Chapter I: Part 1

THE LOOM OF THE DESERT

To the courtesy of the editors of the “Argonaut,” “Out West,” “Criterion,” “Arena” and “Munsey’s”--in which publications many of these sketches have already seen print--is due their reappearance in more permanent form.

The Loom of the Desert

by
Idah Meacham Strobridge

LOS ANGELES
MCMVII

Copyright, 1907, by
Idah Meacham Strobridge

Printed by the
Baumgardt Publishing Company
Los Angeles, California

Of this autographed edition of
“The Loom of the Desert,” one
thousand copies were made; this
one being number 351

Idah M. Strobridge

MARRIED: In Newark, New Jersey, Thursday, evening, June the Second,
1852, Phebe Amelia Craiger of Newark, to George Washington Meacham of
California.

To these--my dearest;
the FATHER and MOTHER who are my comrades still,
I dedicate
these stories of a land where we were pioneers.

FOREWORD

There, in that land set apart for Silence, and Space, and the Great Winds, Fate--a grim, still figure--sat at her loom weaving the destinies of desert men and women. The shuttles shot to and fro without ceasing, and into the strange web were woven the threads of Light, and Joy, and Love; but more often were they those of Sorrow, or Death, or Sin. From the wide Gray Waste the Weaver had drawn the color and design; and so the fabric’s warp and woof were of the desert’s tone. Keeping this always well in mind will help you the better to understand those people of the plains, whose lives must needs be often sombre-hued.

MESQUITE

Miss Glendower sat on the ranch-house piazza, shading her eyes from the white glare of the sun by holding above them--in beautiful, beringed fingers--the last number of a Boston magazine. It was all very new and delightful to her--this strange, unfinished country, and each day developed fresh charm. As a spectacle it was perfect--the very desolation and silence of the desert stirred something within her that the Back Bay had never remotely roused. Viewed from the front row of the dress circle, as it were, nothing could be more fascinating to her art-loving sense than this simple, wholesome life lived out as Nature teaches, and to feel that, for the time, the big, conventional world of wise insincerities was completely shut away behind those far purple mountains out of which rose the desert sun.

As for becoming an integral part of all this one’s self--Ah, that was a different matter! The very thought of her cousin, Blanche Madison, and Roy--her husband--deliberately turning their backs on the refinements of civilization, and accepting the daily drudgery and routine of life on a cattle ranch, filled her with wondering amazement. When she fell to speculating on what their future years here would be, she shuddered. From the crown of her sleek and perfectly poised little head, to the hollowed sole of her modishly booted foot, Miss Audrey Glendower was Bostonian.

Still, for the short space of time that she waited Lawrence Irving’s coming, life here was full of charm for her--its ways were alluring, and not the least among its fascinations was Mesquite.

She smiled amusedly as she thought of the tall cowboy’s utter unconsciousness of any social difference between them--at his simple acceptance of her notice. Miss Glendower was finding vast entertainment in his honest-hearted, undisguised adoration. She had come West for experiences, and one of the first (as decidedly the most exciting and interesting) had been found in Mesquite. Besides, it gave her something to write of when she sent her weekly letter to Lawrence Irving. Sometimes she found writing to him a bit of a bore--when topics were few.

But Mesquite---- The boy was a revelation of fresh surprises every day. There was no boredom where he was. Amusing; yes, that was the word. There he was now!--crossing the bare and hard beaten square of gray earth that lay between the ranch house and the corrals. Though he was looking beyond the piazza to where the other boys were driving a “bunch” of bellowing, dust-stirring cattle into an enclosure, yet she felt it was she whom his eyes saw. He was coming straight toward the house--and her. She knew it. Miss Glendower knew many things, learned in the varied experience of her eight-and-twenty years. Her worldly wisdom was more--much more--than his would be at double his present age. Mesquite was twenty.

