Dick Forrest proved himself no prodigy at the university, save that he cut more lectures the first year than any other student. The reason for this was that he did not need the lectures he cut, and he knew it. His coaches, while preparing him for the entrance examinations, had carried him nearly through the first college year. Incidentally, he made the Freshman team, a very scrub team, that was beaten by every high school and academy it played against.
But Dick did put in work that nobody saw. His collateral reading was wide and deep, and when he went on his first summer cruise in the ocean-going gasoline yacht he had built no gay young crowd accompanied him. Instead, his guests, with their families, were professors of literature, history, jurisprudence, and philosophy. It was long remembered in the university as the “high-brow” cruise. The professors, on their return, reported a most enjoyable time. Dick returned with a greater comprehension of the general fields of the particular professors than he could have gained in years at their class-lectures. And time thus gained, enabled him to continue to cut lectures and to devote more time to laboratory work.
Nor did he miss having his good college time. College widows made love to him, and college girls loved him, and he was indefatigable in his dancing. He never cut a smoker, a beer bust, or a rush, and he toured the Pacific Coast with the Banjo and Mandolin Club.
And yet he was no prodigy. He was brilliant at nothing. Half a dozen of his fellows could out-banjo and out-mandolin him. A dozen fellows were adjudged better dancers than he. In football, and he gained the Varsity in his Sophomore year, he was considered a solid and dependable player, and that was all. It seemed never his luck to take the ball and go down the length of the field while the Blue and Gold host tore itself and the grandstand to pieces. But it was at the end of heart-breaking, grueling slog in mud and rain, the score tied, the second half imminent to its close, Stanford on the five-yard line, Berkeley’s ball, with two downs and three yards to gain—it was then that the Blue and Gold arose and chanted its demand for Forrest to hit the center and hit it hard.
He never achieved super-excellence at anything. Big Charley Everson drank him down at the beer busts. Harrison Jackson, at hammer-throwing, always exceeded his best by twenty feet. Carruthers out-pointed him at boxing. Anson Burge could always put his shoulders to the mat, two out of three, but always only by the hardest work. In English composition a fifth of his class excelled him. Edlin, the Russian Jew, out-debated him on the contention that property was robbery. Schultz and Debret left him with the class behind in higher mathematics; and Otsuki, the Japanese, was beyond all comparison with him in chemistry.
But if Dick Forrest did not excel at anything, he failed in nothing. He displayed no superlative strength, he betrayed no weakness nor deficiency. As he told his guardians, who, by his unrelenting good conduct had been led into dreaming some great career for him; as he told them, when they asked what he wanted to become:
“Nothing. Just all around. You see, I don’t have to be a specialist. My father arranged that for me when he left me his money. Besides, I couldn’t be a specialist if I wanted to. It isn’t me.”
And thus so well-keyed was he, that he expressed clearly his key. He had no flare for anything. He was that rare individual, normal, average, balanced, all-around.
When Mr. Davidson, in the presence of his fellow guardians, stated his pleasure in that Dick had shown no wildness since he had settled down, Dick replied:
“Oh, I can hold myself when I want to.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Slocum gravely. “It’s the finest thing in the world that you sowed your wild oats early and learned control.”
Dick looked at him curiously.
“Why, that boyish adventure doesn’t count,” he said. “That wasn’t wildness. I haven’t gone wild yet. But watch me when I start. Do you know Kipling’s ‘Song of Diego Valdez’? Let me quote you a bit of it. You see, Diego Valdez, like me, had good fortune. He rose so fast to be High Admiral of Spain that he found no time to take the pleasure he had merely tasted. He was lusty and husky, but he had no time, being too busy rising. But always, he thought, he fooled himself with the thought, that his lustiness and huskiness would last, and, after he became High Admiral he could then have his pleasure. Always he remembered:
“’—comrades—Old playmates on new seas—When as we traded orpimentAmong the savages—A thousand leagues to south’ardAnd thirty years removed—They knew not noble Valdez,But me they knew and loved.
“’Then they that found good liquorThey drank it not alone,And they that found fair plunder,They told us every one,Behind our chosen islandsOr secret shoals between,When, walty from far voyage,We gathered to careen.
“’There burned our breaming-fagots,All pale along the shore:There rose our worn pavilions—A sail above an oar:As flashed each yearning anchorThrough mellow seas afire,So swift our careless captainsRowed each to his desire.
“’Where lay our loosened harness?Where turned our naked feet?Whose tavern mid the palm-trees?What quenchings of what heat?Oh fountain in the desert!Oh cistern in the waste!Oh bread we ate in secret!Oh cup we spilled in haste!
“’The youth new-taught of longing,The widow curbed and wan—The good wife proud at season,And the maid aware of man;All souls, unslaked, consuming,Defrauded in delays,Desire not more than quittanceThan I those forfeit days!’
“Oh, get him, get him, you three oldsters, as I’ve got him! Get what he saws next:
“’I dreamed to wait my pleasure,Unchanged my spring would bide:Wherefore, to wait my pleasure,I put my spring aside,Till, first in face of Fortune,And last in mazed disdain,I made Diego ValdezHigh Admiral of Spain!’
“Listen to me, guardians!” Dick cried on, his face a flame of passion. “Don’t forget for one moment that I am anything but unslaked, consuming. I am. I burn. But I hold myself. Don’t think I am a dead one because I am a darn nice, meritorious boy at college. I am young. I am alive. I am all lusty and husky. But I make no mistake. I hold myself. I don’t start out now to blow up on the first lap. I am just getting ready. I am going to have my time. I am not going to spill my cup in haste. And in the end I am not going to lament as Diego Valdez did:
“’There walks no wind ’neath heavenNor wave that shall restoreThe old careening riotAnd the clamorous, crowded shore—The fountain in the desert,The cistern in the waste,The bread we ate in secret,The cup we spilled in haste.’
“Listen, guardians! Do you know what it is to hit your man, to hit him in hot blood—square to the jaw—and drop him cold? I want that. And I want to love, and kiss, and risk, and play the lusty, husky fool. I want to take my chance. I want my careening riot, and I want it while I am young, but not while I am too young. And I’m going to have it. And in the meantime I play the game at college, I hold myself, I equip myself, so that when I turn loose I am going to have the best chance of my best. Oh, believe me, I do not always sleep well of nights.”
