The Cattle-Baron's Daughter
- -
- 100%
- +
Early next morning Breckenridge and the messenger drove away, and rather more than a week later Fräulein Muller, whom the former had taken to attend on the homesteader’s wife, arrived one night at Fremont ranch. She came in, red-cheeked, unconcerned, and shapeless, in Muller’s fur coat, and quietly brushed the dusty snow from her dress before she sat down as far as possible from the stove.
“I a message from Mrs. Harper bring,” she said. “Last night two men to Harper’s house have come, and one now and then will to the other talk in our tongue. He is one, I think, who will destroy everything. Then they talk with Harper long in the stable, and to-day Harper with his rifle rides away. Mrs. Harper, who has fears for her husband, would have you know that to-night, or to-morrow he will go with other men to the Cedar Ranch.”
Grant was on his feet in a moment, and nodded to Breckenridge, who rose almost as quickly and glanced at him as he moved towards the door.
“Yes,” he said, “there’s some tough hoeing to be done now. You’ll drive Miss Muller back to Harper’s, and then turn out the boys. They’re to come on to Cedar as fast as they can.”
“And you?” said Breckenridge quietly.
“I’m going there now.”
“You know the cattle-men would do almost anything to get their hands on you.”
“Oh, yes,” Grant said wearily. “Aren’t you wasting time?”
Breckenridge was outside the next moment, but before he had the sleigh ready Grant lead a saddled horse out of the stable, and vanished at a gallop down the beaten trail. It rang dully beneath the hoofs, but the frost that had turned its surface dusty lessened the chance of stumbling, and it was not until the first league had been left behind and he turned at the forking beneath a big birch bluff that he tightened his grip on the bridle. There it was different, for the trail no longer led wide and trampled hard across the level prairie, but wound, an almost invisible riband, through tortuous hollow and over swelling rise, so narrow that in places the hoofs broke with a sharp crackling through the frozen crust of snow. That, Larry knew, might, by crippling the beast he rode, stop him then and there, and he pushed on warily, dazzled at times by the light of the sinking moon which the glistening white plain flung back into his eyes.
It was bitter cold, and utterly still for the birds had gone south long ago, and there was no beast that ventured from his lair to face the frost that night. Dulled as the trample of hoofs was, it rang about him stridently, and now and then he could hear it roll repeated along the slope of a rise. The hand upon the bridle had lost all sense of feeling, his moccasined feet tingled painfully, and a white fringe crackled under his hand when, warned by the nipping of his ears, he drew the big fur cap down further over them. It is not difficult to lose the use of one’s members for life by incautiously exposing them to the cold of the prairie, while a frost that may be borne by the man covered to the chin with great sleigh robes, is not infrequently insupportable to the one on horseback.
Grant, however, took precautions, as it were mechanically, for his mind was too busy to feel in its full keenness the sting of the frost, and while his eyes were fixed on the blur of the trail his thoughts were far away, and it was by an almost unconscious effort he restrained the impatient horse. Because speed was essential, he dare risk no undue haste. He was not the only rider out on the waste that night, and the shiver that went through him was not due to the cold as he pictured the other horsemen pressing on towards Cedar Ranch. Of the native-born he had little fear, and he fancied but few of them would be there. There was even less to dread from any of English birth, but he feared the insensate alien, and still more the human vultures that had gathered about the scene of strife. They had neither race, nor creed, nor aspirations, but only an unhallowed lust for the fruits of rapine.
He could also picture Hetty, sitting slight and dark-eyed at the piano, as he had often seen her, and Torrance listening with a curious softening of his lean face to the voice that had long ago wiled Larry’s heart away from him. That led him back to the days when, loose-tressed and flushed in face, Hetty had ridden beside him in the track of the flying coyote, and he had seen her eyes glisten at his praise. There were other times when, sitting far apart from any of their kind, with the horses tethered beside them in the shadow of a bluff, she had told him of her hopes and ambitions, but half-formed then, and to silence his doubts sung him some simple song. Larry had travelled through Europe, to look about him, as he naïvely said, but it was what reminded him of that voice he had found most pleasure in when he listened to famous sopranos and great cathedral choirs.
