THE STORY OF LESTER
Bud's sleep of exhaustion was ended by the sound of voices calling to one
another. So deep had been his unconsciousness that as he slowly struggled
back to light and reason he forgot where he was and what had happened.
One thing was certain, the sun had been up a long while, and it was
growing extremely hot even under the sheltering cottonwood tree where he
lay.
The voices continued to call to one another, and Bud finally sat up to
investigate.
On the opposite bank another camp was being made by bow-legged men who
wore heavy chaps over their trousers, broad hats, and knotted
neckerchiefs. Some of these men limped, and most of them swore at their
cramped toes as they went about the business in hand.
A short distance away from where Bud sat some of the sheepmen were lying
comfortably on their elbows, chaffing the punchers.
"I allow you cowmen're gettin' pretty swell," remarked one. "They tell me
yuh kinder hanker after photygrafts of yerselves. How about it?"
"Better lose a hoss fer the sake of yer good looks than be a comic
valentine all yore life, what?" was the drawling retort.
"Mebbe so, but if I'd lost hosses the way you fellers did last night I
wouldn't have enough vanity left no ways to look a pony in the left leg.
I'd go to raisin' grasshoppers to sell to old ladies' chicken ranches, I
plumb would."
At this sally such a guffaw of laughter greeted the discomfited punchers
that they retired from the field for the time being. Larkin grinned with
the rest. Then he turned his attention to the little tent set up near by
between two trees. He remembered that Julie had slept there and wondered
if she were awake yet.
He called her name and presently a very sleepy voice responded, so tender
and helpless in its accents that he laughed for joy.
"Lazy girl!" he cried. "Do you know what time it is? I've been up for
hours."
"All right; I'll get up, I suppose. Is breakfast ready?"
"Not quite," he replied seriously, "but I'll have the maid bring it in as
soon as the eggs are shirred."
"Bud Larkin, you're horrid!" she cried. "I don't believe you have even
started a fire. Do you expect me to get your breakfast?"
"It would tickle me silly," he confessed, unrepentant. "Shall I wait for
you? You see the cooks are getting dinner now. Breakfast was over hours
ago."
"Oh, dear, I suppose so! We're not even married and you want me to cook
for you. Oh, dear!"
"Well," he said, relenting, "I'll get things started, but you come out as
soon as you can."
So saying he beckoned to Ah Sin who had been waiting for the boss, and
gave him a number of orders. Then he thrashed about the river bank as
though looking for fagots, while Julie continued pretending to mourn over
her hard lot. When at last she appeared, however, and had dashed the sleep
from her eyes in the icy waters of the river, it was not to cook, but to
sit down at one of Ah Sin's little tables and eat a glorious breakfast.
"You perfect darling!" she cried happily and ran and kissed Bud though the
Chinaman was looking on.
During breakfast she noticed the work going forward on the other side of
the river and asked Bud about it.
"The cowmen moved their camp down here opposite us as soon as they could
find out where we were," he explained. "I guess they want to talk with me
regarding several matters. I'm pretty sure I have a thing or two to say to
them, now that I am out of their clutches."
"Oh, then my father must be among those men."
"He must, although I have not seen him. I intend to take you over to him
immediately after breakfast."
Suddenly for the first time, the girl's face clouded; through their sweet
bantering pierced the hideous visage of the thing that haunted her and
that she had come to ask him about.
"Talk to me a little while first, will you?" she pleaded. "You know I came
to see you for a special reason last night but had no time to discuss it
then."
"Certainly, dear girl," he replied.
When they had finished eating they strolled a little way up the noisy
stream and finally found a cozy nook between two trees. All about them in
the succulent grass of the banks and river bottoms they could hear the
bells and contented blethering of the flocks; for Sims had determined to
rest his animals for a few days before starting again the long trek
north.
"Bud," she began, speaking slowly so as to choose her words, "I am going
to ask you questions about things that you have never chosen to discuss
with me for some reason I could not fathom. If it is unmaidenly I am
sorry, but I must ask them. I cannot stand any more such anxiety and pain
as I have suffered in the last few weeks."
Bud's features settled themselves into an expression of thought that told
the girl absolutely nothing.
"Yes, go on," he said.
"First I want you to read this note," she continued, drawing a soiled bit
of paper from the bosom of her dress. "A photographer called Skidmore was
held up by the rustlers and asked to bring it to the Bar T and give it to
me."
Her hand trembled a little as she held the paper out to him. He took it
gravely, unfolded and read it.
Then he smiled his old winning smile at her and kissed the hand she had
extended.
"Lies! All lies!" he said. "Please think no more about them."
She looked at him steadily and withdrew her hand.
"That won't do, Bud," she replied firmly, but in a low voice. "What is the
thing for which Caldwell blackmailed you three years ago and again this
year?"
Bud looked at her quizzically for a moment, and then seemed to recede into
thought. She waited patiently, and, after a while, he began to speak.
"Yes, I suppose you are right," he said. "It is a woman's privilege to
know what a man's life holds if she desires it. There are but a few rare
souls who can marry men against whom the world holds something, and say:
'Never tell me what you were or what you have done; what you are and what
you will be are enough for me.'
"Putting myself in your place, I am sure I should do what you are doing,
for I have always told myself that those who marry with points unsettled
between them have taken the first step toward unhappiness. Suspicion and
deceit would undermine the greatest love that ever existed. Acts in the
past that cannot be explained create suspicion, and those in the present
that are better unobserved father deceit."
