The Short Cut Part 7

It was dark within the long, narrow room, although the starlight gleamed feebly through the dirty window panes. Wayne found the lantern upon the nail where it had hung when he was a boy, lighted it, and turned the wick low so that there was only a wan light in the bunk house.

"Where's Big Bill's bunk?" he whispered to Garth.

Chuckling softly he drew near the bunk which Garth indicated against the wall at the far end of the room. He leaned forward, stooping low, peering into the shadows. Big Bill was fast asleep, his great, deep lungs expelling his breath regularly and mightily, his head with its touseled ink black hair half hidden by the hairy arm flung up over it.

Wayne tiptoed away from the bunk, moved two chairs further back against the other wall, and still chuckling with vastly amused antic.i.p.ation, again approached Big Bill's bedside.

He put out his hands slowly, gently, until they slipped into Big Bill's arm pits. Then, his laughter suddenly booming out he bunched his muscles and a black haired giant of a man in shirt and underdrawers was jerked floundering out of his bunk to the middle of the room.

Big Bill's mighty roar of mingled astonishment and anger brought a dozen cowboys leaping out of their bunks. In the dimly lighted room their blinking eyes made out the forms of two men struggling, one in his night dress, the other in hat and boots. One was Big Bill, for his roar was an unmistakable as the roar of summer thunder. But the other?

"I've been hungering to get my hands on you for a year!" came the laughing voice of the man in hat and boots. "You said that you could roll me, Bill. Now go to it!"

He lifted the mighty body of the struggling, half wakened cowboy clean off the floor, carried him across the room and slammed him down in a chair.

"It's Red Reckless!" cried a voice from the group of stupefied men.

"He's come home!"

"You ol' son-of-a-gun!" bellowed Big Bill, half in the surly anger which is the natural right of a man rudely awakened, half in tremulous joy. "Wait ontil I git my eyes open good an' I'll roll you like you was dough an' I'm makin' biscuits out'n you!"

Evidently he had his eyes "open good" before he had done talking. He was upon his feet, the big, swaying body oddly like a clumsy black bear's, his big hands lifted in front of him. And then he threw himself forward, close to two hundred and fifty pounds of brawn and bone hurled like a boulder from a catapult. Some one had turned up the lantern wick. The black head and the red head from which the hat had dropped came together, there was the thud of two strong bodies meeting with an impact that brought a little coughing grunt from each, and Red Reckless had done what any man must do before such a thunderbolt. He was flung backward, went down, and the two big bodies struck hard upon the bare floor. And above the crash of the falling bodies there were two other sounds, Big Bill's grunt, and the laughter of Red Reckless.

They were down, and Big Bill was topmost. But by the laws of the game a man must be forced back until his two shoulders touch the floor before he is beaten. Wayne Shandon's left shoulder was still two inches from the floor.

"You would wake a man up," grumbled Big Bill with that fierceness of tone which spoke a moment of rare delight.

"I'm going to show you something, Bill," gasped Wayne, half choked with the breath driven out of his lungs by the great bulk on top of him and by the laughter within his soul which had not been driven out.

"Something I learned from a j.a.p about three feet high. It cost me a hundred dollars and a broken collar bone. I'll let you off easier, Bill."

The light was none too good, perhaps the boys were not yet wide awake.

They didn't know how the trick was done, and it wasn't at all clear to Big Bill.

Wayne seemed to grow very limp beneath his hard hands and watchful eyes. Ready for trickery Big Bill, while he bore down hard on the left shoulder, and wrenched and twisted at the corded neck, expected anything. He had considerably less respect for a j.a.p than for a horse, looking upon the race as mimicking apes and not men at all, and he had no wish to be bested by a j.a.p trick. Yet Big Bill didn't understand.

Somehow Wayne Shandon slipping out of Bill's grasp like an eel through its native mud, had run an arm under his left arm pit, around his neck, over his right shoulder. Wayne's left hand leaped to Big Bill's right wrist. Bill felt that his neck was breaking, that his right arm was broken. And then he knew that Wayne was upon his knees, that his own two hundred and fifty pounds of big battling body were lifted high from the floor, that he was jerked sideways and slammed down. And then the boys were laughing and Wayne stood over him, laughing too, and he knew that his two big shoulder blades had struck the floor together.

"It's a d.a.m.n' j.a.p trick," he muttered, more than half angry now, flinging himself to his feet. "White man's fightin' I c'n lick every inch of you from red hair to toe nails."

But Red Reckless was laughing and shaking hands all round and Big Bill found no one to listen to the explanations he made. One after another the owner of the outfit greeted warmly the men who were working for him. Then he swung about, and went back to Big Bill.

"Shake, Bill," he cried. "It was rather a mean trick to do you up to-night but I couldn't wait until morning. I'll give you another chance when you like."

Big Bill grinned and his hard brown hand shut tight about Wayne's.

"There'll be lots of chances," he said shortly, his voice fierce, his black eyes very gentle. "You've come to stay, ain't you, Red?"

A look of vast disgust stole over Garth Conway's face.

"It's Bill and Red as if they're all dogs in one kennel," he muttered.

"It isn't hard to forecast what's going to happen to a range with a boss like that!"

