A YEARLING SOLD
Three riders came galloping along the ridge towards the hunter. At
sight of his pony the grizzled cowman in the lead signed to his
companions and came to a sudden stop behind a clump of service-berry
bushes. The others swerved in beside him, the bowlegged young puncher
on the right with his hand at his hip.
"Jumping Jehosaphat!" he exulted. "We shore have got him, Mr. Knowles,
the blasted--" His thin lips closed tight to shut in the oath as he
turned his gaze on the lovely flushed face of the girl beside him.
When his cold gray eyes met hers they lighted with a glow like that of
fire through ice.
"You better stay here, Miss Chuckie," he advised. "We're going to cure
that rustler."
"But, Kid, what if--No, no! wait!" she cried at sight of his drawn
Colt's. "Daddy, stop him! The man may not be a rustler."
"You heard the shooting," answered the cowman.
"Yes, but he may have been after a deer," answered the girl, lifting
her lithe figure tiptoe in the stirrups of her man's saddle to peer
over the bushes.
"Deer?" rejoined the puncher. "Who'd be deer-hunting in July?"
"Then a bear. He fired fast enough," remarked the girl.
"Not much chance of that round here," said the cowman. "Still, it
might be. At any rate, Kid, this time I want you to wait for me to ask
questions _before_ you cut loose."
"If he don't try any funny business," qualified the puncher.
"Course," assented Knowles. "Chuckie, you best stay back here."
"Oh, no, Daddy. There's only one man and between you and Kid--"
"_Sho!_ Come on, then, if you're set on it. Kid, you circle to the
right."
The puncher wheeled his horse and rode off around the chaparral. The
girl and Knowles, after a short wait, advanced upon the hunter. They
were soon within a few yards of him and in plain view. His pony
stopped browsing and raised its head to look at them. But the man was
stooped over, with his face the other way, and the incessant,
reverberating roar of the canyon muffled the tread of their horses on
the dusty turf.
The puncher crashed through the corner of the thicket and pulled up on
the top of the slope immediately opposite the hunter. The latter
sprang to his feet. The puncher instantly covered him with his
long-barreled revolver and snapped tersely: "Hands up!"
"My--ante!" gasped the hunter. "A--a road agent!"
But he did not throw up his hands. With the rash bravery of
inexperience, he dropped his knife and snatched out his automatic
pistol. On the instant the puncher's big revolver roared. The pistol
went spinning out of the hunter's hand. Through the smoke of the shot
the puncher leveled his weapon.
"Put up your hands!--put them up!" screamed the girl, urging her horse
forward.
The hunter obeyed, none too soon. For several moments he stood rigid,
glaring half dazed at the revolver muzzle and the cool hard face
behind it. Then slowly he twisted about to see who it was had warned
him. The girl had ridden up within a few feet.
"You--you _tenderfoot_!" she flung at him. "Are you locoed? Hadn't you
any more sense than to do that? Why, if Daddy hadn't told Mr. Gowan to
wait--"
"You shore would have got yours, you--rustler!" snapped the puncher.
"It was you, though, Miss Chuckie--your being here."
"But he's not a rustler, Kid," protested the girl. "Where are your
eyes? Look at his riding togs. If they're not tenderfoot, howling
tenderfoot--!"
"Just the same, honey, he's shot a yearling," said Knowles, frowning
at the culprit. "Suppose you let me do the questioning."
"Ah--pardon me," remarked the hunter, rebounding from apprehension to
easy assurance at sight of the girl's smile. "I would prefer to be
third-degreed by the young lady. Permit me to salute the Queen of the
Outlaws!"
He bent over the fingers of one hand to raise his silver-banded
sombrero by its high peak. It left his head--and a bullet left the
muzzle of the puncher's revolver. A hole appeared low down in the side
of the sombrero.
"That'll do, Kid," ordered the cowman. "No more hazing, even if he is
a tenderfoot."
"Tenderfoot?" replied Gowan, his mouth like a straight gash across his
lean jaws. "How about his drawing on me--and how about your yearling?
That bullet went just where it ought to 've gone with his hat down on
his head."
There was no jesting even of the grimmest quality in the puncher's
look and tone. He was very cool and quiet--and his Colt's was leveled
for another shot.
The hunter thrust up his hands as high as he could reach.
"You--you surely can't intend to murder me!" he stammered, staring from
the puncher to the cowman. "I'll pay ransom--anything you ask! Don't let
him shoot me! I'm Lafayette Ashton--I'll pay thousands--anything! My
father is George Ashton, the great financier!"
"New York?" queried Knowles.
"No, no, Chicago! He--If only you'll write to him!"
The girl burst into a ringing laugh. "Oh!" she cried, the moment she
could speak, "Oh, Daddy! don't you see? He really thinks we're a bunch
of wild and woolly bandits!"
The hunter looked uncertainly from her dimpled face to Gowan's ready
revolver. Turning sharply about to the cowman, he caught him in a
reluctant grin. With a sudden spring, he placed the girl between
himself and the scowling puncher. Behind this barrier of safety he
swept off his hat and bowed to the girl with an exaggerated display of
politeness that hinted at mockery.
"So it's merely a cowboy joke," he said. "I bend, not to the Queen of
the Outlaws, but to the Princess of the Cows!"
Her dimples vanished. She looked over his head with the barest shade
of disdain in her expression.
"The joke came near to being on us," she said. "Kid, put up your gun.
A tenderfoot who has enough nerve and no more sense than to draw when
you have the drop on him, you've hazed him enough."
Gowan sullenly reloaded his Colt's and replaced it in its holster.
"That's right," said Knowles; but he turned sharply upon the offender.
"Look here, Mr. Ashton, if that's your name--there's still the matter
of this yearling. Shooting stock in a cattle country isn't any
laughing matter."
