Chapter VII: Part 7

"Now then, I'm going into the next room. I've got a wall safe there where I keep some of my private papers and other valuables, including money. I'm going to get a bill--a nice new United States Treasury certificate for one thousand dollars--out of my safe. It may take me two or three minutes to work the combination and find the bill. When I come back, if one or two of those capsules should happen to be missing, why I'll just say to myself that somebody with a touch of grippe, or somebody who's got a friend laid up somewhere with the grippe, saw this medicine here and helped himself to a dose or so without saying anything about it. It won't stick in my mind; what difference does a measly little drug-store pill or two mean to me or to anybody else, for that matter? Inside of ten minutes I'll have forgotten all about it.

"Make yourself at home, please--I'll be back in a jiffy."

He entered the inner room of the two-room flat, closing and snapping shut the connecting door behind him. When he came back, which was quite soon, he glanced at the open box. The twelfth capsule, that one which was red-dotted, and one neighboring capsule had disappeared. Isgrid was sitting where he had been seated before Finburg's temporary withdrawal.

"See this?" resumed Finburg, and he held up what he was holding in his hands. "It's a nice slick new one that's never been in circulation. Well, I've about made up my mind to slip this bill to you. You've been kind to a party that's in trouble--a party that I've had considerable dealings with. He's grateful and naturally I'm grateful, too. As I understand it, you're going to keep on being good to this party. He's in a bad way--may not live very long, in fact--and we'll both appreciate any little attentions you might continue to show him. But this is a hard world--people get careless sometimes; you can't always depend on them. Not knocking you or anything, but still I'd like to make certain that you won't go back on any little promise you might have made to him lately. You get me, I think--just a precaution on my part. See what I'm going to do next?"

From his desk he took up a pair of scissors and with one swift clip of their blades sheared the yellow-back squarely in two across the middle. Isgrid said nothing to this but kept eying him intently.

"Now, then, I put one-half of this bill into my pocket," proceeded Finburg; "and the other half I'm handing over to you"--doing so. "Separated this way, these halves are no use to anybody--none to me, none to you. But paste them together again and you've got a thousand-dollar bill that's just as good as it ever was. For the time being, you keep your half and I'll keep my half. I'll have it right here handy on my person and ready to slip it over to you when the contract that I've been speaking of is completed.

"Now, I expect to be seeing our sick friend tomorrow. Tonight I'll be fixing up a document or two for him to sign and I'm going to take them up to where he is in the morning. I'll tell him of this little arrangement between us and I'm certain he'll endorse it. I may not see him again until the twenty-seventh of this month." He dwelt meaningly upon the date. "It looks as though he couldn't last much longer than that--not more than a few hours. And on the twenty-seventh, if the prospects are that he'll pass out within the next twenty-four hours--which, as I say, is the present outlook--I'll pay him a farewell visit. If everything has worked out right--if you've done him any little last favor that he's counting on--why, he'll tip me the word while we're alone together. You won't have to wait much longer than that for what's coming to you. Just as soon as he gives me the word I'll meet you in some private corner that we'll decide on, and hand you over the other half of your bill. Is everything understood--everything agreeable to you?"

Still mute, Isgrid nodded. They shook hands on it after Isgrid had named a suitable place for their rendezvous on the twenty-seventh; then the silent caller took himself away. All told, he had not contributed a hundred words, counting in grunts as words, to the dialogue.

Being left alone, Mr. Finburg mentally hugged himself before he set to the task of drawing up the papers for his client's signature. This same Sunday he decided not to go to the governor of that near-by state with any futile plea for executive clemency. He'd tell Scarra, of course, that he was going; would pretend he had gone. But what was the use of a man wasting his breath on a quest so absolutely hopeless? He salved his conscience--or the place where his conscience had been before he wore it out--with this reflection, and by an effort of the will put from him any prolonged consideration of the real underlying reason. It resolved itself into this: Why should a man trifle with his luck? With Scarra wiped out--and certainly Scarra deserved wiping out, if ever a red-handed brute did--the ends of justice would be satisfied and the case might serve as a warning to other criminals. But if that governor should turn mush-headed and withhold from Scarra his just punishment, where would Scarra's lawyer be? He'd be missing a delectable chunk of jack by a hair--that's where he would be.

Let the law take its course!

The law did. It took its racking course at quarter past one o'clock on the morning of the twenty-eighth.

Those who kept ward on Tony Scarra, considering him as scientists might consider an inoculated guinea-pig waiting patiently for this or that expected symptom of organic disorder to show itself, marveled more and more as the night wore on at the bearing of the condemned man. His, they dispassionately decided among themselves, was not the rehearsed but transparent bravado of the ordinary thug. That sort of thing they had observed before; they could bear testimony that very often toward the finish this make-believe fortitude melted beneath the lifting floods of a mortal terror and a mortal anguish, so that the subject lost the use of his members and the smoothness of his tongue, and babbled wild meaningless prayers and flapped with his legs and must be half-dragged, half-borne along on that first, last, short journey of his through the painted iron door to what awaited him beyond.

Or, fifty-fifty, it might be that imminent dread acted upon him as a merciful drug which soothed him into a sort of obedient coma wherein he yielded with a pitiful docility to the wishes of his executioners and mechanically did as they bid him, and went forth from his cell meek as a lamb, thereby simplifying and easing for them their not altogether agreeable duties. These experienced observers had come to count on one or the other of these manifestations. In Scarra neither of them was developed.

