The Cattle-Baron's Daughter

The Cattle-Baron's Daughter
Harold Bindloss

Harold Bindloss

The Cattle-Baron's Daughter

I

THE PORTENT

The hot weather had come suddenly, at least a month earlier than usual, and New York lay baking under a scorching sun when Miss Hetty Torrance sat in the coolest corner of the Grand Central Depot she could find. It was by her own wish she had spent the afternoon in the city unattended, for Miss Torrance was a self-reliant young woman; but it was fate and the irregularity of the little gold watch, which had been her dead mother’s gift, that brought her to the depot at least a quarter of an hour too soon. But she was not wholly sorry, for she had desired more solitude and time for reflection than she found in the noisy city, where a visit to an eminent modiste had occupied most of her leisure. There was, she had reasons for surmising, a decision of some moment to be made that night, and as yet she was no nearer arriving at it than she had been when the little note then in her pocket had been handed her.

Still, it was not the note she took out when she found a seat apart from the hurrying crowd, but a letter from her father, Torrance, the Cattle-Baron, of Cedar Range. It was terse and to the point, as usual, and a little smile crept into the girl’s face as she read.

“Your letter to hand, and so long as you have a good time don’t worry about the bills. You’ll find another five hundred dollars at the bank when you want them. Thank God, I can give my daughter what her mother should have had. Two years since I’ve seen my little girl, and now it seems that somebody else is wanting her! Well, we were made men and women, and if you had been meant to live alone dabbling in music you wouldn’t have been given your mother’s face. Now, I don’t often express myself this way, but I’ve had a letter from Captain Jackson Cheyne, U. S. Cavalry, which reads as straight as I’ve found the man to be. Nothing wrong with that family, and they’ve dollars to spare; but if you like the man I can put down two for every one of his. Well, I might write a good deal, but you’re too much like your father to be taken in. You want dollars and station, and I can see you get them, but in a contract of this kind the man is everything. Make quite sure you’re getting the right one.”

There was a little more to the same purpose, and when she slipped the letter into her pocket Hetty Torrance smiled.

“The dear old man!” she said. “It is very like him; but whether Jake is the right one or not is just what I can’t decide.”

Then she sat still, looking straight in front of her, a very attractive picture, as some of the hurrying men who turned to glance at her seemed to find, in her long light dress. Her face, which showed a delicate oval under the big white hat, was a trifle paler than is usual with most Englishwomen of her age, and the figure the thin fabric clung about less decided in outline. Still, the faint warmth in her cheeks emphasized the clear pallor of her skin, and there was a depth of brightness in the dark eyes that would have atoned for a good deal more than there was in her case necessity for. Her supple slenderness also became Hetty Torrance well, and there was a suggestion of nervous energy in her very pose. In addition to all this, she was a rich man’s daughter, who had been well taught in the cities, and had since enjoyed all that wealth and refinement could offer her. It had also been a cause of mild astonishment to the friends she had spent the past year with, that with these advantages, she had remained Miss Torrance. They had been somewhat proud of their guest, and opportunities had not been wanting had she desired to change her status.

While she sat there musing, pale-faced citizens hurried past, great locomotives crawled to and fro, and long trains of cars, white with the dust of five hundred leagues, rolled in. Swelling in deeper cadence, the roar of the city came faintly through the din; but, responsive to the throb of life as she usually was, Hetty Torrance heard nothing of it then, for she was back in fancy on the grey-white prairie two thousand miles away. It was a desolate land of parched grass and bitter lakes with beaches dusty with alkali, but a rich one to the few who held dominion over it, and she had received the homage of a princess there. Then she heard a voice that was quite in keeping with the spirit of the scene, and was scarcely astonished to see that a man was smiling down on her.

He was dressed in city garments, and they became him; but the hand he held out was lean, and hard, and brown, and, for he stood bareheaded, a paler streak showed where the wide hat had shielded a face that had been darkened by stinging alkali dust from the prairie sun. It was a quietly forceful face, with steady eyes, which had a little sparkle of pleasure in them, and were clear and brown, while something in the man’s sinewy pose suggested that he would have been at home in the saddle. Indeed, it was in the saddle that Hetty Torrance remembered him most vividly, hurling his half-tamed broncho straight at a gully down which the nondescript pack streamed, while the scarcely seen shape of a coyote blurred by the dust, streaked the prairie in front of them.

“Hetty!” he said.

“Larry!” said the girl. “Why, whatever are you doing here?”

Then both laughed a little, perhaps to conceal the faint constraint that was upon them, for a meeting between former comrades has its difficulties when one is a man and the other a woman, and the bond between them has not been defined.

“I came in on business a day or two ago,” said the man. “Ran round to check some packages. I’m going back again to-morrow.”

“Well,” said the girl, “I was in the city, and came here to meet Flo Schuyler and her sister. They’ll be in at four.”

The man looked at his watch. “That gives us ’most fifteen minutes, but it’s not going to be enough. We’ll lose none of it. What about the singing?”

Hetty Torrance flushed a trifle. “Larry,” she said, “you are quite sure you don’t know?”

The man appeared embarrassed, and there was a trace of gravity in his smile. “Your father told me a little; but I haven’t seen him so often of late. Any way, I would sooner you told me.”

“Then,” said the girl, with the faintest of quivers in her voice, “the folks who understand good music don’t care to hear me.”

