The "Wild West" Collection. William MacLeod Raine
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dear, I suppose so! We're not even married and you want me to cook for you. Oh, dear!"
"Well," he said, relenting, "I'll get things started, but you come out as soon as you can."
So saying he beckoned to Ah Sin who had been waiting for the boss, and gave him a number of orders. Then he thrashed about the river bank as though looking for fagots, while Julie continued pretending to mourn over her hard lot. When at last she appeared, however, and had dashed the sleep from her eyes in the icy waters of the river, it was not to cook, but to sit down at one of Ah Sin's little tables and eat a glorious breakfast.
"You perfect darling!" she cried happily and ran and kissed Bud though the Chinaman was looking on.
During breakfast she noticed the work going forward on the other side of the river and asked Bud about it.
"The cowmen moved their camp down here opposite us as soon as they could find out where we were," he explained. "I guess they want to talk with me regarding several matters. I'm pretty sure I have a thing or two to say to them, now that I am out of their clutches."
"Oh, then my father must be among those men."
"He must, although I have not seen him. I intend to take you over to him immediately after breakfast."
Suddenly for the first time, the girl's face clouded; through their sweet bantering pierced the hideous visage of the thing that haunted her and that she had come to ask him about.
"Talk to me a little while first, will you?" she pleaded. "You know I came to see you for a special reason last night but had no time to discuss it then."
"Certainly, dear girl," he replied.
When they had finished eating they strolled a little way up the noisy stream and finally found a cozy nook between two trees. All about them in the succulent grass of the banks and river bottoms they could hear the bells and contented blethering of the flocks; for Sims had determined to rest his animals for a few days before starting again the long trek north.
"Bud," she began, speaking slowly so as to choose her words, "I am going to ask you questions about things that you have never chosen to discuss with me for some reason I could not fathom. If it is unmaidenly I am sorry, but I must ask them. I cannot stand any more such anxiety and pain as I have suffered in the last few weeks."
Bud's features settled themselves into an expression of thought that told the girl absolutely nothing.
"Yes, go on," he said.
"First I want you to read this note," she continued, drawing a soiled bit of paper from the bosom of her dress. "A photographer called Skidmore was held up by the rustlers and asked to bring it to the Bar T and give it to me."
Her hand trembled a little as she held the paper out to him. He took it gravely, unfolded and read it.
Then he smiled his old winning smile at her and kissed the hand she had extended.
"Lies! All lies!" he said. "Please think no more about them."
She looked at him steadily and withdrew her hand.
"That won't do, Bud," she replied firmly, but in a low voice. "What is the thing for which Caldwell blackmailed you three years ago and again this year?"
Bud looked at her quizzically for a moment, and then seemed to recede into thought. She waited patiently, and, after a while, he began to speak.
"Yes, I suppose you are right," he said. "It is a woman's privilege to know what a man's life holds if she desires it. There are but a few rare souls who can marry men against whom the world holds something, and say: 'Never tell me what you were or what you have done; what you are and what you will be are enough for me.'
"Putting myself in your place, I am sure I should do what you are doing, for I have always told myself that those who marry with points unsettled between them have taken the first step toward unhappiness. Suspicion and deceit would undermine the greatest love that ever existed. Acts in the past that cannot be explained create suspicion, and those in the present that are better unobserved father deceit."
He paused for a few moments, and appeared to be thinking.
"Do you know who that Ed Skidmore is?" he asked abruptly.
"No; only he was quite nice, and evidently from the East."
"He is my brother Lester, and he is the man who stampeded the punchers' horses last night with his flashlight."
"He is? I should never have suspected it; you are absolutely different in looks."
"I know we are, or I shouldn't have risked his life last night. Well, I bring him into this because I have to. He is part of the story. Lester was always a wild youth, particularly after the governor stuck him on a bookkeeper's stool and tried to make a business man out of him. The boy couldn't add a column of figures a foot long correctly inside of ten tries. I took to the game a little better than he did, and managed to get promoted occasionally. But Lester never did.
"Father believed, and announced often enough, that anybody that couldn't add figures and keep accounts had no business to handle money. To discipline Lester, who he thought was loafing when he really was incapable, the governor cut off the boy's allowance almost entirely and told him he would have to live on his wages until he showed he could earn more.
"Well, Julie, you know what kind of a cad I was back in the old days--rich, spoiled, flattered by men, and sought after by women. (I can say these things now, since I've learned their opposites!) Just try to imagine, then, the effect of such an order on Lester, who was always the petted one of us two because he was small and delicate! It was like pouring cold water on a red-hot stove lid.
"Tied more than ever to his desk, Lester wanted more amusements than ever. But he had only about fifteen a week where he had been accustomed to five times the amount. He drifted and borrowed and pledged and pawned, and finally was caught by some loan-sharks, who got him out of one difficulty only to plunge him into three others.
"Although my father had a narrow-gauge mind as far as life in general is concerned, I will say this for him: that he was right in everything he did about business. He had made it a rule of the firm that anybody who borrowed money was fired on the spot. Lester knew this, and, while he would have liked nothing better than the sack, he did not want to disgrace the governor before his employees and all the business world. So he clung along and tried to make a go of it.
"I must confess that I think some of the blame for what followed should be laid at my door. I had been patient with the kid and loaned him money until I came to the conclusion that it was like throwing it down a well. Then I got fond of a certain person"--he paused a moment and smiled at Julie--"and I needed all my money to entertain her properly; so I quit loaning.
"I don't know whether to tell you the rest or not; it isn't what I would want anyone else to tell you, even about a perfect stranger, but I think it is right you should know everything if you know anything."
The girl nodded without speaking.
"In the loan-shark office was a very pretty little girl, and Lester thought he fell in love with her. She had a red-headed cousin and an admirer named Smithy Caldwell, who belonged to a tough gang on the South Side.
"The girl was fond of Lester for a while, but she wouldn't forsake her friends as he ordered her to, and they quarreled. Her name was Mary, and after the fuss the three friends, together with the loan-shark people, played Lester for a gilt-edged idiot, basing their operations on alleged facts concerning Mary. In reality Smithy Caldwell had married her in the meantime, and Lester eventually proved he had always treated her honorably, though now she denied it."
"Poor, innocent boy in the hands of those blood-suckers!" cried Juliet compassionately.
"Naturally driven frantic by the fear of exposure and the resulting disgrace of the whole family, the boy lost his head and tried to buy his persecutors off. And to do this he took money out of the safe. But what's the use of prolonging the agony? Finally he forged my father's signature, and when the check came back from the bank