That more than Joe's surliness stood between Isita and Harry, the
latter was not long in discovering. She was not easily discouraged
from attempting anything she had set her heart on, and at first she
made all sorts of pretexts for going up to the Biane's. Sometimes it
was to carry eggs or new pieplant or lettuce; "We have so much," she
explained to the silent, haggard-faced woman who came to the door; or
it was a bundle of illustrated papers that had been sent her from home,
and she thought Isita might be interested in them. Once or twice she
asked boldly if Isita might not come down and stay with her for a few
days to help with the chores, while she was working outside with Rob.
But Biane himself made it plain that Isita was expected to work for her
own family, and Mrs. Biane avoided seeing or talking to their neighbor.
To be sure, Isita came down to the Holliday's, but it was to "borrow"
soap, salt, tools and various other small necessities of which the
shiftless Biane family stood in need, and she was always in a nervous
hurry to get back home and never accepted Harry's friendliest urging
to stay awhile. Harry felt sure that the younger girl wanted to be
friends, that in this lonely land of vast distances each of them needed
the other. But she saw that Isita was very much afraid of her quiet,
smiling tyrannical father and, in spite of her unmistakable attachment
to Harry, she was too shy to talk of home troubles.
As the spring days lengthened there was, too, less time for visiting.
To the sagebrush homesteader the sixty days of May and June are the
heart of the year's labor and a man must keep things moving from dawn
to dark, if he means to get ahead. No sooner is the frost out of the
ground, no sooner have the break-up floods of snow water run off, the
quaking morass of meadow-lands grown solid earth once more, than the
plow must be started.
Harry had learned to handle the four-horse disk plow and the harrow as
well, so, while Rob worked one team she handled the other. They now had
four heavy work horses, besides three colts that could be used off and
on, and quite a bunch of half-broke and young stuff belonging to Owens,
which they worked as payment for their feed; thus there were few idle
hours while the spring drive lasted.
To Harry each new morning was a fresh adventure and whenever Rob did
not need her for an hour or so, she explored the steep sides of the
rocky buttes, the narrow cañons separating them, and the tree-filled
"draw" behind the house. Nor was it altogether careless amusement which
led her to this. She had discovered that a good many other people
went to and fro through the cañons and across the foothills near by:
surveyors, sheepherders, looking for strayed stock, and men who were
just "going through." Often these various wayfarers carried "guns"
that were sometimes rifles but oftener, especially late in summer,
shotguns. And it had not taken Harry long to discover that the men with
shot guns were after grouse and sage hen.
From the time of her arrival on the ranch she had been interested in
the wild birds and had soon begun trying to protect them. Rob had hung
"no shooting" signs along all the fences and already the birds seemed
to know that they were protected in that spot and came fearlessly to
feed in the alfalfa and close to the house.
But even signs and outspoken orders would not keep a certain class of
game butchers away. They came even before the season opened, shooting
early in the morning and trusting to the lack of settlers to escape
arrest. Harry had several times driven off these poachers, but there
was one who persisted in defying her. That was Joe Biane. He was so
sly, so sharp, so indifferent to all remonstrance or warning that Harry
realized it was useless to threaten with words only; if he would shoot
on her land he should be punished.
She came to this decision one morning in May when she had run out to
try and get a snapshot of a grouse cock strutting on the edge of the
alfalfa. She had moved cautiously along behind the currant bushes until
just within the right distance to get a good picture and was adjusting
the camera when a shotgun cracked in the draw above her.
"After my birds again!" Harry exclaimed indignantly. "If it's Joe I
declare I'll go straight to town and fetch the game warden up here to
arrest him. Of course he's spoiled my picture, too!" For the grouse
had folded his wings and scuttled out of sight into the willows.
"I'll just go right along and see who that was," Harry decided, closing
her camera and starting up the cow path through the glen.
At this time of the year the steep sides of the ravine were masked in
the leafage of quaking asp, thorn apple, willow and choke cherry, and
it was next to impossible to see whether the person shooting was there
or not.
Harry did not stop to explore. She knew by experience that it was
farther up in the high meadow, a favorite nesting place of grouse and
sage hen that she was most likely to find the poachers. Now, in her
excitement she had started running (Joe should not evade her!) but the
path was steep, the sun ardent, and before she could reach the meadow
she was out of breath, hot, and not any calmer. In a final, desperate
effort to cut across Joe's path toward home she swerved through the
trees and almost ran over Joe himself.