“You mean?” queried Mr. Crockett.
“Sure. That’s just what I mean. I haven’t gone wild yet, but just watch me when I start.”
“And you will start when you graduate?”
The remarkable youngster shook his head.
“After I graduate I’m going to take at least a year of post-graduate courses in the College of Agriculture. You see, I’m developing a hobby—farming. I want to do something ... something constructive. My father wasn’t constructive to amount to anything. Neither were you fellows. You struck a new land in pioneer days, and you picked up money like a lot of sailors shaking out nuggets from the grass roots in a virgin placer—”
“My lad, I’ve some little experience in Californian farming,” Mr. Crockett interrupted in a hurt way.
“Sure you have, but you weren’t constructive. You were—well, facts are facts—you were destructive. You were a bonanza farmer. What did you do? You took forty thousand acres of the finest Sacramento Valley soil and you grew wheat on it year after year. You never dreamed of rotation. You burned your straw. You exhausted your humus. You plowed four inches and put a plow-sole like a cement sidewalk just four inches under the surface. You exhausted that film of four inches and now you can’t get your seed back.
“You’ve destroyed. That’s what my father did. They all did it. Well, I’m going to take my father’s money and construct. I’m going to take worked-out wheat-land that I can buy as at a fire-sale, rip out the plow-sole, and make it produce more in the end than it did when you fellows first farmed it.”
It was at the end of his Junior year that Mr. Crockett again mentioned Dick’s threatened period of wildness.
“Soon as I’m done with cow college,” was his answer. “Then I’m going to buy, and stock, and start a ranch that’ll be a ranch. And then I’ll set out after my careening riot.”
“About how large a ranch will you start with?” Mr. Davidson asked.
“Maybe fifty thousand acres, maybe five hundred thousand. It all depends. I’m going to play unearned increment to the limit. People haven’t begun to come to California yet. Without a tap of my hand or a turn over, fifteen years from now land that I can buy for ten dollars an acre will be worth fifty, and what I can buy for fifty will be worth five hundred.”
“A half million acres at ten dollars an acre means five million dollars,” Mr. Crockett warned gravely.
“And at fifty it means twenty-five million,” Dick laughed.
But his guardians never believed in the wild oats pilgrimage he threatened. He might waste his fortune on new-fangled farming, but to go literally wild after such years of self-restraint was an unthinkable thing.
Dick took his sheepskin with small honor. He was twenty-eighth in his class, and he had not set the college world afire. His most notable achievement had been his resistance and bafflement of many nice girls and of the mothers of many nice girls. Next, after that, he had signalized his Senior year by captaining the Varsity to its first victory over Stanford in five years. It was in the day prior to large-salaried football coaches, when individual play meant much; but he hammered team-work and the sacrifice of the individual into his team, so that on Thanksgiving Day, over a vastly more brilliant eleven, the Blue and Gold was able to serpentine its triumph down Market Street in San Francisco.
In his post-graduate year in cow college, Dick devoted himself to laboratory work and cut all lectures. In fact, he hired his own lecturers, and spent a sizable fortune on them in mere traveling expenses over California. Jacques Ribot, esteemed one of the greatest world authorities on agricultural chemistry, who had been seduced from his two thousand a year in France by the six thousand offered by the University of California, who had been seduced to Hawaii by the ten thousand of the sugar planters, Dick Forrest seduced with fifteen thousand and the more delectable temperate climate of California on a five years’ contract.
Messrs. Crockett, Slocum, and Davidson threw up their hands in horror and knew that this was the wild career Dick Forrest had forecast.
But this was only one of Dick Forrest’s similar dissipations. He stole from the Federal Government, at a prodigal increase of salary, its star specialist in livestock breeding, and by similar misconduct he robbed the University of Nebraska of its greatest milch cow professor, and broke the heart of the Dean of the College of Agriculture of the University of California by appropriating Professor Nirdenhammer, the wizard of farm management.
“Cheap at the price, cheap at the price,” Dick explained to his guardians. “Wouldn’t you rather see me spend my money in buying professors than in buying race horses and actresses? Besides, the trouble with you fellows is that you don’t know the game of buying brains. I do. That’s my specialty. I’m going to make money out of them, and, better than that, I’m going to make a dozen blades of grass grow where you fellows didn’t leave room for half a blade in the soil you gutted.”
So it can be understood how his guardians could not believe in his promise of wild career, of kissing and risking, and hitting men hot on the jaw. “One year more,” he warned, while he delved in agricultural chemistry, soil analysis, farm management, and traveled California with his corps of high-salaried experts. And his guardians could only apprehend a swift and wide dispersal of the Forrest millions when Dick attained his majority, took charge of the totality of his fortune, and actually embarked on his agricultural folly.
The day he was twenty-one the purchase of his principality, that extended west from the Sacramento River to the mountain tops, was consummated.
“An incredible price,” said Mr. Crockett.
“Incredibly cheap,” said Dick. “You ought to see my soil reports. You ought to see my water-reports. And you ought to hear me sing. Listen, guardians, to a song that is a true song. I am the singer and the song.”
Whereupon, in the queer quavering falsetto that is the sense of song to the North American Indian, the Eskimo, and the Mongol, Dick sang:
“Hu’-tim yo’-kim koi-o-di’!Wi’-hi yan’-ning koi-o-di’!Lo’-whi yan’-ning koi-o-di’!Yo-ho’ Nai-ni’, hal-u’-dom yo nai, yo-ho’ nai-nim’!”
“The music is my own,” he murmured apologetically, “the way I think it ought to have sounded. You see, no man lives who ever heard it sung. The Nishinam got it from the Maidu, who got it from the Konkau, who made it. But the Nishinam and the Maidu and the Konkau are gone. Their last rancheria is not. You plowed it under, Mr. Crockett, with you bonanza gang-plowing, plow-soling farming. And I got the song from a certain ethnological report, volume three, of the United States Pacific Coast Geographical and Geological Survey. Red Cloud, who was formed out of the sky, first sang this song to the stars and the mountain flowers in the morning of the world. I shall now sing it for you in English.”
