Sawtooth Ranch Read online

  CHAPTER III

  REALITY IS WEIGHED AND FOUND WANTING

  Still dreaming her dreams, still featuring herself as the star of manyadventures, Lorraine followed the brakeman out of the dusty day coachand down the car steps to the platform of the place called Echo, Idaho.I can only guess at what she expected to find there in the person of acattle-king father, but whatever it was she did not find it. Nofather, of any type whatever, came forward to claim her. In spite ofher "Western" experience she looked about her for a taxi, or at least astreetcar. Even in the wilds of Western melodrama one could hear theclang of street-car gongs warning careless autoists off the track.

  After the train had hooted and gone on around an absolutelyuninteresting low hill of yellow barrenness dotted with stunted sage,it was the silence that first impressed Lorraine disagreeably. Echo,Idaho, was a very poor imitation of all the Western sets she had everseen. True, it had the straggling row of square-fronted, one-storybuildings, with hitch rails, but the signs painted across the frontswere absolutely common. Any director she had ever obeyed would havesent for his assistant director and would have used language which alady must not listen to. Behind the store and the post-office and theblacksmith shop, on the brow of the low hill around whose point thetrain had disappeared, were houses with bay windows and porchesabsolutely out of keeping with the West. So far as Lorraine could see,there was not a log cabin in the whole place.

  The hitch rails were empty, and there was not a cowboy in sight.Before the post-office a terribly grimy touring car stood with itsrunning-boards loaded with canvas-covered suitcases. Three goggled,sunburned women in ugly khaki suits were disconsolately drinking sodawater from bottles without straws, and a goggled, red-faced,angry-looking man was jerking impatiently at the hood of the machine.Lorraine and her suitcase apparently excited no interest whatever inEcho, Idaho.

  The station agent was carrying two boxes of oranges and a crate ofCalifornia cabbages in out of the sun, and a limp individual in bluegingham shirt and dirty overalls had shouldered the mail sack and wasmaking his way across the dusty, rut-scored street to the post-office.

  Two questions and two brief answers convinced her that the stationagent did not know Britton Hunter,--which was strange, unless thishappened to be a very new agent. Lorraine left him to his cabbages andfollowed the man with the mail sack.

  At the post-office the anaemic clerk came forward, eyeing her withadmiring curiosity. Lorraine had seen anaemic young men all her life,and the last three years had made her perfectly familiar with that lookin a young man's eyes. She met it with impatient disfavour foundedchiefly upon the young man's need of a decent hair-cut, a less flowerytie and a tailored suit. When he confessed that he did not know MrBritton Hunter by sight he ceased to exist so far as Lorraine wasconcerned. She decided that he also was new to the place and thereforeperfectly useless to her.

  The postmaster himself--Lorraine was cheered by his spectacles, hisshirt sleeves, and his chin whiskers, which made him look the part--wasbetter informed. He, too, eyed her curiously when she said "My father,Mr Britton Hunter," but he made no comment on the relationship. Hegave her a telegram and a letter from the General Delivery. Thetelegram, she suspected, was the one she had sent to her dad announcingthe date of her arrival. The postmaster advised her to get a "liveryrig" and drive out to the ranch, since it might be a week or two beforeany one came in from the Quirt. Lorraine thanked him graciously anddeparted for the livery stable.

  The man in charge there chewed tobacco meditatively and told her thathis teams were all out. If she was a mind to wait over a day or two,he said, he might maybe be able to make the trip. Lorraine took a longlook at the structure which he indicated as the hotel.

  "I think I'll walk," she said calmly.

  "_Walk?_" The stableman stopped chewing and stared at her. "It's someconsider'ble of a walk. It's all of eighteen mile--I dunno but twenty,time y'get to the house."

  "I have frequently walked twenty-five or thirty miles. I am a memberof the Sierra Club in Los Angeles. We seldom take hikes of less thantwenty miles. If you will kindly tell me which road I must take----"

  "There she is," the man stated flatly, and pointed across the railroadtrack to where a sandy road drew a yellowish line through the sage,evidently making for the hills showing hazily violet in the distance.Those hills formed the only break in the monotonous gray landscape, andLorraine was glad that her journey would take her close to them.

  "Thank you so much," she said coldly and returned to the station. Inthe small lavatory of the depot waiting room she exchanged her slippersfor a pair of moderately low-heeled shoes which she had at the lastminute of packing tucked into her suitcase, put a few extra articlesinto her rather smart travelling bag, left the suitcase in thetelegraph office and started. Not another question would she ask ofEcho, Idaho, which was flatter and more insipid than the drinking waterin the tin "cooler" in the waiting room. The station agent stood withhis hands on his hips and watched her cross the track and start downthe road, pardonably astonished to see a young woman walk down a roadthat led only to the hills twenty miles away, carrying her luggageexactly as if her trip was a matter of a block or two at most.

  The bag was rather heavy and as she went on it became heavier. Shemeant to carry it slung across her shoulder on a stick as soon as shewas well away from the prying eyes of Echo's inhabitants. Later, ifshe felt tired, she could easily hide it behind a bush along the roadand send one of her father's cowboys after it. The road was very dustyand carried the wind-blown traces of automobile tires. Some one wouldsurely overtake her and give her a ride before she walked very far.