He was moving stealthily through the willows, but startled by Harry's
unexpected appearance, he stopped short.
"Joe!" she exclaimed; "I thought so."
"You did!" He laughed mischievously. "I ain't the only fella that takes
a short cut through here, am I?"
"You take it oftenest. Outsiders don't get here quite so early in the
morning, as a rule. I see I'm too late to save my birds, though."
She pointed indignantly to the grouse hen that hung from Joe's left
hand.
Joe looked at it too. "Pretty nice one, ain't it," he observed. "Want I
should get you one?"
"I should say not!" she exclaimed angrily. "And what's more, you may
put that one down. I've told you not to shoot on my land, and I don't
intend to have you carry off the birds under my nose, even though they
are dead. Give that to me, please."
She reached out her hand, but Joe stepped alertly back. "This ain't
yours," he said. He was no longer smiling; instead he eyed her
sullenly, a cruel expression on his handsome face. Harry remembered
that he had looked at her just so the day he had tried to pull her
sweater from Isita. "Everybody's got a right to the wild critters,"
he added. "Besides," glancing covertly at Harry, "I was gettin' this
because Isita likes 'em."
For a second Harry faltered. The picture of the younger girl, thin,
tired-looking, unmistakably underfed came before her. But even as she
started to yield, her indignation flamed again. "Oh, well, if it's for
Isita," she answered with affected surprise, "give it to me. I'll take
it home and cook it, and you tell your sister I've invited her down to
dinner."
"Not much," Joe answered shortly. "We don't beg a meal off'n any one."
"An invitation isn't begging; but never mind. If you're as anxious
as you say to please your sister, go put your time into plowing and
planting; then you won't have to depend on a tough grouse hen for
dinner."
Her eyes went again to the limp, feathered form, the bloodstained
breast.
"Such stupid cruelty!" she exclaimed. "To shoot the hens at this season
when it means a nestful of young ones left to starve."
"Aw!" Joe growled contemptuously and began to walk away. "What's that
to you? You ain't running this country, so far's I know, and you ain't
a goin' to stop me gettin' a sage hen. I'll shoot when I like."
"Not on my land," she warned him. "Remember, Joe, I've told you to
keep out. Next time I'll bring the game warden up here and have you
arrested."
He laughed mockingly, his face darkening. "You'll do a whole lot," he
sneered; "just like you tried down at the school. But Isita didn't run
any more of your errands and she didn't wear your sweater. Did she?"
"Because your father took her out of school and moved out of that
district is no proof that what I did was wrong."
"What do I care for your 'methods'? I'll get even with you if you try
any of your bossing on me. Better watch out, Miss Schoolmarm."
Harry looked after him as he disappeared in the willows. "Such people!"
she exclaimed with sparkling eyes and clenched hands. "They are a
menace to the country."
She broke off with a start and turned. While she had been talking with
Joe a man on horseback had come over the ridge and crossed the meadow.
As she turned, the rider, who had drawn rein and was looking down at
her with interest, touched his hat. Harry's cheeks reddened as she
explained what had happened.
"Get the law on him, like you threatened," the stranger advised.
"That'll learn him. It ain't good business not to stick up for your
rights."
"It's not only my rights, it's the birds' rights I'm fighting for, and
unfortunately Joe is not the only one who needs teaching. In spite of
signs all round our fence the hunters come right inside and shoot. I
did think Westerners were more honorable."
At her warmth the man laughed quietly. It was a sort of laughter that
fitted his comfortable appearance; middle-aged, bearded, with the
mildly decisive manner of a person used to giving orders. His fine
saddle horse and saddle, yet plain dress, showed him to be a man
familiar with the ways of that country. He made an instant impression
upon the girl. She was too frank and guileless to recognize that under
the smoothness of his manner were hard purpose and a hidden threat for
any one who crossed him.
"You're from the East, then?" he asked.
"From Connecticut. I came out three years ago to stay with my brother,
Robert Holliday."
"Yes. Of course. Joyce told me that Holliday had a ranch up this way.
Ludlum's my name. I live down in the lower country at the siding."
Harry knew who Ludlum was--the stockman who shipped twice as many
cattle as any other man living on the railway line. A new town had
grown up around the station that had been put in to accommodate him.
