The Cattle-Baron's Daughter

“I couldn’t,” he said gently. “It was perhaps worth very little; but it was all I had, and – since that day by the river – I never asked for anything in return. It was very hard not to now and then, but I saw that you had only kindness to spare for me.”

“Then why do you talk of it again?”

“I think,” said Grant very quietly, “it is different now. After to-night nothing can be quite the same again. Hetty, dear, if you had missed me and I had ridden on to the bridge – ”

“Stop!” said the girl with a shiver. “I dare not think of it. Larry, can’t you see that just now you must not talk in that strain to me?”

“But there is a difference?” and Grant looked at her steadily.

For a moment the girl returned his gaze, her face showing very white in the faint light flung up by the snow; but she sat very straight and still, and the man’s passion suddenly fell from him.

“Yes,” she said softly, “there is. I was only sure of it when I fancied I had missed you a few minutes ago; but that can’t affect us, Larry. We can neither of us go back on those we belong to, and I know how mean I was when I tried to tempt you. You were staunch, and if I were less so, you would not respect me.”

Grant sighed. “You still believe your father right?”

“Yes,” said Hetty. “I must hope so; and if he is wrong, I still belong to him.”

“But you can believe that I am right, too?”

“Yes,” said Hetty simply. “I am, at least, certain you think you are. Still, it may be a long and bitter while before we see this trouble through. I have done too much to-night – that is, had it been for anyone but you – and you will not make my duty too hard for me.”

Larry’s pulses were throbbing furiously; but he had many times already checked the passionate outbreak that he knew would have banished any passing tenderness the girl had for him.

“No, my dear,” he said. “But the trouble can’t last for ever, and when it is over you will come to me? I have been waiting – even when I felt it was hopeless – year after year for you.”

Hetty smiled gravely. “Whether I shall ever be able to do that, Larry, neither you nor I can tell; but at least I shall never listen to anyone else. That is all I can promise; and we must go on, each of us doing what is put before us, and hoping for the best.”

Larry swept off his fur cap, and, stooping, kissed her on the cheek. “It is the first time, Hetty. I will wait patiently for the next; but I shall see you now and then?”

The girl showed as little sign of resentment as she did of passion. “If I meet you; but that must come by chance,” she said. “I want you to think the best of me, and if the time should come, I know I would be proud of you. You have never done a mean thing since I knew you, Larry, and that means a good deal now.”

Grant pulled the team up in silence, and called to Breckenridge, who checked his horses and getting down looked straight in front of him as his comrade handed Hetty into her sleigh. Then they stood still, saying nothing while the team swept away.

Hetty was also silent, though she drove furiously, and Flora Schuyler did not consider it advisable to ask any questions, while the rush of icy wind and rocking of the sleigh afforded scanty opportunity for conversation. She was also very cold, and greatly relieved, when a blink of light rose out of the snow. Five minutes later somebody handed her out of the sleigh, and she saw a man glance at the team.

“You have been sending them along. Was it you or Hetty who drove, Miss Schuyler?” he said.

Flora Schuyler laughed. “Hetty, of course; but I want you to remember when we came in,” she said, mentioning when they left Cedar. “I told Mrs. Ashley we would get here inside an hour, and she wouldn’t believe me.”

“If anyone wants to know when you came in, send them to me,” said the man. “There are not many horses that could have made it in the time.”

XVIII

A FUTILE PURSUIT

Hetty’s sleigh was sliding, a dim moving shadow, round a bend in the rise when Breckenridge touched his comrade, who stood gazing silently across the prairie.

“It’s abominably cold, Larry,” he said, with a shiver. “Hadn’t we better get on?”

Grant said nothing as he took his place on the driving-seat, and the team had plodded slowly along the trail for at least five minutes before he spoke.

“You heard what Miss Torrance told me?” he said.

“Yes,” Breckenridge said. “I notice, however, we are still heading for the bridge. Can’t you cross the ice, Larry?”

“If I wanted to I fancy I could.”

“Then why don’t you?”

Grant laughed. “Well,” he said, “there’s only one trail through the bluff, and it’s not the kind I’m fond of driving over in the dark.”

Breckenridge twisted in his seat, and looked at him. “Pshaw!” he said. “It would be a good deal less risky than meeting the Sheriff at the bridge. You are not going to do anything senseless, Larry?”

