"And now," said Judith Sanford to the stillness about her--she was
alone in the big ranch-house--"not being constructed of iron, I'm going
to take a snooze."
She yawned, stretched her supple young body luxuriously, and passed
slowly through the empty rooms which, at her command, José had opened
to the sweet morning air. Through the great living-room, library, and
music-room, where the grand piano stood dejectedly in its mantle of
dust, she came to her own chambers at the southwest corner of the
building. Her bed was made, the sheets clean and fresh and inviting,
dressing-gown and slippers were upon the window-seat, and from her
table a vase of glorious roses sent out a welcoming perfume.
"Good old José," she smiled.
Vivid blossom that she was upon the tough, hardy stalk of her pioneer
ancestry, creature of ardent flame and passion which her blood and her
life in the open had made her, she was not devoid of the understanding
of the limit of physical endurance. Last night, through the late
moonlight and later starlight, through the thick darkness which lay
across the mountain trails before the coming of day, on into the dawn,
she had ridden the forty miles from the railroad at Rocky Bend.
Certain of treachery on the part of Bayne Trevors, she had arrived only
to find him plotting another blow at her interests. She had ridden a
mad brute of a horse whose rebellious struggle against her authority
had taxed her to the last ounce of her strength. She had shot a man in
the right shoulder and the left forearm. . . . And now, with no one to
see her, she was pale and shaking a little, suddenly faint from the
heavy beating of her own heart. She had had virtually no sleep last
night. She was glad of it. For now she would sleep, sleep.
"I am not to be called, no matter what happens," she said to José who
came trotting to the tinkle of her bell. "Thank you for the roses,
José."
Slipping out of her clothes, she drew the sheet up to her throat--and
tossed for a wretched hour before sleep came to her. A restless sleep,
filled with broken bits of unpleasant dreams.
At two o'clock, swiftly dressing after a leisurely bath, she went out
into the courtyard, where she found José making a pretense of
gardening, whereas in truth for a matter of hours he had done little
but watch for her coming.
"José," she said, as he swept off his wide hat and made her the bow
reserved for _la señorita_ and _la señorita_ alone, "you will have to
be lady's maid and errand-boy for me until I get things running right.
I am going to telephone into town this minute for a woman to do my
cooking and housekeeping and be a nuisance around generally. While I
do that, will you scare up something for me to eat and then saddle a
horse for me? And don't make a fire, either; just something cold out
of a can, you know."
She went to the office, arranged over the wire with Mrs. Simpson of
Rocky Bend to come out on the following day, and then spent fifteen
minutes studying the pay-roll taken from the safe, which, fortunately,
Trevors had left open. As José came in with a big tray she was running
through a file of reports made at the month-end, two weeks ago, by
certain of the ranch foremen.
"Put it down on the table, José. Thank you," and she found time for a
smile at her devoted servitor; "Now, have a horse ready, will you?" And
without waiting for José's answer, taking up the telephone, she asked
for the office at the Lower End, as the rich valley land of the western
portion of the ranch was commonly known.
Briefly making herself known to the owner of the boyish voice which
answered, she asked, for "Doc" Tripp and was informed that the ranch
veterinarian was no longer with the outfit. Judith frowned.
"Where is he?"
"Rocky Bend, I think."
"When did he leave us?"
"Three days ago."
"Why?"
"Fired. Mr. Trevors let him go."
"Hm!" said Judith. "Who has taken his place?"
"Bill Crowdy is sort of acting vet, right now."
"Thanks," she said. Clicking off, she put in a call for "Doc" Tripp in
Rocky Bend. "Get him for me as quick as you can, will you, please?"
she asked of the operator in town.
For five minutes she munched at a sandwich and pored over the papers
before her, dealing with this or that of the many interests of the big
ranch. When at last her telephone-bell rang she found that it was
Tripp.
