The Cattle-Baron's Daughter

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?”