"While they were honeymooning in a mansion on the hill,Kind friends were laying Nellie out behind the mill."
"While they were honeymooning in a mansion on the hill,Kind friends were laying Nellie out behind the mill."
"While they were honeymooning in a mansion on the hill,Kind friends were laying Nellie out behind the mill."
"That's one of Ben's best songs," said Ewing, with so genuine a gravity that he stifled quite another emotion in the lady as she caught his look.
"Indeed! I must hear him sing more," she managed with some difficulty.
The sorrowful one arose as they entered, hastily thrusting aside his guitar as might an assassin have cast away his weapon. His face was shaven to a bitter degree; in spots it was scarified. But the drooping lines of woe unutterable were still there in opposition to his Sabbath finery—a spreading blue-satin cravat, lighted by a stone of impressive bulk, elegant black trousers, and suspenders of red silk embroidered with pansies and a running vine of green. He greeted the visitor as one who would say, "Yes, it's a sad affair—wholly unexpected," and, cocking an eye of long-suffering negation on Ewing, he went out to the horses.
As they entered the studio Mrs. Laithe saw that the easel had been wheeled into the light from the big window and that a woman's portrait had been placed upon it. Had Ewing looked at her on the instant he might have detected that her face seemed to ripple under some wind of emotion. But his own eyes had been on the portrait.
"That's my mother," he said, unconsciously hushing his voice.
"I should have known it," she answered, with a kind of spurious animation. "The face is so much like yours. It is a face one seems to have known before, one of those elusive resemblances that haunt the mind. It is well done." She ended the speech glibly enough.
"She was beautiful. My father did it. He had that trick of color, as you call it, or he could never have painted her. She was so slight, but she had color. And she was quick and fiery. I used to see her rage when I was very small. I believed there were coals in her eyes, and that something blew on them inside to make them blaze. I wouldn't know what it was about, only that it wasn't us she raged at—not my father or me. I could go up and catch her hand even when she frightened me. And sometimes, after a while, my father would get excited, too. He was slower to take fire, but he burned longer. And at last she would become afraid and grow quiet herself and try to soothe him. I never could tell what they were at war with."
They looked in silence at the vivid young face on the canvas, a thin, daring, eager face, a face of delicate features, but strong in a perfect balance. The eyes were darkly alive.
"You were young when she died?" the woman asked at last.
"Too young to understand. I was eight, I think. There was a lot I shall never understand. Sometimes my father would tell me about their life here in the West, but never of the time before they came here. It always seemed to me that either he or she had quarreled with their people. They were poor when they came here. We lived in Leadville when I first remember. My mother sang in a church choir and made a little money and nights—you'll think this queer—my father played a piano in a dance hall. They had to live. Days, he painted. He had studied abroad in Paris and Munich, but he wasn't selling his pictures then. It took him years to do much of that. Sometimes they were hungry,though I didn't know it." He paused, overwhelmed by a sudden realization that he was talking much.
"Tell me more," she said very quietly. "I wish to hear the rest."
"Well, at the last my mother was in bed a long time, and my father worked hard to get things for her, things she must have. But one night she died—it was a cold night in winter. He and I were alone with her. I'll not soon forget that. I sat up on the cot where I slept and saw my father sitting on the bed looking down at my mother. They were both still, and he wouldn't answer or turn his head when I spoke. Then I cried, for it was cold in the little cabin and my father's stillness scared me. But I don't think he heard me crying. He kept looking down at my mother's face, even when I called to him as loud as I could. Then I was afraid to see him that way any longer, so I pulled the blankets over my head and I must have cried myself to sleep.
"He was sitting the same way when I woke in the morning, still looking at my mother's face. Even when the people came to take her away he kept silent—and while they put her in the ground in a great, snowy field with little short waves all over it. And when we were back in the cabin not a word could I get from him, nor a look. He just sat on the bed again, looking at her pillow.
"In the evening some one brought a letter. I lighted a candle and took this letter to him, crowding it into his hand. I wanted him to notice me. I saw him study the envelope, then tear it open and look at a little slip of green paper that fell out. It was money, you understand, for pictures he had sent to New York. I knew this at once. I'd heard them talk of its comingand of wonderful things they'd do with it when it did come. I was glad in an instant, for I thought that now we could get my mother back out of the ground. I was sure we could when he held the green slip close to the candle and began to laugh. It wasn't the way he usually laughed, it was louder and longer, but it was the first sound I'd heard from him, and it made me happy. I began to laugh myself as loud as I could, and danced before him, and his laugh went still higher at that. I ran for my jacket and mittens and cap. I wanted him to stop laughing and hurry along. I pulled his arm and he stopped laughing and looked down at me. I shouted 'Hurry—let's hurry and bring her back—let me carry the money!' He caught my shoulder and looked so astonished, then he burst into that loud laugh again, after he'd made me say it over. I ran for his overcoat, too, but when I came with it I saw he wasn't laughing at all. He was crying, and it was so much like his laugh that I hadn't noticed the change."
He had kept his eyes on the portrait while he spoke. He stopped abruptly now, turning to the listening woman, searching her face with new signs of confusion.
"I—I didn't know I was telling you all that."
She did not answer at once.
"And you came here after that?" she said at last.
"Yes; my father found this place. He wanted to be alone. I think he began to die when my mother went. He couldn't live without her. He taught me what he could, about books and pictures, but I couldn't have been much to him. I think it hurt him that I looked like her—he said I looked like her. He worked on that portrait to the very last, even on the morning of the day he died."
"What was your father's name?"
"Gilbert Denham Ewing. I was named for him."
"And your mother's name before marriage was——"
"I'm ashamed that I never knew. It must have been spoken often, but I was so young; it never stayed in my mind. And a little while before he died my father burned all his letters and papers. I've wondered about their life long ago before I came, but I think my father meant me not to know. He had some reason."
"I am glad you have told me all you did know," she said.
"But you have mademeglad," he assured her, returning to his livelier manner.
"Your mother's first name"—she asked—"what did your father call her?"