He looked up with unconcealed pleasure in her presence as he seated himself on the piazza--swinging his spurred heels against each other, while he leaned his head back against one of the pillars. Miss Glendower’s eyes rested on the burned, boyish face with delight. There was something so näive, so sweetly childish about him. It was simply delicious to hear his “Yes, ma’am,” or his “Which?” Just now his yellow hair lay in little damp rings on his forehead, like a baby’s just awakened from sleep. He sat with his big, dust-covered sombrero shoved back from a forehead guiltless of tan or freckles as the petals of a white rose. But the lower part of his face was roughened by wind and burned by the sun to an Indian red, making the blue eyes the bluer--those great, babyish eyes that looked out with a belying innocence from under their marvelous fringe of upcurling lashes. The blue eyes were well used to looking upon sights that would have shocked Miss Glendower’s New England training, could she have known; and the babyish lips were quite familiar with language that would have made her pale with horror and disgust to hear. But then, she didn’t know. Neither could he have understood her standpoint.

He was only the product of his environment, and one of the best things that it had taught him was to have no disguises. So he sat today looking up at his lady with all his love showing in his face.

Then, in the late afternoon warmth, as the day’s red ball of burning wrath dropped down behind the western desert rim of their little world, he rode beside her, across sand hills where sweet flowers began to open their snow-white petals to the night wind’s touch, and over barren alkali flats to the postoffice half a dozen miles away.

There was only one letter waiting for Miss Glendower that night. It began:

“I will be with you, my darling, twenty-four hours after you get this. Just one more day, Love, and I may hold you in my arms again! Just one more week, and you will be my wife, Audrey. Think of it!”

She had thought; she was thinking now. She was also wondering how Mesquite would take it. She glanced at the boy as she put the letter away and turned her horse’s head toward home. Such a short time and she would return to the old life that, for the hour, seemed so strangely far away! Now--alone in the desert with Mesquite--it would not be hard to persuade herself that this was all there was of the world or of life.

As they loped across the wide stretch of desert flats that reached to the sand hills, shutting the ranch from sight, the twilight fell, and with it came sharp gusts of wind that now and then brought a whirl of desert dust. Harder and harder it blew. Nearer and nearer--then it fell upon them in its malevolence, to catch them--to hold them in its uncanny clasp an instant--and then, releasing them, go madly racing off to the farther twilight, moaning in undertone as it went. Then heat lightning struck vividly at the horizon, and the air everywhere became surcharged with the electric current of a desert sand storm. They heard its roar coming up the valley. Audrey Glendower felt her nerves a-tingle. This, too, was an experience! In sheer delight she laughed aloud at the excitement showing in the quivering horses--their ears nervously pointing forward, and their nostrils distended, as with long, eager strides they pounded away over the wind-beaten levels.

Then the storm caught them at its wildest. Suddenly a tumble-weed, dry and uprooted from its slight moorings somewhere away on the far side of the flats, came whirling toward them broadside in the vortex of a mad rush of wind in which--without warning--they were in an instant enveloped. As the great, rolling, ball-like weed struck her horse, Miss Glendower took a tighter grip on the reins and steadied herself for the runaway rush into the dust storm and the darkness. The wild wind caught her, shrieked in her ears, tore at her habit as though to wrest it from her body, dragged at the braids of heavy hair until--loosened--the strands whipped about her head, a tangled mass of stinging lashes.

She was alone--drawn into the maelstrom of the mad element; alone--with the fury of the desert storm; alone--in the awful darkness it wrapped about her, the darkness of the strange storm and the darkness of the coming night. The frightened, furious horse beneath her terrified her less than the weird, rainless storm that had so swiftly slipped in between her and Mesquite, carrying her away into its unknown depths. Where was he? In spite of the mastering fear that was gaining upon her, in spite of her struggle for courage, was a consciousness which told her that more than all else--that more than everyone else in the world--it was Mesquite she wanted. Had others, to the number of a great army, ridden down to her rescue she would have turned away from them all to reach out her arms to the boy vaquero. Perhaps it was because she had seen his marvelous feats of daring in the saddle (for Mesquite was the star rider of the range), and she felt instinctively that he could help her as none other; perhaps it was because of the past days that had so drawn him toward her; perhaps (and most likely) it was because he had but just been at her side. However it might be, she was praying with all her soul for his help--for him to come to her--while mile after mile she rode on, unable to either guide or slacken the stride of her horse. His pace had been terrific; and not until it had carried him out of the line of the storm, and up from the plain into the sand hills, did he lessen his speed. Then the hoofs were dragged down by the heavy sand, and the storm’s strength--all but spent--was left away back on the desert.

