Brand Blotters Part 17

"That's frank. It's worth something to have so decent an enemy. I don't believe you would shoot me in the back."

"Some of the others would. You should be more careful," she cried before she could stop herself.

He shrugged. "I take my fighting chance."

"It isn't much of a one. You'll be shot at from ambush some day."

"It wouldn't be a new experience. I went through it last week."

"Where?" she breathed.

"Down by Willow Wash."

"Who did it?"

He laughed, without amus.e.m.e.nt. "I didn't have my rifle with me, so I didn't stay to inquire."

"It must have been some of those wild vaqueros."

"That was my guess."

"But you have other enemies, too."

"Miss Lee," he smiled.

"I mean others that are dangerous."

"Your father?" he asked.

"Father would never do that except in a fair fight. I wasn't thinking of him."

"I don't know whom you mean, but a few extras don't make much difference when one is so liberally supplied already," he said cynically.

"I shouldn't make light of them if I were you," she cautioned.

"Who do you mean?"

"I've said all I'm going to, and more than I ought," she told him decisively. "Except this, that it's your own fault. You shouldn't be so stiff. Why don't you compromise? With the cattlemen, for instance. They have a good deal of right on their side. They _did_ have the range first."

"You should tell that to your father, too."

"Dad runs sheep on the range to protect himself. He doesn't drive out other people's cattle and take away their living."

"Well, I might compromise, but not at the end of a gun."

"No, of course not. Here comes dad now," she added hurriedly, aware for the first time that she had been holding an extended conversation with her father's foe.

"We started enemies and we quit enemies. Will you shake hands on that, Miss Lee?" he asked.

She held out her hand, then drew it swiftly back. "No, I can't. I forgot.

There's another reason."

"Another reason! You mean the Arkansas charge against me?" he asked quietly.

"No. I can't tell you what it is." She felt herself suffused in a crimson glow. How could she explain that she could not touch hands with him because she had robbed him of twenty thousand dollars?

Lee stopped at the steps, astonished to see his daughter and this man in talk together. Yesterday he would have resented it bitterly, but now the situation was changed. Something of so much greater magnitude had occurred that he was too perturbed to cherish his feud for the present. All night he had carried with him the dreadful secret he suspected. He could not look Melissy in the face, nor could he discuss the robbery with anybody.

The one fact that overshadowed all others was that his little girl had gone out and held up a stage, that if she were discovered she would be liable to a term in the penitentiary. Laboriously his slow brain had worked it all out. A talk with Jim Budd had confirmed his conclusions. He knew that she had taken this risk in order to save him. He was bowed down with his unworthiness, with shame that he had dragged her into this horrible tangle. He was convinced that Jack Flatray would get at the truth, and already he was resolved to come forward and claim the whole affair as his work.

"I've been apologizing to Mr. Morse for insulting him, dad," the girl said immediately.

Her father pa.s.sed a bony hand slowly across his unshaven chin. "That's right, honey. If you done him a meanness, you had ought to say so."

"She has said so very handsomely, Mr. Lee," spoke up Morse.

"I've been warning him, dad, that he ought to be more careful how he rides around alone, with the cattlemen feeling the way they do."

"It's a fact they feel right hot under the collar. You're ce'tainly a temptation to them, Mr. Morse," the girl's father agreed.

The mine owner shifted the subject of conversation. He was not a man of many impulses, but he yielded to one now.

"Can't we straighten out this trouble between us, Mr. Lee? You think I've done you an injury. Perhaps I have. If we both mean what's right, we can get together and fix it up in a few minutes."

The old Southerner stiffened and met him with an eye of jade. "I ain't asking any favors of you, Mr. Morse. We'll settle this matter some day, and settle it right. But you can't buy me off. I'll not take a bean from you."

The miner's eyes hardened. "I'm not trying to buy you off. I made a fair offer of peace. Since you have rejected it, there is nothing more to be said." With that he bowed stiffly and walked away, leading his horse.

Lee's gaze followed him and slowly the eyes under the beetled brows softened.

"Mebbe I done wrong, honey. Mebbe I'd ought to have given in. I'm too proud to compromise when he's got me beat. That's what's ailin' with me.

But I reckon I'd better have knuckled under."

The girl slipped her arm through his. "Sometimes I'm just like that too, daddy. I've just _got_ to win before I make up. I don't blame you a mite, but, all the same, we should have let him fix it up."

It was characteristic of them both that neither thought of reversing the decision he had made. It was done now, and they would abide by the results. But already both of them half regretted, though for very different reasons. Lee was thinking that for Melissy's sake he should have made a friend of the man he hated, since it was on the cards that within a few days she might be in his power. The girl's feeling, too, was unselfish. She could not forget the deep hunger for friendship that had shone in the man's eyes. He was alone in the world, a strong man surrounded by enemies who would probably destroy him in the end. There was stirring in her heart a sweet womanly pity and sympathy for the enemy whose proffer of friendship had been so cavalierly rejected.

The sight of a horseman riding down the trail from the Flagstaff mine shook Melissy into alertness.

"Look, dad. It's Mr. Norris," she cried.

Morse, who had not yet recognized him, swung to the saddle, his heart full of bitterness. Every man's hand was against his, and every woman's. What was there in his nature that turned people against him so inevitably?

There seemed to be some taint in him that corroded all natural human kindness.

A startled oath brought him from his somber reflections. He looked up, to see the face of a man with whom in the dead years of the past he had been in bitter feud.

Neither of them spoke. Morse looked at him with a face cold as chiselled marble and as hard. The devil's own pa.s.sion burned in the storm-tossed one of the other.

Norris was the first to break the silence.