CHAPTER III
THE HIDDEN HOMESTEAD
Jackson left shortly after noon with the spare horse for Rand, and he left content. Stoney had specialized on stews and hash, alternating with steaks he always contrived to render tough, but Quong dished them up a meat-pie that was savory with herbs and would not have done injustice to Delmonico. Or so Sheridan told him.
Quong accepted everything with a dignified complacency that seemed to set him apart—at least in his cooking—as an automaton of perfect mechanism, plus imagination and resource, but uncommunicative, self-sufficient. Later in the afternoon, Sheridan, passing round the ranch-house on his way to the corral, saw him seated on a bench, reading a book set down beside him, its leaves held open by stone weights. How he contrived to follow the text and the contour of the vegetables at the same time, without disaster to fingers or potatoes, seemed a marvel to Sheridan, but Quong was doing it, the parings were fine and continuous, potato eyes were whisked out with a deft twist of the knife point.
"Everything goes wonderfully, Quong," he said. "You were a godsend. You are an artist as a chef but I suspect you capable of better things than cooking for a ranch outfit. For one, you have studied English with excellent results. Not that I want to interfere in your affairs and, above all, I don't want to lose you as a cook."
Quong looked up, inscrutable, his well-shaped fingers gauging his work by feel, trimming, guiding the shavings of peel automatically into a basket.
"I have studied—much," he said. "As for cooking, knowledge helps all things." He indicated the pages he had been reading in the tattered cook book, sent with some baking powder preparation as advertisement. "And I do not consider the means that may lead to an end," he concluded.
Sheridan thought that he would like to know what end Quong referred to. Hardly a trivial one he fancied, as he walked off to get what he had started after, a coil of barbed wire. With it he rode away to help repair a reported break in the line-fence. The wiring there was comparatively new, and Stoney, restored to horse-duty, stated that it had been cut by nippers. The bright, clipped ends told a story that seemed to point to Hollister.
Hollister had a holding and he had a herd. He spent most of his time in Metzal and he had no outfit but a Mexican woman, her daughter, Juanita, and her son, Pedro. Yet his herd steadily increased. He had more yearlings, comparatively, to the number of his cows than any other rancher on Chico Mesa. They all bore the brand that Jackson had claimed as so appropriate for its owner—the Lazy H—and it was generally rumored that Hollister was lucky with mavericks." Sheridan was the only man who had actually caught him in the act of appropriation. He had made a habit of fixing in his mind the peculiarities of markings on his herd with that purpose in mind, but he had no actual proof. He could not prove that Hollister had slit the tongue of the calf and, though he had redeemed the animal, he had incurred Hollister's enmity. "For which," he assured himself, "he did not give a damn." Hollister friendly, or Hollister an enemy, would be equally a rascal. Current talk ran that Hollister had started cattle ranching with "a branding iron and his gall" and they had strangely multiplied.
Generally, Sheridan imagined, he confined his depredations to nightfall and the open range. This cutting of the wire might not have included the stealing of stock, but have been only a spiteful answer to his discomfiture over the red-and-white heifer. Some cattle have a fence-drifting habit and any of Sheridan's, coming to the break would surely have gone through and wandered down towards the river over unfenced territory.
He looked for tracks but could not find any. He and Stoney used wire-stretcher and staples and mended the break in silence. Stoney was never a man of words, a lack that had been bad for him under the recriminations of his mates for his spoiling of good food. Sheridan had his mouth half full of staples most of the time, and Hollister, and the ways to get rid of such undesirables, filled his mind.
All hands, save Rand and Jackson, were washing up at the trough they used for the purpose, half a score of rangy chaps, sun-browned and sun-dried, splashing and laughing and all watching Quong, who was plucking chickens for supper, speculating on how he was going to serve it. Supper had been set back half an hour to allow for the two to come in from Metzal to eat with the rest. Sheridan himself ate at the same table with his boys. The more he saw of them the more he liked them. At ease, they were like so many kids at times, in action, they were men who appeared, many of them, far older than their years. Often they posed, they loved excitement and loved still better to affect to be unmoved by it, as they did by danger. Yet at times they would break out into the wildest demonstrations. They interlarded their talk with profanity as others might quote scraps of a foreign language, to add piquancy. They hated a liar and a braggart, they loved a good story. They gambled, they drank—whenever they could get it. Nearly all of them were shy of women; their stories were far more decent than the average run among men of their rank.
