Kitabı oku: «Frances of the Ranges: or, The Old Ranchman's Treasure», sayfa 7
CHAPTER XVII
AN ACCIDENT
It was not until later that Frances was disturbed by the thought that Pratt was suspected by her father of having a strong curiosity regarding the Spanish treasure chest.
“And here he has forced his company upon me,” thought the girl. “What would father say, if he knew about it?”
But fortunately Captain Rugley was not at hand with his suspicions. Frances wished to believe the young man from Amarillo truly her friend; and on this ride toward Peckham’s they became better acquainted than before.
That is, the girl of the ranges learned to know Pratt better. The young fellow talked more freely of himself, his mother, his circumstances.
“Just because I’m in a bank–the Merchants’ and Drovers’–in Amarillo doesn’t mean that I’m wealthy,” laughed Pratt Sanderson. “They don’t give me any great salary, and I couldn’t afford this vacation if it wasn’t for the extra work I did through the cattle-shipping season and the kindness of our president.
“Mother and I are all alone; and we haven’t much money,” pursued the young man, frankly. “Mother has a relative somewhere whom she suspects may be rich. He was a gold miner once. But I tell her there’s no use thinking about rich relatives. They never seem to remember their poor kin. And I’m sure one can’t blame them much.
“We have no reason to expect her half-brother to do anything for me. Guess I’ll live and die a poor bank clerk. For, you know, if you haven’t money to invest in bank stock yourself, or influential friends in the bank, one doesn’t get very high in the clerical department of such an institution.”
Frances listened to him with deeper interest than she was willing to show in her countenance. They rode along pleasantly together, and nothing marred the journey for a time.
Ratty had not followed them–as she was quite sure he would have done had not Pratt elected to become her escort. And as for the strange teamster who had turned into the trail ahead of them, his outfit had long since disappeared.
Once when Frances rode to the front of the covered wagon to speak to Mack, she saw that Pratt Sanderson lifted a corner of the canvas at the back and took a swift glance at what was within.
Why this curiosity? There was nothing to be seen in the wagon but the corded chest.
Frances sighed. She could credit Pratt with natural curiosity; but if her father had seen that act he would have been quite convinced that the young man from Amarillo was concerned in the attempt to get the treasure.
It was shortly thereafter that the trail grew rough. Some heavy wagon-train must have gone this way lately. The wheels had cut deep ruts and left holes in places into which the wheels of the Bar-T wagon slumped, rocking and wrenching the vehicle like a light boat caught in a cross-sea.
The wagon being nearly empty, however, Mack drove his mules at a reckless pace. He was desirous of reaching the Peckham ranch in good season for supper, and, to tell the truth, Frances, herself, was growing very anxious to get the day’s ride over.
This haste was a mistake. Down went one forward wheel into a hole and crack went the axle. It was far too tough a stick of oak to break short off; but the crack yawned, finger-wide, and with a serious visage Mack climbed down, after quieting his mules.
The teamster’s remarks were vividly picturesque, to say the least. Frances, too, was troubled by the delay. The sun was now low behind them–disappearing below distant line of low, rolling hills.
Pratt got off his horse immediately and offered to help. And Mack needed his assistance.
“Lucky you was riding along with us, Mister,” grumbled the teamster. “We got to jack up the old contraption, and splice the axle together. I got wire and pliers in the tool box and here’s the wagon-jack.”
He flung the implements out upon the ground. They set to work, Pratt removing his coat and doing his full share.
Meanwhile Frances sat on her pony quietly, occasionally riding around the stalled wagon so as to get a clear view of the plain all about. For a long time not a moving object crossed her line of vision.
“Who you looking for, Frances?” Pratt asked her, once.
“Oh, nobody,” replied the girl.
“Do you expect that fellow is still trailing us?” he went on, curiously.
“No-o. I think not.”
“But he’s on your mind, eh?” suggested Pratt, earnestly. “Just as well I came along with you,” and he laughed.
“So Mack says,” returned Frances, with an answering smile.
