Frances of the Ranges: or, The Old Ranchman's Treasure

Marlowe Amy Bell

Frances of the Ranges; Or, The Old Ranchman's Treasure

CHAPTER I

THE ADVENTURE IN THE COULIE

The report of a bird gun made the single rider in sight upon the short-grassed plain pull in her pinto and gaze westerly toward the setting sun, now going down in a field of golden glory.

The pinto stood like a statue, and its rider seemed a part of the steed, so well did she sit in her saddle. She gazed steadily under her hand–gazed and listened.

Finally, she murmured: “That’s the snarl of a lion–sure. Get up, Molly!”

The pinto sprang forward. There was a deep coulie ahead, with a low range of grass-covered hills beyond. Through those hills the lions often came down onto the grazing plains. It was behind these hills that the sun was going down, for the hour was early.

As she rode, the girl loosened the gun she carried in the holster slung at her hip. On her saddle horn was coiled a hair rope.

She was dressed in olive green–her blouse, open at the throat, divided skirts, leggings, and broad-brimmed hat of one hue. Two thick plaits of sunburned brown hair hung over her shoulders, and to her waist. Her grey eyes were keen and rather solemn. Although the girl on the pinto could not have been far from sixteen, her face seemed to express a serious mind.

The scream of that bane of the cattlemen–the mountain lion–rang out from the coulie again. The girl clapped her tiny spurs against the pinto’s flanks, and that little animal doubled her pace. In a minute they were at the head of the slope and the girl could see down into the coulie, where low mesquite shrubs masked the bottom and the little spring that bubbled there.

Something was going on down in the coulie. The bushes waved; something rose and fell in their midst like a flail. There was a voice other than that of the raucous tones of the lion, and which squalled almost as loudly!

A little to one side of the shrubs stood a quivering grey pony, its ears pointed toward the rumpus in the shrubs, blowing and snorting. The rider of that empty saddle was plainly in trouble with the snarling lion.

The cattlemen of the Panhandle looked upon the lion as they did upon the coyote–save that the former did more damage to the herds. Roping the lion, or shooting it with the pistol, was a general sport. But caught in a corner, the beast–unlike the coyote–would fight desperately. Whoever had attacked this one had taken on a larger contract than he could handle. That was plain.

Urged by the girl the pinto went down the slope of the hollow on a keen run. At the bottom she snorted and swerved from the mesquite clump. The smell of the lion was strong in Molly’s nostrils.

“Stand still, Molly!” commanded the girl, and was out of the saddle with an ease that seemed phenomenal. She ran straight toward the thrashing bushes, pistol in hand.

The lion leaped, and the person who had been beating it off with the shotgun was borne down under the attack. Once those sabre-sharp claws got to work, the victim of the lion’s charge would be viciously torn.

The girl saw the gun fly out of his hands. The lion was too close upon its prey for her to use the pistol. She slipped the weapon back into its holster and picked up the shotgun. Plunging through the bushes she swung the gun and knocked the beast aside from its prey. The blow showed the power in her young arms and shoulders. The lion rolled over and over, half stunned.

“Quick!” she advised the victim of the lion’s attack. “He’ll be back at us.”

Indeed, scarcely had she spoken when the brute scrambled to its feet. The girl shouldered the gun and pulled the other trigger as the beast leaped.

There was no report. Either there was no shell in that barrel, or something had fouled the trigger. The lion, all four paws spread, and each claw displayed, sailed through the air like a bat, or a flying squirrel. Its jaws were wide open, its teeth bared, and the screech it emitted was, in truth, a terrifying sound.

The girl realized that the original victim of the lion’s attack was scrambling to his feet. She dropped to her knee and kept the muzzle of the gun pointed directly for the beast’s breast. The empty gun was her only defense in that perilous moment.

“Grab my gun! Here in the holster!” she panted.

The lion struck against the muzzle of the shotgun, and the girl–in spite of the braced position she had taken–was thrown backward to the ground. As she fell the pistol was drawn from its holster.

The empty shotgun had saved her from coming into the embrace of the angry lion, for while she fell one way, the animal went another. Then came three shots in rapid succession.

She scrambled to her feet, half laughing, and dusting the palms of her gantlets. The lion was lying a dozen yards away, while the victim of its attack stood near, the blue smoke curling from the revolver.

