Kitabı oku: «Frances of the Ranges: or, The Old Ranchman's Treasure», sayfa 4
CHAPTER IX
SURPRISING NEWS
Frances arrived at home about noon. The last few miles she bestrode Molly, for that intelligent creature had allowed herself to be caught. It was too late to go on the errand to Cottonwood Bottom before luncheon.
Silent Sam Harding met her at the corral gate. He was a lanky, saturnine man, with never a laugh in his whole make-up. But he was liked by the men, and Frances knew him to be faithful to the Bar-T interests.
“What happened to Ratty’s bunch?” he asked, in his sober way.
“Did you see them?” cried Frances, leaping down from the saddle.
“Saw their dust,” said Sam.
“They stampeded,” Frances said, warmly. “And Mr. Sanderson and I lost our ponies–pretty nearly had a bad accident, Sam,” and she went on to give the foreman of the ranch the particulars. “I thought something was wrong. I got that little grey hawse of Bill Edwards’. He just come in,” said Sam.
“Ratty M’Gill was running those steers,” Frances told him. “I must report him to daddy. He’s been warned before. I think Ratty’s got some whiskey.”
“I shouldn’t wonder. There was a bootlegger through here yesterday.”
“The man who tried to get over our roof!” exclaimed Frances.
“Mebbe.”
“Do you suppose he’s known to Ratty?” questioned the girl, anxiously.
“Dunno. But Ratty’s about worn out his welcome on the Bar-T. If the Cap says the word, I’ll can him.”
“Well,” said Frances, “he shouldn’t have driven that herd so hard. I’ll have to speak to daddy about it, Sam, though I hate to bother him just now. He’s all worked up over that business of last night.”
“Don’t understand it,” said the foreman, shaking his head.
“Could it have been the bootlegger?” queried Frances, referring to the illicit whiskey seller of whom she suspected the irresponsible Ratty M’Gill had purchased liquor. The “bootleggers” were supposed to carry pint flasks of bad whiskey in the legs of their topboots, to sell at a fancy price to thirsty punchers on the ranges.
“Dunno how that slate come broken on the roof,” grumbled Sam. “The feller knowed just where to go to hitch his rope ladder. Goin’ to have one of the boys ride herd on the hacienda at night for a while.” This was a long speech for Silent Sam.
Frances thanked him and went up to the house. She did not find an opportunity of speaking to Captain Rugley about Ratty M’Gill at once, however, for she found him in a state of great excitement.
“Listen to this, Frances!” he ejaculated, when she appeared, waving a sheet of paper in his hand, and trying to get up from the hard chair in which he was sitting.
A spasm of pain balked him; his bronzed face wrinkled as the rheumatic twinge gripped him; but his hawklike eyes gleamed.
“My! my!” he grunted. “This pain is something fierce.”
Frances fluttered to his side. “Do take an easier chair, Daddy,” she begged. “It will be so much more comfortable.”
“Hold on! this does very well. Your old dad’s never been used to cushions and do-funnies. But see here! I want you to read this.” He waved the paper again.
“What is it, Daddy?” Frances asked, without much curiosity.
“Heard from old Lon at last–yes, ma’am! What do you know about that? From good old Lon, who was my partner for twenty years. I’ve got a letter here that one of the boys brought from the station just now, from a minister, back in Mississippi. Poor old Lon’s in a soldier’s home, and he’s just got track of me.
“My soul and body, Frances! Think of it,” added the excited Captain. “He’s been living almost like a beggar for years in a Confederate soldiers’ home–good place, like enough, of its kind, but here am I rolling in wealth, and that treasure chest right here under my eye, and Lon suffering, perhaps – ”
The Captain almost broke down, for with the pain he was enduring and all, the incident quite unstrung him. Frances had her arms about him and kissed his tear-streaked cheek.
“Foolish, am I?” he demanded, looking up at her, “But it’s broken me up–hearing from my old partner this way. Read the letter, Frances, won’t you?”
She did so. It was from the chaplain of the Bylittle Soldiers’ Home, of Bylittle, Mississippi.
“Captain Daniel Rugley,
“Bar-T Ranch,
“Texas Panhandle.
“Dear Sir:
“I am writing in behalf of an old soldier in this institution, one Jonas P. Lonergan, who was at one time a member of Company K, Texas Rangers, and who before that time served honorably in Company P, Fifth Regiment, Mississippi Volunteers, during the War between the States.