"Hello, Doc," she said cordially. "I haven't seen you for so long I
almost have forgotten how you comb your hair!" Tripp laughed with her
at that; across the miles she could picture him running his big hand
through the rebellious shock. "Yes, I'm back to stay, and from the
looks of it I didn't come any too soon. Yes, Doc, we do miss him," and
her voice softened wonderfully to Tripp's mention of the man who had
been more than father to her, more than friend to him. "But we are
going to buck up and show folks that he _knew_. He would have made a
go of the thing; we are going to do it. What was the trouble with you
and Trevors?"
Tripp explained succinctly. He and the general manager had disagreed
openly and frequently about that part of the work in which, until the
coming of Trevors, the veterinarian had been entirely unhampered. Two
months ago Trevors had reduced Tripp's wages and had threatened another
cut.
"Just to make me quit, you know," he added. "And I would have quit if
it had been any other outfit in the world."
"I know," she said, and she did understand. "Go on. What was the
excuse for canning you?"
"Case of lung-worms," he told her. "Some of the calves, I don't know
just how many yet. He insisted on my treating them the old way."
"Slaked lime? Or sulphur fumes?" she said quickly. "And you insisted
on chloroform?"
"You've hit it!" he exclaimed wonderingly. "How'd you know?"
"I haven't been loafing on the job the last six months," she laughed.
"I've been at the school at Davis and hobnobbing with some of the
university men at Berkeley. They're doing some great work there. Doc,
I'll want to talk to you about it. You're going down there, expenses
paid, to brush up with a course or two this year. Now, how soon can
you get back here?--Trevors? Oh, Trevors is fired. I'm running the
ranch myself. And, Doc, I need a few men like you! Can you come early
to-morrow?--To-night? You're a God-blessed brick! Yes, I'll stop that
murderous sulphur treatment if it isn't too late. Good-by."
She lost no time in calling for Bill Crowdy, the man whom Trevors had
put into Tripp's place.
"By the way," she said when the man with the voice which had sounded so
boyish in her ears answered again, "who are you?"
"Ed Masters," he told her. "Electrician, you know."
A glance at the pay-roll in front of her showed that Edward Masters,
general electrician, was a new man and was drawing eighty-five dollars
monthly.
"What are you doing this afternoon?" she demanded sharply--"just
hanging around the office? Is that the way you earn your eighty-five
dollars?"
"Not always. But Trevors told me to be on hand to-day to take some
orders."
"What work?"
"Don't know," he said frankly. "He didn't say."
"Well," said Judith, "I'll tell you one thing, Ed Masters. If you are
one of the loaf-around kind you'd better call for your time to-night.
If there's anything for you to do, go do it. Don't wait for Trevors.
He's gone. Yes, for good. You can report to me here the first thing
in the morning. Now send me Crowdy."
"He's down in the hospital and the hospital phone is out of order."
"And you're an electrician, hanging around for orders! That's your
first job. Send the first man you can get your hands on to tell Crowdy
I say not to touch one of those calves with the lung-worm. And not to
do anything else but get ready to talk with me. I'll be down in half
an hour."
She clicked up the receiver, drank a cup of lukewarm coffee, noting
subconsciously that José must have had a fire ready against the time of
her awakening, and again consulted the files before her. Then again
she used the telephone, ringing the Lower End office. This time it was
another voice answering her.
"Where's Masters?" she asked.
"Gone down to the cow hospital," was the answer.
"Where's Johnson, the irrigation foreman?"
"Out in the south fields."
"And Dennings?"
"Went to look the olives over."
"Send out for both of them. I'm coming right down as fast as a horse
will carry me and I want to talk with them. Wait a minute--I'll tell
you when I'm through with you. Who are you, anyway?"
"Williams, the ranch carpenter."
"What _are_ you doing to-day? Repairs needed at the office where you
are?"
"No. You see----"
"You bet I see!" she cried warmly. "The first thing I see is that I've
got more men on this job than I need. If there's no work for you to
do, call tonight for your time. If you've got anything to do, go do
it."
She clicked off again, waited a brief second and rang three for the
dairy. After she had rung several times and got no answer, she
murmured to herself:
"There's some one too busy on the ranch to be just hanging round after
all, it seems."
