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CHAPTER VII
PRAIRIE BELL

When Juliet Bissell rode back to the Bar T ranch after her parting with Larkin at the fork of Grass Creek, she was a decidedly more thoughtful and sober young woman than she had been at the same hour the day previous.

Although blessed with an adoring father and a rather eccentric mother, she had, for the last year, begun to feel the stirrings of a tiny discontent.

Her life was a good example of the familiar mistake made by many a wealthy cattle-owner. Her parents, realizing their crudity and lack of education, had seen to it that she should be given all the advantages denied them, and had sent her East to Chicago for eight consecutive years.

During this time, while hating the noise and confinement of the city, she had absorbed much of its glamour, and enjoyed its alluring pleasures with a keen appreciation. Music had been her chief study, and her very decided talent had opened a busy career for her had she chosen to follow it.

But Julie was true to her best instincts, and refused to consider such a thing. Her father and mother had done all in their power for her, she reasoned, and therefore it was but fair that she should return to them and make the closing years of their lives happy.

Though nothing had ever been said, the girl knew that when she had left the ranch house, even for a week’s visit with a girl friend two hundred miles away, the sun might as well have fallen from the heavens, considering the gloom that descended upon the Bar T.

It was this knowledge of their need for her that had brought her back to fulfill what she considered her greatest happiness and duty in life.

Now, a monkey cannot wear clothes, smoke cigarettes, perform before applauding audiences and return to the jungle without a certain feeling of hateful unfitness among his gibbering brethren.

No more could this wild, lovely creature of the plains become one of the most sought-after girls of Chicago’s North Shore set, and return to the painful prose of the Bar T ranch without paying the penalty.

With the glory of health and outdoor life, she had failed to realize this, but since the sudden appearance of Bud Larkin she had done little else.

He had brought back to her a sudden powerful nostalgia for the life she had once known. And had old Beef Bissell been aware of this nostalgia, he would have realized for the first time that in his desire to give his daughter everything he had created a situation that was already unfortunate and might, with very little prompting, be unhappy.

But this knowledge was not vouchsafed to him, and Julie certainly would never make it plain.

The evening after Bud’s departure, that same evening, in fact, when he was fighting toward water with his flocks, the cattleman and his daughter sat outside on the little veranda that ran across the front of the ranch house.

“That feller Larkin,” remarked Bissell, terminating a long pause. “Kind of a dude or something back East, wasn’t he?”

“That’s what the punchers would call him, father,” returned the girl gravely. “But he was never anything but a gentleman in his treatment of me.”

“I don’t know what you mean exactly by that word ’gentleman,’ Julie, but I allow that no real man ever went into raisin’ sheep.”

“Perhaps not, dear,” she said, taking his rough, ungainly hand in both of hers, “but I think there is bound to be money in it. Mr. Larkin himself says that in the end the cattle will have to give way before the sheep.”

“An’ he thought he was tellin’ you something new when he said it, too, didn’t he? Well, I’ve knowed that fact for the last five years. That’s the main reason I won’t let his animals through my range. Once they get a foothold, there’s no stoppin’ ’em. Judas! I’m tired of fightin’ for things!”

“Poor father,” and the girl’s voice was full of tenderness. “You’re not discouraged, are you, dear?”

“No, Prairie Bell, but I reckon I’m gettin’ old, an’ I can’t get up the fight I used to. I thought I had my hands full with the rustlers, but now with the sheep comin’ – well, between you and me, little girl, I wish I had somebody to stand up and take the licks.”

“There’s Mike; he certainly can give and take a few.”

“Yes, of course I’ve got Mike, but, when you’re all done, he’s only a foreman, an’ his interest don’t go much beyond his seventy-five a month an’ grub. Yet – by George!” He sat suddenly erect and slapped his thigh with his disengaged hand.

“What is it?”

“Oh, nothin’.” They talked on in the affectionate, intimate way that had always characterized their relations since Julie had been a girl just big enough to listen to involved harangues about cattle without actually going to sleep. In the course of an hour Bissell suddenly asked:

“Did you ever think of marryin’, Prairie Bell?”

“If thinking ever helped any, I would have been a Mormon by this time.”

“Well, you are growed up, ain’t you?” and Bissell spoke in the wondering tone of a man who has just realized a self-evident fact “Fancy my little girl old enough to marry! How old are you, anyhow? ’Bout eighteen?”

