Chapter III: Part I: An Easy Traveller (3)

Even as it dropped, Jack's revolver had risen, his own gun-hand steadied in the palm of his left hand, which had an elbow in the sand for a rest. Victor and spectators, in their preoccupation with the relief and elation of a drama finished, had their first warning of what was to come in a voice that did not seem like the voice of the tenderfoot as they had heard it, but of another man. And Leddy was looking at a black hole in a rim of steel which, though twenty yards away, seemed hot against his forehead, while he turned cold.

"Now, Pete Leddy, do not move a muscle!" Jack told him. "Pete Leddy, you did not play my way. I still have a shot due, and I am going to kill you!"

Jack's face seemed never to have worn a smile. It was all chin, and thin, tightly-pressed lips, and solid, straight nose, bronze and unyielding.

"And I am going to kill you!"

This was surely the devil of Ignacio's imagery speaking in him--a cold, passionless, gray-eyed devil. Though they had never seen him shoot, everybody felt now that he could shoot with deadly accuracy and that there was no play cowboy in his present mood. He had the bead of death on Leddy and he would fire with the first flicker of resistance. His call seemed to have sunk the feet of everyone beneath the sand to bed-rock and riveted them there. Lang and the two seconds were as motionless as statues.

Mary recalled Leddy's leer at her on the pass, with its intent of something more horrible than murder. Savagery rose in her heart. It was right that he should be killed. He deserved his fate. But no sooner was the savagery born--born, she felt, of the very hypnosis of that carved face--than she cast it out shudderingly in the realization that she had wished the death of a fellow human being! She looked away from Jack; and then it occurred to her that he must be bleeding. He was again a companion of the trail, his strength ebbing away. Her impulse was retarded by no fear of the gallery now. It brought her to her feet.

"But first drop your revolver!" she heard Jack call, as she ran.

She saw it fall from Leddy's trembling hand, as a dead leaf goes free of a breeze-shaken limb. All the fight was out of him. The courage of six notches was not the courage to accept in stoicism the penalty of foul play. And that black rim was burning his forehead.

"Galway, you have a gun?" Jack asked.

"Yes," Galway answered, mechanically. His presence of mind, which had been so sure in the store, was somewhat shaken. He had seen men killed, but never in such deliberate fashion.

"Take it out'"

There was a quality in the command like frosty madness, which one instinctively obeyed. The half-prostrate figure of the tenderfoot seemed to dominate everything--men, earth, and air.

Mary had a glimpse of Galway drawing an automatic pistol from his pocket when she dropped at Jack's side. She knew that Jack had not heard or seen her approach. All his will was flowing out along a pistol's sight, even as his blood was flowing out on the sand in a broadening circle of red.

It was well that she had come. Her fingers were splashed as she felt for the artery, which she closed by leaning her whole weight on the thumb.

Ignacio had followed her and immediately after him came Firio, who had been startled in his breakfast preparations by the sound of a shot and had set out to investigate its cause. He was as changed as his master; a twitching, fierce being, glaring at her and at the wound and then prolongedly and watchfully at Pete Leddy.

"Can you shoot to kill?" Jack asked Galway, in a piercing summons.

"Yes," drawled Galway.

"Then up with your gun--quick! There! A bead on Ropey Smith!"

Galway had the bead before Ropey could protest.

"Give Ropey ten seconds to drop his gun or we will care for him at the same time as Pete'" Jack concluded.

Ropey did not wait the ten seconds. He was over-prompt for the same reasons of temperament that made Pete Leddy prefer his own way of fighting.

"I take it that we can count on the neutrality of our spectators. They cannot be interested in the success of either side," Jack observed, with dry humor, but still methodically. "All they ask is a spectacle."

"Yes, you bet!" came a voice from the gallery, undisguisedly eager to concur.

"Now, Pete and Ropey," Jack began, and broke off.

There was a poignant silence that waited on the processes of his mind. Not only was there no sound, but to Mary there seemed no movement anywhere in the world, except the pulse of the artery trying to drive its flood past the barrier of her thumb. Jack kept his bead unremittingly on Pete. It was Firio who broke the silence.

"Kill him! He is bad! He hates you!" said Firio.

"_Sí, sí_! If you do not kill him now, you must some time," said Ignacio.

Mary felt that even if Jack heard them he would not let their advice influence him. On the bank before she had hastened to him a strange and awful visitor in her heart had wished for Leddy's death. Now she wished for him to go away unharmed. She wished it in the name of her own responsibility for all that had happened. Yet her tongue had no urging word to offer. She waited in a supernatural and dreadful curiosity on Jack's decision. It was as if he were to answer one more question in explanation of the mystery of his nature. Could he deliberately shoot down an unarmed man? Was he that hard?

"I am thinking just how to deal with you, Pete and Ropey," Jack proceeded. "As I understand it, you have not been very useful citizens of Little Rivers. You can live under one condition--that you leave town and never return armed. Half a minute to decide!"

"I'll go!" said Pete.

"I'll go!" said Ropey.

"And keep your words?"

"Yes!" they assented.

But neither moved. The fact that Jack had not yet lowered his revolver made them cautious. They were obviously over-anxious to play safe to the last.

"Then go!" called Jack.

Pete and Ropey slouched away, leaving behind Ropey's gun, which was unimportant as it had only one notch, and Pete's precious companion of many campaigns with its six notches, lying on the sand.