And again, in Indian falsetto, ringing with triumph, vernal and bursting, slapping his thighs and stamping his feet to the accent, Dick sang:
“The acorns come down from heaven!I plant the short acorns in the valley!I plant the long acorns in the valley!I sprout, I, the black-oak acorn, sprout, I sprout!”
Dick Forrest’s name began to appear in the newspapers with appalling frequency. He leaped to instant fame by being the first man in California who paid ten thousand dollars for a single bull. His livestock specialist, whom he had filched from the Federal Government, in England outbid the Rothschilds’ Shire farm for Hillcrest Chieftain, quickly to be known as Forrest’s Folly, paying for that kingly animal no less than five thousand guineas.
“Let them laugh,” Dick told his ex-guardians. “I am importing forty Shire mares. I’ll write off half his price the first twelvemonth. He will be the sire and grandsire of many sons and grandsons for which the Californians will fall over themselves to buy of me at from three to five thousand dollars a clatter.”
Dick Forrest was guilty of many similar follies in those first months of his majority. But the most unthinkable folly of all was, after he had sunk millions into his original folly, that he turned it over to his experts personally to develop along the general broad lines laid down by him, placed checks upon them that they might not go catastrophically wrong, bought a ticket in a passenger brig to Tahiti, and went away to run wild.
Occasionally his guardians heard from him. At one time he was owner and master of a four-masted steel sailing ship that carried the English flag and coals from Newcastle. They knew that much, because they had been called upon for the purchase price, because they read Dick’s name in the papers as master when his ship rescued the passengers of the ill-fatedOrion, and because they collected the insurance when Dick’s ship was lost with most of all hands in the great Fiji hurricane. In 1896, he was in the Klondike; in 1897, he was in Kamchatka and scurvy-stricken; and, next, he erupted with the American flag into the Philippines. Once, although they could never learn how nor why, he was owner and master of a crazy tramp steamer, long since rejected by Lloyd’s, which sailed under the aegis of Siam.
From time to time business correspondence compelled them to hear from him from various purple ports of the purple seas. Once, they had to bring the entire political pressure of the Pacific Coast to bear upon Washington in order to get him out of a scrape in Russia, of which affair not one line appeared in the daily press, but which affair was secretly provocative of ticklish joy and delight in all the chancellories of Europe.
Incidentally, they knew that he lay wounded in Mafeking; that he pulled through a bout with yellow fever in Guayaquil; and that he stood trial for brutality on the high seas in New York City. Thrice they read in the press dispatches that he was dead: once, in battle, in Mexico; and twice, executed, in Venezuela. After such false flutterings, his guardians refused longer to be thrilled when he crossed the Yellow Sea in a sampan, was “rumored” to have died of beri-beri, was captured from the Russians by the Japanese at Mukden, and endured military imprisonment in Japan.
The one thrill of which they were still capable, was when, true to promise, thirty years of age, his wild oats sown, he returned to California with a wife to whom, as he announced, he had been married several years, and whom all his three guardians found they knew. Mr. Slocum had dropped eight hundred thousand along with the totality of her father’s fortune in the final catastrophe at the Los Cocos mine in Chihuahua when the United States demonetized silver. Mr. Davidson had pulled a million out of the Last Stake along with her father when he pulled eight millions from that sunken, man-resurrected, river bed in Amador County. Mr. Crockett, a youth at the time, had “spooned” the Merced bottom with her father in the late ’fifties, had stood up best man with him at Stockton when he married her mother, and, at Grant’s Pass, had played poker with him and with the then Lieutenant U.S. Grant when all the little the western world knew of that young lieutenant was that he was a good Indian fighter but a poor poker player.
And Dick Forrest had married the daughter of Philip Desten! It was not a case of wishing Dick luck. It was a case of garrulous insistence on the fact that he did not know how lucky he was. His guardians forgave him all his wildness. He had made good. At last he had performed a purely rational act. Better; it was a stroke of genius. Paula Desten! Philip Desten’s daughter! The Desten blood! The Destens and the Forrests! It was enough. The three aged comrades of Forrest and Desten of the old Gold Days, of the two who had played and passed on, were even severe with Dick. They warned him of the extreme value of his treasure, of the sacred duty such wedlock imposed on him, of all the traditions and virtues of the Desten and Forrest blood, until Dick laughed and broke in with the disconcerting statement that they were talking like a bunch of fanciers or eugenics cranks—which was precisely what they were talking like, although they did not care to be told so crassly.
At any rate, the simple fact that he had married a Desten made them nod unqualified approbation when he showed them the plans and building estimates of the Big House. Thanks to Paula Desten, for once they were agreed that he was spending wisely and well. As for his farming, it was incontestible that the Harvest Group was unfalteringly producing, and he might be allowed his hobbies. Nevertheless, as Mr. Slocum put it: “Twenty-five thousand dollars for a mere work-horse stallion is a madness. Work-horses are work-horses; now had it been running stock....”
While Dick Forrest scanned the pamphlet on hog cholera issued by the State of Iowa, through his open windows, across the wide court, began to come sounds of the awakening of the girl who laughed from the wooden frame by his bed and who had left on the floor of his sleeping porch, not so many hours before, the rosy, filmy, lacy, boudoir cap so circumspectly rescued by Oh My.
Dick heard her voice, for she awoke, like a bird, with song. He heard her trilling, in and out through open windows, all down the long wing that was hers. And he heard her singing in the patio garden, where, also, she desisted long enough to quarrel with her Airedale and scold the collie pup unholily attracted by the red-orange, divers-finned, and many-tailed Japanese goldfish in the fountain basin.
He was aware of pleasure that she was awake. It was a pleasure that never staled. Always, up himself for hours, he had a sense that the Big House was not really awake until he heard Paula’s morning song across the patio.
But having tasted the pleasure of knowing her to be awake, Dick, as usual, forgot her in his own affairs. She went out of his consciousness as he became absorbed again in the Iowa statistics on hog cholera.