“Mr. Lonergan is a sadly broken man, having passed through much evil after his experiences on the Border and in Mexico in your company. Indeed, his whole life has been one of privation and hardship. Now, bent with years, he has been obliged to seek refuge with some of his ancient comrades at Bylittle.
“In several private talks with me, Captain Rugley, he has mentioned the incidents relating to the looting and destruction of Señor Morales’ hacienda, over the Border in Mexico, while you and he were on detail in that vicinity as Rangers.
“Perhaps the old man is rambling; but he always talks of a treasure chest which he claims you and he rescued from the bandits and removed into Arizona, hiding the same in a certain valley at the mouth of a cañon which he calls Dry Bone Cañon.
“Mr. Lonergan always speaks of you as ‘the whitest man who ever lived.’ ‘If my old partner, Captain Dan, knew how I was fixed or where I was, he’d have me rollin’ in luxury in no time,’ he has said to me; ‘providing he’s this same Captain Dan Rugley that’s owner of the Bar-T Ranch in the Panhandle.’
“You know (if you know him at all) that Mr. Lonergan had no educational advantages. Such men have difficulty in keeping up communication with their friends.
“He claims to have lost track of you twenty-odd years ago. That when you separated you both swore to divide equally the contents of Señor Morales’ treasure chest, the hiding place of which at that time was in a hostile country, Geronimo and his braves being on the warpath.
“If you are Jonas P. Lonergan’s old-time partner you will remember the particulars more clearly than I can state them.
“If this be the case, I am sure I need only state the above and certify to the identity of Mr. Lonergan, to bring from you an expression of your remembrance and the statement whether or no any property to which Mr. Lonergan might make a claim is in your possession.
“Mr. L. speaks much of the treasure chest and tells marvelous stories of its contents. He does not seem to desire wealth for himself, however, for he well knows that he has but a few months to live, nor does he seem ever to have cared greatly for money.
“His anxiety is for the condition of a sister of his who was left a widow some years ago, and for her son. Mr. L. fears that the nephew has not the chance of getting on in life that he would like the boy to have. In his old age Mr. L. feels keenly the fact that he was never able to do anything for his family, and the fate of his widowed sister and her son is much on his mind.
“A prompt reply, Captain Rugley, if you are the old-time partner of my ancient friend, will be gratefully received by the undersigned, and joyfully by Mr. Lonergan.
Respectfully,(Rev.) Decimus Tooley.
“Why! what do you think of that?” gasped Frances, when she had read the letter to the very last word.
Her father’s face was shining and there were tears in his eyes. His joy at hearing from his old companion-in-arms was unmistakable.
This turning up of Jonas Lonergan meant the parting with a portion of the mysterious wealth that the old ranchman kept hidden in the Spanish chest–wealth that he might easily keep if he would.
Frances was proud of him. Never for an instant did he seem to worry about parting with the treasure to Lonergan. His fears for it had never been the fears of a miser who worshiped wealth–no, indeed!
Now it was plain that the thought of seeing his old partner alive again, and putting into his hands the part of the treasure rightfully belonging to him, delighted Captain Dan Rugley in every fibre of his being.
“The poor old codger!” exclaimed the ranchman, affectionately. “And to think of Lon being in need, and living poor–maybe actually suffering–when I’ve been doing so well here, and have had this old chest right under my thumb all these years.
“You see, Frances,” said the Captain, making more of an explanation than ever before, “Lon and I got possession of that chest in a funny way.
“We’d been sent after as mean a man as ever infested the Border–and there were some mighty mean men along the Rio Grande in those days. He had slipped across the Border to escape us; but in those times we didn’t pay much attention to the line between the States and Mexico.
“We went after him just the same. He was with a crowd of regular bandits, we found out. And they were aiming to clean up Señor Milo Morales’ hacienda.
“We got onto their plans, and we rode hard to the hacienda to head them off. We knew the old Spaniard–as fine a Castilian gentleman as ever stepped in shoe-leather.
“We stopped with him a while, beat off the bandits, and captured our man. After everything quieted down (as we thought) we started for the Border with the prisoner. Señor Morales was an old man, without chick or child, and not a relative in the world to leave his wealth to. His was one of the few Castilian families that had run out. Neither in Mexico nor in Spain did he have a blood tie.
“His vast estates he had already willed to the Church. Such faithful servants as he had (and they were few, for the peon is not noted for gratitude) he had already taken care of.
“Lon and I had saved his life as well as his personal property, he was good enough to say, and he showed us this treasure chest and what was in it. When he passed on, he said, it should be ours if we were fixed so we could get it before the Mexican authorities stepped in and grabbed it all, or before bandits cleaned out the hacienda. It was a toss-up in those days between the two, which was the most voracious!
