As Morgan Anderson had predicted, the condition of Gard’s foot next day was such as to make him a captive. The cattleman, surveying it after Jacinta had given the patient his breakfast, prescribed rest, and forbade any thought of leaving the rancho inside of a week.
“You say you came to see me on business,” he said, as he stood looking down upon Gard where he lay in bed in a big, low-ceiled room of the casa, “Well, I’m off to the upper range to-day, to pick out some work-cattle. I shall not be able to talk business till night; so that settles to-day.”
“You’re mighty good,” was Gard’s reply, “but that business o’ mine is only to ask you a question that you can answer in half a minute. You mustn’t think it’s some matter of consequence—to anybody but me, that is,” he added.
“All right; so much the better. It’ll keep, and we can keep you.”
Morgan Anderson had taken a liking to his unexpected guest, and made him welcome with true western hospitality. It was long since Gard had talked with a man of his stamp, and the mere sound of Anderson’s pleasant, easy voice was a joy to him. It was good just to lie there and listen; at the same time, he was concerned about his foot. He wanted to be up and about Kate Hallard’s business. He had not calculated that the delivery of the deed which he had found in Arnold’s coat-pocket two years before, would involve him as it had done.
He had come back to civilization with a strong purpose. He meant to make every effort to reinstate himself in the eyes of the law, and he realized that he must do all that he could before some chance recognition should work to hinder his efforts. Nevertheless, he told himself, the claim of this woman came first. Kate Hallard had no one to fend for her, and the responsibility, in this particular matter, had been laid on him, Gabriel Gard.
Later in the forenoon, when Anderson had ridden away with his men, Wing Chang, the Chinese cook, acting upon the patron’s instructions, established Gard in a long steamer-chair, under the cottonwoods beside the casa. Hither, when he was settled, came Helen, bearing a little tray on which were biscuits and a grape-fruit. Gard smiled as he saw her coming around a corner of the casa, and answered her greeting with a cheery “good-morning.”
“I wondered where you’d got to,” he began, and stopped, suddenly, the quick color rushing to his face.
“Now I just beg your pardon, Miss,” he stammered, in piteous confusion, “I mistook—I thought—I thought you were your little sister.”
“I am,” laughed Helen, putting the tray on a chair by his side.
“No, no: you mustn’t move your foot”—for Gard was struggling forward in his steamer-chair.
“If you do,” she threatened, “I shall have to scold you harder than I did yesterday.”
He sank back, a look in his face of mingled chagrin and wonder. Helen was arrayed in white, the simplest sort of a shirt-waist suit, with a touch of brown at neck and belt and shoes; but to his bewildered senses she was a radiant vision of unguessed daintiness and beauty. There was something incredible, to him, in the idea of this unearthly being offering him food. He glanced from her to the tray, and back again.
“I don’t know what that is,” he said, indicating the grape-fruit, “and I ain’t sure I know what you are. I thought yesterday you were a little girl, and now you seem like a young lady; and I don’t seem right sure you won’t turn into a fairy in a minute, and run away.”
“Oh, Oh!” Helen cried, “What three-fold flattery!”
Then it was her turn to experience a shock; for, as she stood looking down upon him, it suddenly became apparent to her that this man was young.
She had thought nothing about the matter, in the excitement of yesterday’s encounter, and when she had walked beside him, seeing his bearded face in her brief, upward glances, she had taken it for granted that he was middle-aged, at least. There was something disconcerting about the unexpected revelation of youth in those eager brown eyes, in the clear olive of the face above the strong, short beard, and in the firm curve of red lips just visible under the moustache. She could think of no further retort to his pretty speech, and busied herself with showing him how to eat the grape-fruit, wondering, vaguely, where he could have been, in the desert, not to have encountered pomelos.
“These are from over the border,” she explained. “One of the boys smuggled them in last week; think how wicked we are! But by New Year’s we shall have some of our very own.”
“They’re mighty good,” Gard said, with no idea of what the fruit tasted like. He was still wrestling with the awesome fact that Helen had prepared it, and was teaching him to eat it. He took more sugar when she told him to, though years of abstinence from sugar had blunted his taste for it, and he shook his head with very proper commiseration when she told him of the way eastern folk spoil the fruit in preparing it.
