SELF-DEFENSE
Nothing more was said about the trip to town until late Wednesday
evening. As Knowles slammed shut his book and the young men rose to
withdraw to the bunkhouse, he asked Gowan casually: "Got those harness
hawsses in the corral?"
"Brought 'em in this afternoon. Greased the buckboard and overhauled
the harness. Everything's in shape," answered the puncher.
Knowles merely nodded. Yet in the morning, immediately after the usual
early breakfast, Gowan went up to the corral and returned driving a
lively pair of broncos to the old buckboard. Ashton happened to come
around the house as Knowles stepped from the front door. The cowman
was followed by his daughter, attired in a new riding habit and a
fashionable hat with a veil.
"You're just in time, Lafe," said Knowles. "Saddle a couple of hawsses
and follow Chuckie to town. I misdoubt that seat is cramped for three,
and a baby to boot."
"But I--it looks quite wide to me," said Ashton, flushing and drawing
back.
"You know the size of Blake and his lady--I don't," replied the
cowman. "Just the same, I want you to go along with Chuckie. There's
not a puncher in this section would harm her, drunk or sober; but the
fellows that come in and go out on the railroad are sometimes another
sort."
"Of course I--if necessary," stammered Ashton. "Yet may I ask you to
excuse me? In the event of trouble, Mr. Gowan, you know--"
"Great snakes!" called Gowan from the buckboard. "Needn't ask _me_ to
go, twice!"
"Can't spare you today," said Knowles, his keen eyes fixed on Ashton
in unconcealed amazement.
It was inconceivable. For the first time in his career as an employe,
the tenderfoot was attempting to evade a duty,--a duty that comprised
a fifty-mile ride in company with Miss Isobel Knowles!
The girl looked at Ashton with a perfect composure that betrayed no
trace of her feelings.
"I'm sure there's no reason whatever why Lafe should go, if he does
not wish to," she remarked. "Any of my hawsses will lead to the
buckboard."
"He's going to town with you," said Knowles, his jaw setting hard with
stubborn determination.
"Why, of course, Mr. Knowles, if you really think it necessary,"
reluctantly acquiesced Ashton. He put his hand into his pocket,
shrugged, and asked in a hesitating manner: "May I request--I have
only a small amount left from that five dollars. If you consider there
are any wages owing me--Going to town, you know."
"Lord!" said the cowman. "So that's what you stuck on. 'Fraid of
running out of change with a lady along. Here's the balance of your
first month's wages, and more, if you want it."
He drew out a fat wallet and began counting out banknotes.
"Oh, no, not so many," said Ashton. "I wish only what you consider as
owing to me now."
"You'll take an even hundred," ordered Knowles, forcing the money on
him. "A man doesn't feel just right in town unless he's well heeled.
Only don't show more than a ten at a time in the saloon."
"You have chosen me to act as your daughter's escort," replied
Ashton.
Quick to catch the inference of his remark, Isobel flashed him a look
of approval, but called banteringly as she darted out to the
buckboard: "Better move, if you expect to get near enough to escort
me, this side of Stockchute."
Gowan sprang down to hand her into the buckboard. She took the reins
from him and spoke to the fidgetting broncos. They plunged forward and
started off on a lope. Ashton perceived that she did not intend to
wait for him. He caught Gowan's look of mingled exultance and envy,
and dashed for the corral. Rocket was outside, but at his call trotted
to meet him, whinnying for his morning's lump of sugar. Ashton flung
on saddle and bridle, and slipped inside the corral to rope his own
pony. Haste made him miss the two first throws. At last he noosed the
pony, and slapped on the girl's saddle and bridle.
As he raced off, pounding the pony with his rope to keep him alongside
Rocket, Knowles waved to him from the house. He had saddled up in less
than twice the time that Gowan could have done it,--which was a record
for a tenderfoot. He waved back, but his look was heavy despite the
excitement of the pursuit.
He expected to overtake Isobel in a few minutes. This he could have
done had he been able to give Rocket free rein. But he had to hold
back for the slower-gaited pony. Also, the girl had more of a start
than he had at first realized, and she did her best to hold the
handicap. Hitched to the light buckboard, her young broncos could have
run a good part of the way to Stockchute. She was far out on the flat
before she at last tired of the wild bumping over ruts and sagebrush
roots, and pulled her horses down to a walk.
"I could have kept ahead clear across to the hills," she flung back at
him as he galloped up.
"You shouldn't have been so reckless!" he reproached. "Every moment
I've been dreading to see you bounced out."
