Next to the rooster in the chicken yards, the cook is generally the first living thing to waken on a ranch. Even during the short nights and long days of early summer he is in his kitchen while the dawn is still chilly and gray. But on the ranch of Morgan Valentine there was always one person up even before the cook began to rattle at the lids of his big stove, and that person was the owner. He was like one of those old-fashioned skippers who keeps only one eye closed even during the dogwatch. Usually Morgan Valentine employed the early hour in a walk among the ranch buildings. He enjoyed that morning stroll while the light grew brighter and brighter on the mountaintops and the mists became thin in the lower valleys. Each day he watched his big domain unroll before his eye, and the first pride of the possessor flowed back upon him.
But this morning he went into the living room and knocked up a fire over the coals which remained from the night before. It burned poorly. There were charred ends of logs from which the smoldering heat had been eating the life all night, and now they glowed like charcoal, but would not flame. A thick smoke rose toward the chimney, and some of it rolled out and curled around the mantelpiece and filled the room with pungent scent.
Morgan Valentine remained hanging over this dreary blaze. A man, if fifty, is generally fat enough to content himself with the present, but when he turns back to the past, it is dangerous. And Valentine was thinking of the past. There had been something in Jess Dreer which made him reminiscent of the days when he and his brother became empire builders in this valley. Sitting before the fire, the rancher recalled how the tall man had sat back in the shadow and watched the others with bright, uneasy eyes. Like a wild animal, thought Valentine, which has come out of the night, and even in captivity carries with it an air of the freedom of the outer spaces.
That was the thing which tormented him. Jess Dreer was free. Free and penniless, no doubt, but freedom was worth poverty. Here was he, the rich man, tied down by his wealth. What had it brought him except an unloved wife and children who were hardly more than names to him? To Jess Dreer the whole mountain desert was synonymous with the word “home.”
There was something infinitely attractive to Valentine in the character of the outlaw. There was an honesty—if that word could be used with a thief—that drew the rancher as he had never been drawn before to any man except his dead brother.
Someone was coughing in the hall; he recognized his wife even before she appeared in the door.
“Why, Morgan, I thought the house was on fire,” she said, and straightway she went to a window and opened it. “The house was that full of smoke,” she added, coughing again.
He returned no answer to this, but kicked the log fragments again, and this time a yellow tongue of fire leaped out and hung for a moment quivering in the mist of smoke as though it had a life of its own. After that, the blaze began, and the smoke diminished. There had been a touch of irritation in that kick at the smoldering wood, but now he was able to turn his usual calm face toward his wife.
“You look kind of tired,” he said kindly.
“How could I look any other way after last night?”
“Bear up for a little while, Mother. Mary is leaving in a few days and then you can have a long rest.”
Maude Valentine regarded her husband critically. She had studied this silent man with profound attention for many years and knew less about him now than she had at the beginning.
“I been thinking something,” she said slowly, and folded her hands before her. “After Mary goes, every time you miss her, you'll look to me and be angry.”
At this a little spot of color came up in each cheek.
“I wish you'd talk straight out to me once in a while, Morgan. I wish you'd talk man talk to me now and then.”
He shrugged his shoulders, but she went on in spite of this danger sign: “Even if you was to storm at me, Morgan, I'd like it better than—this!”
“Kind?” she said. “Kind?” And there was a breathless little check in her voice. It suddenly occurred to the man that she was acting as if she had been enduring for a long time and had now reached the limit of her strength. He braced himself with that chilly feeling in his back which a man usually has when he faces the hysteria of a woman.
“Well,” she said at length, so calmly that his nerves gradually began to relax, “we won't talk any more about her. We'll talk about—you, Morgan.”
And she made a step toward him as timid as a girl approaching her new lover who has not yet completed his avowal. Now and then a sort of youthful beauty would flush across this middle-aged woman's face.
“Just now,” said he, “I'd kind of like to talk about her. You ain't apt to admire her, Mother, but you got to admit that what she did last night was pretty fine.”
