Silvermane Page 9

  “Wal, wal! Now I wonder what made me ride down the wrong trail…? Missus Keitch, I reckon you could use a fine, young, sober, honest, hard-workin’ cowboy who knows all there is about ranchin’.”

  Monty addressed the woman in cool, easy speech, quite deferential, and then he shifted his gaze to the dubious face of the daughter. He was discovering that it had a compelling charm. She laughed outright, as if to say what a liar he was. That not only discomfited Monty, but roused his ire. The Mormon baggage!

  “I guess I could use such a young man,” returned Mrs. Keitch shortly, with penetrating eyes on him.

  “Wal, you’re lookin’ at him right now,” said Monty fervently. “An’ he’s seein’ nothin’ less than the hand of Providence heah.”

  The woman stood up decisively. “Fetch your horse around,” she said, and walked off the porch to wait for him. Monty made haste, his mind in a whirl. What was going to happen here? That girl! He ought to ride right on out of this cañon, and he was making up his mind to do that when he came back around the house to see that the girl had come to the porch rail. Her great eyes burned at his horse. Monty did not need to be told that she had a passion for horses. It would help some. But she did not appear to see Monty at all.

  “You’ve a wonderful horse,” said Mrs. Keitch. “Poor fellow. He’s lame and tuckered out. We’ll turn him loose in the pasture.”

  Monty followed her down a shady lane of cottonwoods, where the water ran noisily on each side, and he sort of trembled inwardly at the content of the woman’s last words. He had heard of the Good Samaritan ways of Mormons. And in that short walk Monty did a deal of thinking. They reached an old barn beyond which lay a green pasture with an orchard running down one side. Peach trees were in bloom, lending a delicate and beautiful pink to the fresh spring foliage.

  “What wages would you work for?” queried the woman earnestly.

  “Wal, come to think of thet, for my board an’ keep. Anyhow till we got the ranch payin’,” replied Monty.

  “Very well, stranger, that’s a fair deal. Unsaddle your horse and stay,” said the woman.

  “Wait a minnit, lady,” drawled Monty. “I got to substitute somethin’ for that recommend I gave you. Shore I know cattle an’ ranchin’ backwards. But I reckon I should have said I’m a no-good, gun-throwin’ cowpuncher who got run out of Arizona.”

  “What for?” demanded Mrs. Keitch.

  “Wal, a lot of it was bad company an’ bad licker. But at that I wasn’t so drunk I didn’t know I was rustlin’ cattle.”

  “Why do you tell me?” she demanded.

  “Wal, it is kinda funny. But I just couldn’t fool a kind woman like you. Thet’s all.”

  “You don’t look like a hard-drinking man.”

  “Aw, I’m not. I never said so, ma’am. Fact is, I ain’t much of a drinkin’ cowboy a-tall.”

  “You came across the cañon?” she asked.

  “Shore, an’ by golly thet was the orfellest ride, an’ slide, an’ swim, an’ climb I ever had. I really deserve heaven, lady.”

  “Any danger of a sheriff trailing you?”

  “Wal, I’ve thought about that. I reckon one chance in a thousand.”

  “He’d be the first one I ever heard of…from across the cañon at any rate. This is a lonesome, out-of-the-way place…and, if you stayed away from the Mormon ranches and towns….”

  “See heah, lady,” interrupted Monty sharply, “you shore ain’t goin’ to take me on?”

  “I am. You might be a welcome change. Lord knows, I’ve hired every kind of a man. But not one of them ever lasted. You might.”

  “What was wrong with them?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw much wrong, but Rebecca could not get along with them, and she drove them away.”

  “Aw, I see!” exclaimed Monty, who did not see at all. “But I’m not one of the moonin’ kind, lady, and I’ll stick.”

  “All right. It’s only fair, though, to tell you there’s a risk. The young fellow doesn’t live who could let Rebecca alone. It’d be a godsend to a distracted old woman.”

  Monty wagged his bare head, pondering, and slid the rim of his sombrero through his fingers. “Wal, I reckon I’ve been most everythin’ but a godsend, an’ I’d shore like to try thet.”

  “What’s your name?” she asked with those searching gray eyes on him.

