The Son of his Father

Gordon stirred. He turned and looked into Silas Mallinsbee's smiling eyes.

"It's – all yours?" he inquired.

"For miles an' miles around. I got nigh a hundred miles of grazing in these hills – and nobody else don't seem to want it. Makes you wonder."

Gordon laughed.

"Say, set a spade into the ground and find a marketable mineral and tell somebody. Then see."

Mallinsbee chewed an unlit cigar, and his chin beard twisted absurdly.

"That's it," he said slowly. "There's nothing to these hills as they are, except to a cattleman, I guess. Cattle don't suit the modern man. Your profitable crop's a three years' waiting, and that don't mean a thing to folk nowadays, except a dead loss of time on the round-up of dollars. They don't figure that once you're good and going that three years' crop comes around once every year. So they miss a deal."

"Yes, they'd reckon it slow, I guess," Gordon agreed. "But," he went on with enthusiasm, "the life of it. The air." He took a deep breath of the sparkling mountain atmosphere. "It's champagne. The champagne of life. Say, it's good to be alive in such a place. And you," he gazed inquiringly into the man's strong face, "you began it from – the beginning?"

"I built the first ranch house with my own hands. My old wife an' I built up this ranch and ran it. And now it's rich and big – she's gone. She never saw it win out. Hazel's took her place, and it's been for her to see it grow to what it is. She helped me ship my first single year's crop of twenty thousand beeves to the market ten years ago. She was a small kiddie then, and she cried her pretty eyes out when I told her they were going to the slaughter yards of Chicago. You see, she'd known most of 'em as calves."

"The work of it must be enormous," meditated Gordon, after a pause in which he had pictured that small child weeping over her lost calves.

"So," rumbled Mallinsbee. "We're used to it. I run thirty boys all the year round, and more at round-up. Guess if I was missing Hazel wouldn't be at a loss to carry on. She's a great ranchman. She knows it all."

"Wonderful," Gordon cried in admiration. "It's staggering to think of a girl like that handling this great concern."

"There's two foremen, though. They've been with us years," said the other simply.

But Gordon's wonder remained no less, and Mallinsbee went on —

"After breakfast we'll take a gun and get up into those woods yonder. Maybe we'll put up a jack rabbit, or a blacktail deer. Anyway, I guess there's always a bunch of prairie chicken around."

"Fine," cried Gordon, all his sporting instincts banishing every other thought. "Which – "

But Hazel's voice interrupted him, summoning them both to breakfast.

"Come along, folks," she cried, "or the coffee 'll be cold."

The men hurried into the house. Gordon felt that there was nothing and no power on earth that could keep him from his breakfast in that delicious mountain air, with Hazel for his hostess.

The meal was all he anticipated. Simple, ample, wholesome country fare, with the accompaniment of perfect cooking. He ate with an appetite that set Hazel's merry eyes dancing, and her tongue accompanying them with an equally merry banter. And all the time Silas Mallinsbee looked on, and smiled, and rumbled an occasional remark.

After breakfast the two men set out with their guns.

"We're sure making Sunday service," said Hazel's father, glancing into the breech of his favorite gun.

Gordon concurred.

"Up in the woods there," he laughed.

"With a congregation of fur and feather," laughed Hazel.

"Which is as wholesome as petticoats an' swallowtails," said her father, "an' a good deal more healthy fer our bodies."

"But what about your souls?" inquired Hazel slyly.

"Souls?" Her father snapped the breech closed. "A soul's like a good sailin' ship. If she's driving on a lee shore it's through bad seamanship and the winds of heaven, and you can't save it anyway. If she ain't driving on a lee shore – well, I don't guess she needs saving."

"It's a great big scallywag," came through the open doorway after them, as they departed. The tenderness and affection in the manner of the girl's parting words made Gordon feel that his great host had some compensation for the absence of that mother who had blessed him with such a pledge of their love.

The two men were returning with their bag. It was not extensive, but it was select. A small blacktail was lying across Mallinsbee's broad shoulders. Gordon was carrying a large jack-rabbit, and several brace of prairie chicken. The younger man was enthusiastic over their sport.

"Talk to me of a city! Why, I could do this twice a day and every day, till I was blind and silly, and deaf and dumb. I sort of feel life don't begin to tell you things till you get out in the open, at the right end of a gun. Makes you feel sorry for the fellows chasing dollars in a city."

