Jim Allen was the sole owner and proprietor of Allen Hacienda. His ranch, the Bar One, stretched for miles up and down the Sweetwater Valley. Bounded on the east and west by the foot-hills, the tract was one of the garden spots of Arizona. Southward lay the Sweetwater Ranch, owned by Jack Payson. Northward was the home ranch of the Lazy K, an Ishmaelitish outfit, ever at petty war with the other settlers in the district. It was a miscellaneous and constantly changing crowd, recruited from rustlers from Wyoming, gamblers from California, half-breed outlaws from the Indian Territory; in short, "bad men" from every section of the Western country. They had a special grudge against Allen and Payson, whom they held to be accountable for the sudden disappearance, about a year before, of their leader, Buck McKee, a half-breed from the Cherokee Strip. However, no other leader had arisen equal to that masterful spirit, and their enmity expressed itself only in such petty depredations as changing brands on stray cattle from the Bar One and Sweetwater Ranches, and the slitting of the tongues of young calves, so that they would be unable to feed properly, and, as a result, be disowned by their mothers, whereupon the Lazy K outfit would slap its brand on them as mavericks.
Allen was a Kentuckian who had served in the Confederate Army as one of Morgan's raiders, and so had received, by popular brevet, the title of colonel. At the close of the war he had come to Arizona with his young wife, Josephine, and had founded a home on the Sweetwater. He was now one of the cattle barons of the great Southwest. Prosperity had not spoiled him. Careless in his attire, cordial in his manner, he was a man who was loved and respected by his men, from the newest tenderfoot to the veteran of the bunkhouse. His wife, however, was not so highly regarded, for she had never been able to recognize changes in time or location and so was in perpetual conflict with her environment. She attempted to make the free and independent cowboys of the Arizona plains "stand around" like the house servants of the Kentucky Bluegrass; and she persisted in the effort to manage her husband by the feminine artifice of weeping. In days of her youth and beauty this had been very effective, but now that these had passed, it was productive only of good-humored raillery from him, and mirth from the bystanders.
"No wonder Jim has the finest ranch in Arizony," the cowboys were wont to say, "with Josephine a irrigatin' it all the time."
Allen Hacienda was certainly a garden spot in that desert country. The building was of the old Mexican style, an architecture found, by centuries of experience, to be suited best to the climate and the materials of the land. The house was only one story in height. The rooms and outbuildings sprawled over a wide expanse of ground. The walls were of native stone and adobe clay; over them clambered grape-vines. In front of the home Mrs. Allen had planted a garden. A 'dobe wall cut off the house from the corral and the bunk-house. A heavy girder spanned the distance from the low roof to the top of the barrier. Latticework, supporting a grape-vine, formed, with a girder, a gateway through which one could catch from the piazza a view of a second cultivated plot. Palms and flowering cacti added color and life to the near prospect. Through the arbor a glimpse of the Tortilla Mountains, forty miles away, held the eye. The Sweetwater, its path across the plains outlined by the trees fringing its banks, flowed past the ranch. Yucca palms and sahuaroes threw a scanty shade over the garden.
Shortly after the arrival of the Allens in Arizona they were blessed with a daughter, the first white child born in that region. They waited for a Protestant clergyman to come along before christening her, and, as such visits were few and far between, the child was beginning to talk before she received a name. From a "cunning" habit she had of repeating last words of questions put to her, her father provisionally dubbed her Echo, which name, when the preacher came, he insisted upon her retaining.
As Echo grew older, in order that she might have a companion, Colonel Allen went to Kentucky and brought back with him a little orphan girl, who was a distant relative of his wife. Polly Hope her name was, and Polly Hope she insisted on remaining, though the Allens would gladly have adopted her.
Colonel Allen trained the girls in all the craft of the plains, just as if they were boys. He taught them to ride astride, to shoot, to rope cattle. They accompanied him everywhere he went, cantering on broncos by the side of his Kentucky thoroughbred. Merry, dark-eyed, black-haired Echo always rode upon the off side, and saucy Polly, with golden curls, blue eyes, and tip-tilted nose, upon the near. The ex-Confederate soldier dubbed them, in military style, his "right and left wings." As the three would "make a raid" upon Florence, the county town, the inhabitants did not need to look out of doors to ascertain who were coming, for the merriment of the little girls gave sufficient indication. "Here comes Jim Allen ridin' like the destroyin' angel," said young Sheriff Hoover, on one of these occasions, "I know him by the rustlin' of his 'wings.'"
