Day followed day in an endless round of range duties, and two weeks
had passed since Greek Conniston began work for the Half Moon outfit.
He admitted to himself over many a solitary pipeful of cheap tobacco
that Miss Argyl Crawford had been the reason for his coming out into
the wilderness. And he asked himself what good his coming had done. He
had not so much as caught a fleeting glimpse of her since her father
had engaged him to go to work at thirty dollars a month. He did not
even know that she was still on the range, that she had not gone to
Crawfordsville, where her father had a house, where he owned the
electric-lighting plant, the water system, and a general merchandise
store, and where both father and daughter spent many weeks each year.
The range-house, although but a few hundred yards distant from the
bunk-house, might as well have been in the next county. News from it
seldom filtered to the men's sleeping-quarters. The foreman, Brayley
now, Bat Truxton before him, reported frequently to Mr. Crawford at
his office in the big building, took orders from him there, advised
with him. The other men went there only when they were sent for, and
that was not more than half a dozen times yearly, when that many.
Conniston knew that Hapgood had stayed with the Crawfords two or three
days, resting up, as he overheard Brayley say with a fine scorn, and
that then he had gone on into Crawfordsville. Conniston supposed that
by now he had borrowed money and, if not again in New York, was on his
way thither. Of all else of the doings in the big house he was as
ignorant as though he had never crossed the desert lands between the
Half Moon and Indian Creek.
Conniston most of all men working for Mr. Crawford felt that he could
not go to the house. He had come to these people as an equal, as one
of their own station in life, even from a plane a bit higher than
theirs. When he had gone to work he had not thought that he was to be
put upon the same footing as every ignorant laborer who drew his pay
from the owner of the Half Moon. He had thought that it would be a
lark, that he would come to the house and laugh with the girl over his
days of rubbing elbows with thirty-dollar-a-month men. That he would
be, in a way, a guest.
Now it was evident that they had forgotten him, that if they thought
of Conniston it was merely to remember that he was one of the common
outfit. And Conniston's pride told him that if they chose to ignore
him, to look down upon him, to shut him out of their world socially,
he could do equally as well without them. Which was all very well, but
which did not in the least hinder him from dreaming dreams inhabited
solely by a slender, lithe, graceful girl with big gray eyes like dawn
skies in springtime.
The two weeks had not been wasted. He had learned something, and he
had made a friend. The friend was Lonesome Pete. Night after night,
with a dogged perseverance which neither towering barriers in the way
of unbelievably long words nor the bantering ridicule of his fellows
could affect, the red-headed man sat at the table in the bunk-house
under the swinging-lamp and conned "Macbeth." Upon long rides across
the range he carried "Macbeth" in his hand, a diminutive and
unsatisfactory dictionary in his hip-pocket.
One day Conniston and Lonesome Pete were riding together upon some
range errand. Lonesome Pete was particularly interested in his study,
and Conniston asked him the question he had been upon the verge of
asking many times.
"How does it happen, Pete," he said, carelessly, "that you're getting
so interested in an education here of late?"
Pete did not answer with his usual alacrity. Conniston, looking at
him, about to repeat the question, thinking that it had been lost in
the thud of their horses' hoofs, was considerably amazed to see the
cowboy's face go as flaming a red as his hair.
"Look here, Con," Pete said, finally, his tone half belligerent, while
his eyes, usually so frank, refused to meet Conniston's amused regard,
"what I do an' why I do it ain't any other jasper's concern, is it?"
"Certainly not," answered Conniston, promptly. "Certainly not mine. I
didn't go to frolic into your personal business, Pete."
"I mean other jaspers, not you, Con," Pete continued, after they had
galloped on for a moment in silence. "You been helpin' me so's I don't
know how I'd 'a' made such fas' improvement without you. It's like
this: here I am, gittin' along first-rate, maybe, like the res' of the
boys, workin' steady, an' a few good hard iron dollars put away in a
sock. An' all the time with no more eddication than a wall-eyed,
year-ol' steer. An' some day, in case I might creep a ways off'n the
range, I ain't no more fit to herd with real folks than that same
steer is."