"Oh, that—Katharine. He called her Kitty."
"Kitty!" She repeated it after him, softly, as if she spoke it in compassion to the portrait.
"But see," he continued, "it's late. Stay and eat with us and I'll take you back by moonlight. I've ordered a fine, big, silver moon to be set up in the sky at seven, and Ben is already getting supper."
He pulled aside the blanket portiére, and through the doorway she could see the saturnine one—a man fashioned for tragedies, for deeds of desperate hazard—incongruously busied with a pan of soda biscuits and a hissing broiler.
When they rode back to Bar-7 the hills were struck to silver by the moon. They were companionably silent for most of the ride, though the youth from time to time, when the trail narrowed to put him in the rear, crooned stray bits of a song with which Ben Criderhad favored them while he prepared the evening meal. The lines Mrs Laithe remembered were:
"Take back your gold, for gold it cannot buy me;Make me your wife, 'tis all I ask of you."
"Take back your gold, for gold it cannot buy me;Make me your wife, 'tis all I ask of you."
"Take back your gold, for gold it cannot buy me;Make me your wife, 'tis all I ask of you."
When they parted she said, "You must think about leaving here. It's time you rode out into the world. I think my brother will be back from his cattle-driving trip to-morrow, and I mean to bring him to see your pictures very soon. Perhaps he will suggest something for you."
"This moonlight does such wonderful things to your face," he remarked.
"Good night! I'm sorry you have so far to go."
"It isn't far enough," he answered, still searching her face. "Not half far enough—I have so much thinking—so much thinking to do."
IT was not without concern that Mrs. Laithe awaited the return of her brother the following day. The cattle drive that had beguiled him from habits of extreme and enforced precision had occupied a fortnight, and she understood the life to be sorely trying to any but the rugged. Earnestly had she sought to dissuade him from the adventure, for insomnia had long beset him, and dyspepsia marked him for its plaything. Eloquently exposed to him had been the folly of hoping for sleep on stony ground after vainly wooing it in the softest of beds with an air pillow inflated to the nice degree of resiliency. And the unsuitability of camp fare to a man who had long been sustained by an invalid's diet had been shrewdly set forth. None the less he had persisted, caught in the frenzy of desperation that sometimes overwhelms even the practiced dyspeptic.
"It can't be worse, Sis," he had tragically assured her at parting. "If I've got to writhe out my days, why, I shall writhe like a gentleman, that's all. I can at least chuck those baby foods and perish with some dignity."
"But you're not leaving your medicines, those drops and things?" she had asked, in real alarm.
"Every infernal drop. I've struck all along the line—not another morsel of disinfected zwieback norsanitary breakfast food nor hygienic prunes nor glutenized near-food—not even one pepsin tablet. It's come to where I'd sooner have no stomach at all than be bullied night and day by one."
With which splendid defiance he had ridden desperately off, a steely flash in his tired gray eyes and a bit of fevered color glowing in his sallow cheeks.
When Mrs. Pierce loudly announced the return of the men early in the afternoon, therefore, the invalid's sister was ready to be harrowed. There would be bitter agonies to relate—chiefly stomachic. She had heroically resolved, moreover, not immediately to flaw the surface of her sympathy with any gusty "I told you so!" That was a privilege sacred unto her, and not to be foregone; but she would defer its satisfaction until the pangs of confession had been suffered; until the rash one should achieve a mood receptive to counsel.
At the call of Mrs. Pierce she ran down the flower-bordered walk to join that lady at the gate, and there they watched the cavalcade as it jolted down the lacets of the mesa trail—four horsemen in single file, two laden pack animals, another horseman in the rear. The returning invalid was equal, then, to sitting a horse. The far-focused eyes of Mrs. Pierce were the first to identify him. As the line advanced through the willow growth that fringed the creek she said, pointing, "There's Mr. Bartell—he's in the lead."
"But Clarence doesn't smoke; the doctors won't let him," his sister interposed, for she could distinguish a pipe in the mouth of the foremost horseman. "And, anyway, it couldn't be Clarence; it's too—" On the point of saying "too disreputable," she reflected thatthe person in front looked quite like the run of Mrs. Pierce's nearest friends and might, indeed, be of her own household.
"It's sure your brother, though," insisted Mrs. Pierce, as the riders broke into a lope over the level, "and hedon'tlook quite as—" Mrs. Pierce forbore tactfully in her turn. She had meant to say "dandified."
"And I tell you, Mis' Laithe, he does look husky, too. Not no ways so squammish as when he started. My suz! Here we've et dinner and they'll be hungry as bears. I must run in and set back something."
The other men turned with the packhorses off toward the corrals, but Bartell came on at a stiff gallop to where his sister waited. When he had pulled his horse up before her with perilous but showy abruptness, he raised himself in the saddle, swung his hat, and poured into the still air of the valley a long, high yell of such volume that his sister stepped hastily within the gate again. She had heard the like of that yell as they passed through Pagosa Springs, rendered by a cowboy in the acute stage of alcoholic dementia.
"Why, Clarence,dear!" she gasped, fearing the worst. But he hurriedly dismounted and came, steadily enough, to kiss her. She submitted doubtfully to this, and immediately held him off for inspection. He was frankly disreputable. The flannel shirt and corduroy trousers were torn, bedraggled, gray with the dust of the trail; his boots were past redemption, his hat a reproach; his face a bronzed and hairy caricature; and he reeked of the most malignant tobacco Mrs. Laithe had ever encountered. Only the gold-rimmed spectacles, the nearsighted, peering gray eyes, and a narrow zone of white forehead under his hat brim served to recallthe somewhat fastidious, sedate, and rather oldish-looking young man who had parted from her.
He smiled at her with a complacency that made it almost a smirk. Then he boisterously kissed her again before she could evade him, and uttered once more that yell of lawless abandon.
"Clarence!" she expostulated, but he waved her to silence with an imperious hand.
