Knights of the Range. Zane Grey

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СКАЧАТЬ Texas Pan Handle, Kansas, all the ranges north, scream at me for listening to you.”

      “I don’t care what you’ve been,” she went on, passionately. “It’s what you are now. . . . Those ranges are far, far away. Forget them. Bury that past. Fight for my rancho, my cattle, my horses, for me!”

      Like a drunken man Frayne staggered back against the fence. Britt quickened to the most complex and moving situation of his experience. If this man had been utterly bad, he could not have remained so.

      “I will never ask you one question,” went on Holly. “I’ll exact only one promise.”

      “What?”

      “That as long as you stay with me—and I hope it will be always—this, this dishonesty you confess will be as if it had never been. . . . Do you promise me?”

      “I swear it. . . . But how can you trust me?”

      “I made you a promise. You said I would never break my word. . . . Can I do less than trust you, Frayne? Here’s my hand.”

      Blindly he reached out to take her ungloved hand in his, and bowed his face over it.

      Holly gazed down upon his lowered head. Britt had seen many lights and shades in those splendid Spanish eyes, but none ever so soft and strange and mystically lovely as those that shone there now. It had taken an outcast of the range to reach Holly’s wayward heart. For two years Britt had watched her varied obsessions in the cowboys of Don Carlos’ Rancho. She had been Lee Ripple’s American girl, but her light and fickle fancies had been Spanish. Britt sighed over the inevitable, yet his love for Holly stormed his convictions and routed them.

      Frayne lifted a cold face, from which emotion had been erased, and released her hand.

      “Take her home, Britt. I will follow,” he said, composedly, and stalked toward his grazing horse.

Chapter Three

      Holly Ripple’s school life in New Orleans, from her ninth to her sixteenth year, had been one of comfort, luxury, restraint, so that when she was launched upon the wildest range on the frontier, soon to become sole mistress of Don Carlos’ Rancho with its great herds of cattle and droves of horses, she most certainly needed the pride and spirit that had been born in her.

      Britt had trained her ceaselessly and faithfully during these past years. She cared nothing for cattle, but as she loved horses he had taught her to ride them like an Indian and to know them. She developed a superb physique, strength, skill, endurance, and a daring that had cost her foreman much dismay and anxiety. But Britt could not perform miracles, and the hard life of the range failed to blunt the soft feminine characteristics which had been fostered upon Holly during the impressionable forming time of adolescence. Perhaps the wise Colonel had intended this very thing.

      Naturally Holly had seen much rough life on the range. Curious, interested, thrilled by everything, it had not been possible to hold her back. The old caravan trail from Santa Fe to the Mississippi ran across her land. A Mexican village, the inhabitants of which were in her employ, nestled picturesquely below the great ranch-house. A branch post of Horn’s Trading Company was maintained here, where trappers came to sell and red men to buy and trade. Troops of dragoons stopped there on their way to escort caravans. From spring until winter the caravans passed, always camping in the cottonwood grove along the creek. Wagon-trains from Texas made the most of Don Carlos’ Rancho.

      In two short years much of western life had unrolled before Holly’s all-absorbing eyes. Half a hundred cowboys had come and gone. Many a wild or drunken cowboy had bit the dust or dug his spurs into the earth on her range. Fighting was the breath of their lives. Holly had seen the beginning or the end of innumerable brawls. She had been known to stop fights. On more than one occasion she had unwittingly ridden upon dark slack forms of men swinging by their necks from trees. She had viewed a brush between soldiers and savages; she had seen stage-coaches roll in with bloody drivers roaring and dead passengers with the living; she had been present that very spring when a cattleman and rustler shot it out fatally on the street of San Marcos.

      But the raw terrible spirit of the frontier had never closely touched Holly Ripple until this bright May morning when an outlaw had killed two of his comrades to save her.

      Holly rode away from that scene sick to her marrow. She had watched the encounter on her nerve. Every word and every action had been etched indelibly upon her consciousness. Anger at the boldness of these horse-thieves had given place to fury at their leader, and then to fright such as she had never known. If she could have saved the lives of Heaver and Covell by lifting her hand, she would not have done so. The West of her birth welled up in Holly that day. Afterward pride upheld her while she answered to irresistible and incomprehensible impulse in persuading this lone-wolf outlaw to become one of her riders.

      Upon facing homeward with Britt, the trenchant thrill of this impulse faded away. And then the ghastly business of what had threatened her, and the blood and death which had followed, resulted in a cold misery in her vitals. Only the interest in the strange man who had saved her kept Holly from reacting to that aftermath as might have one of her tenderfoot schoolmates in New Orleans who used to faint at the sight of blood.

      “Holly, you air pale aboot the gills,” spoke up Britt, solicitously, before they had ridden far. “An’ you ain’t settin’ yore saddle like you’d growed there.”

      “I’m sick—Cappy. Ride close. . . . But I’ll get over it.”

      “Shore you will. Grit yore teeth an’ hang on, Holly.”

      “Please don’t scold me—for riding down alone. You were right.”

      “Wal, lass, I’ll not scold you now, anyway. But I hope thet will be a lesson to you.”

      “It will be. I’ll never be headstrong again. . . . I promised him. Oh, he was ruthless, insulting. But no common sort!”

      “Holly, our new hand ’peared to be a lot of things—one of which was chain-lightnin’. My Gawd, but he was quick! . . . Holly, I’ve seen a few of the great Texas gunmen draw. Frayne would have killed any one of them today. Wonder who he is.”

      Holly was silent. She did not want to know. Frayne repelled her even more than he fascinated her. What had possessed her to such a rash and inconsidered offer? Did she already regret it? Had gratitude and pity prompted her wholly? At length she turned in her saddle to see if Frayne was coming. No horseman in sight on the grassy plain! She felt relieved. He might not follow. Then hard on this thought stirred a vague and disturbing fear that he might not keep his word. Next instant she championed him with self-accusation. He would not lie. Shame edged into her conflicting emotions. Cold, ruthless, indifferent, insulting outlaw! No man had ever dared to so criticise her. Holly rode on unaware that her sickness was gradually succumbing to stronger sensations.

      “Cappy, was I wrong?” she asked, at length.

      “How so, lass?”

      “To offer him work? . . . To trust him?”

      “Wal, thet’s a stumper. Fust off I was scared stiff. But I’m hedgin’, Holly. If Brazos an’ Cherokee an’ the Southards take to Frayne I’d say his acquisitions might turn oot great fer Don Carlos’ Rancho.”

      “You wouldn’t be afraid to trust him?”

      “It seems onreasonable, but I СКАЧАТЬ