But it is not the way for a man and a woman, in propinquity, to maintain a definite, unwavering distance asunder. Imperceptibly Paula and Graham drew closer. From lingering eye-gazings and hand-touchings the way led to permitted caresses, until there was a second clasping in the arms and a second kiss long on the lips. Nor this time did Paula flame in anger. Instead, she commanded:
“You must not go.”
“I must not stay,” Graham reiterated for the thousandth time. “Oh, I have kissed behind doors, and been guilty of all the rest of the silly rubbish,” he complained. “But this is you, and this is Dick.”
“It will work out, I tell you, Evan.”
“Come with me then and of ourselves work it out. Come now.”
She recoiled.
“Remember,” Graham encouraged, “what Dick said at dinner the night Leo fought the dragons—that if it were you, Paula, his wife, who ran away, he would say ‘Bless you, my children.’”
“And that is just why it is so hard, Evan. HeisGreat Heart. You named him well. Listen—you watch him now. He is as gentle as he said he would be that night—gentle toward me, I mean. And more. You watch him—”
“He knows?—he has spoken?” Graham broke in.
“He has not spoken, but I am sure he knows, or guesses. You watch him. He won’t compete against you—”
“Compete!”
“Just that. He won’t compete. Remember at the rodeo yesterday. He was breaking mustangs when our party arrived, but he never mounted again. Now he is a wonderful horse-breaker. You tried your hand. Frankly, while you did fairly well, you couldn’t touch him. But he wouldn’t show off against you. That alone would make me certain that he guesses.
“Listen. Of late haven’t you noticed that he never questions a statement you make, as he used to question, as he questions every one else. He continues to play billiards with you, because there you best him. He fences and singlesticks with you—there you are even. But he won’t box or wrestle with you.”
“Hecanout-box and out-wrestle me,” Graham muttered ruefully.
“You watch and you will see what I mean by not competing. He is treating me like a spirited colt, giving me my head to make a mess of things if I want to. Not for the world would he interfere. Oh, trust me, I know him. It is his own code that he is living up to. He could teach the philosophers what applied philosophy is.
“No, no; listen,” she rushed over Graham’s attempt to interrupt. “I want to tell you more. There is a secret staircase that goes up from the library to Dick’s work room. Only he and I use it, and his secretaries. When you arrive at the head of it, you are right in his room, surrounded by shelves of books. I have just come from there. I was going in to see him when I heard voices. Of course it was ranch business, I thought, and they would soon be gone. So I waited. Itwasranch business, but it was so interesting, so, what Hancock would call, illuminating, that I remained and eavesdropped. It was illuminating of Dick, I mean.
“It was the wife of one of the workmen Dick had on the carpet. Such things do arise on a large place like this. I wouldn’t know the woman if I saw her, and I didn’t recognize her name. She was whimpering out her trouble when Dick stopped her. ‘Never mind all that,’ he said. ‘What I want to know is, did you give Smith any encouragement?’
“Smith isn’t his name, but he is one of our foremen and has worked eight years for Dick.
“‘Oh, no, sir,’ I could hear her answer. ’He went out of his way from the first to bother me. I’ve tried to keep out of his way, always. Besides, my husband’s a violent-tempered man, and I did so want him to hold his job here. He’s worked nearly a year for you now, and there aren’t any complaints, are there? Before that it was irregular work for a long time, and we had real hard times. It wasn’t his fault. He ain’t a drinking man. He always—’
“‘That’s all right,’ Dick stopped her. ’His work and habits have nothing to do with the matter. Now you are sure you have never encouraged Mr. Smith in any way?’ And she was so sure that she talked for ten minutes, detailing the foreman’s persedition of her. She had a pleasant voice—one of those sweet, timid, woman’s voices, and undoubtedly is quite attractive. It was all I could do to resist peeping. I wanted to see what she looked like.
“‘Now this trouble, yesterday morning,’ Dick said. ’Was it general? I mean, outside of your husband, and Mr. Smith, was the scene such that those who live around you knew of it?’
“’Yes, sir. You see, he had no right to come into my kitchen. My husband doesn’t work under him anyway. And he had his arm around me and was trying to kiss me when my husband came in. My husband has a temper, but he ain’t overly strong. Mr. Smith would make two of him. So he pulled a knife, and Mr. Smith got him by the arms, and they fought all over the kitchen. I knew there was murder going to be done and I run out screaming for help. The folks in the other cottages’d heard the racket already. They’d smashed the window and the cook stove, and the place was filled with smoke and ashes when the neighbors dragged them away from each other. I’d done nothing to deserve all that disgrace. You know, sir, the way the women will talk—’
“And Dick hushed her up there, and took all of five minutes more in getting rid of her. Her great fear was that her husband would lose his place. From what Dick told her, I waited. He had made no decision, and I knew the foreman was next on the carpet. In he came. I’d have given the world to see him. But I could only listen.
“Dick jumped right into the thick of it. He described the scene and uproar, and Smith acknowledged that it had been riotous for a while. ‘She says she gave you no encouragement,’ Dick said next.
“‘Then she lies,’ said Smith. ’She has that way of looking with her eyes that’s an invitation. She looked at me that way from the first. But it was by word-of-mouth invitation that I was in her kitchen yesterday morning. We didn’t expect the husband. But she began to struggle when he hove in sight. When she says she gave me no encouragement—’
“‘Never mind all that,’ Dick stopped him. ‘It’s not essential.’ ’But it is, Mr. Forrest, if I am to clear myself,’ Smith insisted.
“‘No; it is not essential to the thing you can’t clear yourself of,’ Dick answered, and I could hear that cold, hard, judicial note come into his voice. Smith could not understand. Dick told him. ’The thing you have been guilty of, Mr. Smith, is the scene, the disturbance, the scandal, the wagging of the women’s tongues now going on forty to the minute, the impairment of the discipline and order of the ranch, all of which is boiled down to the one grave thing, the hurt to the ranch efficiency.’
“And still Smith couldn’t see. He thought the charge was of violating social morality by pursuing a married woman, and tried to mitigate the offense by showing the woman encouraged him and by pleading: ’And after all, Mr. Forrest, a man is only a man, and I admit she made a fool of me and I made a fool of myself.’ “‘Mr. Smith,’ Dick said. ’You’ve worked for me eight years. You’ve been a foreman six years of that time. I have no complaint against your work. You certainly do know how to handle labor. About your personal morality I don’t care a damn. You can be a Mormon or a Turk for all it matters to me. Your private acts are your private acts, and are no concern of mine as long as they do not interfere with your work or my ranch. Any one of my drivers can drink his head off Saturday night, and every Saturday night. That’s his business. But the minute he shows a hold-over on Monday morning that is taken out on my horses, that excites them, or injures them, or threatens to injure them, or that decreases in the slightest the work they should perform on Monday, that moment it is my business and the driver goes down the hill.’
“‘You, you mean, Mr. Forrest,’ Smith stuttered, ’that, that I’m to go down the hill?’ ’That is just what I mean, Mr. Smith. You are to go down the hill, not because you climbed over another man’s fence— that’s your business and his; but because you were guilty of causing a disturbance that is an impairment of ranch efficiency.’
