the Drift Fence (1992) (13 page)

"Git up, you big cheese!" yelled Hack Jocelyn, and he did not mean to be funny. "Our money's on you."

Curly responded to that trenchant call. And now to his amazement was added fury. In the ensuing few moments he showed that his spirit was willing but his flesh weak. The blows he landed upon Jim were inconsequential. On the other hand Jim gave him a severe drubbing. After the third knock-down Curly merely sat up. It chanced that this time he was near Bud, who was also sitting up.

"My Gawd! pard, hey we come to this?" cried Bud, evidently sober enough to realize. "What'd he hit me with?"

"I reckon it was a hoss-shoe," said Curly, feeling his swollen and bloody nose.

Jim stepped closer and peered down at Curly.

"Well, Prentiss, have you got enough?" he asked, fiercely. Curly looked up without the least trace of resentment and nodded.

"Boss, I cain't say how it come aboot, but I'm shore licked," he said, and he grinned.

"Did I pick this fight?" went on Jim, quick to grasp the situation.

"You shore didn't."

"All right. Are you going to threaten me with that damn nonsense about gun-play or are you going to shake hands?"

Curly laboriously got to his feet. Something had pierced the armour of his stupidity.

"I reckon I'll shake," he rejoined, and he took Jim's proffered hand.

"Aw, you're drunk," growled Hack Jocelyn, in disgust, with a hard eye on Curly. "An' we had our money on you!" With that he strode surlily away.

Bud Chalfack essayed to rise, a task no means easy, owing to the billets of wood that surrounded his feet.

"Bud, you better stay there, because if you get up I'll only have to knock you down again," said Jim, menacingly. "But I wasn't fightin' you.

Thet was Curly," protested Bud. "No matter. You're a little skunk, and I'll have to do it, unless you have another pard who'll take it for you."

"Ahuh." Bud looked around, and it was evident that at the moment not one of the cowboys seemed eager to take Jim's hint. "Boss, so you're one of them fellars thet's never satisfied once he gets a-goin'?"

"I'm afraid I am."

"But you're bigger'n me an' I didn't do nothin' except give you away. An' if you hadn't soaked me I'd hey told the fellars--"

"If you tell any more 111 beat you into jelly. And do that anyhow unless you apologize."

"Aw! Fer callin' Molly Dunn a little hussy?"

Jim looked a grim affirmative.

"All right, boss. I crawl. But I didn't mean any insult."

"You didn't? Say, you little dumb-head! Didn't you lie when you said you saw me hug her?"

"Boss, I think I was sober then," replied Bud, gravely. "I seen you hug her. You lifted her clean off the floor. She whacked you one--an' when you let her down, she went fer you sudden-like an' kissed you."

Jim faced the silent, puzzled cowboys. He had extracted all the humour for them from the situation, and he believed for once he had the upper hand.

"Boys, Bud was drunk last night. He has heaped disgrace on me and insulted a fine little girl."

Bud took violent exception to this, as was manifest from his face and actions, without the speech that followed.

"Boss, it ain't no disgrace to hug a gurl in Arizonie. An' if it happened to be Molly Dunn you'd shore make this outfit proud. 'Cause Molly Dunn has handed the mitt to me an' Lonestar. An' she shore set Hack Jocelyn down cold an' hard. Hack is plumb crazy over her."

"But you called her hussy!" thundered Jim, trying to hide his rapture.

"But, boss, I didn't mean thet in no insultin' way," protested Bud. "Molly's a little wildcat. She's a devil. She has shore made this Diamond outfit sick. Why, me an' Lonestar was flirtin' with her down at West Fork, an' we never knowed she was Slinger Dunn's sister!... Boss, I take thet hussy back."

"Very well, in that case I'm sorry I misunderstood you," said Jim, and offered his hand to Bud.

Jeff's noisy banging call to supper ended the incident. Jim imagined an almost imperceptible transformation in the air of the cowboys, except in Jocelyn and Winters, who were surly and uncommunicative.