All of them had streaks of adventure, of romance, of poetry. There was Jackson's love of the fiddle. Sheridan had seen Stoney sit like a statue on his horse for half an hour gazing at a sunset. Their play was as vigorous as their work. The latter they took always seriously. They loved to play tricks on each other and their code forbade them wincing when they happened to be the trickee. They were at once boyish, manly, brave, and Sheridan felt himself akin to them in many ways.
One slid a sudsy bit of soap down another's back. The other straightened up in a wild attempt to corral the slippery scrap, when he stiffened and pointed down the road towards Metzal.
"It's Jackson! In a Lizzie!" he shouted. "Bet the Pinto throwed him an' run off!"
"Throwed Jackson, nothin'!" said another, "but he might be hurt. "
The surmise was disproved by Jackson leaping from the car and hurrying on his high heels towards Sheridan, whom he drew aside. The car backed and sped back to town in a whirl of dust.
"I had to kidnap him to bring me," said Jackson. He's got a job to drive a party to Pioche. But I didn't have any time to waste an' the pinto had to throw a shoe. Rand's bringin' him. "
"What is it? Ghost Mountain?"
"Yep. The boys got hold of Old Yuni, thet ha'f dippy Navajo. Got him drunk an' talkin' about Ghost Mountain. He knows the way in an' they got it out of him—most of it ennyway. Yuni believes in the ghosts, all right. He claims they was an Injun tribe massacred there by the Paches, centimes back. His tribe, maybe. The ghosts are still on the job. Hollister was tryin' to git him drunk enough to lead 'em. The gang was all down to Vasquez'."
"Who told you this?"
"Juanita. Oh, it's straight goods, all right. I know she's stuck on Hollister. I reckon he ought to have married her. She come to Metzal to look him up. She's jealous as a wildcat. Hollister must have bin talkin' about the gel on Ghost Mountain an' she's got a notion Hollister will throw her over. They chucked her out of Vasquez' when she began to make a fuss. She was ready to spit fire w'en she met up with me. I figgered she'd had a row with him an' I got it out of her.
"They're goin' up there tonight after they grub up. I hit the breeze."
"We'll beat them to it, Red. Give them a surprise party. What did you learn about the way in?"
"Only that it's masked by a waterfall. There's a little crick runs out of a box canyon. I know whereabouts it is. The water falls plumb out of the rock. Green growth both sides of the fall. You'd never think of lookin' back of it. Live stream, winter an' summer. We can find it. "
"We'll snatch a cold snack and start right away, Red. We've got to get there first. If they've been drinking ...?"
Jackson nodded solemnly.
"It's liable to be a two-gun expedition," he said. "I'll git yore mare an' saddle up my roan. He's faster than the pinto, ennyway. You rustle the grub. Oh, Lord," he groaned.
"What's the matter?"
Jackson had stooped in front of Quong, gathering up the four plump, picked chickens in a pan.
"How was you goin' to serve them, Quong?"
"Fricasseed, with cream gravy." There seemed to be the merest hint of a twinkle in Quong's eyes. He must have overheard some of the talk between Sheridan and Jackson.
"Just my derned, forsaken luck. You—you wasn't goin' to have dumplin's too, was you, Quong?"
"Yes, sir."
Jackson turned away with a groan. Then he wheeled.
"Save some for me, an' the Boss, Quong. Creamed chicken an' dumplin's! I'll git even with Hollister for this. "
Ten minutes later they were saddled and away, loping at a tangent towards Pioche Pass, where a wagon road paralleled the rails. Sheridan did not use his mare for ordinary ranch work and she was fresh. The ewe-necked roan wanted nothing better than to run but they held them in to a steady lope, the horses' heads high, nostrils distended to the cooling evening wind, redolent with spicy herbage. Again the afterglow was brilliant back of Ghost Mountain, spired against the glowing clouds, pink to the sunset that rayed its topmost crags and left the timberline black and shaggy. They had to ride through the pass and around the range to the Pioche side. Fifteen miles to go, against twelve from Metzal.
They carried four guns, though Sheridan hoped there would be no occasion to use them. But he dreaded what form of deviltry the drunken gang from Metzal might devise, and his face was grim as he opened up a primitive gate in the northwest corner of his holding, and looped it back in place again, after they had passed through.
