Mary Aikens often looked back on those days now with a sad smile. Jim was still the stunning big chap—at times. At other times—— But that was the effect of Western haze. In the two years of their married life she had never become really acquainted with her husband. At the very moment—it happened again and again—when the sympathy she craved was lifting the latch, Jim Aikens kicked it from the door with brutal foot and rode madly off on the southern trail on one of his periodical sprees in town.
The ranch-house stood half way down a long slope that stretched northward to the Red Deer River. A half-mile away, across a valley that might have been a garden in a wilderness, rose a sheer line of jagged cliffs, before which ran the tumbling river. Up and down the stream, on both sides of it, sometimes crowding the current, sometimes set back of a deep valley filled with weirdly protuberant mounds of rock from about which the soft clays had been washed by the rains and currents of ages, the cliffs were repeated. Only at long intervals did the banks slope to the river as they did before the H-Lazy Z ranch buildings, and that only on the southern shore. Elsewhere the Red Deer rushed through hundreds of miles of a hundred-and-fifty-foot canyon.
Two hundred yards from the house—Dakota Fraley had insisted on the distance—the cook-house, bunk-house, stables and corrals began, and spread out over the eastern end of the valley in conventional disarray, the bottom corral touching the rough beach that there lined the river. Dakota had no stomach for skirts about the place, especially the kind he imagined his wild master would bring. In that he failed to understand Cockney.
Before the ranch-house door Dakota met his partner retreating from Mary's tears. Behind the foreman two or three cowboys lounged in the open doorway. Three others rolled off toward the stables.
Cockney stood still, watching them with lowering eyes.
"Why the samhill, Dakota, do we need such a bunch of roughnecks about the place?" he exploded. "Every time I see them they make me think of a gang of Whitechapel foreigners fresh from Russia, or Hungary, or Poland. If they hadn't guns on their hips, there'd be knives in their bootlegs or stilettos up their sleeves."
Dakota laughed in a nasty way.
"Best bunch of cowpunchers in Alberta—in America, for that matter. Look at the ranch they've made for you."
Cockney made a wry face. "Gad! I could do without some of the dollars for cheerier countenances about me. They look as if they'd murdered their mothers and were looking for the rest of the family."
"What's it matter to you," Dakota growled, "so long's they fix you up for your gambling and boozing? You better cut butting in on personnel. That's my third of the partnership."