“I’ve stood up for that man, and I’ve stood by him,” said Banjo Gibson, “but when a man shoots a friend of my friend he ain’t no friend of mine. I’m done with him; I won’t never set a boot-heel inside of his door ag’in.”

Banjo was in Mrs. Chadron’s south sitting-room, with its friendly fireplace and homely things, including Mrs. Chadron and her apparently interminable sock. Only now it was a gray sock, designed not for the mighty foot of Saul, but for Chance Dalton, lying on his back in the bunkhouse in a fever growing out of the handling that he had gone through at Macdonald’s place.

Banjo had arrived at the ranch the previous evening. He was sitting now with his fiddle on his knee, having gone through the repertory most favored by his hostess, with the exception of “Silver Threads.” That was an afternoon melody, Banjo maintained, and one would have strained his friendship and shaken his respect if he had insisted upon the musician putting bow to it in the morning hours.

“Yes,” sighed Mrs. Chadron, “it was bad enough when he just shot cowboys, but when it come to Chance we felt real grieved. Chance he ain’t much to 148 look at, but he’s worth his weight in gold on the ranch.”

“Busted his right arm all to pieces, they tell me?”

“Right here.” Mrs. Chadron marked across her wrist with her knitting needle, and shook her head in heavy sadness.

“That’ll kind of spile him, won’t it?”

“Well, Saul says it won’t make so much difference about him not havin’ the use of his hand on that side if it don’t break his nerve. A man loses confidence in himself, Saul says, most always when he loses the hand or arm he’s slung his gun with all his life. He takes the notion that everybody’s quicker’n he is, and just kind of slinges back and drops out of the game.”

“Do you expect Saul he’ll come back here with them soldiers he went after?”

“I expect he’ll more’n likely order ’em right up the river to clear them rustlers out before he stops or anything,” she replied, in high confidence.

“The gall of them low-down brand-burners standin’ up to fight a man on his own land!” Banjo’s indignation could not have been more pointed if he had been a lord of many herds himself.

“There comes them blessed girls!” reported Mrs. Chadron from her station near the window. Banjo crossed over to see, his fiddle held to his bosom like an infant. Nola and Frances were nearing the gate.

“That colonel girl she’s a up-setter, ain’t she?” Banjo admired.

“She’s as sweet as locus’ blooms,” Mrs. Chadron declared, unstintingly.

“But she’s kind of distant; nothing friendly and warm-hearted like your little Nola, mom.”

“She’s a little cool to strangers, but when she knows a body she comes out.”

Banjo nodded, drawing little whispers of melody from his fiddle-strings by fingering them against the neck.

“I noticed when she smiles she seems to change,” he said. “It’s like puttin’ bow to the strings. A fiddle’s a glum kind of a thing till you wake it up; she’s that way, I reckon.”

“Well, git ready for dinner—or lunch, as Nola calls it—they’ll be starved by this time, ridin’ all the way from the post in this chilly wind. I’m mighty afraid we’re goin’ to have some weather before long.”

“Can’t put it off much longer,” Banjo agreed, thinking of the hardship of being caught out in one of those sweeping blizzards, when the sudden cold grew so sharp that a man’s banjo strings broke in the tense contraction. That had happened to him more than once, and it only seemed to sharpen the pleasure of being snowed in at a place like Alamito, where the kitchen was fat and the hand of the host free. He smiled as he turned to the kitchen to wash his face and soap his hair.

They passed a very pleasant afternoon at the ranchhouse, in spite of Mrs. Chadron’s uneasiness on 150 account of their defenseless state. At that season Chadron and his neighbors could not draw very heavily on their scattered forces following the divided herds spread out over the vast territory for the winter grazing.

The twenty men gathered in a hurry-call by Chadron to avenge the defeat of Chance Dalton, who had in their turn been met and unexpectedly repulsed by the homesteaders, as Chadron had related in his own way to Colonel Landcraft, were lying in camp several miles up the river. That is, all that were left of them fit for duty after the fight. A good many of them were limping, and would limp for many a day.

They were waiting the arrival of the troops, which they expected with the same confidence Mrs. Chadron had held before Nola brought her an explanation that covered the confusion of refusal.

Neither of the young women knew of the tiff between the colonel and Chadron, for the colonel was a man who kept his family apart from his business. Chadron had not seen fit to uncover his humiliation to his daughter, but had told her that he was acting on the advice of Colonel Landcraft in sending to his friends in Cheyenne for men to put down the uprising of rustlers himself.

So there were comfortable enough relations between them all at the ranch as the day bent to evening and the red sunset changed to gray. Banjo played for them, as he had done that other afternoon, and sang 151 his sentimental songs in voice that quavered in the feeling passages. Chadron had not left anybody to guard the house, because he knew very well that Macdonald considered nothing beyond defense, and that he would as quickly burn his own mother’s roof above her head as he would set torch to that home by the riverside.

