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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Uphill Climb, by B. M. Bower, Illustrated
+by Charles M. Russell
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Uphill Climb
+
+Author: B. M. Bower
+
+Release Date: December 25, 2004  [eBook #14456]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UPHILL CLIMB***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Project Gutenberg Beginners Projects,
+Jon King, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which
+      includes the original illustrations by Charles M. Russell.
+      See 14456-h.htm or 14456-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/4/5/14456/14456-h/14456-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/4/5/14456/14456-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE UPHILL CLIMB
+
+by
+
+B. M. BOWER
+
+Author of _Good Indian_, _Chip, of the Flying U_, etc.
+
+With Illustrations by CHARLES M. RUSSELL
+
+New York
+Grosset & Dunlap
+Publishers
+
+1913
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "Hell-o, Ford, where the blazes did you drop down from?"
+a welcoming voice yelled. Frontispiece.]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+   I  "Married! And I Don't Know Her Name!"
+  II  Wanted: Information
+ III  One Way to Drown Sorrow
+  IV  Reaction
+   V  "I Can Spare this Particular Girl"
+  VI  The Problem of Getting Somewhere
+ VII  The Foreman of the Double Cross
+VIII  "I Wish You'd Quit Believing in Me!"
+  IX  Impressions
+   X  In Which the Demon Opens an Eye and Yawns
+  XI  "It's Going to Be an Uphill Climb!"
+ XII  At Hand-Grips with the Demon
+XIII  A Plan Gone Wrong
+ XIV  The Feminine Point of View
+  XV  The Climb
+ XVI  To Find and Free a Wife
+XVII  What Ford Found at the Top
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+"Hell-o, Ford, where the blazes did you drop down from?" a welcoming
+voice yelled. (Frontispiece)
+
+She lifted her head and looked at him, and drew away.
+
+Dick tottered upon the step and went off backward.
+
+"Ford, I'm no coquette," she said straightforwardly.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+"Married! And I Don't Know Her Name!"
+
+
+Ford lifted his arms above his head to yawn as does a man who has slept
+too heavily, found his biceps stiffened and sore, and massaged them
+gingerly with his finger-tips. His eyes took on the vacancy of memory
+straining at the leash of forgetfulness. He sighed largely, swung his
+head slowly from left to right in mute admission of failure to grasp
+what lay just behind his slumber, and thereby discovered other muscles
+that protested against sudden movement. He felt his neck with a careful,
+rubbing gesture. One hand strayed to his left cheekbone, hovered there
+tentatively, wandered to the bridge of his nose, and from there dropped
+inertly to the bed.
+
+"Lordy me! I must have been drunk last night," he said aloud,
+mechanically taking the straight line of logic from effect to cause, as
+much experience had taught him to do.
+
+"You was--and then some," replied an unemotional voice from somewhere
+behind him.
+
+"Oh! That you, Sandy?" Ford lay quiet, trying to remember. His
+finger-tips explored the right side of his face; now and then he winced
+under their touch, light as it was.
+
+"I must have carried an awful load," he decided, again unerringly taking
+the backward trail from effect to cause. Later, logic carried him
+farther. "Who'd I lick, Sandy?"
+
+"Several." The unseen Sandy gave one the impression of a man smoking and
+speaking between puffs. "Can't say just who--you did start in on. You
+wound up on--the preacher."
+
+"Preacher?" Ford's tone matched the flicker of interest in his eyes.
+
+"Uhn-hunh."
+
+Ford meditated a moment. "I don't recollect ever licking a preacher
+before," he observed curiously.
+
+Life, stale and drab since his eyes opened, gathered to itself the pale
+glow of awakening interest. Ford rose painfully, inch by inch, until he
+was sitting upon the side of the bed, got from there to his feet, looked
+down and saw that he was clothed to his boots, and crossed slowly to
+where a cheap, flyspecked looking-glass hung awry upon the wall. His
+self-inspection was grave and minute. His eyes held the philosophic calm
+of accustomedness.
+
+"Who put this head on me, Sandy?" he inquired apathetically. "The
+preacher?"
+
+"I d' know. You had it when you come up outa the heap. You licked the
+preacher afterwards, I think."
+
+Sandy was reading a ragged-backed novel while he smoked; his interest in
+Ford and Ford's battered countenance was plainly perfunctory.
+
+Outside, the rain fell aslant in the wind and drummed dismally upon the
+little window beside Sandy. It beat upon the door and trickled
+underneath in a thin rivulet to a shallow puddle, formed where the floor
+was sunken. A dank warmth and the smell of wet wood heating to the
+blazing point pervaded the room and mingled with the coarse aroma of
+cheap, warmed-over coffee.
+
+"Sandy!"
+
+"Hunh?"
+
+"Did anybody get married last night?" The leash of forgetfulness was
+snapping, strand by strand. Troubled remembrance peered out from behind
+the philosophic calm in Ford's eyes.
+
+"Unh-hunh." Sandy turned a leaf and at the same time flicked the ashes
+from his cigarette with a mechanical finger movement. "You did." He
+looked briefly up from the page. "That's why you licked the preacher,"
+he assisted, and went back to his reading.
+
+A subdued rumble of mid-autumn thunder jarred sullenly overhead. Ford
+ceased caressing the purple half-moon which inclosed his left eye and
+began moodily straightening his tie.
+
+"Now what'n hell did I do that for?" he inquired complainingly.
+
+"Search _me_," mumbled Sandy over his book. He read half a page
+farther. "Do what for?" he asked, with belated attention.
+
+Ford swore and went over and lifted the coffeepot from the stove, shook
+it, looked in, and made a grimace of disgust as the steam smote him in
+the face. "Paugh!" He set down the pot and turned upon Sandy.
+
+"Get your nose out of that book a minute and talk!" he commanded in a
+tone beseeching for all its surly growl. "You say I got married. I kinda
+recollect something of the kind. What I want to know is who's the lady?
+And what did I do it for?" He sat down, leaned his bruised head upon his
+palms, and spat morosely into the stove-hearth. "Lordy me," he grumbled.
+"I don't know any lady well enough to marry her--and I sure can't think
+of any female lady that would marry me--not even by proxy!"
+
+Sandy closed the book upon a forefinger and regarded Ford with that
+blend of pity, amusement, and tolerance which is so absolutely
+unbearable to one who has behaved foolishly and knows it. Ford would
+not have borne the look if he had seen it; but he was caressing a
+bruise on the point of his jaw and staring dejectedly into the meager
+blaze which rimmed the lower edge of the stove's front door, and so
+remained unconscious of his companion's impertinence.
+
+"Who was the lady, Sandy?" he begged dispiritedly, after a silence.
+
+"Search _me_" Sandy replied again succinctly. "Some stranger that blew
+in here with a license and the preacher and said you was her fee-ancy."
+(Sandy read romances, mostly, and permitted his vocabulary to profit
+thereby.) "You never denied it, even when she said your name was a nomdy
+gair; and you let her marry you, all right."
+
+"Are you sure of that?" Ford looked up from under lowering eyebrows.
+
+"Unh-hunh--that's what you done, all right." Sandy's voice was
+dishearteningly positive.
+
+"Lordy me!" gasped Ford under his breath.
+
+There was a silence which slid Sandy's interest back into his book. He
+turned a leaf and was half-way down the page before he was interrupted
+by more questions.
+
+"Say! Where's she at now?" Ford spoke with a certain furtive lowering of
+his voice.
+
+"I d' know." Sandy read a line with greedy interest. "She took the
+'leven-twenty," he added then. Another mental lapse. "You seen her to
+the train yourself."
+
+"The hell I did!" Ford's good eye glared incredulity, but Sandy was
+again following hungrily the love-tangle of an unpronounceable count in
+the depths of the Black Forest, and he remained perfectly unconscious of
+the look and the mental distress which caused it. Ford went back to
+studying the meager blaze and trying to remember. He might be able to
+extract the whole truth from Sandy, but that would involve taking his
+novel away from him--by force, probably; and the loss of the book would
+be very likely to turn Sandy so sullen that he would refuse to answer,
+or to tell the truth, at any rate; and Ford's muscles were very, very
+sore. He did not feel equal to a scuffle with Sandy, just then. He
+repeated something which sounded like an impromptu litany and had to do
+with the ultimate disposal of his own soul.
+
+"Hunh?" asked Sandy.
+
+Whereupon Ford, being harassed mentally and in great physical discomfort
+as well, specifically disposed of Sandy's immortal soul also.
+
+Sandy merely grinned at him. "You don't want to take it to heart like
+that," he remonstrated cheerfully.
+
+Ford, by way of reply, painstakingly analyzed the chief deficiencies of
+Sandy's immediate relatives, and was beginning upon his grandparents
+when Sandy reached barren ground in the shape of three long paragraphs
+of snow, cold, and sunrise artistically blended with prismatic
+adjectives. He waded through the first paragraph and well into the
+second before he mired in a hopeless jumble of unfamiliar polysyllables.
+Sandy was not the skipping kind; he threw the book upon a bench and gave
+his attention wholly to his companion in time to save his
+great-grandfather from utter condemnation.
+
+"What's eating you, Ford?" he began pacifically--for Sandy was a
+weakling. "You might be a lot worse off. You're married, all right
+enough, from all I c'n hear--but she's left town. It ain't as if you had
+to live with her."
+
+Ford looked at him a minute and groaned dismally.
+
+"Oh, I ain't meaning anything against the lady herself," Sandy hastened
+to assure him. "Far as I know, she's all right--"
+
+"What I want to know," Ford broke in, impatient of condolence when he
+needed facts, "is, who _is_ she? And what did I go and marry her for?"
+
+"Well, you'll have to ask somebody that knows. I never seen her, myself,
+except when you was leadin' her down to the depot, and you and her
+talked it over private like--the way I heard it. I was gitting a
+hair-cut and shampoo at the time. First I heard, you was married. I
+should think you'd remember it yourself." Sandy looked at Ford
+curiously.
+
+"I kinda remember standing up and holding hands with some woman and
+somebody saying: 'I now pronounce you man and wife,'" Ford confessed
+miserably, his face in his hands again. "I guess I must have done it,
+all right."
+
+Sandy was kind enough when not otherwise engaged. He got up and put a
+basin of water on the stove to warm, that Ford might bathe his hurts,
+and he made him a very creditable drink with lemon and whisky and not
+too much water.
+
+"The way I heard it," he explained further, "this lady come to town
+looking for Frank Ford Cameron, and seen you, and said you was him.
+So--"
+
+"I ain't," Ford interrupted indignantly. "My name's Ford Campbell and
+I'll lick any darned son-of-a-gun--"
+
+"Likely she made a mistake," Sandy soothed. "Frank Ford Cameron, she had
+you down for, and you went ahead and married her willing enough. Seems
+like there was some hurry-up reason that she explained to you private.
+She had the license all made out and brought a preacher down from
+Garbin. Bill Wright said he overheard you tellin' her you'd do anything
+to oblige a lady--"
+
+"That's the worst of it; I'm always too damned polite when I'm drunk!"
+grumbled Ford.
+
+Sandy, looking upon his bruised and distorted countenance and recalling,
+perhaps, the process by which Ford reached that lamentable condition,
+made a sound like a diplomatically disguised laugh. "Not always," he
+qualified mildly.
+
+"Anyway," he went on, "you sure married her. That's straight goods. Bill
+Wright and Rock was the witnesses. And if you don't know why you done
+it--" Sandy waved his hands to indicate his inability to enlighten Ford.
+"Right afterwards you went out to the bar and had another drink--all
+this takin' place in the hotel dining-room, and Mother McGrew down with
+neuralagy and not bein' present--and one drink leads to another, you
+know. I come in then, and the bunch was drinkin' luck to you fast as Sam
+could push the bottles along. Then you went back to the lady--and if you
+don't know what took place you can search me--and pretty soon Bill said
+you'd took her and her grip to the depot. Anyway, when you come back,
+you wasn't troubled with no attack of politeness!
+
+"You went in the air with Bill, first," continued Sandy, testing with
+his finger the temperature of the water in the basin, "and bawled him
+out something fierce for standing by and seeing you make a break like
+that without doing something. You licked him--and then Rock bought in
+because some of your remarks kinda included him too. I d' know," said
+Sandy, scratching his unshaven jaw reflectively, "just how the fight did
+go between you 'n' Rock. You was both using the whole room, I know. Near
+as I could make out, you--or maybe it was Rock--tromped on Big Jim's
+bunion. This cold spell's hard on bunions--and Big Jim went after you
+both with blood in his eye.
+
+"After that"--Sandy spread his arms largely--"it was go-as-you-please.
+Sam and me was the only ones that kept out, near as I can recollect, and
+when it thinned up a bit, you had Aleck down and was pounding the liver
+outa him, and Big Jim was whanging away at you, and Rock was clawin' Jim
+in the back of the neck, and you was all kickin' like bay steers in
+brandin' time. I reached in under the pile and dragged you out by one
+leg and left the rest of 'em fighting. They never seemed to miss you
+none." He grinned. "Jim commenced to bump Aleck's head up and down on
+the floor instead of you--and I knew he didn't have nothing against
+Aleck."
+
+"Bill--"
+
+"Bill, he'd quit right in the start." Sandy's grin became a laugh.
+"Seems like pore old Bill always gits in bad when you commence on your
+third pint. You wasn't through, though, seems like. You was going to
+start in at the beginning and en-core the whole performance, and you
+started out after Bill. Bill, he was lookin' for a hole big enough to
+crawl into by that time. But you run into the preacher. And you licked
+him to a fare-you-well and had him crying real tears before I or anybody
+else could stop you."
+
+"What'd I lick him for?" Ford inquired in a tone of deep
+discouragement.
+
+Sandy's indeterminate, blue-gray eyes rounded with puzzlement.
+
+"Search me," he repeated automatically. But later he inadvertently shed
+enlightenment. He laughed, bending double, and slapping his thigh at the
+irresistible urge of a mental picture.
+
+"Thought I'd die," he gasped. "Me and Sam was watching from the door.
+You had the preacher by the collar, shakin' him, and once in awhile
+liftin' him clean off the ground on the toe of your boot; and you kept
+saying: 'A sober man, and a preacher--and you'd marry that girl to a
+fellow like me!' And then biff! And he'd let out a squawk. 'A drinkin',
+fightin', gamblin' son-of-a-gun like me, you swine!' you'd tell him. And
+when we finally pulled you loose, he picked up his hat and made a run
+for it."
+
+Ford meditated gloomily. "I'll lick him again, and lick him when I'm
+sober, by thunder!" he promised grimly. "Who was he, do you know?"
+
+"No, I don't. Little, dried-up geezer with a nose like a kit-fox's and
+a whine to his voice. He won't come around here no more."
+
+The door opened gustily and a big fellow with a skinned nose and a
+whimsical pair of eyes looked in, hesitated while he stared hard at
+Ford, and then entered and shut the door by the simple method of
+throwing his shoulders back against it.
+
+"Hello, old sport--how you comin'?" he cried cheerfully. "Kinda wet for
+makin' calls, but when a man's loaded down with a guilty conscience--"
+He sighed somewhat ostentatiously and pulled forward a chair rejuvenated
+with baling-wire braces between the legs, and a cowhide seat. "What's
+that cookin'--coffee, or sheep-dip?" he inquired facetiously of Sandy,
+though his eyes dwelt solicitously upon Ford's bowed head. He leaned
+forward and slapped Ford in friendly fashion upon the shoulder.
+
+"Buck up--'the worst is yet to come,'" he shouted, and laughed with an
+exaggeration of cheerfulness. "You can't ever tell when death or
+matrimony's goin' to get a man. By hokey, seems like there's no dodgin'
+either one."
+
+Ford lifted a bloodshot eye to the other. "And I always counted you for
+a friend, Bill," he reproached heavily. "Sandy says I licked you good
+and plenty. Well, looks to me like you had it coming, all right."
+
+"Well--I got it, didn't I?" snorted Bill, his hand lifting involuntarily
+to his nose. "And I ain't bellering, am I?" His mouth took an abused,
+downward droop. "I ain't holdin' any grudge, am I? Why, Sandy here can
+tell you that I held one side of you up whilst he was leadin' the other
+side of you home! And I am sorry I stood there and seen you get married
+off and never lifted a finger; I'm darned sorry. I shoulda hollered
+misdeal, all right. I know it now." He pulled remorsefully at his wet
+mustache, which very much resembled a worn-out sharing brush.
+
+Ford straightened up, dropped a hand upon his thigh, and thereby
+discovered another sore spot, which he caressed gently with his palm.
+
+"Say, Bill, you were there, and you saw her. On the square now--what's
+she like? And what made me marry her?"
+
+Bill pulled so hard upon his mustache that his teeth showed; his breath
+became unpleasantly audible with the stress of emotion. "So help me, I
+can't tell you what she's like, Ford," he confessed. "I don't remember
+nothing about her looks, except she looked good to me, and I never seen
+her before, and her hair wasn't red--I always remember red hair when I
+see it, drunk or sober. You see," he added as an extenuation, "I was
+pretty well jagged myself. I musta been. I recollect I was real put out
+because my name wasn't Frank Ford--By hokey!" He laid an impressive
+forefinger upon Ford's knee and tapped several times. "I never knew your
+name was rightly Frank Ford Cameron. I always--"
+
+"It ain't." Ford winced and drew away from the tapping process, as if
+his knee also was sensitive that morning.
+
+"You told her it was. I mind that perfectly, because I was so su'prised
+I swore right out loud and was so damned ashamed I couldn't apologize.
+And say! She musta been a real lady or I wouldn't uh felt that way about
+it!" Bill glanced triumphantly from one to the other. "Take it from me,
+you married a lady, Ford. Drunk or sober, I always make it a point to
+speak proper before the ladies--t'other kind don't count--and when I
+make a break, you betcher life I remember it. She's a real lady--I'd
+swear to that on a stack uh bibles ten feet high!" He settled back and
+unbuttoned his steaming coat with the air of a man who has established
+beyond question the vital point of an argument.
+
+"Did I tell her so myself, or did I just let it go that way?" Ford, as
+his brain cleared, stuck close to his groping for the essential facts.
+
+"Well, now--I ain't dead sure as to that. Maybe Rock'll remember. Kinda
+seems to me now, that she asked you if you was really Frank Ford
+Cameron, and you said: 'I sure am,' or something like that. The
+preacher'd know, maybe. He musta been the only sober one in the
+bunch--except the girl. But you done chased him off, so--"
+
+"Sandy, I wish you'd go hunt Rock up and tell him I want to see him."
+Ford spoke with more of his natural spirit than he had shown since
+waking.
+
+"Rock's gone on out to Riley's camp," volunteered Bill. "Left this
+morning, before the rain started in."
+
+"What was her name--do you know?" Ford went back to the mystery.
+
+"Ida--or was it Jenny? Some darned name--I heard it, when the preacher
+was marrying you." Bill was floundering hopelessly in mental fog, but he
+persisted. "And I seen it wrote in the paper I signed my name to. I mind
+she rolled up the paper afterwards and put it--well, I dunno where, but
+she took it away with her, and says to you: 'That's safe, now'--or
+'You're safe,' or 'I'm safe,'--anyway, some darned thing was safe. And I
+was goin' to kiss the bride--mebbe I did kiss her--only I'd likely
+remember it if I had, drunk or sober! And--oh, now I got it!" Bill's
+voice was full of elation. "You was goin' to kiss the bride--that was
+it, it was you goin' to kiss her, and she slap--no, by hokey, she
+didn't slap you, she just--or was it Rock, now?" Doubt filled his eyes
+distressfully. "Darn my everlastin' hide," he finished lamely, "there
+was some kissin' somew'ere in the deal, and I mind her cryin'
+afterwards, but whether it was about that, or--Say, Sandy, what was it
+Ford was lickin' the preacher for? Wasn't it for kissin' the bride?"
+
+"It was for marrying him to her," Sandy informed him sententiously.
+
+Ford got up and went to the little window and looked out. Presently he
+came back to the stove and stood staring disgustedly down upon the
+effusively friendly Bill, leering up at him pacifically.
+
+"If I didn't feel so rotten," he said glumly, "I'd give you another
+licking right now, Bill--you boozing old devil. I'd like to lick every
+darned galoot that stood back and let me in for this. You'd ought to
+have stopped me. You'd oughta pounded the face off me before you let me
+do such a fool thing. That," he said bitterly, "shows how much a man can
+bank on his friends!"
+
+"It shows," snorted Bill indignantly, "how much he can bank on
+himself!"
+
+"On whisky, to let him in for all kinds uh trouble," revised Sandy
+virtuously. Sandy had a stomach which invariably rebelled at the second
+glass and therefore, remaining always sober perforce, he took to himself
+great credit for his morality.
+
+"Married!--and I don't so much as know her name!" gritted Ford, and went
+over and laid himself down upon the bed, and sulked for the rest of that
+day of rain and gloom.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Wanted: Information
+
+
+Sulking never yet solved a mystery nor will it accomplish much toward
+bettering an unpleasant situation. After a day of unmitigated gloom and
+a night of uneasy dreams, Ford awoke to a white, shifting world of the
+season's first blizzard, and to something like his normal outlook upon
+life.
+
+That outlook had ever been cheerful, with the cheerfulness which comes
+of taking life in twenty-four-hour doses only, and of looking not too
+far ahead and backward not at all. Plenty of persons live after that
+fashion and thereby attain middle life with smooth foreheads and cheeks
+unlined by thought; and Ford was therefore not much different from his
+fellows. Never before had he found himself with anything worse than
+bodily bruises to sour life for him after a tumultuous night or two in
+town, and the sensation of a discomfort which had not sprung from some
+well-defined physical sense was therefore sufficiently novel to claim
+all his attention.
+
+It was not the first time he had fought and forgotten it afterwards. Nor
+was it a new experience for him to seek information from his friends
+after a night full of incident. Sandy he had always found tolerably
+reliable, because Sandy, being of that inquisitive nature so common to
+small persons, made it a point to see everything there was to be seen;
+and his peculiar digestive organs might be counted upon to keep him
+sober. It was a real grievance to Ford that Sandy should have chosen the
+hour he did for indulging in such trivialities as hair-cuts and
+shampoos, while events of real importance were permitted to transpire
+unseen and unrecorded. Ford, when the grievance thrust itself keenly
+upon him, roused the recreant Sandy by pitilessly thrusting an elbow
+against his diaphragm.
+
+Sandy grunted at the impact and sat bolt upright in bed before he was
+fairly awake. He glanced reproachfully down at Ford, who stared back at
+him from a badly crumpled pillow.
+
+"Get up," growled Ford, "and start a fire going, darn you. You kept me
+awake half the night, snoring. I want a beefsteak with mushrooms,
+devilled kidneys, waffles with honey, and four banana fritters for
+breakfast. I'll take it in bed; and while I'm waiting, you can bring me
+the morning paper and a package of Egyptian Houris."
+
+Sandy grunted again, slid reluctantly out into the bitterly cold room,
+and crept shivering into his clothes. He never quite understood Ford's
+sense of humor, at such times, but he had learned that it is more
+comfortable to crawl out of bed than to be kicked out, and that
+vituperation is a mere waste of time when matched against sheer
+heartlessness and a superior muscular development.
+
+"Y' ought to make your wife build the fires," he taunted, when he was
+clothed and at a safe distance from the bed. He ducked instinctively
+afterwards, but Ford was merely placing a match by itself on the bench
+close by.
+
+"That's one," Ford remarked calmly. "I'm going to thrash every misguided
+humorist who mentions that subject to me in anything but a helpful
+spirit of pure friendship. I'm going to give him a separate licking for
+every alleged joke. I'll want two steaks, Sandy. I'll likely have to
+give you about seven distinct wallopings. Hand me some more matches to
+keep tally with. I don't want to cheat you out of your just dues."
+
+Sandy eyed him doubtfully while he scraped the ashes from the grate.
+
+"You may want a dozen steaks, but that ain't saying you're going to git
+'em," he retorted, with a feeble show of aggression. "And 's far as
+licking me goes--" He stopped to blow warmth upon his fingers, which
+were numbed with their grasp of the poker. "As for licking me, I guess
+you'll have to do that on the strength uh bacon and sour-dough biscuits;
+if you do it at all, which I claim the privilege uh doubting a whole
+lot."
+
+Ford laughed a little at the covert challenge, made ridiculous by
+Sandy's diminutive stature, pulled the blankets up to his eyes, and
+dozed off luxuriously; and although it is extremely tiresome to be told
+in detail just what a man dreams upon certain occasions, he did dream,
+and it was something about being married. At any rate, when the sizzling
+of bacon frying invaded even his slumber and woke him, he felt a
+distinct pang of disappointment that it was Sandy's carroty head bent
+over the frying-pan, instead of a wife with blond hair which waved
+becomingly upon her temples.
+
+"Wonder what color her hair is, anyway," he observed inadvertently,
+before he was wide enough awake to put the seal of silence on his
+musings.
+
+"Hunh?"
+
+"I asked when those banana fritters are coming up," lied Ford, getting
+out of bed and yawning so that his swollen jaw hurt him, and relapsed
+into his usual taciturnity, which was his wall of defense against
+Sandy's inquisitiveness.
+
+He ate his breakfast almost in silence, astonishing Sandy somewhat by
+not complaining of the excess of soda in the biscuits. Ford was inclined
+toward fastidiousness when he was sober--a trait which caused men to
+suspect him of descending from an upper stratum of society; though just
+when, or just where, or how great that descent had been, they had no
+means of finding out. Ford, so far as his speech upon the subject was
+concerned, had no existence previous to his appearance in Montana, five
+or six years before; but he bore certain earmarks of a higher
+civilization which, in Sandy's mind, rather concentrated upon a
+pronounced distaste for soda-yellowed bread, warmed-over coffee, and
+scorched bacon. That he swallowed all these things and seemed not to
+notice them, struck Sandy as being almost as remarkable as his
+matrimonial adventure.
+
+When he had eaten, Ford buttoned himself into his overcoat, pulled his
+moleskin cap well down, and went out into the storm without a word to
+Sandy, which was also unusual; it was Ford's custom to wash the dishes,
+because he objected to Sandy's economy of clean, hot water. Sandy
+flattened his nose against the window, saw that Ford, leaning well
+forward against the drive of the wind, was battling his way toward the
+hotel, and guessed shrewdly that he would see him no more that day.
+
+"He better keep sober till his knuckles git well, anyway," he mumbled
+disapprovingly. "If he goes to fighting, the shape he's in now--"
+
+Ford had no intention of fighting. He went straight up to the bar, it is
+true, but that was because he saw that Sam was at that moment
+unoccupied, save with a large lump of gum. Being at the bar, he drank a
+glass of whisky; not of deliberate intent, but merely from force of
+habit. Once down, however, the familiar glow of it through his being was
+exceedingly grateful, and he took another for good measure.
+
+"H'lo, Ford," Sam bethought him to say, after he had gravely taken
+mental note of each separate scar of battle, and had shifted his cud to
+the other side of his mouth, and had squeezed it meditatively between
+his teeth. "Feel as rocky as you look?"
+
+"Possibly." Ford's eyes forbade further personalities. "I'm out after
+information, Sam, and if you've got any you aren't using, I'd advise you
+to pass it over; I can use a lot, this morning. Were you sober, night
+before last?"
+
+Sam chewed solemnly while he considered. "Tolerable sober, yes," he
+decided at last. "Sober enough to tend to business; why?"
+
+With his empty glass Ford wrote invisible scrolls upon the bar. "I--did
+you happen to see--my--the lady I married?" He had been embarrassed at
+first, but when he finished he was glaring a challenge which shifted the
+disquiet to Sam's manner.
+
+"No. I was tendin' bar all evenin'--and she didn't come in here."
+
+Ford glanced behind him at the sound of the door opening, saw that it
+was only Bill, and leaned over the bar for greater secrecy, lowering his
+voice as well.
+
+"Did you happen to hear who she was?"
+
+Sam stared and shook his head.
+
+"Don't you know anything about her at all--where she came from--and why,
+and where she went?"
+
+Sam backed involuntarily. Ford's tone made it a crime either to know
+these things or to be guilty of ignorance; which, Sam could not
+determine. Sam was of the sleek, oily-haired type of young men, with
+pimples and pale eyes and a predilection for gum and gossip. He was
+afraid of Ford and he showed it.
+
+"That's just what (no offense, Ford--I ain't responsible) that's what
+everybody's wondering. Nobody seems to know. They kinda hoped you'd
+explain--"
+
+"Sure!" Ford's tone was growing extremely ominous. "I'll explain a lot
+of things--if I hear any gabbling going on about my affairs." He was
+seized then with an uncomfortable feeling that the words were mere
+puerile blustering and turned away from the bar in disgust.
+
+In disgust he pulled open the door, flinched before the blast of wind
+and snow which smote him full in the face and blinded him, and went out
+again into the storm. The hotel porch was a bleak place, with snow six
+inches deep and icy boards upon which a man might easily slip and break
+a bone or two, and with a whine overhead as the wind sucked under the
+roof. Ford stood there so long that his feet began to tingle. He was not
+thinking; he was merely feeling the feeble struggles of a newborn
+desire to be something and do something worth while--a desire which
+manifested itself chiefly in bitterness against himself as he was, and
+in a mental nausea against the life he had been content to live.
+
+The mystery of his marriage was growing from a mere untoward incident of
+a night's carouse into a baffling thing which hung over him like an
+impending doom. He was not the sort of man who marries easily. It seemed
+incredible that he could really have done it; more incredible that he
+could have done it and then have wiped the slate of his memory clean;
+with the crowning impossibility that a strange young woman could come
+into town, marry him, and afterward depart and no man know who she was,
+whence she had come, or where she had gone. Ford stepped suddenly off
+the porch and bored his way through the blizzard toward the depot. The
+station agent would be able to answer the last question, at any rate.
+
+The agent, however, proved disappointingly ignorant of the matter. He
+reminded Ford that there had not been time to buy a ticket, and that the
+girl had been compelled to run down the platform to reach the train
+before it started, and that the wheels began to turn before she was up
+the steps of the day coach.
+
+"And don't you remember turning around and saying to me: 'I'm a poor
+married man, but you can't notice the scar,' or something like that?"
+The agent was plainly interested and desirous of rendering any
+assistance possible, and also rather diffident about discussing so
+delicate a matter with a man like Ford.
+
+Ford drummed his fingers impatiently upon the shelf outside the ticket
+window. "I don't remember a darned thing about it," he confessed glumly.
+"I can't say I enjoy running all around town trying to find out who it
+was I married, and why I married her, and where she went afterwards, but
+that's just the kinda fix I'm in, Lew. I don't suppose she came here and
+did it just for fun--and I can't figure out any other reason, unless she
+was plumb loco. From all I can gather, she was a nice girl, and it seems
+she thought I was Frank Ford Cameron--which I am not!" He laughed, as a
+man will laugh sometimes when he is neither pleased nor amused.
+
+"I might ask McCreery--he's conductor on Fourteen. He might remember
+where she wanted to go," the agent suggested hesitatingly. "And say!
+What's the matter with going up to Garbin and looking up the record? She
+had to get the license there, and they'd have her name, age, place of
+residence, and--and whether she's white or black." The agent smiled
+uncertainly over his feeble attempt at a joke. "I got a license for a
+friend once," he explained hastily, when he saw that Ford's face did not
+relax a muscle. "There's a train up in forty minutes--"
+
+"Sure, I'll do that." Ford brightened. "That must be what I've been
+trying to think of and couldn't. I knew there was some way of finding
+out. Throw me a round-trip ticket, Lew. Lordy me! I can't afford to let
+a real, live wife slip the halter like this and leave me stranded and
+not knowing a thing about her. How much is it?"
+
+The agent slid a dark red card into the mouth of his office stamp,
+jerked down the lever, and swung his head quickly toward the sounder
+chattering hysterically behind him. His jaw slackened as he listened,
+and he turned his eyes vacantly upon Ford for a moment before he looked
+back at the instrument.
+
+"Well, what do you know about that?" he queried, under his breath,
+released the ticket from the grip of the stamp, and flipped it into the
+drawer beneath the shelf as if it were so much waste paper.
+
+"That's my ticket," Ford reminded him levelly.
+
+"You don't want it now, do you?" The agent grinned at him. "Oh, I forgot
+you couldn't read that." He tilted his head back toward the instrument.
+"A wire just went through--the court-house at Garbin caught fire in the
+basement--something about the furnace, they think--and she's going up in
+smoke. Hydrants are froze up so they can't get water on it. That fixes
+your looking up the record, Ford."
+
+Ford stared hard at him. "Well, I might hunt up the preacher and ask
+him," he said, his tone dropping again to dull discouragement.
+
+The agent chuckled. "From all I hear," he observed rashly, "you've made
+that same preacher mighty hard to catch!"
+
+Ford drummed upon the shelf and scowled at the smoke-blackened window,
+beyond which the snow was sweeping aslant. Upon his own side of the
+ticket window, the agent pared his nails with his pocket-knife and
+watched him furtively.
+
+"Oh, hell! What do I care, anyway?" Revulsion seized Ford harshly. "I
+guess I can stand it if she can. She came here and married me--it isn't
+my funeral any more than it is hers. If she wants to be so darned
+mysterious about it, she can go plumb--to--New York!" There were a few
+decent traits in Ford Campbell; one was his respect for women, a respect
+which would not permit him to swear about this wife of his, however
+exasperating her behavior.
