They were five in number, all dark-faced except one, dark-clad and superbly mounted on dark bays and blacks. They had no pack animals and, for that matter, carried no packs at all.
Four of them, at a swinging canter, passed us, and the fifth pulled his horse to suit our pace and fell in between Molly and me.
"Good day," he said pleasantly to me. "Don't mind my ridin' in with you-all, I hope?"
Considering his pleasant approach, I could not not but be civil.
He was a singularly handsome fellow, at a quick glance, under forty years, with curly, blond hair, almost gold, a skin very fair for that country, and the keenest, clearest, boldest blue eyes I had ever seen in a man.
"You're Cash, I reckon," he said. "Some of my men have seen you ridin' round with Diggs's girls. I'm Jack Bloom."
He did not speak that name with any flaunt or flourish. He merely stated it.
Bloom, the rustler! I grew tight all over.
Still, manifestly there was nothing for me to do but return his pleasantry. I really felt less uneasiness after he had made himself known to me. And without any awkwardness, I introduced him to the girls.
He took off his sombrero and made gallant bows to both.
Miss Diggs had heard of him and his record, and she could not help a paleness, a shrinking, which, however, he did not appear to notice. Molly had been dying to meet a real rustler, and here he was, a very prince of rascals.
But I gathered that she would require a little time before she could be natural. Bloom seemed to have more of an eye for Molly than for Diane. "Do you like Pecos?" he asked Molly.
"Out here? Oh, yes, indeed!" she replied.
"Like ridin'?"
"I love horses."
Like almost every man who made Molly's acquaintance, he hit upon the subject best calculated to make her interesting to free-riding, outdoor Western men.
That he loved a thoroughbred horse himself was plain. He spoke naturally to Molly with interest, just as I had upon first meeting her, and he might not have been Jack Bloom, for all the indication he gave of the fact in his talk.
But the look of the man was different. He was a desperado, one of the dashing, reckless kind—more famous along the Pecos and Rio Grande than more really desperate men. His attire proclaimed a vanity seldom seen in any Westerner except of that unusual brand, yet it was neither gaudy or showy.
One had to be close to Bloom to see the silk, the velvet, the gold, the fine leather. When I envied a man's spurs then they were indeed worth coveting.
Bloom had a short rifle and a gun in saddle-sheaths. My sharp eye, running over him, caught a row of notches on the bone handle of the big Colt he packed.
It was then that the marshal, the Ranger in me, went hot under the collar. The custom that desperadoes and gun-fighters had of cutting a notch on their guns for every man killed was one of which the mere mention made my gorge rise.
At the edge of town Bloom doffed his sombrero again, said "Adios," and rode on ahead of us. And it was then I was hard put to it to keep track of the queries, exclamations, and other wild talk of two very much excited young ladies. I wanted to think; I needed to think.
"Wasn't he lovely? Oh, I could adore him!" rapturously uttered Miss Molly Langdon several times, to my ultimate disgust.
Also, after Bloom had ridden out of sight, Miss Diggs lost the evident effect of his sinister presence, and she joined Miss Langdon in paying the rustler compliments, too. Perhaps my irritation was an indication of the quick and subtle shifting of my mind to harsher thought.
"Jack Bloom!" I broke in upon their adulations. "Rustler and gunman. Did you see the notches on his gun? Every notch for a man he's killed! For weeks reports have come to Springtown that soon as he could get round to it he'd ride down and rid the community of that bothersome fellow, that Texas Ranger! He's come to kill Vaughn Steele!"
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