CHAPTER XIV.Two DeparturesAfter dinner, which we didn’t have until nearly one o’clock on the fourth of July, owing to Chad’s not getting the ice-cream frozen on time, John surprised us all by saying that he was going to take the sedan and drive down to Rattail for the mail.I suspicioned, right then, that he was up to something. He could not fool me into thinking that he would take a fifty mile trip—twenty-five miles each way—through the desert heat for no other reason than to get the mail. He couldn’t do any trading, since all of Rattail would be off to the Telko celebration. When Danny seemed hurt and troubled about him going, and when he went riding right off, anyway, I decided that Sam must have sent him, expecting some word concerning Canneziano. I was wrong.We had had a stiff breeze, with a promising sprinkle of rain in the morning; but it had died down about noon and, at two o’clock, it was too tarnation hot to do anything but try to keep cool. I stacked the dinner dishes, to wash in the evening, and joined the others, sitting around in the living-room with the electric fans going full blast.Sam, chess board in hand, stopped long enough by my chair to say in an undertone, “What did I tell you, Mary? ‘It is always darkest, just before the dawn.’ ”That piece of optimism from him was due, in part, to the extra good holiday dinner he had just eaten; and in part to a sense of quiet, edging close to peace, that had pervaded the place since morning. I had noticed it, too, with thankfulness, and had accounted for it with the supposition that Gaby had spent all of her energy in meanness the day before, and was obliged to rest up for a spell.“That’s a nice little piece,” I answered Sam. “There is another one, though, isn’t there, about a lull before the storm?”That was not pure contrariness on my part. I was expecting, every minute, to see Gaby break out again. She didn’t. She yawned around, and fussed about, and then went and sat beside Danny, who was looking at the pictures inThe Ladies Home Journal, and put her arm around her, and petted her up a little—a most unusual performance for her.When Chad, who had been monkeying with the radio, got a rip-roaring patriotic program from Salt Lake, the two girls went upstairs together.A few minutes later I had an errand upstairs—a real one, I wouldn’t have taken myself up in that heat to satisfy any curiosity—so, out of habit, I stopped at Gaby’s door to listen. I heard the girls giggling in there; and, knowing no great harm is afoot when girls giggle, I went on, got my scrap of pongee silk to mend Sam’s shirt, and came downstairs again.Sam and Hubert Hand were deep in their chess game. Mrs. Ricker was tatting. Chad and Martha were playing dots and crosses. In spite of the noise from the radio, there was a comfortable feeling about the room that made me lonesome for the days we had all had together before the Canneziano girls had come.The radio program, which was to last from two until four o’clock, had just that minute stopped. Martha, who when she didn’t forget it, usually fed her rabbits about that time of day, had gone out to do it. Gaby came downstairs, humming a tune.She had on the tomato soup colored wrap that she had worn on the train, and the hat to match the wrap. She was carrying a beaded bag. She never dressed up like that, to go walking around the place; a wrap, even such a light one, in the heat of that day, was downright ridiculous.Chad said, “All dressed up and no place to go?”She tossed her head at him, and hurried straight down the room and out through the glass doors. Chad followed her. They stopped together on the porch. She stood with her back to me. Chad faced me. In a minute, I saw his mouth bend up into a grin of bliss. Nothing would have surprised me more. For this reason.As that girl had walked through the room, I had seen that she walked in mortal fear. In spite of her humming, in spite of her attempted swagger, fear was in her widened eyes, in her drawn in chin, in the contraction of her shoulders. Wherever it was that she was going, she was afraid to go. But where could she go? John had the sedan. Except for the trucks, which she couldn’t drive, and her pony—she surely would not be dressed like that to ride horseback—there was no way for her to get off the place. It must be, then, that someone was coming to the place, and that she was going out alone to meet them. Who? Canneziano? Not unless Sam had been mistaken about the time when he was to be released from prison. Usually, when people think at all, they think quickly. All this had gone through my mind while she had walked the forty feet to the door. Before Chad smiled, I had spoken to Mrs. Ricker.“That girl,” I said, “is afraid of something.”Mrs. Ricker darted her tatting shuttle back and forth. She moistened her lips, with her tongue; but changed her mind and said nothing.Gaby and Chad stood on the porch talking for two or three minutes—a very short time, at any rate. Then she went down the steps, and Chad, still smiling, came back into the room.As he came in, Danny called down from the top of the stairway. “Gaby—oh, Gaby?”She knows where Gaby is going, and whom she is going to meet, and she, too, is afraid, I decided, because of the queer, strained quality of her voice.“Gaby has gone out,” I called, in answer. And then, since I could still see Gaby, walking down the path, “Do you want her, Danny? We could fetch her back.”