+
+"That's the sensible way to look at it, of course," assented the agent,
+who made it a point to agree always with a man of Ford's size and
+caliber, on the theory that amiability means popularity, and that
+placation is better than plasters. "You sure ought to let her do the
+hunting--and the worrying, too. You aren't to blame if she married you
+unawares. She did it all on her own hook--and she must have known what
+she was up against."
+
+"No, she didn't," flared Ford unexpectedly. "She made a mistake, and I
+wanted to point it out to her and help her out of it if I could. She
+took me for some one else, and I was just drunk enough to think it was a
+joke, I suppose, and let it go that way. I don't believe she found out
+she tied up to the wrong man. It's entirely my fault, for being drunk."
+
+"Well, putting it that way, you're right about it," agreed the adaptable
+Lew. "Of course, if you hadn't been--"
+
+"If whisky's going to let a fellow in for things like this, it's time to
+cut it out altogether." Ford was looking at the agent attentively.
+
+"That's right," assented the other unsuspectingly. "Whisky is sure
+giving you the worst of it all around. You ought to climb on the
+water-wagon, Ford, and that's a fact. Whisky's the worst enemy you've
+got."
+
+"Sure. And I'm going to punish all of it I can get my hands on!" He
+turned toward the door. "And when I'm good and full of it," he added as
+an afterthought, "I'm liable to come over here and lick you, Lew, just
+for being such an agreeable cuss. You better leave your mother's address
+handy." He laughed a little to himself as he pulled the door shut behind
+him. "I bet he'll keep the frost thawed off the window to-day, just to
+see who comes up the platform," he chuckled.
+
+He would have been more amused if he had seen how the agent ducked
+anxiously forward to peer through the ticket window whenever the door of
+the waiting room opened, and how he started whenever the snow outside
+creaked under the tread of a heavy step; and he would have been
+convulsed with mirth if he had caught sight of the formidable billet of
+wood which Lew kept beside his chair all that day, and had guessed its
+purpose, and that it was a mute witness to the reputation which one Ford
+Campbell bore among his fellows. Lew was too wise to consider for a
+moment the revolver meant to protect the contents of the safe. Even the
+unintelligent know better than to throw a lighted match into a keg of
+gunpowder.
+
+Ford leaned backward against the push of the storm and was swept up to
+the hotel. He could not remember when he had felt so completely baffled;
+the incident of the girl and the ceremony was growing to something very
+like a calamity, and the mystery which surrounded it began to fret him
+intolerably; and the very unusualness of a trouble he could not settle
+with his fists whipped his temper to the point of explosion. He caught
+himself wavering, nevertheless, before the wind-swept porch of the hotel
+"office." That, too, was strange. Ford was not wont to hesitate before
+entering a saloon; more often he hesitated about leaving.
+
+"What's the matter with me, anyway?" he questioned himself impatiently.
+"I'm acting like I hadn't a right to go in and take a drink when I feel
+like it! If just a slight touch of matrimony acts like that with a man,
+what can the real thing be like? I always heard it made a fool of a
+fellow." To prove to himself that he was still untrammeled and at
+liberty to follow his own desire, he stamped across the porch, threw
+open the door, and entered with a certain defiance of manner.
+
+Behind the bar, Sam was laughing with his mouth wide open so that his
+gum showed shamelessly. Bill and Aleck and Big Jim were leaning heavily
+upon the bar, laughing also.
+
+"I'll bet she's a Heart-and-Hander, tryin' a new scheme to git a man.
+Think uh nabbing a man when he's drunk. That's a new one," Sam brought
+his lips close enough together to declare, and chewed vigorously upon
+the idea,--until he glanced up and saw Ford standing by the door. He
+turned abruptly, caught up a towel, and began polishing the bar with the
+frenzy of industry which never imposes upon one in the slightest degree.
+
+Bill glanced behind him and nudged Aleck into caution, and in the
+silence which followed, the popping of a piece of slate-veined coal in
+the stove sounded like a volley of small-caliber pistol shots.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+One Way to Drown Sorrow
+
+
+Ford walked up to the bar, with a smile upon his face which Sam
+misunderstood and so met with a conciliatory grin and a hand extended
+toward a certain round, ribbed bottle with a blue-and-silver label. Ford
+waved away the bottle and leaned, not on the bar but across it, and
+clutching Sam by the necktie, slapped him first upon one ear and next
+upon the other, until he was forced by the tingling of his own fingers
+to desist. By that time Sam's green necktie was pulled tight just under
+his nose, and he had swallowed his gum--which, considering the size of
+the lump, was likely to be the death of him.
+
+Ford did not say a word. He permitted Sam to jerk loose and back into a
+corner, and he watched the swift crimsoning of his ears with a keen
+interest. Since Sam's face had the pasty pallor of the badly scared,
+the ears appeared much redder by contrast than they really were. Next,
+Ford turned his attention to the man beside him, who happened to be
+Bill. For one long minute the grim spirit of war hovered just over the
+two.
+
+"Aw, forget it, Ford," Bill urged ingratiatingly at last. "You don't
+want to lick anybody--least of all old Bill! Look at them knuckles! You
+couldn't thump a feather bed. Anyway, you got the guilty party when you
+done slapped Sam up to a peak and then knocked the peak off. Made him
+swaller his cud, too, by hokey! Say, Sam, my old dad used to feed a cow
+on bacon-rinds when she done lost her cud. You try it, Sam. Mebby it
+might help them ears! Shove that there trouble-killer over this way,
+Sammy, and don't look so fierce at your uncle Bill; he's liable to turn
+you across his knee and dust your pants proper." He turned again to
+Ford, scowling at the group and at life in general, while the snow
+melted upon his broad shoulders and trickled in little, hurrying drops
+down to the nearest jumping-off place. "Come, drownd your sorrer," Bill
+advised amiably. "Nobody said nothing but Sammy, and I'll gamble he
+wishes he hadn't, now." If his counsel was vicious, his smile was
+engaging--which does not, in this instance, mean that it was beautiful.
+
+Ford's fingers closed upon the bottle, and with reprehensible
+thoroughness he proceeded to drown what sorrows he then possessed.
+Unfortunately he straightway produced a fresh supply, after his usual
+method. In two hours he was flushed and argumentative. In three he had
+whipped Bill--cause unknown to the chronicler, and somewhat hazy to Ford
+also after it was all over. By mid-afternoon he had Sammy entrenched in
+the tiny stronghold where barreled liquors were kept, and scared to the
+babbling stage. Aleck had been put to bed with a gash over his right eye
+where Ford had pointed his argument with a beer glass, and Big Jim had
+succumbed to a billiard cue directed first at his most sensitive bunion
+and later at his head. Ford was not using his fists, that day, because
+even in his whisky-brewed rage he remembered, oddly enough, his skinned
+knuckles.
+
+Others had come--in fact, the entire male population of Sunset was
+hovering in the immediate vicinity of the hotel--but none had conquered.
+There had been considerable ducking to avoid painful contact with flying
+glasses from the bar, and a few had retreated in search of bandages and
+liniment; the luckier ones remained as near the storm-center as was safe
+and expostulated. To those Ford had but one reply, which developed into
+a sort of war-chant, discouraging to the peace-loving listeners.
+
+"I'm a rooting, tooting, shooting, fighting son-of-a-gun--_and a good
+one!_" Ford would declaim, and with deadly intent aim a lump of coal,
+billiard ball, or glass at some unfortunate individual in his audience.
+"Hit the nigger and get a cigar! You're just hanging around out there
+till I drink myself to sleep--but I'm fooling you a few! I'm watching
+the clock with one eye, and I take my dose regular and not too frequent.
+I'm going to kill off a few of these smart boys that have been talking
+about me and my wife. She's a lady, my wife is, and I'll kill the first
+man that says she isn't." (One cannot, you will understand, be too
+explicit in a case like this; not one thousandth part as explicit as
+Ford was.)
+
+"I'm going to begin on Sam, pretty quick," he called through the open
+door. "I've got him right where I want him." And he stated, with
+terrible exactness, his immediate intentions towards the bartender.
+
+Behind his barricade of barrels, Sam heard and shivered like a gun-shy
+collie at a turkey shoot; shivered until human nerves could bear no
+more, and like the collie he left the storeroom and fled with a yelp of
+sheer terror. Ford turned just as Sam shot through the doorway into the
+dining-room, and splintered a beer bottle against the casing; glanced
+solemnly up at the barroom clock and, retreating to the nearly denuded
+bar, gravely poured himself another drink; held up the glass to the
+dusk-filmed window, squinted through it, decided that he needed a little
+more than that, and added another teaspoonful. Then he poured the
+contents of the glass down his throat as if it were so much water, wiped
+his lips upon a bar towel, picked a handful of coal from the depleted
+coal-hod, went to the door, and shouted to those outside to produce
+Sam, that he might be killed in an extremely unpleasant manner.
+
+The group outside withdrew across the street to grapple with the problem
+before them. It was obviously impossible for civilized men to sacrifice
+Sam, even if they could catch him--which they could not. Sam had bolted
+through the dining-room, upset the Chinaman in the kitchen, and fallen
+over a bucket of ashes in the coal-shed in his flight for freedom. He
+had not stopped at that, but had scurried off up the railroad track. The
+general opinion among the spectators was that he had, by this time,
+reached the next station and was hiding in a cellar there.
+
+Bill Wright hysterically insisted that it was up to Tom Aldershot, who
+was a deputy town marshal. Tom, however, was working on the house he
+hoped to have ready for his prospective bride by Thanksgiving, and hated
+to be interrupted for the sake of a few broken heads only.
+
+"He ain't shooting up nobody," he argued from the platform, where he was
+doing "inside work" on his dining-room while the storm lasted. "He
+never does cut loose with his gun when he's drunk. If I arrested him,
+I'd have to take him clear up to Garbin--and I ain't got time. And it
+wouldn't be nothin' but a charge uh disturbin' the peace, when I got him
+there. Y'oughta have a jail in Sunset, like I've been telling yuh right
+along. Can't expect a man to stop his work just to take a man to
+jail--not for anything less than murder, anyhow."
+
+Some member of the deputation hinted a doubt of his courage, and Tom
+flushed.
+
+"I ain't scared of him," he snorted indignantly. "I should say not! I'll
+go over and make him behave--as a man and a citizen. But I ain't going
+to arrest him as an officer, when there ain't no place to put him." Tom
+reluctantly threw down his hammer, grumbling because they would not wait
+till it was too dark to drive nails, but must cut short his working day,
+and went over to the hotel to quell Ford.
+
+Ingress by way of the front door was obviously impracticable; the
+marshal ducked around the corner just in time to avoid a painful
+meeting with a billiard ball. Mother McGrew had piled two tables against
+the dining-room door and braced them with the mop, and stubbornly
+refused to let Tom touch the barricade either as man or officer of the
+law.
+
+"Well, if I can't get in, I can't do nothing," stated Tom, with
+philosophic calm.
+
+"He's tearing up the whole place, and he musta found all them extra
+billiard balls Mike had under the bar, and is throwin' 'em away," wailed
+Mrs. McGrew, "and he's drinkin' and not payin'. The damage that man is
+doin' it would take a year's profits to make up. You gotta do something,
+Tom Aldershot--you that calls yourself a marshal, swore to pertect the
+citizens uh Sunset! No, sir--I ain't a-goin' to open this door, neither.
+I'm tryin' to save the dishes, if you want to know. I ain't goin' to let
+my cups and plates foller the glasses in there. A town full uh men--and
+you stand back and let one crazy--"
+
+Tom had heard Mrs. McGrew voice her opinion of the male population of
+Sunset on certain previous occasions. He left her at that point, and
+went back to the group across the street.
+
+At length Sandy, whose imagination had been developed somewhat beyond
+the elementary stage by his reading of romantic fiction, suggested
+luring Ford into the liquor room by the simple method of pretending an
+assault upon him by way of the storeroom window, which could be barred
+from without by heavy planks. Secure in his belief in Ford's friendship
+for him, Sandy even volunteered to slam the door shut upon Ford and lock
+it with the padlock which guarded the room from robbery. Tom took a chew
+of tobacco, decided that the ruse might work, and donated the planks for
+the window.
+
+It did work, up to a certain point. Ford heard a noise in the storeroom
+and went to investigate, caught a glimpse of Tom Aldershot apparently
+about to climb through the little window, and hurled a hammer and
+considerable vituperation at the opening. Whereupon Sandy scuttled in
+and slammed the door, according to his own plan, and locked it. There
+was a season of frenzied hammering outside, and after that Sunset
+breathed freer, and discussed the evils of strong drink, and washed down
+their arguments by copious draughts of the stuff they maligned.
+
+Later, they had to take him out of the storeroom, because he insisted
+upon knocking the bungs out of all the barrels and letting the liquor
+flood the floor, and Mike McGrew's wife objected to the waste, on the
+ground that whisky costs money. They fell upon him in a body, bundled
+him up, hustled him over to the ice-house, and shut him in; and within
+ten minutes he kicked three boards off one side and emerged breathing
+fire and brimstone like the dragons of old. He had forgotten about
+wanting to kill Sam; he was willing--nay, anxious--to murder every male
+human in Sunset.
+
+They did not know what to do with him after that. They liked Ford when
+he was sober, and so they hated to shoot him, though that seemed the
+only way in which they might dampen his enthusiasm for blood. Tom said
+that, if he failed to improve in temper by the next day, he would try
+and land him in jail, though it did seem rigorous treatment for so
+common a fault as getting drunk. Meanwhile they kept out of his way as
+well as they could, and dodged missiles and swore. Even that was
+becoming more and more difficult--except the swearing--because Ford
+developed a perfectly diabolic tendency to empty every store that
+contained a man, so that it became no uncommon sight to see a back door
+belching forth hurrying figures at the most unseasonable times. No man
+could lift a full glass, that night, and feel sure of drinking the
+contents undisturbed; whereat Sunset grumbled while it dodged.
+
+It may have been nine o'clock before the sporadic talk of a jail
+crystallized into a definite project which, it was unanimously agreed,
+could not too soon be made a reality.
+
+They built the jail that night, by the light of bonfires which the
+slightly wounded kept blazing in the intervals of standing guard over
+the workers; ready to give warning in case Ford appeared as a war-cloud
+on their horizon. There were fifteen able-bodied men, and they worked
+fast, with Ford's war-chant in the saloon down the street as an
+incentive to speed. They erected it close to Tom Aldershot's house,
+because the town borrowed lumber from him and they wanted to save
+carrying, and because it was Tom's duty to look after the prisoner, and
+he wanted the jail handy, so that he need not lose any time from his
+house-building.
+
+They built it strong, and they built it tight, without any window save a
+narrow slit near the ceiling; they heated it by setting a stove outside
+under a shelter, where Tom could keep up the fire without the risk of
+going inside, and ran pipe and a borrowed "drum" through the jail high
+enough so that Ford could not kick it. And to discourage any thought of
+suicide by hanging, they ceiled the place tightly with Tom's matched
+flooring of Oregon pine. Tom did not like that, and said so; but the
+citizens of Sunset nailed it on and turned a deaf ear to his complaints.
+
+Chill dawn spread over the town, dulling the light of the fires and
+bringing into relief the sodden tramplings in the snow around the jail,
+with the sharply defined paths leading to Tom Aldershot's lumber-pile.
+The watchers had long before sneaked off to their beds, for not a sign
+of Ford had they seen since midnight. The storm had ceased early in the
+evening and all the sky was glowing crimson with the coming glory of the
+sun. The jail was almost finished. Up on the roof three crouching
+figures were nailing down strips of brick-red building paper as a fair
+substitute for shingles, and on the side nearest town the marshal and
+another were holding a yard-wide piece flat against the wall with
+fingers that tingled in the cold, while Bill Wright fastened it into
+place with shingle nails driven through tin disks the size of a
+half-dollar.
+
+Ford, partly sober after a sleep on the billiard table in the hotel
+barroom, heard the hammering, wondered what industrious soul was up and
+doing carpenter work at that unseemly hour, and after helping himself to
+a generous "eye-opener" at the deserted bar, found his cap and went over
+to investigate. He was much surprised to see Bill Wright working, and
+smiled to himself as he walked quietly up to him through the soft,
+step-muffling snow.
+
+"What you doing, Bill--building a chicken house?" he asked, a quirk of
+amusement at the corner of his lips.
+
+Bill jumped and came near swallowing a nail; so near that his eyes
+bulged at the feel of it next his palate. Tom Aldershot dropped his end
+of the strip of paper, which tore with a dull sound of ripping, and
+remarked that he would be damned. Necks craned, up on the roof, and
+startled eyes peered down like chipmunks from a tree. Some one up there
+dropped a hammer which hit Bill on the head, but no one said a word.
+
+"You act like you were nervous, this morning," Ford observed, in the
+tone which indicates a conscious effort at good-humored ignorance.
+"Working on a bet, or what?"
+
+"What!" snarled Bill sarcastically. "I wisht, Ford, next time you bowl
+up, you'd pick on somebody that ain't too good a friend to fight back!
+I'm gittin' tired, by hokey--"
+
+"What--did I lick you again, Bill?" Ford's smile was sympathetic to a
+degree. "That's too bad, now. Next time you want to hunt a hole and
+crawl into it, Bill. I don't want to hurt you--but seems like I've kinda
+got the habit. You'll have to excuse me." He hunched his shoulders at
+the chill of the morning and walked around the jail, inspecting it with
+half-hearted interest.
+
+"What is this, anyway?" he inquired of Tom. "Smoke-house?"
+
+"It's a jail," snapped Tom. "To put you into if you don't watch your
+dodgers. What 'n thunder you want to carry on like you did last night,
+for? And then go and sober up just when we've got a jail built to put
+you into! That ain't no way for a man to do--I'll leave it to Bill if it
+is! I've a darned good mind to swear out a warrant, anyway, Ford, and
+pinch you for disturbin' the peace! That's what I ought to do, all
+right." Tom beat his hands about his body and glared at Ford with his
+ultra-official scowl.
+
+"All right, if you want to do it." Ford's tone embellished the reply
+with a you-take-the-consequences sort of indifference. "Only, I'd advise
+you never to turn me loose again if you do lock me up in this coop
+once."
+
+"I know I wouldn't uh worked all night on the thing if I'd knowed you
+was goin' to sleep it off," Bill complained, with deep reproach in his
+watery eyes. "I made sure you was due to keep things agitated around
+here for a couple uh days, at the very least, or I never woulda drove a
+nail, by hokey!"
+
+"It is a darned shame, to have a nice, new jail and nobody to use it
+on," sympathized Ford, his eyes half-closed and steely. "I'd like to
+help you out, all right. Maybe I'd better kill you, Bill; they _might_
+stretch a point and call it manslaughter--and I could use the bounty to
+help pay a lawyer, if it ever come to a head as a trial."
+
+Whereat Bill almost wept.
+
+Ford pushed his hands deep into his pockets and walked away, sneering
+openly at Bill, the marshal, the jail, and the town which owned it, and
+at wives and matrimony and the world which held all these vexations.
+
+He went straight to the shack, drank a cup of coffee, and packed
+everything he could find that belonged to him and was not too large for
+easy carrying on horseback; and when Sandy, hovering uneasily around
+him, asked questions, he told him briefly to go off in a corner and lie
+down; which advice Sandy understood as an invitation to mind his own
+affairs.
+
+Like Bill, Sandy could have wept at the ingratitude of this man. But he
+asked no more questions and he made no more objections. He picked up the
+story of the unpronounceable count who owned the castle in the Black
+Forest and had much tribulation and no joy until the last chapter, and
+when Ford went out, with his battered, sole-leather suitcase and his
+rifle in its pigskin case, he kept his pale eyes upon his book and
+refused even a grunt in response to Ford's grudging: "So long, Sandy."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+Reaction
+
+
+Even when a man consistently takes Life in twenty-four-hour doses and
+likes those doses full-flavored with the joys of this earth, there are
+intervals when the soul of him is sick, and Life becomes a nauseous
+progression of bleak futility. He may, in his revulsion against it,
+attempt to end it all; he may, in sheer disgust of it, take his doses
+stronger than ever before, as if he would once for all choke to death
+that part of him which is fine enough to rebel against it; he may even
+forswear, in melancholy penitence, that which has served to give it
+flavor, and vow him vows of abstemiousness at which the grosser part of
+him chuckles ironically; or, he may blindly follow the first errant
+impulse for change of environment, in the half-formed hope that new
+scenes may, without further effort on his part, serve to make of him a
+new man--a man for whom he can feel some respect.
+
+Ford did none of these things, however. The soul-sick incentive was
+there, and if he had been a little less of a reasoning animal and a
+little less sophisticated, he would probably have forsworn strong drink
+just as he forswore all responsibility for his inadvertent marriage. His
+reason and his experience saved him from cluttering his conscience with
+broken vows, although he did yield to the impulse of change to the
+extent of leaving Sunset while yet the inhabitants were fortifying
+themselves for the ardors of the day with breakfast and some wild
+prophecies concerning Ford's next outbreak.
+
+Apprehension over Bill's immediate future was popular amongst his
+friends, Ford's sardonic reference to manslaughter and bounty being
+repeated often enough in Bill's presence to keep that peace-loving
+gentleman in a state of trepidation which he sought to hide behind vague
+warnings.
+
+"He better think twicet before he comes bothering around me, by hokey!"
+Bill would mutter darkly. "I've stood a hull lot from Ford; I like 'im,
+when he's himself. But I've stood about as much as a man can be expected
+to stand. And he better look out! That's all I got to say--he better
+look out!" Bill himself, it may be observed incidentally, spent the
+greater portion of that day in "looking out." He was careful not to sit
+down with his back to a door, for instance, and was keenly interested
+when a knob turned beneath unseen fingers, and plainly relieved when
+another than Ford entered his presence. Bill's mustache was nearly
+pulled from its roots, that day--but that is not important to the story,
+which has to do with Ford Campbell, sometime the possessor of a neat
+legacy in coin, later a rider of the cattle ranges, last presiding
+genius over the poker table in Scotty's back room in Sunset, always an
+important factor--and too often a disturbing element--in any community
+upon which he chose to bestow his dynamic presence.
+
+Scotty hoped that Ford would show up for business when the lamps were
+lighted, that night. There had been some delicacy on the part of Ford's
+acquaintances that day in the matter of calling upon him at the shack.
+They believed--and hoped--that Ford was "sleeping it off," and there was
+a unanimous reluctance to disturb his slumbers. Sandy, indulging himself
+in the matter of undisturbed spinal tremors over "The Haunted Chamber,"
+had not left shelter, save when the more insistent shiverings of chilled
+flesh recalled him from his pleasurable nerve-crimplings and drove him
+forth to the woodpile. So that it was not until evening was well
+advanced that Sunset learned that Ford was no longer a potential menace
+within its meager boundaries. Bill took a long breath, observed
+meaningly that "He'd _better_ go--whilst his credit's good, by hokey!"
+and for the first time that day sat down with his back toward an outer
+door.
+
+Ford was not worrying about Sunset half as much as Sunset was worrying
+about him. He was at that moment playing pinochle half-heartedly with a
+hospitable sheep-herder, under the impression that, since his host had
+frankly and profanely professed a revulsion against solitaire and a
+corresponding hunger for pinochle, his duty as a guest lay in
+satisfying that hunger. He played apathetically, overlooked several
+melts he might have made, and so lost three games in succession to the
+gleeful herder, who had needed the diversion almost as much as he needed
+a hair-cut.
+
+His sense of social responsibility being eased thereby, Ford took his
+headache and his dull disgust with life to the wall side of the herder's
+frowsy bunk, and straightway forgot both in heavy slumber, leaving to
+the morrow any definite plan for the near future--the far future being
+as little considered as death and what is said to lie beyond.
+
+That day had done for him all he asked of it. It had put him thirty
+miles and more from Sunset, against which he felt a resentment which it
+little deserved; of a truth it was as inoffensive a hamlet as any in
+that region, and its sudden, overweening desire for a jail was but a
+legitimate impulse toward self-preservation. The fault was Ford's, in
+harassing the men of Sunset into action. But several times that day, and
+again while he was pulling the stale-odored blankets snugly about his
+ears, Ford anathematized the place as "a damned, rotten hole," and was
+as nearly thankful as his mood would permit, when he remembered that it
+lay far behind him and was likely to be farther before his journeyings
+were done.
+
+Sleep held him until daylight seeped in through the one dingy window.
+Ford awoke to the acrid smell of scorched bacon, thought at first that
+Sandy was once more demonstrating his inefficiency as a cook, and when
+he remembered that Sandy's name was printed smudgily upon that page of
+his life which he had lately turned down as a blotted, unlearned lesson
+is pushed behind an unwilling schoolboy, he began to consider seriously
+his next step.
+
+Outside, the sheep were blatting stridently their demand for breakfast.
+The herder bolted coffee and coarse food until he was filled, and went
+away to his dreary day's work, telling Ford to make himself at home, and
+flinging back a hope of further triumphs in pinochle, that night.
+
+Ford washed the dishes, straightened the blankets in the bunk, swept
+the grimy floor as well as he could with the stub of broom he found,
+filled the wood-box and then, being face to face with his day and the
+problem it held, rolled a cigarette, and smoked it in deep meditation.
+
+He wanted to get away from town, and poker games, and whisky, and the
+tumult it brewed. Something within him hungered for clean, wind-swept
+reaches and the sane laughter of men, and Ford was accustomed to doing,
+or at least trying to do, the thing he wanted to do. He was not getting
+into the wilderness because of any inward struggle toward right living,
+but because he was sick of town and the sordid life he had lived there.
+
+Somewhere, back toward the rim of mountains which showed a faint violet
+against the sky to the east, he owned a friend; and that friend owned a
+stock ranch which, Ford judged, must be of goodly extent; two weeks
+before, hearing somehow that Ford Campbell was running a poker game in
+Sunset, the friend had written and asked him to come and take charge of
+his "outfit," on the plea that, his foreman having died, he was
+burdened with many cares and in urgent need of help.
+
+Ford, giving the herder's frying-pan a last wipe with the dish-cloth,
+laughed at the thought of taking the responsibility offered him in that
+letter. It occurred to him, however, that the Double Cross (which was
+the brand-name of Mason's ranch) might be a pleasant place to visit. It
+was long since he had seen Ches--and there had been a time when one bed
+held the two of them through many a long, weary night; when one
+frying-pan cooked the scanty food they shared between them. And there
+had been a season of grinding days and anxious, black nights between,
+when the one problem, to Ford, consisted of getting Ches Mason out of
+the wild land where they wandered, and getting him out alive. The
+problem Ford solved and at the solution men wondered. Afterward they had
+drifted apart, but the memory of those months would hold them together
+with a bond which not even time could break--a bond which would pull
+taut whenever they met.
+
+Ford set down the frying-pan and went to the door and looked out. A
+chinook had blown up in the night, and although the wind was chill, the
+snow had disappeared, save where drifts clung to the hollows, shrinking
+and turning black beneath the sweeping gusts; sodden masses which gave
+to the prairie a dreary aspect of bleak discomfort. But Ford was well
+pleased at the sight of the brown, beaten grasses. Impulse was hardening
+to decision while he stared across the empty land toward the violet rim
+of hills; a decision to ride over to the Double Cross, and tell Ches
+Mason to his face that he was a chump, and have a smoke with the old
+Turk, anyway. Ches had married, since that vividly remembered time when
+adventure changed to hardship and hazard and walked hand in hand with
+them through the wild places. Ford wondered fleetingly if matrimony had
+changed old Ches; probably not--at least, not in those essential
+man-traits which appeal to men. Ford suddenly hungered for the man's
+hearty voice, where kindly humor lurked always, and for a grip of his
+hand.
+
+It was like him to forget all about the herder and the promise of
+pinochle that night. He went eagerly to the decrepit little shed which
+housed Rambler, his long-legged, flea-bitten gray; saddled him
+purposefully and rode away toward the violet hills at the trail-trot
+which eats up the miles with the least effort.
+
+That night, although he slept in a hamlet which called itself a town,
+his purpose kept firm hold of him, and he rode away at a decent hour the
+next morning,--and he rode sober. He kept his face toward the hills, and
+he did not trouble himself with any useless analysis of his unusual
+temperateness. He was going to blow in to the Double Cross some time
+before he slept that night, and have a talk with Ches. He had a pint of
+fairly good whisky in his pocket, in case he felt the need of a little
+on the way, and beyond those two satisfactory certainties he did not
+attempt to reason. They were significant, in a way, to a man with a
+tendency toward introspection; but Ford was interested in actualities
+and never stopped to wonder why he bought a pint, rather than a quart,
+or why, with Ches Mason in his mind, he declined to "set in" to the
+poker game which was running to tempting jackpots, the night before; or
+why he took one glass of wine before he mounted Rambler and let it go at
+that. He never once dreamed that the memory of cheerful, steady-going
+Ches influenced him toward starting on his friendly pilgrimage the Ford
+Campbell whom Mason had known eight years before; a very different Ford
+Campbell, be it said, from the one who had caused a whole town to
+breathe freer for his absence.
+
+Of his wife Ford had thought less often and less uncomfortably since he
+left the town wherein had occurred the untoward incident of his
+marriage. He was not unaccustomed to doing foolish things when he was
+drunk, and as a rule he made it a point to ignore them afterwards. His
+mysterious, matrimonial accident was beginning to seem less of a real
+catastrophe than before, and the anticipation of meeting Ches Mason was
+rapidly taking precedence of all else in his mind.
+
+So, with almost his normal degree of careless equanimity, he faced again
+the rim of hills--nearer they were now, with a deeper tinge that was
+almost purple where the shadows lined them here and there. Somewhere out
+that way lay the Double Cross ranch. Forty miles, one man told him it
+was; another, forty-three. At best it was far enough for the shortened
+daylight of one fall day to cover the journey. Ford threw away the stub
+of his after-breakfast cigarette and swung into the trail at a lope.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+"I Can Spare this Particular Girl"
+
+
+Ford's range-trained vision told him, while yet afar off, that the lone
+horse feeding upon a side hill was saddled and bridled, with reins
+dragging; the telltale, upward toss of its head when it started on to
+find a sweeter morsel was evidence enough of the impeding bridle, even
+before he was near enough to distinguish the saddle.
+
+Your true range man owns blood-relationship with the original Good
+Samaritan; Ford swung out of the trail and untied his rope as a matter
+of course. The master of the animal might have turned him loose to feed,
+but if that were the case, he had strayed farther than was ever
+intended; the chances, since no human being was in sight, were all
+against design and in favor of accident. At any rate Ford did not
+hesitate. It is not good to let a horse run loose upon the range with a
+saddle cinched upon its back, as every one knows.
+
+Ford was riding along the sheer edge of a water-worn gully, seeking a
+place where he might safely jump it--or better, a spot where the banks
+sloped so that he might ride down into it and climb the bank
+beyond--when he saw a head and pair of shoulders moving slowly along,
+just over the brow of the hill where fed the stray. He watched, and when
+the figure topped the ridge and started down the slope which faced him,
+his eyes widened a trifle in surprise.
+
+Skirts to the tops of her shoes betrayed her a woman. She limped
+painfully, so that Ford immediately pictured to himself puckered
+eyebrows and lips pressed tightly together. "And I'll bet she's crying,
+too," he summed up aloud. While he was speaking, she stumbled and fell
+headlong.
+
+When he saw that she made no attempt to rise, but lay still just as she
+had fallen, Ford looked no longer for an easy crossing. He glanced up
+and down the washout, saw no more promising point than where he was,
+wheeled and rode back twenty yards or so, turned and drove deep his
+spurs.
+
+It was a nasty jump, and he knew it all along. When Rambler rose gamely
+to it, with tensed muscles and forefeet flung forward to catch the bank
+beyond, he knew it better. And when, after a sickening minute of
+frenzied scrambling at the crumbling edge, they slid helplessly to the
+bottom, he cursed his idiocy for ever attempting it.
+
+Rambler got up with a pronounced limp, but Ford had thrown himself from
+the saddle and escaped with nothing worse than a skinned elbow. They
+were penned, however, in a box-like gully ten feet deep, and there was
+nothing to do but follow it to where they might climb out. Ford was
+worried about the girl, and made a futile attempt to stand in the saddle
+and from there climb up to the level. But Rambler, lame as he was,
+plunged so that Ford finally gave it up and started down the gulch,
+leading Rambler by the reins.
+
+There were many sharp turns and temper-trying windings, and though it
+narrowed in many places so that there was barely room for them to pass,
+it never grew shallower; indeed, it grew always deeper; and then,
+without any warning, it stopped abruptly upon a coulee's rim, with
+jumbled rocks and between them a sheer descent to the slope below. Ford
+guessed then that he was boxed up in one of the main waterways of the
+foot-hills he had been skirting for the past hour or so, and that he
+should have ridden up the gulch instead of down it.
+
+He turned, though the place was so narrow that Rambler's four feet
+almost touched one another and his rump scraped the bank, as Ford pulled
+him round, and retraced his steps. It was too rough for riding, even if
+he had not wanted to save the horse, and he had no idea how far he must
+go before he could get out. Ford, at that time, was not particularly
+cheerful.
+
+He must have gone a mile and more before he reached the point where, by
+hard scrambling, he attained level ground upon the same side as the
+girl. Ten minutes he spent in urging Rambler up the bank, and when the
+horse stood breathing heavily beside him, Ford knew that, for all the
+good there was in him at present, he might as well have left him at the
+bottom. He walked around him, rubbing leg and shoulder muscles until he
+located the hurt, and shook his head when all was done. Then he started
+on slowly, with Rambler hobbling painfully after him. Ford knew that
+every rod would aggravate that strained shoulder and that a stop would
+probably make it impossible for the horse to go on at all.
