Her Prairie Knight, Lonesome Land & The Uphill Climb: Complete Western Trilogy. B. M. Bower
are tired, and you miss your tea.” soothed Beatrice, optimistic as to tone. “When we all have a good rest we will be all right. Dorman will find plenty to amuse him. We are none of us exactly comfortable now.”
“Comfortable!” sniffed her mother. “I am half dead. Richard wrote such glowing letters home that I was misled. If I had dreamed of the true conditions, Miss Hayes, I should never have sanctioned this wild idea of Beatrice’s to come out and spend the summer with Richard.”
“It’s coming, Be’trice! There it is! Will it bite, auntie? Say, will it bite?”
Beatrice looked. A horseman came over the hill and was galloping down the long slope toward them. His elbows were lifted contrary to the mandates of the riding-school, his long legs were encased in something brown and fringed down the sides. His gray hat was tilted rakishly up at the back and down in front, and a handkerchief was knotted loosely around his throat. Even at that distance he struck her as different from any one she had ever seen.
“It’s a highwayman!” whispered Mrs. Lansell “Hide your purse, my dear!”
“I—I—where?” Miss Hayes was all a-flutter with fear.
“Drop it down beside the wheel, into the water. Quick! I shall drop my watch.”
“He—he is coming on this side! He can see!” Her whisper was full of entreaty and despair.
“Give them here. He can’t see on both sides of the buggy at once.” Mrs. Lansell, being an American—a Yankee at that—was a woman of resource.
“Beatrice, hand me your watch quick!”
Beatrice paid no attention, and there was no time to insist upon obedience. The horseman had slowed at the water’s edge, and was regarding them with some curiosity. Possibly he was not accustomed to such a sight as the one that met his eyes. He came splashing toward them, however, as though he intended to investigate the cause of their presence, alone upon the prairie, in a vehicle which had no horses attached in the place obviously intended for such attachment. When he was close upon them he stopped and lifted the rakishly tilted gray hat.
“You seem to be in trouble. Is there anything I can do for you?” His manner was grave and respectful, but his eyes, Beatrice observed, were having a quiet laugh of their own.
“You can’t get auntie’s watch, nor gran’mama’s. Gran’mama frowed ‘em all down in the mud. She frowed her money down in the mud, too,” announced Dorman, with much complacency. “Be’trice says you is a coyote. Is you?”
There was a stunned interval, during which nothing was heard but the wind whispering things to the grass. The man’s eyes stopped laughing; his jaw set squarely; also, his brows drew perceptibly closer together. It was Mrs. Lansell’s opinion that he looked murderous.
Then Beatrice put her head down upon the little, blue velvet cap of Dorman and laughed. There was a rollicking note in her laughter that was irresistible, and the eyes of the man relented and joined in her mirth. His lips forgot they were angry and insulted, and uncovered some very nice teeth.
“We aren’t really crazy,” Beatrice told him, sitting up straight and drying her eyes daintily with her handkerchief. “We were on our way to Mr. Lansell’s ranch, and the horses broke something and ran away, and Dick—Mr. Lansell—has gone to catch them. We’re waiting until he does.”
“I see.” From the look in his eyes one might guess that what he saw pleased him. “Which direction did they take?”
Beatrice waved a gloved hand vaguely to the left, and, without another word, the fellow touched his hat, turned and waded to shore and galloped over the ridge she indicated; and the clucketycluck of his horse’s hoofs came sharply across to them until he dipped out of sight.
“You see, he wasn’t a robber,” Beatrice remarked, staring after him speculatively. “How well he rides! One can see at a glance that he almost lives in the saddle. I wonder who he is.”
“For all you know, Beatrice, he may be going now to murder Richard and Sir Redmond in cold blood. He looks perfectly hardened.”
“Oh, do you think it possible?” cried Miss Hayes, much alarmed.
“No!” cried Beatrice hotly. “One who did not know your horror of novels, mama, might suspect you of feeding your imagination upon ‘penny dreadfuls.’ I’m sure he is only a cowboy, and won’t harm anybody.”
“Cowboys are as bad as highwaymen,” contended her mother, “or worse. I have read how they shoot men for a pastime, and without even the excuse of robbery.”
“Is it possible?” quavered Miss Hayes faintly.
“No, it isn’t!” Beatrice assured her indignantly.
“He has the look of a criminal,” declared Mrs. Lansell, in the positive tone of one who speaks from intimate knowledge of the subject under discussion. “I only hope he isn’t going to murder—”
“They’re coming back, mama,” interrupted Beatrice, who had been watching closely the hilltop. “No, it’s that man, and he is driving the horses.”
“He’s chasing them,” corrected her mother testily. “A horse thief, no doubt. He’s going to catch them with his snare—”
“Lasso, mama.”
“Well, lasso. Where can Richard be? To think the fellow should be so bold! But out here, with miles upon miles of open, and no police protection anything is possible. We might all be murdered, and no one be the wiser for days—perhaps weeks. There, he has caught them.” She leaned back and clasped her hands, ready to meet with fortitude whatever fate might have in store.
“He’s bringing them out to us, mama. Can’t you see the man is only trying to help us?”
Mrs. Lansell, beginning herself to suspect him of honest intentions, sniffed dissentingly and let it go at that. The fellow was certainly leading the horses toward them, and Sir Redmond and Dick, appearing over the hill just then, proved beyond doubt that neither had been murdered in cold blood, or in any other unpleasant manner.
“We’re all right now, mother,” Dick called, the minute he was near enough.
His mother remarked skeptically that she hoped possibly she had been in too great haste to conceal her valuables—that Miss Hayes might not feel grateful for her presence of mind, and was probably wondering if mud baths were not injurious to fine, jeweled time-pieces. Mrs. Lansell was uncomfortable, mentally and physically, and her manner was frankly chilly when her son presented the stranger as his good friend and neighbor, Keith Cameron. She was still privately convinced that he looked a criminal—though, if pressed, she must surely have admitted that he was an uncommonly good-looking young outlaw. It would seem almost as if she regarded his being a decent, law-abiding citizen as pure effrontery.
Miss Hayes greeted him with a smile of apprehension which plainly amused him. Beatrice was frankly impersonal in her attitude; he represented a new species of the genus man, and she, too, evidently regarded him in the light of a strange animal, viewed unexpectedly at close range.
While he was helping Dick mend the double-tree with a piece of rope, she studied him curiously. He was tall—taller even than Sir Redmond, and more slender. Sir Redmond had the straight, sturdy look of the soldier who had borne the brunt of hard marches and desperate fighting; Mr. Cameron, the lithe, unconscious grace and alertness of the man whose work demands quick movement and quicker eye and brain. His face was tanned to a clear bronze which showed the blood darkly beneath; Sir Redmond’s year of peace had gone far toward lightening his complexion. Beatrice glanced briefly at him and admired his healthy color, and was glad he did not have the look of an Indian. At the same time, she caught herself wishing that Sir Redmond’s eyes were hazel, fringed with very long, dark lashes and topped with very straight, dark brows—eyes which seemed always to have some secret cause for mirth, and to laugh quite independent of the rest of the face. Still, Sir Redmond had very nice eyes—blue, and kind, and steadfast,