"Quickest way to tell the story, Nell—that's my pæan of victory. Sleep? Slept like a night watchman. Eat? I debauched myself with the rowdiest sort of food every chance I got—fried bacon, boiled beans, baking-powder biscuit, black coffee that would bite your finger off—couldn't get enough; smoked when I wasn't eating or sleeping; drank raw whisky, too—whisky that would etch copper. Work? I worked harder than a Coney Island piano player, fell over asleep at night and got up asleep in the morning—when they kicked me the third time. And I galloped up and down cliffs after runaway steers where I wouldn't have crawled on my hands and knees two weeks before. And now that whole bunch of boys treat me like one of themselves. I found out they called me 'Willie Four-eyes' when I first came here. Now they call me 'Doc,' as friendly as you can imagine, and Buck Devlin told me last night I could ride a streak of lightning with the back cinch busted, if I tried."
He broke off to light the evil pipe ostentatiously, while she watched him, open eyed, not yet equal to speech.
"Now run in like a good girl and see if Ma Pierce has plenty of fragments from the noonday feast. Anything at all—I could eat a deer hide with the hair on."
Wavering incredulously, she left to do his bidding. As he led his horse around to the corral he roared a snatch from Buck Devlin's favorite ballad, with an excellent imitation of the cowboy manner:
"Oh, bur-ree menoton the lone prai-ree-e—"
"Oh, bur-ree menoton the lone prai-ree-e—"
"Oh, bur-ree menoton the lone prai-ree-e—"
After he had eaten he slouched into a hammock on the veranda with extravagant groans of repletion, and again lighted his pipe. His sister promptly removed her chair beyond the line of its baleful emanations.
"Well, Sis," he began, "that trip sure did for me good and plenty. Me for the high country uninterrupted hereafter!"
She regarded him with an amused smile.
"I'm so glad, dear, about the health. It's a miracle, but don't overdo it, don't attempt everything at once. And the trip 'sure' seems to have 'done' you in another way—how is it—'good and plenty'? You walk like a cowboy and talk and sing and act generally like one——"
"Do I, really, though?" A sort of half-shamed pleasure glowed in his eyes. "Well, you know they're good, companionable fellows, and a man takes on their ways of speech unconsciously. But I didn't think it would be noticed in me so soon. Do I seem like the real thing, honestly, now?"
She reassured him, laughing frankly.
"Well, you needn't laugh. It's all fixed—I'm going to be one."
"But, Clarence, not for long, surely!"
"It's all settled, I tell you. I've bought a ranch, old Swede Peterson's place over on Pine River; corking spot, three half sections under fence and ditch, rightat the mouth of a box cañon where nobody can get in above me, plenty of water, plenty of free range close at hand."
"Clarence Bartell, you're—what do you call it?—stringing."
"Not a bit of it. Wait till I come on in about two years, after selling a train load of fat steers at Omaha or Kansas City—sashayingdown Fifth Avenue and rounding into Ninth Street with my big hat and long-shanked spurs and a couple of forty-fours booming into the air.You'llsee, and won't dad say it's deuced unpleasant!"
"But I'll not believe until I see."
He spoke ruminantly between pulls at the pipe.
"Lots of things to do now, though. Got to go down to Pagosa this week to pay over the money, get the deed, and register my brand. How does 'Bar-B' strike you? Rather neat, yes? It'll make a tasty little monogram on the three hundred critters I start with. I'm on track of a herd of shorthorns already."
"And a little while ago you were off to the Philippines, and before that to Porto Rico, and last summer you were going on one of those expeditions that come back and tell why they didn't reach the North Pole, and you came out here to be a miner and you've——"
There was an impatient, silencing wave of the pipe.
"Oh, let all that go, can't you?—let the dead past bury its dead. I'm fixed for life. You and dad won't laugh at me any more. Come on out now and see me throw a rope, if you don't believe me. I've been practicing every day. And say, you didn't happen to notice the diamond hitch on that forward pack horse, did you? Well, I'm the boy that did most of that."
She followed him dutifully to the corrals and for half an hour watched him hurl thirty feet of rope at the horned skull of a steer nailed to the top of a post. When the noose settled over this mark his boyish delight was supreme. When it flew wide, which was oftener, his look was one of invincible determination.
As his sister left him he was explaining to Red Phinney, who had sauntered up to be a help in the practice, that the range of Bar-B had a lucky lie—no "greaser" could come along and "sleep" him.
She went back to her chair and book, shaping certain questions she would put to this brother. But it was not until after the evening meal that she could again talk with him, for the ardent novice found occupation about the stable and corrals the rest of the afternoon, and even sat for a time with the men in the evening, listening avidly to their small talk of the range, watchful to share in it. When he dared ask a question knowingly, or venture a swift comment couched in the vernacular, he thrilled with a joy not less poignant because it must be dissembled.
But conscience pricked him at length to leave those fascinating adventurers in the bunkhouse and to condescend for an interval to mere brotherhood. He found his sister alone in the "front" room, ensconced on the bearskin rug before a snapping and fragrant fire of cedar wood.
He drew up the wooden rocker and remarked that the fire smelled like a thousand burning leadpencils. He would have gone on to talk of his great experience, but the woman wisely forestalled him.
"Clarence," she began directly, "I've been thinking over that old affair of Randall Teevan and his wife,Kitty Lowndes, you know. Do you happen to recall the name of the man—the man Kitty went away with?"
"Lord, no! That was before I'd learned to remember anything. If you want to rake that affair up, ask Randy Teevan himself. I'll wager he hasn't forgotten the chap's name. But why desecrate the grave of so antique a scandal? Ask me about something later. I remember he had a cook once, when I was six——"
"Because—because I was thinking, just thinking. Are you certain you remember nothing about it, not even the man's name, nor what sort of man he was, nor what he did, nor anything?"
"I only know what you must know. Randall Teevan's wife decided that the Bishop had made two into the wrong one. I doubt if I ever heard the chap's name. I seem to remember that they took Alden with them—he was a baby of four or five, I believe, and that Randy scurried about and got him back after no end of fuss. I've heard dad speak of that."
"Did Kitty and that manevermarry?"