“Well, Frances, that’s how it stood when we rode away with Simon Hawkins lashed to a pony between us. Before we reached the river we heard of a big band of outlaws that had come down from the Sierras and were trailing over toward Morales’.
“We hurried back, leaving Simon staked down in a hide-out we knew of. But Lon and I were too late,” said the old Captain, shaking his head sadly. “Those scoundrels had got there ahead of us, led by the men we had first beaten off, and they had done their worst.
“The good old Señor–as harmless and lovely a soul as ever lived–had been brutally murdered. One or two of his servants had been killed, too–for appearance’s sake, I suppose. The others, especially the vaqueros, had joined the outlaws, and the hacienda was being looted.
“But Lon and I took a chance, stole in by night, found the treasure chest, and slipped away with it. I went back alone before dawn, found a six-mule team already loaded with household stuff and drove off with it, thus stealing from the thieves.
“A good many of these fine old things we have here were on that wagon. I decided that they belonged to me as much as to anybody. Get them once over the boundary into God’s country and the thieving Mexican Government–only one degree removed at that time from the outlaws themselves–would not dare lay claim to them.
“We did this,” concluded Captain Dan, with a sigh of reminiscence, and with his eyes shining, “and we got Simon into the jail at Elberad, too.
“Lon and I kept on up into Arizona, into Dry Bone Cañon, and there we cached the stuff. Air and sand are so dry there that nothing ever decays, and so all these rugs and hangings and featherwork were uninjured when I brought them away to this ranch soon after you were born.
“That’s the story, my dear. I never talk much about it, for it isn’t altogether my secret. You see, my old partner, Lon, was in on it. And now he’s going to come for his share – ”
“Come for his share, Daddy?” asked Frances, in surprise.
“Yes–sir-ree–sir!” chuckled the old ranchman. “Think I’m going to let old Lon stay in that soldiers’ home? Not much!”
“But will he be able to travel here to the Panhandle?”
“Of course! What the matter is with Lon, he’s been shut indoors. I know what it is. Why! he’s younger than I am by a year or two.”
“But if he can’t travel alone – ”
“I’ll go after him! I’ll hire a private car! My goodness! I’ll hire a whole train if it’s necessary to get him out of that Bylittle place! That’s what I’ll do!
“And he shall live here with us–so he shall! He and I will divide this treasure just as I’ve been aching to do for years. You shall have jewels then, my girl!”
“But, dear!” gasped Frances, “you are not well enough to go so far.”
“Now, don’t bother, Frances. Your old dad isn’t dead yet–not by any means! I’ll be all right in a day or two.”
But Captain Rugley was not all right in so short a time. He actually grew worse. Frances sent a messenger for the doctor the very next morning. Whether it was from the exposure of the night the stranger tried to climb over the hacienda roof or not, Captain Rugley took to his bed. The physician pronounced it rheumatic fever, and a very serious case indeed.
CHAPTER X
THE MAN FROM BYLITTLE
Responsibility weighed heavily upon the young shoulders of Frances of the ranges in these circumstances.
Old Captain Rugley insisted upon being out of doors, ill as he was, and they made him as comfortable as possible on a couch in the court where the fountain played. Ming was in attendance upon him all day long, for Frances had many duties to call her away from the ranch-house at this time. But at night she slept almost within touch of the sick man’s bed.
He did not get better. The physician declared that he was not in immediate danger, although the fever would have to run its course. The pain that racked his body was hard to bear; and although he was a stoic in such matters, Frances would see his jaws clench and the muscles knot in his cheeks; and she often wiped the drops of agony from his forehead while striving to hide the tears that came into her own eyes.
He demanded to know how long he was “going to be laid by the heels”; and when he learned that the doctor could not promise him a swift return to health, Captain Rugley began to worry.
It was of his old partner he thought most. That the affairs of the ranch would go on all right in the hands of his young daughter and Silent Sam, he seemed to have no doubt. But the letter from the chaplain of the Bylittle Soldiers’ Home was forever troubling him. Between his spells of agony, or when his mind was really clear, he talked to Frances of little but Jonas Lonergan and the treasure chest.
“He is troubling his mind about something, and it is not good for him,” the doctor, who came every third day (and had a two hundred-mile jaunt by train and buckboard), told Frances. “Can’t you calm his mind, Miss Frances?”
She told the medical man as much about her father’s ancient friend as she thought was wise. “He desires to have him brought here,” she explained, “so that they can go over, face to face and eye to eye, their old battles and adventures.”