He seemed defiantly insulated against collapse by some indefinable power derived from within; it was as though a hidden secret reservoir of strength sustained him. He gibed the death-watch and he made a joke of the prison chaplain coming in the face of repeated rebuffs to offer the sustaining comfort of his Gospels. He betrayed no signs whatsoever of weakening--and this, to those who officiated at those offices, seemed most remarkable of all--when they clipped the hair off the top of his skull for the pad of the electrodes and again, later in the evening, when they brought him the black trousers with the left leg split up the inside seam.

All at once though, at the beginning of the second hour after midnight, when the witnesses were assembled and waiting in the lethal chamber, his jaunty confidence--if so, for lack of a better description, it might be termed--drained from him in a single gush. He had called, a minute or two before, for a drink of water, complaining of a parched throat. A filled cup was brought to him. Sitting on a stool in his cell he turned his back upon the bringer and took the draught down at a gulp, then rose and stood looking through the bars at the keepers, with a mocking, puzzling grin on his lips and over all his face and in his eyes a look of expectancy. The grin vanished, the look changed to one of enormous bewilderment, then to one of the intensest chagrin, and next he was mouthing with shocking vile words toward the eternity waiting for him. He resisted them when they went in then to fetch him out, and fought with them and screamed out and altogether upset the decorum of the death-house, so that the surviving inmates became excessively nervous and unhappy.

He did not curse those whose task it was now to subdue and, if possible, to calm him. He cursed somebody or other--person or persons unknown--for having deceived him in a vital matter, crying out that he had been imposed on, that he had been double-crossed. He raved of a pill--whatever that might mean--but so frightful a state was he in, so nearly incoherent in his frenzy of rage and distress and disappointment, that the meaning of what he spoke was swallowed up and lost.

Anyhow, his sweating handlers had no time to listen. Their task was to muffle his blasphemy and get him to the chair, which they did. Practically, they had to gag him with their hands, and one of the men had a finger bitten to the bone.

Since he continued to struggle in the presence of the audience, the proceedings from this point on were hurried along more than is common. His last understandable words, coming from beneath the mask clamped over the upper part of his distorted face, had reference to this mysterious double-crossing of which plainly, even in that extremity, he regarded himself the victim, and on which, as was equally plain, his final bitter thoughts dwelt. The jolt of the current cut him off in a panted, choking mid-speech, and the jaw dropped and the body strained up against the stout breast-harness, and the breath wheezed and rasped out across the teeth and past the lips, which instantly had turned purple, and there was a lesser sound, a curious hissing, whispering, slightly unpleasant sound as though the life were so eager to escape from this flesh that it came bursting through the pores of the darkening skin. Also, there was a wisp of rising blue smoke and a faint, a very faint smell of something burning. There nearly always is; a feature which apparently cannot be avoided. Still, after all, that's but a detail.

For absolute certainty of result, they gave Scarra's body a second shock, and the physicians present observed with interest how certain of the muscles, notably certain of the neck muscles, twitched in response to the throb and flow of the fluid through the tissues. But of course the man was dead. It merely was a simple galvanic reaction--like eel-meat twisting on a hot griddle, or severed frogs' legs jumping when you sprinkle salt on them--interesting, perhaps, but without significance. Except for Scarra's unseemly behavior immediately after drinking the water, this execution, as executions go, and they nearly always go so, was an entire success.

Conceded that as to its chief purpose, the plan unaccountably had gone amiss, Mr. Finburg nevertheless felt no concern over the outcome. Privately he preferred that it should have been thus--there being no reason for any official inquiry, naturally there would be no official inquiry. Happy anticipations uplifted him as, sundry legal formulas having been complied with, he went as Scarra's heir to Scarra's bank on Third Avenue and opened Scarra's safe-deposit box.

It would seem that he, also, had been double-crossed. All the box contained was a neat small kit of burglars' tools. It was indeed a severe disappointment to Mr. Finburg, a blow to his faith in human nature. We may well feel for Mr. Finburg.

Of that triumvirate of East Side connivers, there remains the third and least important member, Isgrid, he who, scheming on his own account and in his own protection, had played for safety by smuggling to the late Scarra not number twelve, the poisonous capsule, but number eleven, the harmless one. Let us not spend all our sympathy upon Mr. Finburg but rather let us reserve some portion of it for Isgrid. For this one, he too suffered a grievous disappointment. It befell when, having patched the parted halves of his thousand-dollar bill, he undertook to pass it. It was refused, not because it was pasted together but because it was counterfeit.

THE COWBOY AND THE LADY--AND HER PA

[Decoration]

From up on the first level of the first shelf of the wagon road above Avalanche Creek came the voice of Dad Wheelis, the wagon-train boss, addressing his front span. The mules had halted at the head of the steep grade to twist about in the traces and, with six 'cello-shaped heads stretched over the rim and twice that many somber eyes fixed on the abyss swimming in a green haze beneath them, to contemplate its outspread glories while they got their wind back. It was evident Dad thought the breathing space sufficiently had been prolonged. On a beautiful clearness his words dropped down through the spicy dry air.

