CHAPTER XIII
AT supper time she told them, graphically, and with full and generous credit to the Ranger, about the mountain lion and the fawn, and was entirely amiable about repeating in detail to any one who wished to hear more.
She said to the doctor, while they were at table, lifting her voice a little over the neighboring talk, that she was delighted to see Dean Wolcott so robust. This life must agree tremendously with him. How long—she was brightly, coolly interested—had he been in the west?
“Well, he’s been west of Boston for almost a year, I should say, what with his work at the School of Forestry, and riding in Wyoming, and all, and he’s been here in the Big Sur since early in June.”
The doctor was a little puzzled; he did not quite understand and he did not at all like this hard serenity; she had not the look of a girl reunited to her lover, he told himself ratheranxiously. Later on, when they were settling to bridge, he managed a worried word aside to Mrs. Featherstone.
“I wonder, Miss Fanny, if we bungled it?”
“Certainly not,” said Ginger’s Aunt Fan, comfortably. “She’ll have to stand off and act like her great-grandmother Valdés for awhile, of course—that’s part of the picture, butI’mnot worrying—not aboutthem, at least!” She reached a plump hand into a candy box on the next table. “Doctor, can’t you make it a camp misdemeanor for those girls to leave this stuff around?—Chocolate creams the size of young sofa cushions—”
And when she and her niece had gone to their joint cabin, three hours later, and the girl maintained her cool serenity, she rode blithely over it.
“All right, my dear! Keep it up! I glory in your spunk. But don’t you ever think you’re putting anything over on your Aunt Frances May!”
Dean Wolcott came to supper on Saturday night. The doctor said he was sorry he had not thought to include the little Scout, but the Ranger shook his head. “No, I’ve parked him at thecottage with Rusty, the Airedale, inside and the Mabel horse saddled and ready in case he has to do a hasty Paul Revere to get me. He’s readingPontiac, Chief of the Ottawas, and listening for the telephone, and reflecting, chestily, that Edna couldn’t call him a ’Fraid-Cat if she saw him now. Edna is a slightly older cousin who has been a great help to her mother in making life miserable for him.”
“I’m simply mad about him,” the very blond girl whispered to Ginger. She was wearing a baby blue organdie and looked like the fairest of all the very young angels, and she had a slight lisp which one felt she had not made very stern efforts to eradicate. “I adore the way he talks, and the things he says—and that golden, patent-leather effect of hair—oh, and the way he carries himself, and everything!”
“Aside from that, you don’t admire him especially, I gather,” said Ginger, smiling carefully at her. She felt like a swarthy gypsy beside her, and crudely strong and weathered.
Dean asked the very blond girl for the first dance, and Ginger for the second, and the betrothed girl with the dreaming eyes for thethird, and he did not dance with Ginger again after that, but divided himself among the rest, with two or three extras with the pale blue organdie. Ginger knew and was sure that he knew that the doctor and her aunt and some of the others were watching them keenly, and she held her Scotch chin at a firm angle, and her Spanish mouth did not look in the least as it had that day upon Aleck’s bridge. She asked him if he had been able to save the skin of the mountain lion and was cordially pleased to hear that it was in excellent shape, and had been sent into San José to be mounted. Dean inquired for her henchmen at Dos Pozos with especial emphasis on Estrada, to whom he sent his remembrances.
If the contact set their hearts to galloping as Snort had done in the historic runaway, there was no visible evidence of it. They danced beautifully together, and Dean applauded enthusiastically for an encore, and they finished it out, and then he relinquished her to a gray-haired, black-eyed gallant whose heels had remained as light as his heart, and sat chatting pleasantly with Mrs. Featherstone. Almost at once he was aware that she and her niece had spent the greater portion ofthe winter in the far east, and when he went away to dance again he said bitterly to himself:
“Well, that does settle it. Months in the east, and never a sign, never a word—” and he asked the Fra Angelico angel in the blue organdie to walk down to the creek in the moonlight after their next fox trot together.
And Ginger, for her part, had told herself a hundred times, “He has been here since early in June; he has never let me know; it is simply over, that’s all; finished between us,” and she wondered just how soon she could reasonably and with dignity persuade Aunt Fan to go back to town.
Before the Ranger left that evening the doctor had persuaded him to go with them on a riding trip, or rather, to let them time their excursion with his regular ride to Slate’s Springs. The very blond girl was to go; she had had a riding suit made by the smartest tailor in San Francisco for just such an occasion as this, and—last and greatest wonder of the world—Mrs. Featherstone was to go. The doctor had told her seriously that the heroism of her diet must be supplemented by exercise if she meant to melt her too too solid flesh—strenuous exercise, not chugging down tothe camp gate in her high heels and short vamps after supper—and she had dared two or three very brief equestrian outings on old Sam.
Ginger was amazed. “I think it’s sporting of you, Aunt Fan, but I don’t think you realize how hard it’s going to be—and the doctor doesn’t realize how soft you are! You keep telling that you lead an active life, and he believes you, but if he knew that you think it’s activity to walk from the St. Agnes to the Palace Hotel for lunch—”
“Now, don’t be a crape hanger, my child,” said her aunt, severely. “Just because you’re out of sorts yourself—honestly, Ginger, the way you let Dean Wolcott be gobbled up alive by that little, pale blue string bean—”
Ginger was brushing her mane of black hair, and it hung over her head and down before her face in a thick curtain. Her voice came through it, muffled but wholly amiable, “He seems to be enjoying it, doesn’t he?”
“Seems, of course! That’s just it. Any man with the spirit of a caterpillar— Do you expect him to sit in a corner and twiddle his thumbs until—”
“I expect him to do just as he’s doing,” saidher niece, pleasantly. She was giving her hair, it appeared, an especially thorough brushing.