“Good morning, Merry Gentleman,” was the next he heard, always adorable music in his ears; and Paula flowed in upon him, all softness of morning kimono and stayless body, as her arm passed around his neck and she perched, half in his arms, on one accommodating knee of his. And he pressed her, and advertised his awareness of her existence and nearness, although his eyes lingered a full half minute longer on the totals of results of Professor Kenealy’s hog inoculations on Simon Jones’ farm at Washington, Iowa.
“My!” she protested. “You are too fortunate. You are sated with riches. Here is your Lady Boy, your ‘little haughty moon,’ and you haven’t even said, ’Good morning, Little Lady Boy, was your sleep sweet and gentle?’”
And Dick Forrest forsook the statistical columns of Professor Kenealy’s inoculations, pressed his wife closer, kissed her, but with insistent right fore-finger maintained his place in the pages of the pamphlet.
Nevertheless, the very terms of her “reproof prevented him from asking what he should have asked—the prosperity of her night since the boudoir cap had been left upon his sleeping porch. He shut the pamphlet on his right fore-finger, at the place he intended to resume, and added his right arm to his left about her.
“Oh!” she cried. “Oh! Oh! Listen!”
From without came the flute-calls of quail. She quivered against him with the joy she took in the mellow-sweet notes.
“The coveys are breaking up,” he said.
“It means spring,” Paula cried.
“And the sign that good weather has come.”
“And love!”
“And nest-building and egg-laying,” Dick laughed. “Never has the world seemed more fecund than this morning. Lady Isleton is farrowed of eleven. The angoras were brought down this morning for the kidding. You should have seen them. And the wild canaries have been discussing matrimony in the patio for hours. I think some free lover is trying to break up their monogamic heaven with modern love-theories. It’s a wonder you slept through the discussion. Listen! There they go now. Is that applause? Or is it a riot?”
Arose a thin twittering, like elfin pipings, with sharp pitches and excited shrillnesses, to which Dick and Paula lent delighted ears, till, suddenly, with the abruptness of the trump of doom, all the microphonic chorus of the tiny golden lovers was swept away, obliterated, in a Gargantuan blast of sound—no less wild, no less musical, no less passionate with love, but immense, dominant, compelling by very vastitude of volume.
The eager eyes of the man and woman sought instantly the channel past open French windows and the screen of the sleeping porch to the road through the lilacs, while they waited breathlessly for the great stallion to appear who trumpeted his love-call before him. Again, unseen, he trumpeted, and Dick said:
“I will sing you a song, my haughty moon. It is not my song. It is the Mountain Lad’s. It is what he nickers. Listen! He sings it again. This is what he says: ’Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills. I fill the wide valleys. The mares hear me, and startle, in quiet pastures; for they know me. The grass grows rich and richer, the land is filled with fatness, and the sap is in the trees. It is the spring. The spring is mine. I am monarch of my kingdom of the spring. The mares remember my voice. They know me aforetime through their mothers before them. Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills, and the wide valleys are my heralds, echoing the sound of my approach.’”
And Paula pressed closer to her husband, and was pressed, as her lips touched his forehead, and as the pair of them, gazing at the empty road among the lilacs, saw it filled with the eruptive vision of Mountain Lad, majestic and mighty, the gnat-creature of a man upon his back absurdly small; his eyes wild and desirous, with the blue sheen that surfaces the eyes of stallions; his mouth, flecked with the froth and fret of high spirit, now brushed to burnished knees of impatience, now tossed skyward to utterance of that vast, compelling call that shook the air.
Almost as an echo, from afar off, came a thin-sweet answering whinney.
“It is the Fotherington Princess,” Paula breathed softly.
Again Mountain Lad trumpeted his call, and Dick chanted:
“Hear me! I am Eros! I stamp upon the hills!”
And almost, for a flash of an instant, circled soft and close in his arms, Paula knew resentment of her husband’s admiration for the splendid beast. And the next instant resentment vanished, and, in acknowledgment of due debt, she cried gaily:
“And now, Red Cloud! the Song of the Acorn!” Dick glanced half absently to her from the pamphlet folded on his finger, and then, with equal pitch of gaiety, sang:
“The acorns come down from heaven!I plant the short acorns in the valley!I plant the long acorns in the valley!I sprout, I, the black-oak acorn, sprout, I sprout!”
She had impressed herself very close against him during his moment of chanting, but, in the first moments that succeeded she felt the restless movement of the hand that held the finger-marked hog-pamphlet and caught the swift though involuntary flash of his eye to the clock on his desk that marked 11:25. Again she tried to hold him, although, with equal involuntariness, her attempt was made in mild terms of resentment.
“You are a strange and wonderful Red Cloud,” she said slowly. “Sometimes almost am I convinced that you are utterly Red Cloud, planting your acorns and singing your savage joy of the planting. And, sometimes, almost you are to me the ultramodern man, the last word of the two-legged, male human that finds Trojan adventures in sieges of statistics, and, armed with test tubes and hypodermics, engages in gladiatorial contests with weird microorganisms. Almost, at times, it seems you should wear glasses and be bald-headed; almost, it seems....”
“That I have no right of vigor to possess an armful of girl,” he completed for her, drawing her still closer. ”That I am a silly scientific brute who doesn’t merit his ’vain little breath of sweet rose-colored dust.’ Well, listen, I have a plan. In a few days....”
But his plan died in birth, for, at their backs, came a discreet cough of warning, and, both heads turning as one they saw Bonbright, the assistant secretary, with a sheaf of notes on yellow sheets in his hand.
“Four telegrams,” he murmured apologetically. “Mr. Blake is confident that two of them are very important. One of them concerns that Chile shipment of bulls....”
And Paula, slowly drawing away from her husband and rising to her feet, could feel him slipping from her toward his tables of statistics, bills of lading, and secretaries, foremen, and managers.
“Oh, Paula,” Dick called, as she was fading through the doorway; “I’ve christened the last boy—he’s to be known as ‘Oh Ho.’ How do you like it?”
Her reply began with a hint of forlornness that vanished with her smile, as she warned:
“Youwillplay ducks and drakes with the house-boys’ names.”
“I never do it with pedigreed stock,” he assured her with a solemnity belied by the challenging twinkle in his eyes.
