CHAPTER I.The CannezianosI knew, that evening in April, when Sam got home from Rattail and came stamping snow into my kitchen, his good old red, white, and blue face stretched long instead of wide in its usual grin, that he had brought some bad news with him: a slump in the cattle market; moonshine liquor discovered again, down in the outfit’s quarters; a delayed shipment of groceries from Salt Lake. I, who in the months that were coming, was to live through more shock, and fright, and distress and disaster than should fall to the lot of a thousand women in all of their combined lifetimes, was worrying, then, for fear we should have to be doing without olive oil and canned mushrooms for a few weeks in the ranch-house!“I had a letter to-day,” he said, “from the Canneziano twins.”I am like a lot of folks who say that they are not superstitious, who just happen to think that it is bad luck to walk under a ladder. More than likely the shivery, creepy sensation I felt, when Sam said that, was due to the cold he had brought in with him, and was not due to the fact that those words of his were the forerunners for all of the grim mysteries and the tragedies that made the Desert Moon Ranch, before the end of July, a place of horror.“How much do they want?” I questioned.“No, Mary; they want to come here to live.”“Lands alive! For how long?”“Danielle wrote the letter. She says they want to come here and rest, indefinitely. There was quite a bit in it about the peace of the deserts and the high mountains here in Nevada. She says she longs for it with all her soul, or something like that.”“Danielle,” I said, “always was the best of the two. You going to let them come, Sam?”“Anything else for me to do?”“Not a thing—for you. There’d be plenty for others. Those girls are no kin of yours. Let me see—they must be able-bodied young women by now. Eight years old when they were here in 1909, makes them twenty-four years old now, according to my figures. Why a couple of women twins, aggregating forty-eight years, should decide to come here and rest their souls, at your expense, is beyond me.”“I have plenty.”“So has Henry Ford. Why don’t they go rest their souls with him? They’ve got as much claim on him as they have on you. None.”“I reckon.”“Where are they now, anyway?”“Switzerland.”“Lands alive! I don’t pretend to know much about foreign geography, but I’ve understood that there were a few mountains in Switzerland. Leave those girls rest their souls right there where they are, Sam.”“No—I don’t know, Mary. I guess I’ll write them a letter and tell them to come along. Lots of room.”I didn’t argue any more about it. For twenty-five years I had been housekeeper of the Desert Moon ranch-house, and I had learned, during that time, that there was only one subject, concerning Sam, or the place, on which I could never hope to have any say-so. Trying to argue with Sam about anything that had to do, in any way, with Margarita Ditsie, when she was Margarita Ditsie Stanley, or when she was Margarita Ditsie Canneziano, was about as sensible as hoisting a chiffon parasol for protection in the midst of one of our Nevada mountain cloudbursts.Margarita Ditsie was of French-Canadian parentage; a dark-haired, big-eyed beauty. Her father kept a gambling hole in Esmeralda County in the early days. Her mother had run away from a convent, after she had become a nun, to marry him. The girl had some of the nun, some of the runaway, and some of the gambling house proprietor in her. It made a queer combination.When she was eighteen years old she came from Carson to visit Lily Trooper, over on the Three Bars Ranch, in northeastern Nevada, about sixty miles from here. Sam met her there, at one of Ben Trooper’s big barbecues. She and Sam were married two weeks later. She was a lot younger than Sam; but, even then, he was the richest man in the valley, with every unwedded woman for a hundred miles around setting her cap for him.Whether Margarita married him for his wealth, or whether it was to spite the other girls who would have liked to marry him, I don’t know. All I know is that Margarita never had a mite of love for him. She stayed with him, though, and acted decently enough for two years, until Dan Canneziano came to the ranch and got a job on it as cowpuncher.It was during those two years that Sam built this ranch-house for her. He had an architect in New York draw the plans for it; and though now on the outside, with its towers and trimmings, it looks kind of old fashioned, I think it is still the finest house in Nevada. Sam’s lead and silver mine had just come in, and there was not anything, from Italian marble fireplaces to teakwood floors, that was too grand for what Margarita called the Stanley Mansion. She left it, all the elegance and the luxury, and she broke her marriage vows, for love of this wop cowpuncher. That, I guess, is fair and full enough description of Margarita Canneziano.I don’t blame her. I quit blaming folks for things a good many years ago