Tinhorn's Daughter

 

Bat Connor, the messenger, climbed down from the box and went inside. He came back a moment later swiping his hairy hand across his bleached whiskers and looking guiltily toward Betsy to see if she had noticed anything wrong.

 

Horses were being changed as this last run from Twin Pines to Puma Pass would be completed before midnight, and while Tom, the sober-faced driver, tried to remember to swear under his breath as the horses were changed, Bat took advantage of the pause to shift his Winchester into the crook of his arm, put his boot on the step and converse with the passenger. He wanted the boys to see the intimate terms he was on with her.

 

“Ridin’ easy, miss?” said Bat, spraying a hub of tobacco juice.

 

“It is a little rough,” ventured Betsy.

 

“Won’t be no more stage when the railroad gets through here and across the Rockies,” volunteered Bat. “Steel’s better ridin’, I guess, but it shore looks like the country is gettin’ all settled up. You goin’ as far as Puma Pass, ain’t you, ma’am?”

 

“Yes, if my father is there,” said Betsy.

 

Bat turned to the crowd. “Slim Trotwood still in Puma Pass, boys?”

 

The group looked thunderstruck for an instant and then brightly nodded all together.

 

“He’s still in Puma Pass,” relayed Bat. “And we’ll git you there. Just you wait and see. Ain’t a road agent could ever get up nerve enough to hold up any stage of mine!”

 

“Road agent?” said Betsy, startled.

 

“Shore,” said Bat. “We call ’em road agents because they stops us where they ain’t no station, see? Bandits.”

 

“You mean there are robbers in these hills?”

 

Bat grinned confidently and patted his Winchester as though it were a cat. “Now don’t worry none about it, ma’am. You got me ridin’ the box.”

 

The station boss felt a little jealous of Bat’s intimacy. He growled, “Sunset Maloney wasn’t scared none the last time.”

 

“You’ve been held up?” said Betsy quickly.

 

The crowd was instantly all compassion again. She looked very small and very pretty and just now, scared.

 

“Aw, it ain’t often,” said the station boss.

 

“But you have been held up,” she insisted to Bat.

 

He looked uncomfortable and gnawed a chunk from a villainous black plug before he answered. “Well, yes. A young feller named Sunset Maloney’s been holdin’ up stages every time they’s a money sack goin’ in to your old man.”

 

“He’s been stealing from my father?”

 

“Sure. Slim Trotwood, as agent for the Great Western Railroad, is always havin’ a wad shipped in to him. In fact, we’re carryin’ one right now.”

 

Bat saw glory in his role. “Last time I put up a rarin’ fight and this time he won’t have nerve enough to come within six miles of the stage. You just trust to me, ma’am.”

 

“What sort of fellow is this Sunset Maloney?” said Betsy.

 

“Pretty wild,” replied Bat judicially. “Pretty wild. Faster’n a greased rattler with a six-gun. He’s ornery as a barrel of wildcats. But we won’t have no trouble.”

 

Tom was hitched up again and Bat dragged himself back to the box, Winchester prominently displayed. The half-dozen station men tipped their hats to Miss Trotwood and the Concord rolled on its dusty way again.

 

The horses labored as they pulled the long grade. The road began to wind around high hills, and far below, Betsy could see winding streams all silver with distance. The world was turning scarlet and gold as the sun dipped behind the backbone of the continent. But none of this warm beauty lightened Betsy’s heart.

 

She felt very small and helpless, shaken like a die in the otherwise empty coach. And now she had a new worry. Her father was losing his money to a road agent. Was that hurting the project about which he had waxed so enthusiastic?

 

She had never seen her father that she could remember. He had come from fully as good a Boston family as her mother, but he had never seemed to fit in the East. At least that was what her mother had said. Her other relatives had been less kind.

 

Betsy’s mother had not been dead half a year before her father had begun to communicate with Betsy. Relatives said that he was interested in the fortune her mother had left—as her mother’s purse had been trap-tight as long as she had lived. But Betsy had liked to think otherwise.

 

Her father had written many times that he was now an agent for the Great Western, the first railroad into Montana, but that he needed money to buy up the right-of-way in advance of construction. Puma Pass, he had said, had been selected as the only possible crossing of the Continental Divide and if he could buy this land for the railroad he would be rewarded.

 

It had seemed very good to Betsy. She had liked the feeling of importance his letter had given her. She had sent money and then more money and finally, as a surprise, she had come west, against all advice, to help her father in every way she could. He did not know she was coming, but in a matter of hours . . .

 

The brake shrieked; the coach lurched to an abrupt stop and almost threw Betsy headlong against her largest trunk, which had been too big to go outside. 

 

She sat hastily back and righted her bonnet, while the dust caught up with the stage which had made it and curled smokily past the windows.

 

A voice so clear and so brutally cold that it made her tremble knifed the evening chill.

 

“Throw down your rifle, Bat!”

 

The dust thinned and Betsy, leaning sideways, looked ahead. A man on foot was standing across a newly felled tree which blocked the road. He was a terrifying sight to Betsy as he stood there balancing a huge revolver in each hand. His face was completely covered with a red bandanna into which two crude eyeholes had been cut. He was dressed in a white buckskin shirt, flaring chaps and high-heeled boots. He looked very tall, very grim.