CHAPTER VITHE WOLF SCRATCHES
Mormon Joe had underestimated Jasper Toomey’s capacity for extravagance and mismanagement when he had given him five years to “go broke” in, as he had accomplished it in four most effectively—so completely, in fact, that they had moved into town with only enough furniture to furnish a small house, which they spoke of as having “rented,” though as yet the owner had had nothing but promises to compensate him for their occupancy.
It was close to a year after their advent in Prouty that Mrs. Toomey awakened in the small hours, listened a moment, then prodded her husband sharply:
“The wind’s coming up, Jap, and I left out my washing.”
“Never mind—I’ll borrow a saddle horse in the morning and go after it.”
“Everything will be whipped to ribbons,” she declared plaintively.
“I’m not going out this time of night to collect laundry; besides, the exercise would make me hungrier.”
“Are you hungry, Jap?”
“Hungry! I’ve been lying here thinking of everything I ever left on my plate since I was a baby!”
Mrs. Toomey sighed deeply.
“Wouldn’t a fat club sandwich with chicken, lettuce, thin bacon and mayonnaise dressing—”
“Hush!” Toomey exploded savagely. “If you say that again I’ll dress and go out and rob a hen roost!”
Mrs. Toomey suggested hopefully:
“Perhaps if you light the lamp, and smoke, it will take your mind off your stomach.”
“I surmise that’s all there is on it.” Toomey lighted the lamp on the table beside the bed and looked at the clock on the bureau.
“Hours yet, my love, before I can gorge myself on a shredded wheat biscuit.”
Mrs. Toomey braided a wisp of hair to an infinitesimal end and said firmly:
“Jap, we’ve simplygotto do something! Can’t you borrow?”
“Borrow! I couldn’t throw a rock inside the city limits without hitting some one to whom I owe money. Come again, Old Dear,” mockingly.
“Wouldn’t Mormon Joe—”
“I’d starve before I’d ask that sheepherder!” His face darkened to ugliness. “I’m surprised at you—that you haven’t more pride. You know he broke me, shutting me off from water with his leases. I’ve explained all that to you.”
She was silent; she didn’t have the heart to hit him when he was down, though she had her own opinion as to the cause of his failure.
Since she did not reply, he went on vindictively:
“I’ve come to hate the sight of him—his damned insolence. Every time I see him going into his shack over there,” he nodded towards the diagonal corner, “I could burn it.”
“It’s funny—his building it.”
“To save hotel bills when he comes to town. Yes,” ironically, “I can seehimlendingmemoney.” Mrs. Toomey sat up and cried excitedly:
“Jap, let’s sell something! There’s that silver punchbowl that your Uncle Jasper gave us for a wedding present, and Aunt Sarah Page’s silver teapot—Mrs. Sudds admires it tremendously.”
Toomey’s brow cleared instantly.
“We can do that—I’ll raffle it—the punch bowl—and get a hundred and fifty out of it easily.” He discussed the details enthusiastically, finally blowing out the light and going to sleep as contentedly as though it already had been accomplished.
But in the darkness Mrs. Toomey cried quietly. Selling tickets for a raffle which was for their personal benefit seemed a kind of genteel begging. She wondered that Jap did not feel as she did about it. And what would Mrs. Pantin think? What Mrs. Abram Pantin thought had come to mean a great deal to Mrs. Toomey.
The wind had risen to a gale and she thought nervously of fringed napkins and pillow slips—the wind always gave her the “blues” anyway, and now it reminded her of winter, which was close, with its bitter cold—of snow driven across trackless wastes, of gaunt predatory animals, of cattle and horses starving in draws and gulches, and all the other things which winter meant in that barren country. She slept after a time, to find the next morning that the wind still howled and the fringe on her laundry was all she had pictured.
Toomey set forth gaily immediately after breakfast with the punch bowl wrapped in a newspaper, and Mrs. Toomey nerved herself to negotiate for the sale of the teapot to Mrs. Sudds, in the event of his being unsuccessful.
She watched for his return eagerly, but it was two o’clock before she saw him coming, leaning against the wind and clasping the punch bowl to his bosom. Herheart sank, for his face told her the result without asking.
Toomey set Uncle Jasper’s wedding gift upon the dining room table with disrespectful violence.
“You must be crazy to think I could sell that in Prouty! You should have known better!”
“Didn’t anybody want it, Jap?” Mrs. Toomey asked timidly.
