The Free Range Part 35

horses last night with his flashlight."

"He is? I should never have suspected it; you are absolutely different in looks."

"I know we are, or I shouldn't have risked his life last night. Well, I bring him into this because I have to. He is part of the story. Lester was always a wild youth, particularly after the governor stuck him on a bookkeeper's stool and tried to make a business man out of him. The boy couldn't add a column of figures a foot long correctly inside of ten tries. I took to the game a little better than he did, and managed to get promoted occasionally. But Lester never did.

"Father believed, and announced often enough, that anybody that couldn't add figures and keep accounts had no business to handle money. To discipline Lester, who he thought was loafing when he really was incapable, the governor cut off the boy's allowance almost entirely and told him he would have to live on his wages until he showed he could earn more.

"Well, Julie, you know what kind of a cad I was back in the old days--rich, spoiled, flattered by men, and sought after by women. (I can say these things now, since I've learned their opposites!) Just try to imagine, then, the effect of such an order on Lester, who was always the petted one of us two because he was small and delicate! It was like pouring cold water on a red-hot stove lid.

"Tied more than ever to his desk, Lester wanted more amus.e.m.e.nts than ever.

But he had only about fifteen a week where he had been accustomed to five times the amount. He drifted and borrowed and pledged and p.a.w.ned, and finally was caught by some loan-sharks, who got him out of one difficulty only to plunge him into three others.

"Although my father had a narrow-gauge mind as far as life in general is concerned, I will say this for him: that he was right in everything he did about business. He had made it a rule of the firm that anybody who borrowed money was fired on the spot. Lester knew this, and, while he would have liked nothing better than the sack, he did not want to disgrace the governor before his employees and all the business world. So he clung along and tried to make a go of it.

"I must confess that I think some of the blame for what followed should be laid at my door. I had been patient with the kid and loaned him money until I came to the conclusion that it was like throwing it down a well.

Then I got fond of a certain person"--he paused a moment and smiled at Julie--"and I needed all my money to entertain her properly; so I quit loaning.

"I don't know whether to tell you the rest or not; it isn't what I would want anyone else to tell you, even about a perfect stranger, but I think it is right you should know everything if you know anything."

The girl nodded without speaking.

"In the loan-shark office was a very pretty little girl, and Lester thought he fell in love with her. She had a red-headed cousin and an admirer named Smithy Caldwell, who belonged to a tough gang on the South Side.

"The girl was fond of Lester for a while, but she wouldn't forsake her friends as he ordered her to, and they quarreled. Her name was Mary, and after the fuss the three friends, together with the loan-shark people, played Lester for a gilt-edged idiot, basing their operations on alleged facts concerning Mary. In reality Smithy Caldwell had married her in the meantime, and Lester eventually proved he had always treated her honorably, though now she denied it."

"Poor, innocent boy in the hands of those blood-suckers!" cried Juliet compa.s.sionately.

"Naturally driven frantic by the fear of exposure and the resulting disgrace of the whole family, the boy lost his head and tried to buy his persecutors off. And to do this he took money out of the safe. But what's the use of prolonging the agony? Finally he forged my father's signature, and when the check came back from the bank he tried to 'fix' the books, and got caught.

"I'll pa.s.s over everything that followed, except to say that the disgrace did not become public. But it broke father's heart and hastened his death.

When that occurred it was found that practically all the estate had come to me, and this fellow Smithy Caldwell threatened to disclose the forgery if I did not buy him off.

"That scared me, because I was now the head of the family, and I handed over two thousand dollars. Then I came West, and thought the whole matter was buried, until Caldwell turned up at the Bar T that night for supper.

"That's about all. You see, it's an ugly story, and it paints Lester pretty black. But I've thought the thing over a great many times, and can't blame him very much, after all, for it really was the result of my father's stern and narrow policy. The boy was in his most impressionable years, and was left to face the music alone. It seemed to age him mightily."

