Chapter V

Afterwards, reviewing the situation, the Old Man blamed himself. He should never have let Rosamond come back to the ranch. Certainly he would never have let that fool Crosby Nugent get past his wire if he could have foreseen what was going to happen.

But who could have foretold that the Kid, for instance, was going to back out of the field without even giving battle? Or that Janet would take his withdrawal for indifference? The Old Man, who had forgotten the inverted psychology of lovers, wanted to shake them both, and nearly smoked himself to death over them.

Janet arrived first. From the inside of the car she had made certain that the Kid was with the others on the platform, and was thus able to adopt a wide smile which included everybody and singled out none. All winter she had hated herself for refusing the Kid’s overtures, and all winter she had waited for him to renew them. But he had not. Janet’s attitude, then, was a sort of feverish, watchful waiting; which was, unfortunately, also the Kid’s.

So she smiled at everybody, and the men cheered, and Slim stood in the door of his box car and hi-oo-ed loudly and repeatedly. And the Kid saw only a beautiful and expensively dressed young woman who might pretend to be the same old Janet, but who couldn’t put anything over on him.

No, the Kid saw it all quite clearly. He had gone back to Janet, but she had not come back to him. What was kissing the Old Man and shaking hands all around was a prosperous, successful and worldly Janet, a—he used the only word he had to cover the situation—dude Janet.

She couldn’t put anything over on him. Not even when she suddenly stopped talking and stood still, staring at the mountains with a queer soft look in her eyes. The Kid remained a little aloof, whistling to himself to show his complete comprehension, and his indifference to it. After a while he went over and talked to Slim.

There was no card game in the bunk house that night. In the centre of an enthralled circle sat Slim, and his talk was of Janet and the act. Strange theatrical terms fell from his lips, and stranger statements. Such, for instance, as an offer of ten thousand dollars for Midge, who had cost the Old Man forty, and that Janet’s buckskin stage outfit had set her back five hundred iron men; that the act drew down four hundred a week; that there was a line of Johnnies waiting for Janet every night that reached to the curb and out into the street.

“What about Janet? Did she fall for them?” inquired Dice, with a side glance at the Kid.

“Janet! She told me to push in the face of any one who spoke to her, and you bet I did it.”

The vision of Slim, fighting a path out of the theatre every night for Janet, held the bunk house silent for a moment.

“She’s a great kid,” said Slim reflectively. “A great kid.” While the men slept that night the Kid got up, and drawing on his breeches and boots with extreme caution removed from the wall the almost complete cow-horn masterpiece. With equal caution he reached the open air and headed for the creek.

* * * * *

July came, and with it came dudes and yet more dudes. The ranch overflowed with dudes. Pleasant, genial dudes, who did not expect metropolitan-hotel service and rode their horses carefully; disagreeable dudes, who were afraid to bully the Old Man, but tried it out on the corral with unpleasant results; fool dudes, who sat up all night to make night hideous and rode their horses to death or near it; men dudes, who immediately bought neckerchiefs and wide hats, and rubbed themselves into blisters trying to sit the trot; fat-women dudes in breeches riding off weight; pretty-girl dudes, who looked up at the ranchmen with soft romantic eyes, asking but for notice and a little condescension from the young gods in chaps and spurs.

Once again the alarm clock on the bunk-house window sill exploded at four A. M., and once again an occasional favoured girl was invited to crawl out of her warm bed before dawn, to risk her neck in the romantic West. But there was this difference, that the Kid now rose hopelessly to what may be called a womanless day. The Kid was definitely and permanently off women.

Rosamond blew in breezily the first of August, with a chaperon and Crosby Nugent, and inside of four hours the bunk house had classified Nugent as yellow. He swaggered up to the corral as soon as he had changed into riding clothes, and looked over the stock sourly.

“D’you call them horses?” he demanded of the Kid.

“If you’ve got any better name you’re welcome to use it.”

Mr. Nugent approached the bars of the fence and peered through.