“Want it?” angrily. “‘Tinhorn’ thought it was some kind of a tony cuspidor, and a round-up cook offered me a dollar and a half for it to set bread sponge in.”
“Never mind,” soothingly, “I’m sure Mrs. Sudds will take the teapot.”
“We can’t live all winter on a teapot,” he answered gloomily.
“But you’re sure to get into something pretty quick now.”
“When I land, I’ll land big—I’ll land with both feet,” he responded more cheerfully.
“Of course, you will—I never doubt it.” Mrs. Toomey endeavored to make her tone convincing. “Let’s have tea in the heirloom before we part with it,” she suggested brightly. “It’s never been used that I can remember.”
“It’s ugly enough to be valuable,” Toomey observed, eyeing the teapot as she took it from the top of the bookcase.
“Solid, nearly, and came over in theMayflower,” Mrs. Toomey replied proudly. “We’ll have tea and toast and codfish.”
“The information is superfluous.” Toomey sniffed the air and made a wry face. “I’d as soon eat billposter’s paste as codfish.”
“To-night we’ll have steak—thick, like that—” Mrs. Toomey measured with her thumb and finger as she went into the kitchen.
Toomey eyed the codfish darkly when his wife placed it on the table.
“Sit down, Jap,” she urged. “The tea will be steeped in just a second. Don’t wait—” A scream completed the sentence.
Toomey overturned his chair as he rushed to the kitchen. He arrived in time to see the lid of the priceless heirloom disappearing in a puddle of pewter. It seemed to the Toomeys that the Fates had singled them out as special objects for their malevolence.
The wind continued to blow as though it meant never to stop. It was a wind of which the people of the East who speak awesomely of their own “gales” and “tempest” wot not.
This wind which had kept Prouty indoors for close to a week came out of a cloudless sky, save for a few innocent looking streaks on the western horizon. It had blown away everything that would move. All the loose papers had sailed through the air to an unknown destination—Nebraska, perhaps—while an endless procession of tumble weed had rolled in the same direction from an apparently inexhaustible supply in the west.
Housewives who had watched their pile of tin cans move on to the next lot found their satisfaction short-lived, for as quickly they acquired the rubbish that belonged to their neighbor on the other side. Shingles flew off and chimney bricks, and ends of corrugated iron roofing slapped and banged as though frantic to be loose. Houses shivered on their foundations, and lesser buildings lay on their sides. Clouds of dust obscured the sun atintervals, and the sharp-edged gravel driven before the gale cut like tiny knives.
Any daring chicken that ventured from its coop slid away as if it were on skates. Pitchforks were useless, and those who had horses to feed carried the hay in sacks. The caged inhabitants stood at their windows and made caustic comments upon the legs and general contour of such unfortunates as necessity took out, while those pedestrians who would converse, upon catching sight of each other made a dive for the nearest telephone pole. There, clinging by an arm like a shipwrecked sailor to a mast, they ventured to opine that it must be “getting ready for something.” It seemed as though the earth would soon be denuded of its soil, leaving the rocks exposed like a skeleton stripped of its flesh. Yet, day after day, it blew without respite, and the effect of it upon different temperaments was as varied as that of drink.
No one could seem to remember that the wind had not always blown, or realize that it would sometime stop. No character was strong enough to maintain a perfect equilibrium after three days of it. Logic or philosophy made no more impression upon the mental state than water slipping over a rock. It set the nerves on edge. Irritation, restlessness and discontent were as uncontrollable as great fear. Two wildcats tied together were not more incompatible than husbands and wives, who under normal conditions lived together happily. Doting mothers became shrews; fond fathers, brutes, lambasting their offspring on the smallest pretext; while seven was too conservative an estimate to place upon the devils of which the children who turned the house into Bedlam seemed to be possessed.
Optimists grew green with melancholia, pessimists consideredsuicide as an escape from the futility of life, neighbors resurrected buried hatchets. Friends found fault with friends. Enemies vowed to kill each other as soon as the wind let up.
If the combination of wind and altitude had this effect upon phlegmatic temperaments, something of Mrs. Toomey’s state may be surmised. With nerves already overwrought this prolonged windstorm put her in a condition in which, as she declared hysterically to her husband, she was “ready to fly.”
Lying on his back on the one-time handsome sofa, where he spent many of his waking hours, Toomey responded, grimly:
“I’m getting so light on that breakfast-food diet that we’ll both fly if I don’t make a ‘touch’ pretty quick. I’m 'most afraid to go out in a high wind without running a little shot in the bottoms of my trousers.”