She felt about her only the softest of West winds; the dust that had strangled her was gone, and in its place was the syringa-like fragrance of the wild, white primroses, star-strewing the earth, as the heavens were strewn with their own night blossoms.

Just above the purple-black bar of the horizon burned a great blood-red star in the sky. It danced and wavered before her--rising and falling unsteadily--and she realized that her strength was spent--that she was falling. Then, just as the loosened girth let the saddle turn with her swaying body, a hand caught at her bridle-rein, and----

Ah, she was lying sobbing and utterly weak, but unutterably happy, on Mesquite’s breast--Mesquite’s arms about her! She made no resistance to the passionate kisses the boyish lips laid half fearfully on her face. She was only glad of the sweetness of it all; just as the sweetness of the evening primroses (so like the fragrance of jasmine, or tuberose, or syringa) sunk into her senses. So she rested against his breast, seeing still--through closed eyelids--the glowing, red star. She was unstrung by the wild ride and the winds that had wrought on her nerves. It made yielding so easy.

At last she drew back from him; and instantly his arms were unlocked. She was free! Not a second of time would he clasp her unwillingly. Neither had spoken. Nor, after resetting the saddle, when he took her again in his arms and lifted her, as he would a little child, upon her horse, did they speak. Only when the ranch buildings--outlined against the darkness--showed dimly before them, and they knew that the ride was at an end, did he voice what was uppermost in his mind.

“Yo’ don’t---- Yo’ ain’t---- Oh, my pretty, yo’ ain’t mad at me, are yo’?”

“No, Mesquite,” came the softly whispered answer.

“I’m glad o’ that. Shore, I didn’t mean fur to go an’ do sech a thing; but---- Gawd! I couldn’t help it.”

* * * * *

But when lifting her down at the ranch-house gate he would have again held her sweetness a moment within his clasp, Miss Glendower (she was once again Miss Glendower of the great world) let her cool, steady voice slip between:

“The letter I got tonight is from the man I am to marry in a week. He will be here tomorrow. But, I want to tell you---- Mesquite---- I want you to know that I--I shall always remember this ride of ours. Always.”

Mesquite did not answer.

“Good-night, Mesquite.” She waited. Still there was no reply.

Mesquite led the horses away and Miss Glendower turned and went into the house. Being an uneducated cowboy he was remiss in many matters of courtesy.

* * * * *

When Lawrence Irving arrived at the Madison ranch, his host, in the list of entertainment he was offering the Bostonian, promised an exhibition of bronco riding that would stir even the beat of that serene gentleman’s well regulated pulse.

“This morning,” said Madison, “I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to get my star bronco buster out for your edification, Lawrence, for the boys have been telling me that he has been ‘hitting the jug’ pretty lively down at the store for the past twenty-four hours (he’s never been much of a drinker, either), but when I told him Miss Glendower wanted to show you the convolutions of a bucking horse, it seemed to sober him up a bit, and he not only promised to furnish the thrills, but to do the business up with all the trimmings on--for he’s going to ride ‘Sobrepaso,’ a big, blaze-face sorrel that they call ‘the man killer,’ and that every vaquero in the country has given up unconquered. Mesquite himself refused to mount him again, some time ago; but today he is in a humor that I can’t quite understand--even allowing for all the bad whiskey that he’s been getting away with--and seems not only ready but eager to tackle anything.”

“I’m grateful to you, Rob,” began Irving, “for----”

“Oh, you’ll have to thank Audrey for the show! Mesquite is doing it solely for her sake. He has been her abject slave ever since she came.”

Both men laughed and looked at Miss Glendower, who did not even smile. It might have been that she did not hear them. They rose and went out to the shaded piazza where it was cooler. The heat was making Miss Glendower look pale.