"That's the fun of it," she declared, her cheeks aglow and eyes
sparkling with delight.
"But the road is so rough!" he protested. "Wouldn't it be easier for
you to ride my pony? He's like a rocking-chair."
"No," she refused. But she smiled, by no means ill pleased at his
solicitude for her comfort. She halted the broncos, and said
cordially: "Tie the saddle hawsses to the back rail, and pile in. We
may as well be sociable."
He hastened to accept the invitation. She moved over to the left side
of the seat and relinquished the lines to him. With most young ladies
this would have been a matter-of-course proceeding; from so
accomplished a horsewoman it was a tactful compliment. He appreciated
it at its full value, and his mood lightened. They rattled gayly
along, on across the flats, up and down among the pinyon clad hills,
and through the sage and greasewood of the valleys.
He had thought the country a desolate wilderness; but now it seemed
a Garden of Eden. Never had the girl's loveliness been more
intoxicating, never had her manner to him been more charming and
gracious. He could not resist the infection of her high spirits. For
the greater part of the trip he gave himself over to the delight of
her merry eyes and dimpling, rosy cheeks, her adorable blushes and
gay repartee.
All earthly journeys and joys have an ending. The buckboard creaked up
over the round of the last and highest hill, and they came in sight of
the little shack town down across the broad valley. Though five miles
away, every house, every telegraph pole, even the thin lines of the
railroad rails appeared through the dry clear air as distinct as a
miniature painting. Miles beyond, on the far side of the valley,
uprose the huge bulk of Split Peak, with its white-mantled shoulders
and craggy twin peaks.
But neither Ashton nor Isobel exclaimed on this magnificent view of
valley and peak. Each fell silent and gazed soberly down at the dozen
scattered shacks that marked the end of their outward trip. Rapidly
the gravity of Ashton's face deepened to gloom and from gloom to
dejection. The horses would have broken into a lope on the down grade.
He held them to a walk.
Chancing to gaze about and see his face, the girl started from her
bright-eyed daydream. "Why, Lafe! what is it?" she inquired. "You look
as you did the other day, when you brought the mail."
"It's--everything!" he muttered.
"As what?" she queried.
He shrugged hopelessly, hesitated, and drew out the roll of bills
forced on him by Knowles. "Tell me, please, just how much of this is
mine, at your father's usual rate of wages, and deducting the real
value of that calf."
"Why, I can't just say, offhand," she replied. "But why should you--"
"I shall tell you as soon as--but first--" He drew out his watch.
"This cost me two hundred and fifty dollars. It is the only thing I
have worth trading. Would you take it in exchange for Rocket and the
balance of this hundred dollars over and above what is due me?"
"Why--no, of course, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It would be
absurd, cheating yourself that way. Anyhow, Rocket is your horse to
ride, as long as you wish to."
"But I would like him for my own. How about trading him for my pony
and the wages due me?"
"Well, that wouldn't be an unfair bargain. Your hawss is the best cow
pony of the two."
"It is very kind of you to agree, Miss Chuckie! Here is all the
money; and here is the watch. I wish you to accept it from me as
a--memento."
"Mr. Ashton!" she exclaimed, indignantly widening the space between
them as much as the seat would permit.
"Please!" he begged. "Don't you understand? I am going away."
"Going away?" she echoed.
"Yes."
"But--why?"
"Because he is coming."
"Mr. Blake?"
"Yes. I cannot stay after he--"
"But why not? Has he injured you? Are you afraid of him?"
"No. I'm afraid that you--" Ashton's voice sank to a whisper--"that
you will believe what he--what they will say against me."
"Oh!" she commented, her expression shifting swiftly from sympathetic
concern to doubt.
He caught the change in her look and tone, and flushed darkly.
"There are sometimes two sides to a story," he muttered.
"Tell me your side now," she suggested, with her usual directness.
His eyes fell before her clear honest gaze. His flush deepened. He
hung his head, biting his twisted lip. After several moments he began
to speak in a hesitating broken murmur:
"I've always been--wild. But I graduated from Tech.--not at the foot
of my class. My father--always busy piling up millions--never a word
or thought for me, except when I overspent my allowance. I was in
a--fast set. My father--threatened me. I had to make good. I took a
position in old Leslie's office--Genevieve's father. I--"
He paused, licked his lips, hesitated, and abruptly went on again,
this time speaking with almost glib facility: "There was an engineers'
contest for a projected bridge over Michamac Strait. I started to draw
plans, that I might enter the contest, but I did not finish in time.
