第54章

"Why don't you invite me to go along?" Evadna challenged from the gate, when he was ready to start. She laughed when she said it, but there was something beneath the laughter, if he had only been close enough to read it.

"I didn't think you'd want to ride through all that dust and heat again to-day," he called back. "You're better off in the shade.""Going to call on 'Squaw-talk-far-off'--AGAIN?" She was still laughing, with something else beneath the laugh.

He glanced at her quickly, wondering where she had gotten the name, and in his wonder neglected to make audible reply. Also he passed over the change to ride back to the gate and tell her good-by--with a hasty kiss, perhaps, from the saddle--as a lover should have done.

He was not used to love-making. For him, it was settled that they loved each other, and would marry some day--he hoped the day would be soon. It did not occur to him that a girl wants to be told over and over that she is the only woman in the whole world worth a second thought or glance; nor that he should stop and say just where he was going, and what he meant to do, and how reluctant he was to be away from her. Trouble sat upon his mind like a dead weight, and dulled his perception, perhaps. He waved his hand to her from the stable, and galloped down the trail to the Point o' Rocks, and his mind, so far as Evadna was concerned, was at ease.

Evadna, however, was crying, with her arms folded upon the top of the gate, before the cloud which marked his passing had begun to sprinkle the gaunt, gray sagebushes along the trail with a fresh layer of choking dust. Jack and Wally came up, scowling at the world and finding no words to match their gloom. Wally gave her a glance, and went on to the blacksmith shop, but Jack went straight up to her, for he liked her well.

"What's the matter?" he asked dully. "Mad because you can't smoke up the ranch?"Evadna fumbled blindly for her handkerchief, scoured her eyes well when she found it, and put up the other hand to further shield her face.

"Oh, the whole place is like a GRAVEYARD," she complained.

"Nobody will talk, or do anything but just wander around! I just can't STAND it!" Which was not frank of her.

"It's too hot to do much of anything," he said apologetically.

"We might take a ride, if you don't mind the heat.""You don't want to ride," she objected petulantly. "Why didn't you go with Good Indian?" he countered.

"Because I didn't want to. And I do wish you'd quit calling him that; he has a real name, I believe.""If you're looking for a scrap," grinned Jack, "I'll stake you to my six gun, and you can go down and kill off a few of those claim-jumpers. You seem to be in just about the proper frame uh mind to murder the whole bunch. Fly at it!""It begins to look as if we women would have to do something,"she retorted cruelly. "There doesn't seem to be a man on the ranch with spirit enough to stop them from digging up the whole--""I guess that'll be about enough," Jack interrupted her, coldly.

"Why didn't you say that to Good Indian?""I told you not to call him that. I don't see why everybody is so mean to-day. There isn't a person--"When Jack laughed, he shut his eyes until he looked through narrow slits under heavy lashes, and showed some very nice teeth, and two deep dimples besides the one which always stood in his chin. He laughed then, for the first time that day, and if Evadna had been in a less vixenish temper she would have laughed with him just as everyone else always did. But instead of that, she began to cry again, which made Jack feel very much a brute.

"Oh, come on and be good," he urged remorsefully. But Evadna turned and ran back into the house and into her room, and cried luxuriously into her pillow. Jack, peeping in at the window which opened upon the porch, saw her there, huddled upon the bed.

In the spring-house his mother sat crying silently over her helplessness, and failed to respond to his comforting pats upon the shoulder. Donny struck at him viciously when Jack asked him an idle question, and Charlie, the Indian with the tumor over his eye, scowled from the corner of the house where he was squatting until someone offered him fruit, or food, or tobacco. He was of an acquisitive nature, was Charlie--and the road to his favor must be paved with gifts.

"This is what I call hell," Jack stated aloud, and went straight away to the strawberry patch, took up his stand with his toes against Stanley's corner stake, cursed him methodically until he had quite exhausted his vocabulary, and put a period to his forceful remarks by shooting a neat, round hole through Stanley's coffee-pot. And Jack was the mild one of the family.

By the time he had succeeded in puncturing recklessly the frying-pan, and also the battered pan in which Stanley no doubt meant to wash his samples of soil, his good humor returned. So also did the other boys, running in long leaps through the garden and arriving at the spot very belligerent and very much out of breath.

"Got to do something to pass away the time," Jack grinned, bringing his front sight once more to bear upon the coffee--pot, already badly dented and showing three black holes. "And I ain't offering any violence to anybody. You can't hang a man, Mr.

Stanley, for shooting up a frying-pan. And I wouldn't--hurt--you--for--anything!" He had just reloaded, so that his bullets saw him to the end of the sentence.

Stanley watched his coffee-pot dance and roll like a thing in pain, and swore when all was done. But he did not shoot, though one could see how his fingers must itch for the feel of the trigger.

"Your old dad will sweat blood for this--and you'll be packing your blanket on your back and looking for work before snow flies," was his way of summing up.

Still, he did not shoot.

It was like throwing pebbles at the bowlder in the Malad, the day before.