“I never was back there,” he said, “I was raised on the prairie; but this is good enough for me.”
He looked beyond the fringe of cottonwoods, out across the plain, quivering in the mid-forenoon heat.
“Don’t you like it?” he asked.
“I love it! It’s so big, and beautiful, in spite of its dreadfulness; it’s so positive!” Helen was sitting on the ground, her hands in her lap, her eyes turned toward the far mountains. Gard considered her words.
“Positive:” he repeated, thoughtfully, “Yes: it’s sure that. There ain’t any half-way place,” he added, drawing a deep breath. “A man, he gets big, or he gets little, living in it.”
“Oh!” cried she; “you must have been a long time in the desert to find that out!”
She went on, with youthful, unconscious arrogance: “I’ve lived here all my life; but I never realized that until after I came back from college this last time.”
“Have you been here long?” she added.
“I haven’t been ’round the level much,” Gard answered, and after a pause he added:
“I’ve been in the mountains most of the time.”
“Then you must have been prospecting: I hope you struck pay dirt?”
“I did.”
“Good! So you are a mining-man—I wondered.”
She had wondered about him. Gard turned the thought over in his mind, the while he told her something of his discovery in the mountains. It seemed a marvelous thing that she should have thought of him at all. Almost unconsciously he began telling her of finding his claim; of working it; and of Jinny.
Helen listened with rapt interest. She knew that men did go off into the mountains as she supposed Gard must have done. She had talked with prospectors, in her lifetime, but never with one like this.
“I suppose you will be wonderfully rich when you begin working your claim in earnest,” she said, at last, slowly, “Shall you like that?”
“I think so. There are some things I want a good deal”—Ah, how much he wanted them: the right to freedom; the right to hold up his head among men. Gard’s desire for this was increasing with every moment that he sat talking to this fair, unconscious girl. As he looked at her, sitting before him on the sparse grass, it came home to him with fearful force that it would be hard to have friends if his past life must always be a secret from them.
“I suppose there are,” Helen was saying, half wistfully, “Money brings so many opportunities to a man.”
“Not unless he’s a real man to start with,” replied Gard.
“There’s a lot to be thought about,” he went on. “I used to think that to give a man plenty to eat, and wear, and good things round him; nice, beautiful things such as we read about—and I guess that you’ve always seen,” he explained,—“would help make a better man of him.
“I don’t believe it’s altogether so,” he went on, following a train of thought that he had often mulled over, in the glade, “All the good things that you can put a man into won’t make any better man of him, if when he didn’t have ’em he wasn’t trying to make a better man of himself.”
Helen pondered his saying in some surprise.
“I never thought of it that way before,” she said, at last, “but it seems as if it ought to be true.”
“I guess it’s true enough,” Gard frowned a little, deep in thought. “Jinny and I, we used to figure out ’twas, when we talked things over.” He smiled into his companion’s eyes.
“When I think, sometimes, of what men’ll do for money, though,” continued he, “I ’most feel ’s if I didn’t want any of it.”
“But it seems cleaner money, somehow,” Helen interrupted, “it’s different when a man digs it out of the earth. He doesn’t rob, or defraud anybody, then; and think of all it can do!”
“Yes.” There was a slow twinkle in Gard’s eyes as he spoke. “There’s solid satisfaction to me in thinking that one o’ these days, if I want to, I can get Jinny a solid gold collar.”
They laughed together over this bit of foolishness, feeling, suddenly, that they were very good friends. It was almost with a little sense of something unwelcome that Helen, looking across the level plain, saw a horseman in the distance, coming toward the rancho-gate.
“Some one is coming,” she said, studying the approaching figure. “I wonder who it can be; Daddy isn’t expecting anyone.”
Gard turned his head and they watched together.
“It isn’t one of the men,” commented Helen. “He looks cityfied, doesn’t he?”
It was no careless cowboy figure that they watched. Whoever it was rode compactly, elbows down, and the horse was not running, but coming at an easy ’lope.
“Why!” the girl exclaimed, after a moment or two, “I believe it’s Mr. Westcott!”
The name set Gard’s heart pounding, but he kept his quiet pose in the steamer-chair, and only the faintest flutter of distended nostrils betrayed the emotion that was surging within him.