They avoided the foothills and, choosing their ground by old acquaintance, loped on for the southern mouth of the pass through the thickening twilight. Stars began to come out. There would be a moon waiting for them by the time they emerged from the canyon. The land sloped gently upwards and, when they struck the road, they drew rein, gazing back along the grey ribbon of highway to where the scant lights of Metzal showed. There was no sign of the surprise party, no sound but the surge of Ghost Creek, confined to a rocky bed, sharing the gap with the wagon-road and the railway, crowding the latter sometimes to a manufactured bed hewn from the cliff.
Relieved, for it had been hard to guess at what moment the determination of Hollister and his roisterers might crystallize into action, they set their breathed horses north, going fast and even, the mare springy on her delicate pasterns, the heavier roan forging along with a powerful clumsiness more apparent than real.
Sheridan found himself more than merely anxious to reach the women on Ghost Mountain and stave off the crudities of the drunken gang from Metzal. The girl held his thoughts with an intensity that he wondered at, now and then, as he conjured up what she might look like, how she might act. It was three years since he had been on terms of intimacy with any woman, as long since he had spoken with one of his own rank—by which he meant one who had had the same opportunities of culture, education, habit of thought, manner and speech.
Sheridan liked to think himself essentially a socialist. He had found that what one man might lack in one capacity, he was apt to make up in other things that count. The main thing was to be a man. He found Jackson congenial enough. The cowpuncher had his philosophies, his codes, and they were none the less effective and invigorating for having been acquired without instruction. But, from a woman, Sheridan felt that his spirit demanded something more for true companionship.
A woman, he believed, should be able to furnish aspiration and inspiration to a man, to prevent him from coarsening, to polish what he rough-hewed from life. That is, a woman that a man might take for mate. He checked his thoughts at this. There seemed no reason why they should lead to such a close connection with a girl whom he had never seen, save at long distance. This ride was merely a man's duty. Jackson felt the urge as keenly as himself; any of the cowboys of the Circle S would have instinctively done the same thing. But he found he was regarding this nameless girl as a special individual, not merely as a woman likely to be insulted. And he was quite aware that he was not thinking of her companion at all.
Yet the answer was simple enough. It is hard for a man to judge his own composite. Sheridan was far from being an anchorite. The physical as well as the mental side of him desired to see this girl who said "mounting" for mountain; this "slimsy lady" of Jackson's phrase. The description stuck with him, suggested the need for his aid more keenly, fired his purpose. And she was from his own people.
"Moon's up," said Jackson. "That 'll help some. Better leave the road an' scout along the foot of the hills. Don't want to override the place."
The northern side of the range was more fertile than Chico Mesa. Cactus grew, and soapweed, but gramma grass prevailed. The mountains rose steeply, their slopes bristling with forests of pine and cedar up to the gaunt crags above timberline, silvered by the lifting moon that rose at their backs, full and golden. Once they had to ford Ghost Creek, running in a loop from its mountain sources, fetlocks deep and cold, its ripples sparkling as they splashed through.
"Ahead of 'em all right," said Jackson, turning in his saddle and seeing nothing against the moon though he rode with his head twisted on his shoulder for some minutes, trusting to the roan to pick his way.
"It's just as well, Red. We've got to make ourselves acquainted and get their confidence. We don't want to start a rumpus, either, if we can avoid it by a little diplomacy. No sense in scaring them to death and making them leave the place."
"I'm carryin' my diplomacy on my hip," said Jackson. "There's on'y one sure way to argy with Hollister and his bullies when they're primed with Vasquez' whisky."
"You forget the women. They may not be incapable of handling the situation, with us to back them."
"Play a lullaby to Hollister an' put him to sleep, I suppose," said Jackson with grim sarcasm. "'Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.' I read that in a book somewhere, but I ain't bankin' on it. What if the cuss can't carry a tune?"
"If there's a tunnel back of that waterfall, we'll need lights. We should have brought a lantern."
"We can get some pine-knots," suggested Jackson. "I've got matches. It's a peach of a night, ain't it?"
To the cowboy the ride was an adventure after his own heart. Like all his kind, he had a keen sense of the dramatic and he was going to enjoy every minute of the trip. Danger spiced it, so did the prospect of thwarting Hollister, and the violin held a lively place in his anticipations. The horses kept gallantly to their gait, the air was full of the balmy tang of resin and dry wood, crisp and cool, every breath an exhilaration. And, being supremely happy, Jackson commenced to chant one of the dolorous songs that are sung as lullabies to uneasy cattle when the thunder growls and the nightherds ride round their charge.
