Jack lounged in an armchair in the Galway sitting-room with his bandaged leg bolstered on a stool after Dr. Patterson had fished a bit of lead out of the wound. Tribute overflowed from the table to the chairs and from the chairs to the floor; pineapples, their knobby jackets all yellow from ripening in the field, with the full succulency of root-fed and sun-drawn flavor; monstrous navel oranges, leaden with the weight of juice, richer than cloth of gold and velvet soft; and every fruit of the fertile soil and benignant climate; and jellies, pies, and custards. But these were only the edibles. There were flowers in equal abundance. They banked the windows.
"It's Jasper Ewold's idea to bring gifts when you call," explained Jim Galway. "Jasper is always sowing ideas and lots of them have sprung up and flourished."
Jack had not been in Little Rivers twenty-four hours, and he had played a part in its criminal annals and become subject to all the embarrassment of favors of a royal bride or a prima donna who is about to sail. In a bower, amazed, he was meeting the world of Little Rivers and its wife. Men of all ages; men with foreign accent; men born and bred as farmers; men to whom the effect of indoor occupation clung; men still weak, but with red corpuscles singing a song of returning health in their arteries—strapping, vigorous men, all with hands hardened by manual labor and in their eyes the far distances of the desert, in contrast to the sparkle of oasis intimacy.
Women with the accent of college classrooms; women who made plural nouns the running mates of singular verbs; women who were novices in housework; women drilled in drudgery from childhood—all expanding, all dwelling in a democracy that had begun its life afresh in a new land, and all with the wonder of gardens where there had been only sagebrush in their beings.
There was something at odds with Jack's experience of desert towns in the picture of a bronzed rancher, his arms loaded with roses, saying, in boyish diffidence:
"Mister, you fit him fair and you sure fixed him good. Just a few roses—they're so thick over to our place that they're getting a pest. Thought mebbe they'd be nice for you to look at while you was tied up to a chair nursing Pete's soovenir!"
One visitor whose bulk filled the doorway, the expansion of his smile spreading over a bounteous rotundity of cheek, impressed himself as a personality who had the distinction in avoirdupois that Jim Galway had in leanness. In his hand he had five or six peonies as large as saucers.
"Every complete community has a fat man, seh!" he announced, with a certain ample bashfulness in keeping with his general amplitude and a musical Southern accent.
"If it wants to feel perfectly comfortable it has!" said Jack, by way of welcome.
"Well, I'm the fat man of Little Rivers, name being Bob Worther!" said he, grinning as he came across the room with an amazingly quick, easy step.
"No rivals?" inquired Jack.
"No, seh! I staked out the first claim and I've an eye out for any new-comers over the two hundred mark. I warn them off! Jasper Ewold is up to two hundred, but he doesn't count. Why, you ought to have seen me, seh, before I came to this valley!"
"A living skeleton?"
"No, seh! Back in Alabama I had reached a point where I broke so many chairs and was getting so nervous from sudden falls in the midst of conversation, when I made a lively gesture that I didn't dare sit down away from home except at church, where they had pews. I weighed three hundred and fifty!"
"And now?"
"I acknowledge two hundred and forty, including my legs, which are very powerful, having worked off that extra hundred. I've got the boss job for making a fat man spider-waisted—inspector of ditches and dams. Any other man would have to use a horse, but I hoof it, and that's economy all around. And being big I grow big things. Violets wouldn't be much more in my line than drawnwork. I've got this whole town beat on peonies and pumpkins. Being as it's a fat man's pleasure to cheer people up, I dropped in to bring you a few peonies and to say that, considering the few well-selected words you spoke to Pete Leddy on this town's behalf, I'm prepared to vote for you for anything from coroner to president, seh!"
Later, after Bob had gone, a small girl brought a spray of gladiolus, their slender stems down to her toe-tips and the opening blossoms half hiding her face. Jack insisted on having them laid across his knee She was not a fairy out of a play, as he knew by her conversation.
"Mister, did you yell when you was hit?" she asked.
Jack considered thoughtfully. It would not do to be vagarious under such a shrewd examination; he must be exact.
"No, I don't think I did. I was too busy."
"I'll bet you wanted to, if you hadn't been so busy. Did it hurt much?"
"Not so very much."
"Maybe that was why you didn't yell. Mother says that all you can see is a little black spot—except you can't see it for the bandages. Is that the way yours is?"
"I believe so. In fact, I'll tell you a secret: That's the fashion in wounds."
"Mother will be glad to know she's right. She sets a lot by her opinion, does mother. Say, do you like plums?"
Jack already had a peck of plums, but another peck would not add much to the redundancy as far as he was concerned.
"I'll bring you some. We've got the biggest plums in Little Rivers—oh, so big! Bigger'n Mr. Ewold's! I'll bring some right away." She paused, however, in the doorway. "Don't you tell anybody I said they were bigger'n Mr. Ewold's," she went on. "It might hurt his feelings. He's what they call the o-rig-i-nal set-tler, and we always agree that he grows the biggest of everything, because—why, because he's got such a big laugh and such a big smile. Mother says sour-faced people oughtn't to have a face any bigger'n a crab apple; but Mr. Ewold's face couldn't be too big if it was as big as all outdoors! Good-by. I reckon you won't be s'prised to hear that I'm the dreadful talker of our family."
"Wait!" Jack called. "You haven't told me your name."
"Belvedere Smith. Father says it ain't a name for living things. But mother is dreadfully set in her ideas of names, and she doesn't like it because people call me Belvy; but they just naturally will."
"Belvedere, did you ever hear of the three little blue mice"—Jack was leaning toward her with an air of fascinating mystery—"that thought they could hide in the white clover from the white cat that had two black stripes on her back?"
There was a pellmell dash across the room and her face, with wide-open eyes dancing in curiosity, was pressed close to his:
"Why did the cat have two black stripes? Why? why?"
"Just what I was going to tell," said the pacifier of desperadoes.
