Jean of the Lazy A Read online

  Produced by Charles Keller. HTML version by Al Haines.

  Jean of the Lazy A

  By

  B. M. BOWER

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER

  I HOW TROUBLE CAME TO THE LAZY A II CONCERNING LITE AND A FEW FOOTPRINTS III WHAT A MAN'S GOOD NAME IS WORTH IV JEAN V JEAN RIDES INTO A SMALL ADVENTURE VI AND THE VILLAIN PURSUED LITE VII ROBERT GRANT BURNS GETS HELP VIII JEAN SPOILS SOMETHING IX A MAN-SIZED JOB FOR JEAN X JEAN LEARNS WHAT FEAR IS LIKE XI LITE'S PUPIL DEMONSTRATES XII TO "DOUBLE" FOR MURIEL GAY XIII PICTURES AND PLANS AND MYSTERIOUS FOOTSTEPS XIV PUNCH VERSUS PRESTIGE XV A LEADING LADY THEY WOULD MAKE OF JEAN XVI FOR ONCE AT LEAST LITE HAD HIS WAY XVII "WHY DON'T YOU GIVE THEM SOMETHING REAL?" XVIII A NEW KIND OF PICTURE XIX IN LOS ANGELES XX CHANCE TAKES A HAND XXI JEAN BELIEVES THAT SHE TAKES MATTERS INTO HER OWN HANDS XXII JEAN MEETS ONE CRISIS AND CONFRONTS ANOTHER XXIII A LITTLE ENLIGHTENMENT XXIV THE LETTER IN THE CHAPS XXV LITE COMES OUT OF THE BACKGROUND XXVI HOW HAPPINESS RETURNED TO THE LAZY A

  JEAN OF THE LAZY A

  CHAPTER I

  HOW TROUBLE CAME TO THE LAZY A

  Without going into a deep, psychological discussion of the elements inmen's souls that breed events, we may say with truth that the Lazy Aranch was as other ranches in the smooth tenor of its life until oneday in June, when the finger of fate wrote bold and black across theface of it the word that blotted out prosperity, content, warm familyties,--all those things that go to make life worth while.

  Jean, sixteen and a range girl to the last fiber of her being, hadgotten up early that morning and had washed the dishes and swept, andhad shaken the rugs of the little living-room most vigorously. On herknees, with stiff brush and much soapy water, she had scrubbed thekitchen floor until the boards dried white as kitchen floors may be.She had baked a loaf of gingerbread, that came from the oven with amost delectable odor, and had wrapped it in a clean cloth to cool onthe kitchen table. Her dad and Lite Avery would show cause for thebaking of it when they sat down, fresh washed and ravenous, to theirsupper that evening. I mention Jean and her scrubbed kitchen and thegingerbread by way of proving how the Lazy A went unwarned andunsuspecting to the very brink of its disaster.

  Lite Avery, long and lean and silently content with life, had riddenaway with a package of sandwiches, after a full breakfast and a smilefrom the slim girl who cooked it, upon the business of the day; whichhappened to be a long ride with one of the Bar Nothing riders, down inthe breaks along the river. Jean's father, big Aleck Douglas, hadsaddled and ridden away alone upon business of his own. And presently,in mid-forenoon, Jean closed the kitchen door upon an immaculatelyclean house filled with the warm, fragrant odor of her baking, and infresh shirt waist and her best riding-skirt and Stetson, went whistlingaway down the path to the stable, and saddled Pard, the brown colt thatLite had broken to the saddle for her that spring. In ten minutes or soshe went galloping down the coulee and out upon the trail to town,which was fifteen miles away and held a chum of hers.

  So Lazy A coulee was left at peace, with scratching hens busy with thefeeding of half-feathered chicks, and a rooster that crowed from thecorral fence seven times without stopping to take breath. In the bigcorral a sorrel mare nosed her colt and nibbled abstractedly at thepile of hay in one corner, while the colt wabbled aimlessly up andsniffed curiously and then turned to inspect the rails that felt soqueer and hard when he rubbed his nose against them. The sun was warm,and cloud-shadows drifted lazily across the coulee with the breeze thatblew from the west. You never would dream that this was the lastday,--the last few hours even,--when the Lazy A would be the untroubledhome of three persons of whose lives it formed so great a part.

  At noon the hens were hovering their chickens in the shade of the mowerwhich Lite was overhauling during his spare time, getting it ready forthe hay that was growing apace out there in the broad mouth of thecoulee. The rooster was wallowing luxuriously in a dusty spot in thecorral. The young colt lay stretched out on the fat of its side in thesun, sound asleep. The sorrel mare lay beside it, asleep also, withher head thrown up against her shoulder. Somewhere in a shed a calfwas bawling in bored lonesomeness away from its mother feeding down thepasture. And over all the coulee and the buildings nestled against thebluff at its upper end was spread that atmosphere of homey comfort andsheltered calm which surrounds always a home that is happy.