And she went out to José and the waiting horse.
As she rode the five miles down to the office at the Lower End, her
thoughts were constantly charged with an appreciation of the wonders
which had been worked about her everywhere since that day, ten years
ago, when she had first come with Luke Sanford to the original Blue
Lake ranch. Then there had been only a wild cattle-range, ten thousand
acres of brush, timber, and uncultivated open spaces. Nowhere would
one find rougher, wilder stock-land in California. But Luke Sanford
had seen possibilities and had bought the whole ten thousand acres,
counting, from the first sight of it, upon acquiring as soon as might
be those other thousands of acres which now made Blue Lake ranch one of
the biggest of Western ventures.
It was late May, and the afternoon air was sweet and warm with the
passing of spring. The girl's eager eyes travelled the length of the
sky-seeking cliff almost at the back door of the ranch-house, which
stood like some mighty barricade thrown up in that mythical day given
over to the colossal struggle of a contending race of giants, and she
found that there, alone, time had shown no change. Elsewhere,
improvements at every turn were living monuments to the tireless brain
of her father. Stock-corrals, sturdily built, out-houses spotless in
their gleaming whitewash, monster barns, fenced-off fields, bridges
across the narrow chasm of the frothing river, telephone-poles with
their wires binding into one sheaf the numerous activities of the
ranch, a broad, graded road over which she and her father had come here
the last time together in the big touring-car.
Here the valley was only a mile across, shut in on both sides by cliff
and steep, rocky mountain, walled by cliffs at the upper end, where the
river from three-mile distant Blue Lake came down in flashing
waterfalls.
But, as she rode, the valley widened, changed in character. At first,
wandering herds of beef-cattle, with now and then a riding cowboy
turning in his saddle to wonder at her; then a gate to be opened as she
stooped forward from her own saddle, and wide fields where the grass
stood tall and untrodden and blooded Jersey cows looked up in mild
interest; yonder a small pasture in which were five Guernseys, kept in
religious seclusion, under ideal conditions, to further certain
investigations into the ratios of five different kinds of fodder to the
amount of butter-fat produced; across a green meadow a pure-blooded
Jersey bull, whose mellow bellowings drew Judith's eyes to the clean
line of his perfect back, over which, with pawing hoofs, he was
throwing much trampled earth; in a more distant pen, accepting the
trumpeted challenge and challenging back, a beautiful specimen of
careful breeding in Ayrshire.
The road wound on, following generally the line of the river, which
began a generous broadening, flowing more evenly through level fields.
Looking down the valley, Judith could see the whitewashed clump of
buildings where were the second office, the store and the blacksmith's
shop, the tiny cottages. And beyond, the barns, the dairy, the tall
silos standing like lookout towers, the alfalfa-fields crisscrossed
with irrigating ditches, and still farther on, the pasture-lands where
the big herd of cows was grazing.
Here the valley was spread out until from side to side it measured
something more than four miles. The bordering mountains, like the
river, had grown into a softer mood; rolling hills scantily timbered,
rich in grass, were dotted with herds, cattle and horses, or fenced off
here and there, reserved for later pasturage.
Across the river, to the south, Judith marked the wandering calves,
offspring of the herd; to the north, along the foothills, the subdued
green of the olive-orchards.
"It's a big, big thing!" she whispered, and her eyes were very bright
with it all, her cheeks flushed. "Big!"
Passing one of the great barns, she heard the trumpet call of a
stallion and, turning, saw in the corral one of those glorious brutes
which Bud Lee had spoken of to Trevors as "clean spirit." From the
instant her eyes filled to the massive beauty of him, she knew who he
was: Night Shade, sprung from the union of Mountain King and Black
Empress; regal-blooded, ebon-black from silken fetlock to flowing mane;
a splendid four-year-old destined to tread his proud way to a first
prize at the coming State fair at Sacramento, a horse many
stock-fanciers had coveted.