Mrs. Toomey, who was standing at the dining room table laying a section of a newspaper pattern upon a piece of serge, felt an uncontrollable desire to weep. Furthermore, the conviction seized her that, turn and twist the pattern as she might, she was not going to have material enough unless she pieced.
Her lids turned pink and her eyes filled up.
“Isn’t it awful, Jap, to think of us being like this?”
“You make me think of a rabbit when you sniffle like that. Can’t you cry without wiggling your nose?”
Mrs. Toomey’s quavering voice rose to the upper register:
“Do you suppose I care how I look when I feel like this?”
“How do you think I feel,” ferociously, “with my stomach slumping in so I can hardly straighten up?” He raised a long arm and shook a fist as though in defianceof the Fate that had brought him to this. “I’d sell my soul for a ham! I’m going to Scales and put up a talk.”
Toomey found his hat and coat. “Don’t cut your throat with the scissors while I’m gone, Little Sunbeam, and I’ll be back with food pretty quick—unless I blow off.”
He spoke with such confidence that Mrs. Toomey looked at him hopefully. When he opened the door the furious gust that shook the house and darkened the room with a cloud of dust seemed to suck him into a vortex. Mrs. Toomey watched him round the corner with a sense of relief. Now that she was alone she could cry comfortably and look as ugly as she liked, so the tears flowed copiously as she stood at the table puzzling over the pattern and cloth. They flowed afresh when she proved beyond the question of a doubt that she would have to piece the under-arm sleeve. Simultaneously she wondered if she could do it so skilfully that Mrs. Abram Pantin would not see the piece. Then she frowned in vexation at the realization that it was becoming second nature to wonder what Prissy Pantin would think. Was it possible that there had been a time when she had debated as to whether she wanted to know Mrs. Abram Pantin at all?
When she had married Jap she had thought she was done forever with the miserable poverty and hateful economies that are the lot of the family of a small-town minister; that after years of suppression of opinions and tastes in order not to evoke criticism or give offense, she at last was in a position to assert herself.
And now after a taste of freedom, of power and opulence, here she was back in practically the same position and rapidly developing the same mental attitudetowards those more affluent and, therefore, more socially important than herself. Mrs. Toomey’s thoughts were much the color of the serge into which she slashed.
Finally, after a glance at the clock, she walked to the window to look for her husband. He was not in sight. As she lingered her glance fell on Mormon Joe’s tar-paper shack that set in the middle of the lot on the diagonal corner from their house, and she told herself bitterly that even that drunken renegade, that social pariah, had enough to eat.
Her face brightened as Toomey turned the corner and promptly lengthened when she saw that he was empty-handed and walking with the exaggerated swagger which she was coming to recognize as a sign of failure.
A glimpse of his face as he came in, banged the door, and flung off his hat and coat made her hesitate to speak.
“Well?” he glared at her. “Why don’t you say something?”
“What is there to say, Jap?” meekly. “I see he refused you.”
“Refused me? He insulted me!”
Mrs. Toomey looked hurt.
“What did he say, Jap?”
“He offered me fifteen dollars a week toclerk.”
Toomey resented fiercely the pleased and hopeful expression on his wife’s face, and added:
“I suppose you’d like to see me cutting calico and fishing salt pork out of the brine?”
She ventured timidly:
“I thought you might take it until something worth while turned up.”
“Maybe,” he sneered, “I could get a job swamping in ‘Tinhorn’s’ place—washing fly specks off the windows and sweeping out.”
“Of course, you’re right, Jap,” conciliatingly, but she sighed unconsciously as she went back to her work.
Toomey paced the floor for a time, then sank into his usual place on the sofa. Mrs. Toomey permitted herself to observe sarcastically:
“It’s a wonder to me you don’t get bed sores—the amount of time you spend on the flat of your back.”
“What do you mean by that?” suspiciously. “Do you mean I’m lazy because I didn’t take that job?”
Since she made no denial, conversation ceased, and the silence was broken only by the sound of her scissors upon the table and the howling of the gale.
He smoked cigarette after cigarette in gloomy thought, finally getting up and going to a closet off the kitchen.
“What are you looking for, Jap?” she called as she heard him rummaging.
He did not reply, but evidently found what he sought for he came out presently carrying a shotgun.
“Are you going to try and raffle that?”
Still he did not deign to answer, but preserved his injured air, and getting once more into his hat and coat started off with the martyred manner of a man who has been driven from home.
