# The Popular Magazine/Volume 24/Number 5/The Uphill Climb

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from The Popular Magazine; 1912 June 15, pp. 1–56. Published in book form in 1913.
The Uphill Climb
By B. M. Bower Author of “Lonesome Land” “The Happy Family Stories,” Etc..

### Chapter I.

Ford lifted his arms above his head to yawn as does a man who has slept too heavily, found his biceps stiffened and sore, and felt them gingerly with his finger tips. His eyes took on the tense vacancy of memory straining against the leash of forgetfulness. He sighed largely, swung his head slowly from left to right in mute admission of failure to grasp what lay just behind his slumber, and thereby discovered other muscles that protested against movement. He felt his neck with a careful, rubbing gesture. One hand strayed to his left cheek bone, hovered there tentatively, wandered to the bridge of his nose, and from there dropped inertly to the bed.
“Lordy me! I musta been drunk last night,” he said aloud, mechanically taking the straight line of logic from effect to cause, as much experience had taught him to do.
“You was—and then some,” replied an unemotional voice from somewhere behind him.
“Oh! That you, Sandy?” Ford lay quiet, trying to remember. His finger tips explored the right side of his face; now and then he winced under their touch, light as it was.
“I musta carried an awful load,” he decided, again taking the straight trail from effect to cause. Later, the process of deduction carried him farther. “Who'd I lick, Sandy?”
“Several.” The unseen Sandy gave one the impression of a man smoking and speaking between puffs. “Can't say just who you did start in on. You wound up on the preacher.”
“Preacher?” Ford's tone matched the flicker of interest in his eyes.
“Uhn-hunh.”
Ford meditated a moment. “I don't call to mind ever licking a preacher before,” he observed curiously.
Life, stale and drab since his eyes opened, gathered to itself the pale light of possible interest. Ford rose painfully, inch by inch, until he was sitting upon the side of the bed, got from there to his feet, looked down, and saw that he was clothed to his boots, and crossed slowly to where a cheap, fly-specked looking-glass hung awry upon the wall. His self-inspection was grave and minute, His eyes held the philosophic calm of accustomedness.
“Who put this head on me, Sandy?” he inquired apathetically. “The preacher?”
“I d' know. You had it when yuh come up outa the heap. You licked the preacher—afterward.” Sandy was reading a ragged-backed novel while he smoked; his interest in Ford and Ford's battered countenance was plainly perfunctory.
Outside, the rain fell aslant in the wind and drummed dismally upon the little window beside Sandy. It beat upon the door, and trickled underneath in a thin rivulet to where it formed a shallow puddle where the floor was sunken. A dank warmth and the smell of wet wood heating to the blazing point pervaded the room, and mingled with the coarse aroma of cheap, warmed-over coffee.
“Sandy!”
“Hunh?”
“Did anybody get married last night?” The leash of forgetfulness was snapping, strand by strand. Troubled remembrance peered out from behind the philosophic calm in Ford's eyes.
“Unh-hunh.” Sandy turned a leaf, and at the same time flicked the ashes from his cigarette with a mechanical finger movement. “You did.” He looked briefly up from the page. “That's why you licked the preacher,” he assisted, and went back to his reading.
A subdued rumble of mid-autumn thunder jarred sullenly overhead. Ford ceased caressing the purple half moon which inclosed his left eye, and began moodily straightening his tie.
“Now, what'd I do that for?” he inquired complainingly.
“Search me,” mumbled Sandy over his book. He read half a page farther. “Do what for?” he asked, with belated attention.
Ford swore, and went over and lifted the coffeepot from the stove, shook it, looked in, and made a grimace of disgust as the steam smote him in the face. “Paugh!” He set down the pot and turned upon Sandy.
“Get your nose out of that book a minute and talk!” he commanded, in a tone of beseeching for all its surly growl. “You say I got married. I kinda recollect something of the kind. What I want to know is, who's the lady? And what did I do it for?” He sat down, leaned his bruised head upon his palms, and spat morosely into the stove hearth. “Lordy me,” he grumbled. “I don't know any lady well enough to marry her—and I sure can't think of any female lady that would marry me!”
Sandy closed the book upon a forefinger, and regarded Ford with that blend of pity, amusement, and tolerance which is so absolutely unbearable. Ford would not have borne the look if he had seen it; but he was caressing a bruise on the point of his jaw, and staring dejectedly into the meager blaze which rimmed the lower edge of the stove's front door.
“Who was the lady, Sandy?” he begged dispiritedly.
“Search me,” Sandy replied succinctly. “Some stranger that blew in here with a license, and the preacher, and said you was her fee-ancy.” Sandy read romances mostly, and permitted his vocabularly to profit thereby. “You never denied it; and you let her marry yuh, all right.”
“Is that right?” Ford looked up from under his lowering eyebrows.
“Unh-hunh—that's what you done, all right.” Sandy's voicé was dishearteningly positive.
“Lordy me!” gasped Ford under his breath.
There was a silence which slid Sandy's interest back into his book. He turned a leaf, and was halfway down the page before he was interrupted.
“Say! Where's she at now?” Ford spoke with a certain furtiveness.
“I d' know.” Sandy read a line with greedy interest. “She took the 'leven-twenty,” he added then. Another mental lapse. “You seen her to the train yourself.”
“Eh? What!” Ford's good eye glared incredulity, but Sandy was again following hungrily the love tangle of an unpronounceable count in the depths of the Black Forest; and he remained perfectly unconscious of the took, and the distress which caused it.
Ford went back to studying the meager blaze and trying to remember. He might be able to extract the whole truth from Sandy, but that would involve taking his novel away from him—by force, probably; and the loss of the book would be very likely to turn Sandy sullen so that he would refuse to answer, or to tell the truth, at any rate; and Ford's muscles were very, very sore. He did not feel equal to a scuffle with Sandy just then. He repeated something which sounded like an impromptu litany.
“Hunh?” asked Sandy, and remonstrated cheerfully: “Yuh don't want to take it to heart like that.”
Ford, by way of reply, painstakingly analyzed the shortcomings of Sandy's immediate relatives, and was beginning upon his grandparents when Sandy reached barren ground in the shape of three long paragraphs of snow, cold, and sunrise artistically blended with prismatic adjectives. He waded through the first paragraph and well into the second before he mired in a hopeless jumble of unfamiliar polysyllables. Sandy was not the skipping kind. He threw the book upon a bench and gave his attention wholly to his companion in time to save his great-grandfather from complete condemnation.
“What's eating yuh, Ford?” he began. “You might be a lot worse off. You're married, all right enough—but she's left town. It ain't as if you had to live with her.”
Ford looked at him a minute, and groaned.
“Oh, I ain't meaning anything against the lady herself,” Sandy hastened to assure him. “Far as I know, she's all right——“”
“What I want to know,” Ford broke in, impatient of condolence when he needed facts, “is, who is she? And what'd I marry her for?”
“Well, you'll have to ask somebody that knows. I never seen her close to, and you and her talked it over private like—the way I heard it. I was gitting a hair cut and shampoo at the time. First. I heard, you was married. I should think you'd remember it yourself.” Sandy looked at Ford curiously.
“I kinda remember standing up and holding hands with a woman, and somebody saying, 'I pronounce you man and wife,'” Ford confessed miserably, his face in his hands again. “I guess I must have done it, all right.”
Sandy was kind enough when not otherwise engaged. He got up and put a basin of water on the stove to warm that Ford might bathe his hurts; and he mixed him a very creditable toddy to steady his nerves.
“The way I heard it,” he explained further; “this lady come to town looking for Frank Cameron, and seen you, and said you was him. So——”
“I ain't,” Ford interrupted indignantly. “My name's Ford Campbell, and I'll lick any darned son of a gun——”
“Likely she made a mistake,” Sandy soothed. “Frank Cameron she had yuh down for, and you went ahead and married her willing enough. Seems like there was some hurry-up reason that she explained to you private. She had the license all made out, and brought a preacher down from Garbin. Bill Wright said he overheard you tellin' her you'd do anything to oblige a lady——”
“That's the worst of it. I'm always too darned polite when I'm drunk!” grumbled Ford.
Sandy, looking upon his distorted countenance, and recalling, perhaps, the process by which Ford had reached that condition, made a sound like a laugh diplomatically disguised as a cough. “Not always,” he qualified mildly,
“Anyway,” he went on, “you sure married her. Bill Wright and Rock was the witnesses. And if you don't know why yuh done it——” Sandy waved his hands to indicate his inability to enlighten Ford. “Right afterward you went out to the bar and had another drink—all this takin' place in the hotel dining room, and Mother McGrew down with neuralagy and not bein' present—and one drink leads to another, yuh know. I come in then, and the bunch was drinkin' luck to yuh fast as Sam could pour it out. Then you went back to the lady—and if you don't know what took place, you can search me—and pretty soon Bill said you'd took her and her grip to the depot. Anyway, when you come back you wasn't troubled with no attack uh politeness.
“You went in the air, with Bill first,” continued Sandy testing with his finger the temperature of the water in the basin; “and bawled him out for standing by and seeing you make a break like that without doing something. You licked him—and then Rock bought in, because some of your remarks hit him, too. I d'know,” said Sandy, scratching his unshaven jaw reflectively, “just how the fight did go between you 'n' Rock. You was using the whole room, I know. Near as I could make out, you—or maybe it was Rock—tromped on big Jim's bunion. This weather's hard on bunions, and big Jim went after yuh both with blood in his eye.
“After that”—Sandy spread his arms largely—“it was go as yuh please. Sam and me was the only ones that kept out, near as I can recollect; and when it thinned up a bit, you had Aleck down and was pounding the liver outa him, and big Jim was whanging away at you, and Rock was clawin' Jim in the back of the neck, and you was all kickin' like bay steers in brandin' time. I reached in under the pile and dragged you out by one leg, and left the rest of 'em fighting. They never seemed to miss yuh none.” He grinned. “Jim begun to bump Aleck's head up and down on the floor—and I know he didn't have nothing against Aleck.”
“Bill——”
“Bill, he'd quit right in the start.” Sandy's grin became wider. “You wasn't through, though, seems like. You was going to start in at the beginning “and en-core the whole performance, and you started out after Bill. But you run into that preacher. And you licked him to a fare you well, and had him crying real tears before I or anybody else could stop you.”
“What'd I lick him for?” Ford inquired, in a tone of deep discouragement.
Sandy's indeterminate blue-gray eyes rounded with puzzlement.
“Search me,” he repeated automatically. But later he inadvertently shed enlightenment. He laughed, bending double and slapping his thigh at the irresistible urge of a mental picture.
“Thought I'd die!” he gasped. “Me and Sam was watching from the door. You had him by the collar, shakin' him, and once in a while liftin' him clean off the ground on the toe of your boot; and you kept saying: 'A sober man, and a preacher—and you'd marry that girl to a fellow like me!' And then biff! And he'd let out a squawk. 'A drinkin', fightin', gamblin', no-account cuss like me, you swine!' you'd tell him. And when we pulled you loose, he picked up his hat and made a run for it.”
Ford meditated gloomily. “I'll lick him again, and lick him when I'm sober, by thunder!” he promised grimly. “Who was he, do you know?”
“No, I don't. Little, dried-up geezer, with a nose like a kit fox's and a whine to his voice. He won't come around here no more.”
The door opened gustily, and a big fellow, with a skinned nose and a pair of eyes set too close together, looked in, hesitated while he stared hard at Ford, and then entered, and shut the door by the simple method of throwing his shoulders back against it.
“Hello, old sport!—how yuh comin'?” he cried cheerfully. “Kinda wet for makin' calls; but when a man's loaded down with a guilty conscience——” He sighed somewhat ostentatiously, and pulled forward a chair rejuvenated with baling-wire braces between the legs, and a cowhide seat. “What's that cookin'—coffee, or sheep dip?” he inquired facetiously of Sandy, though his eyes dwelt upon Ford's bowed head solicitously. He leaned and slapped Ford in friendly fashion upon the shoulder.
“Buck up—the worst is yet to come,” he said, and laughed with an exaggeration of cheerfulness. “You can't ever tell when death or matrimony's goin' to get a man. By hokey, there's no dodgin' either one!”
Ford lifted a bloodshot eye. “And I always counted you for a friend, Bill,” he reproached heavily. “Sandy says I licked you. Well, looks to me like you had it coming, all right.”
“Well—I got it, didn't I?” snorted Bill, his hand rising involuntarily to his nose. “And I ain't bellering, am I?” His mouth took an abused, downward droop. “I ain't holdin' any grudge, am I? Why, Sandy here can tell yuh that I held one side of yuh up whilst he was leadin' the other side of yuh home. And I am sorry I stood there and seen you get married off and never lifted a finger. I'm darned sorry. I should 'a' hollered, 'Misdeal,' all right. I know it now.” He pulled remorsefully at his wet mustache, which very much resembled a worn-out shaving brush.
Ford straightened up, dropped a hand upon his thigh, and thereby discovered another sore spot, which he caressed gently with his palm. “Say, Bill, you were there, and you saw her. On the square, now—what's she like?”
Bill pulled so hard upon his mustache that his teeth showed; his breath became unpleasantly audible with the stress of emotion. “So help me, I can't tell yuh that, Ford,” he confessed. “I don't remember nothing about her looks, except she looked good to me, and I never seen her before, and her hair wasn't red—I always remember red hair when I see it, drunk or sober. You see,” he added, as an extenuation, “I was pretty well jagged myself. I musta been. I recollect I was real put out because my name wasn't Frank—— By hokey!” He laid an impressive forefinger upon Ford's knee, and tapped several times. “I never knew you was rightly Frank Cameron. I always——”
“I ain't.” Ford winced, and drew away from the tapping process, as if his knee also was sensitive that morning.
“You told her it was. I mind that perfectly, because I was so su'prised, I swore right out loud, and was so damned ashamed I couldn't apologize. And say! She musta been a real lady, or I wouldn't uh felt that way about it!” Bill glanced triumphantly from one to the other. “Take it from me, you married a lady, Ford. Drunk or sober, I always make it a point to speak proper before the ladies—t'other kind don't count—and when I make a break, you betcher life I remember it. She's a real lady—I'd swear to that on a stack uh Bibles ten feet high!” He settled back and unbuttoned his steaming coat with the air of a man who has established beyond question the vital point of an argument.
“Did I tell her so myself, or did I just let it go that way?” Ford, as his brain cleared, stuck close to his groping for the essential facts.
“Well, now—I ain't dead sure as to that. Maybe Rock'll remember. Kinda seems to me now that she asked you if you was Frank Cameron, and you said: 'I sure am'—or something like that. The preacher'd know, maybe. He musta been the only sober one in the bunch—except the girl. But you done chased him off, so——”
“Sandy, I wish you'd go hunt Rock up, and tell him I want to see him bad.” Ford spoke with more of his natural spirit than he had shown since waking.
“Rock's gone on out to Riley's camp,” volunteered Bill. “Left this morning, before the rain started in.”
“What was her name—do you know?” Ford went back to the mystery.
“Ida—or was it Jenny?—some darned name—I heard it when the preacher was marrying yuh.” Bill was floundering hopelessly in mental fog, but he persisted in believing that he knew a good deal about it. “And I seen it wrote in the paper I signed my name to. I mind she rolled up the paper afterward, and put it—well, I dunno where; but she took it away with her, and says to you: 'That's safe now'—or 'You're safe,' or 'I'm safe.' Anyway, some darned thing was safe. And I was goin' to kiss the bride—mebby I did kiss her—only I'd likely remember it if I had, drunk or sober. And—oh, now I got it!” Bill's voice was full of elation. “You was goin' to kiss her—that was it—it was you goin' to kiss her, and she slap—no, by hokey, she didn't slap yuh, she just—or was it Rock, now?” He tugged hard at his scrubby mustache, and doubt filled his eyes distressfully. “Darn my everlastin' hide,” he finished lamely, “there was some kissin' somewhere in the deal, and I mind her cryin' afterward; but whether it was about that, or—— Say, Sandy, what was it Ford was lickin' the preacher for? Wasn't it for kissin' the bride?”
“It was for marrying him to her,” Sandy informed him sententiously.
Ford got up and walked to the little window and looked out. He walked back to the stove, and stood staring disgustedly down upon the effusively friendly Bill.
“If I didn't feel so rotten,” he said glumly, “I'd give you another licking right now, Bill, you boozing old devil. I'd like to lick every darned galoot that stood back and let me in for this. You'd oughta stopped me. You'd oughta pounded the face off me before you let me do such a fool thing. That,” he said bitterly, “shows how much a man can bank on his friends!”
“It shows,” amended Bill indignantly, “how much he can bank on himself.”
“On whisky, to let him in for all kinds uh trouble,” revised Sandy virtuously. Sandy had a stomach which invariably rebelled at the second glass, and therefore, remaining always sober perforce, he took to himself great credit for his morality.
“Married—and I don't so much as know her name!” gritted Ford, and went over and laid himself down upon the bed, and sulked for the rest of that day of rain and gloom.