"Git up!" he bade the sextet with an affectionate violence, and you could hear his whip-lash where it crackled like a string of firecrackers above the drooping ears of the lead team. "Git up, you scenery-lovin' _so-and-soes_!"

There was an agonized whine of tires and hubs growing faint and fainter and Mrs. Hector Gatling sighed with a profound appreciation.

"How prodigal nature is out here in these Western wilds!" she said.

"Certainly does throw a wicked prod," agreed her daughter, Miss Shirley Gatling. But her eyes were not fixed where her mother's were.

"Such a climate!" affirmed the senior lady, flinching slightly that the argot of a newer and an irreverent generation should be invoked in this cathedral place. "Such views! Such picturesque types everywhere!"

"Not bad-looking mountains across over yonder, at that," said Mr. Gatling, husband and father of the above, giving his gestured indorsement to an endless vista of serrated peaks of an average height of not less than seven thousand feet. "Not bad at all, so long as you don't have to hoof up any of 'em."

"_Mong père_, he also grows poetic, is it not?" murmured Miss Gatling. "Now, who'd have ever thunk it, knowing him in his native haunts back in that dear Pittsburgh!"

Her glance still was leveled in a different direction from the one in which her elders gazed. Mr. Gatling twisted about so that a foldable camp-chair creaked under his weight, and looked through his glasses in the same quarter where his daughter looked. His forehead drew into wrinkles.

Miss Gatling stood up, a slim, trim figure in her riding-boots and well-tailored breeches and with a gay little sweater drawn snugly down inside her waistband and held there by a broad brilliant girdle of squaw's beadwork. She settled a white sombrero on her bobbed hair and stepped away from them over the pine-needles and thence down toward the roaring creek. The morning sunlight came slanting through the lower tree boughs and picked out and made shiny glitters of the heavy Mexican silver spurs at her heels and the wide Navaho silver bracelet that was set on her right wrist. She passed between two squared boulders that might have been lichened tombs for Babylon's kings.

"Continue, I pray you, dear parents, to sit and invite your souls, if any," she called back. "I go to make sure they're putting plenty of cold victuals in the lunch kit. Yesterday noon, you'll remember, we darn' near starved. For you, the beckon and the lure of the wonderland. But for me and my girlish gastric juices--chow and lots of it!"

Mr. Gatling said nothing for a minute or two, but he took off his cap as though to make more room for additional furrows forming on his brow. A deer-fly alighted where he was baldest and promenaded to and fro there, across the great open spaces. The thinker too deeply was abstracted to shoo away the little stranger; he let her promenade.

"Mmph!" he remarked presently. Mrs. Gatling emerged promptly from her own reverie. It was his commonest way of engaging her attention--that _mmphing_ sound was. Lacking vowels though it did, its emphasis of uneasiness was quite apparent to her schooled ears.

"What's wrong, dear?" she asked. "Still sore from all that dreadful horseback riding?"

"It's that girl," he told her; "that Shirley of ours. She's the one I'm worried about."

"Why, goodness gracious!" she cried; "what's wrong with Shirley?"

"Look at her. That's all I ask--just look at her."

Mrs. Gatling, who was slightly near-sighted in more ways than one, squinted at the withdrawing figure.

"Why, the child never seemed happier or healthier in her life," she protested, still peering. "Why, only last Monday--or was it Tuesday; no, Monday--I remember distinctly now it was Monday because that was the day we got caught in the snow-storm coming through Swift Current Pass--only last Monday you were saying yourself how well and rosy she was looking."

"I don't mean that--she's a bunch of limber young whalebones. Look where she's going! That's what I mean. Look what she's doing!"

"Why, what is she doing that's out of the way, I'd like to know?" demanded his puzzled wife, now jealously on the defensive for her young.

"She's doing what she's been doing every chance she got these last four-five days, that's what." Mr. Gatling was manifesting an attitude somewhat common in husbands and fathers when dealing with their domestic problems. He preferably would flank the subject rather than bore straight at it, hoping by these round-about tactics to obtain confirmation for his suspicions before he ever voiced them. "Got eyes in your head, haven't you? All right then, use 'em."

"Hector Gatling, for a sane man, you do get the queerest notions in your brain sometimes! What on earth possesses you? Hasn't the child a perfect right to stroll down there and watch those three guides packing up? You know she's been trying to learn to make that pearl knot or turquoise knot or whatever it is they call it. What possible harm can there be in her learning how to tie a pearl knot?"

"Diamond hitch, diamond hitch," he corrected her testily. "Not pearls, but diamonds; not knots, but hitches! You'd better try to remember it, too--diamonds and hitches usually figure in the thing that I've got on my mind. And, if you'll be so kind as to observe her closely, you'll see that it isn't those three guides she's so interested in. It's one guide out of the three. And it's getting serious, or I'm all wrong. Now then, do you get my drift, or must I make plans and specifications?"

"Oh!" The exclamation was freighted with shock and with sorrow but with incredulity too.

"Oh!" said Mrs. Gatling again and now she was fluttering her feathers in alarm, if a middle-aged lady dressed in tweed knickerbockers and a Boy Scout's shirt may be said to have any feathers to flutter. "Oh, Hector, you don't mean it! You can't mean it! A child who's traveled and seen the world! A child who's had every advantage that wealth and social position and all could give her! A child who's a member of the Junior League! A child who's--who-- Hector, you're crazy. Hector, you know it's utterly impossible--utterly! It's preposterous!" Womanlike, she debated against a growing private dread. Then, still being womanlike, she pressed the opposing side for proof to destroy her counter-argument: "Hector, you've seen something--you've overheard something. Tell me this minute what it was you overheard!"

