THERE were no useless injunctions on Reb Santee’s lips as he read the girl’s danger. One comprehensive look and he sprang for his pony, standing in the shade of the willows with hanging reins. The clatter of the wagon was louder as he hit the saddle. He sank in the spurs; the blue roan, having swung him up with his first bound, put on a burst of speed.
He realized it would be impossible to turn the thundering team before they hit the creek; that he could never reach their head in time. He raced across a long angle and swerved in beside the wagon. He saw that he was not going to be able to gain on it. The wheels rasped and bounced at his side; fear-ridden snorts and a rumble of flying hoofs rolled back.
Reb’s decision was lightning swift. He pulled the grullo over, found himself behind the wagon. The pony raced madly, its head drawing up over the tail-gate. Without taking thought of his own peril, Santee loosened his feet in the stirrups and, watching his chance, plunged forward to grasp the wagon.
The grullo dragged from under him. His legs came down on the uneven, flying ground with a thump that threatened to tear loose his grip, if it did not tear his arms out of their sockets. Then by main strength he dragged himself up, got one knee over the gate, and after a writhing moment of struggle gained a footing on the swaying wagon-bed. The brush-lined creek drew near with rushing speed as he flashed a look. He flung himself toward the seat.
The girl had seen the start of his wild race to come to her assistance. Not by the slightest outcry did she indicate what her feelings were in that moment. She had no time to follow each step of his fight; but flinging a wild glance over her shoulder, she saw him make the leap to the wagon. Reb was conscious of a wind-whipped banner of black hair and a white face washed clean of expression turned toward him as he made a grab for the lines. She surrendered them with a limp relaxing of tired arms. He had time to get a grip on them and hurl his weight back, and then the team and the wagon struck the brush-choked dip to the creek.
There was a loud thrashing, a sickening lurch; one of the bays floundered, caught himself as Reb yanked his line; the wagon’s careening speed slowed a shade. But the horses were still thoroughly terrified. It was plain they had no intention of stopping when they struck the open, shallow creek and started across. Silvery sheets of water splashed up, wetting man and girl.
Reb’s expression in this moment was one of grim pleasure in the fight. His blunt jaw was thrust forward and his eyes flashed. The girl, gripping the jolting seat with bloodless knuckles, did not miss it. There was a touch of wonder in her look as it clung to his face.
He knew what he was doing. He did not battle with the ribbons, satisfying himself with holding up the heads of the bays as he swung them imperceptibly toward a long, brush-cluttered slope. They flung out of the far edge of the creek and struck the brush, still running furiously. It hampered their stride, dragged back on the wagon bottom and the wheels, and a dozen yards from the top brought the team to a trembling halt.
“Whoa, boys,” Reb soothed. He sprang from the seat and approached cautiously. The bays stamped and snorted, rolling wicked eyes, but gradually reconciling themselves to his touch.
“You have certainly given me something to thank you for,” the girl called herself to Reb’s attention from the wagon. He looked up to find himself meeting a pair of gray eyes startling in their directness. She seemed aware that in turning his attention to the horses he had given her time to collect herself. “If it hadn’t been for your timely appearance I don’t know what would have happened.”
“Shucks, that’s all right, ma’am.” He grinned at her, for there seemed no other way to dissemble the effect on him of her strong and charming personality. Her face was a small, firm oval, with a delicacy which did not detract from the decision of her chin or the royal bearing of her head. He could see with half-aneye that she had breeding, and of the best. Her wide-set eyes were possessed of a candidness that grew on him with the moments. She was dressed in a fresh-laundered woolen shirt which set off the skin of her neck and throat to decided advantage by its roughness, and a skirt of some heavy, dark material. Her boots were trim and stout. Her body was small and straight and fine; there was, he realized bewilderingly, nothing whatever about her that was not only fine, but immeasurably finer than anything her sex had ever revealed to him before.
“I am Ronda Cameron, of the C 8, over on the Shoshone Meadows,” she was saying in even, unhurried tones. “I don’t remember ever having seen you before—”
“Reb Santee, Miss Ronda,” he introduced himself. “I’m with Doc Lantry, who’s leased the old Farr spread, down the creek.” Never one to miss a bold stroke, he felt safe in addressing her thus. She appeared several years younger than himself—perhaps eighteen. Moreover, there was something boylike in the directness of her speech and the way she handled herself as she swung down and proceeded to examine the wagon. It was undamaged.
They talked over the runaway. When Ronda called attention to the shrewdness with which he had dealt with it, the stern pleasure he seemed to take in the contest, Reb flushed. The faint, quizzical smile on her lips as she noted this only added to the impact of her feminine appeal. It got to Reb from a side he did not know how to guard.