### Chapter II.

Sulking never yet solved a mystery, nor will it accomplish much toward bettering an unpleasant situation. After a day of unmitigated gloom and a night of uneasy dreams, Ford awoke to a white, shifting world of Montana's first-of-October blizzard, and to something like his normal outlook upon life.
That outlook had ever been cheerful, with the cheerfulness which comes of taking life in twenty-four-hour doses only, and of looking not too far ahead, and backward not at all. Plenty of persons live after that fashion, and so attain middle life with smooth foreheads and cheeks unlined by thought; and Ford was not so much different from his fellows. Never before had he found himself with anything worse than body bruises to sour life for him after a tumultuous night or two in town; and the sensation of discomfort which had not sprung from some well-defined physical sense was, therefore, sufficiently novel to claim all his attention.
It was not the first time he had fought and forgotten it afterward; and it was no new thing for him to seek information from his friends after a night full of incident. Sandy he had always found tolerably reliable, because he made it a point to see everything there was to be seen; and his peculiar digestive organs might be counted upon to keep him sober. It was a real grievance to Ford that Sandy should have chosen the hour he did for indulging in such trivialities as hair cuts and shampoos, while events of real importance were permitted to transpire unseen and unrecorded. Ford, when the grievance forced itself keenly upon him, roused the sleeping Sandy by pitilessly thrusting an elbow against his diaphragm.
Sandy grunted at the impact, and sat bolt upright in bed before he was fairly awake. He glanced down at Ford, who scowled back at him from a badly crumpled pillow.
“Get up,” growled Ford, “and start a fire going. You kept me awake half the night, snoring. I want a beefsteak with mushrooms, deviled kidneys, waffles with honey, and four banana fritters for breakfast. I'll take 'em in bed; and, while I'm waiting, you can bring me the morning paper and a package of Egyptian Houris.”
Sandy grunted again, slid reluctantly out into the cold room, and crept, shivering, into his clothes. He never quite understood Ford's sense of humor at such times; but he had learned that it is more comfortable to crawl out of bed than to be kicked out, and that vituperation is a mere waste of time when matched against sheer heartlessness and a superior muscular development.
“Y'ought to make your wife build the fires,” he taunted, when he was clothed and at a safe distance from the bed. He ducked instinctively afterward; but Ford was merely placing a match by itself on the bench close by, and drew his arm under the blankets again.
“That's one,” Ford remarked calmly. “I'm going to thrash every misguided humorist that mentions that subject to me in anything but a helpful spirit of pure friendship. I'm going to give him a separate licking for every alleged joke he perpetrates. I'll want two steaks, Sandy. I'll likely have to give you about seven distinct wallopings for a starter. Hand me some more matches to keep tally with. I don't want to cheat you out of your just dues.”
Sandy eyed him doubtfully while he scraped the ashes from the grate.
“You may want a dozen steaks, but that ain't saying you're going to git 'em,” he retorted, with a feeble show of aggression. “And 's far as licking me goes——” He stopped to blow warmth upon his fingers, which were numbed with their grasp of the poker. “As for licking me, I guess you'll have to do that on the strength uh bacon and sourdough biscuits, if you do it at all, which I claim the privilege uh doubting a whole lot.”
Ford laughed a little, pulled the blankets up to his eyes, and dozed off luxuriously—and, although it is extremely tiresome to be told just what a man dreams, he did dream, and it was something about being married. At any rate, when the sizzling of bacon frying invaded even his slumber, and woke him, he felt a distinct pang of disappointment that it was Sandy's carroty head bent over the frying pan, instead of a wife with blond hair that waved becomingly upon her temples.
“Wonder what color her hair is, anyway,” he said inadvertently, before he was wide enough awake to put the seal of silence on his musings.
“Hunh?”
“I asked when those banana fritters are coming up,” lied Ford, getting out of bed and yawning so that his swollen jaw hurt him.
He ate his breakfast almost in silence, astonishing Sandy somewhat by not complaining of the excess of soda in the biscuits. Ford was inclined toward fastidiousness when he was sober—a trait which caused men to suspect him of descending from an upper strata of society, though just when, or just where, or how great that descent had been they had no means of finding out. Ford, so far as his speech upon the subject was concerned, had no existence previous to his appearance in Montana with ten thousand dollars and a talent for spending; but he bore the earmarks of a higher civilization, which, in Sandy's opinion, rather concentrated upon a querulous distaste for soda-yellowed bread, warmed-over coffee, and scorched bacon. That he swallowed all these things and seemed not to notice them, struck Sandy as being almost as remarkable as his matrimonial adventure.
When he had eaten, Ford buttoned himself into his overcoat, pulled his moleskin cap well down, and went out into the storm without a word to Sandy, which was also unusual. It was Ford's custom to wash the dishes, because he objected to Sandy's economy of clean, hot water. Sandy flattened his nose against the frosting window, saw that Ford, leaning well forward against the drive of the wind, was battling his way toward the hotel, and guessed shrewdly that he would see him no more that day.
“He better keep sober till his knuckles git well, anyway,” he mumbled disapprovingly. “If he goes to fighting, the shape he's in now——”
Ford had no intention of fighting. He went straight up to the bar, it is true; but that was because he saw that Sam was unoccupied save with a large lump of gum. Being at the bar, he drank a glass of whisky—not of deliberate intent, but merely from force of habit. Once down, however, he realized that it was going to make him feel better, and took another for good measure.
“H'lo, Ford!” Sam bethought him to say, after he had gravely taken note of each separate scar of battle, and had shifted his cud to the other side of his mouth and squeezed it meditatively between his teeth. “Feel as rocky as you look?”
“Possibly.” Ford's eyes forbade further personalities. “I'm out after information, Sam; and, if you've got any you aren't using, I'd advise you to pass it over without any frills. Were you sober night before last?”
Sam chewed solemnly while he considered. “Tolerable sober, yes,” he decided. “Sober enough to 'tend to business. Why?”
With his empty glass, Ford wrote invisible scrolls upon the bar. “I—did you happen to see—my—the lady I married?” He had been embarrassed at first; but when he finished, he was glaring a challenge which shifted the disquiet to Sam's manner.
“No. I was 'tendin' bar—and she didn't come in here.”
Ford glanced behind him at the sound of the door opening, saw that it was only Bill, leaned over the bar for greater secrecy, and lowered his voice as well.
“Did you happen to hear who she was?”
Sam stared, and shook his head.
“Don't you know anything about her at all—where she came from—and why, and where she went?”
Sam backed involuntarily. Ford's tone either made it a crime to know these things, or to be guilty of ignorance—which, Sam could not determine. Sam was of the sleek, oily-haired type of young men, with pimples and pale eyes, and a predilection for gum. He was afraid of Ford, and showed it.
“That's just what—no offense, Ford; I ain't responsible—that's what everybody's wondering. Nobody seems to know. They kinda hoped you'd explain——”
“Sure!” Ford's tone was growing extremely ominous. “I'll explain a lot of things—if I hear any gabbling going on about this.” He had an uncomfortable feeling that the words were mere puerile blustering, and turned away from the bar in disgust.
In disgust he pulled open the door, flinched before the blast of wind and snow which smote him full in the face and blinded him, and went out again into the storm. The hotel porch was a bleak place, with snow six inches deep, covering icy boards upon which a man might easily slip and break a bone or two, and a whine overhead as the wind sucked under the roof. Ford stood there so long that his feet began to tingle. He was not thinking; he was merely feeling the feeble struggles of a newborn desire to be something, and do something worth while—a desire which manifested itself chiefly in bitterness against himself as he was, and against the life he had been content to live.
The mystery of his marriage was growing from a mere untoward incident of a night's carouse into a baffling thing which hung over him like an impending doom. He was not the sort of man who marries easily. It seemed incredible that he could really have done it, and then have wiped the slate of his memory clean. More incredible still, that a strange young woman could come into town, marry him, and afterward depart, and no man know who she was, whence she had come, or where she had gone. Ford stepped suddenly off the porch and bored his way through the blizzard toward the depot. The agent would be able to answer the last question, at any rate.
The agent, however, proved disappointingly ignorant of the matter. He reminded Ford that there had not been time to buy a ticket, and that the girl had been compelled to run down the platform to reach the train before it started, and that the wheels began to turn before she was up the steps of the day coach.
“And don't you remember turning around and saying to me: 'I'm a poor, married man, but you couldn't notice it,' or something like that?” The agent was plainly interested and desirous of rendering any assistance possible; but was also rather diffident about discussing so delicate a matter.
Ford drummed his fingers impatiently upon the shelf outside the ticket window. “I don't remember a darned thing about it,” he said glumly. “I can't say I enjoy running all around town trying to find out who it was I married, and why I married her, and where she went afterward; but that's just the kinda fix I'm in, Lew. I don't suppose she came here and did it just for fun—do you? And I can't figure out any other reason, unless she was plumb loco. From all I can gather, she was a nice girl; and it seems she thought I was Frank Cameron—which I am not!” He laughed, as a man will laugh sometimes when he is neither pleased nor amused.
“I might ask McCreery—he's conductor on Fourteen. He might remember where she wanted to go,” the agent suggested hesitatingly. “And say! What's the matter with going up to Garbin and looking up the record? She had to get the license there; and they'd have her name, age, place of residence, and—and whether she's white or black.” The agent smiled uncertainly over his feeble attempt at a joke. “I got a license for a friend once,” he explained hastily when he saw that Ford's face did not relax a muscle. “There's a train up in forty minutes——”
“Sure, I'll do that.” Ford brightened. “That must be what I've been trying to think of, and couldn't. I knew there was some way of finding out. Throw me a round-trip ticket, Lew. Lordy me! I can't afford to let a real, live wife slip the halter like this and leave me stranded, and not knowing a thing about her. How much is it?”
The agent slid a dark-red ticket form into the mouth of his office stamp, and jerked down the lever, while he swung his head quickly toward the sounder chattering hysterically behind him. His jaw slackened as he listened, and he turned his eyes vacantly upon Ford for a moment before he looked back at the instrument.
“Well, what do yuh know about that?” he queried under his breath. He released the ticket from the grip of the stamp, and flipped it into the drawer beneath the shelf, as if it were so much waste paper.
“That's my ticket,” Ford reminded him levelly.
“You don't want it now, do you?” The agent grinned at him. “Oh, I forgot you couldn't read——” He tilted his head back toward the instrument. “A wire just went through—the court-house at Garbin caught fire in the basement—something about the furnace, they think—and she's going up in smoke. Hydrants are froze up so they can't get water on it. That fixes your looking up the record, Ford.”
Ford stared hard at him. “Well, I might hunt up the preacher and ask him,” he said, his tone dropping again to dull discouragement.
The agent chuckled. “From all I hear, you've made that same preacher mighty hard to catch.”
Ford drummed upon the shelf and scowled at the smoke-blackened window, beyond which the snow was sweeping aslant. Upon his own side of the ticket window, the agent pared his nails with his pocketknife, and watched Ford furtively.
“Oh, heliotrope! What do I care, anyway?” Revulsion seized Ford harshly. “I guess I can stand it if she can. She came here and married me—it isn't my funeral any more than it is hers. If she wants to be so darned mysterious about it, she can go plumb—to—New York!” There were several decent traits in Ford Campbell; one was his respect for women, which would not permit him to swear about this wife of his, however exasperating her behavior.
“That's the sensible way to look at it, of course,” assented the agent, who made it a point to agree always with a man of Ford's size and caliber, in the belief that placation is better than plasters. “You sure ought to let her do the hunting—and the worrying, too. You aren't to blame if she married you unawares. She did it all herself—and she sure knew what she was up against.”
“No, she didn't,” flared Ford unexpectedly. “She made a mistake, and I wanted to point it out to her, and help her out of it if I could. She took me for some one else; and I was just drunk enough to think it was a joke, I suppose, and let it go that way. I don't believe she found out she tied up to the wrong man. It's my fault for being drunk.”
“Well, putting it that way, you're right about it,” agreed the adaptable agent. “Of course, if you hadn't been——”
“If whisky's going to let a fellow in for things like this, it's time to cut it out altogether.” Ford was looking at the agent attentively.
“That's right. Whisky is sure giving you the worst of it all around. You ought to climb on the water wagon, Ford. Whisky's the worst enemy you've got.”
“Sure. And I'm going to punish all of it I can get my hands on.” He turned toward the door. “And when I'm good and full,” he added, as an afterthought, “I'm liable to come over here and lick you, Lew, for being such an agreeable cuss. You better write to your mother to-day.” He laughed a little to himself as he pulled the door shut behind him. “I bet he'll keep the frost thawed off the window to-day, just to see who comes up the platform,” he chuckled.
He would have been more amused if he had seen how the agent ducked anxiously forward to peer through the ticket window whenever the door of the waiting room opened, and how he started whenever the snow outside creaked under the tread of a heavy step; and he would have been convulsed with mirth if he had caught sight of the formidable billet of wood which Lew kept beside his chair all that day, and had guessed its purpose, and that it was a mute witness to the reputation which Ford Campbell bore among his fellows. Lew knew better than to consider for a moment the revolver meant to protect the contents of the safe. Even the unintelligent instinctively, avoid throwing a lighted match into a keg of gunpowder.
Ford leaned backward against the push of the storm, and was swept back to the hotel. He could not remember when he had felt so completely baffled; the incident of the girl and the ceremony was growing to something very like a calamity; and the curtain of mystery which surrounded it began to fret him intolerably; the very unusualness of a trouble he could not settle with his fists whipped his temper to the point of explosion. He caught himself wavering, nevertheless, before the wind-swept porch of the hotel “office.” That, too, was strange. Ford was not wont to hesitate before entering a saloon; more often he hesitated about leaving.
“What's the matter with me, anyway?” he questioned himself impatiently. “I'm acting like I hadn't a right to go in and take a drink when I feel like it. If just a slight touch of matrimony acts like that with a man, what can the real thing be like? I always heard it made a fool of a fellow.” To prove to himself that he was still untrammeled and at liberty to follow his own desire, he stamped across the porch, threw open the door, and entered with a certain defiance of manner.
Behind the bar, Sam was laughing with his mouth wide open so that his gum showed shamelessly. Bill and Aleck and big Jim were leaning heavily upon the bar, laughing also.
“I'll bet she's a Heart-and-Hander, tryin' a new scheme to git hold of a man.” Sam brought his lips close enough together to declare, and chewed vigorously upon the idea—until he glanced up and saw Ford standing by the door. He turned abruptly, caught up a towel, and began polishing the bar with the frenzy of industry which never imposes upon one in the slightest degree.
Bill glanced behind him, and nudged Alek into caution; and in the silence which followed, the popping of a piece of slate-veined coal in the stove sounded like a volley of small-caliber pistol shots.

### Chapter III.

Ford walked up to the bar with a smile upon his face which Sam misunderstood, and so met with a conciliatory grin, and a hand extended toward a certain round-ribbed bottle with a blue-and-silver label. But Ford leaned not on the bar, but across it; and, clutching Sam by the necktie, slapped him first upon one ear and next upon the other, until he was forced by the tingling of his own fingers to desist. By that time, Sam's green necktie was pulled tight just under his nose, and he had swallowed his gum—which, considering the size of the lump, was like to be the death of him.
Ford did not say a word. He permitted Sam to pull away and back into a corner; and he watched the swift crimsoning of his ears with a keen interest. Sam's face had the pasty pallor of the badly scared, so that the ears appeared much redder by contrast than they really were. When he saw that they could grow no nearer purple, Ford turned his attention to the man beside him, who happened to be Bill. For one long minute, the grim spirit of war hovered just over the two.
“Aw, forgit it, Ford!” Bill urged mildly at last. “You don't want to lick old Bill. Look at them knuckles! You couldn't thump a feather bed. Anyway, you got the guilty party when you done slapped Sam up to a peak, and then knocked the peak off. Made him swaller his cud, too, by hokey! Say, Sam, my old dad used to fed a cow on bacon rinds when she done lost her cud. You try it, Sam. Mebby it might help them ears. Shove that there trouble-killer over this way, Sammy, and don't look so fierce at your Uncle Bill. He's liable to turn you across his knee and dust your pants proper.” He turned again to Ford, scowling at life in general, while the snow melted upon his broad shoulders and trickled in little, hurrying drops down to the nearest jumping-off place. “Come, drownd your sorrer,” he advised amiably. “Nobody said nothing but Sammy; and I'll gamble he wishes he hadn't now.” If his counsel was vicious, his smile was engaging—which does not, in this instance, mean that it was beautiful.
Ford, with reprehensible thoroughness, proceeded to drown what sorrows he then possessed. Unfortunately he straightway produced a fresh supply of trouble, after his usual method. In two hours he was flushed and argumentative. In three, he had whipped Bill—cause unknown to the chronicler; and to Ford, also, after it was all over. By mid-afternoon he had Sammy intrenched in the tiny stronghold where barreled liquors were kept, and scared to the babbling stage. Aleck had been put to bed with a nasty gash over his right eye, where Ford had pointed his argument with a beer glass; and big Jim had succumbed to a billiard cue directed first at his most sensitive bunion, and later at his head. Ford was not using his fists that day, because even in his whisky-brewed rage he remembered, oddly enough, his skinned knuckles.
Others had come—in fact, the entire male population of Sunset was hovering in the immediate vicinity of the hotel—but none had conquered. There had been considerable ducking to avoid painful contact with flying glasses from the bar, and a few had retreated in search of bandages and liniment; the luckier ones remained as near as was safe, and expostulated. To those Ford had but one reply, which developed into a sort of war chant, discouraging to the listeners.
“I'm a rooting, tooting, shooting, fighting son of a gun—and a good one!” he would declaim, and with deadly intent aim a lump of coal, billiard ball, or glass at some unfortunate individual in his audience. “Hit the nigger and get a cigar! You're just hanging around out there till I drink myself to sleep—but I'm fooling you a few! I'm watching the clock with one eye, and I take my dose regular, and not too frequent. I'm going to kill off a few of these smart boys that have been talking about me and my wife. She's a lady, my wife is, and I'll kill the first man who says she isn't. For I'm a rooting, tooting, shooting, et cetera.” One cannot, you will understand, be too explicit in a case like this; not one thousandth part as explicit as Ford was.
“I'm going to begin on Sam pretty quick,” he called through the open door. “I've got him right where I want him.” And he stated, with terrible exactness, his intentions toward the bartender.
Behind his barricade of barrels, Sam heard and shivered like a gun-shy collie at a turkey shoot; shivered until human nerves could bear no more; and, like the collie, he fled with a yelp of sheer terror. Ford turned just as Sam shot through the doorway into the dining room, and splintered a beer bottle against the casing; glanced solemnly up at the barroom clock, and, retreating to the nearly denuded bar, gravely poured himself another drink; held up the glass to the dusk-filmed window, squinted through it, decided that he needed a little more than that, and added another teaspoonful. Then he poured the contents of the glass down his throat as if it were so much water, wiped his lips upon a bar towel, picked a handful of coal from the depleted coal hod, and went to the door, and shouted to those outside to produce Sam immediately, that he might be killed in an extremely unpleasant manner.
The group outside withdrew across the street to grapple with the problem before them. It was obviously impossible for civilized men to sacrifice Sam, even if they could catch him—which they could not. Sam had bolted through the dining room, upset the Chinaman in the kitchen, and fallen over a bucket of ashes in the coal shed in his flight for freedom. He had not stopped at that, but had scurried off up the railroad track. The general opinion among the spectators was that he had, by this time, reached the next station, and was hiding in a cellar there.
Bill Wright insisted that it was up to Tom Aldershot, who was the town marshal. Tom, however, was working on the house he hoped to have ready for his prospective bride by Thanksgiving, and hated to be interrupted for the sake of a few broken heads only.
“He ain't shooting up nobody,” he argued from the platform where he was doing “inside work” on his dining room while the storm lasted. “He never does cut loose with his gun when he's drunk. If I arrested him, I'd have to take him clear up to Garbin—and I ain't got time. Y' oughta have a jail, like I've been telling yuh right along. Can't expect a man to stop his work to take a man eighty or a hundred miles to jail—not for anything less than murder, anyhow.”
Some member of the deputation hinted a doubt of his courage, and Tom flushed.
“I ain't scared of him,” he snorted indignantly. “I should say not! I'll go over and make him behave—as a man and a citizen. But I ain't going to arrest him in my official capacity when there ain't no place to put him.”
So Tom reluctantly threw down his hammer, grumbling because they would not wait till it was too dark to drive nails, but must cut short his working day, and Went over to the hotel to quell Ford. Ingress by way of the front door was obviously impracticable. The marshal ducked around the corner just in time to avoid a painful meeting with a billiard ball.
Mother McGrew had piled two tables against the dining-room door, and braced them with the mop, and stubbornly refused to let Tom touch the barricade either as a man and citizen or officer of the law.
“Well, if I can't get in, I can't do nothing,” stated Tom, with philosophical calm, and a swift, mental vision of completed wainscoting.
“He's tearing up the whole place; and he musta found all them extra billiard balls Mike had under the bar and is throwin' 'em away,” wailed Mrs. McGrew. “And he's drinkin' and not payin'. The damage that man is doin', it would take a year's profits to make up. You gotta do something, Tom Aldershot—you that calls yourself a marshal, swore to pertect the citizens uh Sunset! No, sir—I ain't a-goin' to open this door, neither. I'm tryin' to save the dishes, if you want to know. I ain't goin' to let my cups and plates foller the glasses in there. A town full uh men—and you stand back and let one crazy——”
Tom had heard Mrs. McGrew voice her opinion of the male population of Sunset on certain previous occasions. He left, at that point, and went back to the group across the street.
At length Sandy, whose imagination had been developed somewhat beyond the elementary stage by his reading, suggested luring Ford into the liquor room by the simple method of pretending an assault upon him by way of the storeroom window, which could be barred from without by heavy planks. Secure in his belief in Ford's friendship for him, Sandy even volunteered to slam the door shut upon Ford, and lock it with the padlock which guarded the room from robbery.
Tom thought that might work, and donated the planks for the window. It did work, up to a certain point. Ford heard a noise in the storeroom, and went to investigate; caught a glimpse of Tom Aldershot apparently about to climb through the little window, and hurled a hammer and considerable vituperation at the opening. Sandy scuttled in and slammed the door, according to his own plan, and locked it. There was a season of frenzied hammering outside; and after that Sunset breathed freer, and discussed the evils of strong drink, and washed down their arguments by copious drafts of the stuff they maligned.
I am not going into further disagreeable details about that night, because Ford was at heart a good fellow, and it does not seem fair to put all his defections down in black and white, especially as it was whisky, and not his sane self, that was responsible for his bad behavior.
Briefly, they had to take him out of the storeroom, because he insisted upon knocking the bungs out of all the barrels and letting the liquor flood the floor; and Mike McGrew's wife objected to that, on the ground that whisky costs money. They bundled him up and took him over and shut him in the ice house; and he kicked three boards off one side, and emerged, breathing fire and brimstone, like the dragons of old. He had forgotten about wanting to kill Sam by that time. He was willing—nay, anxious—to murder every male human in Sunset.
They did not know what to do with him after that. They liked Ford when he was sober, and so they hated to shoot him; though that seemed the only way in which they might dampen his enthusiasm for blood. Tom said that, if he failed to improve in temper by the next day, he would try and land him in jail, though it did seem rigorous treatment for so common a fault as getting drunk. Meanwhile they kept out of his way as well as they could, and dodged missiles and swore. Even that was becoming more and more difficult—except the swearing—because Ford developed a perfectly diabolic tendency to empty every saloon that contained a man, so that it became no uncommon sight to see a back door belching forth hurrying figures at the most unseasonable times. No man could lift a full glass, that night, and feel sure of drinking the contents undisturbed; whereat Sunset grumbled while it dodged.
It may have been nine o'clock before the sporadic talk of a jail crystallized into a definite project which, it was agreed, could not too soon be made a reality.
They built the jail that night by the light of bonfires which the slightly wounded kept blazing in the intervals of standing guard over the workers, ready to give warning in case Ford appeared as a war cloud on their horizon. There were fifteen able-bodied men, and they worked fast. They erected it close to Tom Aldershot's house, because the town borrowed lumber from him, and they wanted to save carrying, and because it was Tom's duty to look after the prisoner; and he wanted the jail handy, so that he need not lose time from his house building.
They built it strong, and they built it tight, without any window save a narrow slit near the ceiling. They heated it by setting a stove outside under a shelter, where Tom could keep up the fire without the risk of going inside, and ran pipe and a borrowed “drum” through the jail high enough so that Ford could not kick it. And to discourage any thought of suicide by hanging, they ceiled the place tightly with Tom's matched flooring of Oregon pine. Tom did not approve of that, and said so; but the citizens of Sunset nailed it on, and turned a deaf ear to his complaints.
Chill dawn spread over the town and dulled the light of the fires. It brought into relief the sodden tramplings in the snow around the jail, and sharply defined the paths leading to Tom Aldershot's lumber pile. The watchers had sneaked off to their beds, for not a sign of Ford had they seen since midnight. The storm had ceased early in the evening, and all the sky was glowing crimson with the coming glory of the sun.
The jail was almost finished. Up on the roof, three crouching figures were nailing down strips of brick-red building paper as a fair substitute for shingles; and, on the side nearest town, the marshal and another were holding a yard-wide piece of paper flat against the wall with fingers that tingled in the cold; while Bill Wright fastened it into place with shingle nails driven through tin disks the size of a half dollar.
Ford, sober after a sleep on the billiard table in the hotel barroom, heard the hammering, wondered what industrious soul was up and doing carpenter work at that unseemly hour; and, after helping himself to a generous “eye opener” at the deserted bar, found his cap and went over to investigate. He was much surprised to see Bill Wright working; and smiled to himself as he walked quietly up to him through the soft, step-muffling snow.
“What y'doing, Bill—building a chicken house?” he asked, a quirk at the corner of his lips.
Bill jumped, and came near swallowing a nail; so near that his eyes bulged at the feel of it next his windpipe—or perhaps it was the memory of Ford's late belligerence.
Tom Aldershot dropped his end of the strip of paper, which tore with a dull sound of ripping,«and remarked that he would be damned. Necks craned, up on the roof, and startled eyes peered down like chipmunks from a tree. Some one up there dropped a hammer and hit Bill on the head; but no one said a word.
“You act like you were nervous this morning,” Ford observed, in the tone which indicates a conscious effort at good humor. “Working on a bet, or what?”
“What!” snarled Bill. “I wisht, Ford, next time you bowl up, you'd pick on somebody that ain't too good a friend to fight back. I'm gittin' tired, by hokey——”
“What!—did I lick you again, Bill?” Ford's smile was sympathetic to a degree. “That's too bad now. Next time, you want to hunt a hole and crawl into it, Bill. I don't want to hurt you—but seems like I've kinda got the habit. You'll have to excuse me.” He hunched his shoulders at the chill of the morning and walked around the jail, inspecting it with half-hearted interest.
“What is this, anyway?” he inquired of Tom. “Smoke house?”
“It's a jug!” snapped Tom. “To put you into if you don't watch your dodgers. What'n thunder you want to carry on like you did last night for—and then go and sober up just when we've got a jail built to put you into? That ain't no way for a man to act—I'll leave it to Bill if it is. I've a darned good mind to swear out a warrant, anyway, Ford, and pinch you for disturbin' the peace. That's what I ought to do, all right.” Tom beat his hands about his body, and glared at Ford with his ultra-official scowl.
“All right, if you want to do it.” Ford's tone embellished the reply with a you-take-the-consequences sort of indifference. “Only, I'd advise you never to turn me loose again if you do lock me up in this coop once.”
“I know I wouldn't uh worked all night on the thing if I'd knowed you was goin' to sleep it off,” Bill complained, with deep reproach in his watery eyes. “I made sure you was due to keep things agitated around here for a couple uh days, at the very least, or I never woulda drove a nail, by hokey!”
“It is a darned shame to have a nice, new jail and nobody to use it on,” sympathized Ford, his eyes half closed and steely. “I'd like to help you out, all right. Maybe I'd better kill Bill. You might stretch a point, and call it manslaughter—and I could use the bounty to help pay a lawyer if it ever come to a head as a trial.”
Whereat Bill almost wept.
Ford pushed his hands deep into his pockets and walked away, sneering openly at Bill, the marshal, the jail, and the town which owned it; and at wives and matrimony, and the world which held all these vexations.
He went straight to the shack, drank a cup of coffee, and packed everything he could find that belonged to him and was not too large for easy carrying on horseback; and when Sandy, hovering uneasily around him, asked questions, he told him briefly to go off in a corner and lie down; which advice Sandy understood as an invitation to mind his own affairs.
Like Bill, Sandy could have wept at the ingratitude of this man. But he asked no more questions, and he made no more objections. He picked up the story of the unpronounceable count who owned the castle in the Black Forest, and had much tribulation and no joy until the last chapter; and, when Ford went out with his battered, sole-leather suit case and his rifle in its pigskin case, he kept his pale eyes upon his book, and refused even a grunt in response to Ford's grudging “So long, Sandy.”