* * * * *

They, and the ranch hands who saw “Sobrepaso” (“the beautiful red devil,” Mrs. Madison called him) brought out into the gray, hard beaten square that formed the arena, felt a thrill of nervous expectancy--a chilling thrill--as Mesquite made ready to mount. The horse was blindfolded ere the saddle was thrown on; but with all the fury of a fiend he fought--in turn--blanket, and saddle, and cincha. The jaquima was slipped on, the stirrups tied together under the horse’s belly, and all the while his squeals of rage and maddened snorts were those of an untamed beast that would battle to the death. The blind then was pulled up from his eyes, and--at the end of a sixty-foot riata--he was freed to go bucking and plunging in a fury of uncontrolled wrath around the enclosure. At last sweating and with every nerve twitching in his mad hatred of the meddling of Man he was brought to a standstill, and the blind was slipped down once more. He stood with all four feet braced stiffly, awkwardly apart, and his head down, while Mesquite hitched the cartridge belt (from which hung his pistol’s holster) in place; tightened the wide-brimmed, battered hat on his head; slipped the strap of a quirt on his wrist; looked at the fastenings of his big-rowelled, jingling spurs; and then (with a quick, upward glance at Miss Glendower--the first he had given her) he touched caressingly a little bunch of white primroses he had plucked that morning from their bed in the sand hills and pinned to the lapel of his unbuttoned vest.

Mesquite had gathered the reins into his left hand, and was ready for his cat-like spring into place. His left foot was thrust into the stirrup--there was the sweep of a long leg thrown across the saddle--a sinuous swing into place, and Mesquite--“the star rider of the range” had mounted the man killer. Quickly the blind was whipped up from the blood-shot eyes, the spurred heels gripped onto the cincha, there was a shout from his rider and a devilish sound from the mustang as he made his first upward leap, and then went madly fighting his way around and around the enclosure.

Mesquite sat the infuriated animal as though he himself were but a part of the sorrel whirlwind. His seat was superb. Miss Glendower felt a tremor of pride stir her as she watched him--pride that her lover should witness this matchless horsemanship. She was panting between fear and delight while she watched the boy’s face (wearing the sweet, boyish smile--like, yet so unlike--the smile she had come to know in the past weeks), and the yellow curls blowing back from the bared forehead.

“Sobrepaso” rose in his leaps to great heights--almost falling backward--to plunge forward, with squeals of rage that he could not unseat his rider. The boy sat there, a king--king of his own little world, while he slapped at the sorrel’s head and withers with the sombrero that swung in his hand. Plunging and leaping, round and round--now here and now there--about the enclosure they went, the horse a mad hurricane and his rider a centaur. Mesquite was swayed back and forth, to and fro, but no surge could unseat him. Miss Glendower grew warm in her joy of him as she looked.

Then, somehow (as the “man killer” made another great upward leap) the pistol swinging from Mesquite’s belt was thrown from its holster, and--striking the cantle of the saddle as it fell--there was a sharp report, and a cloud-like puff (not from the dust raised by beating hoofs), and a sound (not the terrible sounds made by a maddened horse), and the boy swayed backward--backward--with the boyish smile chilled on his lips, and the wet, yellow curls blowing back from his white forehead that soon would grow yet whiter.

* * * * *

Miss Glendower did not faint, neither did she scream; she was one with her emotions held always well in hand, and she expressed the proper amount of regret the occasion required--shuddering a little over its horror. But to this day (and she is Mrs. Lawrence Irving now) she cannot look quite steadily at a big, red star that sometimes burns in the West at early eve; and the scent of tuberoses, or jasmine, or syringa makes her deathly sick.