“I didn’t mean that,” was her retort. “I meant that you were exhausting the possibilities of the language. Before long you’ll have to be calling them Oh Bel, Oh Hell, and Oh Go to Hell. Your ‘Oh’ was a mistake. You should have started with ‘Red.’ Then you could have had Red Bull, Red Horse, Red Dog, Red Frog, Red Fern—and, and all the rest of the reds.”
She mingled her laughter with his, as she vanished, and, the next moment, the telegram before him, he was immersed in the details of the shipment, at two hundred and fifty dollars each, F. O. B., of three hundred registered yearling bulls to the beef ranges of Chile. Even so, vaguely, with vague pleasure, he heard Paula sing her way back across the patio to her long wing of house; though he was unaware that her voice was a trifle, just the merest trifle, subdued.
Five minutes after Paula had left him, punctual to the second, the four telegrams disposed of, Dick was getting into a ranch motor car, along with Thayer, the Idaho buyer, and Naismith, the special correspondent for theBreeders’ Gazette. Wardman, the sheep manager, joined them at the corrals where several thousand young Shropshire rams had been assembled for inspection.
There was little need for conversation. Thayer was distinctly disappointed in this, for he felt that the purchase of ten carloads of such expensive creatures was momentous enough to merit much conversation.
“They speak for themselves,” Dick had assured him, and turned aside to give data to Naismith for his impending article on Shropshires in California and the Northwest.
“I wouldn’t advise you to bother to select them,” Dick told Thayer ten minutes later. “The average is all top. You could spend a week picking your ten carloads and have no higher grade than if you had taken the first to hand.”
This cool assumption that the sale was already consummated so perturbed Thayer, that, along with the sure knowledge that he had never seen so high a quality of rams, he was nettled into changing his order to twenty carloads.
As he told Naismith, after they had regained the Big House and as they chalked their cues to finish the interrupted game:
“It’s my first visit to Forrest’s. He’s a wizard. I’ve been buying in the East and importing. But those Shropshires won my judgment. You noticed I doubled my order. Those Idaho buyers will be wild for them. I only had buying orders straight for six carloads, and contingent on my judgment for two carloads more; but if every buyer doesn’t double his order, straight and contingent, when he sees them rams, and if there isn’t a stampede for what’s left, I don’t know sheep. They’re the goods. If they don’t jump up the sheep game of Idaho ... well, then Forrest’s no breeder and I’m no buyer, that’s all.”
As the warning gong for lunch rang out—a huge bronze gong from Korea that was never struck until it was first indubitably ascertained that Paula was awake—Dick joined the young people at the goldfish fountain in the big patio. Bert Wainwright, variously advised and commanded by his sister, Rita, and by Paula and her sisters, Lute and Ernestine, was striving with a dip-net to catch a particularly gorgeous flower of a fish whose size and color and multiplicity of fins and tails had led Paula to decide to segregate him for the special breeding tank in the fountain of her own secret patio. Amid high excitement, and much squealing and laughter, the deed was accomplished, the big fish deposited in a can and carried away by the waiting Italian gardener.
“And what have you to say for yourself?” Ernestine challenged, as Dick joined them.
“Nothing,” he answered sadly. “The ranch is depleted. Three hundred beautiful young bulls depart to-morrow for South America, and Thayer— you met him last night—is taking twenty carloads of rams. All I can say is that my congratulations are extended to Idaho and Chile.”
“Plant more acorns,” Paula laughed, her arms about her sisters, the three of them smilingly expectant of an inevitable antic.
“Oh, Dick, sing your acorn song,” Lute begged.
He shook his head solemnly.
“I’ve got a better one. It’s purest orthodoxy. It’s got Red Cloud and his acorn song skinned to death. Listen! This is the song of the little East-sider, on her first trip to the country under the auspices of her Sunday School. She’s quite young. Pay particular attention to her lisp.”
And then Dick chanted, lisping:
“The goldfish thwimmeth in the bowl,The robin thiths upon the tree;What maketh them thit so eathily?Who stuckth the fur upon their breasths?God! God! He done it!”
“Cribbed,” was Ernestine’s judgment, as the laughter died away.
“Sure,” Dick agreed. “I got it from theRancher and Stockman, that got it from theSwine Breeders’ Journal, that got it from theWestern Advocate, that got it fromPublic Opinion, that got it, undoubtedly, from the little girl herself, or, rather from her Sunday School teacher. For that matter I am convinced it was first printed inOur Dumb Animals.”
The bronze gong rang out its second call, and Paula, one arm around Dick, the other around Rita, led the way into the house, while, bringing up the rear, Bert Wainwright showed Lute Ernestine a new tango step.
“One thing, Thayer,” Dick said in an aside, after releasing himself from the girls, as they jostled in confusion where they met Thayer and Naismith at the head of the stairway leading down to the dining room. “Before you leave us, cast your eyes over those Merinos. I really have to brag about them, and American sheepmen will have to come to them. Of course, started with imported stock, but I’ve made a California strain that will make the French breeders sit up. See Wardman and take your pick. Get Naismith to look them over with you. Stick half a dozen of them in your train-load, with my compliments, and let your Idaho sheepmen get a line on them.”
They seated at a table, capable of indefinite extension, in a long, low dining room that was a replica of the hacienda dining rooms of the Mexican land-kings of old California. The floor was of large brown tiles, the beamed ceiling and the walls were whitewashed, and the huge, undecorated, cement fireplace was an achievement in massiveness and simplicity. Greenery and blooms nodded from without the deep-embrasured windows, and the room expressed the sense of cleanness, chastity, and coolness.
On the walls, but not crowded, were a number of canvases—most ambitious of all, in the setting of honor, all in sad grays, a twilight Mexican scene by Xavier Martinez, of a peon, with a crooked-stick plow and two bullocks, turning a melancholy furrow across the foreground of a sad, illimitable, Mexican plain. There were brighter pictures, of early Mexican-Californian life, a pastel of twilight eucalyptus with a sunset-tipped mountain beyond, by Reimers, a moonlight by Peters, and a Griffin stubble-field across which gleamed and smoldered California summer hills of tawny brown and purple-misted, wooded canyons.
