Chapter III

In August came the ranch rodeo. The bad string was brought in a day or two before for the bucking contests, and a long-horned Mexican steer waited in a paddock to be bulldogged. Half a dozen burros for roping and tying were there, too, and in the bunk house at night there was a strong odor of saddle soap and metal polish.

Two days before the rodeo came a mysterious gentleman with long grey hair parted in the middle and brushed out in tufts over his ears, and wearing a grey-checked suit of exceeding loudness, bound with black braid.

The corral, viewing this apparition from a distance, pretended to be immediately stricken with blindness, and reeled and staggered about. And, accustomed to the ways of dudes, they waited breathlessly to see the new arrival in riding clothes.

But he did not ride. He sat on a bench most of the time, rolling cigarettes with a facility that put even the corral to shame. Once he wandered up, took a look at the horses and wandered away without a word or a change of expression.

“I wouldn’t sit in a game of cards with that guy, not for a million dollars,” said Jack Moncrielle. “I bet he doesn’t open his mouth to eat, any more than he has to.”

The Kid saw the newcomer, as he saw everything at that time, through a sort of haze. Even the talk that drifted to him in the bunk house, that Poker Face was a cruiser looking for talent for a tent show on the water front in Chicago, passed over his head. He had washed a pan of sand from the creek and found a fleck or two of gold in it, and already at night, when he pulled his mouth organ out from under his pillow and poured out his soul, he was riding in his own automobile, with Rosamond beside him. He never dreamed that the man in the checked suit was to cost him one good year of misery.

The rodeo came, and with it half the countryside. It parked its cars in great lines and brought the children and luncheon boxes, and when the riders rode into the field, to the blare of the band, it crowded to the fences and cheered. It cheered them all, but mostly it cheered Janet. Janet and the Old Man led the procession. Janet was going to ride!

When the Kid learned it, before the procession started, he had a queer sick feeling. Just for a moment he forgot Rosamond, and he made a furious protest to Janet herself.

“I think you’ve lost your mind,” he said.

“Why?”

“It’s all right for us. We’re paid to risk our necks to amuse the dudes. But you! You’re not!”

“Don’t worry about me,” said Janet coldly. “And if you want to know it, I’m not riding to amuse the guests.”

His rage increased when he saw Janet drawing for her horse like the others, but when she drew Corkscrew a dull despair settled on him. Even the Old Man was anxious then, but he need not have worried. Corkscrew lived up to his name, leaped and twisted, whirled and lunged, but Janet’s knees hugged him like two slim steel vises, and Corkscrew came to rest at last, beaten.

When Janet looked around the roaring, cheering field all she saw was Rosamond, delicately clad, cool and very feminine, watching her with hard, triumphant eyes.

The rodeo went the way of all rodeos. Al was thrown and knocked out. He lay quite still, a suddenly pinched and colourless profile turned up to the sky, in the midst of breathless silence. Then he moved and the crowd relaxed. He got up and limped off.

The Kid rode and bulldogged with the others, neither better nor worse than the average, which was good. And he swaggered a bit, with the thirty-dollar spurs clanking and the nail heads on his chaps gleaming like silver. When he caught Rosamond’s eye she smiled, and the warm sense of a secret intimacy between his own perspiring self and her cool exquisiteness swelled his heart almost to bursting.

But Janet, after all, provided the hit of the day. For she brought out Midge after the riding was over, when the bull had been retired to rest his weary neck muscles, and all the little burros, after the thrill of their lives, had trotted docilely back to tell their families of their escapes. And Midge performed.

It is not necessary to tell what Midge did. His fame is a part of the vaudeville history by now, and Janet’s, too, for that matter. Actually Midge was only an agency for the working out of those certain destinies with which this story deals. At the time he provided Janet with the means of release from an intolerable situation, for by nightfall the ranch knew that the cruiser, which is only a bunk-houseism for a highly honourable profession, had made Janet an offer for vaudeville and that she had accepted it.

The bunk house was divided in its opinion that night, but the Kid did not hear about it until later. He spent the evening sitting on the creek bank with Rosamond, telling her about the gold.

August wore on, with the Old Man teaching Janet fancy rope work behind the barn, with divers sluggish Eastern livers renewing their youth, with the horses a trifle leaner and their riders browner, and with the Kid out on the bank and gasping, and Rosamond not yet ready to throw him back.

With the end of August came the general exodus from the ranch. Apparently new people, who were really the old ones changed by their city garb, began to appear on the lawn. The truck carried daily mountains of trunks to the railroad. The line of horses at the rail at saddling time diminished day by day. The grass in the pastures and on the high meadows turned in patches to red and brown. The prairie dogs in Dog Town could emerge without the whistle of a bullet past their heads. A deer was seen in the cañon, and a guide brought in a small and highly disagreeable black bear cub. In a word, the early fall of the mountains was at the door.

And Rosamond was going. The Kid would waken in the morning before the alarm clock and lie there wondering how he could bear it. He thought of her exquisiteness, her fastidious daintiness. He saw her going back to surroundings like herself—although he had not the faintest possible idea of what such surroundings might be—and the bunk house suddenly seemed horrible to him; the boots on the floor, the snorings of the men, the cook’s false teeth in a cup on the chair beside the bed, Dice, in his underdrawers, his fine body bare and uncovered to the waist.

