There was nothing startling in the aspect of Senator Galloway's patrolman. Rawlins had consorted with dozens of his type in cow camps on the Kansas plains, lined up with scores of them at the long bars of the stockyards' saloons. He came riding out of the bushes with stealthy precision, his horse restrained by careful hand, reins held high above the saddle-horn, free and untrammeled in his dark-blue woolen shirt, coat and slicker behind the saddle, rifle in scabbard under the bend of his knee.
Rawlins watched the fence-rider from his covert as he drew his horse up across the cut panel of wire, near enough to him to see that he had left his youth behind him by at least twenty years. His face was thin, his features were prominent, with a look of inflexibility and determination about him that did not promise well for the trespasser. Rawlins concluded from his neat appearance that his camp was not far away.
The fence-rider waited, horse blocking the gap in the fence, something of injured innocence in his bearing, conveying the impression that it was his fence which had been abused, and he had suffered a deep insult along with it. He glanced at the wire-ends which lay in the dust beside him, the lean muscles of his jaws bunching as he chewed hard on something that probably was not gum. It looked like a bad hour for the man who cut the fence, Rawlins thought, and with the thought the person in question burst suddenly into view on top of a little rise not more than twenty yards away.
The person who had ridden across the forbidden territory, desecrating the sacred institution of a fence to do so, appeared on the crest of the little rise under such headway that it was impossible to bring the horse up sharply and cut it for safety away from the sentinel who blocked the exit. Some effort was made to check the horse's plunge down the rather abrupt little hillside, which was not effective until the bottom had been reached.
There the rider swung round as if to give the fence-guard a run for it, no doubt with the design of cutting the fence farther along and escaping from the trap. Not until that moment, horse and rider presenting side view, had Rawlins seen, or even suspected, that the bold trespasser on Senator Galloway's usurped pastures was a woman.
Whether she considered a race on her winded horse against the fresh one of the guard lost before it was begun, or whether it was against her code to turn her back to a foe, Rawlins could do no more than guess as she turned her mount with decisive hand and faced again toward the fence. Rawlins had a pretty good notion that the latter condition was the one which moved her, basing his belief on the defiance proclaimed in every line of her body, from her sombrero-covered head to her spurred boots.
The fence-rider sat waiting her arrival, his lean jaws bunching in hard little knots at the hinges as he bit determinedly on whatever it was between his teeth. It might be a piece of his own barbed-wire fence, from the grimness of his face.
The horse came forward at a walk, it being of that distinctive cow-country breed and training that knows no intermediate gait between its fastest and slowest. The beast had been pushed hard; its long winter coat, giving way in ragged patches here and there, was drenched with sweat as if it had forded a river. The fence-rider stiffened for action as the trespasser drew near, lifting himself in his stirrups as if all set for a race or a row. Rawlins wondered what he would do if she ignored him and tried to ride past.
She was not an uncomely girl—a closer view discovered that she was scarcely more, nineteen or twenty, Rawlins judged—in spite of her broad hat with leather band, her riding breeches and man's coat, knee boots which bore the mark of many a scramble over rough ground and through thorny bushes. Her hair was completely hidden under the hat, jammed down at an angle which appeared most uncomfortable, as it was most unbecoming, on the back of her head. It had the advantage of revealing her face, however, for which Rawlins was pleased, for he had done some tall figuring since he discovered her sex, trying to form an advance picture of a lady who had the temerity to cut a fence guarded by rough-handed men and ride on her business across the interdicted miles.
It was refreshing to find her better than his mental artistry had devised. That added to the interest of the situation. It would be easier to deny a plain girl passage than a handsome one. At least Rawlins knew it would be so in his case if he stood in the fence-rider's place.
The fence-rider's horse was squared around to stand broadside across the cut panel, which it filled almost completely, the posts standing not more than twelve feet apart, leaving no room for passing without a clash. The girl rode up slowly, her blown horse carrying its head dispiritedly, showing no interest in the stranger of its own kind. Rawlins noticed with quickening of anticipation that the girl was gathering her reins with surreptitious movement as she held the fence-rider in her eye. His heart gave a jump with her horse as she roused it from its listless plodding with a touch of the spurs.
It was what Rawlins had expected of her, seeing her come up in that apparently disciplined, defeated way. But her sly trick failed; the fence-rider was expecting it, also. He whirled his horse to meet her charge, which she had begun with no more than a rod between them, catching her horse's neck across the withers of his own, grasping her reins with quick and certain hand.
In the dust of the compact the man leaned out, one leg crooked up, the stirrup on his toe, jerking the bit, setting her horse back on its rump, giving her a busy moment to hold her seat.
"What a' you doin'? What a' you doin'?" he asked, a jerk on the bit with each explosive demand, which was more censorious than interrogative. "Don't you know this ain't no road?"
The girl's horse scrambled up, backing off, dodging, trying to break its captor's hold, succeeding only in stirring the fellow's anger against it, which he relieved in cuffs and curses, as he might have misused a man.