“Ginger,” said Mrs. Featherstone, sniffing, “Ginger!I guess we’ll have to get another nickname for you.Veryweak Lemon Extract ... Vanilla....”
The girl flung up her head and the black mane swung back over her shoulders, thick and shining. Her face was a little flushed. “I’m worrying about your riding to Slate’s, Aunt Fan. I’m positive it will be too much for you.”
“Well, I don’t say I’ll enjoy it,” Mrs. Featherstone conceded. “That isn’t the idea; I shall take it as I would take a dose of medicine.”
“But you can’t swallow it down with one brave gulp, Aunt Fan! You haven’t any idea what it will be like, hours and hours—andhours! Three days in the saddle, and one of the nights you’ll camp out and sleep on the ground—”
“I’m not going to sleep on the ground; the doctor’s loaning me his pneumatic-cushioned sleeping bag!” Then, as Ginger still shook her head, “I’ll tell you, dearie, it’s this way. I haven’t quite made up my mind about the doctor yet, but I’m making it up, and if I do—well, I must learnto like the sort of things he likes, mustn’t I?” She finished very sweetly, with a great deal of wistful earnestness in her blue eyes.
“Well, I wish I could follow you with an ambulance, that’s all,” said her niece, darkly.
The doctor was much surprised and a little hurt to find that Ginger was going to stay in camp and not make the ride with them, but she was very logical about it. She knew his well-known preference for taking only a small party; more than six made a cumbersome excursion, he held—they were only as fast as the slowest horse in the string, and there was constant dismounting for cinching and saddle-setting, and endless delays; there would be seven in this party without her. She pointed out, gently, that riding wasn’t after all such a treat, such a new experience to her as it was to Aunt Fan, and the very blond girl.
They got off at nine on a blue-and-gold morning and Ginger was very helpful and attentive to her aunt, who was large and impressive upon old Sam in her borrowed riding things. Some one among the women had produced an old-fashioned divided skirt of corduroy and her legs were wound withspiral puttees of khaki. She was not ill-pleased with herself. “Of course, I’m stout,” she whispered to Ginger, “but I do taper. I have the wrists and ankles of a woman half my weight. This isn’t a very snappy outfit, is it? But who knows—if I keep up this sort of thing, by next summer I may be able to ride in pants and get away with it!”
The doctor rode up to them. “Won’t change your mind, Ginger, even if I let you ride Ted?”
“Thank you, no, Doctor. I’m going to be a magazine and hammock person.” She held, indeed, a magazine, one of the sober and substantial ones. She waved them out of sight and then found a hammock in the sun and devoted herself to a rather stiff article on California’s attitude toward the Japanese problem, and at luncheon she was very gay with every one, and let the black-eyed gallant (who was just a little flattered at her staying behind) take her down to his improvised golf course and instruct her in driving off, which involved a good deal of minute demonstration as to the position of her hands on the club.
Later in the afternoon she saddled a horse and rode over the hills to the ocean and visited thevaliant little old grandmother of most of the families in the vicinity. She had come from Alsace when she was a child, and she had crossed the plains in a prairie schooner when she was a very young girl, and married and settled in that remote and difficult spot. She had borne and reared nine children and buried four of them, and she had been a widow for long years. Ginger had come to see her on her last visit to the camp, and the old lady remembered her perfectly and thought she was even prettier than she had given promise of being, but she was a little worried to find she was not married, at twenty-three, and had no prospects. Twenty-three was high time, “Gramma” considered, to be about the real business of life. Clearly sorry for her, she made haste to show her all her treasures—the many patchwork quilts which she made in the wet winters when she couldn’t work out-of-doors, slowly, because she had two paralyzed fingers and the rest somewhat warped with work and rheumatism, the quaint, water-colored picture which symbolized her father’s honorable discharge from the French army, the curios her most venturesome son had brought back from Alaska, her clock. This wasa massive affair of onyx, elaborately embellished, and there was a plate upon its front with an inscription. The old lady had risen, one night of wild and violent wind and rain, impelled by she knew not what impulse, and placed a lighted lamp in her upper window, and hours later the shipwrecked crew of a coast steamer had groped to her door. “Gramma” had warmed and dried and fed them and put them to bed, and after their sojourn with her they had sent the clock from San Francisco, inscribed with their names and her name and the date.
“The boys fetched it down in the hay wagon, dearie, and it’s never run,” she said regretfully, looking up at its silent and impassive countenance—it was stating, mendaciously, in late afternoon, that it was only ten o’clock—but clearly she bore it no grudge; it was almost too much, she seemed to feel, to expect a clock as handsome as that to keep time; the kitchen clock could do that: this one was dedicated to being a thing of beauty, and therefore a joy forever.
Ginger, looking down at the dauntless small figure, the work-warped hands and the unconquered brightness of the eyes, put an arm abouther suddenly and gave her a little hug. If the very blond girl and the betrothed girl made her feel old and wise, “Gramma” made her feel her untried youth. She had crossed an ocean and a continent, and helped to hew a home out of a stubborn wilderness; she had borne and reared and buried—there was a little graveyard on the high hill above the ranch—done a woman’s work and a man’s work: three wars had roared and flamed and guttered out again in her ken; the world had leaped forward in science and invention, but she had lived on in her quiet corner, and she seemed as old and as wise as the hills, and as glad as the morning.
She pulled Ginger down and kissed her warm cheek. “You hurry up, dearie,” she said, urgently. “You hurry up! And I’ll give you a quilt—that’s what I’ll do! A basket pattern, or a log cabin, or a rising sun—you can take your choice!” She stood nodding and beaming like an ancient seeress at the door of her cave. “You hurry up! You’re young, dearie, but time goes fast—spring and summer, and then the fall comes and the winter—you hurry!”