Chapter III: Part 3

One Sunday afternoon they were sitting, father and daughter, in the garden, behind the brick house, he with a St. Louis paper on his knee, his head bare, his waistcoat loose, his feet in slippers. His chair was tilted back against a crab-apple tree at the side of one of the garden walks. For several weeks his face had been showing some sort of strain, but at this moment he looked comfortable. She had been telling him that she was glad that he had put up the new watering trough in Court House Square, and the way she had talked about it had made him feel sure that he had had some notion, when he did it, of benefiting the community, instead of insuring that the farmers would stop in front of the Grange store, in which he was interested.

She sat on a bench near him, quite idle; her gown, a tawny drapery, whose half-hidden suggestions of blue were like shy spring flowers, was sheathed closely about her; her eyes were following the pale wide river below the garden; her hair, so light that it made her eyes seem lighter, was piled above the warm, creamy tan of her forehead; there was a little drowsy droop on her face; the dusky-gold radiance was all about her.

"Daddy," she said, by and by, "do you know that I swam the Di once?" He laughed sleepily. He remembered. "I wonder if I could do it now--I was pretty awful as a youngster, wasn't I, Daddy?"

"You certainly had a reputation," he admitted.

"Do you know that I still have a good deal of a reputation"--she turned upon him with more directness and a little laughing pugnacity--"as though I were the same terrible child, up to the same riotous tricks as when I was twelve!"

"Hump-mmh, hump-mmh!" He looked at her from under his slanted lids and shook his head, while his big face quivered with amusement. "You haven't given up all your riotous tricks even yet--don't tell me." He spoke with the indulgence that had allowed free rein to her caprices all her life.

"Never you mind, I do precious little that is riotous any more; I am getting used to harness," she made answer, and looked as though she did not mean to be interfered with in the precious little that was riotous that she still clung to, and then looked as though she were threatening herself with sweeping reform. "Go back to sleep, Daddy. You will be in my way presently, anyhow."

"Anybody coming?"

"Your Mr. Steering."

"'My!'" Madeira's face clouded over, and he thrust out his jaw grimacingly. "If he _were_ mine, you know what I should do with him?" he asked, in a sharp voice.

"No, I don't know. What would you do with him?"

"I should send him packing back East. This country don't need,--aw, the people of this country are good enough for the country and the country is good enough for them. We don't need outsiders."

He was so vehement that she regarded him questioningly. "Don't you like him any more?" she inquired, with a little dubious shake of her head.

"I don't like"--Madeira got up and walked back and forth under the crab-apple tree--"I don't like for a man without any practical knowledge or experience to get a lot of ideas about a thing and bring them to a field and try to push other chaps out, other chaps who are already in the field."

"Yes, but----" It occurred to her that she was defending Steering--"but if he brings the ideas, he ought to have the credit for originating the ideas, oughtn't he?"

"No! No!" Madeira's voice rang up, urgent, strident; he did not seem conscious that he was talking to her; he seemed rather to be having something out with himself. The strain of the past weeks had come back to his face. "Plenty of people before this Steering have thought of ore in the Canaan Tigmores. Look at old Grierson himself! Originate the idea! Grierson had the idea before Steering was born! We can get ideas in this country, and work 'em out, too, without any help from outsiders."

"Mr. Steering is not exactly an outsider, is he?"

"Yes, he is, too. He hasn't any more claim to this land now than you have; it isn't any more his business what's done here during Grierson's lifetime than it's Rockefeller's business. Not a bit. Let Steering wait till the land is his."

"Well,"--she was troubled,--"in the meantime, what is old Grierson going to do?"

Madeira seemed to be trying to quiet himself. He went down to the garden fence and looked at the oak forest on the other side of the Di, puckered up his mouth, as though to whistle, but stopped short of it, and came sauntering back toward his daughter. "He is going to do what I tell him to do, Honey," he made answer. "And I'm telling him to put the Canaan Mining and Development Company into the Tigmores after zinc."

"I should think, though," she said then, slowly, "that even if the matter is in your hands now, it would be to your ultimate advantage to have Mr. Steering in with you. He is the next owner, and, if old Grierson should die, whatever work you have done on the Tigmores would go for nothing. I should think it would be almost essential for you and Mr. Steering to be together."

He let his chair down angrily. "There isn't a big enough scheme in the universe to accommodate Steering and me together! He is a blamed idiot," he said doggedly. And it became clear to her that in his bull-headed way he had forged all the links of one of his intense antagonisms. He had been like that all his life; of pronounced personality himself, he had never been able to abide pronounced personality in those with whom he came in contact. He had ridden rough-shod over inferior men all his life; he liked to ride rough-shod; he was never pleased when his path crossed people over whom he could not ride rough-shod. Generally she had accepted his classification of those who opposed him strongly as "blamed idiots"; sometimes with a little of her laughing banter, but usually, his superiority standing out sharp and clear when opposed to the dull Canaanites, endorsing his opinion. "I sort of wish," he went on, with that keen, wire-edged exasperation still sawing in his voice, "that you wouldn't have much to do with that chap. He isn't my kind of people. I shouldn't mind if, now that you've given him a good high swing, you'd let him drop."

"Why, Father! You oughtn't to forget that there was one time in your life when he might have let you drop--and didn't!"