"Where do you think you're goin' to?" he asked the girl, red to the gills, furious in his mounting anger, which his abuse of the horse appeared to rouse to sudden heat.
The girl was pulling at the reins, which she had twisted around her hand. Between the two of them the horse was having an unhappy time, pitching and lunging, sidling and twisting, its mouth dribbling the foam of torture. Rawlins was so engrossed in the struggle that he forgot his place as a neutral, leaving his concealment, drawing near to see the outcome. Neither of the parties to the squabble saw him, although he had come to the fence in his eagerness.
"Let go that bridle!" said the girl, panting in a white fury that was the hotter for its helplessness.
"No, I'll not let go! No, I'll not let go!" the fence-rider declared. "What a' you doin' inside of this fence—say?"
He fired that at her several times, yanking the bridle savagely, fingers through the ring of the bit, repeating himself explosively.
"Take your dirty hands off my horse and let me go!" the girl demanded, giving up her struggle to break loose out of consideration for her horse.
"This ain't the first time you've cut this fence!" the guard accused.
He left off jerking the horse to lean over and jaw at her, making a menace with his free hand.
"That ain't half of it," she returned, as defiant as he was angry.
"You'll think a long time before you cut another waar," he threatened. "You're not goin' through this gap—you hear me? You're goin' to turn that horse around and ride ahead of me acrost this past'r out the 'way you come in on the other side. You'll go around this fence, you darn little forkid streak of devilment!"
Rawlins went a little nearer. He noted that the girl had no defensive weapon about her, nothing at all but a little buckskin bag at the horn of her saddle, a gunnysack behind her with something lumpy, like groceries, in it. It would be a shame, he thought, to allow that ruffian to send her back. She would hardly be able to make it home that day, considering the long ride around the fence. He was thinking he'd have to throw in a word or two when she flung her leg over the saddle and flipped to the ground.
"I'll not go; you can't make me go!" she said.
"All right," the fence-rider replied, accepting the situation coldly: "It'll cost you your horse and saddle for cuttin' this fence to-day, and next time it'll cost you more. You can take them things off. I don't want your grub."
"You're not going to take that horse!"
"Ain't I? You watch me."
"You'll not dare to steal my horse!" she said, but with trembling, doubtful voice, clutching the bridle opposite the fence-rider's hold with both hands, looking up at him with more of appeal than threat in her pale face.
"You can git me arrested," he suggested, insolent in his certainty of security.
"You'll never dare to ride this fence again if you take that horse!" she said.
"I'll give you leave at me," he derided. "I'll be right along here to-morrow. Take them things off of that saddle if you want 'em."
"You'll not dare—you'll not let him take my horse, will you?" she appealed, catching sight of Rawlins, her voice quick with new hope.
The fence-rider was at a disadvantage, left hand wound in the reins of the captured horse, his back to the stranger, whom he glimpsed in one quick flash of his eyes around, but he was a fellow who had one kind of argument for a woman, another for a man. His hand was on his rifle; he had it half-way out of the scabbard when Rawlins caught his arm, wrenching the gun away from him.
"No call for a break like that," Rawlins reproved him.
"Who asked you to horn in?" the fence-rider wanted to know. "Who in the Billy Hell are you?"
"I guess it don't matter. You heard what the lady said. Let go of that horse and make yourself scarce around here!"
The fence-rider swept the stranger with an appraising eye, noting his calmness, the way he held the gun, and the general bearing of inflexibility that put up the bars to further argument.
"I guess you're the doctor, pardner," he said.
Rawlins waved his hand in a general direction of Lost Cabin, indicating the fence-rider's business just then lay in that quarter, but said no more. There was nothing more to be said, indeed. It was a case of put up or shut up.
The girl gave a little sobbing gasp of relief when the fence-rider galloped off as suddenly as if the gun had been fired for the start of a race that he was determined to win. She looked at Rawlins, her lips puckered in a tremulous struggle that seemed indecisive between a grin and a sob, dragged her sleeve almost viciously across her eyes, hiding her face a moment in the crook of her arm. There was a little sniveling sound, a little agitation of quick-caught sobs in her bosom. She faced him, then, smiling, tears in her eyes.
"Darn him!" she said.
"He's a rough sort of a guy, ain't he?" Rawlins said, looking after the man as he mounted the hill she had ridden down a little while before, passed over it in a flash, and out of sight.
"He'd 'a' stole my horse, all right, if you hadn't happened along."
"I don't see how he could get away with anything like that," Rawlins remarked. "I think it was a bluff to scare you off. More than likely he intended to turn it loose in a little while."
"No, he didn't," she corrected him seriously. "He'd 'a' got out of it—they can get out of anything."
"You ought to carry a gun, it seems to me, when you go out fence-cutting."
"Yes, I know I ought to," she admitted, "but I didn't want them to have anything on me. They can't do anything to you by law, I mean, for cuttin' the fence on a section line—that's a public road, you know—but if you go in with a gun on you and happen to take a shot at one of them, they'd send you over the road."