Mrs. Toomey finally threw down her scissors with a gesture of despair. She was too nervous to do any more. The wind, her anxious thoughts, the exacting task of cutting a suit from an inadequate amount of cloth, was a combination that proved to be too much. She glanced at the clock on the bookcase—only three o’clock! Actually there seemed forty-eight hours in days like this. She stood uncertainly for a moment, then determination settled on her tense worried face. Why put it off any longer? It must be done sooner or later—she was sure of that. Besides, nothing ever was as hard as one anticipates.This was a cheering thought, and the lines in Mrs. Toomey’s forehead smoothed out as she stood before the mirror buttoning her coat and tying a veil over her head.
It took no small amount of physical courage for a person of Mrs. Toomey’s frailty to face such a gale. But with her thin lips in a determined line and her gaze straight ahead, she managed, by tacking judiciously and stopping at intervals to clasp a telephone pole while she recovered her breath, to reach the iron fence imported from Omaha which gave such a look of exclusiveness to the Pantins’ residence.
Mr. Pantin thought he heard the gate slam and peered out through the dead wild-cucumber vines which framed the bow window to see Mrs. Toomey coming up the only cement walk in Prouty. He immediately thrust his stockinged feet back in his comfortable Romeos preparatory to opening the door, but before he got up he stooped and looked again, searchingly. Mr. Pantin was endowed with a gift that was like a sixth sense, which enabled him to detect a borrower as far as his excellent eyesight could see one. This intuition, combined with experience, had been developed to the point of uncanniness. No borrower, however adroit, could hope to conceal from Mr. Pantin for a single instant the real purpose of his call by irrelevant talk and solicitous inquiries about his health. In the present instance it did not require great acumen to guess that something urgent had brought Mrs. Toomey out on a day like this, nor any particular keenness to detect the signs of agitation which Mr. Pantin noted in his swift glance. She was coming to borrow—he was as sure of that as though she already had asked, and if any further confirmation were needed, her unnatural gayetywhen he admitted her and the shortness of her breath finished that.
It availed Mrs. Toomey nothing to tell herself that Mrs. Pantin was her best friend, and that what she was asking was merely a matter of business—the sort of thing that Mr. Pantin was doing every day. Her heart beat ridiculously and she was rather shocked to hear herself laughing shrilly at Mr. Pantin’s banal inquiry as to whether she had not “nearly blown off.” He added in some haste:
“Priscilla’s in the kitchen.”
Mrs. Pantin looked up in surprise at her caller’s entrance.
“How perfectly sweet of you to come out a day like this!” she chirped. “You’ll excuse me if I go on getting dinner? We only have two meals a day when we don’t exercise. This wind—isn’t it dreadful? I haven’t been out of the house for a week.”
She placed two rolls in the warming oven and broke three eggs into a bowl.
“Abram and I are so fond of omelette,” she said, as the egg-beater whirred. “Tell me,” she beamed brightly upon Mrs. Toomey, “what have you been doing with yourself?”
“Priscilla—Prissy—” Mrs. Toomey caught her breath—“I’ve been miserable—and that’s the truth!”
“Why, my dear!” The egg-beater stopped. “Aren’t you well? No wonder—I’m as nervous as a witch myself.” The egg-beater whirred again encouragingly. “You must use your will power—you mustn’t allow yourself to be affected by these external things.”
“It’s not the wind.” Mrs. Toomey’s eyes were swimming now. “I’m worried half to death.”
Mrs. Pantin had not lived twelve years with Abram in vain. A look of suspicion crossed her face, and there was a little less solicitude in her voice as she inquired:
“Is it anything in particular? Bad news from home?”
“It’s money!” Mrs. Toomey blurted out. “We’re dreadfully hard up. I came to see if we could get a loan.”
The egg-beater went on, but the milk of human kindness which, presumably, flowed in Mrs. Pantin’s breast stopped—congealed—froze up tight. Her blue eyes, whose vividness was accentuated as usual by the robin’s egg blue dress she wore, had the warm genial glow radiating from a polar berg. It was, however, only a moment before she recovered herself and was able to say with sweet earnestness:
“I haven’t anything to do with that, my dear. You’ll have to see Mr. Pantin.”
Mrs. Toomey clasped her fingers tightly together and stammered:
“If—if you would speak to him first—I—I thought perhaps—”
Mrs. Pantin’s set society smile was on her small mouth, but the finality of the laws of the Medes and the Persians was in her tone as she replied:
“I never think of interfering with my husband’s business or making suggestions. As fond as I am of you, Delia, you’ll have to ask him yourself.”