"But, I say," replied the hunter, "I didn't know it was your cow,
really I didn't."
"Doesn't make any difference whose brand was on the calf. Even if it
had been a maverick--"
"But that's it!" interrupted Ashton. "I didn't see the brand--only
glimpses of the beast in the chaparral. I thought it a deer until
after it fell and I came up to look."
"You shore did," jeered Gowan. "That's why you was hurrying to yank
off the hide. No chance of proving a case on you with the brand down
in Deep Canyon."
"Indeed no," replied Ashton, drawing a trifle closer to the girl's
stirrup. "You are quite wrong--quite. I was dressing the animal to
take it to my camp. Because I had mistaken it for a deer was no reason
why I should leave it to the coyotes."
"What business you got hunting deer out of season?" questioned
Knowles.
"Pardon me, but are you the game warden?" asked Ashton, with a
supercilious smile.
"Never you mind about that," rejoined the cowman. "Just you answer my
question."
Ashton shrugged, and replied in a bored tone: "I fail to see that it
is any of your affair. But since you are so urgent to learn--I prefer
to enjoy my sport before the rush of the open season."
"Don't you know it's against the law?" exclaimed the girl.
"Ah--as to that, a trifling fine--" drawled the hunter, again
shrugging.
"Humph!" grunted Knowles. "A fine might get you off for deer. Shooting
stock, though, is a penitentiary offense--when the criminal is lucky
enough to get into court."
"Criminal!" repeated Ashton, flushing. "I have explained who I am. My
father could buy out this entire cattle country, and never know it.
I'll do it myself, some day, and turn the whole thing into a game
preserve."
"When you do," warned Gowan, "you'd better hunt a healthier climate."
"What we're concerned with now," interposed Knowles, "is this
yearling."
"The live or the dead one, Daddy?" asked the girl, her cheeks
dimpling.
"What d'you--Aw--_haw! haw! haw!_--The live or the dead one! Catch
that, Kid? The live or the dead one! _Haw! haw! haw!_"
The cowman fairly roared with laughter. Neither of the young men
joined in his hilarious outburst. Gowan waited, cold and unsmiling.
Ashton stiffened with offended dignity.
"I told you that the shooting of the animal was unintentional," he
said. "I shall settle the affair by paying you the price usually asked
for veal."
"You will?" said the cowman, looking down at the indignant tenderfoot
with a twinkle in his mirth-reddened eyes. "Well, we don't usually
sell veal on the range. But I'll let you have this yearling at cutlet
prices. Fifty dollars is the figure."
"Why, Daddy," interrupted the girl, "half that would be--"
"On the hoof, yes; but he's buying dressed veal," broke in the cowman,
and he smiled grimly at the culprit. "Fifty dollars is cheap for a
deer hunter who goes round shooting up the country out of season. He
can take his choice--pay for his veal or make a trip to the county
seat."
"That's talking, Mr. Knowles," approved Gowan. "We'll corral him at
Stockchute in that little log calaboose. He'll have a peach of a time
talking the jury out of sending him up for rustling."
"This is an outrage--rank robbery!" complained Ashton. "Of course you
know I will pay rather than be inconvenienced by an interruption of
my hunting." He thrust his slender hand into his pocket, and drew it
out empty.
"Dead broke!" jeered Gowan.
Ashton shrugged disdainfully. "I have money at my camp. If that is not
enough to pay your blackmail, my valet has gone back to the railway
with my guide for a remittance of a thousand dollars, which must have
come on a week ago."
"Your camp is at the waterhole on Dry Fork," stated Knowles. "Saw a
big smoke over there--tenderfoot's fire. Well, it's only five miles,
and we can ride down that way. We'll go to your camp."
"Ye-es?" murmured Ashton, his ardent eyes on the girl. "Miss--er--Chuckie,
it is superfluous to remark that I shall vastly enjoy a cross-country
ride with you."
"Oh, really!" she replied.
Heedless of her ironical tone, he turned a supercilious glance on
Knowles. "Yes, and at the same time your papa and his hired man can
take advantage of the opportunity to deliver my veal."
"What's that?" growled the cowman, flushing hotly.
But the girl burst into such a peal of laughter that his scowl relaxed
to an uncertain smile.
"Well, what's the joke, honey?" he asked.
"Oh! oh! oh!" she cried, her blue eyes glistening with mirthful
tears. "Don't you see he's got you, Daddy? You didn't sell him his
meat on the hoof. You've got to dress and deliver his cutlets."
"By--James!" vowed Gowan. "Before I'll butcher for such a knock-kneed
tenderfoot I'll see him, in--"
"Hold your hawsses, Kid," put in Knowles. "The joke's on me. You go on
and look for that bunch of strays, if you want to. But I'm not going
to back up when Chuckie says I'm roped in."
Gowan looked fixedly at Ashton and the girl, swore under his breath,
and swung to the ground. He came down beside the calf with the
waddling step of one who has lived in the saddle from early childhood.
Knowles joined him, and they set to work on the calf without paying
any farther heed to the tenderfoot.
Ashton, after fastidiously wiping his hands on a wisp of grass, placed
his hunting knife in his belt and his rifle in its saddle sheath. He
next picked up his pistol, but after a single glance at the side
plate, smashed in by Gowan's first shot, he dropped the ruined weapon
and rather hurriedly mounted his pony.
The girl had faced away from the partly butchered carcass. As Ashton
rode around alongside, her pony started to walk away. Instead of
reining in, she glanced demurely at Ashton, and called over her
shoulder: "Daddy, we'll be riding on ahead. You and Kid have the
faster hawsses."
"All right," acquiesced Knowles, without pausing in his work.
Gowan said nothing; but he glanced up at the jaunty back of the
tenderfoot with a look of cold enmity.