“Suppose I can pick my own horse, eh?”

The Kid looked around. There was no one near.

“Well,” he said softly, “we usually make our own selections, but we aim to please. Which will you have?”

Some ten minutes later Mr. Nugent threw a leg over the back of the blue roan of his selection, and in so doing lightly touched the blue roan on the back with his spur. Immediately following this Mr. Nugent struck the barn wall with a thud, and then dropped to the ground, where he lay for a moment before the Kid helped him up.

“Must have scratched him somewhere,” said the Kid gently.

“Scratched him! I’m scratched all right. Why the hell don’t you break your horses?”

“Break them!” The Kid’s tone was pained. “Why, the children ride that horse. He’s a pet, he is.” He looked off at the blue roan, standing quietly by the rail. “Al,” he called, “look around for something quiet. See if Lizzie’s out.”

After that the men of the outfit were as definitely off Nugent as the Kid was off women. He rode a succession of horses, bringing them in scratched and sweating, and finding fault with them all. But the bunk house knew more than that. It perceived quite early that Rosamond was fatuously in love with him. She trailed him as assiduously as she had once trailed the Kid, but what had thrilled the Kid to his very soul was quite clearly beginning to bore Nugent. He took to riding early now and then to get off by himself, and it was on one of those early trips that he fell in with Janet.

It is hard to defend Janet. It is necessary to remember that she considered the Kid entirely lost to her, and to keep in mind Rosamond’s part in that loss, and of course, too, there was that rankling open humiliation of the year before. But the real issue was the Kid.

She had made one real effort to bridge the gap between them, but it had failed. She had asked him to ride with her some evening when his work was done.

“You don’t want to ride with me,” he said gruffly.

“I’ve asked you.”

“What’s the matter with the dude men who are always hanging round you?”

She flushed.

“I got enough of that last winter, Kid.”

Suddenly all the furious jealousy of that desperately lonely winter flamed in him.

“So I’ve heard,” he said coldly. She waited rather wistfully, but for a moment or two he busied himself with a saddle. Then, “Now look here, Janet!” he burst out angrily, “I don’t want you to be kind to me. I know you mean well, but—I don’t want it.”

She had had to turn and go away.

It was after that that Nugent met Janet on the trail one morning, and recognised her as the girl he had seen in a theatre the winter before. Maybe he considered the women of the stage fair game. Maybe he was bored with Rosamond. Maybe behind it all there was some genuine sentiment. Whatever it may have been, it is certain that from that day he spent an undue amount of time with her.

The Kid, glancing toward Janet’s cottage, could see him curled up on the step, animated and laughing, and Janet laughing too. When there came into view the crowd of young people, which followed Janet those days like the tail of a comet, Nugent would wander away, scowling, to look up Rosamond and make his peace with her. The Kid, who had begun by merely disliking him, began to hate him with a terrible hatred.

Just how Rosamond felt no one could know. She went about with a sort of frozen smile on her face, and made at least one effort to rouse Nugent’s jealousy by getting the Kid back. But the Kid knew nothing of such subterfuges, and he had no intention of going back.

She asked him one night if she might wrangle with him the next morning, and he uncomfortably agreed. Maybe she misunderstood the reason for the moody silence in which he worked in the dawn, his taciturnity on the homeward ride. But she was as desperate as he was, and less resigned. She swayed toward him in the saddle.

“Kid,” she said softly, “I’ve treated you very badly, haven’t I?”

“How?”

“Don’t you want to talk about it?”

He faced her squarely and honestly.

“I don’t see much use in it. Do you?”

“I want you to forgive me, Kid.”

“Forgive you for me having a brain storm? Well, I guess not!” Then he smiled boyishly. “I’m not holding any hard feelings,” he said. “I guess I liked being crazy while it lasted.”

That effectually closed any further negotiations so far as Rosamond was concerned.

