A KNIGHT-ERRANT
The Duke took off his hat, standing before her foolishly dumb between
his disappointment and embarrassment. He had counted so fully on finding
the girl of his romance that he was reluctant to accept the testimony of
his eyes. Here was one charming enough to compensate a man for a hundred
fasts and fevers, but she was not the lodestone that had drawn upon his
heart with that impelling force which could not be denied.
What a stupid blunder his impetuous conclusion had led him into; what an
awkward situation! Pretty as she was, he didn't want to serve this
woman, no matter for her embarrassments and distress. He could not
remain there a week in the ferment of his longing to be on his way,
searching the world for her whom his soul desired. This ran over him
like an electric shock as he stood before her, hat in hand, head bent a
little, like a culprit, looking rather stupid in his confusion.
"Were you looking for somebody?" she asked, her handsome face sunning
over with a smile that invited his confidence and dismissed his qualms.
"I was looking for the boss, ma'am."
"I'm the boss." She spoke encouragingly, as to some timid creature,
bending to brush off the milk that the stubborn calf had shaken from its
muzzle over her skirt.
"My partner and I are strangers here--he's over there at the
gate--passing through the country, and wanted your permission to look
around the place a little. They told us about it down at Glendora."
The animation of her face was clouded instantly as by a shadow of
disappointment. She turned her head as if to hide this from his eyes,
answering carelessly, a little pettishly:
"Go ahead; look around till you're tired."
Lambert hesitated, knowing very well that he had raised expectations
which he was in no present mind to fill. She must be sorely in need of
help when she would brighten up that way at the mere sight of a common
creature like a cow-puncher. He hated to take away what he had seemed to
come there offering, what he had, in all earnestness, come to offer.
But she was not the girl. He had followed a false lure that his own
unbridled imagination had lit. The only thing to do was back out of it
as gracefully as he could, and the poor excuse of "looking around" was
the best one he could lay his hand to in a hurry.
"Thank you," said he, rather emptily.
She did not reply, but bent again to her task of teaching the little
black calf to take its breakfast out of the pail instead of the fashion
in which nature intended it to refresh itself. Lambert backed off a
little, for the way of the range had indeed become his way in that year
of his apprenticeship, and its crudities were over him painfully. When
off what he considered a respectful distance he put on his hat, turning
a look at her as if to further assure her that his invasion of her
premises was not a trespass.
She gave him no further notice, engrossed as she appeared to be with the
calf, but when he reached the gate and looked back, he saw her standing
straight, the bucket at her feet, looking after him as if she resented
the fact that two free-footed men should come there and flaunt their
leisure before her in the hour of her need.
Taterleg was looking over the gate, trying to bring himself into the
range of her eyes. He swept off his hat when she looked that way, to be
rewarded by an immediate presentation of her back. Such cow-punchers as
these were altogether too fine and grand in their independent airs, her
attitude seemed to say.
"Did you take the job?" Taterleg inquired.
"I didn't ask her about it."
"You didn't ask her? Well, what in the name of snakes did you come up
here for?"
The Duke led his horse away from the gate, back where she could not see
him, and stood fiddling with his cinch a bit, although it required no
attention at all.
"I got to thinkin' maybe I'd better go on west a piece. If you want to
stay, don't let me lead you off. Go on over and strike her for a job;
she needs men, I know, by the way she looked."
"No, I guess I'll go on with you till our roads fork. But I was kind of
thinkin' I'd like to stay around Glendora a while." Taterleg sighed as
he seemed to relinquish the thought of it, tried the gate to see that it
was latched, turned his horse about. "Well, where're we headin' for
now?"
"I want to ride up there on that bench in front of the house and look
around a little at the view; then I guess we'll go back to town."
They rode to the top of the bench the Duke indicated, where the view
broadened in every direction, that being the last barrier between the
river and the distant hills. The ranchhouse appeared big even in that
setting of immensities, and perilously near the edge of the crumbling
bluff which presented a face almost sheer on the river more than three
hundred feet below.
"It must 'a' been a job to haul the lumber for that house up here."
That was Taterleg's only comment. The rugged grandeur of nature
presented to him only its obstacles; its beauties did not move him any
more than they would have affected a cow.
The Duke did not seem to hear him. He was stretching his gaze into the
dim south up the river, where leaden hills rolled billow upon billow,
engarnitured with their sad gray sage. Whatever his thoughts were, they
bound him in a spell which the creaking of Taterleg's saddle, as he
shifted in it impatiently, did not disturb.
"Couple of fellers just rode up to the gate in the cross-fence back of
the bunkhouse," Taterleg reported.