Was she expecting an attack? Would Ratty come back? Was the man, Pete, lurking in some hollow or buffalo wallow? She scanned the horizon from time to time and wondered.
The sun sank to sleep in a bed of gold and crimson. Pink and lavender tints flecked the cloud-coverlets he tucked about him.
It was full sunset and still the party was delayed. The mules stamped and rattled their harness. They were impatient to get on to their suppers and the freedom of the corral.
“We’ll sure be too late for supper at Miz’ Peckham’s,” grumbled Mack.
“Oh, you’re only troubled about your eats,” joked Pratt.
At that moment Frances uttered a little cry. Both Pratt and the teamster looked up at her inquiringly.
“What’s the matter, Frances?” asked the young fellow.
“I–I thought I saw a light, away over there where the sun is going down.”
“Plenty of light there, I should say,” laughed Pratt. “The sun has left a field of glory behind him. Come on, now, Mr. Mack! Ready for this other wire?”
“Glory to Jehoshaphat!” grunted the teamster. “The world was made in a shorter time than it takes to bungle this mean, ornery job! I got a holler in me like the Cave of Winds.”
“Hadn’t we better take a bite here?” Frances demanded. “It will be bedtime when we reach the Peckhams.”
“Wal, if you say so, Miss,” said the teamster. “I kin eat as soon as you kin cook the stuff, sure! But I did hone for a mess of Miz’ Peckham’s flapjacks.”
Frances, well used to campwork, became immediately very busy. She ran for greasewood and such other fuel as could be found in the immediate vicinity, and started her fire.
It smoked and she got the strong smell of it in her nostrils, and it made her weep. Pratt, tugging and perspiring under the wagon-body, coughed over the smoke, too.
“Seems to me, Frances,” he called, “you’re filling the entire circumambient air with smoke–ker-chow!”
“Why! the wind isn’t your way,” said Frances, and she stood up to look curiously about again.
There seemed to be a lot of smoke. It was rolling in from the westward across the almost level plain. There was a deep rose glow behind it–a threatening illumination.
“Wow!” yelled Pratt.
He had just crawled out from beneath the wagon and was rising to his feet. An object flew by him in the half-dusk, about shoulder-high, and so swiftly that he was startled. He stepped back into a gopher-hole, tripped, and fell full length.
“What in thunder was that?” he yelled, highly excited.
“A jack-rabbit,” growled Mack. “And going some. Something scare’t that critter, sure’s you’re bawn!”
“Didn’t you ever see a jack before, Pratt?” asked Frances, her tone a little queer, he thought.
“Not so close to,” admitted the young fellow, as he scrambled to his feet. “Gracious! if he had hit me he’d have gone clear through me like a cannon-ball.”
It was only Frances who had realized the unexpected peril. She had tried to keep her voice from shaking; but Mack noticed her tone.
“What’s up, Miss?” he asked, getting to his legs, too.
“Fire!” gasped the range girl, clutching suddenly at Pratt’s arm.
“You mean smoke,” laughed Pratt. He saw her rubbing her eyes with her other hand.
But Mack had risen, facing the west. He uttered a funny little cluck in his throat and the laughing young fellow wheeled in wonder.
Along the horizon the glow was growing rapidly. A tongue of yellow flame shot high in the air. A long dead, thoroughly seasoned tree, standing at the forks of the trail, had caught fire and the flame flared forth from its top like a banner.
The prairie was afire!
“Glory to Jehoshaphat!” groaned Mack Hinkman, again. “Who done that?”
“Goodness!” gasped Pratt, quite horror-stricken.
Frances gathered up the cooking implements and flung them into the wagon. She had hobbled Molly and the grey pony; now she ran for them.
“Got that axle fixed, Mack?” she shouted over her shoulder.
“Not for no rough traveling, I tell ye sure, Miss Frances!” complained the teamster. “That was a bad crack. Have to wait to fix it proper at Peckham’s.” Then he added, sotto voce: “If we get the blamed thing there at all.”
“Don’t say that, man!” gasped Pratt Sanderson. “Surely there’s not much danger?”
“This here spot will be scorched like an overdone flapjack in half an hour,” declared Hinkman. “We got to git!”
