Jackson Gregory - Under Handicap

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[Illustration: CONNISTON HAD SEEN HER FIRST, A HUDDLED HEAP, ALMOST AT
HIS FEET]

Under Handicap

A NOVEL

By JACKSON GREGORY

AUTHOR OF
"The Outlaw," Etc.

With Frontispiece

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York

Published by arrangement with HARPER & BROTHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1914 BY HARPER & BROTHERS

TO
"MY LADY"
LOTUS McGLASHAN GREGORY
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

UNDER HANDICAP

CHAPTER I

Outside there was shimmering heat and dry, thirsty sand, miles upon
miles of it flashing by in a gray, barren blur. A flat, arid,
monotonous land, vast, threatening, waterless, treeless. Its immensity
awed, its bleakness depressed. Man's work here seemed but to
accentuate the puny insignificance of man. Man had come upon the
desert and had gone, leaving only a line of telegraph-poles with their
glistening wires, two gleaming parallel rails of burning steel to mark
his passing.

The thundering Overland Limited, rushing onward like a frightened
thing, screamed its terror over the desert whose majesty did not even
permit of its catching up the shriek of the panting engine to fling it
back in echoes. The desert ignored, and before and behind the
onrushing train the deep serenity of the waste places was undisturbed.

Within the train the desert was nothing. Man's work defied the heat
and the sand and the sullen frown outside. Here in the Pullman
smoking-car were luxury, comfort, and companionship. Behind drawn
shades were the whir of electric fans, an ebon-faced porter in snowy
linen, the clink of ice in long, misted glasses, the cool fragrance
of crushed mint. Even the fat man in shirt-sleeves reading the Denver
_Times_, alternately drawing upon his fat cigar and sipping the glass
of beer at his elbow, was not distressing to look upon. The four men
busy over their daily game of solo might have been at ease in their
own club.

At one end of the long car two young men dawdled in languid comfort,
their bodies sprawling loosely in two big, soft arm-chairs, a tray
with a couple of half-emptied high-ball glasses upon the table between
them. They had created an atmosphere of their own about them, an
atmosphere constituted of the blue haze from cigarettes mingled with
trivial talk. The immensity outside might have bored them, so their
shade was drawn low. For a moment one of the two men lifted a corner
of it. He peered out, only to drop it with a disgusted sigh and return
to his high-ball.

He was slender, young, pale-eyed, pale-haired, white-handed,
anemic-looking. He was patently of the sort which considers such a
thing as carelessness in the matter of a crease in one's trousers a
crime of crimes. His tie, adjusted with a precision which was a
science, was of a pale lavender. His socks were silk and of the same
color. His eyes were as near a pale lavender as they were near any
color.

"The devilish stupid sameness of this country gets on a man's nerves."
He put his disgust into drawling words. "Suppose it's like this all
the way to 'Frisco?"

His companion, stretching his legs a bit farther under the table, made
no answer.

"I said something then," the lavender young gentleman said, peevishly.
"What's the matter with you, Greek?"

Greek took his arms down from the back of his chair where he had
clasped his hands behind his head, and finished his own high-ball.
Nature in the beginning of things for him had been more kind than to
his petulant friend. He was scarcely more than a boy--twenty-five,
perhaps, from the looks of him--but physically a big man. He might
have weighed a hundred and eighty pounds, and he was maybe an inch
over six feet. But evidently where nature had left off there had been
nobody to go on save the tailor. His gray suit was faultlessly
correct, his linen immaculate, his hose silken and of a brilliant,
dazzling blue. His face was fine, even handsome, but indicating about
as much purpose as did his faultlessly correct shoes. There was an
extreme, unruffled good humor in his eyes and about his mouth, and
with it all as much determination of character as is commonly put into
the rosy face of a wax doll.

"Seeing that you have made the same remark seventeen times since
breakfast," Greek replied, when he had set his empty glass back upon
the tray, "I didn't know that an answer was needed."

"Well, it's so," the pale youth maintained, irritably.

Greek nodded wearily and selected a cigarette from a silver
monogrammed case. The cigarettes themselves were monogrammed, each one
bearing a delicately executed _W. C._ His companion reached out a
shapely hand for the case, at the same time regarding his empty glass.

"Suppose we have another, eh?"

Again Greek nodded. The lavender young man reached the button, and a
bell tinkled in the little buffet at the far end of the car. The negro
lazily polishing a glass put it down, glanced at the indicator, and
hastened to put glasses and bottles upon a tray.