She stopped and marvelled afresh at him, paid him his due of unstinted
admiration, and then spurred on to the little clump of buildings
marking the lower ranch headquarters. At the store, where a ten-by-ten
room was partitioned off to serve as office, she swung down from the
saddle and, leaving her horse with dragging reins, went in.
"Hello, Charlie. You're still left to us, are you?" she said, as she
stepped forward to shake hands with Miller, the storekeeper and general
utility man of the settlement. "I'm glad to see you.
"So'm I, Miss Judy," grinned Charlie, looking the part. "Howdy."
"I wanted to see Johnson and Dennings. Are they here yet?"
"No," answered Miller. "Johnson, the ditch man, you mean? He's
somewhere at the Upper End. Has got a crew of men up there making a
new dam or somethin' or other. Been at it purty near a week, now, I
guess. They camp up there."
"How many men are with him?" she asked quickly.
"About a dozen," and he looked hard at her. Judith frowned. But
instead of saying what she might be thinking, she inquired where
Dennings was.
"Out in the olive-orchards, I guess." He paused, filled a pipe he had
neither desire nor intention of smoking, and said abruptly: "What's
this I hear about Trevors? Canned him?"
"Yes."
"Um!" said Miller. "Well, Miss Judy, I ain't sayin' it wasn't purty
near time he got the hooks. But, lemme tell you something. While
you're riding around this afternoon, if I was you I'd pike over to the
milking corrals."
She looked at him sharply.
"What is it, Charlie?"
"You just ride over," said Miller. "It ain't more'n a step an' I'll
just shet up store an' mosey along after you."
Vaguely uneasy because of Charlie Miller's manner, Judith galloped down
toward the four corrals where the cows were milked. From a distance
she saw that there were a number of men, ten or twelve of them,
standing in a close-packed group. She wondered what it was that had
drawn them from their work at this time of day; what that big,
bull-voiced man was saying to them. She heard the muttering rumble of
his words before the words themselves meant anything to her. A quick
glance over her shoulder showed her Charlie Miller hastening behind
her, pick-handle in hand.
Her way carried her by a long, narrow building standing out like a
great capital E, the cow hospital. She thought of Bill Crowdy and the
sick calves as she drew near, but was passing on to the men at the milk
corrals, when the breeze, blowing lightly from the west, brought to her
nostrils a whiff of sulphur.
A quick tide of red ran into her cheeks; that fool, Ed Masters, had not
told Crowdy to refrain from the old-fashioned, deadly treatment!
Almost before her horse had set his four feet at the command of a quick
touch upon the reins, the girl was down and hurrying into the middle
door of the three, calling out as she went:
"Crowdy! Oh, Crowdy!"
She came into a small whitewashed room where were a table, two chairs,
and a telephone; passed through this into the calf-yard. Here were
several compartments with doors which allowed of making them almost
air-tight. And here she was met by a stronger smell of sulphur fumes.
"Crowdy!" she called again. "Where are you?"
Bill Crowdy, a heavy, squat figure of a man, shifty-eyed, with hard
mouth and a nervous, restless air, came down a long hallway, smoking a
cigarette. His eyes rested with no uncertain dislike upon Judith's
eager face.
"I'm Crowdy," he said. "Want me?"
"I told Masters to tell you to stop the sulphur treatment for the
lung-worm calves. Hasn't he told you?"
"Mr. Trevors said I was to give it to them," said Crowdy. "I can't be
taking orders off'n every hop-o'-my-thumb like that college kid."
"Then Masters did tell you?"
"Sure, he told me," said Crowdy in surly defiance. "But if I was to
listen to everything the likes of him says----"
Judith's eyes were fairly snapping.
"You'll listen to the likes of me, Bill Crowdy!" she cried
passionately, a small fist clinched. "You get those calves out into
some fresh air just as quick as the Lord will let you! Into a pen by
themselves. Doc Tripp will attend to them in the morning."
"Tripp's gone."
"He's on his way back, right now. And you're on your way off the
ranch. Understand? You can come to the office for your pay to-night."
Crowdy shrugged his shoulders and turned away.
