Forlorn River. Zane Grey
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them with shaking hands. There seemed to be a tight painful knot in his breast that must burst before he could feel relief.
“Ben, I felt this comin’ to us six months back,” said Nevada, soft-voiced, hovering around Ben like a woman. “Reckon I didn’t know what it was. But Hettie gave me the hunch. I tell you our luck has changed. . . . Mebbe I’ll have to kill Less Setter, but that’s neither here nor there. . . . You ride in to see your mother an’ sister. Make them happy for havin’ faith in you. While you’re gone I’ll do a heap of thinkin’. But come back to-morrow night.”
“What’ll you think so hard about?” asked Ben, curiously.
“Wal, most about California Red,” replied Nevada, with utmost seriousness. “Ben, that red-skinned mustang has wintered over here at Mule Deer Lake.”
“Nevada!” expostulated Ben, suddenly transfixed.
“It’s a fact, unless all them cowmen was lyin’. An’ I don’t see why they should lie. Red is pretty darn smart. We thought he was rangin’ round the lava beds an’ Modoc caves, where there was so many wild hosses, or else over in that big country east of Wild Goose Lake. But the son-of-a-gun wasn’t ten miles from here all winter. Nobody chased him. Reckon those who knew didn’t think there was any chance. But I say winter’s the best time to ketch wild hosses. I’ll prove it to you yet.”
“Too late now. Here’s spring and summer coming fast. You and Modoc ride over to Mule Deer Lake to-morrow.”
“Shore will. I hate to tell you, Ben, there’ll likely be more’n one outfit after California Red from now on.”
“Why now, more than last winter or summer?” queried Ben, sharply.
“Wal, I heard a lot of talk in the saloons,” replied Nevada. “One of them new-rich lake ranchers, Blaine it was, has offered three thousand dollars for California Red, sound an’ well broke.”
“Blaine!” ejaculated Ben, in amaze. “That’s Hart Blaine. There’s only one. He’s a neighbor of my father’s. . . . Three thousand dollars! Why, that’s a fortune! He used to be so stingy he wouldn’t give a boy an apple out of his orchard. All that money!”
“You ought to be tickled to death,” declared Nevada. “For no one else but you will ever ketch Red.”
“I didn’t think of the money. But what could Blaine want that wild horse for? Sound and well broke!”
“Say, any rancher in northern California would go broke for Red,” rejoined Nevada. “Some cowboy said Less Setter offers more than three thousand. If he pays it I’m goin’ to think money’s comin’ easy, an’ you can bet I’ll look around on the ranges. . . . Yes, I mean just that, Ben Ide. But the fellows at Hammell reckon Blaine wants California Red for his daughter.”
The idea struck Ben so strangely that he uttered a loud laugh. California Red, that wild fleet sorrel mustang for sweet little Ina Blaine! It seemed so ridiculous. Yet Ina Blaine was the only person Ben could have allowed to possess the great stallion, even in thought. California Red was his, by right of discovery—for Ben had been the first to see the red-flashing colt on the sage—and by the years of watching and striving.
Chapter Two
HONK! honk! honk! The coarse wild notes pierced Ina Blaine’s slumbers. She opened her eyes, and in the dim room with cool gray dawn at the window she did not recognize where she was. Honk! honk! honk!
“Oh, wild geese!” she cried out suddenly, with rapturous recognition. “Oh, I’m home—home!”
All the time Ina had been away at school she had never heard the melodious cry of a wild goose. She had forgotten, perhaps, the most significant feature of the wild life about Tule Lake. But once the loved honk penetrated her mind, what hosts of sweet memories, stretching back to childhood! It was a welcome home. The sound offered some little compensation for the loss of the lake. Ina had been astounded and dismayed to see vast green and yellow and brown fields, crisscrossed by irrigation ditches, where once Tule Lake had rippled and smiled, a great shining oval of water lying between the gray sage hills and the black lava beds. Tule Lake was gone. It seemed to change even the towering white glory of Mount Shasta.
Ina lay there watching the dawn brighten through the casement. This large luxurious room was not the one in which she had spent her childhood and girlhood. That had been a tiny one, whitewashed, with a low slanted ceiling and one small window. “The days that are no more,” she whispered. That dear room, sacred to her dreams, was gone as Tule Lake was gone. The childhood days, so sweet and stinging now in memory, had passed away forever. Her old home was not the same. Father, mother, sisters, and brothers had changed. She realized all this with sadness. While she had been away at school, growing up, nothing at home had stood still.
The sun rose red over the sage hills and streamed in at her window, gilding the new furniture. A cool breath of morning, with a hint of frost, made her snuggle down under the warm blankets. She had awakened happily, but there had come with memory and thought a check to her joy. She had not anticipated change. Yet all was changed. Even she? Yet the honk of wild geese had found her heart true to the old life, the old order.
Ina Blaine was the third child of a family of four boys and three girls, the favorite of a Kansas farmer who had emigrated to northern California and had taken up a great tract of marshland along Tule Lake. In wet seasons his land was under water. He had labored there, along with several other farsighted pioneers. And when the government drained Tule Lake it was as if their fortunes had been touched by the magic of Aladdin.
But he had sent Ina to a Kansas college long before fortune had smiled upon him. He had a brother at Lawrence, in whose home Ina was welcome during the period of her schooling. It had not been his intention to leave Ina there all this time. But one thing and another, including lack of funds and illness in her uncle’s family, had prevented Ina from spending a vacation at home. So she had been away four years, during which wealth had come, as if overnight, to the Blaines.
To revel in being home, to delight in her freedom, to play a little after the long years of study, to put off the inevitable settling down to the serious things of life—these had been Ina’s cherished hopes.
“I must see the funny side of it,” she soliloquized, with a little laugh. “For it is funny. Dad so important and pompous—mother fussed over a multitude of new fandangles—Archie impressed with his destiny as the eldest son of a cattle king—Fred and Bob leaning away from farm work to white collars and city girls. Kate engaged to a Klamath lawyer! I really can’t savvy her. The kids, though, will make up for much. We’ll get along, when once they remember me.
“To begin, then,” said Ina, resolutely, and she got up on the right side of the bed. She was home. Whatever had been the changes in country and family, here was where she had longed to be and meant to live and serve. She had spent time in St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, San Francisco, the last of which she had found most interesting. But she would never be happy in the confines of a city. She loved northern California—the vastness of it, the great white mountains, the ranges of soft round sage hills, lakes and rivers and streams, and in the midst of them the little villages here and there, not too close together, and the green flat ranches, still few in number.
“Last night when I said I’d teach school some day, didn’t dad roar?” she mused. “And mother looked offended. What has happened to my dear parents? I fear they must suffer for my education. I wonder what they have in mind. Heigho! I feel tremendously old and learned. . . . Back to the tomboy days for Ina! I’ll slide down the haymow with Dall. I’ll fish and ride and swim with Marvie. How keen he was to ask me that! . . . And Ben Ide? . . . Not a letter from him all these years. Dear old Ben! I seem to have forgotten much until now. How time flies! They wrote me Ben had gone to the bad. I never believed it—I think I didn’t. Ben was queer, not like the other boys, but he was good. . . . Has he forgotten me? Ben was a year younger than Archie. He’s twenty-four now. Quite a man! Five years didn’t make such difference when I was fifteen.”
Ina