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A man, rifle in hand and leading a horse, was stealthily crossing the trail to disappear among the large boulders beyond. Melissy did not speak, scarce dared to draw breath, for the man beneath them was Boone. There was something furtive and lupine about him that suggested the wild beast stalking its kill. No doubt he had become impatient to see the end of his foe and had ridden forward.
Supper over, he made her sit with him on the porch for an hour to listen to his boasts of former conquests. And when he let her take her way to her room it was not "Good-night" but a mocking "Au revoir" he murmured as he bent to kiss her hand. Melissy found Rosario waiting for her, crouched in the darkness of the room that had been given the young woman.
The Mexican spoke in her own language, softly, with many glances of alarm to make sure they were alone. "Hist, señorita. Here is a note. Read it. Destroy it. Swear not to betray Rosario." By the light of a match Melissy read: "Behind the big rocks. In half an hour. "A Friend." What could it mean? Who could have sent it? Rosario would answer no questions.
But Aunt Melissy was a stirring person and she didn't let it take as long as it might have in another family. "She kept Uncle Silas and Winters that was the name of the hired man busier than anybody, as she never quite got over the trip to town and the way they came home.
Both men were working for the same end to get the ransom paid as soon as possible and the multimillionaire released; and the outlaw realized that Melissy would coöperate the more heartily if she felt she were working for West and not for himself. "This is Tuesday, Miss Lee. You will reach Mesa some time to-night. My friends ought to be on the ground already.
Granny looked ten years older since morning. The three small boys, instead of popping corn or roasting apples and sweet potatoes, as was their habit in the evenings, sat in a dismal row, their chins on their freckled, sunburned hands, and their elbows on their knees, and gazed ruefully at the fire. And Melissy, why, there was Melissy, a little blue-and-white ball curled up on the floor. Asleep?
West? It skins the world," the big cattleman ran on easily. The financier's eye took in the girl sitting beside the chauffeur in the front seat, and he nodded assent. Melissy Lee bloomed. She was vivid as a wild poppy on the hillsides past which they went flashing. But she had, too, a daintiness, a delicacy of coloring and contour, that suggested the fruit named by her father.
Out of the logical need for it was born the store which Beauchamp Lee ran to supply his neighbors with canned goods, coffee, tobacco, and other indispensables; also the eating house for stage passengers passing to and from the towns. Young as she was, Melissy was the competent manager of both of these.
She didn't miss the hired man, though; and I guess he had something else to think of besides Minty Glenwood and housekeeping, for a few minutes, anyway. "Then Aunt Melissy Lovejoy told him he could take himself out of that house, and not come back except for meals, and she said he could sleep over in the shop, which was an old, leaky, broken stump of a tree where we kept our garden tools.
He couldn't jump on it, for fear of waking up Aunt Melissy, so he came down and said I would have to go out on the limb, and he would stay on the ground with the things, because I was always pretty solid, even in those days.
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