Still, he had expected little, realizing, as he had early done, that Hetty was not for him. It was enough to be with her when she had any need of him and to dream of her when absent, while it was only when he heard she had found her hopes were vain that he clutched at the very faint but alluring possibility that now her heart might turn to him. Then, had come the summons of duty, and when he had to choose which side he would take, Larry, knowing what it would cost him, had with the simple loyalty which had bound him as Hetty’s servant without hope of reward, decided on what he felt was right. He was merely one of the many quiet, steadfast men whom the ostentatious sometimes mistake for fools, until the nation they form the backbone of rises to grapple with disaster or emergency. They are not confined to any one country; for his comrade, Muller, the placid, unemphatic Teuton, had been at Worth and Sedan.
Though none of these memories delayed him a second, he brushed them from him when the moon dipped. Darkness swooped down on the prairie, and it is the darkness that suits rapine best; now, that he could see the trail no longer, he shook the bridle, and the pace grew faster. The powdery snow whirled behind him, the long, dim levels flitted past, until at last, with heart thumping, he rode up a rise from whose crest he could see Cedar Range. A great weight lifted from him – the row of windows were blinking beside the dusky bluff! But even as he checked the horse the ringing of a rifle came portentously out of the stillness. With a gasp he drove in his heels and swept at a furious gallop down the slope.
XIII
UNDER FIRE
It was getting late and Torrance evidently becoming impatient, when Clavering, who had ignored the latter fact as long as he considered it advisable, glanced at Hetty with a smile. He stood by the piano in the big hall at Cedar Range, and she sat on the music-stool turning over one of the new songs he had brought her from Chicago.
“I am afraid I will have to go,” he said. “Your father is not fond of waiting.”
Though Hetty was not looking at him directly, she saw his face, which expressed reluctance still more plainly than his voice did; but just then Torrance turned to them.
“Aren’t you through with those songs yet, Clavering?” he said.
“I’m afraid I have made Miss Torrance tired,” said Clavering. “Still, we have music enough left us for another hour or two.”
“Then why can’t you stay on over to-morrow and get a whole night at it? I want you just now.”
Clavering glanced at Hetty, and, though she made no sign, fancied that she was not quite pleased with her father.
“Am I to tell him I will?” he asked.
Hetty understood what prompted him, but she would not commit herself. “You will do what suits you,” she said. “When my father asks any one to Cedar I really don’t often make myself unpleasant to him.”
Clavering’s eyes twinkled as he walked towards the older man, while Hetty crossed the room to where Miss Schuyler sat. Both apparently became absorbed in the books Clavering had brought, but they could hear the conversation of the men, and it became evident later that one of them listened. Torrance had questions to ask, and Clavering answered them.
“Well,” he said, “I had a talk with Purbeck which cost us fifty dollars. His notion was that the Bureau hadn’t a great deal to go upon if they meant to do anything further about dispossessing us. In fact, he quite seemed to think that as the legislature had a good many other worries just now, it would suit them to let us slide. He couldn’t recommend anything better than getting our friends in the lobbies to keep the screw on them until the election.”
Torrance looked thoughtful. “That means holding out for another six months, any way. Did you hear anything at the settlement?”
“Yes. Fleming wouldn’t sell the homestead-boys anything after they broke in his store. Steele’s our man, and it was Carter they got their provisions from. Now, Carter had given Jackson a bond for two thousand dollars when he first came in, and as he hadn’t made his payments lately, and we have our thumb on Jackson, the Sheriff has closed down on his store. He’ll be glad to light out with the clothes he stands in when we’re through with him.”
Torrance nodded grim approval. “Larry wouldn’t sit tight.”
“No,” said Clavering. “He wired right through to Chicago for most of a carload of flour and eatables, but that car got billed wrong somehow, and now they’re looking for her up and down the side-tracks of the Pacific slope. Larry’s men will be getting savage. It is not nice to be hungry when there’s forty degrees of frost.”
Torrance laughed softly. “You have fixed the thing just as I would.”
Then his daughter stood up with a little flush in her face. “You could not have meant that, father?” she said.
“Well,” said Torrance, drily, “I quite think I did, but there’s a good deal you can’t get the hang of, Hetty – and it’s getting very late.”
