The Collected Western Classics & Adventures Novels. William MacLeod Raine
“No, Tennessee is ce’tainly no two-bit man. Lemme see. One—two—three—four days. That’s surely going some,” the ranger soliloquized.
“Mr. Fraser,” the young woman reproved with a blush.
“Don’t mind him, Peggy. He’s merely jealous,” came back Larry.
“Course I’m jealous. Whyfor not? What license have these Panhandle guys to come in and tote off our girls? But don’t mind me. I’ll pay strict attention to my ham and eggs and not see a thing that’s going on.”
“Lieutenant!” Miss Margaret was both embarrassed and shocked.
“Want me to shut my eyes, Tennessee?”
“Next time we get engaged you’ll not be let in on the ground floor,” Neill predicted.
“Four days! My, my! If that ain’t rapid transit for fair!”
“You’re a man of one idea, Steve. Cayn’t you see that the fact’s the main thing, not the time it took to make it one?”
“And counting out Sunday and Monday, it only leaves two days.”
“Don’t let that interfere with your breakfast. You haven’t been elected timekeeper for this outfit, you know!”
Fraser recovered from his daze and duly offered congratulations to the one and hopes for unalloyed joy to the other party to the engagement.
“But four days!” he added in his pleasant drawl. “That’s sure some precipitous. Just to look at him, ma’am”—this innocently to Peggy—“a man wouldn’t think he had it in him to locate, stake out, and do the necessary assessment work on such a rich claim as the Margaret Kinney all in four days. Mostly a fellow don’t strike such high-grade ore without a lot of—”
“That will do for you, lieutenant,” interrupted Miss Kinney, with merry, sparkling eyes. “You needn’t think we’re going to let you trail this off into a compliment now. I’m going to leave you and see what Mrs. Collins says. She won’t sit there and parrot ‘Four days’ for the rest of her life.”
With which Mistress Peggy sailed from the room in mock hauteur.
When Larry came back from closing the door after her, his friend fell upon him with vigorous hands to the amazement of Wun Hop, the waiter.
“You blamed lucky son of a gun,” he cried exuberantly between punches. “You’ve ce’tainly struck pure gold, Tennessee. Looks like Old Man Good Luck has come home to roost with you, son.”
The other, smiling, shook hands with him. “I’m of that opinion myself, Steve,” he said.
Part II.
The Girl of Lost Valley
Chapter I.
In the Fire Zone
“Say, you Teddy hawss, I’m plumb fed up with sagebrush and scenery. I kinder yearn for co’n bread and ham. I sure would give six bits for a drink of real wet water. Yore sentiments are similar, I reckon, Teddy.”
The Texan patted the neck of his cow pony, which reached round playfully and pretended to nip his leg. They understood each other, and were now making the best of a very unpleasant situation. Since morning they had been lost on the desert. The heat of midday had found them plowing over sandy wastes. The declining sun had left them among the foothills, wandering from one to another, in the vain hope that each summit might show the silvery gleam of a windmill, or even that outpost of civilization, the barb-wire fence. And now the stars looked down indifferently, myriads of them, upon the travelers still plodding wearily through a land magically transformed by moonlight to a silvery loveliness that blotted out all the garish details of day.
The Texan drew rein. “We all been discovering that Wyoming is a powerful big state. Going to feed me a cigarette, Teddy. Too bad a hawss cayn’t smoke his troubles away,” he drawled, and proceeded to roll a cigarette, lighting it with one sweeping motion of his arm, that passed down the leg of his chaps and ended in the upward curve at his lips.
The flame had not yet died, when faintly through the illimitable velvet night there drifted to him a sound.
“Did you hear that, pardner?” the man demanded softly, listening intently for a repetition of it.
It came presently, from away over to the left, and, after it, what might have been taken for the popping of a distant bunch of firecrackers.
“Celebrating the Fourth some premature, looks like. What? Think not, Teddy! Some one getting shot up? Sho! You are romancin’, old hawss.”
Nevertheless he swung the pony round and started rapidly in the direction of the shots. From time to time there came a renewal of them, though the intervals grew longer and the explosions were now individual ones. He took the precaution to draw his revolver from the holster and to examine it carefully.
“Nothing like being sure. It’s a heap better than being sorry afterward,” he explained to the cow pony.
For the first time in twelve hours, he struck a road. Following this as it wound up to the summit of a hill, he discovered that the area of disturbance was in the valley below. For, as he began his descent, there was a flash from a clump of cotton-woods almost at his feet.
“Did yo’ git him?” a voice demanded anxiously.
“Don’t know, dad,” the answer came, young, warm, and tremulous.
“Hello! There’s a kid there,” the Texan decided. Aloud, he asked quietly: “What’s the row, gentlemen?”
One of the figures whirled—it was the boyish one, crouched behind a dead horse—and fired at him.
“Hold on, sonny! I’m a stranger. Don’t make any more mistakes like that.”
“Who are you?”
“Steve Fraser they call me. I just arrived from Texas. Wait a jiff, and I’ll come down and explain.”
He stayed for no permission, but swung from the saddle, trailed the reins, and started down the slope. He could hear a low-voiced colloquy between the two dark figures, and one of them called roughly:
“Hands up, friend! We’ll take no chances on yo’.”
The Texan’s hands went up promptly, just as a bullet flattened itself against a rock behind him. It had been fired from the bank of the dry wash, some hundred and fifty yards away.
“That’s no fair! Both sides oughtn’t to plug at me,” he protested, grinning.
The darkness which blurred detail melted as Fraser approached, and the moonlight showed him a tall, lank, unshaven old mountaineer, standing behind a horse, his shotgun thrown across the saddle.
“That’s near enough, Mr. Fraser from Texas,” said the old man, in a slow voice that carried the Southern intonation. “This old gun is loaded with buckshot, and she scatters like hell. Speak yore little piece. How came yo’ here, right now?”
“I got lost in the Wind River bad lands this mo’ning, and I been playing hide and go seek with myself ever since.”
“Where yo’ haided for?”
“Gimlet Butte.”
“Huh! That’s right funny, too.”
“Why?”
“Because all yo’ got to do to reach the butte is to follow this road and