“Do you know, Evan,” Paula broke in on her recital, “Dick can nose more human tragedy out of columns of ranch statistics than can the average fiction writer out of the whirl of a great city. Take the milk reports—the individual reports of the milkers—so many pounds of milk, morning and night, from cow so-and-so, so many pounds from cow so-and-so. He doesn’t have to know the man. But there is a decrease in the weight of milk. ‘Mr. Parkman,’ he’ll say to the head dairyman, ’is Barchi Peratta married?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ’Is he having trouble with his wife?’ ‘Yes, sir.’
“Or it will be: ’Mr. Parkman, Simpkins has the best long-time record of any of our milkers. Now he’s slumped. What’s up?’ Mr. Parkman doesn’t know. ‘Investigate,’ says Dick. ’There’s something on his chest. Talk to him like an uncle and find out. We’ve got to get it off his chest.’ And Mr. Parkman finds out. Simpkins’ boy; working his way through Stanford University, has elected the joy-ride path and is in jail waiting trial for forgery. Dick put his own lawyers on the case, smoothed it over, got the boy out on probation, and Simpkins’ milk reports came back to par. And the best of it is, the boy made good, Dick kept an eye on him, saw him through the college of engineering, and he’s now working for Dick on the dredging end, earning a hundred and fifty a month, married, with a future before him, and his father still milks.”
“You are right,” Graham murmured sympathetically. “I well named him when I named him Great Heart.”
“I call him my Rock of Ages,” Paula said gratefully. “He is so solid. He stands in any storm.—Oh, you don’t really know him. He is so sure. He stands right up. He’s never taken a cropper in his life. God smiles on him. God has always smiled on him. He’s never been beaten down to his knees... yet. I... I should not care to see that sight. It would be heartbreaking. And, Evan—” Her hand went out to his in a pleading gesture that merged into a half-caress. “—I am afraid for him now. That is why I don’t know what to do. It is not for myself that I back and fill and hesitate. If he were ignoble, if he were narrow, if he were weak or had one tiniest shred of meanness, if he had ever been beaten to his knees before, why, my dear, my dear, I should have been gone with you long ago.”
Her eyes filled with sudden moisture. She stilled him with a pressure of her hand, and, to regain herself, she went back to her recital:
“’Your little finger, Mr. Smith, I consider worth more to me and to the world,’ Dick, told him, ’than the whole body of this woman’s husband. Here’s the report on him: willing, eager to please, not bright, not strong, an indifferent workman at best. Yet you have to go down the hill, and I am very, very sorry.’
“Oh, yes, there was more. But I’ve given you the main of it. You see Dick’s code there. And he lives his code. He accords latitude to the individual. Whatever the individual may do, so long as it does not hurt the group of individuals in which he lives, is his own affair. He believed Smith had a perfect right to love the woman, and to be loved by her if it came to that. I have heard him always say that love could not be held nor enforced. Truly, did I go with you, he would say, ‘Bless you, my children.’ Though it broke his heart he would say it. Past love, he believes, gives no hold over the present. And every hour of love, I have heard him say, pays for itself, on both sides, quittance in full. He claims there can be no such thing as a love-debt, laughs at the absurdity of love-claims.”
“And I agree with him,” Graham said. “’You promised to love me always,’ says the jilted one, and then strives to collect as if it were a promissory note for so many dollars. Dollars are dollars, but love lives or dies. When it is dead how can it be collected? We are all agreed, and the way is simple. We love. It is enough. Why delay another minute?”
His fingers strayed along her fingers on the keyboard as he bent to her, first kissing her hair, then slowly turning her face up to his and kissing her willing lips.
“Dick does not love me like you,” she said; “not madly, I mean. He has had me so long, I think I have become a habit to him. And often and often, before I knew you, I used to puzzle whether he cared more for the ranch or more for me.”
“It is so simple,” Graham urged. “All we have to do is to be straightforward. Let us go.”
He drew her to her feet and made as if to start.
But she drew away from him suddenly, sat down, and buried her flushed face in her hands.
“You do not understand, Evan. I love Dick. I shall always love him.”
“And me?” Graham demanded sharply.
“Oh, without saying,” she smiled. “You are the only man, besides Dick, that has ever kissed me this... way, and that I have kissed this way. But I can’t make up my mind. The triangle, as you call it, must be solved for me. I can’t solve it myself. I compare the two of you, weigh you, measure you. I remember Dick and all our past years. And I consult my heart for you. And I don’t know. I don’t know. You are a great man, my great lover. But Dick is a greater man than you. You— you are more clay, more—I grope to describe you—more human, I fancy. And that is why I love you more... or at least I think perhaps I do.
“But wait,” she resisted him, prisoning his eager hand in hers. “There is more I want to say. I remember Dick and all our past years. But I remember him to-day, as well, and to-morrow. I cannot bear the thought that any man should pity my husband, that you should pity him, and pity him you must when I confess that I love you more. That is why I am not sure. That is why I so quickly take it back and do not know.
“I’d die of shame if through act of mine any man pitied Dick. Truly, I would. Of all things ghastly, I can think of none so ghastly as Dick being pitied. He has never been pitied in his life. He has always been top-dog—bright, light, strong, unassailable. And more, he doesn’t deserve pity. And it’s my fault... and yours, Evan.”
She abruptly thrust Evan’s hand away.
“And every act, every permitted touch of you, does make him pitiable. Don’t you see how tangled it is for me? And then there is my own pride. That you should see me disloyal to him in little things, such as this—” (she caught his hand again and caressed it with soft finger-tips) “—hurts me in my love for you, diminishes me, must diminish me in your eyes. I shrink from the thought that my disloyalty to him in this I do—” (she laid his hand against her cheek) “—gives you reason to pity him and censure me.”
She soothed the impatience of the hand on her cheek, and, almost absently, musingly scrutinizing it without consciously seeing it, turned it over and slowly kissed the palm. The next moment she was drawn to her feet and into his arms.
“There, you see,” was her reproach as she disengaged herself.
“Why do you tell me all this about Dick?” Graham demanded another time, as they walked their horses side by side. “To keep me away? To protect yourself from me?”
Paula nodded, then quickly added, “No, not quite that. Because you know I don’t want to keep you away ... too far. I say it because Dick is so much in my mind. For twelve years, you realize, he filled my mind. I say it because ... because I think it, I suppose. Think! The situation! You are trespassing on a perfect marriage.”
“I know it,” he answered. “And I do not like the role of trespasser. It is your insistence, instead of going away with me, that I should trespass. And I can’t help it. I think away from you, try to force my thoughts elsewhere. I did half a chapter this morning, and I know it’s rotten and will have to be rewritten. For I can’t succeed in thinking away from you. What is South America and its ethnology compared to you? And when I come near you my arms go about you before I know what I am doing. And, by God, you want them there, you want them there, you know it.”
Paula gathered her reins in signal for a gallop, but first, with a roguish smile, she acknowledged.
“I do want them there, dear trespasser.”
Paula yielded and fought at the same time.
“I love my husband—never forget that,” she would warn Graham, and within the minute be in his arms.