The household was again increased a few years later by the generous response of the Allens to an appeal from a Children's Aid Society in an Eastern city to give a home to two orphaned brothers, Richard and Henry Lane. "Dick" and "Buddy" (shortened in time to Bud), as they were called, being taken young, quickly adapted themselves to their new environment, and by the time they arrived at manhood had proved themselves the equals of any cowboy on the range in horsemanship and kindred accomplishments. Dick, the elder brother, was a steady, reliable fellow, modest as he was brave, and remarkably quick-witted and resourceful in emergencies. He gave his confidence over readily to his fellows, but if he ever found himself deceived, withdrew it absolutely. It was probably this last characteristic that attracted to him Echo Allen's especial regard, for it was also her distinguishing trait. "You have got to act square with Echo," her father was wont to say, "for if you don't you'll never make it square with her afterward."
Bud was a generous-hearted, impetuous boy, who responded warmly to affection. He repaid his elder brother's protecting care with a loyalty that knew no bounds. The Colonel, who was a strict disciplinarian, frequently punished him in his boyhood for wayward acts, and the little fellow made no resistance—only sobbed in deep penitence. Once, however, when Uncle Jim, as the boys and Polly called him, felt compelled to apply to rod to Dick—unjustly, as it afterward appeared—Bud burst into a tempest of passionate tears, and, leaping upon the Colonel's back, clung there clawing and striking like a wildcat until Allen was forced to let Dick go. It is shrewdly indicative of the Colonel's character that not only did he refrain from punishing Bud on that occasion, but, when floggings were subsequently due the little fellow, laid on the rod less heavily out of regard for the loyalty to his brother he had then displayed.
This attack also won the admiration of Polly Hope, who was something of a spitfire herself. A little jealous of Dick for the chief place he held in Bud's affection, she openly claimed the younger brother as her sweetheart, and attempted to constitute him her knight—though with repeated discouragements, for Bud was a bashful lad, and, though he had a true affection for the girl, boylike concealed it by a show of indifference.
The tender relations of these boys and girls persisted naturally into young manhood and womanhood. No word of love passed between Dick and Echo until that time when the "nesting impulse," the desire to have a home of his own, prompted the young man to go out into the world and win his fortune. For a year he had acted as foreman of the Allen ranch, working in neighborly cooperation with Jack Payson, of Sweetwater Ranch, a man of about his own age. The two young men became the closest of comrades. When the fever of adventure seized upon Lane, and he became dissatisfied with the plodding career of a wage-earner, Payson insisted on mortgaging Sweetwater Ranch for three thousand dollars and in lending Dick the money for a year's prospecting in the mountains of Sonora, Mexico, in search of a fabulous rich "Lost Mine of the Aztecs."
Traditions of lost mines are plentiful in Arizona and northern Mexico. First taken up by the Spanish invaders of three hundred years ago from the native Indians, they have been passed down to each subsequent influx of white men. The directions are always vague. The inquirer cannot pin his informant down to any definite data. Over the mountains always lies the road. Hundreds of lives have been sacrificed, and cruelty unparalleled practised upon innocent men women, and children, by gold-seekers in their lust for conquest. Prosperous Indian villages have been laid waste, and whole bands of adventurers have gone into the desert in the search of these mines, never to return.
When the time for Lane's departure came Echo wept at the thought of losing for so long a time the close companion of her childhood and the sympathetic confidant of her youthful thoughts and aspirations. Dick, in whom friendship for Echo had long before ripened into conscious love, took her tears as evidence that she was similarly affected toward him, and he allowed all the suppressed passion of his nature full vent in a declaration of love. The girl was deeply moved by this revelation of the heart of a strong man made tender as a woman's by a power centering in her own humble self, and, being utterly without experience of the emotion even in its protective form of calf-love, which is the varioloid of the genuine infection, she imagined through sheer sympathy that she shared his passion. So she assented with maidenly reserve to his plea that she promise to marry him when he should return and provide a home for her. Her more cautious mother secured a modification of this pledge by limiting the time that Echo should wait for him to one year. If at the expiration of that period Lane did not return to claim her promise, or did not write making satisfactory arrangements for continuance of the engagement, Echo was to be considered free to marry whom she chose.
Soon after Lane's departure Mrs. Allen persuaded the Colonel to send Echo east to a New England finishing-school for girls, where her mother hoped that her budding love for Lane might be nipped in the frigid atmosphere of intellectual culture, if not, indeed, supplanted by a saving interest in young men in general, and, perhaps, in some particular scion of a blue-blooded Boston family.
