The Young Runaway, page 5
"Hey, I found out what ailed her," he called to the car merchant.
"Ahuh? An' what was thet?"
"The locomotive ingredient failed to coincide with the perihelion," replied Andrew cheerfully.
"Aw, go-wan, you can't kid me," returned the other. "Bet you don't belong in them overalls."
"Nope. And you belong in Wall Street. Funny old world!...So long!"
On the way to the lodginghouse where Andrew had left his bags he stopped at a grocery store to buy some fruit and provisions. Soon he was on his way out of Omaha, his last stop being at a filling station on the outskirts of the city. Here he procured gas, oil and road maps. Then driving north on the highway, he realized that his new life had begun at last.
Something like a gray curtain had dropped in his consciousness to hide all of his past failures. He was alone, perfectly free, speeding along an open road into an unknown country. Fields, grazing cows, apple trees in bloom, flights of blackbirds, long strings of swallows on the telegraph wires were realities with which he came in close contact for the first time. Rush-lined ponds by the wayside where ducks paddled, wandering willow-bordered brooks, groves of oaks and elms, with other trees unfamiliar to him, met his eager eyes and brought back long-past summer visits in New England, and vague memories of an even remoter period.
Andrew's mood was one of quiet exultation. As he did not rush at the miles, neither did he inquire too avidly into this unfamiliar mood. He felt, however, as he visualized the ranges of the West, that he was undergoing a transformation. It was a transformation which he welcomed. He had pulled his stakes from the East and must transplant them somewhere in the West. But just how the change would take place did not concern Andrew greatly at this time: he was fascinated none the less by the initiation into the process through which he would be made over.
Toward noon he passed through a village that boasted flaring signs of gas stations at both entrance and exit. Somewhere, Andrew promised himself with satisfaction, he would be traveling beyond the smell of gasoline.
Andrew drove along at about twenty-five miles an hour. This snail's pace caused him to be hooted to the side of the road by other cars impatient to pass. One big flashy touring car honked at him impatiently, and as it got by a florid-faced driver in shirt sleeves, evidently a tourist, yelled something about junking a tin can.
"Drive on, mister," said Andrew, aloud. "You represent what I have turned my back on—speed, luxury, restlessness, idleness, high blood pressure—fleshpots of Egypt."
The hours passed by all too quickly for Andrew Bonning. Sunset caught him at the top of a hill, where he stopped to admire the scene. He drove on, presently, coasting down a winding hilly road, and at the bottom turned a curve under a wooded bank that accentuated the twilight.
Andrew caught sight of a camp fire, whose blaze disclosed two slouchy dark forms moving about it. His lights were not working so he moved slowly along the soft road. When about opposite the fire Andrew's sharp ears heard a cry. Then against the evening sky he saw a man and a boy silhouetted in violent action. Andrew stopped the car. He had come upon his first adventure.
"Let that boy go," shouted Andrew and jumped out of his car. Advancing upon the two he asked what the idea was. The man retreated, with a reply about only having fun.
"Oh—n-no sir," cried the youngster, in a voice that startled Andrew. "He meant to rob—me—and I don't know what—when he saw I was a girl!"
Andrew's exclamation of amazement was followed by a swift leap, a lunge and a blow, the power of which he had not calculated. Like a flung sack the man went over the bank out of sight. Andrew yelled for the tramp's comrades to make themselves scarce.
"Are you really a girl?" he queried, turning to the little figure in the middle of the road. Indeed, after peering down into a white oval face and great staring dark eyes he found that he need not have asked that question.
The girl admitted it and said she sometimes wished she were not. Andrew asked her a couple of pertinent questions, to learn that she did not belong thereabouts, and that she was a hitchhiker. As she stood there, looking up at him, Andrew Bonning found himself divided between two impressions—one of admiration and solicitation for a pretty slip of a girl who had been caught in a perilous predicament; the other a sudden bitter reminder of modern woman's wiles and the fact that even on a lovely Nebraska road at night he might expect to meet a girl who was only looking for a thrill. The second impression won out over the former. Andrew offered the girl a lift as far as Norfolk, and helping her in, resumed his seat at the wheel and went on.
