The Settling of the Sage Part 2

The newcomer's gaze returned from down the valley and settled on Morrow's face.

"Do you run a brand of your own--so's you'd stand to lose a dollar if every foot of range was fenced?" he inquired.

"What are you trying to get at now?" Morrow demanded.

"Nothing much--now; I've already got," Harris said. "A man's interest lays on the side where his finances are most concerned."

"What do you mean by that?" Morrow insisted.

"You're good at predicting--maybe you're an expert at guessing too,"

Harris returned. And suddenly Evans laughed as if something had just occurred to him.

Morrow glanced at him without turning his head, then fell silent, his expression unchanged.

A chunky youngster stood in the door and bent an approving gaze on the big pinto as he swung out across the pasture lot. The boy's face was small and quizzical, a s.h.a.ggy mop of tawny hair hanging so low upon his forehead that his mild blue eyes peered forth from under the fringe of it and gave him the air of a surprised terrier, which effect had gained him the t.i.tle of Bangs.

"I bet the little paint-horse could make a man swing and rattle to set up in his middle, once he started to act up," he said.

"Calico wouldn't know how to start," Harris said. "A horse, inside his limitations, is what his breaker makes him. I never favored the idea of breaking a horse to fight you every time you climb him. My horses are gentle-broke."

"But you have to be able to top off just any kind of a horse," Bangs objected.

"That don't hinder a man from gentling his own string," Harris returned.

Bangs turned his surprised eyes on Harris and regarded him intently as if striving to fathom a viewpoint that was entirely new to him.

"Why, it don't, for a fact," he said at last. "Only I just never happened to think of it like that before."

Morrow laughed and the boy flushed at the disagreeable ring of it. The sound was not loud but flat and mirthless, the syllables distinct and evenly s.p.a.ced. His white even teeth remained tight-closed and showed in flashing contrast to his swarthy face and black mustache. Morrow's face wore none of the active malignancy that stamps the features of those uncontrolled desperadoes who kill in a flare of pa.s.sion; rather it seemed that the urge to kill was always with him, had been born with him, his face drawn and over-lengthened from the inner effort to render his homicidal tendencies submissive to his brain, not through desire for regeneration, for he had none, but as a mere matter of expediency.

The set, bleak expression of countenance was but a reflection of his personality and his companions had sensed this strained quality without being able to define it in words.

"You listen to what the squatter man tells you," Morrow said to Bangs.

"He'll put you right--give you a course in how everything ought to be done." He rose and went outside.

"That was a real unhumorous laugh," Evans said. "Right from the bottom of his heart."

A raucous bellow sounded from the cookhouse and every man within earshot rose and moved toward the summons to feed.

"Let's go eat it up," Evans said and left the bunk house with Harris.

"Did you gather all the information you was prospecting for?" he asked.

Harris nodded. "I sorted out one man's number," he said.

"Now if you'd only whispered to me I'd have told you right off," Evans said. "It's astonishing how easy it is to pick them if you try."

"Waddles is a right unpresuming sort of a man in most respects," Evans volunteered as they entered the cookhouse. "But he's downright egotistical about his culinary accomplishments."

All through the meal the gigantic cook hovered near Billie Warren as she sat near one end of the long table. It was evident to Harris that the big man was self-appointed guardian and counsellor of the Three Bar boss. He showed the same fussy solicitude for her welfare that a hen would show for her helpless chicks.

"Praise the grub and have a friend at court," Harris murmured in Evans'

ear.

Billie Warren had nearly completed her meal before the men came in.

She left the table and went to her own room. When Harris rose to go he slapped the big man on the back.

"I'd work for half pay where you get grub like this," he said. "That's what I'd call a real feed."

Waddles beamed and followed him to the door.

"It's a fact that I can set out the best bait you ever throwed a lip over," he confessed. "You're a man of excellent tastes and it's a real pleasure to have you about."

Billie Warren opened the door and motioned to Harris. He went into the big front room that answered for both living room and sleeping quarters. A fire burned in the rough stone fireplace; tanned pelts, Indian curios and Navajo rugs covered the walls; more rugs and pelts lay on the floor. Indian blankets part.i.tioned off one end for her sleeping room.

"You had something to tell me," she observed, after he had remained silent for the s.p.a.ce of a minute, sitting in the chair she had indicated and gazing into the fire.

"And I'll have to start it a little different from the way I first counted on," he said. "Have any of the boys mentioned my name to you?"

She shook her head and waited for him to go on.

"You won't care much to hear it," he announced. "I'd thought some of spending two years here under some other name--but perhaps it's better to come out in the open--don't you think?"

The girl had straightened in her chair and was leaning toward him, her face white and her gray eyes boring straight into the man's. She knew now who he was,--the man she had more reason to despise than all others on earth combined. Of the Harris family she knew nothing at all except that her father's lifelong regret had been the fact that the partnership between himself and his oldest friend, William Harris, had never been brought to pa.s.s. And this regret had, in the end, led him to try and cement that arrangement in the second generation. Five years before his trail had crossed that of the elder Harris for the first time since he had taken over the Three Bar brand; and when his will had been read she had known that on the occasion of that visit his old friend had played upon this sentiment to trick him into making it.

On all sides of her she had evidence that men were wolves who preyed upon the interests of others, and there was not a doubt that the father of the man before her had preyed upon her interests through the sentiment of her parent; no other possible theory could account for the strange disposal of his property, the will dated and signed at the exact time of his visit to the Harrises.

The tenseness of her pose was replaced by lethargic indifference and she relaxed into her chair.

"I've known all the time you would come," she said.

"It's too bad, Billie," he said. "It's tough having me wished on to you this way."

"Don't play that game with me!" she flared. "Of course you've disproved every drop of human decency in advance."

"It sure looms up like that on the surface," he admitted ruefully.

"But I didn't have a hand in cinching you this way."

"You could have proved that by staying away. I wrote you a year ago that I'd donate you a half-interest in the Three Bar at the expiration of the time if you'd only keep off the place. But at the last moment you couldn't resist having it all. Ten more days and you'd have been too late."

The man nodded slowly.

"Too late," he agreed and sat looking into the fire.

She had been almost a son to her father, had ridden the range with him, managed the Three Bar during his sickness; and such was her loyalty to his memory that not a trace of her bitterness had been directed toward her parent. He had loved the Three Bar and had always believed that old Bill Harris, its founder, had loved it too. His will had stipulated that half of his property should go to the younger Harris under the condition that the man should make his home on the Three Bar for two out of the first three years after her father's decease. The whole of it was to go to him in case she failed to make her own home at the Three Bar during her co-heir's stay, or in the event of her marriage to another before the expiration of three years.

"Of course I'm tied here for two years," she said. "Or left penniless.

If you can make it unpleasant enough to drive me away--which won't be difficult--you win."

"I wouldn't count too strong on that," he counseled mildly.