CHAPTER IX

THE BLIZZARD

When it is bright, sunshiny weather, the cold out West is not so penetrating, at least by day, but at night it eats into the very bones. There were long evenings of hard, dry cold, and occasionally a flurry of snow, when Raquel sat opposite Georgie and prodded him on to his lessons.

They had had no more letters from Dad and the boys. Mom, silent and undemanding, spent her time in little services for Raquel and Georgie. The great house was never overly clean, nor even tidy, except for the kitchen. There had been so much drudgery, and Mom was one of the army of western women who grow weary of struggling against the ceaseless invasion of desert dust even into the top shelves of the closets.

“Take it easy, honey. When spring comes on there’ll be plenty of hard work for you. Just wait till this cold weather breaks.”

But it did not break. One afternoon in late January after a day of dark skies it started to snow in great whirling flakes. By night it was blowing a blizzard, sweeping unbroken across the mesas with a strength that seemed to gather force with every mile, until it hurled itself in fury against the steeps of the mountains at their back.

“Well, if we don’t lose us a bunch of steers tonight, this snow’ll save the grass mebbe.” Russell, melting off before the fire, slapped the backs of his hands to bring the blood. He began to warble:

“Oh, I am a Texas cowboy, Far away from home, If ever I get back to Texas I never more will roam.

“Montana is too cold for me And the winters are too long—”

He was unfortunately interrupted by Georgie, who burst in with the message that Elena’s little girls were both sick, and Pancho and Elena wanted Mom and Raquel to please come down there.

“I’ll go.” Raquel was already slipping into her sheepskin jacket and she ran out the door calling back, “If you’re needed, Mom, I’ll come back up, or send for what’s wanted. Come on, Tooth, _pronto_.”

Out through the frozen patio she ran, and as she squeezed through the snow-blocked gate a cutting gale fairly snatched the breath from her lips. Alternately racing before the wind and stumbling head down against it, she and Georgie made downhill.

Blown half the distance in a few minutes, they scrambled and stumbled against the wind the rest of the way for ten or fifteen minutes more.

In the little low adobe at the foot of the corral ten-year-old Josefita sat shaking before the fire, torn by one chill after another. On a pallet against the wall a four-year-old baby, tiny Luisita, lay with glazed eyes, her lips drawn back pitifully from teeth and gums. Fragile little fingers plucked at the coverlet

“How long has she been like this?” Raquel asked sharply, a sick feeling clutching her throat.

“All day, Señorita,” Elena barely whispered, appeal and agony in her eyes.

“Why didn’t you tell us before?” Raquel stopped at Elena’s pitiful face. “_Oiga_,” she said in Spanish, “listen. My mother will have to try to come down. I will go to Red Dog for the Doctor. Take that grease, there on the stove, warm it at once and put it on Josefita’s chest and throat with this flannel over it. Make her a hot drink of your _mescal_ water and sugar, Pancho. Put her feet in hot water; wrap her in a hot blanket.”

It was so they treated sick creatures in the ranch kitchen. But the baby, Luisita!

“This baby, you should have--” No good to scold that poor mother. It looked too late now. She had seen sick lambs so, but this was beyond her skill.

It seemed madness to go out in such a storm. But the Pathfinder had never failed them yet. And within twenty minutes they had started, Jami and she, bundled and gloved and mittened, the Pathfinder’s powerful lights searching through driving snow that swirled and sifted between the closed storm-curtains until she and Jami looked like two snow figures.

Pushing, plowing, slipping, skidding ahead, stopping, they went, Raquel’s hands stiff, glued to the wheel, and they had been gone only twenty minutes. And back there a baby lay gasping for its life.

“Not through the pasture yet,” shouted Jami.

But at length they made the upper gate and, once on the slopes, with a clean-swept frozen road beneath the wheels, the car seemed to take the gale between its teeth as it roared swift and straight up to the pass. The blast that struck them as they reached the top made the ascent seem like balmy weather.

Tears of pain from the cold rolled down Raquel’s face and froze there, and for a moment she had to release the wheel to Jami, who would all too willingly have driven the whole way.

