Brand Blotters, Page 4

  CHAPTER IV

  THE MAN WITH THE CHIHUAHUA HAT

  A little dust cloud was traveling up the trail toward the Bar Double G,the center of which presently defined itself as a rider moving at a roadgait. He wore a Chihuahua hat and with it the picturesque trappings theSouthwest borrows on occasion from across the border. Vanity discloseditself in the gold-laced hat, in the silver conchos of the fringed chaps,in the fine workmanship of the saddle and bit. The man's finery wasoverdone, carried with it the suggestion of being on exhibition. But onelook at the man himself, sleek and graceful, black-haired andwhite-toothed, exuding an effect of cold wariness in spite of the maskedsmiling face, would have been enough to give the lie to any charge ofweakness. His fopperies could not conceal the silken strength of him. Onemeeting with the chill, deep-set eyes was certificate enough for mostpeople.

  Melissy, sitting on the porch with her foot resting on a second chair,knew a slight quickening of the blood as she watched him approach.

  "Good evenin', Miss M'lissy," he cried, sweeping his sombrero as low asthe stirrup.

  "_Buenos tardes_, _Senor_ Norris," she flung back gayly.

  Sitting at ease in the saddle, he leisurely looked her over with eyes thatsmoldered behind half-shuttered lids. To most of her world she was inspirit still more boy than woman, but before his bold, possessive gaze herlong lashes wavered to the cheeks into which the warm blood was beating.Her long, free lines were still slender with the immaturity of youth, hersoul still hesitating reluctantly to cross the border to womanhood towardwhich Nature was pushing her so relentlessly. From a fund of experiencePhilip Norris read her shrewdly, knew how to evoke the latent impulseswhich brought her eagerly to the sex duel.

  "Playing off for sick," he scoffed.

  "I'm not," she protested. "Never get sick. It's just a sprained ankle."

  "Sho! I guess you're Miss Make Believe; just harrowing the feelings ofyour beaux."

  "The way you talk! I haven't got any beaux. The boys are just myfriends."

  "Oh, just friends! And no beaux. My, my! Not a single sweetheart in allthis wide open country. Shall I go rope you one and bring him in,_compadre_?"

  "No!" she exploded. "I don't want any. I'm not old enough yet." Herdancing eyes belied the words.

  "Now I wouldn't have guessed it. You look to me most ready to be picked."He rested his weight on the farther stirrup and let his lazy smile mockher. "My estimate would be sixteen. I'll bet you're every day of that."

  "I only lack three months of being eighteen," she came back indignantly.

  "You don't say! You'll ce'tainly have to be advertising for a husbandsoon, Miss Three-Quarters-Past-Seventeen. Maybe an ad in the Mesa paperwould help. You ain't so awful bad looking."

  "I'll let you write it. What would you say?" she demanded, a patch of pinkstanding out near the curve of the cheek bone.

  He swung from the saddle and flung the reins to the ground. With jinglingspurs he came up the steps and sat on the top one, his back against apillar. Boldly his admiring eyes swept her.

  "_Nina_, I couldn't do the subject justice. Honest, I haven't got thevocabulary."

  "Oh, you!" Laughter was in the eyes that studied him with a side tilt ofthe chin. "That's a fine way to get out of it when your bluff is called."

  He leaned back against the post comfortably and absorbed the beauty of thewestern horizon. The sun had just set behind a saddle of the Galiuros in asplash of splendor. All the colors of the rainbow fought for supremacy ina brilliant-tinted sky that blazed above the fire-girt peaks. Soon duskwould slip down over the land and tone the hues to a softer harmony. Apurple sea would flow over the hills, to be in turn displaced by a deep,soft violet. Then night, that night of mystery and romance whichtransforms the desert to a thing of incredible wonder!

  "Did your father buy this sunset with the ranch? And has he got aguarantee that it will perform every night?" he asked.

  "Did you ever see anything like it?" she cried. "I have looked at them allmy life and I never get tired."

  He laughed softly, his indolent, sleepy look on her. "Some things I wouldnever get tired of looking at either."

  Without speaking she nodded, still absorbing the sunset.

  "But it wouldn't be that kind of scenery," he added. "How tall are you,_muchacha_?"

  Her glance came around in surprise. "I don't know. About five foot five, Ithink. Why?"

  "I'm working on that ad. How would this do? 'MissThree-Quarters-Past-Seventeen wants to meet up with gentleman betweeneighteen and forty-eight. Object, matrimony. Description of lady: Slim,medium height, brunette, mop of blue-black hair, the prettiest dimple youever saw----'"

  "Now I know you're making fun of me. I'm mad." And the dimple flashed intobeing.

