Part 13 (1/2)
Bethune frowned and shook his head doubtfully: ”You might ride the hills for years, and pa.s.s the spot a dozen times and never recognize it. If you do not happen to strike the exact view-point you might easily fail to recognize it. Then, too, the landscape changes with the seasons of the year. However,” his face brightened and the smile returned to his lips; ”we have at least something to go on. We are not absolutely in the dark. Who knows? If the G.o.ddess of luck sits upon our shoulders, I myself may know the place well--may recognize it instantly! For years I have ridden these hills and I flatter myself that no one knows their hidden nooks and byways better than I. Even if I should not know the exact spot, it may be that I can tell by the general features its approximate locality, and thus limit our search to a comparatively small area.”
Patty knew that her refusal to show the photograph could not fail to place her in an unfavorable position. Either she would appear to distrust this man whom she had no reason to distrust, or her action would be attributed to a selfish intention to keep the secret to herself, even though she knew she could only file one claim. The man's argument had been entirely reasonable--in fact, it seemed the sensible thing to do. Nevertheless, she did refuse, and refuse flatly: ”I think, Mr. Bethune, that I would rather play a lone hand. You see, I started in on this thing alone, and I want to see it through--for the present, at least. After a while, if I find that I cannot succeed alone, I shall be glad of your a.s.sistance. I suppose you think me a fool, but it's a matter of pride, I guess.”
Was it fancy, or did the black eyes flash a gleam of hate--a glitter of rage beneath their long up-curving lashes? And did the swarthy face flush a shade darker beneath its tan? Patty could not be sure, for the next moment he was speaking in a voice under perfect control: ”I can well understand your feeling in the matter, Miss Sinclair, and I have nothing of reproach. I do think you are making a mistake. With Vil Holland knowing what he does of your father's operations, time may be a vital factor in the success of your undertaking. Let me caution you again against carrying the photograph upon your person.”
”Oh, I keep that safely hidden where no one would ever think of searching for it,” smiled the girl, and Bethune noted that her eyes involuntarily swept the cabin with a glance.
The man mounted: ”I will no longer keep you from your work,” he said.
”I have arranged to spend the summer in the hills where I shall carry on some prospecting upon my own account. If I can be of any a.s.sistance to you--if you should need any advice, or help of any kind, a word will procure it. I shall stop in occasionally to see how you fare.
Good-bye.” He waved his hand and rode off down the creek where, in a cottonwood thicket he dismounted and watched the girl ride away in the opposite direction, noted that Lord Clendenning swung stealthily, into the trail behind her, and swinging into his saddle rode swiftly toward the cabin.
In his high notch in the hills, Vil Holland chuckled audibly, and catching up his horse, headed for his camp.
CHAPTER X
THE BISHOP OF ALL OUTDOORS
The days slipped into weeks, as Patty Sinclair, carefully and methodically traced valleys to their sources, and explored innumerable coulees and ravines that twisted and turned their tortuous lengths into the very heart of the hills. Rock ledges without number she scanned, many with deep cracks and fissures, and many without them.
But not once did she find a ledge that could by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as the ledge of the photograph. Disheartened, but not discouraged, the girl would return each evening to her solitary cabin, eat her solitary meal, and throw herself upon her bunk to brood over the apparent hopelessness of her enterprise, or to read from the thumbed and tattered magazines of the dispossessed sheep herder. She rode, now, with a sort of dogged persistence. There was none of the wild thrill that, during the first days of her search, she experienced each time she topped a new divide, or entered a new valley.
Three times since she had informed him she would play a lone hand in the search for her father's strike, Bethune had called at the cabin.
And not once had he alluded to the progress of her work. She was thankful to him for that--she had not forgotten the hurt in her father's eyes as the taunting questions of the scoffers struck home.
Always she had known of the hurt, but now, with the disheartening days of her own failure heaping themselves upon her, she was beginning to understand the reason for the hurt. And, guessing this, Bethune refrained from questioning, but talked gaily of books, and sunsets, and of life, and love, and the joy of living. A supreme optimist, she thought him, despite the half-veiled cynicism that threaded his somewhat fatalistic view of life, a cynicism that but added the necessary _sauce piquante_ to so abandoned an optimism.
