CHAPTER VA MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE
De Launay expressed himself as quite willing to look after most of the details of the affair, and Solange, although capable, being more or less ignorant, was willing to leave them to him, although with some misgiving. The sight of that stack of saucers in the café of the Pink Kitten remained to haunt her with distaste for the whole adventure. She distrusted De Launay, recalling some of the more lurid tales she had heard of his exploits. In spite of everything, he had been a légionnaire, and légionnaires could hardly be purified even in the fires of war. Before he arrived at her apartment to go with her to themairieof thatarrondissement, she was to suffer further misgiving. Ahead of him arrived a gorgeous bouquet of lilies of the valley and orange blossoms, and they were not artificial flowers, either. When he arrived, looking much more respectable than she had expected, his mustache even twisted jauntily and his clothes pressed to neatness, she met him with accusation.
“Is it monsieur that I have to thank for—these?” she indicated the flowers with expressive and disdainful79hands. De Launay stared at them vacantly as he stood in the door.
“I suppose it must have been,” he said, meekly. “I am forgetful, mademoiselle. You must make allowances for a broken soldier if my—vagaries—occasionally offend you.”
“It is in bad taste, to say the least, to bedeck the bride in such a ceremony,” she said cuttingly. “If I must hire a husband, he need not, at least, forget decency and make me conspicuous. Remember that.”
“The flowers,” said De Launay, “are as if they had never been. I dismiss them from the earth. With another drink or two I will cease to recall that such things as flowers exist. Mademoiselle will command me!”
Solange tossed the offending blossoms on the floor and walked out ahead of him. He followed at her side but a step behind, and she stalked with face turned forward out to the street and toward themairie. Yet, in spite of all precautions some wind of her intentions must have got about, for more than one old woman or wounded soldier spoke to her and uttered a blessing and good wishes as she walked along. To all of them she returned greetings in kind, thanking them soberly, but with a lip that trembled. De Launay, rolling behind, was the recipient of curious and doubtful glances, as the man who was taking their Morganla féefrom them. Yet here and there a soldier recognized him and80came to a stiff salute, and when this was the case a murmur informing others ran about, and all doubt seemed to die, the greetings growing more cheerful and the blessings being addressed to both of them. This annoyed Solange more than the flowers had done.
“Is it that I am honored by having this mercenary drunkard for a husband?” she said to herself. “Mon Dieu!One would think so!”
Yet she could find nothing really offensive in his attitude to the affair, unless that he was almost too respectful. She suspected that he had been drinking and that his air was due to the exaggeration induced by liquor—or else, and that was worse—he was deliberately, with drunken humor, making a burlesque of his very deference.
The signing of the contract and the ceremony before themairewere successfully completed and De Launay turned to her with a deep bow. Themaire, puzzled at the utterly emotionless quality of this wedding, congratulated them formally, and Solange acknowledged it with stiff thanks and a smile as stiff and mirthless. But it was to De Launay that the official showed the deepest respect, and that angered her again.
Her pride was restored somewhat after they had left themairieand were on their way back to her rooms. A squat, swarthy individual, in the dingy uniform of the French marines, doffed his cap and81stepped up to them, speaking to Solange in French, tinged with a broad Breton accent.
“And is it true, Morganla fée,” he asked, ducking his head, “that this man has been married to you?”
“Why, yes, it is true, Brebon,” she answered, kindly. The man looked searchingly into her face, observing the coldness of it.
“If it is by your will, mademoiselle,” he answered, “it is well. But,” and he swung his lowering head on its bull neck toward De Launay, “if this man who has taken you should ever make you regret, you shall let me know, Morganla fée! If he causes you a single tear, I shall make sausage meat out of him with a knife!”
Solange shook her head in protest, but just behind her she heard a low laugh from De Launay.
“But,mon brave,” said he, “you would find this one a tough swine to carve!”
The Breton stared at him like a sullen and dangerous bull and moved away, saying no more. But Solange felt cheered. There were some who regarded her ahead of this soldier of fortune whom she had hired to masquerade as her husband.