  “Monty Bellew…Smoke for short…an’ it’s shore shameful well known in some parts of Arizona.”

  “Any folks living?”

  “Yes, back in Iowa. Father an’ Mother gettin’ along in years now. An’ a kid sister growed up.”

  “You send them money every month, of course?”

  Monty hung his head. “Wal, fact is, not so regular as I used to. Late years times have been hard for me.”

  “Hard, nothing! You’ve drifted into hard ways. Shiftless, drinking, gambling, shooting cowhand…now haven’t you been just that?”

  “I’m sorry, lady…I…I reckon I have.”

  “You ought to be ashamed. I know boys. I raised nine. It’s time you were turning over a new leaf. Suppose we begin by burying that name Monty Bellew?”

  “I’m shore willin’ an’ grateful, ma’am.”

  “Then it’s settled. Tend to your horse. You can have the little cabin there under the big cottonwood. We’ve kept that for our hired help, but it hasn’t been occupied much lately.”

  She left Monty then, and he stood a moment, irresolute. What a balance was struck there. Presently he slipped saddle and bridle off the horse, and turned him into the pasture. “Baldy, look at that alfalfa,” he said. Weary as Baldy was, he lay down and rolled and rolled.

  Monty carried his equipment to the tiny porch of the cabin under the huge cottonwood. He removed his saddlebags, which contained the meager sum of his possessions. Then he flopped down on the bench.

  “Dog-gone it,” he muttered. His senses seemed playing with him. The leaves rustled above and the white cottonseeds floated down; the bees were murmuring; water tinkled swiftly by the porch; somewhere a bell on a sheep or calf broke the stillness. Monty had never felt such peace and tranquility, and his soul took on a burden of gratitude.

  Suddenly a clear, resonant voice pealed out from the house. “Ma, what’s the name of our new hand?”

  “Ask him, Rebecca. I forgot to,” replied the mother.

  “If that isn’t like you!”

  Monty was on his way to the house and soon hove in sight to the young woman on the porch. He thrilled as he spied her, and he made himself some deep wild promises.

  “Hey, cowboy. What’s your name?” she called.

  “Sam,” he called back.

  “Sam what?”

  “Sam Hill.”

  “For the land’s sake! That’s not your name.”

  “Call me Land’s Sake, if you like it better.”

  “I like it?” She nodded her curly head sagely, and she regarded Monty with a certainty that made him vow to upset her calculations or die in the attempt. She handed him a bucket. “Can you milk a cow?”

  “I never saw my equal as a milker,” asserted Monty.

  “In that case I won’t have to help,” she replied. “But I’ll go with you to drive in the cows.”

  II

  From that hour dated Monty’s apparent subjection. He accepted himself at Rebecca’s valuation—that of a very small hired boy. Monty believed he had a way with girls, and at any rate that way had never been tried upon this imperious young Mormon miss. Monty made good his boast about being a master hand at the milking of cows. He surprised Rebecca, although she did not guess he saw it. For the rest Monty never looked at her—when she was looking—never addressed her, never gave her the slightest hint that her sex was manifest to him.

  Now he knew perfectly well that his appearance did not tally with this kind of
a cowboy. She realized it and was puzzled, but evidently he was a novelty. At first Monty sensed a slight antagonism of the Mormon against the Gentile, but in the case of Mrs. Keitch he never noticed this at all, and less and less from the girl.

  The feeling of being in some sort of a trance persisted with Monty, and he could not account for it, unless it was the charm of this lonely Cañon Walls Ranch, combined with the singular attraction of its young mistress. Monty had not been there three days when he realized that sooner or later he would fall, and great would be the fall thereof. But his sincere and ever-growing admiration for Widow Keitch held him true to his inherent sincerity. It would not hurt him to have a terrible case over Rebecca, and he resigned himself. Nothing could come of it, except perhaps to chasten him. Ordinarily he would never let her dream of such a thing. She just gradually and imperceptibly grew on Monty. There was nothing strange in this. Wherever Monty had ridden, there had always been some girl before that he had bowed down. She might be a fright—a lanky, slab-sided, red-headed country girl, but that made no difference. His comrades had called him Smoke Bellew, because of his propensity for raising so much smoke where there was not any fire.