  For the first half hour she believed that she was walking on levelground, but when she looked back there was no sign of any town behindher. Echo had disappeared as completely as if it had been swallowed.Even the unseemly bay-windowed houses on the hill had gone under. Shewalked for another half hour and saw only the gray sage stretching allaround her. The hills looked farther away than when she started.Still, that beaten road must lead somewhere. Two hours later she beganto wonder why this particular road should be so unending and so empty.Never in her life before had she walked for two hours without seemingto get anywhere, or without seeing any living human.

  Both shoulders were sore from the weight of the bag on the stick, butthe sagebushes looked so exactly alike that she feared she could notdescribe the particular spot where the cowboys would find her bag,wherefore she carried it still. She was beginning to change hands veryoften when the wind came.

  Just where or how that wind sprang up she did not know. Suddenly itwas whooping across the sage and flinging up clouds of dust from theroad. To Lorraine, softened by years of southern California weather,it seemed to blow straight off an ice field, it was so cold.

  After an interminable time which measured three hours on her watch, shecame to an abrupt descent into a creek bed, down the middle of whichthe creek itself was flowing swiftly. Here the road forked, a rough,little-used trail keeping on up the creek, the better travelled roadcrossing and climbing the farther bank. Lorraine scarcely hesitatedbefore she chose the main trail which crossed the creek.

  From the creek the trail she followed kept climbing until Lorrainewondered if there would ever be a top. The wind whipped her narrowskirts and impeded her, tugged at her hat, tingled her nose and wateredher eyes. But she kept on doggedly, disgustedly, the West, which shehad seen through the glamour of swift-blooded Romance, sinking lowerand lower in her estimation. Nothing but jack rabbits and little,twittery birds moved through the sage, though she watched hungrily forhorsemen.

  Quite suddenly the gray landscape glowed with a palpitating radiance,unreal, beautiful beyond expression. She stopped, turned to face thewest and stared awestruck at one of those flaming sunsets which makesthe desert land seem but a gateway into the ineffable glory beyond theearth. That the high-piled, gorgeous cloud-bank presaged athunderstorm she never guessed; and that a thunderstorm may be adea
dly, terrifying peril she never had quite believed. Her mother hadtold of people being struck by lightning, but Lorraine could notassociate lightning with death, especially in the West, where menusually died by shooting, lynching, or by pitching over a cliff.

  The wind hushed as suddenly as it had whooped. Warned by the twinklinglights far behind her--lights which must be the small part at lastvisible of Echo, Idaho--Lorraine went on. She had been walkingsteadily for four hours, and she must surely have come nearly twentymiles. If she ever reached the top of the hill, she believed that shewould see her father's ranch just beyond.

  The afterglow had deepened to dusk when she came at last to the highestpoint of that long grade. Far ahead loomed a cluster of square, blackobjects which must be the ranch buildings of the Quirt, and Lorraine'sspirits lightened a little. What a surprise her father and all hiscowboys would have when she walked in upon them! It was almost worththe walk, she told herself hearteningly. She hoped that dad had a goodcook. He would wear a flour-sack apron, naturally, and would be talland lean, or else very fat. He would be a comedy character, but shehoped he would not be the grouchy kind, which, though very funny whenhe rampages around on the screen, might be rather uncomfortable to meetwhen one is tired and hungry and out of sorts. But of course thecrankiest of comedy cooks would be decently civil to _her_. Men alwayswere, except directors who are paid for their incivility.

  A hollow into which she walked in complete darkness and in silence,save the gurgling of another stream, hid from sight the shadowysemblance of houses and barns and sheds. Their disappearance slumpedher spirits again, for without them she was no more than a solitaryspeck in the vast loneliness. Their actual nearness could not comforther. She was seized with a reasonless, panicky fear that by the timeshe crossed the stream and climbed the hill beyond they would no longerbe there where she had seen them. She was lifting her skirts to wadethe creek when the click of hoofs striking against rocks sent herscurrying to cover in a senseless fear.

  "I learned this act from the jack rabbits," she rallied herselfshakily, when she was safely hidden behind a sagebush whose pungencymade her horribly afraid that she might sneeze, which would be tooridiculous.

  "Some of dad's cowboys, probably, but still they _may_ be bandits."

  If they were bandits they could scarcely be out banditting, for the twohorsemen were talking in ordinary, conversational tones as they rodeleisurely down to the ford. When they passed Lorraine, the horsenearest her shied against the other and was sworn at parentheticallyfor a fool. Against the skyline Lorraine saw the rider's form bulksquatty and ungraceful, reminding her of an actor whom she knew and didnot like. It was that resemblance perhaps which held her quiet insteadof following her first impulse to speak to them and ask them to carryher to the house.

  The horses stopped with their forefeet in the water and drooped headsto drink thirstily. The riders continued their conversation.