"You're figuring, then, on leaving the range? On going to a city to
live? To cut something of a dash in society? Is that it, Pete?"
Again Pete blushed.
"Git out, Con! You're joshin'! But what I says is so, an' you know it
as well's I do. Now, it's goin' on three months I'm down in
Rattlesnake Valley, where the Ol' Man's stringin' his chips on makin'
a big play. He's goin' to make a town down in that sand-pile or bust a
tug; I ain't sayin' which right now. Anyway, he's already got a school
down there, an' they make the kids go. I figgered it out, seein' as
them little freckle-nosed sons o' guns could learn readin' an' writin'
an' such-like, by gravy, I could do it too!"
The explanation was so simple, and Lonesome Pete had such difficulty
in making his halting words come, and had such a way of refusing to
look at Conniston, that the latter began to suspect the truth.
"How about the teacher, Pete?" he asked, quietly, innocently. "They
have a real fine teacher, I suppose? Man or--woman?"
"Nuther! She's a lady! An' she's that smart as would make a man
wonder! In case there's anything as that same Miss Jocelyn Truxton
don't know, I ain't wise to it none."
"And--pretty?"
Lonesome Pete's joyous grin was like a beam of summer sunlight.
"They ain't none han'somer as ever wasted her time ridin' herd on a
bunch of dirty-faced brats. Say, Con," a bit doubtfully, "I wouldn't
mind showin' you--you ain't goin' to blow it off to the boys, are
you?"
Conniston swore himself to secrecy and watched Lonesome Pete with
twinkling eyes as the cowboy put his hand deep into the inside pocket
of his vest--the left pocket. First he removed the safety-pin with
which the top edges of the pocket were held securely together. Then he
brought out a bit of cardboard wrapped carefully in a wonderfully
clean red handkerchief. Whipping the handkerchief from the cardboard,
he held out to Conniston's gaze the picture it concealed.
"That's her, Con. An' I'll leave it to you if she ain't in the
blue-ribbon class, huh?"
She was pretty, decidedly pretty. Very dark, evidently young, her face
rounded, her mouth laughing, her eyes soft and big. And withal it was
a doll-like prettiness, a prettiness which was a trifle too conscious
of itself; there was a bit too much pose, too much studied effect.
Conniston thought that the girl's two chief characteristics were so
close under the smiling surface that he could not help seeing them,
and that they were, first, vanity; second, weakness.
"So that's Jocelyn Truxton, is it?" He handed the picture back to
Lonesome Pete, who, with a long, worshipful glance at it, restored it
in its wrapping to his vest pocket. "Not the daughter of Bat Truxton?"
"You wouldn't think it to look at her after seein' him, would you?"
Never having seen either of them, Conniston remained non-committal.
"Mrs. Bat Truxton was a Boston, Mass., girl, an' I reckon as how Miss
Jocelyn takes after her."
So there had sprung up between the two men a strange sort of
friendship, a strange sort of intimacy. For even when he came to have
a strong liking for Lonesome Pete, Conniston could never for a second
look upon this illiterate, uncouth cowboy as an equal, could not
refrain from feeling toward him an amused and tolerant contempt. If
palmy days ever came again, he was used to thinking, he would find a
place for the red-headed man in his retinue of hired men. He could
have an easy job at a good salary gardening about the Adirondack
country home, or perhaps he might grow into a fair chauffeur.
Gradually Conniston had learned how to ride the wild devils they
called broken saddle-horses as a cowman should, and without pulling
leather. With Lonesome Pete a patient tutor, he was even beginning to
learn how to throw a rope without entangling his own person and his
own horse in it, and how to make it obey him and drop over the horns
of a running steer. These things came slowly and with many
discouraging failures. But they served as a stimulant and an
encouragement to the man who taught him and whom he taught.
When he had been with the outfit for three weeks Conniston began to
feel confident that he could perform the part of the day's work which
was allotted to him. His muscles had begun to harden so that they no
longer ached and throbbed day and night.