She had little to cheer her in the next few days before she took the train for Le Havre. In the neighborhood where her marriage had become known, the fact that De Launay had left her at her door and came to see her only occasionally and then stayed but a moment was a fruitful82subject of comment. What sort of a marriage was this! Suspicion began, gradually, to take the place of confidence in her. The women that had been her worshiping friends now spoke behind her back, hinting at some scandal. Nasty tales began to circulate as feminine jealousy got the upper hand. In the presence of soldiers these tongues were silent, but there were other males in the quarter who were not soldiers. Big, beefy Achille Marot, who kept the butcher shop on the corner had never been one, except in the reserve, where he had done some police duty behind the front. And Marot was a bully, foul of mind and foul of mouth. The whispers of the women were meat and drink to him. Solange had seen fit to resent in a practical manner some of his freedoms. Her poilu friends had nearly wrecked his shop for him on that occasion. But now she was married—this was said with a suggestive raise of the shoulders and eyebrows—and the poilus were not so much in evidence.
“Ah! what have I always said to you about this one!” Marot remarked as Solange passed his shop on her way to her rooms one day. He was looking out at her and smirking at Madame Ricot, the neighborhood gossip and scold. “Is this what one calls a marriage? Rather is it that such a marriage indicates that a marriage was necessary—and arranged conveniently, is it not? For observe that this broken adventurer who, as I know, was kicked out83of the army in disgrace, is not a real husband at all, as every one may see. It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the affair has been arranged to hide something, is it not?”
A hand that was like steel closed on the beefy neck of the butcher and a calm voice behind him spoke in his ear.
“Now here is a word for you, my friend, from De Launay, the légionnaire, and you will do well to remember it! A tongue that is evil will win you an evil end and words that are not true will result in your throat being cut before you know it. Realize that, Marot, my friend, and say again that De Launay was kicked out of the army!”
“Death of a dog!” sputtered the butcher, twisting in the iron grasp on his neck. “I will slit thy belly——”
“Thou wilt do nothing but root in the mud as is thy nature,” said De Launay and kicked him vigorously into the gutter where he did, indeed, plow the filth with his nose. Madame Ricot uttered a shrill shriek for the police, and Solange, who had been unconscious of it all, turned about to see De Launay standing on the sidewalk brushing his hands while the butcher rolled in the mud. At this moment a gendarme came running up.
“Take that carrion and lock him up!” said De Launay, calmly. “I accuse him of public indecency, spreading scandal and criminal slander. He has said84that I, the General de Launay, was kicked out of the army for unmentioned crimes. I will prefer charges against him in the morning.”
“Monsieur le général, it shall be done,” said the gendarme, with a smart salute. He grabbed the groveling butcher and hoisted him from his wallow. “Come along with me, Marot! I have long had my eye on thee! And is there a charge against the woman, my general?”
Madame Ricot was gaping wide-mouthed and silent at the unexpected result of her appeal to the forces of the law. And now she shrank fearfully back toward the gathering crowd.
“There is no charge—as yet,” said De Launay. “But she is suspected of being a procuress and a vile scold. If it is she who has been injuring respected reputations, I shall soon know it, and then——”
“I shall be at your service, my general,” the gendarme assured him, and, with another salute, departed, jerking the roaring Marot with him. De Launay sauntered on, with his rolling walk, toward Solange, who turned and walked away from him so that he did not overtake her until they had come to her apartment.
“There is entirely too much gossip in this quarter,” said De Launay, casually, as she wheeled about at the entrance to her rooms. “It is just as well that you are getting out of it.”85
“It is just as well,” agreed Solange, angrily. “For if I remain here much longer the gossip that you arouse will ruin me.”
“Again,” said De Launay, rather dryly, “I apologize.”
Solange was left to feel at fault. She knew that she had been unjust, but De Launay’s casual ways and his very indifferent deference angered her. Yet it could not last much longer since they were to take a train for Le Havre that evening and sail upon the following day. De Launay had called regarding the final arrangements.
Her passports had been secured and her passage on theAstarte, of the Blue Star line, was arranged for. How this had been done she did not inquire, remaining in ignorance of efforts spent by De Launay in securing the intercession of the French and American military authorities in order that she might have suitable accommodations on the crowded liner, which was being used as a troopship. A high dignitary of an allied nation had had to postpone his sailing in order that Madame de Launay might travel in a first-class stateroom.
Even so, the girl, concerned chiefly with her own adventure, and strange to the conditions existing, suspected nothing. The little stateroom was none too luxurious, for theAstartewas not one of the best boats, and four or five years of war service had not improved her. And she had no notion that De86Launay, even for such comfort as this, had paid an exorbitant price out of his own pocket. He had given her the rate of the second-cabin berth, a dingy little inside cubby-hole, which he himself occupied.