The plan succeeded in part only. The companionship of her schoolfellows, her music and art-lessons, her books (during the limited periods allotted to serious study and reading), and, above all, her attrition at receptions with another order of men than that she had known in the rough, uncultured West, occupied her mind so fully that poor Dick Lane, who was putting a thought of Echo Allen in every blow of his pick, received only the scraps of her attention.
Dick had few opportunities to mail a letter, and none of them for receiving one. Unpractised in writing, his epistolary compositions were crude in the extreme, being wholly confined to bald statements of fact. Had he been as tender on paper as he was in his words and accents when he kissed away her tears at parting, her regard for him would have had fuel to feed on and might have kindled into genuine love. As it was, she was forced to admit that, in comparison, with the brilliant university men with whom she conversed, Dick Lane, intellectually, was as quartz to diamond.
On the other band, she contrasted Dick in the essential point of manliness most favorably with the male butterflies of society that hovered around her. What one of them was so essentially chivalrous as the Western man; so modest, so self-sacrificing, so brave and resolute and resourceful? Dick Lane, or Jack Payson, for that matter, in all save the adventitious points of education and culture was the higher type of manhood, and Jack, at least, if not poor Dick, could hold his own in mental and artistic perception with the brightest, most cultured of Harvard graduates.
At the end of the year she came back home to await Dick's return from the wilds of Mexico. There was great anxiety about his safety, for Geronimo, attacked by Crook in the Apache stronghold of the Tonto Basin, had escaped to the mountains of northwestern Mexico with his band of fierce Chiricahuas.
Now Dick Lane had not been heard from in this region. When he neither made appearance nor sent a message upon the day appointed for his return, his brother, Bud, was for setting out instantly to find him and rescue him if he were in difficulties.
Then it was that Echo Allen discovered the true nature of her affection for her lover, that it was sisterly regard, differing only in degree, but not in kind, from that which she felt for his brother. She joined with Polly in opposing Bud's going, urging his recklessness as a reason. "You are certain to be killed," she said, "and I cannot lose you both." Jack Payson, for whom Bud was working, then came forward and offered to accompany him, and keep him with bounds. Again there was a revelation of her heart Echo, and one that terrified her with a sense of disloyalty. It was Jack she really loved, noble, chivalric, wonderful Jack Payson, whom, with a Southern intensity of feeling, she had unconsciously come to regard as her standard of all that makes for manhood. Plausible objections could not be urged against his sacrificing himself for his friend. With an irresistible impulse she cast herself upon his breast and said: "I cannot BEAR to see you go."
Payson gently disengaged her arms.
"I must, Echo. It is what Dick would do for me if I were in his place."
However, while Payson and Bud were preparing for their departure, Buck McKee appeared in the region and reported that Dick Lane had been killed by the Apaches. He told with convincing details of how he had met Lane as each was returning from a successful prospecting trip in the Ghost Range, and how they had sunk their differences in standing together against an attack of the Indians. He extolled Dick's bravery, relating how, severely wounded, he had stood off the savages to enable himself to escape.
When he handed over Dick's watch to Echo—for he had learned on his return that she was betrothed to Lane—as a last token from her lover, no doubt remained in the minds of his hearers of the truth of his story, and Payson and Bud Lane gave up their purposed expedition.
The owner of Sweetwater Ranch, while accepting McKee's account, could not wholly forget the half-breed's former evil reputation, and was reserved in his reception of the advances of the ex-rustler who was anxious to curry favor. Warm-hearted, impulsive Bud, however, whose fraternal loyalty had increased under his bereavement to the supreme passion of life, took the insinuating half-breed into the aching vacancy made by his brother's death. The two became boon companions, to the great detriment of the younger man's morals. McKee had plenty of money which he spent liberally, gambling and carousing in company with Bud. Polly was wild with indignation at her sweetheart's desertion, and savagely upbraided him for his conduct whenever they met, which may be inferred, grew less and less frequently. It was in revenge she made advances to another man who long "loved her from afar."
This was William Henry Harrison Hoover, sheriff of the county, known as "Slim" Hoover by the humorous propensity of men on the range to give nicknames on the principle of contraries, for he was fattest man in Pinal County. Slim was one of those fleshy men who have nerves of steel and muscles of iron. A round, boyish face, twinkling blue eyes, flaming red hair gave him an appearance entirely at variance with his personality. A vein of sentiment made him all the more lovable. His associates—ranchers, men of the plains, soldiers, and the owners and frequenters of the frontier barroom—respected him greatly.