"And, gentlemen," Jack called to the spectators, "our little entertainment is over now. I am afraid that you will be late for breakfast."

Apparently it came as a real inspiration to all at once that they might be, for they began to withdraw with a celerity that was amazingly spontaneous. Their heads disappeared below the skyline and only the actors were left. Pete and Ropey--Bill Lang following--walked away along the bed of the _arroyo_, instead of going over the bank. Pete paused when he was out of range. The old threat was again in his pose.

"I'm not through with you, yet!" he called.

"Why, I hope you are!" Jack answered.

He let his revolver fall with a convulsion of weakness. Mary wondered if he were going to faint. She wondered if she herself were not going to faint, in a giddy second, while the red spot on the sand shaped itself in revolving grotesquery. But the consciousness that she must not lift her weight from the artery was a centering idea to keep her faculties in some sort of equilibrium.

He was looking around at her, she knew. Now she must see his face after this transformation in him which had made her fears of his competency silly imaginings; after she had linked her name with his in an overwhelming village sensation. She was stricken by unanalyzable emotions and by a horror of her nearness to him, her contact with his very blood, and his power. She was conscious of a glimpse of his turning profile, still transfixed with the cool purpose of action. Then they were gazing full at each other, eyes into eyes, directly, questioningly. He was smiling as he had on the pass; as he had when he stood with his arms full of mail waiting for the signal to deposit his load. His devil had slipped back into his inner being.

He spoke first, and in the voice that went with his vaguest mood; the voice in which he had described his escape from the dinosaur whose scales had become wedged in the defile at the critical moment.

"You have a strong thumb and it must be tired, as well as all bluggy," he said, falling into a childhood symbol for taking the whole affair in play.

Could he be the same man who had said, "I am going to kill you!" so relentlessly? He had eased the situation with the ready gift he had for easing situations; but, at the same time, he had made those unanalyzable emotions more complex, though they were swept into the background for the moment. He glanced down at his leg with comprehending surprise.

"Now, certainly, you are free of all responsibility," he added. "You kept the strength in me to escape the fate you feared. Jim Galway will make a tourniquet and relieve you."

The first available thing for tightening the tourniquet was the barrel of Pete Leddy's gun and the first suggestion for material came from her. It was the sash of her gown, which Galway knotted with his strong, sunburned fingers.

When she could lift her numbed thumb from its task and rose to her feet she had a feeling of relief, as if she were free of magnetic bonds and uncanny personal proximity. The incident was closed--surely closed. She was breathing a prayer of thanks when a remark from Galway to Jack brought back her apprehension.

"I guess you will have to postpone catching to-day's train," he said.

Certainly, Jack must remain until his wound had healed and his strength had returned. And where would he go? He could not camp out on the desert. As Jasper Ewold had the most commodious bungalow it seemed natural that any wounded stranger should be taken there. The idea chilled her as an insupportable intrusion. Jack hesitated a moment. He was evidently considering whether he could not still keep to his programme.

"Yes, Jim, I'm afraid I shall have to ask you for a cot for a few days," he said, finally.

Again he had the right thought at the right moment. Had he surmised what was passing in her mind?

"Seeing that you've got Pete Leddy out of town, I should say that you were fairly entitled to a whole bed," Jim drawled. "These two Indians here can make a hustle to get some kind of a litter."

Now she could go. That was her one crying thought: She could go! And again he came to her rescue with his smiling considerateness.

"You have missed your breakfast, I'll warrant," he said to her. "Please don't wait. You were so brave and cool about it all, and--I--" A faint tide of color rose to his cheeks, which had been pale from loss of blood. For once he seemed unable to find a word.

Mary denied him any assistance in his embarrassment.

"Yes," she answered, almost bluntly. Then she added an excuse: "And you should have a doctor at once. I will send him."

She did not look at Jack again, but hastened away. When she was over the bank of the _arroyo_ out of sight she put her fingers to her temples in strong pressure. That pulse made her think of another, which had been under her thumb, and she withdrew her fingers quickly.

"It is the sun! I have no hat," she said to herself, "and I didn't sleep well."

X

MARY EXPLAINS

Dr. Patterson was still asleep when Mary rapped at his door. Having aroused him to action by calling out that a stranger had been wounded in the _arroyo_, she did not pause to offer any further details. With her eyes level and dull, she walked rapidly along the main street where nobody was yet abroad, her one thought to reach her room uninterrupted. As she approached the house she saw her father standing on the porch, his face beaming with the joy of a serenely-lived moment as he had his morning look at the Eternal Painter's first display for the day. She had crossed the bridge before he became conscious of her presence.

"Mary! You are up first! Out so early when you went to bed so late!" he greeted her.

"I did not sleep well," she explained.

"What, Mary, you not sleep well!" All the preoccupation with the heavens went from his eyes, which swept her from head to foot. "Mary! Your hand is covered with blood! There is blood on your dress' What does this mean?"

She looked down and for the first time saw dark red spots on her skirt. The sight sent a shiver through her, which she mastered before she spoke.

"Oh, nothing--or a good deal, if you put it in another way. A real sensation for Little Rivers!" she said.

"But you are not telling!"