“My goodness!”

After the excitement was all over that exclamation from the girl seemed unnecessary. But the fact that startled her was, that it was not a man at all to whose aid she had come. He was a youth little older than herself.

“I say!” this young man exclaimed. “That was plucky of you, Miss–awfully plucky, don’t you know! That creature would have torn me badly in another minute.”

The girl nodded, but seemed suddenly dumb. She was watching the youth keenly from under the longest, silkiest lashes, it seemed to Pratt Sanderson, he had ever seen.

“I hope you’re not hurt?” he said, shyly, extending the pistol toward the girl. She stood with her hands upon her hips, panting a little, and with plenty of color in her brown cheeks.

“How about you?” she asked, shortly.

It was true the young man appeared much the worse for the encounter. In the first place, he stood upon one foot, a good deal like a crane, for his left ankle had twisted when he fell. His left arm, too, was wrenched, and he felt a tingling sensation all through the member, from the shoulder to the tips of his fingers.

Beside, his sleeve was ripped its entire length, and the lion’s claws had cut deep into his arm. The breast of his shirt was in strips.

“I say! I’m hurt, worse than I thought, eh?” he said, a little uncertainly. He wavered a moment on his sound foot, and then sank slowly to the grass.

“Wait! Don’t let yourself go!” exclaimed the girl, getting into quick action. “It isn’t so bad.”

She ran for the leather water-bottle that hung from her saddle. Molly had stood through the trouble without moving. Now the girl filled the bottle at the spring.

Pratt Sanderson was lying back on his elbows, and the white lids were lowered over his black eyes.

The treatment the range girl gave him was rather rough, but extremely efficacious. She dashed half the contents of the bottle into his face, and he sat up, gasping and choking. She tore away his tattered shirt in a most matter-of-fact manner and began to bathe the scratches on his chest with her kerchief (quickly unknotted from around her throat), which she had saturated with water. Fortunately, the wounds were not very deep, after all.

“You–you must think me a silly sort of chap,” he gasped. “Foolish to keel over like this – ”

“You haven’t been used to seeing blood,” the girl observed. “That makes a difference. I’ve been binding up the boys’ cuts and bruises all my life. Never was such a place as the old Bar-T for folks getting hurt.”

“Bar-T?” ejaculated the young man, with sudden interest. “Then you must be Miss Rugley, Captain Dan Rugley’s daughter?”

“Yes, sir,” said the girl, quietly. “Captain Rugley is my father.”

“And you’re going to put on that very clever spectacle at the Jackleg schoolhouse next month? I’ve heard all about it–and what you have done toward making it what Bill Edwards calls a howling success. I’m stopping with Bill. Mrs. Edwards is my mother’s friend, and I’m the advance guard of a lot of Amarillo people who are coming out to the Edwardses just to see your ‘Pageant of the Panhandle.’ Bill and his wife are no end enthusiastic about it.”

The deeper color had gradually faded out of the girl’s cheeks. She was cool enough now; but she kept her eyes lowered, just the same. He would have liked to see their expression once more. There had been a startled look in their grey depths when first she glanced at him.

“I am afraid they make too much of my part in the affair,” said she, quietly. “I am only one of the committee – ”

“But they say you wrote it all,” the young fellow interposed, eagerly.

“Oh–that! It happened to be easy for me to do so. I have always been deeply interested in the Panhandle–‘The Great American Desert’ as the old geographies used to call all this great Middle West, of Kansas, Nebraska, the Indian Territory, and Upper Texas.

“My father crossed it among the first white men from the Eastern States. He came back here to settle–long before I was born, of course–when a plow had never been sunk in these range lands. He belongs to the old cattle régime. He wouldn’t hear until lately of putting wheat into any of the Bar-T acres.”

“Ah, well, by all accounts he is one of the few men who still know how to make money out of cows,” laughed Pratt Sanderson. “Thank you, Miss Rugley. I can’t let you do anything more for me – ”

“You are a long way from the Edwards’ place,” she said. “You’d better ride to the Bar-T for the night. We will send a boy over there with a message, if you think Mrs. Edwards will be worried.”

“I suppose I’d better do as you say,” he said, rather ruefully. “Mrs. Edwards will be worried about my absence over supper time. She says I’m such a tenderfoot.”

