The desert was a marvel of mauve and yellow and rose-color, under a canopy of blue. The sun was not too hot, and the air was vital and sustaining. Helen Anderson, riding over the hard plain, sniffed it joyously. She loved the smell of the desert, that intangible, indescribable odor that is yet so permeating: one of the fixed facts of the region. She had missed it, hungrily, during four years of exile from the Palo Verde.
She lifted her eyes to the sapphire-blue mountains on the horizon and laughed aloud for sheer joy, with a sense of physical well-being, as her vision ranged from these to nearer scenes. She was passing a Papago’s hut, a tiny structure of cream-colored adobe, with a dark roof of thatch. The hut itself was hardly larger than its own big chimney, and squatted on the yellow sand, in its little patch of shade, was an Indian woman.
She wore a skirt of dark blue stuff, and a white reboso was wound about the upper part of her body and carried over her dark hair. Her dusky arms were bare, and her brown hands patted and shaped and smoothed a pot of red clay, soon to be baked in the little kiln where a fire was already glowing.
Helen called a gay greeting to her and she looked up, showing her white teeth in a broad smile. Then she paused in her deft handling of the wet, red clay, to flip a bit gently at the inquisitive nose of Patsy, Helen’s fox terrier, who was minded to investigate the pottery operations. Helen called the dog and lifted her pony to a gallop. So the three went scampering off in a wild race over the level sand. A mile was measured before the girl drew rein again, with a blissful sigh of pure happiness.
“And to think,” she told herself, with a little feeling of unreality about it all, “that back in New England there is snow on the ground, and fire in the furnaces, and people who must be out of doors are thumping their arms, to keep warm, and telling one another what a glorious, bracing climate they have.”
She fell into a brown study and her reins lay loose upon the pony’s neck while she went back over the four happy years she had spent in the land of snow. How strange it seemed that so short a while ago the east, New England, even college itself, had been to her mere names. Then, for four years, they had been such happy entities. What a beautiful memory her whole college life was!
“And now,” she mused, “it seems as if it were all fading back into the dream again, yet I know things are as real, back there, as they ever were, and the real me, that Radcliffe helped make, is here in a real place, with the realest sort of things to do.
“For one thing,” she said, half aloud, “I can keep right on making Father glad I’m home for good, and showing him that he need not worry about me.”
That thought checked a growing wistfulness in her mood. Morgan Anderson was glad to have his girl back, even though he had his well-defined doubts as to the desert being the best place for her. Her college years had been weary years to the lonely man, and his happiness in the new order was a beautiful part of Helen’s home-coming.
The girl could scarcely remember her mother. There had always been Jacinta, her half-Spanish nurse, now the household factotum, in the background of her childish years. In the foreground was the well-loved figure of her father, who had been her friend and constant companion. It was he who had taught her to read and to write, and to do plane and solid geometry: to ride hard, to shoot straight, and to tell the truth. Beyond these her education, other than what old Jacinta could impart, had been received at the hands of one of the cowboys on the range, a college graduate with a love for the plains.
Aunt Everett had been horrified at this arrangement. Aunt Everett was her father’s relative, who, on two formidable occasions, had descended upon the rancho and undertaken to revolutionize the household. This she did out of a sense of duty to Helen, who, she declared, was growing up in sheer savagery and ignorance.
Helen was twenty years old when Aunt Everett paid her second, and last, visit. It was then the momentous decision was reached that the girl should go to college. It was for the sake of his own youthful dream of Harvard, that had never come true, that Morgan Anderson had fixed upon Radcliffe, and Helen’s four beautiful years had become a fact.
She sighed again, recalling those years.
“They were so lovely,” she murmured, “and they have sent me back—how is it old Marcus Aurelius phrased it?—‘free from all discontent with that to which thou returnest.’
“Free from discontent?” she cried, taking in another deep, long breath of the buoyant air, “I should say I am! I was never in my life so aboundingly happy!”
The pony was walking slowly, and as Helen looked about she became aware that Patsy was not in attendance upon them.
She halted, anxiously, the dog was a recent acquisition, given her by Sandy Larch, on her return from college, she was training him to keep with her. This was the first time she had really forgotten him. She reproached herself as she rode back over the way they had come, for letting her wits go wool-gathering.
She called the terrier, reining in from time to time, but there was no response, and becoming at last thoroughly alarmed, she dismounted, dropping the pony’s reins over his head to the ground, and started on foot to investigate among the cacti.