  "'--mostly says the opposite of what she means, has a----'"

  "I don't. I don't"

  "'--has a spice of the devil in her, which----'"

  "Now, I _am_ mad," she interrupted, laughing.

  "'--which is excusable, since she has the reddest lips for kissing inArizona.'"

  He had gone too far. Her innocence was in arms. Norris knew it by theswiftness with which the smile vanished from her face, by the flash ofanger in the eyes.

  "I prefer to talk about something else, Mr. Norris," she said with all theprim stiffness of a schoolgirl.

  Her father relieved the tension by striding across from the stable. Withhim came a bowlegged young fellow in plain leathers. The youngster wasCharley Hymer, one of the riders for the Bar Double G.

  "You're here at the right time, Norris," Lee said grimly. "Charley hasjust come down from Antelope Pass. He found one of my cows dead, with abullet hole through the forehead. The ashes of a fire were there, and inthe brush not far away a running iron."

  The eyes of Norris narrowed to slits. He was the cattle detective of theassociation and for a year now the rustlers had outgeneraled him. "I'llhave you take me to the spot, Charley. Get a move on you and we'll getthere soon as the moon is up."

  Melissy gripped the arms of her chair tightly with both hands. She waslooking at Norris with a new expression, a kind of breathless fear. Sheknew him for a man who could not be swerved from the thing he wanted. Forall his easy cynicism, he had the reputation of being a bloodhound on thetrail. Moreover, she knew that he was no friend to Jack Flatray. Why hadshe left that running iron as evidence to convict its owner? What follynot to have removed it from the immediate scene of the crime!

  The cattle detective and her father had moved a few steps away and weretalking in low tones. Melissy became aware of a footfall. The man whocalled himself Morse came around the corner of the house and stopped atthe porch steps.

  "May I speak to you a moment, Miss Lee?" he said in a low voice.

  "Of course."

  The voice of Norris rose to an irritated snarl. "Tell you I've gotevidence, Lee. Mebbe it's not enough to convict, but it satisfies mea-plenty that Jack Flatray's the man."

  Melissy was frozen to a tense attention. Her whole mind was on what passedbetween the detective and her father. Otherwise she would have noticed theswift change that transformed the tenderfoot.

  The rancher answered with impatient annoyance. "You're 'way off, Norris. Idon't care anything about your evidence. The idea is plumb ridiculous.Twenty odd years I've known him. He's the best they make, a pure throughand through. Not a crooked hair in his head. I've eat out of the samefrying pan too often with that boy not to know what he is. You go burythose suspicions of yours immediate. There's nothing to them."

  Norris grumbled objections as they moved toward the stable. Melissy drew along breath and brought herself back to the tenderfoot.

  He stood like a coiled spring, head thrust far forward from the shoulders.The look in his black eyes was something new to her experience. For hate,passion, caution were all mirrored there.

  "You know Mr. Norris," she said quickly.

  He started. "What did you say his name was?" he asked with an assumptionof carelessness.

  "
Norris--Philip Norris. He is a cattle detective."

  "Never heard of Mr. Norris before in my life," he answered, but it wasobservable that he still breathed deep.

  She did not believe him. Some tie in their buried past bound these two mentogether. They must have known each other in the South years ago, and oneof them at least was an enemy of the other. There might come a day whenshe could use this knowledge to save Jack Flatray from the punishmentdogging his heels. Melissy filed it away in her memory for futurereference.

  "You wanted to speak to me," she suggested.

  "I'm going away."

  "What for?"

  "Because I'm not a hound. I can't blackmail a woman."

  "How do you mean?"

  "I mean that you've found work here for me because I saw what you did overby Antelope Pass. We made a bargain. Oh, not in words, but a bargain justthe same! You were to keep my secret because I knew yours. I release youfrom your part of it. Give me up if you think it is your duty. I'll nottell what I know."

  "That wasn't how you talked the other day."

  "No. It's how I talk now. I'm a hunted man, wanted for murder. I make youa present of the information."

  "You make me a present of what I already know, Mr. Diller, alias Morse,alias Bellamy."

  "You guessed it the first day?"

  "Yes."

  "And meant to keep quiet about it?"

  "Yes, I meant to shelter you from the punishment you deserve." She addedwith a touch of bitter self-scorn: "I was doing what I had to do."