Above all, the man was a gentleman. His speech held nothing of the abrupt bluntness of Vil Holland's. He would appear shortly after her early supper, and was always well upon his way before the late darkness began to obscure the contours of her little valley. An hour's chat upon the doorstep of the cabin and he was gone--riding down the valley, singing as he rode some old _chanson_ of his French forebears, with always a pause at the cottonwood grove for a farewell wave of his hat. And Patty would turn from the doorway, and light her lamp, and proceed to enjoy the small present which he never failed to leave in her hand--a box of bon-bons of a kind she had vainly sought for in the little town--again, a novel, a woman's novel written by a man who thought he knew--and another time, just a handful of wild flowers gathered in the hills. She ate the candy making it last over several days. She read the book from cover to cover as she lay upon her air mattress, tucked snugly between her blankets. And she arranged the wild flowers loosely in a shallow bowl and watered them, and talked to them, and admired their beauty, and when they were wilted she threw them out, but she did not gather more flowers to fill the bowl, instead she wiped it dry and returned it to its shelf in the cupboard--and wondered when Bethune would come again. She admitted to herself that he interested--at least, amused her--helped her to throw off for the moment the spirit of dull depression that had fastened itself upon her like a tangible thing, bearing down upon her, threatening to crush her with its weight.
Always, during these brief visits, her lurking distrust of him vanished in the frank boyishness of his personality. The incidents that had engendered the distrust--the subst.i.tution of the name Schultz for Schmidt in the matter of the horse pasture, his abrupt warning against Vil Holland, and his attempt to be admitted into her confidence as a matter of right, were for the moment forgotten in the spell of his presence--but always during her lonely rides in the hills, the half-formed doubt returned. Pondering the doubt, she realized that the princ.i.p.al reason for its continued existence was not so much in the incidents that had awakened it, as in the simple question asked by Vil Holland: ”You say your dad told you all about this partners.h.i.+p business?” And in the ”Oh,” with which he had greeted the reply that she had it from the lips of Bethune. With the realization, her dislike for Vil Holland increased. She characterized him as a ”jug-guzzler,” a ”swashbuckler,” and a ”ruffian”--and smiled as she recalled the picturesque figure with the clean-cut, bronzed face. ”Oh, I don't know--I hate these hills! n.o.body seems sincere excepting the Wattses, and they're--impossible!”
She had borrowed Watts's team and made a second trip to town for supplies, and the check that she drew in payment cut her bank account in half. As before she had offered to take Microby Dandeline, but the girl declined to go, giving as an excuse that ”pitcher shows wasn't as good as circusts, an' they wasn't no fights, an' she didn't like towns, nohow.”
Upon her return from town Patty stopped at the Thompsons' for dinner where she was accorded a royal welcome by the genial rancher and his wife, and where also, she met the Reverend Len Christie, the most picturesque, and the most un-clerical minister of the gospel she had ever seen. To all appearances the man might have been a cowboy. He affected chaps of yellow hair, a dark blue flannel s.h.i.+rt, against which flamed a scarf of brilliant crimson caught together by means of a vivid green scarab. He wore a roll brimmed Stetson, and carried a six-gun at his belt. A pair of high-heeled boots added a couple of inches to the six feet two that nature had provided him with, and he shook hands as though he enjoyed shaking hands. ”I've heard of you, Miss Sinclair, back in town and have looked forward to meeting you on my first trip into the hills. How are my friends, the Wattses, these days? And that reprobate, Vil Holland?” He did not mention that it was Vil Holland who had spoken of her presence in the hills, nor that the cowboy had also specified that she utterly despised the ground he rode on.
To her surprise Patty noticed that there was affection rather than disapprobation in the word reprobate, and she answered a trifle stiffly: ”The Wattses are all well, I think: but, as for Mr. Holland, I really cannot answer.”
The parson appeared not to notice the constraint but turned to Thompson: ”By the way, Tom, why isn't Vil riding the round-up this year? Has he made his strike?”
Thompson grinned: ”Naw, Vil ain't made no strike. Facts is, they's be'n some considerable horse liftin' goin' on lately, an' the stockmen's payin' Vil wages fer to keep his eye peeled. He's out in the hills all the time anyhow with his prospectin', an' they figger the thieves won't pay no 'tention to him, like if a stranger was to begin kihootin' 'round out there.”
”Have they got a line on 'em at all?”
”Well,” considered Thompson. ”Not as I know of--exactly. Monk Bethune an' that there Lord Clendennin' is hangin' 'round the hills--that's about all I know.”
The parson nodded: ”I saw Bethune in town the other day. Do you know, Tom, I believe there's a bad Injun.”
”Indian!” cried the girl. ”Mr. Bethune is not an Indian!”
Thompson laughed: ”Yup, that is, he's a breed. They say his gran'mother was a Cree squaw--daughter of a chief, or somethin'.