"The same, suh?" he asked, coming to the table and addressing Greek.

It was the pale young man who assured him that it was to be the same,
but it was Greek who threw a dollar bill upon the tray.

"Thank you, suh. Thank you." The negro bobbed as he made the proper
change--and returned it to his own pocket.

Greek appeared not to have seen him or heard. He poured his own drink
and shoved the bottles toward his friend, who helped himself with
skilful celerity.

"Suppose the old gent will hold out long this time, Greek?" came the
query, after a swallow of the whisky and seltzer, a shrewd look in the
pale eyes.

Greek laughed carelessly.

"I guess we'll have time to see a good deal of San Francisco before he
caves in. The old man put what he had to say in words of one syllable.
But we won't worry about that until we get there."

"Did he shell out at all?"

"He didn't quite give me carte blanche," retorted Greek, grinning. "A
ticket to ride as far as I wanted to, and five hundred in the long
green. And it's going rather fast, Roger, my boy."

"And my tickets came out of the five hundred?"

Greek nodded.

"It's devilish the way my luck's gone lately," grumbled Roger. "I
don't know when I can ever pay--"

Greek put up his hand swiftly.

"You don't pay at all," he said, emphatically. "This is my treat. It
was mighty decent of you to drop everything and come along with me
into this d----d exile. And," he finished, easily, "I'll have more
money than I'll know what to do with when the old man gets
soft-hearted again."

"He's d----d hard on you, Greek. He's got more--"

"Oh, I don't know." Greek laughed again. "He's a good sort, and we get
along first rate together. Only he's got some infernally uncomfortable
ideas about a man going to work and doing something for himself in
this little old vale of tears. He shaves himself five times out of
six, and I've seen him black his own boots!" He chuckled amusedly.
"Just to show people he can, you know."

Roger shook his head and applied himself to his glass, failing to see
the humor of the thing. And while the bigger man continued to muse
with twinkling eyes over the idiosyncrasies of an enormously wealthy
but at the same time enormously hard-headed father, with old-fashioned
ideas of the dignity of labor, Roger sat frowning into his glass.

The silence, into which the click of the rails below had entered so
persistently as to become a part of it rather than to disturb it, was
broken at last by the clamorous screaming of the engine. The train was
slackening its speed. Greek flipped up the shade and looked out.

"Another one of those toy villages," he called over his shoulder. "Who
in the devil would want to get off here?"

Roger sank a trifle deeper into his chair, indicating no interest. The
fat man had dropped his newspaper to the floor and was leaning out the
window.

"Great country, ain't it?" he called to Greek.

"Yes, it certainly _ain't_! What gets me is, why do people live in a
place like this? Are they all crazy?"

The train now was jerking and bumping to a standstill. Sixty yards
away was a little, bluish-gray frame building, by far the most
pretentious of the clutter of shacks, flaunting the legend, "Prairie
City." Beyond the station was the to-be-expected general store and
post-office. A bit farther on a saloon. Beyond that another, and then
straggling at intervals a dozen rough, rambling, one-storied board
houses. For miles in all directions the desert stretched dry and
barren. The faces of women and children peered out of windows, the
forms of roughly garbed men lounged in the doorways of the store and
the saloons. All the denizens of Prairie City manifested a mild
interest in the arrival of Number 1.

"I guess you called the turn," sputtered the fat man. "Here come the
crazy folks now!"

A cloud of dust swirling higher and higher in the still air, the
clatter of hoofs, and two horses swept around the farthest house,
carrying their riders at breakneck speed into the one and only street.
At first Greek took it to be a race, and then he thought it a runaway.
As it was the first interesting incident since Grand Central Station
had dropped out of sight four days ago, he craned his neck to watch.

The two riders were half-way down the street now, a tall bay forging
steadily ahead of a little Mexican mustang until ten feet or more
intervened between the two horses. The train jerked; the Wells Fargo
man, with his truck alongside the express-car far ahead, yelled
something to the man who had taken his packages aboard.

"The bay wins," grinned the fat man. "It looks--Gad! It's a woman!"