THE REVOLT OF MARTHA SCOTT

There was nothing pleasing in the scene. It was in that part of the vast West where a gray sky looked down upon the grayer soil beneath; where neither brilliant birds nor bright blossoms, nor glittering rivulets made lovely the place in which human beings went up and down the earth daily performing those labors that made the sum of what they called life. Neither tree nor shrub, nor spear of grass showed green with the healthy color of plant-life. As far as the eye could reach was the monotonous gray of sagebrush, and greasewood, and sand. The muddy river, with its myriad curves, ran between abrupt banks of soft alkali ground, where now and then as it ate into the confining walls, portions would fall with a loud splash into the water. A hurrying, treacherous river--with its many silent eddies--it turned and twisted and doubled on itself a thousand times as it wound its way down the valley. Here, where it circled in a great curve called “Scott’s Bend,” the waters were always being churned by the ponderous wheel of a little quartz-mill, painted by storm and sunshine in the leaden tones of its sad-colored surroundings.

On the bluff above, near the ore platform, were grouped a dozen houses. Fenceless, they faced the mill, which day after day pounded away at the ore with a maddening monotony. All day, all night, the stamps kept up their ceaseless monotone. The weather-worn mill and drab adobe houses had stood there, year after year, through the heat of summer days, when the sun blistered and burned the whole valley, and in winter, when the winds of the desert moaned and wailed at the windows.

Today the air is quiet, save for the tiny whirlwinds that, running over the tailings below the mill, have caught up the fine powder and carried bits of it away with them, a white cloud, as they went. The sun, too, is shining painfully bright and burning. By the well a woman stands, her eyes intently following a chance wayfarer who has turned into the Sherman road--in all the waste, the only moving thing.

How surely human beings take on themselves the reflection of their surroundings! Living in the dull solitude of this valley that woman’s life has become but a gray reflection of its never-ending sameness. As we look, we fall a-wondering. Has she never known what it is to live in the way we understand it? Has nothing ever set her pulses tingling with the exultation of Life? Does she know only an existence which is but the compulsory working of a piece of human machinery? Has she never known what it is to feel hope, or joy, or love, in the way we feel it--never experienced one single stirring emotion in the whole round of her pitifully barren life? Is it possible that she has never realized the poverty of her existence?

Yet, she was a creature meant for Life. What a beautiful woman she is, too, with all that brilliance of coloring--that copper-hued hair, and those great, velvety eyes, lovely in spite of their apathetic stare. What a model for some painter’s brush! Such beauty and such apathy combined; such expressionless perfection of feature; “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null--dead perfection.”

Martha Scott is one of those women whose commanding figure and magnificent coloring are always sufficient to attract the admiration of even the most indifferent. No doubt now in her maturity she is far more beautiful than when, nearly twenty years ago, she became Old Scott’s wife. A tall, unformed girl then, she gave no promise of her later beauty, except in the velvety softness of the great eyes that never seemed to take heed of anything in the world about her, and the great mass of shining hair that had the red-gold of a Western sunset in it.

There had been a courtship so brief that they were still strangers when he took her to the small, untidy house where he had come to realize that the presence of a woman was needed. He wanted a wife to cook for him; to wash--to sew. And so they were married.

The sheep which numbered thousands, the little mill--always grinding in its jaws the ores brought down the mountain by the snail-paced teams to fill its hungry maw, these added daily to the hoard Old Scott clutched with gripping, penurious fingers. Early and late, unceasingly, he worked, and chose that Martha should labor as he labored, live as he lived. But, as she mechanically took up her burden of life, there came to the sweet, uncomplaining mouth a droop at the corners that grew with the years, telling to those who had the eyes to see, that while accepting with mute lips the unhappy conditions of her lot, she longed with all her starved soul for something different from her yearly round of never-ending toil.

Once--only once--in a whirlwind of revolt, she felt that she could endure it no longer--that she must break away from the dull routine which made the measure of her days; felt that she must go out among happy human beings--to be in the rush and whirl of life under Pleasure’s sunshine--to bask in its warmth as others did. She longed to enjoy life as Youth enjoys; herself to be young once more. Yes, even to dance as she had danced when a girl! In the upheaval of her passionate revolt, flushed and trembling, she begged her husband to take her to one of the country balls of the neighborhood.

“Take me wunst!” she pleaded, her eyes glistening with unshed tears; “only this wunst; I won’t never ask you no more. But I do want to have one right good time. You never take me nowheres. Please take me, Fred, won’t you?”