"It is such a remarkable story, father, it ought not to be spoiled by giving away its plot," she said, with assumed lightness. "I don't feel equal to doing full justice to it until after I've had my bath. I will tell you at breakfast. That's a reason for your waiting for me."

And she hastened past him into the house.

"Was it--was it something to do with this Wingfield?" he called excitedly after her.

"Yes, about the fellow of the enormous spurs--Señor Don't Care, as Ignacio calls him," she answered from the stair.

Some note underneath her nonchalance seemed to disturb, even to distress him. He entered the house and started through the living-room on his way to the library. But he paused as if in answer to a call from one of the four photographs on the wall, Michael Angelo's young David, in the supple ease of grace. The David which Michael made from an imperfect piece of marble! The David which sculptors say is ill-proportioned! The David into which, however, the master breathed the thing we call genius, in the bloom of his own youth finding its power, even as David found his against Goliath.

This David has come out of the unknown, over the hills, with the dew of morning freshness on his brow. He is unconscious of self; of everything except that he is unafraid. If all other aspirants have failed in downing the old champion, why, he will try.

Now, Jasper Ewold frowned at David as if he were getting no answer to a series of questions.

"I must make a change. You have been up a long time, David," he thought; for he had many of these photographs which he kept in a special store-room subject to his pleasure in hanging. "Yes, I will have a Madonna--two Madonnas, perhaps, and a Velasquez and a Rembrandt next time."

In the library he set to reading Professor Giuccamini; but he found himself disagreeing with the professor.

"I want your facts which you have dug out of the archives," he said, speaking to the book as if it were alive. "I don't want your opinions. Confound it!" he threw Giuccamini on the table. "I'll make my own opinions! Nothing else to do out here on the desert. Time enough to change them as often as I want, too."

He went into the garden--the garden which, next to Mary, was the most intimate thing in his affections. Usually, every new leaf that had burst forth over night set itself in the gelatine of his mind like so many letterpress changes on a printed page to a proof-reader. This time, however, a new palm leaf, a new spray of bougainvillea blossoms, a bud on the latest rose setting which he had from Los Angeles, said "Good morning," without any response from him.

He paced back and forth, his hands clasped behind him, his head bowed moodily, and his shoulders drawn together in a way that made him seem older and more portly. With each turn he looked sharply, impatiently, toward the door of the house.

Never had Mary so felt the charm of her room as on this morning; never had it seemed so set apart from the world and so personal. It was the breadth of the ell and the size of her father's library and bedroom combined. The windows could hardly be called windows in a Northern sense, for there was no glass. It was unnecessary to seal up the source of light and air in a dry climate, where a blanket at night supplied all the extra warmth one's body ever required. The blinds swung inward and the shades softened the light and added to the privacy which the screen of the growing young trees and creeping vines were fast supplying. Here she could be more utterly alone than on the summit of the pass itself. She paused in the doorway, surveying familiar objects in the enjoyed triumph of complete seclusion.

While she waited for the water to run into the bowl, she looked fixedly at the stains of a fluid which had been so warm in its touch. It was only blood, she told herself. It would wash off, and she held her hands in the water and saw the spread of the dye through the bowl in a moment of preoccupation. Then she scrubbed as vigorously as if she were bent on removing the skin itself. After she had held up her dripping fingers in satisfied inspection, the spots on her gown caught her eye. For a moment they, too, held her staring attention; then she slipped out of the gown precipitately.

With this, her determined haste was at an end. She was about to enjoy the feminine luxury of time. The combing of her hair became a delightful and leisurely function in the silky feel of the strands in her fingers and the refreshing pull at the roots. The flow of the bath water made the music of pleasurable anticipation, and immersion set the very spirit of physical life leaping and tingling in her veins. And all the while she was thinking of how to fashion a narrative.

When she started down-stairs she was not only refreshed but remade. She was going to breakfast at the usual hour, after the usual processes of ushering herself from the night's rest into the day's activities. There had been no stealthy trip out to the _arroyo_; no duel; no wound; no Señor Don't Care. She had only a story which involved all these elements, a most preposterous story, to tell.

"Now you shall hear all about it!" she called to her father as soon as she saw him; "the strangest, most absurd, most amusing affair"--she piled up the adjectives--"that has ever occurred in Little Rivers!"

She began at once, even before she poured his coffee, her voice a trifle high-pitched with her simulation of humor. And she was exactly veracious, avoiding details, yet missing nothing that gave the facts a pleasant trail. She told of the meeting with Leddy on the pass and of the arrival of the gorgeous traveller; of Jack's whistle; of Pete's challenge.

Jasper Ewold listened with stoical attentiveness. He did not laugh, even when Jack's vagaries were mentioned.

"Why didn't you tell me last night?" was his first question.

"To be honest, I was afraid that it would worry you. I was afraid that you would not permit me to go to the pass alone again. But you will?" She slipped her hand across the table and laid her fingers appealingly on the broad back of his heavily tanned hand, from which the veins rose in bronze welts. "And he was nice about it in his ridiculous, big-spurs fashion. He said that it was all due to the whistle."

"Go on! Go on! There must be more!" her father insisted impatiently.

She gave him the pantomime of the store, not as a bit of tragedy--she was careful about that--but as something witnessed by an impersonal spectator and narrator of stories.

"He walked right toward a muzzle, this Wingfield?" Jasper asked, his brows contracting.