Frances heard him, distant as she was.
“Oh, Mack! you know we can’t reach the river in half an hour, even if we travel express speed.”
“Well! what we goin’ ter do then?” demanded the teamster. “Stay here and fry?”
Pratt was impressed suddenly with the thought that they were both leaning on the advice and leadership of the girl! He was inexperienced, himself; and the teamster seemed quite as helpless.
A pair of coyotes, too frightened by the fire to be afraid of their natural enemy, man, shot by in the dusk–two dim, grey shapes.
Frances released Molly and the grey pony from their hobbles. She leaped upon the back of the pinto and dragged the grey after by his bridle-reins. She was back at the stalled wagon in a few moments.
Already the flames could be seen along the western horizon as far as the unaided eye could see anything, leaping under the pall of rising smoke. The fire was miles away, it was true; but its ominous appearance affrighted even Pratt Sanderson, who knew so little about such peril.
Mack was fastening straps and hooking up traces; they had not dared leave the mules hitched to the wagon while they were engaged in its repair.
“Come on! get a hustle on you, Mister!” exclaimed the teamster. “We got to light out o’ here right sudden!”
CHAPTER XVIII
THE WAVE OF FLAME
Pratt was pale, as could be seen where his face was not smudged with earth and axle-grease. He came and accepted his pony’s bridle from Frances’ hand.
“What shall we do?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady.
It was plain that the teamster had little idea of what was wise or best to do. The young fellow turned to Frances of the ranges quite as a matter of course. Evidently, she knew so much more about the perilous circumstances than he did that Pratt was not ashamed to take Frances’ commands.
“This is goin’ to be a hot corner,” the teamster drawled again; but Pratt waited for the girl to speak.
“Are you frightened, Pratt?” she asked, suddenly, looking down at him from her saddle, and smiling rather wistfully.
“Not yet,” said the young fellow. “I expect I shall be if it is very terrible.”
“But you don’t expect me to be scared?” asked Frances, still gravely.
“I don’t think it is your nature to show apprehension,” returned he.
“I’m not like other girls, you mean. That girl from Boston, for instance?” Frances said, looking away at the line of fire again. “Well!” and she sighed. “I am not, I suppose. With daddy I’ve been up against just such danger as this before. You never saw a prairie fire, Pratt?”
“No, ma’am!” exclaimed Pratt. “I never did.”
“The grass and greasewood are just right for it now. Mack is correct,” the girl went on. “This will be a hot corner.”
“And that mighty quick!” cried Mack.
“But you don’t propose to stay here?” gasped Pratt.
“Not much! Hold your mules, Mack,” she called to the grumbling teamster. “I’m going to make a flare.”
“Better do somethin’ mighty suddent, Miss,” growled the man.
She spurred Molly up to the wagon-seat and there seized one of the blankets.
“Got a sharp knife, Pratt?” she asked, shaking out the folds of the blanket.
“Yes.”
“Slit this blanket, then–lengthwise. Halve it,” urged Frances. “And be quick.”
“That’s right, Miss Frances!” called the teamster. “Set a backfire both sides of the trail. We got to save ourselves. Be sure ye run it a mile or more.”
“Do you mean to burn the prairie ahead of us?” panted Pratt.
“Yes. We’ll have to. I hope nobody will be hurt. But the way that fire is coming back there,” said Frances, firmly, “the flames will be ten feet high when they get here.”
“You don’t mean it!”
“Yes. You’ll see. Pray we may get a burned-over area before us in time to escape. The flames will leap a couple of hundred feet or more before the supply of gas–or whatever it is that burns so high above the ground–expires. The breath of that flame will scorch us to cinders if it reaches us. It will kill and char a big steer in a few seconds. Oh, it is a serious situation we’re in, Pratt!”
“Can’t we keep ahead of it?” demanded the young man, anxiously.
“Not for long,” replied Frances, with conviction. “I’ve seen more than one such fire, as I tell you. There! Take this rawhide.”