+
+He was not quite sure, after all those windings where he could not see,
+just where it was he had seen the girl, but he recognized at last the
+undulating outline of the ridge over which she had appeared, and made
+what haste he could up the slope. The grazing horse was no longer in
+sight, though he knew it might be feeding in a hollow near by.
+
+He had almost given up hope of finding her, when he turned his head and
+saw her off to one side, lying half concealed by a clump of low rose
+bushes. She was not unconscious, as he had thought, but was crying
+silently, with her face upon her folded arms and her hat askew over one
+ear. He stooped and touched her upon the shoulder.
+
+She lifted her head and looked at him, and drew away with a faint,
+withdrawing gesture, which was very slight in itself but none the less
+eloquent and unmistakable. Ford backed a step when he saw it and closed
+his lips without speaking the words he had meant to say.
+
+[Illustration: She lifted her head and looked at him, and drew away.]
+
+"Well, what do you want?" the girl asked ungraciously, after a minute
+spent in fumbling unseen hairpins and in straightening her hat. "I don't
+know why you're standing there like that, staring at me. I don't need
+any help."
+
+"Appearances are deceitful, then," Ford retorted. "I saw you limping
+over the hill, after your horse, and I saw you fall down and stay down.
+I had an idea that a little help would be acceptable, but of course--"
+
+"That was an hour ago," she interrupted accusingly, with a measuring
+glance at the sun, which was settling toward the sky-line.
+
+"I had trouble getting across that washout down there. I don't know
+this part of the country, and I went down it instead of up. What are you
+crying about--if you don't need any help?"
+
+She eyed him askance, and chewed upon a corner of her lip, and flipped
+the upturned hem of her riding skirt down over one spurred foot with a
+truly feminine instinct, before she answered him. She seemed to be
+thinking hard and fast, and she hesitated even while she spoke. Ford
+wondered at the latent antagonism in her manner.
+
+"I was crying because my foot hurts so and because I don't see how I'm
+going to get back to the ranch. I suppose they'll hunt me up if I stay
+away long enough--but it's getting toward night, and--I'm scared to
+death of coyotes, if you must know!"
+
+Ford laughed--at her defiance, in the face of her absolute helplessness,
+more than at what she said. "And you tell me you don't need any help?"
+he bantered.
+
+"I might borrow your horse," she suggested coldly, as if she grudged
+yielding even that much to circumstance. "Or you might catch mine for
+me, I suppose."
+
+"Sure. But you needn't hate me because you're in trouble," he hinted
+irrelevantly. "I'm not to blame, you know."
+
+"I--I hate to ask help from--a stranger," she said, watching him from
+under her lashes. "And I can't help showing what I feel. I hate to feel
+under an obligation--"
+
+"If that's all, forget it," he assured her calmly. "It's a law of the
+open--to help a fellow out in a pinch. When I headed for here, I thought
+it was a man had been set afoot."
+
+She eyed him curiously. "Then you didn't know--"
+
+"I thought you were a man," he repeated. "I didn't come just because I
+saw it was a girl. You needn't feel under any obligation whatever. I'm a
+stranger in the country and a stranger to you. I'm perfectly willing to
+stay that way, if you prefer. I'm not trying to scrape acquaintance on
+the strength of your being in trouble; but you surely don't expect a
+man to ride on and leave a woman out here on the bald prairie--do you?
+Especially when she's confessed she's afraid of the dark--and coyotes!"
+
+She was staring at him while he spoke, and she continued to stare after
+he had finished; the introspective look which sees without seeing, it
+became at last, and Ford gave a shrug at her apparent obstinacy and
+turned away to where Rambler stood with his head drooped and his eyes
+half closed. He picked up the reins and chirped to him, and the horse
+hesitated, swung his left foot painfully forward, hobbled a step, and
+looked at Ford reproachfully.
+
+"Your horse is crippled as badly as I am, it would seem," the girl
+observed, from where she sat watching them.
+
+"I strained his shoulder, trying to make him jump that washout. That was
+when I first got sight of you over here. We went to the bottom and it
+took me quite a while to find a way out. That's why I was so long
+getting here." Ford explained indifferently, with his back to her,
+while he rubbed commiseratingly the swelling shoulder.
+
+"Oh." The girl waited. "It seems to me you need help yourself. I don't
+see how you expect to help any one else, with your horse in that
+condition," she added. And when he still did not speak, she asked: "Do
+you know how far it is to the nearest ranch?"
+
+"No. I told you I'm a stranger in this country. I was heading for the
+Double Cross, but I don't know just--"
+
+"We're eight miles, straight across, from there; ten, the way we would
+have to go to get there. There are other washouts in this country--which
+it is unwise to attempt jumping, Mr.--"
+
+"Campbell," Ford supplied shortly.
+
+"I beg your pardon? You mumbled--"
+
+"Campbell!" Ford was tempted to shout it but contented himself with a
+tart distinctness. A late, untoward incident had made him somewhat
+touchy over his name, and he had not mumbled.
+
+"Oh. Did you skin your face and blacken your eye, Mr. Campbell, when
+you tried to jump that washout?"
+
+"No." Ford did not offer any explanation. He remembered the scars of
+battle which were still plainly visible upon his countenance, and he
+turned red while he bent over the fore ankles of Rambler, trying to
+discover other sprains. He felt that he was going to dislike this girl
+very much before he succeeded in getting her to shelter. He could not
+remember ever meeting before a woman under forty with so unpleasant a
+manner and with such a talent for disagreeable utterances.
+
+"Then you must have been fighting a wildcat," she hazarded.
+
+"Pardon me; is this a Methodist experience meeting?" he retorted,
+looking full at her with lowering brows. "It seems to me the only
+subject which concerns us mutually is the problem of getting to a ranch
+before dark."
+
+"You'll have to solve it yourself. I never attempt puzzles." The girl,
+somewhat to his surprise, showed no resentment at his rebuff. Indeed, he
+began to suspect her of being secretly amused. He began also mentally
+to accuse her of not being too badly hurt to walk, if she wanted to;
+indeed, his skepticism went so far as to accuse her of deliberately
+baiting him--though why, he did not try to conjecture. Women were queer.
+Witness his own late experience with one.
+
+Being thus in a finely soured mood, Ford suggested that, as she no doubt
+knew the shortest way to the nearest ranch, they at least make a start
+in that direction.
+
+"How?" asked the girl, staring up at him from where she sat beside the
+rose bushes.
+
+"By walking, I suppose--unless you expect me to carry you." Ford's tone
+was not in any degree affable.
+
+"I fancy it would be asking too great a favor to suggest that you catch
+my horse for me?"
+
+Ford dropped Rambler's reins and turned to her, irritated to the point
+where he felt a distinct desire to shake her.
+
+"I'd far rather catch your horse, even if I had to haze him all over
+the country, than carry you," he stated bluntly.
+
+"Yes. I suspected that much." She had plucked a red seed-ball off the
+bush nearest her and was nibbling daintily the sweet pulp off the
+outside.
+
+"Where is the horse?" Ford was holding himself rigidly hack from an
+outburst of temper.
+
+"Oh, I don't know, I'm sure." She picked another seed-ball and began
+upon it. "He should be somewhere around, unless he has taken a notion to
+go home."
+
+Ford said something under his breath and untied his rope from the
+saddle. He knew about where the horse had been feeding when he saw him,
+and he judged that it would naturally graze in the direction of
+home--which would probably be somewhere off to the southeast, since the
+trail ran more or less in that direction. Without a word to the girl, or
+a glance toward her, he started up the hill, hoping to get his bearings
+and a sight of the horse from the top. He could not remember when he had
+been so angry with a woman. "If she was a man," he gritted as he
+climbed, "I'd give her a thrashing or leave her out there, just as she
+deserves. That's the worst of dealing with a woman--she can always hand
+it to you, and you've got to give her a grin and thank-you, because she
+ain't a man."
+
+He glanced back, then, and saw her sitting with her head dropped forward
+upon her hands. There was something infinitely pitiful and lonely in her
+attitude, and he knitted his brows over the contrast between it and her
+manner when he left her. "I don't suppose a woman knows, herself, what
+she means, half the time," he hazarded impatiently. "She certainly
+didn't have any excuse for throwing it into me the way she did; maybe
+she's sorry for it now."
+
+After that his anger cooled imperceptibly, and he hurried a little
+faster because the day was waning with the chill haste of mid-autumn,
+and he recalled what she had said at first about being afraid of
+coyotes. And, although the storm of three days ago had been swept into
+mere memory by that sudden chinook wind, and the days were once more
+invitingly warm and hazily tranquil, night came shiveringly upon the
+land and the unhoused thought longingly of hot suppers and the glow of a
+fire.
+
+The girl's horse was, he believed, just disappearing into a deep
+depression half a mile farther on; but when he reached the place where
+he had seen it, there was nothing in sight save a few head of cattle and
+a coyote trotting leisurely up the farther slope. He went farther down
+the shallow coulee, then up to the high level beyond, his rope coiled
+loosely over one arm with the end dragging a foot behind him. But there
+was nothing to be seen from up there, except that the sun was just a red
+disk upon the far-off hills, and that the night was going to be
+uncomfortably cool if that wind kept blowing from the northwest.
+
+He began to feel slightly uneasy about the girl, and to regret wasting
+any time over her horse, and to fear that he might not be able to get
+close enough to rope the beast, even if he did see him.
+
+He turned back then and walked swiftly through the dusk toward the
+ridge, beyond which she and Rambler were waiting. But it was a long
+way--much farther than he had realized until he came to retrace his
+steps--and the wind blew up a thin rift of clouds which made the
+darkness come quickly. He found it difficult to tell exactly at which
+point he had crossed the ridge, coming over; and although experience in
+the open develops in a man a certain animal instinct for directions
+handed down by our primitive ancestry, Ford went wide in his anxiety to
+take the shortest way back to his unwilling protegee. The westering
+slope was lighter, however, and five minutes of wandering along the
+ridge showed him a dim bulk which he knew was Rambler. He hurried to the
+place, and the horse whinnied shrilly as he approached.
+
+"I looked as long as I could see, almost, but I couldn't locate your
+horse," Ford remarked to the dark shadow of the rose bushes. "I'll put
+you on mine. It will be slow going, of course--lame as he is--but I
+guess we can manage to get somewhere."
+
+He waited for the chill, impersonal reply. When she did not speak, he
+leaned and peered at the spot where he knew she must be. "If you want to
+try it, we'd better be starting," he urged sharply. "It's going to be
+pretty cold here on this side-hill."
+
+When there was silence still--and he gave her plenty of time for
+reply--Ford stooped and felt gropingly for her, thinking she must be
+asleep. He glanced back at Rambler; unless the horse had moved, she
+should have been just there, under his hands; or, he thought, she may
+have moved to some other spot, and be waiting in the dark to see what he
+would do. His palms touched the pressed grasses where she had been, but
+he did not say a word. He would not give her that satisfaction; and he
+told himself grimly that he had his opinion of a girl who would waste
+time in foolery, out here in the cold--with a sprained ankle, to boot.
+
+He pulled a handful of the long grass which grows best among bushes. It
+was dead now, and dry. He twisted it into a makeshift torch, lighted and
+held it high, so that its blaze made a great disk of brightness all
+around him. While it burned he looked for her, and when it grew to
+black cinders and was near to scorching his hand, he made another and
+looked farther. He laid aside his dignity and called, and while his
+voice went booming full-lunged through the whispering silence of that
+empty land, he twisted the third torch, and stamped the embers of the
+second into the earth that it might not fire the prairie.
+
+There was no dodging the fact; the girl was gone. When Ford was
+perfectly sure of it, he stamped the third torch to death with vicious
+heels, went back to the horse, and urged him to limp up the hill. He did
+not say anything then or think anything much; at least, he did not think
+coherently. He was so full of a wordless rage against the girl, that he
+did not at first feel the need of expression. She had made a fool of
+him.
+
+He remembered once shooting a big, beautiful, blacktail doe. She had
+dropped limply in her tracks and lain there, and he had sauntered up and
+stood looking at her stretched before him. He was out of meat, and the
+doe meant all that hot venison steaks and rich, brown gravy can mean to
+a man meat-hungry. While he unsheathed his hunting knife, he gloated
+over the feast he would have, that night. And just when he had laid his
+rifle against a rock and knelt to bleed her, the deer leaped from under
+his hand and bounded away over the hill. He had not said a word on that
+occasion, either.
+
+This night, although the case was altogether different and the
+disappearance of the girl was in no sense a disaster--rather a relief,
+if anything--he felt that same wordless rage, the same sense of utter
+chagrin. She had made a fool of him. After awhile he felt his jaws
+aching with the vicelike pressure of his teeth together.
+
+They topped the ridge, Rambler hobbling stiffly. Ford had in mind a
+sheltering rim of sandstone at the nearest point of the coulee he had
+crossed in searching for the girl's horse, and made for it. He had
+noticed a spring there, and while the water might not be good, the
+shelter would be welcome, at any rate.
+
+He had the saddle off Rambler, the shoulder bathed with cold water from
+the spring, and was warming his wet hands over a little fire when the
+first gleam of humor struck through his anger and lighted for a moment
+the situation.
+
+"Lordy me! I must be a hoodoo, where women are concerned," he said,
+kicking the smoking stub of a bush into the blaze. "Soon as one crosses
+my trail, she goes and disappears off the face of the earth!" He fumbled
+for his tobacco and papers. It was a "dry camp" he was making that
+night, and a smoke would have to serve for a supper. He held his book of
+papers absently while he stared hard at the fire.
+
+"It ain't such a bad hoodoo," he mused. "I can spare this particular
+girl just as easy as not; and the other one, too, for that matter."
+
+After a minute spent in blowing apart the thin leaves and selecting a
+paper:
+
+"Queer where she got to--and it's a darned mean trick to play on a man
+that was just trying to help her out of a fix. Why, I wouldn't treat a
+stray dog that way! Darn these women!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+The Problem of Getting Somewhere
+
+
+Dawn came tardily after a long, cheerless night, during which the wind
+whined over the prairie and the stars showed dimly through a shifting
+veil of low-sweeping clouds. Ford had not slept much, for hunger and
+cold make poor bedfellows, and all the brush he could glean on that
+barren hillside, with the added warmth of his saddle-blanket wrapped
+about him, could no more make him comfortable than could cigarettes
+still the gnawing of his hunger.
+
+When he could see across the coulee, he rose from where he had been
+sitting with his back to the ledge and his feet to the meager fire,
+brooding over all the unpleasant elements in his life thus far,
+particularly the feminine element. He folded the saddle-blanket along
+its original creases and went over to where Rambler stood dispiritedly
+with his back humped to the cold, creeping wind and his tail whipping
+between his legs when a sudden gust played with it. Ford shivered, and
+beat his gloved hands about his body, and looked up at the sky to see
+whether the sun would presently shine and send a little warmth to this
+bleak land where he wandered. He blamed the girl for all of this
+discomfort, and he told himself that the next time a woman appeared
+within his range of vision he would ride way around her. They invariably
+brought trouble; of various sorts and degrees, it is true, but trouble
+always. It was perfectly safe, he decided, to bank on that. And he
+wished, more than ever, that he had not improvidently given that pint of
+whisky to a disconsolate-looking sheep-herder he had met the day before
+on his way out from town; or that he had put two flasks in his pocket
+instead of one. In his opinion a good, big jolt right now would make a
+new man of him.
+
+Rambler, as he had half expected, was obliged to do his walking with
+three legs only; which is awkward for a horse accustomed to four
+exceedingly limber ones, and does not make for speed, however great
+one's hurry. Ford walked around him twice, scooped water in his hands,
+and once more bathed the shoulder--not that he had any great faith in
+cold water as a liniment, but because there was nothing else that he
+could do, and his anxiety and his pity impelled service of some sort. He
+rubbed until his fingers were numb and his arm aching, tried him again,
+and gave up all hope of leading the horse to a ranch. A mile he might
+manage, if he had to but ten! He rubbed Rambler's nose commiseratingly,
+straightened his forelock, told him over and over that it was a darned
+shame, anyway, and finally turned to pick up his saddle. He could not
+leave that lying on the prairie for inquisitive kit-foxes to chew into
+shoestrings, however much he might dread the forty-pound burden of it on
+his shoulders. He was stooping to pick it up when he saw a bit of paper
+twisted and tied to the saddle-horn with a red ribbon.
+
+"Lordy me!" he ejaculated ironically. "The lady left a note on my
+pillow--and I never received it in time! Now, ain't that a darned
+shame?" He plucked the knot loose, and held up the ribbon and the note,
+and laughed.
+
+"'When this reaches you, I shall be far away, though it breaks my heart
+to go and this missive is mussed up scandalous with my bitter tears.
+Forgive me if you can, and forget me if you have to. It is better thus,
+for it couldn't otherwise was,'" he improvised mockingly, while his
+chilled fingers fumbled to release the paper, which was evidently a leaf
+torn from a man's memorandum book. "Lordy me, a letter from a lady!
+Ain't that sweet!"
+
+When he read it, however, the smile vanished with a click of the teeth
+which betrayed his returning anger. One cold, curt sentence bidding him
+wait until help came--that was all. His eye measured accusingly the wide
+margin left blank under the words; she had not omitted apology or
+explanation for lack of space, at any rate. His face grew cynically
+amused again.
+
+"Oh, certainly! I'd roost on this side-hill for a month, if a lady told
+me to," he sneered, speaking aloud as he frequently did in the solitude
+of the range land. He glanced from ribbon to note, ended his indecision
+by stuffing the note carelessly into his coat pocket and letting the
+ribbon drop to the ground, and with a curl of the lips which betrayed
+his mental attitude toward all women and particularly toward that woman,
+picked up his saddle.
+
+"I can't seem to recollect asking that lady for help, anyway," he summed
+up before he dismissed the subject from his mind altogether. "I was
+trying to help her; it sure takes a woman to twist things around so they
+point backwards!"
+
+He turned and glanced pityingly at Rambler, watching him with ears
+perked forward inquiringly. "And I crippled a damned good horse trying
+to help a blamed poor specimen of a woman!" he gritted. "And didn't get
+so much as a pleasant word for it. I'll sure remember that!"
+
+Rambler whinnied after him wistfully, and Ford set his teeth hard
+together and walked the faster, his shoulders slightly bent under the
+weight of the saddle. His own physical discomfort was nothing, beside
+the hurt of leaving his horse out there practically helpless; for a
+moment his fingers rested upon the butt of his six-shooter, while he
+considered going back and putting an end to life and misery for
+Rambler. But for all the hardness men had found in Ford Campbell, he was
+woman-weak where his horse was concerned. With cold reason urging him,
+he laid the saddle on the ground and went back, his hand clutching
+grimly the gun at his hip. Rambler's nicker of welcome stopped him
+half-way and held him there, hot with guilt.
+
+"Oh, damn it, I can't!" he muttered savagely, and retraced his steps to
+where the saddle lay. After that he almost trotted down the coulee, and
+he would not look back again until it struck him as odd that the
+nickerings of the horse did not grow perceptibly fainter. With a queer
+gripping of the muscles in his throat he did turn, then, and saw
+Rambler's head over the little ridge he had just crossed. The horse was
+making shift to follow him rather than be left alone in that strange
+country. Ford waited, his lashes glistening in the first rays of the
+new-risen sun, until the horse came hobbling stiffly up to him.
+
+"You old devil!" he murmured then, his contrite tone contrasting oddly
+with the words he used. "You contrary, ornery, old devil, you!" he
+repeated softly, rubbing the speckled nose with more affection than he
+had ever shown a woman. "You'd tag along, if--if you didn't have but one
+leg to carry you! And I was going to--" He could not bring himself to
+confess his meditated deed of mercy; it seemed black-hearted treachery,
+now, and he stood ashamed and humbled before the dumb brute that nuzzled
+him with such implicit faith.
+
+It was slow journeying, after that. Ford carried the saddle on his own
+back rather than burden the horse with it, and hungry as he was, he
+stopped often and long, and massaged the sprained shoulder faithfully
+while Rambler rested it, with all his weight on his other legs and his
+nose rooting gently at Ford's bowed head.
+
+A stray rider assured him that he was on the right trail, but it was
+past noon when he thankfully reached the Double Cross, threw his saddle
+down beside the stable door, and gave Rambler a chance at the hay in the
+corral.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+The Foreman of the Double Cross
+
+
+"Hell-o, Ford, where the blazes did you drop down from?" a welcoming
+voice yelled, when he was closing the gate of the corral behind him and
+thinking that it was like Ches Mason to have a fine, strong corral and
+gate, and then slur the details by using a piece of baling wire to
+fasten it. The last ounce of disgust with life slid from his mind when
+he heard the greeting, and he turned and gripped hard the gloved hand
+thrust toward him. Ches Mason it was--the same old Ches, with the same
+humorous wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, the same kindliness, the
+same hearty faith in the world as he knew it and in his fellowmen as he
+found them--the unquestioning faith that takes it for granted that the
+other fellow is as square as himself. Ford held his hand while he
+permitted himself a swift, reckoning glance which took in these
+familiar landmarks of the other's personality.
+
+"Don't seem to have hurt you much--matrimony," he observed whimsically,
+as he dropped the hand. "You look just like you always did--with your
+hat on." In the West, not to say in every other locality, there is a
+time-honored joke about matrimony, for certain strenuous reasons,
+producing premature baldness.
+
+Ches grinned and removed his hat. Eight years had heightened his
+forehead perceptibly and thinned the hair on his temples. "You see what
+it's done to me," he pointed out lugubriously. "You ain't married
+yourself, I suppose? You look like you'd met up with some kinda
+misfortune." Mason was regarding Ford's scarred face with some
+solicitude.
+
+"Just got tangled up a little with my fellow-citizens, in Sunset," Ford
+explained drily. "I tried to see how much of the real stuff I could get
+outside of, and then how many I could lick." He shrugged his shoulders a
+little. "I did quite a lot of both," he added, as an afterthought.
+
+Mason was rubbing his jaw reflectively and staring hard at Ford. "The
+wife's strong on the temperance dope," he said hesitatingly. "I reckon
+you'll want to bunk down with the boys till you grow some hide on your
+face--there's lady company up at the house, and--"
+
+"The bunk-house for mine, then," Ford cut in hastily. "No lady can get
+within gunshot of me; not if I see her coming in time!" Though he smiled
+when he said it, there was meaning behind the mirth.
+
+Mason pulled a splinter from a corral rail and began to snap off little
+bits with his fingers. "Kate will go straight up in the air with me if
+she knows you're here and won't come to the house, though," he
+considered uneasily. "She's kept a big package of gratitude tucked away
+with your name on it, ever since that Alaska deal. And lemme tell you,
+Ford, when a woman as good as Kate goes and gets grateful to a
+man--gosh! Had your dinner?"
+
+"Not lately, I haven't," Ford declared. "I kinda remember eating, some
+time in the past; it was a long time ago, though."
+
+Mason laughed and tagged the answer as being the natural exaggeration
+of a hungry man. "Well, come along and eat, then--if you haven't
+forgotten how to make your jaws go. I've got Mose Freeman cooking for
+me; you know Mose, don't you? Hired him the day after the Fourth; the
+Mitten outfit fired him for getting soused and trying to clean out the
+camp, and I nabbed him before they had time to forgive him. Way they had
+of disciplining him--when he'd go on a big tear they'd fire him for a
+few days and then take him back. But they can't git him now--not if I
+can help it. A better cook never throwed dishwater over a guy-rope than
+that same old Mose, but--" He stopped and looked at Ford hesitantly.
+"Say! I hate like the deuce to tie a string on you as soon as you hit
+the ranch, Ford, but--if you've got anything along, you won't spring it
+on Mose, will you? A fellow's got to watch him pretty close, or--"
+
+"I haven't got a drop." Ford's tone was reprehensibly regretful.
+
+"You do look as if you'd put it all under your belt," Mason retorted
+dryly. "Left anything behind?"
+
+"Some spoiled beauties, and a nice new jail that was built by my
+admiring townspeople, with my name carved over the door. I didn't stay
+for the dedication services. Sunset was getting all fussed up over me
+and I thought I'd give them a chance to settle their nerves; loss of
+sleep sure plays hell with folks when their nerves are getting frazzly."
+He smiled disarmingly at Mason.
+
+"I'd kinda lost track of you, Ches, till I got your letter. I've been
+traveling pretty swift, and that's no lie. I meant to write, but--you
+know how a man gets to putting things off. And then I took a notion to
+ride over this way, and sample your grub for a day or so, and abuse you
+a little to your face, you old highbinder!"
+
+"Sure. I've been kinda looking for you, too. But--I wish you hadn't
+quite so big an assortment of battle-signs, Ford. Kate's got ideals and
+prejudices--and she don't know all your little personal traits. She's
+heard a lot about you, of course. We was married right after we came
+outa the North, you know, and of course--Well, you know how a woman sops
+up adventure stories; and seeing you was the star performer--"
+
+"And that's a lie," Ford put in modestly, albeit a trifle bluntly.
+
+"No, it ain't. She got the truth. And she's so darned grateful," he
+added lugubriously, "that I don't know how to square your record with
+that face! Unless we can rig up some yarn about a holdup--" He paused
+just outside the mess-house door and eyed Ford questioningly. "We
+might--"
+
+"No, you don't. If you've gone and lied to her, and made me out a little
+tin angel, you deserve what's coming. Anyway, I won't stay long, and
+I'll stop down here with the boys. Call me Jack Jones and let it go at
+that. Honest, Ches, I don't want to get mixed up with no more females.
+I'm plumb scared of 'em. Lordy me, that coffee sure does smell good to
+me!"
+
+Mason looked at him doubtfully, saw that Ford was, for the time being,
+absolutely devoid of anything remotely approaching penitence for his
+sins, or compunction over his appearance, or uneasiness over "Kate's"
+opinion of him. He was hungry. And since it is next to impossible to
+whip up the conscience of a man whose thoughts are concentrated upon his
+physical needs, Mason was wise enough to wait, though the one point
+which he considered of vital importance to them both--the question of
+Ford's acceptance or refusal of the foremanship of the Double Cross--had
+not yet been touched upon.
+
+While Ford ate with a controlled voraciousness which spoke eloquently of
+his twenty-four hours of fasting and exposure, Mason gossiped
+inattentively and studied the man.
+
+Eight years leave their impress of mental growth or deterioration upon a
+man. Outwardly Ford was not much changed since Mason had come with him
+out of Alaska and lost sight of him afterwards. There was the maturity
+which the man of thirty possessed and which the virile young fellow of
+twenty-one had lacked. There was the same straight glance, the same
+atmosphere of squareness and mental poise. Those were qualities which
+Mason set down as valuable factors in his estimate of the man. Besides,
+there were other signs which did not make so pleasant a reading.
+
+Eight years--and a few of them, at least, had been spent wastefully in
+tearing down what the other years had built; Mason had heard that Ford
+was "going to the dogs," and that by the short trail men blazed for
+themselves centuries ago and which those who came after have made a
+highway--the whisky trail. Mason had heard, now and then, of ten
+thousand dollars coming to Ford upon the death of his father and going
+almost as suddenly as it had come. That, at least, had been the rumor.
+Also he had heard, just lately, that Ford had taken to gambling as a
+profession and to terrorizing Sunset periodically as a pastime. And
+Mason remembered the Ford Campbell who had carried him on his back out
+of a wild place in Alaska, and had nearly starved himself that the sick
+man's strength might not fail him utterly. He had remembered--had Ches
+Mason; and, being one of those tenacious souls who cling to friendship
+and to a resilient faith in the good that is in the worst of us, he had
+thrown out a tentative life-line, as it were, and hoped that Ford might
+clutch it before he became quite submerged in the sodden morass of
+inebriety.
+
+Ford may or may not have grasped eagerly at the line. At any rate he was
+there in the mess-house of the Double Cross, and he was not quite so
+sodden as Mason had feared to find him--provided he found him at all. So
+much, at least, was encouraging, and for the rest, Mason was content to
+wait.
+
+Mose, recognizing Ford at once, had asked him, with a comical attempt at
+secrecy, if he had anything to drink. When Ford shook his head, Mose
+stifled a sigh and went back to his dishwashing, not more than half
+convinced and inclined toward resentfulness. That a "booze-fighter" like
+Ford Campbell should come only a day's ride from town and not be fairly
+well supplied with whisky was too remarkable to be altogether plausible.
+He eyed the two sourly while they talked, and he did not bring forth one
+of the fresh pies he had baked, as he had meant to do.
+
+It was not until Ford was ready to light his after-dinner cigarette
+that Mason led the way into the next room, which held the bunks and
+general belongings of the men, and closed the door so that they might
+talk in confidence without fear of Mose's loose tongue. Ford immediately
+pulled off his boots, laid himself down upon one of the bunks, doubled a
+pillow under his head, and began to eye Mason quizzically. Then he said:
+
+"Say, you kinda played your hand face down, didn't you, Ches, when you
+wrote and asked me to come out here and take charge? Eight years is a
+long time to expect a man to stay right where he was when you saw him
+last. You've lost a whole lot of horse sense since I knew you."
+
+"Well, what about it? You came, I notice." Mason grinned and would not
+help Ford otherwise to an understanding.
+
+"I didn't come to hog-tie that foreman job, you chump. I just merely
+want to tell you that you'll get into all kinds of trouble, some day, if
+you go laying yourself wide open like that. Why, it's plumb crazy to
+offer a job like that to a fellow you haven't seen for as long as you
+have me. And if you heard anything about me, it's a cinch it wasn't what
+would recommend me to any Sunday-school as a teacher of their Bible
+class! How did you know I wouldn't take it? And let you in for--"
+
+"Well, you're here, and I've seen you. The job's still waiting for you.
+You can start right in, to-morrow morning." Ches got out his pipe and
+began to fill it as calmly and with as much attention to the small
+details as if he were not mentally tensed for the struggle he knew was
+coming; a struggle which struck much deeper than the position he was
+offering Ford.
+
+Ford almost dropped his cigarette in his astonishment. "Well, you damn'
+fool!" he ejaculated pityingly.
+
+"Why? I thought you knew enough--you punched cows for the Circle for
+four or five years, didn't you? Nelson told me you were his top hand
+while you stayed with him, and that you ran the outfit one whole summer,
+when--"
+
+"That ain't the point." A hot look had crept into Ford's face--a tinge
+which was not a flush--and a glow into his eyes. "I know the
+cow-business, far as that goes. It's me; you can't--why, Lordy me! You
+ought to be sent to Sulphur Springs and get your think-tank hoed out.
+Any man that will offer a foreman's job to a--a--"
+
+"'A rooting, tooting, shooting, fighting son-of-a-gun, and a good one!'"
+assisted Mason equably. "'The only original go-getter--' Sure. That's
+all right."
+
+The flush came slowly and darkened Ford's cheeks and brow and throat. He
+threw his half-smoked cigarette savagely at the hearth of the rusty
+box-stove, and scowled at the place where it fell. "Well, ain't that
+reason enough?" he demanded harshly, after a minute.
+
+Mason had been studying that flush. He nodded assent to some question he
+had put to himself, and crowded tobacco into his pipe. "No reason at
+all, one way or the other. I need a foreman--one I can depend on. I've
+got to make a trip out to the Coast, this fall, and I've got to leave
+somebody here I can trust."
+
+Ford shot him a quick, questioning glance, and bit his lip. "That," he
+said more calmly, "is just what I'm driving at. You can't trust me. You
+can't depend on me, Ches."
+
+"Oh, yes I can," Mason contradicted blandly. "It's just because I can
+that I want you."
+
+"You can't. You know damn' well you can't! Why, you--don't you know I've
+got the name of being a drunkard, and a--a bad actor all around? I'm not
+like I was eight years ago, remember. I've traveled a hard old trail
+since we bucked the snow together, Ches--and it's been mostly down
+grade. I was all right for awhile, and then I got ten thousand dollars,
+and it seemed a lot of money. I bought a fellow out--he had a ranch and
+a few head of horses--so he could take his wife back East to her mother.
+She was sick. I didn't want the darned ranch. And so help me, Ches,
+that's the only thing I've done in the last four years that I hadn't
+ought to be ashamed of. The rest of the money I just simply blew.
+I--well, you see me; you didn't want to take me up to the house to meet
+your wife, and I don't blame you. You'd be a chump if you did. And this
+is nothing out of the ordinary. I've got my face bunged up half the
+time, seems like." He thumped the pillow into a different position,
+settled his head against it, and looked at Mason with his old, whimsical
+smile. "So when you talk about that foreman job, and depending on me,
+you're--plumb delirious. I was going to write and tell you so, but I
+kept putting it off. And then I took a notion I'd hunt you up and give
+you some good advice. You're a good fellow, Ches, but the court ought to
+appoint a guardian for you."
+
+"I'll stick around for three or four weeks," Mason observed, in the
+casual tone of one who is merely discussing the details of an everyday
+affair, "till the calves are all gathered. We're a little late this
+year, on account of old Slow dying right in round-up time. We got most
+of the beef shipped--all I care about gathering, this fall. I've got
+most all young stock, and it won't hurt to let 'em run another season;
+there ain't many. I'll let you take the wagons out, and I'll go with you
+till you get kinda harness-broke. And--"
+
+"I told you I don't want the job." Ford's mouth was set grimly.
