Out Of The Depths Part 19

He held them to a walk.

Chancing to gaze about and see his face, the girl started from her bright-eyed daydream. "Why, Lafe! what is it?" she inquired. "You look as you did the other day, when you brought the mail."

"It's--everything!" he muttered.

"As what?" she queried.

He shrugged hopelessly, hesitated, and drew out the roll of bills forced on him by Knowles. "Tell me, please, just how much of this is mine, at your father's usual rate of wages, and deducting the real value of that calf."

"Why, I can't just say, offhand," she replied. "But why should you--"

"I shall tell you as soon as--but first--" He drew out his watch.

"This cost me two hundred and fifty dollars. It is the only thing I have worth trading. Would you take it in exchange for Rocket and the balance of this hundred dollars over and above what is due me?"

"Why--no, of course, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It would be absurd, cheating yourself that way. Anyhow, Rocket is your horse to ride, as long as you wish to."

"But I would like him for my own. How about trading him for my pony and the wages due me?"

"Well, that wouldn't be an unfair bargain. Your hawss is the best cow pony of the two."

"It is very kind of you to agree, Miss Chuckie! Here is all the money; and here is the watch. I wish you to accept it from me as a--memento."

"Mr. Ashton!" she exclaimed, indignantly widening the s.p.a.ce between them as much as the seat would permit.

"Please!" he begged. "Don't you understand? I am going away."

"Going away?" she echoed.

"Yes."

"But--why?"

"Because he is coming."

"Mr. Blake?"

"Yes. I cannot stay after he--"

"But why not? Has he injured you? Are you afraid of him?"

"No. I'm afraid that you--" Ashton's voice sank to a whisper--"that you will believe what he--what they will say against me."

"Oh!" she commented, her expression shifting swiftly from sympathetic concern to doubt.

He caught the change in her look and tone, and flushed darkly.

"There are sometimes two sides to a story," he muttered.

"Tell me your side now," she suggested, with her usual directness.

His eyes fell before her clear honest gaze. His flush deepened. He hung his head, biting his twisted lip. After several moments he began to speak in a hesitating broken murmur:

"I've always been--wild. But I graduated from Tech.--not at the foot of my cla.s.s. My father--always busy piling up millions--never a word or thought for me, except when I overspent my allowance. I was in a--fast set. My father--threatened me. I had to make good. I took a position in old Leslie's office--Genevieve's father. I--"

He paused, licked his lips, hesitated, and abruptly went on again, this time speaking with almost glib facility: "There was an engineers'

contest for a projected bridge over Michamac Strait. I started to draw plans, that I might enter the contest, but I did not finish in time.

The plans of the other engineers were all rejected. I continued to work on mine. After the contest I happened to pick up a piece of torn plan out of the office wastebasket, and it gave me a suggestion how to improve the central span of my bridge."

"Yes?" asked the girl, her interest deepening.

He again licked his lips, hesitated, and continued: "There was no name on that torn plan--nothing to indicate to whom it had belonged.

So I used it--that is, the suggestion I got from it, and was awarded the bridge on my plans. This made me the Resident Engineer of the bridge, and I had it almost completed when this man Blake came back from Africa after Genevieve, and claimed that I had--had stolen his plans of the bridge. It seems they were lost in Mr. Leslie's office.

He claimed he had handed them in to me for the contest. But so had all the other contestants, and their plans were not lost. It may have been that one of the doorkeepers tore his plans up, out of revenge. Blake was a very rough brute of a fellow at that time. He quarreled with the doorkeeper because the man would not admit him to see Mr. Leslie--threatened to smash him. Afterwards he accused Mr. Leslie of stealing his plans."

"Oh, no, no! he couldn't have done that! He can't be that kind of a man!" protested Isobel.

"It's true! Even he will not deny it. Old Leslie thought him crazy--then. It was different when he came back and accused me! He had been shipwrecked with Genevieve. They were alone together all those weeks, and so one can--" Ashton checked himself. "No, you must not think--He saved her. When they came back he claimed the bridge as his own--those lost plans."

"His plans? So that was it! And you--?"

"Of course they believed him. What was my word against his with Genevieve and Leslie. Leslie's consulting engineer was an old pal of Blake's. So of course I--I'll say though that Blake agreed to put it that I had only borrowed his idea of the central span."

"That was generous of him, if he really believed--"

"Did he?--did Genevieve? Do they believe it now? You see why I must go away."

"I don't any such thing," rejoined the girl.

"You don't?" he exclaimed. "When they are coming here, believing I did it! They must believe it, all of them! And my father--after all this time--They agreed not to tell him. Yet he has found out. That letter, up at the waterhole--it was from his lawyers. He had cut me off--branded me as an outcast."

"Without waiting to hear your side--without asking you to explain? How unjust! how unfair!" cried Isobel.

Ashton winced. "I--I told you I--my record was against me. But I was his son--he had no right to brand me as a--a thief! My valet read the letter. He must have told the guide--the scoundrels!"

Tears of chagrin gathered in the young man's dark eyes. He bit his lip until the blood ran.

"O-o-oh!" sighed the girl. "It's all been frightfully unjust! You haven't had fair play! I shall tell Mr. Blake."

"No, not him!--not him!" Ashton's voice was almost shrill. "All I wish is to slip away, before they see me."

"You don't mean, run away?" she said, quietly placing her little gauntlet-gloved hand on his arm. "You're not going to run away, Lafe."

"What else?" he asked, his eyes dark with bitter despair. "Would you have me return, to be booted off the range when they tell your father?"

"Just wait and see," she replied, gazing at him with a rea.s.suring smile. "You've proved yourself a right smart puncher--for a tenderfoot. You're in the West, the good old-style West, where it's a man's present record that counts; not what he has been or what he has done. No, you're not going to run. You're going to face it out--and going to stay to learn your new profession of puncher and--_man_!"

"But they will not wish to a.s.sociate with me."

"Yes, they will," she predicted. "I shall see to that."