For a moment a twinkle came into the veiled grey eyes; the new expression illumined the girl’s face like a flash of sunlight across the shadowed field.

“You rather back up her opinion when you tackle a lion with nothing but birdshot–and one barrel of your gun fouled in the bargain,” she said. “Don’t you think so?”

“But I killed it with a revolver!” exclaimed the young fellow, struggling to his feet again.

“That pistol throws a good-sized bullet,” said the ranchman’s daughter, smiling. “But I’d never think of picking a quarrel with a lion unless I had a good rope, or something that threw heavier lead than birdshot.”

He looked at her, standing there in the after-glow of the sunset, with honest admiration in his eyes.

“I am a tenderfoot, I guess,” he admitted. “And you were not scared for a single moment!”

“Oh, yes, I was,” and Frances Rugley’s laugh was low and musical. “But it was all over so quickly that the scare didn’t have a chance to show. Come on! I’ll catch your pony, and we’ll make the Bar-T before supper time.”

CHAPTER II

“FRANCES OF THE RANGES”

The grey was a well-trained cow-pony, for the Edwards’ ranch was one of the latest in that section of the Panhandle to change from cattle to wheat raising. A part of its range had not as yet been plowed, and Bill Edwards still had a corral full of good riding stock.

Pratt Sanderson got into his saddle without much trouble and the girl whistled for Molly.

“I’ll throw that lion over my saddle,” she said. “Molly won’t mind it much–especially if you hold her bridle with her head up-wind.”

“All right, Miss Rugley,” the young man returned. “My name is Pratt Sanderson–I don’t know that you know it.”

“Very well, Mr. Sanderson,” she repeated.

“They don’t call me that much,” the young fellow blurted out. “I answer easier to my first name, you know–Pratt.”

“Very well, Pratt,” said the girl, frankly. “I am Frances Rugley–Frances Durham Rugley.”

She lifted the heavy lion easily, flung it across Molly, and lashed it to the saddle; then she mounted in a hurry and the ponies started for the ranch trail which Frances had been following before she heard the report of the shotgun.

The youth watched her narrowly as they rode along through the dropping darkness. She was a well-matured girl for her age, not too tall, her limbs rounded, but without an ounce of superfluous flesh. Perhaps she knew of his scrutiny; but her face remained calm and she did not return his gaze. They talked of inconsequential things as they rode along.

Pratt Sanderson thought: “What a girl she is! Mrs. Edwards is right–she’s the finest specimen of girlhood on the range, bar none! And she is more than a little intelligent–quite literary, don’t you know, if what they say is true of her. Where did she learn to plan pageants? Not in one of these schoolhouses on the ranges, I bet an apple! And she’s a cowgirl, too. Rides like a female Centaur; shoots, of course, and throws a rope. Bet she knows the whole trade of cattle herding.

“Yet there isn’t a girl who went to school with me at the Amarillo High who looks so well-bred, or who is so sure of herself and so easy to converse with.”

For her part, Frances was thinking: “And he doesn’t remember a thing about me! Of course, he was a senior when I was in the junior class. He has already forgotten most of his schoolmates, I suppose.

“But that night of Cora Grimshaw’s party he danced with me six times. He was in the bank then, and had forgotten all ‘us kids,’ I suppose. Funny how suddenly a boy grows up when he gets out of school and into business. But me —

“Well! I should have known him if we hadn’t met for twenty years. Perhaps that’s because he is the first boy I ever danced with–in town, I mean. The boys on the ranch don’t count.”

Her tranquil face and manner had not betrayed–nor did they betray now–any of her thoughts about this young fellow whom she remembered so clearly, but who plainly had not taxed his memory with her.

That was the way of Frances Durham Rugley. A great deal went on in her mind of which nobody–not even Captain Dan Rugley, her father–dreamed.

Left motherless at an early age, the ranchman’s daughter had grown to her sixteenth year different from most girls. Even different from most other girls of the plains and ranges.

For ten years there was not a woman’s face–white, black, or red–on the Bar-T acres. The Captain had married late in life, and had loved Frances’ mother devotedly. When she died suddenly the man could not bear to hear or see another woman on the place.

Then Frances grew into his heart and life, and although the old wound opened as the ranchman saw his daughter expand, her love and companionship was like a healing balm poured into his sore heart.

