Squawtooth Canby’s wife had been dead ten years. The mistress of Squawtooth Ranch, then, was his daughter, Miss Manzanita Canby—a thorn in his flesh, the sting of which he both loved and deplored.
Manzanita Canby was nineteen; and if Squawtooth Canby was an incorrigible snob, she was an incorrigible roughneck. Three years of her young life had been spent away from Squawtooth while she was at school in Los Angeles. These three years had made no appreciable dent in her. She seemed to care for nothing in life beyond her “pa,” her brother Martin, a good saddle and saddle horse, and the illimitable sweep of desert and mountains; and on this rock all of her father’s hopes and ambitions for her had grounded.
She attended country dances and permitted fatuously grinning cow-punchers to swing her lithe figure in their arms. Of this her father highly disapproved. She spoke Mexican Spanish like a native, but beyond this her interest in the languages died. She cared nothing for well-to-do and good-looking young men whom her father coerced out from the cities under the pretext of a bear hunt in the mountains or a deer hunt through the foothill chaparral. To marry her to a man of means—now that this future was assured along these same lines—was the consuming ambition of Squawtooth Canby, an ambition that bade fair to be forever fruitless.
So the old cowman had jumped at the chance of having a young, energetic man of means—one Hunter Mangan—camped on Squawtooth Ranch with his big construction company. Surely this offered the chance of a lifetime to make his daughter see the error of her ways. And at the very beginning Manzanita had voiced her disapproval of a railroad being built over her beloved desert, and particularly through her beloved Squawtooth Ranch, and accordingly was averse to the man who had a hand in the desecration.
Old Squawtooth left no stone unturned to interest Manzanita in Hunter Mangan, and he was quite certain that to interest the young contractor in his wild and willful daughter was the least difficult part of his task.
Squawtooth was considered wealthy. Up at Piñon, in the chain of mountains that fringed the desert on the south, was his summer range—many thousand acres in the National Forest. In the winter the cows fed over a ninety-mile desert range, from Little Woman Butte to Squawtooth and beyond. Thus grass was practically assured for all seasons of the year, and for all time to come, unless the railroad should bring a flock of homesteaders down upon him. But if it did this it would automatically increase the value of his own holdings. It also would give him wonderful shipping facilities, both at Squawtooth and Little Woman Butte.
Yes, Squawtooth Canby was to become a big man, and Manzanita Canby must be thrown into the company of big men, so that she might pick the biggest of them and marry him. And Hunter Mangan seemed to be the man.
Everything was planned carefully, but still, as he rode along, the brow of Squawtooth Canby was corrugated. He could not shake off the presentiment that all of his strategic plans might fail because of the willingness of a slip of a girl called Manzanita.
CHAPTER III
THE DESERT
“LET’S go!” cried Hunter Mangan, seated in the saddle, and cupping his lean, strong hands about his mouth.