He looked at his daughter steadily, and Flora Schuyler looked at all of them, and remembered the picture – Torrance sitting lean and sardonic with the lamplight on his face, Clavering watching the girl with a curious little smile, and Hetty standing very slim and straight, with something in the poise of her shapely head that had its meaning to Miss Schuyler. Then with a “Good-night” to Torrance, and a half-ironical bend of the head to Clavering, she turned to her companion, and they went out together before he could open the door for them.
Five minutes later Hetty tapped at Miss Schuyler’s door. The pink tinge still showed in her cheeks, and her eyes had a suspicious brightness in them.
“Flo,” she said, “you’ll go back to New York right off. I’m sorry I brought you here. This place isn’t fit for you.”
“I am quite willing, so long as you are coming too.”
“I can’t. Isn’t that plain? This thing is getting horrible – but I have to see it through. It was Clavering fixed it, any way.”
“Put it away until to-morrow,” Flora Schuyler advised. “It will be easier to see whether you have any cause to be angry then.”
Hetty turned towards her with a flash in her eyes. “I know just what you mean, and it would be nicer just to look as if I never felt anything, as some of those English folks you were fond of did; but I can’t. I wasn’t made that way. Still, I’m not going to apologize for my father. He is Torrance of Cedar, and I’m standing in with him – but if I were a man I’d go down and whip Clavering. I could almost have shaken him when he wanted to stay here and tried to make me ask him.”
“Well,” said Flora Schuyler, quietly, “I am going to stay with you; but I don’t quite see what Clavering has done.”
“No?” said Hetty. “Aren’t you just a little stupid, Flo? Now, he has made me ashamed – horribly – and I was proud of the men we had in this country. He’s starving the women and the little children; there are quite a few of them lying in freezing shanties and sod-huts out there in the snow. It’s just awful to be hungry with the temperature at fifty below.”
Miss Schuyler shivered. It was very warm and cosy sitting there, behind double casements, beside a glowing stove; but there had been times when, wrapped in costly furs and great sleigh-robes and generously fed, she had felt her flesh shrink from the cold of the prairie.
“But they have Mr. Grant to help them,” she said.
Even in her agitation Hetty was struck by something which suggested unquestioning faith in her companion’s tone.
“You believe he could do something,” she said.
“Of course! You know him better than I do, Hetty.”
“Well,” said Hetty, “though he has made me vexed with him, I am proud of Larry; and there’s just one thing he can’t do. That is, to see women and children hungry while he has a dollar to buy them food with. Oh, I know who was going to pay for the provisions that came from Chicago that Clavering got the railroad men to send the wrong way, and if Larry had only been with us he would have been splendid. As it is, if he feeds them in spite of Clavering, I could ’most forgive him everything.”
“Are you quite sure that you have a great deal to forgive?”
Hetty, instead of resenting the question, stretched out her hand appealingly. “Don’t be clever, Flo. Come here quite close, and be nice to me. This thing is worrying me horribly; and I’m ashamed of myself and – of everybody. Oh, I know I’m a failure. I couldn’t sing to please folks and I sent Jake Cheyne away, while now, when the trouble’s come, I’m too mean even to stand behind my father as I meant to do. Flo, you’ll stay with me. I want you.”
Miss Schuyler, who had not seen Hetty in this mood before, petted her, though she said very little, for she felt that the somewhat unusual abasement might, on the whole, be beneficial to her companion. So there was silence in the room, broken only by the snapping of the stove and the faint moaning of the bitter wind about the lonely building, while Miss Schuyler sat somewhat uncomfortably on the arm of Hetty’s chair with the little dusky head pressed against her shoulder. Hetty could not see her face or its gravity might have astonished her. Miss Schuyler had not spoken quite the truth when, though she had only met him three times, she admitted that Hetty knew Larry Grant better than she did. In various places and different guises Flora Schuyler had seen the type of manhood he stood for, but had never felt the same curious stirring of sympathy this grave, brown-faced man had aroused in her.
A hound bayed savagely, and Hetty lifted her head. “Strangers!” she said. “Bowie knows all the cattle-boys. Who can be coming at this hour?”
The question was not unwarranted, for it was close on midnight, but Flora Schuyler did not answer. She could hear nothing but the moan of the wind, the ranch was very still, until once more there came an angry growl. Then, out of the icy darkness followed the sound of running feet, a hoarse cry, and a loud pounding at the outer door.