He could see her dimly in the paling afterglow without appearing to notice her, and it was not easy to subdue his curiosity. She had slim brown hands, beautifully shaped, that clung nervously to the pack she held on her lap. He could feel that she wanted to speak to him, and finally she did, hazarding a remark that he evidently did not live in this section. Then, in the short interchange of conversation that followed, which he did not encourage because he resented his interest in a girl hiker, he was led to reveal his name. But she did not give hers, an omission Andrew added to her discredit.
At last they arrived at Norfolk. He called her attention to the fact and remarked her enthusiasm over the bright lights.
"You'll get another kick here," he replied, slowing down preparatory to a stop.
"Kick?" she echoed, turning those strange, luminous eyes upon him in doubt, not of the word, but of his intimation. Andrew could have sworn not only to her innocence, but to the fact that in the bright light he was gazing at the very prettiest girl he had ever seen in his life.
"Yes, kick," he replied curtly, annoyed with himself. Then he laughed. "Isn't that what you're after? Isn't that about all girls think of nowadays?"
She did not reply and seemed to have been affronted by his accusation.
"Please let me out here," she requested, pointing toward a modest looking hotel.
They stopped, and he stepped out to assist her. Then she said, hesitatingly: "Thank you, Mr. Bonning, for—for everything."
He replied that she was welcome and that he hoped she would have better luck on the next lap of her hike...
"You forgot to tell me your name."
"I didn't forget. I was—"
No doubt her faltering was due to Andrew's exposure of the letters M A D on the pack he lifted from the car, and at which he stared.
"Mad!" he spelled out, "Wyoming Mad?" with a laugh. "It suits you better than any name. And as you are an unforgettable kid I'll remember you by that...I hope we don't meet again. Good-by."
She stood there at the curb, holding her bag, her sweet face uplifted, puzzled, shy, slowly awakening to his rudeness. Andrew flung himself into the car and drove away, conscious of several conflicting feelings. He halted on the next corner at a gas station to fill up. Then he continued on to another hotel further down the street, where he put up for the night.
Andrew ate a dinner less frugal than had been his intention. But he gave very little thought to his plan of travel. He was in a curious state of mind. After dinner he walked twice past the hotel where the hiking girl had stopped, and nearly succumbed to a desire to go in to inquire for her. Then he went to a motion picture theater and stood in front of it for a while hoping like a fool that she might come along. He went in but soon left. After that he walked to and fro in the town's little park, and at length returned to his hotel and room.
"Well, my first adventure is a puzzler," soliloquized Andrew while he undressed. He had to own up to having received a thrill from his rescue of the little hiker with the big eyes. He had been shocked to meet a girl, hardly sixteen years old, he calculated, alone on a country road after dark, confessedly engaged upon what he considered to be a mad prank. He had been alienated by a recurrent bitterness which fostered the thought that she could not be anything else but a wayward girl, on adventure bent. It was this thought that had accounted for his sudden rudeness.
"Unforgettable kid? Nuts!" he concluded, turning out the light. "The world was full of alluring, seductive, irresistible females. What chance had a man? Wyoming Mad?...If this isn't the queerest deal I ever had. Suppose I meet that girl again? It'll be funny. Ha! Ha!...I don't think!...That kid's just no good!" Then Andrew was amazed to hear an inward voice damn him for a sophisticated, suspicious and embittered Easterner who could not recognize innocence when he met it.
"My God!" muttered Andrew aghast. "What would Connie or Gloria say to that? That I'm 'Wyoming Mad' myself." But his derision was not convincing. In this new voice there appeared to be the nucleus of a revolt.
At daylight Andrew was behind the wheel of his Ford, and he started with a speed which indicated that he wanted to leave something far behind. Twenty-five or thirty miles an hour, however, was about the limit his old battered car could produce and soon cars began to pass him. To save his life he could not resist trying to get a look at their occupants. But that was seldom possible, unless he deliberately stared as the cars sped by. All day long, he reflected, a trim little figure, between lifts, was probably hiking along that road. Her eyes haunted him, not because of their size, he imagined, or their strange glow, or their color—because he had no idea of their color—but because of the wistful look they held. Had he misjudged her? Had he placed her in a class with all the neckers, flirts and thrill seekers, just because he had found her on a lonely road, waylaid by tramps? It did seem unjust, he had to admit. There was some unquenchable chivalry in Andrew Bonning which had often been the jest of his sportive acquaintances.