"I've overheard nothing. Think I'm going snooping around eavesdropping and spying on Shirley? I've never done any of that on her yet and I'm too old to begin now--and too fat. But I've seen a-plenty."

"Oh, pshaw! I guess if there'd been anything afoot I'd have seen it myself first, what with my mother's intuition and all! Oh, pshaw!" But Mrs. Gatling's derisive rejoinder lacked conviction.

"I've had the feeling for longer than just these last few days," continued Mr. Gatling despondently. "But I couldn't put my hand on it, not at first. I tried to fool myself by saying it was this Wild Western flubdub and stuff getting into her blood and she'd get over it, soon as the attack had run its course. First loading up with all that Indian junk, then saying she felt as though she never wanted to do anything but be natural and stay out here and rough it for the rest of her life, and now here all of a sudden getting so much more flip and slangy than usual. That's the worst symptom yet--that slang is.

"In your day, ma'am, when a girl fell in love or thought she had, she went and got all mushed-up and sentimental; went mooning around sentimentalizing and rhapsodizing and romanticking and everything. All of you but the strong-minded ones did and I guess they must have mushed-up some too, on the sly. Yes'm, that's what you did--you mushed-up." His tone was accusing, condemning, as though he dealt with ancient offenses which not even the passage of the years might condone. "But now it's different with them. They get slangier and flippier and they let on to make fun of their own affections. And that's what Miss Shirley is doing right now, this very minute, or else I'm the worst misled man in the entire state of Montana."

"Maybe--maybe--" The matron sputtered as her distress mounted. "Of course I'm not admitting that you're right, Hector--the mere suggestion of such a thing is simply incredible--but on the bare chance that the child might be getting silly notions into her head, maybe I'd better speak to her. I'm so much older than she is that--"

"You said it then!" With a grim firmness Mr. Gatling interrupted. "You're so much older than she is; that's your trouble. And I'm suffering from the same incurable complaint. People our age who've got children growing up go around bleating that young people are different from the way young people were when we were young. They're not. They're just the same as we were--same impulses, same emotions, same damphoolishness, same everything--but they've got a new way of expressing 'em. And then we say we can't understand them. Knock thirty years off of our lives and we'd understand all right because then we'd be just the same as they are. So you'll not say a word to that youngster of ours--not yet awhile, you won't. Nor me, neither." Grammar, considered as such, never had meant very much to Mr. Gatling, that masterful, self-educated man.

"But if I pointed out a few things to her--if I warned her--"

"Ma'am, you'll perhaps remember your own daddy wasn't so terribly happy over the prospect when I started sparking you. After I'd come courting and had gone on home again I guess it was as much as the old man could do to keep from taking a shovel and shoveling my tracks out of the front yard. But he had sense enough to keep his mouth shut where you were concerned. Suppose he'd tried to influence you against me, tried to break off the match--what would have happened? You'd have thought you were oppressed and persecuted and you'd have grabbed for me even quicker than you did."

"Why, Hector Gatling, I never grabbed--"

"I'm merely using a figure of speech. But no, he had too much gumption to undertake the stern-father racket. He locked his jaw and took it out in nasty looks and let nature take its course, and the consequence was we got married in the First Methodist Church with bridesmaids and old shoes and kins folks and all the other painful details instead of me sneaking you out of a back window some dark night and us running off together in a side-bar buggy. No, ma'am, if you'll take a tip from an old retired yardmaster of the Lackawanna, forty-seven years, man and boy, with one road, you'll--"

"You never worked a day as a railroad man and you know it."

"Just another figure of speech, my dear. Understand now, you're to keep mum for a while and I keep mum and we just sit back in our reserved seats up in the grandstand and see how the game comes out. A nice polite quiet game of watchful waiting--that's our line and we're both going to follow it. We'll stand by for future developments and then maybe I'll frame up a little campaign. With your valuable advice and assistance, of course!"

* * * * *

With a manner which she strove to make casual and unconcerned, the disturbed Mrs. Gatling that day watched. It was the manner rather of a solicitous hen with one lone chick, and she continually oppressed by dreads of some lurking chicken-hawk. It would have deceived no one who closely studied the lady's bearing and demeanor. But then, none in the party closely studied these.

The camp dunnage being miraculously bestowed upon the patient backs of various pack-animals, their expedition moved. They overtook and passed Dad Wheelis and his crew, caravaning with provender for the highway contractors on up under the cloud-combing parapet of the Garden Wail Wall, and behind them heard for a while his frank and aboveboard reflections upon the immediate ancestries, the present deplorable traits, the darkened future prospects of his work stock. They swung away from the rutted wagon track and took the steeper horseback trail and for hours threaded it like so many plodding ants against the slant of a tilted bowl. They stopped at midday on a little plateau fixed so high toward heaven that it was a picture-molding on Creation's wall above a vast mural of painted buttes and playful cataracts and a straggling timber-line and two jeweled glaciers.

They stretched their legs and uncramped their backs; they ate and remounted and on through the afternoon single-filed along the farther slope where a family herd of mountain-goats browsed among the stones and paid practically no heed to them. They saw a solitary bighorn ram with a twisted double cornucopia springing out of his skull and likewise they saw a pair of indifferent mule-deer and enough landscapes to fill all the souvenir post-card racks of the world; for complete particulars consult the official guide-book of Our National Playgrounds.

Evening brought them across a bony hip of the Divide to within sight of the distant rear boundary of the governmental domain. So they pitched the tents and coupled up the collapsible stove there in a sheltered small cove in the Park's back yard and watched the sun go down in his glory. When the moon rose it was too good to believe. You almost could reach up and jingle the tambourines of little circling stars; anyhow, you almost thought you could. It was a magic hour, an ideal place for love-making among the young of the species. Realizing the which, Mrs. Gatling had a severe sinking and apprehensive sensation directly behind the harness buckle on the ample belt which girthed her weary form amidships. She'd been apprehensive all day but now the sinking was more pronounced.

She strained at the tethers of her patience though until supper was over and it was near hushaby-time for the tired forms of the middle-aged. Within the shelter of their small tent she spoke then to her husband, touching on the topic so stedfastly uppermost in her brain.

"Oh, Hector," she quavered, "I'm actually beginning to be afraid you're right. They've been together this livelong day. Neither one of them had eyes for anything or anybody else. The way he helped her on and off her horse! The way he fetched and carried for her! And the way she let him do it! And they're--they're together outside now. Oh, Hector!"

"They certainly are," he stated. "Sitting on a slab of rock in that infernal moonlight like a couple of feeble-minded turtle-doves. Why in thunder couldn't it 'a' rained tonight--good and hard? Romola, I don't want to harry you up any more than's necessary but you take, say, about two or three more nights like this and they're liable to do considerable damage to tender hearts."

"Don't I know it? O-oh, Hector!"

"Well, anyhow, I had the right angle on the situation before you tumbled," he said with a sort of melancholy satisfaction. "I can give myself credit for that much intelligence anyhow." It was quite plain that he did.

He stepped, a broad shape in his thick pajamas and quilted sleeping-boots, to the door flap and he drew the canvas back and peeped through the opening.

The pair under discussion had found the night air turning chill and their perch hard. They got up and stood side by side in the shimmering white glow. Against a background of luminous blue-black space, it revealed their supple figures in strong, sharp relief. The youth made a handsome shadowgraph. His wide-brimmed sugar-loaf hat; his blue flannel blouse with its flaunting big buttons; his Angora chaps with wings on them that almost were voluminous enough for an eagle's wings; his red silk neckerchief reefed in by a carved bone ring to fit a throat which Mr. Gatling knew to be sun-tanned and wind-tanned to a healthy mahogany-brown; his beaded, deep-cuffed gauntlets; his sharp-toed, high-heeled, silver-roweled boots of a dude cowboy--they all matched and modeled in with the slender waist and the flat thighs and the sinewy broad shoulders and the alert head of the wearer.

His name was Hayes Tripler, but the other two guides generally called him "Slick" and they looked up to him, for he had ridden No Name, the man-killer, at last year's Pendleton Round-up and hoped this year to be in the bulldogging money over the line at Calgary. Within his limitations he was an exceedingly competent person and given to deporting himself accordingly.

At this present moment he appeared especially well pleased with his own self-cast horoscope. There was a kind of proud proprietary aura all about him.

The watcher inside the tent saw a caressing arm slip from about his daughter's body and he caught the sounds but did not make out the sense of words that passed between them. Then the two silhouettes swung apart and the boy laughed contentedly and flung an arm aloft in a parting salute and began singing a catch as he went teetering off toward the spot where his mates of the outfit already were making the low tilt of a tarpaulin roof above them pulse to some very sincere snoring. But before she betook herself to quarters, the girl bided for a long minute on the verge of the cliff and looked off and away into the studded void beyond her. She seemed to be checking up on the minor stars to see whether any of them were missing. But her father knew better than that. The sidewise cant of her head showed that one of the things she did was to listen while her late companion served due notice on the night to such effect as this:

"You monkey with my Lulu,
Tell you what I'll do:
Take out a gun and shoot you,
And carve you plenty too!"

Mr. Gatling drew the flaps together in an abstracted way and _mmphed_ several times.

"Pretty dog-gone spry-looking young geezer at that," he remarked absently. "Yes, sir, pretty spry-looking."

"Who?"

"Him."

"You actually mean that cowboy?"

"None other than which."

"Oh, Hector! That--that vulgarian, that country bumpkin, that clodhopper!"

"Now hold on there, Romola. Let's try to be just even if we are prejudiced. All the clods that kid ever hopped you could put 'em in your eye without interfering with your eyesight. He's no farm-hand; he's a cow-hand or was before he got this job of steering tourists around through these mountains--and that's a very different thing, I take it. And what he knows he knows blame' well. I wish I could mingle in with a horse the way he does. When he gets in a saddle he's riveted there but I only come loose and work out of the socket. And I'd give about five years off my life to be able to handle a trout-rod like he can. I claim that in his departments he's a fairly high-grade proposition. He's aware of it, too, but I don't so much blame him for that, either. If you don't think well of yourself who else is going to?"

"Why, Hector Gatling, I believe you're really--but no, you couldn't be! Look at the difference in their stations! Look at their different environments! Look at their different view-points!"

"I'm looking--just as hard as you are. You don't get what I'm driving at. I wouldn't fancy having this boy for a son-in-law any more than you would--although at that I'm not saying I couldn't maybe make some use of him in another capacity. Still, you needn't mind worrying so much about their respective stations in life. I didn't have any station in life to start from myself--it was a whistling-post. And yet I've managed to stagger along fairly well. I'd a heap rather see Shirley tied up to pretty near any decent, ambitious, self-respecting young cuss that came along than to have her fall for one of those plush-headed lounge-lizards that keep hanging round her back home. I know the breed. In my day they used to be guitar-pickers--and some of 'em played a snappy game of Kelly pool. Now they're Charleston dancers and the only place most of 'em carry any weight is on the hip.

"But that's not the point. The point is that if Shirley fell for this party she'd probably be a mighty regretful young female when the bloom began to rub off the peach. They haven't been raised to talk the same language--that's the trouble. I don't want her to make a mistake that'll gum up her life before it's fairly started; don't want that happening any more than you do. I don't want her to have a husband that she's liable later on to be ashamed to show him off before the majority of her friends, or anyhow one that she'd maybe have to go around making excuses for the way he handled his knife and fork in company; or something. Right now, the fix she's in, she's probably saying to herself that she could be perfectly satisfied to settle down in a cabin somewhere out here and wet-nurse a lot of calves for the next forty or fifty years. But that's only her heart talking, not her head. After a while she'd get to brooding on Palm Beach.

"But if she's set her mind--and you know how stubborn she is when she gets her mind set--thank Heavens she didn't get that from my side of the family!--I say, if she's set her mind on him, Heavens above only knows what's going to happen. She's bewitched, she's hypnotized; it's this free-and-easy Western life that's fascinated her. I can't believe she's in love with him!"

"Well, I don't know. Maybe she's in love with a two-gallon hat and a pair of cowboy pants with silver dewdabs down the sides, or then again on the other hand maybe it's the real thing with her, or a close imitation of it. That's for us to find out if we can."

"I won't believe it. She's distracted, she's glamoured, she's--"

"All right, then, let's get her unglammed."

"But how?"

"Well, for one thing, by not rushing in and interfering with her little dream. By not letting either one of 'em see how anxious we are over this thing. By remaining as calm, cool and collected as we can."

"And in the meanwhile?"

"Well, in the meanwhile I, for one, am going to tear off a few winks. I hurt all over and there's quite a lot of me measured that way--all over."

"You can go to sleep with that--that dreadful thought hanging over us?"

"I can and I will. Watch me for about another minute and you'll see me doing it." He settled himself on his air mattress and drew the blankets over him.

"Well, I know I won't close my eyes this whole night through."

"I've heard you say that before and then had to shake you like a dish towel in the morning to make you snap out of it."

"This time I won't. I don't want to sleep. I want to plan something since you won't help me. Hector"--she reached across from her side and plucked at his top coverlid--"Hector, listen, I've got an idea--let's break off this trip tomorrow. Let's bundle right up and start back East. You can say you've got a message calling you back to the office--say you forgot something important, say--"

"And tip our hands just at the most critical time! We will not!... Mmph!" With a drowsy scornfulness he added this. Ten seconds later he _mmphed_ again, then again. But the third one merged into a snore.

Undeniably Mr. Hector Gatling could be one of the most aggravating persons on earth when he set out to be. Any husband can.

* * * * *

Speaking with regard to the ripening effect of summer nights upon the spirits of receptive and impressionable youth, Mr. Gatling had listed the cumulative possibilities of three moonlit ones hand-running. Specifically he had not included in his perilous category those languishing soft gloamings and those explosive sunrises and those long lazy mornings when the sun baked resiny perfumes out of the cedars, and the unseen heart-broken little bird that the mountaineers call the lonesome bird sang his shy lament in the thickets; nor had he mentioned slow journeys through deep defiles where the ferns grew with a tropical luxuriance out of the cinders of old forest-fires and, in a paradoxical defiance, shook their fronds toward the never-melting snow-caps on the _sierras_ across the cañon; nor yet the fordings of tumbling streams when it might seem expedient on the part of a thoughtful young man to push up alongside and steady a young equestrian of the opposite sex while her horse's hoofs fumbled over the slick, drowned boulders. But vaguely he had lumped all these contingencies.

Three more nights of moon it was with three noble days of pleasant adventuring in between; and on the late afternoon of the third day when camp was being made beside a river which mostly was rapids, Miss Shirley Gatling sought out her father in a secluded spot somewhat apart from the rest. It was in the nature of a rendezvous, she having told him a little earlier that presently she desired to have speech with him. Only, her way of putting it had been different.

"Harken, O most revered Drawing Account," she said, dropping back on a broad place in the trail to be near him. "If you can spare the time for being saddle-sore I want to give you an earful as soon as this procession, as of even date, breaks up. You find a quiet retreat away from the flock and wait there until I find you, savvy?"

So now he was waiting, and from yonder she came toward him, stepping lightly, swinging forward from her hips with a sort of impudent freedom of movement; and to his father's eyes she never had seemed more graceful or more delectable or more independent-looking.

"Dad," she began, without preamble, and meeting him eye to eye, "in me you behold a Sabine woman. I'm bespoken."

"Mmph," he answered, and the answer might be interpreted, by a person who knew him, in any one of half a dozen ways.

"Such is the case," she went on, quite unafraid. "That caveman over there in the blue shirt"--she pointed--"he's the nominee. We're engaged."

"I can't plead surprise, kid," he stated, taking on for the moment her bantering tone. "The report that you two had come to a sort of understanding has been in active circulation on this reservation for the past forty-eight hours or so--maybe longer."

Her eyebrows went up.

"I don't get you," she said. "Who circulated it?"

"You did, for one," he told her. "And he did, for another. I may be failing, what with increasing age and all, but I'm not more than half blind yet. Have you been to your mother with this piece of news?"

"I came to you first. I--I"--for the first time she faltered an instant--"I figured you might be able to get the correct slant a little quicker than she would. This is only the curtain-raiser. I'm saving the big scene with the melodramatic touches for her. I have a feeling that she may be just a trifle difficult. So I picked on something easy to begin with."

"I see," he said. "Kind of an undress rehearsal, eh?" He held her off at arm's length from him, studying her face hungrily. "But what's the reason your young man didn't come along with you or ahead of you, in fact? In my time it generally was the young man that brought the message to Garcia."

"He wanted to come--he wasn't scared. I wouldn't let him. I told him I'd been knowing you longer than he had and I could handle the job better by myself. Well, that's your cue. What's it going to be, daddy--the glad hand of approval and the parental bless you, my children, bless you, or a little line of that go-forth-ungrateful-hussy-and-never-darken-my-doors-again stuff? Only, we're a trifle shy on doors around here."

He drew her to him and spoke downward at the top of her cropped head, she snuggling her face with a quick nervous little jerk against his wool-clad breast.

"Baby," he said, "when all's said and done, the whole thing's up to you, way I look at it. I don't suppose there ever was a man who really loved his daughter but what he figured that, taking one thing with another, she was too good for any man on earth. No matter who the lucky candidate is he says to himself: 'Well, if I have to have a son-in-law I suppose maybe you'll do, but alongside of her you're a total loss.' That's what any father who's worth his salt is bound to think. And that's what I'd still think no matter who you picked out. I'm not saying now what sort of a husband I'd try to pick out for you if the choice had been left to me. I'd probably want to keep you an old maid so's I could have you around and then I'd secretly despise myself for doing it, too. What I'm saying is this: If you're certain you know your own mind and if you've decided that this boy is the boy you want, why what more is there for me to do except maybe to ask you just one or two small questions?"

"Shoot!" she bade, without looking up, but her arms hugged him a little tighter. "Probably one of the nicest old meal-tickets in the world," she added, confidentially addressing the top buttonhole of his sweater.

"Has it by any chance entered into your calculations at this early stage of the game, how you are going to live--you two? Or where? Or, if I may be so bold, what on?"

"That's easy," she said, and now she was peering up at him through a tousled short forelock. "You're going to set us up on a place out here somewhere--a ranch. We're going to raise beef. He knows about beef. And I'm going to learn. I aim to be the leading lady beefer of the Imperial Northwest before I'm done."

"Whose notion was that?" His voice had sharpened the least bit.

"Mine, of course. He doesn't know anything about it. His idea is that we start in on what he can earn. But my idea is that we start in on a few of the simoleons that have already been earned--by you. And that's the idea that's going to prevail."

"Lucky I brought a fountain pen and a check-book along," he said. "Nothing like being prepared for these sudden emergencies. Still, I take it there's no great rush. Now, I tell you what: You run along and locate your mother and get _that_ over with. She knows how I stand--we've been discussing this little affair our own selves."

"Oh," she said. "Oh, you have?" She seemed disappointed somehow--disappointed and slightly puzzled.

"Oh yes, several times. And on your way kindly whisper to the young man that I'm lurking right here behind these rocks ready to have a few words with him--if he can spare the time."

"Righto!" She reached up and kissed him and went swinging away, suspecting nothing, and for just a moment Mr. Gatling's conscience smote him, that she did not suspect.

"I've got to do it," he said to himself, excusing himself. "I've just got to find out--for her sake and ours--yes, and for his, too. It looks like an impossible bet and I've got to make sure."

With young Tripler he had more than the few words he had specified. They had quite an interview and as they had it the youth's embarrassment, which at the outset of the dialogue had made him wriggle and mumble and kick with his toes at inoffensive pebbles, gradually wore off until it vanished altogether and his native assurance reasserted itself. A proposition was advanced. It needed little pressing; promptly he fell in with it. It appealed to him.

"So we're agreed there," concluded his prospective father-in-law, clinching the final rivets. "We'll all go right ahead and finish out this tour--it's only a couple of days more anyhow and there's still a few cutthroats I want to catch. Then I'll take Shirley and her mother and run on out to Spokane. We'll hustle one of the other boys back tomorrow to the entrance to tell my chauffeur to load some bags in the car and run around to this side and meet us where we come out. We'll leave you there and you can dust back to the starting point through that short cut over the Garden Wall you were just speaking of. The business that I've got in Spokane will keep me maybe two or three days. That'll give you time to get those new clothes of yours and then we'll all meet over at Many Glacier--I'll wire you in advance--and in a day or two we'll all go on East together so's you can get acquainted with Shirley's friends and so forth. But of course, as I said before, that's our secret--all that part of it is. You've never been East, I believe?"

"Well, I've been as far as Minot, North Dakota."

"You'll probably notice a good deal of territory the other side of there. You'll enjoy it. Sure you can pick up all the wardrobe you need out in this country?" His manner was solicitous.

"Oh yes, sir, there's those two swell fellows named Steinfelt and Immergluck I was telling you about that they've got the leading gents' furnishing goods store down in Cree City."

"Good enough! I'd suggest that when picking out a suit you get something good and brisk as to pattern. Shirley likes live colors." Mr. Gatling next stressed a point which already had been dwelt upon: "You understand of course that she's not to know a single thing about all this--it's strictly between us two?"

"Yes, sir."

"You see, that'll make the surprise all the greater when she sees you all fixed up in a snappy up-to-date rigging like young college fellows your age wear back where she comes from. Seems like to me I was reading in an advertisement only here the other day where they're going in for coats with belts on 'em this season. Oh yes, and full-bottomed pants; I read that, too.

"One thing more occurs to me: Your hair is a little bit long and shaggy, don't you think? That's fine for out here but back East a young fellow that wants to be in style keeps himself trimmed up sort of close. Now I saw a barber working on somebody about as old as you are just the other day. Let me see--where was it? Oh yes, it was the barber at that town of Cree City--I dropped in there for a shave when we motored down last week. He seemed to have pretty good ideas about trimming up a fellow's bean, that barber."

"I know the one you mean--Silk Sullivan, next door to the bank. I've patronized him before."

"That's the one. Well, patronize him again before you rejoin us. He knows his business all right, your friend Sullivan does.... Now, mind you, mum's the word. All this part of it is absolutely between us."

"Oh yes, sir."

"O. K. Shake on it.... Well, suppose we see how they're coming along with supper."

Mr. Gatling's strategy ticked like a clock. After they got to Spokane he delayed the return by pretending a vexatious prolongation of a purely fictitious deal in ore properties, his privy intent being to give opportunity for Cree City's ready-made clothing princes to work their will. Since a hellish deed must be done he craved that they do it properly. Then on the homeward journey when they had reached the Western Gate and were preparing to ship the car through the non-negotiable sixty-mile stretch across the summit, he suddenly remembered he had failed to complete his purchases of an assortment of game heads at Lewis's on Lake McDonald. He professed that he couldn't round out the order by telephone; unless he personally selected his collection some grievous error might be made.

"You go on across on this train, Shirley," he said. "I telegraphed your young man that we'd be there this morning and he'll be on the lookout. Your mother and I'll dust up to the head of the lake on the bus and I'll finish up what I've got to do there and we'll be along on the Limited this evening. After being separated for a whole week you two'll probably enjoy a day together without any old folks snooping around. Meet us at the hotel tonight for a reunion."

So Shirley went on ahead. It perhaps was true that Shirley's nerves had suffered after six days spent in the companionship of a devoted mother who trailed along with yearning, grief-stricken eyes fixed on her only child--a mother who at frequent intervals sniffed mournfully and once in a while broke into low moaning and sighing sounds. Mrs. Gatling was bearing up under the blow as well as could be expected, but, even so, there had been hours when depression enveloped her as with sable trappings and at no period had she been what the kindliest of critics would call good company. Quite willingly Shirley went.

"I--I feel as though I were giving her up forever," faltered Mrs. Gatling, following with brimming eyes her daughter's departing form.

"Romola," commanded Mr. Gatling, "don't be foolish in the head. You're going to be separated from her exactly nine hours--unless the evening train's late, in which event it may be as long as nine hours and a half."

"You know what I mean, Hector."

"Don't I? Mmph!"

"But she tripped away so gaily--so gladly. It was exactly as though she wanted to leave us. And yet, Heaven knows I've tried and tried ever since that--that terrible night to show her what she means to me.... Have you got a handkerchief to spare? Mine's sopping."

"You've done more than try, Romola--you've succeeded, if that's any consolation to you. You've succeeded darned well." He stared almost regretfully down the line at the rear of an observation-car swiftly diminishing into a small square dot where the rails came together. "Since you mention it, she did look powerfully chipper and cheerful a minute ago, hustling to climb aboard that Pullman--cheerfuller than she's looked since we quit the trail last Wednesday. Lord, how I wish I could guarantee that kid was never going to have a minute's unhappiness the rest of her life!" Something remotely akin to remorse was beginning to gnaw at Mr. Gatling's heart-cockles.

Indeed, something strongly resembling remorse beset him toward the close of this day. At the station when they detrained, no Shirley was on hand to greet them; nor was there sign of Shirley's affianced. Up the slope from the tracks at the hotel a clerk wrenched himself from an importuning cluster of newly arrived tourists for long enough to tell them the numbers of their rooms and to say Miss Gatling had left word she would be awaiting them there.

So they went up under escort of two college students serving as bell-hops. Collegians as a class make indifferent bell-hops. These two deposited the hand-baggage in the living-room of the suite, accepted the customary rewards and departed. As they vanished, a bedroom door opened and out came Shirley--a crumpled, wobegone Shirley with a streaky swollen face and on her cheek the wrinkle marks where she had ground it into a wadded pillow.