The Westerners Part 22

Molly looked on him with new wonder, this slayer of bears and wild cats, who nevertheless appeared so gentle, whose eye was so mild. It was indeed a marvellous world. She forgot the Kid and the hunting party, and gave herself up to the pleasure of the moment.

From the pets they wandered to the flowers. These interested Molly exceedingly, for she herself was struggling with the boxes of geraniums. It was fully half an hour later when Molly finally said farewell to her host and continued on down the gulch in the direction taken by her little companion.

The Kid was waiting with all the heart-rending impatience of youth.

The precious time before breakfast was slipping away in futility. He had made a sacrifice in taking this girl. Never would he do it again!

never! never! And then he saw her coming, and forgot everything except his relief.

"Took you long enough to break away," was his only complaint as he rose to conduct the party.

"Have we got time to hunt now? Ain't it 'most breakfast-time?"

inquired Molly dubiously. "Don't you think we'd better let it go for this morning?"

"Lord, no! Come on! For heaven's sake don't let's waste any more time!" cried the Kid with a gusty impatience that surprised his companion. She did not realize the humiliated disappointment that had this last hour seethed in the little breast. "I s'pose we might 's well get up on the ridge," suggested the Kid, still grumbling.

They turned sharp to the left, through the thicket, where the birds were already hushing their songs, and the early dew was quite dried away. The Kid pushed ahead with almost feverish rapidity. Here and there in the brush Peter scurried, head down, hind legs well drawn together beneath his flanks. He snuffled eagerly into the holes and forms, doing his dramatic best to create some game, if necessary.

Every once in awhile his bristly head, all alert, peered, c.o.c.k-eared, over a bush, searching the hunter's face for directions, and then plunging away suddenly as his own judgment advised. It was most scienceless and unsportsman-like. The Kid peered eagerly to right and left, holding the muzzle of the little rifle conscientiously at an angle of forty-five degrees, as he had been taught, and vainly striving to avoid dry twigs, although Peter was making enough noise for a circus parade. The girl followed a step or so in the rear. It was breath-taking, this excitement. Every stir of the bushes needed examination, every flutter of wings was a possibility, every plunge of Peter might send a covey whirring into the pine tops, or rouse a squirrel to angry expostulation. As they went on up the side hills, still without result, but therefore with expectation the more sharpened, and as Molly's cheeks became redder and redder under her brown skin and her eyes brighter and brighter, and as she bit her under lip more and more, and as the straight level line of her brows grew straighter and straighter with the concentration of her thoughts, it is to be doubted if the most enthusiastic lover of scenery could have torn his eyes from the pretty picture even for the sake of the magnificent sweep of country below. So at least thought Cheyenne Harry, on his way across the ridge to his claim.

He surveyed the eager three with some slight amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Hullo!" he called suddenly.

The boy and girl started.

"Hullo!" answered Molly after a moment, when her intent hunting expression had quite fled before her cheerful look of recognition.

"That you?"

The Kid too paused, but evidently under protest, and with the idea of moving on again at the earliest polite moment.

"How's hunting?" inquired Harry facetiously. "Killed all the game down below there?"

"All we've seen," replied Molly promptly; "and the hunting's very good." She put ever so slight a stress on the word "hunting." "We're going over the ridge now. Want to come along and help carry the game?"

Harry looked speculatively at the Kid, who was standing first on one bare foot, then on the other. "Naw, guess not," he replied. The Kid brightened at once. "I'm going over to the Gold King for a while.

You'd better come along with me."

"Haven't had any breakfast," objected Molly.

"Oh, that's nothing. Neither have I. I'm just out to look around.

Come ahead."

Molly did not care a snap of her fingers about the Gold King claim, except that it belonged to Cheyenne Harry; and, owing to the rarity of that individual's visits to his property, she had never seen it.

Besides this, she had been a good deal the last few days with Graham.

That young man had been interesting her greatly with a most condensed and popularized account of the nebular theory, which seemed to Molly very picturesque and intellectual. She was much taken with the idea of thus improving herself and she gave herself great credit for the effort, but it was so far above the usual plane of her intellectual workings that she had to stand on tiptoe to reach it. The evening before, she had gone to bed keyed up to wonderful resolves. To-day the pendulum had begun ever so slowly to swing back. All the influences of out-door life had drawn her to the earth; the clear freshness of the early morning, the rank smell of the wild beast, the incipient hero-worship in her admiration of the old man's supposed prowess as a slayer of bears, the actual physical contact with the slapping clinging brush through which she had pa.s.sed. She breathed deep of the crisp air. She broadened her chest, and stretched her muscles, and drank the soft caressing sun warmth. She felt she would like to get down near the gra.s.s, to breathe its earthly smell, to kiss it. It was the gladness of just living.

And to her in a subtle manner Cheyenne Harry symbolized these things, just as Graham symbolized that elusive intangible humiliating power of the intellect. He was strong and bold and breezy of manner, and elemental of thought, and primitive in his pa.s.sions and the manner of their expression. He appealed to that spirit in her which craved the brusque conqueror.

