DURING the ride down to the ranch, after the probability of pursuit had passed and given place to a feeling of security, the question of why Alma Nearing had summoned him rose constantly in Barrett's mind. The answer evaded him still as he walked a little beat outside the gate with his pipe, waiting for her to come.
Something had happened to jangle woefully the serenity of that household between the day of his departure for Eagle Rock camp and the day of his return, Barrett could feel, rather than see. Mrs. Nearing was not herself; the fact that he was a horse wrangler in her husband's employ could not alone justify her strange behavior toward him when she knew he stood at her door. She was as one distracted by a great grief, a racking calamity. Her anxious inquiry for news of Nearing seemed to give an insight into the cause of her troubled state.
Had the thieves fallen out? Had Nearing gone on some expedition not countenanced by his partners in those dark transactions, for which his life might be forfeit? Or was it that his wife had become cognizant of his dishonesty at last? Even so, what could Alma
Alma, coming softly to keep her rendezvous, was almost beside him when he turned, wrapped in his brooding thoughts as though he walked in a fog. The long dark cloak that shrouded her dress made her as part of the moonless night; she must be wearing moccasins to approach so noiselessly, he thought. She came upon him so unexpectedly, although waited for, confronting him so close when he turned at the end of his beat, head down in troubled concentration, that he felt hot blood rush into his face as if she had surprised him of his meditations.
"Aunt Hope is asleep," she said, "but I'm afraid it will not be for long. We'd just as well sit on the porch, where I can hear her when she wakes."
"She must have suffered a great deal to change her so in this short time," said he. "She didn't appear to recognize me."
"She's always worried so about Uncle Hal when he's away," Alma excused, leading the way to the house. "Can you expect her, or any of us, to feel the same toward you, Mr. Barrett, when you come here under false pretenses to humiliate and trouble us, and drive us out of house and home if you can!"
"My intention has been greatly abused by somebody," Barrett quietly returned. "Under the indictment I'd better not go any nearer the house; I'd feel better a little distance away. We can talk here?"
"Anywhere. Maybe you're right about going any nearer."
She remained silent a little while, arms on the gate as he had been fond of recalling her in memory during the days of his short apprenticeship on the range. She was looking away, he knew, with that far-seeing gaze into the mysteries of a land he had not yet come to understand. He could not see her eyes, but he could feel the struggle that lay in them, as he had felt it that calm morning when they first stood together at the gate.
"Look what you've done!" she said, facing him again in her sudden, unexpected way, hand thrown out as if discovering the material damage laid to his charge.
"Done?" he repeated, amazed by her vehemence.
"Come here whining for your money back, like a tin-horn that's got into a game too big for him. You've got to have your precious money, no matter if it wrecks the company, breaks my uncle and drives us out on the prairie. Before you came here you were writing around to certain stockholders to get their proxies, boping to throw Uncle Hal out!"
"Yes, that's true," Barrett admitted, neither shaken nor ashamed. "I'd do it tomorrow if I could."
"Why didn't you come here like a man, then, and fight for controf in the open, if you think you're the appointed savior of this company?"
"There wasn't anything secret in my attempt to get enough proxies to put in another president at the next election, Miss Nearing. I knew some of the stockholders would make inquiry about it here. Senator Nearing knew what I came here to find out, he told me so the first night; why didn't he send me away?"
"I didn't mean to get out of patience with you, Mr. Barrett," she said, not attempting to answer him, seemingly oblivious to his question, indeed, her mind running back on her hot, ungenerous speech of a moment before. "I've seen them suffer so, Uncle Hal and Aunt Hope, worrying over the thought of disgrace the son of an old friend might bring, was trying to bring, on them in their old days. For the failure of this company, the ousting of Uncle Hal, would be a disgrace to them that they could never bear."
"There's no disgrace in honest failure, Miss Nearing. The business world, heartless as it is said to be, never looks on it in that light."
"Uncle Hal only wants time, time to catch up on his losses, to pay every stockholder his original investment, if not a profit," she urged, knowing her lesson very well, Barrett thought. "I sent for you to come while Uncle Hal was away to ask you, as a gentleman and a friend of the family, to leave here, Mr. Barrett, drop this silly little attempt of yours to investigate something that's away too much of a big man's problem for a boy of your experience to handle, or even understand."
"He could have refused to put me to work; that would have been the better way," said Barrett, seeming to answer his own question of a little while before, the question she had passed over and ignored. "But I have not done anything, Miss Nearing, nor found out anything, to give an honest man one moment's uneasiness."