"That's only a bluff. They haven't got any more rights inside the fence than they have outside."
"I don't know," shaking her head doubtfully. "They make everybody think they have, anyhow. Are you from the land office?"
"No; I'm a stranger here."
"Well, I'm darn glad you happened along, anyhow." She breathed out a big sigh of relief, looking at him gratefully. "We'd better go away from here—that fence-rider'll double back if he meets another one, and from the way he started off I think he had hopes. What are you going to do with his gun?"
"Leave it here. I don't want it."
"I think you'd better hold on to it till we leave the fence. You can stand it against a post, he'll find it."
She led her horse through the fence, refusing his offer to help her to the saddle, saying she would walk along with him if he was going her way. If that way led over to the settlements on the creek, he said. Sure; their ranch was the first one, about two miles east. She'd be glad to have him stop for dinner.
As they walked along the fence she explained her reason for coming to that spot to make a breach in the wire.
"I generally cut it along here, because I can see this hill from a good ways off when I'm comin' back. If there's anybody snoopin' around I come in below here and cut my way out in another place. That man's laid for me a long time, but he never caught me before to-day. I guess I'll have to go around after this."
"An old sheepman named Clemmons told me about the way this fence cut you folks around here off from Lost Cabin," Rawlins said. "I never heard of it before last night."
"It's been here a long time, but nobody ever cuts it but me. Well, once a man cut it in the night to go after the doctor, but they threw such a scare into him I guess he'd let the whole family die before he'd do it again."
Her adventure with the fence-rider did not appear to trouble her very deeply, now she was out of it. She was more interested in the appearance of a stranger of such unusual type in the sheeplands. As Rawlins was in that country to know and be known, he made short work of unfolding his plans and intentions, feeling himself very well rewarded for his confidence when she told him she belonged to a sheep family, and that she would be glad to help him in any way she could.
Close-mouthed and wary, in the true sheepman fashion, she closed up on her personal affairs with that, not even revealing her name, nor showing any curiosity about his. Rawlins leaned the rifle against a post at the point where she said their way turned off from the fence, marching along beside her down into the valley of a little stream that came winding out of the north over a stone-broken course.
Rawlins wanted her to ride, which she refused to do, saying she welcomed the chance to get out of the saddle and stretch her legs, which particulars of her anatomy she mentioned with frankness as ingenuous as their proportions were plain to the eye in her mannish garb. She passed the bridle-reins over her arm and took her hat off to wind up her hair, which seemed to be coming down, although not a strand of it was to be seen before she revealed it by this sudden uncovering.
There was plenty of it, braided and wound in the German way about the head, light and fine, harmonizing with her fair skin and blue eyes. Her femininity was enhanced greatly by the simple removal of her hat, her comeliness established beyond a doubt. She stood somewhat above the height of romance, her newly-wound top-knot but a few inches short of Rawlins' own crown as he trudged beside her taking inventory of her sheepland charms.
She did not have the appearance of one who lived in a sheep wagon, or followed the flocks over the hills, as Clemmons had told him many sheep families did in that neighborhood of small flockmasters. While she slammed around somewhat carelessly with her words, there was an edging of a better understanding in her manner. She had not spent all her time on the sequestered ranch at the mountain creekside, Rawlins was very sure.
Sequestered ranch was about the name for it, he thought, as they wormed along the trail beside the crooked stream, its bright clear water making a rumpus among the stones, the red-barked willows along its course showing a little dressing of green leaves and pendant blooms.
They burst upon the ranch at once, with no preliminary hint of its nearness, not even in the broadening of the trail as much as the breadth of a hand. A comfortable, snug place it was, a low log house, long and commodious, with a jutting wing, a veranda between. There were folds and shelters of various kinds in the background, and sheep pens enclosed by a wattled fence that must have been an effective windbreak in winter storms. There was a patch of alfalfa, green as a daub in some crude painting, a brown spot where corn and cabbage stalks marked last summer's garden, a little orchard whose trees leaned as if to lie down out of the rigors of that bare, wind-trampled land.
An irrigation ditch, having its source up the stream at some point out of sight, carried the water for these domestic enterprises. It ran brimful in the bright spring sun to-day, a fringe of springing grass, of green that almost paled the vivid alfalfa, along its brink. There was a wire fence enclosing house and grounds, with a gate that one could open from the saddle by a lever. Bits of wool clung to the barbs of the fence, where incautious grazers had pressed too close. A lilac bush stood in the otherwise bare dooryard, its fat buds swelling to burst.
"This is home," the girl said, pausing, turning to him, throwing out her hand in a gesture of revelation and presentation, as if she offered it all, just as it stood. "You're welcome to it, such as it is, Mr ?"
"Rawlins, of Kansas."
"I am Edith Stone. I live here with my aunt, Mrs. Duke. We run the ranch. Come on in and meet her."