"They were off on a tremendous adventure, with anthills for mountains and clover-stems for the tree-trunks of forests in the path. Tragedy seemed due for the mice, when a bee dropped off a thistle blossom for a remarkable reason—none other than that a hummingbird cuffed him in the ear with his wing—and the bee, looking for revenge with his stinger on the first vulnerable spot, stung the cat right in the Achilles tendon of his paw, just as that paw was about to descend with murderous purpose. The cat ran away crying, with both black stripes ridges of fur sticking up straight, while the rest of the fur lay nice and smooth; and the mice giggled so that their ears nearly wiggled off their heads. So all ended happily."
"He does beat all!" thought Mrs. Galway, who had overheard part of the nonsense from the doorway. "Wouldn't it make Pete Leddy mad if he could hear the man who took his gun away getting off fairy stuff like that!"
Mrs. Galway had brought in a cake of her own baking. She was slightly jealous of the neighbors' pastry as entering into her own particular field of excellence. Jack saw that the supply of cake in the Galway pantry must be as limitless as the pigments on the Eternal Painter's palette.
"The doctor said that I was to have a light diet," he expostulated; "andI am stuffed to the brim."
"I'll make you some floating island," said Mrs. Galway, refusing to strike her colors.
"That isn't filling and passes the time," Jack admitted.
"Jim says if you had to Fletcherize on floating island you would starve to death and your teeth would get so used to missing a step on the stairs that they would never be able to deal with real victuals at all."
"Mrs. Galway," Jack observed sagely, dropping his head on the back of the chair, "I see that it has occurred to you and Jim that it is an excellent world and full of excellent nonsense. I am ready to eat both fluffy isles and the yellow sea in which they float. I am ready to keep on getting hungry with my efforts, even though you make it continents and oceans!"
From his window he had a view, over the dark, polished green of Jim's orange trees, of the range, brown and gray and bare, holding steady shadows of its own and host to the shadows of journeying clouds, with the pass set in the centre as a cleft in a forbidding barrier. In the yard Wrath of God, Jag Ear, and P.D. were tethered. Deep content illumined the faces of P.D. and Jag Ear; but Wrath of God was as sorrowful as ever. A cheerful Wrath of God would have excited fears for his health.
"Yet, maybe he is enjoying his rest more than the others," Jack told Firio, who kept appearing at the window on some excuse or other. "Perhaps he takes his happiness internally. Perhaps the external signs are only the last stand of a lugubriousness driven out by overwhelming forces of internal joy."
"Sí, sí!" said Firio.
"Firio, you are eminently a conversationalist," said Jack. "You agree with any foolishness as if it were a new theory of ethics. You are an ideal companion. I never have to listen to you in order that I may in turn have my say."
"Sí," said Firio. He leaned on the windowsill, his black eyes shining with ingenuous and flattering appeal: "I will broil you a quail on a spit," he whispered. "It's better than stove cooking."
"Don't talk of that!" Jack exclaimed, almost sharply. The suggestion brought a swift change to sadness over his face and drew a veil of vagueness over his eyes. "No, Firio, and I'll tell you why: the odor of a quail broiled on a spit belongs at the end of a day's journey, when you camp in sight of no habitation. You should sit on a dusty blanket-roll; you should eat by the light of the embers or a guttering candle. No, Firio, we'll wait till some other day. And it's not exactly courtesy to our hostess to bring in provender from the outside."
The trail had apparently taught Firio all the moods of his master. He knew when it was unwise to persist.
"Sí!" he whispered, and withdrew.
Jack looked at Galeria and then back quickly, as if resisting its call. He smiled half wryly and readjusted his position in the chair. Over the hedge he could see the heads and shoulders of passers-by. Jim Galway had come into the room, when Jasper Ewold's broad back and great head hove in sight with something of the steady majesty of progress of a full-rigged ship.
"The Doge!" Jack exclaimed, brightening.
Jim was taken unawares. Was it the name of a new kind of semi-tropical fruit not yet introduced into Arizona?
"Not the Doge of Venice—hardly, when Mr. Ewold's love runs to Florence!The Doge of Little Rivers!"
"Why, the Doge—of course!" Jim was "on" now and grinning. "I didn't think of my history at first. That's a good one for Jasper Ewold!"
"O Doge of Little Rivers, I expected you in a gondola of state!" said Jack, with a playfully grandiloquent gesture, as Jasper's abundance filled the doorway. "But it is all the more compliment to me that you should walk."
"Doge, eh?" Jasper tasted the word. "Pooh!" he said. "Persiflage! persiflage! I saw at once yesterday that you had a weakness for it."
"And Miss Ewold? How is she?" Jack asked. Remembering the promise that Mary had exacted from him, he took care not to refer to her part in the duel.
His question fell aptly for what Jasper had to say. Being a man used to keeping the gate ever open to the full flood of spontaneity, he became stilted in the repetition of anything he had thought out and rehearsed. He was overcheerful, without the mellowness of tone which gave his cheer its charm on the previous evening.
"She's not a bit the worse. Why, she went for a ride out to the pass this afternoon as usual! I've had the whole story, from the pass till the minute that Jim put the tourniquet on your leg. She recognizes the great kindness you did her."
"Not a kindness—an inevitable interruption by any passer-by,"Jack put in.
"Naturally she felt that it was a kindness, a service, and when she knew you were in danger she acted promptly for herself, with a desert girl's self-reliance. When it was all over she saw the whole thing in its proper perspective, as an unpleasant, preposterous piece of barbarism which had turned out fortunately."
"Oh, I am glad of that!" Jack exclaimed, in relief that spoke rejoicing in every fibre. "I had worried. I had feared lest I had insisted too much on going on. But I had to. And I know that it was a scene that only men ought to witness—so horrible I feared it might leave a disagreeable impression."
"Ah, Mary has courage and humor. She sees the ridiculous. She laughs at it all, now!"
"Laughs?" asked Jack. "Yes, it was laughable;" and he broke into laughter, in which Jasper joined thunderously.
