The Settling of the Sage Part 34

The girl felt the clutch of stark fear at her heart. She had come too late. Harris was to meet Slade. It seemed that she must die with him if he should pa.s.s out before she could speak to him again and tell him she was back. She had a wild desire to run to him,--at least to lean from the window and call out to him to mount Calico and ride away. But she knew he would not. She was frontier bred. Even the knowledge that she was in town might unsteady him now. She sat without a move and the driver and guard outside supposed her merely a curious on-looker interested in the scene.

"A hundred on Harris," the driver offered.

The guard grunted a refusal.

"I'd bet that way myself," he said.

From this she knew that the two men were hoping Harris would be the one to survive; but the fact that their proffered bets backed their sentiments was no proof that they felt the conviction of their desire.

She knew the men of their breed. No matter how small the chance, their money would inevitably be laid on the side of their wishes, never against them, as if the wagering of a long shot was proof of their confidence and might in some way exercise a favorable influence on the outcome. No man had ever stood against Slade. She noted Harris's gun.

He carried it with the same awkward sling as of old, on the left side in front with the b.u.t.t to the right.

"Fifty on Slade," a voice offered from the doorway of the hotel. The guard started for the spot but the bet was snapped up by another. Wild fighting rage swept through her at the thought that to all these men it was but a sporting event.

Her eyes never once left Harris as he came down the street. When almost abreast of the stage Slade stepped from a doorway twenty feet in before him and stopped in his tracks. Harris turned on one heel and stood with his left side quartering toward Slade,--the old pose she remembered so well. There was a tense quiet the length of the street.

"Those you hire do poor work from behind," Harris said. "Maybe you sometimes take a chance yourself and work from in front." His thumb was hooked in the opening of his shirt just above the b.u.t.t of his gun.

Slade held a cigarette in his right hand and raised it slowly to his lips. He removed it and flicked the ash from the end, then inspected the results and snapped it again,--and the downward move of his wrist was carried through in a smooth sweep for his gun. It flashed into his hand but his knees sagged under him as a forty-five slug struck him an inch above the buckle of his belt. Even as he toppled forward he fired, and Harris's gun barked again. Then the Three Bar men were vaulting to their saddles. Evans careened down the street, leading the paint-horse, and within thirty seconds after Slade's first move for his gun a dozen riders were turning the corner on the run. Before the spectators had time to realize that it was over, the Three Bar men were gone. Slade had many friends in town.

The girl had seen Harris's draw, merely a single pull from left to right and by his quartering pose the gun had been trained on Slade at the instant it cleared the holster; not one superfluous move, even to the straightening of his wrist. The driver's voice reached her.

"Fastest draw in the world for the few that can use it," he said.

The guard opened the door. The girl was sitting with her head bowed in her hands.

"Don't take it that way, Ma'am," he counseled. "He was a hard one--Slade."

But he had misread his signs. She felt no regret for Slade, only a wave of thankfulness, so powerful as almost to unnerve her, over Harris's escape, untouched. She accused herself of callousness but the spring of her sympathy, usually so ready, seemed dry as dust when she would have wasted a few drops on Slade.

The next day, in the late afternoon, Harris looked up and saw a chap-clad rider on the edge of the valley. She had ridden over unannounced on a horse she had borrowed from Brill. She answered the wave of his hat and urged the horse down the slope. He met her at the mouth of the lane and together they walked back to the new buildings of the ranch. The men breaking horses in the new corrals were the same old hands. The same old Waddles presided over the new cook shack. Her old things, rescued from the fire, were arranged in the living room of the new house. A row of new storerooms and the shop stood on the site of the old. And in the midst of all the improvements the old cabin first erected on the Three Bar stood protected by a picket fence on which a few vines were already beginning to climb.

"It didn't take long to throw them up, with all hands working, along in the winter when there wasn't much else to do," he said.

After the men had quit work to greet the returning Three Bar boss she went over every detail of the new house. The big living room and fireplace were modeled closely along the lines of her old quarters; heads and furs were on the walls, pelts and Indian rugs on the floors.

Running water had been piped down from a sidehill spring. The new house was modernized. Then Harris saddled Calico and Papoose and they rode down to the fields.

As they turned into the lane they heard the tw.a.n.g of Waddles's guitar from the cook shack, the booming voice raised in song in mid-afternoon, a thing heretofore unheard of in the annals of Three Bar life.

"There'll be one real feast to-night," Harris prophesied. "Waddles will spread himself."

They rode past the meadow, covered with a knee-deep stand of alfalfa hay.

"It was only tramped down," he said. "She came up in fine shape this spring. We'll put up a thousand tons of hay."

He held straight on past the meadow, turned off below the lower fence and angled southwest across the range. The calves and yearlings along their route gave proof that the grading-up of the Three Bar herds was already having its effect. Ninety per cent. were straight red stock with only a few throwbacks to off-color strains. The two spoke but little and near sunset they rode out and dismounted on the ridge from which, almost a year before, they had viewed the first move of organized law in the Coldriver strip.

A white-topped wagon came toward them up the valley along the same route followed by the file of dusty riders on that other day. A woman held the reins over the team and a curly-haired youngster jostled about on the seat by her side. A man wrangled a nondescript drove of horses and cows in the rear.

"That's the way we both came into this country first, you and I,"

Harris said. "Just like that little shaver on the seat."

"Will they find a place to settle?" she asked, with a sudden hope that the newcomers would find a suitable site for a home.

"Maybe not close around here," he said. "Most of the good sites you can get water on are picked up. But they'll find a place either here or somewhere else a little further on."

He slipped an arm about her shoulders.

"It's been right lonesome planning without a little partner to talk it all over with at night," he said. "Have you come back for keeps to help me make the Three Bar the best outfit in three States? I can't hold down that job alone."

She nodded and leaned against him.

"That's what they wanted--old Bill and Cal," she said. "But it's nice that we want it too. I've come for keeps; and the road to the outside is closed."

They stood and watched the sun pitch over the far edge of the world; and down in the valley below them the hopeful squatters were looking for a place to camp.