The Greatest Works of B. M. Bower - 51 Titles in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). B. M. Bower

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The Greatest Works of B. M. Bower - 51 Titles in One Volume (Illustrated Edition) - B. M. Bower


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not seem to organize his own campaign of annihilation, though he tried hard enough.

      "You may be hell on a horse," the Native Son told him between smacks, "but you're just an ornery kid that needs a good spanking. Your mother oughta turn you over her knee and paddle you good! Now will you behave? Will you own you're cleaned, and cleaned right?"

      Tears of rage stood in the Kid's heavy-lashed eyes. He made one last ineffectual attempt to plant his fist in the Native Son's face, and dropped his hands to his sides. It took moral strength to do that, and Weary, at least, recognized the fact with softened gaze.

      "No! I own you're a fighter and I'm not—you've got me stopped, damn you—but I'm not whipped! Some day I'll show you—all of you—Dad too—that I'm not—" His jaws came hard together for a second to steady a dangerous trembling. "Not the complete washout you all seem to think!" he finished with bitter vehemence as he turned away, mounted slowly with all the spirit and easy grace gone from his movements, and rode off toward the stables.

      "Gosh, I hated to do that!" the Native Son muttered into Weary's ear as they rode back to the chutes, meeting the crowd that had somewhat tardily awakened to the fact that something not in the script was being enacted down there, and had started down to see what it was.

      Weary did not answer. He was thinking of that last remark of the Kid's, wondering just what he had meant. Perhaps the key to the whole sorry mess lay right there. Perhaps the Kid—

      "You let him off easier than I would have done," Pink half reproved the Native Son, riding up alongside. "I'd have laid him out cold if he'd said to me what he said to you."

      "Oh, kids of his age are always kind of goofy on some things. I can remember when I looked on a man past thirty as having one foot in the grave. He's learned something this morning he would never get in college—"

      "Oh, sign off, you fellows!" snarled Weary, the sunny-tempered. "I'm getting darn sick of everybody romping on the Kid just because he lacks the outlook of us old roughnecks. I admit we're all qualified to double for the Almighty, but the Kid might be entitled to the same chance we took when we were his age of showing why the Lord should let us go on livin'. I don't want to hear any more about the Kid."

      "All right, go pat him on the head and tell him he's a wonder!" snapped Pink, and galloped on ahead of the heavily burdened horse Weary and the Native Son bestrode.

      Yet when Andy hailed him and asked what was the matter down there, Pink said nothing much was the matter, but Luis called down the fellow that roped his bronk, and that was all.

      Dulcie Harlan, sitting just above them with a pair of splendid opera glasses in her hand, opened her mouth in complete amazement while she stared wide-eyed at Pink. But she did not say a word, even when Boy declared that he bet that was the Kid down there, because the horse looked like Blazes.

      She did not say anything, either, when the Little Doctor wondered aloud where Claude was that morning. She wanted to ask him, she said, whatever possessed him to tell such an outrageous story to the newspaper people. Among the badge-bedecked, big-hatted men loitering near her, Montana Kid seemed to share the honors equally with Luis Mendoza; the more heated arguments were about the Kid and his exploit with the bandit, his record in the arena, his affectation in the matter of shirts. A good many of the remarks that reached Dulcie's alert ears were distinctly unfriendly. The Kid's aloofness was not going unnoticed, she gathered. Some one suddenly raised his voice to declare, "That boy shore hates hisself, that's what I mean!" She also heard sneering references to "them college champeens," and vague predictions that they'd be late for school if they had to walk back.

      Presently, when it began to look as though the movie people were in for one of those long intervals when no one seems to be doing anything whatever, Miss Dulcie Harlan left her place of vantage and made her way thoughtfully to the office. Would Miss Gray please show her the list of contestants? There was a name she wanted to look up. She studied the list frowningly, giving especial attention to the events. Finally she placed her finger tip upon a certain name and laughed.

      "If that isn't a synthetic flavor for you! Joella Germain! Did you get that, Miss Gray? I'll bet she spent days and days thinking that up. I noticed her trying to do her stuff—she's an awful mess, really. I don't see how she ever got in." She lifted her finger and studied the name again. "Joella Germain, Missoula, Montana," she read aloud. "It ought to be said on a saxophone. Just where is Missoula?"

      Miss Gray confessed that she did not know, exactly; out on the plains somewhere, she thought.

      "Not that it matters," said Dulcie, closing the book. "It's such a jazzy combination, and the girl is so terrible, one can't help noticing, is all."

      Chapter XIX. The Kid Plumbs the Depths

       Table of Contents

      So the incident passed and left scarcely a ripple on the surface, though the pebble of conscious reaction to it remained in the minds of many there. Probably no one person there was the object of so much conflicting thought and emotion as the Kid, though his name was not mentioned by any one save strangers. Weary's demand had closed the conversational door with a bang, so far as the Happy Family were concerned, and neither Chip nor the Little Doctor wanted to open it just then.

      But none of these things reached the Kid just then. The Kid had slipped away from the boys and was lying full length in the loose hay, back where the light was dim. His face was hidden upon his folded arms and he was wrestling with that agony of shame which to the proud is worse than death; that terrible sense of defeat which a youth feels when he thinks himself hated where he would be loved; spurned with contempt where he would be understood and appreciated for his purpose if not for its faulty realization.

      The Happy Family had not changed. He knew it now beyond all possible doubt. That iron grasp of the Native Son's—he had felt it as inexorable as when he was twelve and Mig grabbed him and held him while he administered a playful paddling. Those two, Weary and Pink, bearing swiftly down upon them, getting the bronk between them with no fuss at all, not a false motion anywhere; the Native Son pulling his feet from the stirrups, throwing a limber leg over the rump of Weary's horse, twisting his slim body side-wise out of the saddle, sliding to the ground so easily—just as if he crawled off bronks every day of his life. The Kid was no fool. He knew a master when he saw one. They were his kind. They could still join, if they chose, the sport he loved with every fiber of his being. The way Mig had sat and cussed him out while that bay devil bucked—never giving a thought to the horse, it seemed, but thinking only of his anger.

      His bunch; the same old boys he had worshiped all his life. Yesterday when he saw them come riding down through the stable he had felt that it was so. But then they had merely looked the same as he remembered them. This was different. This was the bunch in action, the way they used to ride bronks at the Flying U, when the Kid was so little they were afraid to let him perch alone on the top rail of the corral; afraid he would fall off and get hurt. However busy they were, however excited, however hurried, some one of them always remembered to keep an eye on the Kid; always—always! He hadn't appreciated that watchfulness then. He had hated the way they plucked him back from danger. They thought he was just a baby and couldn't take care of himself. Now, he knew they had loved him. They hadn't said so. They were always bossing him around, threatening to paddle his pants, sending him to the house, yelling at him not to do this and for-gosh-sake to cut that out. But they had loved him.

      Therein lay the tragedy of to-day. He had looked straight down into the Native Son's eyes and had read there—hate? The Kid in his misery believed so. A cold, malevolent hatred that had crimpled along the Kid's nerves like an electric shock. Even the humiliation of being slapped in the face again and again—with Walt and Billy and Beck looking on!—was dwarfed beneath the cataclysmic conviction that they hated him. Weary and Pink had sat there on their horses and never spoke a word to him—but could he wonder at that? For what concerned one concerned them all. They had heard what he said to the Native Son; it was as if he had said it to them too. Mig had not even bothered to fight him like a man! Mig had just held him off and slapped


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