The "Wild West" Collection. William MacLeod Raine
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is, an' I want Stelton here to remember I said it."
"Then we won't say anything more about the matter," replied Bud calmly, as he rose. "I'll go outside and look to my horse."
"You'll stay the night with us, won't you?" asked Bissell anxiously.
"Yes, thanks. I've heard so much about the Bar T I should like to see a little more of it."
When Larkin had left the room, Bissell, with a frown on his face, turned to Stelton.
"Tell all the boys what's happened to-day," he said, "and tell 'em to be on the watch for this young feller's first herd. He'll plenty soon find out he can't run riot on my range."
CHAPTER II
A LATE ARRIVAL
After visiting the corral, Larkin paid his respects to the pump and refreshed himself for supper. Then he strolled around the long, rambling ranch house. Across the front, which faced southwest, had been built a low apology for a veranda on which a couple of uninviting chairs stood. He appropriated one of these and settled back to think.
The late sun, a red-bronze color, hung just above the horizon and softened the unlovely stretches of prairie into something brooding and beautiful. Thirty miles away the Rockies had become a mass of gray-blue fleeced across the top with lines of late snow--for it was early June.
The Bar T ranch house itself stood on a rise of ground back from a cold, greenish-blue river that made a bend at this point, and that rose and had its being in the melting whiteness of those distant peaks. Between the willows of the river bottoms, Larkin could see the red reflection of the sun on the water, and could follow the stream's course across the prairie by the snake-like procession of cottonwoods that lined its banks.
On the plains themselves there was still a fading hue of green. The buffalo grass had already begun to wither under the increasing heat, and in a month would have become the same gray, cured fodder that supported millions of buffalo centuries before a steer was on the range.
For Bud Larkin, only a year in the West, this evening scene had not lost its charm. He loved this hour when the men washed up at the pump. There were enticing sounds from the cook house and enticing odors in the air. Sometimes it seemed as though it almost made up for a day's failure and discouragement.
His quick eye suddenly noted a dark speck moving rapidly across the prairie toward the ranch house. It seemed to skim the ground and in five minutes had developed into a cow pony and its rider. A quarter of an hour later and the pony proved himself of "calico" variety, while the rider developed into a girl who bestrode her mount as though she were a part of the animal itself.
The front rim of her broad felt hat was fastened upward with a thong and exposed her face. Bud watched her idly until she dashed up to the front of the house, fetched her horse back on its haunches with a jerk on the cruel Spanish bridle, and leaped to the ground before he had fairly lost headway. Then with a slap on the rump she sent him trotting to Stelton, who had appeared around the end of the veranda as though expecting her.
Occupied with pulling off her soft white buckskin gauntlets, she did not notice the young man on the low porch until, with an exclamation, he had sprung to his feet and hurried toward her.
"Juliet Bissell!" gasped Larkin, holding out a hand to her. "What are you doing here?"
"Of all people, Bud Larkin!" cried the girl, flushing with pleasure. "Why, I can't believe it! Did you drop out of the sky somewhere?"
"If the sky is heaven, I've just dropped into it," he returned, trying to confine his joy to intelligible speech, and barely succeeding.
"That sounds like the same old Bud," she laughed, "and it's a pleasure to hear it. For if there is one thing a cowboy can't do, and it's the only one, it is to pay a woman a compliment. That speech brands you a tenderfoot."
"Never! I've been out a year and can nearly ride a cow pony, providing it is lame and blind."
So, bantering each other unmercifully, they reached the front door.
"Wait a few minutes, Bud, and I will be out again. I must dress for dinner."
When she had gone Larkin understood at once the presence of the carpet, the patent rocker, and the piano.
"What a double-barreled idiot I am," he swore, "to talk turkey to old Bissell and never connect him with Juliet. All the sheep in the world couldn't get me away from here to-night." And he ejaculated the time-worn but true old phrase that the world is a mighty small place.
Juliet Bissell had been a very definite personage in Bud Larkin's other life--the life that he tried to forget. The eldest son of a rich Chicago banker, his first twenty-five years had been such years as a man always looks back upon with a vast regret.
From the mansion on Sheridan Drive he had varied his time among his clubs, his sports, and his social duties, and generally made himself one of many in this world that humanity can do without. In other words, he added nothing to himself, others, or life in general, and was, therefore, without a real excuse for existing.
Of one thing he was ever zealous, now that he had left it behind, and this was that his past should not pursue him into the new life he had chosen.
Strangely enough, the person who had implanted this ambition and determination in him was Juliet Bissell. Three winters before, he had met her at the charity ball, and at the time she was something of a social sensation, being described as "that cowgirl from Wyoming." However, that "cowgirl" left her mark on many a gilded youth, and Bud Larkin was one.
He had fallen in love with her, as much as one in his position is capable of falling in love, had proposed to her, and been rejected with a grace and gentleness that had robbed the blow of all hurt--with one exception. Bud's pride, since his wealth and position had meant nothing in the girl's eyes, had been sorely wounded, and it had taken six months of the vast mystery of the plains to reduce this pettiness to the status of a secret shame.
When Juliet refused him she had told him with infinite tact that her husband would be a man more after the pattern of her father, whom she adored, and who, in turn, worshiped the very air that surrounded her; and it was this fact that had turned Bud's attention to the West and its opportunities.
When she returned to the porch Juliet had on a plain white dress with pink ribbons at elbows, neck, and waist. Larkin, who had always thrilled at her splendid physical vigor, found himself more than ever under the spell of her luxuriant vitality.
Her great dark eyes were remarkably lustrous and expressive, her black hair waved back from her brown face into a great braided coil, her features were not pretty so much as noble. Her figure, with its limber curves, was pliant and graceful in any position or emergency--the result of years in the saddle. Her feet and hands were small, the latter being firm but infinitely gentle in their touch.
"Well, have you forgotten all your Eastern education?" Larkin asked, smiling, as she sat down. "Have you reverted to your original untamed condition?"
"No, indeed, Bud. I have a reputation to keep up in that respect. The fact that I have had an Eastern education has made our punchers so proud that they can't be lived with when they go to town, and lord it over everybody."
"I suppose they all want to marry you?"
"Yes, singly or in lots, and sometimes I'm sorry it can't be done, I love them all so much. But tell me, Bud, what brings you out West in general and here in particular?"
"Probably you don't know that a year and a half ago my father died," and Larkin's face shadowed for a moment with retrospection. "Well, he did, and left me most of his estate. I was sick of it there, and I vowed I would pull up stakes and start somewhere by myself. So I went up to Montana in the vicinity of the Musselshell Forks and bought a ranch and some stock."
"Cattle?"
"No, sheep. The best merino I ever saw--"
"Bud Larkin! You're not a sheepman?"
"Yes, ma'am, and a menace to a large number of cowmen, your father