Weary flushed embarra.s.sment; this was no joke. "No," he stammered, in some doubt just how to proceed. "The fact is, you've made a little mistake. I'm not--"

"Oh, you needn't go on," she interrupted, and her voice, had Weary known it better, heralded the pouring out of a woman's heart. "I know I've made a mistake, all right; you don't need to tell me that. And I suppose you want to tell me that you've got over--things; that you don't care, any more. Maybe you don't, but it'll take a lot to make me believe it. Because you _did_ care, Ira. You _cared_, all right enough!" She laughed in the way that makes one very uncomfortable.

"And maybe you'll tell me that I didn't. But I did, and I do yet. I ain't ashamed to say it, if I did marry Spikes Weber just to spite you.

That's all it was, and you'd have found it out if you hadn't gone off the way you did. I _hate_ Spikes Weber; and he knows it, Ira. He knows I--care--for you, and he's making my life a h.e.l.l. Oh, maybe I deserve it--but you won't-- Now you've come back, you can have it out with him; and I--I almost hope you'll kill him! I do, and I don't care if it is wicked. I--I don't care for anything much, but--you." She had big, soft brown eyes, and a sweet, weak mouth, and she stopped and looked at Weary in a way that he could easily imagine would be irresistible--to a man who cared.

Weary felt that he was quite helpless. She had hurried out sentences that sealed his lips. He could not tell her now that she had made a mistake; that he was not Ira Mallory, but a perfect stranger. The only thing to do now was to carry the thing through as tactfully as possible, and get away as soon as he could. Playing he was Irish, he found, was not without its disadvantages.

"What particular brand of h.e.l.l has he been making for you?" he asked her sympathetically.

"I wouldn't think, knowing Spikes as you do, you'd need to ask," she said impatiently. "The same old brand, I guess. He gets drunk, and then--I told him, right out, just after we were married, that I liked you the best, and he don't forget it; and he don't let me. He swears he'll shoot you on sight--as if that would do any good! He hates you, Ira." She laughed again unpleasantly.

Weary, sitting uneasily in the saddle looking at her, wondered if Irish really cared; or if, in Weary's place, he would have sat there so calmly and just looked at her. She was rather pretty, in a pink and white, weak way. He could easily imagine her marrying Spikes Weber for mere spite; what he could not imagine, was Irish in love with her.

It seemed almost as if she caught a glimmer of his thoughts, for she reined closer, and her teeth were digging into her lower lip. "Well, aren't you going to _do_ anything?" she demanded desperately. "You're here, and I've told you I--care. Are you going to leave me to bear Spikes' abuse always?"

"You married him," Weary remarked mildly and a bit defensively. It seemed to him that loyalty to Irish impelled him.

She tossed her head contemptuously. "It's nice to throw that at me. I might get back at you and say you loved me. You did, you know."

"And you married Spikes; what can _I_ do about it?"

"What--can--you--do--about it? Did you come back to ask me that?"

There was a well defined, white line around her mouth, and her eyes were growing ominously bright.

Weary did not like the look of her, nor her tone. He felt, somehow, glad that it was not Irish, but himself; Irish might have felt the thrall of old times--whatever they were--and have been tempted. His eyes, also, grew ominous, but his voice was very smooth. (Irish, too, had that trait of being quietest when he was most roused.)

"I came back on business; I will confess I didn't come to see you," he said. "I'm only a bone-headed cowpuncher, but even cowpunchers can play square. They don't, as a rule step in between a man and his wife.

You married Spikes, and according to your own tell, you did it to spite me. So I say again, what can _I_ do about it?"

She looked at him dazedly.

"Uh course," he went on gently, "I won't stand to see any man abuse his wife, or bandy her name or mine around the country. If I should happen to meet up with Spikes, there'll likely be some dust raised. And if I was you, and Spikes abused me, I'd quit him cold."

"Oh, I see," she said sharply, with an exaggeration of scorn. "You have got over it, then. There's someone else. I might have known a man can't be trusted to care for the same woman long. You ran after me and acted the fool, and kept on till you made me believe you really meant all you said--"

"And you married Spikes," Weary reiterated--ungenerously, perhaps; but it was the only card he felt sure of. There was no gainsaying that fact, it seemed. She had married Spikes in a fit of pique at Irish.