when, after firing three Chinese cooks in six weeks, I decided that, if we were to live healthy and wholesome, I’d have to take over the job of cooking as well as housekeeping for the Desert Moon Ranch, and set about it, and learned to cook. In other words, when I became a creator myself, I got to know creations and so quit blaming all of them. If I forget to put the soda in the sour milk pancakes, it isn’t their fault if they don’t rise. They are as I made them. Margarita was as the Lord made her. He, I suppose, either had His own good reasons for turning out such a mess, or else He was tired, or flustered, or, maybe, was just experimenting on the road to something better when He did it.I should explain, I suppose, wishing to be as honest as possible in spite of the fact that I am writing a mystery story, that Canneziano was different from the ordinary breed of cowpunchers. His father, he claimed, had some hifaluting title in Italy, before he got into a peck of honorable, patriotic trouble and had to skip to the United States to save his neck. That may be true, and it may not. Canneziano had a good education; he talked poetry, and played the violin. Margarita heard him playing, down in the outfit’s quarters one day, and had Sam invite him up to the house to play. She accompanied him on the grand piano that Sam had bought for her.Before long, Dan Canneziano was spending a good part of his time at the ranch-house. Sam, being nobody’s fool, soon saw how the land lay; but he, according to his custom then and now, kept his mouth shut and his eyes open. Sure enough, one evening they tried to elope together. Sam went after them and brought them back. I remember, yet, how the three of them looked, coming into the house that night.Margarita, her head high, defiant, but pretty as a fire’s flame. Canneziano, slinking in at her heels, like a whipped cur, expecting worse; and Sam, following behind them, calm as cold turkey. The three of them had about half an hour’s talk together. Then Sam herded Canneziano down to the outfit’s quarters and, I suppose, told the men to keep him there, for there he stayed until Sam was ready for him again.The next morning Sam started to the county seat. He reached there that evening. The following morning he got his divorce. He came back to the Desert Moon on the third morning, with his divorce and with a preacher. He sent for Canneziano, and stood by, while the preacher married Margarita Stanley to Daniel Canneziano, decent and regular, according to the laws of Nevada.There it should have ended. It didn’t, because Sam never got over loving Margarita. I don’t hold that to his credit. I see no more virtue in keeping on loving a person who has proved unworthy of being loved, than I see in hating a person who has turned out to be blameless, or in continuing to do any other unreasonable thing.At any rate, Sam did it. So when, nine years later, she came back to the Desert Moon, with twin girls, Danielle and Gabrielle, and said that Canneziano had deserted her and the children Sam took them all right in. I don’t know, yet, whether or not they took him in.Certainly he did not show much surprise when, in about ten days, Canneziano put in an appearance. Sam allowed him to get a good start with his threats, and then he took him across his knees and gave him a sound spanking, and passed him over to Margarita to dry his tears, and washed his own hands and went fishing.That evening he had one of the men hitch up and take the whole kit and caboodle of Cannezianos to Rattail in time to catch the east-bound train. I am ashamed to say that Sam gave them money. I don’t know how much. I shouldn’t be surprised if it was more than they had expected to get from their blackmailing scheme. A tidy sum, I’ll be bound, for shortly after we heard that Canneziano had opened the finest gambling house south of the Mason and Dixon line, in New Orleans.Sam wanted to keep the children. He offered to adopt them. Margarita would not consider it. But, several times after that, pale yellow, perfumed letters came to the Desert Moon, and Sam answered those letters with a check. Me he answered, each time, with, “It is for the little girls, Mary. I can’t let little girls go needing.”When Margarita died, in France, seven years after she had paid us her blackmailing visit, Sam, the ninny, wrote to Canneziano and again offered to adopt the girls and give them a good home on the Desert Moon. He got a few insulting, insinuating lines for an answer. Canneziano had his own plans for his daughters, who had developed into rare beauties. He would thank Sam to keep his hands off, mind his own business, and so forth.It would have made a milder man than Sam Stanley fighting mad. Sam went around all that day, swearing to me that he was through; that he had made his last offer of help to the Canneziano family, had sent his last contribution. I know for certain, though, that he sent five hundred dollars to Gabrielle, after that, in answer to a letter she wrote to him. But, if Sam was soft with the women, he was not soft with Canneziano. He had showed up here, beaming and broke, about three years ago. He had left, suddenly, after having seen Sam and no one else, less beaming but quite as broke as he had been when he had come. I thought, maybe, Sam was forgetting that side of the family, and that this might be a good time to remind him.