Chapter I

Into the monotonous beat of a heavy rain on the tin roof and the rhythmic snoring of a dozen men the alarm clock on the window sill of the bunk house burst with a wild, metallic scream, announcing four o’clock of a wet morning. Low groans here and there, the stretching of tired bodies and a break in the snoring of the cook—temporarily housed there—followed.

Dice Barnett, the corral boss, sat up in bed and yawned. Then, “Roll out, boys!” he roared, and yawned again.

The cook sat up and stared venomously across the row of inert figures.

“You bellow like a bull!” he growled.

The corral boss said nothing. At these rising hours he was always hopeless and dispirited. The cook thumped his pillow, lay back and was instantly asleep again. Only the wranglers rose at four. The Kid, in the next bed to Dice, opened a pair of drowsy eyes in a sunburned face, and shut them again. But Dice, with the gesture of an expert, leaned over and dragged the coverings away, making a clean sweep of them. The Kid made a frantic clutch, but they were gone. The cold early-morning air of the mountains penetrated to the Kid’s very marrow. Grumbling, he got out of bed.

In the faint light other equally hopeless figures were emerging. No one spoke. Life wasn’t worth the effort. They pulled on their trousers, shirts and socks, and began the daily struggle to get into boots still damp and stiff from the day before, and always, even at their driest and best, a trifle small. The bunk house resounded with dreary thuds as their heels came down, thud, thud, on the floor.

“Get out and lemme sleep,” muttered the cook, with his eyes shut.

Outside on the rough veranda the men morosely got their chaps and gloves, and the Kid lighted a lantern and led the way toward the stables, where the night horses waited for the morning wrangling. The silent line, dogged, unhappy, still half asleep, plodded through the mud and rain without speech, except for a muttered comment from some one to the effect that this was the life.

The Kid was as silent as the rest, but, for a reason of his own, less hopeless. And once outside the barn, boots softening a little under mud and rain, blood moving a little faster, the stalls warm with the heat of a dozen animals, signs of life began to assert themselves among the others. Gathered around the lantern they tossed for who should wrangle the cañon and who should take the big pasture. They saddled under shelter, and leading their horses out mounted them carefully, for the horses in the small hours of the morning were rather like themselves, irritable and quarrelsome. The Kid, with an eye toward the cottages, still shrouded in darkness, moved with extreme deliberation.

Dice slid into his saddle after the manner of one experienced in the early-morning tempers of horses, and rolled a cigarette.

“One thing this rain’s good for,” he observed. “No dude woman will want to wrangle in it.”

From one or two quarters came a half-hearted assent in this. Now and then some Eastern girl among the ranch boarders who had proved herself to the corral, with its rather exacting standards, was given the privilege of rising at four A. M., lighting herself to the corral with an electric flash, getting out her own saddle and bridle, and then of accompanying the men on their wild ride through the dawn, risking her neck for the thrill of being a part of the romantic world of story and dream. Always, to outward seeming, the attitude of the men was one of amused tolerance. Actually they accepted it as tribute, took extremely good care of their devotees and concealed behind their taciturnity certain predilections which they would have died rather than avow.

“You tell ’em,” said Al, the saddle boss.

The Kid said nothing. He cast another glance toward the sleeping cottages, and led his horse back and forth several times before mounting.

Dice watched these manœuvres coldly.

“Don’t let me hurry you any,” he said politely. “Maybe you’d like your breakfast first.”

Reluctantly the Kid mounted, but before he touched spur to his horse he looked back. Yes, quite certainly; unmistakably. There was a spot of white light moving through the semidarkness toward the corral. The Kid suddenly dismounted, and throwing up a stirrup began to fumble with a strap. But the corral boss interfered cruelly.

“Come right along,” he said. “Whoever she is, she’s out of luck.”

The Kid was forced to mount, and they started, going at a walk in order to get the stiffness out of their horses, climbing slowly up the steep and muddy trail which they could not see, but which the horses followed unerringly.

At the top Dice slowed up and the Kid fell in beside him.

“Who was the wild woman?” he asked.

“It was the Carter girl,” said the Kid, with an assumption of indifference. “Rosamond Carter.”

“I thought so. She works while the other girls sleep.”

“What do you mean by that?” the Kid demanded truculently.