### Chapter IV.

Ford's range-trained vision told him while yet afar that the lone. horse feeding upon a sidehill was saddled and bridled, with reins dragging. The tell-tale, upward toss of its head when it started on to find a sweeter morsel was evidence enough of the impeding bridle reins, even before he was near enough to distinguish the saddle.
Your true range man owns blood relationship with the original good Samaritan. Ford swung out of the trail as a matter of course. The master of the animal might have turned him loose to feed; but if that was the case, he had strayed farther than was ever intended. The chances, since no human being was in sight, were all against design and in favor of accident. At any rate, Ford did not hesitate. It is not good to let a horse run loose upon the range with a saddle cinched upon its back, as every one knows.
Ford was riding along the sheer edge of a water-worn gully, seeking a place where he might safely jump it—or better, a spot where the banks sloped so that he might ride down into it and climb the bank beyond, when he saw a head and pair of shoulders moving slowly along, just over the brow of the hill where fed the stray. He watched, and, when the figure topped the ridge and started down the other side, his eyes widened a trifle.
Skirts to the tops of her shoes betrayed her a woman. She limped painfully, so that Ford immediately pictured to himself puckered eyebrows, and lips pressed tightly together. “And I'll bet she's crying, too,” he summed up aloud. While he was speaking, she stumbled, and fell headlong.
When he saw that she made no attempt to rise, but lay still, just as she had fallen, Ford looked no longer for an easy crossing. He glanced up and down the washout, saw no more promising point than where he was, wheeled, and rode back twenty yards or so, turned, and drove deep his spurs.
It was a nasty jump, and he knew it all along. When Rambler rose gamely to it, with tensed muscles and forefeet flung forward to catch the bank beyond, he knew it better. And when, after a sickening minute of frenzied scrambling at the crumbling edge, they slid helplessly to the bottom, he cursed his idiocy for ever attempting it.
Rambler got up with a pronounced limp; but Ford had thrown himself from the saddle, and escaped with nothing worse than a skinned elbow. They were penned, however, in a boxlike gully ten feet deep, and there was nothing to do but follow it to where they might climb out. Ford was worried about the girl, and made a futile attempt to stand in the saddle, and from there climb up to the level. But Rambler, lame as he was, plunged so that Ford gave it up and started down the gulch, leading Rambler by the reins.
There were many sharp turns and, temper-trying windings; and, though it narrowed in many places so that there was barely room for them to pass, it never grew shallower; and then, without any warning, it stopped abruptly upon a coulee's rim, with jumbled rocks, and a sheer descent to the slope below. Ford guessed then that he was boxed up in one of the main waterways of the foothills he had been skirting for the past hour or so, and that he should have ridden up the gulch instead of down it.
He turned, though the place was so narrow that Rambler's four feet almost touched one another, and his rump scraped the bank as Ford pulled him round and retraced his steps. It was too rough for riding, even if he had not wanted to save the horse; and he had no idea how far he must go before he could get out. Ford, at that time, was not particularly cheerful.
He must have gone a mile and more before he reached a point where, by hard scrambling, he attained level ground upon the same side as the girl. Ten minutes he spent in urging Rambler up the bank; and when the horse stood breathing heavily beside him, Ford knew that, for all the good there was in him at present, he might almost as well have left him at the bottom. He walked around him, rubbing leg and shoulder muscles until he located the hurt, and shook his head when all was done. Then he started on slowly, with Rambler hobbling stiffly after him. Ford knew that every rod would aggravate that strained shoulder, and that a prolonged stop might make it impossible for the horse to go on.
Worse, he was not quite sure, after all those windings where he could not see, just where it was he had seen the girl. But he recognized at last the undulating outline of the ridge over which she had appeared, and made what haste he could up the slope. The grazing horse was no longer in sight, though he knew it might be feeding in a hollow.
He had almost given up hope of finding her, when he turned his head and saw her off to one side, lying half concealed by a clump of low rosebushes. She was not unconscious, as he had thought, but was crying silently, with her face upon her folded arms and her hat askew over one ear. He stooped, and touched her upon the shoulder.
She lifted her head and looked at him, and shrank from him with that faint, withdrawing gesture which may be very slight in itself, but none the less eloquent and unmistakable. Ford backed a step when he saw it, and closed his lips without speaking the words he had meant to say.
“I wish you'd go away,” the girl said, after a minute spent in fumbling unseen hairpins and in straightening her hat. “I don't know what you're here for, anyway. I don't need any help—from you.”
“Appearances are deceitful, then,” Ford retorted. “I saw you limping over the hill after your horse; and I saw you fall down, and stay down. I had an idea that a little help would be acceptable; about catching your horse, for instance.”
“That was an hour ago,” she stated, with a measuring glance at the sun, which was settling toward the sky line.
“I had trouble getting across that washout down there. I don't know this part of the country, and I went down it instead of up. What are you crying about—if you don't need any help?”
She eyed him askance, and chewed upon a corner of her lip, and flipped the upturned hem of her riding skirt down over one spurred foot with a truly feminine instinct before she answered him. She seemed to be thinking hard and fast, and she hesitated even while she spoke. Ford wondered at the latent antagonism in her manner.
“I was crying because my foot hurts so, and because I don't see how I'm going to get back to the ranch. They'll hunt me up if I stay away long enough—but it's getting toward night, and—I'm scared to death of coyotes, if you must know.”
Ford laughed—at her defiance of his amusement more than at what she said. “And you tell me you don't need any help?” he bantered.
“I might borrow your horse,” she suggested coldly, as if she grudged yielding even that much to circumstance.
“You needn't hate me because you're in trouble,” he hinted irrelevantly. “I'm not to blame, you know.”
“I—I hate to ask help from—a stranger,” she said, feeling her way and watching him from under her lashes the while. “And I suppose I can't help showing what I feel. I hate to feel under an obligation——”
“If that's all, forget it,” he assured her calmly. “It's a law of the open—to help a fellow out in a pinch. When I headed for here, I thought it was a man had been set afoot.”
She eyed him curiously. “Then you didn't know——”
“I thought you were a man;” he repeated. “I didn't come just because I saw it was a girl. You needn't feel under any obligation whatever. I'm a stranger in the country, and a stranger to you. I can stay that way, if you prefer. I'm not trying to scrape acquaintance on the strength of your being in trouble; but you surely don't expect, me to ride on and leave you out here on the bald prairie—do you?”
She was staring at him while he spoke, and she continued to stare after he had finished; the introspective look which sees without seeing it became at last; and Ford gave a shrug at her apparent obstinacy, and turned away to where Rambler stood with his head drooped and his eyes half closed. He picked up the reins and chirped to him, and the horse hesitated, swung his left foot forward, hobbled a step, and looked at Ford reproachfully.
“Your horse is crippled as badly as I am, it would seem,” the girl observed from where she sat watching them.
“I strained his shoulder trying to make him jump that washout. That was when I first got sight of you over here. We went to the bottom, and it took me quite a while to find a way out. That's why I was so long getting here.” Ford explained with his back to her while he rubbed commiseratingly the swelling shoulder.
“Oh!” The girl waited. “It seems to me you need help yourself. I don't see how you are going to help any one else with your horse in that condition.” And when he still did not speak: “Do you know how far it is to the nearest ranch?”
“No. I told you I'm a stranger in this country. I was heading for the Double Cross; but I don't know just where——”
“We're eight miles, straight across, from there; ten, the way we would have to go to get there. There are other washouts in this country—which it is unwise to attempt jumping, Mr.——”
“Campbell,” Ford supplied shortly.
“I beg pardon?”
“Campbell.” Ford was tempted to shout it, but contented himself with a tart distinctness. A late, untoward incident had made him somewhat touchy over his name.
“Oh! Did you skin your face, Mr. Campbell, when you tried to jump the washout?”
“No.” Ford did not offer any explanation. He remembered the scars of battle which were still plainly visible upon his countenance, and he turned red while he bent over the fore ankles of Rambler, trying to discover other sprains. He felt that he was going to dislike this girl very much before he succeeded in getting her anywhere. He could not remember ever meeting before a woman under forty with so unpleasant a manner, and such a talent for disagreeable utterances.
“Then you must have been fighting a whole family of wild cats.”
“Pardon me. Is this a Methodist 'experience' meeting?” he retorted, looking full at her with lowering brows. “It seems to me, the only subject which concerns us mutually is the problem of getting to a ranch before dark.”
“You'll have to solve it yourself, then. I never attempt puzzles.” The girl, somewhat to his surprise, showed no resentment at his rebuff. Indeed, he suspected her of being secretly amused. He began also to suspect that she was not too badly hurt to walk if she wanted to. Indeed, his skepticism went so far as to accuse her mentally of deliberately baiting him—though why, he did not try to conjecture. Women were queer. Witness his own late experience with one.
Being thus in a finely soured mood, Ford suggested that, as she no doubt knew the shortest way to the nearest ranch, they, at least, make a start in that direction.
“How?” asked the girl, staring up at him from where she sat beside the rose-bushes.
“By walking, I suppose—unless you expect me to carry you.” Ford's tone was not in any degree affable.
“I fancy it would be asking too great a favor to suggest that you catch my horse for me?”
Ford dropped Rambler's reins and turned to her, irritated to the point where he felt a distinct desire to shake her.
“I'd far rather catch your horse, even if I had to haze him all over the country, than carry you,” he stated bluntly.
“Yes. I suspected that much.” She had plucked a red seed ball off the bush nearest her, and was nibbling daintily the sweet pulp off the outside.
“Where is the horse?” Ford was holding himself rigidly back from an emotional outburst of any sort.
“Oh, I don't know, I'm sure.” She picked another seed ball, and began upon it. “He should be somewhere around, unless he has taken a notion to go home.”
Ford said something under his breath, and untied his rope from the saddle. He knew about where the horse had been feeding when he saw him, and he judged that it would naturally graze in the direction of home—which would probably be somewhere off to the southeast, since the trail ran more or less in that direction. Without a word to the girl, or a glance toward her, he started up the hill, meaning to get his bearings, and a sight of the horse, perhaps, from the top. He could not remember when he had been so angry with a woman.
“If she was a man,” he gritted as he climbed, “I'd leave her out there, just as she deserves. That's the worst of dealing with a woman—she can always hand it to you, and you've got to give her a grin and thank-you, because she ain't a man.”
He glanced back then, and saw her sitting with her head dropped forward upon her hands. There was something infinitely pitiful and lonely in her attitude; and he knitted his brows over the contrast between it and her manner when he left her.
“I don't suppose a woman knows herself what she means half the time,” he hazarded impatiently. “She certainly didn't have any excuse for throwing it into me the way she did. Maybe she's sorry for it now.”
After that his anger cooled imperceptibly, and he hurried a little faster, because the day was waning with the chill haste of mid-autumn, and he recalled what she had said at first about being afraid of coyotes. And, although the storm of four days ago had been swept into mere memory by one of those sudden chinook winds, and the days were once more invitingly warm and hazily tranquil, night came shiveringly upon the land, and the unhoused thought longingly of hot suppers and the glow of a fire.
The girl's horse was, he believed, just disappearing into a depression half a mile farther on; but when he reached the place where he thought he had seen it, there was nothing in sight save a few head of cattle, and a coyote trotting leisurely up the farther slope. He went farther down the shallow coulee, then up to the high level beyond, his rope coiled loosely over one arm, with the end dragging a foot behind him. There was nothing to be seen up there, either, except that the sun was just a red disk upon the far-off hills, and that the night was going to be uncomfortably cool if that wind kept blowing from the northwest.
He began to feel slightly uneasy about the girl, and to regret wasting any time over her horse. He might not be able to get close enough to rope the beast, even if he did see him.
He turned back, and walked swiftly through the dusk toward the ridge beyond which she and Rambler were waiting. But it was a long way—much farther than he had realized until he came to retrace his steps—and the wind blew up a thin rift of clouds which made the darkness come quickly. He found it difficult to tell exactly at which point he had crossed the ridge coming over; and, although experience in the open develops in a man a certain animal instinct for directions handed down by our primitive ancestry, Ford went wide in his anxiety to take the shortest way back to his unwilling protégée. The westering slope was lighter, however; and five minutes of wandering along the ridge showed him a dim bulk which he knew was Rambler. He hurried to the place, and the horse whinnied shrilly as he approached.
“I looked as long as I could see, almost, but I couldn't locate your horse,” Ford remarked to the dark shadow of the rosebushes. “I'll put you on mine. It will be slow going, of course—lame as he is—but I guess we can manage to get somewhere.”
He waited for the chill, impersonal voice to answer. When she did not speak, he leaned and peered at the spot where he knew she must be. “If you want to try it, we'd better be starting,” he urged sharply. “It's going to be pretty cold here on this sidehill.”
When there was silence still—and he gave her plenty of time for reply—Ford stooped, and felt gropingly for her. He thought she must be asleep. He glanced back at Rambler. Unless the horse had moved, she should have been—but she might have moved to some other spot, and he waiting in the dark to see what he would do. His palms touched the pressed grasses where she had been; but he did not say a word. He would not, he thought, give her that satisfaction; and he told himself grimly that he had his opinion of a girl who would waste time in foolery out here in the cold—with a sprained ankle to boot.
He pulled a handful of the long grass which grows best among bushes. It was dead now, and dry. He twisted it into a makeshift torch, lighted and held it high, so that its blaze made a great disk of brightness all around him. While it burned he looked; and, when it grew to black cinders and was near to scorching his hand, he made another, and looked farther. He laid aside his dignity, and called; and, while his voice went booming, full-lunged, through the whispering silence of that empty land, he twisted the third torch, and stamped the embers of the second into the earth that it might not fire the prairie.
There was no dodging the fact; the girl was gone. When Ford was perfectly sure of it, he stamped the third torch to death with vicious heels, went back to the horse, and urged him to limp up the hill. He did not say anything then, or think anything much; at least, he did not think coherently. He was full of a wordless rage against that girl; and he did not at first feel the need of expression. She had deliberately tricked him.
He remembered once shooting a big, beautiful, blacktail doe. She had dropped limply in her tracks, and lain there; and he had sauntered up, and stood looking at her stretched there before him. He was out of meat, and the doe meant what hot venison steaks and rich, brown gravy can mean to a man meat hungry. While he unsheathed his hunting knife, he gloated over the feast he would have that night. And just when he had laid his rifle against a rock and knelt to bleed her, the deer leaped from under his hand and bounced away over the hill. He had not said a word on that occasion, either.
This night, although the case was altogether different, and the disappearance of the girl was in no sense a disaster—rather a relief, if anything—he felt that same wordless rage, the same sense of utter chagrin. She had made a fool of him. After a while he felt his jaws aching with the viselike pressure of his teeth together.
They topped the ridge, Rambler hobbling stiffly. Ford had in mind a sheltering rim of sandstone at the nearest point of the coulee he had crossed, and was making for it. He had noticed a spring there; and, while the water might not be good, the shelter would be welcome, at any rate.
He had the saddle off Rambler, his shoulder bathed with cold water from the spring, and was warming his wet hands over a little fire when the first gleam of humor struck through his anger and lighted for a moment the situation.
“Lordy me! I must be hoodooed where women are concerned,” he said, kicking the smoking stub of a bush into the blaze. “Soon as one crosses my trail, she goes and disappears off the face of the earth.” He fumbled for his tobacco and papers. It was a “dry camp” he was making that night, and a smoke would have to serve for a supper. He held his book of papers absently while he stared hard at the fire.
“It ain't such a bad hoodoo,” he mused. “I can spare this particular girl just as easy as not; and the other one, too.” After a minute spent in blowing apart the thin leaves and selecting a paper:
“Queer where she got to—and it's a darned mean trick to play on a man that was just trying to help her out of a fix. Why, I wouldn't treat a stray dog that way! Darn these women!” And when he had the cigarette going, he voiced his most pressing need. “I'd give ten dollars for a pint of whisky—twenty-five for a quart!”

