Chapter II

Now Janet was in the ranch, but hardly of it. Her mother was the ranch housekeeper; but years ago, in the days of the open range and hostile Indians, when the Old Man was young and believed that the proper place for dudes was east of the Mississippi River, she had been the great lady of the cow country. Her husband had been a younger son of the British aristocracy, a fact which he had proceeded to forget as quickly as possible, except that he had gone through his money like an English gentleman, both living and giving generously.

Not that that mattered now, save for a certain breeding, an English sort of reticence and the excellent horsemanship which were all he had bequeathed to Janet. His widow was the ranch housekeeper, and during the long summer she went around from cottage to tent, tent to cottage, conversing with maids in some such manner as “Get some mouse traps for 22, Maggie. The field mice have eaten Mrs. Brown’s orange sweater.” Or “Tell Mr. Jenkins in 18 that he’ll have to stop smoking in bed. He burns holes in his sheets every time.”

Janet taught school in the winter, riding back and forth on Midge, the little buckskin which she had trained to an uncanny degree of intelligence. Not that Janet had any idea of the importance Midge was to assume in her life, but because, until the Kid came into it, she had a good bit of leisure time. After that, of course—

The Kid had come over from the Powder River country some eight months before, a big brown boy with a scar on his neck from the Argonne Forest, a good saddle, a dauntless spirit and ten dollars in coin of the realm, which he stood ready to bet at any odds or none on anything at all. He lost the ten dollars and his heart almost simultaneously and for the rest went through his initiation into the outfit creditably.

He was given bad horses and stuck to them as long as his knees held out; fought with his two fists when he had to; jibed and was jibed at; mortgaged his pay in advance on blackjack and poker; drank a variety of moonshine under different names, with equally disastrous results; and in sentimental moments was wont to tilt back his chair, draw his hat over his eyes and, having thus secured the delusion of isolation from his kind, to produce a mouth organ and pour out his soul in a succession of dismal sounds.

He had eight words of army French, a cowpuncher’s sense of humour, a very masculine vanity, an extreme humility about women, and a modesty so shrinking that he did without bed sheets for a week because he wouldn’t ask Janet for them.

“What do you get out of all those books, Miss Janet?” he had asked her once.

“I like to know about things. Don’t you?”

He set about a course of reading then. It irked him horribly, but it was his idea of decreasing the distance between them. He would sit off, grimly aloof from the card table, going at full blast, and feel that with every line, so to speak, he climbed a step. By late spring, although nothing had been said, Janet and the Kid were keeping steady company, and the Old Man had his eye on a homestead for them up Indian Creek. But the summer influx had changed everything. Beginning with the first of June the ranch took on a strange and exotic blooming, became colourful and sparkling. The lawn by the big house began to be dotted with bright hats and sweaters. The corral lost its air of businesslike austerity and on its high fence perched strange and brilliant birds, with clear young voices which shouted, “Ride ’er, cowboy!”

The wranglers themselves took on some of this new colouring. They began to appear in new hats, in pink shirts, in vivid-coloured neck handkerchiefs. The corral in business hours, which were all day now, was as full of local colour as a Buffalo Bill show, and slightly reminiscent of it, for the Old Man knew his business.

And to the Kid a new and bewildering world of women opened up, and with this difference: He had always looked up to Janet as a sort of superior being, and now came dozens of girls, clean and sweet and wholesome as the mountain air, who stood near him, in groups or singly, and gazed at him as at some supreme and magnificent creature.

They tendered him the homage of all the romance they had built up about the West, gazing at him with their clear soft eyes, seeing in him the Virginian or some other hero; but mostly Faversham.

It went to the Kid’s head. He paid thirty dollars for a new pair of inlaid spurs, and was quite apt, when not otherwise occupied, to play idly with a hemp rope, with which he could do a variety of things. When, standing like a star in the centre of a circle of satellites, he let it settle gently over the head of some pretty creature, she would flush at the distinction. Generally, that is. For once he saw a new girl, Rosamond Carter, and roped her neatly. But Rosamond did not flush. She looked quite squarely into the Kid’s eyes and said, “Now you’ve got me, what do you intend to do with me?”

It was the Kid who flushed that time.

The cruel thing about it all was that Rosamond very deliberately set to work to steal the Kid, to sacrifice him to make a summer holiday. Before she fixed on him she had coolly appraised the masculine situation, the men of the outfit, the visiting Easterners, even the Old Man himself. She even knew about Janet, which must be Janet’s excuse, for she will need one—and Janet knew that she knew.

Perhaps Rosamond maliciously hoped for a struggle, girl against girl; but Janet never put up a fight. She let the Kid go his blundering, masculine way, cried herself to sleep at night, rode Midge and trained him in a sort of desperation, and presented to the Kid and to the world a sort of frozen friendliness that wrung the Old Man’s heart. The Kid was gone. He rode with Rosamond in the evenings, and swallowed whole her bait of his horsemanship and his red-bloodedness and the general lack of both in Eastern men.

“There’s nothing to the society game,” she would say, sitting on her horse and looking over the far places through lashes lightly touched with black paste. “I’m a better woman when I’m here with you.”

The Kid felt rather noble at such times, and very, very strong. Now and then, however, his conscience hurt him, and he would go and sit on Janet’s small veranda. But he could not find anything much to say, and Janet would not help him. She never once told him that he was a magnificent specimen of manhood, although she felt that the mould had been broken when the Kid was made. She did tell him that he needed a haircut, and Rosamond rather gasped when he appeared later with a dark roof on the ridgepole of his head, so to speak, and from there to the eaves and below almost entirely unthatched.