He saw that he had got himself before her in too keen a light.

"Yes, but you don't expect me to let him hold me up by the collar forever, do you, Pet? That's his dog-on way, anyhow--wants to dictate. I can't stand a man who wants to dictate. I think we've had enough of him. That's what I mean, and all I mean." He patted her hands and got up from his chair again. "There comes Samson with the mail," he said nervously.

A negro man rode up through the big gate at the front of the grounds and came on to Madeira, who took two letters from him. "One for you, Sally," said Madeira, "and one for me."

"Oh, from Elsie Gossamer!" she cried, and took her letter and sat, unobservant of him, for several moments, the little frown that his words had brought out still on her brow. Presently she looked up and saw that he had read his letter, and had put it in his pocket; he was tilted back against the crab-apple tree again, his forehead knit, his eyes brilliant, a peculiar fixity in their gaze. "Oh, here!" she cried protestingly, "you look as though you had just decided to become the President of the United States of America! Stop scowling and listen; Elsie is after me again to join her in Europe. She is fairly eloquent with the project----"

He broke in upon her with a sudden intensity of interest: "Do it!" he cried. "It's the very thing. You go. You go and have a good time."

"I don't want to go so awfully," she began hesitatingly. "I've been away from you a lot in the last two years. I don't care so much about it."

"Yes, you do; you go." He was always keen for her pleasure, but in the present case he seemed especially earnest.

"Want to get rid of me, huh?"

"No; you know I'll half die without you. But I am going to be fearfully busy from now on,"--his mouth seemed hot and dry as he talked,--"it will suit better now than ever. You go."

"Well, maybe," she said. She was accustomed to let her own fancy settle such questions for her. "Maybe I'll go. Maybe I shan't." There was a click at the front gate. "I expect that's Mr. Steering," she announced.

Madeira got out of his chair quickly. "If it is, I don't want to see him," he said, "he--oh, he irritates me, that man,--always wanting to dictate. I'll go in. Don't want ever to see him again,--and say, Pet?"

"Well, Dad?"

"I'd be glad if you would never see him again. Just stop where you are, will you?"

She drew a long sighing breath. "Just stop where I am? Well, I'll see," she said, laughing and flushing in the warm, rich fashion of her skin, but there was the faint far call of uneasiness in her laughter, like a wind-whisper of coming rain. "Tell Samson to bring Mr. Steering out here to me," she commanded, and Madeira went off toward the house and disappeared through the green-latticed porch.

Inside the house he retired to the room that was known as his office, locked the door and came over to his desk. As he did it a peculiar consciousness of himself suffused him like the first fumes of a deadly narcotic. He began to see that he was lifting his feet stealthily, advancing them stealthily, stealthily setting them down, with the soundless fall of a cat's foot on velvet. Reaching his desk, he half fell into a chair there, a thin line of white froth between his lips, his big face purplish. "Eh, God?" he cried, "what's this? what's this?"

The seizure passed as suddenly as it had come. By and by he heard Steering pass through the house under Samson's escort. When the sound of Steering's foot-steps had died away, Madeira took a letter from his pocket, spread it open before him and read it over and over.

"Dear Crit," [the letter said] "I have thought this thing to a finish. I want you to turn the Tigmores over to my cousin, Bruce Steering. Let him start at once on the jack trail, that primrose path of dalliance. As for me, my dear sir, by the time this reaches you, I shall be on the long trail. You needn't blow any trumpets about it, for B. G. will have no funeral. The name that I gave you as the name that I live here under is good enough to die here under. The certain fact for your consideration is that I die at once, and that the question of this property entail is now confided to you to arrange for my heir, young Steering. Write to the clerk of Snow Mountain County for the documents that I have left with him for you. They establish everything. Tell my cousin that, besides the Tigmores, I bequeath him my debts to you. This leaves me not at all envious of the job ahead of him, and, as ever,

"Your blindly devoted servant,

"BRUCE GRIERSON."

_Chapter Seven_

THE GARDEN OF DREAMS

Crittenton Madeira's daughter wandered down the garden path, singing softly, after her father had left her, but there was in her song, as there had been in her laughter, a little tremble of unrest. The garden was a delicious place, whose fragrance beat up in waves of sweetness at every turn. All the flowers were in their luxuriant last bloom. There were great roses and sweet elysium, mignonette, peppermint pinks, crepe myrtle, riotous vines and creepers. Long ago she had taken everything out of the garden that was not sweet. She had a fancy that fragrance was one of the spirit's tremulous paths into heaven, and out in the garden she liked to shut her eyes and, with her little straight nose in the air, go drifting off toward what was infinitely good, fine, strong, imperishable. It sometimes seemed to her that the most intimate and exquisite happinesses of her life had come to her with her eyes shut in that garden. She called it the Garden of Dreams.

When Steering found her, she was waiting for him, her arms on an old vine-covered stump, that dusky-gold radiance of hers playing over her and from her, the most beautifully, glowingly alive woman in the world. What he said to her was "How-do-you-do?" But what he wanted to say was, "Oh, stand there so forever, and let every grace, every beauty burn into my brain, so that all my life I may carry you about with me, your wine-warm eyes, your sunlit hair, the whole sweet glow of you,--having you perfectly, knowing you perfectly everywhere, everyhow, near, far, in the sunshine, in the dark!" And when a man wants to talk like that "how-do-you-do" is as good a catchphrase as the next to keep his tongue discreet.