Jasper kept on laughing after Jack stopped, and in genuine relief to find that the affair was to be as uninfluencing a chapter in the easy traveller's life as in Mary's.
"Our regret is that we may have delayed you, sir," Jasper proceeded. "You may have had to postpone an important engagement. I understand that you had planned to take the train this morning."
"When one has been in the desert for a long time," Jack answered, "a few days more or less hardly matter in the time of his departure. In a week Dr. Patterson says that I may go. Meanwhile, I shall have the pleasure of getting acquainted with Little Rivers, which, otherwise, I should have missed."
"I am glad!" Jasper Ewold exclaimed with dramatic quickness. "Glad that your wound is so slight—glad that you need not be shut up long when you are due elsewhere."
What books should he bring to the invalid to while away the time? "The Three Musketeers" or "Cyrano"? Jack seemed to know his "Cyrano" so well that a copy could be only a prompt. He settled deeper in his chair and, more to the sky than to Jasper Ewold, repeated Cyrano's address to his cadets, set to a tune of his own. His body might be in the chair, with a bandaged leg, but clearly his mind was away on the trail.
"Yes, let me see," he said, coming back to earth. "I should like the 'Road to Rome,' something of Charles Lamb, Aldrich's 'Story of a Bad Boy,' Heine—-but no! What am I saying? Bring me any solid book on economics. I ought to be reading economics. Economics and Charles Lamb, that will do. Do you think they could travel together?"
"All printed things can, if you choose. I'll include Lamb."
"And any Daudet lying loose," Jack added.
"And Omar?"
"I carry Omar in my head, thank you, O Doge!"
"Sir Chaps of the enormous spurs, you have a broad taste for one who rides over the pass of Galeria after five years in Arizona," said the Doge as he rose. He was covertly surveying that soft, winning, dreamy profile which had turned so hard when the devil that was within came to the surface.
"I was fed on books and galleries in my boyhood," Jack said; but with a reticence that indicated that this was all he cared to tell about his past.
Every resident except the cronies of Pete Leddy considered it a duty, once a day at least, to look over the Galway hedge and ask how Señor Don't Care was doing. That is, everyone with a single exception, which was Mary. Jack had never seen her even pass the house. It was as if his very existence had dropped out of her ken. The town remarked the anomaly.
"You have not been in lately," Mrs. Galway reminded her.
"My flowers have required a lot of attention; also, I have been riding out to the pass a good deal," she answered, and changed the subject to geraniums, for the very good reason that she had just been weeding her geranium bed.
Mrs. Galway looked at her strangely and Mary caught the glance. She guessed what Mrs. Galway was thinking: that she had been a little inconsiderate of a man who had been wounded in her service.
"Probably it is time I bore tribute, too," she said to herself.
That afternoon she took down a glass of jelly from the pantry shelves and set forth in the line of duty, frowning and rehearsing a presentation speech as she went. With every step toward the Galway cottage she was increasingly confused and exasperated with herself for even thinking of a speech. As she drew near she heard a treble chorus of "ohs!" and "ahs!" and saw Jack on the porch surrounded by children.
"It's dinosaur foolishness again!" she thought, pungently.
He was in the full fettle of nonsense, his head a little to one side and lowered, while he looked through his eyebrows at his hearers, measuring the effect of his words. She thought of that face when he called to Leddy, "I am going to kill you!" and felt the pulse of inquiry beat over all that lay in this man's repertory between the two moods.
"Then, counting each one in his big, deep, bass voice, like this," he was saying, "that funny little dwarf kept dropping oranges out of the tree on the big giant, who could not wiggle and was squeaking in protest in his little, old woman's voice. Every orange hit him right on the bridge of his nose, and he was saying: 'You know I never could bear yellow! It fusses me so.'"
"He doesn't need any jelly! I am going on!" Mary thought.
Then Jack saw a slim, pliant form hastening by and a brown profile under hair bare of a hat, with eyes straight ahead. Mary might have been a unit of marching infantry. The story stopped abruptly.
"Yes—and—and—go on!" cried the children.
Jack held up his hand for silence.
"How do you do?" he called, and she caught in his tone and in her first glimpse of his face a certain mischievousness, as if he, who missed no points for idle enjoyment of any situation, had a satisfaction in taking her by surprise with his greeting. This put her on her mettle with the quickness of a summons to fence. She was as nonchalant as he.
"And you are doing well, I learn," she answered.
"Oh, come in and hear it, Miss Ewold! It's the best one yet!" criedBelvedere Smith. "And—and—"
"And—and—" began the chorus.
Mary went to the hedge. She dropped the glass of jelly on the thick carpet of the privet.
"I have just brought my gift. I'll leave it here. Belvy will bring it when the story is over. I am glad you are recovering so rapidly."
"And—and—" insisted the chorus.
"You oughtn't to miss this story. It's a regular Jim dandy!"Belvedere shouted.
"Yes, won't you come in?" Jack begged in serious urgency. "I pride myself that it is almost intellectual toward the close."
"I have no doubt," she said, looking fairly at him from under her hand, which she held up to shade her face, so he saw only the snap of her eyes in the shadow. "But I am in a hurry."
And he was looking at a shoulder and a quarter profile as she turned away.
"Did you make the jelly yourself?" he called.
"Yes, I am not afraid of the truth—I did!" she answered with a backward glance and not stopping.
"Oh, bully!" he exclaimed with great enthusiasm, in which she detected a strain of what she classified as impudence.
"But all the time the giant was fumbling in his pocket for his green handkerchief. You know the dwarf did not like green. It fussed him just as much as yellow fussed the giant. But it was a narrow pocket, so narrow that he could only get his big thumb in, and very deep. So, you see—" and she heard the tale proceeding as she walked on to the end of the street, where she turned around and came back across the desert and through the garden.
On the way she found it amusing to consider Jack judicially as a human exhibit, stripped of all the chimera of romance with which Little Rivers had clothed his personality. If he had not happened to meet her on the pass, the townspeople would have regarded this stranger as an invasion of real life by a character out of a comic opera. She viewed the specimen under a magnifying glass in all angles, turning it around as if it were a bronze or an ivory statuette.