“Twenty-five, you dear, old goose. Eighteen! The idea.”

“Well, twenty-five, then. Of course, Julie, when I die I will leave this place to you, and that’s what made me think about your marryin’. I want a good, sharp man to fight fer my cows an’ my range, a man that knows it and could make a success of it, an’ yet wouldn’t care because it was in your name.”

“Would you mind if I loved him a little bit, too?” asked the girl, with elaborately playful sarcasm.

“Bless you, no. Love him all you want to, but I ’low you couldn’t love a man very long who didn’t have all them qualifications I mentioned. I figger love out somethin’ like this. First there’s a rockbed of ability, then a top soil of decency, an’ out o’ these two, admiration kind o’ grows like corn. Of course you always grind up the corn and soak it with sentiment; then you’ve got mush. An’ the trouble with most people is they only think of the mush an’ forget the rock an’ the top soil.”

“Why, you old philosopher!” cried the girl, laughing and squeezing his big shoulders. “You’re awfully clever, really.” Which remark brought a confused but pleased blush to Bissell’s hard face that had become wonderfully soft and tender during this hour with his daughter.

“Now, see here,” went on the girl severely, “I think there’s something back of all this talk about marriage. What is it?”

Bissell looked at her, startled, not having expected to encounter feminine intuition.

“Nothin’, only I wish you could marry somebody that’d look out fer you the way I mentioned. Then I could die happy, though I don’t expect to be on that list fer a long while.”

“Anybody in mind?” asked Julie banteringly.

“Well, not exactly,” hesitated her father, with another sharp glance. “But I allow I could dig up one if I tried very hard.”

“Go ahead and try.”

“Well, now there’s Billy Speaker over on the Circle Arrow, as gentle a man for a blond as I ever see.”

“I’ve only met him twice in my life,” remarked the girl. “Try again.”

“There’s Red Tarken, foreman on the M Square. He’d be good to yuh, I know, and he’s a hum-dinger about cows.”

“I am glad he has one qualification aside from his red hair,” put in Julie seriously. “However, I am afraid that as a husband Red would be about as steady as a bronco saddled for the first time after the winter feeding. He’d better have free range as long as he lives. Once more, father.”

“Well, see here, Julie, it seems to me you could do a lot worse than take our own Mike Stelton. I’ve never thought of it much before, but to-night it sort of occurred to me an’ – ”

Juliet Bissell broke into an uncontrollable fit of laughter, at which her father fixed her with a regard as wondering as it was hurt. His cherished inspiration so tactfully approached had burst like a soap-bubble under the gale of Juliet’s merriment.

“Bud was right, after all,” said the girl, after her nervous outbreak. “He told me Mike had some silly hope or other, and I believe Stelton has given you absent treatment until you have made this suggestion. Father, he’s just as preposterous as the others.”

“I don’t agree with you,” contended Bissell stubbornly. “Mike is faithful, and has been for years. He knows the ins and outs of the business, and is willing to take the hard knocks that I’m getting tired of. Then there’s another thing. I could be half-blind an’ still see what Mike has been wanting these last five years.”

Juliet suddenly rose to her feet, all the laughter gone from her eyes and her heart. With a feeling of frightened helplessness she realized that her father was serious.

“Are you taking Mike’s part against me?” she asked calmly.

“Well, I still don’t see why you couldn’t marry him.”

“You’ve forgotten the mush, father, but that isn’t all. There’s something different about Mike lately, something I have never noticed before. His eye seems shifty; he avoids all the family. If I didn’t know him so well, I should think he was a criminal. Leaving out the fact that I don’t love him, and that the very thought of his ever touching me makes me shudder, this distrust of him would be enough to block any such arrangements. Why” – and her lip curled scornfully – “I would marry Bud Larkin a hundred times rather than Mike Stelton once.”

“What!”

Bissell rose to his feet with the quiet, amazed exclamation. He could hardly credit his ears.

“Marry that dirty sheepman?” he continued in a tense, even voice. “I’d like to know what put that crazy notion in yore head. Don’t tell me you are in love with that dude.”

“No, I am not,” answered the girl just as evenly, “but I may as well tell you frankly, that he is the only man within a radius of three hundred miles who has certain things I must have in a husband. I’m sorry if I displease you, father!” she cried, going to him affectionately, “but I could never love any one not of our class.”