The ranchman’s daughter was not idle while she talked. She showed him how to knot the length of rawhide which she had produced from under the wagon-seat to one end of his share of the blanket. Her own fingers were busy with the other half meanwhile.
“Into your saddle now, Pratt. Take the right-hand side of the trail. Ride as fast as you can toward the river when I give the word. Go a mile, at least.”
The ponies were urged close to the campfire and he followed Frances’ example when she flung the tail of her piece of blanket into the blaze. The blankets caught fire and began to smoulder and smoke. There was enough cotton mixed with the wool to cause it to catch fire quickly.
“All right! We’re off!” shouted Frances, and spurred her pinto in the opposite direction. Immediately the smouldering blanket-stuff was blown into a live flame. Wherever it touched the dry grass and clumps of low brush fire started like magic.
Immediately Pratt reproduced her work on the other side of the trail. At right angles with the beaten path, they fled across the prairie, leaving little fires in their wake that spread and spread, rising higher and higher, and soon roaring into quenchless conflagrations.
These patches of fire soon joined and increased to a wider and wider swath of flame. The fire traveled slowly westward, but rushed eastward, propelled by the wind.
Wider and wider grew the sea of flame set by the burning blankets. Like Frances, Pratt kept his mount at a fast lope–the speediest pace of the trained cow-pony–nor did he stop until the blanket was consumed to the rawhide knot.
Then he wheeled his mount to look back. He could see nothing but flames and smoke at first. He did not know how far Frances had succeeded in traveling with her “flare”; but he was quite sure that he had come more than a mile from the wagon-trail.
He could soon see a broadening patch of burned-over prairie in the midst of the swirling flames and smoke. His pony snorted, and backed away from the approach-fire; but Pratt wheeled the grey around to the westward, and where the flames merely crept and sputtered through the greasewood and against the wind, he spurred his mount to leap over the line of fire.
The earth was hot, and every time the pony set a hoof down smoke or sparks flew upward; but Pratt had to get back to the trail. With the quirt he forced on the snorting grey, and finally reached a place where the fire had completely passed and the ground was cooler.
Ashes flew in clouds about him; the smoke from the west drove in a thick mass between him and the darkened sky. Only the glare of the roaring fire revealed objects and landmarks.
The backfire had burned for many yards westward, to meet the threatening wave of flame flying on the wings of the wind. To the east, the line of flame Pratt and Frances had set was rising higher and higher.
He saw the wagon standing in the midst of the smoke, Mack Hinkman holding the snorting, kicking mules with difficulty, while a wild little figure on a pony galloped back from the other side of the trail.
“All right, Pratt?” shrieked Frances. “Get up, Mack; we’ve no time to lose!”
The teamster let the mules go. Yet he dared not let them take their own gait. The thought of that cracked axle disturbed him.
The wagon led, however, through the smoke and dust; the two ponies fell in behind upon the trail. Frances and Pratt looked at each other. The young man was serious enough; but the girl was smiling.
Something she had said a little while before kept returning to Pratt’s mind. He was thinking of what would have happened had Sue Latrop, the girl from Boston, been here instead of Frances.
“Goodness!” Pratt told himself. “They are out of two different worlds; that’s sure! And I’m an awful tenderfoot, just as Mrs. Bill Edwards says.”
“What do you think of it?” asked Frances, raising her voice to make it heard above the roar of the fire and the rumble of the wagon ahead of them.
“I’m scared–right down scared!” admitted Pratt Sanderson.
“Well, so was I,” she admitted. “But the worst is over now. We’ll reach the river and ford it, and so put the fire all behind us. The flames won’t leap the river, that’s sure.”
The heat from the prairie fire was most oppressive. Over their heads the hot smoke swirled, shutting out all sight of the stars. Now and then a clump of brush beside the trail broke into flame again, fanned by the wind, and the ponies snorted and leaped aside.
Suddenly Mack was heard yelling at the mules and trying to pull them down to something milder than a wild gallop. Frances and Pratt spurred their ponies out upon the burned ground in order to see ahead.
Something loomed up on the trail–something that smoked and flamed like a big bonfire.
“What can it be?” gasped Pratt, riding knee to knee with the range girl.
