Trail of Conflict by Emilie Loring

CHAPTER VIII

Jerry Courtlandt sent her horse up the slope and came out on a bluff above the Double O. As the girl sat motionless looking off over the plain, an artist would have labeled the picture she made, "A Study in Browns," before he slipped it into his mental portfolio. Her mount, Patches, was a deep mahogany in color, her riding boots were but a shade lighter than his satin skin, her breeches and long coat were of khaki, her blouse was fawn color, her eyes were deeply, darkly bronze. Rebellious tendrils of lustrous brown hair escaped from under the broad brim of the campaign hat she wore, one of Steve's army hats with its gold and black cord. He had insisted upon her using it. The hats she had brought to the ranch had been urban affairs, not designed to shade her eyes from the glare of white roads. As she had had no money with which to buy another she had taken it.

Jerry pulled it off as she took a deep breath of the glorious air asparkle with bubbles of life. She loved the spot. Every day that she rode she stopped to look down upon the valley. Far away among the foot-hills a silver stream cleft rocky bluffs, then coiled and foamed its way until it broadened and flashed in gleaming waterfalls. In places where it boiled and frothed rustic bridges had been thrown across. Toward the east lay the sturdily built stock corrals, storehouses spick and span with whitewash, towering silos. Toward the west were fenced-off alfalfa fields and beyond them a mosaic of varicolored pasture-lands, dotted with grazing herds, stretched out to the foot-hills.

Beyond the foot-hills loomed mountains darkly green with pine and spruce to the timberline, above which reared sombre, forbidding rock until against the ragged edge of gold-lined clouds, white peaks flamed crimson in the slanting sun. Toward the north she could see the gap in the mountains through which the railroad cut. The gap was known as the Devil's Hold-up because of the natural facilities it had offered—and still offered for that matter,—to the class whose pleasing pastime it had been to maintain their divine right in the other man's property at the point of a gun.

Almost beneath her, approached by a broad, well-graded road, lay the ranch-house. Telephone wires from all directions rounded up the activities of the Double O at the office near by. The house was a rambling structure of rudely squared timbers set in fieldstone and cement. Its one story was built around a court on which many doors opened and which was gayly brocaded with shrubs and plants in blossom this late June day.

Where was Steve, Jerry wondered, as her eyes lingered on the office building. She saw him less and less as the days passed, as more and more he assumed the responsibilities of the Double O. He was off before she was up in the morning riding the range or in the dairies or barns until night. She had hardly believed her eyes when on the evening after her arrival, she had seen Steve and Tommy Benson, his secretary, come into the living-room in dinner coats. Courtlandt had answered her unspoken question with the explanation that it had been Nicholas Fairfax's unvarying rule to shed ranch problems at night, and he had found that getting into the dress of the city helped. A man just naturally would curb an impulse to toddle down to the corral if he were in dinner clothes. The two didn't seem to go together.

Steve had appointed Tommy Benson her squire, he himself had so little time to give her. A laugh curved Jerry's lips as she thought of Tommy. He was a slight youth with a face of one of Raphael's cherubs grown up and a book for his inseparable companion. His almost yellow hair was short and wavy, his eyes were a brilliant blue, his skin was as nearly pink and white as human skin can be after it has been ranch-seasoned, his lips seemed made for laughter. He and Steve had been officers in the same company and when they returned from overseas the two had gone to the ranch to recuperate. Tommy had remained there to please his mother. He was in the throes of a virulent attack of stage fever and Mrs. Benson had begged him to wait a few years before he decided upon acting as his career. She had assured him that if after reflection he still felt that it was the profession for him she would attend his première without a qualm. So he had stayed at the Double O. There was plenty of money back of him and he had grown to love the ranch life, apparently.