The Collected Western Classics & Adventures Novels. William MacLeod Raine
exclaimed the mine-owner angrily.
“Why, yes—me. Hope we didn’t inconvenience you, seh, by postponing the coyote’s journey to Kingdom Come. My friend had to take a hand because he is a ranger, and I sat in to oblige him. No hard feelings, I hope.”
“Did you—Are you all safe?” Margaret asked.
“Yes, ma’am. Got away slick and clean.”
“Where?” barked Dunke.
“Where what, my friend?”
“Where did you take him?”
Larry laughed in slow deep enjoyment. “I hate to disappoint you, but if I told that would be telling. No, I reckon I won’t table my cards yet a while. If you’re playing in this game of Hi-Spy go to it and hunt.”
“Perhaps you don’t know that I am T. J. Dunke.”
“You don’t say! And I’m General Grant. This lady hyer is Florence Nightingale or Martha Washington, I disremember which.”
Miss Kinney laughed. “Whichever she is she’s very very tired,” she said. “I think I’ll accept your offer to see me to the hotel, Mr. Neill.”
She nodded a careless good night to the mine-owner, and touched the horse with her heel. At the porch of the rather primitive hotel she descended stiffly from the saddle.
Before she left the Southerner—or the Westerner, for sometimes she classified him as one, sometimes as the other—she asked him one hesitant question.
“Were you thinking of going out again tonight?”
“I did think of taking a turn out to see if I could find Fraser. Anything I can do for you?”
“Yes. Please don’t go. I don’t want to have to worry about you. I have had enough trouble for the present.”
“Would you worry about me?” he asked quietly, his eyes steadily on her.
“I lie awake about the most unaccountable things sometimes.”
He smiled in his slow Southern fashion. “Very well. I’ll stay indoors. I reckon Steve ain’t lost, anyhow. You’re too tired to have to lie awake about me to-night. There’s going to be lots of other nights for you to think of me.”
She glanced at him with a quick curiosity. “Well, of all the conceit I ever heard!”
“I’m the limit, ain’t I?” he grinned as he took himself off.
Chapter IX.
Down the Jackrabbit Shaft
Next morning Larry got up so late that he had to Order a special breakfast for himself, the dining-room being closed. He found one guest there, however, just beginning her oatmeal, and he invited himself to eat at her table.
“Good mawnin’, Miss Kinney. You don’t look like you had been lying awake worrying about me,” he began by way of opening the conversation.
Nor did she. Youth recuperates quickly, and after a night’s sound sleep she was glowing with health and sweet vitality. He could see a flush beat into the fresh softness of her flesh, but she lifted her dark lashes promptly to meet him, and came to the sex duel gaily.
“I suppose you think I had to take a sleeping-powder to keep me from it?” she flashed back.
“Oh, well, a person can dream,” he suggested.
“How did you know? But you are right. I did dream of you.”
To the waiter he gave his order before answering her. “Some oatmeal and bacon and eggs. Yes, coffee. And some hot cakes, Charlie. Did you honest dream about me?” This last not to the Chinese waiter who had padded soft-footed to the kitchen.
“Yes.”
She smiled shyly at him with sweet innocence, and he drew his chair a trifle closer.
“Tell me.”
“I don’t like to.”
“But you must. Go on.”
“Well,” very reluctantly. “I dreamed I was visiting the penitentiary and you were there in stripes. You were in for stealing a sheep, I think. Yes, that was it, for stealing a sheep.”
“Couldn’t you make it something more classy if you’re bound to have me in?” he begged, enjoying immensely the rise she was taking out of him.
“I have to tell it the way it was,” she insisted, her eyes bubbling with fun. “And it seems you were the prison cook. First thing I knew you were standing in front of a wall and two hundred of the prisoners were shooting at you. They were using your biscuits as bullets.”
“That was a terrible revenge to take on me for baking them.”
“It seems you had your sheep with you—the one you stole, and you and it were being pelted all over.”
“Did you see a lady hold-up among those shooting at me?” he inquired anxiously.
She shook her head. “And just when the biscuits were flying thickest the wall opened and Mr. Fraser appeared. He caught you and the sheep by the back of your necks, and flung you in. Then the wall closed, and I awoke.”
“That’s about as near the facts as dreams usually get.”
He was very much pleased, for it would have been a great disappointment to him if she had admitted dreaming about him for any reason except to make fun of him. The thing about her that touched his imagination most was something wild and untamed, some quality of silken strength in her slim supple youth that scoffed at all men and knew none as master. He meant to wrest from her if he could an interest that would set him apart in her mind from all others, but he wanted the price of victory to cost him something. Thus the value of it would be enhanced.
“But tell me about your escape—all about it and what became of Lieutenant Fraser. And first of all, who the lady was that opened the door for you,” she demanded.
“She was his sister.”
“Oh! His sister.” Her voice was colorless. She observed him without appearing to do so. “Very pretty, I thought her. Didn’t you?”
“Right nice looking. Had a sort of an expression made a man want to look at her again.”
“Yes.”
Innocently unaware that he was being pumped, he contributed more information. “And that game.”
“She was splendid. I can see her now opening the door in the face of the bullets.”
“Never a scream out of her either. Just as cool.”
“That is the quality men admire most, isn’t it—courage?”
“I don’t reckon that would come first. Course it wouldn’t make a hit with a man to have a woman puling around all the time.”
“My kind, you mean.”
Though she was smiling at him with her lips, it came to him that his words were being warped to a wrong meaning.
“No, I don’t,” he retorted bluntly.
“As I remember it, I was bawling every chance I got yesterday and the day before,” she recalled, with fine contempt of herself.
“Oh, well! You had reason a-plenty. And sometimes a woman cries just like a man cusses. It don’t mean anything. I once knew a woman wet her handkerchief to a sop crying because her husband forgot one mo’ning to kiss her good-by. She quit irrigating to run into a burning house after a neighbor’s kids.”
“I accept your apology for