The Duke grunted, to let it be known that he heard, but was not
interested. He was a thousand miles away from the Bad Lands in his
fast-running dreams.
"That old nigger seems to be havin' some trouble with them fellers,"
came Taterleg's further report. "There goes that girl on her horse up to
the gate--say, look at 'em, Duke! Them fellers is tryin' to make her let
'em through."
Lambert turned, indifferently, to see. There appeared to be a
controversy under way at the gate, to be sure. But rows between
employees and employer were common; that wasn't his fuss. Perhaps it
wasn't an argument, as it seemed to be from that distance, anyhow.
"Did you see that?" Taterleg started his horse forward in a jump as he
spoke, reining up stiffly at Lambert's side. "One of them fellers pulled
his gun on that old nigger--did you see him, Duke?"
"Ye-es, I saw him," said the Duke speculatively, watching the squabble
at the distant gate keenly, turning his horse to head that way by a
pressure of his knee.
"Knocked him flat!" Taterleg set off in a gallop as he spoke, the Duke
right after him, soon ahead of him, old Whetstone a yellow streak across
the mesa.
It wasn't his quarrel, but nobody could come flashing a gun in the face
of a lady when he was around. That was the argument that rose in the
Duke's thoughts as he rode down the slope and up the fenced passage
between the barns.
The gate at which the two horsemen were disputing the way with the girl
and her old black helper was a hundred yards or more beyond the one at
which Taterleg and the Duke had stopped a little while before. It was in
a cross-fence which appeared to cut the house and other buildings from
the range beyond.
As the Duke bent to open this first gate he saw that the girl had
dismounted and was bending over the old negro, who was lying stretched
on the ground. He had fallen against the gate, on which one of the
ruffians was now pushing, trying to open it against the weight of his
body. The girl spoke sharply to the fellow, bracing her shoulder against
the gate. Lambert heard the scoundrel laugh as he swung to the ground
and set his shoulder against the other side.
The man who remained mounted leaned over and added his strength to the
struggle, together forcing the gate open, pushing the resisting girl
with it, dragging the old negro, who clutched the bottom plank and was
hauled brutally along. All concerned in the struggle were so deeply
engrossed in their own affair that none noted the approach of the Duke
and Taterleg. The fellow on the ground was leading his horse through as
Lambert galloped up.
At the sound of Lambert's approach the dismounted man leaped into his
saddle. The two trespassers sat scowling inside the gate, watching him
closely for the first hostile sign. Vesta Philbrook was trying to help
the old negro to his feet. Blood was streaming down his face from a cut
on his forehead; he sank down again when she let go of him to welcome
this unexpected help.
"These men cut my fence; they're trespassing on me, trying to defy and
humiliate me because they know I'm alone!" she said. She stretched out
her hand toward Lambert as if in appeal to a judge, her face flushed
from the struggle and sense of outrage, her hat pushed back on her amber
hair, the fire of righteous anger in her eyes. The realization of her
beauty seemed to sweep Lambert like a flood of sudden music, lifting his
heart in a great surge, making him recklessly glad.
"Where do you fellers think you're goin'?" he asked, following the
speech of the range.
"We're goin' where we started to go," the man who had just remounted
replied, glaring at Lambert with insulting sneer.
This was a stocky man with bushy red-gray eyebrows, a stubble of roan
beard over his blunt, common face. One foot was short in his boot, as if
he had lost his toes in a blizzard, a mark not uncommonly set by
unfriendly nature on the men who defied its force in that country. He
wore a duck shooting-jacket, the pockets of it bulging as if with game.
His companion was a much younger man, slender, graceful in the saddle,
rather handsome in a swarthy, defiant way. He ranged up beside the
spokesman as if to take full share in whatever was to come. Both of them
were armed with revolvers, the elder of the two with a rifle in
addition, which he carried in a leather scabbard black and slick with
age, slung on his saddle under his thigh.
"You'll have to get permission from this lady before you go through
here," Lambert told him calmly.
Vesta Philbrook had stepped back, as if she had presented her case and
waited adjudication. She stood by the old negro where he sat in the
dust, her hand on his head, not a word more to add to her case, seeming
to have passed it on to this slim, confident, soft-spoken stranger with
his clear eyes and steady hand, who took hold of it so competently.
"I've been cuttin' this purty little fence for ten years, and I'll keep
on cuttin' it and goin' through whenever I feel like it. I don't have to
git no woman's permission, and no man's, neither, to go where I want to
go, kid."
The man dropped his hand to his revolver as he spoke the last word with
a twisting of the lip, a showing of his scorbutic teeth, a sneer that
was at once an insult and a goad. The next moment he was straining his
arms above his head as if trying to pull them out of their sockets, and
his companion was displaying himself in like manner, Lambert's gun down
on them, Taterleg coming in deliberately a second or two behind.