"I do very well," she told him, smiling at him, maddening him, "I always do well, here in my garden,--but you, you put my sense of well-being to shame. You look so glad!"

"I am the gladdest man on earth," Bruce told her, knowing chiefly that he had her hand in his. He barely remembered in time that she was rich in gold and lands and cattle, and that he was poor, and that the positivism of his personality had already incurred the ill-will of her father. "Still, I don't think there is any doubt in the world how it is all going to end," he said hazily. He still had her hand. She had the hardest hand to put down that he had ever taken up.

"I don't quite follow? All what?" She bit her lip; her eyes flashed off across the Di, bright and swift as mating birds, as she drew her hand gently away.

"I was only thinking that a man may go on and on through so many meaningless years, of no special significance to himself or to anybody else and then suddenly,--think everything is going to be all right some day." He clasped his hands and leaned on the other side of the vine-covered stump and looked at her wishfully, and she laughed at him, with her eyes still on the pale river.

"How do you like my garden?" she asked divertingly. For answer he shut his eyes and breathed deeply. "Oh, how good!" she cried, satisfied, "that's the only way really to follow the path of fragrance,--that's my own way!" He blessed his stars that he had sniffed at the roses. "Where did the path lead you?" she queried, as he opened his eyes dreamily upon her golden beauty. "Into heaven," he murmured with sublime conviction, and she clasped her slender hands, delighted at their mystical congeniality.

"I am so glad that we like the same thing," she continued, hurrying a little; "haven't you noticed?--we both like the garden,--and we both like Piney. When did you see Piney?"

"Piney? Oh, I see Piney often." He rather wished that she had not mentioned Piney. Since he had come to know the tramp-boy better his first ache for him had become sharper and sharper. "Piney and I were out on the hills together only yesterday. Poor Piney!"

"Why," she took his hand and led him forward through a tangle of rose-bushes; she would not look at him, but the bewildering sweetness of her hair, her gown, the curve of her cheek came back to him--"why _poor_ Piney?" She was guiding him to a bench of twisted grape-vines from which they might look down upon the river. "Sit down," she said, "and tell me why poor Piney?"

"Well," he sat down and looked at the river, half-frowning, "it has seemed to me--I've had a notion--oh, I don't know. I suppose it is not poor Piney after all."

"Tell me," she insisted, "tell me what you started to tell me."

"Well, it has seemed to me ever since I first met Piney that he was in the way of trouble," he dashed on more abruptly, thinking only of Piney for a moment--"I have come to love that boy. I find myself clinging to him. I think it is because he stands to me for the spirit of my own boyhood; perhaps that, perhaps because he stands for the spirit of the woods he loves; because he stands for simplicity, honesty, spontaneity. At any rate he is rare, what with his musical gift and his high melody of living--and--oh well, I've sometimes felt sorry that he is not all wood-spirit, that he is part human." The characteristics that had made Steering stand too determinedly to suit Crittenton Madeira made him forge ahead determinedly now. "Piney would be apt to suffer less if he were wholly the sylvan, irresponsible creature, the faun, he sometimes seems to be. But, alas, Piney has a man's heart, Miss Madeira. He will have to suffer for that, for he will have to love. That's why 'poor' Piney; because he will have to love."

"Would that be so terrible?" The flash from the amber eyes that she turned up to him made the world go zig-zagging through a long space while Steering looked on with a great tremulous intake of breath. Then he steadied again to what he wanted to say to her and could say to her for Piney's sake.

"It would be for Piney. Piney is going to love hopelessly," he saw that a little shiver caught her and he was glad of it. "Yes, it would be terrible to love hopelessly, wouldn't it?" he said, to strengthen his hidden appeal for Piney. He wanted to make her realise what she was doing for Piney, realise that for sheer kindness, kindness as to a dumb thing, she should never let the lad come near her. He had forgotten the woman in her when he began to formulate that appeal. She laughed a light, mocking laugh.

"I believe that you think that Piney loves me!" she cried. "Piney, the spirit of the oaks! the song of the night-wind! Piney suffer! Piney love!" Steering was sorry to hear the note of evasion in her voice. No woman, he remembered, too late, could be brought to treat man's love or boy's love quite honestly. His eyes clouded. He felt masculinely, sanely sympathetic with Piney.

"I wish," he said gloomily, "that you would sometimes put yourself in the place of a man who loves you, put yourself in Piney's place."

Her eyes crinkled up again. "I'll just do it," she said gaily, "I'll do it now. Presto," she shut her eyes. "Now I have his point of view. Now I'm seeing what he sees--that Miss Sally Madeira likes to hear him sing, and humours him and pets him because he is gay and glad to be alive, and because Uncle Bernique says that he needs somebody to mother him. I mother Piney. Can't you see that." She laughed again and arose and stood in front of him, gay, mocking, nonchalant. "Piney love! And if Piney could love, that you should fancy that he might dare love Salome Madeira!"