"Why, yes. I told you at the start it was all most preposterous," she answered.

"And he was not afraid of death--this Wingfield!" Jasper repeated.

He was looking away from her. The contraction of his brows had become a scowl of mystification.

"Why do you always speak of him as 'this Wingfield,'" she demanded, "as if the town were full of Wingfields and he was a particular one?"

He looked around quickly, his features working in a kind of confusion. Then he smiled.

"I was thinking of the whistle," he explained. "Well, we'll call him this Sir Chaps, this Señor Don't Care, or whatever you please. As for his walking into the gun, there is nothing remarkable in that. You draw on a man. You expect him to throw up his hands or reach for his gun. He does nothing but smile right along the level of the sight into your eyes. It was disturbing to Pete's sense of etiquette on such occasions. It threw him off. There are similar instances in history. A soldier once put a musket at Bonaparte's head. Some of Caesar's legionaries once pressed their swords at his breast. Such old hands in human psychology had the presence of mind to smile. And the history of the West is full of examples which have not been recorded. Go on, Mary!"

"Ignacio says he has a devil in him," she added.

"That little Indian has a lot of primitive race wisdom. Probably he is right," her father said soberly.

"It explains what followed," she proceeded.

She was emphatic about the reason for her part. She went out to the _arroyo_ on behalf of her responsibility for a human life.

"But why did you not rouse me? Why did you go alone?" he asked.

"I didn't think--there wasn't time--I was upset and hurried."

She proceeded in a forced monotone which seemed to allow her hardly a single full breath.

"And I am going to kill you!" she repeated, shuddering, at the close of the narrative.

"When he said that did his face change completely? Did it seem like the face of another man? Yes, did it seem as if there were one face that could charm and another that could kill?" Jasper's words came slowly and with a drawn exactness. They formed the inquiry of one who expected corroboration of an impression.

"Yes."

"You felt it--you felt it very definitely, Mary?"

"Yes."

She was living over the moment of Jack's transformation from silk to steel. The scene in the _arroyo_ became burning clear. Under the strain of the suppression of her own excitement, concentrated in her purpose to make all the realism of the duel an absurdity, she did not watch keenly for the signs of expression by which she usually knew what was passing in her father's mind. But she was not too preoccupied to see that he was relieved over her assent that there was a devil in Jack Wingfield, which struck her as a puzzle in keeping with all that morning's experience. It added to the inward demoralization which had suddenly dammed her power of speech.

"Ignacio saw it, too, so I was interested," Jasper added quickly, in a more natural tone, settling back into his chair. His agitation had passed.

So that was it. Her father's dominant, fine old egoism was rejoicing in another proof of his excellence as a judge of character.

"Finis! The story is told!" he continued softly.

All told! And it had been a success. Mary caught her breath in a gay, high-pitched exclamation of realization that she had not to go on with explanations.

"Our singular cavalier is safe!" she said. "My debt is paid. I need not worry any further lest someone who did me a favor should suffer for it!"

"True! true!"

Jasper's outburst of laughter when he had paused in turning down the wick of the lamp the previous evening had been as a forced blast from the brasses. Anyone with strong lungs may laugh majestically; but it takes depth of feeling and years rich with experience to express the gratification that now possessed him. He stretched his hands across the table to her and the laugh that came then came as a cataract of spontaneity.

"Exactly, Mary! The duel provided the way to pay a debt," he said. "Why, it is you who have done our Big Spurs a favor! He has a wound to show to his friends in the East! I am proud that you could take it all so coolly and reasonably."

She improved her opportunity while he held her hands.

"I will go armed next time, and I do know how to shoot, so you won't worry"--she put it that way, rather than openly ask his consent--"if I ride out to the pass?"

"Mary, I have every reason to believe that you know how to take care of yourself," he answered.

And that very afternoon she rode out to Galeria, starting a little earlier than usual, returning a little later than usual, in jubilant mood.

"Everything is the same!" she had repeated a dozen times on the road. "Everything is the same!" she told herself before she fell asleep; and her sleep was long and sweet, in nature's gratitude for rest after a storm.

The sunlight breaking through the interstices of the foliage of a poplar, sensitive to a slight breeze, came between the lattices in trembling patchwork on the bed, flickering over her face and losing itself in the strands of her hair.

"Everything is the same!" she said, when her faculties were cleared of drowsiness.

For the second time she gave intimate, precious thanks for a simple thing that had never occurred to her as a blessing before: for the seclusion and silence of her room, free from all invasion except of her own thoughts. The quicker flow of blood that came with awaking, the expanding thrill of physical strength and buoyancy of life renewed, brought with it the moral courage which morning often brings to flout the compromises of the confusion of the evening's weariness. The inspiriting, cool air of night electrified by the sun cleared her vision. She saw all the pictures on the slate of yesterday and their message plainly, as something that could not be erased by any Buddhistic ritual of reiterated phrase.

"No, everything is not the same, not even the ride--not yet!" she admitted. "But time will make it so--time and a sense of humor, which I hope I have."

