The Short Cut Part 19

Hume eased himself in the saddle and looked down at Shandon keenly. A little sneeringly he demanded,

"What are you going to make it? A little penny ante game?"

Shandon stared at him curiously. Hume laughed again under his gaze and said arrogantly, after the born manner of the man,

"If you'll make the stakes worth a man's time I'll make you hunt your hole, Shandon."

A little flush crept up into Shandon's cheeks and his eyes hardened.

It would be so easy to quarrel again with this man; the very sight of him, supremely egotistical and contemptuous, stirred a natural dislike into something very close to positive hatred. But these days he was making it his business to hold himself in check, he was turning his back against the old headlong ways, and he said quietly,

"Make your proposition. I see you've got one to make."

"I'll ride you any race you like, anywhere you like and at any time; provided it's a gentleman's game and not penny ante."

"Done," answered Shandon promptly. Had he refused it would have been the first time in his life he had refused a wager offered as this one was. "Name the sum and if it's anything I can raise I'm satisfied.

And," his eyes steely, "_I'll_ name the sort of race!"

"Some one said that you were going to start things with a purse of five hundred," remarked Hume. "I don't do business on that scale. I'll lay you an even thousand."

"I'm pretty close up right now," was Shandon's answer. "I've spent a good bit lately and I don't want to sacrifice any more cattle. But--"

"Oh, well," laughed Hume, "it doesn't make any difference. I thought that you might have a little sporting blood, you know. You must have done a lot of talking, Shandon."

"--but," Shandon went on, his voice raised to cut into the other's jibe, "I can sell a few cows if necessary. And while I'm doing it it is just as easy to raise five thousand as one."

"Oho!" cried Hume. "Little Saxon is proving up, eh?"

"Little Saxon can beat his brother Endymion any day in the week in the sort of race we're going to run. It's going to be ten miles, across country, across the d.a.m.ndest country you ever saw, Sledge Hume! It's going to be a distance race and an endurance race. And since it's going to be here in the West it's going to be Western. I don't care if you run or don't run and I don't care if it is for five cents or for five thousand dollars."

There crept into Sledge Hume's cold eyes a look of such shrewdness that Shandon was struck by it then, and remembered it long afterward.

"When I go into a deal," was Hume's swift answer, "it's because there's something in it. You put up your five thousand if you're so c.o.c.ksure, and put it up now and I'll cover it! With one thoroughly understood provision, Shandon. The man who comes in first at the end of that ten miles, be it you or me, gets the money. There's going to be no chance to get cold feet and pull out. If you don't ride at all, if you get scared and decide to get sick or break a leg to save five thousand, I ride alone and get it just the same. Remember I didn't ride over this morning for love of racing or for love of anything else; I saw a chance for some money, easy money."

"Draw up an agreement to that effect," answered Shandon, a darkening of his eyes showing that Hume's taunt had stung. "I'll sign it. Find a trustworthy man to hold stakes and I'll put up my five thousand within ten days after you put yours up. Is that satisfactory?"

Hume answered that it was, and named two or three men in El Toyon as possible stake holders. When he mentioned Charlie Granger, proprietor of the El Toyon hotel, Shandon said curtly,

"Charlie's all right. He's square."

So the matter was decided as coolly, and apparently with as much indifference, as if it had been a matter of no particular importance.

Hume made no pretence of desiring to continue a conversation that would be a mere waste of time and words now that his business was done, and swinging his horse about raked it with his spurs and galloped back toward the Echo Creek. Wayne Shandon, suddenly a little thoughtful, turned and went to the stable. Little Saxon jerked up his head and looked at his master with glaring, untamed eyes.

"We've got to get busy, Little Saxon," he said, looking with critical eyes at the lithe, powerful, rebellious body.

"Say, Red! Ain't you on to his game?" Shandon had not noticed that Willie Dart was anywhere near, but was hardly surprised when the little man popped up, wild eyed and excited. "Once you get your cash down he's going to put you out of the running! That guy'd put ground gla.s.s in a baby's milk bottle for the price of a beer. Gee, Red. You sure enough do need a keeper!"

Which position Willie Dart was already seeking manfully to fill.