“There are only the three of us for once, thank goodness,” Paula cried, seizing Dick and Graham by the hands and leading them toward Dick’s favorite lounging couch in the big room. “Come, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings. Come, milords, and lordly perishers, and we will talk of Armageddon when the last sun goes down.”
She was in a merry mood, and with surprise Dick observed her light a cigarette. He could count on his fingers the cigarettes she had smoked in a dozen years, and then, only under a hostess’s provocation to give countenance to some smoking woman guest. Later, when he mixed a highball for himself and Graham, she again surprised him by asking him to mix her a “wee” one.
“This is Scotch,” he warned.
“Oh, a very wee one,” she insisted, “and then we’ll be three good fellows together, winding up the world. And when you’ve got it all wound up and ready, I’ll sing you the song of the Valkyries.”
She took more part in the talk than usual, and strove to draw her husband out. Nor was Dick unaware of this, although he yielded and permitted himself to let go full tilt on the theme of the blond sun-perishers.
She is trying to make him compete—was Graham’s thought. But Paula scarcely thought of that phase of it, her pleasure consisting in the spectacle of two such splendid men who were hers. They talk of big game hunting, she mused once to herself; but did ever one small woman capture bigger game than this?
She sat cross-legged on the couch, where, by a turn of the head, she could view Graham lounging comfortably in the big chair, or Dick, on his elbow, sprawled among the cushions. And ever, as they talked, her eyes roved from one to the other; and, as they spoke of struggle and battle, always in the cold iron terms of realists, her own thoughts became so colored, until she could look coolly at Dick with no further urge of the pity that had intermittently ached her heart for days.
She was proud of him—a goodly, eye-filling figure of a man to any woman; but she no longer felt sorry for him. They were right. It was a game. The race was to the swift, the battle to the strong. They had run such races, fought such battles. Then why not she? And as she continued to look, that self-query became reiterant.
They were not anchorites, these two men. Liberal-lived they must have been in that past out of which, like mysteries, they had come to her. They had had the days and nights that women were denied—women such as she. As for Dick, beyond all doubt—even had she heard whispers—there had been other women in that wild career of his over the world. Men were men, and they were two such men. She felt a burn of jealousy against those unknown women who must have been, and her heart hardened. They had taken their fun where they found it—Kipling’s line ran through her head.
Pity? Why should she pity, any more than she should be pitied? The whole thing was too big, too natural, for pity. They were taking a hand in a big game, and all could not be winners. Playing with the fancy, she wandered on to a consideration of the outcome. Always she had avoided such consideration, but the tiny highball had given her daring. It came to her that she saw doom ahead, doom vague and formless but terrible.
She was brought back to herself by Dick’s hand before her eyes and apparently plucking from the empty air the something upon which she steadfastly stared.
“Seeing things?” he teased, as her eyes turned to meet his.
His were laughing, but she glimpsed in them what, despite herself, made her veil her own with her long lashes. He knew. Beyond all possibility of error she knew now that he knew. That was what she had seen in his eyes and what had made her veil her own.
“‘Cynthia, Cynthia, I’ve been a-thinking,’” she gayly hummed to him; and, as he resumed his talk, she reached and took a sip from his part-empty glass.
Let come what would, she asserted to herself, she would play it out. It was all a madness, but it was life, it was living. She had never so lived before, and it was worth it, no matter what inevitable payment must be made in the end. Love?—had she ever really loved Dick as she now felt herself capable of loving? Had she mistaken the fondness of affection for love all these years? Her eyes warmed as they rested on Graham, and she admitted that he had swept her as Dick never had.
Unused to alcohol in such strength, her heart was accelerated; and Dick, with casual glances, noted and knew the cause of the added brilliance, the flushed vividness of cheeks and lips.
He talked less and less, and the discussion of the sun-perishers died of mutual agreement as to its facts. Finally, glancing at his watch, he straightened up, yawned, stretched his arms and announced:
“Bed-time he stop. Head belong this fellow white man too much sleepy along him.—Nightcap, Evan?”
Graham nodded, for both felt the need of a stiffener.
“Mrs. Toper—nightcap?” Dick queried of Paula.
But she shook her head and busied herself at the piano putting away the music, while the men had their drink.
Graham closed down the piano for her, while Dick waited in the doorway, so that when they left he led them by a dozen feet. As they came along, Graham, under her instructions, turned off the lights in the halls. Dick waited where the ways diverged and where Graham would have to say good night on his way to the tower room.
The one remaining light was turned off.
“Oh, not that one, silly,” Dick heard Paula cry out. “We keep it on all night.”
Dick heard nothing, but the dark was fervent to him. He cursed himself for his own past embraces in the dark, for so the wisdom was given him to know the quick embrace that had occurred, ere, the next moment, the light flashed on again.
He found himself lacking the courage to look at their faces as they came toward him. He did not want to see Paula’s frank eyes veiled by her lashes, and he fumbled to light a cigarette while he cudgeled his wits for the wording of an ordinary good night.
“How goes the book?—what chapter?” he called after Graham down his hall, as Paula put her hand in his.
Her hand in his, swinging his, hopping and skipping and all a-chatter in simulation of a little girl with a grown-up, Paula went on with Dick; while he sadly pondered what ruse she had in mind by which to avoid the long-avoided, good night kiss.
Evidently she had not found it when they reached the dividing of the ways that led to her quarters and to his. Still swinging his hand, still buoyantly chattering fun, she continued with him into his workroom. Here he surrendered. He had neither heart nor energy to wait for her to develop whatever she contemplated.
He feigned sudden recollection, deflected her by the hand to his desk, and picked up a letter.
“I’d promised myself to get a reply off on the first machine in the morning,” he explained, as he pressed on the phonograph and began dictating.
For a paragraph she still held his hand. Then he felt the parting pressure of her fingers and her whispered good night.
“Good night, little woman,” he answered mechanically, and continued dictating as if oblivious to her going.
Nor did he cease until he knew she was well out of hearing.
A dozen times that morning, dictating to Blake or indicating answers, Dick had been on the verge of saying to let the rest of the correspondence go.
“Call up Hennessy and Mendenhall,” he told Blake, when, at ten, the latter gathered up his notes and rose to go. “You ought to catch them at the stallion barn. Tell them not to come this morning but to-morrow morning.”
Bonbright entered, prepared to shorthand Dick’s conversations with his managers for the next hour.
“And—oh, Mr. Blake,” Dick called. “Ask Hennessy about Alden Bessie.— The old mare was pretty bad last night,” he explained to Bonbright.
“Mr. Hanley must see you right away, Mr. Forrest,” Bonbright said, and added, at sight of the irritated drawing up of his employer’s brows, “It’s the piping from Buckeye Dam. Something’s wrong with the plans—a serious mistake, he says.”
Dick surrendered, and for an hour discussed ranch business with his foremen and managers.
Once, in the middle of a hot discussion over sheep-dips with Wardman, he left his desk and paced over to the window. The sound of voices and horses, and of Paula’s laugh, had attracted him.
“Take that Montana report—I’ll send you a copy to-day,” he continued, as he gazed out. “They found the formula didn’t get down to it. It was more a sedative than a germicide. There wasn’t enough kick in it...”
