"It wouldn't be charity. I've always felt as if you had a moral claim on
an interest in the 'Monte Cristo.' If you won't take this yourself, why
not let me make out the papers to Miss Lee? You would feel then that she
was comfortably fixed, no matter what happened to you."
"Well, I'll lay it befo' her. Anyhow, we're much obliged to you, Mr.
Morse. I'll tell you what, seh," he added as an after-thought. "You come
down and talk it over with 'Lissie. If you can make her see it that way,
good enough."
When Champ Lee turned his bronco's head homeward he was more at peace with
the world than he had been for a long time. He felt that he would be able
to look his little girl in the face again. For the first time in a week he
felt at one with creation. He rode into the ranch plaza humming "Dixie."
On the day following that of Lee's call, the mine-owner saddled his mare
and took the trail to the half-way house. It was not until after the stage
had come and gone that he found the chance for a word with Melissy alone.
"Your father submitted my proposition, did he?" Bellamy said by way of
introducing the subject.
"Let's take a walk on it. I haven't been out of the house to-day," she
answered with the boyish downrightness sometimes uppermost in her.
Calling Jim, she left him in charge of the store, caught up a Mexican
sombrero, and led the way up the trail to a grove of live-oaks perched on
a bluff above. Below them stretched the plain, fold on fold to the blue
horizon edge. Close at hand clumps of cactus, thickets of mesquit,
together with the huddled adobe buildings of the ranch, made up the
details of a scene possible only in the sunburnt territory. The
palpitating heat quivered above the hot brown sand. No life stirred in the
valley except a circling buzzard high in the sky, and the tiny moving
speck with its wake of dust each knew to be the stage that had left the
station an hour before.
Melissy, unconscious of the charming picture she made, stood upon a rock
and looked down on it all.
"I suppose," she said at last slowly, "that most people would think this
pretty desolate. But it's a part of me. It's all I know." She broke off
and smiled at him. "I had a chance to be civilized. Dad wanted to send me
East to school, but I couldn't leave him."