“No,” Danny answered. “Don’t bother. I’ll come down.”I had to reverse my first decision about Danny’s being frightened. At least, her voice was natural enough, now; I fancied, perhaps, a note of relief in it.It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes after that, when Martha came running into the house, laughing and dancing, and wearing the gold bracelet with the monkey clasp. Gaby, she said, had given it to her, just now, out by the rabbit hutch.While we were all still exclaiming over the monkey, and praising it up, to please Martha, Danny came downstairs. She was freshly dressed, and sweet smelling with the nice, quiet flower scent she used, but she looked really ill. She said her headache was worse again, and she drew the curtains at the windows beside the big davenport, to ease the glare of the light, before she curled up on it.I thought it was a good time to continue the conversation we had begun the other evening.“Danny,” I said, as I sat down beside her, “if you just could tell John, or Sam, or me what is troubling you, I am pretty sure that we could find some way out.”“Bless your hearts,” she repeated. “You are all too good. I am afraid I can’t tell you what has been troubling me. But I can tell you, honestly, that I think now the worst of the troubles are over. They never were really mine, you see; they were Gaby’s. And now Gaby has decided to—well, stop being troubled.“We had a good long talk this afternoon. She has made me some promises. She is going to try to act differently, to be good—as she used to say when we were little. She had a dreadful disappointment day before yesterday. It made her act very badly—at first. She has decided now to make the best of it, for there is a best of it to make. You’ve noticed how much better she acted last evening and all of to-day? She is making a fresh start. You see, she has even given Martha her precious monkey. I am sure we shall all be much happier, from now on.”“Do you know where she was going this afternoon?” I asked.“For a little walk.”“Why did she wear her wrap, and carry her beaded bag, just to go out for a little walk?”Danny sat up straight, pressing her hands to her aching head. “Her wrap—to-day? Her beaded bag? Surely not.”“That’s just what she did. Didn’t you see her before she left?”“I was lying down. She came to my door and said that she was going for a walk, and asked me if I cared to go with her. I said that my headache was too severe. She went into her room, and from there downstairs. I felt guilty about refusing to go with her, after our talk. I thought that I should; so I called after her. But, when you said she had gone, I was afraid she would be annoyed at being called back. I had gotten up; so, since John will surely be home before long, now, I came down. I can’t understand her wearing a wrap. It is so silly, on a day like this.”It sounded all right, but I was not quite satisfied.“I thought,” I said, “that, when you called after her, you were frightened, or worried, or—something.”“Frightened? No, Mary, I had nothing to be frightened about.”“Gaby was frightened,” I said.“Gaby! She couldn’t have been. She was all right this afternoon. Nothing could have happened since then.”“I don’t know. Something was the matter with her when she walked through this room. I’ll go bond that, wherever it was she was going, she was afraid to go.”“Mary, it must be that you are imagining this. Unless—Oh, it couldn’t be that Gaby has not told me the truth about—about anything. I am sure she was honest with me this afternoon. I am sure—— And yet—— Dear me, I wonder where she went for her walk?”“She talked to Chad, just before she left. Maybe she told him where she was going.”Danny called the question across the room to Chad, who was improvising cheerful, happy music on the piano.“Not a word,” Chad spoke above his music, “except that she was going for a walk and didn’t want my company.”“Gaby told me,” Martha piped up, from where she was sitting on the arm of Sam’s chair, “that she was going to the cabin. She was in a big hurry. She ran.”“Up toward the cabin?” Danny questioned, though we all knew we could not put a mite of trust in anything Martha said.“Yes. Chad loves me better’n he loves her. Don’t you, Chad?”“You are positive,” Danny insisted, and I couldn’t see why, for a minute, “that she went to the cabin, or toward it? You aren’t fibbing, are you, Martha dear? Are you sure that she didn’t go around the house toward the road?”When she asked about the road, her meaning was clear to me. Danny was afraid that Gaby had gone to meet John, who should have been back from Rattail before this. But, if she had hoped to get anything out of Martha, she had made a mistake in her questioning. For anyone to accuse Martha of a fib, was to make her stick to it like a waffle to an ungreased pan.“She told me she was going to the cabin,” Martha answered. “She ran. She was in a hurry.”Danny stood up. “I think I shall walk up to the cabin and see whether I can find her. You’ll come with me, Mary?”I said not in the heat. Besides, it would soon be five o’clock, and time to be starting supper. She asked Mrs. Ricker to go with her. Mrs. Ricker refused. I wondered why, when neither of us would go, Danny did not go by herself. She did not. Had she, perhaps, guessed at the cause of Gaby’s fear? Did she share it? Was she afraid to go to the cabin alone?