Mrs. Toomey had the feeling that they never would be quite on the same footing again. She knew it from the way in which Mrs. Pantin’s eyes travelled from the unbecoming brown veil on her head to her warm but antiquated coat, stopping at her shabby shoes which, instinctively, she drew beneath the hem of her skirt.
To be shabby from carelessness was one thing—to be so from necessity was another, clearly was in Mrs. Pantin’s mind. She had known, of course, of the collapse of their cattle-raising enterprise, but she had not dreamed they were in such a bad way as this. She hoped she was not the sort of person who would let it make any difference in her warm friendship for Delia Toomey; nevertheless, Mrs. Toomey detected the subtle note of patronage in her voice when she said:
“Abram is alone in the living room—you might speak to him.”
“I think I will.” Mrs. Toomey endeavored to repair the mistake she felt she had made by speaking in a tone which implied that a loan was of no great moment after all, but she walked out with the feeling that she used to have in the presence of the more opulent members of her father’s congregation when the flour barrel was low.
Mrs. Toomey was not too agitated to note how immaculate and dainty the dining room table looked with its fine linen and cut glass. There were six dices of apple with a nut on top on the handsome salad plates, and the crystal dessert dishes each held three prunes swimming in their rich juice.
The living-room, too, reflected Mrs. Pantin’s taste. A framed motto extolling the virtues of friendship hung over the mantel and the “Blind Girl of Pompeii” groped her way down the staircase on the neutral-tinted wall. A bookcase filled with sets of the world’s best literature occupied a corner of the room, while ooze leather copies of Henry Van Dyke gave an unmistakable look of culture to the mission table in the center of the room. A handsome leather davenport with a neat row of sofa pillows along the back, which were of Mrs. Pantin’s own handiwork, suggested luxurious ease. But the chief attractionof the room was the brick fireplace with its spotless tiled hearth. One of Mr. Pantin’s diversions was sitting before the glowing coals, whisk and shovel in hand, waiting for an ash to drop.
Seeing Mrs. Toomey, Mr. Pantin again hastily thrust his toes into his slippers—partly because he was cognizant of the fact that no real gentleman will receive a lady in his stocking feet, and partly to conceal the neat but large darn on the toe of one sock. He was courteous amiability itself, and Mrs. Toomey’s hopes shot up.
“I came to have a little talk.”
“Yes?”
Mr. Pantin’s smile deceived her and she plunged on with confidence:
“I—we would like to arrange for a loan, Mr. Pantin.”
“To what amount, Mrs. Toomey?”
Mrs. Toomey considered.
“As much as you could conveniently spare.”
The smile which Mr. Pantin endeavored to conceal was genuine.
“For what length of time?”
Mrs. Toomey had not thought of that.
“I could not say exactly—not off-hand like this—but I presume only until my husband gets into something.”
“Has he—er—anything definite in view?”
“I wouldn’t say definite, not definite, but he has several irons in the fire and we expect to hear soon.”
“I see.” Mr. Pantin’s manner was urbane but, observing him closely, Mrs. Toomey noted that his eyes suddenly presented the curious illusion of two slate-gray pools covered with skim ice. It was not an encouraging sign and her heart sank in spite of the superlative suavity of the tone in which he inquired:
“What security would you be able to give, Mrs. Toomey?”
Security? Between friends? She had not expected this.
“I—I’m afraid I—we haven’t any, Mr. Pantin. You know we lost everything when we lost the ranch. But you’re perfectly safe—you needn’t have a moment’s anxiety about that.”
Immediately it seemed as though invisible hands shot out to push her away, yet Mr. Pantin’s tone was bland as he replied:
“I should be delighted to be able to accommodate you, but just at the present time—”
“You can’t? Oh, I wish you would reconsider—as a matter of friendship. We need it—desperately, Mr. Pantin!” Her voice shook.
Again she had the sensation of invisible hands fighting her off.
“I regret very much—”
The hopelessness of any further plea swept over her. She arose with a gesture of despair, and Mr. Pantin, smiling, suave, urbane, bowed her out and closed the door. He watched her go down the walk and through the gate, noting her momentary hesitation and wondering where she might be going in such a wind. When she started in the opposite direction from home and walked rapidly down the road that led out of town it flashed through his mind that she might be bent on suicide—she had looked desperate, no mistake, but, since there was no water in which to drown herself, and no tree from which to hang herself, and the country was so flat that there was nothing high enough for her to jump off of and break her neck, he concluded there was no real cause for uneasiness.