He forgot about Piney. She blocked his farther vision like a shaft of light. He could not see an inch beyond her. Madeira's voice rang down the garden walk. Steering did not hear it. "Salome! Salome!" he murmured, "Is that it, Salome?"

"Yes, that's it, Salome. Isn't it foolish? The Di down there is the Diaphanous, too. Some pioneer poet named it for its shimmer, but what good did it do? Missouri promptly called it the 'Di.' No more good is it to name a child Salome in the backwoods of Missouri. She's bound to grow up Sally. I've always been Sally, except at school. I'll always be Sally down here with my own people."

"No, you won't always be Sally--no you won't always be down here with your own people either,"--he leaned back on the bench and watched her, his eyes half shut, his whole sense of being illumined by her, his tongue playing audaciously with his discretion.

"Yes, I shall always be Sally, too." That bisque-warm skin of hers flushed wondrously and she seemed to talk out of a little confused audacity of her own. Madeira's voice rang down the walk again. "Yes, Father!--and down here with my own people, too. Yes, Father!"

"Company's here, Sally."

"All right, Father, coming."

"And I have to go?" asked Steering piteously.

"Oh no, come up to the house and meet our sixteen-to-one congressman, Quicksilver Sam."

"No--I'll go," chose Steering. "Say, can't I get through from the garden here, and go down the river road?"

"Yes, you can. Samson shall bring your horse around, if you like. There's a bridle-path down to the river; it's Piney's way."

"Well, if you will be so good as to have the horse brought, I'll take Piney's path. I'm going to the hills to try to find Piney and Uncle Bernique. Think I'll sleep in the hills with them to-night. I feel so sad. When may I come back?"

"Well, you see," the trouble crept into her voice again, misty, tremulous--"you see, I may go away."

"Oh!" he cried, and then again, "Oh!" a bitter wailing note.

"Yes, I may," she said hastily. "You see, your friend, Miss Gossamer, wants me to join her in Europe. She is very insistent about it."

"And you may go?"

"And I may go."

He knew that she said that she would see him again before going, if it came to pass that she decided to go, and that she pressed his hand, with the grateful look that she had bestowed upon him when she had tried to thank him for holding on to her father in the Joplin mine; and that afterwards she stole away through the garden, and a negro man-servant brought his horse around to the rear grounds and showed him a bridle-path to the river; but these things were hazy. The vivid thing was an imprecation that by and by took awful form, like a monster of the mist, hissingly, from between his clenched teeth:

"_Damn Miss--Europe!_"

_Chapter Eight_

WHEN A GIRL FINDS HERSELF

Sally Madeira went to her own room early that Sunday night. It was a large room, sheer and white, with its wall space broken here and there by cool, calm etchings, cows knee-deep in clover, sunsets on small rivers, old windmills, wheat fields in harvest, hills where the snow lay thick. When she had lit her lamp a rosy light suffused the room through the tinted globe. The pictures on the walls looked so tonefully tender, intimate, in the soft glow, that the girl, noticing them for the thousandth time, moved from one to another, admiring and loving them. They were, in a way, sign-posts of her development. She had begun to buy them when she had stopped working in colour with a man who had a famous studio in New York. One day she had gone with the man to an exhibition of oil paintings which were infused with a matchless poetry of colour.

"If I paint all my life am I ever going to be able to paint like that?" she had asked of the man earnestly.

"No, my child, you are not," he had answered, quite as earnestly.

"I wonder why I should try to do something poorly that someone else can do so well?" she had mused.

And then, because she had talent, and, finest of all, an exquisite temperament in whose pulses the sense of colour beat in veritable tides of joy, the man from the studio had encouraged her with warm words of praise. "You will some day paint well enough to win a high place," he had reminded her.

But she had stayed thoughtful, and a day or two later had talked to him again.

"I don't believe, since I have thought it all out, that I can get what's in life for me out of it in a high place," she had said, shy but eager. Then, on that line, she had forged on to a swift and comprehensive conclusion. "You have told me," she had continued to the studio man, "that what I have in me for painting is not the real thing, and since I have seen the real thing I know for myself that colour is too rich and assertive, too apt to run away with one, for any but master hands to use it. I feel that I don't want even to see poor colouring on canvas any more. I shan't ever even have poor colour pictures around me. I can get my colour stories outside. Inside, the stories shall all be told in light and shadow. And I am not going to paint bad pictures myself any more."

"Ah, but the work, the beautiful work!" cried the painter.

"Well, as for me, do you know, I've come to believe that my work is just living--for a time anyhow."

"Well, then, the fame!" cried the painter.

"I don't seem to care for the fame."

It had gone much like that with her music. She had a fine voice, and her New York teacher had told her over and over that she "must go on." She had been pleased with his praise and had worked hard for a time. Then she had gone to him, too, one day, open-eyed and inquiring.

"Go on to what?" she had asked.

"Why, to glory," the singer had said.

She had shaken her head, unconvinced. "I don't seem to care for the glory," she had said. And beyond learning to use her voice well she would not work with it. "It is not that I am lazy," she had protested to the singer, "but I couldn't get what's in life for me out of it by singing."

"What's in life for you?" queried the singer, interested, for the girl was beautiful and rich and aspirant.

"Ah, I don't quite know yet," said the girl, the pretty pathos of youth and waiting upon her, "but some day I shall find myself; then I shall know."