  Sunday brought a change at the Keitch household. Rebecca appeared in a white dress, and Monty caught his breath. He worshipped from a safe distance through the leaves. Presently a two-seated buckboard drove up to the ranch house, and Rebecca lost no time climbing in with the young people. They drove off, of course, to church at the village of White Sage, some half dozen miles across the line. Monty thought it odd that Mrs. Keitch did not go.

  There had been many a time in Monty’s life when the loneliness and solitude of these dreaming cañon walls would have been maddening. But Monty found strange ease and solace here. He had entered upon a new era of thinking. He hated to think that it might not last. But it would last if the shadow of the past did not fall on Cañon Walls.

  At 1:00 p.m. Rebecca returned with her friends in the buckboard, and presently Monty was summoned to dinner, by no less than Mrs. Keitch’s trenchant call. Monty had not anticipated this, but he brushed and brightened himself up a bit, and proceeded to the house. Mrs. Keitch met him as he mounted the porch steps. “Folks,” she announced, “this is our new man, Sam Hill. Sam, meet Lucy Card and her brother Joe, and Hal Stacey.”

  Monty bowed, and took the seat assigned to him by Mrs. Keitch. She was beaming, and the dinner table fairly groaned with the load of good things to eat. Monty defeated an overwhelming desire to look at Rebecca. In a moment he saw that the embarrassment under which he labored was silly. These Mormon young people were quiet, friendly, and far from curious. His presence at Widow Keitch’s table was more natural to them than it seemed to Monty. Soon he was at ease and dared to glance across the table. Rebecca was radiant. How had it come that he had not seen her beauty? She appeared like a gorgeous, opening rose. Monty did not risk a second glance and he soliloquized to himself that he ought to go far up the cañon and crawl into a hole. Nevertheless, he enjoyed the dinner and did ample justice to it.

  After dinner more company arrived, mostly on horseback. Sunday was evidently the Keitches’ day at home. Monty made several unobtrusive attempts to escape, once being stopped in his tracks by a single glance from Rebecca, and the other times failing through the widow’s watchfulness. He felt that he was very dense not to have seen sooner how they wished him to be at home. At length, toward evening, Monty left Rebecca to several of her admirers, who outstayed the other visitors, and went off for a sunset stroll under the cañon walls.

  Monty did not consider himself exactly a dunce, but he could not see clearly through the afternoon’s experience. There were, however, some points he could be sure of. The Widow Keitch had evidently seen better days. She did not cross the Arizona line into Utah. Rebecca was waited upon by a host of Mormons, to whom she appeared imperiously indifferent one moment and alluringly coy the next. She was a spoiled girl, Monty argued. Monty had not been able to discover the slightest curiosity or antagonism in those visitors, and, as they were all Mormons and he was a Gentile, it changed some preconceived ideas of his.

  Next morning Monty plunged into the endless work needful to be done about the ranch. He doubled the water in the irrigation ditches, to Widow Keitch’s delight. That day passed as if by magic. It did not end, however, without Rebecca’s crossing Monty’s trail, and earned for him a very good compliment from her, anent the fact that he might develop into a milkman.

  The days flew by then, and another Sunday came, very like the first one, and that brought June around. Thereafter the weeks were as short as days. Monty was amazed to see what a diversity of tasks he could put an efficient hand to. But then he had seen quite a good deal of ranch service, aside from driving cattle. And it so happened that here was an ideal farm awaiting development, and Monty put his heart into the task. The summer was hot, especially in the afternoon under the reflected heat from the walls. He had cut alfalfa several times. And the harvest of fruit and grain was at hand. There were pumpkins so large that Monty could scarcely roll one over, bunches of grapes longer than his arm, great, luscious peaches that shone gold in the sunlight, and other farm products in proportion.

  The womenfolk spent days putting up preserves, pickles, fruit. Monty used to go out of his way to smell the fragrant wood fire in the backyard under the cottonwoods, where the big, brass kettle steamed with peach butter. “I’ll shore eat myself to death when winter comes,” he said.