That diplomatic “our” did not deceive Bissell. For the first time he saw that the greatest treasure of his whole life had grown beyond him; that there were needs and ideals in her existence of which he had but the faintest inkling, and that in her way she was as much of a “dude” as the man she had mentioned.

He was encountering the seemingly cruel fate of parents who glorify their children by their own immolation, and who watch those same children pass up and out of their humble range of vision and understanding nevermore to return. Henceforth he could never see his daughter without feeling his own lack of polish.

Such a moment of realization is bitter on both sides, but especially for the one who has given all and can receive less in return than he had before the giving. The iron of this bitterness entered into Beef Bissell’s soul as he stood there, silent, on the low, rickety veranda under the starlight of the plains.

With the queer vagary of a mind at great tension, his senses became particularly acute for a single moment. He saw the silver-pierced vault of the sky, smelled the fragrance of the plains borne on the gentle wind, and heard the rustle of the dappled cottonwoods and the howling of the distant coyotes.

Then he came back to the reality of the moment, and exhibited the simple greatness that had always been his in dealings with his daughter. He slipped his heavy arm across her shoulders and drew her to him.

“Never mind, Prairie Bell,” he said gently. “You know best in everything. Do as your heart dictates.” He sighed and added: “I wish I was your mother to-night.”

CHAPTER VIII
FOR REVENGE

Breakfast next morning at the Bar T ranch was disturbed by the arrival of a cowboy on a lathering, wicked-eyed pony who announced to Stelton that Bud Larkin and his sheep had crossed over into the range. What then occurred is already known, and after Bissell had returned from his final parley with Larkin, he retired sullenly into himself to rage silently.

In his perturbed state of mind, the sheepman’s double-edged remark about clearing out had had but one meaning, and he took it for granted that Larkin had been awed or frightened into the better part of valor. This was a partial relief, but he foresaw that although this danger to his cattle was averted, it was merely the first of many such struggles that he might expect.

Human desires, particularly those of great urgency, are of such domination that they take little thought for anything but themselves, except in persons of particularly adroit mind. It was Stelton’s misfortune, therefore, to embark on an ill-timed conversation with his chief.

The foreman for ten years had secretly adored Juliet Bissell with all the intensity of a soul made single of purpose by the vast, brooding immensity of his surroundings. So long as he might be near her, serving her in many little ways, he had been, in a manner, content with the situation.

But the sudden appearance of Larkin and the enthusiastic renewal of a former intimacy had spurred Stelton to seek some sort of a definite understanding. Bissell’s retirement to the veranda after the noonday meal was shortly followed by Stelton’s appearance there, timorous and abashed.

The interview had been short and not very satisfactory. The cowman, remembering with considerable pain the conversation with his daughter, told his employé frankly that he had better give up any such ideas as evidently possessed him. Stelton, who had with some right formerly felt he might count on the favorable attitude of his chief, was astounded, and took the venom of the curt refusal to heart.

Retiring without betraying his emotion, he had resolved to speak to the girl herself, and that same afternoon asked permission to accompany her on her daily ride across the prairies, a thing not unusual with him.

Juliet, although she wished to be alone, consented, and at four o’clock they set out, unobserved by Bissell.

It was not until they had turned their horses homeward that Stelton spoke, almost tongue-tied by the emotions that rent him, alternate waves of fear and hope.

“Miss Julie,” he began, “I allow I’ve known you a long while.”

“Yes, Mike, you have.”

“An’ I allow that I would be plumb miserable if you ever went away from here again.”

“Thank you, Mike; I should miss you, too,” replied the girl civilly, growing uneasy at the unusual trend of the man’s speech, halting and indefinite though it was.

“Miss Julie, I ain’t no hand at fine talk, but I want to ask yuh if you will marry me? I’ve thought about it a lot, an’ though I ain’t noways good enough fer yuh, I’d try to make yuh happy.”

Juliet, taken aback by the suddenness of this declaration, particularly after her talk with her father, remained silent.

“Take yore time, Miss Julie,” pleaded Stelton, riding closer to her. “I ain’t in no hurry.”

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’ve said, Mike,” she replied slowly. “I’ve always liked you and I always will, but I don’t love you, and I would sooner tell you now than keep you in suspense. I can’t marry you.”