He had no real fear that Westcott might recognize him. The lawyer, as it happened, had seen him but twice; once at Phoenix, just after his arrest, and again on the occasion of that memorable visit to Blue Gulch. Nevertheless, Gard was thankful that he was warned of the new-comer’s approach.
“Do you know him?” Helen asked, still watching the rider, and Gard answered, promptly enough, that he had heard of him.
“He’s stopping at the corrals,” said Helen, presently. “I hope there’s some one there to take his horse.”
She started off, with a backward glance and a smile for her invalid, and presently Gard saw her going toward the corrals, followed by Wing Chang. She walked with a light, springing step that seemed to him must be peculiar to her alone. He had seen girls, back in Iowa, but they had not walked like that.
“There ain’t anybody like her,” he said, half aloud, replying to his own thought. Then he remembered that happy glance, and smile, and a shiver of pain ran through him.
“Heaven help me,” he muttered, “She wouldn’t have looked like that if she’d known.”
Helen, in the meantime, was greeting Westcott, who walked up to the casa with her, leaving his horse for Chang to unsaddle and turn in. He had come up to Sylvania to see a man, he explained, and when he got where the man was, why the man was not there. He showed his handsome, even teeth in a merry smile at his own jest, and somehow managed to convey to Helen the idea that the man “wasn’t there” for the reason that he was afraid to meet him, Ashley Westcott.
“It’s just a game of bluff some smart Aleck is trying to play on me,” he added, with pleasant carelessness; “It isn’t of much importance, except as it gives me the excuse I’m always glad of, to ride out here. I shall have to wait over, a day or two, to give the fellow a chance to make good, I dare say.”
His eyes narrowed when he was introduced to Gard. Kate Hallard had written to him, three days before, and the letter had brought him to Sylvania in a hurry. He had seen Mrs. Hallard and, therefore, Gard’s name had significance for him.
He seated himself in the chair from which Jacinta had long since removed the tray, and made a casual inquiry about Gard’s hurt. Gard explained it briefly, giving, to Helen’s immense relief, none of the details.
“I was in Sylvania this morning,” Westcott remarked, taking the glass of ice and the bottle of ginger ale that Jacinta brought him. “Came up from Tucson, and got that brute of a stage at Bonesta.”
“It is a horrid ride,” Helen commented.
Gard said nothing, and Westcott and Helen chatted indifferently for a few moments of matters common enough, the news and talk of the territory, yet as new to Gard, in large measure, as though he had been a foreigner. The lawyer turned to him again, irritated by his silent scrutiny.
“I saw your friend Mrs. Hallard in Sylvania,” he said, “She was a good deal worried to know what had become of you.”
Gard’s eyes flashed, but his reply was given in a low, even tone.
“That was mighty kind of her,” he said, “I calculated to be on hand—we reckoned you’d be coming soon. When you go back you can ease her mind, and let her know I’m all right.”
Helen looked puzzled. She was not familiar with Sylvania, although it was the post office town of the rancho, but she knew, in a vague way, who Mrs. Hallard was. It would have been difficult not to know, when there were but half a dozen white women within a radius of fifty miles. She could not think of her, however, as a friend of this new acquaintance. She had seen Mrs. Hallard once, and Westcott’s apparently chance remark had exactly the effect he had calculated. It troubled her, and disturbed the atmosphere of friendliness which he had dimly felt between the girl and Gard, when he saw them together.
“It seems curious to find Mr. Gard here,” the lawyer went on, addressing Helen. “He is just the man I came to Sylvania to see. You can bank on it I did not expect to meet him when I rode this way.”
He overshot his mark, that time, going too far in his anxiety to produce an impression unfavorable to Gard. Helen’s hospitality was touched, and her sympathy enlisted for her guest. Whatever his friendship for Mrs. Hallard, of whom she really knew nothing definite, she did not believe that the man who sat there regarding them both with serene eyes, would ever be afraid to meet Ashley Westcott.
She looked from one to the other, and Gard smiled as he answered the lawyer’s remark, speaking to her rather than to the other.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m the man. I told Mrs. Hallard,” he added, glancing at Westcott, “to tell you to see me.”