"He was more afraid of what you'd tell around when you went back home than what you'd find out, I'm sure, if he sent you away without giving you a chance to try, your hand at this despicable, sneaking detective business," she told him, scornfully.
"But it would have been wiser," he persisted, thinking of the three guns that had leaped to work the vengeance of cowards and thieves, "wiser and better than the other way."
"What other way?" she asked, in sharp severity. "What do you mean?"
"I was thinking of the jokes of certain merry gentlemen," said he, grimly.
"You're even more of a green boy than I thought you were!" she declared.
"I am very green," he owned with a kindly toleration of her scornful abuse, "and I hope I'm still something of a boy. Maybe I'll outgrow both faults in time."
"You've seen how Aunt Hope has broken already under the worry and anxiety," she said, passing over him in her manner of noting only what it suited the baronial fashion of her argument to note. "I've heard them talking nearly all night time and again since you came. What do you suspect, Mr. Barrett? What da you want to know?"
"Maybe it was just a tin-horn's uneasiness for his little stake," said he.
"You knew before you came here, as all the stockholders know, why this business hasn't paid, but you don't know how the rustlers work, you folks back East; you can't realize how they can get away with so many cattle and not get caught or killed. I only wish you could run into a bunch of them, just to give you a taste of what it means!"
Evidently she had not heard of his fight with Wells and his companion his first day on the range, as she had not heard of many things which Nearing locked in his secret places. Barrett knew that it was not his place to inform her. He hoped, in truth, that she might never know.
"The manly thing, the kind and friendly thing, would be to go away from here," she said, her manner softer, her voice gentle and pleading. "Give Uncle Hal the chance you'd ask for yourself in his place; believe me when I tell you he hasn't deceived anybody, doesn't want a cent of anybody's money; that he would rather put a bullet through his own heart than wrong the most unworthy person that ever trusted him."
"I hope it will all clear up for him, then, and come out right," he said.
"It will all come out right, Mr. Barrett, if you'll go away and stop worrying him by your suspicions of crookedness, or whatever it was induced you to come. Your money's safe; Uncle Hal's got the rustlers on the run, and things are going to take a turn for the good from now on. Will you take my word for it, Mr. Barrett, if you're not willing to take his?"
"I've cut all my connections with the Diamond Tail, as far as they relate to employer and employed," he told her, his voice slow and grave. "My foolish, small, sneaking investigations have come to an end."
"Have you found out anything?" she challenged, in the defiance of perfect confidence.
"Nothing to give an honest man one moment of uneasiness, as I said before, Miss Nearing."
"Then you're going away?"
"Not very far. I like this country, I'm going to settle here."
"Going into the cattle business?"
"I hardly think so. I don't see my way to anything very clearly yet, but when Senator Nearing comes home I'll give him my resignation—I've already quit. Does that assurance quiet your mind any?"
"If I've been hasty and harsh, and maybe I have, forgive me, Mr. Barrett," she appealed, more like herself, not overriding in the egotism of a cattle baron's sacred rights, he thought. She offered her hand, whitegleaming in the dark. Barrett took it, encased it a moment between both his own, and thus gave her absolution without words.
Barrett made allowance for her breeding, readily forgiving much, but his pride was hurt, as the pride of youth must suffer before it bends down in meekness, or strikes to the by-ways in craft. It hurt him to have her give him such a low rating among men. Without undue egotism he felt this to be untrue.
Barrett believed, he knew, in fact, that he could stand up in a man's place and give and take with the roughest of them on equal terms. It was in this coward's game of gun slinging that he lacked the speed and recklessness of consequences to class as a fighting man. He visualized the men she meant when she spoke of the big ones. Dale Findlay rose in the foreground of the picture; other figures grew distinct in the campfire, pressing behind him. And cattle barons rode into the picture, broad men of lordly bearing, insolent to look upon the weak, ready with fire and shot to drive onward all who trespassed upon their undeeded estates.
Such as these this girl knew, such as these were to her the nobility of the earth. Whatever she had seen of life in her schooling and travels beyond the range, her heart had been molded there in that land; its ideals were her own, its free interpretations of right composed her own moral code.
"So you think you'll stay here on the range," she said, curious to the core to learn what he meant to do for a livelihood there. "If you don't go into the cattle business there's nothing for you but sheep, unless you turn nester."
