They Of The High Trails Part 55

"I am," confessed the girl, "very tired and very dusty. I hope you always put your prisoners under the hose."

"I'll give you my spare chamber," replied the matron, with abstracted glance. "It's next the bath-room. I'm sorry, but I guess your father'll have to go down below."

"What do you mean by that?"

The sheriff explained, "The cells are below."

Helen was instantly alarmed. "Oh no!" she protested. "My father is not at all well. Please give him my room. I'll go down below."

"It won't be necessary for either of you to go below," interposed the sheriff. "Hanscom, I'll put Kauffman in your charge. You can take him to your boarding-house if you want to."

"You're very kind," said Helen, with such feeling that the sheriff reacted to it. "I hope it won't get you into trouble."

"Oh, I don't think it will," he said, cheerily. "So long as I know he's safe, it don't matter where he sleeps."

"Well, you'd better all stay to supper, anyhow," said Mrs. Throop. "It's ready and waiting."

No one but Helen perceived anything unusual in this hearty offhand invitation. To Hanscom it was just another instance of Western hospitality, and to the sheriff a common service, and so a few minutes later they all sat down at the generous table, in such genial mood (with Mrs. Throop doing her best to make them feel at home) that all their troubles became less than shadows.

Although disinclined to go into a detailed story of his return to the hills, Hanscom described the capture of the housebreakers and, in spite of a careful avoidance of anything which might sound like boasting, disclosed the fact that at the moment when he threw open the door of the cabin he had exposed himself to the weapons of a couple of reckless young outlaws and might have been killed.

"You shouldn't have risked that," Helen protested. "Our poor possessions are not worth such cost."

"I couldn't endure the notion of those hoodlums looting the place," he explained.

At the thought of Rita (who was occupying a cell in the women's ward) Helen grew a little sad, for, according to the ranger's own account, she was hardly more than a child, and had been led away by her first pa.s.sion.

At the close of the meal, upon Mrs. Throop's housewifely invitation, they all took seats in the "front room" and Helen quite forgot that she was a prisoner, and the ranger almost returned to boyhood as he faced the marble-topped table, the cabinet organ, and the enlarged family portraits on the walls, for of such quality were his mother's adornments in the old home at Circle Bend. Something vaguely intimate and a little confusing filled his mind as he listened to the voice of the woman before him. Only by an effort could he connect her with the cabin in the high valley. She was becoming each moment more alien, more aloof, but at the same time more desirable, like the girls he used to worship in the church choir.

Speech was difficult with him, and he could only repeat: "It makes me feel like a rabbit to think I could not keep you from coming here, and the worst of it is I had nothing to offer as security. All I have in the world is a couple of horses, a saddle, and a typewriter."

"It really doesn't matter," she replied in hope of easing his mind. "See how they treat us! They know we're unjustly held and that we shall be set free to-morrow."

Strange to say, this did not lighten his gloom. "And then--you will go away," he said, soberly.

"Yes; we cannot remain here."

"And I shall never see you again," he pursued.

Her face betrayed a trace of sympathetic pain. "Don't say that! _Never_ is such a long time."

"And you'll forget us all out here--"

"I shall never forget what you have done, be sure of that," she replied.

Nevertheless, despite the tenderness of her tone and her grat.i.tude openly expressed, something disconcerting had come into her eyes and voice. She was more and more the lady and less and less the recluse, and as she receded and rose to this higher plane, the ranger lost heart, almost without knowing the cause of it.

At last he turned to Kauffman. "I suppose we'd better go," he said. "You look tired."

"I am tired," the old man admitted. "Is it far to your hotel?"

"Only a little way."

"Good night," said Helen, extending her hand with a sudden light in her face which transported the trailer. "We'll meet again in the morning."

He took her hand in his with a clutch in his throat which made reply difficult; but his glance expressed the adoration which filled his heart.

Kauffman left the house, walking like a man of seventy. "My bones are not broken, but they are weary," he said, dejectedly; "I fear I am to be ill."

"Oh, you'll be all right in the morning," responded the ranger much more cheerily than he really felt.

"Is it not strange that any reasonable being should accuse my daughter and me of that monstrous deed?"

"That is because no one knows you. When the towns-folk come to know you and her they will think differently. That is why I am glad the coroner is to hold his court here in the town."

"Well, if only we are set free--We shall be set free, eh?"

"Surely? But what will you do then? Where will you go?"

"I hope Helen will return to her people." He sighed deeply. "It was all very foolish to come out here. But it was natural. She was stricken, and sensitive--so morbidly sensitive--to pity, to gossip. Then, too, a romantic notion about the healing power of the mountains was in her thought. She wished to go where no one knew her--where she could live the simple life and regain serenity and health. She said: 'I will not go to a convent. I will make a sanctuary of the green hills.'"

"Something very sorrowful must have happened--" said Hanscom, hesitatingly.

The old man's voice was very grave as he replied: "Not sorrow, but treachery," he said. "A treachery so cruel, a betrayal so complete, that when she lost her lover and her most intimate girl friend (one nearer than a sister) she lost faith in all men and all women--almost in G.o.d. I cannot tell you more of her story--" He paused a moment, then added: "She believes in you--she already trusts you--and some time, perhaps, she herself will tell the story of her betrayal. Till then you must be content with this--she is here through no fault or weakness of her own."

The ranger, pondering deeply, dared not put into definite form the precise disloyalty which had driven a broken-hearted girl to seek the shelter of the hills, but he understood her mood. Hating her kind and believing that she could lose herself in the immensity of the landscape, she had come to the mountains only to be cruelly disillusioned. The Kitsongs had taught her that in the wilderness a woman is more noticeable than a peak.

Just why she selected the Sh.e.l.lfish for her retreat remained to be explained, and to this question Kauffman answered: "We came here because a friend of ours, a poet, who had once camped in the valley, told us of the wonderful beauty of the place. It is beautiful--quite as beautiful as it was reported--but a beautiful landscape, it appears, does not make men over into its image. It makes them seem only the more savage."

Hanscom, refraining from further question, helped the old man up the stairway to his bed and then returned to the barroom, in which several of the regular boarders were loafing. One or two greeted him familiarly, and it was evident that they all knew something of the capture and were curious to learn more. His answers to their questions were brief: "You'll learn all about it to-morrow," he said.

Simpson, the proprietor of the hotel, jocosely remarked: "Well, Hans, as near as I can figure it out, to-morrow is to be your busy day, but you'd better lay low to-night. The Kitsongs'll get ye, if ye don't watch out."

"I'll watch out. What do you hear?"

"The whole of Sh.e.l.lfish Valley is coming in to see that your Dutchman and his girl gets what's coming to them. Abe has just left here, looking for you. He's turribly wrought up. Says you had no right to arrest them youngsters and he'll make you sorry you did."

One of the clerks dryly remarked: "They's a fierce interest in this inquest. Carmody will sure have to move over to the court-house. Gee!

but he feels his feed! For one day, anyhow, he's bigger than the _en_tire County Court."

The ranger had a clearer vision of his own as well as Helen's situation as he replied: "Well, I'm going over to see him. When it comes to a show-down he's on my side, for he needs the witnesses I've brought him."

"Abe sure has got it in for you, Hans. Your standing up for the Dutchman and his woman was bad enough, but for you to arrest Hank without a warrant has set the old man a-poppin'." He glanced at the ranger's empty belt. "Better take your gun along."

"No; I'm safer without it," he replied. "I might fly mad and hurt somebody."

The loafers, though eager to witness the clash, did not rise from their chairs till after Hanscom left. No one wished to betray unseemly haste.