Four horses, bunched, crossed his field of vision. Paula, teasing the pair of them, was between Martinez and Froelig, old friends of Dick, a painter and sculptor respectively, who had arrived on an early train. Graham, on Selim, made the fourth, and was slightly edged toward the rear. So the party went by, but Dick reflected that quickly enough it would resolve itself into two and two.
Shortly after eleven, restless and moody, he wandered out with a cigarette into the big patio, where he smiled grim amusement at the various tell-tale signs of Paula’s neglect of her goldfish. The sight of them suggested her secret patio in whose fountain pools she kept her selected and more gorgeous blooms of fish. Thither he went, through doors without knobs, by ways known only to Paula and the servants.
This had been Dick’s one great gift to Paula. It was love-lavish as only a king of fortune could make it. He had given her a free hand with it, and insisted on her wildest extravagance; and it had been his delight to tease his quondam guardians with the stubs of the checkbook she had used. It bore no relation to the scheme and architecture of the Big House, and, for that matter, so deeply hidden was it that it played no part in jar of line or color. A show-place of show-places, it was not often shown. Outside Paula’s sisters and intimates, on rare occasions some artist was permitted to enter and catch his breath. Graham had heard of its existence, but not even him had she invited to see.
It was round, and small enough to escape giving any cold hint of spaciousness. The Big House was of sturdy concrete, but here was marble in exquisite delicacy. The arches of the encircling arcade were of fretted white marble that had taken on just enough tender green to prevent any glare of reflected light. Palest of pink roses bloomed up the pillars and over the low flat roof they upheld, where Puck-like, humorous, and happy faces took the place of grinning gargoyles. Dick strolled the rosy marble pavement of the arcade and let the beauty of the place slowly steal in upon him and gentle his mood.
The heart and key of the fairy patio was the fountain, consisting of three related shallow basins at different levels, of white marble and delicate as shell. Over these basins rollicked and frolicked life-sized babies wrought from pink marble by no mean hand. Some peered over the edges into lower basins, one reached arms covetously toward the goldfish; one, on his back, laughed at the sky, another stood with dimpled legs apart stretching himself, others waded, others were on the ground amongst the roses white and blush, but all were of the fountain and touched it at some point. So good was the color of the marble, so true had been the sculptor, that the illusion was of life. No cherubs these, but live warm human babies.
Dick regarded the rosy fellowship pleasantly and long, finishing his cigarette and retaining it dead in his hand. That was what she had needed, he mused—babies, children. It had been her passion. Had she realized it... He sighed, and, struck by a fresh thought, looked to her favorite seat with certitude that he would not see the customary sewing lying on it in a pretty heap. She did not sew these days.
He did not enter the tiny gallery behind the arcade, which contained her chosen paintings and etchings, and copies in marble and bronze of her favorites of the European galleries. Instead he went up the stairway, past the glorious Winged Victory on the landing where the staircase divided, and on and up into her quarters that occupied the entire upper wing. But first, pausing by the Victory, he turned and gazed down into the fairy patio. The thing was a cut jewel in its perfectness and color, and he acknowledged, although he had made it possible for her, that it was entirely her own creation—her one masterpiece. It had long been her dream, and he had realized it for her. And yet now, he meditated, it meant nothing to her. She was not mercenary, that he knew; and if he could not hold her, mere baubles such as that would weigh nothing in the balance against her heart.
He wandered idly through her rooms, scarcely noting at what he gazed, but gazing with fondness at it all. Like everything else of hers, it was distinctive, different, eloquent of her. But when he glanced into the bathroom with its sunken Roman bath, for the life of him he was unable to avoid seeing a tiny drip and making a mental note for the ranch plumber.
As a matter of course, he looked to her easel with the expectation of finding no new work, but was disappointed; for a portrait of himself confronted him. He knew her trick of copying the pose and lines from a photograph and filling in from memory. The particular photograph she was using had been a fortunate snapshop of him on horseback. The Outlaw, for once and for a moment, had been at peace, and Dick, hat in hand, hair just nicely rumpled, face in repose, unaware of the impending snap, had at the instant looked squarely into the camera. No portrait photographer could have caught a better likeness. The head and shoulders Paula had had enlarged, and it was from this that she was working. But the portrait had already gone beyond the photograph, for Dick could see her own touches.
With a start he looked more closely. Was that expression of the eyes, of the whole face, his? He glanced at the photograph. It was not there. He walked over to one of the mirrors, relaxed his face, and led his thoughts to Paula and Graham. Slowly the expression came into his eyes and face. Not content, he returned to the easel and verified it. Paula knew. Paula knew that he knew. She had learned it from him, stolen it from him some time when it was unwittingly on his face, and carried it in her memory to the canvas.
Paula’s Chinese maid, Oh Dear, entered from the wardrobe room, and Dick watched her unobserved as she came down the room toward him. Her eyes were down, and she seemed deep in thought. Dick remarked the sadness of her face, and that the little, solicitous contraction of the brows that had led to her naming was gone. She was not solicitous, that was patent. But cast down, she was, in heavy depression.
It would seem that all our faces are beginning to say things, he commented to himself.
“Good morning, Oh Dear,” he startled her.
And as she returned the greeting, he saw compassion in her eyes as they dwelt on him. She knew. The first outside themselves. Trust her, a woman, so much in Paula’s company when Paula was alone, to divine Paula’s secret.
Oh Dear’s lips trembled, and she wrung her trembling hands, nerving herself, as he could see, to speech.
“Mister Forrest,” she began haltingly, “maybe you think me fool, but I like say something. You very kind man. You very kind my old mother. You very kind me long long time...”
She hesitated, moistening her frightened lips with her tongue, then braved her eyes to his and proceeded.
“Mrs. Forrest, she, I think...”
But so forbidding did Dick’s face become that she broke off in confusion and blushed, as Dick surmised, with shame at the thoughts she had been about to utter.
“Very nice picture Mrs. Forrest make,” he put her at her ease.
The Chinese girl sighed, and the same compassion returned into her eyes as she looked long at Dick’s portrait.
She sighed again, but the coldness in her voice was not lost on Dick as she answered: “Yes, very nice picture Mrs. Forrest make.”
She looked at him with sudden sharp scrutiny, studying his face, then turned to the canvas and pointed at the eyes.
“No good,” she condemned.
Her voice was harsh, touched with anger.
“No good,” she flung over her shoulder, more loudly, still more harshly, as she continued down the room and out of sight on Paula’s sleeping porch.
Dick stiffened his shoulders, unconsciously bracing himself to face what was now soon to happen. Well, it was the beginning of the end. Oh Dear knew. Soon more would know, all would know. And in a way he was glad of it, glad that the torment of suspense would endure but little longer.
But when he started to leave he whistled a merry jingle to advertise to Oh Dear that the world wagged very well with him so far as he knew anything about it.
The same afternoon, while Dick was out and away with Froelig and Martinez and Graham, Paula stole a pilgrimage to Dick’s quarters. Out on his sleeping porch she looked over his rows of press buttons, his switchboard that from his bed connected him with every part of the ranch and most of the rest of California, his phonograph on the hinged and swinging bracket, the orderly array of books and magazines and agricultural bulletins waiting to be read, the ash tray, cigarettes, scribble pads, and thermos bottle.