“Sing us that dreamy one, Banjo,” Nola requested, “the one that begins ‘Come sit by my side little—’ you know the one I mean.”

A sentimental tenderness came into Banjo’s face. He turned his head so that he could look out of the window into the thickening landscape beyond the corral gate, gray and mysterious and unfriendly now as a twilight sea. Nola touched Frances’ arm to prime her for the treat.

“Watch his face,” she whispered, smiling behind her hand.

Banjo struck the chords of his accompaniment; the sentimental cast of his face deepened, until it seemed that he was about to come to tears. He sang:

Banjo must have loved many ladies in many lands, for that is the gift and the privilege of the troubadour. Now he seemed calling up their vanished faces out of the twilight as he sang his little song. What 152 feeling he threw into the chorus, what shaking of the voice, what soft sinking away of the last notes, the whang of the banjo softened by palm across the strings!

The chorus:

There was a great deal more of that song, which really was not so bad, the way Banjo sang it, for he exalted it on the best qualities that lived in his harmless breast; not so bad that way, indeed, as it looks in print. Frances could not see where the joke at the little musician’s expense came in, although Nola was laughing behind his unsuspecting back as the last notes died.

Mrs. Chadron wiped her eyes. “I think it’s the sweetest song that ever was sung!” she said, and meant it, every word.

Banjo said nothing at all, but put away his instrument with reverent hands, as if no sound was worthy to come out of it after that sweet agony of love.

Mrs. Chadron got up, in her large, bustling, hospitable way, sentimentally satisfied, and withal grossly hungry.

“Supper’ll be about ready now, children,” she said, putting her sock away in its basket, “and while you two are primpin’ I’ll run down to the 153 bunkhouse and take some chicken broth to Chance that Maggie made him.”

“Oh, poor old Chance!” Nola pitied, “I’ve been sitting here enjoying myself and forgetting all about him. I’ll take it down to him, mother—Banjo he’ll come with me.”

Banjo was alert on the proposal, and keen to go. He brought Nola’s coat at her mother’s suggestion, for the evening had a feeling of frost in it, and attended her to the kitchen after the chicken broth as gallantly as if he wore a sword.

Mrs. Chadron came back from her investigations in the kitchen in a little while to Frances, who waited alone before the happy little fire in the chimney. She sighed as she resumed her rocking-chair by the window, and crossed her seldom idle hands over her comfortably inelegant front.

“It’ll be some little time before supper’s ready to set down to,” she announced regretfully. “Maggie’s makin’ stuffed peppers, and they’re kind of slow to bake. We can talk.”

“Of course,” Frances agreed, her mind running on the hope that had brought her to the ranch; the hope of seeing Macdonald, and appealing to him in pity’s name for peace.

“That thievin’ Macdonald’s to blame for Chance, our foreman, losin’ the use of his right hand,” Mrs. Chadron said, with asperity. “Did Nola tell you about the fight they had with him?”

“Yes, she told me about it as we came.”

“It looks like the devil’s harnessed up with that man, he does so much damage without ever gittin’ hurt himself. He had a crowd of rustlers up there with him when Chance went up there to trace some stock, and they up and killed three of our cowboys. Ain’t it terrible?”

“It is terrible!” Frances shuddered, withholding her opinion on which side the terror lay, together with the blame.

“Then Saul went up there with some more of the men to burn that Macdonald’s shack and drive him off of our land, and they run into a bunch of them rustlers that Macdonald he’d fetched over there, and two more of our men was killed. It looks like a body’s got to fight night and day for his rights now, since them nesters begun to come in here. Well, we was here first, and Saul says we’ll be here last. But I think it’s plumb scan’lous the way them rustlers bunches together and fights. They never was known to do it before, and they wouldn’t do it now if it wasn’t for that black-hearted thief, Macdonald!”

“Did you ever see him?” Frances asked.

“No, I never did, and don’t never want to!”

“I just asked you because he doesn’t look like a bad man.”

“They say he sneaked in here the night of Nola’s dance, but I didn’t see him. Oh, what ’m I tellin’ you? Course you know that—you danced with him!”

“Yes,” said Frances, neither sorry nor ashamed.

“But you wasn’t to blame, honey,” Mrs. Chadron comforted, “you didn’t know him from Adamses off ox.”

Frances sat leaning forward, looking into the fire. The light of the blaze was on her face, appealingly soft and girlishly sweet. Mrs. Chadron laid a hand on her hair in motherly caress, moved by a tenderness quite foreign to the vindictive creed which she had pronounced against the nesters but a little while before.

“I’m afraid you’re starved, honey,” she said, in genuine solicitude, thus expressing the nearest human sympathy out of her full-feeding soul.

“I’m hungry, but far from starving,” Frances told her, knowing that the confession to an appetite would please her hostess better than a gift. “When do you expect Mr. Chadron home?”

