Brand Blotters Part 10

"_Buenos tardes, senorita_," he gave her with a flash of white teeth.

"_Buenos_," she nodded coolly.

But the dancing eyes of her could not deny their pleasure at sight of him.

They had rested upon men as handsome, but upon none who stirred her blood so much.

He was in the leather chaps of a cowpuncher, gray-shirted, and a polka dot kerchief circled the brown throat. Life rippled gloriously from every motion of him. Hermes himself might have envied the perfect grace of the man.

She supplied his wants while they chatted.

"Jogged off your range quite a bit, haven't you?" she suggested.

"Some. I'll take two bits' worth of that smokin', _nina_."

She shook her head. "I'm no little girl. Don't you know I'm now half past eighteen?"

"My--my. That ad didn't do a mite of good, did it?"

"Not a bit."

"And you growing older every day."

"Does my age show?" she wanted to know anxiously.

The scarce veiled admiration of his smoldering eyes drew the blood to her dusky cheeks. Something vigilant lay crouched panther-like behind the laughter of his surface badinage.

"You're standing it well, honey."

The color beat into her face, less at the word than at the purring caress in his voice. A year ago she had been a child. But in the Southland flowers ripen fast. Adolescence steals hard upon the heels of infancy, and, though the girl had never wakened to love, Nature was pushing her relentlessly toward a womanhood for which her unschooled impulses but scantily safeguarded her.

She turned toward the shelves. "How many air-tights did you say?"

"I didn't say." He leaned forward across the counter. "What's the hurry, little girl?"

"My name is Melissy Lee," she told him over her shoulder.

"Mine is Phil Norris. Glad to give it to you, Melissy Lee," the man retorted glibly.

"Can't use it, thank you," came her swift saucy answer.

"Or to lend it to you--say, for a week or two."

She flashed a look at him and pa.s.sed quickly from behind the counter. Her father was just coming into the store.

"Will you wait on Mr. Norris, dad? Hop wants to see me in the kitchen."

Norris swore softly under his breath. The last thing he had wanted was to drive her away. It had been nearly a year since he had seen her last, but the picture of her had been in the coals of many a night camp fire.

The cattle detective stayed to dinner and to supper. He and her father had their heads together for hours, their voices pitched to a murmur. Melissy wondered what business could have brought him, whether it could have anything to do with the renewed rustling that had of late annoyed the neighborhood. This brought her thoughts to Jack Flatray. He, too, had almost dropped from her world, though she heard of him now and again. Not once had he been to see her since the night she had sprained her ankle.

Later, when Melissy was watering the roses beside the porch, she heard the name of Morse mentioned by the stock detective. He seemed to be urging upon her father some course of action at which the latter demurred. The girl knew a vague unrest. Lee did not need his anger against Morse incensed. For months she had been trying to allay rather than increase this. If Philip Norris had come to stir up smoldering fires, she would give him a piece of her mind.

The men were still together when Melissy told her father good-night. If she had known that a whisky bottle pa.s.sed back and forth a good many times in the course of the evening, the fears of the girl would not have been lightened. She knew that in the somber moods following a drinking bout the lawlessness of Beauchamp Lee was most likely to crop out.

As for the girl, now night had fallen--that wondrous velvet night of Arizona, which blots out garish day with a cloak of violet, purple-edged where the hills rise vaguely in the distance, and softens magically all harsh details beneath the starry vault--she slipped out to the summit of the ridge in the big pasture, climbing lightly, with the springy ease born of the vigor her nineteen outdoor years had stored in the strong young body. She wanted to be alone, to puzzle out what the coming of this man meant to her. Had he intended anything by that last drawling remark of his in the store? Why was it that his careless, half insulting familiarity set the blood leaping through her like wine? He lured her to the s.e.x duel, then trampled down her reserves roughshod. His bold a.s.surance stung her to anger, but there was a something deeper than anger that left her flushed and tingling.

Both men slept late, but Norris was down first. He found Melissy superintending a drive of sheep which old Antonio, the herder, was about to make to the trading-post at Three Pines. She was on her pony near the entrance to the corral, her slender, lithe figure sitting in a boy's saddle with a businesslike air he could not help but admire. The gate bars had been lifted and the dog was winding its way among the bleating gray ma.s.s, which began to stir uncertainly at its presence. The sheep dribbled from the corral by ones and twos until the procession swelled to a swollen stream that poured forth in a torrent. Behind them came Antonio in his sombrero and blanket, who smiled at his mistress, shouted an "_Adios, senorita_," and disappeared into the yellow dust cloud which the herd left in its wake.

"How does Champ like being in the sheep business," Norris said to the girl.

Melissy did not remove her eyes from the vanishing herd, but a slight frown puckered her forehead. She chose to take this as a criticism of her father and to resent it.

"Why shouldn't he be?" she said quietly, answering the spirit of his remark.

"I didn't mean it that way," he protested, with his frank laugh.

"Then if you didn't mean it so, I shan't take it that way;" and her smile met his.

"Here's how I look at this sheep business. Some ranges are better adapted for sheep than cattle, and you can't keep Mary's little lamb away from those places. No use for a man to buck against the thing that's bound to be. Better get into the band-wagon and ride."

"That's what father thought," the girl confessed. "He never would have been the man to bring sheep in, but after they got into the country he saw it was a question of whether he was going to get the government reserve range for his sheep, or another man, some new-comer like Mr. Morse, for his. It was going to be sheep anyhow."

"Well, I'm glad your father took the chance he saw." He added reminiscently: "We got to be right good friends again last night before we parted."

She took the opening directly. "If you're so good a friend of his, you must not excite him about Mr. Morse. You know he's a Southerner, and he is likely to do something rash--something we shall all be sorry for afterward."

"I reckon that will be all right," he said evasively.

Her eyes swept to his. "You won't get father into trouble will you?"

The warm, affectionate smile came back to his face, so that as he looked at her he seemed a sun-G.o.d. But again there was something in his gaze that was not the frankness of a comrade, some smoldering fire that strangely stirred her blood and yet left her uneasy.

"I'm not liable to bring trouble to those you love, girl. I stand by my friends."

Her pony began to move toward the house, and he strode beside, as debonair and gallant a figure as ever filled the eye and the heart of a woman. The morning sun glow irradiated him, found its sparkling reflection in the dark curls of his bare head, in the bloom of his tanned cheeks, made a fit setting for the graceful picture of lingering youth his slim, muscular figure and springy stride personified. Small wonder the untaught girl beside him found the merely physical charm of him fascinating. If her instinct sometimes warned her to beware, her generous heart was eager to pay small heed to the monition except so far as concerned her father.

After breakfast he came into the office to see her before he left.

"Good-by for a day or two," he said, offering his hand.

"You're coming back again, are you?" she asked quietly, but not without a deeper dye in her cheeks.

"Yes, I'm coming back. Will you be glad to see me?"

"Why should I be glad? I hardly know you these days."

"You'll know me better before we're through with each other."

She would acknowledge no interest in him, the less because she knew it was there. "I may do that without liking you better."