It was Mr. Pantin’s proud boast that he never yet had“held the sack,” and now he thought complacently as he turned from the window, grabbed the shovel and whisk and leaped for an ash that had dropped, that this was an instance where he had again shown excellent judgment in not allowing his warm heart and impulses to control his head.
CHAPTER VIITHE BLOOD OF JEZEBEL
The prognostication made by the citizens of Prouty that it was “gettin’ ready for somethin’” seemed about to be verified out on the sheep range twenty miles distant, for at five o’clock one afternoon the wind stopped as suddenly as it had arisen and heavy snow clouds came out of the northeast with incredible swiftness.
Mormon Joe walked to the door of the cook tent and swept the darkening hills with anxious eyes. Kate should have been back long before this. He always had a dread of her horse falling on her and hurting her too badly to get back. That was about all there was to fear in summer time, but to-night there was the coming storm.
Kate’s sense of direction was remarkable, but the most experienced plainsman would be apt to lose himself in these foothills, with the snow falling thick and the night so black he could not see his hand before his face.
Mormon Joe shook his head and turned back to his task of peeling potatoes. While he worked he reproached himself that he had not hunted those horses himself; but she had been so insistent upon going. She did not mind the wind, she had said, but then she did not “mind” anything, when it came to that. What would have been hardships for another were merely adventures to her.
At any rate, Kate was more comfortable now than she had been the year before. He smiled a little as he recalledher delight in the sheep wagon which he had given her to be her own quarters. He had had to borrow the money at the bank in addition to what he already had borrowed for running expenses, but his circumstances justified it. He was getting ahead, not with phenomenal rapidity, but satisfactorily. With the leases, and the land he owned, he was building the future upon a substantial foundation. A few years more of economy and attention to business and he could give Kate the advantages he wished. He listened, got up from the condensed-milk box upon which he sat and walked to the entrance of the tent once more. He strained his ears, but death itself was not more still than the opaque night.
Kate had left immediately after breakfast, and since the horses had only a few hours’ start and would probably feed as they went, she had expected to be back by noon.
Kate was exceedingly resourceful—she knew what to do if caught out, he assured himself, unless she had been hurt. It was this thought that gave him a curious stillness at his heart. What would life be without her now? With the knife in his hand he stopped as he turned inside and stared at the potatoes on the box. He never had thought of that before—it left him aghast.
The girl had twined herself into every fiber of his nature from the time she had come to him as a child. She was identified with every hope. Humph! He knew well enough what the answer would be if anything happened to Kate. He would shoot the chutes, again—quick. It was she who had awakened his ambition and kept him tolerably straight. Without her? Humph!
He stoked the sheet-iron camp stove, put the potatoes to boil, cut chops enough for two and laid the table with the steel knives and forks and tin plates. Then he set out a tin of molasses and the sour-dough bread, afterwhich there was nothing to do but wait for the potatoes to boil, and for Kate.
He was trying the potatoes with a fork when he raised his head sharply. He was sure he heard the rattle of rocks. A faint whoop followed.
“Thank God!” He breathed the ejaculation fervently, yet he said merely as he stood in the entrance puffing his pipe as she rode up, “Got ’em, I see, Katie!”
“Sure. Don’t I always get what I go after?” Then, with a tired laugh, “I’m disappointed; I thought you would be worried about me.”
He smiled quizzically.
“I don’t know why you’d think that.”
“I’ll know better next time,” she replied good-humoredly, as she swung down with obvious weariness.
“There won’t be any next time,'” he replied abruptly, “at least not at this season of the year.”
“Oh, but I’m glad I went,” she interposed hastily.
As Mormon Joe unwrapped the lead-rope from the saddle horn and took the horses away to picket, he wondered what wonderful adventure she would have to relate, for she seemed able to extract entertainment from nearly anything. By the time he returned she had removed her hat, gloves and spurs, washed her dust-streaked face, smoothed her hair, slipped on an enveloping apron over her riding clothes and had the chops frying.
The sight warmed his heart as he paused for a moment outside the circle of light which came through the entrance.
He had seen the same thing often before, but it never had impressed him particularly. Her presence in the canvas tent made the difference between home and a mere shelter. The small crumbs of bread he had cast upon the water were indeed coming back to him.