+
+"You tried to tell me what I want and what I don't want," Mason
+corrected amiably. "Now I've got my own ideas on that subject. This here
+outfit belongs to me. I like to pick my men to suit myself; and if I
+want a certain man for foreman, I guess I've got a right to hire him--if
+he'll let himself be hired. I've picked my man. It don't make any
+difference to me how many times he played hookey when he was a kid, or
+how many men he's licked since he growed up. I've hired him to help run
+the Double Cross, and run it right; and I ain't a bit afraid but what
+he'll make good." He smiled and knocked the ashes gently from his pipe
+into the palm of his hand, because the pipe was a meerschaum just
+getting a fine, fawn coloring around the base of the bowl, and was dear
+to the heart of him. "Down to the last, white chip," he added slowly,
+"he'll make good. He ain't the kind of a man that will lay down on his
+job." He got up and yawned, elaborately casual in his manner.
+
+"You lay around and take it easy this afternoon," he said. "I've got to
+jog over to the river field; the boys are over there, working a little
+bunch we threw in yesterday. To-morrow we can ride around a little, and
+kinda get the lay of the land. You better go by-low, right now--you look
+as if it wouldn't do you any harm!" Whereupon he wisely took himself off
+and left Ford alone.
+
+The door he pulled shut after him closed upon a mental battle-ground.
+Ford did not go "by-low." Instead, he rolled over and lay with his face
+upon his folded arms, alive to the finger-tips; alive and fighting. For
+there are times when the soul of a man awakes and demands a reckoning,
+and reviews pitilessly the past and faces the future with the veil of
+illusion torn quite away--and does it whether the man will or no.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+"I Wish You'd Quit Believing in Me!"
+
+
+A distant screaming roused Ford from his bitter mood of introspection.
+He raised his head and listened, his heavy-lidded eyes staring blankly
+at the wall opposite, before he sprang off the bunk, pulled on his
+boots, and rushed from the room. Outside, he hesitated long enough to
+discover which direction he must take to reach the woman who was
+screaming inarticulately, her voice vibrant with sheer terror. The sound
+came from the little, brown cottage that seemed trying modestly to hide
+behind a dispirited row of young cottonwoods across a deep, narrow
+gully, and he ran headlong toward it. He crossed the plank footbridge in
+a couple of long leaps, vaulted over the gate which barred his way, and
+so reached the house just as a woman whom he knew must be Mason's
+"Kate," jerked open the door and screamed "Chester!" almost in his
+face. Behind her rolled a puff of slaty blue smoke.
+
+Ford pushed past her in the doorway without speaking; the smoke told its
+own urgent tale and made words superfluous. She turned and followed him,
+choking over the pungent smoke.
+
+"Oh, where's Chester?" she wailed. "The whole garret's on fire--and I
+can't carry Phenie--and she's asleep and can't walk anyway!" She rushed
+half across the room and stopped, pointing toward a closed door, with
+Ford at her heels.
+
+"She's in there!" she cried tragically. "Save her, quick--and I'll find
+Chester. You'd think, with all the men there are on this ranch, there'd
+be some one around--oh, and my new piano!"
+
+She ran out of the house, scolding hysterically because the men were
+gone, and Ford laughed a little as he went to the door she had
+indicated. When his fingers touched the knob, it turned fumblingly under
+another hand than his own; the door opened, and he confronted the girl
+whom he had tried to befriend the day before. She had evidently just
+gotten out of bed, and into a flimsy blue kimono, which she was holding
+together at the throat with one hand, while with the other she steadied
+herself against the wall. She stared blankly into his eyes, and her face
+was very white indeed, with her hair falling thickly upon either side in
+two braids which reached to her hips.
+
+Ford gave her one quick, startled glance, said "Come on," quite
+brusquely, and gathered her into his arms with as little sentiment as he
+would have bestowed upon the piano. His eyes smarted with the smoke,
+which blinded him so that he bumped into chairs on his way to the door.
+Outside he stopped, and looked down at the girl, wondering what he
+should do with her. Since Kate had stated emphatically that she could
+not walk, it seemed scarcely merciful to deposit her on the ground and
+leave her to her own devices. She had closed her eyes, and she looked
+unpleasantly like a corpse; and there was an insistent crackling up in
+the roof, which warned Ford that there was little time for the weighing
+of fine points. He was about to lay her on the bare ground, for want of
+a better place, when he glimpsed Mose running heavily across the
+bridge, and went hurriedly to meet him.
+
+"Here! You take her down and put her in one of the bunks, Mose," he
+commanded, when Mose confronted him, panting a good deal because of his
+two hundred and fifty pounds of excess fat and a pair of
+down-at-the-heel slippers which hampered his movements appreciably. Mose
+looked at the girl and then at his two hands.
+
+"I can't take her," he lamented. "I got m'hands full of aigs!"
+
+Ford's reply was a sweep of the girl's inert figure against Mose's
+outstretched hands, which freed them effectually of their burden of
+eggs. "You darned chump, what's eggs in a case like this?" he cried
+sharply, and forced the girl into his arms. "You take her and put her on
+a bunk. I've got to put out that fire!"
+
+So Mose, a reluctant knight and an awkward one, carried the girl to the
+bunk-house, and left Ford free to save the house if he could.
+Fortunately the fire had started in a barrel of old clothing which had
+stood too close to the stovepipe, and while the smoke was stifling, the
+flames were as yet purely local. And, more fortunately still, that day
+happened to be Mrs. Mason's wash-day and two tubs of water stood in the
+kitchen, close to the narrow stairway which led into the loft. Three or
+four pails of water and some quick work in running up and down the
+stairs was all that was needed. Ford, standing in the low, unfinished
+loft, looked at the rafter which was burnt half through, and wiped his
+perspiring face with his coat sleeve.
+
+"Lordy me!" he observed aloud, "I sure didn't come any too soon!"
+
+"Oh, it's all out! I don't know how I ever shall thank you in this
+world! With Phenie in bed with a sprained ankle so she couldn't walk,
+and the men all gone, I was just wild! I--why--" Kate, standing upon the
+stairs so that she could look into the loft, stopped suddenly and stared
+at Ford with some astonishment. Plainly, she had but then discovered
+that he was a stranger--and it was quite as plain that she was taking
+stock of his blackened eyes and other bruises, and that with the
+sheltered woman's usual tendency to exaggerate the disfigurements.
+
+"That's all right; I don't need any thanks." Ford, seeing no other way
+of escape, approached her steadily, the empty bucket swinging in his
+hand. "The fire's all out, so there's nothing more I can do here, I
+guess."
+
+"Oh, but you'll have to bring Josephine back!" Kate's eyes met his
+straightforward glance reluctantly, and not without reason; for Ford had
+dark, greenish purple areas in the region of his eyes, a skinned cheek,
+and a swollen lip; his chin was scratched and there was a bruise on his
+forehead where, on the night of his marriage, he had hit the floor
+violently under the impact of two or three struggling male humans.
+Although they were five days old--six, some of them--these divers
+battle-signs were perfectly visible, not to say conspicuous; so that
+Kate Mason was perhaps justified in her perfectly apparent diffidence in
+looking at him. So do we turn our eyes self-consciously away from a
+cripple, lest we give offense by gazing upon his misfortune.
+
+"_I_ can't carry her, and she can't walk--her ankle is sprained
+dreadfully. So if you'll bring her back to the house, I'll be ever so
+much--"
+
+"Certainly; I'll bring her back right away." Ford came down the stairs
+so swiftly that she retreated in haste before him, and once down he did
+not linger; indeed, he almost ran from the house and from her
+embarrassed gratitude. On the way to the bunk-house it occurred to him
+that it might be no easy matter, now, for Mason to conceal Ford's
+identity and his sins. From the way in which she had stared wincingly at
+his battered countenance, he realized that she did, indeed, have ideals.
+Ford grinned to himself, wondering if Ches didn't have to do his smoking
+altogether in the bunk-house; he judged her to be just the woman to wage
+a war on tobacco, and swearing, and muddy boots, and drinking out of
+one's saucer, and all other weaknesses peculiar to the male of our
+species. He was inclined to pity Ches, in spite of his mental
+acknowledgment that she was a very nice woman indeed; and he was half
+inclined to tell Mason when he saw him that he'd have to look further
+for a foreman.
+
+He found the girl lying upon a bunk just inside the door, still with
+closed eyes and that corpse-like look in her face. He was guilty of
+hoping that she would remain in that oblivious state for at least five
+minutes longer, but the hope was short-lived; for when he lifted her
+carefully in his arms, her eyes flew open and stared up at him intently.
+
+Ford shut his lips grimly and tried not to mind that unwinking gaze
+while he carried her out and up the path, across the little bridge and
+on to the house, and deposited her gently upon her own bed. He had not
+spoken a word, nor had she. So he left her thankfully to Kate's tearful
+ministrations and hurried from the room.
+
+"Lordy me!" he sighed, as he closed the door upon them and went back to
+the bunk-house, which he entered with a sigh of relief. One tribute he
+paid her, and one only: the tribute of feeling perturbed over her
+presence, and of going hot all over at the memory of her steady stare
+into his face. She was a queer girl, he told himself; but then, so far
+as he had discovered, all women were queer; the only difference being
+that some women were more so than others.
+
+He sat down on the bunk where she had lain, and speedily forgot the girl
+and the incident in facing the problem of that foremanship. He could not
+get away from the conviction that he was not to be trusted. He did not
+trust himself, and there was no reason why any man who knew him at all
+should trust him. Ches Mason was a good fellow; he meant well, Ford
+decided, but he simply did not realize what he was up against. He meant,
+therefore, to enlighten him further, and go his way. He was almost sorry
+that he had come.
+
+Mason, when Ford confronted him later at the corral and bluntly stated
+his view of the matter, heard him through without a word, and did not
+laugh the issue out of the way, as he had been inclined to do before.
+
+"I'll be all right for a month, maybe," Ford finished, "and that's as
+long as I can bank on myself. I tell you straight, Ches, it won't work.
+You may think you're hiring the same fellow that came out of the North
+with you--but you aren't. Why, damn it, there ain't a man I know that
+wouldn't give you the laugh if they knew the offer you've made me! They
+would, that's a fact. They'd laugh at you. You're all right, Ches, but I
+won't stand for a deal like that. I can't make good."
+
+Mason waited until he was through. Then he came closer and put both
+hands on Ford's shoulders, so that they stood face to face, and he
+looked straight into Ford's discolored eyes with his own shining a
+little behind their encircling wrinkles.
+
+"You can make good!" he said calmly. "I know it. All you need is a
+chance to pull up. Seeing you won't give yourself one, I'm giving it to
+you. You'll do for me what you won't do for yourself, Ford--and if
+there's a yellow streak in you, I never got a glimpse of it; and the
+yellow will sure come to the surface of a man when he's bucking a
+proposition like you and me bucked for two months. You didn't lay down
+on that job, and you were just a kid, you might say. Gosh, Ford, I'd
+bank on you any old time--put you on your mettle, and I would! You can
+make good here--and damn it, you will!"
+
+"I wish I was as sure of that as you seem to be," Ford muttered
+uneasily, and turned away. Mason's easy chuckle followed him, and Ford
+swung about and faced him again.
+
+"I haven't made any cast-iron promise--"
+
+"Did I ask you to make any?" Mason's voice sharpened.
+
+"But--Lordy me, Ches! How do you know I--"
+
+"I know. That's enough."
+
+"But--maybe I don't want the darned job. I never said--"
+
+Mason was studying him, as a man studies the moods of an untamed horse.
+"I didn't think you'd dodge," he drawled, and the blood surged
+answeringly to Ford's cheeks. "You do want it."
+
+"If I should happen to get jagged up in good shape, about the first
+thing I'd do would be to lick the stuffing out of you for being such a
+simple-minded cuss," Ford prophesied grimly, as one who knows well
+whereof he speaks.
+
+"Ye-es--but you won't get jagged."
+
+"Oh, Lord! I wish you'd quit believing in me! You used to have some
+sense," Ford grumbled. But he reached out and clenched his fingers upon
+Mason's arm so tight that Mason set his teeth, and he looked at him
+long, as if there was much that he would like to put into words and
+could not. "Say! You're white clear down to your toes, Ches," he said
+finally, and walked away hurriedly with his hat jerked low over his
+eyes.
+
+Mason looked after him as long as he was in sight, and afterwards took
+off his hat, and wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead. "Gosh!"
+he whispered fervently. "That was nip and tuck--but I got him, thank the
+Lord!" Whereupon he blew his nose violently, and went up to his supper
+with his hands in his pockets and his humorous lips pursed into a
+whistle.
+
+Before long he was back, chuckling to himself as he bore down upon Ford
+in the corral, where he was industriously rubbing Rambler's sprained
+shoulder with liniment.
+
+"The wife says you've got to come up to the house," he announced
+gleefully. "You've gone and done the heroic again, and she wants to do
+something to show her gratitude."
+
+"You go back and tell your wife that I'm a bold, bad man and I won't
+come." Ford, to prove his sincerity, sat down upon the stout manger
+there, and crossed his legs with an air of finality.
+
+"I did tell her," Mason confessed sheepishly. "She wanted to know who
+you was, and I told her before I thought. And she wanted to know what
+was the matter with your face, 'poor fellow,' and I told her that,
+too--as near as I knew it. I told her," he stated sweepingly, "that
+you'd been on a big jamboree and had licked fourteen men hand-running.
+There ain't," he confided with a twinkle, "any use at all in trying to
+keep a secret from your wife; not," he qualified, "from a wife like
+Kate! So she knows the whole darned thing, and she's sore as the deuce
+because I didn't bring you up to the house right away when you came. She
+thinks you're sufferin' from them wounds and she's going to doctor 'em.
+That's the way with a woman--you never can tell what angle she's going
+to look at a thing from. You're the man that packed me down out of the
+Wrangel mountains on your back, and that's enough for her--dang it, Kate
+thinks a lot of me! Besides, you done the heroic this afternoon. You've
+got to come."
+
+"There ain't anything heroic in sloshing a few buckets of water on a
+barrel of burning rags," Ford belittled, seeking in his pockets for his
+cigarette papers.
+
+"How about rescuing a lady?" Mason twitted. "You come along. I want you
+up there myself. Gosh! I want somebody I can talk to about something
+besides dresses and the proper way to cure sprained ankles, and whether
+the grocer sent out the right brand of canned peaches. Women are all
+right--but a man wants some one around to talk to. You ain't married!"
+
+"Oh. Ain't I?" Ford snorted. "And what if I ain't?"
+
+"Say, there's a mighty nice girl staying with us; the one you rescued.
+She's laid up now--got bucked off, or fell off, or something yesterday,
+and hurt her foot--but she's a peach, all right. You'll--"
+
+"I know the lady," Ford cut in dryly. "I met her yesterday, and we
+commenced hating each other as soon as we got in talking distance. She
+sent me to catch her horse, and then she pulled out before I got back.
+She's a peach, all right!"
+
+"Oh. You're the fellow!" Mason regarded him attentively. "Now, I don't
+believe she said a word to Kate about that, and she must have known who
+it was packed her out of the house. I wonder why she didn't say anything
+about it to Kate! But she wasn't to blame for leaving you out there,
+honest she wasn't. I went out to hunt her up--Kate got kinda worried
+about her--and she told me about you, and we did wait a little while.
+But it was getting cold, and she was hurt pretty bad and getting kinda
+wobbly, so I put her on my horse and brought her home. But she left a
+note for you, and I sent a man back after you with a horse. He come back
+and said he couldn't locate you. So we thought you'd gone to some other
+ranch." He stopped and looked quizzically at Ford. "So you're the man!
+And you're both here for the winter--at least, Kate says she's going to
+keep her all winter. Gosh! This is getting romantic!"
+
+"Don't you believe it!" Ford urged emphatically. "I don't want to bump
+into her again; a little of her company will last me a long while!"
+
+"Oh, you won't meet Jo to-night; Josephine, her name is. She's in bed,
+and will be for a week or so, most likely. You've just got to come,
+Ford. Kate'll be down here after you herself, if I go back without
+you--and she'll give me the dickens into the bargain. I want you to get
+acquainted with my kid--Buddy. He's down in the river field with the
+boys, but he'll be back directly. Greatest kid you ever saw, Ford! Only
+seven, and he can ride like a son-of-a-gun, and wears chaps and spurs,
+and can sling a loop pretty good, for a little kid! Come on!"
+
+"Wel-ll, all right--but Lordy me! I do hate to, Ches, and that's a fact.
+Women I'm plumb scared of. I never met one in my life that didn't hand
+me a package of trouble so big I couldn't see around it. Why--" He shut
+his teeth upon the impulse to confide to Mason his matrimonial
+mischance.
+
+"These two won't. My wife's the real goods, once you get to know her; a
+little fussy, maybe, over some things--most all women are. But she's all
+right, you bet. And Josephine's the proper stuff too. A little abrupt,
+maybe--"
+
+"Abrupt!" Ford echoed, and laughed over the word. "Yes, she is what you
+might call a little--abrupt!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Impressions
+
+
+Josephine waited languidly while Kate chose a second-best cushion from
+the couch and, lifting the bandaged foot as gently as might be, placed
+it, with many little pats and pulls, under the afflicted member.
+Josephine screwed her lips into a soundless expression of pain, smiled
+afterwards when Kate glanced at her commiseratingly, and pulled a long,
+dark-brown braid forward over her chest.
+
+"Do you want tea, Phenie?--or would you rather have chocolate to-day? I
+can make chocolate just as easy as not; I think I shall, anyway. Buddy
+is so fond of it and--"
+
+"Is that man here yet?" Josephine's tone carried the full weight of her
+dislike of him.
+
+"I don't know why you call him 'that man,' the way you do," Kate
+complained, turning her mind from the momentous decision between tea
+and chocolate. "Ford's simply fine! Chester thinks there's no one like
+him; and Buddy just tags him around everywhere. You can always,"
+asserted Kate, with the positiveness of the person who accepts
+unquestioningly the beliefs of others, living by faith rather than
+reason, "depend upon the likes and dislikes of children and dogs, you
+know."
+
+"Has the swelling gone out of his eyes?" Josephine inquired pointedly,
+with the irrelevance which seemed habitual to her and Kate when they
+conversed.
+
+"Phenie, I don't think it's kind of you to harp on that. Yes, it has, if
+you want to know. He's positively handsome--or will be when the--when
+his nose heals perfectly. And I don't think that's anything one should
+hold against Ford; it seems narrow, dear."
+
+"The skinned place?" Josephine's tone was perfectly innocent, and her
+fingers were busy with the wide, black bow which becomingly tied the end
+of the braid.
+
+"Phenie! If you hadn't a sprained ankle, and weren't such a dear in
+every other respect, I'd shake you! It isn't fair. Because Ford was
+pounced upon by a lot of men--sixteen, Chester told me--"
+
+"I suppose he counted the dead after the battle, and told Ches
+truthfully--"
+
+"Phenie, that sounds catty! When you get down on a man, you're perfectly
+unmerciful, and Ford doesn't deserve it. You shouldn't judge men by the
+narrow, Eastern standards. I know it's awful for a man to drink and
+fight. But Ford wasn't altogether to blame. They got him to drinking
+and," she went on with her voice lowered to the pitch at which women are
+wont to relate horrid, immoral things, "--I wouldn't be surprised if
+they put something in it! Such things are done; I've heard of men being
+drugged and robbed and all sorts of things. And I'm just as much of an
+advocate for temperance as you are, Phenie--and I think Ford was just
+right to fight those men. There are," she declared wisely,
+"circumstances where it's perfectly just and right for a man to fight. I
+can imagine circumstances under which Chester would be justified in
+fighting--"
+
+"In case sixteen men should hold his nose and pour drugged whisky down
+his throat?" Phenie inquired mildly, curling the end of her braid over a
+slim forefinger.
+
+Mrs. Kate made an inarticulate sound which might almost be termed a
+snort, and walked from the room with her head well up and a manner which
+silently made plain to the onlooker that she might say many things which
+would effectually crush her opponent, but was magnanimously refraining
+from doing so.
+
+Josephine did not even pay her the tribute of looking at her; she had at
+that moment heard a step upon the porch, and she was leaning to one side
+so that she might see who was coming into the dining-room. As it
+happened, it was Mason himself. Miss Josephine immediately lost interest
+in the arrival and took to tracing with her finger the outline of a
+Japanese lady with a startling coiffure and an immense bow upon her
+spine, who was simpering at a lotus bed on Josephine's kimono. She did
+not look up until some one stepped upon the porch again.
+
+This time it was Ford, and he stopped and painstakingly removed the last
+bit of soil from his boot-soles upon the iron scraper which was attached
+to one end of the top step; when that duty had been performed, he paid
+further tribute to the immaculate house he was about to enter, by wiping
+his feet upon a mat placed with mathematical precision upon the porch,
+at the head of the steps. Josephine watched the ceremonial, and studied
+Ford's profile, and did not lay her head back upon the cushion behind
+her until he disappeared into the dining-room. Then she stared at a
+colored-crayon portrait of Buddy which hung on the wall opposite, and
+her eyes were the eyes of one who sees into the past.
+
+Buddy, when he opened the door and projected himself into the room,
+startled her into a little exclamation.
+
+"Dad says he'll carry you out to the table and you can have a whole side
+to yourself," he announced without preface. "They'll just pick up your
+chair, and pack chair and all in, and set you down as ee-asy--do you
+want to eat out there with us?"
+
+Josephine hesitated for two seconds. "All right," she consented then, in
+a supremely indifferent tone which was of course quite wasted on Buddy,
+who immediately disappeared with a whoop.
+
+"Come on, dad--she says yes, all right, she'll come," he announced
+gleefully. Buddy was Josephine's devoted admirer, at this point in their
+rather brief acquaintance; which, according to his mother's well-known
+theory, was convincing proof of her intrinsic worth--Mrs. Kate having
+frequently strengthened her championship of Ford to his detractor, Miss
+Josephine, by pointing out that Buddy was fond of him.
+
+Josephine spent the brief interval in tucking back locks of hair and in
+rearranging the folds of her long, Japanese kimono, and managed to fall
+into a languidly indifferent attitude by the time Chester opened the
+door. Behind him came Ford; Miss Josephine moved her lips and tilted her
+head in a perfunctory greeting, and afterward gave him no more
+attention than if he had been a Pullman porter assisting with her
+suitcases. For the matter of that, she gave quite as much attention as
+she received from him--and Mason's lips twitched betrayingly at the
+spectacle.
+
+Through dinner they seemed mutually agreed upon ignoring each other as
+much as was politely possible, which caused Mason to watch them with
+amusement, and afterwards relieve his feelings by talking about them to
+Kate in the kitchen.
+
+"Gosh! Jo and Ford are sure putting up a good bluff," he chuckled, while
+he selected the freshest dish towel from the rack behind the pantry
+door. "They'd be sticking out their tongues at each other if they was
+twenty years younger; pity they ain't, too; it would be a relief to 'em
+both!"
+
+"Phenie provokes me almost past endurance!" Mrs. Kate complained,
+burying two plump forearms in a dishpan of sudsy hot water, and bringing
+up a handful of silver. "It's because Ford had been fighting when he
+came here, and she knows he has been slightly addicted to liquor. She
+looks down on him, and I don't think it's fair. If a man wants to
+reform, I believe in helping him instead of pushing him father down."
+(Mrs. Kate had certain little peculiarities of speech; one was an
+italicized delivery, and another was the omission of an r now and then.
+She always said "father" when she really meant "farther.") "There's a
+lot that one can do to help. I believe in showing trust and confidence
+in a man, when he's trying to live down past mistakes. I think it was
+just fine of you to make him foreman here! If Phenie would only be nice
+to him, instead of turning up her nose the way she does! You see
+yourself how she treats Ford, and I just think it's a shame! I think
+he's just splendid!"
+
+"She don't treat him any worse than he does her," observed Mason, just
+to the core. "Seems to me, if I was single, and a girl as pretty as
+Jo--"
+
+"Well, I'm glad Ford has got spunk enough not to care," Mrs. Kate
+interposed hastily. "Phenie's pretty, of course--but it takes more than
+that to attract a man like Ford. You can't expect him to like her when
+she won't look at him, hardly; it makes me feel terribly, because he's
+sure to think it's because he--I've tried to make her see that it isn't
+right to condemn a man because he has made one mistake. He ought to be
+encouraged, instead of being made to feel that he is a--an outcast,
+practically. And--"
+
+"Jo don't like Ford, because she's stuck on Dick," stated a shrill,
+positive young voice behind them, and Mrs. Kate turned sharply upon her
+offspring. "They was waving hands to each other just now, through the
+window. I seen 'em," Buddy finished complacently. "Dick was down fixing
+the bridge, and--"
+
+"Buddy, you run right out and play! You must not listen to older people
+and try to talk about some-thing you don't understand."
+
+"Aw, I understand them two being stuck on each other," Buddy maintained
+loftily. "And I seen Dick--"
+
+"Chase yourself outdoors, like your mother said; and don't butt in on--"
+
+"Chester!" reproved Mrs. Kate, waving Buddy out of the kitchen. "How
+can you expect the child to learn good English, when you talk to him
+like that? Run along, Buddy, and play like a good boy." She gave him a
+little cake to accelerate his departure and to turn his mind from
+further argument, and after he was gone she swung the discussion to
+Buddy and his growing tendency toward grappling with problems beyond his
+seven years. Also, she pointed out the necessity for choosing one's
+language carefully in his presence.
+
+Mason, therefore, finished wiping the dishes almost in silence, and left
+the house as soon as he was through, with the feeling that women were
+not by nature intended to be really companionable. He had, for instance,
+been struck with the humorous side of Ford and Josephine's perfectly
+ridiculous antipathy, and had lingered in the kitchen because of a
+half-conscious impulse to enjoy the joke with some one. And Mrs. Kate
+had not taken the view-point which appealed to him, but had been
+self-consciously virtuous in her determination to lend Ford a helping
+hand, and resentful because Josephine failed to feel also the urge of
+uplifting mankind.
+
+Mason, poor man, was vaguely nettled; he did not see that Ford needed
+any settlement-worker encouragement. If he was let alone, and his moral
+regeneration forgotten, and he himself treated just like any other man,
+Mason felt that Ford would thereby have all the encouragement he needed.
+Ford was once more plainly content with life, and was taking it in
+twenty-four-hour doses again; healthful doses, these, and different in
+every respect from those days spent in the sordid round of ill-living in
+town; nor did he flay his soul with doubts lest he should disappoint
+this man who trusted him so rashly and so implicitly. Ford was busy at
+work which appealed to the best of him. He was thrown into companionship
+with men who perforce lived cleanly and naturally, and with Ches Mason,
+who was his friend. At meals he sometimes gave thought to Mrs. Kate, and
+frequently to Josephine. The first he admired impersonally for her
+housewifely skill, and smiled at secretly for her purely feminine
+outlook upon life and her positive views upon subjects of which she knew
+not half the alphabet. He had discovered that Mason did indeed refrain
+from smoking in the house because she discountenanced tobacco; and since
+she had a talent for making a man uncomfortably aware of her disapproval
+by certain wordless manifestations of scorn for his weaknesses, Ford
+also took to throwing away his cigarette before he crossed the bridge on
+his way to her domain. He did not, however, go so far as Ches, who kept
+his tobacco, pipe, and cigarette papers in the stable, and was always
+borrowing "the makings" from his men.
+
+Ford also followed Mason's example in sterilizing his vocabulary
+whenever he crossed that boundary between the masculine and feminine
+element on the ranch, the bridge. Mrs. Kate did not approve of slang.
+Ford found himself carefully eliminating from his speech certain
+grammatical inaccuracies in her presence, and would not so much as split
+an infinitive if he remembered in time. It was trying, to be sure. Ford
+thanked God that he still retained a smattering of the rules he had
+reluctantly memorized in school, and that he was not married (at least,
+not uncomfortably so), and that he was not compelled to do more than eat
+his meals in the house. Mrs. Kate was a nice woman; Ford would tell any
+man so in perfect sincerity. He even considered her nice looking, with
+her smooth, brown hair which was never disordered, her fine, clear skin,
+her white teeth, her clear blue eyes, and her immaculate shirt-waists.
+But she was not a comfortable woman to be with; an ordinary human
+wearied of adjusting his speech, his manners, and his morals to her
+standard of propriety. Ford, quietly studying matrimony from the
+well-ordered example before him, began to congratulate himself upon not
+being able to locate his own wife--since accident had afflicted him with
+one. When he stopped, during these first busy days at the Double Cross,
+to think deeply or seriously upon the mysterious entanglement he had
+fallen into, he was inclined to the opinion that he had had a narrow
+escape. The woman might have remained in Sunset--and Ford flinched at
+the thought.
+
+As to Josephine, Ford's thoughts dwelt with her oftener than they did
+with Mrs. Kate. The thought of her roused a certain resentment which
+bordered closely upon dislike. Still, she piqued his interest; for a
+week she was invisible to him, yet her presence in the house created a
+tangible atmosphere which he felt but could not explain. His first sight
+of her--beyond a fleeting glimpse once or twice through the window--had
+been that day when he had helped Mason carry her and her big chair into
+the dining-room. The brief contact had left with him a vision of the
+delicate parting in her soft, brown hair, and of long, thick lashes
+which curled daintily up from the shadow they made on her cheeks. He did
+not remember ever having seen a woman with such eyelashes. They impelled
+him to glance at her oftener than he would otherwise have done, and to
+wonder, now and then, if they did not make her eyes seem darker than
+they really were. He thought it strange that he had not noticed her
+lashes that day when he carried her from the house and back again--until
+he remembered that at first his haste had been extreme, and that when
+he took her from the bunk-house she had stared at him so that he would
+not look at her.
+
+He did not know that Ches Mason was observant of his rather frequent
+glances at her during the meal, and he would have resented Mason's
+diagnosis of that particular symptom of interest. Ford would, if put to
+the question, have maintained quite sincerely that he was perfectly
+indifferent to Josephine, but that she did have remarkable eyelashes,
+and a man couldn't help looking at them.
+
+After all, Ford's interest was centered chiefly upon his work. They were
+going to start the wagons out again to gather the calves for weaning,
+and he was absorbed in the endless details which fall upon the shoulders
+of the foreman. Even the fascination of a woman's beauty did not follow
+him much beyond the bridge.
+
+Mason, hurrying from the feminine atmosphere at the house, found him
+seriously discussing with Buddy the diet and general care of Rambler,
+who had been moved into a roomy box stall for shelter. Buddy was to
+have the privilege of filling the manger with hay every morning after
+breakfast, and every evening just before supper. Upon Buddy also
+devolved the duty of keeping his drinking tub filled with clean water;
+and Buddy was making himself as tall as possible during the conference,
+and was crossing his heart solemnly while he promised, wide-eyed, to
+keep away from Rambler's heels.
+
+"I never knew him to kick, or offer to; but you stay out of the stall,
+anyway. You can fill his tub through that hole in the wall. And you let
+Walt rub him down good every day--you see that he does it, Bud! And when
+he gets well, I'll let you ride him, maybe. Anyway, I leave him in your
+care, old-timer. And it's a privilege I wouldn't give every man. I think
+a heap of this horse." He turned at the sound of footsteps, and lowered
+an eyelid slowly for Mason's benefit. "Bud's going to have charge of
+Rambler while we're gone," he explained seriously. "I want to be sure
+he's in good hands."
+
+The two men watched Buddy's departure for the house, and grinned over
+the manifest struggle between his haste to tell his mother and Jo, and
+his sense of importance over the trust.
+
+"A kid of your own makes up for a whole lot," Mason observed
+abstractedly, reaching up to the narrow shelf where he kept his tobacco.
+"I wish I had two or three more; they give a man something to work for,
+and look ahead and plan for."
+
+Ford, studying his face with narrowed eyelids, was more than ever
+thankful that he was not hampered by matrimony.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+In Which the Demon Opens an Eye and Yawns
+
+
+A storm held the Double Cross wagons in a sheltered place in the hills,
+ten miles from the little town where Ford had spent a night on his way
+to the ranch a month before. Mason, taking the inaction as an excuse,
+rode home to his family and left Ford to his own devices with no
+compunctions whatever. He should, perhaps, have known better; but he was
+acting upon his belief that nothing so braces a man as the absolute
+confidence of his friends, and to have stayed in camp on Ford's account
+would, according to Mason's code, have been an affront to Ford's
+manifest determination to "make good."
+
+It is true that neither had mentioned the matter since the day of Ford's
+arrival at the ranch; men do not, as a rule, harp upon the deeper issues
+within their lives. For that month, it had been as though the subject
+of intemperance concerned them as little as the political unrest of a
+hot-tempered people beyond the equator. They had argued the matter to a
+more or less satisfactory conclusion, and had let it rest there.
+
+Ford had ridden with him a part of the way, and when they came to a
+certain fork in the trail, he had sent a whimsically solemn message to
+Buddy, had pulled the collar of his coat closer together under his chin,
+and had faced the wind with a clean conscience, and with bowed head and
+hat pulled low over his brows. There were at least three perfectly valid
+reasons why Ford should ride into town that day. He wanted heavier socks
+and a new pair of gloves; he was almost out of tobacco, and wanted to
+see if he could "pick up" another man so that the hours of
+night-guarding might not fall so heavily upon the crew. Ford had been
+standing the last guard himself, for the last week, to relieve the
+burden a little, and Mason had been urgent on the subject of another
+man--or two, he suggested, would be better. Ford did his simple
+shopping, therefore, and then rode up to the first saloon on the one
+little street, and dismounted with a mind at ease. If idle men were to
+be found in that town, he would have to look for them in a saloon; a
+fact which every one took for granted, like the shortening of the days
+as winter approached.