"No; you can be sure Teevan saw to that. He took precious good care not to divorce her. They manage those things more politely nowadays; everything formal, six months' lease of a furnished house in Sioux Falls, with the chap living at a hotel and dropping in for tea every day at five; and felicitations from the late husband when the decree is granted in the morning and the new knot tied in the afternoon—another slipknot like the first, so that the merest twitch at a loose end will——"
"Please don't! And did you never know anything more about them, where they lived or how they ended?"
"Never a thing, Sis. It's all so old, everybody's forgotten it, except Teevan. Of course he'd not forgetthe only woman who ever really put a lance through his shirt-of-mail vanity."
"You forget Kitty's mother. She remembers."
"That's so, by Jove. Teevan got what was coming to him, he got his 'cone-uppance' as the boys say; but old Kitty—yes, it was rough on her. But she's always put a great face on it. No one would know if theydidn'tknow."
"She's proud. Even though she's been another mother to me she rarely lets me see anything, and she's tried so hard to find comfort in Kitty's boy, in Alden. She's failed in that, though, for some reason."
Her brother glanced sharply at her. "I'll tell you why she's failed, Nell. Alden Teevan wasn't designed to be a comfort to anyone, not even to himself. There was too much Teevan in him at the start, and too much Teevan went into his raising."
"They're back in town, you know."
"Yes; Teevan must have realized that old Kitty is getting on in years, and has a bit of money for Alden. Say, Sis, I hate to seem prying, but you don't—you're not thinking about Alden Teevan seriously, are you? Come, let's be confidential for twenty seconds."
She mused a moment, then faced him frankly.
"There's something I like in Alden, and something I don't. I know what I like and I don't know what I don't like—I only feel it. There!"
He reached over to take one of her hands.
"Well, Sis, you trust to the feeling. You couldn't be happy there. And you deserve something fine, poor child! You deserve to be happy again." His inner eye looked back six years to see the body of poor Dick Laithe carried into the Adirondack camp by twosilent guides who had found him where a stray bullet left him.
She turned a tired, smiling face into the light.
"Iwashappy, so happy; yet I wonder if you can understand how vague it seems now. It was so brief and ended so terribly. I think the shock of it made me another woman. Dick and I seem like a boy and girl I once knew who laughed and played childish games and never became real. I find myself sympathizing with them sometimes, as I would with two dear young things in a story that ended sadly."
He awkwardly stroked and patted the hand he still held.
"Come and live with me, Nell. There's only a one-room cabin at that place now, with a carpet of hay on the dirt floor. But I'll have a mansion there next summer that will put the eye out of this shack at Bar-7. I believe in getting back to Nature, but I don't want to land clear the other side of her. You'd be comfy with me. And it's a great life; not a line of dyspepsia in it. And think offeelingyourself sliding off to sleep the moment you touch the pillow, as plainly as you feel yourself going down in an elevator. That reminds me, I'm going to bed down with the boys in the bunkhouse to-night. I'm afraid to trust myself in that bed upstairs again—I've lain awake there so many nights."
For a time she lost the thread of his rambling talk, busied with her own thoughts. She was faintly aware that for luncheon he had been eating a biscuit, a thick, soggy, dangerous biscuit, caught up in the hurry of the morning's packing, wrenched in half and sopped in bacon grease. There was a word about shooting. He was learning to "hold down" the Colt's 44, and hadalmost hit a coyote. Later, words reached her of a cold night on the divide, when ice formed in the pail by the cooking fire. What at last brought her back was a yawn and his remark that he must "hole up" for the night.
"Clarence," she began, looking far into a little white-hot chamber between two half-burned logs, "listen, please, and advise me. If you were going to do something that might, just possibly, and not by any means certainly, rake up rather an ugly mess, in a sort of remote way—that might make some people uncomfortable, you understand—I mean if you saw something that ought to be done, because the person deserved it, and it was by no means that person's fault, not in the least, and the person didn't even know about it nor suspect anything, would you stop because it might be painful to some one else—just possibly it might—or to a number of people, or even to the person himself, after he knew it? Or would you go ahead and trust to luck, especially when there's a chance that it mightn't ever come out?—though I'm quite sure it's true, you see, and that's what makes it so hard to know what to do."
She looked up at him with bright expectancy. Clutching his head with both hands, he stared at her, alarm leaping in his eyes.
"Would you mind repeating that slowly?" he began, in hushed, stricken tones. "No, no—I shouldn't ask that. One moment, please—now it all comes back to me. I see in fancy the dear old home, and hear faithful Rover barking his glad welcome. Ah, now I have the answer; I knew it would come. It's because one is a toiler of the sea and the other is a soiler of thetea—then the ball is snapped back for a run around the end and the man on third must return to his base."
"I might have known you couldn't understand," she said regretfully; "but I can't possibly be more explicit. I thought if I stated the case clearly in the abstract—but I dare say it's a waste of time to ask advice in such matters."
"You've wasted yours, my child, if that's the last chance I get. Do you really want help about something?"
"No, dear, it wasn't anything. Never mind."
"All right, if you say so. And now, me for the blankets!"
When he had gone she stepped out into the night under the close, big stars. She breathed deeply of the thin, sharp air and looked over at the luminous pearl of a moon that seemed to hang above the cabin where Ewing's kid would doubtless be dreaming. Her lips fell into a little smile, half cynical, half tender.
"I'll do it anyway!" The inflection was defiant, but the words were scarcely more than a whisper. She said them again, giving them tone.
THEY were chatting the next morning over the late breakfast of Mrs. Laithe. Her brother, summoned from the branding pen, where tender and terrified calves were being marked for life, had come reluctantly, ill disposed to forego the vivacity of that scene. He had rushed in with the look of a man harassed by large affairs. His evil beard was still unshorn, his dress as untidy as care could make it. He drew a chair up to the oilcloth covered table and surveyed the meager fare of his sister with high disapproval.