The man’s strong, fierce nature suddenly went out to his child and she became all and all to him–just as her mother had been during the few years she had been spared to him.

So the girl’s schooling was cut short–and Frances loved books and the training she had received at the Amarillo schools. She would have loved to go on–to pass her examinations for college preparation, and finally get her diploma and an A. B., at least, from some college.

That, however, was not to be. Old Captain Rugley lavished money on her like rain, when she would let him. She used some of the money to buy books and a piano and pay for a teacher for the latter to come to the ranch, while she spent much midnight oil studying the books by herself.

Captain Rugley’s health was not all it should have been. Frances could not now leave him for long.

Until recently the old ranchman had borne lightly his seventy years. But rheumatism had taken hold upon him and he did not stand as straight as of old, nor ride so well.

He was far from an invalid; but Frances realized–more than he did, perhaps–that he had finished his scriptural span of life, and that his present years were borrowed from that hardest of taskmasters, Father Time.

Often it was Frances who rode the ranges, instead of Captain Rugley, viewing the different herds, receiving the reports of underforemen and wranglers, settling disputes between the punchers themselves, looking over chuck outfits, buying hay, overseeing brandings, and helping cut out fat steers for the market trail.

There was nothing Frances of the ranges did not know about the cattle-raising business. And she was giving some attention to the new grain-raising ideas that had come into the Panhandle with the return of the first-beaten farming horde.

For the Texas Panhandle has had its two farming booms. The first advance of the farmers into the ranges twenty-five years or more before had been a rank failure.

“They came here and plowed up little spots in our parsters that air eyesores now,” one old cowman said, “and then beat it back East when they found it didn’t rain ’cordin’ ter schedule. This land ain’t good for nothin’ ’cept cows.”

But this had been in the days of the old unfenced ranges, and before dry-farming had become a science. Now the few remaining cattlemen kept their pastures fenced, and began to think of raising other feed than river-bottom hay.

The cohorts of agriculturists were advancing; the cattlemen were falling back. The ancient staked plains of the Spanish conquestadors were likely to become waving wheat fields and smiling orchards.

The young girl and her companion could not travel fast to the Bar-T ranch-house for two reasons: Pratt Sanderson was sore all over, and the mountain lion slung across Frances’ pony caused some trouble. The pinto objected to carrying double–especially when an occasional draft of evening air brought the smell of the lion to her nostrils.

The young fellow admired the way in which the girl handled her mount. He had seen many half-wild horsemen at the Amarillo street fairs, and the like; since coming to Bill Edwards’ place he had occasionally observed a good rider handling a mean cayuse. But this man-handling of a half-wild pony was nothing like the graceful control Frances of the ranges had over Molly. The pinto danced and whirled and snorted, and once almost got her quivering nose down between her knees–the first position of the bucking horse.

At every point Frances met her mount with a stern word, or a firm rein, or a touch of the spur or quirt, which quickly took the pinto’s mind off her intention of “acting up.”

“You are wonderful!” exclaimed the youth, excitedly. “I wish I could ride half as good as you do, Miss Frances.”

Frances smiled. “You did not begin young enough,” she said. “My father took me in his arms when I was a week old and rode a half-wild mustang twenty miles across the ranges to exhibit me to the man who was our next-door neighbor in those days. You see, my tuition began early.”

It was not yet fully dark, although the ranch-house lamps were lit, when they came to the home corral and the big fenced yard in front of the Bar-T.

Two boys ran out to take the ponies. One of these Frances instructed to saddle a fresh pony and ride to the Edwards place with word that Pratt Sanderson would remain all night at the Bar-T.

The other boy was instructed to give the mountain lion to one of the men, that the pelt might be removed and properly stretched for curing.

“Come right in, Pratt,” said the girl, with frank cordiality. “You’ll have a chance for a wash and a brush before supper. And dad will find you some clean clothes.

“There’s dad on the porch, though he’s forbidden the night air unless he puts a coat on. Oh, he’s a very, very bad patient, indeed!”

CHAPTER III

THE OLD SPANISH CHEST

Pratt saw a tall, lean man–a man of massive frame, indeed, with a heavy mustache that had once been yellow but had now turned grey, teetering on the rear legs of a hard-bottomed chair, with his shoulders against the wall of the house.