Then one morning he saw Argyl Crawford. He had begun of late to tell
himself that he had invested her in his imagination with a charm which
was not hers; that after the studied neglect that he had sustained at
her hands and at her father's hands he was going to forget all about
her. And now, as she came unexpectedly out of the circle of trees,
pausing upon a little grassy knoll just where his idle eyes were
resting, where the early sun found her out, making her a thing of
light against the dull-green background, Conniston caught his breath
and told himself that she was in reality the queen of this land of
enchantment.
She came out of the forest as a mountain Naiad might have done, her
beauty a glorious, wonderful thing, her grace the free, lithe,
unconscious grace of the wild things of this country of hers,
swift-footed, firm-footed, and, it seemed to the man who watched her,
with a sort of shyness which belongs to the creature of the woodlands.
As she paused, her hands at her sides, her head lifted with tip-tilted
chin, unconscious that any one saw her, not seeing the man who
squatted by the spring below the bunk-house, he felt vaguely as though
he were looking upon a nymph who, if he so much as moved, would turn
swiftly and flash away from him into the depths of her shadowy forest.
Having no desire to be seen just then, Conniston sat very still. The
other boys were breakfasting within the bunk-house. He had hurried
with his meal, and now was washing a pair of socks. He had no wish to
have her see him doing this sort of work. He moved slightly so that
the little clump of willows near the spring stood like a screen
between them.
He remembered suddenly that he had not had a shave for four days.
Rawhide Jones, Toothy, and Brayley came out of the bunk-house
together. They all saw her and as one man lifted their broad-brimmed
hats. She called to Brayley, and as the others went down to the stable
he walked, lurching, to her. Conniston could not hear what she was
saying, but Brayley's heavier voice came to him distinctly. The girl
was asking something, and Brayley after a moment's thought agreed to
her request. She turned, smiling at him and thanking him, and went
back through the trees toward the house. The big foreman came back to
the bunk-house. Conniston, his socks washed and now dripping, turned
away from the stream and came to the clothes-line running from the
corner of the low building to a tree sixty feet away.
"Hey, you, Conniston," Brayley called to him. "You're jest the man I'm
lookin' for. Saddle Dandy for Miss Argyl an' take him up to the house
for her. An' take your own hoss along. She wants you to go with her."
Conniston flushed up, suddenly rebellious. He had not gone to work to
be a lacky to Miss Argyl. He had no desire to lead her horse up to the
house for her that she might swing into her saddle, leaving him to
follow her at due and respectful distance like a groom. Why had she
singled him out from the others to go with her, to play the part of
the menial at her orders? Was it simply so that she, a Crawford, the
daughter of a man who for all that Conniston knew to the contrary had
never been out of this little corner of the West and was in the
beginning a nobody, might say in the future that she had been served
by a Conniston, by the son of William Conniston, of Wall
Street--boasting of it? If she crooked her finger must he run to do
her bidding because her father was taking advantage of his temporary
exile to have him work for him at a dollar a day?
"Well?" snapped Brayley, as Conniston stood frowning, making no
answer, "Did you think I said she wanted you to-morrow?"
For a moment Conniston hesitated. Then, scarcely knowing why he did
it, he turned upon his heel and went to hang out his wet socks. Still
making no reply to Brayley, he got his hat and strode off to the
stable.
Ten minutes later he rode through the circle of trees and to the front
of the house, leading Miss Argyl's pony. Miss Crawford, in khaki
riding-habit, gray gauntlets, and wide, gray hat, already booted and
spurred for her ride, was waiting upon the front steps. As she saw
Conniston ride up she nodded gaily to him with a merry "Good morning,"
and ran lightly down the steps to meet him. He answered her a bit
stiffly--with dignity, he would have said--and swung down from his
saddle to help her to mount. But before he could come to her side she
had mounted, and sat watching him as he again got into his saddle. He
saw a vast amusement in her eyes as they omitted no detail of his
appearance, missing neither the stubby growth upon cheek and chin, nor
the unbuttoned vest with Durham tag and strings protruding, nor the
not over-clean chaps, nor the gun at his belt. And when her eyes
rested at last upon his they were smiling, and his stubbornly grave
and vacant.
"You are going to ride with me?" she asked, quickly.
He inclined his head.
"Orders from Brayley," he said, quietly.
