The Range Dwellers

by B. M. Bower

Then dad got well enough so the nurse had no excuse for keeping me out, and I spent a lot of time sitting beside his bed and answering questions. By the time he was sitting up, peevish at the restraint of weakness and doctor's orders, we began to get really acquainted and to be able to talk together without a burdensome realization that we were father and son—and a mighty poor excuse for the son. Dad wasn't such bad company, I discovered. Before, he had been mostly the man that handled the carving-knife when I dined at home, and that wrote checks and dictated letters to Crawford in the privacy of his own den—he called it his study.

Now I found that he could tell a story that had some point to it, and could laugh at yours, in his dry way, whether it had any point or not. I even got to telling him some of the scrapes I had got into, and about Perry Potter; dad liked to hear about Perry Potter. The beauty of it was, he could understand everything; he had lived there himself long enough to get the range view-point. I hate telling a yarn and then going back over it explaining all the fine points.

I remember one night when the fog was rolling in from the ocean till you could hardly see the street-lamps across the way, we sat by the fire—dad was always great for big, wood fires—and smoked; and somehow I got strung out and told him about that Kenmore dance, and how the boys rigged up in my clothes and went. Dad laughed harder than I'd ever heard him before; you see, he knew the range, and the picture rose up before him all complete. I told that same yarn afterward to Barney MacTague, and there was nothing to it, so far as he was concerned. He said: "Lord! they must have been an out-at-heels lot not to have any clothes of their own." Now, what do you think of that?

Well, I went on from that and told dad about my flying trips through King's Highway, too—with the girl left out. Dad matched his finger-tips together while I was telling it, and afterward he didn't say much; only: "I knew you'd play the fool somehow, if you stayed long enough." He didn't explain, however, just what particular brand of fool I had been, or what he thought of old King, though I hinted pretty strong. Dad has got a smooth way of parrying anything he doesn't want to answer straight out, and it takes a fellow with more nerve than I've got to corner him and just make him give up an opinion if he doesn't want to. So I didn't find out a thing about that old row, or how it started—more than what I'd learned at the Ragged H, that is.

Frosty had written me, a week or two after I left, that our fellows had really burned King's sheds, and that Perry Potter had a bullet just scrape the hair off the top of his head, where he hadn't any to spare. It made him so mad, Frosty said, that he wanted to go back and kill, slay, and slaughter—that is Frosty's way of putting it. Another one of the boys had been hit in the arm, but it was only a flesh wound and nothing serious. So far as they could find out, King's men had got off without a scratch, Frosty said; which was another great sorrow to Perry Potter, who went around saying pointed things about poor markmanship and fellows who couldn't hit a barn if they were locked inside—that kept the boys stirred up and undecided whether to feel insulted or to take it as a joke. I wished that I was back there—until I read, down at the bottom of the last page, that Beryl King and her Aunt Lodema had gone back to the East.

The next day I learned the same thing from another source. Edith Loroman had kept her promise—as I remembered her, she wasn't great at that sort of thing, either—and sent me a picture of White Divide just before I left the ranch. Somehow, after that, we drifted into letter-writing. I wrote to thank her for the picture, and she wrote back to say "don't mention it"—in effect, at least, though it took three full pages to get that effect—and asked some questions about the ranch, and the boys, and Frosty Miller. I had to answer that letter and the questions—and that's how it began. It was a good deal of a nuisance, for I never did take much to pen work, and my conscience was hurting me half the time over delayed answers; Edith was always prompt; she liked to write letters better than I did, evidently.

But when she wrote, the day after I got that letter from Frosty, and said that Beryl and Aunt Lodema had just returned and were going to spend the winter in New York and join the Giddy Whirl, I will own that I was a much better—that is, prompt—correspondent. Edith is that kind of girl who can't write two pages without mentioning every one in her set; like those Local Items from little country towns; a paragraph for everybody.

So, having a strange and unwholesome hankering to hear all I could about Beryl, I encouraged Edith to write long and often by setting her an example. I didn't consider that I was taking a mean advantage of her, either, for she's the kind of girl who boasts about the number of her proposals and correspondents. I knew she'd cut a notch for me on the stick where she counted her victims, but it was worth the price, and I'm positive Edith didn't mind.

The only drawback was the disgusting frequency with which the words "Beryl and Terence Weaver" appeared; that did rather get on my nerves, and I did ask Edith once if Terence Weaver was the only man in New York. In fact, I was at one time on the point of going to New York myself and taking it out of Mr. Terence Weaver. I just ached to give him a run for his money. But when I hinted it—going to New York, I mean—dad looked rather hurt.

"I had expected you'd stay at home until after the holidays, at least," he remarked. "I'm old-fashioned enough to feel that a family should be together Christmas week, if at no other time. It doesn't necessarily follow that because there are only two left—" Dad dropped his glasses just then, and didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. I'd have stayed, then, no matter what string was pulling me to New York. It's so seldom, you see, that dad lowers his guard and lets you glimpse the real feeling there is in him. I felt such a cur for even wanting to leave him, that I stayed in that evening instead of going down to the Olympic, where was to be a sort of impromptu boxing-match between a couple of our swiftest amateurs.