He waited a little restlessly for Wayne to finish the conversation into which he had entered with the crowd of cowboys who seemed to have forgotten that they had a day's work before them. But Wayne Shandon, too, seemed to have forgotten. He was half sitting on the table, one leg swinging, his quick hands rolling a cigarette from the "makings"

proffered by Tony Harris, his laughing eyes filled with the joy of home coming, his tongue already busied with the answering of many rapid fire questions. No, he hadn't seen all of the world; it was bigger than they'd think. But he had played "gentleman's poker" with club dudes in London, he had hunted with n.i.g.g.e.rs and potted many strange things from an alligator to a cow elephant, he had seen the pyramids--

While Garth lingered at the door, the other men, crowding closer to the man at the table, grew into a charmed circle about him, a picturesque congregation in their underclothes of grey and white and washed out pinks and blues. Within five minutes after the defeat of Big Bill every man of them was either making or smoking a cigarette with all thought of their tumbled bunks forgotten. There were many demands for first hand information concerning wild n.i.g.g.e.rs and pyramids and the ways of the jungle; there were many exclamations testifying in mild profanity to startled wonderment. At last Garth, turning away, called out,

"I say, Wayne, you mustn't forget it's getting late. There's a big day's work for the boys to-morrow."

"This is my home coming celebration, Garth," Wayne laughed back at him.

"Hang the work, man. We'll have a half holiday to-morrow if the whole outfit goes to pot."

Anything further Garth had to remark he said angrily to himself as he strode away to the range house. And Wayne, with no further interruption, explained how the games ran at Monte Carlo. Finally, since there was nothing in the world he had learned to love as he loved horses, he came to speak of the Derby.

"The greatest race in the world," he cried, slapping his thigh enthusiastically. "Just because it's the straightest and the stakes are right and the horses are as beautiful as women and as swift as lightning!"

One o'clock came and they were talking horses and racing, the men now upon common ground, their eyes bright with the tale retold of the Kings' race. And before it was two Red Reckless was standing erect upon his two feet, his eyes brighter than the rest, his voice leaping out eagerly as he cried:

CHAPTER VI

THE PROMISE OF LITTLE SAXON

Rose-bud, the unlovely Chinese cook, made the dawn hideous in the range house with his pots and pans and rattling stove lids. To him appeared Red Reckless, touseled and sleepy eyed looking to the astonished oriental's vision like an avenging demon, threatening to choke him to death with his own pigtail and to roast him crisp and brown him in his own oven if he didn't conduct himself with less noise in his pastime of breakfast getting.

"Gollee!" Rose-bud found his tongue as Wayne disappeared into his bedroom. "Led, him come back some more. Led, him boss now!" He stood grinning in slant eyed cunning at the closed door. "Garth him all same go bye-bye now, maybeso?" He pondered the question, with his evil featured head c.o.c.ked to one side. Then his grin became more profoundly Chinese, more radiantly joyful. "All same h.e.l.l pop all time now."

And he went about his preparations for breakfast in strange, complacent silence, making his coffee twice as strong as he had made it for a year, the way Red Reckless liked it.

Garth Conway breakfasted alone. A glance out toward the bunk house against the fringe of trees at the far side of the clearing showed him that there was no smoke there, that the men were not about. A little angry spot glowing on each cheek he stepped out upon the porch as though to bring these slumbering men to a swift awakening. But he turned instead and came back into the dining room.

"You c.h.i.n.k fool," he flung at Rose-bud when his cup of coffee was set in front of him. "I don't drink ink for breakfast. What's the matter with you?"

Rose-bud wrapped his body in his long arms and his face in its childish smile, lifted his vague hints of eyebrows archly and nodded toward Wayne's room.

"Led, him come back," he said with unutterable sweetness. "Him like coffee all same black as h.e.l.l. Him boss now? Too bad. You d.a.m.n fine boss, Mis' Garth."

And he shuffled back to the stove leaving Garth scowling angrily after him.

Garth breakfasted in morose silence, disregarding the many joyful glances which Rose-bud directed upon him. Afterward he took out his pipe and stuffed it full with an impatient finger. The hesitation which had marked him last night seemed to grow with the slow hours of the idle morning. He had long been absolute, unquestioned dictator of the destiny of the Bar L-M, and he had grown naturally into the way of regarding it half with the eye of its permanent master. It had not only been his entirely so far as management was concerned for more than twelve months, but there had been always the possibility that it would be his to have and to hold, to do with as he thought best, if Wayne should not come back. But Wayne had come back. The coffee was eloquent of the fact; the slothfulness of the bunk house shouted it in his ears. He felt a sense of irritation, of injustice.

"The men will sleep until noon," he growled savagely. "Good heavens, is he crazy? Must he come back and chuck the whole thing to the dogs?"

There was nothing to do but smoke and wait for the next absurdity of a man who had played ducks and drakes with everything he had ever had, who was too big a fool to see--or care, which was it?--what was going to happen when he had run to the end of his rope.

Wayne, rosy from head to foot from his rough bath towel, tingling with the leaping life within him, showing no signs of the all but sleepless night, came out to breakfast before Garth had finished his pipe. He caught Rose-bud by the two shoulders, drove him back against the wall and held him there while he spoke to him.

"I've a notion to jam you through into the other room, you yellow heathen," he informed the cook whose smile was just a trifle uncertain.

"If the coffee is good I'll let you off."