The Southerner shook his grizzled head. “No, I reckon not, Mr. Morse. Understand, I got nothin’ against you. The feud is wiped out, and I’ll make you no mo’ trouble. But it’s yore mine, and I 171 don’t feel like taking charity. I got enough anyhow.”
“It wouldn’t be charity. I’ve always felt as if you had a moral claim on an interest in the ‘Monte Cristo.’ If you won’t take this yourself, why not let me make out the papers to Miss Lee? You would feel then that she was comfortably fixed, no matter what happened to you.”
“Well, I’ll lay it befo’ her. Anyhow, we’re much obliged to you, Mr. Morse. I’ll tell you what, seh,” he added as an after-thought. “You come down and talk it over with ’Lissie. If you can make her see it that way, good enough.”
When Champ Lee turned his bronco’s head homeward he was more at peace with the world than he had been for a long time. He felt that he would be able to look his little girl in the face again. For the first time in a week he felt at one with creation. He rode into the ranch plaza humming “Dixie.”
On the day following that of Lee’s call, the mine-owner saddled his mare and took the trail to the half-way house. It was not until after the stage had come and gone that he found the chance for a word with Melissy alone.
“Your father submitted my proposition, did he?” Bellamy said by way of introducing the subject.
“Let’s take a walk on it. I haven’t been out of the house to-day,” she answered with the boyish downrightness sometimes uppermost in her.
Calling Jim, she left him in charge of the store, 172 caught up a Mexican sombrero, and led the way up the trail to a grove of live-oaks perched on a bluff above. Below them stretched the plain, fold on fold to the blue horizon edge. Close at hand clumps of cactus, thickets of mesquit, together with the huddled adobe buildings of the ranch, made up the details of a scene possible only in the sunburnt territory. The palpitating heat quivered above the hot brown sand. No life stirred in the valley except a circling buzzard high in the sky, and the tiny moving speck with its wake of dust each knew to be the stage that had left the station an hour before.
Melissy, unconscious of the charming picture she made, stood upon a rock and looked down on it all.
“I suppose,” she said at last slowly, “that most people would think this pretty desolate. But it’s a part of me. It’s all I know.” She broke off and smiled at him. “I had a chance to be civilized. Dad wanted to send me East to school, but I couldn’t leave him.”