"Oh!" And then, flicking her horse across the flank with her quirt,
she turned away from the house and down the roadway which led by the
pond and along which Conniston had come that day when he first saw the
Half Moon. And Conniston, ten paces behind her, erect, sober-faced,
followed her like a well-trained groom.
For a mile they rode at a swift gallop, the girl in front not so much
as turning her head to see if he were following, their way leading
along the bank of Indian Creek and through the gloomy half-light which
sifted down through the mesh of branches of the big trees reaching
high overhead. Then she left the road for a narrow trail which wound
through trees and bushes down into the creek-bed and across it, coming
out through the trees upon the dry grass-covered plain to the east.
And now again she rode at a swinging gallop, and he followed her. He
knew that twenty miles ahead of them was Rattlesnake Valley. He began
to wonder if that were where she was going.
Suddenly she jerked in her horse and sat waiting for him. And
Conniston, grown stubbornly determined that if she wanted him she must
call to him, stopped his own horse at a respectful distance behind
her. She turned her head and looked at him wonderingly.
"What is it, Mr. Conniston? What makes you act so strangely? Don't you
want to ride with me?"
He touched his hat with mock solemnity.
"I did not know that you wanted me to. I imagined that the hired man's
place--"
"Oh, nonsense!" she broke in, impatiently. And with a swift smile
which was so faint, so elusive that it was gone before he could be
sure that he had not imagined it, "I thought that you were going--that
we were going to be friends."
"That was ages ago," he retorted, bitterly. "Ages before I turned into
a dollar-a-day laborer. Before I went to work for your father, Miss
Crawford."
"And that is nonsense. A man does a man's work, honorable work with
his two hands, and makes his own money, much or little. The most
independent men in the world, Mr. Conniston, are men like Brayley and
Toothy and Rawhide Jones and the rest. Are you not as good a man as
these, as independent, as free to do as you like, as they are?"
"Am I as good a man!" He laughed shortly. "Conceit, no doubt, Miss
Crawford, but none the less I really do fancy that a Conniston is as
good as the sort of men I have been herding with here of late!"
She seemed not to notice his sarcasm, although his tones rang with it.
"Your going to work for father--I think it was brave of you. If it
makes any difference at all it will be because you make it do so. I
should be glad to have you ride with me as a companion if you wish."
She pricked her horse with her spur and rode on. And Conniston, after
a brief moment of hesitation in which he began to see that he had been
acting rather foolishly, galloped up to her side.
"I am afraid I have been boorish, Miss Crawford. You must forgive me."
"In three weeks you have learned a great deal, but there is still a
great deal which you do not seem to have assimilated."
"I have learned--" There was a question in his unfinished sentence.
"You have learned to ride as a man must who is to do his day's work of
twelve, maybe fifteen, hours in the saddle. Surely that is something.
You have learned to rope a steer on the dead run. You have learned to
rope your own horse, to throw him while you saddle him, and to ride
him when he gets up. You have learned to work."
He stared at her in surprise.
"How do you know what I have been doing?"
She laughed, a happy gurgle of a laugh which made a man want to laugh
with her without knowing the cause of her merriment.
"Lonesome Pete has brought me news, and Toothy, and even your friend
Brayley! Do you know," mischief lurking in the depths of her eyes
above the assumed gravity of her face, "I think that the boys are
actually beginning to approve of you."
"Flattering, I must say!"
"I think that it is."
"Even," he cried, incredulously, wondering if she could jest so
earnestly--"even by such men as Toothy and Rawhide Jones and the
rest?"
She looked at him steadily, frowning a little bit.
"I don't know why you should speak of them so contemptuously. If, on
the one hand, they have had no great social advantages, on the other
hand have they not at least made men out of themselves?"
"I had hardly looked upon them in that light," he answered, with
something of the sneer still in his voice. "I had looked upon them
rather as I had supposed you were ready to consider me, as machines of
the type which ladies and gentlemen have to wait upon them, to do the
unskilled labor for them, as common laborers."
"Common laborers! I hate that word. They are men, aren't they? They
are stanch friends and good enemies. They are true to their own laws
and to their conceptions of right and wrong. And they are strong and
self-reliant and free and independent."