1. In his favor: Firstly, children were fond of him; but his extravagance of phrase and love of applause accounted for that. Secondly, Firio was devoted to him. Such worshipful attachment on the part of a native Indian to any Saxon was remarkable. Yet this was explained by his love of color, his foible for the picturesque, his vagabond irresponsibility, and, mostly, by his latent savagery—which she would hardly have been willing to apply to Ignacio's worshipful attachment to herself.
2. Against him: Everything of any importance, except in the eyes of children and savages; everything in logic. He would not stand analysis at all. He was without definite character. He was posing, affected, pleased with himself, superficial, and theatrical, and interested in people only so long as they amused him or gratified his personal vanity.
"I had the best of the argument in leaving the jelly on the hedge, and that is the last I shall hear of it," she concluded.
Not so. Mrs. Galway came that evening, a bearer of messages.
"He says it is the most wonderful jelly that ever was," said Mrs. Galway. "He ate half the glass for dinner and is saving the rest for breakfast—I'm using his own words and you know what a killing way he has of putting things—saving it for breakfast so that he will have something to live through the night for and in the morning the joy of it will not be all a memory. He wants to know if you have any more of the same kind."
"Yes, a dozen glasses," Mary returned. "Tell him we are glad of the opportunity of finishing last year's stock, and I send it provided he eats half a glass with every meal."
"I don't know what his answer will be to that," said Mrs. Galway, contracting her brow studiously at Mary. "But he would have one quick. He always has. He's so poetic and all that, we're planning to go to the station to see him off and pelt him with flowers; and Dr. Patterson is going to fashion a white cat out of white carnations, with deep red ones for the black stripes, for the children to present."
"Hurrah!" exclaimed Mary blithely, and went for the jelly.
She was spared further bulletins on the state of health of the wounded until her father returned from his daily call the next morning. She was in the living-room and she knew by his step on the porch, vigorous yet light, that he was uplifted by good news or by the anticipation of the exploitation of some new idea—a pleasure second only to that of the idea's birth. Such was his elation that he broke one of his own rules by tossing some of the books loaned to Jack onto the broad top of the table of the living-room, which was sacred to the isolation of the ivory paper-knife.
"He has named the date!" shouted the Doge. "He goes by to-morrow's train! It will be a gala affair, almost an historical moment in the early history of this community. I am to make a speech presenting him with the freedom of the whole world. Between us we have hit on a proper modern symbol of the gift. He slips me his Pullman ticket and I formally offer it to him as the key to the hospitality of the seven seas, the two hemispheres, and the teeming cities that lie beyond the range. It will be great fun, with plenty of persiflage. And, Mary, they suggest that you write some verses—ridiculous verses, in keeping with the whole nonsensical business."
"You mean that I am to stand on the platform and read poetry dedicated to him?" she demanded.
"Poetry, Mary? You grow ambitious. Not poetry—foolish doggerel. Or someone will read it for you."
He had not failed to watch the play of her expression. She had received all his nonsense, announced in his best style of simulated forensic grandeur, with a certain unchanging serenity which was unamused: which was, indeed, barely interested.
"And someone else shall write it, for I don't think of any verses," she said, with a slight shrug of the shoulder. "Besides, I shall not be there."
"Not be there! People will remark your absence!"
"Will they?" she asked, thoughtfully, as if that had not occurred to her. "No, they will be too occupied with the persiflage. I am going to ride out to the pass in the morning very early—before daybreak."
"But"—he was positively frolicsome as he caught her hands and waved them back and forth, while he rocked his shoulders—"when you are stubborn, Mary, have your way. I will make your excuses. And I to work now. It is the hour of the hoe," as he called all hours except those of darkness and the hot midday.
For Jasper Ewold was no idler in the affairs of his ranch or of the town. Few city men were so busy. His everlasting talk was incidental, like the babbling of a brook which, however, keeps steadily flowing on; and the stored scholarship of his mind was supplemented by long evenings with no other relaxation but reading. Now as he went down the path he broke into song; and when the Doge sang it was something awful, excusable only by the sheer happiness that brought on the attack.
Mary had important sewing, which this morning she chose to do in her room rather than in her favorite spot in the garden. She closed the shutters on the sunny side and sat down by the window nearest the garden, peculiarly sensible of the soft light and cool spaciousness of an inner world. The occasional buzz of a bee, the flutter of the leaves of the poplar, might have been the voice of the outer world in Southern Spain or Southern Italy, or anywhere else where the air is balmy.
And to-morrow! Out to Galeria in the fervor of a pilgrim to some shrine, with the easy movement of her pony and the rigid lines of the pass gradually drawing nearer and the sky ever distant! She would be mistress of her thoughts in all the silent glamour of morning on the desert. She would hear the train stop at the station, its heavy effort as it pulled out, and watch it winding over the flashing steel threads in a clamor of stridency and harshness, which grew fainter and fainter. And she would smile as it disappeared around a bend in the range. She would smile at him, at the incident, just as carelessly as he had smiled when he told of the dinosaur.
The sun became benign in its afternoon slant. Little Rivers was beginning to move after its siesta, with the stretching of muscles that would grow more vigorous as evening approached and freshened life came into the air with the sprinkle of sunset brilliance.
To Jack the hour palpably brought a reminder of the misery of the moment when a thing long postponed must at last be performed. The softness of speculative fancy faded from his face. His lips tightened in a way that seemed to bring his chin into prominence in mastery of his being. As he called Firio, his voice unusually high-pitched, he did not look out at P.D. and Wrath of God and Jag Ear.
Firio came with the eagerness of one who is restless for action. He leaned on the windowsill, his elbows spread, his chin cupped in his hands, his Indian blankness of countenance enlivened by the glow of his eyes, as jewels enliven dull brown velvet.
"Firio, I have something to tell you."
"Sí!"
There was a laboring of Jack's throat muscles, and then he forced out the truth in a few words.