On cottage verandas the great burglary was much under discussion, and sympathy was entirely with Janet. Even the Kid came in for his share.

“The poor fish!” was one gentleman’s comment. “She’s got him out of water and gasping, and when he’s good and dead she’ll throw him back.”

Certainly the Kid was gasping. He was not sleeping well, and in the long night watches he lay and thought to the accompaniment of a chorus of snores in which the cook sang the bass. Even the Kid knew that Rosamond would be expensive, and that red-blooded manhood was hardly a sufficient asset in supporting a wife; and somehow he could not see Rosamond on a one-hundred-and-sixty-acre homestead, in a log house, washing dishes. He was divided between going East to make a fortune and prospecting the mountains for a gold mine. On the whole he leaned toward the gold mine. It was quicker, and certainly there were traces of gold in the creek.

He took a camping trip up into the mountains, and on his return the boss had a bad time with one of the campers.

“The next time I go out, for God’s sake send me with a guide. That boy we had was hunting gold instead of firewood half the time.”

“Gold!” said the Old Man thoughtfully.

Now the Old Man was no fool, and he was fond of his boys. Especially he was fond of the Kid. So that evening, cigarette in hand, he wandered up to the corral. Generally during the dude season he stayed away from the corral, for out of every hundred intelligent and considerate riders there was sure to be one congenital idiot who thought it highly Western to take a horse stiff with hours of standing and spur him into a wild gallop at the start.

The Old Man, at such times, according to the corral, was likely to go off by himself and tell God all about it, and later to tell the horse killer himself.

So he wandered up, cigarette between his teeth and battered hat on his head, and stood off by himself, watching; and, since he was no fool, he got the Carter situation in a minute. He saw her standing watching the Kid, and the Kid saddling with the highest sort of efficiency, but conscious of her every second. And when she had got her horse at last he saw her go down the road and stop there waiting while the Kid roped out his own animal and threw the saddle on his back. The Old Man smiled and called to the Kid.

“Going somewhere?” he inquired.

“I’m through, sir. I’ve been teaching Miss Carter to ride, and I thought—”

“Ride!” snorted the Old Man. “That girl rode in a horse show before you were out of short pants, son. What’s she been putting over on you?”

The Kid gulped and said nothing.

“Now see here!” said the Old Man. “You’re new to this dude stuff, and it’s gone to your head. All the boys get it at first, but it’s like being vaccinated. They’re safe after that, and the scar hardly shows.” He surveyed the Kid, who looked like the picture on a coloured jacket of a Western novel, and grinned. “It’s the trimmings, boy, the trimmings!” Then his smile died and his face hardened. “But I’ll tell you this: If this local colour is going to turn one of my best men into a damn fool, then by the Almighty I’ll put the outfit in overalls. I don’t see any women going crazy over the blacksmith or the irrigator.”

He started off, but turned and spoke over his shoulder.

“Put your horse up,” he said. “One of the principles of this ranch is to teach its guests self-confidence. Maybe she can manage alone—if she has to. And another thing: There isn’t any gold in these mountains. I’ve prospected them for forty years.”

It was that night that the Kid proposed to Rosamond Carter. There was a dance going on, with the band from the town forty miles away. The band arrogated to itself certain prerogatives, in addition to a fair amount in money. Thus, once each evening, after looking over the ground, the gentleman at the bass drum would pick out the best dancer, signal to her with a lifted finger and thus indicate, no matter what her previous engagement, that the next dance was his. And once also each evening the cornetist would, instrument to mouth and blowing lustily, cut in and send some discomfited youth to the wall.

The bass drummer chose Rosamond that night, and she shot a glance of visible triumph around the room. It was when it was over that the Kid took her outside and asked her to marry him. He was so husky that she had to ask him to repeat it.

“I don’t mean now, Rosamond. All I want is to know that you care. After that—” He made a large gesture, implying no doubt that if she cared the rest was easy.

“Of course I care, Kid dear. I’m crazy about you.”

He nearly broke her hand, so convulsively did he grab it.

“But—marriage!” Rosamond said gently, loosening her hand and surreptitiously rubbing her fingers. “That’s different, isn’t it?”

“Why different? If you love me and I love you—”

“‘Marry’ is such a long, long word,” she said. “Let’s not worry about that part of it. There’s no hurry about it. Let’s just be happy together.”

That suited him well enough. He was too content to force things, and he knew extremely well that there could be no hurry about it, anyhow. Of course he kissed her, and he was trembling all over when he released her. Quite certainly he considered that the kiss had sealed her to him, that she was his and he was hers. He didn’t go back to the dance at all. He wandered out and half dazedly climbed a butte, where he sat in the starlight, not thinking so much as feeling, while tired horses grazed around him and the lights of the ranch below were a constellation of planets, reflected in an ink-black lake.

But—and here was a queer thing—Janet suddenly came into his mind, and his first thought was that now he had lost her! He had never heard that a man may have a passion for one woman while he loves another, and certainly it did not occur to him then.

One of the stars below was Janet’s, and he sat and gazed at it for some time. Then—such a strange creature is man—he went down from the butte and stood watching the dance from outside a window, just to catch a glimpse of Rosamond.