“Just what I said, son.” The corral boss’s voice was bland but firm. “She makes a life work of what ought to be a little diversion, and she’s that afraid of getting out of practice that she keeps her hand in on you—and me,” he added as a cautious afterthought. On and up they rode. From far away in the big pasture rose to them already the shrill cries and whistles of Al, Slim and Jack Moncrielle as they hazed the horses into bunches and threw them together, a hundred or so, ready to run them back along the trail to the corral and the day’s work. The stream in the cañon below roared with its burden of the night’s rain, which streamed down the steep walls in a thousand temporary torrents and drowned all conversation. The Kid rode on, turning over in his mind the corral boss’s comment. Now and then he thought of replies he might have made, but hadn’t.

Once, indeed, he did clear his throat and commenced, “You don’t understand her. She—”

But the rushing water drowned the sound of his voice.

The horses, seeking shelter, had wandered far up the cañon and off the trail. With the first light the men began to bunch them, their own animals climbing like goats, finding foothold here, there and anywhere. Once the Kid’s horse slipped and went down, and there was a bad moment when eternity lay over a rock and a foot away. But there came a good moment, too, when the last straggler had been brought in, when the rain had ceased and the tops of the cliffs were pink with the rising sun, and when through the cañon and out on the plain below, the Kid could see the ranch, and smoke rising from the cook-house chimney.

The Kid felt his first glow of the day, and it was compounded of the facts that the morning wrangling was over, that breakfast was waiting, and that somewhere in that huddle of pin-point houses Rosamond Carter was living, moving and having her being. He drew a long breath.

“I want to talk to you, Dice,” he said, as they rode companionably behind their morning’s salvage. “This is the life, all right. But where do you go from here?”

“Meaning?”

“There’s no future in this sort of thing, Dice.”

“No? I thought you were going to take up a homestead.”

“There’s nothing in ranching,” said the Kid gloomily. “Look at the Old Man. Had to come to dude ranching after all. And if he couldn’t make it go, who could?”

Dice said nothing. Somebody had been getting at the boy, he knew, and he knew who it was. It was the Kid himself who gave him his chance a moment later.

“I think you’ve got a wrong idea about Rosamond Carter, Dice,” he offered.

“Maybe—maybe not.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“I told you. She works while the other girls sleep, that’s all. Do you think she piled out of bed to go wrangling in the rain because she loved Nature? Rats!”

“Even at that,” the Kid said hotly, “I don’t like the way you speak of her.”

“No? I didn’t suppose you would. Well, you’ve asked my opinion and I’ll give it to you. She’s the sort that has to have some fellow trailing after her or she isn’t happy, and if she can pry him away from another girl it doesn’t take anything from her pleasure.”

“There was nothing between me and Janet, Dice.”

“All right. I’ll take your word for it. But did Janet know it?”

The Kid was very angry—unreasonably angry. He had merely tried to set Dice right as to Rosamond Carter, and Dice had had to drag in Janet, and a lot of extraneous matters which the Kid himself was trying very hard to put out of his mind. “You’ll feel better when you’ve had your breakfast,” he said witheringly.

In the cook-house ham and eggs, flapjacks, fried potatoes, coffee, corn bread. The Kid ate enormously but sulkily, and then, lounging out, took a quick survey of the ranch. Already in the corral Jack Moncrielle’s rope was whirling and the horses were milling madly. As he brought out each animal, meek enough now that the rope was around its neck, the saddlers took it in hand and fastened on it the badges of servitude. A growing row of saddled animals stood waiting.

In that brief glance the Kid could see all that constituted his little world, with its hopes and problems. The Old Man, an affectionate but rather misleading term, the Old Man being fifty; on the porch in front of the linen house Janet in a blue gingham, fresh and tidy and steady-eyed, but with a despondent droop to her mouth; and coming toward him, gay and smart in riding clothes and showing no resentment for the morning’s fiasco, Rosamond Carter.

“I’m awfully sorry, Kid,” she said. “I got there just a minute too late.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said awkwardly.

“I just went back and cried, Kid.”

He was practically stricken dumb at this confession of emotion, and the hand which held his after-breakfast cigarette trembled. Nothing adequate to say occurred to him, but his wildly rolling eyes saw that Janet had risen and was going into the linen house.

“’Stoo bad,” he muttered.

Rosamond had caught his glance toward the linen house.

“Well, I’ll try again to-morrow,” she said brightly, and moved a foot or two away. Then she turned. “You certainly are a handsome thing, standing there in the sun!” She smiled at him. “I wish I had a picture of you.”

She went on, and the Kid drew himself up to his full height and put a hand carelessly to his neckerchief. Then he took off his hat, recreasing it, rolling up the rim at the sides with tender hands, and replaced it, slightly tilted, over the right eye. After that he swaggered up to the corral.