The Short Cut Read Online Free PDF Page B

its meaning, each to carry across the miles a lover's message.
    They agreed upon the exact time when every day their love would laugh at the miles separating them; an early hour when they had waited just long enough to give Wanda time to ride hither and the Bar L-M men time to have gone about the day's work. And if Wayne were not upon his porch then Wanda was to understand that he was already riding to meet her.
    "But your mother," he said. "Doesn't she often go with you?"
    "Not when I want to be alone," Wanda smiled back at him. "Mamma knows, Wayne."
    "You have told her? Your father told her?"
    "It isn't something that papa talks about, dear. I told. And, Wayne-"
    Suddenly they ceased to be children playing and became very serious. For while the love brimming their young hearts had been like a fountain from which laughter bubbled up, still its song had not deafened their ears to the murmur of life about them. There were things to be told each other, questions to ask and answer, their own future to look soberly in the face.
    Day after day Shandon had looked for word from Martin Leland, had counted on receiving from him an offer for the water to be employed in bringing fertility to Dry Valley. He told her of Ruf Ettinger and his counter scheme, how close he had come to being drawn into it; he wondered if something had happened to cause Leland and Hume to give up their proposition.
    No, whatever this proposition was they had not given it up, Wanda was sure of that. Her father was away much of the time; she knew that he had been often in Dry Valley, that he had had some sort of dealings with Ruf Ettinger. She had heard him say to her mother last night that the man was a hog, that when offered an unheard of price for his land he had held out for something still better, and that Leland had broken off negotiations with him entirely. Yes, it must be the same proposition about which Ettinger had gone to Shandon. Strange that Garth had not told him anything. She knew that Garth regularly met her father and Sledge Hume; she knew that whatever the business was that had drawn Leland and Hume together had drawn Conway into it also.
    That matter finally disposed of, left with the unsatisfactory conclusion that Garth had his own reasons for remaining silent, and that Shandon would soon hear from Leland, Wanda broached the other subject which had all along been the one cloud upon her happiness. Driven to the rim of her mind by her gayer moods it was still there, sinister and black upon the horizon.
    "I should have told you the other day," she said slowly, "the day when we found so much else to talk of. You will understand why papa has refused to let you come to the house."
    "What is it, Wanda?" he asked eagerly, hoping there would be a direct charge so that he might vindicate himself.
    "Have you no idea, Wayne?" a little curiously. "Have you never had a suspicion of the reason that makes papa hate you so?"
    "He disliked my father-"
    "It is not that. Maybe that makes him the more ready to suspect you-" And then she blurted it out, a little defiantly, laying her hand softly upon his arm. "He thinks, he has thought all along, that you killed Arthur!"
    He stared at her gravely, the shock of such a charge too great to be appreciated to its fullest extent in a moment.
    "He thinks that I killed Arthur?" he repeated incredulously. And then, bitterly, "My God, Wanda. This is too horrible."
    "Listen, Wayne. We must talk this over calmly and see what is to be done. You see papa has disliked you because he hated your father. Oh, it's unjust but it's so human! He has believed all the hard things men have said of you and they have said many. He knows that the day before Arthur was killed you and he quarrelled. Then you went away, you were gone a year and he didn't think that you would ever come back. You came back, you made me love you. Believing as he did, papa did the natural thing when he refused to let you come again."
    "He had no right to believe it,"