Still, it was not well to remind her of it too often. In the next five minutes of tumultuous recrimination, Weary had cause to remember what Shakespeare has to say about a woman scorned, and he wondered, more than ever, if Irish had really cared. The girl--even now he did not know what name to call her--was showing a strain of coa.r.s.e temper; the temper that must descend to personalities and the calling of unflattering names. Weary, not being that type of male human who can retort in kind, sat helpless and speechless the while she berated him.

When at last he found opportunity for closing the interview and riding on, her anger-sharpened voice followed him shrewishly afar. Weary breathed deep relief when the distance swallowed it, and lifted his gray hat to wipe his beaded forehead.

"Mamma mine!" he said fervently to Glory. "Irish was sure playing big luck when she _did_ marry Spikes; and I don't wonder at the poor devil taking to drink. I would, too, if my little schoolma'am--"

At the ranch, he hastened to make it quite plain that he was not Ira Mallory, but merely his cousin, Will Davidson. He was quite determined to put a stop to all this annoying mixing up of ident.i.ties. And as for Spikes Weber, since meeting the woman Spikes claimed from him something very like sympathy; only Weary had no mind to stand calmly and hear Irish maligned by anybody.

The next day he rode again to Sleepy Trail to meet the stage, hoping fervently that he would get some word--and that favorable--from Chip.

He was thinking, just then, a great deal about his own affairs and not at all about the affairs of Irish. So that he was inside the saloon before he remembered that the bartender knew him for Irish.

The bartender nodded to him in friendly fashion, and jerked his head warningly toward a far corner where two men sat playing seven-up half-heartedly. Weary looked, saw that both were strangers, and puzzled a minute over the mysterious gesture of the bartender. It did not occur to him, just then, that one of the men might be Spikes Weber.

The man who was facing him nipped the corners of the cards idly together and glanced up; saw Weary standing there with an elbow on the bar looking at him, and pushed back his chair with an oath unmistakably warlike. Weary resettled his hat and looked mildly surprised. The bartender moved out of range and watched breathlessly.

"You ---- ---- --------!" swore Spikes Weber, coming truculently forward, hand to hip. He was of medium height and stockily built, with the bull neck and little, deep-set eyes that go often with a nature quarrelsome.

Weary still leaned his elbow on the bar and smiled at him tolerantly.

"Feel bad anywhere?" he wanted to know, when the other was very close.

Spikes Weber, from very surprise, stopped and regarded Weary for a s.p.a.ce before he began swearing again. His hand was still at his hip, but the gun it touched remained in his pocket. Plainly, he had not expected just this att.i.tude.

Weary waited, smothering a yawn, until the other finished a particularly pungent paragraph. "A good jolt uh brandy 'll sometimes cure a bad case uh colic," he remarked. "Better have our friend here fix yuh up--but it'll be on you. I ain't paying for drinks just now."

Spikes snorted and began upon the pedigree and general character of Irish. Weary took his elbow off the bar, and his eyes lost their sunniness and became a hard blue, darker than was usual. It took a good deal to rouse Weary to the fighting point, and it is saying much for the tongue of Spikes that Weary was roused thoroughly.

"That'll be about enough," he said sharply, cutting short a sentence from the other. "I kinda hated to start in and take yuh all to pieces--but yuh better saw off right there, or I can't be responsible--"

A gun barrel caught the light menacingly, and Weary sprang like the pounce of a cat, wrested the gun from the hand of Spikes and rapped him smartly over the head with the barrel. "Yuh would, eh?" he snarled, and tossed the gun upon the bar, where the bartender caught it as it slid along the smooth surface and put it out of reach.

After that, chairs went spinning out of the way, and gla.s.ses jingled to the impact of a body striking the floor with much force. Came the slapping sound of hammering fists and the scuffling of booted feet, together with the hard breathing of fighting men.