Oh, bury me on the hillside where the grasses gently wave,
With a score of my com-pan-y-uns to follow m^e to my grave.
With four of my good comrades to carry me on my bier,
To speak a partin' word for me an' shed a bitter tear,
I was a rovin' cowboy an' I broke my mother's heart,
With gamblin' an' with drun-ken-ness I drifted far apart.
Now let me be a warnin' to all who see me lie,
An' listen to the tale of one who wasn't fit to die.
There were innumerable verses, strung out to while away the monotony of night work, and Jackson, in a high-pitched tenor that was not all unmusical, recorded them faithfully to the tempo of the roan's gallop. Despite the crimes of the leading personage of the song—he had been everything from bank-robber to train-bandit, horse-thief, crooked card-player and woman-stealer—shot at last through the lungs to a death by slow music; this ballad was the apotheosis of the cowboy; the villain was a hero in "The Cowboy's Lament." Sheridan knew this, the local version, well, and smiled at the doleful solemnity with which Jackson invested it. It stopped abruptly as they came to the sandy bed of a creek that was now merely a trickle. There were no foothills proper on this side of the range, merely a few buttresses of detritus and, here and there, a projecting spur or headland of stubborn granite. Just ahead of them jutted out such a promontory.
"Ha'f a mile, or thereabouts on t' other side of that," announced Jackson, "is where the crick I was talkin' of heads out. There's the Old Ghost loomin' up.
The northern escarpments of Ghost Mountain soared into the sky, its crags, as wildly rugged as those overlooking Lake of the Woods, touched by the moon with a magic that seemed to dissolve the harsh rock to something more ethereal.
To achieve those battlemented heights, to storm that fortress through some rift backing a waterfall seemed ridiculous. But a growing excitement possessed both of them now that they neared the goal. Jackson, riding in the skirts of the timber on the lower slopes, found what he wanted in the shape of dry pine boughs and resinous knots for torches. They rode more slowly as they reached a place where the mountain wall rose perpendicular from the plain, looking for a gap that might harbor the waterfall.
They found the stream first and let the horses rinse their mouths. Dismounted, they followed up the current into a narrow ravine, a mere cleft in the rock, walking now in, now out of the water, rushing fast from a pool some two hundred feet back from the plain; fed by a spouting fall, leaping over a ledge fifty feet above their heads; a veil of dulled silver in the gloom of the place unpenetrated by the moon. It covered the backwall of the cleft almost completely and vines and bushes framed it wherever they found placement and soil. The water fanned out towards the pool and completely screened any suggestion of an entrance back of it.
"This is the on'y waterfall along here or anywhere's nigh Ghost Mountain," said Jackson. "So this is it, though you'd never guess it. Derned if it don't seem foolish to butt yore head against what seems like must be solid rock behind that water, but, here goes."
There was not room to slip around the edge of the fall; the ledge it spouted from was not projecting. Jackson charged fairly into the silver tumble, broke through and disappeared. The next moment he was out again, soaked, but triumphant.
"Reg'lar adit. Blacker 'n a steer's stummick!"
With the pine torches protected by the slicker carried on Jackson's saddle, they led the none too willing horses through the drenching spray. Sheridan produced matches and soon they held flaring lights that revealed a narrow tunnel, not particularly moist and with the air pure enough, a tunnel that Sheridan believed had been enlarged if not entirely fashioned by hand. This theory was confirmed by the rude petroglyphs they passed, picture phrases chiseled in the rock and filled in with red and black pigments that held their color, for all the ages that had passed since the prehistoric chroniclers tried to link up their generation and its deeds with those to follow.
The floor rose at a stiff gradient. Occasionally one of the horses stumbled, its shoes striking sparks from the rock. A strong draught faced them. The tunnel turned abruptly to the left, widened, its walls opening upwards and, overhead, they saw the sprinkled light of stars. Their eyes became adjusted to the gloom of this grim gorge that lay before them, a gigantic gash, the unhealed scar of some titanic upheaval. Their torches were but small use now and they stamped them out. They were inside the mountain wall. Towering, the enormous rampart of Ghost Mountain lifted, springing from a floor midway the height of the mountain, reached from the tunnel's end by a series of terraces. Ghost Mountain was semi-hollow; its pinnacles and turrets were on true walls that guarded this hidden valley where, according to the Indian legend, once lived a tribe, remote in its fastness until the fierce Apaches raided it. The moon only tipped the eastern angles of the highest spires, the stars managed a lurky twilight, from which slowly emerged weird shapes of stone, wind-carven, sand-lathed; crouching monsters, sphinxes, grotesque statues on great pedestals, sentinels of the terraces. Among them loomed branched cacti, like mammoth candelabra, with the ashes of dead fire in their sockets.