"He's square as Slim" was the best recommendation ever given of a man in that region.
Pinal County settlers had made Slim sheriff term after term because he was the one citizen supremely fitted for the place. He had ridden the range and "busted" broncos before election. After it he hunted wrong-doers. Right was right and wrong was wrong to him. There was no shading in the meaning. All he asked of men was to ride fast, shoot straight, and deal squarely in any game. He admitted that murder, horse-stealing, and branding another man's calves were subjects for the unwritten law. But in his code this law meant death only after a fair trial, with neighbors for a jury. He was not scrupulous that a judge should be present. His duties were ended when he brought in his prisoner.
Hoover's rule had been marked by the taming of bad men in Florence, and a truce declared in the guerrilla warfare between the cattlemen and the sheepmen on the range.
Slim's seemingly superfluous flesh was really of great advantage to him: it served as a mask for his remarkable athletic abilities, and so lulled the outlaws with whom he had to deal into a false sense of superiority and security.
Slow and lethargic in his ordinary movements, in an emergency he was quick as a panther, never failing to get the drop on his man.
Furthermore, his fat exerted a beneficial influence on his character in keeping him humble-minded. Being the most popular man in the county, he would probably have been swollen with vanity had there been any space left vacant for it in his huge frame. He was especially admired by the women, but was at ease only in the company of those who were married. It was his fate to see the few girls of the region, with every one of whom, by turns, he was in love, grow up to marry each some less diffident wooer.
"Dangnation take it!" he used to say, "I don't git up enough spunk to cut a heifer out o' the herd until somebody else has roped her and slapped his brand onto her. Talk about too many irons in the fire, why, I've only got one, and it's het up red all the time waitin' fer the right chanct to use it; but some how I never git it out o' the coals. Hell! what's the use, anyhow? Nobody loves a fat man."
Slim was inordinately puffed up by Polly's preference of him, which she showed by all sorts of feminine tyrannies, and he was forced continually to slap his huge paunch to remind himself of what he considered his disabling deformity. "Miss Polly," he would apostrophize the absent lady, "you don't know what a volcano of seethin' fiery love this here mountain of flesh is that your walkin' over. Some day I'll erupt, and jest eternally calcify you, if you don't look out!"
The sheriff took no stock in Buck McKee's professed reformation, and was greatly worried over the influence he had acquired over Bud Lane, who had before this been Slim's protege. Accordingly, he readily conspired with her to break off the relations between the former outlaw and the young horse-wrangler, but thus far had met with no success.
Payson, feeling himself absolved by the death of Dick Lane from all obligations to his friend, began openly to woo Echo Allen, but without presuming upon the revelation of her love for him which she had made at his proposition to go into the desert to Lane's rescue. She responded to his courteous advances as frankly and naturally as a bud opens to the gentle wooing of the April sun. Softened by her grief for Dick as for a departed brother, as the flower is by the morning dew, the petals of her affection opened and laid bare her heart of purest gold. The gentle, diffident girl expanded into a glorious woman, conscious of her powers, and proud and happy that she was fulfilling the highest function of womanhood, that of loving and aiding with her love a noble man.
Jack Payson, however, failed to get the proper credit for this sudden flowering of Echo's beauty and charm. These were ascribed to her year's schooling in the East, and her proud mother was offended by the way in which she accepted the young ranchman's advances. "You hold yourself too cheap," she said. "It is at least due to the memory of poor Dick Lane" (whom, now that he was safely dead, she idealized as a type of perfect manhood) "that you make Jack wait as long as you did him." When Payson reasonably objected to this delay by pointing out he was fully able to support a wife, as Lane had not been, and proposed, with Echo's assent, six months as the limit of waiting, Mrs. Allen resorted to her expedient—tears.
"BOO-HOO! you are going to take away my only daughter!"
The Colonel, however, though he had loved Dick as if he were his own son, was delighted to the bottom of his hospitable soul that it was a man not already in the family circle who was to marry Echo, especially when he was a royal fellow like Jack Payson; so he arranged a compromise between the time proposed by Mrs. Allen and that desired by the lovers, and the date of the wedding was fixed nine months ahead.
"It will fall in June," said the old fellow, who knew exactly how to handle his fractious wife; "the month when swell folks back in the East do all their hitchin' up. Why, come to think of it, it was the very month I ran off with you in, though I didn't know, then that we was elopin' so strictly accordin' to the Book of Etikwet."
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