Stelton bit his lip and his dark face grew even blacker with rage at the futility of his position. With anyone other than Juliet Bissell, perhaps, he realized that insistent pressure of his suit might have favorable results. But this cool, calm girl offered no opportunity for argument or hope.

“Mebbe if yuh waited a bit, yuh might think different about it,” he ventured nevertheless. She shook her head.

“No, Mike, I wouldn’t, I am sure. If you care for me you will never mention this again. And for my part, I shall always remember what you have said to me to-day. It is a sweet thing for a girl to know that a man loves her.”

Such gracious refusals are effective with most men, both because they succeed in closing a tender subject and at the same time leave an unwounded pride. But Stelton was not the ordinary type of lover.

Repressed emotions in somber minds feed and grow fat upon their own substance, and it was inconceivable that Stelton’s genuine though distorted love, an abnormal product of ten long years, should be dismissed thus with a few words.

“Why won’t you marry me?” he demanded, looking angrily into her level, brown eyes.

“I have told you I did not love you. That is the reason and the best reason in the world. Now I ask you to drop the subject.”

“Love somebody else, I suppose,” he sneered, baring his teeth in a fatal attempt at an ugly smile.

“If I do, it is none of your business,” she replied, her eyes beginning to blaze.

“That dude sheepman, I allow. He’s a gilt-edged vanderpoop, he is! But I’d hate to be in his boots, if you want to know it.”

“Look here, Mike Stelton,” and Juliet drew her horse abruptly to a stop, “either you say nothing more on this subject or I shall tell my father what you have done this afternoon when we reach home.”

Instantly the man saw he had gone too far, and, with a quickness born of hatred, immediately changed his front.

“I was only thinkin’ of protectin’ you,” he muttered, “and I’m sorry I was ornery about things. That feller Larkin is a bad lot, that’s all. He wouldn’t be out here if he wasn’t.”

Perhaps it was that Juliet had given a greater place to Larkin in her thoughts than she realized; perhaps his eloquent defense of wool-growing had not been sufficient explanation for his unheralded appearance on the range. Whatever the reason, the girl rose to the bait like a trout when the ice has left the rivers.

“What do you mean by that?” she demanded.

“You remember that feller Caldwell that rode in late to supper the night Larkin come?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I heard him blackmail Larkin for five hundred dollars back by the corral fence. An’ Larkin knew what he had to do as soon as Caldwell showed up. Didn’t yuh see him turn yaller at the table?”

As a matter of fact Larkin’s perturbation at that time had been puzzling and inexplicable to Juliet. Also the disappearance of the two men immediately after supper had mystified her. But without admitting this to Stelton she asked:

“What was it all about?”

“I don’t know exactly, Miss Julie, but it worked in somethin’ he done back in Chicago a year or so ago. From what I heard ’em say, Larkin just dodged the calaboose. Now there ain’t no disgrace in that – that’s really credit – but that don’t clear him of the crime noways. Why, I even heard ’em talk about two thousand dollars that Larkin give this Caldwell a couple of years back.”

“How did you learn all this?” she asked.

“I was a goin’ back to the corral for a rope I left hangin’ on a post there, an’ I heard ’em talkin’.”

“And you listened, I suppose,” remarked Julie contemptuously.

“Mebbe I did,” he retorted, stung by her tone. “But you can be thankful for it. I’d be plenty mad if you throw’d yourself away on a man like-a-that. A hoss that’ll kill one puncher’ll kill another. Same with a man.”

“What are you saying, Mike?” cried the girl, frightened out of her attitude of aloof reserve. “Kill a man! He’s never killed a man, has he?”

“He didn’t say so in so many words, no ma’am, but that talk o’ their’n was mighty suspicious.”

Unwittingly Stelton had struck his hardest blow. To him, as to other rough and ready men in the West, life was a turbulent existence conducted with as few hasty funerals as was absolutely necessary. But in the girl who had absorbed the finer feelings of a civilized community, the horror of murder was deep-rooted.

She knew that to a man in Larkin’s former position the slightest divergence from the well-defined tenets of right and wrong was inexcusable. Crime, she knew, was a result of poverty, necessity, self-defense or lack of control, and she also knew that Bud Larkin had never been called upon to fall back on any of these. How much of truth, therefore, was there in Stelton’s innuendoes?

“Would you swear on the Bible that you overheard what you have told me?” she asked suddenly.

“Yes, ma’am, I shore would,” Stelton answered with solemn conviction.