"Don't you get lonesome up in these hills, young lady?" Ludlum inquired.
"Not very. There's too much to do. All summer there's work on the place
and every winter I've taught school down on the flat."
"Saving up to get you an auto?" asked the stockman with a laugh.
"Saving up for cattle," Harry replied.
"So! You're going into stock, are you? I thought all the ranchers up
here on the prairie were grain crazy."
"Most of them are; but my brother says the money is in feeding what you
raise. 'Ship it on the hoof, not in the sack' is his motto."
"And a mighty good one, too. Those your cows down yonder?"
He was leaning on his saddle horn, pointing down the draw. From where
they stood they could look between the steep, rocky walls of the buttes
upon a wonderful picture of the ranch, narrow, but immensely long.
Beginning with the garden on the upper end of the slope below the glen,
it widened as it descended, taking in the green-blinded white cottage
with its porch and young shade trees, the corral with its long stock
sheds, the deep-green alfalfa, the emerald of winter wheat, the shaded
browns of fall-plowed earth and, across the creek, the tossing sea of
scab land, the flat of Camas Prairie and the mountains. To complete
it, strung out along the creek, was Rob's bunch of cattle. Harry
felt very proud of them. On the very day of her arrival in Idaho Rob
had bargained for a little bunch of heifers. They were now cows with
their calves beside them, and in her mind's eye Harry always saw them
multiplied a hundred-fold, into the herd they were working for.
"That ain't all you've got, is it?" asked Ludlum.
"That's all," admitted Harry, and felt suddenly how small a herd of
forty head must look to the stockman. In a country where everything ran
in big numbers, from the miles that you lived from the post office to
the feet of snow and degrees below zero, it sounded "small farmerish"
to have so few heads of stock.
"You've got the right sort of place for a stock ranch," Ludlum told
her. "Have you proved up yet?"
"We have on the original hundred and sixties; but we've filed on
additional homesteads. We'll prove up on those next spring. That will
give us six hundred and forty acres; about half of it seeded--pasture
and hay. We plan to stay in here this winter. We've both saved up some
money, and it looks as if we were going to have plenty of hay."
"You've thought it all out ahead, I see," Ludlum said, with a sort of
surprised admiration. For "tenderfoot" Easterners Holliday and his
sister seemed very practical and businesslike.
An idea swung slowly round into his thoughts. He was silent for a
moment as he gazed down at the ranch.
"Why don't you get a bigger herd to start with?" he asked presently.
"There's lots of money in cattle nowadays, but it's slow making it when
you start so small."
"Of course; but we haven't the capital to start a big herd, and my
brother doesn't believe in mortgaging."
"That's a good principle, generally; but taking cattle on time is
different. Your herd increases so fast that you're making fifteen or
twenty per cent, instead of four or five. Supposing, say, you were
to borrow off a stockman like me. Say I make over a hundred head of
stock--white-face, good beef critters, you understand--and you have hay
to feed up into the spring. Then you could figure like this."
Fascinated, convinced in spite of herself, Harry listened while Ludlum
rapidly sketched the problem, the profit and loss, the complete
working, so it seemed to the girl, of a stock ranch. He made Rob's
little bunch of cows appear almost contemptibly unimportant. After
all, it appeared to be just as she had believed: if you had energy,
confidence and common sense, you were virtually sure of succeeding.
Rob's idea of poking along for years, collecting a heifer here and
there on the way, was hopelessly wrong and unnecessary.
An impulse moved her to speak. "Won't you come down to the house now
and talk to Rob?" she begged. "He's off plowing, but he'll be in for
dinner. I'm sure you could convince him that your plan is a sound one
for us."
"I'd be glad to," Ludlum answered, gathering up his reins, "but I'm on
my way to the reserve to look at the pasture. If it'll be agreeable,
I'll stop a few days later on my way back."
"We'll always be glad to see you," Harry responded cordially.
"Meanwhile I'll tell my brother what you've told me about making money
with cattle."
"So that's Holliday's," Ludlum said to himself as he rode on. "Joyce
told me it was the best location round here. Funny how these-here
suckers think they can come along any time they like and shut us
old-timers out of every good water hole in the country! H'm! Well,"
he remarked presently as if finishing a silent argument, "the way it
stands suits me first-rate. A year from July, say, I'd be able to feed
a big bunch of stock in there."