Ronicky Doones Reward

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By Max Brand
1922

CHAPTER I
ENTER, BLONDY
The rider shot down the street, swung out of one stirrup, and rested all this weight on the other; then, when his pony flung back on braced legs, still traveling with great speed, he leaped down and ran up the steps to the hotel. His eyes were shining. He whipped off his hat and beat the dust from the crown against his leg, a great cloud of it rolling lazily down the wind.
"Boys," he cried, "what d'you think's up? Old Steve Bennett's new man has come to town!"
This announcement was greeted with such a roar of cheers that even Ronicky Doone turned his head. He was seated at the far end of the veranda, stretched low in his chair and so posed that the keen, hot sunshine fell upon all of him, saving one shoulder and his head, above which his arms were thrown for greater ease. He was taking a sun bath which might have set a lizard boiling, but Ronicky Doone enjoyed every instant of it. As he turned he literally flashed with color, turning from sunlight into shadow. For Ronicky was one of those dandies of the mountain desert who adopted the gaudiness of the Spanish-Indian habits. No band but one of carved gold could surround his sombrero. No ready-made boot could surround his ankles and slope with glove-fitted smoothness about his feet The red of his bandanna was glowing scarlet and of the purest silk. Silk also was his shirt, though of a heavier and coarser make. What vain, and almost womanly, vanity had made him have such gloves worked to order? The leather was as thin as a fine tissue, it seemed, and clothed his hand so that it hardly impeded the movement of the fingers in flexing. Even his cartridge belt, that symbol of all the grimmer side of the cow business, could not be allowed to remain as it had come from its maker. No, the webbing must needs be taken to some Mexican silver worker who wrought upon it, with infinite patience and skill, figures of birds and beasts and the strange flowers of cacti.
He stretched himself in the shadow now, as if he enjoyed the coolness fully as much as he had enjoyed the heat. He showed, as he turned, a rather lean, handsome face, dark of skin and hair and eyes and with a singularly youthful look. The strangeness of those youthful lines came out of the contrast with a certain weariness which, now and again, dulled his eyes. Just as one was about to write him down as a half-breed for his luxurious laziness and his olive skin, one caught a glimpse of that time-tired look in his eyes, and there was a suggestion of sadness beyond words.
It came and went in his face, however, so quickly that the observer could not be entirely sure. So he lounged in his chair, for he had appropriated to his uses the only long wicker chair in that vast county. It creaked with shrill voices whenever he stirred.
As for the rider who had dismounted in such haste to rush upon the hotel veranda with the tidings that old Steve Bennett's new man had come to town, he had stepped back, laughing and still dusting clouds out of his sombrero and nodding his head to affirm his tidings, as the cow-punchers yelled.
"It's the blond-headed kid," he repeated. "He's come in to look us over, maybe."
This remark provoked a yet heartier chorus of mirth, and Ronicky Doone thrust himself slowly into a more erect position.
"Who's the blond-headed kid?" he asked. "And who's Bennett?"
Now, as a rule, people west of the Rockies avoid direct questions and prefer to learn by inference and by patient waiting. He who bluntly asked to find out what he wishes to know, instead of trailing the information stealthily to the ground, is usually put down as a greenhorn; or else he is an established man with a known reputation, a man born and bred in the West and possessed of sufficient fame to free him from the danger of being put down as a blockhead.
The man to whom Ronicky Doone had put the question had never seen his face before that day, nevertheless, no matter to what other conclusions he may have come, he decided that the olive-skinned youth was not a tenderfoot. The smile of cold derision and aloofness faded instantly from his lips, and he returned: "You're new to these parts, I reckon?"
"I'm plumb new," admitted Ronicky.
"Bennett is the old gent tried to put Al Jenkins out of business thirty years back. But now Jenkins has come back after making a stake in Alaska gold. He sunk that gold right back in the oil range land, bought in the acres that Bennett had robbed