Out Of The Depths Part 2

Ashton stiffened with offended dignity.

"I told you that the shooting of the animal was unintentional," he said. "I shall settle the affair by paying you the price usually asked for veal."

"You will?" said the cowman, looking down at the indignant tenderfoot with a twinkle in his mirth-reddened eyes. "Well, we don't usually sell veal on the range. But I'll let you have this yearling at cutlet prices. Fifty dollars is the figure."

"Why, Daddy," interrupted the girl, "half that would be--"

"On the hoof, yes; but he's buying dressed veal," broke in the cowman, and he smiled grimly at the culprit. "Fifty dollars is cheap for a deer hunter who goes round shooting up the country out of season. He can take his choice--pay for his veal or make a trip to the county seat."

"That's talking, Mr. Knowles," approved Gowan. "We'll corral him at Stockchute in that little log calaboose. He'll have a peach of a time talking the jury out of sending him up for rustling."

"This is an outrage--rank robbery!" complained Ashton. "Of course you know I will pay rather than be inconvenienced by an interruption of my hunting." He thrust his slender hand into his pocket, and drew it out empty.

"Dead broke!" jeered Gowan.

Ashton shrugged disdainfully. "I have money at my camp. If that is not enough to pay your blackmail, my valet has gone back to the railway with my guide for a remittance of a thousand dollars, which must have come on a week ago."

"Your camp is at the waterhole on Dry Fork," stated Knowles. "Saw a big smoke over there--tenderfoot's fire. Well, it's only five miles, and we can ride down that way. We'll go to your camp."

"Ye-es?" murmured Ashton, his ardent eyes on the girl. "Miss--er--Chuckie, it is superfluous to remark that I shall vastly enjoy a cross-country ride with you."

"Oh, really!" she replied.

Heedless of her ironical tone, he turned a supercilious glance on Knowles. "Yes, and at the same time your papa and his hired man can take advantage of the opportunity to deliver my veal."

"What's that?" growled the cowman, flushing hotly.

But the girl burst into such a peal of laughter that his scowl relaxed to an uncertain smile.

"Well, what's the joke, honey?" he asked.

"Oh! oh! oh!" she cried, her blue eyes glistening with mirthful tears. "Don't you see he's got you, Daddy? You didn't sell him his meat on the hoof. You've got to dress and deliver his cutlets."

"By--James!" vowed Gowan. "Before I'll butcher for such a knock-kneed tenderfoot I'll see him, in--"

"Hold your hawsses, Kid," put in Knowles. "The joke's on me. You go on and look for that bunch of strays, if you want to. But I'm not going to back up when Chuckie says I'm roped in."

Gowan looked fixedly at Ashton and the girl, swore under his breath, and swung to the ground. He came down beside the calf with the waddling step of one who has lived in the saddle from early childhood.

Knowles joined him, and they set to work on the calf without paying any farther heed to the tenderfoot.

Ashton, after fastidiously wiping his hands on a wisp of gra.s.s, placed his hunting knife in his belt and his rifle in its saddle sheath. He next picked up his pistol, but after a single glance at the side plate, smashed in by Gowan's first shot, he dropped the ruined weapon and rather hurriedly mounted his pony.

The girl had faced away from the partly butchered carca.s.s. As Ashton rode around alongside, her pony started to walk away. Instead of reining in, she glanced demurely at Ashton, and called over her shoulder: "Daddy, we'll be riding on ahead. You and Kid have the faster hawsses."

"All right," acquiesced Knowles, without pausing in his work.

Gowan said nothing; but he glanced up at the jaunty back of the tenderfoot with a look of cold enmity.

CHAPTER III

QUEEN OF WHAT?

Heedless of the men behind him, Ashton rode off with his ardent gaze fixed admiringly upon his companion. The more he looked at her the more astonished and gratified he was to have found so charming a girl in this raw wilderness.

As a city man, he might have considered the healthy color that glowed under the tan of her cheeks a trifle too p.r.o.nounced, had it not been offset by the delicate mold of her features. Her eyes were as blue as alpine forget-me-nots.

Though she sat astride and the soft coils of her chestnut hair were covered with a broad-brimmed felt hat, he was puzzled to find that there really was nothing of the Wild West cowgirl in her costume and bearing. Her modest gray riding dress was cut in the very latest style. If her manner differed from that of most young ladies of his acquaintance, it was only in her delightful frankness and total absence of affectation. Yet she could not be a city girl on a visit, for she sat her horse with the erect, long-stirruped, graceful, yielding seat peculiar to riders of the cattle ranges.

"Do you know," he gave voice to his curiosity, as she directed their course slantingly down the ridge away from Deep Canon, "I am simply dying to learn, Miss Chuckie--"

"Perhaps you had better make it 'Miss Knowles,'" she suggested, with a quiet smile that checked the familiarity of his manner.

"Ah, yes--pardon me!--'Miss Knowles,' of course," he murmured. "But, you know, so unusual a name--"

"You mean Chuckie?" she asked. "It formerly was quite common in the West--was often used as a nickname. My real name is Isobel. I understand that Chuckie comes from the Spanish Chiquita."

"Chiquita!" he exclaimed. "But that is not a regular name. It is only a term of endearment, like Nina. And you say Chuckie comes from Chiquita? Chiquita--dear one!"

His large dark eyes glowed at her brilliant with audacious admiration.

Her color deepened, but she replied with perfect composure: "You see why I prefer to be addressed as 'Miss Knowles'--by you."

"Yet you permitted that common cowpuncher to call you Miss Chuckie."

The girl smiled ironically. "For one thing, Mr. Ashton, I have known Kid Gowan over eight years, and, for another, he is hardly a _common_ cowpuncher."

"He looks ordinary enough to me."

"Well, well!" she rallied. "I should have thought that even to the innocent gaze of a tenderfoot--Let me hasten to explain that the common or garden variety of cowshepherd is to be distinguished in many respects from his predecessor of the Texas trail."

"Texas trail?" he rejoined. "Now I know you're trying to string me.

This Gowan can't be much older than I am."

The girl dropped her bantering tone, and answered soberly: "He is only twenty-five, and yet he is a full generation older than you. He was born and raised in a cow camp. He is one of the few men of the type that remain to link the range of today with the vanished world of the cattle frontier."

"Yet you say that the fellow is only my age?"

"In years, yes. But in type he belongs to the generation that is past--the generation of longhorns, long drives, long Colt's, and short lives; of stampedes, and hats like yours, badmen, and Injins."

"Surely you cannot mean that this--You called him 'Kid.'"

"Kid Gowan," she confirmed. "Yes, he holds to the old traditions even in that. There are six notches on the hilt of his 'gun,' if you count the two little ones he nicked for his brace of Utes."

"What! He is a real Indian fighter, like Kit Carson?"

"Oh, no, it was merely a band of hide hunters that came over the line from Utah, and Mr. Gowan helped the game warden run them back to their reservation."