Frontier Stories | Page 8

the ranch
go to thunder, as long as there's a stranger to trapse round with; go on!"
Lance would have made some savage reply, but Flip interrupted. "You
know yourself, Dad, it's a blind trail, and as that 'ere constable that kem
out here hunting French Pete, couldn't find it, and had to go round by
the cañon, like ez not the stranger would lose his way, and have to
come back!" This dangerous prospect silenced the old man, and Flip
and Lance stepped into the road together. They walked on for some
moments without speaking. Suddenly Lance turned upon his
companion.
"You did n't swallow all that rot about the diamond, did you?" he asked,
crossly.
Flip ran a little ahead, as if to avoid a reply.
"You don't mean to say that's the sort of hog wash the old man serves
out to you regularly?" continued Lance, becoming more slangy in his ill
temper.
"I don't know that it's any consarn o' yours what I think," replied Flip,
hopping from boulder to boulder, as they crossed the bed of a dry
watercourse.
"And I suppose you've piloted round and dry-nussed every tramp and
dead-beat you've met since you came here," continued Lance, with

unmistakable ill humor. "How many have you helped over this road?"
"It's a year since there was a Chinaman chased by some Irishmen from
the Crossing into the brush about yer, and he was too afeered to come
out, and nigh most starved to death in thar. I had to drag him out and
start him on the mountain, for you couldn't get him back to the road. He
was the last one but you."
"Do you reckon it's the right thing for a girl like you to run about with
trash of this kind, and mix herself up with all sorts of roughs and bad
company?" said Lance.
Flip stopped short. "Look! if you're goin' to talk like Dad, I'll go back."
The ridiculousness of such a resemblance struck him more keenly than
a consciousness of his own ingratitude. He hastened to assure Flip that
he was joking. When he had made his peace they fell into talk again,
Lance becoming unselfish enough to inquire into one or two facts
concerning her life which did not immediately affect him. Her mother
had died on the plains when she was a baby, and her brother had run
away from home at twelve. She fully expected to see him again, and
thought he might sometime stray into their cañon. "That is why, then,
you take so much stock in tramps," said Lance.
You expect to recognize _him_?"
"Well," replied Flip, gravely, "there is suthing in that, and there's
suthing in _this_: some o' these chaps might run across brother and do
him a good turn for the sake of me."
"Like me, for instance?" suggested Lance.
"Like you. You'd do him a good turn, wouldn't you?"
"You bet!" said Lance, with a sudden emotion that quite startled him;
"only don't you go to throwing yourself round promiscuously." He was
half conscious of an irritating sense of jealousy, as he asked if any of
her _protégés_ had ever returned.

"No," said Flip, "no one ever did. It shows," she added with sublime
simplicity, "I had done 'em good, and they could get on alone. Don't
it?"
"It does," responded Lance grimly. "Have you any other friends that
come?"
"Only the Postmaster at the Crossing."
"The Postmaster?"
"Yes: he's reckonin' to marry me next year, if I'm big enough."
"And what do you reckon?" asked Lance earnestly.
Flip began a series of distortions with her shoulders, ran on ahead,
picked up a few pebbles and threw them into the wood, glanced back at
Lance with swimming mottled eyes, that seemed a piquant incarnation
of everything suggestive and tantalizing, and said:
"That's telling."
They had by this time reached the spot where they were to separate.
"Look," said Flip, pointing to a faint deflection of their path, which
seemed, however, to lose itself in the underbrush a dozen yards away,
"ther's your trail. It gets plainer and broader the further you get on, but
you must use your eyes here, and get to know it well afore you get into
the fog. Good-by."
"Good-by." Lance took her hand and drew her beside him. She was still
redolent of the spices of the thicket, and to the young man's excited
fancy seemed at that moment to personify the perfume and intoxication
of her native woods. Half laughingly, half earnestly, he tried to kiss her:
she struggled for some time strongly, but at the last moment yielded,
with a slight return and the exchange of a subtle fire that thrilled him,
and left him standing confused and astounded as she ran away. He