XI

SEÑOR DON'T CARE RECEIVES

Jack lounged in an armchair in the Galway sitting-room with his bandaged leg bolstered on a stool after Dr. Patterson had fished a bit of lead out of the wound. Tribute overflowed from the table to the chairs and from the chairs to the floor; pineapples, their knobby jackets all yellow from ripening in the field, with the full succulency of root-fed and sun-drawn flavor; monstrous navel oranges, leaden with the weight of juice, richer than cloth of gold and velvet soft; and every fruit of the fertile soil and benignant climate; and jellies, pies, and custards. But these were only the edibles. There were flowers in equal abundance. They banked the windows.

"It's Jasper Ewold's idea to bring gifts when you call," explained Jim Galway. "Jasper is always sowing ideas and lots of them have sprung up and flourished."

Jack had not been in Little Rivers twenty-four hours, and he had played a part in its criminal annals and become subject to all the embarrassment of favors of a royal bride or a prima donna who is about to sail. In a bower, amazed, he was meeting the world of Little Rivers and its wife. Men of all ages; men with foreign accent; men born and bred as farmers; men to whom the effect of indoor occupation clung; men still weak, but with red corpuscles singing a song of returning health in their arteries--strapping, vigorous men, all with hands hardened by manual labor and in their eyes the far distances of the desert, in contrast to the sparkle of oasis intimacy.

Women with the accent of college classrooms; women who made plural nouns the running mates of singular verbs; women who were novices in housework; women drilled in drudgery from childhood--all expanding, all dwelling in a democracy that had begun its life afresh in a new land, and all with the wonder of gardens where there had been only sagebrush in their beings.

There was something at odds with Jack's experience of desert towns in the picture of a bronzed rancher, his arms loaded with roses, saying, in boyish diffidence:

"Mister, you fit him fair and you sure fixed him good. Just a few roses--they're so thick over to our place that they're getting a pest. Thought mebbe they'd be nice for you to look at while you was tied up to a chair nursing Pete's soovenir!"

One visitor whose bulk filled the doorway, the expansion of his smile spreading over a bounteous rotundity of cheek, impressed himself as a personality who had the distinction in avoirdupois that Jim Galway had in leanness. In his hand he had five or six peonies as large as saucers.

"Every complete community has a fat man, seh!" he announced, with a certain ample bashfulness in keeping with his general amplitude and a musical Southern accent.

"If it wants to feel perfectly comfortable it has!" said Jack, by way of welcome.

"Well, I'm the fat man of Little Rivers, name being Bob Worther!" said he, grinning as he came across the room with an amazingly quick, easy step.

"No rivals?" inquired Jack.

"No, seh! I staked out the first claim and I've an eye out for any new-comers over the two hundred mark. I warn them off! Jasper Ewold is up to two hundred, but he doesn't count. Why, you ought to have seen me, seh, before I came to this valley!"

"A living skeleton?"

"No, seh! Back in Alabama I had reached a point where I broke so many chairs and was getting so nervous from sudden falls in the midst of conversation, when I made a lively gesture that I didn't dare sit down away from home except at church, where they had pews. I weighed three hundred and fifty!"

"And now?"

"I acknowledge two hundred and forty, including my legs, which are very powerful, having worked off that extra hundred. I've got the boss job for making a fat man spider-waisted--inspector of ditches and dams. Any other man would have to use a horse, but I hoof it, and that's economy all around. And being big I grow big things. Violets wouldn't be much more in my line than drawnwork. I've got this whole town beat on peonies and pumpkins. Being as it's a fat man's pleasure to cheer people up, I dropped in to bring you a few peonies and to say that, considering the few well-selected words you spoke to Pete Leddy on this town's behalf, I'm prepared to vote for you for anything from coroner to president, seh!"

Later, after Bob had gone, a small girl brought a spray of gladiolus, their slender stems down to her toe-tips and the opening blossoms half hiding her face. Jack insisted on having them laid across his knee She was not a fairy out of a play, as he knew by her conversation.

"Mister, did you yell when you was hit?" she asked.

Jack considered thoughtfully. It would not do to be vagarious under such a shrewd examination; he must be exact.

"No, I don't think I did. I was too busy."

"I'll bet you wanted to, if you hadn't been so busy. Did it hurt much?"

"Not so very much."

"Maybe that was why you didn't yell. Mother says that all you can see is a little black spot--except you can't see it for the bandages. Is that the way yours is?"

"I believe so. In fact, I'll tell you a secret: That's the fashion in wounds."

"Mother will be glad to know she's right. She sets a lot by her opinion, does mother. Say, do you like plums?"

Jack already had a peck of plums, but another peck would not add much to the redundancy as far as he was concerned.

"I'll bring you some. We've got the biggest plums in Little Rivers--oh, so big! Bigger'n Mr. Ewold's! I'll bring some right away." She paused, however, in the doorway. "Don't you tell anybody I said they were bigger'n Mr. Ewold's," she went on. "It might hurt his feelings. He's what they call the o-rig-i-nal set-tler, and we always agree that he grows the biggest of everything, because--why, because he's got such a big laugh and such a big smile. Mother says sour-faced people oughtn't to have a face any bigger'n a crab apple; but Mr. Ewold's face couldn't be too big if it was as big as all outdoors! Good-by. I reckon you won't be s'prised to hear that I'm the dreadful talker of our family."

"Wait!" Jack called. "You haven't told me your name."

"Belvedere Smith. Father says it ain't a name for living things. But mother is dreadfully set in her ideas of names, and she doesn't like it because people call me Belvy; but they just naturally will."

"Belvedere, did you ever hear of the three little blue mice"--Jack was leaning toward her with an air of fascinating mystery--"that thought they could hide in the white clover from the white cat that had two black stripes on her back?"

There was a pellmell dash across the room and her face, with wide-open eyes dancing in curiosity, was pressed close to his:

"Why did the cat have two black stripes? Why? why?"

"Just what I was going to tell," said the pacifier of desperadoes.

"They were off on a tremendous adventure, with anthills for mountains and clover-stems for the tree-trunks of forests in the path. Tragedy seemed due for the mice, when a bee dropped off a thistle blossom for a remarkable reason--none other than that a hummingbird cuffed him in the ear with his wing--and the bee, looking for revenge with his stinger on the first vulnerable spot, stung the cat right in the Achilles tendon of his paw, just as that paw was about to descend with murderous purpose. The cat ran away crying, with both black stripes ridges of fur sticking up straight, while the rest of the fur lay nice and smooth; and the mice giggled so that their ears nearly wiggled off their heads. So all ended happily."

"He does beat all!" thought Mrs. Galway, who had overheard part of the nonsense from the doorway. "Wouldn't it make Pete Leddy mad if he could hear the man who took his gun away getting off fairy stuff like that!"

Mrs. Galway had brought in a cake of her own baking. She was slightly jealous of the neighbors' pastry as entering into her own particular field of excellence. Jack saw that the supply of cake in the Galway pantry must be as limitless as the pigments on the Eternal Painter's palette.

"The doctor said that I was to have a light diet," he expostulated; "and I am stuffed to the brim."

"I'll make you some floating island," said Mrs. Galway, refusing to strike her colors.

"That isn't filling and passes the time," Jack admitted.

"Jim says if you had to Fletcherize on floating island you would starve to death and your teeth would get so used to missing a step on the stairs that they would never be able to deal with real victuals at all."

"Mrs. Galway," Jack observed sagely, dropping his head on the back of the chair, "I see that it has occurred to you and Jim that it is an excellent world and full of excellent nonsense. I am ready to eat both fluffy isles and the yellow sea in which they float. I am ready to keep on getting hungry with my efforts, even though you make it continents and oceans!"

From his window he had a view, over the dark, polished green of Jim's orange trees, of the range, brown and gray and bare, holding steady shadows of its own and host to the shadows of journeying clouds, with the pass set in the centre as a cleft in a forbidding barrier. In the yard Wrath of God, Jag Ear, and P.D. were tethered. Deep content illumined the faces of P.D. and Jag Ear; but Wrath of God was as sorrowful as ever. A cheerful Wrath of God would have excited fears for his health.

"Yet, maybe he is enjoying his rest more than the others," Jack told Firio, who kept appearing at the window on some excuse or other. "Perhaps he takes his happiness internally. Perhaps the external signs are only the last stand of a lugubriousness driven out by overwhelming forces of internal joy."

"_Sí, sí_!" said Firio.

"Firio, you are eminently a conversationalist," said Jack. "You agree with any foolishness as if it were a new theory of ethics. You are an ideal companion. I never have to listen to you in order that I may in turn have my say."

"_Sí_," said Firio. He leaned on the windowsill, his black eyes shining with ingenuous and flattering appeal: "I will broil you a quail on a spit," he whispered. "It's better than stove cooking."

"Don't talk of that!" Jack exclaimed, almost sharply. The suggestion brought a swift change to sadness over his face and drew a veil of vagueness over his eyes. "No, Firio, and I'll tell you why: the odor of a quail broiled on a spit belongs at the end of a day's journey, when you camp in sight of no habitation. You should sit on a dusty blanket-roll; you should eat by the light of the embers or a guttering candle. No, Firio, we'll wait till some other day. And it's not exactly courtesy to our hostess to bring in provender from the outside."

The trail had apparently taught Firio all the moods of his master. He knew when it was unwise to persist.

"_Sí_!" he whispered, and withdrew.

Jack looked at Galeria and then back quickly, as if resisting its call. He smiled half wryly and readjusted his position in the chair. Over the hedge he could see the heads and shoulders of passers-by. Jim Galway had come into the room, when Jasper Ewold's broad back and great head hove in sight with something of the steady majesty of progress of a full-rigged ship.

"The Doge!" Jack exclaimed, brightening.

Jim was taken unawares. Was it the name of a new kind of semi-tropical fruit not yet introduced into Arizona?

"Not the Doge of Venice--hardly, when Mr. Ewold's love runs to Florence! The Doge of Little Rivers!"

"Why, the Doge--of course!" Jim was "on" now and grinning. "I didn't think of my history at first. That's a good one for Jasper Ewold!"

"O Doge of Little Rivers, I expected you in a gondola of state!" said Jack, with a playfully grandiloquent gesture, as Jasper's abundance filled the doorway. "But it is all the more compliment to me that you should walk."

"Doge, eh?" Jasper tasted the word. "Pooh!" he said. "Persiflage! persiflage! I saw at once yesterday that you had a weakness for it."

"And Miss Ewold? How is she?" Jack asked. Remembering the promise that Mary had exacted from him, he took care not to refer to her part in the duel.

His question fell aptly for what Jasper had to say. Being a man used to keeping the gate ever open to the full flood of spontaneity, he became stilted in the repetition of anything he had thought out and rehearsed. He was overcheerful, without the mellowness of tone which gave his cheer its charm on the previous evening.

"She's not a bit the worse. Why, she went for a ride out to the pass this afternoon as usual! I've had the whole story, from the pass till the minute that Jim put the tourniquet on your leg. She recognizes the great kindness you did her."

"Not a kindness--an inevitable interruption by any passer-by," Jack put in.

"Naturally she felt that it was a kindness, a service, and when she knew you were in danger she acted promptly for herself, with a desert girl's self-reliance. When it was all over she saw the whole thing in its proper perspective, as an unpleasant, preposterous piece of barbarism which had turned out fortunately."

"Oh, I am glad of that!" Jack exclaimed, in relief that spoke rejoicing in every fibre. "I had worried. I had feared lest I had insisted too much on going on. But I had to. And I know that it was a scene that only men ought to witness--so horrible I feared it might leave a disagreeable impression."

"Ah, Mary has courage and humor. She sees the ridiculous. She laughs at it all, now!"

"Laughs?" asked Jack. "Yes, it was laughable;" and he broke into laughter, in which Jasper joined thunderously.

Jasper kept on laughing after Jack stopped, and in genuine relief to find that the affair was to be as uninfluencing a chapter in the easy traveller's life as in Mary's.

"Our regret is that we may have delayed you, sir," Jasper proceeded. "You may have had to postpone an important engagement. I understand that you had planned to take the train this morning."

"When one has been in the desert for a long time," Jack answered, "a few days more or less hardly matter in the time of his departure. In a week Dr. Patterson says that I may go. Meanwhile, I shall have the pleasure of getting acquainted with Little Rivers, which, otherwise, I should have missed."

"I am glad!" Jasper Ewold exclaimed with dramatic quickness. "Glad that your wound is so slight--glad that you need not be shut up long when you are due elsewhere."

What books should he bring to the invalid to while away the time? "The Three Musketeers" or "Cyrano"? Jack seemed to know his "Cyrano" so well that a copy could be only a prompt. He settled deeper in his chair and, more to the sky than to Jasper Ewold, repeated Cyrano's address to his cadets, set to a tune of his own. His body might be in the chair, with a bandaged leg, but clearly his mind was away on the trail.

"Yes, let me see," he said, coming back to earth. "I should like the 'Road to Rome,' something of Charles Lamb, Aldrich's 'Story of a Bad Boy,' Heine---but no! What am I saying? Bring me any solid book on economics. I ought to be reading economics. Economics and Charles Lamb, that will do. Do you think they could travel together?"

"All printed things can, if you choose. I'll include Lamb."

"And any Daudet lying loose," Jack added.

"And Omar?"

"I carry Omar in my head, thank you, O Doge!"

"Sir Chaps of the enormous spurs, you have a broad taste for one who rides over the pass of Galeria after five years in Arizona," said the Doge as he rose. He was covertly surveying that soft, winning, dreamy profile which had turned so hard when the devil that was within came to the surface.

"I was fed on books and galleries in my boyhood," Jack said; but with a reticence that indicated that this was all he cared to tell about his past.

XII

MARY BRINGS TRIBUTE

Every resident except the cronies of Pete Leddy considered it a duty, once a day at least, to look over the Galway hedge and ask how Señor Don't Care was doing. That is, everyone with a single exception, which was Mary. Jack had never seen her even pass the house. It was as if his very existence had dropped out of her ken. The town remarked the anomaly.

"You have not been in lately," Mrs. Galway reminded her.

"My flowers have required a lot of attention; also, I have been riding out to the pass a good deal," she answered, and changed the subject to geraniums, for the very good reason that she had just been weeding her geranium bed.

Mrs. Galway looked at her strangely and Mary caught the glance. She guessed what Mrs. Galway was thinking: that she had been a little inconsiderate of a man who had been wounded in her service.

"Probably it is time I bore tribute, too," she said to herself.

That afternoon she took down a glass of jelly from the pantry shelves and set forth in the line of duty, frowning and rehearsing a presentation speech as she went. With every step toward the Galway cottage she was increasingly confused and exasperated with herself for even thinking of a speech. As she drew near she heard a treble chorus of "ohs!" and "ahs!" and saw Jack on the porch surrounded by children.

"It's dinosaur foolishness again!" she thought, pungently.

He was in the full fettle of nonsense, his head a little to one side and lowered, while he looked through his eyebrows at his hearers, measuring the effect of his words. She thought of that face when he called to Leddy, "I am going to kill you!" and felt the pulse of inquiry beat over all that lay in this man's repertory between the two moods.

"Then, counting each one in his big, deep, bass voice, like this," he was saying, "that funny little dwarf kept dropping oranges out of the tree on the big giant, who could not wiggle and was squeaking in protest in his little, old woman's voice. Every orange hit him right on the bridge of his nose, and he was saying: 'You know I never could bear yellow! It fusses me so.'"

"He doesn't need any jelly! I am going on!" Mary thought.

Then Jack saw a slim, pliant form hastening by and a brown profile under hair bare of a hat, with eyes straight ahead. Mary might have been a unit of marching infantry. The story stopped abruptly.

"Yes--and--and--go on!" cried the children.

Jack held up his hand for silence.