"And still they are ignorant, unrefined, coarse. Not your equals, Miss
Crawford, and, I thank God, not mine!"
"Not yours? Are you sure?"
"You are serious--or are you making fun of me?"
"I am very serious." There was no mistaking that when he looked into
her eyes.
"They are the sons of Smith and Jones and Brown," he replied slowly.
"Smith and Jones and Brown before them were uneducated, ignorant,
living lives with low horizons, seeing nothing, knowing nothing of the
greater world beyond their ken. They were a degree higher than the
horses which they mastered, the cattle which they drove to market. And
now their sons, inheriting the limited natures of their sires, have
grown like weeds in the environment in which fate put them, with no
knowledge of the other things. I think that it is answer enough when I
say that I am the son of William Conniston."
He did not mean to boast. He merely stated a simple fact simply. And
the scorn leaping up in her eyes, ringing in her clear voice as she
answered him, startled him.
"We know a man by his hands, not by his name!" she cried, her face
flushing with her eagerness. "Our admiration, our respect is always
for the man who does things, not for the man whose father did them for
him. And now, because men like Lonesome Pete and Brayley and the rest
of the boys live a life which knows nothing of your world, you sneer
at them!"
"I'll admit," he granted, although stung by her hot words, "that the
poor devils have hardly had a fair chance. They are handicapped--"
"Handicapped!" Her scorn was a fine thing, leaping out at him, cutting
into his words. "Can't you see who it is that is handicapped in the
great race here--here in the West? Here where there is a fight going
on every day, every night of the year, a battle royal of man against
mother earth? And the man who fights here successfully a winning
fight, not stopping to ask at what odds, must be endowed with a great
strength, a rugged physical and moral constitution, self-reliance, a
true, deep insight into the natures of other men. Those things my
father has. So has Bat Truxton, so has Brayley, so, for that matter,
has Lonesome Pete."
He had never seen her so tense, so vehement, so warmly impulsive
before. Nor so radiantly beautiful.
"Do you know," she was running on, swiftly, "how it happened that you
were selected to ride with me to-day?"
"No. At first I thought merely because you wanted to humiliate me. Now
I am beginning to believe that you sent for me to instruct me in
certain matters relative to the brotherhood of man!"
"And you were not right at first, and are not right now. I asked
Brayley to let me have a man to help me with something I have to do
over in the valley, and he said he would send you. Do you guess why?"
"No. It was a kindness from Brayley, and I am not in the habit of
expecting kindnesses from him."
"Then I will tell you. He sent you because you are the only man he has
working under him whom he could spare. _Because he needs all the good
men!_"
Conniston felt his face go red. He tried to laugh at what she said, to
show her that it mattered little to him what a man of Brayley's type
said or thought. And he was angry with himself because he knew that it
did matter. Biting back the words which first sprang to his lips, he
tried to say, lightly:
"I'm afraid that I shall have to lick Brayley for that."
"Lick him!" Again she laughed her disdain. "Why didn't you do it that
first night in the bunk-house? Unless," she challenged, "in spite of
all your blue blood and white hands and father's name, Brayley is the
better man!"
"What do you know of that?" His voice was harsh, his question a
command for an answer. "Who told you?"
"I knew there was trouble. I asked about it. Brayley told me."
He made no answer. There was nothing for him to say. She had Brayley's
account of the fight, she believed it, and Conniston would not let her
know that he cared enough to give his own version.
"I have not meant to be unkind, Mr. Conniston," she said, after a
moment. A new note had crept into her voice with what sounded like
sympathy. He did not look toward her. "And, after all, it is none of
my concern how you think, how you carry yourself. But I did want you
to realize just what that great handicap is. You said on that day when
you first came to the Half Moon that you were going to make yourself
my friend, didn't you? Do you mind if I talk to you now like a friend?
You may call me presumptuous if you like. No doubt I am. As a friend I
have a right to be meddlesome, haven't I?" She smiled at him as
brightly as if she had never said or thought the things which she had
flung at him a moment ago. "To begin with, then, I think that you have
deep down in some corner of your being a strength which might do great
things, that nature intended you to be a man, a great, big, splendid
man!"