Old Scott straightened himself from the task over which he was bending and looked at her in incredulous wonder. For more than a minute he stared at her; then, breaking into a loud laugh, he mocked:

“You’d look pretty, now, wouldn’t you, a-goin’ and a-toein’ it like you was a young gal!”

She shrank from him as though he had raised a lash over her, and the light died out of her face. Without a word she turned and went back to her work.

* * * * *

Martha Scott never again alluded to the meagre pleasures of her life. She went back to her work of cooking the coarse food which was their only fare; of mending the heavy, uncouth clothing which week-day and Sunday alike, was her husband’s only apparel; of washing and ironing the cheap calicoes, and coarse, unbleached muslins of her own poor, and scanty wardrobe, fulfilling her part as a bread-winner. The man never saw that he failed in performing the part of a good and loving husband; and if anyone had pointed out to him that her existence was impoverished by his indifference and neglect, he still would have been unable to see wherein he had erred. He would have argued that she had enough to eat, enough to wear; that they owned their home--their neighbors having no better, nor any larger; he was laying aside money all the time; he did not drink; he never struck her. What more could any woman ask?

That the home which suited him, and the life to which he was used, could be other than all she desired, had never once occurred to him. As a boy, “back East” in the old days, he had never cared for the sports and pleasures enjoyed by other young people. How much less, now that the natural pleasure-time of life was past, could he tolerate pleasure-seeking in others!

“Folks show better sense to work an’ save their money,” he would say, “than to go gaddin’ about havin’ a good time an’ comin’ home broke.”

Together they lived in the house which through all their married life they had called “home;” together they worked side by side through all their years of youth and middle age. But not farther are we from the farthest star than were these two apart in their real lives. Yet she was his wife; this woman for whom he had no dearer name than “Marth’,” and to whom--for years--he had given no caress. She looked the incarnation of indifference and apathy. Ah! but was she?

* * * * *

A few years ago there came a mining expert from San Francisco to examine the Yellow Bird mine; and with him came a younger man, who appeared to have no particular business but to look around at the country, and to fish and hunt. There is the finest kind of sport for the hunter over in the Smoky Range; and this fellow, Baird--Alfred Baird was his name--spent much of his time there shooting antelope and deer.

He was courteous and gentle mannered; he was finely educated--polished in address; he spoke three or four languages, and was good to look at. He stayed with the Scotts for a time--and a long time it proved to be; a self-invited guest, whether or no. Yet all the while he did not fail to reiterate his intentions to “handsomely remunerate them for their generous hospitality in a country where there were so few or no hotels.” He assured them he was “daily expecting a remittance from home. The delay was inexcusable--unless the mail had miscarried. Very annoying! So embarrassing!” And so on. It was the old stereotyped story which that sort of a fellow always carries on the tip of his tongue. And the wonder of it all was that Scott--surly and gruff to all others--was so completely under the scamp’s will, and ready to humor his slightest wish. Baird used without question his saddle and best horse; and it was Scott who fitted him out whenever he went hunting deer over in the Smokies.

By and by there came a time when Scott himself had to go away on a trip into the Smoky Range, and which would keep him from home a week. He left his wife behind, as was his custom. He also left Alfred Baird there--for Baird was still “boarding” at Scott’s.

When old Fred Scott came back, it was to find the house in as perfect order as ever, with every little detail of house work faithfully performed up to the last moment of her staying, but the wife was gone. Neither wife, nor the money--hidden away in an old powder-can behind the corner cupboard--were there.

Both were gone--the woman and the gold pieces; and it was characteristic of Old Scott that his first feelings of grief and rage were not for the loss of his wife, but for the coins she had taken from the powder-can. He was like a maniac--breaking everything he had ever seen his wife use; tearing to pieces with his strong, sinewy hands every article of her clothing his eyes fell upon. He raved like a madman, and cursed like a fiend. Then he found her letter.