"How do you do?" he called, and she caught in his tone and in her first glimpse of his face a certain mischievousness, as if he, who missed no points for idle enjoyment of any situation, had a satisfaction in taking her by surprise with his greeting. This put her on her mettle with the quickness of a summons to fence. She was as nonchalant as he.

"And you are doing well, I learn," she answered.

"Oh, come in and hear it, Miss Ewold! It's the best one yet!" cried Belvedere Smith. "And--and--"

"And--and--" began the chorus.

Mary went to the hedge. She dropped the glass of jelly on the thick carpet of the privet.

"I have just brought my gift. I'll leave it here. Belvy will bring it when the story is over. I am glad you are recovering so rapidly."

"And--and--" insisted the chorus.

"You oughtn't to miss this story. It's a regular Jim dandy!" Belvedere shouted.

"Yes, won't you come in?" Jack begged in serious urgency. "I pride myself that it is almost intellectual toward the close."

"I have no doubt," she said, looking fairly at him from under her hand, which she held up to shade her face, so he saw only the snap of her eyes in the shadow. "But I am in a hurry."

And he was looking at a shoulder and a quarter profile as she turned away.

"Did you make the jelly yourself?" he called.

"Yes, I am not afraid of the truth--I did!" she answered with a backward glance and not stopping.

"Oh, bully!" he exclaimed with great enthusiasm, in which she detected a strain of what she classified as impudence.

"But all the time the giant was fumbling in his pocket for his green handkerchief. You know the dwarf did not like green. It fussed him just as much as yellow fussed the giant. But it was a narrow pocket, so narrow that he could only get his big thumb in, and very deep. So, you see--" and she heard the tale proceeding as she walked on to the end of the street, where she turned around and came back across the desert and through the garden.

On the way she found it amusing to consider Jack judicially as a human exhibit, stripped of all the chimera of romance with which Little Rivers had clothed his personality. If he had not happened to meet her on the pass, the townspeople would have regarded this stranger as an invasion of real life by a character out of a comic opera. She viewed the specimen under a magnifying glass in all angles, turning it around as if it were a bronze or an ivory statuette.

1. In his favor: Firstly, children were fond of him; but his extravagance of phrase and love of applause accounted for that. Secondly, Firio was devoted to him. Such worshipful attachment on the part of a native Indian to any Saxon was remarkable. Yet this was explained by his love of color, his foible for the picturesque, his vagabond irresponsibility, and, mostly, by his latent savagery--which she would hardly have been willing to apply to Ignacio's worshipful attachment to herself.

2. Against him: Everything of any importance, except in the eyes of children and savages; everything in logic. He would not stand analysis at all. He was without definite character. He was posing, affected, pleased with himself, superficial, and theatrical, and interested in people only so long as they amused him or gratified his personal vanity.

"I had the best of the argument in leaving the jelly on the hedge, and that is the last I shall hear of it," she concluded.

Not so. Mrs. Galway came that evening, a bearer of messages.

"He says it is the most wonderful jelly that ever was," said Mrs. Galway. "He ate half the glass for dinner and is saving the rest for breakfast--I'm using his own words and you know what a killing way he has of putting things--saving it for breakfast so that he will have something to live through the night for and in the morning the joy of it will not be all a memory. He wants to know if you have any more of the same kind."

"Yes, a dozen glasses," Mary returned. "Tell him we are glad of the opportunity of finishing last year's stock, and I send it provided he eats half a glass with every meal."

"I don't know what his answer will be to that," said Mrs. Galway, contracting her brow studiously at Mary. "But he would have one quick. He always has. He's so poetic and all that, we're planning to go to the station to see him off and pelt him with flowers; and Dr. Patterson is going to fashion a white cat out of white carnations, with deep red ones for the black stripes, for the children to present."

"Hurrah!" exclaimed Mary blithely, and went for the jelly.

She was spared further bulletins on the state of health of the wounded until her father returned from his daily call the next morning. She was in the living-room and she knew by his step on the porch, vigorous yet light, that he was uplifted by good news or by the anticipation of the exploitation of some new idea--a pleasure second only to that of the idea's birth. Such was his elation that he broke one of his own rules by tossing some of the books loaned to Jack onto the broad top of the table of the living-room, which was sacred to the isolation of the ivory paper-knife.

"He has named the date!" shouted the Doge. "He goes by to-morrow's train! It will be a gala affair, almost an historical moment in the early history of this community. I am to make a speech presenting him with the freedom of the whole world. Between us we have hit on a proper modern symbol of the gift. He slips me his Pullman ticket and I formally offer it to him as the key to the hospitality of the seven seas, the two hemispheres, and the teeming cities that lie beyond the range. It will be great fun, with plenty of persiflage. And, Mary, they suggest that you write some verses--ridiculous verses, in keeping with the whole nonsensical business."

"You mean that I am to stand on the platform and read poetry dedicated to him?" she demanded.

"Poetry, Mary? You grow ambitious. Not poetry--foolish doggerel. Or someone will read it for you."

He had not failed to watch the play of her expression. She had received all his nonsense, announced in his best style of simulated forensic grandeur, with a certain unchanging serenity which was unamused: which was, indeed, barely interested.

"And someone else shall write it, for I don't think of any verses," she said, with a slight shrug of the shoulder. "Besides, I shall not be there."

"Not be there! People will remark your absence!"