The descent on the other side was made rapidly, and fairly easily. They seemed to aeroplane down through bitter arctic spaces, but when they came to enter the tiny mining town drifts mounted, choking, smothering them. The engine labored, roared like a baffled giant, and only when it had been fed with the thermos flask of hot coffee did it gather itself together, and plow up over the freezing masses of snow.

They stood at length within Doc Merrick’s house. He pulled them toward a leaping fire. The clock on the mantel showed ten, nearly an hour and a half since Raquel had looked down at the sick child in Esquibal’s house.

“Esquibal’s baby, Doc. It looks like pneumonia. I’m afraid she’s dying, and it took so long to come.”

Doc Merrick, tall, splendidly broad and bronzed, lived at the pass through the grace of God and the rare air of the mountain top, with one active lung, two active dogs and three inactive servants. Already he was buttoning his coat with one hand while he handed Raquel a cup of hot coffee with the other.

And then, with two hot-water bottles for the Pathfinder, they were outside again. And they had need of the hot water, for the force of the wind broke the momentum of the long coast from the pass, and they reached the arroyo without any speed and a cold engine. They had to stop, to back, and to rush at the heavy drifts that had piled up.

It seemed an eternity until the car plowed up to its own shed and slid in. When they reached the _casita_, the doctor went from one cot to the other and then set to work over wee Luisita.

Raquel and Mom, who had come without being summoned, were at his elbow, Elena and Pancho were thrust into the next room, where Panchito slept safely. If once Elena’s volcanic weeping were to start it would be beyond control.

It was seven o’clock in the morning when the doctor beckoned Raquel outside. Mrs. Daniels had gone home about dawn. Inside the two little girls slept quietly. With every care they would recover.

The world was one glittering expanse of snow, gleaming whiteness stretching everywhere, clear and cold and quiet under a dazzling sun. The mountains looked like a frosted Christmas card.

Raquel was tired. Even her youthful face was drawn in that searching light.

“Well, well, young lady, you mustn’t look so sad. Think of what you have accomplished in the last twelve hours. Come, a little breakfast will fix you up,” and Doctor Merrick put a hand under her elbow. “What’s that you’ve got there?”

“Just a branding iron.” Raquel lifted the heavy bar. In the snow at her feet a large letter H was cut diagonally. She rubbed it out with her boot, and shouldering the iron walked up the hill with the doctor.

So Pancho _was_ the rustler! Living right here on Dad’s land! She had noticed the iron in a corner back of the kitchen stove as she sat tending the fire and boiling water during the night. Well, at any rate, Pancho cared enough about his babies to have forgotten such incriminating evidence. He had left it right out where it could be seen. Ordinarily such a discovery would have driven any ranch owner wild, but now, somehow, the struggle for the children’s lives during the night had made other things seem unimportant.

As she passed the bunk house, Russ and Jami came out.

“We’re startin’ out to see how the steers on the mesa stood the storm.” Russ looked at the Boss for confirmation, and Raquel nodded.

“Russ, did you ever see any Lazy L whitefaces, or cattle that looked like Ranchos whitefaces, branded like this?” She held up the iron.

“About a month ago George and I found a heifer at the spring below La Bolsa. It was one that I had branded last summer and was burned over like this.”

Russ swore a round range oath. “Beg your pardon, ma’am, but--” and he sputtered.

“Don’t say a word, Russ. I found it in Pancho’s cabin this morning. Wait till the little girls are well and we’ll fire him clean off Los Ranchos. Dad always said he was mean, but never thought that he would steal.”

After breakfast Raquel slipped into her icy room, crept between blankets that Mom had warmed in the kitchen, and slept for six hours. She woke refreshed, so invigorated by the bracing air that she did not feel the exertion of the night before at all.

Georgie was in the kitchen, on his knees behind the stove, where he had a pair of twin lambs, poor little early offspring that Russ had rescued from a snow drift. Their mother’s body over them had saved them from her fate. Mom and Georgie had poured warm milk from a spoon down their throats, and the little pink noses were beginning to quiver with returning life. They made awkward movements in their soft nest, and blindly adopted the nursing bottle for their mother.

