Part 17 (2/2)

They had topped the divide and the sorrels had been fighting the bits.

As she spoke Tom gave them their heads and the team swept the buckboard forward with a banging and clatter that would have drowned words anyhow, but the fact that he did not reply gave Jane a feeling of jubilation. Her thrust had p.r.i.c.ked his reserve, showing it to be not wholly genuine!

d.i.c.k Hilton had told her of the encounter Beck had had with Webb, told it jeeringly as he attempted to impress her with the distasteful phases of her environment. He had failed in that. He had impressed her only with the fact that Tom Beck had gone out of his way, had taken a chance, to protect her standing. Others of her men had heard her insulted, men from other ranches had been there, but of them all Beck had been her champion.

And it was Beck who had bullied her, had doubted her in the face of her best efforts to convince him of fitness! He had even challenged her to make herself his friend!

She had believed before she came into those hills that she knew men of all sorts but now she had found something new. Here was a man who, in her presence, would plot to humiliate her and yet when she could not see or hear his loyalty and his belief in her were outstanding.

And what was it, she asked herself, that made her pulse leap and her throat tighten? It was not wholly grat.i.tude. It was not merely because he resisted her efforts to win his open regard. Those things were potent influences, surely, but there was something more fundamental about him, a basic quality which she had not before encountered in men; she could not a.n.a.lyze it but daily she had sensed its growing strength.

Now she felt it ... felt, but could not identify.

Two-Bits opened the gate for them and Tom carried her bundles into the house.

At the corral, as Beck unharnessed, the homely cow puncher said:

”Gosh, Tommy, how'd it seem, ridin' all the way to town an' back with her settin' up beside you?”

”Just about like you was there, Two-Bits, only we didn't swear quite so much.”

”I got lots of respect for you, Tommy, but I think you're a d.a.m.ned liar.”

And Beck chuckled to himself as though, perhaps, the other had been right.

”Two weeks now since he wrote,” Two-Bits sighed. ”He sh.o.r.e ought to be comin'. Gosh, Tom, but he's a bright man!”

Again that night Jane Hunter looked from a window after the lights in the bunk house had gone out and the place was quiet, to see a tall, silent figure move slowly beneath the cottonwoods, watching the house, pausing at times as if listening. Then it went back through the shadows more rapidly, as though satisfied that all was well.

Many times she had watched this but tonight it seemed of greater significance than ever before. He denied her his friends.h.i.+p; he had made Webb his sworn enemy by defending her (she had not told him that part of the tale she heard in Ute Crossing) and yet disclaimed any great interest in her as a motive. Still, he patrolled her dooryard at night!

A sudden impulse to do something that would _make_ him give her that consideration in her presence which he gave before others came to life. His att.i.tude suddenly angered her beyond reason and she felt her body shaking as tears sprang into her eyes. The great thing which she desired was just there, just out of reach and the fact exasperated her, grew, became a fever until, on her knees at the window, hammering the sill with her fists, she cried:

”Tom Beck you're going to love me!”

CHAPTER VIII

AND NOW, THE CLERGY

Two-bits was the last into the bunkhouse the following evening. He had ridden his n.i.g.g.e.r horse in from the westward hills and had not come through the big gate so not until he stepped across the threshold were the others aware of his presence.

”Here he is!” said a rider from down the creek who was stopping for the night and the group in the center of the low room broke apart.

”Two-Bits, here's your brother,” said Curtis.

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