she isn’t your sweetheart at all? Never was?”
“I don’t reckon she ever was. Neill took that picture himself. We were laughing, because I had just been guying them about how quick they got engaged. She was saying I’d be engaged myself before six months. And I am. Ain’t I?”
She came to him slowly—first, the little outstretched hands, and then the soft, supple, resilient body. Slowly, too, her sweet reluctant lips came round to meet his.
“Yes, Steve, I’m yours. I think I always have been, even before I knew you.”
“Even when you hated me?” he asked presently.
“Most of all, when I hated you,” She laughed happily. “That was just another way of love.”
“We’ll have fifty years to find out all the different ways,” the man promised.
“Fifty years. Oh, Steve!”
She gave a happy little sigh, and nestled closer.
Bucky O'Connor
A Tale of the Unfenced Border
Chapter 1. Enter “Bear-Trap” Collins
Chapter 2. Taxation Without Representation
Chapter 3. The Sheriff Introduces Himself
Chapter 6. Bucky Makes a Discovery
Chapter 7. In the Land of Revolutions
Chapter 9. “Adore Has Only One D.”
Chapter 10. The Hold-up of the M. C. P. Flyer
Chapter 11. “Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make.”
Chapter 12. A Clean White Man's Option
Chapter 13. Bucky's First-Rate Reasons
Chapter 14. Le Roi Est Mort; Vive Le Roi
Chapter 15. In the Secret Chamber
Chapter 16. Juan Valdez Scores
Chapter 18. A Dinner for Three
Chapter 19. A Villon of the Desert
Chapter 20. Back to God's Country
To My Brother
EDGAR C. RAINE
MY DEAR WANDERER:
I write your name on this page that you may know we hold you not less in our thoughts because you have heard and answered again the call of the frozen North, have for the time disappeared, swallowed in some of its untrodden wilds. As in those old days of 59 Below On Bonanza, the long Winter night will be of interminable length. Armed with this note of introduction then, Bucky O'Connor offers himself, with the best bow of one Adventurer to another, as a companion to while away some few of those lonely hours.
March, 1910, Denver.
Chapter 1.
Enter “Bear-Trap” Collins
She had been aware of him from the moment of his spectacular entrance, though no slightest sign of interest manifested itself in her indolent, incurious eyes. Indeed, his abundant and picturesque area was so vivid that it would have been difficult not to feel his presence anywhere, let alone on a journey so monotonous as this was proving to be.
It had been at a water-tank, near Socorro, that the Limited, churning furiously through brown Arizona in pursuit of a lost half-hour, jarred to a sudden halt that shook sleep from the drowsy eyes of bored passengers. Through the window of her Pullman the young woman in Section 3 had glimpsed a bevy of angry train officials eddying around a sturdy figure in the center, whose strong, lean head rose confidently above the press. There was the momentary whirl of a scuffle, out of the tangle of which shot a brakeman as if propelled from a catapult. The circle parted, brushed aside by a pair of lean shoulders, muscular and broad. Yet a few moments and the owner of the shoulders led down the aisle to the vacant section opposite her a procession whose tail was composed of protesting trainmen.
“You had no right to flag the train, Sheriff Collins, and you'll have to get off; that's all there is to it,” the conductor was explaining testily.
“Oh, that's all right,” returned the offender with easy good nature, making himself at home in Section 4. “Tell the company to send in its bill. No use jawing about it.”
“You'll have to get off, sir.”
“That's right—at Tucson.”
“No, sir. You'll have to get off here. I have no authority to let you ride.”
“Didn't I hear you say the train was late? Don't you think you'd arrive earlier at the end of your run if your choo-choo got to puffing?”
“You'll have to get off, sir.”
“I hate to disoblige,” murmured the owner of the jingling spurs, the dusty corduroys, and the big, gray hat, putting his feet leisurely on the cushion in front of him. “But doesn't it occur to you that you are a man of one idea?”
“This is the Coast Limited. It doesn't stop for anybody—not even for the president of the road.”
“You don't say! Well, I ce'tainly appreciate the honor you did me in stopping to take me on.” His slight drawl was quite devoid of concern.
“But you had no right to flag the train. Can't you understand ANYTHING?” groaned the conductor.
“You explain it again to me, sonny. I'm surely