“Say,” Thayer muttered in an undertone across to Naismith, while Dick and the girls were in the thick of exclamatory and giggling banter, “here’s some stuff for that article of yours, if you touch upon the Big House. I’ve seen the servants’ dining room. Forty head sit down to it every meal, including gardeners, chauffeurs, and outside help. It’s a boarding house in itself. Some head, some system, take it from me. That Chiney boy, Oh Joy, is a wooz. He’s housekeeper, or manager, of the whole shebang, or whatever you want to call his job—and, say, it runs that smooth you can’t hear it.”
“Forrest’s the real wooz,” Naismith nodded. “He’s the brains that picks brains. He could run an army, a campaign, a government, or even a three-ring circus.”
“Which last is some compliment,” Thayer concurred heartily.
“Oh, Paula,” Dick said across to his wife. “I just got word that Graham arrives to-morrow morning. Better tell Oh Joy to put him in the watch-tower. It’s man-size quarters, and it’s possible he may carry out his threat and work on his book.”
“Graham?—Graham?” Paula queried aloud of her memory. “Do I know him?”
“You met him once two years ago, in Santiago, at the Café Venus. He had dinner with us.”
“Oh, one of those naval officers?”
Dick shook his head.
“The civilian. Don’t you remember that big blond fellow—you talked music with him for half an hour while Captain Joyce talked our heads off to prove that the United States should clean Mexico up and out with the mailed fist.”
“Oh, to be sure,” Paula vaguely recollected. “He’d met you somewhere before... South Africa, wasn’t it? Or the Philippines?”
“That’s the chap. South Africa, it was. Evan Graham. Next time we met was on theTimesdispatch boat on the Yellow Sea. And we crossed trails a dozen times after that, without meeting, until that night in the Café Venus.
“Heavens—he left Bora-Bora, going east, two days before I dropped anchor bound west on my way to Samoa. I came out of Apia, with letters for him from the American consul, the day before he came in. We missed each other by three days at Levuka—I was sailing theWild Duckthen. He pulled out of Suva as guest on a British cruiser. Sir Everard Im Thurm, British High Commissioner of the South Seas, gave me more letters for Graham. I missed him at Port Resolution and at Vila in the New Hebrides. The cruiser was junketing, you see. I beat her in and out of the Santa Cruz Group. It was the same thing in the Solomons. The cruiser, after shelling the cannibal villages at Langa-Langa, steamed out in the morning. I sailed in that afternoon. I never did deliver those letters in person, and the next time I laid eyes on him was at the Café Venus two years ago.”
“But who about him, and what about him?” Paula queried. “And what’s the book?”
“Well, first of all, beginning at the end, he’s broke—that is, for him, he’s broke. He’s got an income of several thousand a year left, but all that his father left him is gone. No; he didn’t blow it. He got in deep, and the ‘silent panic’ several years ago just about cleaned him. But he doesn’t whimper.
“He’s good stuff, old American stock, a Yale man. The book—he expects to make a bit on it—covers last year’s trip across South America, west coast to east coast. It was largely new ground. The Brazilian government voluntarily voted him a honorarium of ten thousand dollars for the information he brought out concerning unexplored portions of Brazil. Oh, he’s a man, all man. He delivers the goods. You know the type—clean, big, strong, simple; been everywhere, seen everything, knows most of a lot of things, straight, square, looks you in the eyes—well, in short, a man’s man.”
Ernestine clapped her hands, flung a tantalizing, man-challenging, man-conquering glance at Bert Wainwright, and exclaimed: “And he comes tomorrow!”
Dick shook his head reprovingly.
“Oh, nothing in that direction, Ernestine. Just as nice girls as you have tried to hook Evan Graham before now. And, between ourselves, I couldn’t blame them. But he’s had good wind and fast legs, and they’ve always failed to run him down or get him into a corner, where, dazed and breathless, he’s mechanically muttered ‘Yes’ to certain interrogatories and come out of the trance to find himself, roped, thrown, branded, and married. Forget him, Ernestine. Stick by golden youth and let it drop its golden apples. Pick them up, and golden youth with them, making a noise like stupid failure all the time you are snaring swift-legged youth. But Graham’s out of the running. He’s old like me—just about the same age—and, like me, he’s run a lot of those queer races. He knows how to make a get-away. He’s been cut by barbed wire, nose-twitched, neck-burnt, cinched to a fare-you-well, and he remains subdued but uncatchable. He doesn’t care for young things. In fact, you may charge him with being wobbly, but I plead guilty, by proxy, that he is merely old, hard bitten, and very wise.”
“Where’s my Boy in Breeches?” Dick shouted, stamping with jingling spurs through the Big House in quest of its Little Lady.
He came to the door that gave entrance to her long wing. It was a door without a knob, a huge panel of wood in a wood-paneled wall. But Dick shared the secret of the hidden spring with his wife, pressed the spring, and the door swung wide.
“Where’s my Boy in Breeches?” he called and stamped down the length of her quarters.
A glance into the bathroom, with its sunken Roman bath and descending marble steps, was fruitless, as were the glances he sent into Paula’s wardrobe room and dressing room. He passed the short, broad stairway that led to her empty window-seat divan in what she called her Juliet Tower, and thrilled at sight of an orderly disarray of filmy, pretty, lacy woman’s things that he knew she had spread out for her own sensuous delight of contemplation. He fetched up for a moment at a drawing easel, his reiterant cry checked on his lips, and threw a laugh of recognition and appreciation at the sketch, just outlined, of an awkward, big-boned, knobby, weanling colt caught in the act of madly whinneying for its mother.
“Where’s my Boy in Breeches?” he shouted before him, out to the sleeping porch; and found only a demure, brow-troubled Chinese woman of thirty, who smiled self-effacing embarrassment into his eyes.
This was Paula’s maid, Oh Dear, so named by Dick, many years before, because of a certain solicitous contraction of her delicate brows that made her appear as if ever on the verge of saying, “Oh dear!” In fact, Dick had taken her, as a child almost, for Paula’s service, from a fishing village on the Yellow Sea where her widow-mother earned as much as four dollars in a prosperous year at making nets for the fishermen. Oh Dear’s first service for Paula had been aboard the three-topmast schooner,All Away, at the same time that Oh Joy, cabin-boy, had begun to demonstrate the efficiency that enabled him, through the years, to rise to the majordomoship of the Big House.