### Chapter V.

Dawn came tardily after a long, cheerless night, when the wind whined over the prairie and the stars showed dimly through a shifting veil of low-sweeping clouds. Ford had not slept much, for hunger and cold make poor bedfellows; and all the brush he could glean on that barren hillside, with the added warmth of his saddle blanket wrapped about him, could no more make him comfortable than could cigarettes still the gnawing of his hunger.
When he could see across the coulee, he rose from where he had been sitting, with his back to the ledge and his feet to the meager fire, brooding over all the unpleasant elements in his life thus far, particularly the feminine element. Folding the saddle blanket along its original creases, he went over to where Rambler stood dispiritedly with his back humped to the cold, creeping wind, and his tail whipping between his legs, when a sudden gust played with it.
Ford shivered, and beat his gloved hands about his body, and looked up at the sky to see whether the sun would presently shine and send a little warmth to this bleak land where he wandered. He blamed the girl for all of this discomfort; and he told himself that the next time a woman appeared within his range of vision, he would ride away around her. They invariably brought trouble—of various sorts and degrees, it is true, but trouble always. It was perfectly safe, he decided, to bank on that. And he wished, more than ever, that he had not improvidently lavished his last gill of whisky on that disconsolate-looking sheep-herder whom he had met the day before on his way out from town; or that he had put two flasks in his pocket, instead of one. In his opinion, a good, big jolt right now would make a new man of him.
Rambler, as he had half expected, was obliged to do his walking with three legs only; which is awkward for a horse accustomed to four exceedingly limber ones, and does not make for speed, however great one's hurry. Ford walked around him twice, scooped water in his hands, and once more bathed the shoulder—not that he had any great faith in cold water as a liniment, but because there was nothing else that he could do, and his anxiety and his pity impelled service of some sort.
He rubbed until his fingers were numb and his arm aching; tried him again, and gave up all hope of leading the horse to a ranch. A mile he might manage, if he had to; but ten! He rubbed Rambler's nose commiseratingly, straightened his forelock, told him over and over that it was a darned shame, anyway, and finally turned to pick up his saddle. He could not leave that lying on the prairie for inquisitive kit foxes to chew into shoe strings, however much he might dread the forty-pound burden of it on his shoulders. He was stooping to pick it up, when he saw a bit of paper twisted and tied to the saddle horn with a red ribbon.
“Lordy me!” he ejaculated ironically. “The lady must have left a note on my pillow—and I never received it in time! Now, ain't that a darned shame?” He plucked the knot loose and held up the ribbon and the note, and laughed.
“When this reaches you, I shall be far away, though it breaks my heart to go, and this missive is mussed up scandalous with my bitter tears. Forgive me if you can, and forget me if you have to. It is better thus, for it couldn't otherwise was,” he improvised mockingly, while his chilled fingers fumbled to release the paper, which was evidently a leaf torn from a man's memorandum book. “Lordy me, a letter from a lady! Ain't that sweet!”
When he read it, however, the smile vanished with a click of the teeth, which betrayed his returning anger. One cold, curt sentence—or so it seemed to him. His eye measured accusingly the wide strip of paper left blank under the words. She had not omitted an apology or explanation for want of room, at any rate.
“Oh, cer-tainly! I'd roost on that sidehill for a month if you said so.” He glanced just once from ribbon to note; stuck the paper in his pocket, because he never left letters lying around for inquisitive persons to read, and dropped the ribbon upon the ground as if it had been a piece of string, and, with a curl of his lip, picked up the saddle and flung it upon his shoulder.
“I can't seem to recollect ever asking her to help me out, anyway,” he snorted, while he looped the bridle reins over his arm. He turned, and looked pityingly at Rambler watching him with ears perked forward inquiringly, and started off briskly in the direction of the trail.
He was lucky that morning. He had not gone much farther than a mile when he was overtaken by a pleasant-eyed young fellow rushing a small band of horses across a little flat beyond the mouth of the coulee. He swerved and galloped toward Ford when he caught sight of him, and his grin was a direct invitation to the camaraderie of the plains; not at all like the antagonism of the girl, for instance. Ford's brow cleared, and his eyes. He grinned back whimsically.
“Hello! Looks like you're kinda up against it, stranger,” greeted the galloping one, and pulled his horse to a stand.
“My looks aren't deceiving,” said Ford. “Crippled my horse last night, so I'm trying to break myself to the saddle.” Since the other had stopped, Ford stopped, also, and let the saddle slide to the ground, with a wriggle of the shoulders, afterward. “I'm glad I ain't a horse,” he remarked dryly.
The other's eyes laughed. “How far did you pack that load—if it ain't against the rules to ask?”
“The country behind me says about a mile. My shoulders call it ten. I'd a heap rather take my shoulders' word for it; but you can believe the map if you'd rather.”
The eyes of the stranger spilled the laugh to his lips, and the laugh drew funny, little creases about them. Ford liked him just for the spiritual uplift it gave one to look at him. He forgot even how hungry he was, which is saying a good deal.
“You've got the earmarks,” said the young fellow, somewhat ambiguously—unless one knew the range well enough to know he meant the earmarks of a rider. “I'll rope you something out of the bunch to slap that riding gear onto. It'll beat walking; but it's liable to be rough going for a ways; every son of a gun has been running out since spring round-up; and there never was any lady's palfrey in that bunch.”
“Man, I'm willing to ride a horse if he walks on his left ear exclusively—only so he can move!” Ford looked as if some one had just handed him a certified check for a million, except that he was not dazed with his good fortune.
“Oh—he'll likely move, all right.” A quirk of the lips lent much meaning to the words.
This is not by way of introducing a rough-riding chapter. The important point for Ford was to get to his destination without being compelled to walk there. Inquiry developed the statement that the Double Cross was, as the girl had told him, ten miles away. Ford was not particularly famous as a “twister”; probably he never will be. But he saddled the fighting brute which the fellow managed to rope out of the bunch, and which he helped hold until it was bridled and the saddle cinched.
“I guess I coulda picked a gentler one—I ain't sure,” he had half apologized during the saddling process. “Anyway, Toad pitches straight ahead, which is more than some of them freaks do. And he ain't tricky. You can bank on his being mean as thunder all the time. The whole bunch is pretty sassy. It was the rough string; and the tamer we had riding 'em tried to gentle 'em down by riding 'em to death. We turned 'em out after spring round-up; and there isn't one has had a saddle on him since. But I guess you can make out to ride him. As I say, he pitches straight and clean—and high.”
“I'll ride him,” promised Ford. “It looks to me like a case of have to. I sure ain't stuck on walking.”
So he got on, after some maneuvering; and, though the young fellow had spoken truth, and it was rough going, he managed to stick. Visions of a ten-mile tramp, with the saddle on his own aching shoulders, may have helped to glue him in the saddle.
“He'll quit after a while, maybe,” yelled the young fellow, by way of encouragement, after a tumultuous half mile or so.
“I doubt it some,” Ford retorted in staccato.
That was the extent of their conversation for some time. When, from sheer inability to make another jump, the horse did settle down to mere snorting and headshakes, the dozen horses they were driving showed a persistent desire to separate, and run up divers, little gullies which they should have crossed, so that they were kept busy trying to keep the bunch together, and headed for the ranch—which, though Ford gathered that it was not the Double Cross, remained nameless to him.
“You can turn the horse out again when you get to the Double Cross,” called the stranger when their trails parted, “and some of our boys will pick him up. Or you can throw him in the field till some one comes after him, just as you like.” He paid the penalty of a hot chase after a pinto that bolted back for even that short speech. Ford did not learn who he was; but he watched him scurrying off after the pinto, and thanked him in his heart for the friendliness he had shown.
“H'lo, Ford! Where did you blow from?” a welcoming voice yelled when he rode up to the corral. The last ounce of trouble slid from Ford's shoulders when he heard it. He was among his kind once more, and he slid to the ground and gripped gladly the hand thrust at him. This was the man he had come from Sunset to see; the man who owned the Double Cross jointly with his wife, and who had stuck to a resilient sort of faith in Ford in the face of much condemnatory evidence.
“You look like you've been having a fine, large time, old man,” he added, when Ford was standing before him. “Gosh! You'll want to stay in the bunk house, I reckon, till you grow some new hide—what? The wife's got lady company.”
“No lady can get within gunshot of me, Ches—not if I see her coming in time.” Though Ford smiled when he said it, there was meaning back of the smile. “I'd be willing to confront a large-sized breakfast, though.”
Mason was rubbing his jaw reflectively, and staring at Ford. “Kate will go straight in the air if she knows you're here, and won't come to the house and stay,” he observed uneasily. “She's had a big package of gratitude tucked away with your name on it ever since we made that prospecting trip together. And, lemme tell you, when a woman goes and gets grateful to a man—gosh! Well, come on and get fed up, anyway. Mose—you remember Mose? I've got him cooking here. Hired him the day after the Fourth. The Mitten outfit fired him for getting soused, and I snapped him up before they had a chance to forgive him. Going to keep him, too. A better cook never threw dishwater over a guy rope than ole Mose. But—say!” He looked hesitantly at Ford. “I hate to tie a string on you—but if you've got any pain-killer along, don't spring it on Mose, will yuh?”
“I haven't got a drop.” Ford's tone was reprehensibly regretful.
“You do look as if you'd put it all under your belt,” Mason retorted dryly. “Leave anything behind you?”
“A lot of sore heads, and a brand-new jail that was built especially for me,” Ford admitted cheerfully. “Sunset was getting all fussed up over me. I thought I'd let their nerves settle a while. I was going to answer your letter, Ches, and tell you there was nothing doing in the foreman line—and then I took a notion to come and tell you myself. I was getting pretty well pickled in town, and that's a fact.”
“Sure. Glad you came. I wish you hadn't brought that face, though—on account of Kate. She don't know—all about you; and she's got ideals. And,” he added lugubriously, “she's so darned grateful to you for pulling me out of that Wolf Creek trip——”
“Well, call me Jack Jones, and let me stay down with the boys,” Ford suggested carelessly, because he was close enough to the long, two-roomed bunk house to smell coffee and beefsteak. Mason's uneasiness seemed to him too trivial for words. “You can square it afterward, somehow,” he added inattentively. “Lordy me, that coffee does smell good!”
You can't successfully whip up the conscience of a hungry man, and Ches Mason was wise enough to wait. Ford's face was, indeed, a glaring advertisement of some, at least, of his sins; but Ford himself did not worry much about it, now that the first soreness had abated. Perhaps he would have felt more sympathy for Mason's anxiety over Kate's opinion if he had come in contact with a mirror oftener; but even that is doubtful.
Mose asked him, first thing—and bent low over his shoulder while he handed him his coffee that Mason might not hear—if he had anything to drink. Ford shook his head, and Mose stifled a sigh, and went back to his dish-washing, and left Mason to gossip, undisturbed, while Ford ate.
It was not until Ford mentioned an inclination for sleep that Mason led the way into the other room, and they could speak in confidence without fear of Mose's loose tongue. Ford pulled off his boots, laid himself down upon the least-rumpled bunk, lighted a cigarette, and then eyed Mason quizzically.
“Do you know, Ches, I've been wondering for the last month what kind of a chump you are, anyway,” he observed.
Ches grinned understandingly by way of reply.
“I was going to write and tell you what I think of a man that will lay himself wide open the way you did. And then I took a notion to come and tell you myself.”
“You've got the floor,” hinted Ches, still smiling.
“Well, you are a fool, Ches. Lordy me! Any man that will offer the place of foreman to a——”
“A rooting, tooting, shootin'——” assisted Ches, chuckling over certain memories.
“Well, yes.” Ford looked sheepish for a minute. “That's when I'm on a good one. But the point is this, Ches: You can't depend on me. You know you can't depend on me. I'll be all right for a month, maybe, and then—— I can't, for the life of me, see what made you make that offer. There are other good men. The foremen haven't all died off, just because old Slow cashed in—and that was too bad, too. I always kinda liked old Slow. But you back up, Ches. You ought to be sent to Sulphur Springs just for offering me the job.”
“You're here,” Ches stated blandly. “This is—the fifth, is it, or the sixth? Well, we'll date you from the first, anyway. I can't bother with odd numbers. And soon as you look a little more human, you'll stop with us, of course. Kate wouldn't hear to anything else.”
“Yes, and first thing you know, I'll get roaring, fighting drunk, and most likely try to lick everybody on the ranch—you included. For a man that's permitted to run loose and is supposed to be sane, you certainly are the——”
“There's quite a lot of riding left,” Mason interrupted, his eyes twinkling. “Right around close, though. It won't be necessary to take out the wagons, except for a week or so. There's some stuff over on Bent Willow I want gathered in; but not much. This storm we had——”
“I never said I'd go to work for you, you weak-minded, old reprobate. I just came over to——”
“Oh, but you will,” Ches contradicted. “You're on the job, old man.”
Ford sat up and scowled. “Don't you know I'm a—a drunkard, practically?” he demanded sharply. “Why, I've got a rep from Glasgow to Butte as a booze fighter, and you know it. And a mean son of a gun, too. Why, I blew in ten thousand dollars in two months—and you know that, too, darn yuh! I'd like to know what man in his senses would trust me with his outfit. You don't count. You're a gibbering idiot, only you don't know it. Why, I'm liable to hit town with your darned old wagons, and—oh, heliotrope!” He dropped back upon the bunk, and said a good deal—which was not the language of flowers, by the way.
Mason smoked and smiled, and heard him through. When Ford had been silent for twenty seconds—staring up at the rough-board ceiling the while—Mason put his pipe in his pocket.
“You may have been all you claim,” he admitted mildly, “as a pastime. I've hired you for what you really are, down underneath all that. I don't give a darn how mean you are when you're jagged. I don't expect to bump into you in that condition. You're foreman of the Double Cross now, old man; and the foreman of the Double Cross is all right. He's going to make good to the last white chip. I ain't a bit scared about that.” He got up and stretched his arms, and yawned. “I've got to jog over to the river field,” he volunteered. “The boys started over there to work a little bunch we threw in yesterday. You go ahead and take a snooze, Ford; and this afternoon, if you feel like it, we'll ride around and kinda size up the layout. I'm mighty glad you made up your mind to come. I've been wanting to take a trip to Oregon, and I hated to take some stranger and put him on the job and then leave him; and I couldn't leave the outfit to run itself, either. Good boys I've got here now, but rattle-headed, kinda. I did think, if you didn't show up pretty soon, I'd just make a flying trip of it. But the folks live out there, and they'd make a big howl if I didn't make 'em a visit, so——”
“Well, you go bye-low, old man. We can talk any time.” He took himself and his cheerfulness away, then.
He left behind him a mental battleground. Ford did not go “bye-low.” Instead, he rolled over, and lay with his face upon his folded arms, alive to his finger tips; alive and fighting. There are times when the soul of a man awakes and reviews the past and faces the future with the veil of illusion torn away—and does it whether the man will or no.

### Chapter VI.

Ford raised his head from his arms and listened, his heavy-lidded eyes staring blankly at the wall opposite. Then he sprang off the bunk and rushed from the room, slamming the door behind him so that the house shook. Outside, he hesitated long enough to see just where he must go to reach the woman who was screaming some inarticulate word over and over, and ran toward the voice, which seemed to issue from the little brown cottage that was trying modestly to hide behind a dispirited row of trees across a narrow gully. He took the plank footbridge in a couple of long leaps, vaulted over the gate when it showed a disposition to stick, and so reached the house.
A woman—instinctively he knew it must be “Kate”—jerked open the door, and screamed “Chester!” almost in his face. Behind her rolled a puff of slaty-blue smoke. Ford pushed past her without speaking. The smoke told, more clearly than she could have done, the tale of her need for help. She turned and followed him, choking.
“Oh, where's Chester?” she wailed. “The garret's on fire—and it's right over Phenie's room, and she can't take a step to save her life! Carry her out—quick! Nothing else matters——”
She rushed across that room and another, Ford at her heels. “There!” she cried, and pointed to a door. “Save her life—and I'll get Chester.” She was off again; and Ford laughed in spite of himself at her panicky desire for her husband, and none other.
When he stopped with his hand upon the knob of the closed door, it turned fumblingly under his fingers. Again a woman confronted him—the girl he had met on the range. She had just struggled out of bed, it would seem, and into a flimsy, blue kimono, which she was holding together with one hand, while with the other she steadied herself against the wall. Her face was very white, and her eyes very big and dark; and her hair was tumbled into a brown mass which went away below her waist. Ford saw all that in one glance.
It was not done according to the best rules of romance. Ford said: “Come on;” and gathered her up in his arms, and carried her out with as much sentiment as he would have bestowed upon a sack of grain. His eyes smarted with smoke, so that he bumped into things once or twice. And when he reached the porch outside, he stood and wondered where he should put her, now that he had—theoretically, at least—saved her life. Kate had told him she could not take a step to save her life, so it scarcely seemed fair to deposit her upon the ground and leave her to her own devices.
He looked down at the girl; but there was no help to be gained there. She had closed her eyes, and was looking very much like a corpse. And there was an ominous crackling overhead. Then he glimpsed Mose running, limpingly, from the stables, and went down to meet him.
“Here, you take her and put her on a bunk, Mose,” he entreated when Mose confronted him, panting a good deal because of his two hundred pounds of flesh and a pair of down-at-the-heel slippers, and a stiff knee that made haste laborious in the extreme.
Mose looked at the girl, and then at his two hands. “I can't take her—with both hands full of aigs,” he objected. “Carry her down there yourself.”
“Oh, put the eggs on the ground!” bawled Ford. “Lordy me, the house is on fire, and I've got to put it out!”
So Mose took the girl to the bunk house, after he had placed the eggs in a safe place, and Ford went back to put out the fire; which was a sinful waste of opportunity, I grant, but perhaps more practical. Once Kate had given up all hope of bringing Chester to the spot, she made a valiant assistant, handing up buckets of water to Ford on the ladder which led to the loft; and, since she had been washing clothes and had two tubs of water in the kitchen, the house was saved from destruction; because, after all, the fire had caught in a barrel of stuff which stood too close to the stovepipe, and was only just beginning to crackle along the rafters next the eaves when Ford was summoned. He was coming down with an empty bucket, and the atmosphere of a ticklish business carried to a successful end, when Mose puffed in, blatantly excited and eager to help save something.
“I don't know how to thank you,” said Kate, with wet lashes and a trembling around the lips. “There was Josephine in there with a terribly sprained ankle, and couldn't walk, and—I was just wild with fear. I don't know what ever I should have done. And I'm so thankful and—and——”
“That's all right, without the thanks.” Ford was backing toward the door. “I guess there's nothing more that I can do——”
“Oh, but you'll have to bring Josephine back!” Kate's eyes twinkled damply. “I'm awfully sorry, but I'm afraid she won't want to stay in the bunk house; and she can't walk, you know. Poor Phenie—I don't know what she thought—and she's such a strange girl. I didn't tell her the house was on fire,” she finished naïvely. “She may have imagined she was being kidnaped. I'll go and let the smoke out of the rooms, if you'll please bring her back. And—really, I'm so grateful that——”
Ford did not linger at that. He almost ran to the bunk house; and it occurred to him on the way that it might be difficult now for Mason to conceal his identity, and the fact that he was human, and therefore much inclined toward erring. She had had plenty of opportunity, he remembered, to see the condition his face was in. She was a nice woman, he fancied; but her gratitude he did not desire.
He found the girl, Josephine, lying upon a bunk just inside the door, still with her eyes closed and that corpselike look on her face; and he was guilty of hoping that she would remain in that state for a few minutes longer. But when he lifted her in his arms, her eyes flew wide open, and stared up at him intently. She did not speak, however; so Ford shut his lips tightly together and carried her out without a word, and across the bridge and up to the house, where Kate received her with tearful sympathy.
Ford drew a long breath of relief when he closed the door upon the incident and went back to the bunk house. One tribute he paid her, and that was the decision to leave the ranch just as soon as he could after seeing Mason. He did not trouble himself over any explanation, further than conceding to woman the power of making things disagreeable for a man. Besides, it was not altogether upon her account that he was going. He had done some hard thinking, and had decided within himself that he was not to be trusted too far, and that Mason might mean well, but that he needed some one to do his thinking for him.
Mason, however, speedily demonstrated that he was not yet to be placed among the mentally incompetent. He heard Ford through—and it did not take long, because Ford was brief in his statement—and he did not laugh, as he had done before. They were standing down by the corral, where Ford had gone to meet him; and he put both hands upon Ford's shoulders, and looked him straight in the eye.
“You can make good,” he said calmly. “I know it. All you want is a chance, and, seeing you won't give yourself one, Ill give it to you. If there's a yellow streak in you, I've never got a glimpse of it. Now, here's this foreman job. You can hold it down, all right—you know enough about stock. You'll do for me what you won't do for yourself, I believe. Anyway, I'm taking a chance. as can make good—and, damn it, you will!”
“I wish I was as sure of that as you seem to be,” Ford muttered, and turned away. Mason's easy chuckle followed him, and Ford turned and went back.
“I haven't made any cast-iron promise——”
“Did I ask you for one?” Mason's voice sharpened.
“But—Lordy me, man! How do you know I'll——”
“You will, That's enough.”
“But maybe I don't want the job. You can't shanghai me, you know.”
Mason studied him. “I didn't think you'd dodge, Ford,” he drawled, and the blood surged to the other's cheeks. “If you hadn't wanted the place, you'd have answered my letter and told me so——”
“If I should happen to get jagged up in good shape, the first thing I'll want to do will be to lick the stuffing out of you for this,” Ford prophesied, as one who knows whereof he speaks.
“You won't, though.”
“Oh, Lord! I wish you'd quit believing in me,” Ford grumbled. “It only goes to show you're plumb foolish.” But he reached out and clenched his fingers upon Mason's arm, and looked at him long, as if there was much he would like to say, if only he could find the words.
“You're white clear down to your toes, Ches,” he said finally, and went away with his hat jerked low down upon his forehead.
Mason looked after him as long as he was in sight, then took off his own hat, and wiped beads of perspiration from his face. “Gosh!” he whispered fervently. “That was nip and tuck—but I got him.” Whereupon he replaced his hat, blew his nose violently, and went to his dinner, with his hands in his pockets and his humorous lips pursed into a whistle.
Before long he was back, chuckling to himself as he bore down upon Ford. “The wife says you've got to come up to the house,” he announced, pulling Ford out of hearing of the others. “You've gone and done the heroic again, and you can't beg off.”
“You go back and tell your wife I'm a bold, bad man, and that I won't go.” Ford, to prove his sincerity, sat down on the saw-horse and crossed his legs. “Tell her—well, darn it all, tell her the truth. And there ain't anything heroic in packing a few buckets of water and sloshing them on a few blazing boards.”
“How about rescuing a lady?” twitted Mason. “You come along. I want you up there myself. Gosh! I've got to have somebody I can talk to about something besides the proper treatment for sprained ankles, and dresses, and whether the grocer sent out the right brand of canned peaches. You ain't married!”
“Oh! Ain't I?” Ford snorted. “And what's that got to do with it?”
“Say, there's a mighty nice girl visiting Kate. The one you rescued. Had an accident yesterday, so she's crippled up some for the present, but—say, she's a peach! You better——”
“I met the lady,” Ford stated dryly. “We didn't fall in love at first sight. She commenced hating me soon as I came within a mile of her. And she sent me to catch her horse, and then ran off before I got back.”
“Oh! You're the fellow.” Mason regarded him attentively. “I don't believe she told Kate that. I wonder why she didn't. You see, I went out to hunt her up—Kate got kinda worried—and she spoke about you, and we waited a while. But I knew how Kate would feel if we didn't get back, so we came on home, and I sent a man back with a horse for you. She left a note tied on your saddle; but the fellow came back and said he couldn't find you.” He stopped, and looked quizzically at Ford. “I didn't know you were the man,” he said. “Gosh! This is getting romantic.”
“Not enough to hurt,” Ford disclaimed.
“Well, dinner's waiting, and you've got to come. You won't,” he added shrewdly, “meet Joe, anyway. She's in bed. And Kate you can't dodge, so there's no use hanging back. She'll come after you herself if I go back without you—and she'll give me the devil into the bargain.”
“Well—all right, then; but, Lordy me, I do hate to, Ches! Women I'm plumb scared of. I never met one in my life that didn't hand me a package of trouble with both fists. Why——” He shut his teeth on the impulse to confide his matrimonial mischance, and followed Mason in silence, though Mason laughed all the way, and made facetious remarks upon the subject.