“He’s found a gopher-hole somewhere,” she said to herself, as she went whistling about among the greasewood and cacti.
She ceased to whistle, presently, vexed at Patsy’s lack of response, and continued her search in silence until, rounding a cactus-grown knoll, strewn with loose stone, she suddenly halted, warned by a familiar, burring sound that for an instant made her heart jump.
A few yards away from her was the terrier, rigid, immovable, the hair along his back, even the loose skin between his shoulders, stiffly erect. His lips were drawn back from his white teeth; his ears were pricked forward, and his whole body shuddered with the vibration of his low, continuous growling.
Near the dog, lying prone, his face turned toward her, Helen saw a man, and still beyond him, alert, motionless, save for the minute quiver of that ominous, buzzing tail, a huge rattler was coiled, its cold, wicked little eyes fixed upon the dog.
“I must not scream; I must not faint,” the horrified girl told herself, trying to stand steady, and to think quick.
If the dog or the snake saw her neither made any sign. They glared, unmoving, at each other, across the helpless man. Neither dared attack, or retreat, and Helen knew that any move on either her part or the man’s, would cause the snake to strike—the dog to spring.
The man lay exactly in the storm-center, when trouble should come, and it seemed as though neither dog nor snake could much longer maintain the horrid statu quo. Patsy’s low growling was dreadful to hear, and the snake’s steady rattle brought the sweat of sheer fright to her forehead.
She glanced again at the man and his gaze met hers steadily. It was clear that he was alive to the full peril of his position, yet there was no sign of agitation in his face. Rather, his glance seemed meant to reassure her. Shamed by her own fears, Helen summoned her faculties to meet the situation.
She had grown up in the desert. She had known rattlesnakes before ever she went to college, and her four years of sophistication had not crowded out that earlier knowledge. Her brain seemed suddenly to clear, her nerves to harden. She knew what could be done, if she could but trust Patsy to hold steady. She remembered Sandy Larch’s boast, that the dog was game. Now was the time to show it, if he was.
“Steady, Patsy; steady, boy; quiet; quiet, boy!”
Over and over she whispered the words, oh, so gently, that she might not startle the young dog, and all the while she was slowly, slowly, raising her right hand, in which was her riding-whip. She was too thorough a plainswoman to use such a thing on a horse, but she carried it to use in training the terrier.
“Steady, Patsy; down, boy; down!”
The whip was extended in front of her, now, and she was moving it gently from side to side. The snake had caught sight of it, and was following it with its eyes, swaying in unison with the whip’s motion.
Never staying the steady movement of her arm, Helen crept forward, whispering reassurance to the dog, until at last, still waving the whip, she dropped to one knee and slipped her fingers under his collar. He stopped his growling and nestled to her with a little whimper. When she commanded him to charge he dropped to his belly and lay perfectly still, his eyes fixed upon the snake.
“If you can manage to turn the thing’s head a bit, little girl;—” it was the man who spoke, in a low, level voice—“so he can’t notice what I’m doing, I’ll fix him.”
With a little nod, Helen stood up and began moving sidewise, still swinging the whip. Thoroughly hypnotized, the snake swayed with its movement, those beady little eyes never leaving it. The rattler did not see the stealthy glide of the man’s hand, or the gleaming steel that was presently leveled at that flat, venomous head. An instant after there was a sharp report, and the snake was whipping the desert in its death struggle as Helen again caught the terrier by the collar. The man essayed to rise, and sank back with a sharp exclamation of pain.
“I guess I’ve hurt my foot,” he said, answering Helen’s look of inquiry.
“I—my horse took to pitching, and slung me here,” he went on, sitting up. “I can’t think what got the fellow, or me either,” he added, with a look of chagrin. “I never thought I needed a bucking-strap; but it seems as if I did.”
He spoke lightly, partly to hearten the girl, who was white and shaken, after her horrid experience, and partly to draw her attention from the victim of his shot, now stretched on the desert.
Another effort and he got to his feet; but the first attempt to step brought him to one knee, frowning with pain.
“And I don’t suppose there’s a stick in sight, that would give me any support,” he said, looking about.
“I’m afraid not,” Helen answered, following his glance; and then she remembered.
“I can bring up my horse,” she cried. “I left him by the mesquite when I dismounted to look for Patsy, here.”
“Patsy’s sure an enterprising little dog,” the man said, smiling, “I don’t just know whether I have to thank him for stirring up the little difficulty a while ago, or for keeping it from being worse before you came.”