“Is Canneziano planning to come on later, too, and rest?” I asked.“Just at present he is in San Quentin, serving a three years’ term. Danielle didn’t say for what deviltry. His term’s up this summer. That is another reason the girls want to come here. Somewhere safe from his persecutions, I think the letter said. Poor little girls,” Sam went on, “I reckon we haven’t any idea of what they’ve been through, all these years.”“I reckon not,” I agreed. “But they aren’t little girls any more. Seems queer to me, with all the beauty their father was bragging about, that neither of them has married. Twenty-four is getting along.”“I’ll bet,” Sam answered, “it is because they have never had any decent opportunities. You know how pretty they were as little girls, and how good——”“Danielle was good enough,” I said. “Gabrielle was a holy terror.”Sam let that pass. “Considering,” he continued, “the life that they’ve had to lead, and all, I think it speaks pretty well for them that they have come through straight and clean.”Instead of asking him how he knew that, I said, “You’d be willing, then, to have John marry one of them?”John, Sam’s adopted son, was the apple of Sam’s eye. He would have the ranch, and Sam’s fortune, other dependents provided for, when Sam died. Whether or not the girl he married would be contented to live on the ranch, and help John carry it on and keep up its traditions, making it one of the proudest spots in Nevada, was a mighty important thing to Sam.He waited so long before answering my question that I was sure I had hit the nail on the head.“John,” he finally said, “is old enough to take care of himself.”With that he turned and went out of my kitchen, not giving me a chance to say that, though I had lived through fifty-six years, I had never yet seen a man at the age he had just mentioned. I did not care. I felt too vimless for even a spat with Sam. I knew that if these Canneziano girls came to the Desert Moon, they would bring trouble with them. I was right. A merciful Providence be thanked that, for a time at least, the knowledge of how terribly right I was, was spared me.
I knew, that evening in April, when Sam got home from Rattail and came stamping snow into my kitchen, his good old red, white, and blue face stretched long instead of wide in its usual grin, that he had brought some bad news with him: a slump in the cattle market; moonshine liquor discovered again, down in the outfit’s quarters; a delayed shipment of groceries from Salt Lake. I, who in the months that were coming, was to live through more shock, and fright, and distress and disaster than should fall to the lot of a thousand women in all of their combined lifetimes, was worrying, then, for fear we should have to be doing without olive oil and canned mushrooms for a few weeks in the ranch-house!
“I had a letter to-day,” he said, “from the Canneziano twins.”
I am like a lot of folks who say that they are not superstitious, who just happen to think that it is bad luck to walk under a ladder. More than likely the shivery, creepy sensation I felt, when Sam said that, was due to the cold he had brought in with him, and was not due to the fact that those words of his were the forerunners for all of the grim mysteries and the tragedies that made the Desert Moon Ranch, before the end of July, a place of horror.
“How much do they want?” I questioned.
“No, Mary; they want to come here to live.”
“Lands alive! For how long?”
“Danielle wrote the letter. She says they want to come here and rest, indefinitely. There was quite a bit in it about the peace of the deserts and the high mountains here in Nevada. She says she longs for it with all her soul, or something like that.”
“Danielle,” I said, “always was the best of the two. You going to let them come, Sam?”
“Anything else for me to do?”
“Not a thing—for you. There’d be plenty for others. Those girls are no kin of yours. Let me see—they must be able-bodied young women by now. Eight years old when they were here in 1909, makes them twenty-four years old now, according to my figures. Why a couple of women twins, aggregating forty-eight years, should decide to come here and rest their souls, at your expense, is beyond me.”
“I have plenty.”
“So has Henry Ford. Why don’t they go rest their souls with him? They’ve got as much claim on him as they have on you. None.”
“I reckon.”
“Where are they now, anyway?”
“Switzerland.”
“Lands alive! I don’t pretend to know much about foreign geography, but I’ve understood that there were a few mountains in Switzerland. Leave those girls rest their souls right there where they are, Sam.”
