BLUE PETE, FRIEND AND LOVER
Close to the waters of the Tepee River, now returned to its normal sluggishness with the rapidity of mountain-fed streams, a man sat on his heels in a clump of spruce. There, two miles above the construction camp, the canyon fell away more gradually to the old river bottom, and the trees, encouraged by a century of immunity from floods, crept ever downward until they pressed to the very edge of the channel that held the waters of the Tepee fifty weeks of the year.
It was evening. Clear as lines on a white sheet the woods on the other side stood out in the dustless air against the flaming sky. The wide band of water that intervened gleamed in the setting sun, scarce revealing the existence of a current. Save for the low chatter of nesting birds and the gentle gurgle of water beneath the bank there was not a sound. The wind was against the camp. For all the solitary man could hear he might have been the only human within the northland.
About him was a furtiveness of the wilds, not guilty but protective. In such surroundings he had been born, there he had spent most of his days. You could read it in the crouch, the quiet, unwasted movements, the unconscious attitudes.
His face told much of his story. Those bright, darting eyes, crooked though they were, missed nothing; those sudden spaces of motionlessness, the peculiar, utterly still tilt of the head, were the natural impulses of one ever listening; the calm immobility of the dusky face was bred of a life of self-sufficiency, where muscle and eye were ever-active guardians. The coarse black hair that straggled from beneath a dirty Stetson, the high cheek bones, the swarthy complexion; these the outward signals of his half-breed origin. Yet from Stetson to high-heeled boots he was a cowboy, with the individual eccentricities in dress that scorned hairy chaps for leather, and walked with an arch of leg that craved the back of a horse to fill it.
The half breed was whittling, yet even in that simple recreation of the careless he bent to his surroundings. No crackling of hasty knife, no splashing about of shavings. Already one capacious pocket was filled with them, and those just made lay in a neat heap for hasty collection.
Often his hand held to listen, and always as he listened his eyes sought the shadows among the trees on the far shore. A scowl was twisting his face, of worry, not of anger; sometimes the knife bit into the soft stick with muscular response to his thoughts.
Presently he pushed the dirty Stetson back and ran a sleeve across his forehead, though it was not warm. Raising himself to his feet within the limited range of the clump of trees, he peered anxiously across the river, searching the opposite bank from the east to where it curved southward above the camp.
"Gor swizzle! Ef she don't come soon I gotta git over thar an' trail her. . . . An' that means givin' up the job . . . an' mebbe losin' out. Suthin' 's happened; she never took so long before. . . . But pshaw! what with Whiskers 'n' Juno—they'd take's good keer o' her as I cud myself."
He resumed his seat, but not the whittling, leaning against a tree with closed eyes. But he was not resting, for deep sighs broke from him, and his muscles were not loose.