The Elk House did not rejoice in a private dining room, and competition strenuous ensued as to who should have the pleasure of sitting beside the guest of honor. To avoid ill feeling, the matter was determined by a game of freeze-out, in which Texas and a mature gentleman named, from his complexion, “Beet” Collins, were the lucky victors. Texas immediately repaired to the general store, where he purchased a new scarlet bandanna for the occasion; also a cake of soap with which to rout the alkali dust that had filtered into every pore of his hands and face from a long ride across the desert.
Came supper and Texas simultaneously, the cow-puncher's face scrubbed to an apple shine. At the last moment Collins defaulted, his nerve completely gone. Since, however, he was a thrifty soul, he sold his place to Soapy for ten dollars, and proceeded to invest the proceeds in an immediate drunk.
During the first ten minutes of supper Miss Messiter did not appear, and the two guardians who flanked her chair solicitously were the object of much badinage.
“She got one glimpse of that red haid of Tex and the pore lady's took to the sage,” explained Yorky.
“And him scrubbed so shiny fust time since Christmas before the big blizzard,” sighed Doc Rogers.
“Shucks! She ain't scared of no sawed-off, hammered-down runt like Texas, No, siree! Miss Messiter's on the absent list 'cause she's afraid she cayn't resist the blandishments of Soapy. Did yo' ever hear about Soapy and that Caspar hash slinger?”
“Forget it, Slim,” advised Soapy, promptly. He had been engaged in lofty and oblivious conversation with Texas, but he did not intend to allow reminiscences to get under way just now.
At this opportune juncture arrived the mistress of the “gasoline bronc,” neatly clad in a simple white lawn with blue trimmings. She looked like a gleam of sunshine in her fresh, sweet youth; and not even in her own school room had she ever found herself the focus of a cleaner, more unstinted admiration. For the outdoors West takes off its hat reverently to women worthy of respect, especially when they are young and friendly.
Helen Messiter had come to Wyoming because the call of adventure, the desire for experience outside of rutted convention, were stirring her warm-blooded youth. She had seen enough of life lived in a parlor, and when there came knocking at her door a chance to know the big, untamed outdoors at first hand she had at once embraced it like a lover. She was eager for her new life, and she set out skillfully to make these men tell her what she wanted to know. To them, of course, it was an old story, and whatever of romance it held was unconscious. But since she wanted to talk of the West they were more than ready to please her.
So she listened, and drew them out with adroit questions when it was necessary. She made them talk of life on the open range, of rustlers and those who lived outside the law in the upper Shoshone country, of the deadly war waging between the cattle and sheep industries.
“Are there any sheep near the Lazy D ranch?” she asked, intensely interested in Soapy's tale of how cattle and sheep could no more be got to mix than oil and water.
For an instant nobody answered her question; then Soapy replied, with what seemed elaborate carelessness:
“Ned Bannister runs a bunch of about twelve thousand not more'n fifteen or twenty miles from your place.”
“And you say they are spoiling the range?”
“They're ce'tainly spoiling it for cows.”
“But can't something be done? If my cows were there first I don't see what right he has to bring his sheep there,” the girl frowned.
The assembled company attended strictly to supper. The girl, surprised at the stillness, looked round. “Well?”
“Now you're shouting, ma'am! That's what we say,” enthused Texas, spurring to the rescue.
“It doesn't much matter what you say. What do you do?” asked Helen, impatiently. “Do you lie down and let Mr. Bannister and his kind drive their sheep over you?”
“Do we, Soapy?” grinned Texas. Yet it seemed to her his smile was not quite carefree.
“I'm not a cowman myself,” explained Soapy to the girl. “Nor do I run sheep. I—”
“Tell Miss Messiter what yore business is, Soapy,” advised Yorky from the end of the table, with a mouthful of biscuit swelling his cheeks.
Soapy crushed the irrepressible Yorky with a look, but that young man hit back smilingly.
“Soapy, he sells soap, ma'am. He's a sorter city salesman, I reckon.”
“I should never have guessed it. Mr. Sothern does not LOOK like a salesman,” said the girl, with a glance at his shrewd, hard, expressionless face.
“Yes, ma'am, he's a first-class seller of soap, is Mr. Sothern,” chuckled the cow-puncher, kicking his friends gayly under the table.
“You can see I never sold HIM any, Miss Messiter,” came back Soapy, sorrowfully.
All this was Greek to the young lady from Kalamazoo. How was she to know that Mr. Sothern had vended his soap in small cubes on street corners, and that he wrapped bank notes of various denominations in the bars, which same were retailed to eager customers for the small sum of fifty cents, after a guarantee that the soap was good? His customers rarely patronized him twice; and frequently they used bad language because the soap wrapping was not as valuable as they had expected. This was manifestly unfair, for Mr. Sothern, who made no claims to philanthropy, often warned them that the soap should be bought on its merits, and not with an eye single to the premium that might or might not accompany the package.
“I started to tell you, ma'am, when that infant interrupted, that the cowmen don't aim to quit business yet a while. They've drawn a dead-line, Miss Messiter.”
“A dead-line?”
“Yes, ma'am, beyond which no sheep herder is to run his bunch.”
“And if he does?” the girl asked, open eyed.
“He don't do it twict, ma'am. Why don't you pass the fritters to Miss Messiter, Slim?”
“And about this Bannister Who is he?”
Her innocent question seemed to ring a bell for silence; seemed to carry with it some hidden portent that stopped idle conversation as a striking clock that marks the hour of an execution.
The smile that had been gay grew grim, and men forgot the subject of their light, casual talk. It was Sothern that answered her, and she observed that his voice was grave, his face studiously without expression.
“Mr. Bannister, ma'am, is a sheepman.”
“So I understood, but—” Her eyes traveled swiftly round the table, and appraised the sudden sense of responsibility that had fallen on these reckless, careless frontiersmen. “I am wondering what else he is. Really, he seems to be the bogey man of Gimlet Butte.”
There was another instant silence, and again it was Soapy that lifted it. “I expaict you'll like Wyoming, Miss Messiter; leastways I hope you will. There's a right smart of country here.” His gaze went out of the open door to the vast sea of space that swam in the fine sunset light. “Yes, most folks that ain't plumb spoilt with city ways likes it.”
“Sure she'll like it. Y'u want to get a good, easy-riding hawss, Miss Messiter,” advised Slim.
“And a rifle,” added Texas, promptly.
It occurred to her that they were all working together to drift the conversation back to a safe topic. She followed the lead given her, but she made up her mind to know what it was about her neighbor, Mr. Bannister, the sheep herder, that needed to be handled with such wariness and circumspection of speech.
Her chance came half an hour later, when she stood talking to the landlady on the hotel porch in the mellow twilight that seemed to rest on the land like a moonlit aura. For the moment they were alone.
“What