  Lite Avery, riding toward home just when the shadows were beginning togrow long behind him, wondered if Jean would be back by the time hereached the ranch. He hoped so, with a vague distaste at finding theplace empty of her cheerful presence. Be looked at his watch; it wasnearly four o'clock. She ought to be home by half-past four or five,anyway. He glanced sidelong at Jim and quietly slackened his pace alittle. Jim was telling one of those long, rambling tales of the littlehappenings of a narrow life, and Lite was supposed to be listeninginstead of thinking about when Jean would return home. Jim believed hewas listening, and drove home the point of his story.

  "Yes, sir, them's his very words. Art Osgood heard him. He'll do it,too, take it from me, Crofty is shore riled up this time."

  "Always is," Lite observed, without paying much attention. "I'll turnoff here, Jim, and cut across. Got some work I want to get done yetto-night. So long."

  He swung away from his companion, whose trail to the Bar Nothing ledhim straight west, passing the Lazy A coulee well out from its mouth,toward the river. Lite could save a half mile by bearing off to thenorth and entering the coulee at the eastern side and riding up throughthe pasture. He wanted to see how the grass was coming on, anyway.The last rain should have given it a fresh start.

  He was in no great hurry, after all; he had merely been bored withJim's company and wanted to go on alone. And then he could get thefire started for Jean. Lite's life was running very smoothly indeed;so smoothly that his thoughts occupied themselves largely with littlethings, save when they concerned themselves with Jean, who had beenaway to school for a year and had graduated from "high," as she calledit, just a couple of weeks ago, and had come home to keep house for dadand Lite. The novelty of her presence on the ranch was still freshenough to fill his thoughts with her slim attractiveness. Town hadn'tspoiled her, he thought glowingly. She was the same good littlepal,--only she was growing up pretty fast, now. She was a young ladyalready.

  So, thinking of her with the brightening of spirits which is the firstsymptom of the world-old emotion called love, Lite rounded the easternarm of the bluff and came within sight of the coulee spread before him,shaped like the half of a huge platter with a high rim of bluff onthree sides.

  His first involuntary glance was towards the house, and there wasunacknowledged expectancy in his eyes. But he did not see Jean, nor anysign that she had returned. Instead, he saw her father just mountingin haste at the corral. He saw him swing his quirt down along the sideof his horse and go tearing down the trail, leaving the wire gate flatupon the ground behind him,--which was against all precedent.

  Lite quickened his own pace. He did not know why big Aleck Douglasshould be hitting that pace out of the coulee, but since Aleck's pacewas habitually unhurried, the inference was plain enough that there wassome urgent need for haste. Lite let down the rails of the barred gatefrom the meadow into the pasture, mounted, and went galloping acrossthe uneven sod. His first anxious thought was for the girl. Hadsomething happened to her?

  At the stable he looked and saw that Jean's saddle did not hang on itsaccustomed peg inside the door, and he breathed freer. She could nothave returned, then. He turned his own horse inside without taking offthe saddle, and looked around him puzzled. Nothing seemed wrong aboutthe place. The sorrel mare stood placid
ly switching at the flies andsuckling her gangling colt in the shady corner of the corral, and thechickens were pecking desultorily about their feeding-ground inexpectation of the wheat that Jean or Lite would fling to them lateron. Not a thing seemed unusual.

  Yet Lite stood just outside the stable, and the sensation thatsomething was wrong grew keener. He was not a nervous person,--youwould have laughed at the idea of nerves in connection with Lite Avery.He felt that something was wrong, just the same. It was not altogetherthe hurried departure of Aleck Douglas, either, that made him feel so.He looked at the house setting back there close to the bluff just whereit began to curve rudely out from the narrowest part of the coulee. Itwas still and quiet, with closed windows and doors to tell there was noone at home. And yet, to Lite its very silence seemed sinister.

  Wolves were many, down in the breaks along the river that spring; andthe coyotes were an ever-present evil among the calves, so that Litenever rode abroad without his six-shooter. He reached back andloosened it in the holster before he started up the sandy path to thehouse; and if you knew the Lazy A ranch as well as Lite knew it, fromsix years of calling it home, you would wonder at that action of his,which was instinctive and wholly unconscious.

