The Bandit of Hell's Bend by Edgar Rice Burroughs (ebook reader web .txt) 📕

“Well,” demanded Texas Pete, “if you’re comin’ why don’t you saddle up?”

“Reckon I’ve changed my mind.”

Texas Pete glanced toward the ranch house, following the direction of the other’s eyes, and shrugged his shoulders.

“O, well,” he said, “this ain’t a bad place. Reckon as how I’ll stay on, too, fer a spell.”

Elias Henders and Hal Colby were walking slowly in the direction of the horse corral. The girl had turned and reentered the house. The two men entered the corral and as they did so Bull descended from the fence and approached Henders.

“You don’t happen to need no hands, do you?” he asked the older man.

“I can use you, Bull,” replied Henders with a faint smile. “Thirty-five a month and found.”

The former foreman nodded in acceptance of the terms and, walking toward the bunch of horses huddled at one side of the corral, whistled. Instantly Blazes’ head came up above those of the other animals. With up-pricked ears he regarded his owner for a moment, and then, shouldering his way through the bunch, he walked directly to him.

Elias Henders stopped in the center of the corral and attracted the attention of the men. “Colby here,” he announced, “is the new foreman.”

That was all. There was a moment’s embarrassed silence and then the men resumed their preparations for the work of the day, or, if they were ready, lolled in their saddles rolling cigarettes. Colby went among them assigning the various duties for the day-pretty much routine work with which all were familiar.

“And you, Bull,” he said when he reached the ex-foreman, “I wish you’d ride up to the head of Cottonwood Canyon and see if you can see anything of that bunch of Crazy J cows-I ain’t seen nothin’ of ‘em for a week or more.”

It was the longest, hardest assignment of the day, but if Bull was dissatisfied with it he gave no indication. As a matter of fact he probably was content, for he was a hard rider and he liked to be off alone. A trait that had always been a matter for comment and some conjecture.

More than one had asked himself or a neighbor what Bull found to do that took him off by himself so often. There are those who cannot conceive that a man can find pleasure in his own company, or in that of a good horse and the open.

The mouth of Cottonwood Canyon lay a good twenty miles from the ranch and the head of it five miles of rough going farther. It was ten o’clock when Bull suddenly drew rein beside the lone cottonwood that marked the entrance to the canyon and gave it its name.

He sat motionless, listening intently. Faintly, from far up the canyon, came the staccato of rifle shots. How far it was difficult to judge, for the walls of a winding canyon quickly absorb sound. Once convinced-of the direction of their origin, however, the man urged his pony into a gallop, turning his head up the canyon.

As the last of the cow hands loped away from the ranch upon the business of the day Elias Henders turned back toward the office, while Hal Colby caught up two ponies which he saddled and bridled, humming meanwhile a gay little tune. Mounting one, he rode toward the ranch house, leading the other, just as Diana Henders emerged from the interior, making it apparent for whom the led horse was intended.

Taking the reins from Colby, the girl swung into the saddle like a man, and she sat her horse like a man, too, and yet, though she could ride with the best of them, and shoot with the best of them, there was nothing coarse or common about her. Some of the older hands had known her since childhood, yet even that fact, coupled with the proverbial freedom of the eighties in Arizona, never permitted them the same freedom with Diana Henders that most of the few girls in that wild country either overlooked or accepted as a matter of course.

Men did not curse in Diana’s presence, nor did they throw an arm across her slim shoulders, or slap her upon the back in good fellowship, and yet they all worshipped her, and most of them had been violently in love with her. Something within her, inherently fine and noble, kept them at a distance, or rather in their places, for only those men who were hopelessly bashful ever remained at a distance from Diana where there was the slightest chance to be near her.

The men often spoke of her as a thoroughbred, sensing, perhaps, the fine breeding that made her what she was. Elias Henders was one of the Henders of Kentucky, and, like all the males of his line for generations, held a degree from Oxford, which he had entered after graduation from the beloved alma mater of his native state, for the very excellent reason that old Sir John Henders, who had established the American branch of the family, had been an Oxford man and had seen his son and his grandson follow his footsteps.

Twentyfive years before Elias Henders had come west with John Manill, a class-mate and neighbor of Kentucky, and the two young men had entered the cattle business. Their combined capital managed to keep them from the embarrassments and annoyances of a sheriffs sale for some three years, but what with raiding Apaches, poor rail facilities and a distant market, coupled with inexperience, they were at last upon the very brink of bankruptcy when Henders discovered gold on their property. Two years later they were rich men.

Henders returned to Kentucky and married Manill’s sister, and shortly afterwards moved to New York, as it was decided that the best interests of the partnership required an eastern representative. Manill remained in Arizona.