Andrew made no stop that day, except at a crossroad refueling station. Toward evening he had dinner at a little wayside hamlet, and then he drove on a few miles to camp in his car. All the next day engine trouble occupied his attention, and gave him enough tinkering to satisfy a long-felt want. It halted him, too, at Sidonia for a minor repair.
He was standing in front of the one hotel, watching the traffic and awaiting the dinner hour, when a car gingerly approached the curb.
The driver was the girl who had been causing him so much speculation. Her companion appeared to be a young local chap to whom this was an auspicious occasion. As Andrew recognized the hitchhiker, she simultaneously looked up to meet his gaze. Then a sudden light, a half-break of a smile, was blotted out in a crimson blush.
Andrew strode into the hotel, somehow glad that she had had the grace to blush. Caught with the goods, he thought scornfully! She had picked up this country bumpkin on the road and had ended a short or long, probably long, ride by driving his car, no doubt to allow him freer use of his arms. It made Andrew slightly sick, because that queer streak of chivalry in him had almost won a battle in her behalf. He wished she would appear in the dining room before he left. He wanted just one more look at her.
Andrew, however, had given up hope and had almost finished his meal when she did come in, escorted by the young fellow who was very overceremonious and obviously self-conscious. Andrew, considerably surprised at her appearance, could only stare.
She had changed the masculine hiking garb for a pretty blue dress that was exceedingly feminine. She had trim shapely legs and little feet on which were patent-leather slippers. Her dainty head, carried high, was bare. The wavy, golden hair caught and held the light. All this Andrew saw in a glance before her face transfixed him. Its opal hue, just hinting of tan, took on a little warmth and color. As she passed she spoke, impudently he thought.
"Howdy, Hiram Perkins. Hope you heerd from Mizzourie."
"Good evening, Wyoming Mad," he returned, rising and bowing.
Her escort seated her at a nearby table, and evidently was concerned by the exchange of greetings between her and Andrew. She made some casual explanation, with a deprecatory motion of her hand that seemed to satisfy her escort.
"Knows her stuff," muttered Andrew to himself, and then, drawing a deep breath, as a man about to undergo an ordeal, he looked deliberately at her. It was to find that she was already gazing fixedly at him. For a long moment their eyes held their gaze. Andrew had an odd thought—if those wonderful eyes had expressed the least softness, the least hint of yielding, he would not have been accountable for himself. All Andrew could detect, however, was pride and disdain. And he caught these impressions only as she averted her face.
Then he had his opportunity and he made the most of it. Pretty? Beautiful? Such terms did not do her justice. She was lovely. Engrossed with his scrutiny Andrew had not at once grasped one dismaying fact. She was flirting outrageously with her escort. She never deigned to give Andrew another glance. Again his vision of her became distorted, though her actions were merely those of a gay young girl having an enjoyable dinner with a newly made acquaintance. Andrew knew that, but his biased mind would not accept it. He imagined them in the shadowy park—nay—riding along a country road in the moonlight to some lonesome spot. He shook his head angrily. Suddenly Andrew found himself hating the girl.
Abruptly he arose, leaving his dessert untasted, and stalked out. "One born every minute!" he muttered, and then in bitter conflict with his skepticism: "Connie, old girl, I guess you ruined the makings of a square fellow!" He got his car, and after driving half the night, he stopped to watch the moon go down over the western horizon.
A WEEK later Andrew Bonning made camp outside a little Wyoming town called Split Rock. This was on the Old Oregon Trail, which he had followed all the way from Torrington, on the Nebraska line.