They were approaching the limits of a woodland bluff, from the edge of which the ranch would be in view.

"Guess that's how I've always felt – till little Hazel got without a mother," replied Mallinsbee. "After that – well, I just guess I needed other things to fill up spare thoughts."

Gordon's enthusiasm promptly lessened out of sympathy. Something of the loneliness of the ranch life – when one of the partners was taken – now occurred to him.

"Yes," he said earnestly, "the right woman's just the whole of a man's world. I guess there are circumstances when – this sun don't shine so bright. When a man feels something of the vastness and solitude of these hills, when their mystery sort of gets hold of him. I can get that – sure."

"Yep. It's just about then when a bit of coal makes all the difference," Mallinsbee smiled. "I wouldn't just call coal the gayest thing in life. But it's got its uses. When the summer's past, why, I guess the stoves of winter need banking."

Gordon nodded his understanding.

"But your daughter is just crazy on this life," he suggested.

The old man's smile had passed.

"Sure." Then he sighed. "She's been my partner ever since, sort of junior partner. But sometime she 'll be – going." Then his slow smile crept back into his eyes. "Then it'll be winter all the time. Then it'll have to be coal, an' again coal – right along."

They emerged from the woods, and instinctively Gordon gazed across at the distant ranch. In a moment he was standing stock still staring across the valley. And swiftly there leaped into his eyes a dangerous light. Mallinsbee halted, too. He shaded his eyes, and an ominous cloud settled upon his heavy brows.

"Some one driven out," he muttered, examining narrowly a team and buggy standing at the veranda.

Gordon emitted a sound that was like a laugh, but had no mirth in it.

"It's a man, and he's talking to Miss Mallinsbee on the veranda. It don't take me guessing his identity. That suit's fixed right on my mind."

"David Slosson," muttered Mallinsbee, and he hurried on at an increased pace.

It was after the midday dinner which David Slosson had shared with them.

When her father and Gordon arrived, and before objection could be offered by anybody, Hazel asked her uninvited guest to stay to dinner. David Slosson, without the least hesitation, accepted the invitation. In this manner all opposition from her father was discounted, all display of either man's displeasure avoided. She contrived, with subtle feminine wit, to twist the situation to the ends she had in view. She disliked the visitor intensely. The part she had decided to play troubled her, but she meant to carry it through whatever it cost her, and she felt that an opportunity like the present was not to be missed.

Her father accepted the cue he was offered, but Gordon was obsessed with murderous thoughts which certainly Hazel read, even in the smile with which he greeted the man he had decided was to be his enemy.

To Gordon, David Slosson was even more detestable socially than in business. Here his obvious vulgarity and commonness had no opportunity of disguise. He displayed it in the very explanation of his visit.

"Say," he cried, "Snake's Fall is just the bummest location this side of the Sahara on a Sunday. I was lyin' around the hotel with a grouch on I couldn't have scotched with a dozen highballs. I was hatin' myself that bad I got right up an' hired a team and drove along out here on the off-chance of hitting up against some one interestin'." Then he added, with a glance at Hazel, which Gordon would willingly have slain him for: "Guess I hit."

This was on the veranda. But later, throughout the meal, his offenses, in Gordon's eyes, mounted up and up, till the tally nearly reached the breaking strain.

The man put himself at his ease to his own satisfaction from the start. He addressed all his talk either to Hazel or to her father, and, by ignoring Gordon almost entirely, displayed the fact that antagonism was mutual.

He criticised everything he saw about him, from the simple furnishing of the room in which they were dining, and the food they were partaking of, and its cooking, even to the riding-costume Hazel was wearing. He lost no opportunity of comparing unfavorably the life on the ranch, the life, as he put it, to which her father condemned Hazel, with the life of the cities he knew and had lived in. He passed from one rudeness to another under the firm conviction that he was making an impression upon this flower of the plains. The men mattered nothing to him. As far as Mallinsbee was concerned, he felt he held him in the palm of his hand.

Never in his life had Gordon undergone such an ordeal as that meal, which he had so looked forward to, in the pleasant company of father and daughter. Never had he known before the real meaning of self-restraint. More than all it was made harder by the fact that he felt Hazel was aware of something of his feelings. And the certainty that her father understood was made plain by the amused twinkle of his eyes when they were turned in his direction.

