The Fighting Shepherdess Part 29

Was this human nature when one understood it? Was this what the world was like if one were out in it? Wasn't there anybody sincere or kind or disinterested? She asked herself these questions despairingly as she untied her horse and swung slowly into the saddle.

"Poverty makes most people sordid, selfish, cowardly." She fancied she heard Mormon Joe saying it, and herself expressing her disbelief in the statement. "There are few persons strong enough to stand the gaff of public opinion." She had contradicted him, she remembered.

She recalled--word for word, almost--a philosophical dissertation apropos of Prouty as he sat on the wagon tongue one evening smoking his pipe in the moonlight.

"People who live without change in a small community grow to attach an exaggerated importance to the opinions of others. They come to live and breathe with a view to what their neighbors think of them. When life resolves itself into a struggle for a bare existence, it makes for cowardice and selfishness. In time the strongest characters deteriorate with inferior a.s.sociates and only small interests to occupy their minds. Wills weaken, standards lower unconsciously, ideals grow misty or vanish. Youth, enthusiasm, hope, die together. Ambition turns to bitterness or stolid resignation. Suspicion, meanness, cruelty, are the natural offspring of small intelligences and narrow environment--and they flourish in a town like Prouty."

"I don't believe it!" she had cried, shocked by his cynicism. He had shrugged a shoulder and replied solemnly:

"I hope to G.o.d you'll never know how true it is, Katie. I hope no combination of circ.u.mstances will ever place you at their mercy. It is to make any such condition impossible that I am bending all my energies to get on my feet again."

In this moment it seemed to Kate that his cynicism had the sweetness of honey compared to her own bitterness.

Since the murder, curiosity had changed to unfriendliness, and unfriendliness in some instances to actual hostility. Her slightest advance was met by a barrier of coldness that froze her, and she quickly had come to wince under each fresh evidence of enmity as from a blow in the face. Thoughts of Mrs. Toomey's friendship and the belief that this antagonism was only temporary and would disappear when the local authorities had brought out the truth concerning the murder, had sustained and comforted her. The last time she had questioned Lingle, the deputy had told her with much elation in his manner that "the trail was getting warmer."

Now, crushed, heartsick, staggering fairly under the brutal blow that Mrs. Toomey's weak hand had dealt her, it was an ordeal to ride back to Main Street and run the gauntlet.

All that was left to her was the hope that Lingle might soon clear her, and she felt in her despair that she could not return to the ranch until he had given her some rea.s.surance. She checked her horse at the corner and looked each way for him, but he was nowhere visible. Then, while she hesitated she saw him emerge from a doorway where a steep stairway led to the office of the mayor on the second floor of Prouty's only two-story building.

Kate received the swift impression that the deputy was agitated, and a closer view confirmed it. His face was pale, and the light that shone in his eyes was unmistakably due to anger. He walked to the edge of the sidewalk and stood there, too engrossed in thought to see Kate until she had ridden close to him.

"Will you tell me what progress you're making? It's so hard, this waiting and not knowing."

The deputy's eyes blazed anew when he recognized the girl, and under stress of feeling he blurted out harshly:

"I'm called off, Miss Prentice!"

"Called off!" she gasped. "You mean--"

"Stopped!" fiercely. "I've been blocked at every turn by the authorities and others, and now it's come straight from 'Tinhorn' himself--the mayor."

Speechless, Kate's trembling hand sought the saddle horn and gripped it.

"But why?" finally.

Ineffable scorn was in the deputy's answer:

"It might hurt the town to have this murder stirred up and the story sent broadcast--make prospective settlers hesitate to invest in such a dangerous community--that's what was given me, along with my instructions to quit. But another reason is that the man implicated belongs to one of them secret orders."

"I can't believe it!" she cried piteously.

"I couldn't either, until I had to. But I've got sense enough to know that I'm done, with n.o.body to back up my hand. After all, I'm only a deputy," he said savagely. "I'm all broke up, I can tell you!"

"But aside from the way in which it leaves me it seems such a--such an insult to Uncle Joe--as though n.o.body cared--as though--" she could not finish.

"I know--I know," he nodded gravely.

"I'm going up to see the mayor--to beg him to keep on--to tell him what it means to me!" she declared pa.s.sionately.

"I wouldn't, Miss Prentice," Lingle advised.

"I must! It can't stop like this! He shall understand what it means to me--this suspicion--this disgrace that is nearly killing me!"

He saw that she was determined, so he did not protest further, but his reluctant gaze followed her as she disappeared up the narrow dirty stairway.

The mayor attended to the official business of Prouty at a flat-top desk in a large front room where he also wrote an occasional life insurance policy. As the insurance business was a rise from a disreputable saloon and gambling joint, so the saloon and gambling joint had been a step upward from his former means of livelihood as a dance-hall tout in a neighboring state.

With his election to an office which n.o.body else wanted, an incipient ambition began to stir. Already his mind was busy with plans for advancement, and each move that he made was with an eye to the future.

But one thing was certain, and it was that wherever his Star of Destiny led him he would remain, underneath any veneer of polish which experience might give him, the barroom bully, the mental and moral tinhorn that Nature had made him.

Enveloped in a cloud of the malodorous smoke of a cheap cigar and tilted on the hind legs of his chair with his heels hooked in the rungs, he was resting his head against the wall where a row of smudges from his oily black hair bore evidence to the fact that it was a favorite position.

Hearing a woman's light step and catching a glimpse of a woman's skirt as Kate came down the corridor, he removed his cigar and unhooked his heels preparatory to rising.

She was in the doorway before he recognized her; where she paused during a moment's look of mutual inquiry. Then, with all the deliberation of an intentional insult he retilted his chair, returned his heels to the rungs and replaced his cigar while he surveyed her with a quite indescribable insolence.

"Tinhorn" had no special reason for the act and it served no purpose; it was merely the instinctive act of the bully who strikes in wanton cruelty at something or somebody he knows cannot retaliate. His Honor found a satisfaction now in watching the blood rise flaming to the roots of Kate's hair and it gave him a feeling of power knowing that she must accept the humiliation or leave with her errand unstated, though he guessed the nature of her visit.

It pleased him, however, to feign ignorance when, gripping the frame of the doorway, she said in a voice that trembled noticeably in spite of her obvious effort to steady it:

"I came to ask you if it's true--that you mean to stop work--on the--case?"

He rolled the chewed end of his cigar between his yellow snags of teeth and asked insolently:

"What case you talkin' about?"

"There's only one that interests me," she replied, with a touch of dignity.

"What do you want, anyhow?"

Kate's labored breathing was audible.

"Is it so that you are not going to do any more about the murder of my uncle?"

"Your uncle!" he snorted, necked the ashes from the end of his cigar, rolled it back into place with his tongue and reiterated: "Your uncle!"

Then: "What's it to you? You got off, didn't you?"

She came into the room a step or two.

"It's everything to me or I wouldn't be here. Can't you understand what it means to me--going through life with people thinking--"

"You got the money, didn't you?" he interrupted.

"What you throwing a bluff like this for, anyhow? I guess what people think ain't worryin' you."

Kate's fingers clenched, but she said quietly:

"You haven't answered my question."