There was incredulity, which pleased his companion, in the man’s face, but his voice vaguely suggested contentment.

“That is just what they can’t do,” he said decisively. “You sing most divinely.”

“There is a good deal you and the boys at Cedar don’t know, Larry. Any way, lots of people sing better than I do, but I should be angry with you if I thought you were pleased.”

The man smiled gravely. “That would hurt. I’m sorry for you, Hetty; but again I’m glad. Now there’s nothing to keep you in the city, you’ll come back to us. You belong to the prairie, and it’s a better place than this.”

He spoke at an opportune moment. Since her cherished ambition had failed her, Hetty Torrance had grown a trifle tired of the city and the round of pleasure that must be entered into strenuously, and there were times when, looking back in reverie, she saw the great silent prairie roll back under the red sunrise into the east, and fade, vast, solemn, and restful, a cool land of shadow, when the first pale stars came out. Then she longed for the jingle of the bridles and the drumming of the hoofs, and felt once more the rush of the gallop stir her blood. But this was what she would not show, and her eyes twinkled a trifle maliciously.

“Well, I don’t quite know,” she said. “There is always one thing left to most of us.”

She saw the man wince ever so slightly, and was pleased at it; but he was, as she had once told him in the old days, grit all through, and he smiled a little.

“Of course!” he said. “Still, the trouble is that there are very few of us good enough for you. But you will come back for a little?”

Miss Torrance would not commit herself. “How are they getting along at the Range?”

“Doesn’t your father write you?”

“Yes,” said the girl, colouring a trifle. “I had a letter from him a few days ago, but he seldom mentioned what he was doing, and I want you to tell me about him.”

The man appeared thoughtful. “Well,” he said, “it’s quite three months since I spoke to him. He was stirring round as brisk as ever, and is rolling the dollars in this year.”

“But you used to be always at the Range.”

The man nodded, but the slight constraint that was upon him did not escape the girl. “Still, I don’t go there so often now. The Range is lonesome when you are away.”

Miss Torrance accepted the speech as one made by a comrade, and perhaps was wrong, but a tramp of feet attracted her attention then, and she looked away from her companion. Driven by the railroad officials, and led by an interpreter, a band of Teutons some five or six hundred strong filed into the station. Stalwart and stolid, tow-haired, with the stamp of acquiescent patience in their homely faces, they came on with the swing, but none of the usual spirit, of drilled men. They asked no questions, but went where they were led, and the foulness of the close-packed steerage seemed to cling about them. For a time the depot rang to the rhythmic tramp of feet, and when, at a sign from the interpreter, it stopped, two bewildered children, frowsy and unwashed, in greasy homespun, sat down and gazed at Miss Torrance with mild blue eyes. She signed to a boy who was passing with a basket slung before him, and made a little impatient gesture when the man slipped his hand into his pocket.

“No,” she said; “you’ll make me vexed with you. Tell him to give them all he has. They’ll be a long while in the cars.”

She handed the boy a silver coin, and while the children sat still, undemonstratively astonished, with the golden fruit about them, the man passed him a bill.

“Now get some more oranges, and begin right at the top of the line,” he said. “If that doesn’t see you through, come back to me for another bill.”

Hetty Torrance’s eyes softened. “Larry,” she said, “that was dreadfully good of you. Where are they all going to?”

“Chicago, Nebraska, Minnesota, Montana,” said the man. “There are the cars coming in. Just out of Castle Garden, and it’s because of the city improvements disorganizing traffic they’re bringing them this way. They’re the advance guard, you see, and there are more of them coming.”

The tramp of feet commenced again, but this time it was a horde of diverse nationality, Englishmen, Irishmen, Poles, and Finns, but all with the stamp of toil, and many with that of scarcity upon them. Bedraggled, unkempt, dejected, eager with the cunning that comes of adversity, they flowed in, and Hetty Torrance’s face grew pitiful as she watched them.

“Do they come every week like this and, even in our big country, have we got room for all of them?” she said.

There was a curious gleam in the man’s brown eyes. “Oh, yes,” he said. “It’s the biggest and greatest country this old world has ever seen, and the Lord made it as a home for the poor – the folks they’ve no food or use for back yonder; and, while there are short-sighted fools who would close the door, we take them in, outcast and hopeless, and put new heart in them. In a few short years we make them men and useful citizens, the equal of any on this earth – Americans!”

Hetty Torrance nodded, and there was pride but no amusement in her smile; for she had a quick enthusiasm, and the reticence of Insular Britain has no great place in that country.

“Still,” she said; “all these people coming in must make a difference.”

The man’s face grew grave. “Yes,” he said; “there will have to be a change, and it is coming. We are only outwardly democratic just now, and don’t seem to know that men are worth more than millionaires. We have let them get their grip on our industries, and too much of our land, until what would feed a thousand buys canvas-backs, and wines from Europe for one. Isn’t what we raise in California good enough for Americans?”

Miss Torrance’s eyes twinkled. “Some of it isn’t very nice, and they don’t live on canvas-backs,” she said. “Still, it seems to me that other men have talked like that quite a thousand years ago; and, while I don’t know anyone better at breaking a broncho or cutting out a steer, straightening these affairs out is too big a contract for you.”

The man laughed pleasantly. “That’s all right, but I can do a little in the place I belong to, and the change is beginning there. Is it good for this country that one man should get rich feeding his cattle on leagues of prairie where a hundred families could make a living growing wheat?”