A Sagebrush Cinderella — Text and Context

She lay prone upon the floor, kicking her heels together, frowningly intent upon her book. Outside the sky was crimson with the sunset. Inside the room, every corner was filled with the gay fantoms of the age of chivalry. Jac would not raise her head, for if she kept her eyes upon the printed page it seemed to her that the armored knights were trooping about her rooms. A board creaked. That was from the running of some striped page with pointed toes. The wind made a soft rustling. That was the stir of the nodding plumes of the warriors. The pageantry of forgotten kings flowed brightly about her.

Jacqueline frowned and shrugged her shoulders.

She raised her head. The dreary board walls of her room looked back at her, empty, barren, a thousand miles and a thousand years from all romance. She closed her book as the door of her room opened and her father stood in the entrance.

“Readin’ again!” said Jim During in infinite disgust. “Go down an’ wait on the table. The cook’s gone an’ got drunk. I’ve give him the run. Hurry up.”

She shied the book into a corner and rose.

“How many here for chow?” she asked.

“Maurice Gordon an’ a lot of others,” said her father. “Start movin’!”

She started. Handsome Maurice Gordon! She had only to close her eyes and there he stood in armor--Sir Maurice de Gordon!

You might have combed the cattle ranges for five hundred miles north, east, south, and west, and never found so fine a figure of a man as Maurice Gordon. Good looks are rather a handicap than a blessing in the mountain desert, but “Maurie” Gordon was notably ready at all times for anything from a dance to a fight, and his reputation was accordingly as high among men as among women.

He made a stir wherever he went, and now as he sat in the dining-room of Jim During’s crossroads hotel, all eyes were upon him. He withstood their critical admiration with the nonchalant good-nature of one who knew that, from his silk bandanna to his fine riding-boots, his outfit represented the beau-ideal of the cow-puncher.

“Where you bound for?” asked the proprietor of the hotel as the supper drew toward its close.

“The dance over to Bridewell,” said Maurie. “Damnation!”

For as he mentioned the dance, Jac, who was bringing him his second cup of coffee, started so violently that a drop of the hot liquid splashed on the back of Maurie’s neck.

“Oh!” she cried, and seized her apron to wipe away the coffee.

“’Scuse me,” growled Maurie, seeing that he had sworn at a woman. “But you took me by surprise.”

With that he stopped the hand which was bearing the soiled apron toward his neck, and produced from his pocket--marvelous to behold!--a handkerchief of stainless white, with which he rubbed away the coffee.

“Jacqueline!” rumbled her father, and his accent made the name far more emphatic than Maurie’s “damnation.”

That was her given title, but to every cow-puncher on the ranges she was known as “Jac” During, who rode, shot, and sometimes swore as well as any man of them all. She was Jacqueline to her father alone, and to him only at such a time as this.

“Well?” she said belligerently, and her eyes fixed on her father as steadily and as angrily as those of a man.

“Your hands was made for feet! Go back to the kitchen. We don’t need you till the boys is through with their coffee. Too bad, Maurie.”

“Nothin’ at all!” said the latter heartily, and waved the matter out of existence.

He might banish Jac from his thoughts with a gesture, but he could not drive away her thoughts of him so easily, it seemed; for she stopped in the shadow of the doorway which led into the kitchen and stared back with big eyes at the cow-puncher.

“Who you takin’ to the dance?” said her father.

“Dolly Maxwell,” said Maurie, naming the prettiest girl in many, many miles.

“That pale-faced--thing!” muttered Jac, relapsing into a feminine vocabulary at this crisis. But she sighed as she turned back into the kitchen.

She threw open the door of the stove so that the light flamed on her red hair, which was tied in a hard knot on top of her head--the quickest, easiest, and unquestionably the most ugly manner of dressing hair. A vast and unreasoning rage made her blood hot.