“Where is your mistress, Oh Dear?” Dick asked.
Oh Dear shrank away in an agony of bashfulness.
Dick waited.
“She maybe with ’m young ladies—I don’t know,” Oh Dear stammered; and Dick, in very mercy, swung away on his heel.
“Where’s my Boy in Breeches?” he shouted, as he stamped out under the porte cochère just as a ranch limousine swung around the curve among the lilacs.
“I’ll be hanged if I know,” a tall, blond man in a light summer suit responded from the car; and the next moment Dick Forrest and Evan Graham were shaking hands.
Oh My and Oh Ho carried in the hand baggage, and Dick accompanied his guest to the watch tower quarters.
“You’ll have to get used to us, old man,” Dick was explaining. “We run the ranch like clockwork, and the servants are wonders; but we allow ourselves all sorts of loosenesses. If you’d arrived two minutes later there’d have been no one to welcome you but the Chinese boys. I was just going for a ride, and Paula—Mrs. Forrest—has disappeared.”
The two men were almost of a size, Graham topping his host by perhaps an inch, but losing that inch in the comparative breadth of shoulders and depth of chest. Graham was, if anything, a clearer blond than Forrest, although both were equally gray of eye, equally clear in the whites of the eyes, and equally and precisely similarly bronzed by sun and weather-beat. Graham’s features were in a slightly larger mold; his eyes were a trifle longer, although this was lost again by a heavier droop of lids. His nose hinted that it was a shade straighter as well as larger than Dick’s, and his lips were a shade thicker, a shade redder, a shade more bowed with fulsome-ness.
Forrest’s hair was light brown to chestnut, while Graham’s carried a whispering advertisement that it would have been almost golden in its silk had it not been burned almost to sandiness by the sun. The cheeks of both were high-boned, although the hollows under Forrest’s cheek-bones were more pronounced. Both noses were large-nostriled and sensitive. And both mouths, while generously proportioned, carried the impression of girlish sweetness and chastity along with the muscles that could draw the lips to the firmness and harshness that would not give the lie to the square, uncleft chins beneath.
But the inch more in height and the inch less in chest-girth gave Evan Graham a grace of body and carriage that Dick Forrest did not possess. In this particular of build, each served well as a foil to the other. Graham was all light and delight, with a hint—but the slightest of hints—of Prince Charming. Forrest’s seemed a more efficient and formidable organism, more dangerous to other life, stouter-gripped on its own life.
Forrest threw a glance at his wrist watch as he talked, but in that glance, without pause or fumble of focus, with swift certainty of correlation, he read the dial.
“Eleven-thirty,” he said. “Come along at once, Graham. We don’t eat till twelve-thirty. I am sending out a shipment of bulls, three hundred of them, and I’m downright proud of them. You simply must see them. Never mind your riding togs. Oh Ho—fetch a pair of my leggings. You, Oh Joy, order Altadena saddled.—What saddle do you prefer, Graham?”
“Oh, anything, old man.”
“English?—Australian?—McClellan?—Mexican?” Dick insisted.
“McClellan, if it’s no trouble,” Graham surrendered.
They sat their horses by the side of the road and watched the last of the herd beginning its long journey to Chili disappear around the bend.
“I see what you’re doing—it’s great,” Graham said with sparkling eyes. “I’ve fooled some myself with the critters, when I was a youngster, down in the Argentine. If I’d had beef-blood like that to build on, I mightn’t have taken the cropper I did.”
“But that was before alfalfa and artesian wells,” Dick smoothed for him. “The time wasn’t ripe for the Shorthorn. Only scrubs could survive the droughts. They were strong in staying powers but light on the scales. And refrigerator steamships hadn’t been invented. That’s what revolutionized the game down there.”
“Besides, I was a mere youngster,” Graham added. “Though that meant nothing much. There was a young German tackled it at the same time I did, with a tenth of my capital. He hung it out, lean years, dry years, and all. He’s rated in seven figures now.”
They turned their horses back for the Big House. Dick flirted his wrist to see his watch.
“Lots of time,” he assured his guest. “I’m glad you saw those yearlings. There was one reason why that young German stuck it out. He had to. You had your father’s money to fall back on, and, I imagine not only that your feet itched, but that your chief weakness lay in that you could afford to solace the itching.”
“Over there are the fish ponds,” Dick said, indicating with a nod of his head to the right an invisible area beyond the lilacs. “You’ll have plenty of opportunity to catch a mess of trout, or bass, or even catfish. You see, I’m a miser. I love to make things work. There may be a justification for the eight-hour labor day, but I make the work-day of water just twenty-four hours’ long. The ponds are in series, according to the nature of the fish. But the water starts working up in the mountains. It irrigates a score of mountain meadows before it makes the plunge and is clarified to crystal clearness in the next few rugged miles; and at the plunge from the highlands it generates half the power and all the lighting used on the ranch. Then it sub-irrigates lower levels, flows in here to the fish ponds, and runs out and irrigates miles of alfalfa farther on. And, believe me, if by that time it hadn’t reached the flat of the Sacramento, I’d be pumping out the drainage for more irrigation.”
“Man, man,” Graham laughed, “you could make a poem on the wonder of water. I’ve met fire-worshipers, but you’re the first real water-worshiper I’ve ever encountered. And you’re no desert-dweller, either. You live in a land of water—pardon the bull—but, as I was saying...”
Graham never completed his thought. From the right, not far away, came the unmistakable ring of shod hoofs on concrete, followed by a mighty splash and an outburst of women’s cries and laughter. Quickly the cries turned to alarm, accompanied by the sounds of a prodigious splashing and floundering as of some huge, drowning beast. Dick bent his head and leaped his horse through the lilacs, Graham, on Altadena, followed at his heels. They emerged in a blaze of sunshine, on an open space among the trees, and Graham came upon as unexpected a picture as he had ever chanced upon in his life.
