CHAPTER XLIV

THE LOST SCRIP

JIM NABOURS, his shirt front bulging, approached the door of the Drovers’ Cottage, near which he found a man tinkling a steel triangle, which one day soon would boom a summons thrice a day.

“How are you, sir?” began Nabours. “Can you tell me if Miss Taisie Lockhart is in here? She come up on that herd with us.”

The husband of Lou Gore indicated the rear of the building. Unannounced, Nabours pushed on through the rear hall, beyond whose door he heard sounds of culinary conflict.

“Law, mister, ain’t you in a sort of hurry?” said Lou Gore, a large spoon in one hand. “This is the kitchen. You go on out.”

“But I want to see my boss,” remonstrated the old foreman. “I’ve got five thousand dollars in my shirt for her.”

Lou Gore wiped her hands on her apron.

“Well,” said she, “if you’ve got five thousand dollars come on in. I’ll let you see her if I can.” She approached the bedroom door.

“Jim! Jim!” called a voice he knew very well, a voice full of eagerness now. The door flung open. Taisie, shrouded in blankets, broke out, her radiant face framed in its mass of glowing hair. She flung an arm about the grizzled foreman’s neck. He seemed almost the one friend in all the world for her. “I’m so glad you’ve come!”

“Miss Taisie,” said Jim Nabours succinctly, “here is five thousand dollars. I reckon you’d better put on your pants—if you got nothing else.”

But Taisie sank into a chair, enveloping herself in her blankets. Her eyes were startled.

“Five thousand dollars?”

“Yes, ma’am. I done sold the cows at twenty straight. There’ll be about three thousand head. That’s sixty thousand dollars, ma’am. This here, now, is only part of it. It’ll be in and around sixty thousand. We can get the rest any time we want. I reckon we done right well for you, Miss Taisie.”

Taisie Lockhart looked up at him with sudden tears in her eyes, weak in the reaction from the strain of years.

“I could kiss you, Jim!” said she.

“I wish you wouldn’t, ma’am; not until I get shaved. Yes, ma’am, we done right well, all things considered. Now, I think you better get about five thousand worth of more clothes.”

“She’s got all the clothes she needs, she told me,” remarked Lou Gore; “a whole trunk of clothes out there on the cart. We haven’t had time to fetch it in yet.”

“Why, shore she has, ma’am! We brung that trunk all the way from Texas. You can’t ride a cow horse in them kind of clothes, ma’am. So Lord Lovel he mounted his milk-white steed. Ain’t she pretty, ma’am? Prettier’n any spotted pup ever was!

“But say, Miss Taisie,” he went on to the girl who still sat huddled in her blankets, “I got to tell you all the news. Dan McMasters has throwed in with the man we sold our cows to. They’re going to start a ranch up North here. We-all are a-goin’ to drive cows up to their ranch next year. Dan, he’s a partner in that; he’s going to be plumb rich. I heard him say he was going to leave Texas, him sher’f and all.

“Far as that goes, if it hadn’t of been for Dan, we maybe wouldn’t have traded. He bid up for all the light stuff, at the same price the other man offered for fours—twenty straight through. Now, Dan——”

“For mercy sake, man, how you run on!” broke in Lou Gore. “You go help this black woman to bring in that trunk from the cart. This is the Fourth of July, and we may have some sort of dance here if them band people ain’t too drunk. Go fetch that trunk.”

“Well, all right, all right,” said Jim Nabours. “I was just trying to tell the boss a few things she’d orter know.”

But in three minutes Jim Nabours was back in the room, gray under his grime and tan.

“Miss Taisie,” said he dully, “your trunk’s gone! It ain’t in the cart at all. The scrip in there was worth maybe five times as much as sixty thousand dollars. Lands’ll go up in Texas now. And here I’ve lost all the scrip that yore paw give you!

“Miss Taisie, it was all my fault. I never did once think of that trunk a-tall; I was only thinking of cows.”

“Why, Jim, who could have taken it?”

“I don’t know,” said Jim Nabours. “It’s gone oncet more.”

He stumbled into a chair.

“I reckon I’m too old now. I’ve let you get robbed oncet more.”