"What you need is food, Nell," he began abruptly. "Look at me. This morning I ate two pounds of oatmeal, three wide slices of ham, five chunks of hot bread, about two thousand beans, and drank all the coffee I could get—and never foundered. How's that, against one silly glass of malted milk two weeks ago? And I slept till seven. I woke up for just eight seconds at four-thirty to hear the boys turning out. Oh, it was gray and cold in that bunkhouse—with me warm in the blankets. That was the one moment of real luxury I've ever known—not to turn out if I didn't choose. And I didnotchoose—if anyone should ride up hastily and inquire of you. When we were on the drive I had to turn out with the rest of the bunch and catch horses and unbuckle frosty hobbles with stiff fingers, and fetch pails of ice water and freeze anddo other things, but this morning I just grinned myself asleep again. That was worth living for, my girl."
But his sister was for once unresponsive. She had not seemed to hear him.
"Clarence," she began, as if reciting lines she had learned, "there's a chap over on the next ranch—Ewing's his name—that ought to have something done for him. He's young, twenty-four, I believe, and boyish even for that age, but he draws; draws well. His father was a painter who died here years ago, and the boy has lived in these mountains ever since. His father taught him to draw, but he has had no chance to study, and he's reached a point where he must learn more or lose all he has. I'm almost certain he can make something of himself. He ought to go to New York, where he can study and see pictures and find out things. Now, please advise me about it."
"How's his health—his stomach?"
"I believe we've never spoken of it. That's hardly the point."
"Well, I call it a big point. Suppose he went off to New York and got plumb ruined, the way I did—no eats, no sleeps. If you want my advice, he ought to stay right here where everybody's healthy. He shouldn't be foolish."
"Clarence!" Her eyes shone with impatience. "It isn't whether he's to go or not. He'sgoing, and he's to have money to keep him there till he makes himself known. It's on that point I need advice."
"Oh, I beg your pardon! I didn't savvy at first. You're to tell me what to advise and I'm to advise it? Well, tell me what to say."
"Don't be stupid, dear—just for a moment, please.You're bound to agree with me when you see his work. And you might offer to lend him the money—my money, though he's not to know that. Or perhaps you ought to buy his pictures. I'm sure you'll want some of those things he has. Of course that's the better way. It will let him feel independent. There, it's fixed. It was simple, after all." She flashed him a look of gratitude. "You're a help after all, dear, when you choose to be."
"But—one moment, my babe! Perhaps after listening to my advice so meekly you'll let the poor chap say a word for himself. Perhaps he'd rather stay right here in God's own country if he eats and sleeps well now."
"Please, please, let's not be so—so foody! Of course he wants to go!"
"But what in Heaven's name would you ever have done without my help, poor mindless child that you are?"
But she was oblivious to this subtlety.
"Yes, dear, you're always a comfort. We'll ride over this afternoon and tell him he's to go. It will be a fine thing to do—he's so promising."
"Look here, Nell"—he glanced at her shrewdly—"is this to be his picnic or yours?"
She burned with a little inner rage to feel her cheeks redden, but the black fringe of her eyes did not fall before him.
"We'll ride over after luncheon," she repeated, "and I do wish, Clarence, that you'd shave and wear a collar or a stock, and throw that unspeakable coat away, and have your boots cleaned, and send for some cigars."
He looked complacently down over the objectionable attire, pulled sputteringly at the condemned pipe, then grinned at her.
"Say, Sis, if it's going to bethatmuch fun for you, I'll rope and throw him, and send him on tied if he acts rough."
Late that evening the two inmates of the lake cabin sat before the big fireplace in the studio to talk of a wondrous thing. They had survived the most exciting half day in the life of either, and the atmosphere of the room was still electrical with echoes of the big event. Through their supper Ewing, unable to eat, had sat staring afar, helpless in the rush of the current, inert as a bowlder in the bed of a mountain stream. He, so long at rest, was to be swept down from the peace of his hill nook to the ocean, to life itself. It was a thing to leave one aghast with a consternation that was somehow joyous. Since supper he had stared into the fire in dumb surrender to the flood, with intervals of dazed floor-pacing, in which he tried to foresee his course.
Ben Crider, submerged by the waters of the same cloudburst, was giving stouter battle to the current. His face drawn to more than its wonted dejection, he strove to play the beacon. Between snatches of worldly counsel he read with solemn inflection certain gems of guidance from authors in whose wisdom he had long felt a faith entire. His ready mind harked forward to direful emergencies, and he submitted devices for meeting these.
"Remember what that says, Kid," he urged impressively, and he read once more a saving passage from his well-thumbed "Guide to Polite Behavior." "'If you cannot sing a song or tell a mirth-provoking story at an evening ball or party you may well perform a few tricks in legerdemain. The following are among the simplest and, when deftly performed never fail toprovoke loud applause and win you the undying gratitude of your hostess.' Are you a-hearin' me? Well, I've turned down the pages at that one with the coin and the hat, and the one where you must tell the right card by a simple act of mind-readin'. And don't forget what he says here, 'the hand is quicker'n the eye.'"
"Yes, Ben; I'm listening."
"Well, listen to this here other book. It's more serious."
He took up his treasured "Traps and Pitfalls of a Great City," and again became a voice in the wilderness, waving a forefinger to punctuate and warn.
"'It is the habit of these gentry to lie in wait for their intended victims when they alight at the principal railway stations, and where, by their plausible and insinuating advances, they ingratiate themselves into theconfidenceof those whom it is their purpose to fleece; hence the name, "confidence men." Only by constant watchfulness and a thorough knowledge of their methods may the stranger in the great city hope to escape their wiles, since their ways of approach are manifold.' You hear that, Kid—their ways is manifold. Here's a pitcher of one of 'em tacklin' a countryman. See what an oily-lookin' feller he is, stovepipe hat, fancy vest, big watchchain, long coat, striped pants. You'd say he was a bank president. Oh, I bet they're slick ones. They'd have to be to tog out like that every day in the week. Now remember, if one o' them ducks comes up to you and starts to butter you up with fine words and wants to carry your satchel, you just let out a yell for the police and hand him over. That's the way to settle 'em!"
"I'll surely remember, Ben."