Diana Henders was born in New York City, and when she was about five years old her mother contracted tuberculosis of the lungs. Physicians advising a dry climate, Henders and Manill changed places, Henders taking his family to Arizona and Manill removing to New York with his wife and little daughter. He had married beneath him and unhappily with the result that being both a proud and rather reserved man he had confided nothing to his sister, the wife of his partner and best friend.

When Diana was fifteen her mother had died, and the girl, refusing to leave her father, had abandoned the idea of finishing her education in an eastern college, and Elias Henders, loath to give her up, had acquiesced in her decision. Qualified by education as he was to instruct her, Diana’s training had been carried on under the tutorage of her father, so that at nineteen, though essentially a frontier girl unversed in many of the finer artificialities of social usage, she was yet a young woman of culture and refinement. Her music, which was the delight of her father, she owed to the careful training of her mother as well as to the possession of a grand piano that had come over Raton Pass behind an ox team in the seventies.

Her father, her books, her music and her horses constituted the life of this young girl; her social companions the young vaqueros who rode for her father, and without at least one of whom she was not permitted to ride abroad, since the Apaches were still a menace in the Arizona of that day.

And so it was that this morning she rode out with the new foreman. They walked their horses in silence for a few minutes, the man’s stirrup just behind that of the girl, where he might let his eyes rest upon her profile without detection. The heavy-lashed eye, the short, straight nose, the patrician mouth and chin held the adoring gaze of the young foreman in mute worship; but it was he who, at length, broke the silence.

“You ain’t congratulated me yet, Di, ” he said, “or maybe you didn’t know?”

“Yes, I knew,” she replied, “and I do congratulate you; but I cannot forget that your fortune means another man’s sorrow.”

“It’s his own fault. A man that can’t keep sober can’t be trusted with a job like this.”

“He was a good foreman.”

“Maybe so-I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ about a man that’s down. It seems to me you set a lot of store by him, though; and what do you know about him? You can’t be too careful, Di. There’s lots of bad ‘uns in these parts and when a feller never talks none, like him, it’s probably because he’s got something on his mind he don’t want to talk about.”

“I thought he was your friend,” said the girl.

Colby flushed. “He is my friend. I set a lot of store by Bull; but it’s you I’m thinkin’ of-not him or me. I wouldn’t want nothin’ to happen that you’d have to be sorry about.’ .’

“I don’t understand you, Hal.”

He flecked the leg of his chaps with the lash of his quirt. “Oh, pshaw, Di,” he parried, “I don’t want to say nothin’ about a friend. I only want to put you on your guard, that’s all. You know there ain’t nothin’ I wouldn’t do for you-no, not even if it cost me all the friends I got.”

He passed his reins to his right hand and reaching across laid his left across one of hers, which she quickly withdrew.

“Please don’t,” she begged.

“I love you, Di,” he blurted suddenly.

The girl laughed gaily, though not in derision. “All the men think they do. It’s because I’m the only girl within miles and miles.”

“You’re the only girl in the world-for me.”

She turned and looked at him quizzically. He was very handsome. That and his boyish, laughing manner had attracted her to him from the first. There had seemed a frankness and openness about him that appealed to her, and of all the men she knew, only excepting her father, he alone possessed anything approximating poise and selfconfidence in his intercourse with women. The others were either shy and blundering, or loud and coarse, or taciturn sticks like Bull, who seemed to be the only man on the ranch who was not desperately in love with her.

“We’ll talk about something else,” she announced.

“Isn’t there any hope for me?” he asked.

“Why yes,” she assured him. “I hope you will keep on loving me. I love to have people love me.”

‘ ‘But I don’t want to do all the loving,” he insisted.

“Don’t worry-you’re not. Even the cook is writing poems about me. Of all the foolish men I ever heard of Dad has certainly succeeded in corraling the prize bunch.”

“I don’t care a hang about that red-headed old fool of a cook,” he snapped. “What I want is for you to love me.”

“Oh, well, that’s a horse of another color. Now we will have to change the subject.”

“Please, Di, I’m in earnest,” he pleaded; “won’t you give me a little to hope for?”

“You never can tell about a girl, Hal,” she said.

Her voice was tender and her eyes suddenly soft, and that was as near a promise as he could get.

As Bull urged Blazes up the rough trail of Cottonwood Canyon the continued crack of rifles kept the man apprised of the direction of the origin of the sounds and approximately of their ever lessening distance ahead. Presently he drew rein and, pulling his rifle from its boot, dismounted, dropping the reins upon the ground.

“Stand!” he whispered to Blazes and crept forward stealthily.

The shooting was close ahead now just around the brush-covered shoulder of a rocky hill. The detonations were less frequent. Bull guessed that by now both hunters and hunted were under cover