The Big-Town Round-Up Part 23

"She's an awful pretty cute little thing," the puncher added, hoping to modify her judgment.

"Indeed!"

Beatrice turned and walked swiftly into the house. A pulse of anger was beating in her soft throat. She felt a sense of outrage. To Clay Lindsay she had given herself generously in spirit. She had risked something in introducing him to her friends. They might have laughed at him for his slight social lapses. They might have rejected him for his lack of background. They had done neither. He was so genuinely a man that he had won his way instantly. In this City of Bluff, as O.

Henry dubs New York, his simplicity had rung true as steel. Still, she had taken a chance and felt she deserved some recognition of it on his part. This he had never given. He had based their friendship on equality simply. She liked it in him, though her vanity had resented it a little. But this was different. She was still young enough, still so little a woman of the world, that she set a rigid standard which she expected her friends to meet. She had believed in Clay, and now he was failing her.

Pacing up and down her room, little fists clenched, her soul in pa.s.sionate turmoil, Beatrice went over it all again as she had done through a sleepless night. She had given him so much, and he had seemed to give her even more. Hours filled with a keen-edged delight jumped to her memory, hours that had carried her away from the falseness of social fribble to clean, wind-swept, open s.p.a.ces of the mind. And after this--after he had tacitly recognized her claim on him--he had insulted her before her friends by deserting his guests to go off with this hussy he had been spending weeks to search for.

Now his little henchman had the imbecility to ask her help while this girl was living at Clay Lindsay's apartment, pa.s.sing herself off as his sister, and proposing to stay there ostensibly as the housekeeper. She felt degraded, humiliated, she told herself. Not for a moment did she admit, perhaps she did not know, that an insane jealousy was flooding her being, that her indignation was based on personal as well as moral grounds.

Something primitive stirred in her--a flare of feminine ferocity. She felt hot to the touch, an active volcano ready for eruption. If only she could get a chance to strike back in a way that would hurt, to wound him as deeply as he had her!

Pat to her desire came the opportunity. Clay's card was brought in to her by Jenkins.

"Tell Mr. Lindsay I'll see him in a few minutes," she told the man.

The few minutes stretched to a long quarter of an hour before she descended. To the outward eye at least Miss Whitford looked a woman of the world, sheathed in a plate armor of conventionality. As soon as his eyes fell on her Clay knew that this pale, slim girl in the close-fitting gown was a stranger to him. Her eyes, star-bright and burning like live coals, warned him that the friend whose youth had run out so eagerly to meet his was hidden deep in her to-day.

"I reckon I owe you and Mr. Whitford an apology," he said. "No need to tell you how I happened to leave last night. I expect you know."

"I know why you left--yes."

"I'd like to explain it to you so you'll understand."

"Why take the trouble? I think I understand." She spoke in an even, schooled voice that set him at a distance.

"Still, I want you to know how I feel."

"Is that important? I see what you do. That is enough. Your friend Mr. Green has carefully brought me the details I didn't know."

Clay flushed. Her clear voice carried an edge of scorn. "You mustn't judge by appearances. I know you wouldn't be unfair. I had to take her home and look after her."

"I don't quite see why--unless, of course, you wanted to," the girl answered, tapping the arm of her chair with impatient finger-tips, eyes on the clock. "But of course it isn't necessary I should see."

Her cavalier treatment of him did not affect the gentle imperturbability of the Westerner.

"Because I'm a white man, because she's a little girl who came from my country and can't hold her own here, because she was sick and chilled and starving. Do you see now?"

"No, but it doesn't matter. I'm not the keeper of your conscience, Mr.

Lindsay," she countered, with hard lightness.

"You're judging me just the same."

Her eyes attacked him. "Am I?"

"Yes." The level gaze of the man met hers calmly. "What have I done that you don't like?"

She lost some of her debonair insolence that expressed itself in indifference.

"I'd ask that if I were you," she cried scornfully. "Can you tell me that this--friend of yours--is a good girl?"

"I think so. She's been up against it. Whatever she may have done she's been forced to do."

"Excuses," she murmured.

"If you'd ever known what it was to be starving--"

Her smoldering anger broke into a flame. "Good of you to compare me with her! That's the last straw!"

"I'm not comparing you. I'm merely saying that you can't judge her.

How could you, when your life has been so different?"

"Thank Heaven for that."

"If you'd let me bring her here to see you--"

"No, thanks."

"You're unjust."

"You think so?"

"And unkind. That's not like the little friend I've come to--like so much."

"You're kind enough for two, Mr. Lindsay. She really doesn't need another friend so long as she has you," she retorted with a flash of contemptuous eyes. "In New York we're not used to being so kind to people of her sort."

Clay lifted a hand. "Stop right there, Miss Beatrice. You don't want to say anything you'll be sorry for."

"I'll say this," she cut back. "The men I know wouldn't invite a woman to their rooms at midnight and pa.s.s her off as their sister--and then expect people to know her. They would be kinder to themselves--and to their own reputations."

She was striking out savagely, relentlessly, in spite of the better judgment that whispered restraint. She wanted desperately to hurt him, as he had hurt her, even though she had to behave badly to do it.

"Will you tell me what else there was to do? Where could I have taken her at that time of night? Are reputable hotels open at midnight to lone women, wet and ragged, who come without baggage either alone or escorted by a man?"

"I'm not telling you what you ought to have done, Mr. Lindsay," she answered with a touch of hauteur. "But since you ask me--why couldn't you have given her money and let her find a place for herself?"

"Because that wouldn't have saved her."

"Oh, wouldn't it?" she retorted dryly.

He walked over to the fireplace and put an elbow on the corner of the mantel. The blood leaped in the veins of the girl as she looked at him, a man strong as tested steel, quiet and forceful, carrying his splendid body with the sinuous grace that comes only from perfectly synchronized muscles. At that moment she hated him because she could not put him in the wrong.

"Lemme tell you a story, Miss Beatrice," he said presently. "Mebbe it'll show you what I mean. I was runnin' cattle in the Galiuros five years ago and I got caught in a storm 'way up in the hills. When it rains in my part of Arizona, which ain't often, it sure does come down in sheets. The clay below the rubble on the slopes got slick as ice.

My hawss, a young one, slipped and fell on me, clawed back to its feet, and bolted. Well, there I was with my laig busted, forty miles from even a whistlin' post in the desert, gettin' wetter and colder every blessed minute. Heaps of times in my life I've felt more comfortable than I did right then. I was hogtied to that shale ledge with my broken ankle, as you might say. And the weather and my game laig and things generally kept gettin' no better right along hour after hour.

"There wasn't a chance in a million that anybody would hear, but I kept firin' off my forty-five on the off hope. And just before night a girl on a _pinto_ came down the side of that uncurried hill round a bend and got me. She took me to a cabin hidden in the bottom of a canon and looked after me four days. Her father, a prospector, had gone into Tucson for supplies and we were alone there. She fed me, nursed me, and waited on me. We divided a one-room twelve-by-sixteen cabin.

Understand, we were four days alone together before her dad came back, and all the time the sky was lettin' down a terrible lot of water.

When her father showed up he grinned and said, 'Lucky for you Myrtle heard that six-gun of yore's pop!' He never thought one evil thing about either of us. He just accepted the situation as necessary. Now the question is, what ought she to have done? Left me to die on that hillside?"