"Firio," he said, "this is my trail end. I am going back to New York to-morrow."
"Sí!" answered Firio, without a tremor of emotion; but his eyes glowed confidently, fixedly, into Jack's.
"There will be money for you, and—"
"Sí!" said Firio mechanically, as if repeating the lines of a lesson.
Was this Indian boy prepared for the news? Or did he not care? Was he simply clay that served without feeling? The thought made Jack wince. He paused, and the dark eyes, as in a spell, kept staring into his.
"And you get P.D. and Wrath of God and Jag Ear and, yes, the big spurs and the chaps, too, to keep to remember me by."
Firio did not answer.
"You are not pleased? You—"
"Sí! I will keep them for you. You will want them; you will come back to all this;" and suddenly Firio was galvanized into the life of a single gesture. He swept his arm toward the sky, indicating infinite distance.
"No, I shall never come back! I can't!" Jack said; and his face had set hard, as if it were a wall about to be driven at a wall. "I must go and I must stay."
"Sí!" said Firio, resuming his impassiveness, and slipped around the corner of the house.
"He does care!" Jack cried with a smile, which, however, was not the smile of gardens, of running brooks, and of song. "I am glad—glad!"
He picked up his crutches and went out to the three steeds of trail memory:
"Andyoucare—youcare!" he repeated to them.
He drew a lugubrious grimace in mockery at Wrath of God. He tickled the sliver of the donkey's ear, whereat Jag Ear wiggled the sliver in blissful unconsciousness that he had lost any of the ornamental equipment of his tribe.
"You are like most of us; we don't see our deformities, Jag Ear," Jack told him. "And if others were also blind to them, why, we should all be good-looking!"
His arm slipped around P.D.'s neck and he ran a finger up and down P.D.'s nose with a tickling caress.
"You old plodder!" he said. "You know a lot. It's good to have the love of any living thing that has been near me as long as you have."
This preposterous being was preposterously sentimental over a pair of ponies and an earless donkey. When Mrs. Galway, who had watched him from the window, came out on the porch she saw that he was on his way through the gate in the hedge to the street.
"Look here! Did the doctor say you might?" she called.
"No, my leg says it!" Jack answered, gaily. "Just a little walk!Back soon."
It was his first enterprise in locomotion outside the limits of Jim Galway's yard since he had been wounded. He turned blissful traveller again. Having come to know the faces of the citizens, now he was to look into the faces of their habitations. The broad main street, with its rows of trees, narrowed with perspective until it became a gray spot of desert sand. Under the trees leisurely flowed those arteries of ranch and garden-life, the irrigation ditches. Continuity of line in the hedge-fences was evidently a municipal requirement; but over the hedges individualism expressed itself freely, yet with a harmony which had been set by public fashion.
The houses were of cement in simple design. They had no architectural message except that of a background for ornamentation by the genius of the soil's productivity. They waited on vines to cover their sides and trees to cast shade across their doorways. One need not remain long to know the old families in this community, where the criterion of local aristocracy was the size of your plums or the number of crops of alfalfa you could grow in a year.
Already Jack felt at home. It was as if he were friends with a whole world, lacking the social distinctions which only begin when someone acquires sufficient worldly possessions to give exclusive, formal dinners. He knew every passer-by well enough to address him or her by the Christian name. Women called to him from porches with a dozen invitations to visit gardens.
"Just a saunter, just a try-out before I take the train. Not going far," he always answered; yet there was something in his bearing that suggested a definite mission.
"We hate to lose you!" called Mrs. Smith.
"I hate to be lost!" Jack called back; "but that is just my natural luck."
"I suppose you've got your work cut out for you back East, same's everybody else, somewhere or other, 'less they're millionaires, who all stay in the city and try to run from microbes in their automobiles."
"Yes, I have work—lots of it," said Jack, ruefully. He shifted his weight on the crutches, paused and looked at the sky. The Eternal Painter was dipping his brush lightly and sweeping soft, silvery films, as a kind of glorified finger-exercise, over an intangible blue.
"Why care? Why care?" His Majesty was asking. "Why not leave all the problems of earthly existence to your lungs? Why not lie back and look on at things and breathe my air? That is enough to keep your whole being in tune with the Infinite."
It was his afternoon mood. At sunset he would have another. Then he would be crying out against the folly of wasting one precious moment in the eons, because that moment could never return to be lived over.
Jack kept on until he recognized the cement bridge where he had stopped when he came from the post-office with Mary. Left bare of its surroundings, the first habitation in Little Rivers, with the ell which had been added later, would have appeared a barracks. But Jasper Ewold had the oldest trees and the most luxuriant hedge and vines as the reward of his pioneerdom.
When Jack crossed the bridge and stood in the opening of the hedge there was no one on the porch in the inviting shade of the prodigal bougainvillea vines. So he hitched his way up the steps. Feeling that it was a formal occasion, he searched for the door-bell. There was none. He rapped on the casing and waited, while he looked at the cool, quiet interior, with the portrait of David facing him from the wall.
"David, you seem to be the only one at home," he remarked, for there had been no answer to his raps; "and you are too busy getting a bead on Goliath to answer the immaterial questions of a wayfarer."
Accepting the freedom of the Little Rivers custom on such occasions, he followed the path to the rear. His head knocked off the dead petals of a rambler rose blossom, scattering them at his feet. Rounding the corner of the house, he saw the arbor where he had dined the night of his arrival, and beyond this an old-fashioned flower garden separated by a path from a garden of roses. There was a sound of activity from the kitchen behind a trellis screen, but he did not call out for guidance. He would trust to finding his own way.
When he came to the broad path, its stretch lay under a crochet-work of shadows from the ragged leaves of two rows of palms which ran to the edge of an orange grove, and the centre of this path was in a straight line with the bottom of the V of Galeria.
Jasper Ewold had laid out his little domain according to a set plan before the water was first let go in laughing triumph over the parched earth, and this plan, as one might see on every hand, was expressive of the training of older civilizations in landscape gardening, which ages of men striving for harmonious forms of beauty in green and growing things had tested, and which the Doge, in all his unconventionalism of personality, was as little inclined to amend as he was to amend the classic authors. An avenue of palms is the epic of the desert; a bougainvillea vine its sonnet.