“I’ve ridden over forty miles since morning,” she chattered, while he flung the snow flakes from his hat brim and brushed them from his shoulders. “The wind blew the horses’ tracks out so I couldn’t follow them. I never caught sight of them until just this side of Prouty. You can sit down, Uncle Joe—everything’s ready.”
They talked of the coming snowstorm, and the advisability of holding the sheep on the bed-ground if it should be a bad one; of the trip to town that he was contemplating; of the coyote that was bothering and the possibility of trapping him. There was no dearth of topics of mutual interest. Nevertheless, Mormon Joe knew that she was holding something in reserve and wondered at this reticence. It came finally when they had finished and still lingered at the table.
“Who do you suppose I met to-day when I was hunting horses?”
“Teeters?” Mormon Joe was tearing a leaf from his book of cigarette papers.
“Guess again.”
He shook his head.
“Can’t imagine.”
She announced impressively:
“Mrs. Toomey!”
He was distributing tobacco from the sack upon the crease in the paper with exactitude. He made no comment, so Kate said with increased emphasis:
“She was crying!”
Still he was silent, and she demanded:
“Aren’t you surprised?”
She looked crestfallen, so he asked obligingly:
“Where did all of this happen?”
“In a draw a couple of miles this side of Prouty, where I found the horses. They had gone there to get out ofthe wind and it was by only a chance that I rode down into it.
“She was in the bottom, huddled against a rock, and didn’t see me until I was nearly on her. I thought she was sick—she looked terrible.”
“And was she?”
“No—she was worried.”
“Naturally. Any woman would be who married Toomey.”
“About money.”
“Indeed.” His tone and smile were ironic.
Kate, a trifle disconcerted, continued:
“He’s had bad luck.”
“He’s had the best opportunities of any man who’s come into the country.”
“Anyway,” she faltered, “they haven’t a penny except when they sell something.”
He shrugged a shoulder, then asked teasingly:
“Well—what were you thinking of doing about it?”
“I said—I promised,” she blurted it out bluntly, “that we’d loan them money.”
“What!” incredulously.
“I did, Uncle Joe.”
He answered with a frown of annoyance:
“You exceeded your authority, Katie.”
“But you will, won’t you?” she pleaded. “You’ve never refused me anything that I really wanted badly, and I’ve never asked much, have I?”
“No, girl, you haven’t,” he replied gently. “And there’s hardly anything you could ask, within reason, that wouldn’t be granted.”
“But they only need five hundred until he gets into something. You could let them have that, couldn’t you?”
His face and eyes hardened.
“I could, but I won’t,” he replied curtly.
When Prouty was in its infancy, certain citizens had been misled by Mormon Joe’s mild eyes, low voice and quiet manner. His easy-going exterior concealed an incredible hardness upon occasions, but this was Kate’s first knowledge of it. He never had displayed the slightest authority. In any difference, when he had not yielded to her good-naturedly, they had argued it out as though they were in reality partners. At another time she would have been wounded by his brusque refusal, but to-night it angered her. Because of her intense eagerness and confidence that she had only to ask him, it came as the keenest of disappointments. This together with her fatigue combined to produce a display of temper as unusual in her as Mormon Joe’s own attitude.
“But I promised!” she cried, impatiently. “And you’ve told me I must always keep my promise, 'if it takes the hide'!”
“You exceeded your authority,” he reiterated. “You’ve no right to promise what doesn’t belong to you.”
“Then it’s all ‘talk’ about our being partners,” she said, sneeringly. “You don’t mean a word of it.”
“You shan’t make a fool of yourself, Katie, if I can help it,” he retorted.
“Because you don’t care for friends, you don’t want me to have any!” she flung at him hotly.
He was silent a long time, thinking, while she waited angrily, then he responded quietly and with obvious effort:
“That’s where you’re mistaken, Katie. If I have one regret it is that in the past I have not more deliberately cultivated the friendship of true men and gentle women when I have had the opportunity. It doesn’t make muchdifference whether they are brilliant or rich or successful, if only they are true-hearted. Loyalty is the great attribute—but,” and he shrugged a shoulder, “it is my judgment that you will not find it in that quarter.”
“You’re prejudiced.”
“It is my privilege to have an opinion,” he replied coldly.
“We were going to be friends—Mrs. Toomey and I—we shook hands on it!” Tears of angry disappointment were close to the surface.
He replied, doggedly:
“If you have to buy your friendships, Katie, you’d better keep your money.”