Her photograph, the only picture on the porch, held her attention. It hung under his barometers and thermometers, which, she knew, was where he looked oftenest. A fancy came to her, and she turned the laughing face to the wall and glanced from the blankness of the back of the frame to the bed and back again. With a quick panic movement, she turned the laughing face out. It belonged, was her thought; it did belong.
The big automatic pistol in the holster on the wall, handy to one’s hand from the bed, caught her eye. She reached to it and lifted gently at the butt. It was as she had expected—loose—Dick’s way. Trust him, no matter how long unused, never to let a pistol freeze in its holster.
Back in the work room she wandered solemnly about, glancing now at the prodigious filing system, at the chart and blue-print cabinets, at the revolving shelves of reference books, and at the long rows of stoutly bound herd registers. At last she came to his books—a goodly row of pamphlets, bound magazine articles, and an even dozen ambitious tomes. She read the titles painstakingly: “Corn in California,” “Silage Practice,” “Farm Organization,” “Farm Book-keeping,” “The Shire in America,” “Humus Destruction,” “Soilage,” “Alfalfa in California,” “Cover Crops for California,” “The Shorthorn in America"—at this last she smiled affectionately with memory of the great controversy he had waged for the beef cow and the milch cow as against the dual purpose cow.
She caressed, the backs of the books with her palm, pressed her cheek against them and leaned with closed eyes. Oh, Dick, Dick—a thought began that faded to a vagueness of sorrow and died because she did not dare to think it.
The desk was so typically Dick. There was no litter. Clean it was of all work save the wire tray with typed letters waiting his signature and an unusual pile of the flat yellow sheets on which his secretaries typed the telegrams relayed by telephone from Eldorado. Carelessly she ran her eyes over the opening lines of the uppermost sheet and chanced upon a reference that puzzled and interested her. She read closely, with in-drawn brows, then went deeper into the heap till she found confirmation. Jeremy Braxton was dead—big, genial, kindly Jeremy Braxton. A Mexican mob of pulque-crazed peons had killed him in the mountains through which he had been trying to escape from the Harvest into Arizona. The date of the telegram was two days old. Dick had known it for two days and never worried her with it. And it meant more. It meant money. It meant that the affairs of the Harvest Group were going from bad to worse. And it was Dick’s way.
And Jeremy was dead. The room seemed suddenly to have grown cold. She shivered. It was the way of life—death always at the end of the road. And her own nameless dread came back upon her. Doom lay ahead. Doom for whom? She did not attempt to guess. Sufficient that it was doom. Her mind was heavy with it, and the quiet room was heavy with it as she passed slowly out.
“’Tis a birdlike sensuousness that is all the Little Lady’s own,” Terrence was saying, as he helped himself to a cocktail from the tray Ah Ha was passing around.
It was the hour before dinner, and Graham, Leo and Terrence McFane had chanced together in the stag-room.
“No, Leo,” the Irishman warned the young poet. “Let the one suffice you. Your cheeks are warm with it. A second one and you’ll conflagrate. ’Tis no right you have to be mixing beauty and strong drink in that lad’s head of yours. Leave the drink to your elders. There is such a thing as consanguinity for drink. You have it not. As for me—”
He emptied the glass and paused to turn the cocktail reminiscently on his tongue.
“’Tis women’s drink,” he shook his head in condemnation. “It likes me not. It bites me not. And devil a bit of a taste is there to it.—Ah Ha, my boy,” he called to the Chinese, “mix me a highball in a long, long glass—a stiff one.”
He held up four fingers horizontally to indicate the measure of liquor he would have in the glass, and, to Ah Ha’s query as to what kind of whiskey, answered, “Scotch or Irish, bourbon or rye—whichever comes nearest to hand.”
Graham shook his head to the Chinese, and laughed to the Irishman. “You’ll never drink me down, Terrence. I’ve not forgotten what you did to O’Hay.”
“’Twas an accident I would have you think,” was the reply. “They say when a man’s not feeling any too fit a bit of drink will hit him like a club.”
“And you?” Graham questioned.
“Have never been hit by a club. I am a man of singularly few experiences.”
“But, Terrence, you were saying... about Mrs. Forrest?” Leo begged. “It sounded as if it were going to be nice.”
“As if it could be otherwise,” Terrence censured. “But as I was saying, ’tis a bird-like sensuousness—oh, not the little, hoppy, wagtail kind, nor yet the sleek and solemn dove, but a merry sort of bird, like the wild canaries you see bathing in the fountains, always twittering and singing, flinging the water in the sun, and glowing the golden hearts of them on their happy breasts. ’Tis like that the Little Lady is. I have observed her much.
“Everything on the earth and under the earth and in the sky contributes to the passion of her days—the untoward purple of the ground myrtle when it has no right to aught more than pale lavender, a single red rose tossing in the bathing wind, one perfect Duchesse rose bursting from its bush into the sunshine, as she said to me, ’pink as the dawn, Terrence, and shaped like a kiss.’
“’Tis all one with her—the Princess’s silver neigh, the sheep bells of a frosty morn, the pretty Angora goats making silky pictures on the hillside all day long, the drifts of purple lupins along the fences, the long hot grass on slope and roadside, the summer-burnt hills tawny as crouching lions—and even have I seen the sheer sensuous pleasure of the Little Lady with bathing her arms and neck in the blessed sun.”
“She is the soul of beauty,” Leo murmured. “One understands how men can die for women such as she.”
“And how men can live for them, and love them, the lovely things,” Terrence added. “Listen, Mr. Graham, and I’ll tell you a secret. We philosophers of the madroño grove, we wrecks and wastages of life here in the quiet backwater and easement of Dick’s munificence, are a brotherhood of lovers. And the lady of our hearts is all the one—the Little Lady. We, who merely talk and dream our days away, and who would lift never a hand for God, or country, or the devil, are pledged knights of the Little Lady.”
“We would die for her,” Leo affirmed, slowly nodding his head.
“Nay, lad, we would live for her and fight for her, dying is that easy.”
Graham missed nothing of it. The boy did not understand, but in the blue eyes of the Celt, peering from under the mop of iron-gray hair, there was no mistaking the knowledge of the situation.
Voices of men were heard coming down the stairs, and, as Martinez and Dar Hyal entered, Terrence was saying:
“’Tis fine weather they say they’re having down at Catalina now, and I hear the tunny fish are biting splendid.”
Ah Ha served cocktails around, and was kept busy, for Hancock and Froelig followed along. Terrence impartially drank stiff highballs of whatever liquor the immobile-faced Chinese elected to serve him, and discoursed fatherly to Leo on the iniquities and abominations of the flowing bowl.
Oh My entered, a folded note in his hand, and looked about in doubt as to whom to give it.
“Hither, wing-heeled Celestial,” Terrence waved him up.
“’Tis a petition, couched in very proper terms,” Terrence explained, after a glance at its contents. “And Ernestine and Lute have arrived, for ’tis they that petition. Listen.” And he read: “’Oh, noble and glorious stags, two poor and lowly meek-eyed does, wandering lonely in the forest, do humbly entreat admission for the brief time before dinner to the stamping ground of the herd.’
