HERVEY TAKES A TRICK
The night before, when Perris rode off from the ranchhouse
after defying Hervey and his men, his hoofbeats had
no sooner faded to nothing than the cowpunchers swarmed
out from the patio and into the open; as though they
wished to put their heads together and plan the battle
which the command of Hervey, to-night, had postponed.
All of that was perfectly clear to Marianne.
Her call brought Hervey back to her and she led him
at once off the veranda and to the living room where
she could talk secure of interruption or of being overheard.
There he slumped uninvited into the first easy chair
and sat twirling his sombrero on his finger-tips,
obviously well satisfied with himself and the events
of the evening. She herself remained standing,
carefully turning her back to the light so that her
face might, as much as possible, be in shadow.
For she knew it was pale and the eyes unnaturally
large.
Hervey must not see. He must not guess at the
torment in her mind and all the self-revelations which
had been pouring into her consciousness during the
past few moments. Greatest of all was one overshadowing
fact: she loved Red Jim Perris! What did
it matter that she had seen him so few times, and
spoke to him so few words? A word might be a
thunderclap; a glance might carry into the very soul
of a man. And indeed she felt that she had seen
that proud, gay, impatient soul in Jim. What
he thought of her was another matter. That he
found a bar between them was plain. But on the
night of his first arrival at the ranch, when she
sang to him, had she not felt him, once, twice and
again, leaning towards her, into her life. And
if they met once more, might he not come all the way?
But no matter. The thing now was to use all her
cunning of mind, all her strength of body, to save
him from imminent danger; and the satisfied glint
of Hervey’s eye convinced her that the danger
was imminent indeed. Why he should hate Jim so
bitterly was not clear; that he did so hate the stranger
was self-evident. The more she studied her foreman
the more her terror grew, the more her lonely sense
of weakness increased.
“Mr. Hervey,” she said suddenly.
“What’s to be done?”
Her heart fell. He had avoided her eyes.
“I dunno,” said Hervey. “You
seen to-night that I treated him plumb white.
I put my cards on the table. I warned him fair
and square. And that after I’d given him
a week’s grace. A gent couldn’t do
any more than that, I guess!”
He was right, in a way. At least, the whole populace
of the mountains would agree that he had given Red
Jim every chance to leave the ranch peaceably.
And if he would not go peaceably, who could raise a
finger against Hervey for throwing the man off by
force?
“But something more has to be done,”
she said eagerly. “It has to be
done!”