The last choice she added with an outflung word, as one names a thing outlawed by common contempt, impossible by reason of its very baseness. Barrett did not reply at once. There was so much of forecast of the standing he would assume in her opinion if he should proceed in the hay-making venture with Fred Grubb, that his mind veered from that business.
"There's somebody coming," said he, catching the sound of an approaching horse.
"You've got a good ear if you hear anybody," she said, discounting the news in that superior way of one who resents being beaten at his own trade by an outsider.
"Yes," he admitted, "a man's ears sharpen at sea."
"You're right, I beg your pardon; there is somebody coming. But it doesn't ride like Uncle Hal."
Barrett thought it must be Findlay, or a man sent from Eagle Rock camp by him, arriving with the news of the half-breed's death, and other particulars of the failure of their plot, for Nearing's ear. For he could not get it out of his thought that the mestizo had been Nearing's agent, sent there to work the rustlers' vengeance and his own.
"One of the boys," said Alma, indifferent now, as the rider halted at the high gate opening into the stable yard.
Barrett could see him, plainly outlined against the sky, reach up to pull the lever which opened the gate to riders without dismounting. There seemed to be something familiar in the carriage of the man, but he was certain it was not Findlay.
Barrett thought of going to join Fred Grubb, feeling that nothing remained to be said between this lady of the cattle lands and himself that would advance either of them toward the desired end. For he intended to go ahead with his demands on Nearing, and his investigation of him. The charge of being a man too small to play that game of the cattle country, which she had laid with so much contempt against him, would be refuted in her eyes very soon.
"I'm rather glad you're going to stay, after all, Mr. Barrett," she said, returning unexpectedly to that theme. "I've been considering it; maybe it's better that way. Stand off and take an outsider's view, even if it can't be a friendly and unprejudiced one. You'll see then how things are run in this country, and what the cattlemen have to face. Stay one winter, just one winter, and I'll promise you that you'll never question & cowman's word again when he tells you of losing thousands of his cattle in one blizzard, and thousands more when the snow covers up the grass for weeks at a time."
"Strange as it may seem to you, Miss Nearing, that's one part of it I never have questioned," Barrett told her. "I've seen a few things in the way of storms"
He broke off suddenly, the flame of conscious shame coming again hotly into his face. It began to sound like a boast, a bolstering up of the manhood in him that she had sneered upon and found without weight in the rude balance of that land.
But what could a cowman know of storm or hardship, who never had clung his watch to the ice-sheathed deck of a struggling ship! Incredible as it might seem to them, to her, other parts of the world than the cattle lands contained men. But deeds, not words, must prove him in her eyes.
"Yes, but there's a shelter on a ship," she said, unimpressed by his halted speech.
"What are the men doing while the cattle are dying of cold and starvation?" he inquired.
"What can they do?" she countered, resentful of the implied criticism. "There's nothing to be done but wait till it blows over."
"And then go out and count the dead," said he, keeping to himself the thought that it was all very noble and humane.
"They skin 'em if the wolves haven't torn the hides,—but it hardly ever pays," she said, no compassion in her for that great suffering, that slow death in unvoiced misery upon those bitter wilds. "But you wait here through one winter—that will be the best medicine for you, after all, You'll understand the hazards of this business then."
When Barrett parted with her she made apology for not offering the hospitality of the house. She seemed herself again, for the first time since the moment of his arrival, when she had given him her hand in welcome that could not have been feigned. Barrett believed the news brought by Manuel from Eagle Rock camp must have worked something in her mind to his prejudice, deepening her resentment against him for coming there to guard his family's interests.
He went his way through the dark to the bunkhouse to find a bed, there to meet Dan Gustin, who proved to be the rider who had arrived a little while before. It was their first sight of each other since the evening of Barrett's arrival at the ranch, Dan having been on duty many miles from the scene of Barrett's humble start as wrangler.
Dan reported that he was out of a job. It had come to the point where he either had to kill a man or quit, he said.
"I'm too poor to kill a man," he said soberly, "so I had to quit my job. I was talkin' to old Charley Thomson about it the day I met you in Saunders, Ed. He said a cowpuncher couldn't afford to kill nobody these days, it come too high; so I just let the feller live on."
"I was tellin' him about me and you goin' to start grangerin', Ed," Fred Grubb disclosed.
"What do you think of it, Dan?" Barrett asked, anxious to have the clean young fellow's opinion on the bold departure.
"I was just tellin' this old hidebound wrangler if you fellers'd let me, I'd take up a claim by the side of yours and settle down to stretch my hands and face and rest," said Dan.