“The metaphor is mixed,” said Terrence. “Yet have they acted well. ’Tis the rule—Dick’s rule—and a good rule it is: no petticoats in the stag-room save by the stags’ unanimous consent.—Is the herd ready for the question? All those in favor will say ’Aye.’—Contrary minded?—The ayes have it.
“Oh My, fleet with thy heels and bring in the ladies.”
“‘With sandals beaten from the crowns of kings,’” Leo added, murmuring the words reverently, loving them with his lips as his lips formed them and uttered them.
“‘Shall he tread down the altars of their night,’” Terrence completed the passage. “The man who wrote that is a great man. He is Leo’s friend, and Dick’s friend, and proud am I that he is my friend.”
“And that other line,” Leo said. “From the same sonnet,” he explained to Graham. “Listen to the sound of it: ’To hear what song the star of morning sings’—oh, listen,” the boy went on, his voice hushed low with beauty-love for the words: “’With perished beauty in his hands as clay, Shall he restore futurity its dream—’”
He broke off as Paula’s sisters entered, and rose shyly to greet them.
Dinner that night was as any dinner at which the madroño sages were present. Dick was as robustly controversial as usual, locking horns with Aaron Hancock on Bergson, attacking the latter’s metaphysics in sharp realistic fashion.
“Your Bergson is a charlatan philosopher, Aaron,” Dick concluded. “He has the same old medicine-man’s bag of metaphysical tricks, all decked out and frilled with the latest ascertained facts of science.”
“’Tis true,” Terrence agreed. “Bergson is a charlatan thinker. ’Tis why he is so popular—”
“I deny—” Hancock broke in.
“Wait a wee, Aaron. ’Tis a thought I have glimmered. Let me catch it before it flutters away into the azure. Dick’s caught Bergson with the goods on him, filched straight from the treasure-house of science. His very cocksureness is filched from Darwin’s morality of strength based on the survival of the fittest. And what did Bergson do with it? Touched it up with a bit of James’ pragmatism, rosied it over with the eternal hope in man’s breast that he will live again, and made it all a-shine with Nietzsche’s ‘nothing succeeds like excess—’”
“Wilde’s, you mean,” corrected Ernestine.
“Heaven knows I should have filched it for myself had you not been present,” Terrence sighed, with a bow to her. “Some day the antiquarians will decide the authorship. Personally I would say it smacked of Methuselah—But as I was saying, before I was delightfully interrupted...”
“Who more cocksure than Dick?” Aaron was challenging a little later; while Paula glanced significantly to Graham.
“I was looking at the herd of yearling stallions but yesterday,” Terrence replied, “and with the picture of the splendid beasties still in my eyes I’ll ask: And who more delivers the goods?”
“But Hancock’s objection is solid,” Martinez ventured. “It would be a mean and profitless world without mystery. Dick sees no mystery.”
“There you wrong him,” Terrence defended. “I know him well. Dick recognizes mystery, but not of the nursery-child variety. No cock-and-bull stories for him, such as you romanticists luxuriate in.”
“Terrence gets me,” Dick nodded. “The world will always be mystery. To me man’s consciousness is no greater mystery than the reaction of the gases that make a simple drop of water. Grant that mystery, and all the more complicated phenomena cease to be mysteries. That simple chemical reaction is like one of the axioms on which the edifice of geometry is reared. Matter and force are the everlasting mysteries, manifesting themselves in the twin mysteries of space and time. The manifestations are not mysteries—only the stuff of the manifestations, matter and force; and the theater of the manifestations, space and time.”
Dick ceased and idly watched the expressionless Ah Ha and Ah Me who chanced at the moment to be serving opposite him. Their faces did not talk, was his thought; although ten to one was a fair bet that they were informed with the same knowledge that had perturbed Oh Dear.
“And there you are,” Terrence was triumphing. “’Tis the perfect joy of him—never up in the air with dizzy heels. Flat on the good ground he stands, four square to fact and law, set against all airy fancies and bubbly speculations....”
And as at table, so afterward that evening no one could have guessed from Dick that all was not well with him. He seemed bent on celebrating Lute’s and Ernestine’s return, refused to tolerate the heavy talk of the philosophers, and bubbled over with pranks and tricks. Paula yielded to the contagion, and aided and abetted him in his practical jokes which none escaped.
Choicest among these was the kiss of welcome. No man escaped it. To Graham was accorded the honor of receiving it first so that he might witness the discomfiture of the others, who, one by one, were ushered in by Dick from the patio.
Hancock, Dick’s arm guiding him, came down the room to confront Paula and her sisters standing in a row on three chairs in the middle of the floor. He scanned them suspiciously, and insisted upon walking around behind them. But there seemed nothing unusual about them save that each wore a man’s felt hat.
“Looks good to me,” Hancock announced, as he stood on the floor before them and looked up at them.
“And it is good,” Dick assured him. “As representing the ranch in its fairest aspects, they are to administer the kiss of welcome. Make your choice, Aaron.”
Aaron, with a quick whirl to catch some possible lurking disaster at his back, demanded, “They are all three to kiss me?”
“No, make your choice which is to give you the kiss.”
“The two I do not choose will not feel that I have discriminated against them?” Aaron insisted.
“Whiskers no objection?” was his next query.
“Not in the way at all,” Lute told him. “I have always wondered what it would be like to kiss black whiskers.”
“Here’s where all the philosophers get kissed tonight, so hurry up,” Ernestine said. “The others are waiting. I, too, have yet to be kissed by an alfalfa field.”
“Whom do you choose?” Dick urged.
“As if, after that, there were any choice about it,” Hancock returned jauntily. “I kiss my lady—the Little Lady.”
As he put up his lips, Paula bent her head forward, and, nicely directed, from the indented crown of her hat canted a glassful of water into his face.
When Leo’s turn came, he bravely made his choice of Paula and nearly spoiled the show by reverently bending and kissing the hem of her gown.
“It will never do,” Ernestine told him. “It must be a real kiss. Put up your lips to be kissed.”
“Let the last be first and kiss me, Leo,” Lute begged, to save him from his embarrassment.
He looked his gratitude, put up his lips, but without enough tilt of his head, so that he received the water from Lute’s hat down the back of his neck.
“All three shall kiss me and thus shall paradise be thrice multiplied,” was Terrence’s way out of the difficulty; and simultaneously he received three crowns of water for his gallantry.
Dick’s boisterousness waxed apace. His was the most care-free seeming in the world as he measured Froelig and Martinez against the door to settle the dispute that had arisen as to whether Froelig or Martinez was the taller.
“Knees straight and together, heads back,” Dick commanded.
And as their heads touched the wood, from the other side came a rousing thump that jarred them. The door swung open, revealing Ernestine with a padded gong-stick in either hand.
Dick, a high-heeled satin slipper in his hand, was under a sheet with Terrence, teaching him “Brother Bob I’m bobbed” to the uproarious joy of the others, when the Masons and Watsons and all their Wickenberg following entered upon the scene.