Then came the dénouement. It was at the finish of the meal that Hazel launched her bombshell. Slosson, in a long, coarse disquisition upon ranching, had been displaying his most perfect ignorance and conceit. He finished up with the definite statement that ranching was done, "busted." He knew. He had seen. There was nothing in it. Only in grain or mixed farming. He had had wide experience on the prairie, and you couldn't teach him a thing.

"You must let me show you how fallible is your opinion," said Hazel, with more politeness of language than intent. There was a subtle sparkle in her eyes which Gordon was rejoiced to detect. "Let me see," she went on, "it's light till nearly nine o'clock. You see, I mustn't keep you driving on the prairie after dark for fear of losing yourself." She laughed. "Now, I'll lend you a saddle horse – if you can ride," she went on demurely, "and we'll ride round the range till supper. That'll leave you ample time to get back to Snake's Fall without losing yourself in the dark."

Gordon wanted to laugh, but forced himself to refrain. Mallinsbee audibly chuckled. David Slosson looked sharply at Hazel with his narrow black eyes, and his face went scarlet. Then he forced a boisterous laugh.

"Say, that's a bet, Miss Hazel," he cried familiarly. "If you can lose me out on the prairie you're welcome, and when it comes to the saddle, why, I guess I can ride anything with hair on."

"Better let him have my plug, Sunset," suggested Mallinsbee gutturally.

But Hazel's eyes opened wide. She shook her head.

"I wouldn't insult a man of Mr. Slosson's experience by offering him a cushy old thing like Sunset," she expostulated. Then she turned to Slosson. "Sunset's a rocking-horse," she explained. "Now, there's a dandy three-year-old I've just finished breaking in the barn. He's a lifey boy. Wouldn't you rather have him?" she inquired wickedly.

Slosson's inclination was obvious. He would have preferred Sunset. But he couldn't take a bluff from a prairie girl, he told himself. Forthwith he promptly demanded the three-year-old, and his demand elicited the first genuine smile Gordon had been able to muster since he had become aware of Slosson's presence on the ranch.

Within half an hour one of the ranch hands brought the two horses to the veranda. Hazel's mare, keen-eyed, alert and full of life, was a picture for the eye of a horseman. The other horse, shy and wild-eyed, was a picture also, but a picture of quite a different type.

Hazel glanced keenly round the saddle of the youngster. Then she approached Slosson, who was stroking his black mustache pensively on the veranda, and looked up at him with her sweetest smile.

"Shall I get on him first?" she inquired. "Maybe he'll cat jump some. He's pretty lifey. I'd hate him to pitch you."

But to his credit it must be said that Slosson possessed the courage of his bluff. With a half-angry gesture he left the veranda and took the horse from the grinning, bechapped ranchman. He knew now that he was being "jollied."

"Guess you can't scare me that way, Miss Hazel," he cried, but there was no mirth in the harsh laugh that accompanied his words.

He was in the saddle in a trice, and, almost as quickly, he was very nearly out of it. That cat jump had come on the instant.

"Stick to him," Hazel cried.

And David Slosson did his best. He caught hold of the horn of the saddle, his heels went into the horse's sides, and, in two seconds, his attitude was much that of a shipwrecked mariner trying to balance on a barrel in a stormy sea. But he stuck to the saddle, although so nearly wrecked, and though the terrified horse gave a pretty display of bucking, it could not shed its unwelcome burden. So, in a few moments, it abandoned its attempt.

Then David Slosson sat up in triumph, and his vanity shone forth upon his pale face in a beaming smile.

"He's some horseman," rumbled Mallinsbee, loud enough for Slosson to hear as the horses went off.

"Quite," returned Gordon, in a still louder voice. "If there's one thing I like to see it's a fine exhibition of horsemanship."

Then as the horses started at a headlong gallop down towards the valley, the two men left behind turned to each other with a laugh.

"He called Hazel's bluff," said the girl's father, with a wry thrust of his chin beard.

"Which makes it all the more pleasant to think of the time when my turn comes," said Gordon sharply.