+
+Perhaps he over-estimated his powers of endurance, or under-estimated
+the strength of his enemy. Certain it is that he had no intention of
+drinking whisky when he closed the door upon the chill wind; and yet, he
+involuntarily walked straight up to the bar. There he stuck. The
+bartender waited expectantly. When Ford, with a sudden lift of his head,
+turned away to the stove, the man looked after him curiously.
+
+At the stove Ford debated with himself while he drew off his gloves and
+held his fingers to the welcome heat which emanated from a red glow
+where the fire burned hottest within. He had not made any promise to
+himself or any one else, he remembered. He had simply resolved that he
+would make good, if it were humanly possible to do so. That, he told
+himself, did not necessarily mean that he should turn a teetotaler out
+and out. Taking a drink, when a man was cold and felt the need of it,
+was not--
+
+At that point in the argument two of his own men entered, stamping
+noisily upon the threshold. They were laughing, from pure animal
+satisfaction over the comforts within, rather than at any tangible cause
+for mirth, and they called to Ford with easy comradeship. Dick
+Thomas--the Dick whom Buddy had mentioned in connection with
+Josephine--waved his hand hospitably toward the bar.
+
+"Come on, Campbell," he invited. He may have seen the hesitancy in
+Ford's face, for he laughed. "I believe in starting on the inside and
+driving the frost out," he said.
+
+The two poured generously from the bottle which the bartender pushed
+within easy reach, and Ford watched them. There was a peculiar lift to
+Dick's upper lip--the lift which comes when scorn is the lever. Ford's
+eyes hardened a little; he walked over and stood beside Dick, and he
+took a drink as unemotionally as if it had been water. He ordered
+another round, threw a coin upon the bar, and walked out. He had rather
+liked Dick, in an impersonal sort of way, but that half-sneer clung
+disagreeably to his memory. A man likes to be held the master--be the
+slave circumstance, danger, an opposing human, or his own appetite; and
+although Ford was not the type of man who troubles himself much about
+the opinions of his fellows, it irked him much that Dick or any other
+man should sneer at him for a weakling.
+
+He went to another saloon, found and hired a cow-puncher strayed up from
+Valley County, and when Dick came in, a half-hour later, Ford went to
+the bar and deliberately "called up the house." He had been minded to
+choose a mineral water then, but he caught Dick's mocking eye upon him,
+and instead took whisky straight, and stared challengingly at the other
+over the glass tilted against his lips.
+
+After that, the liquor itself waged relentless war against his good
+resolutions, so that it did not need the urge of Dick's fancied
+derision to send him down the trail which the past had made familiar. He
+sat in to a poker game that was creating a small zone of subdued
+excitement at the far end of the room, and while he was arranging his
+stacks of red, white, and blue chips neatly before him, he was
+unpleasantly conscious of Dick's supercilious smile. Never mind--he was
+not the first foreman who ever played poker; they all did, when the mood
+seized them. Ford straightened his shoulders instinctively, in defiance
+of certain inner misgivings, and pushed forward his ante of two white
+chips.
+
+Jim Felton came up and stood at his shoulder, watching the game in
+silence; and although he did not once open his lips except to let an
+occasional thin ribbon of cigarette smoke drift out and away to mingle
+with the blue cloud which hung under the ceiling, Ford sensed a certain
+good-will in his nearness, just as intangibly and yet as surely as he
+sensed Dick's sardonic amusement at his apparent lapse.
+
+With every bet he made and won he felt that silent approbation behind
+him; insensibly it steadied Ford and sharpened his instinct for reading
+the faces of the other players, so that the miniature towers of red
+chips and blue grew higher until they threatened to topple--whereupon
+other little towers began to grow up around them. And the men in the
+saloon began to feel the fascination of his success, so that they
+grouped themselves about his chair and peered down over his shoulder at
+the game.
+
+Ford gave them no thought, except a vague satisfaction, now and then,
+that Jim Felton stuck to his post. Later, when he caught the dealer, a
+slit-eyed, sallow-skinned fellow with fingers all too nimble, slipping a
+card from the bottom of the deck, and gave him a resounding slap which
+sent him and his cards sprawling all over that locality, he should have
+been more than ever glad that Jim was present.
+
+Jim kept back the gambler's partner and the crowd and gave Ford
+elbow-room and some moral support, which did its part, in that it
+prevented any interference with the chastisement Ford was administering.
+
+It was not a fight, properly speaking. The gambler, once Ford had
+finished cuffing him and stating his opinion of cheating the while,
+backed away and muttered vague threats and maledictions. Ford gathered
+together what chips he felt certain were his, and cashed them in with a
+certain grim insistence of manner which brooked no argument. After that
+he left the saloon, with Jim close behind him.
+
+"If you're going back to camp now, I reckon I'll ride along," said Jim,
+at his elbow. "There's just nice time to get there for supper--and I
+sure don't want to miss flopping my lip over Mose's beefsteak; that
+yearling we beefed this morning is going to make some fine eating, if
+you ask me." His tone was absolutely devoid of anything approaching
+persuasion; it simply took a certain improbable thing as a commonplace
+fact, and it tilted the balance of Ford's intentions.
+
+He did not go on to the next saloon, as he had started to do, but
+instead he followed Jim to the livery stable and got his horse, without
+realizing that Jim had anything to do with the change of impulse. So
+Ford went to camp, instead of spending the night riotously in town as he
+would otherwise have done, and contented himself with cursing the game,
+the gambler who would have given a "crooked deal," the town, and all it
+contained. A mile out, he would have returned for a bottle of whisky;
+but Jim said he had enough for two, and put his horse into a lope. Ford,
+swayed by a blind instinct to stay with the man who seemed friendly,
+followed the pace he set and so was unconsciously led out of the way of
+further temptation. And so artfully was he led, that he never once
+suspected that he did not go of his own accord.
+
+Neither did he suspect that Jim's stumbling and immediate spasm of
+regretful profanity at the bed-wagon where they unsaddled, was the
+result of two miles of deep cogitation, and calculated to account
+plausibly for not being able to produce a full flask upon demand. Jim
+swore volubly and said he had "busted the bottle" by falling against the
+wagon wheel; and Ford, for a wonder, believed and did not ask for proof.
+He muddled around camp for a few indecisive minutes, then rolled
+himself up like a giant cocoon in his blankets, and slept heavily
+through the night.
+
+He awoke at daylight, found himself fully clothed and with a craving for
+whisky which he knew of old, and tried to remember just what had
+occurred the night before; when he could not recall anything very
+distinctly, he felt the first twinge of fear that he had known for
+years.
+
+"Lordy me! I wonder what kinda fool I made of myself, anyway!" he
+thought distressfully. Later, when he discovered more money in his
+pockets than his salary would account for, and remembered playing poker,
+and having an argument of some sort with some one, his distress grew
+upon him. In reality he had not done anything disgraceful, according to
+the easy judgment of his fellows; but Ford did not know that, and he
+flayed himself unmercifully for a spineless, drunken idiot whom no man
+could respect or trust. It seemed to him that the men eyed him askance;
+though they were merely envious over his winnings and inclined to admire
+the manner in which he had shown his disapproval of the dealer's
+attempt at cheating.
+
+He dreaded Mason's return, and yet he was anxious to see him and tell
+him, once for all, that he was not to be trusted. He held aloof from Jim
+and he was scantily civil to Dick Thomas, whose friendship rang false.
+He pushed the work ahead while the air was still alive with swirls of
+mote-like snowflakes, and himself bore the brunt of it just to dull that
+gnawing self-disgust which made his waking hours a mental torment.
+
+Before, when disgust had seized upon him in Sunset, it had been an
+abstract rebellion against the futility of life as he was living it.
+This was different: This was a definite, concrete sense of failure to
+keep faith with himself and with Mason; the sickening consciousness of a
+swinish return to the wallow; a distrust of himself that was beyond any
+emotion he had ever felt in his life.
+
+So, for a week of hard work and harder thinking. Mason sent word by a
+migratory cowboy, who had stopped all night at the ranch and whom he had
+hired and sent on to camp, that he would not return to the round-up,
+and that Ford was to go ahead as they had planned. That balked Ford's
+determination to turn the work over to Mason and leave the country, and,
+after the first day of inner rebellion, he settled down insensibly to
+the task before him and let his own peculiar moral problem wait upon his
+leisure. He did not dream that the cowboy had witnessed his chastisement
+of the gambler and had gleefully, and in perfect innocence, recounted
+the incident at the Double Cross ranch, and that Mason had deliberately
+thrown Ford upon his own resources in obedience to his theory that
+nothing so braces a man as responsibility.
+
+Ford went about his business with grim industry and a sureness of
+judgment born of his thorough knowledge of range work. There was the
+winnowing process which left the bigger, stronger calves in charge of
+two men, at a line camp known locally as Ten Mile, and took the younger
+ones on to the home ranch, where hay and shelter were more plentiful and
+the loss would be correspondingly less.
+
+Not until the last cow of the herd was safe inside the big corral
+beyond the stables, did Ford relax his vigilance and ride over to where
+Ches Mason and Buddy were standing in the shelter of the stable, waiting
+to greet him.
+
+"Good boy!" cried Mason, when Ford dismounted and flung the stirrup up
+over the saddle, that he might loosen the latigo and free his steaming
+horse of its burden. "I didn't look for you before to-morrow night, at
+the earliest. But I'm mighty glad you're here, let me tell you. That
+leaves me free to hit the trail to-morrow. I've got to make a trip home;
+the old man's down with inflammatory rheumatism, and they want me to
+go--haven't been home for six years, so I guess they've got a license to
+put in a bid for a month or two of my time, huh? I didn't want to pull
+out, though, till you showed up. I'm kinda leery about leaving the women
+alone, with just a couple of sow-egians on the ranch. Bud, you go get a
+pan of oats for old Schley. Supper's about ready, Ford. Have the boys
+shovel some hay into the corral, and we'll leave the bunch there till
+morning. Say, the wagons didn't beat you much; they never pulled in
+till after three. Mose says the going's bad, on them dobe patches."
+
+Not much of an opening, that, for saying what Ford felt he was in duty
+bound to say. He was constrained to wait until a better opportunity
+presented itself--and, as is the way with opportunity, it did not seem
+as if it would ever come of its own accord. There was Buddy, full of
+exciting anecdotes about Rambler, and how he had rubbed the liniment on,
+all alone, and Rambler never kicked or did a thing; and how he and
+Josephine rode clear over to Jenson's and got caught in the storm and
+almost got lost--only Buddy's horse knew the way home. And, later, there
+was Mrs. Kate's excellent supper and gracious welcome, and an evening
+devoted to four-handed cribbage--with Josephine and Mason as implacable
+adversaries--and a steady undercurrent of latent hostility between him
+and the girl, which prevented his thinking much about himself and his
+duty to Mason. There was everything, in fact, to thwart a man's
+resolution to discharge honorably a disagreeable duty, and to distract
+his attention.
+
+Ford went to bed with the baffled sense of being placed in a false
+position against his will; and, man-like, he speedily gave over thinking
+of that, and permitted his thoughts to dwell upon a certain face which
+owned a perfectly amazing pair of lashes, and upon a manner
+tantalizingly aloof, with glimpses now and then of fascinating
+possibilities in the way of comradeship, when the girl inadvertently
+lowered her guard in the excitement of close playing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+"It's Going to Be an Uphill Climb!"
+
+
+Ford was no moral weakling except, perhaps, when whisky and he came to
+hand-grips. He had made up his mind that Mason must be told of his
+backsliding, and protected from the risk of leaving a drunkard in charge
+of his ranch. And when he saw that the opportunity for opening the
+subject easily did not show any sign of presenting itself, he grimly
+interrupted Mason in the middle of a funny story about Josephine and
+Buddy and Kate, involving themselves in a three-cornered argument to the
+complete discomfiture of the women.
+
+"I tell you, Ford, that kid's a corker! Kate's got all kinds of book
+theories about raising children, but they don't none of 'em work, with
+Bud. He gets the best of her right along when she starts to reason with
+him. Gosh! You can't reason with a kid like Bud; you've got to take him
+on an equal footing, and when he goes too far, just set down on him and
+no argument about it. Kate's going to have her hands full while I'm
+gone, if--"
+
+"She sure will, Ches, unless you get somebody here you can depend on,"
+was the way in which Ford made his opportunity. "You've got the idea,
+somehow, that cutting out whisky is like getting rid of a mean horse.
+It's something you don't--"
+
+"Oh, don't go worrying over that, no more," Mason expostulated hastily.
+"Forget it. That's the quickest cure; try Christian Science dope on it.
+The more you worry about it, the more--"
+
+"But wait till I tell you! That day I went to town, and you came on
+home, I got drunk as a fool, Ches. I don't know what all I did, but I
+know--"
+
+"Well, I know--more about it than you do, I reckon," Mason cut in dryly.
+"I was told five different times, by one stranger and four of these here
+trouble-peddlin' friends that clutter the country. That's all right,
+Ford. A little slip like that--" He held out his hand for Ford's sack of
+tobacco.
+
+"I ain't the least bit uneasy over that, old man. I'm just as sure as I
+stand here that you're going to pull up, all right."
+
+"I know you are, Ches." Ford's voice was humble. "That's the hell of it.
+You're more sure than sensible--but--But look at it like I was a
+stranger, Ches. Just forget you ever knew me when I was kinda half-way
+decent. You ain't a fool, even if you do act like one. You know what I'm
+up against. I'm going to put up the damnedest fight I've got in me, but
+I don't want you to take any gamble on it. Maybe I'll win, and then
+again maybe I won't. Maybe I'll go down and out. I don't know--I don't
+feel half as sure of myself as I did before I made that bobble in town.
+Before that, I did kinda have an idea that all there was to it was to
+quit. I thought, once I made up my mind, that would settle it. But
+that's just the commencement; you've got to fight something inside of
+you that's as husky a fighter as you are. You've got to--"
+
+"There!" Mason reached out and tapped him impressively on the arm with a
+match he was about to light. "Now you've got the bull right by the
+horns! You ain't so darned sure of yourself now--and so I'm dead willing
+to gamble on you. I ain't a bit afraid to go off and let you have full
+swing."
+
+"Well, I hope you won't feel like kicking me all over the ranch when you
+get back," Ford said, after a long pause, during which Mason's whole
+attention seemed centered upon his cigarette. "It's going to be an
+uphill climb, old-timer--and a blamed long hill at that. And it's going
+to be pretty darned slippery, in places."
+
+"I sabe that, all right," grinned Mason. "But I sabe you pretty well,
+too. You'll dig in your toes and hang on by your eye-winkers if you have
+to. But you'll get up, all right; I'll bank on that.
+
+"Speaking of booze-fighters," he went on, without giving Ford a chance
+to contradict him, "I wish you'd keep an eye on old Mose. Now, there's a
+man that'll drink whisky as long as it's made, if he can get it. I
+wouldn't trust that old devil as far as I can throw him, and that's a
+fact. I have to watch pretty close, to keep it off the ranch, and him
+on. It's the only way to get along with him--he's apt to run amuck, if
+he gets full enough; and good cooks are as scarce as good foremen." A
+heartening smile went with the last sentence.
+
+"If he does make connections with the booze, don't can him, Ford, if you
+can help it. Just shut him up somewhere till he gets over it. There's
+nothing holds good men with an outfit like the right kind of grub--and
+Mose sure can cook. The rest of the men you can handle to suit yourself.
+Slim and Johnnie are all right over at Ten Mile--you made a good stab
+when you picked them two out--and you will want a couple of fellows here
+besides Walt, to feed them calves. When the cows are throwed back on the
+range and the fences gone over careful--I ought to have tended to that
+before, but I got to putting it off--you can pay off what men you don't
+need or want."
+
+There was no combating the friendship of a man like that. Ford mentally
+squared his shoulders and set his feet upon the uphill trail.
+
+He realized to the full the tribute Mason paid to his innate
+trustworthiness by leaving him there, master of the ranch and guardian
+of his household god--and goddess, to say nothing of Josephine, whom
+Mason openly admired and looked upon as one of the family.
+
+Of a truth, it would seem that she had really become so. Ford had
+gathered, bit by bit, the information that she was quite alone in the
+world, so far as immediate relatives were concerned, and that she was
+Kate's cousin, and that Kate insisted that this was to be her home, from
+now on. Josephine's ankle was well enough now so that she was often to
+be met in unexpected places about the ranch, he discovered. And though
+she was not friendly, she was less openly antagonistic than she had
+been--and when all was said and done, eminently able to take care of
+herself.
+
+So also was Kate, for that matter. No sooner was her beloved Chester out
+of sight over the hill a mile away, than Mrs. Kate dried her wifely
+tears and laid hold of her scepter with a firmness that amused Ford
+exceedingly. She ordered Dick up to work in the depressed-looking area
+before the house, which she called her flower garden, a task which Dick
+seemed perfectly willing to perform, by the way--although his assistance
+would have been more than welcome at other work than tying scraggly rose
+bushes and protecting them from the winter already at hand.
+
+As to Buddy, he surely would have resented, more keenly than the women,
+the implication that he needed any one to take care of him. Buddy's
+allegiance to Ford was wavering, at that time. Dick had gone to some
+trouble to alter an old pair of chaps so that Buddy could wear them, and
+his star was in the ascendant; a pair of chaps with fringes were, in
+Buddy's estimation, a surer pledge of friendship and favor than the
+privilege of feeding a lame horse.
+
+Buddy was rather terrible, sometimes. He had a way of standing back
+unnoticed, and of listening when he was believed to be engrossed in his
+play. Afterward he was apt to say the things which should not be said;
+in other words, he was the average child of seven, living without
+playmates, and so forced by his environment to interest himself in the
+endless drama played by the grown-ups around him. Buddy, therefore, was
+not unusually startling, one day at dinner, when he looked up from
+spatting his potato into a flat cake on his plate.
+
+"What hill you going to climb, Ford?" was his manner of exploding his
+bomb. "Bald pinnacle? I can climb that hill myself."
+
+"I don't know as I'm going to climb any hills at all," Ford said
+indulgently, accepting another helping of potato salad from Mrs. Kate.
+
+"You told dad before he went to gran'ma's house you was going to climb a
+big, long hill, and he was more sure than sensible." He giggled and
+showed where two front teeth were missing from among their fellows. "Dad
+told him he'd make it, but he'd have to dig in his toes and hang on by
+his eye-winkers," he added to the two women. "Gee! I'd like to see Ford
+hang onto a hill by his eye-winkers. Jo could do it--she's got winkers
+six feet long."
+
+Miss Josephine had been looking at Ford's face going red, as
+enlightenment came to him, but when she caught a quick glance leveled
+at her lashes, she drooped them immediately so that they almost touched
+her cheeks. Bud gave a squeal and pointed to her with his fork.
+
+"Jo's blushing! I guess she's ashamed because she's got such long
+winkers, and Ford keeps looking at 'em all the time. Why don't you shave
+'em off with dad's razor? Then Ford would like you, maybe. He don't now.
+He told dad--"
+
+"Robert Chester Mason, do you want me to get the hairbrush?" This, it
+need not be explained, from Mrs. Kate, in a voice that portended grave
+disaster.
+
+"I guess we can get along without it, mamma," Buddy answered her, with
+an ingratiating smile. Even in the first seven years of one's life, one
+learns the elementary principles of diplomacy. He did not retire from
+the conversation, but he prudently changed the subject to what he
+considered a more pleasant channel.
+
+"Dick likes you anyway, Jo," he informed her soothingly. "He likes you,
+winkers and all. I can tell, all right. When you go out for a ride he
+gives me nickels if I tell him where--"
+
+"Robert Ches--"
+
+"Oh, all right." Buddy's tone was wearily tolerant. "A man never knows
+what to talk about to women, anyway. I'd hate to be married to
+'em--wouldn't you, Ford?"
+
+"A little boy like you--" began his mother, somewhat pinker of cheeks
+than usual.
+
+"I guess I'm pretty near a man, now." He turned his eyes to Ford,
+consciously ignoring the feminine members of his family. "If I had a
+wife," he stated calmly, "I'd snub her up to a post and then I'd talk to
+her about anything I damn pleased!"
+
+Mrs. Kate rose up then in all the terrifying dignity of outraged
+motherhood, grasped Buddy by the wrist, and led him away, in the
+direction of the hairbrush, if one would judge by Buddy's reluctance to
+go.
+
+"So you are going to climb the--Big Hill, are you?" Miss Josephine
+observed, when the two were quite alone. "It is to be hoped, Mr.
+Campbell, that you won't find it as steep as it looks--from the bottom."
+
+Ford was not an adept at reading what lies underneath the speech of a
+woman. To himself he accented the last three words, so that they
+overshadowed all the rest and made her appear to remind him where he
+stood--at the bottom.
+
+"I suppose a hollow does look pretty high, to a man down a well," he
+retorted, glancing into his teacup because he felt and was resisting an
+impulse to look at her.
+
+"One can always keep climbing," she murmured, "and never give up--" Miss
+Josephine, also, was tilting her teacup and looking studiously into it
+as if she would read her fortune in the specks of tea leaves there.
+
+"Like the frog in the well--that climbed one jump and fell back two!" he
+interrupted, but she paid no attention, and went on.
+
+"And the reward for reaching the top--"
+
+"Is there supposed to be a reward?" Ford could not tell why he asked
+her that, nor why he glanced stealthily at her from under his eyebrows
+as he awaited her reply.
+
+"There--might--there usually is a reward for any great
+achievement--and--" Miss Josephine was plainly floundering where she had
+hoped to float airily upon the surface.
+
+"What's the reward for--climbing hills, for instance?" He looked at her
+full, now, and his lips were ready to smile.
+
+Miss Josephine looked uneasily at the door. "I--really, I
+never--investigated the matter at all." She gave a twitch of shoulders
+and met his eyes steadily. "The inner satisfaction of having climbed the
+hill, I suppose," she said, in the tone of one who has at last reached
+firm ground. "Will you have more tea, Mr. Campbell?"
+
+Her final words were chilly and impersonal, but Ford left the table,
+smiling to himself. At the door he met Dick, whom Buddy had mentioned
+with disaster to himself. Dick saw the smile, and within the room he saw
+Miss Josephine sitting alone, her chin resting in her two palms and her
+eyes fixed upon vacancy.
+
+"Hello," Ford greeted somewhat inattentively. "Do you want me for
+anything, Dick?"
+
+"Can't say I do," drawled Dick, brushing past Ford in the doorway.
+
+Ford hesitated long enough to give him a second glance--an attentive
+enough glance this time--and went his way; without the smile, however.
+
+"Lordy me!" he said to himself, when his foot touched the bridge, but he
+did not add anything to the exclamation. He was wondering when it was
+that he had begun to dislike Dick Thomas; a long while, it seemed to
+him, though he had never till just now quite realized it, beyond
+resenting his covert sneer that day in town. He had once or twice since
+suspected Dick of a certain disappointment that he himself was not
+foreman of the Double Cross, and once he had asked Mason why he hadn't
+given the place to Dick.
+
+"Didn't want to," Mason had replied succinctly, and let it go at that.
+
+If Dick cherished any animosity, however, he had not made it manifest
+in actual hostility. On the contrary, he had shown a distinct
+inclination to be friendly; a friendliness which led the two to pair off
+frequently when they were riding, and to talk over past range
+experiences more or less intimately. Looking back over the six weeks
+just behind him, Ford could not remember a single incident--a sentence,
+even--that had been unpleasant, unless he clung to his belief in Dick's
+contempt, and that he had since set down to his own super-sensitiveness.
+And yet--
+
+"He's got bad eyes," he concluded. "That's what it is; I never did like
+eyes the color of polished steel; nickel-plated eyes, I call 'em; all
+shine and no color. Still, a man ain't to blame for his eyes."
+
+Then Dick overtook him with Buddy trailing, red-eyed, at his heels, and
+Ford forgot, in the work to be done that day, all about his
+speculations. He involved himself in a fruitless argument with Buddy,
+upon the subject of what a seven-year-old can stand in the way of
+riding, and yielded finally before the quiver of Buddy's lips. They were
+only going over on Long Ridge, anyway, and the day was fine, and Buddy
+had frequently ridden as far, according to Dick. Indeed, it was Dick's
+easy-natured, "Ah, let the kid go, why don't you?" which gave Ford an
+excuse for reconsidering.
+
+And Buddy repaid him after his usual fashion. At the supper table he
+looked up, round-eyed, from his plate.
+
+"Gee, but I'm hungry!" he sighed. "I eat and eat, just like a horse
+eating hay, and I just can't fill up the hole in me."
+
+"There, never mind, honey," Mrs. Kate interposed hastily, fearing worse.
+"Do you want more bread and butter?"
+
+"Yes--you always use bread for stuffing, don't you? I want to be
+stuffed. All the way home my b--my stomerch was a-flopping against my
+backbone, just like Dick's. Only Dick said--"
+
+"Never mind what Dick said." Mrs. Kate thrust the bread toward him, half
+buttered.
+
+"Dick's mad, I guess. He's mad at Ford, too."
+
+Buddy regarded his mother gravely over the slice of bread.
+
+"First I've heard of it," Ford remarked lightly. "I think you must be
+mistaken, old-timer."
+
+But Buddy never considered himself mistaken about anything, and he did
+not like being told that he was, even when the pill was sweetened with
+the term "old-timer." He rolled his eyes at Ford resentfully.
+
+"Dick is mad! He got mad when you galloped over where Jo's red ribbon
+was hanging onto a bush. I saw him a-scowling when you rolled it up and
+put it in your shirt pocket. Dick wanted that ribbon for his bridle; and
+you better give it to him. Jo ain't your girl. She's Dick's girl. And
+you have to tie the ribbon of your bestest girl on your bridle. That's
+why," he added, with belated gallantry, "I tie my own mamma's ribbons on
+mine. And," he returned with terrible directness to the real issue,
+"Jo's Dick's girl, 'cause he said so. I heard him tell Jim Felton she's
+his steady, all right--and you are his girl, ain't you, Jo?"
+
+His mother had tried at first to stop him, had given up in despair, and
+was now sitting in a rather tragic calm, waiting for what might come of
+his speech.
+
+Josephine might have saved herself some anxious moments, if she had been
+so minded; perhaps she would have been minded, if she had not caught
+Ford's eyes fixed rather intently upon her, and sensed the expectancy in
+them. She bit her lip, and then she laughed.
+
+"A man shouldn't make an assertion of that sort," she said quizzically,
+in the direction of Buddy--though her meaning went straight across the
+table to another--"unless he has some reason for feeling very sure."
+
+Buddy tried to appear quite clear as to her meaning. "Well, if you are
+Dick's girl, then you better make Ford give that ribbon--"
+
+"I have plenty of ribbons, Buddy," Josephine interrupted, smiling at him
+still. "Don't you want one?"
+
+"I tie my own mamma's ribbons on my bridle," Buddy rebuffed. "My mamma
+is my girl--you ain't. You can give your ribbons to Dick."
+
+"Mamma won't be your girl if you don't stop talking so much at the
+table--and elsewhere," Mrs. Kate informed him sternly, with a glance of
+trepidation at the others. "A little boy mustn't talk about grown-ups,
+and what they do or say."
+
+"What can I talk about, then? The boys talk about their girls all the
+time--"
+
+"I wish to goodness I had let you go with your dad. I shall not let you
+eat with us, anyway, if you don't keep quiet. You're getting perfectly
+impossible." Which even Buddy understood as a protest which was not to
+be taken seriously.
+
+Ford stayed long enough to finish drinking his tea, and then he left the
+house with what he privately considered a perfectly casual manner. As a
+matter of fact, he was extremely self-conscious about it, so that Mrs.
+Kate felt justified in mentioning it, and in asking Josephine a question
+or two--when she had prudently made an errand elsewhere for Buddy.
+
+Josephine, having promptly disclaimed all knowledge or interest
+pertaining to the affair, Mrs. Kate spoke her mind plainly.
+
+"If Ford's going to fall in love with you, Phenie," she said, "I think
+you're foolish to encourage Dick. I believe Ford is falling in love with
+you. I never thought he even liked you till to-night, but what Buddy
+said about that ribbon--"
+
+"I don't suppose Bud knows what he's talking about--any more than you
+do," snapped Josephine. "If you're determined that I shall have a love
+affair on this ranch, I'm going home." She planted her chin in her two
+palms, just as she had done at dinner, and stared into vacancy.
+
+"Where?" asked Mrs. Kate pointedly, and then atoned for it
+whole-heartedly. "There, I didn't mean that--only--this is your home.
+It's got to be; I won't let it be anywhere else. And you needn't have
+any love affair, Phene--you know that. Only you shan't hurt Ford. I
+think he's perfectly splendid! What he did for Chester--I--I can't think
+of that without getting a lump in my throat, Phene. Think of it! Going
+without food himself, because there wasn't enough for two,
+and--and--well, he just simply threw away his own chance of getting
+through, to give Chester a better one. It was the bravest thing I ever
+heard of! And the way he has conquered--?"
+
+"How do you know he has conquered? Rumor says he hasn't. And lots of men
+save other men's lives; it's being done every day, and no one hears much
+about it. You think it was something extraordinary, just because it
+happened to be Chester that was saved. Anybody will do all he can for a
+sick partner, when they're away out in the wilds. I haven't a doubt Dick
+would have done the very same thing, when it comes to that." Josephine
+got up from the table then, and went haughtily into her own room.
+
+Mrs. Kate retired quite as haughtily into the kitchen, and there was a
+distinct coolness between them for the rest of the day, and a part of
+the next. The chill of it affected Ford sufficiently to keep him away
+from the house as much as possible, and unusually silent and unlike
+himself when he was with the men.
+
+But, unlike many another, he did not know that his recurrent
+dissatisfaction with life was directly traceable to the apparent
+intimacy between Josephine and Dick. Ford, if he had tried to put his
+gloomy unrest into words, would have transposed his trouble and would
+have mistaken effect for cause. In other words, he would have ignored
+Josephine and Dick entirely, and would have said that he wanted
+whisky--and wanted it as the damned are said to want water.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+At Hand-Grips with the Demon
+
+
+Mose was mad. He was flinging tinware about the kitchen with a fine
+disregard of the din or the dents, and whenever the blue cat ventured
+out from under the stove, he kicked at it viciously. He was mad at Ford;
+and when a man gets mad at his foreman--without knowing that the foreman
+has been instructed to bear with his faults and keep him on the pay-roll
+at any price--he must, if he be the cook, have recourse to kicking cats
+and banging dishes about, since he dare not kick the foreman. For in
+late November "jobs" are not at all plentiful in the range land, and
+even an angry cook must keep his job or face the world-old economic
+problem of food, clothing, and shelter.
+
+But if he dared not speak his mind plainly to Ford, he was not averse to
+pouring his woes into the first sympathetic ear that came his way. It
+happened that upon this occasion the ear arrived speedily upon the head
+of Dick Thomas.
+
+"Matter, Mose?" he queried, sidestepping the cat, which gave a long leap
+straight for the door, when it opened. "Cat been licking the butter
+again?"
+
+Mose grunted and slammed three pie tins into a cupboard with such force
+that two of them bounced out and rolled across the floor. One came
+within reach of his foot, and he kicked it into the wood-box, and swore
+at it while it was on the way. "And I wisht it was Ford Campbell
+himself, the snoopin', stingy, kitchen-grannying, booze-fightin',
+son-of-a-sour-dough bannock!" he finished prayerfully.
+
+"He surely hasn't tried to mix in here, and meddle with you?" Dick
+asked, helping himself to a piece of pie. You know the tone; it had just
+that inflection of surprised sympathy which makes you tell your troubles
+without that reservation which a more neutral listener would
+unconsciously impel.
+
+I am not going to give Mose's version, because he warped the story to
+make it fit his own indignation, and did not do Ford justice. This,
+then, is the exact truth:
+
+Ford chanced to be walking up along the edge of the gully which ran past
+the bunk-house, and into which empty cans and other garbage were thrown.
+Sometimes a can fell short, so that all the gully edge was liberally
+decorated with a gay assortment of canners' labels. Just as he had come
+up, Mose had opened the kitchen door and thrown out a cream can, which
+had fallen in front of Ford and trickled a white stream upon the frozen
+ground. Ford had stooped and picked up the can, had shaken it, and heard
+the slosh which told of waste. He had investigated further, and decided
+that throwing out a cream can before it was quite empty was not an
+accident with Mose, but might be termed a habit. He had taken Exhibit A
+to the kitchen, but had laughed while he spoke of it. And these were his
+exact words:
+
+"Lordy me, Mose! Somebody's liable to come here and get rich off us, if
+we don't look out. He'll gather up the cream cans you throw into the
+discard and start a dairy on the leavings." Then he had set the can
+down on the water bench beside the door and gone away.
+
+"I've been cookin' for cow-camps ever since I got my knee stiffened up
+so's't I couldn't ride--and that's sixteen year ago last Fourth--and
+it's the first time I ever had any darned foreman go snoopin' around my
+back door to see if I scrape out the cans clean!" Mose seated himself
+upon a corner of the table with the stiff leg for a brace and the good
+one swinging free, and folded his bare arms upon his heaving chest.