"But what will happen now?" asked Julie anxiously. "Aren't the other two still alive? Can't they make trouble?"

"Yes, but I don't think they will. I have the drop on Smithy now, and he will either write a full dismissal of the matter for all three of them or he will swing with the rustlers. And if I know my Smithy Caldwell, he won't be able to get pen and paper fast enough."

"But can you save him, even at that cost, do you think? The cowmen won't understand all this."

"That will rest with your father, dear," replied Bud, getting to his feet.

"Now, let's go over and see him, for I have something else I want to ask him."

His face that had been clouded during his recital was suddenly flooded with the sunlight of his smile, and Julie realized for the first time what it had cost him to lay bare again these painful memories of a past he had sought to bury.

When he had helped her to her feet she went to him and laid her hands on his shoulders, looking up into his face with eyes that brimmed with the loosed flood of her love, so long pent up.

"Can I ever be worth what I have cost you to-day?" she asked humbly.

Tenderly he gathered her to him.

"In love there is no such word as cost," he said.

CHAPTER XXV

THE THREADS MEET

It could not have been later than ten o'clock in the morning when a puncher with sharp eyes might have seen two figures approaching the Bar T ranch house on horseback. They rode needlessly close together and swung their clasped and gauntleted hands like happy children.

One was a girl into whose radiant eyes a new wonder had come, and the other a handsome, tanned young man bathed in a deliriously happy expression.

"Isn't it jolly to be married without anyone's knowing?" cried Julie. "Oh, but won't they be surprised at home?"

"Rather!" remarked Bud, with a sobered expression. "I only hope your father doesn't widow you just as I ride into the yard with the olive branch."

"Stop it, Bud! What puts such awful thoughts into your head?"

"Experience. Your father was so mad about my getting the sheep across the river that he started his punchers walking home that same night, and n.o.body has seen him since."

Larkin spoke the truth, but little exaggerated. Beef Bissell, humiliated, beaten, and forced to accept the small end of a deal for once in his life, had started from the useless cowmen's camp by the Gray Bull the very night of the crossing. He ordered the men to follow and round up their stampeded horses and then to ride home.

Meanwhile he appropriated one horse that had not been in the corral and trotted homeward, eaten by chagrin and beside himself with impotent fury.

Bud and Julie had found this out the day of their talk concerning Lester, when they forded the stream on horses and asked for Bissell. Under the circ.u.mstances Bud developed a genius for inspiration that was little short of marvelous.

"What's the use of riding all the way home and having a grand row with your father?" he asked. "Why not go over to Rattlesnake, where there's a sky-pilot, and be married? Then we'll go home, and there can't be any row, because there will only be one party in the mood for it."

But the girl demurred. It was cruel to her father and mother, she said, not to have them present on the greatest day of her life. She allowed it was mighty ungrateful after all they had done for her. Then Bud took her hand in his and told her his princ.i.p.al reasons.

"I'm a business man, honey, and I've got to start north after Simmy and the sheep in three or four days," he said. "Shearing is late now, but I guess we can make it. This trouble has set me behind close to fifteen thousand dollars, and everything is in a critical state.

"I know it don't sound much like a lover, but as soon as we get on our feet we'll take a honeymoon to j.a.pan that will make you think I'd never heard of a sheep.

"You want your mother and father in on the joy, I know, but it doesn't seem to me there can be much joy with nine or ten men sitting around waiting for their necks to be stretched. Does it to you?"

"No," said Julie, and shuddered.

"Then come along over to Rattlesnake and be married. Then we'll ride back to the Bar T, so you can see your folks, and I can see Caldwell. We can be through and away before anything is really done about the rustlers."

So it was arranged, and the two were married by an Episcopal clergyman who had a surplice but no ca.s.sock, and whose trouser-legs looked very funny moving about inside the thin, white material--and Julie nearly laughed out loud.

After the ceremony they had ridden out of town with their equipment and made their first honeymoon camp in a cool, green place beside a little brook that had trout in it and sang to them for hours on end.