  "--and as I says time and again, they ain't big enough to fight theoutfit, and the quicker they git out the less lead they'll carry undertheir hides when they do go. What they want to try an' hang on for,beats me. Why, it's like setting into a poker game with a five-centpiece! They ain't got my sympathy. I ain't got any use for a damnfool, no way yuh look at it."

  "Well, there's the TJ--they been here a long while, and they ain'tpackin' any lead, and they ain't getting out."

  "Well, say, lemme tell yuh something. The TJ'll git theirs and git itright. Drink all night, would yuh?" He swore long and fluently at hishorse, spurred him through the shallows, and the two rode on up thehill, their voices still mingled in desultory argument, with now andthen an oath rising clearly above the jumble of words.

  They may have been law-abiding citizens riding home, to families thatwere waiting supper for them, but Lorraine crept out from behind hersagebush, sneezing and thanking her imitation of the jack rabbits.Whoever they were, she was not sorry she had let them ride on. Theymight be her father's men, and they might have been very polite andchivalrous to her. But their voices and their manner of speaking hadbeen rough; and it is one thing, Lorraine reflected, to mingle withmade-up villains--even to be waylaid and kidnapped and tied to treesand threatened with death--but it is quite different to accostrough-speaking men in the dark when you know they are not being roughto suit the director of the scene.

  She was so absorbed in trying to construct a range of war or somethingequally thrilling from the scrap of conversation she had heard that shereached the hilltop in what seemed a very few minutes of climbing. Thesky was becoming overcast. Already the stars to the west were blottedout, and the absolute stillness of the atmosphere frightened her morethan the big, dark wilderness itself. It seemed to her exactly asthough the earth was holding its breath and waiting for somethingterrible to happen. The vague bulk of buildings was still somedistance ahead, and when a rumble like the deepest notes of a pipeorgan began to fill all the air, Lorraine thrust her grip under a bushand began to run, her soggy shoes squashing unpleasantly on the roughplaces in the road.

  Lorraine had seen many stage storms and had thrilled ecstatically tothe mimic lightning, knowing just how it was made. But when that hugeblackness behind and to the left of her began to open and show aterrible brilliance within, and to close abruptly, leaving the worldink black, she was terrified. She wanted to hide as she had hiddenfrom those two men; but from that stupendous monster, a realthunderstorm, sagebrush formed no protection whatever. She must reachthe substantial shelter of buildings, the comforting presence of menand women.

  She ran, and as she ran she wept aloud like a child and called for herfather. The deep rumble grew louder, nearer. The revealed brilliancebecame swift sword-thrusts of blinding light that seemed to stab deepthe earth. Lorraine ran awkwardly, her hands over her ears, crying outat each lightning flash, her voice drowned in the thunder that followedit close. Then, as she neared the sombre group of buildings, theclouds above them split with a terrific, rending crash, and the wholeplace stood pitilessly revealed to her, as if a spotlight had beenturned on. Lorraine stood aghast. The buildings were not buildings atall. They were rocks, great, black, forbidding boulders standing thereon a narrow ridge, having a diabolic likeness to houses.

  The human mind is wonderfully resilient, but readjustment comes slowlyafter a shock. Dumbly, refusing to admit the significance of what shehad seen, Lorraine went forward. Not until she had reached and hadtouched the first grotesque caricature of habitation did she whollygrasp the fact that she was lost, and that shelter might be miles away.She stood and looked at the orderly group of boulders as the lightningintermittently revealed them. She saw where the road ran on, betweentwo square-faced rocks. She would have to follow the road, for afterall it must lead _somewhere_,--to her father's ranch, probably. Shewondered irrelevantly why her mother had never mentioned these queerrocks, and she wondered vaguely if any of them had caves or ledgeswhere she could be safe from the lightning.

  She was on the point of stepping out into the road again when ahorseman rode into sight between the two rocks. In the same instant ofhis appearance she heard the unmistakable crack of a gun, saw the riderjerk backward in the saddle, throw up one hand--and then the darknessdropped between them.

  Lorraine crouched behind a juniper bush close against the rock andwaited. The next flash came within a half-minute. It showed a man atthe horse's head, holding it by the bridle. The horse was rearing.Lorraine tried to scream that the man on the ground would be trampled,but something went wrong with her voice, so that she could only whisper.

  When the light came again the man who had been shot was not altogetheron the ground. The other, working swiftly, had thrust the injuredman's foot through the stirrup. Lorraine saw him stand back and lifthis quirt to slash the horse across the rump. Even through the crashof thunder Lorraine heard the horse go past her down the hill,galloping furiously. When she could see again she glimpsed himrunning, while something bounced along on the ground beside him.

/>   She saw the other man, with a dry branch in his hand, dragging itacross the road where it ran between the two rocks. Then LorraineHunter, hardened to the sight of crimes committed for picture valuesonly, realised sickeningly that she had just looked upon a realmurder,--the cold-blooded killing of a man. She felt very sick. Queerlittle red sparks squirmed and danced before her eyes. She crumpleddown quietly behind the jumper bush and did not know when the raincame, though it drenched her in the first two or three minutes ofdownpour.