“I don’t know, honey, but you don’t need to worry; them rustlers can’t pass our men Saul left camped up the valley.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that; I’m not afraid.”

Mrs. Chadron chuckled. “Did I tell you about Nola?” she asked. Then, answering herself, before Frances could more than turn her head inquiringly; “No, of course, I never. It was too funny for anything!”

“What was it?” Frances asked, in girlish eagerness. Mrs. Chadron’s smile was reflected in her face as she sat straight, and turned expectantly to her hostess.

“The other evening when she and her father was comin’ home from the postoffice over at the agency they run acrosst that sneak Macdonald, afoot in the road, guns so thick on him you couldn’t count ’em. Saul asked him what he was skulkin’ around down this way for, and the feller he was kind of sassy about it, and tried to pass Nola and go on. He had the gall to tip his hat to her, just like she was low enough to notice a brand-burner! Well, she give him a larrup over the face with her whip that cut the hide! He took hold of her bridle to shove her horse out of the way so he could run, I reckon, and she switched him till he squirmed like a puppy-dog! I laughed till I nearly split when Saul told me!”

Mrs. Chadron surrendered again to her keen appreciation of the humor in that situation. Frances felt now that she understood the attitude of the cattlemen toward the homesteaders as she never had even sensed it before. Here was this motherly woman, naturally good at heart and gentle, hardened and blinded by her prejudices until she could discuss murder as a thing desired, and the extirpation of a whole community as a just and righteous deed.

There was no feeling of softness in her breast for the manful strivings of Alan Macdonald to make a home in that land, not so much for himself—for it was plain that he would grace a different world to far better advantage—but for the disinherited of the earth. To Mrs. Chadron he was a thing apart from her species, a horrible, low, grisly monster, to 157 whom the earth should afford no refuge and man no hiding-place. There was no virtue in Alan Macdonald; his fences had killed his right to human consideration.

In a moment Mrs. Chadron was grave again. She put out her hand in that gentle, motherly way and touched Frances’ hair, smoothing it from her forehead, pleased with the irrepressible life of it which sprung it back after the passage of her palm like water in a vessel’s wake.

“I let on to you a little while ago that I wasn’t uneasy, honey,” she said, “but I ain’t no hand at hidin’ the truth. I am uneasy, honey, and on pins, for I don’t trust them rustlers. I’m afraid they’ll hear that Saul’s gone, and come sneakin’ down here and burn us out before morning, and do worse, maybe. I don’t know why I’ve got that feelin’, but I have, and it’s heavy in me, like raw dough.”

“I don’t believe they’d do anything like that,” Frances told her.

“Oh, you don’t know ’em like we do, honey, the low-down thieves! They ort to be hunted like wolves and shot, wherever they’re found.”

“Some of them have wives and children, haven’t they?” Frances asked, thinking aloud, as she sat with her chin resting in her hand.

“Oh, I suppose they litter like any other wolves,” Mrs. Chadron returned, unfeelingly.

“Si a tu ventana llega una paloma,” sang Maggie in the kitchen, the snapping of the oven door coming 158 in quite harmoniously as she closed it on the baking peppers. Mrs. Chadron sighed.

“Tratala con cariÑa que es mi persona,” sounded Maggie, a degree louder. Mrs. Chadron sat upright, with a new interest in life apart from her uneasy forebodings about the rustlers. Maggie was in the dining-room, spreading the cloth. The peppers were coming along.

Somebody burst into the kitchen; uncertain feet came across it; a cry broke Maggie’s song short as she jingled the silver in place on the cloth. Banjo Gibson stumbled into the room where the low fire twinkled in the chimney, reeling on his legs, his breath coming in groans.

Maggie was behind him, holding the door open; the light from the big lamp on the dining-table fell on the musician, who weaved there as if he might fall. His hat was off, blood was in his eyes and over his face from a wound at the edge of his hair.

“Nola—Nola!” he gasped.

Mrs. Chadron, already beside him, laid hold of him now and shook him.

“Tell it, you little devil—tell it!” she screamed.

Frances, with gentler hand, drew Banjo from her.

“What’s happened to Nola?” she asked.

“The rustlers!” he said, his voice falling away in horror.

“The rustlers!” Mrs. Chadron groaned, her arms lifted above her head. She ran in wild distraction into the dining-room, now back to the chimney to 159 take down a rifle that hung in its case on a deer prong over the mantel.

“Nola, Nola!” she called, running out into the garden. Her wild voice came back from there in a moment, crying her daughter’s name in agony.

Banjo had sunk to the floor, his battered face held in his hands.

“My God! they took her!” he groaned. “The rustlers, they took her, and I couldn’t lift a hand!”

Frances beckoned to Maggie, who had followed her mistress to the kitchen door.

“Give him water; stop the blood,” she ordered sharply.

In a moment she had dashed out after Mrs. Chadron, and was running frantically along the garden path toward the river.