Hetty stood up, trembling and white in the face, but very straight. “Don’t be frightened, Flo,” she said. “We’ll whip them back to the place they came from.”
“Who is it?” asked Miss Schuyler.
Again the building rang to the blows upon the outer door; but Hetty’s voice was even, and a little contemptuous.
“The rustlers!” she said.
There was a trampling below, and a corridor beneath the girls vibrated with the footsteps of hurrying men, while Torrance’s voice rose faintly through the din; a very unpleasant silence, until somebody rapped upon the door. Flora Schuyler felt her heart throbbing painfully, and gasped when Torrance looked in. His lean face was very stern.
“Put the lamp out, and sit well away from the window,” he said.
“No,” said Hetty in a voice Miss Schuyler had not heard before; “we are coming down.”
Torrance considered for a second, and then smiled significantly as he glanced at his daughter’s face. “Well, you would be ’most as safe down there – and I guess it was born in you,” he said.
The girls followed him down the cedar stairway and into the hall. A lamp burning very low stood on a table in one corner, but the big room was dim and shadowy, and the girls could scarcely see the five or six men standing near, not in front of, one open window. Framed by its log casing the white prairie faded into the dimness under a smear of indigo sky. Here and there a star shone in it with intense brilliancy, and though the great stove roared in the draught it seemed to Miss Schuyler that a destroying cold came in. Already she felt her hands grow numb.
“Where are the boys, Hetty?” she asked.
“In at the railroad, most of them. One or two at the back. Now, I’ll show you how to load a rifle, Flo.”
Miss Schuyler followed her to the table, where several rifles were lying beside a big box of cartridges, and Hetty took one of them up.
“You push this slide back, and drop the cartridge in,” she said. “Now it has gone into this pipe here, and you drop in another. Get hold, and push them in until you can’t get in any more. Why – it can’t hurt you – your hands are shaking!”
There was a rattle, and the venomous, conical-headed cartridge slipped from Miss Schuyler’s fingers. She had never handled one before, and it seemed to her that a horrible, evil potency was bound up in that insignificant roll of metal. Then, while the rifle click-clacked in Hetty’s hands, Torrance stood by the window holding up a handkerchief. He called out sharply, and there was a murmur of derision in the darkness outside.
“Come out!” said a hoarse voice. “We’ll give you a minute. Then you can have a sleigh to drive to perdition in.”
The laughter that followed frightened Miss Schuyler more than any threats would have done. It seemed wholly horrible, and there was a hint in it of the fierce exultation of men driven to desperation.
“That wouldn’t suit me,” said Torrance. “What do you want here, any way?”
“Food,” somebody answered. “You wanted to starve us, Torrance, and rode us out when we went chopping stove wood in the bluff. Well, you don’t often miss your supper at the Range, and there’s quite enough of it to make a decent blaze. You haven’t much of that minute left. Are you coming out?”
“No,” said Torrance briefly, and, dropping the handkerchief, moved from the window.
The next moment there was a flash in the darkness, and something came whirring into the room. The girls could not see it, but they heard the thud it struck with and saw a chip start from the cedar panelling. Then, there was a rush of feet, and twice a red streak blazed from the window. A man jerked a cartridge, which fell with a rattle from his rifle, and a little blue smoke blew across the room. Flora Schuyler shivered as the acrid fumes of it drifted about her, but Hetty stood very straight, with one hand on the rim of the table.
“Got nobody, and they’re into the shadow now,” said a man disgustedly, and Flora Schuyler, seeing his face, which showed a moment fierce and brutish as he turned, felt that she could not forget it, and most illogically hated him.
For almost a minute there was silence. Nobody moved in the big room, where the shadows wavered as the faint flickering lamplight rose and fell, and there was no sound but the doleful wail of the night wind from the prairie. It was broken by a dull crash that was repeated a moment later, and the men looked at one another.
“They’ve brought their axes along,” said somebody. “If there’s any of the Michigan boys around they’ll drive that door in.”
“Watch it, two of you,” said Torrance. “Jake, can’t you get a shot at them?”