Greek saw that it was a woman in khaki riding-habit, and that the
spurs she wore were gnawing into her horse's flanks. He began to take
a sudden, stronger interest. He leaned farther out, hardly realizing
that he had called to the conductor to hold the train a moment. For it
was at last clear that these were not mad people, but merely a couple
of the dwellers of the desert anxious to catch Number 1. But the
conductor had waved his orders and was swinging upon the slowly moving
steps. From the windows of the train a score of heads were thrust out,
a score of voices raised in shouting encouragement. And down to the
tracks the woman and the man behind her rushed, their horses' feet
seeming never to touch the ground.

A bump, a jar, a jerk, and the Limited was drawing slowly away from
the station. The woman was barely fifty yards away. As she lifted her
head Greek saw her face for the first time. And, having seen her ride,
he pursed his lips into a low whistle of amazement.

"Why, she's only a kid of a girl!" gasped the fat man. "And, say,
ain't she sure a peach!"

Greek didn't answer. He was busy inwardly cursing the conductor for
not waiting a second longer. For it was obvious to him that the girl
was going to miss the train by hardly more than that.

But she had not given up. She had dropped her head again and was
rushing straight toward the side of the string of cars. Greek held his
breath, a swift alarm for her making his heart beat trippingly. He did
not see how she could stop in time.

Again a clamor of voices from the heads thrust out of car windows,
warning, calling, cheering. And then suddenly Greek sat back limply.
The thing had been so impossible and in the end so amazingly simple.

Not ten feet away from the train she had drawn in her horse's reins,
"setting up" the half-broken animal upon his four feet, bunched
together so that with the momentum he had acquired he slid almost to
the cars. As he stopped the girl swung lightly from the saddle and,
seeming scarcely to have put foot upon the sandy soil, caught the
hand-rail as the car came by and swung on to the lowest step. The man
behind her caught up her horse's reins, whirled, sweeping his hat off
to her, and turned back.

"Which is some riding, huh?" chuckled the fat man, his own head
withdrawn as he reached for his beer-glass.

"What's the excitement?" Roger's interest had not been great enough to
send him to the window.

"Some people trying to catch the train," Greek told him, shortly. For
some reason, not clear to himself, he did not care to be more
definite.

"I don't blame the poor devils. Think of waiting there until another
came by!" Roger washed the dryness out of his mouth with a generous
sip of his whisky and seltzer.

The fat man finished his glass of beer and rang for another. Greek sat
gazing out over the wide wastes of the desert. He had never before
been in a land like this. Now that more than two thousand miles
lengthened out between him and New York, he had felt himself more than
ever an exile. Heretofore he had given no thought to the people
dwelling here beyond the last reaches of those things for which
civilization stood to him. He was not in the habit of thinking deeply.
That part of the day's work could be left to William Conniston,
Senior, while William Conniston, Junior, more familiarly known to his
intimates as "Greek" Conniston, found that he could dispense with
thinking every bit as easily as he could spend the money which flowed
into his pockets. But now, as unexpectedly as a flash from a dead
fire, a girl's face had startled him, and he found himself almost
thinking--wondering--

Conniston turned swiftly. The girl was passing down the long narrow
hallway leading by the smoking-car, evidently seeking the
observation-car. Through the windows he could see her shoulders and
face as she walked by him. He could see that there was the same
confidence in her carriage now that there had been when she had jerked
her horse to a standstill and had thrown herself to the ground. Even
Roger, turning idly, uttered an exclamation of surprised interest.

She was dressed in a plain, close-fitting riding-habit which hid
nothing of the undulating grace of her active young body. In her hand
she carried the riding-quirt and the spurs which she had not had time
to leave behind. Her wide, soft gray hat was pushed back so that her
face was unhidden. And as she walked by her eyes rested for a fleeting
second upon the eyes of Greek Conniston.

Her cheeks were flushed rosily from her race, the warm, rich blood
creeping up to the untanned whiteness of her brow. But he did not
realize these details until she had gone by; not, in fact, until he
began to think of her. For in that quick flash he saw only her eyes.
And to this man who had known the prettiest women who drive on Fifth
Avenue and dine at Sherry's and wear wonderful gowns to the
Metropolitan these were different eyes. Their color was elusive, as
elusive as the vague tints upon the desert as dusk drifts over it;
like that calm tone of the desert resolved into a deep, unfathomable
gray, wonderfully soft, transcendently serene. And through the
indescribable color as through untroubled skies at dawn there shone
the light which made her, in some way which he could not entirely
grasp, different from the women he had known. He merely felt that
their light was softly eloquent of frankness and health and cleanness.
Their gaze was as steady and confident as her hand had been upon her
horse's reins.