+
+"And that ain't all, Dick," he went on aggrievedly. "He went and cut
+down the order I give him for grub. That's something Ches never
+done--not with me, anyway. Asked me--asked me, what I wanted with so
+much choc'late. And I wanted boiled cider for m' mince-meat, and never
+got it. And brandy, too--only I didn't put that down on the list; I
+knowed better than to write it out. But I give Jim money--out uh my own
+pocket!--to git some with, and he never done it. Said Ford told him
+p'tic'ler not to bring out nothin' any nearer drinkable than lemon
+extract! I've got a darned good mind," he added somberly, "to fire the
+hull works into the gully. He don't belong on no cow ranch. Where he'd
+oughta be is runnin' the W.C.T.U. So darned afraid of a pint uh
+brandy--"
+
+"If I was dead sure your brains wouldn't get to leaking out your mouth,"
+Dick began guardedly, "I might put you wise to something." He took a
+drink of water, opened the door that he might throw out what remained in
+the dipper, and made sure that no one was near the bunk-house before he
+closed the door again. Mose watched him interestedly.
+
+"You know me, Dick--I never do tell all I know," he hinted heavily.
+
+"Well," Dick stood with his hand upon the door-knob and a sly grin upon
+his face, "I ain't saying a word about anything. Only--if you might
+happen to want some--eggs--for your mince pies, you might look good
+under the southeast corner of the third haystack, counting from the big
+corral. I believe there's a--nest--there."
+
+"The deuce!" Mose brightened understandingly and drummed with his
+fingers upon his bare, dough-caked forearm. "Do yuh know who--er--what
+hen laid 'em there?"
+
+"I do," said Dick with a rising inflection. "The head he-hen uh the
+flock. But if I was going to hunt eggs, I'd take down a chiny egg and
+leave it in the nest, Mose."
+
+"But I ain't got--" Mose caught Dick's pale glance resting with what
+might be considered some significance upon the vinegar jug, and he
+stopped short. "That wouldn't work," he commented vaguely.
+
+"Well, I've got to be going. Boss might can me if he caught me loafing
+around here, eating pie when I ought to be working. Ford's a fine
+fellow, don't you think?" He grinned and went out, and immediately
+returned, complaining that he never could stand socks with a hole in the
+toe, and he guessed he'd have to hunt through his war-bag for a good
+pair.
+
+Mose, as need scarcely be explained, went immediately to the stable to
+hunt eggs; and Dick, in the next room, smiled to himself when he heard
+the door slam behind him. Dick did not change his socks just then; he
+went first into the kitchen and busied himself there, and he continued
+to smile to himself. Later he went out and met Ford, who was riding
+moodily up from the river field.
+
+"Say, I'm going to be an interfering kind of a cuss, and put you next to
+something," he began, with just the right degree of hesitation in his
+manner. "It ain't any of my business, but--" He stopped and lighted a
+cigarette. "If you'll come up to the bunk-house, I'll show you something
+funny!"
+
+Ford dismounted in silence, led his horse into the stable, and without
+waiting to unsaddle, followed Dick.
+
+"We've got to hurry, before Mose gets back from hunting eggs," Dick
+remarked, by way of explaining the long strides he took. "And of course
+I'm taking it for granted, Ford, that you won't say anything. I kinda
+thought you ought to know, maybe--but I'd never say a word if I didn't
+feel pretty sure you'd keep it behind your teeth."
+
+"Well--I'm waiting to see what it is," Ford replied non-committally.
+
+Dick opened the kitchen door, and led Ford through that into the
+bunk-room. "You wait here--I'm afraid Mose might come back," he said,
+and went into the kitchen. When he returned he had a gallon jug in his
+hand. He was still smiling.
+
+"I went to mix me up some soda-water for heartburn," he said, "and when
+I picked up this jug, Mose took it out of my hand and said it was boiled
+cider, that he'd got for mince-meat. So when he went out, I took a
+taste. Here: You sample it yourself, Ford. If that's boiled cider, I
+wouldn't mind having a barrel!"
+
+Ford took the jug, pulled the cork, and sniffed at the opening. He did
+not say anything, but he looked up at Dick significantly.
+
+"Taste it once!" urged Dick innocently. "I'd just like to have you see
+the brand of slow poison a fool like Mose will pour down him."
+
+Ford hesitated, sniffed, started to set down the jug, then lifted it and
+took a swallow.
+
+"That isn't as bad as some I've seen," he pronounced evenly, shoving in
+the cork. "Nor as good," he added conservatively. "I wonder where he got
+it."
+
+"Search me--oh, by jiminy, here he comes! I'm going to take a scoot,
+Ford. Don't give me away, will you? And if I was you, I wouldn't say
+anything to Mose--I know that old devil pretty well. He'll keep mighty
+quiet about it himself--unless you jump him about it. Then he'll roar
+around to everybody he sees, and claim it was a plant."
+
+He slid stealthily through the outer door, and Ford saw him run down
+into the gully and disappear, while Mose was yet half-way from the
+stable.
+
+Ford sat on the edge of a bunk and looked at the jug beside him. If Dick
+had deliberately planned to tempt him, he had chosen the time well; and
+if he had not done it deliberately, there must have been a malignant
+spirit abroad that day.
+
+For twenty-four hours Ford had been more than usually restless and
+moody. Even Buddy had noticed that, and complained that Ford was cross
+and wouldn't talk to him; whereupon Mrs. Kate had scolded Josephine and
+accused her of being responsible for his gloom and silence. Since
+Josephine's conscience sustained the charge, she resented the accusation
+and proceeded deliberately to add to its justice; which did not make
+Ford any the happier, you may be sure. For when a man reaches that
+mental state which causes him to carry a girl's ribbon folded carefully
+into the most secret compartment of his pocketbook, and to avoid the
+girl herself and yet feel like committing assault and battery with
+intent to kill, because some other man occasionally rides with her for
+an hour or two, he is extremely sensitive to averted glances and chilly
+tones and monosyllabic conversation.
+
+Since the day before, when she had ridden as far as the stage road with
+Dick, when he went to the line-camp, Ford had been fighting the desire
+to saddle a horse and ride to town; and the thing that lured him
+townward confronted him now in that gray stone jug with the brown neck
+and handle.
+
+He lifted the jug, shook it tentatively, pulled out the cork with a jerk
+that was savage, and looked around the room for some place where he
+might empty the contents and have done with temptation; but there was no
+receptacle but the stove, so he started to the door with it, meaning to
+pour it on the ground. Mose just then shambled past the window, and Ford
+sat down to wait until the cook was safe in the kitchen. And all the
+while the cork was out of that jug, so that the fumes of the whisky rose
+maddeningly to his nostrils, and the little that he had swallowed
+whipped the thirst-devil to a fury of desire.
+
+In the kitchen, Mose rattled pans and hummed a raucous tune under his
+breath, and presently he started again for the stable. Dick, desultorily
+bracing a leaning post of one of the corrals, saw him coming and
+grinned. He glanced toward the bunk-house, where Ford still lingered,
+and the grin grew broader. After that he went all around the corral with
+his hammer and bucket of nails, tightening poles and braces and,
+incidentally, keeping an eye upon the bunk-house; and while he worked,
+he whistled and smiled by turns. Dick was in an unusually cheerful mood
+that day.
+
+Mose came shuffling up behind him and stood with his stiff leg thrust
+forward and his hands rolled up in his apron. Dick could see that he had
+something clasped tightly under the wrappings.
+
+"Say, that he-hen--she laid twice in the same place!" Mose announced
+confidentially. "Got 'em both--for m'mince pies!" He waggled his head,
+winked twice with his left eye, and went back to the bunk-house.
+
+Still Ford did not appear. Josephine came, however, in riding skirt and
+gray hat and gauntlets, treading lightly down the path that lay all in a
+yellow glow which was not so much sunlight as that mellow haze which we
+call Indian Summer. She looked in at the stable, and then came straight
+over to Dick. There was, when Josephine was her natural self, something
+very direct and honest about all her movements, as if she disdained all
+feminine subterfuges and took always the straight, open trail to her
+object.
+
+"Do you know where Mr. Campbell is, Dick?" she asked him, and added no
+explanation of her desire to know.
+
+"I do," said Dick, with the rising inflection which was his habit, when
+the words were used for a bait to catch another question.
+
+"Well, where is he, then?"
+
+Dick straightened up and smiled down upon her queerly. "Count ten before
+you ask me that again," he parried, "because maybe you'd rather not
+know."
+
+Josephine lifted her chin and gave him that straight, measuring stare
+which had so annoyed Ford the first time he had seen her. "I have
+counted," she said calmly after a pause. "Where is Mr. Campbell,
+please?"--and the "please" pushed Dick to the very edge of her favor, it
+was so coldly formal.
+
+"Well, if you're sure you counted straight, the last time I saw him he
+was in the bunk-house."
+
+"Well?" The tone of her demanded more.
+
+"He was in the bunk-house--sitting close up to a gallon jug of whisky."
+His eyelids flickered. "He's there yet--but I wouldn't swear to the
+gallon--"
+
+"Thank you very much." This time her tone pushed him over the edge and
+into the depths of her disapproval. "I was sure I could depend upon
+you--to tell!"
+
+"What else could I do, when you asked?"
+
+But she had her back to him, and was walking away up the path, and if
+she heard, she did not trouble to answer. But in spite of her manner,
+Dick smiled, and brought the hammer down against a post with such force
+that he splintered the handle.
+
+"Something's going to drop on this ranch, pretty quick," he prophesied,
+looking down at the useless tool in his hand. "And if I wanted to name
+it, I'd call it Ford." He glanced up the path to where Josephine was
+walking straight to the west door of the bunk-house, and laughed sourly.
+"Well, she needn't take my word for it if she don't want to, I guess,"
+he muttered. "Nothing like heading off a critter--or a woman--in time!"
+
+Josephine did not hesitate upon the doorstep. She opened the door and
+went in, and shut the door behind her before the echo of her step had
+died. Ford was lying as he had lain once before, upon a bunk, with his
+face hidden in his folded arms. He did not hear her--at any rate he did
+not know who it was, for he did not lift his head or stir.
+
+Josephine looked at the jug upon the floor beside him, bent and lifted
+it very gently from the floor; tilted it to the window so that she could
+look into it, tilted her nose at the odor, and very, very gently put it
+back where she had found it. Then she stood and looked down at Ford with
+her eyebrows pinched together.
+
+She did not move, after that, and she certainly did not speak, but her
+presence for all that became manifest to him. He lifted his head and
+stared at her over an elbow; and his eyes were heavy with trouble, and
+his mouth was set in lines of bitterness.
+
+"Did you want me for something?" he asked, when he saw that she was not
+going to speak first.
+
+She shook her head. "Is it--pretty steep?" she ventured after a moment,
+and glanced down at the jug.
+
+He looked puzzled at first, but when his own glance followed hers, he
+understood. He stared up at her somberly before he let his head drop
+back upon his arms, so that his face was once more hidden.
+
+"You've never been in bell, I suppose," he told her, and his voice was
+dull and tired. After a minute he looked up at her impatiently. "Is it
+fun to stand and watch a man--What do you want, anyway? It doesn't
+matter--to you."
+
+"Are you sure?" she retorted sharply. "And--suppose it doesn't. I have
+Kate to think of, at least."
+
+He gave a little laugh that came nearer being a snort. "Oh, if that's
+all, you needn't worry. I'm not quite that far gone, thank you!"
+
+"I was thinking of the ranch, and of her ideals, and her blind trust in
+you, and of the effect on the men," she explained impatiently.
+
+He was silent a moment. "I'm thinking of myself!" he told her grimly
+then.
+
+"And--don't you ever--think of me?" She set her teeth sharply together
+after the words were out, and watched him, breathing quickly.
+
+Ford sprang up from the bunk and faced her with stern questioning in
+his eyes, but she only flushed a little under his scrutiny. Her eyes, he
+noticed, were clear and steady, and they had in them something of that
+courage which fears but will not flinch.
+
+"I don't want to think of you!" he said, lowering his voice
+unconsciously. "For the last month I've tried mighty hard not to think
+of you. And if you want to know why--I'm married!"
+
+She leaned back against the door and stared up at him with widening
+pupils. Ford looked down and struck the jug with his toe. "That thing,"
+he said slowly, "I've got to fight alone. I don't know which is going to
+come out winner, me or the booze. I--don't--know." He lifted his head
+and looked at her. "What did you come in here for?" he asked bluntly.
+
+She caught her breath, but she would not dodge. Ford loved her for that.
+"Dick told me--and I was--I wanted to--well, help. I thought I
+might--sometimes when the climb is too steep, a hand will keep one
+from--slipping."
+
+"What made you want to help? You don't even like me." His tone was flat
+and unemotional, but she did not seem able to meet his eyes. So she
+looked down at the jug.
+
+"Dick said--but the jug is full practically. I don't understand how--"
+
+"It isn't as full as it ought to be; it lacks one swallow." He eyed it
+queerly. "I wish I knew how much it would lack by dark," he said.
+
+She threw out an impulsive hand. "Oh, but you must make up your mind!
+You mustn't temporize like that, or wonder--or--"
+
+"This," he interrupted rather flippantly, "is something little girls
+can't understand. They'd better not try. This isn't a woman's problem,
+to be solved by argument. It's a man's fight!"
+
+"But if you would just make up your mind, you could win."
+
+"Could I?" His tone was amusedly skeptical, but his eyes were still
+somber.
+
+"Even a woman," she said impatiently, "knows that is not the way to win
+a fight--to send for the enemy and give him all your weapons, and a plan
+of the fortifications, and the password; when you know there's no mercy
+to be hoped for!"
+
+He smiled at her simile, and at her earnestness also, perhaps; but that
+black gloom remained, looking out of his eyes.
+
+"What made you send for it? A whole gallon!"
+
+"I didn't send for it. That jug belongs to Mose," he told her simply.
+"Dick told me Mose had it; rather, Dick went into the kitchen and got
+it, and turned it over to me." In spite of the words, he did not give
+one the impression that he was defending himself; he was merely offering
+an explanation because she seemed to demand one.
+
+"Dick got it and turned it over to you!" Her forehead wrinkled again
+into vertical lines. She studied him frowningly. "Will you give it to
+me?" she asked directly.
+
+Ford folded his arms and scowled down at the jug. "No," he refused at
+last, "I won't. If booze is going to be the boss of me I want to know
+it. And I can't know it too quick."
+
+"But--you're only human, Ford!"
+
+"Sure. But I'm kinda hoping I'm a man, too." His eyes lightened a
+little while they rested upon her.
+
+"But you've got the poison of it--it's like a traitor in your fort,
+ready to open the door. You can't do it! I--oh, you'll never understand
+why, but I can't let you risk it. You've got to let me help; give it to
+me, Ford!"
+
+"No, You go on to the house, and don't bother about me. You can't
+help--nobody can. It's up to me."
+
+She struck her hands together in a nervous rage. "You want to keep it
+because you want to drink it! If you didn't want it, you'd hate to be
+near it. You'd want some one to take it away. You just want to get
+drunk, and be a beast. You--you--oh--you don't know what you're doing,
+or how much it means! You don't know!" Her hands went up suddenly and
+covered her face.
+
+Ford walked the length of the room away from her, turned and came back
+until he faced her where she stood leaning against the door, with her
+face still hidden behind her palms. He reached out his arms to her,
+hesitated, and drew them back.
+
+"I wish you'd go," he said. "There are some things harder to fight than
+whisky. You only make it worse."
+
+"I'll go when you give me that." She flung a hand out toward the jug.
+
+"You'll go anyway!" He took her by the arm, quietly pulled her away from
+the door, opened it, and then closed it while, for just a breath or two,
+he held her tightly clasped in his arms. Very gently, after that, he
+pushed her out upon the doorstep and shut the door behind her. The lock
+clicked a hint which she could not fail to hear and understand. He
+waited until he heard her walk away, sat down with the air of a man who
+is very, very weary, rested his elbows upon his knees, and with his
+hands clasped loosely together, he glowered at the jug on the floor.
+Then the soul of Ford Campbell went deep down into the pit where all the
+devils dwell.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+A Plan Gone Wrong
+
+
+It was Mose crashing headlong into the old messbox where he kept rattly
+basins, empty lard pails, and such, that roused Ford. He got up and went
+into the kitchen, and when he saw what was, the matter, extricated Mose
+by the simple method of grabbing his shoulders and pulling hard; then he
+set the cook upon his feet, and got full in his face the unmistakable
+fumes of whisky.
+
+"What? You got another jug?" he asked, with some disgust, steadying Mose
+against the wall.
+
+"Ah--I ain't got any jug uh nothin'," Mose protested, rather thickly.
+"And I never took them bottles outa the stack; that musta been Dick done
+that. Get after him about it; he's the one told me where yuh hid
+'em--but I never touched 'em, honest I never. If they're gone, you get
+after Dick. Don't yuh go 'n' lay it on me, now!" He was whimpering with
+maudlin pathos before he finished. Ford scowled at him thoughtfully.
+
+"Dick told you about the bottles in the haystack, did he?" he asked.
+"Which stack was it? And how many bottles?"
+
+Mose gave him a bleary stare. "Aw, you know. You hid 'em there yourself!
+Dick said so. I ain't goin' to say which stack, or how many
+bottles--or--any other--darn thing about it." He punctuated his phrases
+by prodding a finger against Ford's chest, and he wagged his head with
+all the self-consciousness of spurious virtue. "Promised Dick I
+wouldn't, and I won't. Not a--darn--word about it. Wanted some--for m'
+mince-meat, but I never took any outa the haystack." Whereupon he began
+to show a pronounced limpness in his good leg, and a tendency to slide
+down upon the floor.
+
+Ford piloted him to a chair, eased him into it, and stood over him in
+frowning meditation. Mose was drunk; absolutely, undeniably drunk. It
+could not have been the jug, for the jug was full. Till then the oddity
+of a full jug of whisky in Mose's kitchen after at least twenty-four
+hours must have elapsed since its arrival, had not occurred to him. He
+had been too preoccupied with his own fight to think much about Mose.
+
+"Shay, I never took them bottles outa the stack," Mose looked up to
+protest solemnly. "Dick never told me about 'em, neither. Dick tol'
+me--" tapping Ford's arm with his finger for every word, "--'at there
+was aigs down there, for m' mince-meat." He stopped suddenly and goggled
+up at Ford. "Shay, yuh don't put aigs in--mince-meat," he informed him
+earnestly. "Not a darn aig! That's what Dick tol' me--aigs for m'
+mince-meat. Oh, I knowed right off what he meant, all right," he
+explained proudly. "He didn't wanta come right out 'n' shay what it
+was--an' I--got--the--aigs!"
+
+"Yes--how many--eggs?" Ford held himself rigidly quiet.
+
+"Two quart--aigs!" Mose laughed at the joke. "I wisht," he added
+pensively, "the hens'd all lay them kinda aigs. I'd buy up all the
+shickens in--the whole worl'." He gazed raptly upon the vision the words
+conjured. "Gee! Quart aigs--'n' all the shickens in the worl' layin'
+reg'lar!"
+
+"Have you got any left?"
+
+"No--honest. Used 'em all up--for m' mince-meat!"
+
+Ford knew he was lying. His eyes searched the untidy tables and the
+corners filled with bags and boxes. Mose was a good cook, but his ideas
+of order were vague, and his system of housekeeping was the simple one
+of leaving everything where he had last been using it, so that it might
+be handy when he wanted it again. A dozen bottles might be concealed
+there, like the faces in a picture-puzzle, and it would take a
+housecleaning to disclose them all. But Ford, when he knew that no
+bottle had been left in sight, began turning over the bags and looking
+behind the boxes.
+
+He must have been "growing warm" when he stood wondering whether it was
+worth while to look into the flour-bin, for Mose gave an inarticulate
+snarl and pounced on him from behind. The weight of him sent Ford down
+on all fours and kept him there for a space, and even after he was up he
+found himself quite busy. Mose was a husky individual, with no infirmity
+of the arms and fists, even if he did have a stiff leg, and drunkenness
+frequently flares and fades in a man like a candle guttering in the
+wind. Besides, Mose was fighting to save his whisky.
+
+Still, Ford had not sent all of Sunset into its cellars, figuratively
+speaking, for nothing; and while a man may feel more enthusiasm for
+fighting when under the influence of the stuff that cheers sometimes and
+never fails to inebriate, the added incentive does not necessarily mean
+also added muscular development or more weight behind the punch. Ford,
+fighting as he had always fought, be he drunk or sober, came speedily to
+the point where he could inspect a skinned knuckle and afterwards gaze
+in peace upon his antagonist.
+
+He was occupied with both diversions when the door was pushed open as by
+a man in great haste. He looked up from the knuckle into the expectant
+eyes of Jim Felton, and over the shoulder of Jim he saw a gloating
+certainty writ large upon the face of Dick Thomas. They had been
+running; he could tell that by their uneven breathing, and it occurred
+to him that they must have heard the clamor when he pitched Mose head
+first into the dish cupboard. There had been considerable noise about
+that time, he remembered; they must also have heard the howl Mose gave
+at the instant of contact. Ford glanced involuntarily at that side of
+the room where stood the cupboard, and mentally admitted that it looked
+like there had been a slight disagreement, or else a severe seismic
+disturbance; and Montana is not what one calls an earthquake country.
+His eyes left the generous sprinkle of broken dishes on the floor, with
+Mose sprawled inertly in their midst, looking not unlike a broken
+platter himself--or one badly nicked--and rested again upon the grinning
+face behind the shoulder of Jim Felton.
+
+Ford was ever a man of not many words, even when he had a grievance. He
+made straight for Dick, and when he had pushed Jim out of the way, he
+reached him violently. Dick tottered upon the step and went off
+backward, and Ford landed upon him fairly and with full knowledge and
+intent.
+
+[Illustration: Dick tottered upon the step and went off backward.]
+
+Jim Felton was a wise young man. He stood back and let them fight it
+out, and when it was over he said never a word until Dick had picked
+himself up and walked off, holding to his nose a handkerchief that
+reddened rapidly.
+
+"Say, you are a son-of-a-gun to fight," he observed admiringly then to
+Ford. "Don't you know Dick's supposed to be abso-lute-ly unlickable?"
+
+"May be so--but he sure shows all the symptoms of being licked right at
+present." Ford moved a thumb joint gently to see whether it was really
+dislocated or merely felt that way.
+
+"He's going up to the house now, to tell the missus," remarked Jim,
+craning his neck from the doorway.
+
+"If he does that," Ford replied calmly, "I'll half kill him next time.
+What I gave him just now is only a sample package left on the doorstep
+to try." He sat down upon a corner of the table and began to make
+himself a smoke. "Is he going up to the house--honest?" He would not
+yield to the impulse to look and see for himself.
+
+"We-el, the trail he's taking has no other logical destination," drawled
+Jim. "He's across the bridge." When Ford showed no disposition to say
+anything to that, Jim came in and closed the door. "Say, what laid old
+Mose out so nice?" he asked, with an indolent sort of curiosity. "Booze?
+Or just bumps?"
+
+"A little of both," said Ford indifferently, between puffs. He was
+thinking of the tale Dick would tell at the house, and he was thinking
+of the probable effect upon one listener; the other didn't worry him,
+though he liked Mrs. Kate very much.
+
+Jim went over and investigated; discovering that Mose was close to
+snoring, he sat upon a corner of the other table, swung a spurred boot,
+and regarded Ford interestedly over his own cigarette building. "Say,
+for a man that's supposed to be soused," he began, after a silence, "you
+act and talk remarkably lucid. I wish I could carry booze like that," he
+added regretfully. "But I can't; my tongue and my legs always betray
+the guilty secret. Have you got any particular system, or is it just a
+gift?"
+
+"No"--Ford shook his head--"nothing like that. I just don't happen to be
+drunk." He eyed Jim sharply while he considered within himself. "It
+looks to me," he began, after a moment, "as if our friend Dick had
+framed up a nice little plant. One way and another I got wise to the
+whole thing; but for the life of me, I can't see what made him do it.
+Lordy me! I never kicked him on any bunion!" He grinned, as memory
+flashed a brief, mental picture of Sunset and certain incidents which
+occurred there. But memory never lets well enough alone, and one is
+lucky to escape without seeing a picture that leaves a sting; Ford's
+smile ended in a scowl.
+
+"Jealousy, old man," Jim pronounced without hesitation. "Of course, I
+don't know the details, but--details be darned. If he has tried to hand
+you a package, take it from me, jealousy's the string he tied it with. I
+don't mind saying that Dick told me when I first rode up to the corral
+that you and Mose were both boozing up to beat the band; and right after
+that we heard a deuce of a racket up here, and it did look--" He waved
+an apologetic hand at Mose and the fragments of pottery which framed
+like a "still life" picture on the floor, and let it go at that. "I'm
+strong for you, Ford," he added, and his smile was frank and friendly.
+"Double Cross is the name of this outfit, but I'm all in favor of
+running that brand on the cow-critters and keeping it out of the
+bunk-house. If you should happen to feel like elucidating--" he hinted
+delicately.
+
+Ford had always liked Jim Felton; now he warmed to him as a real friend,
+and certain things he told him. As much about the jug with the brown
+neck and handle as concerned Dick, and all he knew of the bottles in the
+haystack, while Jim smoked, and swung the foot which did not rest upon
+the floor, and listened.
+
+"Sounds like Dick, all right," he passed judgment, when Ford had
+finished. "He counted on your falling for the jug--and oh, my! It was a
+beautiful plant. I'd sure hate to have anybody sing 'Yield not to
+temptation' at me, if a gallon jug of the real stuff fell into my arms
+and nobody was looking." He eyed Ford queerly. "You've got quite a
+reputation--" he ventured.
+
+"Well, I earned it," Ford observed laconically.
+
+"Dick banked on it--I'd stake my whole stack of blues on that. And after
+you'd torn up the ranch, and pitched the fragments into the gulch, he'd
+hold the last trump, with all high cards to keep the lead. Whee!" He
+meditated admiringly upon the strategy. "But what I can't seem to
+understand," he said frankly, "is why the deuce it didn't work! Is your
+swallower out of kilter? If you don't mind my asking!"
+
+"I never noticed that it was paralyzed," Ford answered grimly. He got
+up, lifted a lid of the stove, and threw in the cigarette stub
+mechanically. Then he bethought him of his interrupted search, and
+prodded a long-handled spoon into the flour bin, struck something smooth
+and hard, and drew out a befloured, quart bottle half full of whisky.
+He wiped the bottle carefully, inspected it briefly, and pitched it into
+the gully, where it smashed odorously upon a rock. Jim, watching him,
+knew that he was thinking all the while of something else. When Ford
+spoke, he proved it.
+
+"Are you any good at all in the kitchen, Jim?" he asked, turning to him
+as if he had decided just how he would meet the situation.
+
+"Well, I hate to brag, but I've known of men eating my grub and going
+right on living as if nothing had happened," Jim admitted modestly.
+
+"Well, you turn yourself loose in here, will you? The boys will be good
+and empty when they come--it's dinner time right now. I'll help you
+carry Mose out of the way before I go."
+
+Jim looked as if he would like to ask what Ford meant to do, but he
+refrained. There was something besides preoccupation in Ford's face, and
+it did not make for easy questioning. Jim did yield to his curiosity to
+the extent of watching through a window, when Ford went out, to see
+where he was going; and when he saw Ford had the jug, and that he took
+the path which led across the little bridge and so to the house, he drew
+back and said "Whee-e-e!" under his breath. Then he remarked to the
+recumbent Mose, who was not in a condition either to hear or understand:
+"I'll bet you Dick's got all he wants, right now, without any
+postscript." After which Jim hunted up a clean apron and proceeded, with
+his spurs on his heels, his hat on the back of his head, and a smile
+upon his lips, to sweep out the broken dishes so that he might walk
+without hearing them crunch unpleasantly under his boots. "I'll take
+wildcats in mine, please," he remarked once irrelevantly aloud, and
+smiled again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+The Feminine Point of View
+
+
+When Ford stepped upon the porch with the jug in his hand, he gave every
+indication of having definitely made up his mind. When he glimpsed
+Josephine's worried face behind the lace curtain in the window, he
+dropped the jug lower and held it against his leg in such a way as to
+indicate that he hoped she could not see it, but otherwise he gave no
+sign of perturbation. He walked along the porch to the door of his own
+room, went in, locked the door after him, and put the jug down on a
+chair. He could hear faint sounds of dishes being placed upon the table
+in the dining-room, which was next to his own, and he knew that dinner
+was half an hour late; which was unusual in Mrs. Kate's orderly domain.
+Mrs. Kate was one of those excellent women whose house is always
+immaculate, whose meals are ever placed before one when the clock
+points to a certain hour, and whose table never lacks a salad and a
+dessert--though how those feats are accomplished upon a cattle ranch
+must ever remain a mystery. Ford was therefore justified in taking the
+second look at his watch and in holding it up to his ear, and also in
+lifting his eyebrows when all was done. Fifteen minutes by the watch it
+was before he heard the silvery tinkle of the tea bell, which was one of
+the ties which bound Mrs. Kate to civilization, and which announced that
+he might enter the dining-room.
+
+He went in as clean and fresh and straight-backed and quiet as ever he
+had done, and when he saw that the room was empty save for Buddy,
+perched upon his long-legged chair with his heels hooked over the top
+round and a napkin tucked expectantly inside the collar of his blue
+blouse, he took in the situation and sat down without waiting for the
+women. The very first glance told him that Mrs. Kate had never prepared
+that meal. It was, putting it bluntly, a scrappy affair hastily gathered
+from various shelves in the pantry and hurriedly arranged haphazard
+upon the table.
+
+Buddy gazed upon the sprinkle of dishes with undisguised
+dissatisfaction. "There ain't any potatoes," he announced gloomily. "My
+own mamma always cooks potatoes. Josephine's the limit! I been working
+to-day. I almost dug out a badger, over by the bluff. I got where I
+could hear him scratching to get away, and then it was all rocks, so I
+couldn't dig any more. Gee, it was hard digging! And I'm just about
+starved, if you want to know. And there ain't any potatoes."
+
+"Bread and butter is fine when you're hungry," Ford suggested, and
+spread a slice for Buddy, somewhat inattentively, because he was also
+keeping an eye upon the kitchen door, where he had caught a fleeting
+glimpse of Josephine looking in at him.
+
+"You're putting the butter all in one place," Buddy criticised, with his
+usual frankness. "I guess you're drunk, all right. If you're too drunk
+to spread butter, let me do it."
+
+"What makes you think I'm drunk?" Ford questioned, lowering his voice
+because of the person he suspected was in the kitchen.
+
+"Mamma and Jo was quarreling about it; that's why. And my own mamma
+cried, and shut the door, and wouldn't let me go in. And Jo pretty near
+cried too, all right. I guess she did, only not when any one was
+looking. Her eyes are awful red, anyway." Buddy took great, ravenous
+bites of the bread and butter and eyed Ford unwinkingly.
+
+"What's disslepointed?" he demanded abruptly, after he had given himself
+a white mustache with his glass of milk.
+
+"Why do you want to know?"
+
+"That's what my own mamma is, and that's what Jo is. Only my own mamma
+is it about you, and Jo's it about mamma. Say, did you lick Dick? Jo
+told my own mamma she wisht you'd killed him. Jo's awful mad to-day. I
+guess she's mad at Dick, because he ain't very much of a fighter. Did
+you lick him easy? Did you paste him one in the jaw?"
+
+Josephine entered then with Ford's belated tea. Her eyelids were pink,
+as Buddy had told him, and she did not look at him while she filled his
+cup.
+
+"Kate has a sick headache," she explained primly, "and I did the best I
+could with lunch. I hope it's--"
+
+"It is," Ford interrupted reassuringly. "Everything is fine and dandy."
+
+"You didn't cook any potatoes!" Buddy charged mercilessly. "And Ford's
+too drunk to put the butter on right. I'm going to tell my dad that next
+time he goes to Oregon I'm going along. This outfit will sure go to the
+devil if he stays much longer!"
+
+"Where did you hear that, Bud?" Josephine asked, still carefully
+avoiding a glance at Ford.
+
+"Well, Dick said it would go to the devil. I guess," he added on his own
+account, with an eloquent look at the table, "it's on the trail right
+now."
+
+Ford looked at Josephine, opened his lips to say that it might still be
+headed off, and decided not to speak. There was a stubborn streak in
+Ford Campbell. She had said some bitter things, in her anger. Perhaps
+she had not entirely believed them herself, and perhaps Mrs. Kate had
+not been accurately quoted by her precocious young son; she may not have
+said that she was disappointed in Ford. They might not have believed
+whatever it was Dick told them, and they might still have full
+confidence in him, Ford Campbell. Still, there was the stubborn streak
+which would not explain or defend. So he left the table, and went into
+his own room without any word save a muttered excuse; and that in spite
+of the fact that Josephine looked full at him, at last, and with a
+wistfulness that moved him almost to the point of taking her in his arms
+and kissing away the worry--if he could.
+
+He went up to the table where stood the jug, looked at it, lifted it,
+and set it down again. Then he lifted it again and pulled the cork out
+with a jerk, wondering if the sound of it had reached through the thin
+partition to the ears of Josephine; he was guilty of hoping so. He put
+back the cork--this time carefully--walked to the outer door, turned the
+key, opened the door, and closed it again with a slam. Then, with a
+grim set of the lips, he walked softly into the closet and pulled the
+door nearly shut.