“No—I don’t know, Mary. I guess I’ll write them a letter and tell them to come along. Lots of room.”
I didn’t argue any more about it. For twenty-five years I had been housekeeper of the Desert Moon ranch-house, and I had learned, during that time, that there was only one subject, concerning Sam, or the place, on which I could never hope to have any say-so. Trying to argue with Sam about anything that had to do, in any way, with Margarita Ditsie, when she was Margarita Ditsie Stanley, or when she was Margarita Ditsie Canneziano, was about as sensible as hoisting a chiffon parasol for protection in the midst of one of our Nevada mountain cloudbursts.
Margarita Ditsie was of French-Canadian parentage; a dark-haired, big-eyed beauty. Her father kept a gambling hole in Esmeralda County in the early days. Her mother had run away from a convent, after she had become a nun, to marry him. The girl had some of the nun, some of the runaway, and some of the gambling house proprietor in her. It made a queer combination.
When she was eighteen years old she came from Carson to visit Lily Trooper, over on the Three Bars Ranch, in northeastern Nevada, about sixty miles from here. Sam met her there, at one of Ben Trooper’s big barbecues. She and Sam were married two weeks later. She was a lot younger than Sam; but, even then, he was the richest man in the valley, with every unwedded woman for a hundred miles around setting her cap for him.
Whether Margarita married him for his wealth, or whether it was to spite the other girls who would have liked to marry him, I don’t know. All I know is that Margarita never had a mite of love for him. She stayed with him, though, and acted decently enough for two years, until Dan Canneziano came to the ranch and got a job on it as cowpuncher.
It was during those two years that Sam built this ranch-house for her. He had an architect in New York draw the plans for it; and though now on the outside, with its towers and trimmings, it looks kind of old fashioned, I think it is still the finest house in Nevada. Sam’s lead and silver mine had just come in, and there was not anything, from Italian marble fireplaces to teakwood floors, that was too grand for what Margarita called the Stanley Mansion. She left it, all the elegance and the luxury, and she broke her marriage vows, for love of this wop cowpuncher. That, I guess, is fair and full enough description of Margarita Canneziano.
I don’t blame her. I quit blaming folks for things a good many years ago when, after firing three Chinese cooks in six weeks, I decided that, if we were to live healthy and wholesome, I’d have to take over the job of cooking as well as housekeeping for the Desert Moon Ranch, and set about it, and learned to cook. In other words, when I became a creator myself, I got to know creations and so quit blaming all of them. If I forget to put the soda in the sour milk pancakes, it isn’t their fault if they don’t rise. They are as I made them. Margarita was as the Lord made her. He, I suppose, either had His own good reasons for turning out such a mess, or else He was tired, or flustered, or, maybe, was just experimenting on the road to something better when He did it.
I should explain, I suppose, wishing to be as honest as possible in spite of the fact that I am writing a mystery story, that Canneziano was different from the ordinary breed of cowpunchers. His father, he claimed, had some hifaluting title in Italy, before he got into a peck of honorable, patriotic trouble and had to skip to the United States to save his neck. That may be true, and it may not. Canneziano had a good education; he talked poetry, and played the violin. Margarita heard him playing, down in the outfit’s quarters one day, and had Sam invite him up to the house to play. She accompanied him on the grand piano that Sam had bought for her.
Before long, Dan Canneziano was spending a good part of his time at the ranch-house. Sam, being nobody’s fool, soon saw how the land lay; but he, according to his custom then and now, kept his mouth shut and his eyes open. Sure enough, one evening they tried to elope together. Sam went after them and brought them back. I remember, yet, how the three of them looked, coming into the house that night.
Margarita, her head high, defiant, but pretty as a fire’s flame. Canneziano, slinking in at her heels, like a whipped cur, expecting worse; and Sam, following behind them, calm as cold turkey. The three of them had about half an hour’s talk together. Then Sam herded Canneziano down to the outfit’s quarters and, I suppose, told the men to keep him there, for there he stayed until Sam was ready for him again.
The next morning Sam started to the county seat. He reached there that evening. The following morning he got his divorce. He came back to the Desert Moon on the third morning, with his divorce and with a preacher. He sent for Canneziano, and stood by, while the preacher married Margarita Stanley to Daniel Canneziano, decent and regular, according to the laws of Nevada.