David Slosson was more than pleased with himself. He was so delighted that, by a miraculous effort, he had stuck to his horse, that his vanity completely ran away with him. He would show this girl and her mossback father. They wanted to "jolly" him. Well, let them keep trying.

Once the horses had started he gave his its head, and set it at a hard gallop. He turned in the saddle with a challenge to his companion.

"Let's have a run for it," he cried.

The girl laughed back at him.

"Where you go I'll follow," she cried.

Her words were well calculated. The light of vainglory was in the man's eyes, and he hammered his heels into his horse's flanks till it was racing headlong. But Hazel's mare was at his shoulder, striding along with perfect confidence and controlled under hands equally perfect.

"We'll go along this valley and I'll show you our next year's crop of beeves," cried Hazel, later. "They're away yonder, beyond that southern hill, guess we'll find half of them around there. You said ranching was played out, I think."

"Right ho," cried the man, with a sneering laugh. "Guess you'll need to convince me. Say, this is some hoss."

"Useful," admitted Hazel, watching with distressed eyes the man's lumbering seat in the saddle.

They rode on for some moments in silence. Then Hazel eased her hand upon the Lady Jane, and drew up on the youngster like a shot from a gun.

"We'll have to get across this stream," she declared, indicating the six-foot stream along which they were riding. "There's a cattle bridge lower down which you'd better take. There it is, away on. Guess you can see it from here."

"What are you goin' to do?" asked the man sharply. He was expecting another bluff, and was in the right mood to call it, since his success with the first.

But Hazel had calculated things to a nicety. She owed this man a good deal already for herself. She owed him more for his impertinent ignoring of Gordon, and also for his disparagement of the ranch life she loved.

Without a word she swung her mare sharply to the left. A dozen strides, a gazelle-like lifting of the round, brown body, and the Lady Jane was on the opposite bank of the stream.

Before David Slosson was aware of her purpose, and its accomplishment, his racing horse, still uneducated of mouth, had carried him thirty or forty yards beyond the spot where Hazel had jumped the stream. At length, however, he contrived to pull the youngster up.

He smiled as he saw the girl on the other side of the stream. He remembered her suggestion of the bridge, and he shut his teeth with a snap. The stream was narrower here, so he had an advantage which, he believed, she had miscalculated. He took his horse back some distance and galloped at the stream. Hazel sat watching him with a smile, just beyond where he should land. His horse shuffled its feet as it came up to the bank. Then it lifted. Slosson clung to the horn of the saddle. Then the horse landed, stumbled, fell, hurling its rider headlong in a perfect quagmire of swamp.

Slosson gathered himself up, a mass of mud and pretty well wet through. Hazel was out of the saddle in a moment and offering him assistance with every expression of concern. She came to the edge of the swamp and reached out her quirt. The man ignored it. He ignored her, and scrambled to dry ground without assistance.

"I told you to take the bridge," Hazel cried shamelessly. "You knew you were on a young horse. Oh dear, dear! What a terrible muss you're in. My, but my daddy will be angry with me for – for letting this happen."

Her apparently genuine concern slightly mollified the man.

"I thought you were putting up another bluff at me, Miss Hazel," he said, still angrily. "Say, you best quit bluffing me. I don't take 'em from anybody."

"Bluff? Why, Mr. Slosson, I couldn't bluff you. I – I warned you. Same as I did about the cat-jumping your horse put up. Say, this is just dreadful. We'll have to get right back, and get you dried out and cleaned. I guess that horse is too young for a – city man. I ought to have given you Sunset. He'd have jumped that stream a mile – if you wanted him to. Say – there, I'll have to round up your horse, he's making for home."

In a moment Hazel was in the saddle again, and the man alternately watched her and scraped the thick mud off his clothes.

He was decidedly angry. His pride was outraged. But even these things began to pass as he noted the ease and skill with which she rounded up the runaway horse. She was doing all she could to help him out, and the fact helped to further mollify him. After all, she had warned him to take the bridge. Perhaps he had been too ready to see a bluff in what she had suggested. After all, why should she attempt to bluff him? He remembered how powerful he was to affect her father's interests, and took comfort from it.

She came back with the horse and dismounted.

"Say," she cried, in dismay, "that dandy suit of yours. It's all mussed to death. I'm real sorry, Mr. Slosson. My word, won't my daddy be angry."