"Thanks," murmured Conniston, dryly. "I don't know what I have done to
deserve--"
"Nothing! You have done nothing! That is just it. Oh, you see, when I
start to meddle I do it very thoroughly! It is not what you have done but
what you might do. And I was going to tell you what the real handicap is.
It is not the being-without-things, without advantages, which has
restricted the fuller growth of such men as Bat Truxton and Brayley. It
is something very different from that--essentially different. It is the
being-raised-a-rich-man's-son! It is the being-born-something instead of
the being-obliged-to-make-oneself-something!"
"Theoretically, Miss Crawford, I suppose that you are right. But
theory is only theory, you know. Frankly, would not a man be a fool to
work when there is no need for it? Would not a man be a fool to eschew
the pleasures of life when fortune is ready to spill them into his lap
for him? Does not the rich man's son get a great deal more out of the
game than the poor devil who spends his life punching cows at thirty
dollars a month? Even if I began to take myself seriously at this late
hour and to take life as a serious sort of thing, too; even if I
tucked in and fell in love with my work"--he shuddered for her
benefit--"what good would it do me? If I turned out to be the best
rider, the best shot, the best roper of steers, what then?"
"My father," she answered, simply, "like every other man who does big
things on a big scale, is always looking for good men, for foremen,
for men like Bat Truxton, like Brayley, and for men who must do work
for which such men as Brayley are unfit--men who have got an education
and have retained their strength of manhood through it. You could
grow; you could step from one position to another, you could yourself
be a strong man, a big man, a man like my father, like your father.
Don't you see? You could be that sort of a man, a real man, a man's
man, instead of being the sort of man who is sent upon a girl's errand
because none of the other men can be spared. You have done the natural
thing heretofore; the fault has not been yours. You have merely been
unfortunate in being too fortunate. But now, don't you see, it is
different. Now you are being submitted to the test. Why, even your
friend, Roger Hapgood--"
"Leave out the _friend_ part. What about him?"
"He is taking hold. He is shaking off the listlessness which has clung
to him ever since he was born. Father learned from him that he had
studied law in college and got him a place with Mr. Winston in
Crawfordsville. And he is working, working hard, and making good!"
"You seem to know everything, Miss Crawford."
"Oh, this is so simple. Mr. Winston is father's lawyer. Mr. Hapgood
has ridden back to the Half Moon several times upon business for the
firm."
Conniston frowned, little pleased. The Half Moon range-house, then,
was open to Hapgood as a friend, as an equal. It was closed to Greek
Conniston as a day-laborer! And he knew well enough why Hapgood was
staying, why he was working so hard. He had not forgotten the
pale-eyed man's appreciation of the girl--and of her father's wealth.
He knew that Roger Hapgood was working for much more than his monthly
stipend, for much more than the love of the law.
He whirled suddenly toward the girl, surprising her in her scrutiny of
his frowning face.
"Why do you care what I do?" he cried, almost fiercely. "Why do you
tell me to go ahead, to do something? What difference does it make to
you? Will you tell me?"
She returned his look steadily, answered steadily, not hesitating.
"Because it seemed to me a shame for a man like you to be a pawn in a
game all of his life while he might be playing the game himself,
directing the pawns."
"And there is no other interest?"
"A friend's interest. For," smiling at him, "I believed what you said
when you told me that we were going to be friends."
"We are." He spoke slowly, thoughtfully. "You have talked very plainly
to me to-day, and I can do no more and no less than to thank you. You
have told me several things. Some of them are true. I don't know that
I agree with the others. You have a way of looking at life, at the
world, which is new to me. I must think it all over. I shall know how
to think, what to do, to-morrow."
She looked at him questioningly.
"For to-morrow I shall have decided. And then I shall ask for my time
and quit, or--"
"Or--?" she asked, quickly.
"Or I shall tie into my work in earnest. I wonder which it will be?"
"I don't wonder at all!" she cried, softly, her eyes very bright. "And
to-morrow evening will you come up to the house and tell me what you
have decided?"
"I think," he answered her, quietly, "that I have already decided. But
I shall not tell you until to-morrow evening."