“Fine?” she gasped, “Getting a murdering outlaw away from a sheriff. Fine?”
“Two sheriffs,” corrected her husband grimly.
“Are you laughing at me, Morgan?”
“I mean, she took a bad job off my hands, Mother.”
“Would you of had me let them take my guest under my roof, when he come here by my invitation?”
She found no ready answer to this, but nevertheless she instinctively shook her head.
“If it hadn't been for Mary, I'd of had to stand back to back with that Jess Dreer and fought 'em off.”
“I think we'd of cleaned 'em up. Then it would of meant that I'd be riding this minute beside Jess Dreer on the long outtrail, no matter where it takes him, and every man's hand agin' us. That's what it would of meant.”
“Morgan, I actually believe that you almost regret it!”
“Sometimes—I dunno. But it's Mary that's kept me here.”
“Ah, but you don't look down deep and get the reasons why she done it, dear. Do you know what they were?”
She bore the patient, neglectful tone.
“Because she saw that Dreer was paying a lot of attention to Elizabeth. She was not being talked to. She was jealous! That's the whole fact of it!”
“Maude,” said her husband after a moment of silence, “here comes the sheriffs. Maybe you better meet 'em and make 'em at home.”
At that, she regretted what she had said, for she saw the mouth of Morgan Valentine setting in a way she knew very well. But he had closed the conversation too definitely and pointedly for her to attempt to reopen it.
The sheriffs were at least good losers. They made only laughing comments on their futile chase of Jess Dreer the night before. And they kept up the same cheery talk all during the breakfast. When Mary Valentine came down with Elizabeth beside her, they neither frowned at the girl who had broken through their trap nor openly reproached her. If anyone were estranged by the events of the night before, it seemed, oddly enough, to be the three women. For Elizabeth studiously avoided the eye of Mary and paid strict attention to eating, and as for Maude Valentine, it seemed that her niece was not in the room for all the attention that she paid her.
Charlie and Louis were full of open admiration for the manner in which the outlaw had broken through.
“But it must of been a lucky shot that he got in,” said Charlie. “It ain't hardly likely that it was aimed, the shot that dropped Sam.”
“D'you see where it hit him?” asked Sheriff John Caswell, raising his head at this point in the conversation.
“Clean through the thigh. He'll be on his feet ag'in inside three weeks and riding after Jess Dreer.”
At this the sheriff smiled pityingly.
“Son,” he said, “Clancy tells me you're kind of handy with a gun yourself; but you fasten onto this. If Dreer had wanted to kill Sam he would of done it. That was an aimed shot, son. And don't make no mistake.”
“But it was night, Mr. Caswell, and besides, he was on a galloping hoss.”
“Sure he was, but all Dreer needs is enough light to see what he's shooting at. He's a snap shot, son, and he shoots with a gun the way other men point with their finger. No, sir; he planted that shot on purpose not to kill Sam, but to drop him off'n his hoss. And here's another thing. Sam won't take the trail after Jess as soon as he can ride a hoss ag'in. Not him! It's a queer thing, but them that's ever faced Jess don't generally have any hankering to see him ag'in. And them that's seen him swing a gun jest natcherally lose all appetite for seeing the same show all over ag'in.”
“But you've been on the trail a long time, Sheriff,” said Charlie.
“It's different with me, son. I'll tell you how it is. Jess Dreer has made a fool out of me more times than you can count on your two fingers. And I don't mind much of anything except to have a man laugh at me. Well, they's been other men take after Jess that was a heap smarter men than I'll ever be, and they's been some that was faster fighters and straighter shots. Jess has fooled 'em all. He may keep right on fooling me, but he'll never shake me off'n his trail. I stay there till I come up with him and one of us goes down. I ain't fast, I ain't smart, but I'm a tolerable patient man, son. Tolerable patient!”
For some reason there was little talk at the breakfast table after this moment.