All through her college days she had been looking for herself. When the time had come that she had gone to Elsie Gossamer's house to visit, and there had met men--college boys at first and later on men of a larger world--she had still been looking for herself. But though in the meantime she had learned how to meet men and how to treat them--capably, Elsie Gossamer said--she had not found herself. During the past summer, since her return from college, she had idled on here through a little interim with her father, comfortable, dreamy, waiting, seeking. But she had not found herself.

As she began to make ready for bed that Sunday night she had, suddenly and subtly, a quiver of consciousness that the waiting and the seeking were nearly over. Just how she knew it she could not have told, or just what she meant by knowing it, or just what would happen because of knowing it. Moving about the large room softly, her harmonious strength and grace were revealed in the swing of her long lithe limbs, the reach of her satiny brown arms, the breadth of her sweet smooth breast, the straightness and firmness of her tall frame. Only a self-reliant girl could have moved as she moved, a girl made self-reliant by exuberant health and ideals and hope. When she stopped moving about and stood before her mirror, her hand on the great rope of shining hair that hung over her shoulder, her body assumed a rare natural poise, classically, ancestrally beautiful, Grecian. By and by she roused from the little reverie before the mirror, put out the light, and came over to the window.

"Oh," she cried at once, "that was what was the matter with me, that was why I felt that something was about to happen! It was the storm!"

Beyond the window a Missouri tempest was rising. The girl, responsive as a reed to the wind, sat down in a low chair, the subtle quiver of consciousness intensified within her, and watched the lightning that began to play over the hills, and the rain that began to beat through the trees. Strangely enough, as she sat there, in the flashes she could see little, but in the dark--a warm, wind-blown, sweet-smelling dark--she saw several things. For one thing, she saw that, most probably, she would never again in her life spend an evening with a sixteen-to-one congressman. It had been a very tiresome evening. For another thing, she saw that she was not going to Europe. Her father needed her; or if he didn't he ought to. For a third thing, she saw that, in some way, she was going to have to make her father like Bruce Steering again. Then she saw the fourth thing. There had not been a flash for some minutes. Seeing that fourth thing, in the intense dark, she gave a trembling sigh, put one of her hands on top of the other on her breast and pushed, as though she were pushing her heart down. Then presently the pressure of her hands relaxed, her head dropped down until her chin touched her fingers, and a great flush that was like a charge from something electric surged through her.

"Oh," she cried, "oh, is it you! Have you come!" It was a triumphant, shy, thrilling greeting to something, something that she had been waiting for, born for. The dark grew intenser, sweeter, warmer. She lifted her arms and held them out yearningly toward the Tigmore hills, half-leaning out the window, catching the rain on her eager young face, in her shining hair, on her broad low breast. "I am so glad of it!" she panted, in a singing whisper, "I am so glad----" A great sheet of lightning unrolled across the Tigmore hills and held steadily magnificent for a moment, revealing everything to everybody, so it seemed to Sally Madeira. She crept into bed shaking, ecstatic, afraid.

Next morning she made her toilet away from the mirror as much as was possible, not being quite ready to face her whole found self as yet. But before she went downstairs she crossed to the window and looked out at the tumbling Tigmore line, a kissing sigh on her lips.

When she reached the dining room she found that Madeira had not yet come down, so she walked out into the garden, where she stood for a little while by the vine-covered stump, her eyes closed, her little straight nose in the air, the broad daylight beating down on her. Then presently she opened her eyes determinedly. "Yes, I can stand it," she said, as though she had been afraid that she couldn't, and looked straight up into the rain of light over-head. "I can stand it, in the daytime as in the dark, from now on forever."

In the air was an autumn mellowness that had not been there the day before. It nipped, with a strong, winey flavour, as it went down. All around her lay drifts of petals, rain-beaten roses, ragged lilies. The storm had stolen the garden's glory. "To put it into my heart!" cried the girl, in her all-conquering joy. "Oh, you Garden of Dreams, you! See, my eyes are wide open, and this, _this_ is better than dreams!"

She went back to the house with her arms full of the very last roses. "For now, I must go bring my father around," she said.

Madeira had had a bad night. He had not slept at all as far as he could tell. For hours he had had to lie on his bed and face the dark, with Bruce Grierson's letter under his pillow, licking out at his temples like a tongue of flame. But he had not taken the letter away all night long. "Let it burn," he had said. "Let it find out who's stronger, me or it. That's my way." All night long he had made plans, with his face set toward the dark. When he got to the dining room that morning he went to the window and stood there waiting for Sally, revolving one of the night's plans in his head, deciding with how much force to project it, how to hit the mark patly with it. "For I won't have him here at my house again," Madeira was telling himself there at the window. "God! I _can't_ have him here." He caught at the vest pocket above his heart. His teeth were chattering. His daughter, with the roses in her arms, entered the room just then.