He got her mind away from himself by the jocular narration of runaways he had experienced or witnessed in the past. Soon he had her laughing merrily, joining in with his own bubbling bass tones. There was nothing forward in his manner, however, a circumstance she was quick to appreciate; for in this lonely land, rich in men and almost barren of women, she had been called on to deal with all manner of advances. It had given her a self-reliance of her own.
The ice broken, Reb drew from her the information that she was on her way to the store at Washakie Point. A sudden-flushing quail, flying almost in their faces, had been the cause of the bays’ terror, just over the east ridge.
“I expect I look a sight to go anywhere now,” she remarked with unconscious candor, reaching up to deal with her disheveled hair.
“No, no. You look fine,” Reb declared. From his vehemence it was easy to tell that he meant it. The luxuriance of her tumbled hair, the roses slowly blooming in her cheeks as the blood came back, gave her a freshness that would have made her welcome anywhere, and rendered her doubly beautiful to him. He choked off an uprush of guileless compliments, and for the first time in his life began to fear lest he should overplay his hand.
He did not attempt to deceive himself. He found a stake in this girl such as he had never played for. He hesitated to commit himself, for some instinct told him that to play and lose would bring to his days a darkness no man could bear for long; but already he felt an interest in her that it seemed impossible to keep out of every word and gesture.
The bays had by now been restored to calm under Reb’s expert hands. He led them and the wagon through the brush to the top of the slope, straightened out the reins and handed them up as Ronda Cameron resumed her place on the seat.
“I must thank you again for your help,” she said earnestly, looking down at him; “but I hope I am not forced to allow the matter to drop there. Won’t you ride over to the C 8 sometime? I should like you to meet Father.”
“I sure will, ma’am,” Reb promised, grateful to her for having gracefully bridged over the problem of when he was going to see her again. “There’s a lot of things about the Basin I’m beginnin’ to like, an’ it looks like I’d stay awhile. I won’t lose no time makin’ the acquaintance of my neighbors. An’ yore dad’ll be one of the first ... I’d favor that off hoss a mite, if I was you,” he added, as she made ready to drive on. “He’s barked up some. I couldn’t help it. He’ll likely be sore.”
After a few more words, which Reb scarcely heard in his pre-occupation with her soft face, they parted. Standing on the top of the slope, with Ghost Creek behind him, he watched until the spring wagon was only a small dot far out on the rolling surface of the Basin. Then heaving an unconscious sigh, he turned back to his work, his mind a jumble of disturbing visions. He did not know what to think.
For her part, Ronda Cameron was thinking with clarity and vigor as she rolled away in the wagon. She had heard of the new outfit on the Farr place, said to be horse buyers. Her experience at the creek was her first meeting with any of them. She felt that if the others were anything like Reb Santee, they would be a distinct addition to the Basin range. It would have been impossible not to like this laughing, homely fellow, even apart from the brave thing he had done in her behalf. But as she remembered the boldness of his act, the sheer virility of his whole bearing, she felt admiration as well.
Ronda put the bays to a brisk pace. An hour later she drew near to Washakie Point. It was not a pretentious place, even for this country, consisting simply of the old Farragoh ranch house and its corrals and ramshackle sheds.
Five years ago this had been a prosperous spread, with longhorns dotting the range in every direction. Then, on a wild night of storm that was the climax of a terrific blizzard, Cleve Farragoh had died, leaving his wife and their young son to carryon. They had done so to the best of their ability. But dark days came. Another winter, and storms blew down out of the north which all but wiped out the brand. Mrs. Farragoh let the hands go and gave up ranching then, to open the store, for which the Basin showed its appreciation by christening it Washakie Point. It was the only store this side of Lander, but no town grew up around it and it remained a solitary place, ten miles off the freighting trail which crossed the Basin to the southwest.
As Ronda drew up before the store porch a young man appeared in the door. He was only a year or so older than herself, tall and slim, with hair as dark as her own and brown eyes that lighted up the instant he saw her.
“Hello, Ronda,” he greeted, coming down the steps, with a warm smile that rendered him uncommonly handsome. “I was hoping you’d drive over today. Let me put up your team and you can stay to dinner. Ma’s been busy with it for an hour.”
“Billy,” Ronda queried as she got down, “have you something to put on Charlie’s legs? He got scratched up on the way over.” She rested a hand lightly on Billy Farragoh’s arm with the same pleasure she had always taken in this clean-limbed, upstanding boy. They had known each other for a long time.
“Sure have,” he returned, more than ready to do anything for her. “You go in and talk to Ma while I take care of it.”
After a word or two, which brightened the faces of both, Billy led the bays away, calling back over his shoulder. With a lighthearted rejoinder from the porch, Ronda stepped inside.
The store was simply the main building of the ranch house, transformed by some shelving and a counter Billy had knocked together with loose boards. It was given a mercantile look by the stacks of air-tights and yellow plug tobacco signs, and the blankets and bridles hanging from the rafters, the barrels of flour and other commodities standing in the corners.