A frightful sound suddenly filled all the place with hideous, wailing clamor. To Sheridan it seemed the wail of a woman in frightful agony of soul and body, magnified by resounding echoes. They had mounted again, for the horses were better able to pick a path in that light. The mare reared, shied, fought at the bit while Sheridan tried to soothe her, too much occupied with her plunges to grip a pistol, as his instinct prompted. The roan, too, tried to bolt but Jackson brought him up.
"Mountain lion," he shouted to Sheridan. "Way up on the cliff!"
Sheridan had heard their weird cries before and always his blood had run a little cold at their eerie quality, resounding in a canyon of the foothills. But this had been close and the character of the place had emphasized it. Even after Jackson spoke he could not laugh at himself. But his turn came.
They were traveling a trail that the horses had discovered and had reached the third of the terraced pitches, the way winding amid the monoliths and giant cacti. The rift funneled as they mounted and a strong wind blew intermittently, bred, Sheridan fancied, from the battling temperatures of the still warm cliffs that had absorbed the sun all day and the cold, descending air of the night. The puma had given no further outcry. Doubtless it had scented its chief enemy and deemed discretion the better part of its uncertain valor.
Jackson pointed to a sphinxlike head of sandstone, set on a snaky pillar, its profile startlingly realistic. A hole had been turned clean through a sand-drilled eye. And, as it towered above them, through that socket gleamed a star.
"There's yore ghosts," said Jackson. "Enough to scare any Injun. I'm glad I ain't alone, myself," he deprecated candidly. "I might git a notion to go back. My Gawd! What's that?"
This time the horses did not start and it was Sheridan who divined the cause. The wind, whistling through the orifice it had made, produced a sound that was uncanny in its semblance of a human sigh, or moan.
"It's the soul of some ghost that has lost its bearings. Red," and then Sheridan explained.
"Humph! No wonder the old Injun didn't want to guide 'em up here. If it wasn't for Vasquez' whisky, that crowd 'ud never come by here. But that stuff 'ud give a chap nerve enough to ask the devil in hell for a water chaser. The gels must have gone up in the daytime. I wonder if that lion's scared 'em?"
They passed the whistling monument and toiled up the steep trail to where the chasm closed in. On the rim they stopped involuntarily at the wonder of the scene. They seemed to look across the floor of a crater, its lava long crumbled to fertile soil, circled by jagged cliffs. The moon bathed a segment of the western wall. Grass grew thick as a mat, there were groves of trees and, in the center of this gently sloping bowl, a little lake lay like a frosted silver shield. The scent of flowers came to them, flower faces looked up at them, dim in the dusk. The foot of the circling wall was heaped with talus and this was thick with pines and cedar. On a low slope beyond the lake, backed by a mass of trees, there glowed an orange star.
"Too steady for a fire," said Jackson. "It 's in a winder. D'ye suppose them two wimmen c'ud have built them a house?"
"Let's go and see," said Jackson and they put their horses to a brisk canter. Once again sound halted them, a melody, thinly exquisite, that seemed reaching out to them in welcome.
"The fiddle," said Jackson in a whisper. "Here's where we settle that bet." The air continued, as they rode up it, as one rides up the wind; surely sustained, a haunting tune that was both sad and sweet, played with tender variants by a hand that was sure and firm. It ended on a high, faint note when they were still twenty yards from the light and could see the bulk of a low log-cabin with a stone chimney at one end and a long verandah fronting the lake.
"How you goin' to rouse 'em 'thout stampedin' 'em?" asked Jackson. "They ain't expectin' us no more than no one else. Also," he added whimsically, "I allow that Big One is short-tempered. She might have a gun—an' she might be able to aim straight an' hold steady."
His question was answered for him. Somewhere back of the house a horse nickered and Sheridan's mare responded with a shrill whinny. An oblong of yellow light appeared close to the smaller space that was the window. It was almost instantly blocked by the giant figure of a woman. A streak of dull light shone on the object she carried, which both men knew for a rifle.
"Who you bane out there? What you want?" The voice was deep, contralto, musical, but it carried a quality that was imperative, backed by the rifle.
"My name is Peter Sheridan. I am owner of the Circle S ranch," said Sheridan, riding in a little way.