Whereupon Dick insisted that the young men of their party receive the kiss of welcome. Nor did he miss, in the hubbub of a dozen persons meeting as many more, Lottie Mason’s: “Oh, good evening, Mr. Graham. I thought you had gone.”
And Dick, in the midst of the confusion of settling such an influx of guests, still maintaining his exuberant jolly pose, waited for that sharp scrutiny that women have only for women. Not many moments later he saw Lottie Mason steal such a look, keen with speculation, at Paula as she chanced face to face with Graham, saying something to him.
Not yet, was Dick’s conclusion. Lottie did not know. But suspicion was rife, and nothing, he was certain, under the circumstances, would gladden her woman’s heart more than to discover the unimpeachable Paula as womanly weak as herself.
Lottie Mason was a tall, striking brunette of twenty-five, undeniably beautiful, and, as Dick had learned, undeniably daring. In the not remote past, attracted by her, and, it must be submitted, subtly invited by her, he had been guilty of a philandering that he had not allowed to go as far as her wishes. The thing had not been serious on his part. Nor had he permitted it to become serious on her side. Nevertheless, sufficient flirtatious passages had taken place to impel him this night to look to her, rather than to the other Wickenberg women, for the first signals of suspicion.
“Oh, yes, he’s a beautiful dancer,” Dick, as he came up to them half an hour later, heard Lottie Mason telling little Miss Maxwell. “Isn’t he, Dick?” she appealed to him, with innocent eyes of candor through which disguise he knew she was studying him.
“Who?—Graham, you must mean,” he answered with untroubled directness. “He certainly is. What do you say we start dancing and let Miss Maxwell see? Though there’s only one woman here who can give him full swing to show his paces.”
“Paula, of course,” said Lottie.
“Paula, of course. Why, you young chits don’t know how to waltz. You never had a chance to learn."—Lottie tossed her fine head. “Perhaps you learned a little before the new dancing came in,” he amended. “Anyway, I’ll get Evan and Paula started, you take me on, and I’ll wager we’ll be the only couples on the floor.”
Half through the waltz, he broke it off with: “Let them have the floor to themselves. It’s worth seeing.”
And, glowing with appreciation, he stood and watched his wife and Graham finish the dance, while he knew that Lottie, beside him, stealing side glances at him, was having her suspicions allayed.
The dancing became general, and, the evening being warm, the big doors to the patio were thrown open. Now one couple, and now another, danced out and down the long arcades where the moonlight streamed, until it became the general thing.
“What a boy he is,” Paula said to Graham, as they listened to Dick descanting to all and sundry on the virtues of his new night camera. “You heard Aaron complaining at table, and Terrence explaining, his sureness. Nothing terrible has ever happened to him in his life. He has never been overthrown. His sureness has always been vindicated. As Terrence said, it has always delivered the goods. He does know, he does know, and yet he is so sure of himself, so sure of me.”
Graham taken away to dance with Miss Maxwell, Paula continued her train of thought to herself. Dick was not suffering so much after all. And she might have expected it. He was the cool-head, the philosopher. He would take her loss with the same equanimity as he would take the loss of Mountain Lad, as he had taken the death of Jeremy Braxton and the flooding of the Harvest mines. It was difficult, she smiled to herself, aflame as she was toward Graham, to be married to a philosopher who would not lift a hand to hold her. And it came to her afresh that one phase of Graham’s charm for her was his humanness, his flamingness. They met on common ground. At any rate, even in the heyday of their coming together in Paris, Dick had not so inflamed her. A wonderful lover he had been, too, with his gift of speech and lover’s phrases, with his love-chants that had so delighted her; but somehow it was different from this what she felt for Graham and what Graham must feel for her. Besides, she had been most young in experience of love and lovers in that long ago when Dick had burst so magnificently upon her.
And so thinking, she hardened toward him and recklessly permitted herself to flame toward Graham. The crowd, the gayety, the excitement, the closeness and tenderness of contact in the dancing, the summer-warm of the evening, the streaming moonlight, and the night-scents of flowers—all fanned her ardency, and she looked forward eagerly to the at least one more dance she might dare with Graham.
“No flash light is necessary,” Dick was explaining. “It’s a German invention. Half a minute exposure under the ordinary lighting is sufficient. And the best of it is that the plate can be immediately developed just like an ordinary blue print. Of course, the drawback is one cannot print from the plate.”
“But if it’s good, an ordinary plate can be copied from it from which prints can be made,” Ernestine amplified.
She knew the huge, twenty-foot, spring snake coiled inside the camera and ready to leap out like a jack-in-the-box when Dick squeezed the bulb. And there were others who knew and who urged Dick to get the camera and make an exposure.
He was gone longer than he expected, for Bonbright had left on his desk several telegrams concerning the Mexican situation that needed immediate replies. Trick camera in hand, Dick returned by a short cut across the house and patio. The dancing couples were ebbing down the arcade and disappearing into the hall, and he leaned against a pillar and watched them go by. Last of all came Paula and Evan, passing so close that he could have reached out and touched them. But, though the moon shone full on him, they did not see him. They saw only each other in the tender sport of gazing.
The last preceding couple was already inside when the music ceased. Graham and Paula paused, and he was for giving her his arm and leading her inside, but she clung to him in sudden impulse. Man-like, cautious, he slightly resisted for a moment, but with one arm around his neck she drew his head willingly down to the kiss. It was a flash of quick passion. The next instant, Paula on his arm, they were passing in and Paula’s laugh was ringing merrily and naturally.
Dick clutched at the pillar and eased himself down abruptly until he sat flat on the pavement. Accompanying violent suffocation, or causing it, his heart seemed rising in his chest. He panted for air. The cursed thing rose and choked and stifled him until, in the grim turn his fancy took, it seemed to him that he chewed it between his teeth and gulped it back and down his throat along with the reviving air. He felt chilled, and was aware that he was wet with sudden sweat.
“And who ever heard of heart disease in the Forrests?” he muttered, as, still sitting, leaning against the pillar for support, he mopped his face dry. His hand was shaking, and he felt a slight nausea from an internal quivering that still persisted.
It was not as if Graham had kissed her, he pondered. It was Paula who had kissed Graham. That was love, and passion. He had seen it, and as it burned again before his eyes, he felt his heart surge, and the premonitory sensation of suffocation seized him. With a sharp effort of will he controlled himself and got to his feet.
“By God, it came up in my mouth and I chewed it,” he muttered. “I chewed it.”
Returning across the patio by the round-about way, he entered the lighted room jauntily enough, camera in hand, and unprepared for the reception he received.
“Seen a ghost?” Lute greeted.
“Are you sick?"—"What’s the matter?” were other questions.
“Whatisthe matter?” he countered.
“Your face—the look of it,” Ernestine said. “Something has happened. What is it?”
And while he oriented himself he did not fail to note Lottie Mason’s quick glance at the faces of Graham and Paula, nor to note that Ernestine had observed Lottie’s glance and followed it up for herself.
“Yes,” he lied. “Bad news. Just got the word. Jeremy Braxton is dead. Murdered. The Mexicans got him while he was trying to escape into Arizona.”
“Old Jeremy, God love him for the fine man he was,” Terrence said, tucking his arm in Dick’s. “Come on, old man, ’tis a stiffener you’re wanting and I’m the lad to lead you to it.”