“I shall, all right,” the lawyer replied, pointedly, and turned to ask Helen some question about her father. She was glad of the diversion, and went into detail about his errand to the upper range.
“We’re going to have an orchard,” she explained, “Father had some trees put in three or four years ago; I believe he must have sat and held their heads all the while I was away, and watered them with a teaspoon.”
The others joined in her laugh at the vision conjured up of Morgan Anderson playing nurse to desert trees.
“They are only a few grape-fruit, and a date palm or two,” Helen went on, “but they have kindled his ambition, and now he is planning for oranges, and apricots.”
“Has he got the trees yet?” Gard asked.
“Mercy, no! Our needs are still more elemental than that. He has gone after some cattle to ‘gentle’ for plowing. Can’t you just see those wild-eyed long-horns figuring in pastoral idyls on the plain?”
Westcott grinned, but before either man could comment Wing Chang appeared from the direction of the adobe structure that served him for kitchen, and beckoned Helen to a domestic conference.
“Wing Chang’s official beck is equal to a royal summons,” she said, lightly, “so I shall have to be excused for a season.”
When she had departed the two men regarded each other for a little space. Westcott took out paper and tobacco, offering them to Gard. The latter declined them and the lawyer began rolling himself a cigarette.
“I take it you’re an attorney, Mr. Gard?” he began, in a tone of careless query, as he struck a match.
At Gard’s negative he held the little taper alight in his finger for an instant, while he stared in surprise.
“Oh,” he said, recovering himself quickly, and lighting his cigarette, “I thought you must be. I rather figured,”—with a laugh which he meant to be irritating, “that you were a young attorney, or a new-comer in the territory, and trying to scare up business.” He puffed a cloud of smoke into the air and regarded his companion through it, with veiled eyes. “’Twas rather natural, don’t you think?” he persisted, with a sneer, “considering the nature of the little game up at Sylvania?”
Still Gard did not speak. He had put his well foot to the ground, and curled the other leg up that he might lean forward, and he sat regarding Westcott with quiet attention.
“I suppose you know, anyway,” the latter finally said, with a very good assumption of contempt, “Anybody with a headpiece might, whether he’s a lawyer or not, that neither my client nor I need feel obliged to pay any attention to the matter.”
Gard seemed to turn the remark over in his mind.
“Then what made you come up here?” he finally asked.
“That’s easy,” Westcott answered, scornfully. “I wanted to see who was trying to make a fool of poor Kate Hallard. I don’t wish her any harm, and I wanted to put her wise that she’s being used by some sharper, in a queer game.”
“I guess you’ll think better o’ that before we get through, Mr. Westcott,” Gard said, with deliberation.
“Not much I won’t.” Westcott was admiring the rings he had blown into the air. “Fact is, my friend,” he went on, with an air of easy confidence, “the more I think of your little scheme the less I think of it. In the first place, it won’t work. My client is in possession. That’s nine points, you know. By way of a tenth point, he has a quit claim from Mrs. Hallard—”
“That’s one item,” Gard interrupted, softly, “that I guess you won’t care to dwell on, when the matter comes to be pushed.”
“Pushed!” Westcott ignored the first part of the speech. “I tell you, man,” he cried, “you’ve got nothing that can be pushed! That deed you an’ Kate Hallard pretend to have found hasn’t a leg to stand on. You’d better be careful you don’t get into trouble with it.”
“I’m going to, Mr. Westcott,” the slow, calm tone made the lawyer feel uneasy, he could not have told why.
“If it will save you any trouble, my friend,” he sneered, at the same time keeping a close watch on the other’s face, “I’ll tell you that I saw some time ago, in a Chicago paper, that Jared Oliphant is out of commission—softening of the brain. I suppose you weren’t banking any on him, though?”
“We’re banking on facts,” was Gard’s reply.
“And Sawyer’s skipped the country.”
“Who’s Sawyer?” Gard’s question came quick and sharp, nailing Westcott’s blunder fast. The lawyer looked blank for an instant, then recovered himself.
“Why Kate Hallard seemed to think you were going to get some help through him,” he lied; “but I know Sawyer. You can’t do it.”
“You must have known him,” Gard said, “if you know he witnessed that deed; for Kate Hallard never told you.”