  So he went up through the sunshine of late afternoon that sent hisshadow a full rod before him, and he stepped upon the narrow platformbefore the kitchen door, and stood there a minute listening. He heardthe mantel clock in the living-room ticking with the resonance given bya room empty of all other sound. Because his ears were keen, he heardalso the little alarm clock in the kitchen tick-tick-tick on the shelfbehind the stove where Jean kept it daytimes.

  Peaceful enough, for all the silence; yet Lite reached back and laidhis fingers upon the smooth butt of his six-shooter and opened the doorwith his left hand, which was more or less awkward. He pushed the dooropen and stepped inside. Then for a full minute he did not move.

  On the floor that Jean had scrubbed till it was so white, a man laydead, stretched upon his back. His eyes stared vacantly straight up atthe ceiling, where a single cobweb which Jean had not noticed swayed inthe air-current Lite set in motion with the opening of the door. Onthe floor, where it had dropped from his hand perhaps when he fell, asmall square piece of gingerbread lay, crumbled around the edges.Tragic halo around his head, a pool of blood was turning brown andclotted. Lite shivered a little while he stared down at him.

  In a minute he lifted his eyes from the figure and looked around thesmall room. The stove shone black in the sunlight which the open doorlet in. On the table, covered with white oilcloth, the loaf ofgingerbread lay uncovered, and beside it lay a knife used to cut offthe piece which the man on the floor had not eaten before he died.Nothing else was disturbed. Nothing else seemed in the least to bearany evidence of what had taken place.

  Lite's thoughts turned in spite of him to the man who had ridden fromthe coulee as though fiends had pursued. The conclusion was obvious,yet Lite loyally rejected it in the face of reason. Reason told himthat there went the slayer. For this dead man was what was left ofJohnny Croft, the Crofty of whom Jim had gossiped not more than half anhour before. And the gossip had been of threats which Johnny Croft hadmade against the two Douglas brothers,--big Aleck, of the Lazy A, andCarl, of the Bar Nothing ranch adjoining.

  Suicide it could scarcely be, for Crofty was the type of man who wouldcling to life; besides, his gun was in its holster, and a man wouldhardly have the strength or the desire to put away his gun after he hasshot himself under one eye. Death had undoubtedly been immediate.Lite thought of these things while he stood there just inside the door.Then he turned slowly and went outside, and stood hesitating upon theporch. He did not quite know what he ought to do about it, and so hedid not mean to be in too great a hurry to do anything; that was Lite'shabit, and he had always found that it served him well.

  If the rider had been fleeing from his crime, as was likely, Lite hadno mind to raise at once the hue and cry. An hour or two could make nodifference to the dead man,--and you must remember that Lite had forsix years called this place his home, and big Aleck Douglas his friendas well as the man who paid him wages for the work he did. He was halftempted to ride away and say nothing for a while. He could let itappear that he had not been at the house at all and so had notdiscovered the crime when he did. That would give Aleck Douglas moretime to get away. But there was Jean, due at any moment now. He couldnot go away and let Jean discover that gruesome thing on the kitchenfloor. He could not take it up and hide it away somewhere; he couldnot do anything, it seemed to him, but just wait.

  He went slowly down the path to the stable, his chin on his chest, hismind grappling with the tragedy and with the problem of how best hemight lighten the blow that had fallen upon the ranch. It wasunreal,--it was unthinkable,--that Aleck Douglas, the man who met butfriendly glances, ride where he might, had done this thing. And yetthere was nothing else to believe. Johnny Croft had worked here on theranch for a couple of months, off and on. He had not been steadilyemployed, and he had been paid by the day instead of by the month aswas the custom. He had worked also for Carl Douglas at the BarNothing; back and forth, for one or the other as work pressed. He wastoo erratic to be depended upon except from day to day; too prone tosaddle his horse and ride to town and forget to return for a day or twodays or a week, as the mood seized him or his money held out.

  Lite knew that there had been some dispute when he had left; he hadclaimed payment for more days than he had worked. Aleck was a just manwho paid honestly what he owed; he was also known to be "close-fisted."He would pay what he owed and not a nickel more,--hence the dispute.Johnny had gone away seeming satisfied that his own figures were wrong,but later on he had quarreled with Carl over wages and other things.Carl had a bad temper that sometimes got beyond his control, and he hadordered Johnny off the ranch. This was part of the long, full-detailedstory Jim had been telling. Johnny had left, and he had talked aboutthe Douglas brothers to any one who would listen. He had said theywere crooked, both of them, and would cheat a working-man out of hispay. He had come back, evidently, to renew the argument with Aleck.With the easy ways of ranch people, he had gone inside when he found noone at home,--hungry, probably, and not at all backward about helpinghimself to whatever appealed to his appetite. That was Johnny'sway,--a way that went unquestioned, since he had lived there longenough to feel at home. Lite remembered with an odd feeling of pity howJohnny had praised the first gingerbread which Jean had baked, the dayafter her arrival; and how he had eaten three pieces and had madeJean's cheeks burn with confusion at his bold flattery.