"She must have been born in this wilderness, raised in it!" he mused,
when she had passed. "Her eyes are the eyes of a glorious young
animal, bred to the freedom of outdoors, a part of the wild, untamable
desert! And her manner is like the manner of a great lady born in a
palace!"

"Hey, Greek," Roger was saying, his droning voice coming unpleasantly
into the other's musings, "did you pipe that? Did you ever see
anything like her?"

Conniston lighted a fresh cigarette and turned again to look out
across the level gray miles. Ignoring his friend, Greek thought on,
idly telling himself that the Dream Girl should be born out here,
after all. Here she would have a soul; a soul as far-reaching, as
infinite, as free from shackles of convention as the wide bigness of
her cradle. And she would have eyes like that, drawing their very
shade from the vague grayness which seemed to him to spread over
everything.

"I say, Greek," Roger was insisting, sufficiently interested to sit up
straight, his cigarette dangling from his lip, "that little country
girl, dressed like a wild Indian, is pretty enough to be the belle of
the season! What do you think?"

Conniston laughed carelessly.

"You're an impressionable young thing, Hapgood."

"Am I?" grunted Roger. "Just the same, I know a fine-looking woman
when I clap my bright eyes on her. And I'd like to camp on her trail
as long as the sun shines! Say"--his voice half losing its eternal
drawl--"who do you suppose she is? Her old man might own about a
million acres of this God-forsaken country. If she goes on through to
'Frisco--"

"You wouldn't be strong for stopping off out here?" the fat man put in
genially. Hapgood shuddered.

And to Greek Conniston there came a sudden inspiration.

"Anyway," Roger Hapgood went on in his customary drawl, "I'm going to
find out. It's little Roger to learn something about the prairie
flower. I'll soon tell you who she is," he added, rising from his
seat.

But he never did. For one thing, young Conniston was not there when
Roger returned five minutes later, and it is extremely doubtful if
Roger Hapgood would have told how his venture had fared. Being duly
impressed with the fascination of his own debonair little person, and
having the imagination of a cow, he had smirked his way to the girl,
who now sat in the observation-car, and had begun on the weather.

"Dreadfully warm in this desert country, isn't it?" he said, with
over-politeness and the smile which he knew to be irresistible.

The girl turned from gazing out the window, and her eyes met his, very
clear and very much amused.

"Very warm," she smiled back at him. Even then he had a faint fear
that she was not so much smiling as laughing. "The surprising thing is
how well things keep, is it not?"

"Ah--yes," he murmured, not entirely confident, and still dropping
into a chair at her side. "You mean--"

"How fresh some things keep!"

Roger Hapgood's pink little face went violently red.

"I say!" he began. "I didn't mean any offense. I thought--"

"Oh, that's all right," she laughed, gaily. "No offense whatever. Will
you please open that window for me?"

His face became normally pink again as he hastened to throw up the
window in front of her. His eyelid fluttered downward as he met the
regard of a couple of men facing them. Then he came back to her side.

"Thank you," she smiled sweetly up at him. And she held out her hand.

He didn't know what she wanted to do that for, but had a confused idea
that in the free and easy spirit of the West she was going to shake
hands. The next thing which he realized clearly was that she had
dropped a shining ten-cent piece into his palm.

"Oh, look here," he stammered, only to be interrupted by her voice, a
gurgle of suppressed mirth in it.

"I'm sorry that that's all I have in change! And now, if you will hand
me that magazine--I want to read!"

Roger Hapgood fumbled with the dime and dropped it. He swept up the
magazine from a near-by chair and held it out to her. As he did so he
caught a glimpse of the faces of the two men at whom he had winked so
knowingly, heard one of them break into loud, hearty laughter.
Dropping the magazine to her lap, the lavender young man, with what
dignity he could command, marched back to the smoking-car.

A few minutes later Greek Conniston, returning to the smoking-car,
found his friend pinching his smooth cheek thoughtfully and frowning
out the window. He dropped into his chair, deep in thought. In the
brief interval he had taken his resolution, plunging, as was his
careless nature, after the first impulse. The girl had interested him;
he did not yet realize how much. She came aboard the train without bag
or baggage. Certainly she could not be going far. And he--it didn't
matter in the least where he went. All that he had to do was to keep
out of his father's way until the old man cooled down, and then to
wire for money. His ticket read to San Francisco, but he had no desire
to go there rather than to any other place. And he told himself that
he had a sort of curiosity about this bleak, monotonous desert land.