### Chapter VII.

“And you needn't accuse me of being disappointed, either.” Mrs. Kate finished a spirited monologue with unabashed enthusiasm. “I think he's perfectly splendid; and I like him all the better because he does try to stay in the background, and refuses to make any declaration of good intentions. You needn't worry the least bit about the ranch, or me, or Ford, or anything else. If Phenie wasn't so—so——” Like many women, Mrs. Kate found it easier to divine a peculiar mental state in another than to find expression for all she felt upon the subject. “Well, you know yourself how she treats Ford,” she asserted. “As if—well, just the way I feel when I start across the pasture afoot, and you have cattle in there. Maybe it's a mercy he doesn't care enough to notice it, but——”
“But you wish he would, eh?”
“No-o, I don't. I didn't mean that at all, But, coming back to the point, I do think you showed good judgment, for once in your life, when you brought Ford here. He'll never touch liquor again—I'm perfectly certain of that.”
He had been at the Double Cross just six weeks. Women seem rather precipitate always, both in building up a perfectly blind belief in a man, and in condemning him utterly.
Ford did not consider that the fight was fairly on yet. He was, so to speak, still gathering his forces together and studying the map of the battleground. He had never mentioned the subject to Ches Mason until the morning when Mason was preparing to start on the long-planned trip to Oregon. Then Mason himself spoke of it indirectly, because he wanted Ford to understand that he felt no uneasiness about going.
“I know you don't, Ches,” Ford replied. “I think myself you're more sure than sensible about it; but I hope you won't feel like kicking yourself all over the ranch for going off like this. You aren't a fool. You know what I'm up against. It's going to be an uphill climb, old-timer, and a blamed long hill at that, I'm afraid. And it's liable to be pretty darned slippery in places.”
“I sabe that, all right,” grinned Mason. “But I know, too, that you'll dig in your toes, and hang on by your eye-winkers if you have to. Keep an eye on Mose, will you? I wouldn't trust that old devil as far as I can throw him. He come pretty near sousing himself good just before you came; had a gallon jug of whisky sent out—and claimed it was vinegar. He won't quit pouring it down till he gets full, if he gets hold of it; and the boys all know better than to pass any on to him; but you'd better watch him yourself. Then I'll know everything's all right. But if he does make connections with anything, Ford, don't can him. Just shut him up somewhere till he gets over it. Good cooks are scarcer than—good foremen, for instance.”
A heartening smile went with that last sentence, which was the closest Mason had come to praising Ford—unless one recognized the tribute he paid him by going off with a mind at ease and leaving Ford master of the ranch and guardian of his wife, to say nothing of “Buddy,” who was six, and who had a burning desire to be a real twister.
Buddy would, by the way, have forced a recognition of his existence sooner if he had been on the ranch when Ford arrived. He had gone with the very first bunch of riders to the lower field, however, determined to help hold the “cut,” which he did to the complete satisfaction of himself, if not of the men.
Buddy was rather terrible sometimes. He had a way of standing back unnoticed, and of listening when he was believed to be engrossed in his play. Afterward he was apt to say the things which should not be said. In other words, he was the average child of six, living without playmates, and so forced by his environment to interest himself in the endless drama played by the grown-ups around him. Buddy, therefore, was not unusually startling, that day at dinner, when he looked up from spatting his potato into a flat cake on his plate.
“What hill you going to climb, Ford?” was his manner of exploding his bomb. “Bald Pinnacle? I can climb that hill myself.”
“I don't know as I'm going to climb any hills at all,” Ford said indulgently, accepting another helping of potato salad from Mrs. Kate.
“You told dadykins you was going to climb a big, long hill; and he was more sure than sensible.” He giggled, and showed where the first baby tooth was missing from among its fellows. “Daddy,” he observed to his mother, “told him he'd make it; but he'd have to dig in his toes and hang on by his eye-winkers. Gee! I'd like to see Ford hang onto a hill by his eye-winkers. Joe could do it—she's got winkers six feet long.”
Miss Josephine had been looking at Ford's face going red as understanding came to him; but when she caught a quick glance leveled at her lashes, she drooped them immediately so that they almost touched her cheeks. Buddy gave a squeal, and pointed to her with his fork.
“Joe's blushing! I guess she's ashamed because she's got such long winkers, and Ford keeps looking at 'em all the time. Why don't you shave 'em off with dad's razor? Then Ford would like you, maybe. He don't now. He told dad——”
“Robert Chester Mason, do you want me to get the hairbrush?” This, it need not be explained, from Mrs. Kate, in a voice portending disaster.
“I guess we can get along without it, mamma,” Buddy answered her, with an ingratiating smile. Even in the first six years of one's life, one learns the elementary principles of diplomacy. He did not retire from the conversation; but he prudently changed the subject to what he considered a more pleasant channel.
“Dick likes you, anyway, Joe,” he informed her soothingly. “He likes you, winkers and all. I can tell, all right. When you go out for a ride, he gives me nickels if I tell him where——”
“Robert Ches——”
“Oh, all right.” Buddy's tone was wearily tolerant. “A man never knows what to talk about to women, anyway. I'd hate to be married to 'em—wouldn't you, Ford?”
“A little boy like you,” began his mother, somewhat pinker of cheeks than usual.
“I guess I'm pretty near a man now.” He turned his eyes to Ford, consciously ignoring the feminine members of his family. “If I had a wife,” he stated calmly, “I'd snub her up to a post, and talk to her about anything I damn' pleased!”
Mrs. Kate rose up then in all the terrifying dignity of outraged motherhood, grasped Buddy by the wrist and led him away—in the direction of the hairbrush, one would judge by Buddy's reluctance to go.
“So you are going to climb the—Big Hill, are you?” Miss Josephine observed when the two were quite alone. “It is to be hoped, Mr. Campbell, that it isn't so steep as it looks—from the bottom.”
Ford was not an adept at reading what lies underneath the speech of a woman. To himself he accented the last three words, so that they overshadowed all the rest and made her appear to remind him where he stood—at the bottom.
“I suppose a hollow looks pretty high to a man down a well,” he retorted, looking into the teacup because he felt an impulse to stare at her.
“One can always keep climbing,” she murmured, “and never give up——” Miss Josephine, also, was tilting her teacup, and looking studiously into it as if she would read her fortune in the specks of tea leaves there. “And the reward for reaching the top——”
“Is there supposed to be a reward?” Ford could not tell why he asked her that, nor why he glanced stealthily at her from under his eyebrows.
“There—might—there usually is a reward for any great achievement—and——” Miss Josephine was plainly floundering where she had hoped to float airily upon the surface.
“What's the reward for climbing hills?” He looked at her full now, and his lips were ready to smile.
Miss Josephine looked uneasily at the door. “I—really, I never—investigated the matter at all.” She gave a twitch of shoulders, and met his eyes steadily. “The inner satisfaction of having climbed the hill, I suppose,” she said, in the tone of one who has at last reached firm ground. “Will you have more tea, Mr. Campbell?”
Her final words were chilly and impersonal, but Ford left the table smiling to himself. At the door he met Dick, whom Buddy had mentioned with disaster to himself. Dick saw the smile, and within the room he saw Miss Josephine sitting alone, with her chin resting in her two palms and her eyes fixed upon vacancy.
“Hello!” Ford greeted. “Do you want me for anything, Dick?”
“Can't say I do,” drawled Dick, brushing past Ford in the doorway.
Ford hesitated long enough to give him a second glance—an attentive enough glance this time—and went his way; without the smile, however.
“Lordy me!” he said to himself when his foot touched the bridge; but he did not add anything to the exclamation. He was wondering when it was that he had begun to dislike Dick Thomas; a long while, it seemed to him, though he had never till just now quite realized it. Dick and he had been friendly enough, too, though he had once or twice suspected Dick of a certain disappointment that he himself was not foreman of the Double Cross; and once he had asked Mason why he hadn't given the place to Dick.
“Didn't want to,” Mason had replied succinctly, and let it go at that.
If Dick cherished any animosity, however, he had never made it manifest. Indeed, he had shown a distinct inclination to be friendly; a friendliness which led the two to pair off frequently when they were riding, and to talk over past range experiences more or less intimately. Looking back over the six weeks just behind him, Ford could not remember a single incident—a sentence, even—that had been unpleasant; and yet here he was disliking the fellow.
“He's got bad eyes,” he concluded. “That's what it is. I never did like eyes the color of polished steel; nickel-plated eyes, I call 'em; all shine and no color. Still, a man ain't to blame for his eyes.”
Then Dick overtook him, with Buddy trailing, red-eyed, at his heels; and Ford forgot, in the work to be done that day, all about his speculations. He involved himself in a fruitless argument with Buddy upon the subject of what a six-year-old can stand in the way of riding, and yielded finally before the quiver of Buddy's lips. They were only going over on Long Ridge, anyway, to take a look at Rambler; and the day was fine, and Buddy had frequently ridden as far, according to Dick. Indeed, it was Dick's easy-natured, “Ah, let the kid go, why don't you?” which gave Ford an excuse for reconsidering.
And Buddy repaid him after his usual fashion. At the supper table he looked up, round-eyed, from his plate.
“Gee, but I'm hungry!” he sighed. “I eat and eat, just, like a horse eating hay; and I just can't fill up the hole in me.”
“There, never mind, honey,” Mrs. Kate interposed hastily, fearing worse. “Do you want more bread and butter?”
“Yes—you always use bread for stuffing, don't you? I want to be stuffed. All the way home my b—my stomerch was a-flopping against my backbone, just like Dick's. Only Dick said——”
“Never mind what Dick said.” Mrs. Kate thrust the bread toward him half buttered.
“Dick's mad, anyway. He's mad at Ford.” Buddy regarded his mother gravely over the slice of bread.
“First I've heard of it,” Ford remarked lightly. “I think you must be mistaken, old-timer.”
But Buddy never considered himself mistaken about anything; and he did not like being told that he was. He rolled his eyes at Ford resentfully.
“Dick is mad. He got mad when you galloped over where Joe's red ribbon was hanging onto a bush. I saw him a-scowling when you rolled it up and put it in your shirt pocket. Dick wanted that ribbon for his bridle; and you better give it to him. Joe ain't your girl. She's Dick's girl. And you have to tie the ribbon of your bestest girl on your bridle. That's why,” he added, with belated gallantry, “I tie my own mamma's ribbons on mine. And”—he returned with terrible directness to the real issue—“Joe's Dick's girl, 'cause he said so. I heard him tell Jim Felton—and you are his girl; ain't you, Joe?”
His mother had tried at first to stop him, had given up in despair, and was now sitting in a rather tragic calm, waiting for what might come of it.
Josephine caught Ford's eyes fixed rather intently upon her, and sensed the expectancy in them. She bit her lip, and then she laughed.
“A man shouldn't make an assertion of that sort,” she said quizzically, in the direction of Buddy—though her meaning went straight across the table to another—“unless he has some reason for feeling very sure.”
Buddy tried to appear quite clear as to her meaning. “Well, if you are Dick's girl, then you better make Ford give that ribbon——”
“I have plenty of ribbons, Buddy,” Josephine interrupted, smiling at him still. “Don't you want one?”
“I tie my own mamma's ribbons on my bridle,” Buddy rebuffed. “My mamma is my girl—you ain't. You can give your ribbons to Dick.”
“Mamma won't be your girl if you don't stop talking so much at the table,” Mrs. Kate informed him sternly, with a glance of trepidation at the others. “A little boy mustn't talk about grown-ups, and what they do or say.”
“What can I talk about, then? The boys talk about their girls all the time when they——”
“I wish to goodness I had let you go with your dad. I shall not let you eat with us, anyway, if you don't stop talking so much. You're getting perfectly awful.” Which even Buddy understood as a protest which was not to be taken seriously.
Ford stayed long enough to finish drinking his tea, and then he left the house with what he privately considered a perfectly casual manner. As a matter of fact, he was extremely self-conscious about it, so that Mrs. Kate felt justified in mentioning it, and in asking Josephine a question or two—when she had prudently made an errand elsewhere for Buddy."
Josephine having promptly disclaimed all knowledge or interest pertaining to the affair, Mrs. Kate spoke her mind plainly.
“If Ford's going to fall in love with you, Phenie,” she said, “I think you're foolish to encourage Dick. I believe Ford is falling in love with you. I never thought so till to-night; but what Buddy said——”
“I don't suppose Bud knows what he's talking about—any more than you do,” snapped Josephine. “If you're determined that I shall have a love affair on this ranch, I'm going home.” She planted her chin in her two palms, just as she had done at dinner, and stared into vacancy.
“Where?” asked Mrs. Kate politely, and then atoned for it whole-heartedly. “There, I didn't mean that—only—this is your home. It's got to be. I won't let it be anywhere else. And you needn't have any love affair, Phene—you know that. Only you shan't badger Ford. I think he's perfectly splendid! What he did for Chester—I—I can't think of that without getting a lump in my throat, Phene. Think of it! Going without food himself, because there wasn't enough for two, and—and—well, he just simply threw away his own chance of getting through to give Chester a better one. It's the bravest thing I ever heard of! And the way he has conquered——”
“How do you know he has conquered? And lots of men save other men's lives. It's being done every day, and no one hears much about it. You think it was something extraordinary just because it happened to be Chester that was saved. Anybody will do all he can for a sick partner when they're away out in the wilds. I haven't a doubt Dick would have done the very same thing when it comes to that.” Josephine got up from the table then and went into her own room.
Mrs. Kate went into the kitchen; and there was a distinct coolness between them for the rest of that day, and a part of the next. The chill of it affected Ford sufficiently to keep him away from the house as much as possible, and unusually silent when he was away; but he did not know that his disagreeable mental state was directly traceable to the two women; more exactly, to the younger woman.
Ford, if he had tried to put his gloomy unrest into words, would probably have said that he wanted whisky, and wanted it badly.

### Chapter VIII.

Mose was mad. He was flinging tinware about the kitchen with a fine disregard of the din or the dents; and whenever the blue cat ventured out from under the stove he kicked at it viciously. He was mad at Ford; and when a man gets mad at his foreman—without knowing that the foreman has been instructed to bear with his faults and keep him on the pay roll at any price—he must, if he be the cook, have recourse to kicking cats and banging dishes about, since he dare not kick the foreman. In late November “jobs” are not at all plentiful in the range land; and even an angry cook must keep his job or face the world-old economic problem of food, clothing, and shelter.
But if he dared not speak his mind plainly to Ford, he was not averse to pouring his woes into the first sympathetic ear that came his way. It happened that upon this occasion the ear arrived speedily upon the head of Dick Thomas.
“Matter, Mose?” he queried, sidestepping the cat, which gave a long leap straight for the door when it opened. “Cat been licking the butter again?”
Mose grunted, and slammed three pie tins into a cupboard with such force that two of them bounced out and rolled across the floor. One came within reach of his foot, and he kicked it into the woodbox, and swore at it while it was on the way. “And I wisht it was Ford Campbell himself, the snoopin', stingy, kitchen-grannying, booze-fightin' son-of-a-sour-dough bannock!” he finished prayerfully.
“He surely hasn't tried to mix in here and meddle with you?” Dick asked, helping himself to a piece of pie. You know the tone. It had just that inflection of surprised sympathy which makes you tell your troubles without that reservation which a more neutral listener would unconsciously impel.
I am not going to give Mose's version, because he warped the story to make it fit his own indignation, and did not do Ford justice. This, then, is the truth:
Ford chanced to be walking up along the edge of the gully which ran past the bunk house, and into which empty cans and other garbage were thrown. Sometimes a can fell short, so that all the gully edge was liberally decorated with a gay assortment of canners' labels. Just as he came up, Mose opened the kitchen door and threw out a cream can, which fell in front of Ford and trickled a white stream upon the frozen ground. Ford stooped and picked up the can, shook it, and heard the slosh which told of waste. He investigated further, and decided that throwing out a cream can before it was quite empty was not an accident with Mose, but might be termed a habit. He took Exhibit A to the kitchen; but he laughed while he spoke of it. And these were his exact words:
“Lordy me, Mose, somebody's liable to come here and get rich off us if we don't look out! He'll gather up the cream cans you throw into the discard and start a dairy on the leavings.” He set the can down on the water bench beside the door and went away.
“I've been cookin' for cow camps ever since I got my knee stiffened up so's't I couldn't ride—and that's sixteen year ago last Fourth—and it's the first time I ever had any darned foreman go snoopin' around my back door to see if I scrape out the cans clean.” Mose seated himself upon a corner of the table, with the stiff leg for a brace and the good one swinging free, and folded his bare arms upon his heaving chest.
“And that ain't all, Dick,” he went on aggrievedly. “He went and cut down the order I give him for grub. That's something Ches never done—not with me, anyway. Asked me—asked me what I wanted with so much choc'let. And I wanted boiled cider for m' mincemeat, and never got it. And brandy, too—only I didn't put that down on the list. I knowed better than to write it out. But I give Jim money—out uh my own pocket!—to git some with, and he never done it. Said Ford told him p'tic'ler not to bring out nothin' any near drinkable than lemon extract! I've got a darned good mind,” he added somberly, “to fire the hull works into the gully. He don't belong on no cow ranch, Where he'd oughta be is runnin' the W. C. T. U. So darned afraid of a pint uh brandy——”
“If I was dead sure your brains wouldn't get to leaking out your mouth,” Dick began guardedly, “I might put you wise to something.” He took a drink of water, opened the door that he might throw out what remained in the dipper, and made sure that no one was near the bunk house before he closed the door again.
Mose watched him interestedly.
“You know me—I never do tell all I know,” he hinted eagerly.
“Well”—Dick stood with his hand upon the doorknob and a sly grin upon his face—“I ain't saying a word about anything. Only—if you might happen to want some—eggs—for your mince pies, you might look good under the southeast corner of the third haystack, counting from the big corral. I believe there's a—nest—there.”
“The deuce!” Mose brightened understandingly, and drummed with his fingers upon his bare, dough-caked forearm. “Do yuh know who—er—what hen laid there?”
“I do,” said Dick, with a rising inflection. “The head hen uh the flock. But if I was going to hunt eggs, I'd take down a chiny egg and leave it in the nest, Mose.”
“But I ain't got——” Mose caught Dick's pale glance resting, with what might be considered some significance, upon the vinegar jug, and he stopped short. “That wouldn't work,” he commented vaguely.
“Well, I've got to be going. Boss might can me if he caught me loafing around here, eating pie when I ought to be working. Ford's a fine fellow, don't you think?” He grinned and went out, and then came back, and said he never could stand socks with a hole in the toe, and he guessed he'd have to hunt through his war bag for a good pair.
Mose, as need scarcely be explained, went immediately to the stable to hunt eggs; and Dick, in the next room, smiled to himself when he heard the door slam behind him. Dick did not change his socks just then; he went first into the kitchen and busied himself there, and he continued to smile to himself. Later, he went out and met Ford, who was riding moodily up from the river field.
“Say, I'm going to be an interfering kind of a cuss, and put you next to something,” he began, with just the right degree of hesitation in his manner. “It ain't any of my business, but——” He stopped and lighted a cigarette. “If you'll come up to the bunk house, I'll show you something funny.”
Ford dismounted in silence, led his horse into the stable, and, without waiting to unsaddle, followed Dick.
“We've got to hurry before Mose gets back from hunting eggs.” Dick explained the long strides he took. “And, of course, I'm taking it for granted, Ford, that you won't say anything. I kinda thought you ought to know, maybe—but I'd never say a word if I didn't feel pretty sure you'd keep it behind your teeth.”
“Well—I'm waiting to see what it is,” Ford replied noncommittally.
Dick opened the kitchen door, and led Ford through that into the bunk room. “You wait here—I'm afraid Mose might come back,” he said, and went back to the kitchen. When he returned, he had a gallon jug in his hand. He was still smiling.
“I went to mix me up some soda water for heartburn,” he said, “and when I picked up this jug, Mose took it out of my hand, and said it was boiled cider that he'd got for mincemeat. So when he went out I took a taste. Here. You sample it yourself, Ford. If that's boiled cider, I wouldn't mind having a barrel.”
Ford took the jug, pulled the cork, and sniffed at the opening. He did not say anything, but he looked up at Dick significantly.
“Taste it once!” urged Dick innocently. “I'd just like to have you see the brand of slow poison a fool like Mose will pour down him.”
Ford hesitated, sniffed, started to set down the jug, then lifted it, and took a swallow.
“That isn't as bad as some I've seen,” he pronounced evenly, shoving in the cork. “Nor as good,” he added conservatively. “I wonder where he got it.”
“Search me. Oh, by Jiminy, here he comes! I'm going to take a scoot, Ford. Don't give me away, will you? And if I was you, I wouldn't say anything to Mose—I know that old devil pretty well. He'll keep mighty quiet about it himself—unless you jump him about it. Then he'll roar around to everybody he sees, and claim it was a plant.” He slid stealthily through the outer door; and Ford saw him run down into the gully and disappear while Mose was yet halfway from the stable.
Ford sat on the edge of a bunk and looked at the jug beside him. If Dick had deliberately planned to tempt him, he had cunningly chosen the time well; and, if he had not done it deliberately, there must have been a malignant spirit abroad that day.
For a week Ford had been restless and moody. Even Buddy had noticed that, and complained that Ford was cross and wouldn't talk to him; and Mrs. Kate had scolded Josephine, and accused her of being responsible for his gloom and silence. Since Josephine's conscience sustained the charge, she resented the accusation, and proceeded deliberately to add to its justice; which did not make Ford any the happier, you may be sure. For when a man reaches that mental state which causes him to carry a girl's ribbon folded carefully into the most secret compartment of his pocketbook, and to avoid the girl herself, and yet feel like committing assault and battery with intent to kill, because some other man occasionally rides with her for an hour or two, he is extremely sensitive to averted glances and chilly tones and monosyllabic conversation.
Since the day before, when she had ridden over to the stage road with Dick, Ford had been fighting the desire to saddle a horse and ride to town; and the thing that lured him townward confronted him now in that gray stone jug with the brown neck and handle.
He lifted the jug, shook it tentatively, pulled out the cork with a jerk that was savage, and looked around the room for some place where he might empty out the contents and have done with temptation; but there was nothing. but the stove, so he started to the door with it, meaning to pour it on the ground. Mose just then shambled past the window, so Ford sat down to wait until he was safe in the kitchen. And all the while the cork was out of that jug, so that the fumes of the whisky rose maddeningly to his nostrils; and the little that he had swallowed whipped the thirst devil to a fury of desire.
In the kitchen, Mose rattled pans and hummed a raucous tune under his breath. In a few minutes he started again for the stable. Dick, desultorily bracing a leaning post of one of the corrals, saw him coming, and grinned. He glanced toward the bunk house, where Ford still lingered, and the grin grew broader. After that he went all around the corral with his hammer and bucket of nails, tightening poles and braces, and incidentally keeping an eye upon the bunk house; and, while he worked, he whistled and smiled by turns. Dick was in an unusually cheerful mood.
Mose came up behind him, and stood with his stiff leg thrust forward and his hands rolled «up in his apron—with something clasped tightly under the wrappings, Dick could see.
“Say, that he-hen—she laid twice in the same place,” Mose announced confidentially. “Got 'em both—for m' mince pies.' He waggled his head, winked twice with his left eye, and went back to the bunk house.
Still Ford did not appear. Josephine came, however, in riding skirt and gray hat and gauntlets, treading lightly down the path, which lay all in a yellow glow which was not sunlight, but that mellow haze which we call Indian summer. She looked in at the stable, and then came straight over to Dick. There was, when Josephine was her natural self, something very direct and honest about her movements, as if she disdained all those little, feminine subterfuges, but took always the straight, open trail to her object.
“Do you know where Mr. Campbell is, Dick?” she asked him, and added no explanation of her desire to know.
“I do,” said Dick, with the rising inflection which was his habit when the words were used for a bait to catch another question.
“Well, where is he, then?”
Dick straightened up, and smiled down upon her queerly. “Count ten before you ask me that again,” he parried, “because maybe you'd better not know.”
Josephine lifted her chin, and gave him that straight, measuring stare which had so annoyed Ford the first time he had seen her. “I have counted,” she said calmly, after a pause. “Where is Mr. Campbell, please?”—and the “please” pushed Dick to the very edge of her favor, it was so coldly formal.
“Well, if you're sure you counted straight—the last time I saw him he was in the bunk house.”
“Well?” The tone of her demanded more.
“He was in the bunk house—cuddled close up to a gallon jug of whisky.” His eyelids flickered. “He's there yet—but I wouldn't swear that there's still a gallon——”
“Thank you very much.” This time her tone pushed him over the edge and into the depths of her disapproval. “I thought I could depend upon you—to tell!”
“What else could I do when you asked?”
But she had her back to him, and was walking away up the path; and if she heard, she did not trouble to answer. Still Dick smiled, and brought the hammer down against a post with such force that he splintered the handle.
“Something's going to drop on this ranch pretty quick,” he prophesied, looking down at the useless tool in his hand. “And if I wanted to name it, I'd call it Ford.” He glanced up the path to where Josephine was walking straight to the west door of the bunk house, and laughed sourly. “Well, she needn't take my word for it if she don't want to, I guess,” he muttered. “Nothing like heading off a critter—or a woman—in time.”
Josephine did not hesitate upon the doorstep. She went in, and shut the door behind her before the echo of her step had died. Ford was lying, as he had lain once before, upon a bunk, with his face hidden in his folded arms. He did not hear her—at any rate, he did not know who it was, for he did not lift his head or stir.
Josephine looked at the jug upon the floor beside him, bent, and lifted it very gently from the floor; tilted it to the window so that she could look into it; tilted her nose at the odor, and very, very gently put it back where she had found it. Then she stood and looked down at Ford.
She did not move, and she certainly did not speak; but her presence, for all that, penetrated his abstraction. He lifted his head and stared at her over an elbow; and his eyes were heavy with trouble, and his mouth was set in lines of bitterness.
“Did you want me for something?” he asked, when he knew that she was not going to speak.
She shook her head. “Is it—pretty steep?” she ventured, and glanced down at the jug.
He looked puzzled at first; but when his own glance followed hers, he understood. He stared up at her somberly before he let his head drop back upon his arms so that his face was hidden.
“You've never been in hell, I suppose,” he told her, and his voice was tired. After a minute, he looked up at her again. “Is it fun to stand and watch a man—— What do you want, anyway? It doesn't matter—to you.”
“Are you sure?” she retorted sharply. “And—suppose it doesn't. I have Kate to think of, at least.”
He gave a little laugh that came nearer being a snort. “Oh, if that's all, you needn't worry. I'm not quite that far gone, thank you.”
“I was thinking of the ranch, and of her ideals, and of the effect on the men,” she explained impatiently.
He was silent a moment. “I'm thinking of myself,” he told her grimly then.
“And—don't you ever—think of me?” She set her teeth sharply together after the words were out; but she did not seem to repent having spoken them. She watched him, and she was breathing quickly.
Ford got up from the bunk and faced her with stern questioning in his eyes; but she only flushed a little under his scrutiny. Her eyes, he noticed, were clear and steady, and they had in them something of that courage which fears but will not flinch.
“I don't want to think of you,” he said, lowering his voice unconsciously. “For the last month I've tried hard not to think of you.”
She leaned back against the door and stared up at him with widening pupils. Ford looked down, and struck the jug with his toe. “That thing,” he said slowly, “I've got to fight alone. I don't know yet which is going to come out winner, me or the booze. I—don't—know.” He lifted his head and looked at her. “What did you come in here for?” he asked bluntly.
She caught her breath. “Dick told me—and I was—I, wanted to—well, help. I thought I might—sometimes when the climb is too steep, a hand will keep one from—slipping.”
“What made you want to help? You don't like me.” His tone was flat and unemotional; but she did not seem able to meet his eyes. So she looked down at the jug.
“Dick said—but the jug is full practically. I don't understand how——”
“It isn't as full as it ought to be; it lacks one swallow.” He eyed it queerly. “I wish I knew how much it would lack by dark,” he said.
She threw out an impulsive hand. “Oh, but you must make up your mind. You mustn't temporize, or——”
“This,” he interrupted rather flippantly, “is something little girls can't understand. They'd better not try. This isn't a woman's problem, to be solved by argument. It's a man's fight.”
“But if you just made up your mind, you could win.”
“Could I?” His tone was amusedly skeptical, but his eyes were still somber.
“Even a woman,” she said impatiently, “knows that is not the way to win a fight—to send for the enemy and give him all your weapons and a plan of the fortifications and the password; when you know there's no mercy to be hoped for!”
He smiled at her simile, and at her earnestness also, perhaps; but that black gloom stayed in his eyes.
“What made you send for it? A whole gallon!”
“I didn't. That jug belongs to Mose,” he told her simply. “Dick told me Mose had it; rather, Dick went into the kitchen and got it, and turned it over to me.” In spite of the words, he did not give one the impression that he was defending himself; he was merely offering an explanation.
“Dick got it and turned it over to you!” Her forehead wrinkled into vertical lines. She studied him frowningly. “Will you give it to me?” she asked directly.
Ford folded his arms and scowled down at the jug. “No,” he decided at last, “I won't. If booze is going to get the best of me, I want to know it—and I can't know it too quick.”
“But you're only human, Ford!”
“Sure. But I'm kinda hoping I'm a man, too.” His eyes lightened a little while they rested upon her.
“But you've got the poison of it—it's like a traitor in your fort, ready, to open the door. You can't do it! I—oh, you'll never understand why, but I can't let you risk it. You've got to let me help. Give it to me, Ford.”
“No. You go on to the house, and don't bother about me. You can't help—nobody can. It's up to me.”
She struck her hands together in a nervous rage. “You want to keep it because you want to drink it! If you didn't want it, you'd hate to be near it. You'd want some one to take it away. You just want to get drunk, and be a beast. You—you—oh—you don't know what you're doing, or how much it means. You don't know!” Her hands went up suddenly, and covered her face.
Ford walked the length of the room away from her, turned, and came back until he faced her, where she stood leaning against the door with her face still hidden behind her palms. He reached out his arms to her, hesitated, and drew them back.
“I wish you'd go,” he said hoarsely. “I believe there are some things harder to fight than whisky. You only make it worse.”
“I'll go when you give me that.”
“You'll go anyway.” He took her by the arm, quietly pulled her away from the door, opened it, and then closed it while, for just a breath or two, he held her tightly in his arms. Very gently, after that, he pushed her out upon the doorstep, and shut the door behind her. The lock clicked a hint which she could not fail to hear and understand. He waited until he heard her walk away, then sat down with the air of a man who is very, very weary, rested his elbows upon his knees, and, with his hands clasped loosely together, he glowered at the jug on the floor; and once more the soul of Ford went deep down into the pit where all the devils dwell.