Between the palms to the right and left Jack had glimpses of a vegetable garden; of rows of berry bushes; of a grove of young fig-trees; of rows of the sword-bundles of pineapple tops. Everything except the old-fashioned flower-bed, with its border of mignonette, and the generous beds of roses and other flowers of the bountiful sisterhood of petals of artificial cultivation, spoke of utility which must make the ground pay as well as please.
Jack took each step as if he were apprehensive of disturbing the quiet Midway of the avenue of palms ran a cross avenue, and at the meeting-point was a circle, which evidently waited till the oranges and the olives should pay for a statue and surrounding benches. Over the breadth of the cross avenue lay the glossy canopy of the outstretched branches of umbrella-trees. A table of roughly planed boards painted green and green rattan chairs were in keeping with the restful effect, while the world without was aglare with light.
Here Mary had brought her sewing for the afternoon. She was working so intently that she had not heard his approach. He had paused just as his line of vision came flush with the trunks of the umbrella-trees. For the first time he saw his companion in adventure in repose, her head bent, leaving clear the line of her neck from the roots of her hair to the collar, and the soft light bringing out the delicate brown of her skin.
There seemed no movement anywhere in the world at the moment, except the flash of her needle in and out.
And she had not seen him! He was touched with a sense of guilt for having looked so long; for not having at once called to her; and rather than give her the shock of calling now, he moved toward her, the scuff of his limp, pendent foot attracting her attention. Her start at the sound was followed, when she saw him, with amazement and a flush and a movement as if she would rise. But she controlled the movement, if not the flush, and fell back into her chair, picking up her sewing, which had dropped on the table.
It was like him, she might well think, to come unexpectedly, without invitation or announcement. She was alert, ready to take the offensive as the best means of defence, and wishing, in devout futility, that he had stayed away. He was smiling happily at everything in cosmos and at her as a part of it.
"Good afternoon!"
"Good afternoon!"
"That last lot of jelly was better than the first," he said softly.
"Was it? You must favor vintage jelly!"
"I came to call—my p.p.c. call—and to see your garden," he added.
"Is there any particular feature that interests you?" she asked. "The date-trees? The aviary? The nursery?"
"No," he answered, "not just yet. It is very cool here under the umbrella-trees, isn't it? I have walked all the way from the Galways and I'll rest a while, if I may."
He was no longer the play cavalier in overornamentedchaparejosand cart-wheel spurs, but a lame fellow in overalls, who was hitching toward her on crutches, his cowpuncher hat held by the brim and flopping with every step. But he wore the silk shirt and the string tie, and somehow he made even the overalls seem "dressy."
"Pray sit down," she said politely.
Standing his crutches against the table, he accepted the invitation. She resumed her sewing, eyes on the needle, lips pressed into a straight line and head bending low. He might have been a stranger on a bench in a public park for all the attention she was paying to him. She realized that she was rude and took satisfaction in it as the only way of expressing her determination not to reopen a closed incident.
"It's wonderful—wonderful!" he observed, in a voice of contemplative awe.
"What is?" she asked.
"Why, how fast you sew!"
"Yes?" she said, as automatically as she stitched. "Your wound is quite all right? No danger of infection?"
"I don't blame you!" he burst out. His tone had turned sad and urgent.
She looked up quickly, with the flare of a frown. His remark had brought her out of her pose and she became vivid and real.
"Blame me!" she demanded, sharply, as one who flies to arms.
But she met a new phase—neither banter, nor fancy, nor unvarying coolness in the face of fire. He was all contrition and apology. Must she be the audience to some fresh exhibition of his versatility?
"I do not blame you for feeling the way that you do," he said.
"How do you know how I feel?" she asked; and as far as he could see into her eyes there was nothing but the flash of sword-points.
"I don't. I only know how I think you feel—how you might well feel," he answered delicately. "After Pete let his gun drop in the store I should not have named terms for an encounter. I should have turned to the law for protection for the few hours that I had to remain in town."
"But to you that would have been avoiding battle!" she exclaimed.
"Which may take courage," he rejoined. "What I did was selfish. It was bravado, with no thought of your position."
"It is late to worry about that now. What does it matter? I did not want anyone killed on my account, and no one was," she insisted. "Besides, you should not be blue," this with a ripple of satire; "it is not quite all bravado to face Pete Leddy's gun at twenty yards."
"And it is not courage. Courage is a force of will driving you into danger for some high purpose. I want you to realize that I am not such a barbarian that I do not know that I could have kept you out of it all if I had had proper self-control. Though probably, on the impulse, I would do the fool thing over again! Yes, that's the worst of it!"
"There is a devil in him!" Ignacio's words were sounding in her ears. To how many men had he said, "I am going to kill you?" What other quarrels had he known in his wanderings from Colorado to Chihuahua?
"If you really want my opinion, I am glad, so far as I am concerned, that you did fight," she said lightly. "Aren't you a hero? Isn't the town free of Leddy? And you take the train in the morning!"
"Yes."
The monosyllable was drawn out rather faintly. For the first time since they had met on the pass she felt she was mistress of the situation. This time she had not to plead with him in fear for his life. She could regard him without any sense of obligation, this invader of her garden retreat who had to put in one more afternoon in a dull desert town before he was away to that outside world which she might know only through books and memory.
She rose exultantly, disregarding any formality that she would owe to the average guest; for an average guest he was not. Her attitude meant that she was having the last word; that she was showing her mettle.
He did not rise. He was staring into the sunlight, as if it were darkness alive with flitting spectres which baffled identification.
"Yes, back—back to armies of Leddys!" he said slowly.
But this she saw as still another pose. It did not make her pause in gathering up her sewing. She was convinced that there was nothing more for her to say, except to give their parting an appearance of ease and unconcern.