After dinner, which we didn’t have until nearly one o’clock on the fourth of July, owing to Chad’s not getting the ice-cream frozen on time, John surprised us all by saying that he was going to take the sedan and drive down to Rattail for the mail.
I suspicioned, right then, that he was up to something. He could not fool me into thinking that he would take a fifty mile trip—twenty-five miles each way—through the desert heat for no other reason than to get the mail. He couldn’t do any trading, since all of Rattail would be off to the Telko celebration. When Danny seemed hurt and troubled about him going, and when he went riding right off, anyway, I decided that Sam must have sent him, expecting some word concerning Canneziano. I was wrong.
We had had a stiff breeze, with a promising sprinkle of rain in the morning; but it had died down about noon and, at two o’clock, it was too tarnation hot to do anything but try to keep cool. I stacked the dinner dishes, to wash in the evening, and joined the others, sitting around in the living-room with the electric fans going full blast.
Sam, chess board in hand, stopped long enough by my chair to say in an undertone, “What did I tell you, Mary? ‘It is always darkest, just before the dawn.’ ”
That piece of optimism from him was due, in part, to the extra good holiday dinner he had just eaten; and in part to a sense of quiet, edging close to peace, that had pervaded the place since morning. I had noticed it, too, with thankfulness, and had accounted for it with the supposition that Gaby had spent all of her energy in meanness the day before, and was obliged to rest up for a spell.
“That’s a nice little piece,” I answered Sam. “There is another one, though, isn’t there, about a lull before the storm?”
That was not pure contrariness on my part. I was expecting, every minute, to see Gaby break out again. She didn’t. She yawned around, and fussed about, and then went and sat beside Danny, who was looking at the pictures inThe Ladies Home Journal, and put her arm around her, and petted her up a little—a most unusual performance for her.
When Chad, who had been monkeying with the radio, got a rip-roaring patriotic program from Salt Lake, the two girls went upstairs together.
A few minutes later I had an errand upstairs—a real one, I wouldn’t have taken myself up in that heat to satisfy any curiosity—so, out of habit, I stopped at Gaby’s door to listen. I heard the girls giggling in there; and, knowing no great harm is afoot when girls giggle, I went on, got my scrap of pongee silk to mend Sam’s shirt, and came downstairs again.
Sam and Hubert Hand were deep in their chess game. Mrs. Ricker was tatting. Chad and Martha were playing dots and crosses. In spite of the noise from the radio, there was a comfortable feeling about the room that made me lonesome for the days we had all had together before the Canneziano girls had come.
The radio program, which was to last from two until four o’clock, had just that minute stopped. Martha, who when she didn’t forget it, usually fed her rabbits about that time of day, had gone out to do it. Gaby came downstairs, humming a tune.
She had on the tomato soup colored wrap that she had worn on the train, and the hat to match the wrap. She was carrying a beaded bag. She never dressed up like that, to go walking around the place; a wrap, even such a light one, in the heat of that day, was downright ridiculous.
Chad said, “All dressed up and no place to go?”
She tossed her head at him, and hurried straight down the room and out through the glass doors. Chad followed her. They stopped together on the porch. She stood with her back to me. Chad faced me. In a minute, I saw his mouth bend up into a grin of bliss. Nothing would have surprised me more. For this reason.
As that girl had walked through the room, I had seen that she walked in mortal fear. In spite of her humming, in spite of her attempted swagger, fear was in her widened eyes, in her drawn in chin, in the contraction of her shoulders. Wherever it was that she was going, she was afraid to go. But where could she go? John had the sedan. Except for the trucks, which she couldn’t drive, and her pony—she surely would not be dressed like that to ride horseback—there was no way for her to get off the place. It must be, then, that someone was coming to the place, and that she was going out alone to meet them. Who? Canneziano? Not unless Sam had been mistaken about the time when he was to be released from prison. Usually, when people think at all, they think quickly. All this had gone through my mind while she had walked the forty feet to the door. Before Chad smiled, I had spoken to Mrs. Ricker.
“That girl,” I said, “is afraid of something.”
Mrs. Ricker darted her tatting shuttle back and forth. She moistened her lips, with her tongue; but changed her mind and said nothing.
Gaby and Chad stood on the porch talking for two or three minutes—a very short time, at any rate. Then she went down the steps, and Chad, still smiling, came back into the room.
As he came in, Danny called down from the top of the stairway. “Gaby—oh, Gaby?”
She knows where Gaby is going, and whom she is going to meet, and she, too, is afraid, I decided, because of the queer, strained quality of her voice.
“Gaby has gone out,” I called, in answer. And then, since I could still see Gaby, walking down the path, “Do you want her, Danny? We could fetch her back.”
“No,” Danny answered. “Don’t bother. I’ll come down.”
