The Range Dwellers

  CHAPTER XII.

  I Begin to Realize.

  If I had hoped that I'd gotten over any foolishness by spending the falland winter away from White Divide--or the sight of it--I commenced rightaway to find out my mistake. No sooner did the big ridge rise up from thegreen horizon, than every scar, and wrinkle, and abrupt little peak fairlyshouted things about Beryl King.

  She wasn't there; she was back in New York, and that blasted TerenceWeaver was back there, too, making all kinds of love to her according tothe letters of Edith. But I hadn't realized just how seriously I wastaking it, till I got within sight of the ridge that had sheltered herabiding-place and had made all the trouble.

  Like a fool I had kept telling myself that I was fair sick for the range;for range-horses and range-living; for the wind that always blows over theprairies, and for the cattle that feed on the hills and troop down thelong coulee bottoms to drink at their favorite watering-places. I thoughtit was the boys I wanted to see, and to gallop out with them in the softsunrise, and lie down with them under a tent roof at night; that I wantedto eat my meals sitting cross-legged in the grass, with my plate piledwith all the courses at once and my cup of coffee balanced precariouslysomewhere within reach.

  That's what I thought. When things tasted flat in old Frisco, I wasn'tdead sure why, and maybe I didn't want to be sure why. When I couldn't gethold of anything that had the old tang, I laid it all to a hankering afterround-up.

  Even when we drove around the end of White Divide, and got up on a ridgewhere I could see the long arm that stretched out from the east side ofKing's Highway, I wouldn't own up to myself that there was the cause ofall my bad feelings. I think Frosty knew, all along; for when I had satwith my face turned to the divide, and had let my cigarette go cold whileI thought and thought, and remembered, he didn't say a word. But whenmemory came down to that last ride through the pass, and to Shylock shotdown by the corral, at last to Frosty standing, tall and dark, against thefirst yellow streak of sunrise, while I rode on and left him afoot besidea half-dead horse, I turned my eyes and looked at his thin, thoughtfulface beside me.

  His eyes met mine for half a minute, and he had a little twitching at thecorners of his mouth. "Chirk up," he said quietly. "The chances are she'llcome back this summer."

  I guess I blushed. Anyway, I didn't think of anything to say that would beeither witty or squelching, and could only relight my cigarette and lookthe fool I felt. He'd caught me right in the solar plexus, and we bothknew it, and there was nothing to say. So after awhile we commencedtalking about a new bunch of horses that dad had bought through an agent,and that had to be saddle-broke that summer, and I kept my eyes away fromWhite Divide and my mind from all it meant to me.

  The old ranch did look good to me, and Perry Potter actually shook hands;if you knew him as well as I do you'd realize better what such ademonstration means, coming from a fellow like him. Why, even his lips arealways shut with a drawstring--from the looks--to keep any words but whatare actually necessary from coming out. His eyes have the same look, kindof pulled in at the corners. No, don't ever accuse Perry Potter of being ademonstrative man, or a loquacious one.

  I had two days at the ranch, getting fitted into the life again; on thethird the round-up started, and I packed a "war-bag" of essentials, tookmy last summer's chaps down off the nail in the bunk-house where they hadhung all that time as a sort of absent-but-not-forgotten memento, one ofthe boys told me, and started out in full regalia and with an enthusiasmthat was real--while it lasted.

  If you never slept on the new grass with only a bit of canvas between youand the stars; if you have never rolled out, at daylight, and dressedbefore your eyes were fair open, and rushed with the bunch over to themess-wagon for your breakfast; if you have never saddled hurriedly arange-bred and range-broken cayuse with a hump in his back and sevendevils in his eye, and gone careening across the dew-wet prairie like atug-boat in a choppy sea; if you have never--well, if you don't know whatit's all like, and how it gets into the very bones of you so that thehankering never quite leaves you when you try to give it up, I'm not goingto tell you. I can't. If I could, you'd know just how heady it made mefeel those first few days after we started out to "work the range."

  I was fond of telling myself, those days, that I'd been more scared thanhurt, and that it was the range I was in love with, and not Beryl King atall. She was simply a part of it--but she wasn't the whole thing, nor evena part that was going to be indispensable to my mental comfort. I was afree man once more, and so long as I had a good horse under me, and abunch of the right sort of fellows to lie down in the same tent with,I wasn't going to worry much over any girl.

  That, for as long as a week; and that, more than pages of description,shows you how great is the spell of the range-land, and how it grips aman.