The voyage was long and slow and dull. The swarming troops and military men crowded the ship to embarrassing fullness and Solange kept mostly to her cabin. She saw little of De Launay, who had not the run of the upper decks as she had, though his rank was recognized and he was made free of the lounge where the military men congregated. She heard somewhat of him, however, and what she heard angered her still more. It was chiefly in the line of gossip and conjecture as to why Madame de Launay, who seemed to be distinguished because shewasMadame de Launay, should be traveling alone, first class, while the famous soldier shared a stuffy hole in the wall with a Chicago merchant. The few women aboard, nurses, Y. M. C. A. workers, welfare workers on war missions, picked up the talk among the officers and passed their curiosity on to Solange through stewardesses and maids. Every one seemed to think it strange, and Solange acknowledged that it was strange—stranger than they thought. But the thing that rankled was the fact that the assiduous care of the stewardess, her very obsequiousness, seemed toemanatefrom De Launay. It was because she was87De Launay’s wife that she was a figure of importance—although she pictured him as a discredited mercenary who was even now, probably, indulging his bestial appetite for liquor in the officers’ lounge and boasting of his exploits to a congenial audience.
Her one consoling thought was that it could not last much longer. True, New York would not mean the last of him since he was to accompany her to her destination, but that should not take long. Once at Sulphur Falls, which she understood to be her final railroad station, he could be relegated to his proper place.
Something like this did happen, though not in the measure she anticipated. They landed in New York on a chill, rainy day, and De Launay appeared at the gangway with his usual rolling gait, as though half intoxicated, eyes half closed and indifferent. His bow was almost mocking, she thought, with the flash of irritation that he always aroused in her. Other passengers looked at him curiously and at herself with some wonder, whispers running among them. Behind her veil she flushed, realizing that her own personality was not so much the subject of interest as his. She was uncomfortably aware that he was a striking figure, tall and handsome in spite of his careless demeanor and slouching walk. It was all the more reprehensible that such a man should make so little of himself.
But De Launay led her through the customs with88a word that worked like magic and soon had her in a taxicab. He took her to a small and good hotel, not at all conspicuous, and saw that she was properly taken care of and supplied with American currency. Then, as she turned to follow the bell boy to her rooms, he bowed again. But she hesitated a moment.
“May I ask,” she said, with some contrition roused by his care of her, “where you are going?”
“To my usual haunts, mademoiselle,” he answered, carelessly. “But I shall be within reach. To-morrow afternoon the train leaves for the West. I will see that everything goes well.”
“See that it goes well with you,” she answered, a little tartly, “if not for your own sake, then for mine.”
“Things go—as they go, with me,” he answered, with a shrug. Solange turned away, but she felt somewhat more kindly toward him.
In part this was due to the fact that she was no longer overshadowed by him. The hotel clerks knew nothing of him. As soon as he passed without the zone of military activities, he became nothing and no one. They only knew that they had been liberally tipped to afford Madame de Launay every service and comfort, and, as her appearance was striking and distinguished, they rendered the service with an impressive enthusiasm. From this point on89De Launay took his rightful place as a mere appanage.
When they left New York Solange was apparently in full control and De Launay a mere courier. Used to short European trips, it did not occur to her that the price for which she secured drawing-room accommodations on the Twentieth Century Limited was ridiculously low, and as De Launay had proved capable of handling such matters, and she was a stranger, she gladly and unquestioningly left such things in his hands. He, himself, had a berth in some obscure part of the train and remained there. The maid and the porter of her car hovered around her with solicitude, and she became very favorably impressed with the kindliness and generosity of America, extended, apparently, without thought of reward.
At Chicago De Launay again showed himself in what she supposed was his true light. He had seen her to a hotel for the two or three hours they had to wait there and had escorted her back to her train again. While she was settling herself in her compartment she chanced to look out of the window before the train left the station and perceived her escort conversing with an individual who was not prepossessing. It was a short, broad man, dressed roughly, wearing boots covered by his trousers and with a handkerchief knotted about his neck. He wore a wide-brimmed, high-crowned felt hat, old and battered,90its brim curled disreputably at all angles. She perceived that, after a few words together, this fellow and De Launay appeared to be on the best of terms, shaking hands cordially, conversing with much laughter and an occasional slap on the back. Finally the man, in the shelter of a truck loaded with baggage, produced a bottle from his hip pocket and offered it to De Launay who, with a preliminary salute, lifted it to his mouth. After which he wiped the neck of it with his hand and passed it back, the man duplicating his action.