He paused for a few moments, and appeared to be thinking.
"Do you know who that Ed Skidmore is?" he asked abruptly.
"No; only he was quite nice, and evidently from the East."
"He is my brother Lester, and he is the man who stampeded the punchers'
horses last night with his flashlight."
"He is? I should never have suspected it; you are absolutely different in
looks."
"I know we are, or I shouldn't have risked his life last night. Well, I
bring him into this because I have to. He is part of the story. Lester was
always a wild youth, particularly after the governor stuck him on a
bookkeeper's stool and tried to make a business man out of him. The boy
couldn't add a column of figures a foot long correctly inside of ten
tries. I took to the game a little better than he did, and managed to get
promoted occasionally. But Lester never did.
"Father believed, and announced often enough, that anybody that couldn't
add figures and keep accounts had no business to handle money. To
discipline Lester, who he thought was loafing when he really was
incapable, the governor cut off the boy's allowance almost entirely and
told him he would have to live on his wages until he showed he could earn
more.
"Well, Julie, you know what kind of a cad I was back in the old
days--rich, spoiled, flattered by men, and sought after by women. (I can
say these things now, since I've learned their opposites!) Just try to
imagine, then, the effect of such an order on Lester, who was always the
petted one of us two because he was small and delicate! It was like
pouring cold water on a red-hot stove lid.
"Tied more than ever to his desk, Lester wanted more amusements than ever.
But he had only about fifteen a week where he had been accustomed to five
times the amount. He drifted and borrowed and pledged and pawned, and
finally was caught by some loan-sharks, who got him out of one difficulty
only to plunge him into three others.
"Although my father had a narrow-gauge mind as far as life in general is
concerned, I will say this for him: that he was right in everything he did
about business. He had made it a rule of the firm that anybody who
borrowed money was fired on the spot. Lester knew this, and, while he
would have liked nothing better than the sack, he did not want to
disgrace the governor before his employees and all the business world. So
he clung along and tried to make a go of it.
"I must confess that I think some of the blame for what followed should be
laid at my door. I had been patient with the kid and loaned him money
until I came to the conclusion that it was like throwing it down a well.
Then I got fond of a certain person"--he paused a moment and smiled at
Julie--"and I needed all my money to entertain her properly; so I quit
loaning.
"I don't know whether to tell you the rest or not; it isn't what I would
want anyone else to tell you, even about a perfect stranger, but I think
it is right you should know everything if you know anything."
The girl nodded without speaking.
"In the loan-shark office was a very pretty little girl, and Lester
thought he fell in love with her. She had a red-headed cousin and an
admirer named Smithy Caldwell, who belonged to a tough gang on the South
Side.
"The girl was fond of Lester for a while, but she wouldn't forsake her
friends as he ordered her to, and they quarreled. Her name was Mary, and
after the fuss the three friends, together with the loan-shark people,
played Lester for a gilt-edged idiot, basing their operations on alleged
facts concerning Mary. In reality Smithy Caldwell had married her in the
meantime, and Lester eventually proved he had always treated her
honorably, though now she denied it."
"Poor, innocent boy in the hands of those blood-suckers!" cried Juliet
compassionately.
"Naturally driven frantic by the fear of exposure and the resulting
disgrace of the whole family, the boy lost his head and tried to buy his
persecutors off. And to do this he took money out of the safe. But what's
the use of prolonging the agony? Finally he forged my father's signature,
and when the check came back from the bank he tried to 'fix' the books,
and got caught.
"I'll pass over everything that followed, except to say that the disgrace
did not become public. But it broke father's heart and hastened his death.
When that occurred it was found that practically all the estate had come
to me, and this fellow Smithy Caldwell threatened to disclose the forgery
if I did not buy him off.
"That scared me, because I was now the head of the family, and I handed
over two thousand dollars. Then I came West, and thought the whole matter
was buried, until Caldwell turned up at the Bar T that night for supper.
"That's about all. You see, it's an ugly story, and it paints Lester
pretty black. But I've thought the thing over a great many times, and
can't blame him very much, after all, for it really was the result of my
father's stern and narrow policy. The boy was in his most impressionable
years, and was left to face the music alone. It seemed to age him
mightily."
"But what will happen now?" asked Julie anxiously. "Aren't the other two
still alive? Can't they make trouble?"
"Yes, but I don't think they will. I have the drop on Smithy now, and he
will either write a full dismissal of the matter for all three of them or
he will swing with the rustlers. And if I know my Smithy Caldwell, he
won't be able to get pen and paper fast enough."
"But can you save him, even at that cost, do you think? The cowmen won't
understand all this."
"That will rest with your father, dear," replied Bud, getting to his feet.
"Now, let's go over and see him, for I have something else I want to ask
him."
His face that had been clouded during his recital was suddenly flooded
with the sunlight of his smile, and Julie realized for the first time what
it had cost him to lay bare again these painful memories of a past he had
sought to bury.
When he had helped her to her feet she went to him and laid her hands on
his shoulders, looking up into his face with eyes that brimmed with the
loosed flood of her love, so long pent up.
"Can I ever be worth what I have cost you to-day?" she asked humbly.
Tenderly he gathered her to him.
"In love there is no such word as cost," he said.