He had a wonderful parting from Rosamond. They rode up the cañon and watched the moon rise, and she made him promise a dozen ways to be faithful. She made no promises herself, however, and he was to remember that later. When late that night he went to the bunk house he found Dice waiting for him, sitting on the step.

“Well,” was Dice’s greeting, “thank God, that’s over!”

“What’s over?”

“Rosamond. You thick-headed idiot, d’you think you’ll ever see her again?”

“That’s my affair,” said the Kid loftily.

“Not by a damned sight!” was Dice’s comment. “This outfit has been short one man for eight weeks, and you’re the man. Now you take some advice. Can the Lady Rosamond and crawl on your face to Janet—and I hope to God she puts her foot on you.”

Janet did almost literally that.

By the middle of September the ranch was almost down to what Jack Moncrielle designated as a prewar basis. A dozen horses saddled in the morning, six or eight in the evening; in the bunk house long sessions of poker or blackjack, in the peculiar silence of the gambling puncher; Janet training her horse; the Old Man shooting ducks out on the flat, and in close conclave with Janet in the evening; the alarm clock in the bunk house set at six instead of four; in the pastures cinch sores and saddle galls slowly healing, and spurs a cruel memory, and in the Kid’s mind already a faint haze over Rosamond’s memory and an unexpected pang at the knowledge that Janet was going away.

Then two things happened in quick succession which showed the Kid what he had done. The first was that Janet was caught in the wire.

Now to be caught in the wire is one of the desperate emergencies and often one of the tragedies of Western life. Horses caught in the wire come home with flesh torn to ribbons, deep cuts to the bone, muscles and tendons severed.

Fortunately it was not Midge, but another horse. Janet knew better than to lay a fence flat and try to leap over it, but she was possessed those days by a sort of restless desperation, and it followed the first talk she had had with the Kid for weeks. He had gone to her, humble enough in all conscience, unable to bear the thought that she should leave with the coldness between them. Janet was in the little paddock the Old Man had given her, with Midge’s curious stage properties scattered about, for she had just finished a lesson, and she heard him through without a quiver.

“In all you’re saying,” she said at last, “you are taking for granted that you have offended me or hurt me. Just why?”

He fingered the hat in his hand nervously.

“Well, we used to be good friends, Janet.”

“Aren’t we still?”

“You didn’t tell me you were going to do this thing.”

“I didn’t tell Dice, either, or any of the boys.”

“That’s different.”

“How is it different?”

“I don’t know. I used to think it was.”

He gave it up then and went away. He didn’t understand it himself, so how could he explain? All he knew was that it mattered less and less each day that no letter came from Rosamond, and more and more that Janet would soon be gone. He went away and sat by himself, staring in the general direction of the railroad, which seemed somehow to be interfering with his life. And Janet saddled the Old Man’s bay mare and got caught in the wire.

When the mare’s foot caught and she leaped forward she pulled the wire Janet was standing on and threw her on it. Instantly she was caught on a hundred red-hot, tearing and jerking points of agony. The mare leaped over her, leaped back again, reared and fell. The wire by that time was over and under Janet, and the horse was up again. Janet was dragged out into the field as post after post gave way, and then the mare got free.

The Old Man found Janet there a half hour later, her clothes torn to ribbons and stained with blood, and he got her out and onto his horse. She was too dazed to be questioned, but the Old Man knew, and he muttered most of the way home.

Her going was delayed almost a month by the accident, and in that month the Kid suffered horribly. Rosamond was like a bad dream by that time, but if he wanted to forget her the bunk house gave him no chance. He grew to hate her very name, although not as much as he hated himself.

He was consumed with jealousy too. It was Dice who sat with Mrs. Allenby and Janet during the convalescence, and Slim who took over the care and training of Midge. Even the cook, wandering over in the evening with a bit of specially broiled chicken or trout, had the entrée to the Allenby cottage. Only the Kid was left out.

The truth, of course, was that under the ice that had frozen over Janet’s love the current of it still ran fast and furious. But the ice was there. Even the Old Man finally put in a word for him, but Janet shook her head.

“If he would do it once he would do it again,” she said. “I used to mind, but I don’t now.”

The abominable fact that all the ranch had pitied her was, next to the Kid’s defection, what rankled. And when, the night before she left, the Kid came again, humbly, and stood before her she went quite pale with outraged pride.

“I’ve been a fool, Janet, and I know it.”

“About what?”

“You know what I mean, don’t you?”

She was not very strong, yet, and she began to tremble, but her voice was steady. She even laughed a little.

“I suppose I do. But aren’t we all foolish at times? I was myself, last spring, but I’ve got over it.”

As old as the hills, this story. The wandering male, the hurt pride of the woman, four feet of distance and yet a mile or so between them. The Kid, who had never heard of the vicious pendulum of love, from passion to hate and back to love again, the Kid turned on his high heels and went away from this new and different Janet, who was as hard and stiff and shiny as new leather.

It was entirely clear now that she had never cared a plugged nickel for him. He had thought once— They called this life, did they, this thing of working all day and suffering all night? Life!

He went down and sat by the creek. Life! A man poured out his whole heart at a woman’s feet, and she went on the stage and painted her face, and a lot of dudes stared at her and sent her notes and took her out to supper. Life!

Oh, well, let it ride!