Heart of the Sunset, Rex Beach [best fiction books of all time txt] 📗

now, and the young men of the neighborhood had made the discovery. Yes, and Paloma was a pretty woman; therefore the hole under the ebony-tree would probably be worn deep by impatient hoofs. He was glad that most of the boys preferred saddles to soft upholstery, for it argued that some vigor still remained in Texas manhood, and that the country had not been entirely ruined by motors, picture-shows, low shoes, and high collars. Of course the youths of this day were nothing like the youths of his own, and yet—Blaze let his gaze linger fondly on the high-bred mare and her equipment—here at least was a person who knew a good horse, a good saddle, and a good gun.

As he came up the walk he heard Paloma laugh, and his own face lightened, for Paloma's merriment was contagious. Then as he mounted the steps and turned the corner of the "gallery" he uttered a hearty greeting.

"Dave Law! Where in the world did you drop from?"

Law uncoiled himself and took the ranchman's hand. "Hello, Blaze! I been ordered down here to keep you straight."

"Pshaw! Now who's giving you orders, Dave?"

"Why, I'm with the Rangers."

"Never knew a word of it. Last I heard you was filibustering around with the Maderistas."

Blaze seated himself with a grateful sigh where the breeze played over him. He was a big, bearlike, swarthy man with the square-hewn, deep-lined face of a tragedian, and a head of long, curly hair which he wore parted in a line over his left ear. Jones was a character, a local landmark. This part of Texas had grown up with Blaze, and, inasmuch as he had sprung from a free race of pioneers, he possessed a splendid indifference to the artificial fads of dress and manners. It was only since Paloma had attained her womanhood that he had been forced to fight down his deep-seated distrust of neckwear and store clothes and the like; but now that his daughter had definitely asserted her rights, he had acquired numerous unwelcome graces, and no longer ventured among strangers without the stamp of her approval upon his appearance. Only at home did he maintain what he considered a manly independence of speech and habit. To-day, therefore, found him in a favorite suit of baggy, wrinkled linen and with a week's stubble of beard upon his chin. He was so plainly an outdoor man that the air of erudition lent him by the pair of gold-rimmed spectacles owlishly perched upon his sunburned nose was strangely incongruous.

"So you're a Ranger, and got notches on your gun." Blaze rolled and lit a tiny cigarette, scarcely larger than a wheat straw. "Well, you'd ought to make a right able thief-catcher, Dave, only for your size—you're too long for a man and you ain't long enough for a snake. Still, I reckon a thief would have trouble getting out of your reach, and once you got close to him—How many men have you killed?"

"Counting Mexicans?" Law inquired, with a smile.

"Hell! Nobody counts them."

"Not many."

"That's good." Blaze nodded and relit his cigarette, which he had permitted promptly to smolder out. "The Force ain't what it was. Most of the boys nowadays join so they can ride a horse cross-lots, pack a pair of guns, and give rein to the predilections of a vicious ancestry. They're bad rams, most of 'em."

"There aren't many," said Paloma. "Dave tells me the whole Force has been cut down to sixteen."

"That's plenty," her father averred. "It's like when Cap'n Bill McDonald was sent to stop a riot in Dallas. He came to town alone, and when the citizens asked him where his men was, he said, 'Hell! 'Ain't I enough? There's only one riot.' Are you workin' up a case, Dave?"

"Um-m—yes! People are missing a lot of stock hereabouts."

"It's these blamed refugees from the war! A Mexican has to steal something or he gets run down and pore. If it ain't stock, it's something else. Why, one morning I rode into Jonesville in time to see four Greasers walkin' down the main street with feed-sacks over their shoulders. Each one of those gunnie's had something long and flat and heavy in it, and I growed curious. When I investigated, what d'you suppose I found? Tombstones! That's right; four marble beauties fresh from the cemetery. Well, it made me right sore, for I'd helped to start Jonesville. I was its city father. I'd made the place fit to live in, and I aimed to keep it safe to die in, and so, bein' a sort of left-handed, self-appointed deppity-sheriff, I rounded up those ghouls and drove 'em to the county-seat in my spring wagon. I had the evidence propped up against the front of our real-estate office—'Sacred to the Memory' of four of our leading citizens—so I jailed 'em. But that's all the good it did."

"Couldn't convict, eh?"

Blaze lit his cigarette for the third time. "The prosecuting attorney and I wasn't very good friends, seeing as how I'd had to kill his daddy, so he turned 'em loose. I'm damned if those four Greasers didn't beat me back to Jonesville." Blaze shook his head ruminatively. "This was a hard country, those days. There wasn't but two honest men in this whole valley—and the other one was a nigger."

Dave Law's duties as a Ranger rested lightly upon him; his instructions were vague, and he had a leisurely method of "working up" his evidence. Since he knew that Blaze possessed a thorough knowledge of this section and its people, it was partly business which had brought him to the Jones home this afternoon.

Strictly speaking, Blaze was not a rancher, although many of his acres were under cultivation and he employed a sizable army of field-hands. His disposition was too adventurous, his life had been too swift and varied, for him to remain interested in slow agricultural pursuits; therefore, he had speculated heavily in raw lands, and for several years past he had devoted his energies to a gigantic colonization scheme. Originally Blaze had come to the Rio Grande valley as a stock-raiser, but the natural advantages of the country had appealed to his gambling instinct, and he had "gone broke" buying land.