“I’m afraid it was he that roused the rattler,” replied Helen, ruefully. “He is young, yet, and has his sense to get.”
The man laughed. “I was a little stunned when my horse landed me here,” he explained, shyly. “First thing I knew I was sort of waking-up, and that was the tableau I beheld. I didn’t do much that was strenuous, from then on.”
Helen was wondering, curiously, who the man could be. He was evidently not a cowboy, or a prospector, and she knew that if he were a cattleman or a mining expert, a stranger in that part of the country, he would naturally have been the hacienda’s guest. Such visitors in the neighborhood were always for her father. Perhaps he was on his way to him, now.
“Were you going to the Palo Verde?” she asked, impulsively. “I am Helen Anderson. Father will be sorry you have had an accident.”
“I thought you must belong there,” he said, simply, “and I was going to tell you my name. It’s Gard—not a very long one,” with a smile, “and I was going to the Palo Verde, though your father doesn’t know me. I wanted to see him on business.”
“Then the best thing we can do,” Helen said, briskly, “is to get there at once. I’m going to ask you to keep Master Patsy here, while I go for the horse.”
She was already speeding down the knoll, and a moment later she returned leading Dickens, the pony, who had stood patiently where she left him.
For a time it looked as though the stranger was not going to get into the saddle. Dickens was restless and nervous over his awkward approaches, and the pain in Gard’s foot was excruciating, but after many agonized attempts he finally mounted. He was white and faint, after the effort, but he smiled resolutely down upon the girl while he adjusted the stirrup he could use.
“I am glad you ride this way,” he said, indicating her military tree. “I thought I’d have to sit in one of those queer dishes ladies usually ride on.”
Helen laughed. “If I waited to have horses gentled to the side-saddle,” she answered, “I should never get anything to ride. It’s the only way, here in the desert, and Father always thought it was the safer way.”
She was walking beside the pony, her broad-brimmed felt hat pushed back, that she might look up at her guest. “I used a side-saddle back east,” she added.
“I think this way is a lot better,” Gard replied. He wished she would look up again. It seemed to him that his eyes had never beheld anything more delicious than her upturned face, with its background of broad hat-brim.
He could only glimpse it when she looked straight ahead, as she was doing now. Her nose had a little tilt, that made him think her always just about to look up, and kept him in a pleasant state of expectation. He could not see her mouth and chin without leaning forward, and he shrank, shyly, from doing that, but he studied the firm brown cheek, where just a touch of deep color came and went, and the neat sweep of fair hair back into the shadow of the broad hat, and he had noted when she looked up that her eyes were gray, looking out friendly-wise under level brows.
“You were a mighty plucky little girl to tackle that rattler,” he said, with a sudden realization of her courage. Her short riding-habit misled him and he did not think of her as grown up.
Helen stiffened, resentful of what seemed like a too familiar address. Then she recognized his mistake, with a curious little sense of pleasure in it.
“That was nothing,” she answered, with a lighthearted laugh, “Sandy Larch taught me the trick. I played that way with more than one rattler when”—“when I was a child,” she had been about to say, but she changed it, and added, “before I went away to school.” “No use dragging in ‘college’” she told herself. “He might think I was trying to seem important.”
“I know Sandy Larch,” Gard said. “He’s a good man.”
“So are you,” was the thought that flashed through the girl’s mind as she glanced upward again. She dismissed it instantly, with a feeling of astonishment at herself. She was not given to speculate in such wise on the quality of chance acquaintances.
“Sandy’s just Sandy,” she replied. “One of the best friends I ever had. I can’t remember the time when he wasn’t on hand looking after me.”
There was silence for a while, till Gard spoke again.
“I hate to make you walk,” he apologized, “You’ll be all tuckered out.”
“Not a bit,” she declared, stoutly. “You must be new to the desert, if you don’t know what miles people can walk here, without getting tired.”
The bronze of his face was tinged with a faint red.
“No,” said he, “I ain’t new to the desert. Not much I ain’t new; even—” with a mortified laugh—“if I did let my bronco throw me. I guess, though, I’m new to little girls,” he continued. “Seem’s if you ought to be tired. You don’t look so very big.”
“I’m strong, though.” Somehow, his assumption that she was a little girl gave Helen a pleasant sense of ease in his company. She glanced up at him again, and was startled to see how pale he had grown, under his tan. His forehead was knit with pain, and his teeth were set against one lip.
“I wish I could do something for you!” she cried, in quick sympathy. “But we’re nearly there; and Father’s as good as a doctor, any day.”
