“Compromise! I’ve got nothing to compromise! I reckon that means that you want my two water holes and grazing land that join yours! Well, you can’t have them! But if you want any more fight over this cattle business you can have all you want, and whenever you want it!” And he turned on his heel and walked away. “I reckon they would like me to compromise,” he said to himself. “It would be lots of money in their pockets, and holes in mine. It’s a pity that a man with Wellesly’s grit should be such a hog!”
Wellesly shrugged his shoulders and climbed into the carriage that was to take him to Las Plumas. “I can’t help it,” he thought, “if he chooses to look at it that way. I told him the truth, and I put it in the kindest way. The little fellows are sure to go down before the big ones. That is the law that governs all commerce nowadays. He is bound to be eaten up, and he ought to have sense enough to see it. He’d save himself trouble and money if he would take my advice, compromise, and get out now with what he can. He can’t stop things from taking their natural course, and the more he fights the sooner he’ll go under. Of course, I don’t like to do anything against him, after he has saved my life, but my private sentiments can’t interfere with the company’s interests, and measures will have to be taken before next fall’s round-up to put a stop to this whole thing. I offered the olive branch, and he refused it, and now he can have all the war he wants. He is the head and backbone of all the opposition to us, and if we were rid of him the Fillmore Company could double its profits. I don’t doubt for a minute that he killed Will Whittaker, and if we could prove it that would solve the whole matter. He said he would submit to arrest and trial if we could prove that Will died a violent death. That means, of course, that nobody saw him commit the murder and that he has hid the body where he thinks it can’t be found.
“Then it must be very much out of the way, where he is sure nobody would think of looking for it. Probably it isn’t any where near the traveled road, the cattle ranges, nor the ranches in the foothills. It must be in some out of the way corner of the Fernandez plain. Whittaker says the searching parties have been all over this part of the country, so it must be farther up toward the north. The White Sands are up that way, I remember, and if a body were buried there, deep enough, it might as well be at the bottom of the sea. Yes, I think that’s a pretty good idea. Whittaker must send a searching party up to the White Sands as soon as he can get one together. If we can find that body—there’s adios to Emerson Mead and the fight against us. He’ll have to hang or go to the penitentiary for life.”
When Wellesly reached Las Plumas he found the town basking in peace and friendliness. Colonel Whittaker and Judge Harlin were enjoying a midday mint julep together over the bar of the Palmleaf saloon; John Daniels and Joe Davis were swapping yarns over a watermelon in the back room of Pierre Delarue’s store, while Delarue himself was laughing gleefully at their stories, and Mrs. Harlin was assisting Mrs. Daniels in preparations for the swellest card party of the summer, which the sheriff’s wife was to give that afternoon.
In the late afternoon Wellesly sat beside Marguerite Delarue on her veranda and told her the story of his abduction and of his fight, which he had come so near to losing, with the fiends of heat and thirst. He showed her the bent and bloody pin which had helped to liberate him from his captivity in the canyon and in soft and lover-like tones told her that he owed his life to her and that a lifetime of devotion would not be sufficient to express his gratitude. But he stopped just short of asking her to accept the lifetime of devotion. She was much moved and her tender blue eyes were misty with tears as she listened to the story of his sufferings. He thought he had never seen her look so sweet and attractive and so entirely in accord with his ideal of womanly sympathy. When he told her how Emerson Mead and his two friends had worked over him and by what a narrow margin they had saved him from severe illness and probably from death, her face brightened and she seemed much pleased. She asked some questions about Mead, and was evidently so interested in this part of the story that Wellesly, much to his surprise, felt a sudden impulse of personal dislike and enmity toward the big Texan. That night, as he sat at his window smoking and looking thoughtfully at the lop-sided moon rising over the Hermosa mountains, he was thinking about Marguerite Delarue and the advisability of asking her to marry him.
“Undoubtedly,” he owned to himself, “I think more of her than I usually do of women, because I never before cared a hang what their feelings were toward other men. I must have been mistaken in thinking there was anything between her and Mead. Her heart is as fresh as her face, and I can go in and take it, and feel there have been no predecessors, if I want to. Do I want to? I don’t know. She’s handsome and she’s got a stunning figure. Her feet aren’t pretty, but they would look better if she didn’t wear such clumsy shoes. Well, I’d see that she didn’t. She seems to be sweet and gentle and sympathetic, and the sort of woman that would be absorbed in her husband and his interests. She’s overfond of flattery, moral, mental and physical. Gets that from Frenchy, I suppose, for you can start him strutting like a rooster any time with a dozen words. But that isn’t much of a fault in a wife, after all, for if a fellow can only remember about it it’s the easiest way in the world to keep a woman happy. Well, I’ll think about it. There are no rivals in the field, and it will be time enough to decide when I make my next visit to Las Plumas.”
The next day he went to tell Marguerite good-bye and sat talking with her a long time upon her veranda. Las Plumas had noticed the frequency of his calls at the Delarue house on his last trip to the town, and when it saw him there again two days in succession it felt sure that a love story was going on under the roses and honeysuckles. The smoke of the engine which carried him away had scarcely melted on the horizon before people were saying to one another that it would be a splendid match and what a fine thing it was for Marguerite Delarue that so rich a man as Wellesly had fallen in love with her.
Judge Harlin at once drove out to Emerson Mead’s ranch in order that he might learn, from Mead’s own lips, exactly what had happened to Wellesly and what sort of a compact Mead had made with him concerning the finding of Will Whittaker’s body. They sat under the trees discussing Wellesly’s character, after Mead had told the whole story down to their parting at Muletown.
“By the way,” said Harlin, “they are saying, over in town, that Wellesly is stuck on Frenchy Delarue’s daughter, and that they are to be married next fall. She is a stunning pretty girl, and as good as she is pretty, but it seems to me rather odd for Wellesly to come down here to get a wife. He’s the sort of man you would expect to look for money and position in a wife, rather than real worth.”