"You stop right where you bane now. Both of you, 'lest you want you should git shot. Who told you how to git in this place?"
"I shall be glad to explain," said Sheridan, conscious of Jackson snickering beside him in the dark. "We'll both come in with our hands up, if you like. I assure you we are friends on a friendly mission."
"That will do, Thora." The great bulk of the woman disappeared from the lighted frame as she stepped on the verandah. Another figure took her place, slight, silhouetted, with the rays of the lamp inside just touching gold-brown hair and an oval cheek.
"The slimsy lady," muttered Sheridan. She spoke his own tongue, the language of culture. He fancied that she had recognized it in him also, that it had served as a password and countersign.
"Will you gentlemen come up? You startled us a little, but I am sure there is nothing for us to be afraid of."
"Plucky as a nestin' wren," murmured Jackson. Then, aloud, "No'm, there ain't nothin' to be alarmed at. We're harmless as yearlin's."
The girl, she was only that, gave a laugh that was like a silvery chiming of tiny bells but the pair was conscious of the dim shape of the bigger woman, suspicious, protective, holding her rifle ready.
"We'd like to leave our horses where we could tie them," said Sheridan. "We heard a mountain lion on the way up. They might get restless."
"There is a shed back of the house," she answered. "Our own horses are there. There is plenty of room."
What was a girl of her type doing in this wilderness? The marvel of it grew on Sheridan as they put away their mounts in the shed, a substantial affair built of heavy logs, like the house, and roughly divided into boxstalls that were bedded down with pine twigs. The wonder of finding Quong at Metzal depot faded beside this new riddle. The "slimsy lady" belonged against a background of mahogany highboys, old china, andirons, bookshelves and an Adams' mantel. He had a swift picture of her coming down a spiral staircase of white treads and slender white spindles, her white hand on the polished rail, her dainty body clad in white. And now she was dressed in a khaki skirt, with gaiters, a waist of blue flannel relieved by a bowtie of lighter blue silk. He had registered all this as she had stood in the door watching them as they rode round the cabin. Her face he had not seen clearly. But, what had brought her to so solitary a spot, who had given her the secret to this hidden homestead?
"The Big One, she's a whale!" said Jackson. There was respect rather than ridicule in his voice. "She's the biggest woman I ever see, short of a circus. And she's no freak. Well built. I'll bet that yarn of her crackin' them two fresh ranch-hands' heads is true. How in time did they ever make out to come to this hole in a hill?"
"They'll tell us, if they want to. We don't want to seem too inquisitive on a first visit, Red."
"Not me. I ain't that kind of a neighbor."
The girl and the woman stood on the verandah to bid them welcome and then the two men followed them into a big room where a fire burned low in a stone fireplace. It was somewhat primitively furnished. The big table, a settle, and two or three chairs, were eminently home-made and also evidently old, but they were not without some lines of grace and well put together.
"It will look more homey when the rest of our things arrive," said the girl as she noticed their glances. "When we get some curtains up and a squashy pillow or so. They are following us by freight, you know?"
She had a fascinating air of taking them into her confidence though it really mystified them the more. The Big One stood by silent, an Amazon on guard. She too was in khaki skirt, her well-shaped legs in high-laced boots, a khaki sweater tight over her great chest, ample breasted. Above it, her neck rose like a column on which her squarish but well contoured face was set, firm of flesh, ruddy under a thin veneer of bronze. Blue-grey eyes were frank with inquiry and suspended judgment. A mass of ash-blond hair was braided and coiled around her head. A handsome woman, a woman with no nonsense about her and of much capacity, with every inch of her body solid with good health and strength.
The face of the "slimsy lady" was not pretty, Sheridan decided, and almost immediately reversed his decision. The mouth was wide, but the corners turned up, the nose was short, but it was piquant. Her hair was either dull gold or bright bronze, he never really determined which. Her eyes were the color of cornflowers. Their blue made that of her companion's eyes almost faded but their chief charm lay in their crystalline clearness, the transparent whites, the fleck of red in the corners, the brilliance of their movement under the long lashes. And her teeth were perfect. The somewhat stilted adjective used by Jackson to describe her figure, fitted exactly. "Elegant." She was not plump, the "slimsy lady," but her breasts were delicately full and she was all lissome curves and tapering lines with daintiness of wrist and ankle.
For a few seconds the four of them appraised each other silently and then, springing to some common impulse, all smiled.