I had to reverse my first decision about Danny’s being frightened. At least, her voice was natural enough, now; I fancied, perhaps, a note of relief in it.
It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes after that, when Martha came running into the house, laughing and dancing, and wearing the gold bracelet with the monkey clasp. Gaby, she said, had given it to her, just now, out by the rabbit hutch.
While we were all still exclaiming over the monkey, and praising it up, to please Martha, Danny came downstairs. She was freshly dressed, and sweet smelling with the nice, quiet flower scent she used, but she looked really ill. She said her headache was worse again, and she drew the curtains at the windows beside the big davenport, to ease the glare of the light, before she curled up on it.
I thought it was a good time to continue the conversation we had begun the other evening.
“Danny,” I said, as I sat down beside her, “if you just could tell John, or Sam, or me what is troubling you, I am pretty sure that we could find some way out.”
“Bless your hearts,” she repeated. “You are all too good. I am afraid I can’t tell you what has been troubling me. But I can tell you, honestly, that I think now the worst of the troubles are over. They never were really mine, you see; they were Gaby’s. And now Gaby has decided to—well, stop being troubled.
“We had a good long talk this afternoon. She has made me some promises. She is going to try to act differently, to be good—as she used to say when we were little. She had a dreadful disappointment day before yesterday. It made her act very badly—at first. She has decided now to make the best of it, for there is a best of it to make. You’ve noticed how much better she acted last evening and all of to-day? She is making a fresh start. You see, she has even given Martha her precious monkey. I am sure we shall all be much happier, from now on.”
“Do you know where she was going this afternoon?” I asked.
“For a little walk.”
“Why did she wear her wrap, and carry her beaded bag, just to go out for a little walk?”
Danny sat up straight, pressing her hands to her aching head. “Her wrap—to-day? Her beaded bag? Surely not.”
“That’s just what she did. Didn’t you see her before she left?”
“I was lying down. She came to my door and said that she was going for a walk, and asked me if I cared to go with her. I said that my headache was too severe. She went into her room, and from there downstairs. I felt guilty about refusing to go with her, after our talk. I thought that I should; so I called after her. But, when you said she had gone, I was afraid she would be annoyed at being called back. I had gotten up; so, since John will surely be home before long, now, I came down. I can’t understand her wearing a wrap. It is so silly, on a day like this.”
It sounded all right, but I was not quite satisfied.
“I thought,” I said, “that, when you called after her, you were frightened, or worried, or—something.”
“Frightened? No, Mary, I had nothing to be frightened about.”
“Gaby was frightened,” I said.
“Gaby! She couldn’t have been. She was all right this afternoon. Nothing could have happened since then.”
“I don’t know. Something was the matter with her when she walked through this room. I’ll go bond that, wherever it was she was going, she was afraid to go.”
“Mary, it must be that you are imagining this. Unless—Oh, it couldn’t be that Gaby has not told me the truth about—about anything. I am sure she was honest with me this afternoon. I am sure—— And yet—— Dear me, I wonder where she went for her walk?”
“She talked to Chad, just before she left. Maybe she told him where she was going.”
Danny called the question across the room to Chad, who was improvising cheerful, happy music on the piano.
“Not a word,” Chad spoke above his music, “except that she was going for a walk and didn’t want my company.”
“Gaby told me,” Martha piped up, from where she was sitting on the arm of Sam’s chair, “that she was going to the cabin. She was in a big hurry. She ran.”
“Up toward the cabin?” Danny questioned, though we all knew we could not put a mite of trust in anything Martha said.
“Yes. Chad loves me better’n he loves her. Don’t you, Chad?”
“You are positive,” Danny insisted, and I couldn’t see why, for a minute, “that she went to the cabin, or toward it? You aren’t fibbing, are you, Martha dear? Are you sure that she didn’t go around the house toward the road?”
When she asked about the road, her meaning was clear to me. Danny was afraid that Gaby had gone to meet John, who should have been back from Rattail before this. But, if she had hoped to get anything out of Martha, she had made a mistake in her questioning. For anyone to accuse Martha of a fib, was to make her stick to it like a waffle to an ungreased pan.
“She told me she was going to the cabin,” Martha answered. “She ran. She was in a hurry.”
Danny stood up. “I think I shall walk up to the cabin and see whether I can find her. You’ll come with me, Mary?”
I said not in the heat. Besides, it would soon be five o’clock, and time to be starting supper. She asked Mrs. Ricker to go with her. Mrs. Ricker refused. I wondered why, when neither of us would go, Danny did not go by herself. She did not. Had she, perhaps, guessed at the cause of Gaby’s fear? Did she share it? Was she afraid to go to the cabin alone?