminded him that it was close upon
dinner-time. That meal was taken at noon, at the Palo Verde, so Anderson
excused himself to clean up. He was dusty and begrimed from the hot
day’s work. He carried Westcott off as well, to remove the traces of his
own long ride, and as Helen had already gone into the house, on some
domestic errand, Gard was left alone.
The temporary solitude was welcome, and he lay back in the long chair
half dizzied by the thoughts and memories that besieged his brain.
Uppermost, for the instant, was an intense, grateful sense of relief.
Westcott had so plainly not recognized him that he might consider one
source of immediate danger to himself removed. He would probably be able
to carry this business through with no other difficulties than lay in
the matter itself.
There would be plenty of these. Westcott would see to that. He was
evidently fully aware of the position he was in, and would let no
scruples stand in the way of protecting himself.
“He’ll do just about anything—” Gard spoke half aloud, then checked
himself, recalling that this was not the solitude of the glade.
“He’ll make a big fight,” he thought, “both to keep the property and to
escape being punished.”
“_Punished!_”
The word came home to him with stunning force. The punishment for this
crime, if Kate Hallard saw fit to press the matter, was jail!
And Kate Hallard would probably do what he advised.
Sudden fierce exultation leaped into the man’s heart. Beneath his quiet
he had been deeply stirred by the encounter with Westcott.
“_I wonder how he would like being in jail?_” he thought, grimly, and
brought himself sternly into line again.
“There ain’t any right of way for me there. I must stop that,” he
whispered, the knuckles of his big hands white as wool under the strain
of clasping his chair-arms.
The next instant he sat upright, staring out across the hot sand, but
seeing only the vision of Helen’s dainty maiden loveliness. The thought
of his heart sent the blood from his face.
“I’ve settled my account with Ashley Westcott,” he muttered, “God knows
I’ve settled _my_ account; but if that is what he’s aiming to do—”
He shivered, sinking back into his chair. Wing Chang was approaching
with a tray of food.
“If that is what it is,” Gard finished to himself, turning to greet the
Chinaman, “Then I guess Mr. Ashley Westcott and I will have to open a
new account; and he wants to look out.”