As long as she lived Sally Madeira never forgot the way the dining room looked that morning, as she came into it from the Garden of Dreams: the dull green wall spaces, broken by some of her beloved cool etchings, and by great walnut panels that deepened and toned and strengthened the room beautifully; the old walnut side-board that had been her mother's mother's; in the centre of the room the heavy round table, unlaid, snowy, waiting for her effective interference; Madeira, her big handsome father, idling by the window, his fine physical maturity cut out strongly against the light, his deep chest, his great height, his wide, well-featured face, his good clothes, the adaptability with which he wore them; and on beyond Madeira, outside the window, the satin green foliage of the pet magnolia tree. It was all finely satisfying. She had tried her hardest to kiss the foolish gladness out of her eyes and voice into the roses in her hands, but things grew so increasingly pleasant that all her endeavour went for nothing. As soon as her father saw her and heard her, he said:

"Well, Honey-love, are you as happy as _that_?"

She put her roses into an old blue bowl and went over to him, and he sat down in one of the big chairs by the window and drew her to his knee. Then they fell into a caressing habit of theirs, he with both arms about her body, she with both arms about his neck, half-choking him with tenderness, rumpling his thick hair with the tip of her chin. She looked as much mother as child like that.

"What a big girl you are, Pet!"

"I have a big excuse for it, Dad."

"But your mother, now, was little, Sally. My, yes, reckon that was why I loved her so. Such a little, little thing!"

"And I'm so big--'reckon' that's why you love me so, huh?"

"Reckon," he said. They sat on for a moment silent, looking out of the window. There was a lost cardinal whisking among the satin leaves of the pet magnolia, gazing wistfully at an old nest that swung in the branches like the ragged ghost of a summer's completeness and happiness. The nest seemed to arouse memories and hopes in the cardinal's breast. He had to flirt about it nervously for some minutes before he could satisfy himself that his housekeeping notions were unseasonable. Finally he perched himself on an humble syringa bush and stared at the nest, quiet, depressed.

"Are you betting on the magnolia tree with anybody this winter?" she asked, her eyes, too, on the high nest.

"No one left to bet with, Pet. Everybody knows now that it can live through the worst that can come to it. Let's see, it's twenty years since I planted it there, and I've won twenty jack-knives betting that it would live, twenty different winters. Twenty years! Sally, that's a good while, my honey. Why, twenty years ago you didn't come knee-high to a puddle-duck. We had just moved down here from St. Louis, your mother and I, twenty years ago."

As he talked, the moment shaped itself for Madeira as a little negligible interim, wedged in between the restless night, with its defined purposes, and the next hour, when he should have consummated at least one of the night's purposes.

"That mother of yours was a lovely little thing, Sally."

The girl was sure of it. She had felt the loveliness of her mother all her life. Once she had gone to her mother's old Kentucky home, and though her mother's people were all dead long ago, the great Kentucky house was still there, and, standing before it, she had been almost able to see the aura of influence that it had been in the moulding of the loveliness of her mother, the southern girl, lifting from it to ensphere her, the western girl.

"I know she was lovely," said Sally.

"Oh my, yes,--just about at her loveliest twenty years ago. But as for twenty years, Sally, why, I can go a lot farther back than that. I can go back forty years, close to my beginning. This is all sort of different from my beginning, Sally." Out beyond the window, into the September sunshine, rolled the fat corn lands, hundreds upon hundreds of acres, the wheat flats, the miles of cattle range of Madeira Place. Around them shut the strong walls of the old Peele house, a memorable house in its way, massive and wide-porched and staunch.

"You can hardly imagine anything more different from this than was my beginning," went on Madeira. "This is pretty luxurious, isn't it? In its way, though it is down here on the Di, it's just about as good for a country house as the places you saw on the Hudson, aint it?"

"Oh, it has a lot more soul and story than the Hudson places," she acquiesced at once. Sometimes she could feel that desire of his to give her as good as the best palpitate like a pulse through his words.

"Well, anyhow, Lord knows it's mighty different from what I began with, Sally. Why, Honey, in my boy-days living on a farm in Missouri was mighty much like living on the fringes of hellen-blazes. Br-r-rt!" He clamped and unclamped his big hand, watching the strong muscle-play in it. "I can feel my fingers burn to this day where the frozen fodder sawed and rasped 'em in winter and the hot plough-handles bit and blistered 'em in summer. And then, afterwards, those old St. Louis days meant hard pulling, too, of another kind. From grocery clerk, to dry-goods clerk, to old Peele's real estate office, it was pull, pull, if not over one thing, over another. Takes a thundering lot of pulling to pull out in this world, Sally." All in a minute his voice sounded perplexed and resentful.

"Well, you did it, didn't you? You pulled out. I'm proud of you. I like the way you did it."

"Do you, Pet? Do you like me?" he queried with a peculiar anxiety.

"Yes, sir, I do."

Black Chloe, who had been making slow trips between kitchen and dining-room for some minutes, stopped now to say, in a sort of Arabian Nights measure, "Ef you raddy fuh yo' brekfus, yo' brekfus raddy fuh you."

"Better than anybody?" pursued Madeira, but his daughter was drawing him to the table, and he did not notice that her only answer was a quivering laugh.

They sat down to a breakfast-table whose delightful appearance was due to that sense of colour in Sally Madeira's temperament. Both ate some fruit, because it was juicy and went down easily, and both looked at their coffee-cups.

"Why don't you eat your breakfast, Daddy?"

