LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

thinking deeply about something, and her eyes softened in a shy sympathy with his trouble. Wagalexa Conka worked hard and thought much and worried more than was good for him. Bill Holmes, she decided fiercely, should not add to those worries. She would warn Ramon when next she talked with him. She would tell Ramon that he must not be friends with Bill Holmes; in the meantime, she would watch.

      Ten feet from Luck she stopped short, sensing trouble in the hardness that was in his eyes. She stood there and waited in meek subjection.

      “Annie, come here!” Luck’s voice was no less stern because it was lowered so that a couple of the boys fussing with the horses inside the rope corral could not overhear what he had to say.

      Annie-Many-Ponies, pulling one of the shiny black braids into the correct position over her shoulder and breast, stepped soft-footedly up to him and stopped. She did not ask him what he wanted. She waited until it was his pleasure to speak.

      “Annie, I want you to keep away from Bill Holmes.” Luck was not one to mince his words when he had occasion to speak of disagreeable things. “It isn’t right for you to let him make love to you on the sly. You know that. You know you must not leave camp with him after dark. You make me ashamed of you when you do those things. You keep away from Bill Holmes and stay in camp nights. If you’re a bad girl, I’ll have to send you back to the reservation—and I’ll have to tell the agent and Chief Big Turkey why I send you back. I can’t have anybody in my company who doesn’t act right. Now remember—don’t make me speak to you again about it.”

      Annie-Many-Ponies stood there, and the veiled, look was in her eyes. Her face was a smooth, brown mask—beautiful to look upon but as expressionless as the dead. She did not protest her innocence, she did not explain that she hated and distrusted Bill Holmes and that she had, months ago, repelled his surreptitious advances. Luck would have believed, for he had known Annie-Many-Ponies since she was a barefooted papoose, and he had never known her to tell him an untruth.

      “You go now and get ready for work. Wear the moccasins with the birds on the toes.” He pointed to them and turned away.

      Annie-Many-Ponies also turned and went her way and said nothing. What, indeed, could she say? She did not doubt that Luck had seen her the night before, and had seen also Bill Holmes when he left camp or returned—perhaps both. She could not tell him that Bill Holmes had gone out to meet Ramon, for that, she felt instinctively, was a secret which Ramon trusted her not to betray. She could not tell Wagalexa Conka, either, that she met Ramon often when the camp was asleep. He would think that as bad as meeting Bill Holmes. She knew that he did not like Ramon, but merely used him and his men and horses and cattle for a price, to better his pictures. Save in a purely business way she had never seen him talking with Ramon. Never as he talked with the boys of the Flying U—his Happy Family, he called them.

      She said nothing. She dressed for the part she was to play. She twined flowers in her hair and smoothed out the red bows and laid them carefully away—since Wagalexa Conka did not wish her to wear ribbon bows in this picture. She murmured caresses to Shunka Chistala, the little black dog that was always at her heels. She rode with the company to the rocky gorge which was “location” for today. When Wagalexa Conka called to her she went and climbed upon a high rock and stood just where he told her to stand, and looked just as he told her to look, and stole away through the rocks and out of the scene exactly as he wished her to do.

      But when Wagalexa Conka—sorry for the harshness he had felt it his duty to show that morning—smiled and told her she had done fine, and that he was pleased with her, Annie-Many-Ponies did not smile back with that slow, sweet, heart-twisting smile which was at once her sharpest weapon and her most endearing trait.

      Bill Holmes who had also had his sharp word of warning, and had been told very plainly to cut out this flirting with Annie if he wanted to remain on Luck’s payroll, eyed her strangely. Once he tried to have a secret word with her, but she moved away and would not look at him. For Annie-Many-Ponies, hurt and bitter as she felt toward her beloved Wagalexa Conka, hated Bill Holmes fourfold for being the cause of her humiliation. That she did not also hate Ramon Chavez as being equally guilty with Bill Holmes, went far toward proving how strong a hold he had gained upon her heart.

Chapter VI. “I go Where Wagalexa Conka Say”

       Table of Contents

      That afternoon Ramon joined them, suave as ever and seeming very much at peace with the world and his fellow-beings. He watched the new leading woman make a perilous ride down a steep, rocky point and dash up to camera and on past it where she set her horse back upon, its haunches with a fine disregard for her bones and a still finer instinct for putting just the right dash of the spectacular into her work without overdoing it.

      “That senora, she’s all right, you bet!” he praised the feat to those who stood near him; “me, I not be stuck on ron my caballo down that place. You bet she’s fine rider. My sombrero, he’s come off to that lady!”

      Jean, hearing, glanced at him with that little quirk of the lips which was the beginning of a smile, and rode off to join her father and Lite Avery. “He made that sound terribly sincere, didn’t he?” she commented. “It takes a Mexican to lift flattery up among the fine arts.” Then she thought no more about it.

      Annie-Many-Ponies was sitting apart, on a rock where her gay blanket made a picturesque splotch of color against the gray barrenness of the hill behind her. She, too, heard what Ramon said, and she, too, thought that he had made the praise sound terribly sincere. He had not spoken to her at all after the first careless nod of recognition when he rode up. And although her reason had approved of his caution, her sore heart ached for a little kindness from him. She turned her eyes toward him now with a certain wistfulness; but though Ramon chanced to be looking toward her she got no answering light in his eyes, no careful little signal that his heart was yearning for her. He seemed remote, as indifferent to her as were any of the others dulled by accustomedness to her constant presence among them. A premonitory chill, as from some great sorrow yet before her in the future, shook the heart of Annie-Many-Ponies.

      “Me, I fine out how moch more yoh want me campa here for pictures,” Ramon was saying now to Luck who was standing by Pete Lowry, scribbling something on his script. “My brother Tomas, he liking for us at ranch now, s’pose yoh finish poco tiempo.”

      Luck wrote another line before he gave any sign that he heard. Annie-Many-Ponies, watching from under her drooping lids, saw that Bill Holmes had edged closer to Ramon, while he made pretense of being much occupied with his own affairs.

      “I don’t need your camp at all after today.” Luck shoved the script into his coat pocket and looked at his watch.

      “This afternoon when the sun is just right I want to get one or two cut-back scenes and a dissolve out. After that you can break camp any time. But I want you, Ramon—you and Estancio Lopez and Luis Rojas. I’ll need you for two or three days in town—want you to play the heavy in a bank-robbery and street fight. The makeup is the same as when you worked up there in the rocks the other day. You three fellows come over and go in to the ranch tomorrow if you like. Then I’ll have you when I want you. You’ll get five dollars a day while you work.” Having made himself sufficiently clear, he turned away to set and rehearse the next scene, and did not see the careful glance which passed between Ramon and Bill Holmes.

      “Annie,” Luck said abruptly, swinging toward her, “can you come down off that point where Jean Douglas came? You’ll have to ride horseback, remember, and I don’t want you to do it unless you’re sure of yourself. How about it?”

      For the first time since breakfast her somber eyes lightened with a gleam of interest. She did not look at Ramon—Ramon who had told her many times how much he loved her, and yet could praise Jean Douglas for her riding. Ramon had declared that he would not care to come riding down that point as Jean had come; very well, then she would show Ramon something.

      “It isn’t necessary, exactly,” Luck explained further. “I can show you at the top, looking down at the way Jean

Скачать книгу