"And there's thugs and footpads. Always keep your coat buttoned over your watch, it says, and if you're goin' along Broadway or Fifth Avenue after dark, get out and walk in the middle o' the street, so's they can't spring around a corner and slug you. And don't talk to strangers, and don't look into store windows ner up at the high buildin's, else they'll spot you fer a greeny and give you the laugh."
"I can't believe it yet, Ben." He rose to walk the floor again, his hands sunk deep in his pockets, his head bent low.
"And don't git into no card game on the train with a couple o' smooth strangers that ain't ever met each other before and want to pass away the time pleasantly. And don't bet you can open the patent lock after you think you found the secret spring. And don't buy any o' that money you can't tell from real, that was printed from stolen Gov'ment plates."
"Think of his giving a hundred dollars for that drawing of 'Lon Pierce on the pinto, throwing a steer, and all that money for the others."
"Serves him right!" Ben hissed this vindictively, having first reluctantly laid aside "Traps and Pitfalls." "Serves him dead right! That feller puts on a wise look that's about sixty-five years beyond his real age, as I'd cal'late it. I tell you, son, it sure takes all kinds o' fools to make a world."
"But he said they were worth the money," Ewing pleaded. "He said I would do even better, some day."
"Sure—surehe said it! An' didn't he ask me if I had dyspepsia, an' did I sleep at night, an' I'd better remember to live an outdoor life of activity if I ever gotthat a-way. An' he thinks he's learned how to grain a deer hide after watching me do it three minutes, an' he's goin' to pick up a live skunk next chanct he gits, because I told him jest how to grab it. Oh, hesaidthings all right! He said a variety o' things!" He glared at Ewing as he rounded out this catalogue of follies.
"I'm torn in two, Ben. I shan't be glad to leave here, and yet I'll be glad to go. I've dreamed it so long. It seems as if I'd dreamed it so hard I'd made it come true."
"Always pin your money to the inside of your vest, like I told you," came the voice of warning.
"I will, I will. But thingsdohappen, don't they? This is like a fairy tale."
"Fairy tale!" The wise one uttered this with violent scorn. "Likely you was the sleepin' beauty, an' this here princess comes along with an alarm clock!"
"Not a princess, Ben." He laughed boyishly. "She's a sure-enough queen."
"Jest remember they's knaves in the deck. That's allIask."
"You like her don't you?"
Ben made an effort to be fair.
"Well, I do an' then I don't. She's saddle stock, fur looks, that lady is, but she ain't serious. No, sir! When her eyes is on me I know as well's I want to she's snickerin' inside; makes no difference if her face does look like it was starched. You'll find, when all's said an' done, that she's plumb levitous, an' levitous folks is triflin'."
"Have you seen how sorrowful she looks sometimes, a sort of glad-sorry, as if she felt sorry for herself andglad for other people? She makes me feel old when she looks that way—as if I must protect her."
"Yes, an' other times she's stiffer'n Lot's wife!"
"Other times she seems older than all the world, a woman who has always lived and always will."
"Well, son, when you git put afoot there, you write on an' I'll manage to scare up a git-away stake fur you."
"It's wonderful to think of going out into the world thattheyknew, Ben—my father and mother. It seems as if they must be out there now, and that I'm going to meet them very quietly and naturally some day. I think it wouldn't astonish me."
"Look a-here, Kid! That'll be about enough o'that! You go to bed."
The other smiled a little wanly.
"I can't. I'm afraid to. I'm going to sit here awhile and think, and when the moon gets up I'm going outside to think. The hills haven't heard the news yet, and the trail over to the lake doesn't know about it. I've got to spread it before I sleep. You see, when I do sleep, I'm afraid I'll wake up and find it was stuff I dreamed."
"Shucks, Kid, what's the use o' talking like that? It ain't no dream. It's true as God made little apples." There was, at the moment, a noticeable relaxation from the speaker's habitual austerity. An awkward smile of affection melted the hardness of his face as he held out a hand to Ewing. "An' I'm doggoned if I'd be soall-firedamazed if everything come out fur the best. Yes, sir, blame me, Kid, if I don't almost half b'lieve you'll make good!"
"You can bet I'll try, Ben!"
"That's right; you do your damndest—'angels can do no more,' as the feller said."
As he lighted a candle his face was grim once more—savagely grim, even as he sang, in going to his rest:
"Oh, 'twas on a summer's eve when I firstmetter,Swingin' on the garden ga-a-ate!"
"Oh, 'twas on a summer's eve when I firstmetter,Swingin' on the garden ga-a-ate!"
"Oh, 'twas on a summer's eve when I firstmetter,Swingin' on the garden ga-a-ate!"
It now befell that the imminent adventure of Ewing should bring him a double rapture. The day after Mrs. Laithe secretly played special Providence to that unsuspicious youth her brother found profit of his own in the plan.
"I've a world of things to do here, Nell," he said. "I ought to stay here this winter. I'd be that much forwarder with my work next spring."
"I shall be quite safe alone," she answered.
"Why go alone? If you insist on robbing the cradle, why not take the innocent with you? Of course you'll have to see that he doesn't walk off the train, or lose his hat out of the window, or eat too much candy, or rough-house the other children on the way, but he'll serve every purpose of a man and brother."
"To be sure!" she broke in with enthusiasm. "I worried last night about his going. We'll put it that I'm in his charge, and he will really be in mine."
"That's it. He'll feel important, and you'll be the tidy nurse. And with both of you off my mind I can start those chaps to getting out logs for the Bar-B mansion. I'll camp over there till a good tracking snow comes, then I'll have an elk hunt—I want a good head for the dining room—then I'll hole up here at Pierce's for the winter and learn how to handle my stock. So that's settled."