"My name is Mary Burrows," said the slimsy lady, "and this is my friend Thora Neilsen." Sheridan caught the look of affectionate gratitude flashed from the Big One to the girl who was undoubtedly, in less democratic surroundings, her mistress. And Mary Burrows began to mount in Sheridan's estimation. She was clever, as well as unprejudiced by caste.
"I have told you my name," he said, as he shook hands with Thora and felt the vigor of her grip, electric with vitality. "Peter Sheridan. This is my friend and my mainstay at the ranch, Lem Jackson."
"Better known as 'Red,' Miss—and Miss," said Jackson, trying to appear at his ease, dropping the hand of the slimsy lady as if he thought he might hurt it, shaking that of Thora Neilsen as if it had been that of another man.
"We've seen you before," said Sheridan. "One night when we were camping at Lake of the Woods at sunset and you were on the rim of the mountain."
The girl's eyes widened.
"That was you? I told Thora about it. I rode to see the sunset and I saw the lake. It was like a great opal. I saw the little fire and two tiny figures by it. But I did not suppose you had noticed me. The mists were all about me."
"You looked like a wraith," laughed Sheridan. "I was inclined to doubt your solidity and Red thought you were a ghost for a minute. This is Ghost Mountain, you know? El Monte del Muerte, the Mount of Death."
"We are not afraid of ghosts. El Monte del Muerte, Mountain of Death, is the Spanish name. We knew that, of course. An Indian tribe lived here long ago. Thora dug up some arrowheads yesterday. And so you came to make us a call? That was thoughtful. But—how did you find the way in? We are glad to see you but—we are a little disappointed that our secret entrance is known."
"You could easily make a heavy gate across the tunnel behind the fall," said Sheridan. "Or we would be glad to make it for you to atone for our trespass. It might be a good idea. I'll tell you how we found our way."
He was sure that they were well ahead of the surprise party and he took time to gloss the character of the proposed visit. He told of the way their arrival had been heralded to Metzal and described that place, half-cowtown, half-pueblo; he hinted at the ways of Hollister and his gang, watching the girl's eyes take on understanding, while Thora's narrowed. But neither of them showed any sign of fear.
"You must n't think that these men represent the community," he said. "They are in the minority. We have some respect for the conventions. And these are not altogether lawless. I don't want to frighten you away from here."
"You won't do that," said the girl. "We made up our minds before we came that things would be in the rough. We knew something of it, you see. We don't frighten as easily as we—as I—perhaps look. Do we, Thora?"
The woman sat there with her capable hands clasping each separate knee.
"I not bane afraid of any man," she said, without boast, a simple assertion that bore its own proof.
"I imagine that their main motive is curosity," said Sheridan. "They might be less—boisterous—if we were present. Or so we fancied. "
"It was kind of you. To ride all the way around the mountain to help us receive our visitors. Do not think I underestimate it, Mr. Sheridan, Mr. Jackson. I think we can manage them—now. I understand what we might have expected. It will not be a surprise party. And we must entertain them. Thora makes delicious doughnuts. She made a batch today. Do you like doughnuts, Mr. Jackson?"
"Who? Me? Tackin' Mister to my name is like callin' a dawg or a hawss by a strange one, Miss. I presume you'll mean crullers. To my mind they've mostly been overestimated, or misunderstood, out West. I've heard they eat 'em for breakfas' back East but I reckon that's jest a yarn. I've eat crullers in the Pioche depot restyront an' they 'peared to me like an excuse for cookin' sawdust in grease. "
"Wait till you try Thora's. And we can make coffee. We have it powdered, in cans. Do you think they will like that?"
"Coffee, black and hot, might help them," said Sheridan. "And, by the way, Miss Burrows, what about that gate in the tunnel? A heavy one with a bar, set in a long frame. We could fix it for you in a day."
"You are thoughtful. It might be a good plan. But we have an enormous front yard. There could be no bell. How should we know when our friends called?"
"We could arrange that, I think. You had better let me do it."
"Thank you. I suppose Thora could hardly do it alone, though she is wonderful with tools. She chops trees for the fire and she mended the roof; put in new poles. Some of them were nearly down. The house was in wonderful condition, considering it was built sixty years ago; but so well built. The windows were boarded up and the glass was unbroken. It was terribly dusty, of course, but we fixed that."
How did she know when the house was built? Did she put in all these "you sees" and "of courses" for sheer tantalization?
