Captives of the Desert by Zane Grey

Author:Zane Grey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Western, Fiction
Publisher: Reading Essentials
Published: 1952-12-20T05:00:00+00:00

9

The readiness with which Katharine had agreed to carry Mary’s message to John Curry now seemed to fail her in the execution of her promise. She passed four days at the post and three on a trip to Cathedral Valley without Mary Newton’s name even being mentioned by either of them. On the eighth day, the day that was to see them break camp in Cathedral Valley, she resolutely determined to break the silence. Katharine and Curry were sitting on a log in a cedar cove when she suddenly determined to take the bull by the horns.

Before her in a clearing burned a cheery fire; pots were heating in the cinders, hooks were warming on the crane. The crackle of the fire sounded close, and there came to her above it the tinkling sound of bells that swung from the halter ropes of the feeding horses. The cowboy cook whistled softly over the potatoes he was peeling. Katharine, pleasantly aware of these things, stared into the fire, as if she could snatch courage from the red-hot bed of coals. Alice came up to her. She had been watching High-Lo hobble the pack mules and was returning flushed, to tell of High-Lo’s miraculous escape from a rain of blows from a mule’s hoofs.

“There are three of those mules I’d never want to ride,” she declared. “But I’m getting very proud of my riding at that. High-Lo says no one would guess I was a tenderfoot.”

“Beware of the flattery of a cowboy,” Katharine cautioned her with a laugh. “I think High-Lo is smitten with my sister.”

Katharine had observed High-Lo’s attentiveness. At each camp he had made a bed of cedar boughs for Alice, unwilling to be outdone by John Curry who served Katharine in this way. Such consideration Katharine rather expected from Curry, and she knew he intended to make Alice comfortable too. But handsome, carefree High-Lo was only an apprentice aping his master, and in his deference to Alice he was following a will-o’-the-wisp fancy. Katharine had sensed at once the relationship that existed between John and High-Lo, and Mrs. Weston, always ready in praise of the elder man, had told her the details of their friendship. It was one of her chief delights to discover the many evidences of High-Lo’s fierce loyalty.

At supper to which they were summoned with the lusty call, “Come and get it,” High-Lo served Alice, and Curry served Katharine. Occasionally Beany would look on with his tongue in his cheek and a mischievous twinkle in his eye and waft some remark to the nearest bystander about one man’s success being another man’s failure. And after supper when Katharine drew Curry away from the others by boldly suggesting that they climb the mountain behind camp, she felt Beany’s eyes upon her and also Alice’s, which plainly asked why she should not be invited to go too. When Katharine sauntered past her sister, she was not as serene as she appeared to be.

They climbed around the mound that

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