The Kid was becoming an extremely difficult person to live with. He no longer joined in the card game in the bunk house at night, and if he wore his hat with the rim curled at the sides and the front tilted toward his right eye it was from pure habit. The swagger had gone from his walk and the lilt from his voice. When sent after strays he went alone, by choice, riding as though all the devils of hell were after him.

And Janet? Janet was suffering from a complex, which is a bad thing at any time, but which when constituted of love and hurt pride makes an insoluble compound with some of the attributes of revenge. She could not sit on her heel behind the saddle shed and whistle melancholy dirges. She could not yell at any crowd playing poker around the lamps to “For God’s sake put the light out and let a fellow sleep.” All she could do was to give hurt for hurt, and this she did with a Janetlike thoroughness.

After two weeks or so, when Crosby Nugent haunted Janet’s every step, and Rosamond’s eyes had a feverish glitter and her laugh was shrill and forced, one night Dice Barnett took his hat in his hand and presented himself at the Old Man’s office door.

“Come in,” said the Old Man from the lamplight by his desk. “I’ve been expecting you for a day or two.”

“Yes, sir,” said Dice. “I guess you were right last winter. They’re not making the grade after all. I don’t know but somebody’d better do some shoving.”

The Old Man nodded.

“Things are pretty bad, are they?”

“If he gets any worse to live with he’ll have to be roped and tied.”

The Old Man rolled a cigarette thoughtfully.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It strikes me, Dice, that this thing is between the two women now, and it is no place for us. I don’t know that I blame Janet, but I’ll tell you this: If she was half her age I’d give her a good spanking.”

He sighed and got up.

“It’s a good bit like a boil, Dice,” he went on. “It’s got to come to a head before it can be cut.”

Dice moved to the door. It was all right for the Old Man to be philosophical; he didn’t have to live with the Kid.

“He’s likely to do Nugent some harm some of these days,” he offered. “Looks to me like he’s just waiting his chance.”

The Old Man smiled grimly.

“The one rule of this ranch,” he said, “is first-class care of our guests. I insist on that.” Dice nodded and stepped out on the doorstep. “Of course,” the Old Man added, “what I don’t know won’t hurt me.”

Dice was smiling faintly as he went back to the bunk house.

The ranch meanwhile was watching the play with avid interest. It saw the foppish Nugent spending hours in Janet’s paddock in the heat and dust, hauling out and putting away props, holding horses, saddling and unsaddling, his face smeared with sweat and his clothing dirty and disarranged. Janet was training a new pony, and once it kicked him. He walked with a limp for days.

Just what he thought, what furtive and secret hope he had, cannot be known. Certainly he had no intimation of any situation save the Rosamond one, which must have been pretty acute sometimes. To him the Kid was merely a good-looking cowpuncher with a grouch, and certainly a small flare-up which occurred between them at that time must have puzzled him considerably. It came about, oddly enough, through the gold in the creek sand.

Certainly the Kid had never given a thought to any gold in the mountains after the Old Man’s statement relative to it. And so far as gold is concerned, if there ever was any there it is still there, for it has never been found. But although the Kid did not believe there was gold, if there was any—if this can be made clear—he meant to find it. And the breaking point came one day when Nugent came up to the bunk-house porch with a pan in his hand, with a few pin-point specks in it which he said were gold.

The Kid had watched him coming with malevolent eyes.

“Gold!” he said nastily. “Fool’s gold!”

“Real gold,” said Nugent.

“Fool’s gold!” said the Kid belligerently.

Nugent gave him a contemptuous glance.

“You may know how to ride,” he said coldly, “although I’d like to see you on an English saddle before I can say. But there may be one or two other little things you don’t know.”

The Kid got up slowly, with a dangerous smile, but Dice Barnett pushed him back and stepped in front of him.

“Better take it away, Mr. Nugent,” he said firmly. “There isn’t enough there to have any difference of opinion about.”

Over Dice’s shoulder Nugent got a look at the Kid’s face, and it must have startled him. There seemed to be no particular reason for the dull hatred that blazed in the Kid’s eyes. He was a trifle startled.