“I’d certainly see that he repented, apologized, and vowed eternal devotion,” smiled Miss Georgie. “That should be my revenge.”
“I don’t want any revenge. I simply want nothing to do with him. I don’t want to speak to him, even.”
“He’s awfully good—looking,” mused Miss Georgie.
“He looks to me just like an Indian. He ought to wear a blanket, like the rest.”
“Then you’re no judge. His eyes are dark; but they aren’t snaky, my dear. His hair is real wavy, did you notice? And he has the dearest, firm mouth. I noticed it particularly, because I admire a man who’s a man. He’s one. He’d fight and never give up, once he started. And I think”—she spoke hesitatingly—“I think he’d love—and never give up; unless the loved one disappointed him in some way; and then he’d be strong enough to go his way and not whine about it. I do hate a whiner! Don’t you?”
A shadow fell upon the platform outside the door, and Saunders appeared, sidling deprecatingly into the room. He pulled off his black, slouched hat and tucked it under his arm, smoothed his lank, black hair, ran his palm down over his lank, unshaven face with a smoothing gesture, and sidled over to the telegraph table.
“Here’s the answer to that message,” he said, in a limp tone, without any especial emphasis or inflection. “If you ain’t too busy, and could send it right off—it’s to go C.O.D. and make ’em repeat it, so as to be sure—”
“Certainly, Mr. Saunders.” Miss Georgie rose, the crisp, businesslike operator, and went to the table. She took the sheet of paper from him with her finger tips, as if he were some repulsive creature whose touch would send her shuddering, and glanced at the message. “Write it on the regular form,” she said, and pushed a pad and pencil toward him. “I have to place it on file.” Whereupon she turned her back upon him, and stood staring down the railroad track through the smoke-grimed window until a movement warned her that he was through.
“Very well—that is all,” she said, after she had counted the words twice. “Oh—you want to wait for the repeat.”
She laid her fingers on the key and sent the message in a whirl of chittering little sounds, waited a moment while the sounder spoke, paused, and then began a rapid clicking, which was the repeated message, and wrote it down upon its form.
“There—if it’s correct, that’s all,” she told him in a tone of dismissal, and waited openly for him to go. Which he did, after a sly glance at Evadna, a licking of pale lips, as if he would speak but lacked the courage, and a leering grin at Miss Georgie.
He was no sooner over the threshold than she slammed the door shut, in spite of the heat. She walked to the window, glanced down the track again, turned to the table, and restlessly arranged the form pads, sticking the message upon the file. She said something under her breath, snapped the cover on the inkwell, sighed, patted her pompadour, and finally laughed at her own uneasiness.
“Whenever that man comes in here,” she observed impatiently, “I always feel as if I ought to clean house after him. If ever there was a human toad—or snake, or—ugh! And what does he mean—sending twenty-word messages that don’t make sense when you read them over, and getting others that are just a lot of words jumbled together, hit or miss? I wish—only it’s unprofessional to talk about it—but, just the same, there’s some nasty business brewing, and I know it. I feel guilty, almost, every time I send one of those cipher messages.”
“Maybe he’s a detective,” Evadna hazarded.
“Maybe.” Miss Georgie’s tone, however, was extremely skeptical. “Only, so far as I can discover, there’s never been anything around here to detect. Nobody has been murdered, or robbed, or kidnapped that I ever heard of. Pete Hamilton says not. And—I wonder, now, if Saunders could be watching somebody! Wouldn’t it be funny, if old Pete himself turned out to be a Jesse James brand of criminal? Can you imagine Pete doing anything more brutal than lick a postage stamp?”
“He might want to,” Evadna guessed shrewdly, “but it would be too much trouble.”
“Besides,” Miss Georgie went on speculating, “Saunders never does anything that anyone ever heard of. Sweeps out the store, they say—but I’d hate to swear to that. I never could catch it when it looked swept—and brings the mail sack over here twice a day, and gets one to take back. And reads novels. Of course, the man’s half dead with consumption; but no one would object to that, if these queer wires hadn’t commenced coming to him.”
“Why don’t you turn detective yourself and find out?” Plainly, Evadna was secretly laughing at her perturbed interest in the matter.
“Thanks. I’m too many things already, and I haven’t any false hair or dark lantern. And, by the way, I’m going to have the day off, Sunday. Charlie Green is coming up to relieve me. And—couldn’t we do something?” She glanced wearily around the little office. “Honest, I’d go crazy if I stayed here much longer without a play spell. I want to get clear out, away from the thing—where I can’t even hear a train whistle.”
“Then you shall come down to the ranch the minute you can get away, and we’ll do something or go somewhere. The boys said they’d take me fishing—but they only propose things so they can play jokes on me, it seems to me. They’d make me fall in the river, or something, I just know. But if you’d like to go along, there’d be two of us—”
“Chicken, we’ll go. I ought to be ashamed to fish for an invitation the way I did, but I’m not. I haven’t been down to the Hart ranch yet; and I’ve heard enough about it to drive me crazy with the desire to see it. Your Aunt Phoebe I’ve met, and fallen in love with—that’s a matter of course. She told me to visit her just any time, without waiting to be invited especially. Isn’t she the dearest thing? Oh! that’s a train order, I suppose—sixteen is about due. Excuse me, chicken.”
She was busy then until the train came screeching down upon the station, paused there while the conductor rushed in, got a thin slip of paper for himself and the engineer, and rushed out again. When the train grumbled away from the platform and went its way, it left man standing there, a fish-basket slung from one shoulder, a trout rod carefully wrapped in its case in his hand, a box which looked suspiciously like a case of some bottled joy at his feet, and a loose-lipped smile upon his face.
“Howdy, Miss Georgie?” he called unctuously through the open door.
Miss Georgie barely glanced at him from under her lashes, and her shoulders indulged themselves in an almost imperceptible twitch.
“How do you do, Mr. Baumberger?” she responded coolly, and very, very gently pushed the door shut just as he had made up his mind to enter.
CHAPTER VIII
THE AMIABLE ANGLER
Baumberger—Johannes was the name he answered to when any of his family called, though to the rest of the world he was simply Baumberger—was what he himself called a true sport. Women, he maintained, were very much like trout; and so, when this particular woman calmly turned her back upon the smile cast at her, he did not linger there angling uselessly, but betook himself to the store, where his worldly position, rather than his charming personality, might be counted upon to bring him his meed of appreciation.
Good Indian and Jack, sitting side by side upon the porch and saying very little, he passed by with a careless nod, as being not worth his attention. Saunders, glancing up from the absorbing last chapter of “The Brokenhearted Bride,” also received a nod, and returned it apathetically. Pete Hamilton, however, got a flabby handshake, a wheezy laugh, and the announcement that he was down from Shoshone for a good, gamy tussle with that four-pounder he had lost last time.
“And