  Among the young men who paid court to Rebecca were two brothers, Wade and Eben Tyler, lean-faced, still-eyed young Mormons who were wild-horse hunters. The whole southern end of Utah was run over by droves of wild horses, and according to some of the pioneers they would become a nuisance to the range. The Tylers took such a liking to Monty that they asked Mrs. Keitch to let him go with them on a hunt in October, over in what they called the Siwash. The widow was prevailed upon to consent, stipulating that Monty should fetch back a supply of venison. Rebecca said she would allow him to go if he brought her one of the wild mustangs with long mane and tail that touched the ground.

  So when October rolled around, Monty rode off with the brothers, and three days brought them to the edge of a black forest called Buckskin. It took a whole day to ride through the magnificent spruces and pines to the rim of the cañon. Here, Monty found the wildest and most wonderful country he had ever seen. The Siwash was a rough section where the breaks in the rim afforded retreat for the thousands of deer and wild horses, and the cougars that preyed upon them. Monty had the hunt of his life, and, when those fleeting weeks were over, he and the Tylers were fast friends.

  Monty returned to Cañon Walls Ranch, pleased to find that he had been sorely needed and missed, and keen to go at his work again. Gradually he thought less and less of that retreating Arizona escapade that had made him a fugitive; a little time in that wild country had a tendency to make past things seem dim and far away. He ceased to start whenever he saw strange riders coming up the cañon gateway. Mormon sheepmen and cattlemen, when in the vicinity of Cañon Walls, always paid the Keitches a visit. Still Monty never ceased to pack a gun, a fact that Mrs. Keitch often mentioned. Monty said it was a habit.

  He went to clearing the upper end of the cañon. The cottonwood, oak, and brush were as thick as a jungle. But it appeared to be mowed down under the sweep of Monty’s axe. In his boyhood on the Iowa farm he had been a rail-splitter. How many useful things came back to him! Every day Rebecca or Mrs. Keitch or the boy Randy, who helped at chores, drove up in the big sled and hauled firewood. When the winter’s wood, with plenty to spare, had been stored away, Mrs. Keitch pointed with satisfaction to a considerable saving of money.

  The leaves did not fall until late in November, and then they changed color slowly and dropped reluctantly, as if not sure that winter could actually come to Cañon Walls. Monty doubted that it would. But frosty mornings did come, and soon thin skins of ice formed on the still pools. Sometimes, whe
n Monty rode out of the cañon gateway upon the desert, he could see the white line reaching down from Buckskin, and Mount Trumbull had its crown of snow. But no real winter came to the cañon. The gleaming walls seemed to have absorbed enough of the summer sun to carry over. Every hour of daylight found Monty outdoors at one of the tasks that multiplied under his eye. After supper he would sit before the little stone fireplace he had built in his cabin, and watch the flames, and wonder about himself, and how long this could last. He did not see why it could not last always, and he went so far in calculation as to say that a debt paid cancelled even the acquiring of a few cattle not his own, in that past that got further back all the time. He had been just a wild cowboy, urged by drink and a need of money. He had asked only that it be forgotten and buried, but now he began to think he wanted to square that debt.

  The winter passed, and Monty’s labors had opened up as many new acres as had been cleared originally. Cañon Walls Ranch took the eye of Andrew Boller who made Widow Keitch a substantial offer for it. Mrs. Keitch laughed her refusal, and the remark she made to Boller mystified Monty for many a day. Something like Cañon Walls someday being as great a ranch as that one of which the Church had deprived her!

  Monty asked Wade Tyler what she’d meant, and Wade replied that he had heard how John Keitch had owed the bishop money, and the great ranch, after Keitch’s death, had been taken. But that was one of the few questions Monty ever asked. The complexity and mystery of the Mormon Church did not interest him. It had been a shock, however, to find that two of Mrs. Keitch’s Sunday callers, openly courting Rebecca’s hand, already had wives. By golly, I ought to marry her myself, declared Monty with heat, as he soliloquized to himself beside his fire, and then he laughed at his dreaming conceit. He was only the hired help to Rebecca.

  * * * * *

  How good to see the green burst out upon the cottonwoods, and then the pink on the peach trees! Monty had been at Cañon Walls a year. It seemed incredible. He could see a vast change in the ranch. And what transformation had that labor wrought in him!