CHAPTER XI.
ENTER THE NEW MAN.
"IF I have to see him again in our house," said Miriam, "I won't answer for what I'll say to him!"
Her father smiled at her.
"I mean it!" she declared.
"But," said Doc Peters, "you sure got to admit that Red Stanton has plenty of nerve."
"He has courage—of a sort. He knows that he's stronger than other men, and of course that makes him confident. But that brute sort of bravery doesn't mean a great deal."
"You don't mean that, Miriam."
"But I do! And it sickens me to see his great red face and watch his insolent rolling eyes, as he stares at me. He acts as though he were paying his suit to me!"
"That's nonsense; honey!"
"I tell you, it's in his stupid head. He thinks that he's saving us, and therefore he can make any demand he wants to make."
"Well, Miriam, he is saving us!"
"I tell you, Joe Daly will smash him and all his gang! What have they done? They've captured one poor rascal who got away again, and"
"He didn't get away. He was turned loose by that pleasant friend of yours."
"Dad, you're simply trying to be aggravating!"
"I'm talking facts."
"I haven't spoken a dozen words to that poor fellow Pete."
"Poor sneak thief!"
"Is it right to say that?"
"I'm staying with the facts still."
"You call him a thief because he turned the rustler loose."
"What would you call a thing like that?"
"I know why he did it."
"Tell me if you can."
"Pete had been used to torture. I know that. He had been broken with pain; he has been crushed by it. And that was why his heart bled for the poor rustler. I pitied him, myself—and I think of that unspeakable beast of a Stanton branding the man with a hot iron—oh, it sickens me when I think of it!"
"He was trying to tear the truth out of the rascal, and cow-punchers don't figure rustlers to be real men; they're just sort of snakes in the eyes of a puncher, Miriam. You'd ought to know that!"
"Oh, he wasn't trying to tear the truth from him. Little he cared about the truth. He was torturing that man to make him break down. He wanted to hear the rustler shriek for mercy; he wanted to make the rustler crawl the way poor Pete crawls. Oh, I can't even talk of it!"
"I know," nodded her father.
"And if Red comes into this house again, I'm not going to be here."
"Honey," said her father slowly, "I know how you feel. Red Stanton ain't a pretty thing to look at. He's got the manners of a hog and the nature of a wild cat. But I can stand bad manners, and so can you. There's only one thing that counts in all that you've been saying about him—if he really has been making a fool of himself in the way he's been looking at you, I'll fill him full of lead, or else just kick him off the place."
"But don't you see, dad, that's the horrible part of it? If he finds out what we think of him, he'll go mad with spite and hatred. He'd burn the house over our heads and never think about it twice. What are we to do, dad? Can't you ask him to go into the bunk house with the other men after supper?"
"He thinks it's his right to be here. Remember, Miriam, that he hired a dozen men to do work for us. And we couldn't have gone out by ourselves and hired two! You can go to town until this job is finished."
"I'll never leave you here alone with such a man!"
Doc Peters shrugged his shoulders and smiled, and his rather tired old eyes lifted and looked past the bright head of his daughter and into the stormy past. He had seen his share of trouble. He had taken his part in battles enough. Now he smiled at this touch of solicitude on the part of his girl.
That night the crowd of cow-punchers and Red Stanton's wild group of hired men crowded into the dining room and filled the place with uproar. And when they had finally stamped their way out again, Red, as usual, tilted back in his chair and drank extra cups of coffee. And all the while he was keeping his eyes fixed upon Miriam.
Peters had been wondering how it was that such a worm of a man as Pete had managed to find the courage to defy them all and set the prisoner free.
"But you don't know that man!" said Miriam. "I'll wager that there's still courage in him. I'll wager that he was once brave."
"Brave?" echoed Red Stanton, eagerly seizing upon this chance to win the favorable attention of the girl. "Say, lady, maybe you dunno what his whole name is?"
"What is it?" she asked, on fire with eagerness.
"Pete Burnside!" he answered pompously.
Here Doc Peters jumped up and ran across the room, though he was a man who was rarely much moved.
"You mean to say that's Pete Burnside?"
"I mean that."
"Miriam!" cried the rancher, turning on his daughter. "Think of that?"
"I don't think I've heard about him," she said wretchedly.
"Never heard? That comes of taking all that time to go to a fool school in the East," exploded her father. "But you remember about the train robbery four years back, when the robbers blew up the guards in the mail coach simply because there was nothing worth taking in the safe? Five men done that trick!"
"I remember that horrible story," said the girl.
