The Lawless West Read Online Free PDF Page A

conversation when Tex took her into his arms. She struggled—fought with all her might. But he succeeded in kissing her cheek and the tip of her ear. Finally she broke away from him.
    “Now…,” she panted. “You’ve done it…you’ve insulted me. Now I’ll never ride with you again…even speak to you.”
    “I shore didn’t insult you,” replied Tex. “Jane…won’t you marry me?”
    “No.”
    “Won’t you be my sweetheart…till you care enough to…to…?”
    “No.”
    “But, Jane, you’ll forgive me, an’ be good friends again?”
    “Never!”
    Jane did not mean all she said. She had come to understand these men of the ranges—their loneliness—their hunger for love. But in spite of her sympathy she needed sometimes to be cold and severe.
    “Jane, you owe me a good deal…more than you’ve any idea,” said Tex seriously.
    “How so?”
    “Didn’t you ever guess about me?”
    “My wildest flight at guessing would never make anything of you, Texas Jack.”
    “You’d never have been here but for me,” he said solemnly.
    Jane could only stare at him.
    “I meant to tell you long ago. But I shore didn’t have nerve. Jane…I…I was that there letter-writin’ feller. I wrote them letters you got. I am Frank Owens.”
    “No!” exclaimed Jane. She was startled. That matter of Frank Owens had never been cleared up. It had ceased to rankle within her breast, but it had never been forgotten. She looked up earnestly into the big fellow’s face. It was like a mask. But she saw through it. He was lying. Almost, she thought, she saw a laugh deep in his eyes.
    “I shore am the lucky man who found you a job when you was sick an’ needed a change…An’ you’ve grown so pretty an’ so well you owe all thet to me.”
    “Tex, if you really were Frank Owens, that would make a great difference. I owe him everything. I would…but I don’t believe you are he.”
    “It’s a sure honest Gospel fact,” declared Tex. “I hope to die if it ain’t!”
    Jane shook her head sadly at his monstrous prevarication.
    “I don’t believe you,” she said, and left him standing there.
    It might have been mere coincidence that during the next few days both Nevada and Panhandle waylaid and conveyed to her intelligence by diverse and pathetic arguments the astounding fact that each was Mr. Frank Owens. More likely, however, was it the unerring instinct of lovers who had sensed the importance and significance of this mysterious correspondent’s part in bringing health and happiness into Jane Stacey’s life. She listened to them with anger and sadness and amusement at their deceit, and she had the same answer for both: “I don’t believe you.”
    And through these machinations of the cowboys Jane had begun to have vague and sweet and disturbing suspicions of her own as to the real identity of that mysterious cowboy, Frank Owens. Andy had originality as well as daring. He would have completely deceived Jane if she had not happened, by the merest accident, to discover the relation between him and certain love letters she had begun to find in her desk. She was deceived at first, for the typewriting of these was precisely like that in the letters like that of Frank Owens. She had been suddenly aware of a wild start of rapture. That had given place to a shameful open-eyed realization of the serious condition of her own heart. But she happened to discover in Andy the writer of these missives, and her dream was shattered, if not forgotten. Andy certainly would not carry love letters to her that he did not write. He had merely learned to use the same typewriter and at opportune times he had slipped theletters into her desk. Jane now began to have her own little aching haunting secret that was so hard to put out of her mind. Every letter and every hint of Frank Owens made her remember. Therefore she decided to put a check to Andy’s sly double-dealing. She addressed a note to him and wrote:
Dear Andy,
    That day at the