CHAPTER XIV

IN WANDA'S CAVE

Willie Dart's sunny nature seemed to grow ever brighter as the days wore on. Once or twice he sighed at Wayne Shandon's failure to respond to his levities; and when he felt particularly unappreciated he carried his dimpling personality to the bunk house where he was hailed with delight. When a flask that had come in with Long Steve, who had made a brief trip to the outer world, disappeared before that joyous gentleman had consumed half of the potent contents, and when later the empty flask was found in the covers of Emmet's bunk, Willie Dart looked on with sorrowful, innocent eyes while Steve and Emmet resorted to physical argument. When a game of crib was being played while half a dozen men looked on, and a portion of the deck vanished, only to turn up ten minutes later in the hip pocket of Tony Harris, who had not once been near the table and was most thoroughly mystified, no one thought of blaming the cheerful Mr. Dart. It was only when he offered privately to collect for Big Bill a debt of six bits long owing to him from Dave Platt that the real gift of those wonderful hands of his began to be at all apparent.

Then, too, the method of his progress over the range was another source of unfailing delight and unbounded admiration. He had ridden a horse to the Bar L-M, but no man of them ever saw his little legs astride a horse again. He found, back of the blacksmith shop, the wreck of an old cart which years ago had been used for breaking colts; he improvised shafts and seat; he discovered the encouraging fact that Old Bots, a shambling derelict who had lost an eye when Wayne Shandon was quite young, was gentle and trustworthy. After that, wherever he went abroad, and he travelled all over the countryside, he rode in the cart, steering Old Bots this way and that with much shouting, prodding and jerking of reins. And he drove where perhaps no man had ever driven before. His smiling confidence in Old Bots, in his rattling, creaking old cart, in his own ability as a driver were all characteristic of his joyous optimism.

In the meantime Wayne Shandon had at last seen Wanda. His reasons for making no effort to see her immediately after his heated interview with Martin Leland were clear in his own mind; he expected to find that they had been equally as clear to her, and that she would have understood.

But the Wanda he found one riotously brilliant morning was rather cool, distant, unapproachable.

He had ridden up on the cliffs which towered at the upper end of the Echo Creek ranch, from which he could look down the valley and see her when she left the house, as he felt confident that she would. He saw her when it was not yet nine o'clock. She was riding out across the valley toward the cliffs opposite at the north end of the valley, toward the cave she had found there. Shandon marked the course she was taking, swung his horse across a ridge and hastened to the meeting with her. He came upon her as she dismounted near the big cedar against the rocks.

"Wanda!" he called softly.

She turned toward him, her face paler, he thought, than it should be.

He slipped from the saddle and came swiftly toward her, his eyes shining, his arms out. Then she raised her hand, stopping him.

"Good morning, Wayne," she said quietly.

"Wanda," he cried, a little perplexed. "What is it? Aren't you glad to see me?"

She smiled, put down the parcel she had been carrying, and perched upon a big broken boulder forcing her eyes to look merrily into his. And what she read in his look sent a quick, glad flutter into her heart.

But she did not let him know it.

"Glad to see you?" she replied gaily. "Why, of course I am. But,"

teasingly, a little cruelly, "aren't you the least bit afraid?"

"Afraid of what?" he asked blankly.

"Of papa!" she retorted, her dimples playing because she meant to look as though she was quite a heart whole maiden, and because the very ring of his earnest voice swept away all the uncertainty that had come to her during these last days of waiting. "You are on his land, you know."

"Surely you don't imagine--" he began.

She laughed lightly.

"My dear Wayne, how should I know?"

"I don't understand you, Wanda," he said a little stiffly. "After what happened the other day--"

In spite of her a little glowing colour ran up into her cheeks.

"Goodness," she exclaimed, persisting in the part she had vowed many times a day she would play for him, "haven't you forgotten that?

Really, after you'd had time to think about it didn't you have to laugh? Weren't we a couple of precious kidlets?"

For a moment he stared at her as though dazed. This was a Wanda he had never seen before; he did not know what to make of her. And then suddenly he put his head back, the gladness that had sung in his heart when first he rode to meet her surged back and he laughed the great, deep, happy laugh the girl knew so well.

"You little witch!" he cried gaily, as gaily as Wanda had spoken at first and more genuinely so. "You've just set out to plague me. And I'll show you how I treat little girls who tease!"