  "You don't have to do it any longer." He looked straight at her with hishead up. "And how do you know what I deserve? Who made you a judge aboutthese facts? Grant for the sake of argument I killed him. Do you know Iwasn't justified?"

  His fierce boldness put her on the defense. "A man sure of his cause doesnot run away. The paper said this Shep Boone was shot from ambush.Nothing could justify such a thing. When you did that----"

  "I didn't. Don't believe it, Miss Lee."

  "He was shot from behind, the paper said."

  "Do I look like a man who would kill from ambush?"

  She admitted to herself that this clear-eyed Southerner did not look likean assassin. Life in the open had made her a judge of such men as she hadbeen accustomed to meet, but for days she had been telling herself shecould no longer trust her judgment. Her best friend was a rustler. By awoman's logic it followed that since Jack Flatray was a thief this manmight have committed all the crimes in the calendar.

  "I don't know." Then, impulsively, "No, you don't, but you may be for allthat."

  "I'm not asking anything for myself. You may do as you please after I'vegone. Send for Mr. Flatray and tell him if you like."

  A horse cantered across the plaza toward the store. Bellamy turned quicklyto go.

  "I'm not going to tell anyone," the girl called after him in a low voice.

  Norris swung from the saddle. "Who's our hurried friend?" he askedcarelessly.

  "Oh, a new rider of ours. Name of Morse." She changed the subject. "Areyou--do you think you know who the rustler is?"

  His cold, black eyes rested in hers. She read in them something cruel andsinister. It was as if he were walking over the grave of an enemy.

  "I'm gathering evidence, a little at a time."

  "Do I know him?"

  "Maybe you do."

  "Tell me."

  He shook his head. "Wait till I've got him cinched."

  "You told father," she accused.

  He laughed in a hard, mirthless fashion. "That cured me. The Lee family isfrom Missouri. When I talk next time I'll have the goods to show."

  "I know who you mean. You're making a mistake." Her voice seemed to pleadwith him.

  "Not on your life, I ain't. But we'll talk about that when the subject isriper. There will be a showdown some day, and don't you forget it. Well,Charley is calling me. So long, Miss Three-Quarters-Past-Seventeen." Hewent jingling down the steps and swung to the saddle. "I'll not forget thead, and when I find the right man I'll ce'tainly rope and bring him toyou."

  "The rustler?" she asked innocently.

  "No, not the rustler, the gent between eighteen and forty-eight, objectmatrimony."

  "I don't want to trouble you," she flung at him with her gay smile.

  "No trouble at all. Fact is, I've got him in mind already," he assured herpromptly.

  "Oh!" A pulse of excitement was beating in her throat.

  "You don't ask me who he is," suggested Norris boldly, crouched in thesaddle with his weight on the far stirrup.

  She had brought it upon herself, but now she dodged the issue. "'Mostanyone will do, and me going on eighteen."

  "You're wrong, girl. Only one out of a thousand will do for your master."

  "Master, indeed! If he comes to the Bar Double G he'll find he is at thewrong address. None wanted, thank you."

  "Most folks don't want what's best for them, I allow. But if they haveluck it sometimes comes to them."

  "Luck!" she echoed, her chin in the air.

  "You heard me right. What you need is a man that ain't afraid of you, oneto ride close herd on you so as to head off them stampede notions ofyours. Now this lad is the very one. He is a black-haired guy, and when hesays a thing----"

  Involuntarily she glanced at his sleek black head. Melissy felt a suddenclamor of the blood, a pounding of the pulses.

  "--he most generally means it. I've wrangled around a heap with him andthere's no manner of doubt he's up to specifications. In appearance helooks like me. Point of fact, he's a dead ringer for me."

  She saw her chance and flashed out. "Now you're flattering him. Therecan't be two as--as fascinating as Senor Norris," she mocked.

  His smoldering eyes had the possessive insolence she resented and yetfound so stimulating.

  "Did I say there were two?" he drawled.

  It was his parting shot. With a touch of the spur he was off, leaving herno time for an adequate answer.

  There were no elusions and inferences about Philip Norris when he wantedto be direct. He had fairly taken her breath away. Melissy's instinct toldher there was something humiliating about such a wooing. But picturesqueand unconventional conduct excuse themselves in a picturesque personality.And this man had that if nothing else.

  She told herself she was angry at him, that he took liberties far beyondthose of any of the other young men. Yet, somehow, she went into the housesmiling. A color born of excitement burned beneath her sparkling eyes. Shehad entered into her heritage of womanhood and the call of sex wassummoning her to the adventure that is old as the garden where Eve metAdam.