"Well, Pete Burnside was him that went on the trail of that five. The posses couldn't get 'em. The five was too strong for a few men and too fast for a whole mob of hossmen to follow 'em. They'd have got clean away and melted off into the mountains somewheres, if Pete hadn't got onto their trail. Then it was a yarn that would make your hair stand right up on end. Dog-goned if Burnside didn't keep on their heels until he dropped one of 'em. Then the other four found out there was only one man behind 'em, and they turned back and cornered him. They got around him, and then they rushed the pile of boulders where he was lying."
Doc Peters paused and lighted his cigarette.
"Hurry, dad!" cried the giri. "I can't breathe, I'm so excited."
He threw away the match.
"Well, when the smoke cleared away, two of 'em was dead, and two of 'em wished that they was dead. But Pete stayed up there and nursed 'em back till they was strong enough to travel. About six weeks later he come down with his two prisoners—yes, sir, he'd stayed up there a whole six weeks with them man-killing hounds!"
"Oh," cried the girl, "how perfectly wonderful, dad!"
"Ain't it?" said Peters. "I tell you, there ain't another man in the mountains that's done the things that Pete Burnside has done. And when he come down with those two gents he'd got so fond of 'em that he went all the way to the governor and come in and sits down, and he tells the governor that these two gents ain't really as bad as the newspapers makes them out, and that, if they get a year in prison and then get pardoned, that he'll go bond that they don't never turn wild again. And will you believe me that old Governor Parks listened to Pete and took his suggestion? Yes, sir. It sure spoke well for Pete, and it spoke well for the governor, too. One year them two was in prison, and then they was turned loose. And ever since then they've just settled down and lived like white folks and ain't give no trouble to nobody!"
"Why, dad," cried the girl, "he's not a man hunter, then. He was a maker of men!"
"Maybe you might call it that," nodded her father. "But, anyway you put it, I'm sure glad to hear that that's Pete Burnside. And I don't care what sort of a man he's turned out to be lately, he's been man enough in the past to suit me. And if he ever comes back to this here ranch he's going to be treated like a king!"
"Yes, yes!" cried the girl. "Oh, dad, he surely deserves everything that good men can do for him!"
Here big Red Stanton, who had listened to the story about Pete Burnside with a restless indifference, now rolled himself about in his chair until it squeaked and groaned in every joint.
"Look here," he said, "I ain't going to have you spoiling him for me!"
The rancher and his daughter looked at the giant, with disgust and some surprise. And in the little silence which spread through the room, they could hear far away a resonant baritone raised in a song which carried far across the night. Perhaps one of the new men in the bunk house was entertaining himself and his companions.
"I ain't going to have you spoil him," continued Red Stanton. "He's no end useful to me. Does all my darning and patching and saddles my hoss for me—and does so many things that I dunno how I'd get along without him! Why, if you started treating him like he was a man, pretty soon he'd think that he was a man. And there ain't no sense to that at all! What he's cut out for is to keep me comfortable. And the more comfortabler that I'm kept the quicker I'll get at Joe Daly and his crew. Ain't that good sense and plain sense, Peters?"
The rancher looked upon his guest with a strange eye.
"Maybe you're right," he said, "but there ain't much to worry about yet. There ain't much likelihood that he'll come back."
Red Stanton threw back his head and laughed.
"You dunno him," he declared. "You dunno him, but I do! Oh, he'll come back!"
The two stared at him, utterly fascinated.
"But what makes you think so?" asked the girl. "What could make him come back when he knows"
"When he knows that he'll get a beating from me so soon as he shows up?"
The lip of Miriam curled with horror and scorn, but she could not answer directly.
"I'll tell you why he'll come back," went on Red, as the singing grew a little louder and a little nearer. "First off, when he gets off by himself with the rustler, he'll begin to think that it's a pretty good thing to be free. But as soon as he runs into somebody that talks loud and has a handy pair of fists, he'll begin to wish that he was back under cover. I dunno how brave he used to be, but I know that I never heard tell of a gent that was half as yaller as he is now. He'll be wishing that he was back where he didn't have nobody to cuss him but some one that he knowed. He'd begin shaking and trembling the way I've seen him do when strangers come around. That's him!"
He laughed again. Miriam dropped her face into her hands.
"What's the matter?" growled Red. "I tell you that he will come back, and partly because he'll figure out that if he comes back quick he won't get as bad a licking as he will if he stays away a long time!"
"Let it drop at that," said Peters. "We'll talk some more about him some other time. Who's that, Miriam? You expecting somebody?"
"Yes; Nell Hotchkiss said she might come over for the night"
She ran to the door nad threw it open. Then she fell back with a shrill, faint cry. As she retreated Pete Burnside stepped forward into the room.