There were plenty of inviting-looking chairs scattered about the veranda. There were rugs, and potted plants, and a lounge-swing, with a big lamp suspended from the ceiling, giving light enough over all.

But the master of the Bar-T had selected a straight-backed, hard-bottomed chair, of a kind that he had been used to for half a century and more. He brought the front legs down with a bang as the girl and youth approached.

“What’s kept you, Frances?” he asked, mellowly. “Evening, sir! I take it your health’s well?”

He put out a hairy hand into which Pratt confided his own and, the next moment, vowed secretly he would never risk it there again! His left hand tingled badly enough since the attentions of the mountain lion. Now his right felt as though it had been in an ore-crusher.

“This is Pratt Sanderson, from Amarillo,” the daughter of the ranchman said first of all. “He’s a friend of Mrs. Bill Edwards. He was having trouble with a lion over in Brother’s Coulie, when I came along. We got the lion; but Pratt got some scratches. Can’t Ming find him a flannel shirt, Dad?”

“Of course,” agreed Captain Rugley, his eyes twinkling just as Frances’ had a little while before. “You tell him as you go in. Come on, Pratt Sanderson. I’ll take a look at your scratches myself.”

A shuffle-footed Chinaman brought the shirt to the room Pratt Sanderson had been ushered to by the cordial old ranchman. The Chinaman assisted the youth to get into the garment, too, for Captain Rugley had already swathed the scratches on Pratt’s chest and arm with linen, after treating the wounds with a pungent-smelling but soothing salve.

“San Soo, him alle same have dlinner ready sloon,” said Ming, sprinkling ‘l’s’ indiscriminately in his information. “Clapen an’ Misse Flank wait on pleaza.”

The young fellow, when he was presentable, started back for the “pleaza.”

Everything he saw–every appointment of the house–showed wealth, and good taste in the use of it. The old ranchman furnished the former, of course; but nobody but Frances, Pratt thought, could have arranged the furnishings and adornments of the house.

The room he was to occupy as a guest was large, square, grey-walled, was hung with bright pictures, a few handsome Navajo blankets, and had heavy soft rugs on the floor. There was a gay drapery in one corner, behind which was a canvas curtain masking a shower bath with nickel fittings.

The water ran off from the shallow marble basin through an open drain under the wall. The bed was of brass and looked comfortable. There was a big steamer chair drawn invitingly near the window which opened into the court, or garden, around which the house was built.

The style of the building was Spanish, or Mexican. A fountain played in the court and there were trees growing there, among the branches of which a few lanterns were lit, like huge fireflies.

In passing back to the front porch of the ranch-house (farther south it would have been called hacienda) Pratt noted Spanish and Aztec armor hanging on the walls; high-backed, carven chairs of black oak, mahogany, and other heavy woods; weapons of both modern and ancient Indian manufacture, and those of the style used by Cortez and his cohorts when they marched on the capital city of the great Montezuma.

In a glass-fronted case, too, hung a brilliant cloak of parakeet feathers such as were worn by the Aztec nobles. Lights had been lit in the hall since he had arrived and the treasures were now revealed for the first time to the startled eye of the visitor.

The sight of these things partially prepared him for the change in Frances’ appearance. Her smooth brown skin and her veiled eyes were the same. She still wore her hair in girlish plaits. She was quite the simple, unaffected girl of sixteen. But her dress was white, of some soft and filmy material which looked to the young fellow like spider’s web in the moonlight. It was cut a little low at the throat; her arms were bared to the elbow. She wore a heavy, glittering belt of alternate red-gold links and green stones, and on one arm a massive, wrought-gold bracelet–a serpent with turquoise eyes.

“Frances is out in her warpaint,” chuckled Captain Rugley’s mellow voice from the shadow, where he was tipped back in his chair again.

“You gave me these things out of your treasure chest, Daddy, to wear when we had company,” said the girl, quite calmly.

She wore the barbarous ornaments with an air of dignity. They seemed to suit her, young as she was. And Pratt knew that the girdle and bracelet must be enormously valuable as well as enormously old.

The expression “treasure chest” was so odd that it stuck in the young man’s mind. He was very curious as to what it meant, and determined, when he knew Frances better, to ask about it.