15 Western Short Stories — page 40: what you’re looking at

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40 WESTERN SHORT STORIES and his mate wasn’t far behind, the heavy yoke jerking. They left the plodding man with mouth agape, the long whip swinging useless in his hand. | Such a run wouldn't ordinarily mat- ter, only now it seemed as if every critter in the long train was sudden- ly possessed to run with them, and a hind wheel of the wagon jounced over a rock twice as high as the humped rabbit had been. The next wagon, with its team catching the contagion, came plunging right behind. The girl had been braiding on a rug, slender fingers weaving a pat- tern like an Indian talking sign. She dropped it and clutched, too late, at the child playing beside her. The sud- den bounce as the wheel jerked over the stone lifted and tossed the little girl, and she was like a ballooning ball of fluttery skirts, then she came to earth behind the wagon. . Such a bump would be jarring but probably not too bad. What made it so was the team following behind, coming at a wild run. Boone saw and acted out of instinct. There was no time to reach the child and snatch her to safety, either for him or the man on the far side. The sharp pounding hoofs of the following team were too close, the heavy wheels of the wagon clanging behind. Boone acted out of habit. With the lasso a-twirl in his hand it was easy. The loop dabbed around the child and jerked tight, and he snatched her out of the way with scant time to spare. A SCREAM cut the air and raked ~& Boone’s heart. It came from the girl, who’d thought she was witness- ing death, expecting to see a mangled form. The child shook with sobs, which was not to be wondered at, for it had been pretty rough for her even SO. - Another man, up ahead, acted fast to halt what might be a bad run of all the teams. He stood his ground and cut the oxen across the noses with his bull-whip, and they stopped. The girl was out of the wagon and running back as Boone jumped off his horse, and they reached the child and dropped to their knees together. That did it. Boone got a look into a pair of eyes so deep you could get lost in them, and he reckoned he did. Annabelle stopped crying, and Jean Marie, who it turned out right and proper was her sister, smiled wet- eyed and tremulous. The father and mother both came hurrying, the latter rom somewhere inside the wagon, but that was anti-climax. “Shucks, don’t thank me,” Boone protested. “It was just luck—luck that I was in the right place at the right time. I hadn’t even planned it that way.” But it was pleasant to have such luck. Annabelle reached and set her arms around his neck and kissed him, and Boone went red as the shirt he wore; that was because he was think- ing how nice it would be if Jean Marie would reward him the same way. She didn’t, but he was invited to stop to supper, which turned out to be as mouth-watering a meal as he’d ever sluiced past his teeth. The fact that Jean Marie was responsible for most of the eatables wasn’t lost on Boone, who had a good pair of eyes. No reasonable man could blame him for using them where she was con- cerned. One feller did seem inclined to blame him. Dabney Prescott, he called himself, and he walked and rode arro- gant, and talked the same. Boone had seen plenty such men, and gave them no never-mind as a rule. The fact that Prescott was acting as guide and wag- on boss didn’t impress him. He’d guid- ed a train or so himself, when it came to that. By morning, Boone made up his mind. Shucks, it was time for a change of scenery anyhow; he'd been around here longer than he usually stayed at any one place. Besides, he'd always had a hankering to see the ocean. It had never occurred to him that he particularly wanted to see Oregon, but now he hankered to look the place over. For that matter, he might make a good farmer; he’d eat shucks if he couldn’t do as well as some others—Dabney Prescott, for example. It was the patent fact of the lat- ter’s hostility that helped to decide him; Boone never liked to be pushed around, Prescott looked at him out of CoOmiclbooks.€©