“Oh,” said Mrs. Shields. “Then you won’t care for the coffee and pie and gingerbread,” she sighed. “I’m very sorry.”
Blake jumped: “Lord, Ma’am,” he cried hastily, “I meant in the smoking line! Why, I’ve been losing sleep a-dreaming of your cooking. Every time the cook fills my cup with his insult to coffee I feel so lonesome that it hurts!”
“You want to look out, Tom!” laughingly warned the sheriff, “or you’ll get yourself disliked! When I don’t care for Margaret’s cooking I ain’t fool enough to say so, not a bit of it.”
“You’re a nice one to talk like that!” cried his wife. “You are just like a little boy on baking day–I can hardly keep you out of the kitchen. You bother me to death, and it is all I can do to cook enough for you!”
After the laugh had subsided and a steaming cup of coffee had been placed at the foreman’s elbow, Helen impatiently urged her brother to begin his story.
He lighted his cigar with exasperating deliberateness and then laughed softly: “Gosh! I’m getting to be a second fiddle around here. From morning to night all I hear is The Orphan. The first thing that hits me when I come home is, ‘Have you seen The Orphan?’ or, ‘Have you heard anything about him?’ The worst offenders are Miss Ritchie and Helen. They pester me nigh to death about him. But here goes:
“I reckon I’d better begin with Old John Taylor,” he slowly began. “I’ve been doing some quiet hunting lately, and in the course of it I ran across Old John down in Crockettsville. You remember him, don’t you, Tom? Yes, I reckoned you wouldn’t forget the man who got us out of that Apache scrape. Well, I had a good talk with him, and this is what I learned:
“About twenty years ago a family named Gordon moved into northwestern Texas and put up a shack in one of the valleys. There was three of them, father, mother, and a bright little five-year-old boy, and they brought about two hundred head of cattle, a few horses and a whole raft of books. Gordon bought up quite a bit of land from a ranch nearby at almost a song, and he never thought of asking for a deed–who would, down there in those days? There wasn’t a rancher who owned more than a quarter section; you know the game, Tom–take up a hundred and sixty acres on a stream and then claim about a million, and fight like the very devil to hold it. We’ve all done it, I reckon, but there is plenty of land for everybody, and so there is no kick. Well, he was shore lucky, for his boundary on two sides was a fair-sized stream that never went dry, and you know how scarce that is–a whole lot better than a gold mine to a cattleman.
“They got along all right for a while, had a tenderfoot’s luck with their cattle, which soon began to be more than a few specks on the plain, and he was very well satisfied with everything, except that there wasn’t no school. Old man Gordon was daffy on education, which is a good thing to be daffy over, and he was some strong in that line himself, having been a school teacher back East. But he took his boy in hand and taught him all he knew, which must have been a whole lot, judging from things in general, and the kid was a smart, quick youngster. He was plumb crazy about two things–books and guns. He read and re-read all the books he could borrow, and got so he could handle a gun with any man on the range.
“About five years after he had located, the ranchman from whom he bought his range and water rights went and died. Some of the heirs, who were not what you would call square, began to get an itching for Gordon’s land, which was improved by the first irrigation ditch in Texas. There was a garden and a purty good orchard, which was just beginning to bear fruit. It was pure, cussed hoggishness, for there was more land than anybody had any use for, but they must grab everything in sight, no matter what the cost. Trouble was the rule after that, and the old man was up against it all the time. But he managed to hold his own, even though he did lose a lot of cattle.