He had located, some fifteen miles below the borders of Las Palmas, and there he had sunk a large fortune; then as a first step in his colonization project he had founded the town of Jonesville. Next he had caused the branch line of the Frisco railroad to be extended until it linked his holdings with the main system, after which he had floated a big irrigation company; and now the feat of paying interest on its bonds and selling farms under the ditch to Northern people kept him fully occupied. It was by no means a small operation in which he was engaged. The venture had taken foresight, courage, infinite hard work; and Blaze was burdened with responsibilities that would have broken down a man of weaker fiber.

But his pet relaxation was reminiscence. His own experience had been wide, he knew everybody in his part of the state, and although events in his telling were sometimes colored by his rich imagination, the information he could give was often of the greatest value—as Dave Law knew.

After a time the latter said, casually, "Tell me something about Tad
Lewis."

Blaze looked up quickly. "What d'you want to know?"

"Anything. Everything."

"Tad owns a right nice ranch between here and Las Palmas," Blaze said, cautiously.

Paloma broke out, impatiently: "Why don't you say what you think?" Then to Dave: "Tad Lewis is a bad neighbor, and always has been. There's a ford on his place, and we think he knows more about 'wet' cattle than he cares to tell."

"It's a good place to cross stock at low water," her father agreed, "and Lewis's land runs back from the Rio Grande in its old Spanish form. It's a natural outlet for those brush-country ranchos. But I haven't anything against Tad except a natural dislike. He stands well with some of our best people, so I'm probably wrong. I usually am."

"You can't call Ed Austin one of our best people," sharply objected
Paloma. "They claim that arms are being smuggled across to the Rebels,
Dave, and, if it's true, Ed Austin—"

"Now, Paloma," her father remonstrated mildly. "The Regulars and the River Guards watched Lewis's ranch till the embargo was lifted, and they never saw anything."

"I believe Austin is a strong Rebel sympathizer," Law ventured.

"Sure! And him and the Lewis outfit are amigos. If you go pirootin' around Tad's place you're more'n apt to make yourself unpopular, Dave. I'd grieve some to see you in a wooden kimono. Tad's too well fixed to steal cattle, and if he runs arms it's because of his sympathy for those noble, dark-skinned patriots we hear so much about in Washington. Tad's a 'galvanized Gringo' himself—married a Mexican, you know."

"Nobody pays much attention to the embargo," Law agreed. "I ran arms myself, before I joined the Force."

When meal-time drew near, both Jones and his daughter urged their guest to stay and dine with them, and Dave was glad to accept.

"After supper I'm going to show you our town," Blaze declared. "It's the finest city in South Texas, and growing like a weed. All we need is good farmers. Those we've got are mostly back-to-nature students who leaped a drug-counter expecting to 'light in the lap of luxury. In the last outfit we sold there wasn't three men that knew which end of a mule to put the collar on. But they'll learn. Nature's with 'em, and so am I. God supplies 'em with all the fresh air and sunshine they need, and when they want anything else they come to Old Blaze. Ain't that right, Paloma?"

"Yes, father."

Paloma Jones had developed wonderfully since Dave Law had last seen her. She had grown into a most wholesome and attractive young woman, with an unusually capable manner, and an honest, humorous pair of brown eyes. During dinner she did her part with a grace that made watching her a pleasure, and the Ranger found it a great treat to sit at her table after his strenuous scouting days in the mesquite.

"I'm glad to hear Jonesville is prosperous," he told his host. "And they say you're in everything."

"That's right; and prosperity's no name for it. Every-body wants Blaze to have a finger in the pie. I'm interested in the bank, the sugar-mill, the hardware-store, the ice-plant—Say, that ice-plant's a luxury for a town this size. D'you know what I made out of it last year?"

"I've no idea."

"Twenty-seven thousand dollars!" The father of Jonesville spoke proudly, impressively, and then through habit called upon his daughter for verification. "Didn't I, Paloma?"

Miss Paloma's answer was unexpected, and came with equal emphasis: "No, you didn't, father. The miserable thing lost money."

Blaze was only momentarily dismayed. Then he joined in his visitor's laughter. "How can a man get along without the co-operation of his own household?" he inquired, naively. "Maybe it was next year I was thinking about." Thereafter he confined himself to statements which required no corroboration.

Dave had long since learned that to hold Blaze Jones to a strict accountability with fact was to rob his society of its greatest charm. A slavish accuracy in figures, an arid lack of imagination, reduces conversation to the insipidness of flat wine, and Blaze's talk was never dull. He was a keen, shrewd, practical man, but somewhere in his being there was concealed a tremendous, lop-sided sense of humor which took the form of a bewildering imagery. An attentive audience was enough for him, and, once his fancy was in full swing, there was no limit to his outrageous exaggerations. A light of credulity in a hearer's eye filled him with prodigious mirth, and it is doubtful if his listeners ever derived a fraction of the amusement from his fabrications that he himself enjoyed. Paloma's spirit of contradiction was the only fly in his ointment; now that his daughter was old enough to "keep books" on him, much of the story-teller's joy was denied him.

Of course his proclivities occasionally led to misapprehensions; chance acquaintances who recognized him as an artful romancer were liable to consider him generally untruthful. But even in this misconception Blaze took a quiet delight, secure in the knowledge that all who knew him well regarded him as a rock of integrity. As a matter of fact, his genuine exploits were quite as sensational as those of his manufacture.

When, after supper, Blaze had hitched a pair of driving-mules to his buckboard, preparatory to showing his guest the glories of Jonesville, Dave said:

"Paloma's getting mighty pretty."