“No; only what seems necessary.”

Breckenridge considered. “Now,” he said slowly, “I can guess what you’re thinking, and, of course, it’s commendable; but one has to be reasonable. Is there anything that could excite the least suspicion that Miss Torrance warned you?”

“There are two or three little facts that only need putting together.”

“Still, if we called at Muller’s and drove home by the other trail it wouldn’t astonish anybody.”

“It would appear a little too much of a coincidence in connection with the fact that Miss Torrance and I were known to be good friends, and the time she left Cedar. As the cattle-men have evidently found out, I have crossed the bridge at about the same time every Wednesday; and two of the cow-boys saw us near Harper’s.”

“Larry,” said Breckenridge, “if you were merely one of the rest your intentions would no doubt become you, but the point is that every homesteader round here is dependent on you. If you went down, the opposition to the cattle-men would collapse, or there would be general anarchy, and that is precisely why Torrance and the Sheriff are anxious to get their hands on you. Now, doesn’t it strike you that it’s your plain duty to keep clear of any unnecessary peril?”

Grant shook his head. “No,” he said. “It seems to me that argument has quite frequently accounted for a good deal of meanness. It is tolerably presumptuous for any man to consider himself indispensable.”

“Well,” said Breckenridge, divided between anger and approval, “I have found out already that it’s seldom any use trying to convince you, but each time you made this round I’ve driven with you, and it’s quite obvious that if one of us crossed the bridge it would suit the purpose. Now, I don’t think the Sheriff could rake up very much against me.”

Grant laid his hand on the lad’s shoulder. “I’m going to cross the bridge, but I don’t purpose that either of us should fall into the Sheriff’s clutches,” he said. “You saw what Jardine’s glass had gone down to?”

Breckenridge nodded. “It dropped like that before the last blizzard we had.”

Grant turned and looked about him, and Breckenridge shivered as he followed his gaze. They had driven out from behind the rise now and a bitter wind met them in the face. There was not very much of it as yet, but all feeling seemed to die out of the lad’s cheeks under it, and it brought a little doleful moaning out of the darkness. Behind them stars shone frostily in the soft indigo, but elsewhere a deepening obscurity was creeping up across the prairie, and sky and snow were blurred and merged one into the other.

“There’s one meaning to that,” said Grant. “We’ll have snow in an hour or two, and when it comes it’s going to be difficult to see anything. In the meanwhile, we’ll drive round by Busby’s and get our supper while the cow-boys cool. The man who hangs around a couple of hours doing nothing in a frost of this kind is not to be relied upon when he’s wanted in a hurry.”

He flicked the horses, and in half an hour the pair were sitting in a lonely log-house beside a glowing stove while its owner prepared a meal. Two other men with bronzed faces sat close by, and Breckenridge fancied he had never seen his comrade so cheerful. His cares seemed to have fallen from him, his laugh had a pleasant ring, and there was something in his eyes which had not been there for many weary months. Breckenridge wondered whether it could be due to anything Miss Torrance had said to him, but kept his thoughts to himself, for that was a subject upon which one could not ask questions.

In the meanwhile, Clavering and the Sheriff found the time pass much less pleasantly – on the bluff. The wind that whistled through it grew colder as one by one the stars faded out, and there was a mournful wailing amidst the trees. Now and then, a shower of twigs came rattling down from branches dried to brittleness by the frost, and the Sheriff brushed them off disgustedly, as, huddling lower in the sleigh from which the horses had been taken out, he packed the robes round him. He had lived softly, and it would have suited him considerably better to have spent that bitter evening in the warmth and security of Clavering’s ranch.

“No sign of him yet?” he said, when Christopher Allonby and Clavering came up together. “Larry will stay at home to-night. He has considerably more sense than we seem to have.”

“I have seen nothing,” said Allonby, who, in the hope of restoring his circulation, had walked up the trail. “Still, the night is getting thicker, and nobody could make a sleigh out until it drove right up to him.”

“If Larry did come, you could hear him,” said the Sheriff.

Allonby lifted his hand, and, as if to supply the answer, with a great thrashing of frost-nipped twigs the birches roared about them. The blast that lashed them also hurled the icy dust of snow into the Sheriff’s face.