WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT
Frances looked through her barred window, out over the fenced yard, and
down to the few twinkling watch-lights at the men's quarters. All the
second-story windows of the ranch-house, overlooking the porch roof,
were barred with iron rods set in the cement, like those on the first
floor. The Bar-T ranch-house was a veritable fort.
There was a reason for this that the girl did not entirely understand,
although her father often hinted at it. His stories of his adventures as
a Texas Ranger, and over the Border into Mexico, amused her; but they
had not impressed her much. Perhaps, because the Captain always skimmed
over the particulars of those desperate adventures which had so spiced
his early years--those years before the gentle influence of Frances'
mother came into his life.
He had mentioned his partner, "Lon," on this evening. But he seldom
particularized about him.
Frances could not remember when her father had gone into Arizona and
returned from thence with a wagon-train loaded with many of the most
beautiful of their household possessions. It was when she was a very
little girl.
With the other things, Captain Rugley had brought back the old Spanish
chest which he guarded so anxiously. She did not know what was in the
chest--not all its treasures. It was the one secret her father kept from
her.
Out of it he brought certain barbarous ornaments that he allowed her to
wear now and then. She was as much enamored of jewelry and beautiful
adornments as other girls, was Frances of the ranges.
There was perfect trust between her father and herself; but not perfect
confidence. No more than Pratt Sanderson, for instance, did she know
just how the old ranchman had become possessed of the great store of
Indian and Spanish ornaments, or of the old Spanish chest.
Certain she was that he could not have obtained them in a manner to
wrong anybody else. He spoke of them as "the loot of old Don Milo
Morales' _hacienda_"; but Frances knew well enough that her good
father, Captain Dan Rugley, had been no land pirate, no so-called Border
ruffian, who had robbed some peaceful Spanish ranch-owner across the Rio
Grande of his possessions.
Frances was a bit worried to-night. There were two topics of thought
that disturbed her.
Motherless, and with few female friends even, she had been shut away
with her own girlish thoughts and fears and wonderings more than most
girls of her age. Life was a mystery to her. She lived in books and in
romances and in imagination's pictures more than she did in the workaday
world about her.
There seems to be little romance attached to the everyday lives we live,
no matter how we are situated. The most dreary and uncolored existence,
in all probability, there is in the world to-day is the daily life of a
real prince or princess. We look longingly over the fence of our desires
and consider all sorts and conditions of people outside as happier and
far better off than we.
That was the way it was with Frances. Especially on this particular
night.
Her unexpected meeting with Pratt Sanderson had brought to her heart and
mind more strongly than for months her experiences in Amarillo. She
remembered her school days, her school fellows, and the difference
between their lives and that which she lived at present.
Probably half the girls she had known at school would be delighted (or
thought they would) to change places with Frances of the ranges, right
then. But the ranch girl thought how much better off she would be if she
were continuing her education under the care of people who could place
her in a more cultivated life.
Not that she was disloyal, even in thought, to her father. She loved him
intensely--passionately! But the life of the ranges, after her taste of
school and association with cultivated people, could not be entirely
satisfactory.
So she sat, huddled in a white wool wrapper, by the barred, open window,
looking out across the plain. Only for the few lights at the corrals and
bunk-house, it seemed a great, horizonless sea of darkness--for there
was no moon and a haze had enveloped the high stars since twilight.
No sound came to her ears at first. There is nothing so soundless as
night on the plains--unless there be beasts near, either tamed or wild.
No coyote slunk about the ranch-house. The horses were still in the
corrals. The cattle were all too far distant to be heard. Not even the
song of a sleepy puncher, as he wheeled around the herd, drifted to the
barred window of Frances' room.
Her second topic for thought was her father's evident expectation that
the ranch-house might be attacked. Every stranger was an object of
suspicion to him.
This did not abate one jot his natural Western hospitality. As mark his
open-handed reception of Pratt Sanderson on this evening. They kept open
house at the Bar-T ranch. But after dark--or, after bedtime at
least--the place was barred like a fort in the Indian country!
Captain Rugley never went to his bed save after making the rounds, armed
as he had been to-night, with Ming to bolt the doors. The only way a
marauder could get into the inner court was by climbing the walls and
getting over the roof, and as the latter extended four feet beyond the
second-story walls, such a feat was well-nigh impossible.
The cement walls themselves were so thick that they seemed impregnable
even to cannon. The roof was of slates. And, as has been pointed out
already, all the outer first-floor windows, and all those reached from
the porch roof, were barred.
Frances knew that her father had been seriously troubled to-night by the
appearance of the strange and unseen tramp in the yard, and the fact
that the arrival of that same individual had not been reported from the
men's quarters.
Captain Rugley telephoned and learned from his foreman, Silent Sam
Harding, that nobody had come to the bunk-house that night asking for
lodging and food.
Frances was about to seek her bed. She yawned, curled her bare toes up
closer in the robe, and shivered luxuriously as the night air breathed
in upon her. In another moment she would pop in between the blankets and
cuddle down----
Something snapped! It was outside, not in!
Frances was wide awake on the instant. Her eyelids that had been so
drowsy were propped apart--not by fear, but by excitement.
She had lived a life which had sharpened her physical perceptions to a
fine point. She had no trouble in locating the sound that had so
startled her. Somebody was climbing the vine at the corner of the
veranda roof, not twenty feet from her window. She crouched back, well
sheltered in the shadow, but able to see anything that appeared
silhouetted between her window and the dark curtain of the night.
There was no light in the room behind her; indeed every lamp in the
ranch-house had been extinguished some time before. It was evident that
this marauder--whoever he was--had waited for the quietude of sleep to
fall upon the place.
Back in the room at the head of Frances' bed hung her belt with the
holster pistol she wore when riding about the ranges. In these days it
was considered perfectly safe for a girl to ride alone, save that
coyotes sometimes came within range, or such a savage creature as had
been the introduction of Pratt Sanderson and herself so recently. It was
the duty of everybody on the ranges to shoot and kill these "varmints,"
if they could.
Frances did not even think of this weapon now. She did not fear the
unknown; only that the mystery of the night, and of his secret pursuit,
surrounded him. Who could he be? What was he after? Should she run to
awaken her father, or wait to observe his appearance above the edge of
the veranda roof?
A dried stick of the vine snapped again. There was a squirming figure on
the very edge of the roof. Frances knew that the unknown lay there,
panting, after his exertions.