The Fighting Edge. William MacLeod Raine

go,” she ordered, and a small brown fist clenched.

      “Not now, nor ever. You’re due to wear the Houck brand, girl.”

      She struck, hard, with all the strength of her lithe and supple body. Above his cheek-bone a red streak leaped out where the sharp knuckles had crushed the flesh.

      A second time he laughed, harshly. Her chin was still clamped in a vice-like grip that hurt. “I get a kiss for that, you vixen.” With a sweeping gesture he imprisoned both of the girl’s arms and drew the slim body to him. He kissed her, full on the lips, not once but half a dozen times, while she fought like a fury without the least avail.

      Presently the man released her hands and chin.

      “Hit me again if you like, and I’ll c’lect my pay prompt,” he jeered.

      She was in a passionate flame of impotent anger. He had insulted her, trampled down the pride of her untamed youth, brushed away the bloom of her maiden modesty. And there was nothing she could do to make him pay. He was too insensitive to be reached by words, no matter how she pelted them at him.

      A sob welled up from her heart. She turned and ran into the house.

      Houck grinned, swung to the saddle, and rode up the valley. June would hate him good and plenty, he thought. That was all right. He had her in the hollow of his hand. All her thoughts would be full of him. After she quit struggling to escape she would come snuggling up to him with a girl’s shy blandishments. It was his boast that he knew all about women and their ways.

      June was not given to tears. There was in her the stark pioneer blood that wrested the West in two generations from unfriendly nature. But the young virgin soul had been outraged. She lay on the bed of her room, face down, the nails of her fingers biting into the palms of the hands, a lump in the full brown throat choking her.

      She was a wild, free thing of the hills, undisciplined by life. Back of June’s anger and offended pride lurked dread, as yet indefinite and formless. Who was this stranger who had swaggered into her life and announced himself its lord and master? She would show him his place, would teach him how ridiculous his pretensions were. But even as she clenched her teeth on that promise there rose before her a picture of the fellow’s straddling stride, of the fleering face with its intrepid eyes and jutting, square-cut jaw. He was stronger than she. No scruples would hold him back from the possession of his desires. She knew she would fight savagely, but a chill premonition of failure drenched the girl’s heart.

      Later, she went out to the stable where Tolliver was riveting a broken tug. It was characteristic of the man that all his tools, harness, and machinery were worn out or fractured. He never brought a plough in out of the winter storms or mended a leak in the roof until the need was insistent. Yet he was not lazy. He merely did not know how to order affairs with any system.

      “Who is that man?” June demanded.

      He looked up, mildly surprised and disturbed at the imperative in the girl’s voice. “Why, didn’t I tell you, honey—Jake Houck?”

      “I don’t want to know his name. I want to know who he is—all about him.”

      Tolliver drove home a rivet before he answered. “Jake’s a cowman.” His voice was apologetic. “I seen you didn’t like him. He’s biggity, Jake is.”

      “He’s the most hateful man I ever saw,” she burst out.

      Pete lifted thin, straw-colored eyebrows in questioning, but June had no intention of telling what had taken place. She would fight her own battles.

      “Well, he’s a sure enough toughfoot,” admitted the rancher.

      “When did you know him?”

      “We was ridin’ together, a right long time ago.”

      “Where?”

      “Up around Rawlins—thataway.”

      “He said he knew you in Brown’s Park.”

      The man flashed a quick, uncertain look at his daughter. It appeared to ask how much Houck had told. “I might ’a’ knowed him there too. Come to think of it, I did. Punchers drift around a heap. Say, how about dinner? You got it started? I’m gettin’ powerful hungry.”

      June knew the subject was closed. She might have pushed deeper into her father’s reticence, but some instinct shrank from what she might uncover. There could be only pain in learning the secret he so carefully hid.

      There had been no discussion of it between them, nor had it been necessary to have any. It was tacitly understood that they would have little traffic with their neighbors, that only at rare intervals would Pete drive to Meeker, Glenwood Springs, or Bear Cat to dispose of furs he had trapped and to buy supplies. The girl’s thoughts and emotions were the product largely of this isolation. She brooded over the mystery of her father’s past till it became an obsession in her life. To be brought into close contact with dishonor makes one either unduly sensitive or callously indifferent. Upon June it had the former effect.

      The sense of inferiority was branded upon her. She had seen girls giggling at the shapeless sacks she had stitched together for clothes with which to dress herself. She was uncouth, awkward, a thin black thing ugly as sin. It had never dawned on her that she possessed rare potentialities of beauty, that there was coming a time when she would bloom gloriously as a cactus in a sand waste.

      After dinner June went down to the creek and followed a path along its edge. She started up a buck lying in the grass and watched it go crashing through the brush. It was a big-game country. The settlers lived largely on venison during the fall and winter. She had killed dozens of blacktail, an elk or two, and more than once a bear. With a rifle she was a crack shot.

      But to-day she was not hunting. She moved steadily along the winding creek till she came to a bend in its course. Beyond this a fishing-rod lay in the path. On a flat rock near it a boy was stretched, face up, looking into the blue, unflecked sky.

CHAPTER III

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PALS

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      He was a red-headed, stringy boy between eighteen and nineteen years old. His hands were laced back of the head, but he waggled a foot by way of greeting.

      “ ’Lo, June,” he called.

      “What you doin’?” she demanded.

      “Oh, jes’ watchin’ the grass grow.”

      She sat down beside him, drawing up her feet beneath the skirt and gathering the knees between laced fingers. Moodily, she looked down at the water swirling round the rocks.

      Bob Dillon said nothing. He had a capacity for silence that was not uncompanionable. They could sit by the hour, these two, quite content, without exchanging a dozen sentences. The odd thing about it was that they were not old friends. Three weeks ago they had met for the first time. He was flunkeying for a telephone outfit building a line to Bear Cat.

      “A man stayed up to the house last night,” she said at last.

      He leaned his head on a hand, turning toward her. The light blue eyes in the freckled face rested on those of the girl.

      Presently she added, with a flare of surging anger, “I hate him.”

      “Why?”

      The blood burned beneath the tan of the brown cheeks. “ ’Cause.”

      “Shucks! That don’t do any good. It don’t buy you anything.”

      She swung