Justin Wingate, Ranchman. Whitson John Harvey
blamed himself ceaselessly for the delay he had wrought in the mistaken notion that Sanders was acting with sinister intent. If that brief delay should aid to a fatal result he knew he should go mad or kill himself.
When Lucy stirred, or moaned, he bent over her with wild words of inquiry. Her eyes were closed, and she was very white.
“We are almost there—almost there!” he cried.
Yet how long the distance seemed!
Clayton came to the door, when he heard the clatter of hoofs. He wore a faded smoking jacket and had a black skull cap perched on the top of his head. His half lounging manner changed when he saw the trembling broncho, dripping sweat and panting with labored breath from the strain of its terrible run, and saw Justin climbing heavily out of the saddle with Lucy. When her feet touched the ground she stood erect, but tottered, clinging weakly to Justin’s arm. She made a brave effort to walk, as Clayton hurried to her side. He saw the knotted handkerchief and the swollen arm, and knew what had happened.
“Into the house,” he said, tenderly supporting her. “Don’t be frightened, Lucy—don’t be frightened! Justin, help me on the other side—ah, that’s right! A little girl was here only the other day, from the Purgatoire, who had been bitten hours before, and I had her all right in a little while. So, there’s really nothing to be alarmed about.”
Clayton’s cheering words were a stimulant. Yet the battle was not fought out. Before victory was announced, word had gone to the ranch-house and to Jasper’s. Philip Davison came, with Harkness and Pearl Newcome, and Mary Jasper rode in on her pony, wild-eyed and tremulous. Among others who arrived was William Sanders.
Justin found him in the yard, out by the grass-grown cellar, where he stood in a subdued manner, holding the reins of his raw-boned horse. His manner changed and his little eyes burned when he saw Justin.
“I don’t keer to have you speak to me,” he said, abruptly. “I reckon from this on our ways lays in different directions. I don’t know what you thought I was up to, but I was doin’ the best I could to git that girl to this place in a hurry. You chipped in. I s’pose you think it was all right, and that you helped matters?”
“I have already asked your pardon, and I ask it again. I see now that I was a fool. We’ll forget the whole thing, if you’re willing.”
Justin held out his hand in an amicable manner.
Sanders disdained to take it.
“I’m not willin’ to fergit it, myself. I wanted to think well of you, rememberin’ when I first come to this house, and some other things, but that’s past. You made me look and feel cheaper than thirty cents Mexican, and I ain’t expectin’ to fergit it.”
He turned away, and walked along the edge of the old cellar, leading his horse. That William Sanders had in him all the elements of a vicious hater was shown then, and many times afterward. He did not speak to Justin again that day; and when the announcement came that Clayton had won his hard fight and Lucy was on the high road to recovery, he mounted and rode away.
CHAPTER VIII
AND MARY WENT TO DENVER
Mary Jasper did not know that she went to Denver because she had read Pearl Newcome’s romances; but so it was. She was in love with Ben, and expected to become his wife by and by, but her day-dreams were of conquests and coronets.
The alluringly beautiful lace of Sibyl had reappeared in Paradise Valley. On her first visit, long before, Sibyl had marked the rare dark beauty of Mary Jasper. Mary was now a fair flower bursting into rich bloom, and wherever a fair flower grows some covetous hand is stretched forth to pluck it.
Though Sibyl had flung Curtis Clayton aside with as little compunction as if his pure heart were no more than the gold on the draggled wings of the butterfly crushed in the road, curiosity and vanity had drawn her again and again to the little railroad town at the base of the flat-topped mountain. There in the home of an acquaintance she had found means to gratify her curiosity concerning the life led by Clayton, and could feed her vanity with the thought that he had immured himself because of her.
Twice she had seen him, having taken rides through the valley for the purpose; once beholding him from afar, watching him as he strolled near the willows by the stream, unconscious of her surveillance, his bent left arm swinging as he walked. On the second occasion they had met face to face in the trail, while he was on his way to the town to inspect some books he had ordered conditionally. Sibyl was on a mettlesome bay, and he on his quick-stepping buckskin broncho. She towered above him from the back of the larger horse. He lifted his hat with a gentle gesture, flushing, and holding the reins tightly in his stiff left hand.
“You are looking well!” she cried gaily. It touched her to know that he still carried himself erect, that he was still a handsome, pleasant-eyed man, whom any woman might admire. “And really I’ve been thinking you were moping down here, and suffering from loneliness and hopeless love!”
“Love is no longer hopeless, when it is dead!” he declared, voicing an indifference he did not feel. Her light laugh fell like the sting of a whip. “Oh, dear me! Is it so serious as that? But of course I don’t believe anything you say. Love is a bright little humming-bird of a boy, who never dies. Truly, it must be lonesome down here, in this poky place. I can’t understand why you stay here. You might come to Denver!” She looked at him archly, half veiling her dark eyes with their lustrous lashes, while her horse pawed fretfully at the bank. “I mean it, Curtis. You could be as far from me in Denver as you are down here, if you wished to be. You know that as well as I do.”
“I don’t think I could,” he said, and though his voice showed pain it showed resolution. “I find this a very good place. I like the quiet.”
“So that no one will ever trouble you while you’re studying or writing! You’ll be a great author or scientist some day, I don’t doubt.”
He did not answer.
“Well, good bye, Curtis. I’m not so bad as I seem, perhaps; you don’t see any horns or cloven hoof about me, do you?” She waved her hand. “And I’m glad to know you’re looking so well, and are so contented and happy!”
She gave her horse a cut with her riding whip and galloped away.
How many more times Sibyl Dudley (she had taken her maiden name) came to the little town by the mountain Curtis Clayton did not know, and never sought to discover; but one day he was almost startled, when Justin brought him news that Mary Jasper had accompanied Sibyl to Denver, and was to remain there with her.
Clayton at once mounted his horse and rode up the valley in the waning afternoon, to where Sloan Jasper’s house squatted by the stream in the midst of a green plume of cottonwoods of his own planting. He found Jasper in a stormy temper. There had been heavy August rains and a cloud-burst. The sluggish stream had overleaped its banks, smearing the alfalfa fields with sticky yellow mud and a tangle of weedy drift, in addition to softening the soil until it was a spongy muck. Hundreds of cattle had ploughed through the softened soil during the night, for the storm had torn out a section of fence and let them drift into the cultivated area of the valley. Standing with Jasper was Clem Arkwright.
“Glorious, sublime!” Arkwright was saying.
He had taken off his hat, and stood in reverent attitude before the lighted mountain, a young, red-faced, pudgy man, with thick mustache. Though Sloan Jasper was not gifted with keen discernment he felt the attitude to be that of the Pharisee proclaiming his own excellence rather than that of his Maker. Arkwright seemed to be saying to him, “Behold one who has been endowed with a capacity which you lack, the capacity to appreciate and enjoy this sublime picture!”
All the way up the valley trail Curtis Clayton had been delighting in the beauty of that evening scene. The misty clouds lingering after the storm had hung white draperies about the wide shoulders of the mountain. Into these the descending sun had hurled a sheaf of fire-tipped arrows, and straightway the white draperies had burned red in streaks and the whole top of the mountain had flamed. The colors were fading now.
“Glorious, sublime!” Arkwright repeated.
“The