"Keep them right there," was the Duke's caution, jerking his head to
Taterleg in the manner of a signal understood.
Taterleg rode up to the fence-cutters and disarmed them, holding his gun
comfortably in their ribs as he worked with swift hand. The rifle he
handed down to the old negro, who was now on his feet, and who took it
with a bow and a grave face across which a gleam of satisfaction
flashed. The holsters with the revolvers in them he passed to the Duke,
who hung them on his saddle-horn.
"Pile off," Taterleg ordered.
They obeyed, wrathful but impotent. Taterleg sat by, chewing gum, calm
and steady as if the thing had been rehearsed a hundred times. The Duke
pointed to the old negro's hat.
"Pick it up," he ordered the younger man; "dust it off and give it to
him."
The fellow did as directed, with evil face, for it hurt his high pride,
just as the Duke intended that it should hurt. Lambert nodded to the man
who had knocked the old fellow down with a blow of his heavy revolver.
"Dust off his clothes," he said.
Vesta Philbrook smiled as she witnessed this swift humbling of her
ancient enemy. The old negro turned himself arrogantly, presenting the
rear of his broad and dusty pantaloons; but the bristling, red-faced
rancher balked. He looked up at Lambert, half choked on the bone of his
rage.
"I'll die before I'll do it!" he declared with a curse.
Lambert beat down the defiant, red-balled glowering eyes with one brief,
straight look. The fence-cutter broke a tip of sage and set to work, the
old man lifting his arms like a strutting gobbler, his head held high,
the pain of his hurt forgotten in the triumphant moment of his revenge.
"Have you got some wire and tools around here handy, Miss Philbrook?"
Lambert inquired. "These men are going to do a little fence fixin' this
morning for a change."
The old negro pranced off to get the required tools, throwing a look
back at the two prisoners now and then, covering his mouth with his hand
to keep back the explosion of his mirth. Badly as he was hurt, his
enjoyment of this unprecedented situation seemed to cure him completely.
His mistress went after him, doubtful of his strength, with nothing but
a quick look into Lambert's eyes as she passed to tell him how deeply
she felt.
It was a remarkable procession for the Bad Lands that set out from the
cross-line fence a few minutes later, the two free rangers starting
under escort to repair the damage done to a despised fence-man's
barrier. One of them carried a wire-stretcher, the chain of it wound
round his saddle-horn, the other a coil of barbed wire and such tools as
were required. After they had proceeded a little way, Taterleg thought
of something.
"Don't you reckon we might need a couple of posts, Duke?" he asked.
The Duke thought perhaps they might come in handy. They turned back,
accordingly, and each of the trespassers was compelled to shoulder an
oak post, with much blasphemy and threatening of future adjustment. In
that manner of marching, each free ranger carrying his cross as none of
his kind ever had carried it before, they rode to the scene of their
late depredations.
Vesta Philbrook stood at the gate and watched them go, reproaching
herself for her silence in the presence of this man who had come to her
assistance with such sure and determined hand. She never had found it
difficult before to thank anybody who had done her a generous turn; but
here her tongue had lain as still as a hare in its covert, and her heart
had gone trembling in the gratitude which it could not voice.
A strong man he was, and full of commanding courage, but neither so
strong nor so mighty that she had need to keep as quiet in his presence
as a kitchen maid before a king. But he would have to pass that way
coming back, and she could make amends. The old negro stood by,
chuckling his pleasure at the sight drawing away into the distance of
the pasture where his mistress' cattle fed.
"Ananias, do you know who that man is," she asked.
"Laws, Miss Vesta, co'se I do. Didn't you hear his hoss-wrangler call
him Duke?"
"I heard him call him Duke."
"He's that man they call Duke of Chimley Butte--I know that hoss he's
a-ridin'; that hoss used to be Jim Wilder's ole outlaw. That Duke man
killed Jim and took that hoss away from him; that's what he done. That
was while you was gone; you didn't hear 'bout it."
"Killed him and took his horse? Surely, he must have had some good
reason, Ananias."
"I don' know, and I ain't a-carin'. That's him, and that's what he
done."
"Did you ever hear of him killing anybody else?"
"Oh, plenty, plenty," said the old man with easy generosity. "I bet
he's killed a hun'ed men--maybe mo'n a hun'ed."
"But you don't know," she said, smiling at the old man's extravagant
recommendation of his hero.
"I don' know, but I bet he is," said he. "Look at 'em!" he chuckled;
"look at old Nick Ha'gus and his onery, low-down Injun-blood boy!"