The Ranch at the Wolverine

by B. M. Bower

"Well, am I keeping you?" Billy Louise was certainly in a villainous mood.

"You are," Ward affirmed quite calmly. "Only for you, I'd be hustling like the mischief right this minute along the get-rich trail. Say, Bill, I don't believe it's the dog!" He looked at her with the smile hiding just behind his lips and his eyes. And behind the smile, if one's insight were keen enough to see it, was a troubled anxiety. He shifted the pail of currants to the other arm and spoke again:

"What is it, Wilhemina? Something's bothering you. Can't you tell a fellow what it is?"

"No, I can't." Billy Louise spoke crossly. "I've got a headache. I've been riding ever since this morning, and I should think that's reason enough. I wish to goodness you'd let me alone. Go on back to work, if you're so crazy about working; I'm sure I don't want to hinder you in any of your get-rich-quick schemes!" She shut her teeth together with a click, jerked Blue angrily into the trail when he had merely stepped out of it to avoid a rock, and managed to make him as conscious of her mood as was Ward.

Ward eyed her unobtrusively with his face set straight ahead. He glanced down at the pail of currants, which was heavy, and at the trail, which was long and lonely. He twisted his lips in brief sarcasm—for he had a temper of his own—and rode on with his neck set very stiff and his eyes a trifle harder than they had ever been before when Billy Louise rode alongside. He did not turn off at the ford—and Billy Louise betrayed by a quick glance at him that she had half expected him to desert her there—but crossed it beside her and rode on up the hill.

He had made up his mind that he would not speak to her again until she wiped out, by apology or a change of manner, that last offensive remark of hers. He hoped she realized that he was only going with her to carry the currants, and he hoped she realized also that, if she had been any other person who had spoken to him like that, he would have dumped the currants on the ground and ridden off and left her to her own devices.

He did not once speak to Billy Louise on the way to the Wolverine; but his silence changed gradually from stubbornness to pure abstraction, as they rode leisurely along the dusty trail with the sunset glowing before them. He almost forgot the actual presence of Billy Louise, and he did actually forget her mood. He was planning just how and where he should plant his orchard, and he was mentally building an addition to the cabin and screening a porch wide enough to hang a hammock inside, and he was seeing Billy Louise luxuriously swinging in that hammock while he sat close, and smoked and teased and gloried in his possession of her companionship.

His thoughts shuttled to his little mine, though he seldom dignified it by that title. He speculated upon the amount of gold he might yet hope to wash out of that gravel streak, though he had held himself sternly back from such mental indulgence all the spring. He felt that he was going to need every grain of gold he could glean. He wanted his wife—he glowed at the mere thinking of that name—to have the nicest little home in the country. He decided that it would be pleasanter than the Cove, all things considered; he had a fine view of the rugged hills from his cabin, and he imagined the Cove must be pretty hot during the days, with that high rock wall shutting off the wind and reflecting the sun. His own place was sheltered, but still it was not set down in the bottom of a well. She had liked it. She had said...

They rode over the crest of the bluff and down the steep trail into the Wolverine. However cloudy the atmosphere between the two, the ride had seemed short—so short that Ward felt the jar of surprise when he looked down and saw the cabin below them. He glanced at Billy Louise, guessed from her somber face that the villainous mood still held her, and sighed a little. He was not deeply concerned by her mood. He understood her too well to descend into any slough of despondence because she was cross. Then he remembered the reason she had given—the reason he had not believed at the time. They were down by the gate, then.

"Head still ache, William?" he asked, in the tone which he could make a fair substitute for a caress.