### Chapter IX.

It was Mose crashing headlong into the old mess box where he kept rattly basins, empty lard pails, and such that roused him. He got up and went into the kitchen; and, when he saw what was the matter, he extricated Mose by the simple method of grabbing his legs and pulling hard; set him upon his feet, and got full in his face the unmistakable fumes of whisky.
“What? You got another jug of stuff? he asked, with some disgust, steadying Mose against the wall.
“Ah—I ain't got any jug uh nothin',” Mose protested rather thickly. “And I never took them bottles outa the stack; that musta been Dick done that. Get after him about it. He's the one told me where yuh hid 'em—but I never touched 'em, honest, I never. If they're gone, you get after Dick. Don't yuh go 'n' lay it on me now.” He was whimpering with maudlin pathos before he finished. Ford scowled at him thoughtfully.
“Dick told you about the bottles in the haystack, did he?” he asked. “Which stack was it? And how many bottles?”
Mose gave him a bleary stare. “Aw, you know! You hid 'em there yourself. Dick said so. I ain't goin' to say which stack, or how many bottles—or—any other—darn thing about it.” He punctuated his phrases by prodding a finger against Ford's chest; and he wagged his head with all the self-consciousness of spurious virtue. “Promised Dick I wouldn't, and I won't. Not a—darn—word about it. Wanted some—for m' mincemeat; but I never took any outa the haystack.”
He began to show a pronounced limpness in his good leg, and a tendency to slide down upon the floor, so Ford piloted him to a chair, eased him into it, and stood over him in frowning meditation. Mose was drunk; absolutely, undeniably drunk. It could not have been the jug, for the jug was full. Till then, the oddity of a full jug of whisky in Mose's kitchen, after at least twenty-four hours must have passed since its arrival, had not occurred to him. He had been too preoccupied with his own fight to think much about Mose.
“Shay, I never took them bottles outa the stack.” Mose looked up to protest solemnly. “Dick never told me about 'em, neither. Dick tol' me”—tapping Ford's arm with his finger for every word—“'at there was aigs down there for m' mincemeat.” He stopped suddenly, and goggled up at Ford. “Shay, yuh don't put aigs in—mincemeat,” he informed him earnestly. “Not a darn aig! Anyway, that's what Dick tol' me—aigs for m' mincemeat. Oh, I knowed right off what he meant, all right,” he explained proudly. “He didn't wanta come right out 'n' shay what it was—an' I—got—the—aigs!”
“Yes—how many—eggs?” Ford held himself rigidly quiet.
“Two quart—aigs!” Mose laughed at the joke. “I wisht,” he added pensively, “the hens'd all lay them kinda aigs. I'd buy up all the shickens in—the whole world.” He gazed raptly upon the vision the words conjured. “Gee! Quart aigs—'n' all the shickens in the world layin' reg'ler!'”
“Have you got any left?”
“No—honest. Used 'em all up—for mincemeat.”
Ford knew he was lying. His eyes searched the untidy tables and the corners filled with bags and boxes. Mose was a good cook, but his ideas of order were vague, and his system of housekeeping was the simple one of leaving everything where he had last been using it, so that it might be handy when he wanted it again. A dozen bottles might be concealed there, like the faces in a picture puzzle, and it would take a housecleaning to discover them all. But Ford, when he saw that no bottle stood in plain sight, began turning over bags and looking behind boxes.
He must have been “growing warm” when he stood uncertain whether to look into the flour bin, for Mose gave a snarl, and pounced on him from behind. The weight of him sent Ford down on all fours, and kept him there for a space; and, even after he was up, he found himself quite busy. Mose was a husky individual, with no infirmity of the arms and fists, even if he did have a stiff leg; and drunkenness frequently flares and fades in a man like a candle guttering in the wind. And Mose was fighting to save his whisky.
Still, Ford had not sent all of Sunset into its cellars, figuratively speaking, for nothing; and, while a man may feel more enthusiasm for fighting when under the influence of the stuff that cheers sometimes and never fails to inebriate, the added incentive does not necessarily mean also superior muscular development, or more weight behind the punch. Ford came speedily to the point where he could inspect a skinned knuckle, and afterward gaze in peace upon his fallen antagonist.
He was occupied with both diversions when the door was pushed open as by a man in great haste; and he looked up from the knuckle into the expectant face of Jim Felton; and over the shoulder of Jim he saw a gloating certainty writ large in the pale eyes of Dick Thomas. They had been running. He could tell that by their uneven breathing; and it occurred to him that they must have heard the clamor when he pitched Mose into the dish cupboard. There had been considerable noise about that time, he remembered. They must have heard the howl Mose gave at the instant of contact.
Ford glanced involuntarily at that side of the room where stood the cupboard, and mentally admitted that it looked like there had been a slight disagreement, or else a severe seismic disturbance; and Montana is not what one calls an earthquake country. His eyes left the generous sprinkle of broken dishes on the floor, with Mose sprawled inertly in their midst, looking not unlike a broken platter himself—or, at least, one badly nicked—and rested again upon the grinning face behind the shoulder of Jim Felton.
Ford was ever a man of not many words. He made straight for Dick; and, when he had pushed Jim out of the way, he reached him violently. Dick tottered upon the steps, and went off backward; and Ford landed upon him fairly, and with full knowledge and intent.
Jim Felton was a wise young man. He stood back and let them fight it out; and when it was over, he never said a word until Dick had picked himself up and walked off, holding to his nose a handkerchief that reddened rapidly.
“Say, you are a son of a gun to fight,” he observed admiringly then to Ford. “Don't you know Dick's supposed to be ab-solute-ly unlickable?”
“May be so—but he sure shows all the symptoms of being licked, right at present.” Ford moved a thumb joint gently to see whether it was dislocated or merely felt that way.
“He's going up to the house now to tell the missus,” remarked Jim, craning his neck from the doorway.
“If he does that,” Ford replied easily, “I'll half kill him next time. What I gave him just now is only a sample package, left on the doorstep, to try free of charge.” He sat down upon a corner of the table and began to make himself a smoke. “Is he going up to the house—honest?” He would not yield to the impulse to look and see for himself.
“We-ell, the trail he's taking has no other logical destination,” drawled Jim. “He's across the bridge.” When Ford showed no disposition to say anything to that, Jim came in and closed the door. “Say, what laid old Mose out so nice?” he asked, with an indolent sort of curiosity. “Booze, or just bumps?”
“A little of both,” said Ford indifferently between puffs. He was thinking of the tale Dick would tell at the house, and he was thinking of the probable effect upon one listener; the other didn't matter, though he liked Mrs. Kate very much.
Jim went over and investigated. Discovering that Mose was close to snoring, he sat upon a corner of the other table, swung a spurred boot, and regarded Ford interestedly over his own cigarette building. “Say, for a man that's supposed to be soused,” he began, after a silence, “you act and talk remarkably lucid. I wish I could carry booze like that,” he added regretfully. “But I can't; my tongue and my legs always betray the guilty secret. Have you got any particular system, or is it just a gift?
“No.” Ford shook his head. “Nothing like that. I just don't happen to be drunk, is all.” He eyed Jim sharply while he considered within himself. “It looks to me,” he began, after a moment, “as if our friend Dick had framed up a nice, little plant. One way and another, I got wise to the whole thing—but for the life of: me, I can't see what made him do it. Lordy me! I never kicked him on any bunion!” He grinned as memory flashed a brief, mental picture of Sunset and certain incidents which occurred there. But memory never lets well enough alone; and one is lucky to escape without seeing a picture that leaves a sting. Ford's smile ended in a scowl.
“Jealousy, old man,” Jim pronounced without hesitation. “Of course, I don't know the details, but—details be darned. If he has tried to hand you a package, take it from me, jealousy's the string he tied it with. I don't mind saying that Dick told me when I first rode up to the corral that you and Mose were both boozing up some; and right after that we heard a deuce of a racket up here, and it did look——” He waved an apologetic hand at Mose, and the fragments of pottery which framed like a “still-life” picture on the floor, and let it go at that. “I'm strong for you, Ford,” he added; and his smile was frank and friendly. “Double Cross is the name of this outfit; but I'm all in favor of running that brand on the cow critters and keeping it out of the bunk house. If you should happen to feel like elucidating——” he hinted delicately.
Ford had always liked Jim Felton in an impersonal way. Now he warmed to him as a friend, and certain things he told him—as much about the jug with the brown neck and handle as concerned Dick, and all he knew of the bottles in the haystack—while Jim smoked and swung the foot which did not rest upon the floor, and listened.
“Sounds like Dick, all right,” he passed judgment when Ford had finished. “He counted on your falling for the jug—and oh, my! It was a beautiful plant. I'd sure hate to have anybody sing 'Yield not to temptation' at me if a gallon jug of the real stuff just fell into my arms and nobody was looking.” He eyed Ford queerly. “You've got quite a reputation——” he ventured.
“Well, I earned it,” Ford observed laconically.
“Dick banked on that rep—I'd stake my whole stack of blues on that. And, after you'd torn up the ranch and pitched the fragments into the gulch, he'd hold the last trump, with all high cards to keep the lead. Whee!” He meditated admiringly upon the strategy. “But what I can't seem to understand,” he said frankly, “is why the deuce it didn't work. Is your swallower out of kilter? If you don't mind my asking.”
“I never noticed that it was paralyzed,” Ford answered grimly.
He got up, lifted a lid of the stove, and threw in the cigarette stub mechanically. Then he bethought him of his interrupted search, and prodded a long-handled spoon into the flour bin, struck something smooth and hard, and drew out a befloured, quart bottle half full of whisky. He wiped the bottle carefully, inspected it briefly, and slid it into his coat pocket. Jim, watching him, knew that he was thinking all the while of something else. When Ford spoke, he proved it.
“Are you any good at all in the kitchen, Jim?” he asked, turning to him as if he had decided just how he would meet the situation.
“Well, I hate to brag; but I've known of men eating my grub and going right on living as if nothing had happened,” Jim admitted modestly.
“Well, you turn yourself loose in here, will you? The boys will be good and empty when they come—it's dinner time right now. I'll help you carry Mose out of the way before I go.”
Jim looked as if he would like to ask what Ford meant to do, but he refrained. There was something besides preoccupation in Ford's face, and it did not make for easy questioning. Jim did yield to his curiosity to the extent of watching through a window, when Ford went out, to see where he was going; and when he saw that Ford had the jug, and that he took the path which led across the little bridge and so to the house, Jim drew back, and said “Whee-e-e!” under his breath.
Then he remarked to the recumbent Mose, who was not in a condition either to hear or understand: “I'll bet you Dick's got all he wants, right now, without any postscript.”
After which Jim hunted up a clean apron and proceeded, with his spurs on his heels, his hat on the back of his head, and a smile upon his lips, to sweep out the broken dishes so that he might walk without hearing them crunch unpleasantly under his boots.
“I'll take wild cats in mine, please,” he remarked once, irrelevantly, aloud, and smiled again.

### Chapter X.

When Ford stepped upon the porch with the jug in his hand, he gave every indication of having made up his mind definitely. When he glimpsed Josephine's worried face behind the lace curtain in the window, he dropped the jug lower, and held it against his leg in such a way as to indicate a hope that she could not see it; but otherwise he gave no sign of perturbation. He went along the porch to the door of his own room, went in, locked the door after him, and put the jug down on a table.
He could hear faint sounds of dishes being placed upon the table in the dining room, which was next to his own; and he knew that dinner was half an hour late, which was unusual in Mrs. Kate's orderly domain. Mrs. Kate was one of those excellent women whose houses are always immaculate; whose meals are ever placed before one when the clock points to a certain hour, and whose tables never lack a salad and a dessert—though how those feats are accomplished upon a cattle ranch must ever remain a mystery.
Ford was, therefore, justified in taking the second look at his watch, and in holding it up to his ear, and also in lifting his eyebrows when all was done. Fifteen minutes by the watch it was before he heard the silvery tinkle of the tea bell, which was one of the ties which bound Mrs. Kate to civilization, and which announced that he might enter the dining room.
He went in as clean and fresh and straight-backed and quiet as ever he had done; and when he saw that the room was empty save for Buddy perched upon his long-legged chair, with his heels hooked over the top round and a napkin tucked expectantly inside the collar of his blue blouse, he took in the situation, and sat down without waiting for the women. The very first glance told him that Mrs. Kate had never prepared that meal. It was, putting it bluntly, a scrappy affair, hastily gathered from various shelves in the pantry and hurriedly arranged upon the table.
Buddy gazed upon the sprinkle of dishes with undisguised dissatisfaction. “There ain't any potatoes,” he announced gloomily. “My own mamma always cooks potatoes. Josephine's the limit! I been working to-day. I almost dug out a badger over by the bluff. I got where I could hear him scratching to get away; and then it was all rocks so I couldn't dig any more. Gee, it was hard digging! And I'm just about starved, if you want to know. And there ain't any potatoes.”
“Bread and butter is fine when you're hungry,” Ford suggested, and spread a slice for Buddy somewhat inattentively because he was keeping an eye upon the kitchen door, where he had caught a fleeting glimpse of some one looking in at him.
“You're putting the butter all in one place,” Buddy criticized, with his usual frankness. “I guess you're drunk, all right. If you're too drunk to spread butter, let me do it.”
“What makes you think I'm drunk?” Ford questioned, lowering his voice because of the person he suspected was in the kitchen.
“Mamma and Joe was quarreling about it. That's why. And my own mamma cried, and shut the door, and wouldn't let me go in. And Joe pretty near cried, all right. I guess she did, only not when any one was looking. Her eyes are awful red, anyway.” Buddy took great, ravenous bites of the bread and butter, and eyed Ford unwinkingly.
“What's disslepointed?” he demanded abruptly, after he had given himself a white mustache with his glass of milk.
“Why do you want to know?”
“That's what my own mamma is, and that's what Joe is. Only my own mamma is it about you, and Joe's it about mamma. Say, did you lick Dick? Joe told my own mamma she wisht you'd killed him. Joe's awful mad to-day. I guess she's mad at Dick, because he ain't much of a fighter. Did you lick him easy? Did you paste him one in the jaw?”
Josephine entered then with Ford's belated tea. Her eyelids were pink, as Buddy had told him; and she did not look at him while she poured the tea.
“Kate has a sick headache,” she explained. primly, “and I did the best I could with lunch. I hope it's——”
“It is,” Ford interrupted reassuringly. “Everything is fine and dandy.”
“You didn't cook any potatoes!” Buddy charged mercilessly. “And Ford's too drunk to put the butter on right. I'm going to tell my dad 'at next time he goes to Oregon I'm going along. This outfit will just go to the devil if he stays a month!”
“Where did you hear that, Bud?” Josephine asked, carefully avoiding a glance at Ford.
“Well, Dick said it would go to the devil. I guess,” he added on his own account, with a meaning glance at the table, “it's on the trail right now.”
Ford looked at Josephine, opened his lips to say that it might still be headed off, and decided not to speak. There was a stubborn streak in Ford Campbell. She had said some bitter things in her anger; perhaps she had not entirely believed them herself, and perhaps Mrs. Kate had not been accurately quoted by her precocious young son. She may not have said that she was disappointed in Ford. They might not have believed whatever it was Dick told them, and they might still have full confidence in him, Ford Campbell. Still, there was the stubborn streak which would not explain, or defend. So he left the table, and went into his own room without any word save a muttered excuse; and that in spite of the fact that Josephine looked full at him at last, and with a wistfulness that moved him almost to the point of taking her in his arms and kissing away the worry—if he could.
He went up to the table where stood the jug, looked at it, lifted it, and set it down again. Then he lifted it again, and pulled the cork out with a jerk, and wondered if the sound of it had reached through the wall to the ears of Josephine. He was guilty of hoping so. He put back the cork—this time carefully—walked to the outer door, turned the key, opened the door, and closed it again with a slam. Then, with a grim set of the lips, he walked softly into the closet and pulled the door nearly shut.
He knew there was every chance that Josephine, if she were interested in his movements, would go immediately into the sitting room, where she could see the path and make sure that he had really left the house. But she did not. She sat long enough in the dining room for Ford to call himself a name or two, and to feel exceedingly foolish over the trick, and to decide that it was too childish for a grown man. Then she pushed back her chair, came straight toward his room, opened the door, and looked in. Ford knew, for he saw her through the crack he had left in the closet doorway. She stood there looking at the jug on the table, then went up and lifted it, much as Ford had done, and pulled the cork with a certain angry defiance. Perhaps, he guessed shrewdly, Josephine also felt rather foolish at what she was doing!
Josephine turned the jug to the light, shut one eye into an adorable squint, and peered in. Then she set the jug down and pushed the cork slowly into place; and her face was puzzled. Ford could have laughed aloud when he saw it; but, instead, he held his breath for fear she should discover him. She stood very still for a minute or two, staring at nothing at all; moved the jug into the exact place where it had stood before, and went out of the room on her toes.
So did Ford, for that matter; and he was in a cold terror lest she should look out and see him walking down the path where he should logically have walked more than five minutes before. He did not dare to turn and look—until he was without the gate. Then inspiration came to aid him, and he went back boldly, stepped upon the porch with no effort at silence, opened his door, and went in as one who has a right there.
He heard the click of dishes, which told she was clearing the table, and he breathed freer. He walked across the room, took the jug, and hid it in the closet, and then went out with his heart in its proper position in his chest. Ford, as a man, was unused to feeling his heart rise to his palate, and the sensation was more novel than agreeable. When he went again down the path, there was a certain exhilaration in his step. He thought in clear-cut sentences, as if he were speaking, instead of those vague, almost wordless impressions which fill the brain ordinarily.
“She's keeping cases—she must care a little, or she wouldn't do that. She's worried a whole lot. I could see that all along. Down at the bunk house she called me Ford twice; and she said it meant a lot to her, whether I make good or not. I wonder—— Lordy me! A man could make good, all right, and do it easy, if she cared. She don't know what to think—that jug staying right up to high-water mark like that!” He laughed then silently, and dwelt upon the picture she had made while she was standing before the table.
“Lord, she'd want to kill me if she knew I was cached in that closet; but I just had a hunch—that is, if she cared anything about it. I wonder if she did really say she wished I'd killed Dick.
“Anyway, I can fight it now—with her keeping cases on the quiet. I know I can fight it—— Lordy me, I've got to fight it! I've got to make good; that's all there is about it. Wonder what she'll think when she sees that jug don't go down any! Wonder—oh, heliotrope! She'd never care anything about me. And if she did——” His thoughts went hazy with vague speculation, then clarified suddenly into one hard fact, like a rock thrusting up through the lazy sweep of a windless tide. “If she did care, I couldn't do anything. I'm married.” His step lost a little of its spring then, and he went into the bunk house with much the same expression on his face as when he had left it an hour or so before.
He did not see Dick. The other boys watched him covertly, it seemed to him, and showed a disposition to talk among themselves. Jim was whistling cheerfully in the kitchen. He turned his head and laughed when Ford went in.
“I found a dead soldier behind the sack of spuds,” he announced, and produced an empty bottle, mate to the one Ford had put in his pocket. “And Dick didn't seem to have any appetite at all, and Mose is still in Sleepytown. I guess that's all the news at this end of the line. Er—hope everything is all right at the house?”
“Far as I could see it was,” Ford replied, with an inner sense of evasion. “I guess we'll just let her go as she looks, Jim. Did you say anything to the boys?”
Jim reddened under his tan, but he laughed again disarmingly. “I cannot tell a lie,” he confessed honestly. “It was too good to keep all to myself. I'm the most generous fellow you ever saw when it comes to passing along a good story that won't hurt anybody's digestion. You don't care, do you? The joke ain't on you.”
“If you'd asked me about it, I'd have said keep it under your hat. But——”
“And that would have been a sin and a shame,” argued Jim, licking a finger he had just scorched on a hot kettle handle. “The boys aren't lacking in any sense of humor that I ever noticed. And they can appreciate a joke—on Dick. They know him pretty well. Still, if I'd known you didn't want——”
“Lordy me, Jim, you needn't worry about it. Say, you'll have to stay here till to-morrow from the looks. The lower fence I'll ride myself this, afternoon. Did you get clear around the Pinnacle field?”
“I sure did—and she's tight as a drum.”
So life, which had loomed big and bitter before the soul of Ford, slipped back into the groove of daily routine.