There was no question now in her mind but that Larkin was paying the piper for some unsavory fling of which she had heard nothing. She did not for a moment believe that the affair could be as serious as Stelton wished her to imagine; but she was sorely troubled, nevertheless, for she had always cared for Larkin in a happy, wholehearted way.

Many times since her final coming West she had remembered with a secret tenderness and pride that this wealthy and popular young man had been willing to trust his life to her. It was one of the sweetest recollections of those other far-off days.

Now, because the thought of Stelton’s revelations was unbearable to her she resolutely put it from her until a time when she could mourn alone over this shattered illusion.

“Thank you, Mike, for telling me this,” she said gently. “Please never say anything further about it.”

And Stelton, elated that his plan of revenge had worked so well, smiled with satisfaction and relapsed into silence during the remainder of the ride home.

All of these events are set down here with some pretense at detail to indicate the important trend of affairs after Larkin had said a more-or-less indifferent good-by to Juliet Bissell at the fork of Grass Creek. While he was wrestling with material problems, these others that destiny had suddenly joined to him were undergoing mental disturbances in which he was the principal though unconscious factor. And this unconscious prominence was to be the main reason for what next occurred.

It was perhaps noon of the day following Larkin’s capture by the rustlers, when from a point directly east of the ranch house a cowboy appeared, riding at a hard gallop. Contrary to most fictions, cowboys rarely ever urge their ponies beyond a trot, the only occasions being the round-up, the stampede, the drive, or when something serious has occurred.

Mike Stelton saw the puncher from a distance and walked to the corral to meet him. Jerking his pony back on his haunches, the rider leaped from his back before the animal had fairly come to a stop.

“Mike, we’ve been tricked!” he cried. “That whole two thousand head of sheep are tracking north as fast as they can go far over east on the range, beyond the hills.”

“What!” cried the foreman, hardly able to credit his ears. “The boys down on watch at the Big Horn swore they had scattered the flock last night when Larkin started to run them north on the range.”

“Well, they swore wrong, then, for I’ve just come from where I seen ’em. I was over back of them hogbacks and buttes lookin’ for strays and mavericks when along come them muttons in a cloud of dust that would choke a cow. I allow that darned sheepman has made us look like a lot of tenderfeet, Mike.”

Stelton at this intelligence fairly gagged on his own fury. Larkin had scored on him again. The two were joined at this moment by Bissell who had noted the excitement at the corral. When apprised of what had happened, the cowman’s face went as dark with anger as that of his foreman.

Beef Bissell was not accustomed to the sensation of being outwitted in anything, and the knowledge that the sheep were nearly half-way up the range put him almost beside himself.

For a few moments the trio looked at one another speechless. Then Bissell voiced the determination of them all.

“By the devil’s mare!” he swore. “I won’t be beaten by any sheepman that ever walked. Stelton, how many men will be in to-night?”

“Fifteen.”

“Get ’em and bring ’em to me as soon as they come.”

While the foreman went off about this business Bissell learned from Chuck, the cowboy, just where he had seen the sheep last, how fast they were traveling, and how far he calculated they would go before bedding down for the night.

“I reckon the outfit ought to camp somewhere about Little Creek,” said Chuck. “That’s runnin’ water.”

“And how far beyond that is Little River?”

“Two miles more or less.”

“Fine. Wait around till the rest of the boys come in, Chuck. Oh, by the way, how near are the sheep to our eastern herd of cows?”

“Five miles more will bring ’em to the range the cows are on now.”

An hour before supper the rest of the punchers began to come in from riding the range and rounding up strays. Before they were permitted a mouthful, however, Bissell went out to the bunk house with Stelton.

“Boys,” he said, “which of you was down at the Big Horn last night an’ turned them sheep back?”

A man spoke up and then two more who had been left on guard in the vicinity.

“How many did you scatter?”

“Dunno, boss,” replied the first judicially. “From the noise they made I allow there was at least a thousand.”

“Well, I bet you a month’s wage there wasn’t more’n a hundred,” said Bissell, glaring at the puncher.

“Won’t take yer, boss,” returned the other calmly. “Why?”

“Because practically the whole flock is beddin’ down at Little Creek now. Chuck seen ’em. Now I want all you fellers to get supper an’ then rope an’ saddle a fresh hoss. There is shore goin’ to be some doin’s to-night.”