Marlowe Amy Bell - Frances of the Ranges: or, The Old Ranchman's Treasure стр 6.

Certain she was that he could not have obtained them in a manner to wrong anybody else. He spoke of them as the loot of old Don Milo Morales hacienda; but Frances knew well enough that her good father, Captain Dan Rugley, had been no land pirate, no so-called Border ruffian, who had robbed some peaceful Spanish ranch-owner across the Rio Grande of his possessions.

Frances was a bit worried to-night. There were two topics of thought that disturbed her.

Motherless, and with few female friends even, she had been shut away with her own girlish thoughts and fears and wonderings more than most girls of her age. Life was a mystery to her. She lived in books and in romances and in imaginations pictures more than she did in the workaday world about her.

There seems to be little romance attached to the everyday lives we live, no matter how we are situated. The most dreary and uncolored existence, in all probability, there is in the world to-day is the daily life of a real prince or princess. We look longingly over the fence of our desires and consider all sorts and conditions of people outside as happier and far better off than we.

That was the way it was with Frances. Especially on this particular night.

Her unexpected meeting with Pratt Sanderson had brought to her heart and mind more strongly than for months her experiences in Amarillo. She remembered her school days, her school fellows, and the difference between their lives and that which she lived at present.

Probably half the girls she had known at school would be delighted (or thought they would) to change places with Frances of the ranges, right then. But the ranch girl thought how much better off she would be if she were continuing her education under the care of people who could place her in a more cultivated life.

Not that she was disloyal, even in thought, to her father. She loved him intenselypassionately! But the life of the ranges, after her taste of school and association with cultivated people, could not be entirely satisfactory.

So she sat, huddled in a white wool wrapper, by the barred, open window, looking out across the plain. Only for the few lights at the corrals and bunk-house, it seemed a great, horizonless sea of darknessfor there was no moon and a haze had enveloped the high stars since twilight.

No sound came to her ears at first. There is nothing so soundless as night on the plainsunless there be beasts near, either tamed or wild.

No coyote slunk about the ranch-house. The horses were still in the corrals. The cattle were all too far distant to be heard. Not even the song of a sleepy puncher, as he wheeled around the herd, drifted to the barred window of Frances room.

Her second topic for thought was her fathers evident expectation that the ranch-house might be attacked. Every stranger was an object of suspicion to him.

This did not abate one jot his natural Western hospitality. As mark his open-handed reception of Pratt Sanderson on this evening. They kept open house at the Bar-T ranch. But after darkor, after bedtime at leastthe place was barred like a fort in the Indian country!

Captain Rugley never went to his bed save after making the rounds, armed as he had been to-night, with Ming to bolt the doors. The only way a marauder could get into the inner court was by climbing the walls and getting over the roof, and as the latter extended four feet beyond the second-story walls, such a feat was well-nigh impossible.

The cement walls themselves were so thick that they seemed impregnable even to cannon. The roof was of slates. And, as has been pointed out already, all the outer first-floor windows, and all those reached from the porch roof, were barred.

Frances knew that her father had been seriously troubled to-night by the appearance of the strange and unseen tramp in the yard, and the fact that the arrival of that same individual had not been reported from the mens quarters.

Captain Rugley telephoned and learned from his foreman, Silent Sam Harding, that nobody had come to the bunk-house that night asking for lodging and food.

Frances was about to seek her bed. She yawned, curled her bare toes up closer in the robe, and shivered luxuriously as the night air breathed in upon her. In another moment she would pop in between the blankets and cuddle down

Something snapped! It was outside, not in!

Frances was wide awake on the instant. Her eyelids that had been so drowsy were propped apartnot by fear, but by excitement.

She had lived a life which had sharpened her physical perceptions to a fine point. She had no trouble in locating the sound that had so startled her. Somebody was climbing the vine at the corner of the veranda roof, not twenty feet from her window. She crouched back, well sheltered in the shadow, but able to see anything that appeared silhouetted between her window and the dark curtain of the night.

There was no light in the room behind her; indeed every lamp in the ranch-house had been extinguished some time before. It was evident that this marauderwhoever he washad waited for the quietude of sleep to fall upon the place.

Back in the room at the head of Frances bed hung her belt with the holster pistol she wore when riding about the ranges. In these days it was considered perfectly safe for a girl to ride alone, save that coyotes sometimes came within range, or such a savage creature as had been the introduction of Pratt Sanderson and herself so recently. It was the duty of everybody on the ranges to shoot and kill these varmints, if they could.

Frances did not even think of this weapon now. She did not fear the unknown; only that the mystery of the night, and of his secret pursuit, surrounded him. Who could he be? What was he after? Should she run to awaken her father, or wait to observe his appearance above the edge of the veranda roof?

A dried stick of the vine snapped again. There was a squirming figure on the very edge of the roof. Frances knew that the unknown lay there, panting, after his exertions.

CHAPTER V

THE SHADOW IN THE COURT

A dozen things she might have done afterward appealed to Frances Rugley. But as she crouched by her chamber window watching the squirming human figure on the edge of the roof, she was interested in only one thing:

Who was he?

This question so filled her thought that she was neither fearful nor anxious. Curiosity controlled her actions entirely for the few next minutes. And so she observed the marauder rise up, carefully balance himself on the slates of the veranda roof, and tiptoe away to the corner of the house. He did not come near her window; nor could she see his face. His outlines were barely visible as he drifted into the shadow at the cornersoundless of step now. Only the cracking of the dry branch, as he climbed up, had betrayed him.

I wish he had come this way, thought Frances. I might have seen what he looked like. Surely, we have no man on the ranch who would do such a thing. Can it be that father is right? Did the fellow who hailed us to-night come here to the Bar-T for some bad purpose?

She waited several minutes by her window. Then she bethought her that there was a window at the end of a cross-hall on the side of the house where the man had disappeared, out of which she might catch another glimpse of him.

So she thrust her bare feet into slippers, tied the robe more firmly about her, and hurried out of the room. Nor did she think now of the charged weapon hanging at the head of her bed.

She believed nobody would be astir in the great house. The Chinamen slept at the extreme rear over the kitchen. Their guest, Pratt Sanderson, was on the lower floor and at the opposite side, with his windows opening upon the court around which the hacienda was built.