### Chapter XI.

Into its groove of routine slipped life at the Double Cross; but it did not move quite as smoothly as before. It was as if the “hill” which Ford was climbing suffered small landslides here and there which threatened to block the trail below. Sometimes—still keeping to the simile—it was but a pebble or two kicked loose by Ford's heel; sometimes what came near being a bowlder which one must dodge.
Dick, for instance, no doubt likened Mose to a real landslide when he came at him the next day with a roar of rage and the rolling-pin. Mose had sobered to the point where he wondered how it had all happened, and greatly desired to get his hands in the wool of the “nigger” said to lurk in woodpiles. He asked Jim, with various embellishments of speech, what it was all about, and Jim told him, and told him truly.
“He was trying to queer you with the outfit, Mose; and that's a fact,” he finished; and that was the only exaggeration Jim was guilty of. Dick had probably thought very little of Mose and his ultimate standing with the Double Cross. “And he was trying to queer Ford—but you can search me for the reason why he didn't make good there.”
Mose was a self-centered individual, like many of us. He wasted a minute, perhaps, thinking of the trick upon Ford; but he spent all of that forenoon, and well into the afternoon, in deep meditation upon the affair as it concerned himself. And the first time Dick showed up he got the result of Mose's reasoning.
“Tried to git me in bad, did yuh? Thought you'd git me fired, hey?” he shouted, as a sort of punctuation to the belaboring. A rolling-pin is considered a more or less fearsome weapon in the hands of a woman, I believe. When wielded by an incensed man who stands close to six feet and weighs a solid two hundred pounds, and who has the headache which follows inevitably in the wake of three pints of whisky administered internally in three hours or so, a rolling-pin should justly be classed as a deadly weapon.
Jim said afterward that he never had believed it possible to act out the rough stuff of the silly supplements in the Sunday papers; but, after seeing Mose perform with that rolling-pin, he was willing to call every edition of the funny papers true to life. It was Jim who helped pull Mose off, so that he felt qualified to judge. It was Jim also who told Ford about the affair, with sober face and eyes that laughed.
“And where's Dick?” Ford asked him, without committing himself upon the justice of the chastisement.
“In the bunk house, lying down,” said Jim dryly. “In the words of the immortal Happy Hooligan, his 'noives hoits.' He hasn't got anything worse than bumps, I guess—but what I saw of them are sure peaches; or maybe Italian prunes would hit them off closer. They're a fine purple shade. I put Three H all over him.”
“I thought Dick was a fighter from Fighterville,” grinned Ford, trying hard to remain noncommittal and making a poor job of it.
“Well, he is when he can stand up and box according to rule, or hit a man when he isn't looking. But my, oh! This wasn't a fight, Ford. This was like an old woman lambasting her son-in-law with an umbrella. Dick never got a chance to begin. Whee-ee! Mose sure can handle a rolling-pin some!”
Ford went up to the house to his supper, and to the constrained atmosphere which was telling on his nerves more severely than did the gallon jug in his closet and the moral effort it cost to keep that jug full to the neck.
He went in quietly, threw his hat on the bed, and sat down with an air of discouragement. It was not yet six o'clock, and he knew that Mrs. Kate would not have supper ready; but he wanted a quiet place to think—and he was closer to Josephine, though he would never have admitted to himself that her nearness was any comfort to him. He did admit, however, that the jug with the brown handle and neck pulled him to the room sometimes in spite of himself. He would often take it from the corner of the closet and let his fingers close over the cork; but so far he had never yielded beyond that point. Always he had been able to set the jug back unopened.
He was getting circles under his eyes, and two new creases had formed on each side of his whimsical lips, and a line was coming between his eyebrows; but he had not opened the jug, and it had been in his possession thirty-six hours. Thirty-six hours is not long, to be sure—when life runs smoothly, with slight incidents to emphasize the figures on the watch; but it may seem eternity to the poor devil on the rack.
Just now Ford was trying to forget that a gallon of whisky stood in the right-hand corner of his closet, behind a pair of half-worn riding boots that pinched his instep so that he seldom wore them; and that he had only to take the jug out from behind the boots, pull the cork, and lift the jug to his lips——
He caught himself leaning forward and staring at the closet door until his eyes ached with the strain. He drew back, and passed his hand over his forehead. It ached, and he wanted to think about what he ought to do with Dick. He did not like to discharge him without first consulting Mrs. Kate, for Ches Mason was in the habit of talking things over with her, he knew. But he felt too far away from Mrs. Kate for any discussion whatever.
Besides, he knew he could prove absolutely nothing against Dick, if Dick were disposed toward flat denial. He might suspect—but the facts showed Ford the aggressor, and Mose also. What if Mrs. Kate declined to believe that Dick had put that jug of whisky in the kitchen, and had afterward given it to Ford? Ford had no means of knowing just what tale Dick had told her; but he did know that Mrs. Kate eyed him doubtfully, and that her conversation was forced and her manner constrained.
And Josephine was worse. Josephine had not spoken to him all that day. At breakfast she had not been present, and at dinner she had kept her eyes upon her plate, and said nothing to any one.
He wished Mason was home so that he could leave. It wouldn't matter then, he tried to believe, what he did. He even dwelt upon the desire of Mason's return to the extent of calculating, with his eyes upon the fancy calendar on the wall opposite, the exact time of his absence. Ten days—there was no hope of release for another week, at least; and Ford sighed unconsciously when he thought of it; for, although a week is not long, there was Josephine refusing to look at him, and there was Dick—and there was the jug in the closet.
As to Josephine, there was no help for it. He could not avoid her without making the avoidance plain to all observers, and Ford was proud. As to Dick, he would not send him off without some proof that he had broken an unwritten law of the Double Cross and brought whisky to the ranch. He had no proof of that; and as to his suspicions—well, he considered that Dick had almost paid the penalty for having roused them, and the matter would have to rest where it was; for Ford was just. As to the jug, he could empty it upon the ground and be done with that particular form of temptation; but he felt sure that Josephine was secretly “keeping cases” on the jug; and Ford was stubborn.
That night Ford did not respond to the tinkle of the tea bell. His head ached abominably, and he did not want to see Josephine's averted face opposite to him at the table, so he lay still upon the bed, where he had finally thrown himself, and let the bell tinkle until it was tired.
They sent Buddy in to see why he did not come. Buddy looked at him with the round, curious eyes of precocious childhood, and went back and reported that Ford wasn't asleep, but was just lying there mad. Ford heard the shrill, little voice innocently maligning him, and swore to himself; but he did not move, for all that. He lay thinking, and fighting discouragement and thirst, while little table sounds came through the partition and made a clicking accompaniment to his thoughts.
If he were free, he was wondering between spells of temptation, would it do any good? Would Josephine care? There was no answer to that, or, if there was, he did not know it.
After a while the two women began talking. He judged that Buddy had left them, because it was madness to speak freely before him. At first he paid no attention to what they were saying, beyond a grudging joy in just hearing Josephine's voice. It had come to that with Ford. But when he heard his name spoken, and by her, he lifted shamelessly to an elbow, and listened, glad that the walls were so thin, and that those who dwell in thin-partitioned houses are prone to forget that the other rooms may not be quite empty. They two spent most of their waking hours alone together, and habit breeds carelessness always.
“Do you suppose he's drinking?” Mrs. Kate asked, and her voice was full of uneasiness. “Chester says he's terrible when he gets started. I was sure he was perfectly safe, and I just can't stand it to have him like this. Dick told me he's drinking a little all the time, and there's no telling when he'll break out and—— Oh, I think it's perfectly terrible.”
“Hsh-sh!” warned Josephine.
“He went out quite a while ago. I heard him,” said Mrs. Kate, with rash certainty. “He hasn't been himself since that day he fought Dick. He must be——”
“But how could he?” Josephine's voice interrupted sharply. “That jug he's got is full yet.”
Ford could imagine Mrs. Kate shaking her head with the wisdom born of matrimony. “Don't you suppose he could keep putting in water?” she asked pityingly. Ford almost choked when he heard that.
“I don't believe he would.” Josephine's tone was dubious. “It doesn't seem to me that a man would do that. He'd think he was just spoiling what was left. That,” she declared, with a flash of inspiration, “is what a woman would do. And a man always does something different.” There was a pathetic note in the last sentence which struck Ford oddly.
“Don't think you know men, my dear, until you've been married to one for eight years or so,” said Mrs. Kate patronizingly. “When you've been tied up——”
“Oh, for mercy's sake, do you think they're all alike?” Josephine's voice was tart and impatient. “I know enough about men to know they're all different. You can't judge one by another. And I don't believe Ford is drinking at all. He's just——”
“Just what?—since you know so well!” Mrs. Kate was growing ironical.
“He's trying not to—and worrying.” Her voice lowered until it took love to hear it. Ford did hear, and his breath came fast. He did not hear Mrs. Kate's reply. He was not in love with Mrs. Kate, and he was busily engaged in letting the words of Josephine soak into his very soul, and in telling himself over and over that she understood. It seemed to him a miracle of intuition that she should sense the fight he was making; and, since he felt that way about it, it was just as well he did not know that Jim Felton sensed it quite as keenly—and with a man's greater understanding of how bitter a fight it was, and for that reason a deeper sympathy.
“I wish Chester was here!” wailed Mrs. Kate across the glow of his exultant thoughts. “I'm afraid to say anything to him myself, he's so queer. It's a shame, because he's so splendid when he's—himself.”
“He's as much himself now as ever he was,” Josephine defended hotly. “When he's drinking, he's altogether another——”
“You never saw him drunk.” Mrs. Kate pointed to the weak spot in Josephine's defense of him. “Dick says that——”
“Oh, do you believe everything Dick says? A week ago you were against Dick and all enthusiasm for Ford.”
“You were flirting with Dick then, and you'd hardly treat Ford decently. And Ford hadn't gone to drink——”
“Will you hush?” There were tears of anger in Josephine's voice. “He isn't, I tell you.”
“What does he keep that jug in the closet for? And every few hours he comes up to the house and goes into his room—and he never did that before. And have you noticed his eyes? He'll scarcely talk any more, and he just pretends to eat. At dinner to-day he scarcely touched a thing. It's a sure sign, my dear.”
Ford was growing tired of that sort of thing. It dimmed the radiance of Josephine's belief in him to have Mrs. Kate so sure of his weakness. He got up from the bed as quietly as he could and left the house. He was even more thoughtful after that, but not quite so gloomy—if one cared enough for his moods to make a fine distinction.
Have you ever observed the fact that many of life's grimmest battles and deepest tragedies scarce ripple the surface of trivial things? We are always rubbing elbows with the big issues and never knowing anything about it. Certainly no one at the Double Cross guessed what was always in the mind of the foreman. Jim thought he was “sore” because of Dick. Dick thought Ford was jealous of him, and trying to think of some scheme to “play even” without coming to open war. Mrs. Kate was positive, in her purely feminine mind—which was a very good mind, understand, but somewhat inadequate when brought to bear upon the big problems of life, and upon human nature—that he was half intoxicated most of the time. Josephine thought—just what she said, probably, upon the chill day when she calmly asked Ford at the breakfast table if he would let her go with him to Long Ridge.
Ford had casually remarked, in answer to a different question from Mrs. Kate, that he was going to ride out and bring in Rambler. He was afraid of a storm, he said. It looked like snow, and Rambler could make the trip all right, much better than he could rustle on the range. He had meant to bring him in before, but had put it off from day to day.
“Can I go?” teased Buddy from sheer force of habit. No one ever mentioned going anywhere, but Buddy shot that question into the conversation.
“No, you can't. You can't go anywhere with that cold,” his mother vetoed promptly; and Buddy, whimpering over his hot cakes, knew well the futility of argument when Mrs. Kate used that tone of finality.
“Will you let me go?” Josephine asked unexpectedly, and looked straight at Ford. But, though her glance was direct, it was unreadable; and Ford mentally threw up his hands after one good look at her.
“Sure, you can go,” he said, with cautious brevity.
Ford made no attempt to understand her any more. He was carefully giving her the lead, as he would have explained it, and was merely following suit until he got a chance to trump; but he was beginning to have a discouraged feeling that, the game was hers, and that he might as well lay down his hand and be done with it. Which, when he brought the simile back to practical affairs, meant that he was thinking seriously of leaving the ranch and the country just as soon as Mason returned. He was thinking of trying the Argentine Republic for a while, if he could sell the section of wild land which he had bought rashly a few years before while he was getting rid of his inheritance.
She did not offer any excuse for the rather startling request, as most women would have done. Neither did she thank him, with lips or with eyes, for his quick consent. She seemed distrait—preoccupied, as if she, also, were considering some weighty question.
Ford pushed back his chair, watching her furtively. She rose with Kate, and glanced toward the window.
“I suppose I shall need my heaviest sweater,” she remarked practically, and as if the whole affair were too commonplace for discussion. “It does look threatening enough. How soon will you want to start?” This without looking toward Ford at all.
“Right away, if that suits you.” Ford was still watchful, as if he had not quite given up hope of reading her meaning.
She told him she would be ready by the time he had saddled; and she came and stood in the stable door while he was cinching the saddle on the horse he meant to ride.
“I hope you haven't given me Dude,” she said unemotionally. “He's supposed to be gentle—but he bucked me off that day I sprained my ankle, and all the excuse he had was that a rabbit jumped out from a bush almost under his nose. I've lost faith in him since. Oh—it's Shorty, is it? I'm glad of that. Shorty's a dear—and he has the easiest gallop of any horse on the ranch. Have you tried him yet, Ford?”
The heart of Ford lifted in his chest at her tone and her words along toward the last. He forgot the chill of her voice in the beginning, and he dwelt greedily upon the fact that once more she had called him Ford. But his joy died suddenly when he led his horse out and discovered that Dick and Jim Felton were coming down the path, within easy hearing of her. Ford did not know women very well; but most men are born with a rudimentary understanding of them. He suspected that her intimacy of tone was meant for Dick's benefit; and when they had ridden three or four miles, and her share of the conversation during that time consisted of “Yes” twice, “No” three times, and one “Indeed! he was sure of it.
So Ford began to wonder why she came at all—unless that, also, was meant to discipline Dick—and his own mood turned a silent one. He did not, he told himself indignantly, much relish being used as a club to beat some other man into good behavior.
They rode almost to Long Ridge before Ford discovered that Josephine was stealing glances at his face whenever she thought he was not looking, and that the glances were questioning, and might almost be called timid. He waited until he was sure he was not mistaken, and then turned his head unexpectedly, and smiled into her startled eyes.
“What is it?” he asked, still smiling at her. “I won't bite. Say it, why don't you?”
She bit her lips and looked away.
“I wanted to ask something—ask you to do something,” she said, after a minute. And then hurriedly, as if she feared her courage might ebb and leave her stranded. “I wish you'd give me that—jug!”
Sheer surprise held Ford silent, staring at her.
“I don't ask many favors—I wish you'd grant just that one. I wouldn't ask another.”
“What do you want of it?”
“Oh——” She stopped, then plunged on recklessly: “It's getting on my nerves so! And if you gave it to me, you wouldn't have to fight the temptation——”
“There's plenty more where that came from,” he reminded her.
“But it wouldn't be right where you could get it any time the craving came. Won't you let me take it?” He had never heard that tone from her; but he fought down the thrill of it, and held himself rigidly calm.
“Oh, I don't know—the jug's doing all right where it is,” he evaded. What he wanted most was to get at her real object, and, manlike, to know beyond doubt whether she really cared whether he “made good,” and why.
“But you don't—you never touch it,” she argued. “I know, because—well, because every day I look into it. I suppose you'll say I have no right, that it's spying, or something. But I don't care for that. And I can see that it's worrying you dreadfully. And if you don't drink any of it, why won't you let me have it?”
“If I don't drink it, what difference does it make who has it?” he countered.
“I'm afraid there'll be a time when you'll yield, just because you are blue and discouraged—or something; whatever mood it is that makes the temptation harder to resist. I know myself that things are harder to fight some days than they are others.” She stopped and looked at him in that enigmatical way she had. “You may not know it—but I've been staying here just to see whether you fail or succeed. I thought I understood a little of why you came, and I—I stayed.” She leaned and twisted a wisp of Shorty's mane nervously, and Ford noticed how the color came and went in the cheek nearest him.
“I—oh, it's awfully hard to say what I want to say and not have it sound different,” she began again, without looking at him. “But if you don't understand what I mean——” Her teeth clicked suggestively.
Ford leaned to her. “Say it, anyway, and take a chance,” he urged; and his voice was like a kiss, whether he knew it or not. He did know that she caught her breath at the words or the tone, and that the color flamed a deeper tint in her cheek, and then faded to a faint glow.
“What I mean is that I appreciate the way you have acted all along. I—it wasn't an easy situation to meet, and you have met it like a man—and a gentleman. I hated you at first, and I misunderstood you completely. I'm ashamed to confess it, but it's true. And I want to see you make good in this other thing you have attempted; and, if there's anything on earth that I can do to help you, I want you to let me do it. You will, won't you?” She looked at him then with clear, honest eyes. “It's my way of wanting to thank you for—for not taking any advantage, or trying to, of your position that night.”
Ford's own cheeks went hot. “I thought you knew all along that I wasn't a cur, at least,” he said harshly. “I never knew before that you were afraid of me that night. If I'd known that—but I thought you just didn't like me, and let it go at that. And what I said I meant. You needn't feel that you have anything to thank me for. I haven't done a thing that deserves thanks—or fear, either.”
“I thought you understood when I left——”
“I didn't worry much about it, one way or the other,” he cut in. “I hunted around for you, of course; and, when I saw you'd pulled out for good, I went over the hill and camped. I didn't get the note till next morning; and I don't know,” he added, with a brief smile, “as that did much toward making me understand. You just said to wait till some one came after me. Well, I didn't wait.” He laughed, and leaned toward her again. “Now there seems a chance of our being—pretty good friends,” he said, in the caressing tone he had used before, and of which he was utterly unconscious. “We won't quarrel about that night, will we? You got home all right, and so did I. And when we get poor old Rambler where he can bury his nose in a pile of good bluejoint, there won't be a thing to worry about. We'll forget all about it. Won't we?” He laid a hand on the horn of her saddle, so that they rode close together, and tried futilely to read what was in her face, since she did not speak.
Josephine stared blankly at the brown slope before them. Her lips were set firmly together, and her brows were contracted; and her gloved fingers gripped the reins tightly. She paid not the slightest attention to Ford's hand upon her saddle horn, nor to the steady gaze of his eyes. Later, when Ford observed the rigidity of her whole pose, and sensed that mental withdrawing which needs no speech to push one off from the more intimate ground of companionship, he wondered a little. Without in the least knowing why he felt rebuffed, he took away his hand, and swung his horse slightly away from her; his own back stiffened a little in response to the chilled atmosphere.
“Yes,” she said at last, “we'll forget all about it, Mr. Campbell.”
“You called me Ford a while ago,” he hinted.
“Did I? One forms the habit of picking up a man's given name, here in the West, I find. I'm sorry——”
“I don't want you to be sorry. I want you to do it again; all the time,” he added boldly.
He caught the gleam of her eyes under her heavy lashes as she glanced at him sidelong.
“If you go looking at me out of the corner of your eyes,” he threatened recklessly, kicking his horse closer, “I'm liable to kiss you!”
And he did, before she could draw away.
“I've been kinda thinking, maybe, I'm in love with you, Josephine,” he murmured, holding her close. “And now I'm dead sure of it. And if you won't love me back, why—there'll be something doing, that's all.”
“Yes? And what would you do, please?” Her tone was icy, but he somehow felt that the ice was very, very thin, and that her heart beat warm beneath. She drew herself free, and he let her go.
“I dunno,” he confessed whimsically. “But, Lordy me, ['d sure do something!”
“You'd get drunk, I suppose you mean?”
“No, I don't mean that.” He stopped and considered, his forehead creased, as if he were half angry at the imputation. “I'm pretty sure where I stand on that subject. I've done a lot of thinking since I hit the Double Cross—and I've cut out the whisky for good.
“I know what you thought, and what Mrs. Kate thinks yet; and I'll admit it was mighty tough scratching for a couple of days after I got hold of that jug. But I found out which was master—and it wasn't the booze.” He looked at her with eyes that shone. “Josie, girl, I took a long chance—but I put it to myself this way, when the jug seemed to be on top: I told myself it was whisky or you. Not that exactly, either. It's hard to say just what I do mean. Not you, maybe—but what you stand for. What I could get out of life if I was straight and lived clean, and had a little woman like you. It may not be you at all. That's as you——”
He stopped, as if some one had laid a hand over his mouth. It was not as she said. It might have been, only for that drunken marriage of his. And never before had he hated whisky as bitterly as he did then, when he remembered what it had done for him that night in Sunset, and what it was doing now. It closed his lips upon what he would have given much to be able to say; for he was a man with all the instincts of chivalry and honor—and he loved the girl. It was, he realized bitterly, just because he did love her so well that he could not say more. He had said too much already; but her nearness had gone to his head, and he had forgotten that he was not free to say what he felt.
Perhaps Josephine mistook his sudden silence for trepidation, or humility. At any rate, she reined impulsively close, and reached out and caught the hand hanging idly at his side.
“Ford, I'm no coquette,” she said straightforwardly, with a blush for maiden modesty's sake. “I believe you; absolutely and utterly I believe you. If you had been different at first—if you had made any overtures whatever toward—toward love-making, I should have despised you. I never would have loved you in this world. But you didn't. You kept at such a distance that I—I couldn't help thinking about you and studying you. And lately—when I knew you were fighting the—the habit—I loved you for the way you did fight. I was afraid, too. I used to slip into your room every time you left it, and look; and I just ached to help you! But I knew I couldn't do a thing; and that was the hardest part. All I could do was stand back—clear back out of sight, and hope. And—and love you, too, Ford. I'm proud of you. I'm proud to think that I—I love a man that is a man; that doesn't sit down and whine because a fight is hard, or give up and say it's no use. I do despise a moral weakling, Ford. I don't mind what you have been; it's what you are that counts with me. And you're a man, every inch of you. I'm not a bit afraid you'll weaken. Only,” she added, half apologetically, “I did want you to give me the—the jug, because I couldn't bear to see you look so worried.” She gave his fingers an adorable little squeeze, and flung his hand away from her, and laughed in a way to set his heart pounding heavily in his chest. “Now you know where I stand, Mr. Man,” she cried lightly; “so let's say no more about it. I bet [ can beat you across this flat.” She laughed again, wrinkled her nose at him impertinently, and was off in a run.
If she had waited, Ford would have told her. If she had given him a chance, he would have told her afterward; but she did not. She was extremely careful not to let their talk become intimate after that. She laughed. She raced Shorty almost to the point of abuse. She chattered about everything under the sun that came into her mind, except their own personal affairs, or anything that could possibly lead up to the subject.
Ford, for a time, watched for an opening honestly; saw at last the impossibility of telling her—unless, indeed, he shouted, “Say, I'm a married man!” to her without preface or extenuating explanation, and yielded finally to the reprieve the Fates sent him.

