A Vendetta of the Hills. Emerson Willis George

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      While speaking, Ashley had been gathering up the gold.

      “I say, Buck,” observed Dick Willoughby, winking at his friend Lieutenant Munson, “it is my private opinion that that bandit, the White Wolf, has nothing on you.”

      Tom Baker laughingly chimed in: “If I am any judge, and I allow as how I am, Buck here would make that pound-of-flesh Shylock feller look like thirty cents Mex.”

      Ashley smiled greedily, but in a satisfied way, as he said with unruffled calm: “Guess I’d better weigh them nuggets and see how much the old squaw’s groceries cost her.”

      “The treacherous Indian and the honest paleface,” laughed Dick Willoughby in a half-rebuking tone.

      Buck Ashley bridled up. His voice rang with deep feeling.

      “Boys,” he said, “you think I’m a Shylock, a robber, a devil I expect, and everything that’s bad. I don’t talk much about myself, but just so you’ll not think too blamed hard of me, I’ll ask you a question. Supposen when you was only about fifteen years old, you stood by, tied hand and foot, and saw a lot of redskins scalp and kill your father and mother and two little sisters, and then rob your dead father of over ten thousand dollars in gold, run off the family stock, and take you to their camp to burn at the stake as a sort of incidental diversion at one of their pow-wow dances; and supposen you performed a miracle and got away and took an oath to kill and rob every derned Indian you might see throughout the remaining days of your life – what, then, if I reformed and gave up the kilin’ and stuck to robbin’, would you blame me?”

      During this tragic recital of his wrongs the old storekeeper had become noticeably excited.

      Dick Willoughby got up from the cracker-box where he had been resting, and advancing with hand extended, said: “Buck, what you have told us presents the whole matter in a new light. Shake!”

      “Thanks,” replied the storekeeper as he turned away to wipe a mist from his eyes.

      Then quickly facing about, he called out in his usual gruff, hale and hearty manner: “Say, boys, what’ll you all have? This round is on the house.” They drank in silence. A fragment of Buck Ashley’s history had cleared away a good deal of previous misunderstanding.

      CHAPTER II – Charmed Lives

      THE spell of restraint that resulted from Buck Ashley’s story was at last broken by the cowboy, Jack Rover.

      “Look here, Dick,” he exclaimed, “I’ll give a month’s salary if you will let me take a chance and follow old Guadalupe. I’ve simply got to find out and locate that sand-bar in some mountain stream from which she brings in all this gold. This is the third time I’ve seen our friend Buck Ashley collect a grocery bill from the old squaw, and the whole business, gold nuggets and all, is getting on my nerves. Why, I dreamed about it for a week last time I saw her forking out whole handfuls of gold.”

      “Very well,” replied Willoughby, “if you want to take the chance, Jack, go ahead. But it is a mad project which will end in my expressing your remains back East or else planting you in the cemetery on the hill. It’s up to you to make your choice before you tackle the job. You certainly know what happened to four or five others who attempted to follow the old squaw. Each mother’s son of them was buried the next day.”

      “Oh, that’s ancient history,” Jack retorted.

      “Not such very ancient hist’ry,” remarked Tom Baker. “I myself saw young Bill McNab drilled through the heart with a bullet that seemed to come from nowhere. After that I’ll allow I wasn’t filled up with too much curiosity as to where Guadalupe hiked over the mountains.”

      “There was a regular sharp-shootin’ outfit,” concurred Buck Ashley.

      “And there wasn’t a sheriff in the country would have led a posse into that damned ambush,” Tom went on. “There wasn’t a sportin’ chance along that narrow ledge round which Guadalupe always disappeared. And with all them outlaws in the mountains!”

      “But the outlaws have been wiped out years ago,” persisted Jack Rover.

      “Mebbe,” said Tom Baker, sententiously.

      “You forget the White Wolf,” added Buck Ashley.

      “Which white wolf?” asked Jack. “I put that question before but got no answer.”

      “Both,” replied Tom. “To begin with I don’t believe that Don Manuel is dead at all. That was only a newspaper story. You may take it from me that the bandit won’t pass in his checks till he gets old Ben Thurston. I’m allowin’ as how Ben Thurston would quick enough give a thousand head of his fattest beeves just to rest easy in his mind on that score. He’ll find out, sure enough, some day.”

      “Yes, when the White Wolf finds him,” interjected the storekeeper with a terse emphasis.

      “What’s that old feud anyway?” queried Lieutenant Munson. “Tell me, Tom.”

      “Oh, it is an old story,” the sheriff answered. “I thought everybody knew about it, but of course you’re a newcomer. Well, you see,” he continued, clearing his throat and expectorating a copious and accurately aimed pit-tew of tobacco juice toward a knot-hole in the floor, “the White Wolf’s father, Don Antonio de Valencia, a reg’lar high-toned grandee from Spain, had settled in these here parts away back longer than anyone could remember. He claimed this whole stretch of country from horizon to horizon. Then came the Americans, among them a government surveyor named Thurston. He had a pull at Washington and managed to get a legal grant to the San Antonio property. Of course the old Spaniard had no real title – his was just a sort of squatter’s claim. But they do say as how he had lived in this here valley more than half a century, so it was mighty hard luck to lose the land. And the boy Manuel never would admit the Thurstons had any right to call it theirs.”

      “Don Manuel had a younger sister,” interposed Buck Ashley. “Rosetta, a beautiful girl – looked like a morning-glory. Gad! but she sure had a purty face. You remember, Tom, don’t you?”

      “Oh, yes,” replied Tom Baker, “it’s not likely I should forget the poor girl. It was ‘cause of her the quarrel became a bitter blood feud – the Vendetta of the Hills, as we got to calling it. You see,” he went on, resuming the thread of his story, “old man Thurston’s son, Ben, the present owner of the rancho, was in his younger days a gay Lothario scamp, and he came from the East to his new home in California loaded down with a college education and a mighty intimate knowledge of the ways of the world that decent folks don’t talk about, much less practice. He had not been here a month until he commenced makin’ love to little Senorita Rosetta. Before the second sheep-shearin’ time came around, she was – well, in a delicate condition. To save himself and, as he thought, cover up the disgrace – you see he was engaged to a rich Eastern girl of prominent family – why, the young scoundrel conceived the hellish plot of lurin’ little Rosetta to Comanche Point one dark night. And when he got her there he threw her over the cliff – at least that’s the way the story goes. Guess Don Manuel was about twenty-five years old at that time, and Ben Thurston two or three years his junior. Well, the disgrace killed Rosetta’s father and mother. They died of grief and shame soon after the affair, almost on the same day, and Don Manuel buried them together in the old churchyard on the hill by the side of his murdered sister. And it was there and then, they say, that he took an oath to kill Ben Thurston. That was mor’n thirty years ago and the feud has been on ever since, and all us old-timers know hell will be poppin’ ‘round СКАЧАТЬ