A man crouched by the open window, which was some little height from the ground, his arms upon the sill, and his head showing against the darkness just above them. He was, it seemed to Miss Schuyler, horribly deliberate, and she held her breath while she watched, as if fascinated, the long barrel move a little. Then its muzzle tilted suddenly, a train of red sparks blew out, and something that hummed through the smoke struck the wall. The man dropped below the sill, and called hoarsely through the crash of the falling axes.
“Got the pillar instead of him. There’s a streak of light behind me. Well, I’ll try for him again.”
Hetty emptied the box of cartridges, and, with hands that did not seem to tremble, stood it up before the lamp. Once more the man crouched by the window, a blurred, huddled object with head down on the rifle stock, and there was another streak of flame. Then, the thud of the axes suddenly ceased, and he laughed a little discordant laugh.
“Got him this time. The other one’s lit out,” he said.
Miss Schuyler shuddered, and clutched at the table, while, though Hetty was very still, she fancied she heard a stifled gasp. The silence was even more disconcerting than the pounding of the axes or the crash of the firing. Flora Schuyler could see the shadowy figures about the window, and just distinguish some of them. The one standing close in front of it, as though disdainful of the risk he ran, was Torrance; the other, who now and then moved lithely, and once rested a rifle on the sill, was Clavering; another, the man who had fired the last shot; but the rest were blurred, formless objects, a little darker than the cedar panelling. Now and then the streak of radiance widened behind the box, and the cold grew numbing as the icy wind flowed in.
Suddenly a voice rose up outside. “You can’t keep us out, Torrance. We’re bound to get in; but I’ll try to hold the boys now if you’ll let us have our wounded man, and light out quietly.”
Torrance laughed. “You are not making much of a show, and I’m quite ready to do the best I can,” he said. “If there’s any life in him we want your man for the Sheriff.”
Then he turned to the others. “I was ’most forgetting the fellow outside there. We’ll hold them off from the window while you bring him in.”
It appeared horribly risky, but Torrance spoke with a curious unconcernedness, and Clavering laughed as, signing to two men, he prepared to do his bidding. There was a creaking and rattling, and the great door at one end of the hall swung open, and Flora Schuyler, staring at the darkness, expected to see a rush of shadowy figures out of it. But she saw only the blurred outline of two men who stooped and dragged something in, and then the door swung to again.
They lifted their burden higher. Torrance, approaching the table, took up the lamp, and Miss Schuyler had a passing glimpse of a hanging head and a drawn grey face as they tramped past her heavily. She opened her blue lips and closed them again, for she was dazed with cold, and the cry that would have been a relief to her never came. It was several minutes later when Torrance’s voice rose from by the stove.
“We’ll leave him here in the meanwhile, where he can’t freeze,” he said. “Shot right through the shoulder, but there’s no great bleeding. The cold would stop it.”
Hetty was at her father’s side the next moment. “Flo,” she said, “we have to do something now.”
Torrance waved them back. “The longer that man stops as he is, the better chances he’s going to have.” He glanced towards the window. “Boys, can you see what they’re doing now?”
“Hauling out prairie hay,” said Clavering. “They’ve broken into the store, and from what one fellow shouted they’ve found the kerosene.”
Torrance said nothing whatever, and his silence was significant. Listening with strained attention, Flora Schuyler could hear a faint hum of voices, and now and then vague sounds amidst a patter of hurrying steps. They told her very little, but the tension in the attitude of the half-seen men had its meaning. It was evident that their assailants purposed to burn them out.
Ten minutes passed, as it were interminably, and still nobody moved. The voices had grown a little louder, and there was a rattle as though men unseen behind the buildings were dragging up a wagon. Suddenly a rhythmic drumming came softly through it, and Clavering glanced at Torrance.
“Somebody riding this way at a gallop,” he said.
The beat of hoofs grew louder. The men without seemed to be running to and fro, and shouting to one another, while those in the hall clustered about the window, reckless of the risk they ran. Standing a little behind them Hetty saw a dim mounted figure sweep out of the waste of snow, and a hoarse shout went up. “Hold on! Throw down that rifle! It’s Larry Grant.”
XIV
TORRANCE’S WARNING
In another moment the horseman pulled up, and sat motionless in his saddle with his head turned towards the house. Hetty could see him silhouetted, shapeless and shadowy in his big fur-coat, against the whiteness of the snow, and the relief she felt betrayed itself in her voice as she turned to Miss Schuyler.