Jean of the Lazy A

by B. M. Bower

Jean turned her head and regarded him attentively. "Out where?" she asked him bluntly. "What are you talking about? Have you and Art been celebrating?" She knew better than that. Lite never indulged in liquid celebrations, and Jean knew it.

Lite reached into his pocket with the hand that was free, and drew forth a telegram envelope. He released her hand while he drew out the message, but he did not hand it to her immediately. "I wired Rossman from Los Angeles," he informed her, "and told him what was up, and asked him to put me up to date on that end of the line. So he did. I got this back there at that last town." He laid his hand over hers again, and looked down at her sidelong.

"Ever since the trouble," he began abruptly, but still in that quiet, matter-of-fact way, "I've been playing a lone hand and kinda holding back and waiting for something to drop. I had that idea all along that you've had this summer: getting hold of the Lazy A and fixing it up so your dad would have a place to come back to. I never said anything, because talking don't come natural to me like it does to some, and I'd rather do a thing first and then talk about it afterwards if I have to.

"So I hung on to what money I had saved up along; I was going to get me a bunch of cattle and fix up that homestead of mine some day, and maybe have a little home." His eyes went surreptitiously to her face, and lingered there wistfully. "So after the trouble I buckled down to work and saved a little faster, if anything. It looked to me like there wasn't much hope of doing anything for your dad till his sentence ran out, so I never said anything about it. Long as Carl didn't try to sell it to anybody else, I just waited and got together all the money I could. I didn't see as there was anything else to do."

Jean was chewing a corner of her lip, and was staring out of the window. "I didn't know I was stealing your thunder, Lite," she said dispiritedly. "Why didn't you tell me?"

'Wasn't anything to tell—till there was something to tell. Now, this telegram here,—this is what I started out to talk about. It'll be just as well if you know it before we get to Helena. I showed it to Art, and he thought the same as I did. You know,—or I reckon you don't, because I never said anything,—away last summer, along about the time you went to work for Burns, I got to thinking things over, and I wondered if Carl didn't have something on his mind about that killing. So I wrote to Rossman. I didn't much like the way he handled your dad's case, but he knew all the ins and outs, so I could talk to him without going away back at the beginning. He knew Carl, too, so that made it easier.

"I wrote and told him how Carl was prowling around through the house nights, and the like of that, and to look up the title to the Lazy A—"

"Why wouldn't you wait and let me buy it myself?" Jean asked him with just a shade of sharpness in her voice. "You knew I wanted to."

"So I got Rossman started, quite a while back. He thought as I did, that Carl was acting mighty funny. I was with Carl more than you was, and I could tell he had something laying heavy on his mind. But then, the rest of us had things laying pretty heavy on our minds, too, that wasn't guilt; so there wasn't any way to tell what was bothering Carl." Lite made no attempt to answer the question she had asked.

"Now, here's this wire Rossman sent me. You don't want to get the wrong idea, Jean, and feel too bad about this. You don't want to think you had anything to do with it. Carl was gradually building up to something of this kind,—has been for a long time. His coming over to the ranch nights, looking for that letter that he had hunted all over for at first, shows he wasn't right in his mind on the subject. But—"