Meanwhile he appropriated one horse that had not been in the corral and trotted homeward, eaten by chagrin and beside himself with impotent fury.
Bud and Julie had found this out the day of their talk concerning Lester, when they forded the stream on horses and asked for Bissell. Under the circumstances Bud developed a genius for inspiration that was little short of marvelous.
“What’s the use of riding all the way home and having a grand row with your father?” he asked. “Why not go over to Rattlesnake, where there’s a sky-pilot, and be married? Then we’ll go home, and there can’t be any row, because there will only be one party in the mood for it.”
But the girl demurred. It was cruel to her father and mother, she said, not to have them present on the greatest day of her life. She allowed 303 it was mighty ungrateful after all they had done for her. Then Bud took her hand in his and told her his principal reasons.
“I’m a business man, honey, and I’ve got to start north after Simmy and the sheep in three or four days,” he said. “Shearing is late now, but I guess we can make it. This trouble has set me behind close to fifteen thousand dollars, and everything is in a critical state.
“I know it don’t sound much like a lover, but as soon as we get on our feet we’ll take a honeymoon to Japan that will make you think I’d never heard of a sheep.
“You want your mother and father in on the joy, I know, but it doesn’t seem to me there can be much joy with nine or ten men sitting around waiting for their necks to be stretched. Does it to you?”
“No,” said Julie, and shuddered.
“Then come along over to Rattlesnake and be married. Then we’ll ride back to the Bar T, so you can see your folks, and I can see Caldwell. We can be through and away before anything is really done about the rustlers.”
So it was arranged, and the two were married by an Episcopal clergyman who had a surplice but no cassock, and whose trouser-legs 304 looked very funny moving about inside the thin, white material—and Julie nearly laughed out loud.