“I am afraid they make too much of my part in the affair,” said she, quietly. “I am only one of the committee – ”
“But they say you wrote it all,” the young fellow interposed, eagerly.
“Oh–that! It happened to be easy for me to do so. I have always been deeply interested in the Panhandle–‘The Great American Desert’ as the old geographies used to call all this great Middle West, of Kansas, Nebraska, the Indian Territory, and Upper Texas.
“My father crossed it among the first white men from the Eastern States. He came back here to settle–long before I was born, of course–when a plow had never been sunk in these range lands. He belongs to the old cattle régime. He wouldn’t hear until lately of putting wheat into any of the Bar-T acres.”
“Ah, well, by all accounts he is one of the few men who still know how to make money out of cows,” laughed Pratt Sanderson. “Thank you, Miss Rugley. I can’t let you do anything more for me – ”
“You are a long way from the Edwards’ place,” she said. “You’d better ride to the Bar-T for the night. We will send a boy over there with a message, if you think Mrs. Edwards will be worried.”
“I suppose I’d better do as you say,” he said, rather ruefully. “Mrs. Edwards will be worried about my absence over supper time. She says I’m such a tenderfoot.”
For a moment a twinkle came into the veiled grey eyes; the new expression illumined the girl’s face like a flash of sunlight across the shadowed field.
“You rather back up her opinion when you tackle a lion with nothing but birdshot–and one barrel of your gun fouled in the bargain,” she said. “Don’t you think so?”
“But I killed it with a revolver!” exclaimed the young fellow, struggling to his feet again.
“That pistol throws a good-sized bullet,” said the ranchman’s daughter, smiling. “But I’d never think of picking a quarrel with a lion unless I had a good rope, or something that threw heavier lead than birdshot.”
He looked at her, standing there in the after-glow of the sunset, with honest admiration in his eyes.
“I am a tenderfoot, I guess,” he admitted. “And you were not scared for a single moment!”
“Oh, yes, I was,” and Frances Rugley’s laugh was low and musical. “But it was all over so quickly that the scare didn’t have a chance to show. Come on! I’ll catch your pony, and we’ll make the Bar-T before supper time.”
CHAPTER II
“FRANCES OF THE RANGES”
The grey was a well-trained cow-pony, for the Edwards’ ranch was one of the latest in that section of the Panhandle to change from cattle to wheat raising. A part of its range had not as yet been plowed, and Bill Edwards still had a corral full of good riding stock.
Pratt Sanderson got into his saddle without much trouble and the girl whistled for Molly.
“I’ll throw that lion over my saddle,” she said. “Molly won’t mind it much–especially if you hold her bridle with her head up-wind.”
“All right, Miss Rugley,” the young man returned. “My name is Pratt Sanderson–I don’t know that you know it.”
“Very well, Mr. Sanderson,” she repeated.
“They don’t call me that much,” the young fellow blurted out. “I answer easier to my first name, you know–Pratt.”
“Very well, Pratt,” said the girl, frankly. “I am Frances Rugley–Frances Durham Rugley.”
She lifted the heavy lion easily, flung it across Molly, and lashed it to the saddle; then she mounted in a hurry and the ponies started for the ranch trail which Frances had been following before she heard the report of the shotgun.
The youth watched her narrowly as they rode along through the dropping darkness. She was a well-matured girl for her age, not too tall, her limbs rounded, but without an ounce of superfluous flesh. Perhaps she knew of his scrutiny; but her face remained calm and she did not return his gaze. They talked of inconsequential things as they rode along.
Pratt Sanderson thought: “What a girl she is! Mrs. Edwards is right–she’s the finest specimen of girlhood on the range, bar none! And she is more than a little intelligent–quite literary, don’t you know, if what they say is true of her. Where did she learn to plan pageants? Not in one of these schoolhouses on the ranges, I bet an apple! And she’s a cowgirl, too. Rides like a female Centaur; shoots, of course, and throws a rope. Bet she knows the whole trade of cattle herding.
“Yet there isn’t a girl who went to school with me at the Amarillo High who looks so well-bred, or who is so sure of herself and so easy to converse with.”
For her part, Frances was thinking: “And he doesn’t remember a thing about me! Of course, he was a senior when I was in the junior class. He has already forgotten most of his schoolmates, I suppose.
“But that night of Cora Grimshaw’s party he danced with me six times. He was in the bank then, and had forgotten all ‘us kids,’ I suppose. Funny how suddenly a boy grows up when he gets out of school and into business. But me —
“Well! I should have known him if we hadn’t met for twenty years. Perhaps that’s because he is the first boy I ever danced with–in town, I mean. The boys on the ranch don’t count.”
Her tranquil face and manner had not betrayed–nor did they betray now–any of her thoughts about this young fellow whom she remembered so clearly, but who plainly had not taxed his memory with her.
That was the way of Frances Durham Rugley. A great deal went on in her mind of which nobody–not even Captain Dan Rugley, her father–dreamed.
Left motherless at an early age, the ranchman’s daughter had grown to her sixteenth year different from most girls. Even different from most other girls of the plains and ranges.
For ten years there was not a woman’s face–white, black, or red–on the Bar-T acres. The Captain had married late in life, and had loved Frances’ mother devotedly. When she died suddenly the man could not bear to hear or see another woman on the place.
Then Frances grew into his heart and life, and although the old wound opened as the ranchman saw his daughter expand, her love and companionship was like a healing balm poured into his sore heart.
The man’s strong, fierce nature suddenly went out to his child and she became all and all to him–just as her mother had been during the few years she had been spared to him.
So the girl’s schooling was cut short–and Frances loved books and the training she had received at the Amarillo schools. She would have loved to go on–to pass her examinations for college preparation, and finally get her diploma and an A. B., at least, from some college.
That, however, was not to be. Old Captain Rugley lavished money on her like rain, when she would let him. She used some of the money to buy books and a piano and pay for a teacher for the latter to come to the ranch, while she spent much midnight oil studying the books by herself.
Captain Rugley’s health was not all it should have been. Frances could not now leave him for long.
Until recently the old ranchman had borne lightly his seventy years. But rheumatism had taken hold upon him and he did not stand as straight as of old, nor ride so well.
He was far from an invalid; but Frances realized–more than he did, perhaps–that he had finished his scriptural span of life, and that his present years were borrowed from that hardest of taskmasters, Father Time.
Often it was Frances who rode the ranges, instead of Captain Rugley, viewing the different herds, receiving the reports of underforemen and wranglers, settling disputes between the punchers themselves, looking over chuck outfits, buying hay, overseeing brandings, and helping cut out fat steers for the market trail.
There