Tree-surrounded, the heart of the open space was a tank, four-sided of concrete. The upper end of the tank, full width, was a broad spillway, sheened with an inch of smooth-slipping water. The sides were perpendicular. The lower end, roughly corrugated, sloped out gently to solid footing. Here, in distress that was consternation, and in fear that was panic, excitedly bobbed up and down a cowboy in bearskin chaps, vacuously repeating the exclamation, “Oh God! Oh God!"—the first division of it rising in inflection, the second division inflected fallingly with despair. On the edge of the farther side, facing him, in bathing suits, legs dangling toward the water, sat three terrified nymphs.
And in the tank, the center of the picture, a great horse, bright bay and wet and ruddy satin, vertical in the water, struck upward and outward into the free air with huge fore-hoofs steel-gleaming in the wet and sun, while on its back, slipping and clinging, was the white form of what Graham took at first to be some glorious youth. Not until the stallion, sinking, emerged again by means of the powerful beat of his legs and hoofs, did Graham realize that it was a woman who rode him—a woman as white as the white silken slip of a bathing suit that molded to her form like a marble-carven veiling of drapery. As marble was her back, save that the fine delicate muscles moved and crept under the silken suit as she strove to keep her head above water. Her slim round arms were twined in yards of half-drowned stallion-mane, while her white round knees slipped on the sleek, wet, satin pads of the great horse’s straining shoulder muscles. The white toes of her dug for a grip into the smooth sides of the animal, vainly seeking a hold on the ribs beneath.
In a breath, or the half of a breath, Graham saw the whole breathless situation, realized that the white wonderful creature was a woman, and sensed the smallness and daintiness of her despite her gladiatorial struggles. She reminded him of some Dresden china figure set absurdly small and light and strangely on the drowning back of a titanic beast. So dwarfed was she by the bulk of the stallion that she was a midget, or a tiny fairy from fairyland come true.
As she pressed her cheek against the great arching neck, her golden-brown hair, wet from being under, flowing and tangled, seemed tangled in the black mane of the stallion. But it was her face that smote Graham most of all. It was a boy’s face; it was a woman’s face; it was serious and at the same time amused, expressing the pleasure it found woven with the peril. It was a white woman’s face—and modern; and yet, to Graham, it was all-pagan. This was not a creature and a situation one happened upon in the twentieth century. It was straight out of old Greece. It was a Maxfield Parrish reminiscence from the Arabian Nights. Genii might be expected to rise from those troubled depths, or golden princes, astride winged dragons, to swoop down out of the blue to the rescue.
The stallion, forcing itself higher out of water, missed, by a shade, from turning over backward as it sank. Glorious animal and glorious rider disappeared together beneath the surface, to rise together, a second later, the stallion still pawing the air with fore-hoofs the size of dinner plates, the rider still clinging to the sleek, satin-coated muscles. Graham thought, with a gasp, what might have happened had the stallion turned over. A chance blow from any one of those four enormous floundering hoofs could have put out and quenched forever the light and sparkle of that superb, white-bodied, fire-animated woman.
“Ride his neck!” Dick shouted. “Catch his foretop and get on his neck till he balances out!”
The woman obeyed, digging her toes into the evasive muscle-pads for the quick effort, and leaping upward, one hand twined in the wet mane, the other hand free and up-stretched, darting between the ears and clutching the foretop. The next moment, as the stallion balanced out horizontally in obedience to her shiftage of weight, she had slipped back to the shoulders. Holding with one hand to the mane, she waved a white arm in the air and flashed a smile of acknowledgment to Forrest; and, as Graham noted, she was cool enough to note him on his horse beside Forrest. Also, Graham realized that the turning of her head and the waving of her arm was only partly in bravado, was more in aesthetic wisdom of the picture she composed, and was, most of all, sheer joy of daring and emprise of the blood and the flesh and the life that was she.
“Not many women’d tackle that,” Dick said quietly, as Mountain Lad, easily retaining his horizontal position once it had been attained, swam to the lower end of the tank and floundered up the rough slope to the anxious cowboy.
The latter swiftly adjusted the halter with a turn of chain between the jaws. But Paula, still astride, leaned forward, imperiously took the lead-part from the cowboy, whirled Mountain Lad around to face Forrest, and saluted.
“Now you will have to go away,” she called. “This is our hen party, and the stag public is not admitted.”
Dick laughed, saluted acknowledgment, and led the way back through the lilacs to the road.
“Who ... who was it?” Graham queried.
“Paula—Mrs. Forrest—the boy girl, the child that never grew up, the grittiest puff of rose-dust that was ever woman.”
“My breath is quite taken away,” Graham said. “Do your people do such stunts frequently?”
“First time she ever did that,” Forrest replied. “That was Mountain Lad. She rode him straight down the spill-way—tobogganed with him, twenty-two hundred and forty pounds of him.”
“Risked his neck and legs as well as her own,” was Graham’s comment.
“Thirty-five thousand dollars’ worth of neck and legs,” Dick smiled. “That’s what a pool of breeders offered me for him last year after he’d cleaned up the Coast with his get as well as himself. And as for Paula, she could break necks and legs at that price every day in the year until I went broke—only she doesn’t. She never has accidents.”
“I wouldn’t have given tuppence for her chance if he’d turned over.”
“But he didn’t,” Dick answered placidly. “That’s Paula’s luck. She’s tough to kill. Why, I’ve had her under shell-fire where she was actually disappointed because she didn’t get hit, or killed, or near-killed. Four batteries opened on us, shrapnel, at mile-range, and we had to cover half a mile of smooth hill-brow for shelter. I really felt I was justified in charging her with holding back. She did admit a ‘trifle.’ We’ve been married ten or a dozen years now, and, d’ye know, sometimes it seems to me I don’t know her at all, and that nobody knows her, and that she doesn’t know herself—just the same way as you and I can look at ourselves in a mirror and wonder who the devil we are anyway. Paula and I have one magic formula:Damn the expense when fun is selling. And it doesn’t matter whether the price is in dollars, hide, or life. It’s our way and our luck. It works. And, d’ye know, we’ve never been gouged on the price yet.”