“Good! Bring the man–have him brought,” said the physician.
“But he is an old soldier,” said Frances. She read aloud that part of the Reverend Decimus Tooley’s letter relating to the state of Mr. Lonergan’s health.
“Don’t know what we can do about it, then,” said the doctor, who was a native of the Southwest himself. “Your father and the old fellow seem to be ‘honing’ for each other. Too bad they can’t meet. It would do your father good. I don’t like his mind’s being troubled.”
That night Frances was really frightened. Her father began muttering in his sleep. Then he talked aloud, and sat up in bed excitedly, his face flushed, and his tongue becoming clearer, although his speech was not lucid.
He was going over in his distraught mind the adventures he had had with Lon when they two had foiled the bandits and recovered possession of the Señor’s treasure chest.
Frances begged him to desist, but he did not know her. He babbled of the long journey with the mule team into the mouth of Dry Bone Cañon, and the caching of the treasure. For an hour he talked steadily and then, growing weaker, gradually sank back on his pillows and became silent.
But the effort was very weakening. Frances telephoned from the nearest station for the doctor. Something had to be done, for the exertion and excitement of the night had left Captain Rugley in a state that troubled the girl much.
She had no friend of her own sex. Mrs. Bill Edwards was a city woman whom, after all, she scarcely knew, for the lady had not been married to Mr. Edwards more than a year.
There were other good women scattered over the ranges–some “nesters,” some small cattle-raisers’ wives, and some of the new order of Panhandle farmers; but Frances had never been in close touch with them.
The social gatherings at the church and schoolhouse at Jackleg had been attended by Frances and Captain Rugley; but the Bar-T folk really had no near neighbors.
The girl’s interest in the forthcoming pageant had called the attention of other people to her more than ever before; but to tell the truth the young folk were rather awe-stricken by Frances’ abilities as displayed in the preparation for the entertainment, while the older people did not know just how to treat the wealthy ranchman’s daughter–whether as a person of mature years, or as a child.
Riding back from the railroad station, where one of the boys with the buckboard three hours later would meet the physician, she thought of these facts. Somehow, she had never felt so lonely–so cut off from other people as she did right now.
The railroad crossed one corner of the Bar-T’s vast fenced ranges; but there were twenty long miles between the house and the station. She had ridden Molly hard coming over to speak to the doctor on the telephone; but she took it easy going back.
Somewhere along the trail she would meet the buckboard and ponies going over to meet the doctor. And as she walked her pony down the slope of the trail into Cottonwood Bottom, she thought she heard the rattle of the buckboard wheels ahead.
A clump of trees hid the trail for a bit; when she rounded it the way was empty. Whoever she had heard had turned off the trail into the cottonwoods.
“Maybe he didn’t water the ponies before he started,” thought Frances, “and has gone down to the ford. That’s a bit of carelessness that I do not like. Whom could Sam have sent with the bronchos for the doctor?”
She turned Molly off the trail beyond the bridge. The wood was not a jungle, but she could not see far ahead, nor be seen. By and by she smelled tobacco smoke–the everlasting cigarette of the cattle puncher. Then she heard the sound of voices.
Why this latter fact should have made Frances suspicious, she could not have told. It was her womanly intuition, perhaps.
Slipping out of the saddle, she tied Molly with her head up-wind. She was afraid the pinto would smell her fellows from the ranch, and signal them, as horses will.
Once away from her mount, she passed between the trees and around the brush clumps until she saw the ford of the river sparkling below her. There were the hard-driven ponies, their heads drooping, their flanks heaving, standing knee-deep in the stream–this fact in itself an offense that she could not overlook.
The animals had been overdriven, and now the employee of the ranch who had them in charge was allowing them to cool off too quickly–and in the cold stream, too!
But who was he? For a moment Frances could not conceive.
The figure of the driver was humped over on the seat in a slouching attitude, sitting sideways, and with his back toward the direction from which the range girl was approaching. He faced a man on a shabby horse, whose mount likewise stood in the stream and who had been fording the river from the opposite direction.
This horseman was a stranger to Frances. He wore a broad-brimmed black hat, no chaps, no cartridge belt or gun in sight, and a white shirt and a vest under his coat, while shoes instead of boots were on his feet. He was neither puncher nor farmer in appearance. And his face was bad.
There could be no doubt of that latter fact. He wore a stubble of beard that did not disguise the sneering mouth, or the wickedly leering expression of his eyes.