Mrs. Laithe rode over to apprise Ewing of this plan. The little clearing slept vacant in the sunlight. She left Cooney "tied to the ground" by throwing the bridle rein over his head, and knocked on the open door of the cabin with the handle of her quirt. There was no response save echoes from the empty living room. Crossing this she drew aside the blanket that curtained the door of the studio. The big room lay before her in strange disorder. Pictures and hangings were gone from the wall. Two yawning trunks stood by the door; canvases and portfolios lay about; loose drawings and clothing littered the chairs and floor. Beyond this disarray stood the easel, still holding the mother's portrait. In the light from the window the eyes looked livingly into her own through the silence. She was struck by some new glint of meaning in them, something she read as an appeal, almost a prayer. Her own eyes fell and then she first noticed the room's living occupant.
On the couch, in the shadow of the half-drawn curtain, Ewing lay asleep. He had sprawled there easily, half turned on his side, one arm flung about his head, the other hanging over to the floor. Now that she saw him she heard his measured breathing. Some new, quick-born interest—curiosity, sympathy, she knew not what—impelled her to scan the sleeping face more closely. She stepped lightly across to the couch and looked down at him, with a little air of carelessness against his sudden awakening. It was the first time she had studied his face in repose. Lacking the ready, boyish smile, it was an older face, revealing lines of maturity she had not suspected in the arch of brow above the deep-set eyes, in the lean jaws and sharply square chin, and in the muscled neck, revealed by the thrown-back head. Itwas a new face, for the unguarded faces of the sleeping, like the faces of the dead tell many secrets. Ewing's face was all at once full of new suggestion, of new depths, of unsuspected complexities. As she gazed, scarce breathing, she was alive to a new consciousness of him. He had been a boy, winning from her at once by his fresh, elemental humanness a regard that came partly from the mother lying alert in her, and partly from the joyous, willing and even wistful comrade which this woman was fitted to be. Now, bending over the unmasked face, she divined with swift alarm that her old careless attitude toward the sleeper might never be recovered. What her new attitude must be she could not yet know, but she was conscious of being swept by a great wave of tenderness for him; swept, too, by fear of him; and the impact of these waves left her trembling before him. Some flash of portent, some premonition born of instinct, warned her with a clearness that was blinding. Tenderness and fear rolled in upon her, though her reason weighed them as equal absurdities. Then her look rose to the mother's portrait and she saw that the eyes had followed her: they seemed now to challenge, almost fiercely. Only the briefest of moments could she endure their gaze, a gaze that in some way drew life to itself from the breathing of the sleeper. Instinctively she brushed her hand before her own eyes, drew herself up with a little flinching shudder and moved slowly backward to the door.
Then she was happily out in the sunlight, breathing deep of the pine-spiced air, gratefully eying the familiar boundaries of the clearing, the stumps, the huge pile of cut wood, and the fenced-in vegetable garden. Over the line of green to the north a gray, bare mountain shotabove the lesser hills, rising splendidly from its timbered base to a peak hooded in snow. It swam in her vision at first, but presently something of its grounded sureness, something of the peace that slept along its upper reaches, fell upon her own soul and her serenity was restored.
Not pausing to review those amazing moments of inner tumult, she stepped again to the door and with her old, careless, mildly amused laugh she beat upon it, loudly this time. She heard an inarticulate call from the studio, and again she assaulted the panel. Then the curtain was drawn aside and Ewing stared at her from the doorway.
"I believe you were sleeping," she started to say, but he came quickly to her with something between a laugh and a shout.
"Then it's true, itistrue—you're real! I just dreamed that you became Ben Crider and made me walk in the middle of the street." He fairly rushed her into the studio and waved excitedly to the open trunks.
"There! I began to pack last night so I could see it when I woke up and have a proof that things were true. I didn't sleep at all till about eight this morning."
She sat on the couch, feeling that she was foolish beyond measure to avoid the eyes of the portrait. Then she smiled at him with an effort to recover the amused ascendancy of their first meetings.
"It's all true, I assure you, and I wonder if you'd mind taking charge of me when you go East. My brother has suggested it, and I'll promise not to be a trouble."
His look of wondering delight was so utterly boyish, his helpless laughter so entirely without reserve that she regained for the moment her old easy dominance.
"Would I mind—mind going with you? That's a joke, isn't it?" He seized both her hands in a grasp from which she caught some thrill of his deep-breathed, electric joy.
"But of course this is nonsense," he went on; "I'm still lying there."
"Enough of dreams," she broke in warningly. "You'll find it only too, too real. You're going to work. It's simple."
He sat down on one of the trunks, trying to subdue his excitement, his hands clenched.
"If this feeling lasts I can do anything,anything, you understand, learn everything, do everything, be everything. I have power. Ever since you left yesterday I've felt full of steel springs, all tightly coiled. Only I must be careful. If they went off all at once there'd be an explosion, and I'm afraid I couldn't ever be repaired."
She grimaced with an effort at mock dismay which was not wholly successful. She divined the literal truth under his jesting. The springs were coiled and their steel was not too well tempered, she believed. The thought left a shadow on her face.
"You're not doubting anything?" he asked quickly.
"Not doubting, O youth! Only a little innocent wonder."
"But isn't life an enchantment? Isn't it all miracles? Oh, I understand poets at last. They can't tell you their secret unless you already know it. They sing in big numbers. They say a million is true, and you say, 'Yes, that's very pretty, but it's poetry—exaggeration; he really means that a hundred is true,' and you never know any better till the light comes. Then you seethat the poet was literal and quite prosaic all the time. The whole million was always true, in beauty and bigness and wonder."
"Stop!" she protested. "You're making me feel as old as the world itself, ancient and scarred with wisdom."
"You!" he burst in, "you're as young as the world. You are foolish and I am the wise one if you can't see that. Indeed, you're looking beautifully foolish this minute. You are thinking all kinds of doubts underneath a lot of things you won't tell me. You're secretive. You hide a lot from me."
She laughed, a little uneasily.
"You are a babe for wisdom," she retorted; "but you're not to be enlightened in a day—nor by me. I'll give you a year. You shall tell me then which of us two is the older. Now you must be at your packing. Can you be ready by Monday?"
"Monday? and I'd been wondering what would be the name of the day. So it's merely Monday? How many Mondays there have been, how many, many Mondays, that were like any other day! And now this Monday steals up—yes, I'll be ready."