“Oh, I’m all right,” Dick smiled, shaking his shoulders and squaring himself as if gathering himself together. “It did hit me hard for the moment. I hadn’t a doubt in the world but Jeremy would make it out all right. But they got him, and two engineers with him. They put up a devil of a fight first. They got under a cliff and stood off a mob of half a thousand for a day and night. And then the Mexicans tossed dynamite down from above. Oh, well, all flesh is grass, and there is no grass of yesteryear. Terrence, your suggestion is a good one. Lead on.”
After a few steps he turned his head over his shoulder and called back: “Now this isn’t to stop the fun. I’ll be right back to take that photograph. You arrange the group, Ernestine, and be sure to have them under the strongest light.”
Terrence pressed open the concealed buffet at the far end of the room and set out the glasses, while Dick turned on a wall light and studied his face in the small mirror inside the buffet door.
“It’s all right now, quite natural,” he announced.
“’Twas only a passing shade,” Terrence agreed, pouring the whiskey. “And man has well the right to take it hard the going of old friends.”
They toasted and drank silently.
“Another one,” Dick said, extending his glass.
“Say ‘when,’” said the Irishman, and with imperturbable eyes he watched the rising tide of liquor in the glass.
Dick waited till it was half full.
Again they toasted and drank silently, eyes to eyes, and Dick was grateful for the offer of all his heart that he read in Terrence’s eyes.
Back in the middle of the hall, Ernestine was gayly grouping the victims, and privily, from the faces of Lottie, Paula, and Graham, trying to learn more of the something untoward that she sensed. Why had Lottie looked so immediately and searchingly at Graham and Paula?—she asked herself. And something was wrong with Paula now. She was worried, disturbed, and not in the way to be expected from the announcement of Jeremy Braxton’s death. From Graham, Ernestine could glean nothing. He was quite his ordinary self, his facetiousness the cause of much laughter to Miss Maxwell and Mrs. Watson.
Paula was disturbed. What had happened? Why had Dick lied? He had known of Jeremy’s death for two days. And she had never known anybody’s death so to affect him. She wondered if he had been drinking unduly. In the course of their married life she had seen him several times in liquor. He carried it well, the only noticeable effects being a flush in his eyes and a loosening of his tongue to whimsical fancies and extemporized chants. Had he, in his trouble, been drinking with the iron-headed Terrence down in the stag room? She had found them all assembled there just before dinner. The real cause for Dick’s strangeness never crossed her mind, if, for no other reason, than that he was not given to spying.
He came back, laughing heartily at a joke of Terrence’s, and beckoned Graham to join them while Terrence repeated it. And when the three had had their laugh, he prepared to take the picture. The burst of the huge snake from the camera and the genuine screams of the startled women served to dispel the gloom that threatened, and next Dick was arranging a tournament of peanut-carrying.
From chair to chair, placed a dozen yards apart, the feat was with a table knife to carry the most peanuts in five minutes. After the preliminary try-out, Dick chose Paula for his partner, and challenged the world, Wickenberg and the madroño grove included. Many boxes of candy were wagered, and in the end he and Paula won out against Graham and Ernestine, who had proved the next best couple. Demands for a speech changed to clamor for a peanut song. Dick complied, beating the accent, Indian fashion, with stiff-legged hops and hand-slaps on thighs.
“I am Dick Forrest, son of Richard the Lucky, Son of Jonathan the Puritan, son of John who was a sea-rover, as his father Albert before him, who was the son of Mortimer, a pirate who was hanged in chains and died without issue.
“I am the last of the Forrests, but first of the peanut-carriers. Neither Nimrod nor Sandow has anything on me. I carry the peanuts on a knife, a silver knife. The peanuts are animated by the devil. I carry the peanuts with grace and celerity and in quantity. The peanut never sprouted that can best me.
“The peanuts roll. The peanuts roll. Like Atlas who holds the world, I never let them fall. Not every one can carry peanuts. I am God-gifted. I am master of the art. It is a fine art. The peanuts roll, the peanuts roll, and I carry them on forever.
“Aaron is a philosopher. He cannot carry peanuts. Ernestine is a blonde. She cannot carry peanuts. Evan is a sportsman. He drops peanuts. Paula is my partner. She fumbles peanuts. Only I, I, by the grace of God and my own cleverness, carry peanuts.
“When anybody has had enough of my song, throw something at me. I am proud. I am tireless. I can sing on forever. I shall sing on forever.
“Here beginneth the second canto. When I die, bury me in a peanut patch. While I live—”
The expected avalanche of cushions quenched his song but not his ebullient spirits, for he was soon in a corner with Lottie Mason and Paula concocting a conspiracy against Terrence.
And so the evening continued to be danced and joked and played away. At midnight supper was served, and not till two in the morning were the Wickenbergers ready to depart. While they were getting on their wraps, Paula was proposing for the following afternoon a trip down to the Sacramento River to look over Dick’s experiment in rice-raising.
“I had something else in view,” he told her. “You know the mountain pasture above Sycamore Creek. Three yearlings have been killed there in the last ten days.”
“Mountain lions!” Paula cried.
“Two at least.—Strayed in from the north,” he explained to Graham. “They sometimes do that. We got three five years ago.—Moss and Hartley will be there with the dogs waiting. They’ve located two of the beasts. What do you say all of you join me. We can leave right after lunch.”
“Let me have Mollie?” Lute asked.
“And you can ride Altadena,” Paula told Ernestine.
Quickly the mounts were decided upon, Froelig and Martinez agreeing to go, but promising neither to shoot well nor ride well.
All went out to see the Wickenbergers off, and, after the machines were gone, lingered to make arrangements for the hunting.
“Good night, everybody,” Dick said, as they started to move inside. “I’m going to take a look at Alden Bessie before I turn in. Hennessy is sitting up with her. Remember, you girls, come to lunch in your riding togs, and curses on the head of whoever’s late.”
The ancient dam of the Fotherington Princess was in a serious way, but Dick would not have made the visit at such an hour, save that he wanted to be by himself and that he could not nerve himself for a chance moment alone with Paula so soon after what he had overseen in the patio.
Light steps in the gravel made him turn his head. Ernestine caught up with him and took his arm.
“Poor old Alden Bessie,” she explained. “I thought I’d go along.”
Dick, still acting up to his night’s rôle, recalled to her various funny incidents of the evening, and laughed and chuckled with reminiscent glee.
“Dick,” she said in the first pause, “you are in trouble.” She could feel him stiffen, and hurried on: “What can I do? You know you can depend on me. Tell me.”
“Yes, I’ll tell you,” he answered. “Just one thing.” She pressed his arm gratefully. “I’ll have a telegram sent you to-morrow. It will be urgent enough, though not too serious. You will just bundle up and depart with Lute.”
“Is that all?” she faltered.
“It will be a great favor.”
“You won’t talk with me?” she protested, quivering under the rebuff.
“I’ll have the telegram come so as to rout you out of bed. And now never mind Alden Bessie. You run a long in. Good night.”
He kissed her, gently thrust her toward the house, and went on his way.