Westcott stared out at the desert. He was playing a desperate game, and he knew it. He would have given much to understand the inscrutable man who sat opposite him. He did not feel that he did understand him, fully; nevertheless, he had his own theories of the stuff men are made of, and presently he leaned forward.
“Look here, Gard,” he said, “This is mighty poor business for a man like you to be in.”
He spoke rapidly; for Miss Anderson had just appeared at the door of the adobe kitchen, still talking to Wing Chang.
“I don’t know what you expect to make by it,” Westcott went on; “but I don’t want Kate Hallard to get into any trouble. She can’t establish that deed. It’s no more use to her than so much blank paper. But I’ve got certain things in view. I’m going into politics in this territory, and there are reasons why I don’t want a thing like this coming up. You know how things get garbled—” He hesitated, and then went on, with a glance in the direction of the girl, who was now approaching.
“Between ourselves,” he said, rapidly, “what’s the reason you and I can’t do business together?”
He regarded his companion narrowly. Helen had stopped, near the casa, and was scanning the desert from under her hand.
“What do you say?” Westcott all but whispered. Gard looked at him a full moment before he spoke:
“I guess we couldn’t do business together,” he said, slowly, “But I guess we shan’t need to, Mr. Westcott; because you’re going to fix this matter up right. You’re going to give Mrs. Hallard back the property you stole from her, or else you’re going to pay her the full value.”
There was a battle of eyes between the two men. Westcott’s flinched, finally, and sought the horizon.
“There ain’t any other ‘or else,’” Gard said, at last. “It’s going the way I stated.”
Westcott had arisen, sneering, but before he could speak again Helen’s voice broke in upon them:
“They’re coming!” she cried, joining her guests. “You’d think they had a whole drove of cattle, from the noise.”
A cloud of white dust far on the desert had resolved itself into a flurry of men, horses and cattle, coming in on a run. There was a thunder of hoofs, and a chorus of yells, and presently the “gentle” work-cattle were being herded into one of the corrals.
One of the horsemen separated himself from the group and rode on to the casa. This was Morgan Anderson, and he shouted greeting to Westcott as he swung from the saddle. He came into the shade of the cottonwoods firing a volley of genial questions, and giving bits of detail about the morning’s work, until Helen reminded him that it was close upon dinner-time. That meal was taken at noon, at the Palo Verde, so Anderson excused himself to clean up. He was dusty and begrimed from the hot day’s work. He carried Westcott off as well, to remove the traces of his own long ride, and as Helen had already gone into the house, on some domestic errand, Gard was left alone.
The temporary solitude was welcome, and he lay back in the long chair half dizzied by the thoughts and memories that besieged his brain. Uppermost, for the instant, was an intense, grateful sense of relief. Westcott had so plainly not recognized him that he might consider one source of immediate danger to himself removed. He would probably be able to carry this business through with no other difficulties than lay in the matter itself.
There would be plenty of these. Westcott would see to that. He was evidently fully aware of the position he was in, and would let no scruples stand in the way of protecting himself.
“He’ll do just about anything—” Gard spoke half aloud, then checked himself, recalling that this was not the solitude of the glade.
“He’ll make a big fight,” he thought, “both to keep the property and to escape being punished.”
“Punished!”
The word came home to him with stunning force. The punishment for this crime, if Kate Hallard saw fit to press the matter, was jail!
And Kate Hallard would probably do what he advised.
Sudden fierce exultation leaped into the man’s heart. Beneath his quiet he had been deeply stirred by the encounter with Westcott.
“I wonder how he would like being in jail?” he thought, grimly, and brought himself sternly into line again.
“There ain’t any right of way for me there. I must stop that,” he whispered, the knuckles of his big hands white as wool under the strain of clasping his chair-arms.
The next instant he sat upright, staring out across the hot sand, but seeing only the vision of Helen’s dainty maiden loveliness. The thought of his heart sent the blood from his face.
“I’ve settled my account with Ashley Westcott,” he muttered, “God knows I’ve settled my account; but if that is what he’s aiming to do—”
He shivered, sinking back into his chair. Wing Chang was approaching with a tray of food.
“If that is what it is,” Gard finished to himself, turning to greet the Chinaman, “Then I guess Mr. Ashley Westcott and I will have to open a new account; and he wants to look out.”