Thora had gone into another room. There seemed to be three in all. The girl caught Red looking wistfully at the violin that lay on the table.
"Do you like music?" she asked. "We may have some presently."
"Yes'm, I do." Red glanced at Sheridan. The bet was still undecided. Thora came back with a kettle which she put on a swinging crane over the embers.
"Better I get some wood," she said. Jackson sprang up.
"I'll help you," he suggested. Thora looked at him with the amiability one might show to a child.
"All right," she said, and they went out together.
Sheridan began to doubt whether their coming had been necessary. Not that he was not heartily glad they had done so. But Thora was a tower in herself and the "slimsy lady" had both wits and spirit. He imagined the crowd arriving, offered coffee and doughnuts, and violin music of no rare order. It might sweep them off their feet. The ride would have toned down their liquor, if they had not brought too much along. He knew the type. Such a girl would check them intuitively. Except Hollister. There would have to be some opening for the rest to display their crudity. And he was certain no such opening would be made. Mary Burrows was the sort who could render herself sexless in certain environments. Her charm would manifest itself in other ways, the lure of her as purely woman would close like a sensitive blossom. Thora was not the kind to readily capitulate. A man would think twice before he tackled her. These two could handle the situation. But it had done no harm for them to supplement the defence. Unless—the thought hit him for the first time—a wrong interpretation might be placed upon the fact of their presence. Hollister, foiled, might well think of that. And Sheridan's jaw jutted as he made up his mind to nip anything of that sort in the bud.
Thora came back with Jackson, staggering under a load of wood that lacked a log or two of the pyramid the woman handled with ease. As he straightened up from depositing his burden he winked at Sheridan.
"Samson," he said, "was a joke along this lady."
Thora took the tribute calmly.
"You can git me them doughnuts, if you want," she said to Red. "I tank yore arms are longer than mine, anyway." If this was meant as a softening of the evident truth of the superior strength of her own, Red did not seem entirely to appreciate it. But he got down the crock from a high shelf obediently.
"No signs of arrival," he said as he put the crock on the table by the violin and took off the cover.
"They sure smell good," he said. Thora plucked him away.
"You bane keep your nose in place, young feller."
Mary Burrows smiled at Sheridan. Thora and Red had become "acquainted" while they were getting the wood.
"You don't find it lonely here?" he asked. He was resolved not to show any desire to probe her secrets until she showed a desire to take him into confidence.
"Why, no. It is as we expected. And it is so beautiful, like a park, the flowers, bees by the million, and birds, orioles, and mocking-birds. There is a pair of eagles that nest on one of the crags. And there are deer in the valley; mountain-sheep, too. We thought of keeping goats. And making honey. Do you suppose it would be profitable?"
There was a certain wistfulness in her inquiry that did not miss Sheridan. They needed to make money. The pity of it clouded his mind for a moment before he answered. Then the melancholy howl of a puma sounded from a distance. Both men got to their feet. Sheridan opened the door.
"That's the same beast we disturbed, I fancy," he said. "It should mean that they are coming."
"We are ready for them, as soon as the kettle boils," said the girl, quietly. Sheridan and Jackson, a bit shamed at her coolness, though she could not entirely comprehend the peril of the situation, sat down again.
"Perhaps we had better go out on the verandah," she suggested. "They will be in plain sight across the meadows beyond the lake, under the moon. Do you think it wisest to wear your guns?"
"I wear one from habit," answered Sheridan. "It will not provoke anything, if that is what you mean. They will have theirs."
"No doubt about that," said Jackson as a small body of horsemen, scattering as they came, galloped from the rim of the rift towards the lake. The moon was now looking down into the mountain valley and they rode in its light, shouting and firing off their guns as they came. Sheridan's face grew stern; they were drunker, more careless, more confident than he had hoped they would be.
"The derned fools 'll likely forgit to reload," said Red. "Seein' they ain't expectin' to meet up with no men. Here's hopin' they empty their cylinders."
There were nine of them. Tuni, the Indian, had either balked or been left behind. Sheridan picked out Hollister leading the rest. He flung up his hand and shouted, apparently demanding a belated silence which was achieved as they reached the lake. The sight of the low house with its orange window seemed to have helped to quiet them by its unexpected picture. Here was a home.
They rode around the lake and reappeared from the shadows of the trees, lining up irregularly some distance from the house. The verandah was in deep shadow. For a moment they consulted. Hollister rode out.
"Hello, the house!" he shouted.