Spikes, on his back, looked up into the blazing eyes he thought were the eyes of Irish and silently acknowledged defeat. But Weary would not let it go at that.

"Are yuh whipped to a finish, so that yuh don't want any more trouble with anybody?" he wanted to know.

Spikes hesitated but the fraction of a second before he growled a reluctant yes.

"Are yuh a low-down, lying sneak of a woman-fighter, that ain't got nerve enough to stand up square to a ten-year-old boy?"

Spikes acknowledged that he was. Before the impromptu catechism was ended, Spikes had acknowledged other and more humiliating things--to the delectation of the bartender, the stage driver and two or three men of leisure who were listening.

When Spikes had owned to being every mean, unknowable thing that Weary could call to mind--and his imagination was never of the barren sort--Weary generously permitted him to get upon his feet and skulk out to where his horse was tied. After that, Weary gave his unruffled attention to the stage driver and discovered the unwelcome fact that there was no letter and no telegram for one William Davidson, who looked a bit glum when he heard it.

So he, too, went out and mounted Glory and rode away to the ranch where waited the horses; and as he went he thought, for perhaps the first time in his life, some hard and unflattering things of Chip Bennett.

He had never dreamed Chip would calmly overlook his needs and leave him in the lurch like this.

At the ranch, when he had unsaddled Glory and gone to the bunk-house, he discovered Irish, Pink and Happy Jack wrangling amicably over whom a certain cross-eyed girl on the train had been looking at most of the time. Since each one claimed all the glances for himself, and since there seemed no possible way of settling the dispute, they gave over the attempt gladly when Weary appeared, and wanted to know, first thing, who or what had been gouging the hide off his face.

Weary, not aware until the moment that he was wounded, answered that he had done it shaving; at which the three hooted derision and wanted to know since when he had taken to shaving his nose. Weary smiled inscrutably and began talking of something else until he had weaned them from the subject, and learned that they had bribed the stage driver to let them off at this particular ranch; for the stage driver knew Irish, and knew also that a man he had taken to be Irish was making this place his headquarters. The stage driver was one of those male gossips who know everything.

When he could conveniently do so, Weary took Irish out of hearing of the others and told him about Spikes Weber. Irish merely swore. After that, Weary told him about Spikes Weber's wife, in secret fear and with much tact, but in grim detail. Irish listened with never a word to say.

"I done what looked to me the best thing, under the circ.u.mstances,"

Weary apologized at the last, "and I hope I haven't mixed yuh up a bunch uh trouble. Mamma mine! she's sure on the fight, though, and she's got a large, black opinion of yuh as a constant lover. If yuh want to square yourself with her, Irish, you've got a big contract."

"I don't want to square myself," Irish retorted, grinning a bit. "I did have it bad, I admit; but when she went and got tied up to Spikes, that cured me right off. She's kinda pretty, and girls were scarce, and--oh, h.e.l.l! you know how it goes with a man. I'd a married her and found out afterwards that her mind was like a little paper windmill stuck up on the gatepost with a shingle nail--only she saved me the trouble. Uh course, I was some sore over the deal for awhile; but I made up my mind long ago that Spikes was the only one in the bunch that had any sympathy coming. If he's been acting up like you say, I change the verdict: there ain't anything coming to him but a big bunch uh trouble. I'm much obliged to yuh, Weary; you done me a good turn and earnt a lot uh grat.i.tude, which is yours for keeps. Wonder if supper ain't about due; I've the appet.i.te of a Billy goat, if anybody should ask yuh."

At supper Irish was uncommonly silent, and did some things without thinking; such as pouring a generous stream of condensed cream into his coffee. Weary, knowing well that Irish drank his coffee without cream, watched him a bit closer than he would otherwise have done; Irish was the sort of man who does not always act by rule.

After supper Weary missed him quite suddenly, and went to the door of the bunk-house to see where he had gone. He did not see Irish, but on a hilltop, in the trail that led to Sleepy Trail, he saw a flurry of dust. Two minutes of watching saw it drift out of sight over the hill, which proved that the maker was traveling rapidly away from the ranch.

Weary settled his hat down to his eyebrows and went out to find the foreman.