"If I'm fired," he growled in that ugly voice which was so fitting a
companion to that ugly mouth of his, "I quit right now. Get some of
your other Willies to turn your calves out."
For a moment, in the heat of her anger, Judith's quirt was lifted as
though she would strike him. Then she turned instead and ran to do her
own bidding. A moment later Miller was with her. The two of them got
the calves--there were seven of them--out of the sulphur-laden air and
into the corral. The poor brutes, coughing softly in paroxysms, some
of them frothing at the mouth, two of them falling repeatedly and
rising slowly upon trembling legs, filed by in a pitiful string. One
of the youngest lay still in the hospital, dead.
"He would have killed them all," said Judith, her teeth set as she
looked at the living calves in the corral where, with necks thrust far
out, they fought for each breath. "And Bayne Trevors ordered a
treatment that he knows has gone into the discard! Charlie, that man
has gone further than I thought he had the nerve to go."
"Crowdy did something else that don't look just right," said Miller,
gazing with eyes of longing after the burly, departing figure. "I saw
him do it just after Masters carried him your message. He drove three
of the sick calves--there's a dozen or more got the worms, you
know--out into the pasture with the well calves."
Judith didn't answer. She looked at Miller a moment as though she
thought this must be some wretched jest of his. And when she read in
his eyes the earnestness in his heart, there rose within her the
question: "How far has Bayne Trevors gone?"
"Charlie," she said finally, "I want you to close store for the rest of
the day. Get some one to help you and cut the sick calves out from the
bunch. Haze them back here into the detention corral. Tripp will
attend to them all in the morning. Now, tell me--what's wrong down at
the milk corrals? What are all of those men up to?"
"We're going to see, me an' you," answered Miller. "I don't just know.
But I do know there's a big guy down there that come onto the ranch a
couple of hours ago an' that don't belong here. He's that guy talking.
Name of Nelson. He ain't done any talking to me, but from a word or
two I picked up from one of the milkers I got a hunch he's been sent
over by Trevors."
Nelson, the big emissary for Trevors--for he admitted the fact openly
and pleasantly--took off his hat to Judith and said he guessed he'd be
going. And the men with whom he had been talking, including all of the
milkers and all of the other workmen upon whom Nelson could get his
meddlesome hands at short notice, all men whom Trevors had placed here,
made known in hesitant speech or awkward silence that they were going
with Nelson. There were good jobs open with the lumber company, it
seemed. Nelson even expressed the hope that the quitting of these men
wouldn't work any hardship to the Blue Lake ranch.
Judith, her eyes flashing, asked no man of them to remain, seeing that
thus she would but humiliate herself fruitlessly, and turned away. And
yet, with the herds of cows with bursting bags soon ready for the
nightly milking, she watched the men move away, her heart bitter with
anger.
"They've got to be milked, Charlie," was all that she said. "Who will
milk them until I can get a new crew?"
"I'll tuck in an' help," answered Miller ruefully. "I hate it worse'n
poison, an' I can't milk more'n ten cows, workin twenty-four-hour
shifts. I'll try an' scare up some of the other boys that can milk."
But he shook his head and looked regretfully at the pick-handle. "Good
milkers is scarce as gold eggs," he muttered. "And the separator men
has quit with the rest."
"Get Masters, the electrician, on the job. Get anybody you can. I'm
going back to the ranchhouse pretty soon and I'll try to send some one
from there."
"Cowboys can't milk," said Miller positively. "An' besides, they
won't. But somehow we'll make out for a day or so."
"We've got to make out!" exclaimed Judith. "We've got to beat that man
Trevors, Charlie, and do it quick. If he'll try to keep us
short-handed, if he'll spend money to do it, if he'll do a trick like
giving sulphur for lung-worm and then send infected stock out into the
herds, I don't know just where he will stop--unless we stop him."
In spite of her intentions, it was nearing the time of dusk when she
returned to the ranchhouse. As she came up the knoll from the barn,
she saw for the first time a thin line of bluish smoke rising from the
north ridge. Saw and understood the new menace.
For that way had Benny, the discharged cook, gone.