Trail of Conflict by Emilie Loring

CHAPTER IX

"Work is the grandest cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.—Carlyle."

Jerry nodded approvingly at the quotation above her desk in the office. It had been hung there in Old Nick's day and was quite as pertinent in her case as it might have been in his. To be sure, their maladies differed. His couldn't by the remotest possibility have been lack of money, she thought with a laugh.

Steve had installed her at her desk two weeks ago and had then forgotten her, presumably. Tommy Benson was giving her instructions as to her duties, but even his attentions were episodic. Ranlett had departed swearing vengeance in the good old nineteenth century style and Steve and Gerrish were out from morning till night taking account of stock and checking up. Tommy was riding range and being general utility man. Neither he nor Steve knew how closely she had remained at her desk. She must make good and she must accomplish it without taking too much of Tommy's time. As Steve had insisted upon paying her a month's salary in advance she had surreptitiously sent for a correspondence course on bookkeeping. She was making Sandy's life miserable because the material, which she expected would make her efficient in twenty-four hours, had not arrived.

Arms on the back of her swivel-chair, one knee in the seat she twisted slowly about. The room inspired the same sense of breathless interest it had the first time she entered it. Two walls were encased in glass. Behind the glass hung a collection of riding equipment and firearms. Some of the pieces dated back to the epoch-making journey of the pathfinders, Lewis and Clark, some to the first white settlers in the region west of the Mississippi. There were saddles rich in silver filigree which had come from the southwest of the cattle country; there were saddles with short round skirts, open stirrups, narrow and rimmed with iron; some had borders and emblems stamped on the leather, some had dark stains. There were chaps, fringed and unfringed, in infinite variety. There were coiled ropes of rawhide and of well worn grass; there were guns and knives and tomahawks, there was a stained and tattered Stars and Stripes.

"You fairly ooze atmosphere." Jerry mused aloud, her dreamy brown eyes on the saddles. "If you could speak what couldn't you tell of romance and comedy and tragedy. Herds, bad men, voyageurs, rustlers, settlers, prairie-schooners and Indians, you must have seen them all." Her voice had dropped to a whisper. Its tenseness roused her from what was fast becoming a vermilion orgy of imagination. She swung her chair round and dropped into it with a laugh and the reflection, "Pete Gerrish says that when a person talks to himself he's sure in for adventure."

She picked up a typewritten letter and regarded it with vainglorious elation. Not so bad! There was a spiral effect at the end of one sentence but on the whole it was a creditable affair for a person who had never used a typewriter till the week before and who was relying on the hunt-and-punch method for progress. Her already flushed cheeks took on a deeper tinge as she looked at the filing cases. Would she ever acquire a feeling of even bowing acquaintance with them, she wondered; they were most awe-inspiring.

The sun lay warmly on the fields outside, a gay little breeze spiced with pine danced in at the open window, stirred the curls at the nape of the girl's neck and whisked out again. Jerry looked out longingly, shook her head. "Remember, you're a daughter of toil now," she adjured the vagabond impulse which urged her to be up and away on her horse. She resolutely turned her back on the tempting out-of-doors and picked up her letter.

"'Gentlemen,'" she read aloud, "'We are shipping'—now why should I have typed that slipping—'thirty head of Guernseys on the——'" A shadow from the open door fell on her paper. Absorbed in her corrections, she spoke without looking up from her desk:

"You are wanted at the Lower Field, Pete. The Chief just 'phoned that more calves are missing. That——" as no colorful ejaculation followed her announcement, Gerrish swore with fascinating facility when he was deeply moved, she looked up in surprise. The smile which the thought of Pete had brought stiffened on her lips. She sprang to her feet and pushed back her chair. A man leaned against the door, a giant of a man fully six feet two. In a flash she sized him up. He was of different caliber from the "boys" of the outfit. No one of them would have stood with his hat on in her presence. The stranger's Mexican sombrero, pushed far back on his head, revealed rough red hair; his eyes were a hard blue; his nose suggested the beak of a hawk; his mouth was his best feature, it looked as though it might have been tender before the insidious processes of discouragement and recklessness got in their work. One temple gave the impression of having been knocked in and from the dent to the corner of his lips ran an angry, wrinkled scar. It contributed a curiously saturnine expression to what in youth might have been a pleasing face. From feet to waist his clothing was reminiscent of the army; from the belt up it might have belonged to a rider, even to the gay purple and crimson bandana at his neck. The stranger smiled boldly as his eyes met the girl's. Jerry's heart did a handspring and righted. A fleeting cloud of apprehension dimmed the brilliance of her eyes.