“Dear Fred:--

Now I’m a going away, and I’m a going to stay a year. The money will last us two just about that long. I asked Mr. Baird to go with me, so you needn’t blame him. I ain’t got nothing against you, only you wouldn’t never take me nowheres; and I just couldn’t stand it no longer. I’ve been a good wife, and worked hard, and earned money for you; but I ain’t never had none of it myself to spend. So I’m a going to have it now; for some of it is mine anyway. It has been work--work all the time, and you wouldn’t take me nowheres. So I’m a going now myself. I don’t like Mr. Baird better than I do you--that ain’t it--and if you want me to come back to you in a year I will. And I’ll be a good wife to you again, like I was before. Only you needn’t expect for me to say that I’ll be sorry because I done it, for I won’t be. I won’t never be sorry I done it; never, never! So, good-by.

Your loving wife,

Martha J. Scott.”

If, through the long years, he had not been blind, he could have saved her from it. Not a vicious woman--not a wantonly sinning woman; only one who--weak and ignorant--was dazed and bewildered by the possibilities she saw in just one year of unrestricted freedom to enjoy all the pleasures that might come within her reach.

To be sure, it did seem preposterous that a young and handsome man, with refined tastes and education, should go away with a woman years older than himself, and one, too, who was uncouth in manner and in speech. However strange it looked to the world, the fact remained that they eloped. But both were well away before it was suspected that they had gone together. Old Scott volunteered no information to the curious; and his grim silence forbade the questions they would have asked. It was long before the truth was known, for people were slow to credit so strange a story.

The two were seen in San Francisco one day as they were buying their tickets on the eve of sailing for Honolulu. She looked very lovely, and was as tastefully and becomingly gowned as any woman one might see. Baird, no doubt, had seen to that; for he had exquisite taste, and he was too wise to challenge adverse criticism by letting her dress in the glaring colors and startling styles she would have chosen, had she been allowed to follow her own tastes. In her pretty, new clothes, with her really handsome face all aglow from sheer joy in the new life she was beginning, she looked twenty years younger, and attracted general attention because of her unusual eyes and her magnificently-colored hair.

She was radiant with happiness; and there was no apparent consciousness of wrong-doing. Baird always showed a gracious deference to all women, and to her he was devotion itself. The little attentions that will charm and captivate any woman--attentions to which she was so unused--fed her starved nature, and for the time satisfied without sating her. They sailed for the Islands, and were there a year. They kept to themselves, seeking no acquaintance with those around them--living but for one another. And those who saw them, told they seemed thoroughly fond of each other. He was too much in love with himself and the surroundings which catered to his extravagant tastes, to have a great love for any woman; and she was scarcely the person, in spite of her beauty--the beauty of some magnificent animal--to inspire lasting affection in a man like Baird. He was shrewd enough to keep people at a distance, for unless one entered into conversation with her she might easily be taken for the really cultivated woman she looked. Yet the refined and aesthetic side of Alfred Baird’s nature--and there was such--much have met with some pretty severe shocks during a twelvemonth’s close companionship. Too indolent to work to support himself, he bore (he felt, heroically) any mortification he was subjected to, and was content in his degradation. But the woman herself was intensely happy; happier than, in all her dreary life, she had ever dreamed that mortals could be. She was in love with the beautiful new world, which was like a dream of fairy-land after her sordid life in the desolate valley. That Hawaiian year must have been a revelation of hitherto unimagined things to her. Baird’s moral sense was blunted by his past dissipations, but her moral sense was simply undeveloped. In her ignorance she had no definition of morality. The man was nothing to her except as an accessory to the fascinating life which she had allowed herself “while the money lasted.”

When the twelve months were run she philosophically admitted the end of it all, and parted with him--apparently--without a pang. If, at the moment of parting, any regrets were felt by either because of the separation, it was he, not she, who would have chosen to drift longer down the stream. The year had run its course; she would again take up the old life. This could not last. Perhaps--who knows?--in time he might have palled on her. No doubt, in time, his weak nature would have wearied her; her own was too eager for strong emotions, to find in him a fitting mate.

Whether, at the last, she wrote to her husband, or if he came to her when the year came to its end, no one knows. But one day the people of the desert saw her back at the adobes on the bluff. She returned as suddenly as she had disappeared.