The train was about to start and, with a few hilarious farewells, they parted and De Launay rolled in her direction while the other tramp strolled away at a gait very much like the general’s. Two of a kind, she thought, bitterly; two ruffians who were hail-fellow-well-met—and she was married to one of them! A soldier of France, a distinguished general, to descend to this level! It was almost inconceivable.
But the train started and the long journey began.
Hour after hour the landscape flashed past the windows. Day faded to night, and Solange slept as best she could on the reeling train. In the morning she awoke to pass another weary time of gazing from the windows at the endless checkerboard of prairie farms rolling past, divided into monotonous squares by straight, dusty roads, each with its house and big red barn forming an exact91replica of every other. She ate and dozed, tried to read a magazine but found the English more than usually difficult to understand, though ordinarily she read it with facility. Now her thoughts were in French and they persisted in coming back to her mission and to the man who accompanied her.
Another long, almost endless day of blatant sun and baked, brown prairie, passing by almost imperceptible degrees into wide plains, flat and dry, cut by wire fences here and there, but no longer checkerboarded in a maddening monotony of pattern. No longer did the houses and red barns succeed one another at exact intervals. In fact they seemed to have almost disappeared and had changed their character, such of them as she saw. They were rough, unpainted board affairs, for the most part, with here and there a more pretentious edifice. But in any case they were scarce and far apart. Low, grass-roofed dugouts also were to be seen at times, but, generally speaking, the view presented almost nothing but an endless vista of rolling, baked plain, covered with scattering grass and dusty gray sage.
And then, far ahead, a dim blue line against the horizon, the mountains appeared. When she awoke in the morning they were rolling majestically through wild gorges under towering peaks clad in snow. Pines and firs shaded the slopes, and the biting, rare air of the peaks burned her lungs. She forgot De Launay, forgot the depression that had92grown upon her with the realization of the immensity into which she was plunging, and felt her spirit soaring in exhilaration and hopes of success. Mountain born and bred, she reacted buoyantly to the inspiration of the environment. The preposterous nature of her quest, a realization of which had been growing upon her, as the endless miles unrolled before her, was forgotten. She felt at home and at ease in the rugged hills, capable of doing anything she set out to do, no longer fettered with the binding restrictions of civilization and no longer bound by the cold laws of probability.
She wanted to summon De Launay, to point out to him the glories of the landscape and to let its purity and strength sink into him for the salvation of his manhood. But he remained aloof, lost, she surmised, in the buffet, drinking illicit liquor with disreputable boon companions.
Then, in time, they passed the mountain rampart, though they never again got entirely out of sight of it, and descended into other desolate plains, broken here and there by patches of green and fertile land where villages and farms stood. Beside a leaden, surging inland sea, across a vast plain of alkali, plunging through enormous gorges cut out of the solid, towering rock, they entered mountains again, and again shot out onto barren plains, now, however, rusty brown and rough with broken and jagged lava. Another night was descending when,93with defiant shrieks of the whistle, the train shot out upon a vast bench and, with flickering electric lights flashing past the windows, and glass reflecting back its blazing stack, it rolled with tolling bell into a station. The porter appeared.
“Sulphuh Falls, ma’am! Hoyeah’s whah you gits off!”
Then De Launay lurched into view behind the porter and she felt a sudden revulsion against the thrill of interest and anticipation that had seized her.94
CHAPTER VIWHERE THE DESERT HAD BEEN
Solange awoke in the bustling, prosperous environment of Sulphur Falls, nestled in the flats below the cañon of the Serpentine, with a feeling of ease and comfort. She had expected to find some wild, frontier village, populated by Indians and cowboys, a desperate and lawless community, and, instead, encountered a small but luxurious hotel, paved streets, shops, people dressed much as they had been in New York. She knew nothing of the changes that had taken place with the building of the great irrigation dam and the coming of the war factories which belched smoke back at the foot of the cañon. She did not realize that, twenty years ago, there had been no town, nothing but limitless plains on which cattle and sheep grazed, a crude ferry and a road house. It was beyond her present comprehension that in a dozen years a city could have sprung up harboring twenty thousand souls and booming with prosperity. Nor did she reflect upon the possible consequences these unknown facts might have upon her search.
Everything was strange to her, and yet everything was what she was accustomed to. Comfort and95even luxury surrounded her, and the law stalked the streets openly in the person of a uniformed policeman. That fact, indeed, spelled a misgiving to her, for, where the law held sway, a private vengeance became a different thing from what she had imagined it to be. Only De Launay’s careless gibe as he had left her at the hotel held promise of performance. “To-morrow we’ll start our private butchery,” he had said, and grinned. But even that gibe hinted at a recklessness that matched her own and gave her comfort now.
De Launay, coming into the glittering new town utterly unprepared for the change that had taken place, had felt the environment strike him like a blow. He saw people like those on Broadway, walking paved sidewalks in front of plate glass under brilliant electric lights. He had come back to seek rest for his diseased nerves in the limitless ranges of his youth and this was what he found.
He had turned and looked back at the frowning cañon through which the train had come from the northeast. There were the mountains, forest clad and cloud capped, as of old. There was the great, black lava gulch of the Serpentine. It looked the same, but he knew that it was changed.
Smoke hung above the cañon where tall chimneys of nitrate plant and smelters belched their foulness against the blue sky. In the forests the loggers were tearing and slashing into all but the remnant of the96timber. Down the gloomy gulch cut out of the lava ran a broad, white ribbon of concrete road. Lastly, and primary cause of all this change, where had once been the roaring falls now sprang a gigantic bow of masonry, two hundred feet in height, and back of it the cañon held a vast lake of water where once had run the foaming Serpentine. From the dam enormous dynamos took their impulses, and from it also huge ditches and canals led the water out and around the valley down below.
Where the lonely road house had stood at the ford across the Serpentine, and the reckless range riders had stopped to drink and gamble, now stood the town, paved with asphalt and brick, jammed with cottages and office buildings, theaters, factories, warehouses, and mills. Plate glass gleamed in the sun or, at night, blazed in the effulgence of limitless electricity.
Around the town, grown in a few years to twenty thousand souls, stretched countless acres of fenced and cultivated land, yielding bountifully under the irrigating waters. From east and west long trains of nickel-plated Pullmans pulled into a granite station.
The people spoke the slang of Broadway and danced the fox trot in evening clothes.
Southward, where the limitless desert had been, brown or white with alkali, one beheld, as far as eye could reach, orderly green patches of farmland,97fenced and dotted with the dainty houses of the settlers.
But no! There was something more, beyond the farms and beyond the desert. It was a blue and misty haze on the horizon, running an uneven and barely discernible line about the edges of the bright blue sky. It was faint and undefined, but De Launay knew it for the Esmeralda range, standing out there aloof and alone and, perhaps, still untamed and uncivilized.
He felt resentful and at the same time helpless. To him it seemed that his last chance to win ease of mind and rest from the driving restlessness had been taken away from him. Only the mountains remained to offer him a haven, and those might be changed as this spot was.
The natural thing to do was to drown his disappointment in drink, and that is what he set out to do. He left Solange safely ensconced in the shiny, new hotel, whose elevators and colored waiters filled him with disgust and sought the darker haunts of the town.
With sure instinct for the old things, if they still existed, he hunted up a “livery and feed barn.” He found one on a side street, near a lumber yard and not far from the loading chutes which spoke of a considerable traffic in beef cattle. He noted with bitterness a cheap automobile standing in front of the place.98
But there were horses in the stalls, horses that lolled on a dropped hip, with heads down and eyes closed. There were heavy roping saddles hanging on the pegs, and bridles with ear loops and no throat latches. If the proprietor, one MacGregor, wore a necktie and a cloth cap, he forgave him for the sake of the open waistcoat and the lack of an outer coat.
MacGregor was an incident of little importance. One of more consequence was a good horse that roamed the open feed yard at the side of the barn. De Launay, seedy and disreputable, still had a look about him that spoke of certain long dead days, and MacGregor, when he was asked about the horse, made no mistake in concluding that he had to deal with one who knew what he was about.
The horse was MacGregor’s, taken to satisfy a debt, and he would sell it. The upshot of the affair was that De Launay bought it at a fair price. This took time, and when he finally came out again to the front of the barn it was late afternoon.
Squatted against the wall, their high heels planted under them on the sloping boards of the runway, sat two men. Wide, flapping hats shaded their faces. They wore no coats, although the November evenings were cool and their waistcoats hung open. Overalls of blue denim, turned up at the bottoms in wide cuffs, hid all but feet and wrinkled ankles of their boots which were grooved with shiny semicircles99around the heels, where spurs had dented them.
One of them was as tall as De Launay, gaunt and hatchet faced. His hair was yellowish, mottled with patches of grayish green.
The other was sturdy, shorter, with curly, brown hair.
The tall one was humming a tune. De Launay recognized it with a shock of recollection. “Roll on, my little doggy!”
Without a word he sat down also, in a duplicate of their pose. No one spoke for several minutes.
Then, the shorter man said, casually, addressing his remarks to nobody in particular.
“They’s sure a lotta fresh pilgrims done hit this here town.”
The tall one echoed an equally casual chorus.
“They don’t teach no sort of manners to them down-East hobos, neither.”
De Launay stared impassively at the road in front of them.
“You’d think some of them’d sense it that a gent has got a right to be private when he wants to be.”
“It’s a —— of a town, nohow.”
“People even run around smellin’ of liquor—which is plumb illegal, Sucatash.”
“Which there are some that are that debased they even thrives on wood alcohol, Dave.”
Silence settled down on them once more. It was100broken this time by De Launay, who spoke as impersonally as they.
“They had real cow hands hereaways, once.”
A late and sluggish fly buzzed in the silence.
“I reckon the sheep eat ’em outa range and they done moved down to Arizona.”
The gaunt Sucatash murmured sadly:
“Them pilgrims is sure smart on g’ography an’ history.”
“An’ sheep—especially,” said the one called Dave.
“Ca ne fait rien!” said De Launay, pronouncing it almost like “sinferien” as he had heard the linguists of the A. E. F. do. The two men slowly turned their heads and looked at him apparently aware of his existence for the first time.
Like MacGregor, they evidently saw something beneath his habiliments, though the small mustache puzzled them.
“You-all been to France?” asked Dave. De Launay did not answer direct.
“There was some reputed bronk peelers nursin’ mules overseas,” he mused. “Their daddies would sure have been mortified to see ’em.”
“We didn’t dry nurse no mules, pilgrim,” said Sucatash. “When did you lick Hindenburg?”
De Launay condescended to notice them. “In the battle ofvin rouge,” he said. “I reckon you-all musta won a round or two with thevinsisters, yourselves.”101
“You’re sure a-sayin’ something, old-timer,” said Dave, with emotion. For the first time he saw the rosette in De Launay’s buttonhole. “You done a little more’n café fightin’ though, to get that?”
De Launay shrugged his shoulders. “They give those for entertainin’ a politician,” he answered. “Any cow hands out of a job around here?”
Both of the men chuckled. “You aimin’ to hire any riders?”
“I could use a couple to wrangle pilgrims in the Esmeraldas. More exactly, there’s a lady, aimin’ to head into the mountains and she’ll need a couple of packers.”
“This lady don’t seem to have no respect for snow and blizzards, none whatever,” was the comment.
“Which she hasn’t, bein’ troubled with notions about gold mines and such things. She needs taking care of.”
“Ridin’ the Esmeraldas this time o’ year and doin’ chores for Pop all winter strikes me as bein’ about a toss-up,” said the man called Sucatash. “I reckon it’s a certainty that Pop requires considerable labor, though, and maybe this demented lady won’t. If the wages is liberal——”
“We ought to see the lady, first,” said Dave. “There’s some lady pilgrims that couldn’t hire me with di’monds.”
“The pay’s all right and the lady’s all right. She’s French.”102
“Amad’mo’selle?” they echoed.
“It’s a long story,” said De Launay, smiling. “You’d better see her and talk it over. Meantime, this prohibition is some burdensome.”
“Which it ain’t the happiest incumbrance of the world,” agreed Sucatash. “They do say that the right kind of a hint will work at the Empire Pool Rooms.”
“If they have it, we’ll get it,” asserted De Launay, confidently. “You-all point the way.”
The three of them rose by the simple process of straightening their legs at the knees, and walked away.103
CHAPTER VIIMAID MARIAN GROWN UP
The Empire Pool Room was an innocent enough place to the uninitiate. To those who had the confidence of the proprietor it was something else. There were rooms upstairs where games were played that were somewhat different from pool and billiards. There was also a bar up there and the drinks that were served over it were not of the soft variety. It seemed that Sucatash and Dave MacKay were known here and had the entrée to the inner circles.
De Launay followed them trustfully. The only thing he took the trouble to note was at a rack in front of the place where—strange anachronism in a town that swarmed with shiny automobiles—were tethered two slumberous, moth-eaten burros laden with heavy packs, miners’ pan, pick and bedding.
“Prospector?” he asked, indicating the dilapidated songsters of the desert.
The two cow hands looked at the beasts, identifying them with the facility of their breed.
“Old Jim Banker, I reckon. In for a wrastlin’ match with the demon rum. Anything you want to know about the Esmeraldas he can tell you, if you can make him talk.”104
“Old Jim Banker? Old-timer, is he?”
“Been a-soakin’ liquor and a-dryin’ out in the desert hereaways ever since fourteenninety-two,I reckon. B’en here so long he resembles a horned toad more’n anything else.” This from Sucatash.
De Launay paused inside the door. “I wonder. Are there any more old-timers left hereaways?”
“Oh, sure. There’s some that dates back past the Spanish War. I reckon ‘Snake’ Murphy—he tends bar for Johnny the Greek, who runs this honkatonk—he’s one of ’em. Banker’s another. You remember when them Wall Street guys hired ‘Panamint Charlie’ Wantage to splurge East in a private car scatterin’ double eagles all the way and hoorayin’ about the big mine he had in Death Valley?”
“No,” said De Launay. “When was that?”
“Back in nineteen eight.”
“I was in Algeria then. I’d never heard. But I remember Panamint. He and Jim Banker were partners, weren’t they?”
“They was.” Sucatash looked curiously at De Launay, wondering how a man who was in Algeria came to know so much about these old survivals. “Leastways, I’ve heard tell they was both of them prospectin’ the Esmeraldas a whole lot in them days and hangin’ together. But Panamint struck this soft graft and wouldn’t let Jim in on it, so they broke up the household. You know—or maybe you don’t—that Panamint was finally found dead in a105cave in Death Valley and there was talk that Banker followed him there and beefed him, thinkin’ he really had a mine. Nothin’ come of it except to make folks a little dubious about Jim. He never was remarkable for popularity, nohow, so it don’t amount to much.”
“And Snake Murphy: he used to keep the road house at the ford over the river, didn’t he?”
Once more Sucatash, fairly well informed on ancient history himself, eyed De Launay askance.
“Which he might have. That’s before my time, I reckon. I was just bein’ weaned when Louisiana was run out of the country. My old man could tell you all about it. He’s Carter Wallace, of the Lazy Y at Willow Spring.”
“I knew him,” said De Launay.
“You knowed my old man?”
“But maybe he’d not remember me.”
Sucatash sensed the fact that De Launay intended to be reticent. “Dad sure knows all the old-timers and their histories,” he declared. “Him and old Ike Brandon was the last ranchers left this side the Esmeraldas, and since Ike checked in a year ago he’s the last survivor. There’s a few has moved into town, but mostly the place is all pilgrims and nesters.”
They had climbed the stairs and come into the hidden sanctum of Johnny the Greek, and De Launay looked about curiously, noting the tables and the scattering of customers about the place, rough men,106close cropped, hard faced and sullen of countenance, most of them, typical of the sort of itinerant labor that was filling the town with recruits and initiates of the I. W. W. There were one or two who were of cleaner strain, like the two young cowmen. Behind the bar was a red-faced, shifty-eyed man, wearing a mustache so black as to appear startling in contrast to his sandy hair. De Launay eyed him curiously, noting with a secret smile that his right arm appeared to be stiff at the wrist. He made no comment, however, but followed the two men to the bar where the business of the day began. It consisted of imbibing vile whisky served by the stiff-armed Snake Murphy.
But De Launay still had something on his mind. “You say Ike Brandon’s dead?” he asked. “What became of his granddaughter?”
“Went to work,” said Sucatash. “Dave, where’s Marian Pettis?”
“Beatin’ a typewriter fer ‘Cap’ Wilding, last I heard,” said Dave.
“She was a little girl when I knew her,” said De Launay, his voice softening a little with a queer change of accent into a Southern slur. Snake Murphy, who was polishing the rough bar in front of him, glanced quickly up, as though hearing something vaguely familiar. But he saw nothing but De Launay’s thoughtful eyes and sober face with its small, pointed mustache.107
“’Scuse me, gents,” he murmured. “What’ll it be?”
“A very little girl,” said De Launay, absently looking into and through Murphy. “A sort of little fairy.”
The lanky Sucatash looked at him askance, catching the note of sentiment. “Yeah?” he said, a bit dryly. “Well, folks change, you know. They grow up.”
“Yes,” said De Launay.
“And this Marian Pettis, she done growed up. I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ against a lady, you understand, but she ain’t exactly in the fairy class nowadays, I reckon.”
De Launay, somewhat to his surprise, although he sensed the note of warning and dry enlightenment in Sucatash’s words, felt no shock. He had had a sentimental desire to see if the girl of six had fulfilled the promise of her youth after nineteen years, had even dreamed, in his soberer moments, of coming back to her to play the rôle of a prince, but nevertheless, he found himself philosophically accepting the possibility hinted at by Sucatash and even feeling a vague sort of relief.
“Who’s Wilding?” he asked. They told him that he was a young lawyer of the town, an officer of their regiment during the war. They seemed to think highly of him.
De Launay had postponed his intended debauch.108In spite of mademoiselle’s conviction, his lapses from sobriety had been only occasional as long as he had work to do, and this occasion, after the information he had gathered, was one calling for the exercise of his faculties.
“If you-all will hang around and herd this here desert rat, Banker, with you when you can find him, and then call at the hotel for Mademoiselle d’Albret, I’ll look up this lawyer and his stenographer. I have to interview her.”
He left them then and went out, a bit unsteady, seedy, unprepossessing, but carrying under his dilapidated exterior some remains of the man he had been.
He reached Wilding’s office and found the man, a young fellow who appeared capable and alert. He also found, with a distinct shock, the girl who had occupied a niche in his memory for nineteen years. He found her with banged and docked hair, rouged and bepowdered, clad in georgette and glimmering artificial silk, tapping at a typewriter in Wilding’s office. He had seen Broadway swarming with replicas of her.
His business with Wilding took a little time. He explained that mademoiselle might have need of his legal services and certainly would wish to see Miss Pettis. The lawyer called the girl in and to her De Launay explained that mademoiselle was the daughter of her grandfather’s former employee and that she would wish to discuss with her certain matters109connected with the death of French Pete. The girl swept De Launay with hard, disdainful eyes, and he knew that she was forming a concept of mademoiselle by comparison with his own general disreputableness.
“Oh, sure; I jus’ as soon drop in on this dame,” she said. “One o’ these Frog refygees, I s’pose. Well, believe me, she’s come a long way to get disappointed if she thinks I’m givin’ any hand-outs to granddad’s pensioners. I got troubles of my own.”
“We’ll be at the hotel, Miss Pettis and I,” said Wilding. “That will do, Miss Pettis.”
The girl teetered out on her spiky heels, with a sway of hips.
De Launay turned back to the lawyer. “I’ve a little personal business you might attend to,” he said. Wilding set himself to listen, resignedly, imagining that this bum would yield him nothing of profit.
In ten minutes he was staring at De Launay with amazement that was almost stupefaction, fingering documents as though he must awake from sleep and find he had been dreaming. De Launay talked on, his voice slightly thick, his eyes heavy, but his mind clear and capable.
Wilding went with him to a bank and, after their business there was finished, shook hands in parting with a mixture of astonishment, disapproval and awe.
De Launay, having finished the more pressing parts of his business, made straight for Johnny the Greek’s.110The two burros still stood there, eyes closed and heads hanging. He walked around them before going in. A worn, dirty leather scabbard, bursting at the seams, slanted up past the withers of one brute, and out of its mouth projected the butt of a rifle. The plate was bright with wear, and the walnut of the stock was battered and dull with age.
De Launay scratched the chin of the burro, was rewarded by the lazy flopping of an ear and then went in to his delayed orgy.
He had received a shock, as he realized he would, and for the moment all thought of Solange and his responsibility to her had vanished. He had come back home after twenty years, seeking solace in the scenes he had known as a boy, seeking, with half-sentimental memory, a little girl with bright hair and sweet face. He had come to find a roaring, artificial city on the site of the range, the friends of his youth gone, the men he had known dying out, his very trade a vanishing art. Instead of a fairy maiden, sweet and demure, a grown-up child as he had vaguely pictured her, he had found a brazen, painted, slangy, gum-chewing flapper, a modern of moderns such as would have broken old Ike Brandon’s heart—as it doubtless had. The last of the old-timers were a bootlegging bartender and a half-crazy and wholly vicious prospector.
Writhing under the sting of futility and disappointment, even the rotten poison served by Johnny the111Greek appealed to him. His old neurosis, almost forgotten in the half-tolerant, half-amused interest in Mademoiselle d’Albret’s adventure which had occupied his activities during the past weeks, revived with redoubled force. Sick, shaken, and disgusted, he strode through the pool room and, with deliberation masking his avid desire for forgetfulness, climbed the stairs to the hidden oasis presided over by his old enemy, Snake Murphy.112