The blizzard took heavy toll over all that part of the state. But Los Ranchos suffered less than most ranges because the cattle were in excellent shape and better able to weather such exposure. The wisdom of Mr. Daniels in acquiring the new piece of range was shown, for the cattle had had fresh grazing for a month before the blizzard; also, that tract of land happened to be protected from northerly winds, and ranged up into the foothills where there were many sheltering canyons.

Raquel, Pancho Esquibal, Angel, Russ and Jami, in a week’s time covered all the lowlands and found not more than twenty casualties.

“We’ll have no trouble rounding up our thousand head, or more,” Russell told her. They were in the middle of February then.

One day the cold weather was gone. The sun shone with surprising heat, the roads were dried up. Raquel drove into town for the mail. She had not been in for a month, although some one went for the mail every week.

There was a big packet, but Raquel did not open it after she saw a letter to her mother on top. She turned and flew straight back to the ranch. Mom was in the kitchen with the lambs, now frisking blithely in the life-giving sunshine that poured through the door. The two other little lambs of the blizzard night, Luisita and Josefita, more languid, but not so white, played beside them.

“You read it, Raquel.” Mom’s hand shook as she held out the letter.

Dad had made his second trip over on cattle transports. Both times they had narrowly escaped being attacked by submarines, and Dad was full of the stupidities of some folks when it came to handling cattle.

“I don’t blame the poor critters none for bein’ seasick,” wrote Dad, “and I wished for Raquel many a time to help me try to quiet them with that way she has when they get frightened.

“Now, Raquel, as soon as you meet the note, deliver the Government as many steers as you can as soon as possible. You’ll be gettin’ a request some time this spring, so be ready. These boys have to eat if we’re goin’ to win this war. Why, I talked with a soldier that said he hadn’t had anything but fudge for a week!”

At that Raquel laughed until she was weak. But the letter had stirred her seriously with a passionate desire for action. The winter seemed as if it would never end. But now the time was coming for which they had been waiting. In two weeks they would begin to pick out their cattle for shipment.

Now the real test for her was at hand. She felt somehow that it was going to be a test; that unforeseen obstacles were waiting. But if other women and girls were taking the place of men all over the country, doing things that they never had done before, she, Raquel Daniels, brought up on the range, used to handling cattle all her life, would be pretty good for nothing if she couldn’t do her bit.

And then she opened the letters from Anne and Miss Carter which came in the same packet.

“We have not forgotten you here at The Towers,” wrote Miss Hetty. “The mistletoe is still green, and so is your memory. I see that the Government is counting greatly on its Western ranches for war supplies, and I envy you your chance to help.”

That was nice of Miss Carter to write her. But my, how far away school seemed now! She could think only of the spring roundup, and the cattle to be shipped from Los Ranchos.

Anne’s letter, however, read aloud to Mom, roused vivid and affectionate memories. Anne loved the Indian necklace, and the mistletoe, “which furnished kisses to lots of parting sweethearts at a big party we gave here New Year’s Night. Did you get the books, darlin’, and the other things? The etching was from Barry, you know. He sailed last week.”

“Didn’t you answer Anne’s letter yet, honey?” Mrs. Daniels looked up in reproof.

“Of course I did, Mother, the next week. Tooth took it in for me.” Georgie had risen stealthily and was creeping from the room. Raquel overtook him at a stride, caught his woolly collar, and from the crumby recesses of an inner pocket of his sheepskin jacket drew forth her six weeks’ old letter to Anne.

She cuffed him, and returned to Anne’s letter, feeling a strange disappointment that Barry should have gone overseas without having had her thanks, without having read her letter to the family at least, for she had been too shy, too “provincial,” Lois would have said, to thank Barry herself.

“The girls at school write,” Anne concluded her letter, “that no one has heard a word from Lois Wainwright since the first few post cards she sent from El Paso. I wonder where she is and why she doesn’t write. I understand that Miss Carter has suggested to your Jimmy that if Lois’ father does not recover she return to school where she can be among old friends. Mr. Wainwright’s lawyers in Boston haven’t even heard from him, and have no idea where he is, as he had said he might go to California, or to the Orient. Did you know that they were in El Paso for some time after you returned home?”