"Why don't you?" Perhaps if he had waited for her to tell him, her gladness would have sent her story bubbling to her lips, but he did not wait. "I'm bothered, Honey, that's why I can't eat."

"What's the bother, Dad?"

Madeira, considering that this was his opportunity, closed in determinedly, with that iron grip of his. "It's that man Steering, Honey."

"Taken a foolish old dislike to him, haven't you, Dad?" She was ready for him, eager to get her case before him, to make her points quickly and surely.

"Foolish," Madeira gasped and put his hand to his vest pocket. "Sally, girl, it's a matter of life and death, I take it." He rose from his chair, his face grey. Staggering a little to the left, he moved to the window, where he stood with his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the Garden of Dreams. Behind him the girl sat on quietly. She had put one hand to her chin, so that her face was up-tilted. The light from the window was strong on it.

"Sally," began Madeira again, "I've never asked very much of you, have I? Always let you do as you please, haven't I? And it's too late now to try to force you to do anything, isn't it? Besides, I wouldn't do it anyway. I wouldn't like it that way. But I'm going to ask you to do something for me. Then I'm going to leave the doing wholly to you. I'm going to ask you to drop that man Steering. I thought it all out last night, Sally. I know that he and I are going to mix up if he doesn't keep well out of my sight. I'm going to ask you to drop him, for my sake, Pet."

He came back toward her, and again he half reeled as he started. With one hand on her shoulder, he looked down at her. By now she was staring unseeingly at the bird that stared at the nest in the magnolia tree. "Are you going to do what I want, Honey?" His hand shook on her shoulder and when she turned to look up at him the ashen hue of his face frightened her. She nestled her cheek into his hand. "It's the God's truth I'm telling you, Sally," went on Madeira, "it's life or death, I think. I've got to get rid of Steering--I--I--oh, I hate him so."

"And you won't tell me why, Daddy?"

"And I won't--I can't--there's reason enough, Sally, that's all I can say. Can't you let it go at that, and help me out?"

"Yes, Dad, yes," she said. "You've done such a lot for me, you've helped me out--it--be--a pity,"--her voice went astray in her throat, and in the strong light Madeira saw a wild pain on her upturned face--"pity if I couldn't do anything you ask me to--wouldn't it?" She got up suddenly and ran to the door.

"Sally!" he called, "Sally, you don't mean--you don't--it isn't that"--but she was gone.

_Chapter Nine_

GOOD-BYE!

Madeira went off in the buckboard late that morning, and, having left word with black Chloe that he might have dinner at the Canaan Hotel, did not come home at all at noon.

His daughter stayed in her room all morning, and far past her lunch hour. About the middle of the afternoon she got up from the bed where she had been lying and sat by the window that looked out across the Tigmores. Her father's face, in its frame of entreaty, trouble, unrest, hung between her and the hills, so that, for a time, she saw nothing but Madeira. Little by little, however, the hills themselves became insistent. They were very beautiful, a long, massed glory of colour, red and gold and green, all looped about by the silver cord of the Di. As the girl watched, a lone horseman came out of one of the wooded knobs and galloped down the ridge road toward Canaan. She could see him plainly, his breadth of shoulders, his high-headedness, his good horsemanship. She got up quickly, swaying toward the window, her hands over her heart, with the strange little pushing gesture, as though she must push her heart down. The horseman went on down the road toward Canaan.

"Oh!" cried the girl presently, pleadingly, "if I may see him just once again! If I just don't have to lose him all at once!" She ran then across the room to another window, through which she whistled shrilly at the negro man dozing in the succulent grass in front of the stable.

"Samson!" she shouted, "saddle Ribbon the quickest you ever did in your life!" And when she saw that the negro had roused sufficiently to execute her commands, she turned from the window hurriedly, went to her clothes-closet hurriedly, changed her house gown for a riding-habit hurriedly, and was out in the yard at the mounting block as the saddle mare was led up from the stable. Taking the bridle from the negro's hand, she leaped into the saddle and was off across the yard like a flash, while the lip of the astonished Samson sagged with impotent inquiry.

Out on the ridge road, she urged the mare to a gallop. All the way she was talking to Madeira, almost praying to him. His face with its trouble and pain still moved before her. "Ah, but you will forgive me!" she was saying to it. "You wait. Wait and see how this ride turns out. I'm going to give myself just one chance, Dad. I'm going to find him, and I'm going riding with him. And I'm not going to say anything. But I look nice, don't I, when I'm riding--and loving--and hoping--and maybe he can't stand it, and if he can't stand it, and rides up close, and stops his horse and tells me--oh, what I hope he will tell me--why, Daddy, dear, I _must_ lean over into his arms for just one minute, mustn't I? You see that, don't you? And maybe after that, everything will be all right, and we can all be happy ever after. I don't see how we could help being happy ever after that, Dad!"

And, praying so, on the galloping mare, Sally Madeira came into the main street of Canaan, and drew rein at last in front of her father's bank. Madeira saw her at once and hurried out to her.

"I'm going to take a little last ride with Mr. Steering, Dad," she said, her head as high as a queen's and her voice strong and sweet. "I didn't want you to think that I was deceiving you. I wanted you to know about it before I did it." Often there was a good deal of the child in Sally's straight gaze, and Madeira saw it there now and loved it.