"I see you are past reason——"
"Say above it——"
"Anyway, get on with your packing. So much is true." He would have ridden back with her, but she demurred.
"It's so far," he urged.
"It isn't half far enough," she mocked him, "I have so much thinking to do!"
"Monday, Monday, Monday, then!" he chanted, as he went out to lift her into the saddle. But when he had done this he suddenly bowed his head to kiss herhand, as he had seen his father long ago kiss his mother's hand.
"You are all the world, just now, all I know of it," he said.
She looked back to where he stood, straight and buoyant, his head thrown back in joyous challenge.
"And you are youth—dear, dear youth!" she cried; but this he could not hear.
A little farther on she breathed softly, "Poor dead Kitty—don't be afraid!"
DURING those last days Ewing brushed only the airy slopes of illusion, strive as he would to keep his feet to earth. Many were the tricks he used to this end: vain tricks to forget the miracle of his going, of going so soon, of going with her.
Ben Crider would not help him forget. When snatches of warning from "Traps and Pitfalls" grew stale, Ben coined advice of a large and general character.
"Want to be an artist, hey? Ask me? Go down to Durango—let that professor learn you in ten lessons. Make yer five t' eight dollars a day canvassin' fur enlargements. Gold frame throwed in. Yes, sir! Ask me? Durango's fur enough. New York's too gosha-mighty fur!"
It was not possible to forget under the droppings of this counsel. Wherefore his spirit tossed in tumult.
When Ben called him on the morning of the start it was still dark. He lay a moment, his nerves tightening. This was the last time he would lie in that bed—for how long? Well, on some unmarked night in the pregnant future, lying there again, he would look back to this moment and tell himself all the wonderful things that had come to him—tell his ignorant, puzzled, excited self, who would, somehow, be waiting and wondering there.
Juggling this conceit, he groped for matches and acandle. He could hear the singing of the kettle in the outer room. Through the window he saw a lantern swinging, and knew that Ben would be bringing around the horses. It was a time to be cool, a time to gird himself.
He had breakfast on the table when Ben came in, and they ate by the light of a smoky lamp, tacitly pretending that no miracle was afoot. Saving the early hour, it was a scene they enacted whenever they drove to Pagosa for supplies, up to the point when, the meal finished, they carried two trunks from the studio out to the wagon. But they managed this carelessly enough, with only a casual, indignant word or two about the excessive weight of full trunks.
Only the faintest hint of light showed in the east as the chilled horses stumbled awkwardly down the hill. A half hour they rode in a silence broken but once, and then only by Ben's hoarse threat to "learn" the off horse something needful but unspecified which it appeared not to know.
The light glowed from gray to rose and day was opened by the bark of a frantic squirrel that ran half-way down a tree trunk, threatening attack, in alarm for its store of spruce cones at the foot of the tree. A crested jay at the same moment mocked them harshly from a higher branch of the tree.
Ewing exhaled with gusto a breath of the warming, pine-spiced air.
"It's sunning up, Ben." Ben grunted unamiably.
A little distance ahead of them a doe and a half-grown fawn bounded across the road.
"She seemed to be in a hurry," Ewing again ventured.
"She wanted t' git that child away from here, 'foresome one stuffed its head full o' fool talk about goin' off to New York. Can't tell what notions a young deermightgit." With this laborious surmise he shut his jaws together with repellent grimness.
Their road now wound down a hill and out of the woods to join the valley road.
"Yender's Beulah Pierce!" Ben snapped this out savagely. The wagon was half a mile ahead. Pierce was driving, and in the rear seat were two figures whom they knew to be Mrs. Laithe and her brother. As Ben had pointedly ignored these Ewing did not refer to them.
They came to a gate in a wire fence that stretched interminably away on either side, over brown, low-rolling hills. Pierce had left the gate open for them, and Ewing got out to close it after they had passed through.
"Larabie is building a lot of fence," he said, as they drove on. "At this rate he'll have every school section in Hinsdale County wired in pretty soon."
On this impersonal ground Ben seemed willing to meet him.
"Me? Know what I'm going to do if Wes' Larabie cuts off any more o' this road with his barb wire? Stick a pair o' wire clippers in the whip socket an' drive through.That'sall! You'd think he owned all America, the way he makes people sidle along that fence till he gits good an' ready to make a gate. Me? Make my own gates. Yes, sir! Wire clippers!"
With this he was sufficiently cheered to insult vivaciously a couple of dull, incurious Mexicans whom they presently passed, plodding behind a laden burro train. To his opprobrious burst of weirdly entangled Spanishand English he added the taunting bleat of a sheep and a merrily malign gesture eloquent of throats to be slit—the throats of unspeakable sheep herders. He observed with deep disgust that neither of the threatened ones gave any sign of interest in their portended fate. They passed with scarce a lift of their heads.
"They're takin' supplies up to that sheep outfit o' Rankin's," grumbled Ben. "Pierce an' some o' the others is talkin' about gettin' in a car load o' saltpeter an' dopin' the range if Rankin lets his herd work down any closeter—have it billed in as hardware or pianos, an' unload the car at night. Serve him right fur bein' a sheep man. An' yet I knowed Nels Rankin, five, six years ago, when there wa'n't a more respectable cuss in the hull San Juan."
In passing the Pulcifer ranch they made talk about the hay-cutting, for a reaper sent its locustlike click from a brown stretch of bottom land. Pulcifer had a good stand of hay, they agreed, and probably he wouldn't have such a big winter kill this year if he didn't act the fool and sell off too much of it. You couldn't expect to bring cattle through fat on cottonwood browse.
So they lamely gossiped the miles away in strained avoidance of the big event. Only once did Ewing look back, while Ben was occupied with the horses at a ford. The rocky wall at the verge of their lake was intimately near, despite the miles they had come, and below it, through a notch in the hills, he could see a spot of yellow—the new shake roof on a shed they had built that summer near the cabin. Then his eyes were ahead to where Pierce's wagon crawled up a hill.
Ben whipped up the horses and burst into song: