A DAUGHTER OF THE DESERT.By Thomas Winthrop Hall.
By Thomas Winthrop Hall.
A tired horse ambled slowly up to the solitary adobe house, or rather hut, that meets the sight of the dusty traveler who journeys between a certain station on the Southern Pacific railroad and the famous Indian station at San Carlos. One hundred miles of dusty road that wound over a naked, sandy plain sparsely dotted with hideous cactus, a stretch of the desert on either side, and on the horizon walls of gray mountains treeless as the desert itself—these were the uncheerful surroundings of McCoy’s ranch. Worse than a prison, more remote than a Siberian mine, lonelier than the grave, here two human souls, father and daughter, had lived for more than twelve years, and during that twelve years they had been away from that adobe oasis, the girl at least, not one single day, and the father never longer than it would take him to ride over to the mountains for a short hunt. It was a watering station on the stage road. An artesian well had been sunk there in the early days. Like every other work of man it had to have its human slaves, and from the day the last adobe had been laid these slaves had been McCoy and his daughter Sis. The latter was a child of six when she was lifted out of the ox wagon at the door of the house. She was now a girl of eighteen.
What a life hers had been! One unvarying monotony of cooking and of washing, of chopping wood and feeding the horses and of looking anxiously one day up the road for the stage to come down and the next day down the road for the stage to come up so that she might have dinner (a pretentious name for a meal that consisted always of bacon, eggs, coffee and hot bread) prepared for the stage driver and what unfortunate companions in misery he might be transporting to or from the agency. These, alas, gulped down their food as hastily as possible and hastened away at once, only too anxious to get the thing over with. That was all she saw of them. Once in a while she caught sight of a muffled figure in an ambulance that stopped for water for its thirsty mules and knew that it was a woman because it did not get out and swear at the heat and dust, an officer’s wife probably—ah! how she longed to speak to her. The rough freighters often camped there. This was the sum total of the girl’s experience with beings of her kind save one.
That was the man who sat carelessly erect on the tired horse that ambled up to the adobe house. Lieutenant Jack Harding was he, of Uncle Sam’s —th regiment of cavalry. And what a man he was, to be sure! Handsome as a Greek god, stalwart as a Norse warrior, reckless, brave, accomplished, as gentle as a girl until aroused, then as wild and defiant as an Apache, he was a Bayard in the eyes of most women and a demi-god in the estimation of poor Sis. He had stopped over night at the watering station six times in four years. Sis dreamed of his coming months before he appeared, and dreamed, too, of his going months after he went. She worshiped him from the moment she first saw him. That was all. She had read many books, for her father had taught her to read, and Jack Harding served in turn as the hero of each novel she became possessed of, and, of course, (O dear little trait of woman’s nature) she as the heroine.
Lieutenant Jack jumped from his horse as lightly as though a ride of fifty miles were a mere bagatelle, and walked smilingly up to the door.Just as he reached it Sis came bashfully to the doorway.
“Hello, Sis,” said the lieutenant cheerfully.
“O——,” replied Sis. She never could talk to him.
“Dad home?”
“Nope.”
“Hunting?”
“Yep.”
“Well, I’ve come to make my party call for the last time I was here. Got anything to eat?”
“Only bacon and eggs.”
“Good enough for a prince—if the prince is as hungry as I am. All right, get them ready. I’ll go and take care of Noche. Come, Noche—want some water, old girl?” He led off the horse, and Sis turned from the doorway to the kitchen. As she did so she stepped just for one moment into a little room that, were she a lady, she would call her boudoir, though it was but little larger than a good sized piano box, and looked searchingly at her own face in a bit of broken looking glass. What did she see? No thing of beauty, I assure you. This girl had not been dowered by God with that divine gift that makes every woman who possesses it a queen. Far from it. But so ignorant of the world was she, so much an utter stranger to the appearance of others of her sex, that she did not know that she was remarkably homely. Freckle faced, pug nosed, red haired, rough and worn with work, she was in appearance positively ugly. She had often asked her father whether or not she was good looking, and he had invariably replied “Yes.” But he always said it in such a way that poor Sis began at last to suspect that she was not really as beautiful as the heroines of Scott’s novels (she knew the descriptions of them by heart.) Still it might be, and she hoped—a thing that a woman does almost as easily as she forgives.
The supper was eaten in the usual wondering silence on her part and the running fire of nonsense on the part of the lieutenant. He accused her of being in love with “Peg-leg,” the mule driver, and was cheerfully unconscious of the fact that his words tortured her heart until she almost broke down and cried before him. He told her all the news of the post and the latest jokes on the officers in an endeavor—a vain one—to make her laugh. People who have lived ten years in a desert do not laugh. At last it was over, and she cleared away and washed the dishes. He smoked his pipe the while, wondering how in the world she came to be so homely, wondering how she managed to exist in such a place, and coming to a mental conclusion as to how long he himself could stand such a life before committing suicide. Then he went out and took a stroll on the sandy desert. Old McCoy was not in sight, and though it was moonlight it was hardly probable that he would return that night. He congratulated himself, too, that Sis had not been brought up to the ideas of good society, else he would have to make his bed in the hay that night and leave the house, double barred and locked, to Sis. He even thoughtlessly muttered to himself, “What a wonderful protection a homely face is!” Then he went back to the kitchen to talk to Sis a while before going to bed. As he entered a sight met his astonished eyes that almost made him burst with laughter. It was nothing more nor less than Sis arrayed in a gown that would have been an absurdity in caricature. Green satin trimmed with red ribbons and a red sash, formless, shapeless, it was her pitiful attempt to appear beautiful. Her great hands hung from the sleeves like baskets from the branches of an apple tree. Her red face and hair looked redder still by the contrast with the gaudy colors of the dress, and she stood in the habitual slouching attitude so characteristic of her. Yet there was something in her gray eyes that told him it was a supreme moment in her life—the wearing of this dress—and he did not laugh. Indeed, for a moment he almost felt sad. He tried to sit down as unconcernedly as possible, and busied himself filling his pipe. He did not dare to look at her. He hoped shewould do something or say something, but she did not. She stood there silent, intense, looking at him so earnestly that it was but too manifest that she was trying to read his thoughts. He must do something.
“Where did you get that dress, Sis?” he said as quietly as he could.
“Dad gave it to me,” she answered. “He always promised me a satin dress, and so last Christmas he sent and got the satin. I made it. This is the first time I have worn it before any one.”
She spoke as though the words were choking her. She seemed to be nerving herself for something unusual. She was.
“Tell me,” she cried, almost fiercely, “tell me honestly, am I beautiful?”
He tried not to do it. He felt like a cur, a second afterwards, for having done it. But he could not help it, do what he could to control himself. He laughed aloud.
“O don’t—don’t—don’t——” she almost screamed. Then she fell on the floor in a green and red heap and wept. Jack had seen women weep before (a number of them had wept at different times when he had come to say “good by”), but never before had he seen such a torrent of tears as this. There was no stemming it, though he tried very hard. It seemed an age before it ceased, and then it seemed another age that she sat there motionless with her face in her hands as though she was trying to hide it. He felt horribly nervous. It took him sixteen matches, as he afterwards said, to smoke one pipe. Finally she broke the silence. Her voice was calm enough as she asked:
“What is a beautiful woman like?”
He did not answer in words. It was just a little hard to speak at all. He unbuttoned his blouse and took from the inside pocket a photograph and handed it to her. She held it fiercely in her two great rough hands and gazed at it steadily for a long time. Poor woman, she learned what beauty was, and she learned of the love of this man whom she worshiped. Then she got up, handed back the photograph to its owner and walked silently and slowly from the room.
It was hard for Jack Harding to sleep that night. He got into a fitful slumber along towards morning, and he had not been sleeping for an hour when he found himself standing awake in the middle of the room feeling for his revolver in the gray light of the early dawn.
“Nothing but a shot could wake me like that,” he said to himself, and hastily pulling on his clothes and taking his revolver in his hand he went through the house. The fire had been built and breakfast, already cooked, was waiting for him. “I guess Sis didn’t sleep much either,” he thought. He knocked at her door but received no answer. “Milking the cow, I guess,” he thought, but there was beginning to be a horrible dread in his heart. He ran hastily out of the house, and there—there under his own window lay Sis, again a green and red heap, but there was red on the dress now that was not ribbon. She had shot herself in the breast. He ran to her and picked her up. He carried her into the house and swore at himself for never having had the energy to study a little surgery in all the long years of his army idleness. Presently she revived a little and he heard her murmur faintly: “Tell dad good by—tell him I can’t help him any longer.”
“Oh, Sis!” he pleaded, “why did you do this?”
“Because you laughed at me,” she answered.
“But I did not mean it. You are beautiful, Sis, indeed you are very beautiful.”
“Oh no, I’m not,” she said. “I know what beauty is now.”
He could say nothing for a time. He hardly knew why he said what he did when he spoke.
“Sis,” he asked her gently, “tell me, why did you want to be beautiful?”
“Because—because I loved you,” she answered slowly and with a sob.
And when her father got home that afternoon and walked gayly into the little adobe house, he found them still together, one dead—one weeping.