“Well, I done my part, old fellow,” drawled the man in the seat of the buckboard, just as Frances came within earshot. “’Tain’t my fault you bungled it.”
Frances stopped instead of going on. It was Ratty M’Gill!
She could not understand why he was not on the range, or why Sam had sent the ne’er-do-well to meet the doctor. It puzzled her before the puncher’s continued speech began to arouse her curiosity.
“You’ll sure find yourself in a skillet of hot water, old fellow,” pursued Ratty, inhaling his cigarette smoke and letting it forth through his nostrils in little puffs as he talked. “The old Cap’s built his house like a fort, anyway. And he’s some man with a gun–believe me!”
“You say he’s sick,” said the other man, and he, too, drawled. Frances found herself wondering where she had heard that voice before.
“He ain’t so sick that he can’t guard that chest you was talkin’ about. He’s had his bed made up right in the room with it. That’s whatever,” said Ratty.
“Once let me get in there,” said the other, slowly.
“Sam’s set some of the boys to ride herd on the house,” chuckled Ratty.
“That’s the way, then!” exclaimed the other, raising his clenched fist and shaking it. “You get put on that detail, Ratty.”
“I’ll see you blessed first,” declared the puncher, laughing. “I don’t see nothing in it but trouble for me.”
“No trouble for you at all. They didn’t get you before.”
“No,” said the puncher. “More by good luck than good management. I don’t like going things blind, Pete. And you’re always so blamed secretive.”
“I have to be,” growled the other. “You’re as leaky as a sieve yourself, Ratty. I never could trust you.”
“Nor nobody else,” laughed the reckless puncher. “Sam’s about got my number now. If he ain’t the gal has – ”
“You mean that daughter of the old man’s?”
“Yep. She’s an able-minded gal–believe me! And she’s just about boss of the ranch, specially now the old Cap is laid by the heels for a while.”
The other was silent for some moments. Ratty gathered up the reins from the backs of the tired ponies.
“I gotter step along, Pete,” he said. “Gal’s gone to telephone for the medical sharp, who’ll show up on Number 20 when she goes through Jackleg. I’m to meet him. Or,” and he began to chuckle again, “José Reposa was, and I took his place so’s to meet you here as I promised.”
“And lots of good your meeting me seems to do me,” growled the man called Pete.
“Well, old fellow! is that my fault?” demanded the puncher.
“I don’t know. I gotter git inside that hacienda.”
“Walk in. The door’s open.”
“You think you are smart, don’t you?” snarled Pete, in anger. “You tell me where the chest is located; but it couldn’t be brought out by day. But at night – My soul, man! I had the team all ready and waiting the other night, and I could have got the thing if I’d had luck.”
“You didn’t have luck,” chuckled Ratty M’Gill. “And I don’t believe you’d ’a’ had much more luck if you’d got away with the old Cap’s chest.”
“I tell you there’s a fortune in it!”
“You don’t know – ”
“And I suppose you do?” snarled Pete.
“I know no sane man ain’t going to keep a whole mess of jewels and such, what you talk about, right in his house. He’d take ’em to a bank at Amarillo, or somewhere.”
“Not that old codger. He’d keep ’em under his own eye. He wouldn’t trust a bank like he would himself. Humph! I know his kind.
“Why,” continued Pete, excitedly, “that old feller at Bylittle is another one just like him. These old-timers dug gold, and made their piles half a dozen times, and never trusted banks–there warn’t no banks!”
“Not in them days,” admitted Ratty. “But there’s a plenty now.”
“You say yourself he’s got the chest.”
“Sure! I seen it once or twice. Old Spanish carving and all that. But I bet there ain’t much in it, Pete.”
“You’d ought to have heard that doddering old idiot, Lonergan, talk about it,” sniffed Pete. “Then your mouth would have watered. I tell you that’s about all he’s been talkin’ about the last few months, there at Bylittle. And I was orderly on his side of the barracks and heard it all.
“I know that the parson, Mr. Tooley, was goin’ to write to this Cap Rugley. Has, before now, it’s likely. Then something will be done about the treasure – ”
“Waugh!” shouted Ratty. “Treasure! You sound like a silly boy with a dime story book.”
The puncher evidently did not believe his friend knew what he was talking about. Pete glowered at him, too angry to speak for a minute or two.
Frances began to worm her way back through the brush. She put the biggest trees between her and the ford of the river. When she knew the two men could not see or hear her, she ran.
She had heard enough. Her mind was in a turmoil just then. Her first thought was to get away, and get Molly away. Then she would think this startling affair out.