+
+He knew there was a chance that Josephine, if she were interested in his
+movements, would go immediately into the sitting-room, where she could
+see the path, and would know that he had not really left the house. But
+she did not, evidently. She sat long enough in the dining-room for Ford
+to call himself a name or two and to feel exceedingly foolish over the
+trick, and to decide that it was a very childish one for a grown man to
+play upon a woman. Then she pushed back her chair, came straight toward
+his room, opened the door, and looked in; Ford knew, for he saw her
+through the crack he had left in the closet doorway. She stood there
+looking at the jug on the table, then went up and lifted it, much as
+Ford had done, and pulled the cork with a certain angry defiance.
+Perhaps, he guessed shrewdly, Josephine also felt rather foolish at what
+she was doing--and he smiled over the thought.
+
+Josephine turned the jug to the light, shut one eye into an adorable
+squint, and peered in. Then she set the jug down and pushed the cork
+slowly into place; and her face was puzzled. Ford could have laughed
+aloud when he saw it, but instead he held his breath for fear she should
+discover him. She stood very still for a minute or two, staring at
+nothing at all; moved the jug into the exact place where it had stood
+before, and went out of the room on her toes.
+
+So did Ford, for that matter, and he was in a cold terror lest she
+should look out and see him walking down the path where he should
+logically have walked more than five minutes before. He did not dare to
+turn and look--until he was outside the gate; then inspiration came to
+aid him and he went back boldly, stepped upon the porch with no effort
+at silence, opened his door, and went in as one who has a right there.
+
+He heard the click of dishes which told that she was clearing the table,
+and he breathed freer. He walked across the room, waited a space, and
+walked back again, and then went out with his heart in its proper
+position in his chest; Ford was unused to feeling his heart rise to his
+palate, and the sensation was more novel than agreeable. When he went
+again down the path, there was a certain exhilaration in his step. His
+thoughts arranged themselves in clear-cut sentences, as if he were
+speaking, instead of those vague, almost wordless impressions which fill
+the brain ordinarily.
+
+"She's keeping cases on that jug. She must care, or she wouldn't do
+that. She's worried a whole lot; I could see that, all along. Down at
+the bunk-house she called me Ford twice--and she said it meant a lot to
+her, whether I make good or not. I wonder--Lordy me! A man could make
+good, all right, and do it easy, if she cared! She doesn't know what to
+think--that jug staying right up to high-water mark, like that!" He
+laughed then, silently, and dwelt upon the picture she had made while
+she had stood there before the table.
+
+"Lord! she'd want to kill me if she knew I hid in that closet, but I
+just had a hunch--that is, if she cared anything about it. I wonder if
+she did really say she wished I'd killed Dick?
+
+"Anyway, I can fight it now, with her keeping cases on the quiet. I
+know I can fight it. Lordy me, I've got to fight it! I've got to make
+good; that's all there is about it. Wonder what she'll think when she
+sees that jug don't go down any? Wonder--oh, hell! She'd never care
+anything about me. If she did--" His thoughts went hazy with vague
+speculation, then clarified suddenly into one hard fact, like a rock
+thrusting up through the lazy sweep of a windless tide. "If she did
+care, I couldn't do anything. I'm married!"
+
+His step lost a little of its spring, then, and he went into the
+bunk-house with much the same expression on his face as when he had left
+it an hour or so before.
+
+He did not see Dick that day. The other boys watched him covertly, it
+seemed to him, and showed a disposition to talk among themselves. Jim
+was whistling cheerfully in the kitchen. He turned his head and laughed
+when Ford went in.
+
+"I found a dead soldier behind the sack of spuds," Jim announced, and
+produced an empty bottle, mate to the one Ford had thrown into the
+gully. "And Dick didn't seem to have any appetite at all, and Mose is
+still in Sleepytown. I guess that's all the news at this end of the
+line. Er--hope everything is all right at the house?"
+
+"Far as I could see, it was," Ford replied, with an inner sense of
+evasion. "I guess we'll just let her go as she looks, Jim. Did you say
+anything to the boys?"
+
+Jim reddened under his tan, but he laughed disarmingly. "I cannot tell a
+lie," he confessed honestly, "and it was too good to keep to myself. I'm
+the most generous fellow you ever saw, when it comes to passing along a
+good story that won't hurt anybody's digestion. You don't care, do you?
+The joke ain't on you."
+
+"If you'd asked me about it, I'd have said keep it under your hat.
+But--"
+
+"And that would have been a sin and a shame," argued Jim, licking a
+finger he had just scorched on a hot kettle-handle. "The fellows all
+like a good story--and it don't sound any worse because it's on Dick.
+And say! I kinda got a clue to where he connected with that whisky. Walt
+says he come back from the line-camp with his overcoat rolled up and
+tied behind the saddle--and it wasn't what you could call a hot night,
+either. He musta had that jug wrapped up in it. I'll bet he sent in by
+Peterson, the other day, for it. He was over there, I know. He's sure a
+deliberate kind of a cuss, isn't he? Must have had this thing all
+figured out a week ago. The boys are all tickled to death at the way he
+got it in the neck; they know Dick pretty well. But if you'd told me not
+to say anything, I'd have said he stubbed his toe on his shadow and fell
+all over himself, and let it go at that."
+
+"Lordy me! Jim, you needn't worry about it; you ought to know you can't
+keep a thing like this quiet, on a ranch. It doesn't matter much how he
+got that whisky here, either; I know well enough you didn't haul it out.
+I'd figured it out about as Walt says.
+
+"Say, it looks as if you'll have to wrastle with the pots and pans till
+to-morrow. The lower fence I'll ride, this afternoon; did you get clear
+around the Pinnacle field?"
+
+"I sure did--and she's tight as a drum. Say, Mose is a good cook, but
+he's a mighty punk housekeeper, if you ask me. I'm thinking of getting
+to work here with a hoe!"
+
+So life, which had of late loomed big and bitter before the soul of
+Ford, slipped back into the groove of daily routine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+The Climb
+
+
+Into its groove of routine slipped life at the Double Cross, but it did
+not move quite as smoothly as before. It was as if the "hill" which Ford
+was climbing suffered small landslides here and there, which threatened
+to block the trail below. Sometimes--still keeping to the simile--it was
+but a pebble or two kicked loose by Ford's heel; sometimes a bowlder
+which one must dodge.
+
+Dick, for instance, must have likened Mose to a real landslide when he
+came at him the next day, with a roar of rage and the rolling-pin. Mose
+had sobered to the point where he wondered how it had all happened, and
+wanted to get his hands in the wool of the "nigger" said to lurk in
+woodpiles. He asked Jim, with various embellishments of speech, what it
+was all about, and Jim told him and told him truly.
+
+"He was trying to queer you with the outfit, Mose, and that's a fact,"
+he finished; which was the only exaggeration Jim was guilty of, for Dick
+had probably thought very little of Mose and his ultimate standing with
+the Double Cross. "And he was trying to queer Ford--but you can search
+me for the reason why he didn't make good, there."
+
+Mose, like many of us, was a self-centered individual. He wasted a
+minute, perhaps, thinking of the trick upon Ford; but he spent all of
+that forenoon and well into the afternoon in deep meditation upon the
+affair as it concerned himself. And the first time Dick entered the
+presence of the cook, he got the result of Mose's reasoning.
+
+"Tried to git me in bad, did yuh? Thought you'd git me fired, hey?" he
+shouted, as a sort of punctuation to the belaboring.
+
+A rolling pin is considered a more or less fearsome weapon in the hands
+of a woman, I believe; when wielded by an incensed man who stands close
+to six feet and weighs a solid two hundred pounds, and who has the
+headache which follows inevitably in the wake of three pints of whisky
+administered internally in the short space of three hours or so, a
+rolling-pin should justly be classed with deadly weapons.
+
+Jim said afterward that he never had believed it possible to act out the
+rough stuff of the silly supplements in the Sunday papers, but after
+seeing Mose perform with that rolling-pin, he was willing to call every
+edition of the "funny papers" realistic to a degree. Since it was Jim
+who helped pull Mose off, naturally he felt qualified to judge. Jim told
+Ford about the affair with sober face and eyes that laughed.
+
+"And where's Dick?" Ford asked him, without committing himself upon the
+justice of the chastisement.
+
+"Gone to bed, I believe. He didn't come out with anything worse than
+bumps, I guess--but what I saw of them are sure peaches; or maybe
+Italian prunes would hit them off closer; they're a fine purple shade. I
+ladled Three H all over him."
+
+"I thought Dick was a fighter from Fighterville," grinned Ford, trying
+hard to remain non-committal and making a poor job of it.
+
+"Well, he is, when he can stand up and box according to rule, or hit a
+man when he isn't looking. But my, oh! This wasn't a fight, Ford; this
+was like the pictures you see of an old woman lambasting her son-in-law
+with an umbrella. Dick never got a chance to begin. Whee-ee! Mose sure
+can handle a rolling-pin some!"
+
+Ford laughed and went up to the house to his supper, and to the
+constrained atmosphere which was telling on his nerves more severely
+than did the gallon jug in his closet, and the moral effort it cost to
+keep that jug full to the neck.
+
+He went in quietly, threw his hat on the bed, and sat down with an air
+of discouragement. It was not yet six o'clock, and he knew that Mrs.
+Kate would not have supper ready; but he wanted a quiet place in which
+to think, and he was closer to Josephine; though he would never have
+admitted to himself that her nearness was any comfort to him. He did
+admit, however, that the jug with the brown neck and handle pulled him
+to the room many times in spite of himself. He would take it from the
+corner of the closet and let his fingers close over the cork, but so far
+he had never yielded beyond that point. Always he had been able to set
+the jug back unopened.
+
+He was getting circles under his eyes, two new creases had appeared on
+each side of his whimsical lips, and a permanent line was forming
+between his eyebrows; but he had not opened the jug, and it had been in
+his possession thirty-six hours. Thirty-six hours is not long, to be
+sure, when life runs smoothly with slight incidents to emphasize the
+figures on the dial, but it may seem long to the poor devil on the rack.
+
+Just now Ford was trying to forget that a gallon of whisky stood in the
+right-hand corner of his closet, behind a pair of half-worn riding-boots
+that pinched his instep so that he seldom wore them, and that he had
+only to take the jug out from behind the boots, pull the cork, and lift
+the jug to his lips--
+
+He caught himself leaning forward and staring at the closet door until
+his eyes ached with the strain. He drew back and passed his hand over
+his forehead; it ached, and he wanted to think about what he ought to do
+with Dick. He did not like to discharge him without first consulting
+Mrs. Kate, for he knew that Ches Mason was in the habit of talking
+things over with her, and since Mason was gone, she had assumed an air
+of latent authority. But Mrs. Kate had looked at him with such
+reproachful eyes, that day at dinner, and her voice had sounded so
+squeezed and unnatural, that he had felt too far removed from her for
+any discussion whatever to take place between them.
+
+Besides, he knew he could prove absolutely nothing against Dick, if Dick
+were disposed toward flat denial. He might suspect--but the facts showed
+Ford the aggressor, and Mose also. What if Mrs. Kate declined to believe
+that Dick had put that jug of whisky in the kitchen, and had afterward
+given it to Ford? Ford had no means of knowing just what tale Dick had
+told her, but he did know that Mrs. Kate eyed him doubtfully, and that
+her conversation was forced and her manner constrained.
+
+And Josephine was worse. Josephine had not spoken to him all that day.
+At breakfast she had not been present, and at dinner she had kept her
+eyes upon her plate and had nothing to say to any one.
+
+He wished Mason was home, so that he could leave. It wouldn't matter
+then, he tried to believe, what he did. He even dwelt upon the desire of
+Mason's return to the extent of calculating, with his eyes upon the
+fancy calendar on the wall opposite, the exact time of his absence. Ten
+days--there was no hope of release for another month, at least, and Ford
+sighed unconsciously when he thought of it; for although a month is not
+long, there was Josephine refusing to look at him, and there was
+Dick--and there was the jug in the closet.
+
+As to Josephine, there was no help for it; he could not avoid her
+without making the avoidance plain to all observers, and Ford was proud.
+As to Dick, he would not send him off without some proof that he had
+broken an unwritten law of the Double Cross and brought whisky to the
+ranch; and of that he had no proof. As to his suspicions--well, he
+considered that Dick had almost paid the penalty for having roused them,
+and the matter would have to rest where it was; for Ford was just. As to
+the jug, he could empty it upon the ground and be done with that
+particular form of torture. But he felt sure that Josephine was secretly
+"keeping cases" on the jug; and Ford was stubborn.
+
+That night Ford did not respond to the tinkle of the tea bell. His head
+ached abominably, and he did not want to see Josephine's averted face
+opposite him at the table. He lay still upon the bed where he had
+finally thrown himself, and let the bell tinkle until it was tired.
+
+They sent Buddy in to see why he did not come. Buddy looked at him with
+the round, curious eyes of precocious childhood and went back and
+reported that Ford wasn't asleep, but was just lying there mad. Ford
+heard the shrill little voice innocently maligning him, and swore to
+himself; but, he did not move for all that. He lay thinking and fighting
+discouragement and thirst, while little table sounds came through the
+partition and made a clicking accompaniment to his thoughts.
+
+If he were free, he was wondering between spells of temptation, would it
+do any good? Would Josephine care? There was no answer to that, or if
+there was he did not know what it was.
+
+After awhile the two women began talking; he judged that Buddy had left
+them, because it was sheer madness to speak so freely before him. At
+first he paid no attention to what they were saying, beyond a grudging
+joy in the sound of Josephine's voice. It had come to that, with Ford!
+But when he heard his name spoken, and by her, he lifted shamelessly to
+an elbow and listened, glad that the walls were so thin, and that those
+who dwell in thin-partitioned houses are prone to forget that the other
+rooms may not be quite empty. They two spent most of their waking hours
+alone together, and habit breeds carelessness always.
+
+"Do you suppose he's drunk?" Mrs. Kate asked, and her voice was full of
+uneasiness. "Chester says he's terrible when he gets started. I was sure
+he was perfectly safe! I just can't stand it to have him like this.
+Dick told me he's drinking a little all the time, and there's no telling
+when he'll break out, and--Oh, I think it's perfectly terrible!"
+
+"Hsh-sh," warned Josephine.
+
+"He went out, quite a while ago. I heard him," said Mrs. Kate, with rash
+certainty. "He hasn't been like himself since that day he fought Dick.
+He must be--"
+
+"But how could he?" Josephine's voice interrupted sharply. "That jug
+he's got is full yet."
+
+Ford could imagine Mrs. Kate shaking her head with the wisdom born of
+matrimony.
+
+"Don't you suppose he could keep putting in water?" she asked pityingly.
+Ford almost choked when he heard that!
+
+"I don't believe he would." Josephine's tone was dubious. "It doesn't
+seem to me that a man would do that; he'd think he was just spoiling
+what was left. That," she declared with a flash of inspiration, "is what
+a woman would do. And a man always does something different!" There was
+a pathetic note in the last sentence, which struck Ford oddly.
+
+"Don't think you know men, my dear, until you've been married to one for
+eight years or so," said Mrs. Kate patronizingly. "When you've been--"
+
+"Oh, for mercy's sake, do you think they're all alike?" Josephine's
+voice was tart and impatient. "I know enough about men to know they're
+all different. You can't judge one by another. And I don't believe that
+Ford is drinking at all. He's just--"
+
+"Just what?--since you know so well!" Mrs. Kate was growing ironical.
+
+"He's trying not to--and worrying." Her voice lowered until it took love
+to hear it. Ford did hear, and his breath came fast. He did not catch
+Mrs. Kate's reply; he was not in love with Mrs. Kate, and he was engaged
+in letting the words of Josephine sink into his very soul, and in
+telling himself over and over that she understood. It seemed to him a
+miracle of intuition, that she should sense the fight he was making;
+and since he felt that way about it, it was just as well he did not know
+that Jim Felton sensed it quite as keenly as Josephine--and with a far
+greater understanding of how bitter a fight it was, and for that reason
+a deeper sympathy.
+
+"I wish Chester was here!" wailed Mrs. Kate, across the glow of his
+exultant thoughts. "I'm afraid to say anything to him myself, he's so
+morose. It's a shame, because he's so splendid when he's--himself."
+
+"He's as much himself now as ever he was," Josephine defended hotly.
+"When he's drinking he's altogether--"
+
+"You never saw him drunk," Mrs. Kate pointed to the weak spot in
+Josephine's defense of him. "Dick says--"
+
+"Oh, do you believe everything Dick says? A week ago you were bitter
+against Dick and all enthusiasm for Ford."
+
+"You were flirting with Dick then, and you'd hardly treat Ford decently.
+And Ford hadn't gone to drink--"
+
+"Will you hush?" There were tears of anger in Josephine's voice. "He
+isn't, I tell you!"
+
+"What does he keep that jug in the closet for? And every few hours he
+comes up to the house and goes into his room--and he never did that
+before. And have you noticed his eyes? He'll scarcely talk any more, and
+he just pretends to eat. At dinner to-day he scarcely touched a thing!
+It's a sure sign, Phenie."
+
+Ford was growing tired of that sort of thing. It dimmed the radiance of
+Josephine's belief in him, to have Mrs. Kate so sure of his weakness. He
+got up from the bed as quietly as he could and left the house. He was
+even more thoughtful, after that, but not quite so gloomy--if one cared
+enough for his moods to make a fine distinction.
+
+Have you ever observed the fact that many of life's grimmest battles and
+deepest tragedies scarce ripple the surface of trivial things? We are
+always rubbing elbows with the big issues and never knowing anything
+about it. Certainly no one at the Double Cross guessed what was always
+in the mind of the foreman. Jim thought he was "sore" because of Dick.
+Dick thought Ford was jealous of him, and trying to think of some scheme
+to "play even," without coming to open war. Mrs. Kate was positive, in
+her purely feminine mind--which was a very good mind, understand, but
+somewhat inadequate when brought to bear upon the big problems of
+life--that Ford was tippling in secret. Josephine thought--just what she
+said, probably, upon the chill day when she calmly asked Ford at the
+breakfast table if he would let her go with him.
+
+Ford had casually remarked, in answer to a diffident question from Mrs.
+Kate, that he was going to ride out on Long Ridge and see if any stock
+was drifting back toward the ranch. He hadn't sent any one over that way
+for several days. Ford, be it said, had announced his intention
+deliberately, moved by a vague, unreasoning impulse.
+
+"Can I go?" teased Buddy, from sheer force of habit; no one ever
+mentioned going anywhere, but Buddy shot that question into the
+conversation.
+
+"No, you can't. You can't, with that cold," his mother vetoed promptly,
+and Buddy, whimpering over his hot cakes, knew well the futility of
+argument, when Mrs. Kate used that tone of finality.
+
+"Will you let me go?" Josephine asked unexpectedly, and looked straight
+at Ford. But though her glance was direct, it was unreadable, and Ford
+mentally threw up his hands after one good look at her, and tried not to
+betray the fact that this was what he had wanted, but had not hoped for.
+
+"Sure, you can go," he said, with deceitful brevity. Josephine had not
+spoken to him all the day before, except to say good-morning when he
+came in to his breakfast. Ford made no attempt to understand her, any
+more. He was carefully giving her the lead, as he would have explained
+it, and was merely following suit until he got a chance to trump; but he
+was beginning to have a discouraged feeling that the game was hers, and
+that he might as well lay down his hand and be done with it. Which, when
+he brought the simile back to practical affairs, meant that he was
+thinking seriously of leaving the ranch and the country just as soon as
+Mason returned.
+
+He was thinking of trying the Argentine Republic for awhile, if he
+could sell the land which he had rashly bought while he was getting rid
+of his inheritance.
+
+She did not offer any excuse for the request, as most women would have
+done. Neither did she thank him, with lips or with eyes, for his ready
+consent. She seemed distrait--preoccupied, as if she, also, were
+considering some weighty question.
+
+Ford pushed back his chair, watching her furtively. She rose with Kate,
+and glanced toward the window.
+
+"I suppose I shall need my heaviest sweater," she remarked practically,
+and as if the whole affair were too commonplace for discussion. "It does
+look threatening. How soon will you want to start?" This without looking
+toward Ford at all.
+
+"Right away, if that suits you." Ford was still watchful, as if he had
+not quite given up hope of reading her meaning.
+
+She told him she would be ready by the time he had saddled, and she
+appeared in the stable door while he was cinching the saddle on the
+horse he meant to ride.
+
+"I hope you haven't given me Dude," she said unemotionally. "He's
+supposed to be gentle--but he bucked me off that day I sprained my
+ankle, and all the excuse he had was that a rabbit jumped out from a
+bush almost under his nose. I've lost faith in him since. Oh--it's
+Hooligan, is it? I'm glad of that; Hooligan's a dear--and he has the
+easiest gallop of any horse on the ranch. Have you tried him yet, Ford?"
+
+The heart of Ford lifted in his chest at her tone and her words, along
+toward the last. He forgot the chill of her voice in the beginning, and
+he dwelt greedily upon the fact that once more she had called him Ford.
+But his joy died suddenly when he led his horse out and discovered that
+Dick and Jim Felton were coming down the path, within easy hearing of
+her. Ford did not know women very well, but most men are born with a
+rudimentary understanding of them. He suspected that her intimacy of
+tone was meant for Dick's benefit; and when they had ridden three or
+four miles and her share of the conversation during that time had
+consisted of "yes" twice, "no" three times, and one "indeed," he was
+sure of it.
+
+So Ford began to wonder why she came at all--unless that, also, was
+meant to discipline Dick--and his own mood became a silent one. He did
+not, he told himself indignantly, much relish being used as a club to
+beat some other man into good behavior.
+
+They rode almost to Long Ridge before Ford discovered that Josephine was
+stealing glances at his face whenever she thought he was not looking,
+and that the glances were questioning, and might almost be called timid.
+He waited until he was sure he was not mistaken, and then turned his
+head unexpectedly, and smiled into her startled eyes.
+
+"What is it?" he asked, still smiling at her. "I won't bite. Say it, why
+don't you?"
+
+She bit her lips and looked away.
+
+"I wanted to ask something--ask you to do something," she said, after a
+minute. And then hurriedly, as if she feared her courage might ebb and
+leave her stranded, "I wish you'd give me that--jug!"
+
+Sheer surprise held Ford silent, staring at her.
+
+"I don't ask many favors--I wish you'd grant just that one. I wouldn't
+ask another."
+
+"What do you want of it?"
+
+"Oh--" she stopped, then plunged on recklessly. "It's getting on my
+nerves so! And if you gave it to me, you wouldn't have to fight the
+temptation--"
+
+"Why wouldn't I? There's plenty more where that came from," he reminded
+her.
+
+"But it wouldn't be right where you could get it any time the craving
+came. Won't you let me take it?" He had never before heard that tone
+from her; but he fought down the thrill of it and held himself rigidly
+calm.
+
+"Oh, I don't know--the jug's doing all right, where it is," he evaded;
+what he wanted most was to get at her real object, and, man-like, to
+know beyond doubt whether she really cared.
+
+"But you don't--you never touch it," she urged. "I know, because--well,
+because every day I look into it! I suppose you'll say I have no right,
+that it's spying, or something. But I don't care for that. And I can see
+that it's worrying you dreadfully. And if you don't drink any of it, why
+won't you let me have it?"
+
+"If I don't drink it; what difference does it make who has it?" he
+countered.
+
+"I'm afraid there'll be a time when you'll yield, just because you are
+blue and discouraged--or something; whatever mood it is that makes the
+temptation hardest to resist. I know myself that things are harder to
+endure some days than they are others." She stopped and looked at him in
+that enigmatical way she had. "You may not know it--but I've been
+staying here just to see whether you fail or succeed. I thought I
+understood a little of why you came, and I--I stayed." She leaned and
+twisted a wisp of Hooligan's mane nervously, and Ford noticed how the
+color came and went in the cheek nearest him.
+
+"I--oh, it's awfully hard to say what I want to say, and not have it
+sound different," she began again, without looking at him. "But if you
+don't understand what I mean--" Her teeth clicked suggestively.
+
+Ford leaned to her. "Say it anyway and take a chance," he urged, and his
+voice was like a kiss, whether he knew it or not. He did know that she
+caught her breath at the words or the tone, and that the color flamed a
+deeper tint in her cheek and then faded to a faint glow.
+
+"What I mean is that I appreciate the way you have acted all along.
+I--it wasn't an easy situation to meet, and you have met it like a
+man--and a gentleman. I was afraid of you at first, and I misunderstood
+you completely. I'm ashamed to confess it, but it's true. And I want to
+see you make good in this thing you have attempted; and if there's
+anything on earth that I can do to help you, I want you to let me do it.
+You will, won't you?" She looked at him then with clear, honest eyes.
+"It's my way of wanting to thank you for--for not taking any advantage,
+or trying to, of--your--position that night."
+
+Ford's own cheeks went hot. "I thought you knew all along that I wasn't
+a cur, at least," he said harshly. "I never knew before that you had any
+reason to be afraid of me, that night. If I'd known that--but I thought
+you just didn't like me, and let it go at that. And what I said I meant.
+You needn't feel that you have anything to thank me for; I haven't done
+a thing that deserves thanks--or fear either, for that matter."
+
+"I thought you understood, when I left--"
+
+"I didn't worry much about it, one way or the other," he cut in. "I
+hunted around for you, of course, and when I saw you'd pulled out for
+good, I went over the hill and camped. I didn't get the note till next
+morning; and I don't know," he added, with a brief smile, "as that did
+much toward making me understand. You just said to wait till some one
+came after me. Well, I didn't wait." He laughed and leaned toward her
+again. "Now there seems a chance of our being--pretty good friends," he
+said, in the caressing tone he had used before, and of which he was
+utterly unconscious, "we won't quarrel about that night, will we? You
+got home all right, and so did I. We'll forget all about it. Won't we?"
+He laid a hand on the horn of her saddle so that they rode close
+together, and tried futilely to read what was in her face, since she did
+not speak.
+
+Josephine stared blankly at the brown slope before them. Her lips were
+set firmly together, and her brows were contracted also, and her gloved
+fingers gripped the reins tightly. She paid not the slightest attention
+to Ford's hand upon her saddle horn, nor at the steady gaze of his eyes.
+Later, when Ford observed the rigidity of her whole pose and sensed that
+mental withdrawing which needs no speech to push one off from the more
+intimate ground of companionship, he wondered a little. Without in the
+least knowing why he felt rebuffed, he took away his hand, and swung his
+horse slightly away from her; his own back stiffened a little in
+response to the chilled atmosphere.
+
+"Yes," she said at last, "we'll forget all about it, Mr. Campbell."
+
+"You called me Ford, a while ago," he hinted.
+
+"Did I? One forms the habit of picking up a man's given name, out here
+in the West, I find. I'm sorry--"
+
+"I don't want you to be sorry. I want you to do it again. All the time,"
+he added boldly.
+
+He caught the gleam of her eyes under her heavy lashes, as she glanced
+at him sidelong.
+
+"If you go looking at me out of the corner of your eyes," he threatened
+recklessly, kicking his horse closer, "I'm liable to kiss you!"
+
+And he did, before she could draw away.
+
+"I've been kinda thinking maybe I'm in love with you, Josephine," he
+murmured, holding her close. "And now I'm dead sure of it. And if you
+won't love me back why--there'll be something doing, that's all!"
+
+"Yes? And what would you do, please?" Her tone was icy, but he somehow
+felt that the ice was very, very thin, and that her heart beat warm
+beneath. She drew herself free, and he let her go.
+
+"I dunno," he confessed whimsically. "But Lordy me! I'd sure do
+something!"
+
+"Look for comfort in that jug, I suppose you mean?"
+
+"No, I don't mean that." He stopped and considered, his forehead creased
+as if he were half angry at the imputation. "I'm pretty sure of where I
+stand, on that subject. I've done a lot of thinking, since I hit the
+Double Cross--and I've cut out whisky for good.
+
+"I know what you thought, and what Mrs. Kate thinks yet; and I'll admit
+it was mighty tough scratching for a couple of days after I got hold of
+that jug. But I found out which was master--and it wasn't the booze!" He
+looked at her with eyes that shone. "Josie, girl, I took a long
+chance--but I put it up to myself this way, when the jug seemed to be on
+top. I told myself it was whisky or you; not that exactly, either. It's
+hard to say just what I do mean. Not you, maybe--but what you stand for.
+What I could get out of life, if I was straight and lived clean, and had
+a little woman like you. It may not be you at all; that's as you--"
+
+He stopped as if some one had laid a hand over his mouth. It was not as
+she said. It might have been, only for that drunken marriage of his.
+Never before had he hated whisky as bitterly as he did then, when he
+remembered what it had done for him that night in Sunset, and what it
+was doing now. It closed his lips upon what he would have given much to
+be able to say; for he was a man with all the instincts of chivalry and
+honor--and he loved the girl. It was, he realized bitterly, just because
+he did love her so well, that he could not say more. He had said too
+much already; but her nearness had gone to his head, and he had
+forgotten that he was not free to say what he felt.
+
+Perhaps Josephine mistook his sudden silence for trepidation, or
+humility. At any rate she reined impulsively close, and reached out and
+caught the hand hanging idly at his side.
+
+"Ford, I'm no coquette," she said straightforwardly, with a blush for
+maiden-modesty's sake. "I believe you; absolutely and utterly I believe
+you. If you had been different at first--if you had made any overtures
+whatever toward--toward lovemaking, I should have despised you. I
+never would have loved you in this world! But you didn't. You kept at
+such a distance that I--I couldn't help thinking about you and studying
+you. And lately--when I knew you were fighting the--the habit--I loved
+you for the way you did fight. I was afraid, too. I used to slip into
+your room every time you left it, and look--and I just ached to help
+you! But I knew I couldn't do a thing; and that was the hardest part.
+All I could do was stand back--clear back out of sight, and hope.
+And--and love you, too, Ford. I'm proud of you! I'm proud to think that
+I--I love a man that is a man; that doesn't sit down and whine because a
+fight is hard, or give up and say it's no use. I do despise a moral
+weakling, Ford. I don't mind what you have been; it's what you are, that
+counts with me. And you're a man, every inch of you. I'm not a bit
+afraid you'll weaken. Only," she added half apologetically, "I did want
+you to give me the--the jug, because I couldn't bear to see you look so
+worried." She gave his fingers an adorable little squeeze, and flung
+his hand away from her, and laughed in a way to set his heart pounding
+heavily in his chest. "Now you know where I stand, Mr. Man," she cried
+lightly, "so let's say no more about it. I bet I can beat you across
+this flat!" She laughed again, wrinkled her nose at him impertinently,
+and was off in a run.
+
+[Illustration: "Ford, I'm no coquette," she said straightforwardly.]
+
+If she had waited, Ford would have told her. If she had given him a
+chance, he would have told her afterward; but she did not. She was
+extremely careful not to let their talk become intimate, after that. She
+laughed, she raced Hooligan almost to the point of abuse, she chattered
+about everything under the sun that came into her mind, except their own
+personal affairs or anything that could possibly lead up to the subject.
+
+Ford, for a time, watched for an opening honestly; saw at last the
+impossibility of telling her--unless indeed he shouted, "Say, I'm a
+married man!" to her without preface or extenuating explanation--and
+yielded finally to the reprieve the fates sent him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+To Find and Free a Wife
+
+
+Ford spent the rest of that day and all of the night that followed, in
+thinking what would be the best and the easiest method of gaining the
+point he wished to reach. All along he had been uncomfortably aware of
+his matrimonial entanglement and had meant, as soon as he conveniently
+could, to try and discover who was his wife, and how best to free
+himself and her. He had half expected that she herself would do
+something to clear the mystery. She had precipitated the marriage, he
+constantly reminded himself, and it was reasonable to expect that she
+would do something; though what, Ford could only conjecture.
+
+When he faced Josephine across the breakfast table the next morning, and
+caught the shy glance she gave him when Mrs. Kate was not looking, a
+plan he had half formed crystallized into a determination. He would not
+tell her anything about it until he knew just what he was up against,
+and how long it was going to take him to free himself. And since he
+could not do anything about it while he rode and planned and gave orders
+at the Double Cross, he swallowed his breakfast rather hurriedly and
+went out to find Jim Felton.
+
+"Say, Jim," he began, when he ran that individual to earth in the
+stable, where, with a pair of sheep shears, he was roaching the mane of
+a shaggy old cow pony to please Buddy, who wanted to make him look like
+a circus horse, even if there was no hope of his ever acting like one.
+"I'm going to hand you the lines and let you drive, for a few days. I've
+got to scout around on business of my own, and I don't know just how
+long it's going to take me. I'm going right away--to-day."
+
+"Yeah?" Jim poised the shears in air and regarded him quizzically over
+the pony's neck. "Going to pass me foreman's privilege--to hire and
+fire?" he grinned. "Because I may as well tell you that if you do, Dick
+won't be far behind you on the trail."
+
+"Oh, darn Dick. I'll fire him myself, maybe, before I leave. Yes," he
+added, thinking swiftly of Josephine as the object of Dick's desires,
+"that's what I'll do. Maybe it'll save a lot of trouble while I'm gone.
+He's a tricky son-of-a-gun."
+
+"You're dead right; he is," Jim agreed. And then, dryly: "Grandmother
+just died?"
+
+"Oh, shut up. This ain't an excuse--it's business. I've just got to go,
+and that's all there is to it. I'll fix things with the missus, and tell
+her you're in charge. Anyway, I won't be gone any longer than I can
+help."