"Is it work you mean? You are not used to that, I take it?" she inquired a little sarcastically.
"Yes, call it work," he answered, looking away from the spectres and back to her.
"And you have never done any work!" she added.
"Not much," he admitted, with his old, airy carelessness. He was smiling at the spectres now, as he had at the dinosaur.
"As there is nothing particular about the garden that I can show you—" she was moving away.
"No, I will be walking back to the house," he said after she had taken a few steps. "Will you wait on my slow pace?"
He reached for his crutches, lifted himself to his feet and swung to her side. She who wished that the interview were over saw that it must be prolonged. Then suddenly she realized the weakness as well as the brusqueness of her attitude. She had been about to fly from him as from something that she feared. It was not necessary. It was foolish, even cowardly.
"I thought perhaps you preferred to be alone, you seemed so abstracted," she said, lamely; and then, as they came out into the sunlight in the circle, she began talking of the garden as she would to any visitor; of its beginnings, its growth, and its future, when her father's plans should have been fulfilled.
"And in all these years you have never been back East?" he asked.
"No. We are always planning a trip, but the money which we save for it goes into more plantings."
They had been moving slowly toward the house, but now he stopped and his glance swept the sky and rested on Galeria.
"It is the best valley of all! I knew it as soon as I saw it from the pass!" and the rapture of the scene was sounding in every syllable like chimes out of the distance. She knew that he was far away from the garden, and delaying, still delaying. If she spoke she felt that he would not hear what she said. If she went on it seemed certain that she would leave him standing there like a statue.
"And there is more land here to make gardens like this?" he asked slowly, absorbed.
"Yes, with water and labor and time."
Though his face was in the full light of the sun, it seemed at times in shadow; then it glowed, as if between two passions. For an instant it was grim, the chin coming forward, the brows contracting; then it was transformed with something that was as a complete surrender to the transport of irresistible temptation. He looked down at her quickly and she saw him in the mood of story-telling to the children, suffused with the radiance of a decision.
"I prefer the Leddys of Little Rivers to the Leddys of New York," he said. "I am not going to-morrow! I am going to have land and a home under the aegis of the Eternal Painter and in sight of Galeria, and worship at the shrine of fecund peace. Will you and the Doge help me?" he asked with an enthusiasm that was infectious. "May I go to his school of agriculture, horticulture, and floriculture?"
Dumfounded, she bent her head and stared at the ground to hide her astonishment.
"You want citizens, industrious young citizens, don't you?" he persisted.
"Yes, yes!" she said hastily and confusedly.
"Do you know a good piece of land?" he continued.
"Yes, several parcels," she answered, recovering her poise and smiling in mockery.
"Come on!" he cried.
He was taking long, jumping steps on his crutches as they went up the path.
"You will take me to look at the land, won't you, please—now? I want to get acquainted with my future estate. I mean to beat the Smiths at plums, Jim Galway at alfalfa, even rival Bob Worther at pumpkins and peonies. And you will help me lay out the flower garden, won't you? You see, I shall have to call in the experts in every line to start with, before I begin to improve on them and make them all jealous. I may find a kind of plum that will grow on alfalfa stalks," he hazarded. "What a horticultural sensation!"
"And a spineless cactus called the Leddy!"
His eyes were laughing into hers and hers irresistibly laughed back. She guessed that he was only joking. He had acted so well in the latest rôle that she had actually believed in his sincerity for a moment. He meant to take the train, of course, but his resourceful capriciousness had supplied him with a less awkward exit from the garden than she had provided. He would yet have the last word if she did not watch out—a last mischievous word at her expense.
"First, you will have to plow the ground, in the broiling hot sun," she said tauntingly, when they had passed around to the porch. She was starting into the house with nervous, precipitate triumph. The last word was hers, after all.
"But you are going to show me the land now!"
His tone was so serious and so hurt that she paused.
"And"—with the seriousness electrified by a glance that sought for mutual understanding—"and we are to forget about that duel and the whole hero-desperado business. I am a prospective settler who just arrived this afternoon. I came direct to headquarters to inquire about property. The Doge not being at home, won't you show me around?"
Again he had said the right thing at the right time, with a delightful impersonality precluding sentiment.
"I couldn't be unaccommodating," she admitted. "It is against all LittleRivers ethics."
"I feel like a butterfly about to come out of his miserable chrysalis!Haven't you a walking-stick? I am going to shed the crutches!"
She became femininely solicitous at once.
"Are you sure you ought? Did the doctor say you might? Is the wound healed?"
"There isn't any wound!" he answered. "That is one of the things which we are to forget."
She brought a stick and he laid the crutches on the porch.
He favored the lame leg, yet he kept up a clipping pace, talking the while as fast as the Doge himself as they passed through one of the side streets out onto the cactus-spotted, baking, cracked levels.
"This is it!" she said finally. "This is all that father and I had to begin with."
"Enough!" he answered, and held out his hands, palms open. "With callouses I will win luxuriance!"
She showed him the irrigation ditch from which he should draw his water; she told him of the first steps; She painted all the difficulties in the darkest colors, without once lessening the glow of his optimism. He was so overwhelmingly, boyishly happy that she had to be happy with him in making believe that he was about to be a real rancher. But he should not have the sport all on his side. He must not think that she accepted this latest departure of his imagination incarnated by his Thespian gift in anything but his own spirit.
"You plowing! You spraying trees for the scale! You digging up weeds! You stacking alfalfa! You settling down in one place as a unit of co-ordinate industry! You earning bread by the sweat of your brow! You with callouses!" Thus she laughed at him.
Very seriously he held out his hands and ran a finger around a palm and across the finger-joints:
"That is where I shall get them," he said. "But not on the thumb. I believe you get them on the thumb only by playing golf."
He asked about carpenters and laborers; he chose the site for his house; he plotted the walks and orchards. She could not refuse her advice. Who can about the planning of new houses and gardens? He had everything quite settled except the land grant from the Doge when they started back; while the sun, with the swift passage of time in such fascinating diversion, had swung low in its ellipse. When they reached the main street the Doge was on the porch passing his opinion on the Eternal Painter's evening work.
