Leave Her to Heaven by Ben Ames Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

a fine gobbler, Mr. Harland, if you wish. I watched six of them, feeding on grasshoppers, yesterday; and they’re sure to be back today.’
    Robie said at once: ‘That’s the idea! Ellen knows every turkey on the ranch by its first name, Harland. You go along with her.’
    Harland, afraid his voice would betray the sudden quickening of his pulses, hesitated; and Ellen said: ‘We needn’t start till after lunch. They only feed there in the afternoon.’
    â€˜Why, fine,’ Harland agreed, and he explained: ‘You see Danny, my brother, has had infantile, and he made me promise to bring back a full report of everything the ranch had to offer.’ To conceal his eagerness he turned to Robie. ‘He spoke of wild horses, too; said Lin told him there were some here.’
    Lin cried quickly: ‘You bet there are! You come along with me
tomorrow — I’m going with Dad today — and maybe we’ll see them.’
    Harland, to hide his excited anticipation, turned to his cabin and spent the forenoon writing a long letter to Danny. He began by describing the pretty girl who sat opposite him in the observation car and who read his book and went to sleep over it. He knew how amusing Danny would find that episode, and he made much of it; but when he came to speak of his arrival here, some impulse led him to avoid saying that that same girl was in the party, and that they were to hunt turkeys together this afternoon. He stayed in his cabin till Mrs. Robie called that lunch was ready. When they had eaten and their horses were at the door, Harland would have forgotten the need for a gun, but Ellen reminded him, and they went to the rack and she bade him take a pump gun and a handful of shells. He put the gun in the saddle boot, and they mounted and set out.
    Ellen led the way, turning up the north canyon, taking almost at once a side trail that climbed steeply through the pines. Riding behind her, he watched the light sway of her shoulders and her pliant waist. When now and then on a level reach they trotted briefly, she did not rise but held her seat after the western fashion. Harland, more used to an English saddle with shortened stirrups, found it hard to relax; and he tried to imitate her yielding grace. They went in silence, pausing briefly now and then where on the lofty trails a break in the forest allowed them to look down some far canyon to the desert like the sea beyond.
    They crossed two ridges and descended into a valley like a park, through which a trickling brook meandered; and since the canyon floor was wide and smoothly turfed they rode now side by side, and flower masses, fringed gentians by the thousands and many other blossoms, were a carpet everywhere. Harland silently chose words to paint the beauty of the scene, but Ellen showed no desire to talk and he did not speak till after half a mile she turned aside.
    â€˜We’ll leave the horses here,’ she told him, and led the way into the forest that cloaked the canyon walls, and they tethered the
beasts where from the open they could not be seen, and went back afoot. ‘We must lie and wait for them,’ she explained. ‘They feed down this canyon almost every afternoon.’
    â€˜There’s not much cover,’ he commented. There was in fact, except for slight irregularities of the ground, none at all. The grass was cropped short, and the flowers were only inches tall, and no underbrush grew in the open anywhere.
    â€˜We’ll just lie still,’ she said. ‘As long as we don’t move, they won’t notice us.’
    She led the way to a single tree of some dwarf variety which Harland could not name, and which grew near the brookside and about equally distant from the forest on either hand. Its lowest branches were five or six feet above the ground, but at its base there was a slight saucer-shaped depression. Ellen lay at length, face down, in such a position that she could, even