  He had come back, and he had helped himself to the gingerbread. Andthen he had been shot down. He was lying in there now, just as he hadfallen, and his blood was staining deep the fresh-scrubbed floor. AndJean would be coming home soon. Lite thought it would be better if herode out to meet her, and told her what had happened, so that she neednot come upon it unprepared. There was nothing else that he couldbring himself to do, and his mood demanded action of some sort; onecould not sit down at peace with a fresh tragedy like that hanging overthe place.

  He had reached the stable when a horse walked out from behind the haycorral and stopped, eyeing him curiously. It was Johnny's horse. Evenas improvident a cowpuncher as Johnny Croft had been likes to own a"private" horse,--one that is his own and can be ridden when and wherethe owner chooses. Lite turned and went over to it, caught it by thedragging bridle-reins, and led it into an empty stall. He did not knowwhether he ought to unsaddle it or leave it as it was; but on secondthought, he loosened the cinch in kindness to the animal, and took offits bridle, so that it could eat without being hampered by the bit.Lite was too thorough a horseman not to be thoughtful of an animal'scomfort.

  He led his own horse out, and then he stopped abruptly. For Pard stoodin front of the kitchen door, and Jean was untying a package or twofrom the saddle. He opened his mouth to call to her; he startedforward; but he was too late to prevent what ha
ppened. Before histhroat had made a sound, Jean turned with the packages in the hollow ofher arm and stepped upon the platform with that springy haste ofmovement which belongs to health and youth and happiness; and before hehad taken more than the first step away from his horse, she had openedthe kitchen door.

  Lite ran, then. He did not call to her. What was the use? She hadseen. She had dropped her packages, and turned and ran to meet him,and caught him by the arm in a panic of horror. Lite patted her handawkwardly, not knowing what he ought to say.

  "What made you go in there?" came of its own accord from his lips."That's no place for a girl."

  "It's Johnny Croft!" she gasped just above her breath. "How--did ithappen, Lite?"

  "I don't know," said Lite slowly, looking down and still patting herhand. "Your father and I have both been gone all day. I just got backa few minutes ago and found out about it." His tone, his manner andhis words impressed upon Jean the point he wanted her to get,--that herfather had not yet returned, and so knew nothing of the crime.

  He led her back to where Pard stood, and told her to get on. Withoutasking him why, Jean obeyed him, with a shudder when her wide eyesstrayed fascinated to the open door and to what lay just within. Litewent up and pulled the door shut, and then, walking beside her with anarm over Pard's neck, he led the way down to the stable, and mountedRanger.

  "You can't stay here," he explained, when she looked at himinquiringly. "Do you want to go over and stay at Carl's, or would yourather go back to town?" He rode down toward the gate, and Jean keptbeside him.

  "I'm going to stay with dad," she told him shakily. "If he stays,I'll--I'll stay."

  "You'll not stay," he contradicted her bluntly. "You can't. Itwouldn't be right." And he added self-reproachfully: "I never thoughtof your cutting across the bench and riding down the trail back of thehouse. I meant to head you off--"

  "It's shorter," said Jean briefly. "I--if I can't stay, I'd rather goto town, Lite. I don't like to stay over at Uncle Carl's."

  Therefore, when they reached the mouth of the coulee, Lite turned intothe trail that led to town. All down the coulee the trail had been dugdeep with the hoofprints of a galloping horse; and now, on the towntrail, they were as plain as a primer to one schooled in the open. ButJean was too upset to notice them, and for that Lite was thankful.They did not talk much, beyond the commonplace speculations whichtragedy always brings to the lips of the bystanders. Comments thatwere perfectly obvious they made, it is true. Jean said it wasperfectly awful, and Lite agreed with her. Jean wondered how it couldhave happened, and Lite said he didn't know. Neither of them saidanything about the effect it would have upon their future; I don'tsuppose that Jean, at least, could remotely guess at the effect. It iscertain that Lite preferred not to do so.

  They were no more than half way to town when they met a group ofgalloping horsemen, their coming heralded for a mile by the dust theykicked out of the trail.

  In the midst rode Jean's father. Alongside him rode the coroner, andbehind him rode the sheriff. The rest of the company was made up of menwho had heard the news and were coming to look upon the tragedy. Litedrew a long breath of relief. Aleck Douglas, then, had not beenrunning away.