Out of the Depths: A Romance of Reclamation. Bennet Robert Ames

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СКАЧАТЬ keep his eye open, Chuckie,” reassured her father. “It’s the other fellow wants to be careful, if he hasn’t already vamoosed. Hey, Kid?”

      “I’ll get him, if I get the chance,” laconically replied Gowan, looking from the girl to Ashton with the characteristic straightening of his lips that marked the tensing of his emotions.

      As he left the room Miss Isobel smiled and nodded to Ashton. “You see how friendly he is, in spite of his cold manner to strangers. I thought he had taken a dislike to you, yet you saw how readily he offered to go out after your assailant.”

      “More likely it’s because he thinks it would discredit us to let such a scoundrel get away,” differed her father. “However, he’ll leave you alone, Mr. Ashton, if you stay with us as a guest, and will only haze you a bit, if you insist upon joining our force.”

      “You mean, working for you? I must insist on that,” said Ashton, with an eager look at the girl. “If only I can do well enough to be employed right along!”

      The cowman grunted, and winked solemnly at his daughter. “Yes, I can understand your feeling that way. How about the winter, though? You mayn’t like it over here so well then.”

      Ashton flushed and laughed at the older man’s shrewdness; hesitated, and confessed candidly: “No, I should prefer Denver in winter.”

      Miss Isobel blushed in adorable payment of his compliment, but thrust back at him: “We bar cowboys in the Sacred Thirty-six.”

      He winced. Her stroke had pierced into his raw wound.

      “Oh!–oh!” she breathlessly exclaimed. “I didn’t mean to–Oh, I’m so sorry!”

      He dashed the tears from his eyes. “No, you–don’t apologize! It’s only that I’m–Please don’t fancy I’m a baby! You see, when a fellow has always lived high–on top, you know–and then to have everything go out from under him without warning!”

      “Keep a stiff upper lip, son,” advised Knowles. “You’ll pull through all right. It isn’t everyone in your fix that would be asking for work.”

      Ashton laughed a trifle unsteadily. “It’s very kind of you to say that, Mr. Knowles. I–I wish a steady position, winter as well as summer.”

      “How about Denver?” asked Knowles.

      “That can wait,” replied Ashton. He met the girl’s smile of approval, and rallied fully. “Yes, that can wait–and so can I.”

      Again the girl blushed, but she found a bantering rejoinder: “With you and Kid and Daddy all waiting for me to come home, I suppose I’ll have to cut the season short.”

      “The winters here are like those you read about up at the North Pole,” the cowman informed Ashton. “But we get our sunshine back along in the spring.”

      “Oh, Daddy! you’re a poet!” cried his daughter, flinging her arm around his sunburnt neck.

      “Wish I were one!” enviously sighed Ashton. The cowman gave him a look that brought him to his feet. “Mr. Knowles,” he hastened to ask, “if you’ll kindly tell me what my work is to be this afternoon.”

      The older man’s frown relaxed. “Did you come out here from Stockchute?”

      “Yes.”

      “Think you could find your way back?”

      “Why, yes; though we wandered all around–But surely, Mr. Knowles, you’ll not require me–”

      “I want a man to ride over with some letters and fetch the mail. I’ll need Gowan for work you can’t do. Chuckie was to have gone; but I can’t let her now, until we’re more sure about that man who shot at you.”

      “I see.”

      “Well, have you got the nerve, in case the man is loose over that way?”

      Ashton’s eyes flashed. “I’ll go! Perhaps I’ll get another crack at the scoundrel.”

      “Keep cool. It’s ninety-nine chances in the hundred he’s on the run and’ll keep going all week.”

      “Shall I start now? As we came by a very roundabout way–We went first in the opposite direction, and then skirted High Mesa down from the mountains. So, you see, I may have a little difficulty–”

      “No you won’t. There’s our wagon trail. Even if you got off that, all you’d have to do would be to keep headed for Split Peak. That’s right in line with Stockchute. But you’ll not start till morning. I haven’t got all my letters written. That’ll give you all day to go and come. It’s only twenty-five miles over there. Chuckie, you show this new puncher of ours over the place, while I write those letters.”

      “I’ll start teaching him how to throw a rope,” volunteered the girl.

      She led the way out through a daintily furnished front room, in which Ashton observed an upright piano and other articles of culture that he would never have expected to come upon in this remote section. In passing, the girl picked up a wide-brimmed lacy hat.

      Once outside, she first took Ashton for a walk up Plum Creek to where half a dozen men were at work with a mowing machine and horse rakes making hay of the rich bunch-grass.

      “Daddy feeds all he can in winter,” she explained. “The spring when I first came back from Denver I cried so over the starving cattle that he promised to always afterwards cut and stack all the hay he could. And he has found it pays to feed well. We would put a lot of land into oats, but, as you see, there’s not enough water in the creek.”

      “That’s where an irrigation system would come in,” remarked Ashton.

      “Oh, I hope you don’t think it possible to water our mesa!” she cried. “I told you how it would break up our range.”

      “I assure you, I don’t think at all,” he replied. “I’m not a reclamation engineer–never specialized on hydraulics.”

      She flashed an odd look at him. “You never? But Mr. Blake–that wonderful engineer of the Zariba Dam–he would know, wouldn’t he?”

      “I–suppose he would–that is, if he–” Ashton hesitated, and exclaimed, “But that’s just it!”

      “What?” she asked.

      “Why, to–to have him come here. He’s the luckiest for blundering on ways to do things,” muttered Ashton. He added with growing bitterness: “Yes, if there’s any way at all to do it, you’d have him flooding your whole range–deluging it. He’s got all those millions to back him.”

      “You do not like him,” said the girl. She looked off towards High Mesa, her face glowing with suppressed excitement. “No doubt you are right–as to his ability. But–don’t you see?–if it can be done, it is bound to be done sooner or later. All the time Daddy and I–and Kid, too–are living under this constant dread that it may be possible. But if such an engineer as–as Mr. Blake came and looked over the situation and told us we needn’t fear–don’t you see how–?”

      “You don’t mean that you–?” Ashton, in turn, left his question unfinished and averted his СКАЧАТЬ