“Well, I don’t know as I’m looking for him awful hard,” the blue kerchiefed youth smiled genially. “Anyway, I can wait a few minutes if I have to.”
“Yes.” She turned away indifferently. “I’ll show you your room, Mr. Morse.”
The deputy watched them disappear into the house with astonishment printed on his face. He had ridden twenty-seven miles to see Melissy Lee and he had not quite expected this sort of a greeting.
“If that don’t beat the Dutch. Looks like I’ll do my callin’ on the old man after all, maybe,” he murmured with a grin.
35
CHAPTER III
AN ACCUSATION
The rescued man ate, drank, and from sheer fatigue fell asleep within five minutes of the time he was shown his bedroom.
Since he was not of the easily discouraged kind, the deputy stayed to supper on invitation of Lee. He sat opposite the daughter of his host, and that young woman treated him with the most frigid politeness. The owner of the Bar Double G was quite unaware of any change of temperature. Jack and his little girl had always been the best of friends. So now he discoursed on the price of cows, the good rains, the outrages of the rustlers, and kindred topics without suspecting that the attention of the young man was on more personal matters.
Though born in Arizona, Melissy was of the South. Due westward rolls the tide of settlement, and Beauchamp Lee had migrated from Tennessee after the war, following the line of least resistance to the sunburned territory. Later he had married a woman a good deal younger than himself. She had borne him two children, the elder of whom was 36 now a young man. Melissy was the younger, and while she was still a babe in arms the mother had died of typhoid and left her baby girl to grow up as best she might in a land where women were few and far. This tiny pledge of her mother’s love Champ Lee had treasured as a gift from Heaven. He had tended her and nursed her through the ailments of childhood with a devotion the most pure of his reckless life. Given to heady gusts of passion, there had never been a moment when his voice had been other than gentle and tender to her.
Inevitably Melissy had become the product of her inheritance and her environment. If she was the heiress of Beauchamp Lee’s courage and generosity, his quick indignation against wrong and injustice, so, too, she was of his passionate lawlessness.
After supper Melissy disappeared. She wanted very much to be alone and have a good cry. Wherefore she slipped out of the back door and ran up the Lone Tree trail in the darkness. Jack thought he saw a white skirt fly a traitorous signal, and at leisure he pursued.
But Melissy was not aware of that. She reached Lone Tree rock and slipped down from boulder to boulder until she came to the pine which gave the place its name. For hours she had been forced to repress her emotions, to make necessary small talk, to arrange for breakfast and other household details. Now she was alone, and the floods of her bitterness were unloosed. She broke down and 37 wept passionately, for she was facing her first great disillusionment. She had lost a friend, one in whom she had put great faith.
The first gust of the storm was past when Melissy heard a step on the rocks above. She knew intuitively that Jack Flatray had come in search of her, and he was the last man on earth she wanted to meet just now.
“ ’Lissie!” she heard him call softly; and again, “ ’Lissie!”
Noiselessly she got to her feet, waiting to see what he would do. She knew he must be standing on the edge of the great rock, so directly above her that if he had kicked a pebble it would have landed beside her. Presently he began to clamber down.
She tiptoed along the ledge and slipped into the trough at the farther end that led to the top. It was a climb she had taken several times, but never in the dark. The ascent was almost perpendicular, and it had to be made by clinging to projecting rocks and vegetation. Moreover, if she were to escape undetected it had to be done in silence.
She was a daughter of the hills, as surefooted as a mountain goat. Handily she went up, making the most of the footholds that offered. In spite of the best she could do the rustling of bushes betrayed her.
Jack came to the foot of the trough and looked up.
“So you’re there, are you?” he asked.
Her foot loosened a stone and sent it rolling down. 38
“If I were you I wouldn’t try that at night, ’Liss,” he advised.
She made sure of the steadiness of her voice before she answered. “You don’t need to try it.”
“I said if I were you, girl.”
“But you are not. Don’t let me detain you here, Mr. Flatray,” she told him in a manner of icy precision.
The deputy began the climb too. “What’s the use of being so hostile, little girl?” he drawled. “Me, I came as soon as I could, burning the wind, too.”
She set her teeth, determined to reach the top in time to get away before he could join her. In her eagerness she took a chance that proved her undoing. A rock gave beneath her foot and clattered down. Clinging by one hand and foot, she felt her body swing around. From her throat a little cry leaped. She knew herself slipping.
“Jack!”
In time, and just in time, he reached her, braced himself, and gave her his knee for a foot rest.
“All right?” he asked, and “All right!” she answered promptly.
“We’ll go back,” he told her.
She made no protest. Indeed, she displayed a caution in lowering herself that surprised him. Every foothold she tested carefully with her weight. Once she asked him to place her shoe in the crevice for her. He had never seen her take so much time 39 in making sure or be so fussy about her personal safety.
Safely on the ledge again, she attempted a second time to dismiss him. “Thank you, Mr. Flatray. I won’t take any more of your time.”
He looked at her steadily before he spoke. “You’re mighty high-heeled, ’Lissie. You know my name ain’t Mr. Flatray to you. What’s it all about? I’ve told you twice I couldn’t get here any sooner.”
She flamed out at him in an upblaze of feminine ferocity. “And I tell you, that I don’t care if you had never come. I don’t want to see you or have anything to do with you.”
“Why not?” He asked it quietly, though he began to know that her charge against him was a serious one.
“Because I know what you are now, because you have made us believe in you while all the time you were living a lie.”
“Meaning what?”
“I was gathering poppies on the other side of Antelope Pass this afternoon.”
“What has that got to do with me being a liar and a scoundrel,” he wanted to know.
“Oh, you pretend,” she scoffed. “But you know as well as I do.”
“I’m afraid I don’t. Let’s have the indictment.”
“If everybody in Papago County had told me I wouldn’t have believed it,” she cried. “I had to 40 see it with my own eyes before I could have been convinced.”
“Yes, well what is it you saw