So for the moment the idea of a scramble with him over these rough dike-strewn ridges seemed to her the one idea in perfect tune with the wild Western quality of the newborn day. And therefore, to the consternation of the waiting Kid, she replied--

"Why, yes. I think it would be good fun, though I don't believe there _is_ any Gold King claim. I believe it's just an excuse for your loafing around, for you certainly never spent much time on it."

"It's the finest thing ever," Harry a.s.sured her with a laugh. "I'll show you."

The Kid stood stock-still in consternation.

"Oh!" cried he, when he could get his voice, "and how about our hunt?"

"You come along with us," invited Cheyenne Harry good-naturedly. "It's good hunting all the way."

But the Kid knew better. This heedless climbing and loud talking would be quite different from the careful attention necessary for the destruction of the wily "chicken" or experienced squirrel. He looked very sad.

"Yes, come on," urged Molly; "we'll get something over in 'Teepee.'"

The Kid shook his head, unable to trust himself to speak. Cheyenne Harry turned away a little impatiently.

"I'm sorry," continued Molly with hesitation. "I think you'd like it.

But we've had quite a hunt already, haven't we? And we can go another time."

She joined Cheyenne Harry. Peter stood looking first at the Kid, then at the two retreating forms. He was plainly undecided. Molly's gingham dress fluttered for the last time before she turned the corner of a bowlder. Peter suddenly made up his worried mind. The Kid was left alone.

He sat down on a rock, and rested his chin in his hands, and looked away across the valley to the peak of Tom Custer. A tiny white cloud was sailing down the wind. He watched it until, swirling, it dissolved into the currents of air. Far back in the forest of pines a little breeze rustled, faint as a whisper: then it crept nearer, ever waxing in strength, until, with a murmur as of a throng of people, it pa.s.sed overhead, and vanished with a last sigh in the distance. The Kid listened attentively to the birth and death of the voice. A squirrel directly above him broke into a rattling torrent of chattering rage.

The Kid sat, his chin in his hands, looking out over the valley with unseeing eyes, his little rifle resting idly against his knee. The moments pa.s.sed by, one after the other, distinct, like the ticks of a great clock.

A soft muzzle nosed its way gently between his wrists. He looked down.

Peter's homely, gray-whiskered face with the pathetic eyes looked up into his own. The Kid flung both arms about the dog's coa.r.s.e-furred neck, and burst into a pa.s.sion of tears.

From the top of the ridge, where she had paused a moment to take breath, Molly saw the whole of this little scene. She suddenly felt very irritated.

That Kid was certainly the most unreasonable of children! Why, she spent three-quarters of her time doing nothing but amuse him. She had got up cheerfully at an unearthly hour, walked several miles without breakfast, followed him uncomplaining through a lot of damp gra.s.s and underbrush, and now, because she wouldn't spend the rest of the day with him, he sulked. Forsooth, was she to give up all her friends, her amus.e.m.e.nts, for the sake of that boy? Molly was most impatient--with the Kid--and she became so preoccupied in pitying herself that she hardly answered Cheyenne Harry's remarks, and was a very poor companion. She deceived herself perfectly; yet in the background of her consciousness was something she did not recognize--something uncomfortable. It was an uneasiness, a heaviness, a slight feeling of guilt for something which she could not specify, quite indefinable, and therefore the more annoying. It made her feel like shaking her shoulders. There seemed no valid reason why she should not be as light-hearted as she had been a few minutes ago, for her reason saw nothing in her conduct to regret. And yet she was uneasy, as though she had done something wrong and was on the point of being found out.

She could not understand it, but it was very real, and, because she could see no reason for it, it made her angry, with a sense of injustice.

It was the first manifestation of another phase of heredity--the New England conscience.

XXI

LAFOND MAKES A FRIEND

Michal Lafond made much less of a stir in the life of the camp than had his ward. He fitted in quietly.

Behind the Little Nugget was a room and a shed. Lafond took possession of the room, and relegated Frosty to the shed. His position as proprietor of the saloon sufficiently explained his idleness, if anybody's idleness ever needed explanation in a mining camp. He seemed to do nothing, merely because he was to be seen almost any hour of the day either smoking contemplative pipes near his place or Bill Martin's, or wandering with every appearance of leisure from claim to claim in the Hills, or disappearing in the direction of Durand's cabin in the lower gulch. That was a mistake. He really did a great deal.

For instance, he made himself agreeable in a cool, drawling fashion to anybody who cared to talk to him. He kept his eyes wide open, no matter where he went. He puffed as many speculations into his brain as he did smoke-clouds into the air. That was not much perhaps; yet, by the time the Chicago men came to Copper Creek, the half-breed knew just about everybody's business in that camp. The student of character never needs to ask blunt questions.

He soon discovered that his first surmise as to Billy's peculiarities was correct. The man was above all things spectacular. He liked to fill the stage. If Lafond could strip him of his property--the Great Snake--his prestige as promoter of the camp would be gone. Black Mike could imagine nothing more galling to one of Knapp's temperament.

He soon discovered that it would be no easy matter to do this, however.

He had felt sure that he would have no difficulty in taking advantage of the proverbial carelessness of Westerners in general, and Billy Knapp in particular, as to some of the finer points of mining law.