The plans of the other engineers were all rejected. I continued to
work on mine. After the contest I happened to pick up a piece of torn
plan out of the office wastebasket, and it gave me a suggestion how to
improve the central span of my bridge."
"Yes?" asked the girl, her interest deepening.
He again licked his lips, hesitated, and continued: "There was no
name on that torn plan--nothing to indicate to whom it had belonged.
So I used it--that is, the suggestion I got from it, and was awarded
the bridge on my plans. This made me the Resident Engineer of the
bridge, and I had it almost completed when this man Blake came back
from Africa after Genevieve, and claimed that I had--had stolen his
plans of the bridge. It seems they were lost in Mr. Leslie's office.
He claimed he had handed them in to me for the contest. But so had
all the other contestants, and their plans were not lost. It may have
been that one of the doorkeepers tore his plans up, out of
revenge. Blake was a very rough brute of a fellow at that time. He
quarreled with the doorkeeper because the man would not admit him
to see Mr. Leslie--threatened to smash him. Afterwards he accused
Mr. Leslie of stealing his plans."
"Oh, no, no! he couldn't have done that! He can't be that kind of a
man!" protested Isobel.
"It's true! Even he will not deny it. Old Leslie thought him
crazy--then. It was different when he came back and accused me! He had
been shipwrecked with Genevieve. They were alone together all those
weeks, and so one can--" Ashton checked himself. "No, you must not
think--He saved her. When they came back he claimed the bridge as his
own--those lost plans."
"His plans? So that was it! And you--?"
"Of course they believed him. What was my word against his with
Genevieve and Leslie. Leslie's consulting engineer was an old pal of
Blake's. So of course I--I'll say though that Blake agreed to put it
that I had only borrowed his idea of the central span."
"That was generous of him, if he really believed--"
"Did he?--did Genevieve? Do they believe it now? You see why I must go
away."
"I don't any such thing," rejoined the girl.
"You don't?" he exclaimed. "When they are coming here, believing I
did it! They must believe it, all of them! And my father--after all
this time--They agreed not to tell him. Yet he has found out. That
letter, up at the waterhole--it was from his lawyers. He had cut me
off--branded me as an outcast."
"Without waiting to hear your side--without asking you to explain? How
unjust! how unfair!" cried Isobel.
Ashton winced. "I--I told you I--my record was against me. But I was
his son--he had no right to brand me as a--a thief! My valet read the
letter. He must have told the guide--the scoundrels!"
Tears of chagrin gathered in the young man's dark eyes. He bit his lip
until the blood ran.
"O-o-oh!" sighed the girl. "It's all been frightfully unjust! You
haven't had fair play! I shall tell Mr. Blake."
"No, not him!--not him!" Ashton's voice was almost shrill. "All I wish
is to slip away, before they see me."
"You don't mean, run away?" she said, quietly placing her little
gauntlet-gloved hand on his arm. "You're not going to run away,
Lafe."
"What else?" he asked, his eyes dark with bitter despair. "Would you
have me return, to be booted off the range when they tell your
father?"
"Just wait and see," she replied, gazing at him with a reassuring
smile. "You've proved yourself a right smart puncher--for a
tenderfoot. You're in the West, the good old-style West, where it's a
man's present record that counts; not what he has been or what he has
done. No, you're not going to run. You're going to face it out--and
going to stay to learn your new profession of puncher and--_man_!"
"But they will not wish to associate with me."
"Yes, they will," she predicted. "I shall see to that."
He took heart a little from her cheery, positive assurance. "Well, if
you insist, I shall not go until they show--"
"They'll not recognize you at first. That will give me a chance to
speak before they can say anything disagreeable. I'm sure Mr. Blake
will understand."
"But--Genevieve?"
"If she married him when he was as rough as you say, and if he agrees
to let bygones be bygones, you need have no fear of Mrs. Blake. Only
be sure to go into raptures over the baby. Tell her it's the perfect
image of its father."
"What if it isn't?" objected Ashton gloomily.
She dimpled. "One must allow for the difference in age; and there's
always some resemblance--each must have a mouth and eyes and ears and
a nose."
He caught himself on the verge of laughter. Her eyes were fixed upon
him, pure and honest and dancing with mirth. A sudden flood of
crimson swept up his face from his bristly, tanned chin to his white
forehead. He averted his gaze from hers.
"You're _good_!" he choked out. "I don't deserve--But I can't go--when
you tell me to stay!"
"Of course you can't," she lightly rejoined. "Look! There's the train
coming. Push on the lines!"