Part 14

"Come, Jim, be reasonable," he said, laying his hand familiarly on Blake's shoulder; "Bob Carlton saved my life once and now we're quits."

"He did? Well, that's the only good thing the sneakin' skunk ever done! Why didn't you tell us that before?"

"Because you didn't give me time. You would have hung him first and then listened to what I had to say afterwards."

"Hum!" ejaculated Blake, "I guess you're about right there."

"Boys," continued Dick, turning to the others, "I'm mighty sorry to have spoiled your fun, but I'll see that you don't regret your visit to Santa Fé. Come into the house and I'll tell how it happened. The cigars and the drinks are on me!"

"Well, as I said before, Dick," exclaimed Blake, "you're the cussedest, most contrariest feller I ever seen. You got the best of us this time, but I guess we'll about get even with you on the drinks before we're through--won't we, boys?" and amid a chorus of laughter and good-humored exclamations, the men, followed by Dick and Blake, crowded into the house.

"What a country!" gasped Mrs. Forest after the last of them had disappeared. "Have people here nothing to do but murder one another?" she asked in a despairing voice, sniffing vigorously at the bottle of salts her maid handed her.

"Ze Saints be praised, zey do not!" cried the Señora who by this time had regained her composure. "Such a zing 'as happened nevair before."

"They are a little more free-handed out here than we are," remarked the Captain. "Where we come from, people allow a man to go free after exhausting all the resources of the law, while here, they quietly hang a scoundrel when they catch him without making any fuss about it. It's much simpler, you know."

"Beautiful!" echoed the Colonel.

VIII

After much persuasion and further caustic remarks on the country and a people whose chief occupation seemed to be that of shooting and hanging one another, Mrs. Forest was finally induced to enter the house, leaving Blanch and Bessie seated on the bench beneath the cottonwood tree where they had collapsed, the result of the shock their nerves had sustained.

Their presence seemed as incongruous with their surroundings as that of some delicate hot-house flower blooming in the midst of the desert.

"Could you have believed it if you hadn't seen it?" asked Bessie, the first to break the silence. "Is it all real, or are we still dreaming? I wish somebody would pinch me, my wits are so scattered," and she passed her hand across her eyes as though to dispel some dreadful nightmare.

"I never imagined," replied her companion in a vague uncertain tone of voice, like one laboring under the influence of a narcotic, "that such people existed anywhere outside of books, and yet the samples to which we have just been introduced make characters of fiction look tame in comparison. Oh, dear!" she burst forth, "who could have imagined it?"

"What a transition--I can't understand it!" said Bessie. "I feel like one who has just dropped from the sky to earth."

"No wonder! I, too, am still seeing stars. Jack certainly must be mad, else how could he have ever picked out such a forsaken land whose inhabitants seem to consist chiefly of ruffians and black women?"

"It's simply incomprehensible after all he's seen of the world," replied Bessie. "Did you notice how he enjoyed our discomfiture? How it was all he could do to keep from laughing in our faces?"

"The brute!" cried Blanch.

"If we had only realized to what we were coming--" Bessie began.

"Oh, it's too late to say that!" interrupted Blanch. "Now that I'm here, I'm not going to turn back; I'm going to see this thing through. And what's more," she added with unmistakable emphasis, "I'm going to see that woman! Have you noticed any one that looks like her?" she asked cautiously, lowering her voice and looking about suspiciously, as she rose from her seat.

"Pshaw!" laughed Bessie, also rising and shaking the dust from her skirt. "You've scarcely talked of anything else since we left home. Why, I really believe you are beginning to be jealous of this creature of your imagination. It's too absurd to suppose that Jack--"

"Is it any more impossible than the people and things we have just encountered?"

"Nonsense! Jack in love with some half-breed--that dusky beauty in breeches who rides astride, and whom he happened to mention to us? It's preposterous!"

"My dear," resumed Blanch calmly, "don't deceive yourself. My woman's intuition tells me that I'm right. Jack's notion of beginning a new life is all nonsense--there's a deeper reason than that for this change in him. Take my word for it, there's a woman at the bottom of it for what possible attraction could this horrid country and its people have for a civilized being?"

"I can't believe it," answered Bessie; "you know how fastidious Jack is. Besides it was only a fleeting glance that he caught of the woman he mentioned--and that in the twilight."

"A glance is quite enough for a fool to fall in love with a phantom," retorted Blanch warmly, thrusting the ground vigorously with the point of her sunshade.

"They say," she went on, "that these dark beauties of the South possess a peculiar fascination of their own--that they have a way of captivating men before they realize what's happening. They sort of hypnotize them, you know."