+
+"I believe that, too," said Jim softly, and busied himself with the
+shears.
+
+Ford looked at him sharply, in doubt as to just how much or how little
+Jim meant by that. He finally shrugged his shoulders and went away to
+tell Mrs. Kate, and found that a matter which required more diplomacy
+than he ever suspected he possessed. But he did tell her, and he hoped
+that she believed the reason he gave for going, and also had some faith
+in his assurance that he would be back, probably, in a couple of
+days--or as soon afterwards as might be.
+
+"There's nothing but chores to do now around the ranch, and Jack will
+ride fence," he explained unnecessarily, to cover his discomfort at her
+coldness. "Jim can look after things just as well as I can. There won't
+be any need to start feeding the calves, unless it storms; and if it
+does, Jim and Jack will go ahead, all right. I'm going to let Dick and
+Curly go. We don't need more than two men besides Walt, from now on."
+
+"I wish Chester was here," said Mrs. Kate ambiguously.
+
+Ford did not ask her why she wished that. He told her good-by as hastily
+as if he had to run to catch a train, and left her. He hoped he would be
+lucky enough to see Josephine--and then he hoped quite as sincerely that
+he would not see her, after all. It would be easier to go without her
+clear eyes asking him why.
+
+What he meant to do first was to find Rock, and see if he had been
+sober enough that night in Sunset to remember what happened at the
+marriage ceremony, and could give him some clue as to the woman's
+identity and whereabouts. If he failed there, he intended to hunt up the
+preacher. That, also, presented certain difficulties, but Ford was in
+the mood to overcome obstacles. Once he discovered who the woman was, it
+seemed to him that there should be no great amount of trouble in getting
+free. As he understood it, he was not the man she had intended to marry;
+and not being the man she wanted, she certainly could not be
+over-anxious to cling to him.
+
+While he galloped down the trail to town, he went over the whole thing
+again in his mind, to see if there might be some simpler plan than the
+one he had formed in the night.
+
+"No, sir--it's Rock I've got to see first," he concluded. "But Lord only
+knows where I'll find him; Rock never does camp twice in the same place.
+Never knew him to stay more than a month with one outfit. But I'll find
+him, all right!"
+
+And by one of those odd twists of circumstances which sets men to
+wondering if there is such a thing as telepathy and a specifically
+guiding hand and the like, it was Rock and none other whom he met fairly
+in the trail before he had gone another mile.
+
+"Well, I'll be gol darned!" Ford whispered incredulously to himself, and
+pulled up short in the trail to wait for him.
+
+Rock came loping up with elbows flapping loosely, as was his ungainly
+habit. His grin was wide and golden as of yore, his hat at the same
+angle over his right eyebrow.
+
+"Gawd bless you, brother! May peace ride behind your cantle!" he
+declaimed unctuously, for Rock was a character, in his way, and in his
+speech was not in the least like other men. "Whither wendest thou?"
+
+"My wending is all over for the present," said Ford, wheeling his horse
+short around, that he might ride alongside the other. "I started out to
+hunt you up, you old devil. How are you, anyway?"
+
+"It is well with me, and well with my soul--what little I've got--but it
+ain't so well with my winter grub-stake. I'm just as tickled to see you
+as you ever dare be to meet up with me, and that's no lie. I heard
+you've got a stand-in with the Double Cross, and seeing they ain't on to
+my little peculiarities, I thought I'd ride out and see if I couldn't
+work you for a soft snap. Got any ducks out there you want led to
+water?"
+
+"Maybe--I dunno. I just canned two men this morning, before I left."
+Ford was debating with himself how best to approach the subject to him
+most important.
+
+"Good ee-nough! I can take the place of those two men; eat their share
+of grub, do their share of snoring, and shirk their share of work, and
+drink their share of booze--oh, lovely! But, in the words of the dead,
+immortal Shakespeare, 'What's eating you?' You look to me as if you
+hadn't enjoyed the delights of a good, stiff jag since--" He waved a
+hand vaguely. "Ain't a scar on you, so help me!" He regarded Ford with
+frank curiosity.
+
+"Oh, yes there is. I've got the hide peeled off two knuckles, and one of
+my thumbs is just getting so it will move without being greased," Ford
+assured him, and then went straight at what was on his mind.
+
+"Say, Rock, I was told that you had a hand in my getting married, back
+in Sunset that night."
+
+Rock made his horse back until it nearly fell over a rock; his face
+showed exaggerated symptoms of terror.
+
+"I couldn't help it," he wailed. "Spare muh--for muh poor mother's sake,
+oh spare muh life!" Whereat Ford laughed, just as Rock meant that he
+should do. "You licked Bill twice for that, they tell me," Rock went on,
+quitting his foolery and coming up close again. "And you licked the
+preacher that night, and--so the tale runneth--like to have put the
+whole town on the jinks. Is there anything in particular you'd like to
+do to me?"
+
+"I just want you to tell me who I married--if you can." Ford reddened as
+the other stared, but he did not stop. "I was so darned full that night
+I let the whole business ooze out of my memory, and I haven't been able
+to--"
+
+Rock was leaning over the saddle horn, howling and watery-eyed. Ford
+looked at him with a dawning suspicion.
+
+"It did strike me, once or twice," he said grimly, "that the whole thing
+was a put-up job. If you fellows rigged up a josh like that, and let it
+go as far as this, may the Lord have mercy on your souls, for I won't!"
+
+But Rock could only wave him off weakly; so Ford waited until he had
+recovered. Even then, it took some talking to convince Rock that the
+affair was truly serious and not to be treated any longer as a joke.
+
+"Why, damn it, man, I'm in love with a girl and I want to marry her if I
+can get rid of this other darned, mysterious, Tom-fool of a woman," Ford
+gritted at last, in sheer desperation. "Or if it's just a josh, by this
+and by that I mean to find it out."
+
+Rock sobered then. "It ain't any josh," he said, with convincing
+earnestness. "You got married, all right enough. And if it's as you say,
+Ford, I sure am sorry for it. I don't know the girl's name. I'd know
+her quick enough if I should see her, but I can't tell you who she was."
+
+Ford swore, of course. And Rock listened sympathetically until he was
+done.
+
+"That's the stuff; get it out of your system, Ford, and then you'll feel
+better. Then we can put our heads together and see if there isn't some
+way to beat this combination."
+
+"Could you spot the preacher, do you reckon?" asked Ford more calmly.
+
+"I could--if he didn't see us coming," Rock admitted guardedly. "Name of
+Sanderson, I believe. I've seen him around Garbin. He could tell--he
+must have some record of it; but would he?"
+
+"Don't you know, even, why she came and glommed onto me like that?"
+Ford's face was as anxious as his tone.
+
+"Only what you told me, confidentially, in a corner afterwards," said
+Rock regretfully. "Maybe you told it straight, and maybe you didn't;
+there's no banking on a man's imagination when he's soused. But the way
+you told it to me was this:
+
+"You said the girl told you that she was working for some queer old
+party--an old lady with lots of dough; and she made her will and give
+her money all to some institution--hospital or some darned thing, I
+forget just what, or else you didn't say. Only, if this girl would marry
+her son within a certain time, he could have the wad. Seems the son was
+something of a high-roller, and the old lady knew he'd blow it in, if it
+was turned over to him without any ballast, like; and the girl was
+supposed to be the ballast, to hold him steady. So the old lady, or else
+it was the girl, writes to this fellow, and he agrees to hook up with
+the lady and take the money and behave himself. Near as I could make it
+out, the time was just about up before the girl took matters into her
+own hand, and come out on a hunt for this Frank Cameron. How she
+happened to sink her rope on you instead, and take her turns before she
+found out her mistake, you'll have to ask her--if you ever see her
+again.
+
+"But this much you told me--and I think you got it straight. The girl
+was willing to marry you--or Frank Cameron--so he could get what
+belonged to him. She wasn't going to do any more, though, and you told
+me"--Rock's manner became very impressive here--"that you promised her,
+as a man and a gentleman, that you wouldn't ever bother her, and that
+she was to travel her own trail, and she didn't want the money. She just
+wanted to dodge that fool will, seems like. Strikes me I'd a let the
+fellow go plumb to Guinea, if I was in her place, but women get queer
+notions of duty, and the like of that, sometimes. Looks to me like a
+fool thing for a woman to do, anyway."
+
+Though they talked a good while about it, that was all the real
+information which Ford could gain. He would have to find the minister
+and persuade him to show the record of the marriage, and after that he
+would have to find the girl.
+
+Before they reached that definite conclusion, the storm which had been
+brewing for several days swooped down upon them, and drove Ford to the
+alternative of riding in the teeth of it to town, which was not only
+unpleasant but dangerous, if it grew any worse, or retracing his steps
+to the Double Cross and waiting there until it was over. So that is what
+he did, with Rock to bear him willing company.
+
+They met Dick and Curly on the way, and though Ford stopped them and
+suggested that they turn back also, neither would do so. Curly intimated
+plainly that the joys of town were calling to him from afar, and that
+facing a storm was merely calculated to make his destination more
+alluring by contrast. "Turn back with two months' wages burning up my
+inside pocket? Oh, no!" he laughed, and rode on. Dick did not say why,
+but he rode on also. Ford turned in the saddle and looked after them, as
+they disappeared in a swirl of fine snow.
+
+"That's what I ought to do," he said, "but I'm not going to do it, all
+the same."
+
+"Which only goes to prove," bantered Rock, "that the Double Cross pulls
+harder than all the preacher could tell you. I wonder if there isn't a
+girl at the Double Cross, now!"
+
+"There is," Ford confessed, with a grin of embarrassment. "And you shut
+up."
+
+"I just had a hunch there was," Rock permitted himself to say meekly,
+before he dropped the subject.
+
+It was ten minutes before Ford spoke again.
+
+"I'll take you up to the house and introduce you to her, Rock, if you'll
+behave yourself," he offered then, with a shyness in his manner that
+nearly set Rock off in one of his convulsions of mirth. "But the missus
+isn't wise--so watch out. And if you don't behave yourself," he added
+darkly, "I'll knock your block off."
+
+"Sure. But my block is going to remain right where it's at," Rock
+assured him, which was a tacit promise of as perfect behavior as he
+could attain.
+
+They looked like snow men when they unsaddled, with the powdery snow
+beaten into the very fabric of their clothing, and Ford suggested that
+they go first to the bunk-house to thaw out. "I'd sure hate to pack all
+this snow into Mrs. Kate's parlor," he added whimsically. "She's the
+kind of housekeeper that grabs the broom the minute you're gone, to
+sweep your tracks off the carpet. Awful nice little woman, but--"
+
+"But not The One," chuckled Rock, treading close upon Ford's heels.
+"And I'll bet fifteen cents," he offered rashly, looking up, "that the
+person hitting the high places for the bunk-house is The One."
+
+"How do you know?" Ford demanded, while his eyes gladdened at sight of
+Josephine, with a Navajo blanket flung over her head, running down the
+path through the blizzard to the bunk-house kitchen.
+
+"'Cause she shied when she saw you coming. Came pretty near breaking
+back on you, too," Rock explained shrewdly.
+
+They reached the kitchen together, and Ford threw open the door, and
+held it for her to pass.
+
+"I came after some of Mose's mince-meat," she explained hastily. "It's a
+terrible storm, isn't it? I'm glad it didn't strike yesterday. I thought
+you were going to be gone for several days."
+
+Ford, with embarrassed haste to match her own, presented Rock in the
+same breath with wishing that Rock was elsewhere; for Mose was not in
+the kitchen, and he had not had more than a few words with her for
+twenty-four hours. He was perilously close to forgetting his legal
+halter when he looked at her.
+
+She was, he thought, about as sweet a picture of a woman as a man need
+ever look upon, as she stood there with the red Navajo blanket falling
+back from her dark hair, and with her wide, honest eyes fixed upon Rock.
+She was blushing, as if she, too, wished Rock elsewhere. She turned
+impulsively, set down the basin she had been holding in her arm, and
+pulled the blanket up so that it framed her face bewitchingly.
+
+"Mose can bring up the mince-meat when he comes--since he isn't here,"
+she said hurriedly. "We weren't looking for you back, but dinner will be
+ready in half an hour or so, I think." She pulled open the door and went
+out into the storm.
+
+Rock stared at the door, still quivering with the slam she had given it.
+Then he looked at Ford, and afterward sat down weakly upon a stool, and
+began dazedly pulling the icicles from his mustache.
+
+"Well--I'll--be--cremated!" he said in a whisper.
+
+"And what's eating you, Rock?" Ford quizzed gayly. He had seen
+something in the eyes of Josephine, when he met her, that had set his
+blood jumping again. "Did Miss Melby--"
+
+"Miss Melby my granny!" grunted Rock, in deep disgust. "That there is
+your wife!"
+
+Ford backed up against the wall and stared at him blankly. Afterward he
+took a deep breath and went out as though the place was on fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+What Ford Found at the Top
+
+
+Ford Campbell was essentially a man of action; he did not waste ten
+seconds in trying to deduce the whys and hows of the amazing fact; he
+would have a whole lifetime in which to study them. He started for the
+house, and the tracks he made in the loose, shifting snow were
+considerably more than a yard apart. He even forgot to stamp off the
+clinging snow and scour his boot-soles upon the porch rug, and when he
+went striding in, he pushed the door only half shut behind him, so that
+it swung in the wind and let a small drift collect upon the parlor
+carpet, until Mrs. Kate, feeling a draught, discovered it, and was
+shocked beyond words at the sacrilege.
+
+Ford went into the dining-room, crossed it in just three strides, and
+ran his quarry to earth in the kitchen, where she was distraitly
+setting out biscuit materials. He started toward her, realized suddenly
+that the all-observing Buddy was at his very heels, and delayed the
+reckoning while he led that terrible man-child to his mother.
+
+"I wish you'd close-herd this kid for about four hours," he told Mrs.
+Kate bluntly, and left her looking scared and unconsciously posing as
+protective motherhood, her arm around the outraged Robert Chester Mason.
+Mrs. Kate was absolutely convinced that Ford was at last really drunk
+and "on the rampage," and she had a terrible vision of slain girlhood in
+the kitchen, so that she was torn between mother-love and her desire to
+protect Phenie. But Ford had looked so threateningly at her and Buddy
+that she could not bring herself to attract his attention to the child
+or herself. Phenie had plenty of spirit; she could run down to the
+bunk-house--Mrs. Kate heard a door slam then, and shuddered. Phenie, she
+judged swiftly, had locked herself into the pantry.
+
+Phenie had. Or, to be exact, she had run in and slammed the door shut
+in Ford's very face, and she was leaning her weight against it. Mrs.
+Kate, pressing the struggling Buddy closer to her, heard voices, a
+slight commotion, and then silence. She could bear no more. She threw a
+shawl over her head, grasped Buddy firmly by the arm, and fled in terror
+to the bunk-house.
+
+The voices were a brief altercation between Ford and Josephine, on the
+subject of opening the door, before it was removed violently from its
+hinges. The commotion was when Josephine, between tears and laughter,
+failed to hold the door against the pressure of a strong man upon the
+other side, and, suddenly giving over the attempt, was launched against
+a shelf and dislodged three tin pans, which she barely saved from
+falling with a great clatter to the floor. The silence--the silence
+should explain itself; but since humanity is afflicted with curiosity,
+and demands details, this is what occurred immediately after Josephine
+had been kissed four times for her stubbornness, and the pans had been
+restored to their proper place.
+
+"Say! Are you my wife?" was the abrupt question which Ford asked, and
+kissed her again while he waited for an answer.
+
+"Why, yes--what makes you ask that? Of course I am; that is--" Josephine
+twisted in his arms, so that she could look into his face. She did not
+laugh at him, however. She was staring at him with that keen, measuring
+look which had so incensed him, when he had first met her. "I don't
+understand you at all, Ford," she said at last, with a frown of
+puzzlement. "I never have, for that matter. I'd think I was beginning
+to, and then you would say or do something that would put me all at sea.
+What do you mean, anyway?"
+
+Ford told her what he meant; told her humbly, truthfully, with never an
+excuse for himself. And it speaks well for the good sense of Josephine
+that she heard him through with neither tears, laughter, nor anger to
+mar his trust in her.
+
+"Of course, I knew you had been drinking, that night," she said, when
+his story was done, and his face was pressed lightly against the white
+parting in her soft, brown hair. "I saw it, after--after the ceremony.
+You--you were going to kiss me, and I caught the odor of liquor, and I
+felt that you wouldn't have done that if you had been yourself; it
+frightened me, a little. But you talked perfectly straight, and I never
+knew you weren't the man--Frank Cameron--until you came here. Then I saw
+you couldn't be he. Chester had known you when Frank was at home with
+his mother--I compared dates and was sure of that--and he called you
+Ford Campbell. So then I saw what a horrible blunder I'd made, and I was
+worried nearly to death! But I couldn't see what I could do about it,
+and you didn't--"
+
+"Say, what about this Frank Cameron, anyway?" Ford demanded, with true
+male jealousy. "What did you want to marry him for? You couldn't have
+known him, or--"
+
+"Oh, you wouldn't understand--" Josephine gave a little, impatient turn
+of the head, "unless you knew his mother. I did know Frank, a long time
+ago, when I was twelve or thirteen, and when I saw you, I thought he'd
+changed a lot. But it was his mother; she was the dearest thing,
+but--queer. Sort of childish, you know. And she just worshiped Frank,
+and used to watch for the postman--oh, it was too pitiful! Sometimes I'd
+write a letter myself, and pretend it was from him, and read it to her;
+her eyes were bad, so it was easy--"
+
+"Where was this Frank?" Ford interrupted.
+
+"Oh, I don't know! I never did know. Somewhere out West, we thought. I
+used to make believe the letters came from Helena, or Butte, because
+that was where she heard from him last. He was always promising to come
+home--in the letters. That used to make her so much better," she
+explained naively. "And sometimes she'd be able to go out in the yard
+and fuss with her flowers, after one like that. But he never came, and
+so she got the notion that he was wild and a spendthrift. I suppose he
+was, or he'd have written, or something. She had lots and lots of money
+and property, you know.
+
+"Well," Josephine took one of Ford's hand and patted it reassuringly,
+"she got the notion that I must marry Frank, when he came home. I tried
+to reason her out of that, and it only made her worse. It grew on her,
+and I got so I couldn't bear to write any more letters, and that made it
+worse still. She made a will that I must marry Frank within a year after
+she died, or he wouldn't get anything but a hundred dollars--and she was
+worth thousands and thousands." Josephine snuggled closer. "She was
+shrewd, too. I was not to get anything except a few trinkets. And if we
+didn't marry, the money would all go to an old ladies' home.
+
+"So, when she died, I felt as if I ought to do something, you see. It
+didn't seem right to let him lose the property, even if he wouldn't
+write to his mother. So I had the lawyers try to find him. I thought I
+could marry him, and let him get the property, and then--well, I counted
+on getting a divorce." She looked up quickly into Ford's face.
+
+"And you know you did promise not to bother me--just to desert me, you
+see, so I could get a divorce in a year. I thought I'd come and live
+with Kate till the year was up, and then get a divorce, and go back
+home to work. My father left me enough to squeak along on, you see, if I
+lived in the country. Aunt Ida--that's Frank's mother--paid me a salary
+for staying with her and looking after her house and her rents and
+things. And then, when you followed me out here, I was furious! Just
+simply furious!" She bent her head and set her teeth gently into the
+fleshy part of Ford's thumb, and Ford flinched. It happened to be the
+sore one.
+
+"Well, but that doesn't explain how you got your loop on me,
+girlie--though I sure am glad that you did!"
+
+"Why, don't you see, the time was almost up, just for all the world like
+a play. 'Only one day more--and I must save the pa-apers!' So the lawyer
+Aunt Ida had for years, heard that Frank was--or had been--at Garbin. I
+rushed out here, and heard that there was a Cameron (only they must have
+meant Campbell) at Sunset. So I got a license, and the Reverend
+Sanderson, and took the evening train down there. At the hotel I asked
+for Mr. Cameron, and they sent you in. And you know the rest, you--you
+old fraud! How you palmed yourself off on me--"
+
+"I never did! I must have just been in one of my obliging moods; and a
+man would have to be mighty rude and unkind not to say yes to a pretty
+girl when--"
+
+That is as far as the discussion went, with anything like continuity or
+coherence even. Later, however, Josephine did protest somewhat
+muffledly: "But, Ford, I married you under the name of Frank Cameron, so
+I don't believe--and anyway--I'd like a real wedding--and a ring!"
+
+Mrs. Kate, having been solemnly assured by Rock that Ford was sober and
+as nearly in his right mind as a man violently in love can be (Rock made
+it plain, by implication at least, that he did not consider that very
+near), ventured into the kitchen just then. She still looked scared and
+uncertain, until, through the half-open door of the pantry, she heard
+soft, whispery sounds like kissing--when the kissing is a rapture rather
+than a ceremony. Mrs. Kate had only been married eight years or so, and
+she had a good memory. She backed from the kitchen on her toes, and
+pulled the door shut with the caution of a thief. She did more; she
+permitted dinner to be an hour late, rather than disturb those two in
+the pantry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The uphill climb was no climb at all, after that. For when a man has
+found the one woman in the world, and with her that elusive thing we
+call happiness, even the demon must perforce sheathe his claws and
+retire, discomfited, to the pit whence he came.
+
+There was a period of impatient waiting, because Josephine and Mrs. Kate
+both stoutly maintained that the "real wedding" could not take place
+until Chester came back. After that, there was a Mrs. foreman at the
+Double Cross until spring. And after that, there was a new ranch and a
+new house and a new home where happiness came and dwelt unhindered.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+STORIES OF RARE CHARM BY
+GENE STRATTON-PORTER
+
+May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap's list.
+
+
+_THE HARVESTER_ Illustrated by W. L. Jacobs
+
+"The Harvester," David Langston, is a man of the woods and fields, who
+draws his living from the prodigal hand of Mother Nature herself. If the
+book had nothing in it but the splendid figure of this man, with his
+sure grip on life, his superb optimism, and his almost miraculous
+knowledge of nature secrets, it would be notable. But when the Girl
+comes to his "Medicine Woods," and the Harvester's whole sound, healthy,
+large outdoor being realizes that this is the highest point of life
+which has come to him--there begins a romance, troubled and interrupted,
+yet of the rarest idyllic quality.
+
+
+_FRECKLES._ Decorations by E. Stetson Crawford
+
+Freckles is a nameless waif when the tale opens, but the way in which he
+takes hold of life; the nature friendships he forms in the great
+Limberlost Swamp; the manner in which everyone who meets him succumbs to
+the charm of his engaging personality; and his love-story with "The
+Angel" are full of real sentiment.
+
+
+_A GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST._ Illustrated by Wladyslaw T. Brenda.
+
+The story of a girl of the Michigan woods; a buoyant, lovable type of
+the self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and kindness
+towards all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by the sheer beauty of
+her soul, and the purity of her vision, she wins from barren and
+unpromising surroundings those rewards of high courage.
+
+It is an inspiring story of a life worth while and the rich beauties of
+the out-of-doors are strewn through all its pages.
+
+
+_AT THE FOOT OF THE RAINBOW._ Illustrations in colors by Oliver Kemp.
+Design and decorations by Ralph Fletcher Seymour.
+
+The scene of this charming, idyllic love story is laid in Central
+Indiana. The story is one of devoted friendship, and tender
+self-sacrificing love; the friendship that gives freely without return,
+and the love that seeks first the happiness of the object. The novel is
+brimful of the most beautiful word painting of nature, and its pathos
+and tender sentiment will endear it to all.
+
+
+Ask for compete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction
+
+Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+
+
+
+JOHN FOX, JR'S.
+STORIES OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS
+
+May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grossett and Dunlap's list.
+
+
+_THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE._ Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.
+
+The "lonesome pine" from which the story takes its name was a tall tree
+that stood in solitary splendor on a mountain top. The fame of the pine
+lured a young engineer through Kentucky to catch the trail, and when he
+finally climbed to its shelter he found not only the pine but the
+_foot-prints of a girl_. And the girl proved to be lovely, piquant, and
+the trail of these girlish foot-prints led the young engineer a madder
+chase than "the trail of the lonesome pine."
+
+
+_THE LITTLE SHEPHERD OF KINGDOM COME_ Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.
+
+This is a story of Kentucky, in a settlement known as "Kingdom Come." It
+is a life rude, semi-barbarous; but natural and honest, from which often
+springs the flower of civilization.
+
+"Chad." the "little shepherd" did not know who he was nor whence he
+came--he had just wandered from door to door since early childhood,
+seeking shelter with kindly mountaineers who gladly fathered and
+mothered this waif about whom there was such a mystery--a charming waif,
+by the way, who could play the banjo better that anyone else in the
+mountains.
+
+
+_A KNIGHT OF THE CUMBERLAND._ Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.
+
+The scenes are laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of
+moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the
+heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two
+impetuous young Southerners' fall under the spell of "The Blight's"
+charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the
+love making of the mountaineers.
+
+Included in this volume is "Hell fer-Sartain" and other stories, some of
+Mr. Fox's most entertaining Cumberland valley narratives.
+
+
+Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction
+
+Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+
+
+
+MYRTLE REED'S NOVELS
+
+May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list
+
+
+_LAVENDER AND OLD LACE._
+
+A charming story of a quaint corner of New England where bygone romance
+finds a modern parallel. The story centers round the coming of love to
+the young people on the staff of a newspaper--and it is one of the
+prettiest, sweetest and quaintest of old fashioned love stories, * * * a
+rare book, exquisite in spirit and conception, full of delicate fancy,
+of tenderness, of delightful humor and spontaniety.
+
+
+_A SPINNER IN THE SUN._
+
+Miss Myrtle Reed may always be depended upon to write a story in which
+poetry, charm, tenderness and humor are combined into a clever and
+entertaining book. Her characters are delightful and she always displays
+a quaint humor of expression and a quiet feeling of pathos which give a
+touch of active realism to all her writings. In "A Spinner in the Sun"
+she tells an old-fashioned love story, of a veiled lady who lives in
+solitude and whose features her neighbors have never seen. There is a
+mystery at the heart of the book that throws over it the glamour of
+romance.
+
+
+_THE MASTER'S VIOLIN,_
+
+A love story in a musical atmosphere. A picturesque, old German virtuoso
+is the reverent possessor of a genuine "Cremona." He consents to take
+for his pupil a handsome youth who proves to have an aptitude for
+technique, but not the soul of an artist. The youth, has led the happy,
+careless life of a modern, well-to-do young American and he cannot, with
+his meagre past, express the love, the passion and the tragedies of life
+and all its happy phases as can the master who has lived life in all its
+fulness. But a girl comes into his life--a beautiful bit of human
+driftwood that his aunt had taken into her heart and home, and through
+his passionate love for her, he learns the lessons that life has to
+give--and his soul awakes.
+
+Founded on a fact that all artists realize.
+
+
+Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction
+
+Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+
+
+
+GROSSET & DUNLAP'S
+DRAMATIZED NOVELS
+
+THE KIND THAT ARE MAKING THEATRICAL HISTORY
+
+May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list
+
+
+_WITHIN THE LAW._ By Bayard Veiller & Martin Dana. Illustrated by Wm.
+Charles Cooke.
+
+This is a novelization of the immensely successful play which ran for
+two years in New York and Chicago.
+
+The plot of this powerful novel is of a young woman's revenge directed
+against her employer who allowed her to be sent to prison for three
+years on a charge of theft, of which she was innocent.
+
+
+_WHAT HAPPENED TO MARY._ By Robert Carlton Brown. Illustrated with
+scenes from the play.
+
+This is a narrative of a young and innocent country girl who is suddenly
+thrown into the very heart of New York, "the land of her dreams," where
+she is exposed to all sorts of temptations and dangers.
+
+The story of Mary is being told in moving pictures and played in
+theatres all over the world.
+
+
+_THE RETURN OF PETER GRIMM._ By David Belasco. Illustrated by John Rae.
+
+This is a novelization of the popular play in which David War, field, as
+Old Peter Grimm, scored such a remarkable success.
+
+The story is spectacular and extremely pathetic but withal, powerful,
+both as a book and as a play.
+
+
+_THE GARDEN OF ALLAH._ By Robert Hichens.
+
+This novel is an intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit
+barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere of vastness and loneliness.
+
+It is a book of rapturous beauty, vivid in word painting. The play has
+been staged with magnificent cast and gorgeous properties.
+
+
+_BEN HUR._ A Tale of the Christ. By General Lew Wallace.
+
+The whole world has placed this famous Religious--Historical Romance on
+a height of pre-eminence which no other novel of its time has reached.
+The clashing of rivalry and the deepest human passions, the perfect
+reproduction of brilliant Roman life, and the tense, fierce atmosphere
+of the arena have kept their deep fascination. A tremendous dramatic
+success.
+
+
+_BOUGHT AND PAID FOR._ By George Broadhurst and Arthur Hornblow.
+Illustrated with scenes from the play.
+
+A stupendous arraignment of modern marriage which has created an
+interest on the stage that is almost unparalleled. The scenes are laid
+in New York, and deal with conditions among both the rich and poor.
+
+The interest of the story turns on the day-by-day developments which
+show the young wife the price she has paid.
+
+
+Ask for compete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction
+
+Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+
+
+
+GROSSET & DUNLAP'S DRAMATIZED NOVELS
+
+Original, sincere and courageous--often amusing--the kind that are
+making theatrical history.
+
+
+_MADAME X._ By Alexandra Bisson and J. W. McConaughy. Illustrated with
+scenes from the play.
+
+A beautiful Parisienne became an outcast because her husband would not
+forgive an error of her youth. Her love for her son is the great final
+influence in her career. A tremendous dramatic success.
+
+
+_THE GARDEN OF ALLAH._ By Robert Hichens.
+
+An unconventional English woman and an inscrutable stranger meet and
+love in an oasis of the Sahara. Staged this season with magnificent cast
+and gorgeous properties.
+
+
+_THE PRINCE OF INDIA._ By Lew. Wallace.
+
+A glowing romance of the Byzantine Empire, presenting with extraordinary
+power the siege of Constantinople, and lighting its tragedy with the
+warm underglow of an Oriental romance. As a play it is a great dramatic
+spectacle.
+
+
+_TESS OF THE STORM COUNTRY._ By Grace Miller White. Illust. by Howard
+Chandler Christy.
+
+A girl from the dregs of society, loves a young Cornell University
+student, and it works startling changes in her life and the lives of
+those about her. The dramatic version is one of the sensations of the
+season.
+
+
+_YOUNG WALLINGFORD._ By George Randolph Chester. Illust. by F. R. Gruger
+and Henry Raleigh.
+
+A series of clever swindles conducted by a cheerful young man, each of
+which is just on the safe side of a State's prison offence. As
+"Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford," it is probably the most amusing expose of
+money manipulation ever seen on the stage.
+
+
+_THE INTRUSION OF JIMMY._ By P.G. Wodehouse. Illustrations by Will Grefe.
+
+Social and club life in London and New York, an amateur burglary
+adventure and a love story. Dramatized under the title of "A Gentleman
+of Leisure," it furnishes hours of laughter to the play-goers.
+
+
+Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+
+
+
+B.M. BOWER'S NOVELS
+Thrilling Western Romances
+
+Large 12 mos. Handsomely bound in cloth. Illustrated
+
+
+_CHIP, OF THE FLYING U_
+
+A breezy wholesome tale, wherein the love affairs of Chip and Della
+Whitman are charmingly and humorously told. Chip's jealousy of Dr. Cecil
+Grantham, who turns out to be a big, blue eyed young woman is very
+amusing. A clever realistic story of the American Cow-puncher.
+
+
+_THE HAPPY FAMILY_
+
+A lively and amusing story, dealing with the adventures of eighteen
+jovial, big hearted Montana cowboys. Foremost amongst them, we find
+Ananias Green, known as Andy, whose imaginative powers cause many lively
+and exciting adventures.
+
+
+_HER PRAIRIE KNIGHT_
+
+A realistic story of the plains, describing a gay party of Easterners
+who exchange a cottage at Newport for the rough homeliness of a Montana
+ranch-house. The merry-hearted cowboys, the fascinating Beatrice, and
+the effusive Sir Redmond, become living, breathing personalities.
+
+
+_THE RANGE DWELLERS_
+
+Here are everyday, genuine cowboys, just as they really exist. Spirited
+action, a range feud between two families, and a Romeo and Juliet
+courtship make this a bright, jolly, entertaining story, without a dull
+page.
+
+
+_THE LURE OF DIM TRAILS_
+
+A vivid portrayal of the experience of an Eastern author, among the
+cowboys of the West, in search of "local color" for a new novel. "Bud"
+Thurston learns many a lesson while following "the lure of the dim
+trails" but the hardest, and probably the most welcome, is that of love.
+
+
+_THE LONESOME TRAIL_
+
+"Weary" Davidson leaves the ranch for Portland, where conventional city
+life palls on him. A little branch of sage brush, pungent with the
+atmosphere of the prairie, and the recollection of a pair of large brown
+eyes soon compel his return. A wholesome love story.
+
+
+_THE LONG SHADOW_
+
+A vigorous Western story, sparkling with the free, outdoor, life of a
+mountain ranch. Its scenes shift rapidly and its actors play the game of
+life fearlessly and like men. It is a fine love story from start to
+finish.
+
+
+Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction.
+
+Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UPHILL CLIMB***
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