The Land of Strong Men Part 12

"I don't know your family very well," he said.

She did not press the question.

"That is so. Angus--I hope you don't mind being called that, any more than I mind being called by my first name--we've known each other for years, but not very well. Perhaps we'll know each other better. I'm home for good. I'm supposed to be a young lady, now."

"Are you?" said Angus. She laughed.

"My education--polite and otherwise--is finished. That is what I mean. I am now prepared to settle down to the serious business of life--of a young woman's life."

"And what is that?"

"If you don't know I won't tell you. Never mind about me. Tell me about yourself."

"Myself? Oh, I've just been living on the ranch."

She considered him gravely, and he stared back. Whatever she saw, he found her decidedly good to look upon, not only because of her eyes and hair and clear, satiny skin, but because of the lithe, clean-run shape of her, which he admired as he would that of a horse, or an athlete's in training. She broke the silence abruptly.

"Do you know what my trunk weighs?"

He glanced back at it, shaking his head. "No. It's riding all right there."

"Do you know what I weigh?"

"Perhaps a hundred and thirty."

"Ten pounds more. And the trunk weighs more than two hundred."

"Well, what about it?" Angus asked, puzzled.

"What about it? Are you in the habit of picking up trunks like that as if they were meat platters, and girls as if they were babies? I was watching you, and you didn't even breathe hard."

"Oh, is that it?" Angus laughed. "That's nothing. Any of your brothers could handle that trunk."

"Gavin could, of course. But he's very strong."

"Well?" said Angus, smiling at her.

"Why, yes, you must be. But I've always thought of you as a boy. And I suppose you've thought of me as a gawky, long-legged girl."

"I haven't thought of you at all," Angus told her.

"Now I know I'm going to like you," she laughed. "I don't know a man--except my brothers, who of course don't count--who would have told me that."

Angus flushed, but stuck to his guns.

"Well, why should I think of you?"

"No reason. You don't know much about girls, do you?"

"Not a thing. I have had no time for them."

"And no use for them!"

"I did not say that."

"But you looked it, Angus. I'll never forget the look of relief on your face years ago when we appeared to take poor, little lost Faith Winton off your hands--and off your pony. And yet she liked you. She speaks still of how good and kind you were to her, though you frightened her at first."

"She must be thinking of Jean's doughnuts," Angus grinned. "I had forgotten all about it. Where is she now?"

"I don't know. She and her father were in Italy when I heard from her last."

"She would be grown up," Angus deduced. "I wonder if I would know her?"

But the French ranch hove in sight, its big two-story house and maze of stables in a setting of uncared-for fields, which Angus never saw without something akin to pain. A chorus of dogs greeted the sound of wheels, and half a dozen of them shot around the corner of the house.

Angus liked dogs, but not when he was driving colts. But just as they began to dance and the nigh bay had lashed out with a vicious hoof, Gavin French came around the corner, and at his command the dogs shrank as if he had laid a whip across them. Just then Gavin was wearing riding breeches, moccasins, and a flannel shirt wide open at the throat and stagged off at the sleeves, so that the bronzed column of his neck and the full sweep of his long, splendidly muscled arms were revealed. He strode softly, cat-footed, gripping with his toes, and the smoke of the short pipe which was his inseparable companion, drifted behind him.

"h.e.l.lo, Kit!" he said, and nodded to Angus. "Where is Blake? He went for you."

"Blake's drunk," Kathleen replied.

"Drunk, is he?" Gavin said without surprise.

"And you're a nice bunch of brothers to send him! Couldn't one of you have come?"

"Oh, well, he was going, anyway," said Gavin carelessly. "Did you see him?"

"Yes, I saw him. He tried to stop Angus' team on the main street, and I slashed him back with the whip."

"You little devil!" said her brother, but with a certain admiration in his voice. "But that's pretty hard medicine, Kit!"

"And what sort of medicine is it for me to have a drunken blackguard of a brother run out on the street to hold up the rig I'm driving in?" she flared. "I'm ent.i.tled to ordinary respect; even if I am a sister, and Blake and all of you had better understand it now."

"Pshaw!" said Gavin. "The trouble with you, Kit, is that you've got a wire edge. You're set on a hair-trigger."

"And the trouble with Blake and the whole lot of you is that you've run wild," she retorted. "You've got so that you don't care for anything or anybody. You're practically savages. But I can tell you, you'll remember some of the ordinary usages of civilization now I'm home."

"And a sweet temper you've come back in!" said Gavin. He lifted his sister down over the wheel and reached for the trunk.

"It's heavy, Gan," she said, with a glance at Angus.

"Is it?" said Gavin, gripping the handles. He lifted it without apparent effort, and set it on his right shoulder. "I may be able to stagger along with it," he told her ironically. "Would you like me to carry you, too?"

"You can't!"

"Can't I?" laughed the blond giant. "Have you any money left to bet on that?"

"Five dollars that you can't carry me and the trunk--upstairs and to my room."