"You do just exactly whatever you want to, Honeyful," he said. "I don't know--I----" He could not go on at all for a minute, and when he could go on he said abruptly, "I'm going to see Steering, too, before I quite bust up with him, Sally." Then he went quickly back to the bank, and the girl passed on down the street to the post-office, in front of which she saw Steering's horse at the hitching-rail. She sent a bare-footed boy inside to post a letter to Elsie Gossamer and to ask Mr. Steering to come out to her.

While she waited, she could see Steering at the pen-and-ink desk, loitering there, one arm on the desk, watching the thin stream of people that went by him to the convex glass-and-pine booth where the post-office boxes were. The men from the Canaan stores, a lonely drummer from the hotel, some belated farmers and several Canaan young ladies passed Steering, the young ladies seeming not to see him, but, in some subtly feminine way, making it impossible for Steering not to see them--their glowing young faces, their enormous hats, the way their gowns didn't fit, the slip-shod carriage of their bodies, all the differences between them and the only other real western girl he knew. None of the people went out of the post-office at once, all idling at the door for a few minutes. From time to time there was quite a little crush at the door, so that Steering did not see Miss Madeira until her messenger reached him. Then he ran out to her quickly.

"I shan't get down," she told him, speaking in a lower tone than the listening Canaanites approved of. "I was hoping that I might find you here. Get on your horse and let's go to the woods. Wouldn't you like to? The hills are one long glory to-day." It was not the note of her prayer, it was well-ordered and calm. Still, Steering's heart leaped like a boy's at her friendliness, and he began to speak his gratitude in a lyric tune:

"Ah, what fortune! Just to be young and alive and off on the hills with you!" he said, and vaulted to his horse's back from the curb, so easily that even the Missourians who were candidly watching and listening, remarked, "Oh, well, it's because he's got some Missouri in him, that's why-for."

Side by side, the horses moved down Main Street. At the bank Crittenton Madeira was standing at the plate-glass window. He had his thumbs in his trousers pockets, and he was rocking to and fro, shifting his weight from his heels to the balls of his feet peculiarly, as though seeking for balance. His eyes were moodily thoughtful, and he kept snapping at his lower lip with his big white teeth.

"Why, God bless you, Steering!" he cried pleasantly, moving out to the curb as the horses came up, "I made a mistake in missing you at the house yesterday. Want to see you again, as soon as I can. What about to-night, young man? Going to get in home early, aren't you, Sally?"

"Yes, Dad, early."

"Well then, my boy, you just stop by the bank, when you get in from the hills, will you? I shan't leave the bank before eight o'clock. Shan't be home to supper, Honeyful."

"All right, Mr. Madeira, I'll come," assented Steering; "look for me sometime before eight."

"All right, my boy. So long, Honeyful."

Again the horses moved off, side by side. Soon the town lay far behind the riders, who were following the shimmering Di around the blue hills. Where the road ran up the bluff into heavy timber they got into deep odorous silences, the silences of young unspoiled places; musical, too, somehow, over and beyond the stillness. Where the road came down to the bottom land along the river the silence shook with the river's silver mystery. No matter where the road ran, always off beyond them lay the hills, ridge upon ridge, beautiful, glorious.

"Aren't they tremendous?" said the girl, "Aren't you glad they are almost yours?" A sense of possession was indeed mounting into a cry of rejoicing within Steering. He admitted it and then laughed at it.

"It's the house of Grierson that should rejoice," he said longingly.

"Wait until I bring you out above Salome Park," said the girl. "I, too, have some land up here that's worth while. From my land you can look straight across the country for miles, back again into your land."

Sometimes, as they journeyed, they passed log cabins backed up against the long hills, or squatting close to the shining river. Sometimes, as they journeyed, the red bluffs beetled up above them, tall and frowning. Sometimes the trees, trailing long green veils, all but met across the Di below them. Once they passed a saw-mill, set and buzzing; once they had to wait in the woods while a string of cattle stampeded by; once they saw a man in a skiff far down the Di. He raised his hand and waved to them for loneliness' sake. He looked sick with loneliness.

"You know your Missouri by heart," Steering commented admiringly, as she led him through bridle-paths and by short cuts with a fine woodsmanship.

"Well, I ought to. The times that I have been over it, with Piney, a ragged Robin-goodfellow at my heels! This is the apple-jack country that we are in now. Did you know that? Apple-jack stands for our big red apples and for zinc. There's some of both down here, see!" She stopped him on a high spur in the ridge road and waved her riding whip toward the flats below, whose miles upon miles of apple trees made him wonder. "But wait for Salome Park," she insisted, and led him on.

Riding along beside her, listening to her, forgetful of his complications, his hills billowing toward him, Steering grew intensely happy. Just to look at her was enough to make a man happy. Her black, semi-fitting riding-habit outlined her graces of form enchantingly, the admirable litheness of her broad deep chest, her firmly-knit back. In her vigour of well-shaped bone and sinew and muscle she constantly emphasised the unpoetic nuisance of superfluous flesh. Beneath her little black hat her burnished hair lay coiled in soft smooth masses low on her neck. The wonderful vitality that beat through her veins brought the red colour to her cheeks in delicate waves. In her sunny amber eyes the high lights danced far back, dazzlingly.