Raquel sat motionless. She felt vaguely covered with a sense of great wrongdoing. Just what it was she did not at first seem to see clearly. Oh, yes, she should have told Jimmy, for then he would have found out where Lois and her father were; he could have seen them while he was stationed so near El Paso. He had been only a few miles away all the time!

Never before in her life had Raquel suffered such a sense of sick shame as came to her then. Once, when she was eight years old, she had stood by and watched her pet coon suck a dozen of Mom’s imported white leghorn eggs, which she had put under a setting hen the day before. Raquel felt now somewhat as she had after that performance.

Russell was standing in the door waiting for Raquel to look up from the letter at which she had been staring for so long.

“Could I speak to you a moment, alone?” He jerked his head towards the store room.

“Now, this here Pancho,” he began when the door was closed behind them, “this here Pancho, it’s time to vamoose him. Roundup’s comin’ on, and if he thinks we ain’t on to him he’ll try some more of this cattle brandin’ business and if he does I’m li’ble to fill him full o’ lead.

“I recommend that we have a understandin’ with him, now that the little gals is well agin, and that you as Boss of the Lazy L backs me as foreman and ridin’ boss, and fires him.”

“Yes,” assented Raquel, dully, “yes. It’s only fair to Dad.”

The interview in the saddle shed was not a happy affair. Pancho, suave, confident, plausible, with a trace of insolence, could explain everything.

The branding iron had been found on the range the day before, was brought home and, on account of the illness of the _muchachitas_, had been forgotten. That was why he had not mentioned it at the time.

“But why not since?” asked Raquel.

Esquibal quivered with righteous anger. What! They doubted him? Never before had the word of an Esquibal-- What should a stray branding iron matter?

“Nothing much except that practically all of the brands in this part of the country are well known,” Raquel replied, “as you know, and this seems to be a new one. And as you also probably know, it has been used over the Lazy L. In fact, it covers it very nicely.”

At that Pancho Esquibal started involuntarily.

“You do not mean you suspect me--me--of stealing cattle?”

“Forget that stuff, Pancho,” advised Russell coldly. “What proof you got that this isn’t your doin’s?”

“What proof have you it is?” Esquibal shot back, while Raquel waved away the discussion with an impatient hand.

“_Oiga_, Pancho. It may be as you say. But the matter of the gas you sold does not look very well for you.”

It seems that Señor Daniels had told him to sell the gas when any one needed it, and that he could either turn over the money, or have it taken out of his wages. There were the cans. The _Padroncita_ could count up just what had been sold--if she wished to deduct it.

Raquel hardly knew what to do. She shared with her family the sentiment for Elena and the children. Pancho was a valuable hand, and it would be difficult to handle the roundup without him. The chances were he’d stay put for a while anyway.

“Well, Pancho, I don’t want to be unfair, and we’ll wait till Dad comes home before we carry out that firing sentence. We’ll see what rebranded cattle come to light in the spring roundup.”

Esquibal bowed, and without a glance at Russell turned on his heel.

“We’d better have turned him off. That’s a snake meaner’n a rattler. He gives no warnin’.”

* * * * *

“Dear Jimmy,” Raquel started her letter off bravely that night. But after two hours of struggle she folded what she had written and sealed it quickly within an envelope. It had been hard, and she ended by telling him plainly:

“I did a very mean, crooked thing. I knew Lois was in the West with her father. She left school when I did. But I didn’t tell you because I guess I didn’t want you to go to see her. She didn’t care for me at school, and we were not roommates after all.

“I certainly didn’t love her, and that’s the truth. But I should have told you and then you could have looked them up while you were at Fort Bliss. I heard from Anne Marvin that no one knows where they are just now. But I suppose you’ll see them on their way back, and maybe you’ve heard from them yourself by now.

“Well, I suppose you will be awfully disappointed in me, Jimmy. I guess I’m mean and vindictive--no good.--As ever,

“Raquel Daniels. “P. S. She’s prettier than ever.”