Jim sought his bed early. There was no singing round the camp fire that night. Scarcely had darkness set in when the fire flickered and went out.

The coyotes had uninterrupted possession of the silence. But Jim did not find slumber coming easily. He believed he had stumbled on a way to get the best of the Diamond outfit. He was not sure that his hope was not father to the conviction, but the more he pondered over his achievement the more elated he became. These simple elemental boys respected only achievement. They did not really in the least care who a man was. It was what he could do! And Jim believed he could whip every last one of them.

Hack Jocelyn would be a mean customer. Jim had liked Hack less and less all the time, and Bud's allusion to Hack's interest in Molly Dunn aggravated the feeling. Jocelyn would be dangerous in a fight and not to be trusted in relation to a woman. Jim could have laughed aloud at this deduction. Already he seemed to be anticipating rivals! But so far as Molly Dunn was concerned he certainly could not trust himself.

Jim reflected. It had amazed him--the ease with which he had bested Curly, and he tried to reason out why. Curly was a big, lithe, strong fellow, who ought to have put up a very aggressive battle. But he had been born on a horse and had lived in a saddle. On the ground he did not know what to do with himself. Slow, awkward, uncertain, he had been at Jim's mercy. Whereupon Jim took stock of himself. He weighed around one hundred and seventy. He had a long reach, a fist like a mallet; he was quick as a cat and fast on his feet. Only a couple of years back he had been pretty clever with his hands. And this had come about naturally enough. When he was about fourteen years old he was friends with a boy who had a cousin come visiting from the East. And this cousin taught Jim and his friend something of the manly art of self-defence.

It began to look as if Jim had another asset which he had not counted on at all. The fence-building on a Missouri farm had been the first; now the second was this playful and friendly boxing habit. These cowboys had long since given him reason to resort to violence. But Jim knew he had been backward and perhaps afraid. From some source had come the courage of a lion. He chuckled to himself No fear that these cowboys would haul in! By their very nature--their pugnacity and curiosity--they must grow worse.

Each and every one of them would feel it his bounden duty to wipe up the camp-ground with the tenderfoot foreman of the Diamond. Jim revelled in a situation that a few days back had been well-nigh intolerable. No wonder they had been a pondering lot of young men! A gleam of light they refused to see had begun to penetrate their craniums.

But as for Molly Dunn! When Jim let clamouring thoughts of her dominate his consciousness his exultant glee died and his heart sank like lead in his breast. So some of these tough cowboys knew her! Had dared to approach her! The idea made Jim's blood run hot and cold. Still, Molly could not have helped that if these cowboys had discovered where she lived or any place she frequented. West Fork! He had not heard of that place. But he would very soon see it for himself. Stone walls could not keep these riders of the Diamond out. How much less then could a girl do it? Molly had spunk, though, Jim thought. It was no use to let pride and distrust have sway over him. As he lay there, his face upward to the dark canopy of pines, through which starlight filtered, he realized he was infatuated. That was as far as he grasped truth. Molly was an enigma, but only that because of the allusions of Bud Chalfack. That confounded cowboy had been witness to the scene on the porch in Flagerstown. He had seen Molly's incredible response to Jim's embrace. Jim felt it as a sacrilege. How could he dream and ponder over something that had been profaned by the keen eyes of a vulgar cowboy? Jim writhed over this aspect of the situation. Then when Jim was abject a staggering thought struck him. Bud Chalfack had lied about the interpretation of the word hussy. Bud was a smooth-tongued, crafty cowboy. Jim had observed a hundred instances of his diplomacy with his comrades. He was the brainiest of the lot.

The thought of Bud's trenchant remark was sickening. If these cowboys actually knew Molly Dunn, if they had ever been in her willing presence--especially that hard-lipped, veiled-eyed Jocelyn--it would be for Jim no less than a calamity. Because he would have at once to turn his back on romance. Then suddenly he recalled Molly's shy swift kiss--timid if there had ever been a timid kiss--and later her sharp retort that he had been the first ever to have that from her, and loyalty and love leaped to her defence. There, then, the battle raged in Jim's mind--between uncertainty and gossip, between romance and realism, between faith and unfaith.