The speech stung her. She glared at him across the narrow table, and, in the moment, each had a sense of unreality. The quarrel was like a bolt from the blue, as startling and unexpected—as most quarrels are—the bitterest and most lasting. Then she sprang to her feet and hurled a taunt at him some Imp of Darkness must have suggested:
“You’re jealous!” She stamped a foot at him. “That’s the real reason. You’re jealous of everybody that would be friends with me! You’re jealous of Hughie. You didn’t like his coming here and you don’t like his writing to me! Ihateyou—I won’t stay any longer!” It was the blood of Jezebel of the Sand Coulee talking, and there was the look of her mother on the girl’s face, in her reckless, uncontrolled fury.
Mormon Joe winced, exactly as though she had struck him. He sat quite still while the color faded, leaving his face bloodless. Kate never had known anything like the white rage it depicted. Persons at the Sand Coulee who lost their temper cursed volubly and loudly, and threatened or made bodily attacks upon the cause of it. In spiteof herself she shrank a little as he, too, got up slowly and faced her. She didn’t know him at all—this man who first threw his cigarette away carefully, as though he were in a drawing room and must regard the ashes—he was a personality from an environment with which she was unfamiliar. Then, as though she were his equal in years, experience and intelligence, he spoke to her in a tone that was cool and impersonal, yet which went slash! slash! slash! like the fine, deep, quick cut of a razor.
“I had no notion that you entertained any such feeling towards me. It is something in the nature of a—er—revelation. You are quite right about leaving. Upon second thought, you are quite right about everything—right to keep your promise to Mrs. Toomey, since you gave it, right in your assertion that I am jealous. I am—but not in the sense in which you mean it.
“I have been jealous of your dignity—of the respect that is due you. I have resented keenly any attempt to belittle you. That is why Disston was not welcome when he came to see you. It is the reason why I have not shown a pleasure I did not feel in his writing you!”
“What do you mean?” she demanded.
“I mean that he took you to that dance on a wager—a bet—to prove that he had the courage. To make a spectacle of you—for a story with which to regale his friends and laugh over.”
She groped for the edge of the table.
“Who told you?”
“Toomey.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“Teeters verified it.”
She sat down on the box from which she had risen.
Unmoved by the blow he had dealt her, he continued:
“You went to that dance against my wishes. What Iexpected to happen did happen, though you did not choose to tell me.
“In my descent through various strata of society I have learned something of types and of human nature. In protesting, my only thought was to save you pain and disappointment—as in this instance—but experience, it seems, is the only teacher.
“To-morrow I am going to Prouty, hire a herder to do your work and mortgage the outfit for half its value. It will be yours to use as it pleases you. You have earned it. Then,” with a gesture of finality, “the door is open to you. I want you to go where you will be happy.”
With his usual deliberation of movement he put on his hat and went out to change the horses on picket, while Kate, stunned by the incredible crisis and the revelation concerning Hugh Disston, sat where she had dropped, staring at the agate-ware platter upon which the mutton grease was hardening.
It was Mormon Joe’s invariable custom to help her with the dishes, but he did not return, so she arose, finally, and set the food away automatically, with the unseeing look of a hypnotic subject. She washed the dishes and dried them, trying to realize that she would be leaving this shortly—that there would be a last time in the immediate future. Her anger was lost in grief and amazement. There was something so implacable, so steel-like in Mormon Joe’s hardness that it did not occur to her to plead with him for forgiveness. And Hughie! She told herself that she could not turn to a traitor for help or sympathy. She blew out the lantern, tied the tent flap behind her, and ran through the fast falling snow to her wagon.
Kate dozed towards morning after a sleepless night of wretchedness and was awakened by a horse’s whinny.Listening a moment, she sprang out and looked through the upper half of the door which opened on hinges. It was a white world that she saw, with some four inches of snow on the level, though the fall had ceased and it was colder. Mormon Joe, dressed warmly in leather “chaps” and sheep-lined coat, was riding away on one of the work horses.
Never since they had been together had he gone to Prouty without some word of farewell—careless and casual, but unfailing. Nor could she remember when he had not turned in the saddle and waved at her before they lost sight of each other altogether. This time she waited vainly. He went without looking behind him, while she stood in the cold watching his peaked high-crowned hat bobbing through the giant sagebrush until it vanished. She had thrust out a hand to detain him—to call after him—and had withdrawn it. Her pride would not yet permit her to act as her heart prompted.