The Fighting Shepherdess (Masterpiece Collection)

Book excerpt: A heavily laden freight wagon, piled high with ranch supplies, stood in the dooryard before a long loghouse. The yard was fenced with crooked cottonwood poles so that it served also as a corral, around which the leaders of the freight team wandered, stripped of their harness, looking for a place to roll.A woman stood on tip-toe gritting her teeth in exasperation as she tugged at the check-rein on the big wheelhorse, which stuck obstinately in the ring. When she loosened it finally, she stooped and looked under the horse's neck at the girl of fourteen or thereabouts, who was unharnessing the horse on the other side. “Good God, Kate,” exclaimed the woman irritably; “how many times must I tell you to unhook the traces before you do up the lines? One of these days you'll have the damnedest runaway in seven states.”The girl, whose thoughts obviously were not on what she was doing, obeyed immediately, and without replying looped up the heavy traces, throwing and tying the lines over the hames with experienced hands.The resemblance between mother and daughter was so slight that it might be said not to exist at all. It was clear that Kate's wide, thoughtful eyes, generous mouth and softly curving but firm chin came from the other side, as did her height. Already she was half a head taller than the short, wiry, tough-fibered woman with the small hard features who was known throughout the southern half of Wyoming as “Jezebel of the Sand Coulee.”A long flat braid of fair hair swung below the girl's waist and on her cheeks a warm red showed through the golden tan. Her slim straight figure was eloquent of suppleness and strength and her movements, quick, purposeful, showed decision and activity of mind. They were as characteristic as her directness of speech.The Sand Coulee Roadhouse was a notorious place. The woman who kept it called herself Isabel Bain—Bain having been the name of one of the numerous husbands from whom she had separated to remarry in another state, without the formality of a divorce. She was noted not only for her remarkable horsemanship, but for her exceptional handiness with a rope and branding iron, and her inability to distinguish her neighbors' livestock from her own.“Pete Mullendore's gettin' in.” There was a frown on Kate's face as she spoke and uneasiness in the glance she sent toward the string of pack-horses filing along the fence.The woman said warningly, “Don't you pull off any of your tantrums—you treat him right.”“I'll treat him right,” hotly, “as long as he behaves himself. Mother,” with entreaty in her voice, “won't you settle him if he gets fresh?”Jezebel only laughed and as the gate of the corral scraped when Mullendore pulled it open to herd a saddle horse and pack ponies through, she called out in her harsh croak:“Hello, Pete!”“Hello yourself,” he answered, but he looked at her daughter.As soon as they were through the gate the pack ponies stopped and stood with spreading legs and drooping heads while Mullendore sauntered over to Kate and laid a hand familiarly on her shoulder.“Ain't you got a howdy for me, kid?”She moved aside and began stripping the harness from the horse for the quite evident purpose of avoiding his touch.“You'd better get them packs off,” she replied, curtly. “Looks like you'd got on three hundred pounds.”“Wouldn't be surprised. Them bear traps weigh twenty poun' each, and green hides don't feel like feathers, come to pack 'em over the trail I've come.”Kate looked at him for the first time.“I wisht I was a man! I bet I'd work you over for the way you abuse your stock!”Mullendore laughed.