Mrs. Farragoh stuck her head through the kitchen door. “There you are, dearie,” she called in her peculiar gruff voice. “Come out here an’ let me look at you.” When Ronda came forward, she brushed the graying hair back from her perspiring brow and kissed the girl, a hearty, vigorous smack.
Cleve Farragoh’s widow was big and muscular and brusque. Her eyes were much like Billy’s, but capable of a certain fierceness too. Her face was bony, square, commanding. As long as Ronda had know her she had been a salty, unsentimental personality, as blunt and resourceful as a man. There was a wisdom in her which did not come from the refinements of womanhood; but although she could, when occasion demanded, cope with the roughest customer, she was a motherly sort at heart. From the beginning she had made a special friend of Ronda.
“Well, I declare,” she said now, looking the girl up and down. “Purty as a picture—after bein’ out in that hot sun, too.”
“No, I’m not,” the girl laughed. “I’m mussed and freckled and what-not. It’s just your opinion of me, Mother Farragoh.”
Mrs. Farragoh abused her genially. “Slick yoreself up, Ronda, an’ set yoreself,” she said. “I’ll have dinner ready in a little.” The steam arose about her in clouds as she worked at the stove. “I declare, I cook more with one boy to feed than I used to when I come out of Texas in a wagon, with seven men lickin’ the pot!” she rambled on.
Billy ducked in the back door, a grin on his face. He found a chair for Ronda.
“I’ll slack off of eating when I’ve got my growth,” he said in reference to his mother’s remark.
She snorted, hearing it. “Yo’re most six foot now; it ain’t to make you bigger I’m feedin’ you up,” she retorted. She turned to Ronda. “I got to nourish his brains as well as his body,” she went on, “as long as I got hopes of makin’ him the best lawyer in Wyomin’. I ain’t entirely discouraged yet, but—” She shrugged expressively.
Billy flung a laughing gibe at her. They ragged each other without stint, these two, and their love was deep. Ronda was familiar with the older woman’s ambition to be able to give Billy a legal education.
“Hurry up, Ma,” said Billy. “Ronda’s hungry, she says. I’ll get the table set, soon as I wash my hands.”
“I?” Ronda caught him up. “What nonsense, Billy! Is it necessary to hide behind skirts at your age?” she disparaged lightly. She had never used a gentle hand with him, for they had grown through their long-legged years together, ridden to the school on Sage Creek side by side, and their companionship had been boisterous. It had grown into a romantic attachment, at least on Billy’s part, during the last year or so. Ronda was aware of it, but she did not choose to reveal her knowledge of it to him by any change of manner.
They sat down to the table a few minutes later. It was an excellent meal, and Mrs. Farragoh did it full justice, as did Ronda and Billy, despite her deprecation of her own cooking.
“Your Charlie certainly got himself in a fine condition,” Billy said to the girl at an interval in the animated range gossip, supplied mainly by his mother. “He’ll be all right now; but however did he get in that shape?”
Ronda told them about the runaway. Billy put down his fork and stared as she described the danger she had run. But it was Mrs. Farragoh who broke in, when Ronda came to the man who had ridden to her aid.
“Hold on. Was he a yella-haired feller, youngish, with blue eyes, an’ laughin’—all the time?”
“That sounds very like him,” Ronda admitted. “He certainly was irrepressible.” She attempted to give them some idea of the joy Reb Santee had found in pitting his brain and his muscle against the unreasoning terror of the bays.
“Ain’t he ridin’ for that new feller over at Farr’s old place?” Mrs. Farragoh persisted. At Ronda’s assent, she went on: “We’ve been hearin’ about him. His name’s Sandy—Sandy—” She groped.
“Santee. Reb Santee,” Ronda supplied.
“That’s it,” Billy’s mother beamed.—“But tell us the rest of it, dearie.”
Ronda completed her narrative. When it ended, the talk turned to Reb Santee once more.
“I hear he’s a top hand wrangler,” Billy said. “Al Brett was here yesterday, telling about Santee riding that big wicked dun of his brother’s, out at the Lazy B. You know they’d about given up that horse as an outlaw. Santee topped him and wouldn’t accept a cent for it. He offered to break it for them right.”
Ronda told more of what she had learned of Reb during their brief meeting. Both Billy and his mother listened with attention, plainly impressed.
“He sounds like one accommodatin’ feller,” said Mrs. Farragoh with an enthusiasm uncommon in her. “Al Brett’s say ain’t the first we’ve heard of him, an’ none of it’s been bad. I hope he rides over before long. I want to git a look at him.”
“He will,” Ronda felt she could safely assure her. “He said that he liked the Basin and probably would stay. He’s going to visit Father soon. I’ve no doubt he will come over here as well.”
“That’s fine,” said Mrs. Farragoh; and despite Ronda’s obvious approval of the newcomer, Billy added generous agreement.