### Chapter XII.

He spent the rest of that day, and all of the night that followed, in thinking what would be the best and easiest method of gaining the point he wished to reach. All along he had been uncomfortably aware of his matrimonial entanglement, and had meant, as soon as he conveniently could, to try and discover who was his wife, and how best to free himself and her. He had half expected that she herself would do something to clear the mystery. She had precipitated the marriage, he constantly reminded himself, and it was reasonable to expect that she would do something—what, Ford could only conjecture.
When he faced Josephine across the breakfast table the next morning, and caught the shy glance she gave him when Mrs. Kate was not looking, a plan he had half formed crystallized into a determination. He would not tell her anything about it until he knew just what he was up against, and how long it was going to take him to free himself. And, since he could not do anything about it while he rode and planned and gave orders at the Double Cross, he swallowed his breakfast rather hurriedly and went out to find Jim Felton.
“Say, Jim,” he began, when he ran that individual to earth in the stable where, with a pair of sheep shears, he was roaching the mane of a shaggy, old cow pony to please Buddy, who wanted to make him look like a circus horse even if there was no hope of his ever acting like one. “I'm going to hand you the lines and let you drive for a few days. I've got to scout around on business of my own, and I don't know just how long it's going to take me. I'm going right away—to-day.”
“Yeah?” Jim poised the shears in air and regarded him quizzically over the pony's neck. “Going to pass me foreman's privilege—to hire and fire?” he grinned. “Because I may as well tell you that if you do, Dick won't be far behind you on the trail.”
“Oh, darn Dick! I'll fire him myself before I leave. Yes,” he added, thinking swiftly of Josephine as the object of Dick's desires, “that's what I'll do. Maybe it'll save a lot of trouble while I'm gone. He's a tricky son of a gun.”
“You're dead right. He is,” Jim agreed. And then dryly: “Grandmother just died?”
“Oh, shut up! This ain't an excuse—it's business. I've just got to go, and that's all there is to it. I'll fix things with the missus, and tell her you're in charge. Anyway, I won't be gone any longer than I can help.”
“I believe that, too,” said Jim softly, and busied himself with the shears.
Ford looked at him sharply, in doubt as to just how much or how little Jim meant by that. He shrugged his shoulders finally, and went away to tell Mrs. Kate, and found that a matter which required more diplomacy than he ever suspected he possessed. But he did tell her, and he hoped that she believed the reason he gave for going, and also had some faith in his assurance that he would be back, probably, in a couple of days—or as soon afterward as might be.
“There's nothing but chores around the ranch, and Jack will ride fence,” he explained unnecessarily to cover his discomfort at her coldness. “Jim can look after things just.as well as I can. There won't be any need to start feeding the calves unless it storms; and if it does, Jim and Jack will go ahead, all right. I'm going to let Dick and Curly go. We don't need more than two men from now on. If Ches comes before I get back——”
“I wish Chester was here now,” said Mrs. Kate ambiguously.
Ford did not ask her why she wished that. He told her good-by as hastily as if he had to run to catch a train, and left her. He hoped he would be lucky enough to see Josephine—and then he hoped he would not see her, after all. It would be easier to go without her clear eyes asking him why.
What he meant to do first was to find Rock, and see if he had been sober enough that night to remember what happened, and could give him some clew as to the woman's identity and whereabouts. If he failed there, he intended to hunt up the preacher. That, also, presented certain difficulties; but Ford was in the mood to overcome obstacles. Once he discovered who the woman was, it seemed to him that there should be no great amount of trouble in getting free. As he understood it, he was not the man she had intended to marry; and not being the man she wanted, she certainly could not be overanxious to cling to him.
While he galloped down the trail to town, he went over the whole thing again in his mind, to see if there might be some simpler plan than the one he had formed in the night.
“No, sir, it's Rock I've got to see first,” he concluded. “But Lord. only knows where I'll find him—Rock never does camp twice in the same place. Never knew him to stay more than a month with one outfit. But I'll find him, all right.”
And, by one of those odd twists of circumstances which sets men to wondering if there is such a thing as telepathy and a specifically guiding hand, and the like, it was Rock, and none other, whom he met fairly in the trail before he had gone another mile.
“Weill, I'll be gol-darned!” Ford whispered incredulously to himself, and pulls up short in the trail to wait for him.
Rock came loping up with elbows flapping loosely, as was his ungainly habit. His grin was wide and golden as of yore, his hat at the same angle over his right eyebrow.
“Gawd bless you, brother, and may peace ride behind your cantle!” he declaimed unctuously—for Rock was a character, in his way. “Whither wendest thou?”
“My wending is all over for the present,” said Ford, wheeling his horse short around that he might ride alongside the other. “I started out to hunt you up, you old devil. How are you, anyway?”
“It is well with me, and well with my soul—what little I've got—but it ain't so well with my winter grubstake. I'm just as tickled to see you as you ever dare to be to meet up with me, and that's no lie. I heard you've got a stand-in with the Double Cross, and, seeing they ain't onto my little peculiarities, I thought I'd ride out and see if I couldn't work you for a soft snap. Got any ducks out there you want led to water?”
“Maybe—I dunno. I just canned two men this morning before I left.” Ford was debating with himself how best to approach the subject to him most important.
“Good ee-nough! I can take the place of those two men; eat their share of grub, do their share of snoring, and shirk their share of work, drink their share of booze—oh, lovely! But, in the words of the dead, immortal Shakespeare, 'What's eating you?' You look to me as if you hadn't enjoyed the delights of a good, stiff jag since——” He waved a hand vaguely. “Ain't a scar on you, so help me!” He regarded Ford with frank curiosity.
“Oh, yes, there is. I've got the hide peeled off two knuckles, and one of my thumbs is just getting so it will move without being greased,” Ford assured him, and then went straight at what was on his mind.
“Say, Rock, I was told that you had a hand in my getting married back in Sunset that night.”
Rock made his horse back until it nearly fell over a rock. His face showed every exaggerated symptom of terror.
“I couldn't help it,” he wailed. “Spare muh—for my mother's sake; oh, spare muh life!” Whereat Ford laughed, just as Rock meant that he should do. “You licked Bill for that twice, they tell me,” Rock went on, quitting his foolery and coming up again. “And you licked the preacher that night, and—so the tale runneth—like to have put the whole town on the jinks. Is there anything in particular you'd like to do to me?”
“I just want you to tell me who I married—if you can.” Ford reddened as the other stared, but he did not stop. “I was so darned full, I let the whole business ooze out of my memory, and I haven't been able to——”
Rock was leaning over the saddle horn, howling and watery-eyed. Ford looked at him with a dawning suspicion.
“It did strike me, once or twice,” he said grimly, “that the whole thing was a put-up job. If you fellows ribbed up a josh like that, and let it go as far as this, the Lord have mercy on your souls—I won't!”
But Rock only waved him off weakly, so Ford waited until he had recovered. Even then it took some talking to convince Rock that the thing was serious, and not to be treated any longer as a joke.
“Why, damn it, man, I'm in love with a girl, and I want to marry her if I can get rid of this other darned, mysterious, tomfool of a woman,” Ford gritted at last, in sheer desperation. “Or, if it's just a josh, by this and by that I mean to find it out.”
Rock sobered then. “It ain't any josh,” he said, with convincing earnestness. “You got married, all right enough. And if it's as you say, Ford, I sure am sorry for it. I don't know the girl's name. I'd know her quick enough if I should see her, but I can't tell you who she was.”
Ford swore, of course. And Rock listened sympathetically until he was done.
“That's the stuff—get it out of your system, Ford, and then you'll feel better; and we can put our heads together and see if there isn't some way to beat this combination.”
“Could you spot the preacher, do you reckon?” asked Ford more calmly.
“I could—if he didn't get a sight of us first,” Rock admitted guardedly. “Name of Sanderson, I believe. I've seen him around Garbin. He could tell—he must have some record of it; but would he?”
“Don't you know, even, why she came and glommed onto me like that?” Ford's face was as anxious as his tone.
“Only what you told me, confidentially, in a corner afterward,” said Rock regretfully. “Maybe you told it straight, and maybe you didn't; there's no banking on a man's imagination when he's full. But the way you told it to me was this:
“You said the girl told you that she was working for some queer old party—an old lady with lots of dough, and she made her will and give her money all to some institution—hospital, or some darned thing, I forget just what, or else you didn't say. Only, if this girl would marry her son within a certain time, he could have the wad. Seems the son was something of a high roller, and she knew he'd blow it in if it was turned over to him without any ballast like; and the girl was supposed to be the ballast, to hold him steady. So the old lady—or else it was the girl—writes to this fellow, and he agrees to hook up with the lady, and take the money and behave himself. Near as I could make it out, the time was just about up before the girl took matters into her own hand and come out on a hunt for this Frank Cameron. How she happened to sink her rope on you instead, and take her turns before she found out her mistake, you'll have to ask her—if you ever see her again.
“But this much you told me—and I think you got it straight: The girl was willing to marry you—or Frank Cameron—so he could get what belonged to him. She wasn't going to do any more, though; and you told me”—Rock's manner became very impressive here—“that you promised her, as a man and a gentleman, that you wouldn't ever bother her, and that she was to travel her own trail and didn't want the money. She just wanted to dodge that fool will, seems like. Strikes me I'd 'a' let the fellow go plumb to Guinea if I was in her place—but women get queer notions of duty, and the like of that, sometimes. Looks to me like a fool thing for a woman to do, anyway.”
Though they talked a good while about it, that was all the real information which Ford could gain. He would have to find the minister, and persuade him to show the record of the marriage; and, after that, he would have to find the girl.
Before they reached that definite conclusion, the storm which had been brewing for several days swooped down upon them, and drove Ford to the alternative of riding in the teeth of it to town, which was not only unpleasant, but dangerous if it grew any worse, or retracing his steps to the Double Cross and waiting there until it was over. So that is what he did, with Rock to bear him willing company.
They met Dick and Curly on the way; and, though Ford stopped them and suggested that they turn back also, neither would do it. Curly intimated plainly that the joys of town were calling to him from afar, and that facing a Thanksgiving storm was merely calculated to make his destination more alluring by contrast. “Turn back with two months' wages heating up my inside pocket? Oh, no!” he laughed, and rode on. Dick did not say why, but he rode on also. Ford turned in the saddle, and looked after them as they disappeared in a swirl of fine snow.
“That's what I ought to do, all right,” he said; “but I'm not going to do it, all the same.”
“Which only goes to prove,” bantered Rock, “that the Double Cross pulls harder than all the preacher could tell you. I wonder if there isn't a girl at the Double Cross now.”
“There is,” Ford confessed, with a grin of embarrassment. “And you shut up, Rock!”
“I just had a hunch there was,” Rock permitted himself to say meekly before he dropped the subject.
It was ten minutes before Ford spoke again.
“I'll take you up to the house and introduce you to her, Rock, if you'll behave yourself,” he offered then, with a shyness in his manner that nearly set Rock off in one of his convulsions of mirth. “But the missus isn't wise—so watch out. And if you don't behave yourself,” he added darkly, “I'll knock your block off.”
“Sure. But my block is going to remain right where it's at,” Rock assured him, which was a tacit promise of as perfect behavior as he could attain.
They looked like snow men when they unsaddled, with the powdery snow beaten into the very. fabric of their clothing; and Ford suggested that they go first to the bunk house and “thaw out.” “I'd sure hate to pack all this snow into Mrs, Kate's parlor,” he added whimsically. “She's the kind of housekeeper that grabs the broom the minute you're gone, to sweep your tracks off the carpet. Awful nice, little woman, but——”
“But not The One,” chuckled Rock, treading close upon Ford's heels. “And I'll bet fifteen cents,” he offered rashly, looking up, “that the lady person hitting the high places for the bunk house is The One.”
“How do you know?” Ford demanded, while his eyes gladdened at sight of Josephine with a Navaho blanket flung over her head, running down the path through the blizzard to the bunk-house kitchen.
“Saw her shy when she saw you coming. Came pretty near breaking back on you, too,” Rock explained shrewdly.
They reached the kitchen door together, and Ford threw open the door, and held it for her to pass.
“I came after some of Mose's mincemeat,” she explained hastily. “It's a terrible storm, isn't it? I'm glad it didn't strike yesterday. I thought you were going to be gone for several days.”
Ford presented Rock in the same breath with wishing that Rock was somewhere else; for Mose was not in the kitchen, and he had not had her to himself for twenty-four hours. He was perilously close to forgetting his legal halter when he looked at her.
She was, he thought, about as sweet a picture of a woman as a man need ever look upon, as she stood there with the red Navaho blanket falling back from her dark hair and her wide, honest eyes fixed upon Rock. She was blushing—perhaps she, too, wished Rock was somewhere else. She turned impulsively, set down the basin she had been holding under her arm, and pulled the blanket up so that it framed her face bewitchingly.
“Mose can bring up the mincemeat when he comes—since he isn't here,” she said hurriedly. “We weren't looking for you back—but dinner will be ready in half an hour or so, I think.” She pulled open the door and went out into the storm.
Rock stared at the door, still quivering with the slam she had given it. Then he looked at Ford, and afterward sat down weakly upon a stool, and began dazedly pulling the icicles from his mustache.
“Well—I'll—be—cremated!” he said, in a whisper.
“And what's eating you, Rock?” Ford quizzed gayly. He had seen something in the eyes of Josephine when he met her that had set his blood jumping again. “Did Miss Warden——”
“Miss Warden my granny!” grunted Rock, in a tone of unfathomable disgust. “That there is your wife!”
And Ford just backed up against the wall and stared at him.

### Chapter XIII.

Ford was essentially a man of action. Once Rock had convinced him that the unbelievable was true, he did not waste one minute in trying to deduce the whys and the hows of the case; they could come afterward, and he would have a whole lifetime to figure them out in. What he did first of all was to slap his hat back on his head and start for the house—and the tracks he made in the snow were considerably more than a yard apart. He even forgot to stamp off the snow and scour his boot soles on the rug placed suggestively upon the porch.
He went in, pushed the door nearly shut, and went on, leaving it swinging in the wind until Mrs. Kate, with a shocked “My goodness!” came and shut out the snow and wind, which were despoiling her immaculate parlor.
He went into the dining room, crossed it in three strides, and found Josephine in the kitchen just setting out biscuit materials. He started toward her; but Buddy was following him up, so he stopped first and led Buddy from the room and to his mother.
“I wish you'd kinda close-herd this kid for a while,” he told Mrs. Kate bluntly, and left her looking scared, with an arm around Buddy's neck. When he reached the kitchen again, Josephine was not there; but he found her in the pantry, fumbling nervously for something on a shelf higher than her head; and so he put his arms around her where she was. Pantry or parlor, it made absolutely no difference to Ford just then.
“Say, are you my wife?” is the startling way in which he began, and kissed her hair many times while he waited.
“Why, yes. I thought you knew—why, of course you must have known!” Josephine twisted in his arms so that she could look at him. “What a funny question to ask!” She did not laugh, however, but stared up at him with that keen, measuring look he had hated so at first. “I don't understand you at all, Ford,” she told him, with a puzzled frown. “I haven't all along. I'd think I did, and then you would say something that put me all at sea. What do you mean, anyway? You aren't troubled with any dual consciousness, are you?”
Ford told her then what he meant—and it speaks well, I think, for the good sense of Josephine that she heard him through with neither tears nor anger.
“Of course I knew you had been drinking that night,” she said when he was through. “I saw it after it was too late to—to 'back up,' as you men say. But you talked straight enough; and I never knew I had made a mistake, and you weren't Frank Cameron, till you came here. Then I knew you couldn't be. Chester had known you, you see, when Frank was East, so——”
“What about Frank Cameron, anyway?” Ford demanded jealously. “What made you come out and marry a man you didn't know, and——”
“Oh——” Josephine gave a little, impatient turn of the head. “You couldn't understand—unless you knew his mother. I was sort of related to her, and stayed with her. She was the dearest thing, but—well, queer. I can't say crazy, for she wasn't. She worshiped Frank, and he was wild and wouldn't stay at home. And she felt sure that the right wife would keep him steady—and then she got the notion that I would be the right wife. And after that,” she sighed, “I couldn't wean her from the notion. It grew on her, and she made the will that way, and gave me just six months to find him and marry him. She didn't even know where he was, you see. And she begged—and begged!” Her voice there was rather tragic.
“She wanted Frank to have her money; and she wouldn't give it to him unless I would marry him. And she was sick—and so finally I did promise. I counted,” she confessed naïvely, “on the divorce laws to help me out. Of course, I wouldn't marry a man I didn't know, and—— But it seemed as if I might please her, even if I did hate it terribly. It was worth while, just to see how happy she was after that. So she died, and, of course, I had to keep my promise, if I could.”
“Of course,” Ford murmured against her hair.
“Well, I advertised, and followed every clew I could get; and the time slipped away until it did seem as if I'd have to give it up, as if I never could find him. And then a newspaper clipping sounded as if he might be in this part of the country, and I went to Garbin. Some one told me a man named Cameron was in Sunset. So I got the license—that was the last day, you know; and I hadn't much time—and persuaded Mr. Sanderson to go with me; and I went to Sunset and—and——” She began to laugh nervously.
“Oh, poor, inoffensive you!” she gasped. “I went to the hotel and asked if Mr. Cameron was in town, and they brought you in. I asked you if your name was Frank Cameron, and you said it was. Oh, you——” She gave him an ineffectual shake. “Anyway, it was your own fault, you see, that I married you. So I explained everything, and you agreed to everything—and were perfectly good about it. I told you that I meant to go away again, and that the marriage was to be only a legal form, and you agreed to that also; and you thanked me beautifully for taking so much trouble to save your legacy for you. I can see now, of course, that you weren't a bit like yourself. But I didn't know you then, you see. It was only when you turned to me after the ceremony, and were going to k-kiss me, that I got a whiff of liquor, and knew you had been drinking. I was afraid, then; but when I wouldn't let you kiss me you were nice again.
“And that's all, I think,” she said, with a little sigh. “I came here to Kate. She had been writing to me to come ever since Aunt Jessie—only she was really a second cousin—died, and I never told her about my—my matrimonial difficulties. I had seen a lawyer in Garbin that day about divorces, and I had made up my mind to just wait a year, and then apply for one on the grounds of non-support, or something. You,” she reminded him demurely, “agreed to that, you know.”
“I wasn't in my right mind, so it's no good,” he stated decisively.
“Well—and then in a few days you popped up before me, out there on Long Ridge—and I was scared stiff! I thought you had followed me and weren't going to keep your agreement.”
“Lordy me!” breathed Ford out of the fullness of his emotions.
“Say,” he queried, after an appreciable lapse of time, “what about that Cameron man? He's kinda left out, ain't he?”
“Well, I did all I could. I mailed the marriage certificate to Aunt Jessie's lawyer, and told him where Frank was—or where I thought he was, at least; and then I just dropped out of it. I don't care much,” she said, with a woman's peculiar idea of justice, “if he does lose his mother's money. It's his own fault. He ought to have been the man.”
“Ought he?”
Conversation, from there on, was what lawyers sometimes describe as irrelevant and beside the point; not, however, unimportant—to those two. One other sentence, spoken later, may be said to bear upon the subject.
“Well, but Ford, I married Frank Cameron. And, anyway, I'd like a real wedding.”
What happened after that was just what one might logically expect to happen. There was a real wedding in Mrs. Kate's parlor, and Mrs. Kate was floury and flustered over the dinner she gave them, and profusely friendly with Ford, and anxious to prove her rejuvenated faith in him. (This to satisfy any chance feminine reader.)
What really counted was not so much the wedding, or the supper, or the approbation of Ches Mason and his wife, however. What really does count is the fact that Ford “made good.” With Josephine to make the climb worth while, he did not find it so very hard to reach the top and walk with head erect upon the level above.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1940, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 84 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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