There it should have ended. It didn’t, because Sam never got over loving Margarita. I don’t hold that to his credit. I see no more virtue in keeping on loving a person who has proved unworthy of being loved, than I see in hating a person who has turned out to be blameless, or in continuing to do any other unreasonable thing.
At any rate, Sam did it. So when, nine years later, she came back to the Desert Moon, with twin girls, Danielle and Gabrielle, and said that Canneziano had deserted her and the children Sam took them all right in. I don’t know, yet, whether or not they took him in.
Certainly he did not show much surprise when, in about ten days, Canneziano put in an appearance. Sam allowed him to get a good start with his threats, and then he took him across his knees and gave him a sound spanking, and passed him over to Margarita to dry his tears, and washed his own hands and went fishing.
That evening he had one of the men hitch up and take the whole kit and caboodle of Cannezianos to Rattail in time to catch the east-bound train. I am ashamed to say that Sam gave them money. I don’t know how much. I shouldn’t be surprised if it was more than they had expected to get from their blackmailing scheme. A tidy sum, I’ll be bound, for shortly after we heard that Canneziano had opened the finest gambling house south of the Mason and Dixon line, in New Orleans.
Sam wanted to keep the children. He offered to adopt them. Margarita would not consider it. But, several times after that, pale yellow, perfumed letters came to the Desert Moon, and Sam answered those letters with a check. Me he answered, each time, with, “It is for the little girls, Mary. I can’t let little girls go needing.”
When Margarita died, in France, seven years after she had paid us her blackmailing visit, Sam, the ninny, wrote to Canneziano and again offered to adopt the girls and give them a good home on the Desert Moon. He got a few insulting, insinuating lines for an answer. Canneziano had his own plans for his daughters, who had developed into rare beauties. He would thank Sam to keep his hands off, mind his own business, and so forth.
It would have made a milder man than Sam Stanley fighting mad. Sam went around all that day, swearing to me that he was through; that he had made his last offer of help to the Canneziano family, had sent his last contribution. I know for certain, though, that he sent five hundred dollars to Gabrielle, after that, in answer to a letter she wrote to him. But, if Sam was soft with the women, he was not soft with Canneziano. He had showed up here, beaming and broke, about three years ago. He had left, suddenly, after having seen Sam and no one else, less beaming but quite as broke as he had been when he had come. I thought, maybe, Sam was forgetting that side of the family, and that this might be a good time to remind him.
“Is Canneziano planning to come on later, too, and rest?” I asked.
“Just at present he is in San Quentin, serving a three years’ term. Danielle didn’t say for what deviltry. His term’s up this summer. That is another reason the girls want to come here. Somewhere safe from his persecutions, I think the letter said. Poor little girls,” Sam went on, “I reckon we haven’t any idea of what they’ve been through, all these years.”
“I reckon not,” I agreed. “But they aren’t little girls any more. Seems queer to me, with all the beauty their father was bragging about, that neither of them has married. Twenty-four is getting along.”
“I’ll bet,” Sam answered, “it is because they have never had any decent opportunities. You know how pretty they were as little girls, and how good——”
“Danielle was good enough,” I said. “Gabrielle was a holy terror.”
Sam let that pass. “Considering,” he continued, “the life that they’ve had to lead, and all, I think it speaks pretty well for them that they have come through straight and clean.”
Instead of asking him how he knew that, I said, “You’d be willing, then, to have John marry one of them?”
John, Sam’s adopted son, was the apple of Sam’s eye. He would have the ranch, and Sam’s fortune, other dependents provided for, when Sam died. Whether or not the girl he married would be contented to live on the ranch, and help John carry it on and keep up its traditions, making it one of the proudest spots in Nevada, was a mighty important thing to Sam.
He waited so long before answering my question that I was sure I had hit the nail on the head.
“John,” he finally said, “is old enough to take care of himself.”
With that he turned and went out of my kitchen, not giving me a chance to say that, though I had lived through fifty-six years, I had never yet seen a man at the age he had just mentioned. I did not care. I felt too vimless for even a spat with Sam. I knew that if these Canneziano girls came to the Desert Moon, they would bring trouble with them. I was right. A merciful Providence be thanked that, for a time at least, the knowledge of how terribly right I was, was spared me.