“It’s all right,” he muttered. “I was just a fool. I thought I’d see if I couldn’t get down and walk; so I tried putting that foot in the stirrup.”
“That was a clever thing to do,” Helen scolded, “I see you do not know how to believe people when they say they are not tired.”
She quickened her pace, that he might see how far she was from weariness.
“I’m sorry,” he said, humbly. “I didn’t mean to do anything to set you running off like that.”
No reply. They went on again in a silence that lasted for several moments.
“Ain’t you going to forgive me?” he asked, presently.
Helen considered; not what he had said however. She was more deeply interested in deciding why his “ain’t” was not offensive to her college-bred ears.
“After all,” she thought, deliberating it, “those things do not matter so much when people themselves are real.”
“I won’t do it again,” the voice beside her pleaded, in an exaggeration of penitence, and she laughed, looking up at him.
“I didn’t think you’d be such a hard-hearted little girl,” Gard said, reproachfully.
“I am not,” she replied. “I am only sensible. You should believe what people tell you.”
He made no reply. He was trying to decide how old the child could be.
“I guess,” he thought, with an effort to recall little girls he had seen—ah, how long ago it was that he had seen any!—“she’s most likely about twelve. She’ll be mighty pretty when she grows up.”
His foot still hurt, cruelly, in consequence of his rash experiment, but fortunately they were at the rancho. A few moments later they had reached the casa, where Morgan Anderson took charge of his guest with skilful good-will. Like all cattlemen, he was fairly expert at attending to hurts; could set a bone, on a pinch, and it did not take him long to discover that one of the small bones of Gard’s foot was dislocated. With Sandy Larch’s aid he set the matter to rights, and bandaged the foot in a way that would have done credit to professional skill.
He would not hear of his patient’s riding back to Sylvania that day.
“Not a bit of it!” he cried, when Gard proposed it. “That’s going to be one unmercifully sore foot by to-morrow; and suppose—”
He checked himself before voicing the suggestion that another accident might possibly put the foot badly out of commission. He had the plainsman’s idea that a horseman should stay with his mount; so he merely said that he wanted to keep an eye on the foot.
“You can’t be sure one of the little bones may not be broken,” he explained, “and anyway, we’re mighty glad to see folks here; so I guess we’ll have to keep you.” And Gard, more willing than at the moment he realized, accepted the invitation.
It was Manuel Gordo who, riding in from the upper range, saw the stranger’s horse, lathered and excited, wandering afield, and threw a rope over him. When he got the bronco to the Palo Verde corrals and took off the saddle, he gave a low, comprehending whistle. Under the blanket, well back, but yet where a rider’s weight would press, was a bit of cholla, the vicious fish-hook cactus of the desert, so disposed as to cause the horse exquisite pain.
Manuel swore a rolling Mexican oath as the thing caught his fingers, and stamped it into the desert before giving attention to the bronco’s back. This, later, he showed to Sandy Larch, with a vivid explanation.
“The blame cowards!” the foreman commented. “So they thought they’d git ’im that way, did they? It seemed mighty queer to me that he couldn’t sit anything four-legged he was likely to git in the ord’nary run, in Sylvania; but that pinto must ’a’ raged considerable with that on its back.”
“Who you think do-a that?” Manuel asked, and the foreman told him of the scene in the Happy Family Saloon. “Some o’ that gang’s been tryin’ to get even,” he finished, and Manuel growled assent.
“I—I see that señor before to-day,” he ventured, hesitating, “He one good man.”
“Where ’d you ever meet up with ’im?” demanded Sandy. “Where ’d he come from?”
“Quién sabe?” Manuel’s shoulders lifted. “It is at Sylvania I see heem,” he added, non-committally, and understanding dawned upon the foreman.
“You did, eh?” he laughed, “An’ he got after you an’ made you quit that spree you was headed on, I bet. That what you come home so quick for? How’d he round you up?”
The Mexican grinned, shamefacedly, and Sandy laughed again.
“He’s sure a sin-buster,” he commented, admiringly, “But he done you a good turn that time, Manuel. The patron’d given me orders to everlastingly fire you next time you showed up after a spree, an’ I’d ’a’ sure done it if you hadn’t ’a’ been on hand that mornin’ same ’s usual!”
Manuel was busy smearing axle-grease on the bronco’s back, to keep the flies from its hurts.
“The señor, he good man all right,” he said, not turning around, and Sandy Larch, being shrewd, walked away without further comment.