Chapter
TEN

Molly Dunn filled the bucket at the spring and set it down.

She had been home from Flagerstown ten days--two weeks--exactly fifteen days, and they seemed years. All had changed. Her very identity was not the same. If she had ever had any capacity for happiness, it had fled.

She looked at the old wooden bucket. She had carried it as long as she could remember, and that was as far back as when she had been so little she could scarcely lift it. And the spring--all her life she remembered that. Once it had been an unfailing source of wonder and gladness. It was the biggest and finest spring of granite water of all the springs in the Cibeque Valley. It roared out from under a mossy cliff at the head of a shady glen, as large as a room and as deep as a well. Molly could see the pink-sided trout lying along the rocky sides; she could see the golden gleams deep down where the bubbles sparkled out of the shadow. Maple Spring was deep enough to drown her, and Molly wished she had the courage to fall in and sink. But she had accidentally fallen in there often, and she could swim like a fish. It would be of no use.

The glen, too, had been one of her perennial joys. The spring lent music and movement as it boiled and eddied round the great hole and then burst over a little fall to begin its melodious way down the winding gully.

Many rocks and drooping ferns lined the banks; maples and sycamores leaned over the amber water, letting only gleams of sunshine through; huge pines and spruces rose from the bank above to tower high. Above the spring on a level bench were grass and flowers, and clean, flat, gray stones where Molly had played alone all her childhood and dreamed hours of her girlhood. It had been a hiding-place, too, for it was isolated and not close to the cabin or trail. The squirrels and jays shared this secret with Molly. Only in the fall when the wild turkeys came down, and the hunters followed, were the sanctity and sweetness of this glen disrupted.

But Molly gazed about with eyes hopelessly disillusioned or else blinded by the trouble that had come to her. All because of the wonderful ride to Flagerstown--a white gown, a dance--and Him! Molly felt she could never be again what she had been before that visit. She would be what he had mistaken her for or she would die.

Every day since her return home had seen a struggle. At first she had been hot and resentful in her humiliation. She had hated Jim Traft. She would be a worthy sister to Slinger Dunn. She would carry on so boldly with the riders that her name would become a byword on the range for--for--Molly did not know what, but she would find out. She would encourage that nice little cowboy of the Diamond--Bud Chalfack, whose name she had never known until the night of the dance. And she would flirt outrageously with Curly Prentiss. Indeed, she would no longer repel the advances of Hack Jocelyn, though she disliked and feared him. She would show Jim Traft that she could win his vain and stuck-up cowboys and cast them aside, for Seth Haverly and even for Andy Stoneham.

But opportunities for such conduct had multiplied and she had not availed herself of them. Seth had been often at her home, with her brother Arch, but she knew why he came. And always Andy waylaid her when she went on errands down to the village. On Sunday she had espied Hack Jocelyn riding up the trail from West Fork, and she had dodged into the brush.

She resented her vacillation and was long in understanding. But as the days went by she had finally realized that she was terribly, miserably in love. Her amaze and scorn, her fury and contempt, her pride and her shame, her wretched attempts to sink under this malady and make of herself what Jim Traft must think her--all were of no avail and only added to her burden.

Lately Molly had begun to soften toward Jim, and that had been the forerunner of dreams and remembrances and longings. Once she had surrendered to this sweet fancy she was doomed. Before she knew it she could no longer fight herself or the thought of. Jim. So that a few lonely afternoons in the glen, a few nights lying wide awake in the dark loft of the cabin, had been her undoing. The shame of it made her more furious than ever, but she was helpless. In the daylight she had some semblance of character. At least she could throw off yearnings and what she deemed idiotic enchantments, but at night she became a weak girl, with aching heart and mad tumultuous emotions.

Each morning for a week when she had come to the spring for water she had set the bucket down, to indulge in pondering, brooding thoughts. This morning they prevailed longer than usual.

But at length she picked up the heavy bucket and took the trail home. She left the glen behind, and perhaps the most bearable of her thoughts.