The man began to smile under the girl's evident distress, and, his temper recovered, his peculiar nature promptly reasserted itself.

"Say, Miss Hazel – oh, hang the 'miss.' You owe me something for this, you do, an' I don't let folks owe me things long."

"Owe?" Hazel's face was blankly astonished.

"Sure." The man eyed her in an unmistakable fashion.

Suddenly the girl began to laugh. She pointed at him.

"Guess we'll need to get you home and cleaned down some before we talk of anything else I owe. That surely is something I owe you. Here, you get up into the saddle. I'll hold your horse, he's a bit scared. We'll talk of debts as we ride back."

But Slosson was in no mood to be denied just now. Although his anger had abated, he felt that Hazel was not to go free of penalty. He came to her as though about to take the reins from her hand, but, instead, he thrust out an arm to seize her by the waist.

Then it was that a curious thing happened. The young horse suddenly jumped backwards, dragging the girl with it out of the man's reach. It had responded to the swift flick of Hazel's quirt, and left the man without understanding, and his amorous intentions quite unsatisfied. The next moment the girl was in her own saddle and laughing down at him.

"I forgot," she cried, "you'd just hate to have your horse held by a – girl. You best hurry into the saddle, or you'll contract lung trouble in all that wet."

Slosson cursed softly. But he knew that she was beyond his reach in the saddle. A tacit admission that, at least here, on the ranch, she dominated the situation.

"And I've never been able to show you those beeves, and convince you about ranching," Hazel sighed regretfully later on, as they rode back towards the ranch. But her sigh was sham and her heart was full of laughter.

She was thinking of the delight she would witness in Gordon's eyes, when he beheld the much besmirched suit of this man, to whom he had taken such a dislike.

CHAPTER XII

THINKING HARD

The days slipped by with great rapidity. They passed far too rapidly for Gordon. The expectation of Silas Mallinsbee that David Slosson would eventually listen to reason, and accept terms for himself similar to those agreeable to him on behalf of the railroad, showed no sign of maturing. The firmness of his front in no way seemed to affect the grafting agent, and from day to day, although the rancher and his assistant waited patiently for a definite dénouement, nothing occurred to hold out promise one way or another. Mallinsbee said very little, but he watched events with wide-open eyes, and not altogether without hope that the man would be brought to reason. His eyes were on Hazel, smiling appreciation, for Hazel was at work using every art of which she was capable to frustrate any opposition to her father's plans, and to help on, as she described it, the "good work."

"I'm a 'sharper' in this, Mr. Van Henslaer," she declared, in face of one of Gordon's frequent protests. "I'm no better than David Slosson. And I – I want you to understand that. I think your ideas of chivalry are just too sweet, but I want you to look with my eyes. We're a bunch of most ordinary folk who want to win out. If you and my daddy thought by burying him, dead or alive, you could beat his hand, why, I guess it would take an express locomotive to stop you. Well, I'm out to try and put him out of harm's way in my own fashion. If I can't do it, why, he'll find I'm not the dandy prairie flower he's figuring I am just now. That's all. So meanwhile get on with any old plans you can find up your sleeve. By hook or crook we've got to make good."

By this expression of the girl's extraordinary determination doubtless Gordon should have been silenced. But he was not silenced, nor anything like it. The truth was he was in love – wildly, passionately, jealously in love. It nearly drove him to distraction to watch the way in which, almost daily, this man Slosson drove out to see Hazel and take her out for buggy rides or horse riding. Not only that, he and her father were practically ignored by the man. They were just so much furniture in the office, and when by any chance the agent did deign to notice them there was generally something offensive in his manner of address.

Worst of all, as the outcome of Hazel's campaign there were no signs that matters were one whit advanced towards the successful completion of their project, and the days had already grown into weeks. All Gordon could do was to busy himself with formulating wild and impossible schemes for beating this creature. And a hundred and one strenuous possibilities occurred to him, all of which, however, offered no suggestion of bending the man, only of breaking him. The sum and substance of all his efforts was a deadly yearning to kill David Slosson, kill him so dead as to spoil forever his chances of resurrection.

This was much the position when, nearly three weeks later, in response to a peremptory note from Slosson in the morning, Silas Mallinsbee decided that Gordon should deal with him on a business visit in the afternoon.