“Not a house. There isn’t one along here,” she returned.
“Some old-timer got caught!” yelled the teamster, looking back at the two pony-riders. “Hope he saved his skin.”
“A wagoner!” cried Frances, startled.
“He cut his stock loose, of course,” yelled Mack Hinkman.
But when they reached the burning wagon they saw that this was not altogether true. One horse lay, charred, in the harness. The wagon had been empty. The driver of it had evidently cut his other horse loose and ridden away on its back to save himself.
“And why didn’t he free this poor creature?” demanded Pratt. “How cruel!”
“He was scare’t,” said Mack, pulling his mules out of the trail so as to drive around the burning wagon. “Or mebbe the hawse fell. Like enough that’s it.”
Frances said nothing more. She was wondering if this abandoned wagon was the one she had seen turn into the trail from Cottonwood Bottom early in the day? And who was its driver?
They went on, puzzled by this incident. At least, Frances and Pratt were puzzled by it.
“We may see the fellow at the ford,” Frances said. “Too bad he lost his outfit.”
“He didn’t have anything in that wagon,” said Pratt. “It was as empty as your own.”
Frances looked at him curiously. She remembered that the young man from Amarillo had taken a peep into the Bar-T wagon when he joined them on the trail. He must have seen the heavy chest; and now he ignored it.
On and on they rode. The smoke made the ride very unpleasant, even if the flames were now at a distance. Behind them the glare of the fire decreased; but to north and south the wall of flame, at a distance of several miles, rushed on and passed the riders on the trail.
The trees along the river’s brink came into view, outlined in many places by red and yellow flames. The fire would do a deal of damage along here, for even the greenest trees would be badly scorched.
The mules had run themselves pretty much out of breath and finally reduced their pace; but the wagon still led the procession when it reached the high bank.
The water in the river was very low; the trail descended the bank on a slant, and Mack put on the brakes and allowed the sure-footed mules to take their own course to the ford.
With hanging heads and heaving flanks, the two cow-ponies followed. Frances and Pratt were scorched, and smutted from head to foot; and their throats were parched, too.
“I hope I’ll never have to take such another ride,” admitted the young man from Amarillo. “Adventure is all right, Frances; but clerking in a bank doesn’t prepare one for such a strenuous life.”
“I think you are game, Pratt,” she said, frankly. “I can see that Mack, even, thinks you are pretty good–for a tenderfoot.”
The wagon went into the water at that moment. Mack yelled to the mules to stop. The wagon was hub deep in the stream and he loosened the reins so that the animals might plunge their noses into the flood. Molly and the grey quickly put down their heads, too.
Above the little group the flames crackled in a dead-limbed tree, lighting the ford like a huge torch. Above the flare of the thick canopy of the smoke spread out, completely overcasting the river.
Suddenly Frances laid her hand upon Pratt’s arm. She pointed with her quirt into a bushy tree on the opposite bank.
“Look over there!” she exclaimed, in a low tone.
Almost as she spoke there sounded the sharp crack of a rifle, and a ball passed through the top of the wagon, so near that it made the ponies jump.
“Put up your hands–all three of you folks down there!” commanded an angry voice. “The magazine of this rifle is plumb full and I can shoot straight. D’ye get me? Hands up!”
“My goodness!” gasped Pratt Sanderson.
What Mack Hinkman said was muffled in his own beard; but his hands shot upward as he sat on the wagon-seat.
Frances said nothing; her heart jumped–and then pumped faster. She recognized the drawling voice of the man in the tree, although she could not see his face clearly in the firelight.
It was Pete–Ratty M’Gill’s acquaintance–the man who had been orderly at the Bylittle Soldiers’ Home, and who had come all the way to the Panhandle to try to secure the treasure in the old Spanish chest.
Perhaps Frances had half expected some such incident as this to punctuate her journey to Amarillo. Nevertheless, the reckless tone of the man, and the way he used his rifle, troubled her.
“Put your hands up!” she murmured to Pratt. “Do just what he tells you. He may be wicked and foolish enough to fire again.”