Many places along the famous old trail of the trappers, explorers, Indian fighters and pioneers had interested him and almost persuaded him to stop for a spell. But satisfying as had been the rolling sagebrush prairie, Andrew had continued on his way in answer to a call he could not define. On clear mornings he could see the mountains white-toothed in the blue. And they lured him. The Platte River saw three of his camps before he left it at Alcova. He passed over the Rattlesnake Range, and as he drove into Split Rock one golden sunset he saw the Granite Mountains on his right and the Green Mountains on his left. And westward, a hundred miles more or less, stood the Continental Divide, dim yet rosy-white in the sunset, the great wall of the Rockies.
Andrew left his car in a thicket not far off the road, deciding to walk the half mile into Split Rock for the exercise. Satisfying himself that it could not readily be detected by passersby, he proceeded into the town to make some much needed purchases.
By this time Andrew had become accustomed to the Wyoming villages along the trail. Casper had been a fairly large place. The other towns from central to western Wyoming held little of interest for the wayfarer. Some of them appeared to be no more than the old wide streeted, board fronted frontier towns modernized principally by the gasoline stations of the present. He found that Split Rock leaned a little more toward the past.
Indeed, his observing eyes detected more cowboys than truck drivers or garage attendants. He listened to snatches of their conversation satisfying for the hundredth time his avid pleasure in things western. Deciding to make inquiries on the morrow about the range country hereabouts he returned to his car.
By this time it was quite dark. A wonderful light still glowed in the west, whence came a cold breeze, keen and penetrating, sweet with a tang of the mountain and the range. Andrew breathed deeply of it, and reveled in the lonesomeness of his surroundings. Every camp of late had been visited by coyotes to his growing delight. These wild prairie dogs could not bark and yelp and mourn and ki-yi too much for him. He even threw scraps of his meals to the stealthy prowlers.
He had collected a bundle of dry sticks and bits of sagebrush when a clip-clop of hoofs drew his attention. A rider was passing on the road. He halted opposite Andrew, lighted a cigarette, then rode on a little further, only to come back. It was evident that he was waiting for someone. Andrew had no mind to disclose his hiding place, so he sat down to watch and listen.
The rider appeared to be impatient. Andrew heard his spurs clinking. Evidently he smoked his cigarette half through, then lit another. His spirited horse would not stand still. And the night was so still, the air so clear that this rider's voice carried to Andrew's vibrant ears.
"You dawggone ornery hawse—cain't you stand on yore fo' feet?" drawled the rider. After another cigarette he appeared to start, to crouch and then to stare up the road toward the town. Andrew heard rapid footsteps approaching from that direction.
"Thet you, McCall?" queried the rider, in a sharp tone which carried far.
"Yes, it's me," came the answer.
"Git off the road over heah," commanded the rider, heading his horse toward the thicket that screened Andrew's car.
Rider and pedestrian met half way and continued as far as a large rock scarcely thirty feet from where Andrew crouched behind a clump of low sagebrush. There the two halted, and the unmounted one hunched himself up on the rock.
"Tex, I been lookin' fer you at my ranch," he said. "Jest happened to be in town today an' got your word."
"Wal, I shore would have rid down on you pronto, if you hadn't showed up tonight," retorted the rider, curtly. "Mac, I want some money."
"Hyar's all I got," returned the other hastily, and passed his hand up to the horseman. "You'll have to wait till I ship some more cattle."
"Ahuh! Always waitin'," growled the younger man. "I cain't see. How much you got heah?"
"Two-hundred-odd."
"Wal, I'll let you off on thet. But only fer a while. I reckon I'm not long fer this range. I got to pull oot, Mac, an' it's mostly yore cattle deals thet's chasin' me."
"Aw, Texas, thet ain't so. You was talked of before you ever forked a hoss fer me."
"Shore I was. But fer makin' love an' throwin' a gun—not fer burnin' yore brand on calves," snapped the cowboy, in a voice so cold and strange to Andrew that it sent shivers up his spine.
"Have it your own way, Tex. I don't want to argue with you. But I heerd Sheriff Slade hang suspicion on you. Right before half a dozen cattlemen, one of which was Jeff Little, who you rode fer once."
"Ahuh. An' what did Jeff say?"