An hour later the train ran into another little clutter of buildings
and drew up, puffing, at the station. Conniston's eyes were alert,
fixed upon the passageway from the observation-car rather than on the
view from his window. Mail-bags were tossed on and off, a few packages
handled by the Wells Fargo man, and the train pulled out. Conniston
leaned back with a sigh.

"Roger," he said, at last, "I've got a proposition to make."

"Well?"

"Let's drop off at one of these dinky towns and see what it's like.
I've a notion we might find something new."

"That's a real joke, I suppose?"

"Not at all," maintained Conniston. "I'm going to do it. Are you with
me?"

Hapgood sat bolt upright.

"Are you crazy, man!" he cried, sharply.

Conniston shrugged. "Why not? You've never seen anything but city life
and the summer-resort sort of thing any more than I have. It would be
a lark."

"Excuse me! I guess I'm something of a fool for having chased clean
across the continent, but I'm not the kind of fool that's going to
pick a place like this sand-pile to drop off in!"

"All right, old man. Nobody's asking you to if you feel that way."

Hapgood waited as long as he could for Conniston to go on, and when
there came no further information he asked, incredulously:

"You don't mean that, do you, Greek? You don't intend to stop off all
alone out here in this rotten wilderness?"

"Yes, I do. If you won't stop with me."

"But how about me? What am I to do? Here I am--busted! What do you
think I'm going to do?"

"You can go on to San Francisco if you like. You can have half of what
I've got left--or you can drop off with me."

Hapgood argued and exploded and sulked by turns. In the end, seeing
the futility of trying to reason with a man who only laughed, and
seeing further the disadvantage of being cut off from his source of
easy money, Roger gave in, growling. So when the train drew into
Indian Creek that afternoon there were three people who got down from
it.

CHAPTER II

Indian Creek stood lonely and isolated in the flat, treeless,
sun-smitten desert. Only in the south was the unbroken flatness
relieved by a low-lying ridge of barren brown hills, their sides cut
as by erosion into steep, stratified cliffs. Even these bleak hills
looked to be twenty miles away, and were in reality fifty. Beyond
them, softened and blurred by the distance, was a blue-gray line where
the mountains were.

"Of all the wretched holes in the world!" fumed Hapgood.

But Conniston didn't hear him. The girl had stepped down from the
train, and, without casting a glance behind her, walked swiftly across
the wriggling thing which stood for a street in Indian Creek. There
was a saloon with a long hitching-pole in front of it, to which a
couple of saddle-horses were tied, and a buckboard with two fretting
two-year-olds in dust-covered harness. A man, a swarthy half-breed,
with hair and eyes and long, pointed mustaches of inky blackness, was
on the seat, handling the jerking reins. He called a soft "_Adios,
compadre_" to the man lounging in the doorway, and swung his colts out
into the road, making a sweeping half-circle, bringing them to a
restless halt, pawing and fighting their bits, at the girl's side.
While with one brown hand he held them back, with the other he swept
off his wide, black hat.

"How do, Mess!" he cried, softly, his teeth flashing a white greeting.

She answered him with a "Hello, Joe!" as she climbed to his side.

Joe loosened his reins a very little, called sharply to his horses,
and in a whirlwind of dust the buckboard made an amazingly sharp turn
and shot rattling down the road and out toward the mountains in the
south.

"And now what?" grinned Hapgood, maliciously. "Even your country girl
has gone!"

Greek Conniston gazed a moment after the flying buckboard, a vague,
wavering, unreal thing, through the dust of its own making, and,
hiding his disappointment under a shrug, turned to Hapgood.

"Now for a hotel somewhere, if the place has one. Come on, Roger.
We're in for it now, so let's make the best of it."

Carrying his suit-case, he strode off toward the saloon, Roger
following silently. The lanky, sunburned individual in the doorway
watched their approach idly for a moment and then turned his lazy eyes
to a cow and calf trudging past toward the watering-trough.

"Hello, friend!" called Conniston.

The lanky individual drew his eyes from the cow and calf, bestowed a
long look and a fleeting nod upon the two strangers, and turned again
toward the trough, little impressed, little interested in the
Easterners.

"I say!" went on Conniston, brusquely. "Where'll a man get a room
here?"

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