"Some very remarkable purples to-night, I admit, Your Majesty, without any intention of giving you too good an opinion of yourself; but otherwise, you are not up to your mark. There must have been a downpour in the rainy world on the other side of the Sierras that moistened your pigments. Next thing we know you will be turning water-colorist!" he was saying, when he heard Jack's voice.
"Here's a new settler!" Jack called. "I am going to stay in Little Rivers and win all the prizes."
"You are joking!" gasped the Doge.
"Not joking," said Jack. "I want to close the bargain to-night."
"You bring color and adventure—yes! I did not expect the honor—the town will be delighted! I am overwhelmed! Will you plow with Pete Leddy's gun drawn by Wrath of God, sir, and harrow with your spurs drawn by Jag Ear? Shall you make a specialty of olives? Do you dare to aspire as high as dates?"
The Doge's speech had begun incoherently, but steadied into rallying humor at the close.
"I haven't seen the date-tree yet," said Jack. "Not until I have can I judge whether or not I shall dare to rival the lord of the manor in his own specialty. And there are business details which I must settle with you, O Doge of this city of slender canals!"
"O youth, will you tarry with peace between wars?" answered the Doge, in quick response to the spirit of nonsense as a basis for their new relations. "Come, and I will show you our noblest product of peace, the Date-Tree Wonderful!" he said, leading the way to the garden, while Mary hurried rather precipitately into the house.
Jasper Ewold was at his best, a glowing husbandman, when he pointed aloft to the clusters of fruit pendent from the crotches of the stiff branches, enclosed in cloth bags to keep them free of insects.
"Do you see strange lettering on the cloth?" he asked.
"Yes, it looks like Arabic."
"So it is! Among other futile diversions in a past incarnation I studied Arabic a little, and I still have my lexicon. Perhaps my construction might not please the grammarians of classic Bagdad, but the sentiment is there safe enough in the language of the mother romance world of the date: 'All hail, first-born of our Western desert fecundity!' It is calling out to the pass and the range from the wastes where the sagebrush has had its own way since the great stir that there was in the world at genesis."
"With the unlimited authority I have in bestowing titles," said Jack, "I have a mind to make you an Emir. But it's a pity that you haven't a camel squatting under your date-tree and placidly chewing his cud."
"A tempting thought!" declared the Doge unctuously.
"Bob Worther could ride him on the tours of inspection. I think the jounce would be almost as good a flesh-reducer as pedestrianism."
"There you go! You would have the camel wearing bells, with reins of red leather and a purple saddle-cloth hung with spangles, and Bob—our excellent Bob—in a turban! Persiflage, sir! A very demoralization of the faculties with cataracts of verbiage, sir!" declared the Doge as he started back to the house. "Little Rivers is a practical town," he proceeded seriously. "We indulge in nonsense only after sunset and when a stranger appears riding a horse with a profane name. Yes, a practical town; and I am surprised at your disloyalty to your own burro by mentioning camels."
"It rests with you, I believe, to let me have the land and also the water," said Jack.
"We grow businesslike!" returned the Doge with a change of manner.
"Very!" declared Jack.
"The requirement is that you become a member of the water users' association and pay your quota of taxes per acre foot; and the price you pay for your land also goes to the association. But I decide on the eligibility of the applicant."
They were in front of the house by this time, and again the Doge gave Jack that sharp, quick, knowing glance of scrutiny through his heavy, tufted eyebrows, before he proceeded:
"The concession for the use of the river for irrigation is mine, administered by the water users' association as if it were theirs, under the condition that no one who has not my approval can have membership. That is, it is practically mine, owing to my arrangement with old Mr. Lefferts, who lives upstream. He is an eccentric, a hermit. He came here many years ago to get as far away from civilization as he could, I judge. That gives him an underlying right. Originally he had two partners, squaw men. Both are dead. He had made no improvements beyond drawing enough water for a garden and for his horse and cow. When I came to make a bargain with him he named an annual sum which should keep him for the rest of his life; and thus he waived his rights. First, Jim Galway, then other settlers drifted in. I formed the water users' association. All taxes and sums for the sale of land go into keeping the dam and ditches in condition."
"You take nothing for yourself!"
"A great deal. The working out of an idea—an idea in moulding a little community in my old age in a fashion that pleases me; while my own property, of course, increases in value. At my death the rights go to the community. But no Utopia; Sir Chaps! Just hard-working, cheerful men and women in a safe refuge!"
"And I am young!" exclaimed Jack, with a hopeful smile. "I have good health. I mean to work. I try to be cheerful. Am I eligible?"
"Sir Chaps, you—you have done us a great favor. Everybody likes you. Sir Chaps"—the Doge hesitated for an instant, with a baffling, unspoken inquiry in his eyes—"Sir Chaps, I like your companionship and your mastery of persiflage. Jim Galway, who is secretary of the association, will look after details of the permit and Bob Worther will turn the water on your land, and the whole town will assist you with advice! Luck, Sir Chaps, in your new vocation!"
That evening, while the Doge took down the David and set a fragment from the frieze of the Parthenon in its place, Little Rivers talked of the delightful news that it was not to lose its strange story-teller and duelist. Little Rivers was puzzled. Not once had Jack intimated a thought of staying. By his own account, so far as he had given any, his wound had merely delayed his departure to New York, where he had pressing business. He had his reservation on the Pullman made for the morning express; he had paid a farewell call at the Ewolds, and apparently then had changed his mind and his career. These were the only clues to work on, except the one suggested by Mrs. Galway, who was the wise woman of the community, while Mrs. Smith was the propagandist.
"I guess he likes the way Mary Ewold snubs him!" said Mrs. Galway.
But there was one person in town who was not surprised at Jack's decision. When Jack sang out as he entered the Galway yard on returning from the Doge's, "We stay, Firio, we stay!" Firio said: "Sí, Señor Jack!" with no change of expression except a brighter gleam than usual in his velvety eyes.