* * * * *

She seems to have settled into the old groove again. She moves in the same apathetic way as before the stirring events of her life. In her letter she said she would not be sorry. It is not probable that she ever was, or ever will be; but neither is it likely that she has ever seen the affair from the point of view a moralist would take. Her limited intelligence only allowed her to perceive the dreariness of her own poor life, and when her longings touched no responsive chord in the man whom she had married, she deliberately took one year of her existence and hung its walls with all the gorgeous tapestries and rich paintings that could be wrought by the witchery of those magic days in the Pacific.

Fires have burned as fiercely within that woman’s breast as ever burned the fires of Kilauea; and when they were ready to burst their bounds, she fled in her impulse to the coral isles of the peaceful Western sea, and there her ears heard the sound, and her heart learned the meaning of words that have left no visible sign upon her--the wondrous, sweet words of a dream, whispered to her unceasingly, while she gave herself up to an enchantment as mad and bewildering as that of the rhythmic hula-hula.

If she sinned, she does not seem to know it. Going about at her work, as before, the expressionless face is a mask; yet it may be she is moving in a dream-world, wherein she lives over once again the months that were hers--once--in the far Hawaiian Isles.

AN OLD SQUAW

She had been lying by the stone wall all day. And the sun was so hot that the blood beating in her ears sounded like the White Man’s fire-horse that had just pulled a freight train into the station, and was grunting and drinking down at the water tank a hundred yards away. It was getting all the water it wanted; why couldn’t she have all the water she wanted, too?

Today they had brought her the tomato can only half full. Such a little drink! And her mouth was so hot and dry! They were starving her to death--had been starving her for days and days. Oh, yes! she knew what they were doing. She knew why they were doing it, too. It was because she was in the way.

She was an old squaw. For weeks she had been half dead; she had lain for weeks whimpering and moaning in a corner of the camp on a heap of refuse and rotting rags, where they had first shoved her aside when she could no longer gather herself up on her withered limbs and go about to wait upon herself.

They had cursed her for her uselessness; and had let the children throw dirt at her, and take her scant share of food away and give it to the dogs. Then they had laughed at her when one of the older grandchildren had spat at her; and when she had striven to strike at the mocking, devilish face, and in her feebleness had failed, they had but laughed the louder while she shrieked out in her hatred of them all.

Her children, and her children’s children--her flesh and bone! They were young, and well, and strong; and she was old, feeble and dying. Old--old--old! Too old to work. Too old to do for herself any longer, they were tired of her; and now they had put her out of the wick-i-up to die alone there by the stone wall. She knew it--knew the truth; but what could she do?

She was only an old Paiute squaw.

At first they had given her half the amount of food which they allowed her before she had grown so feeble. Then it was but a quarter; and then again it was divided in half. Now--at the last--they were bringing her only water.

One day when she was faint and almost crazed from hunger, one of the boys (her own son’s son) had come with a meat bone and thrown it down before her; but when she reached out with trembling, fleshless hands to grasp it, he had jerked at the string to which it was tied, and snatched it away. Again and again he threw it toward her; again and again she tried to be quick enough to close her fingers upon it before he could jerk it from her. Then (when, at last, he was tired of the play) he had flung it only an arm’s length beyond her reach, and had run laughing down to the railroad to beg nickels from the passengers on the train. When he had gone a dog came and dropped down beside her, and gnawed the bone where it lay. She had crawled out into the sunshine that day, and lay huddled in a heap close to the door-flap at the wick-i-up entrance. The warm sunlight at first felt good to her chilled blood, and she had lain there long; but finally when she would have dragged her feeble body within again, a young squaw (the one who had mated with the firstborn son, and was now ruler of the camp) had thrust her back with her foot, and said that her whining and crying were making the Great Spirit angry; and that henceforth she must stay outside the camp, for a punishment.

Ah, she knew! She knew! They could not deceive her. It was not the Great Spirit that had put her out, but her own flesh and blood. How she hated them all! If she could only be young again she would have them put to death, as she herself had had others put to death when there were many to do her bidding. But she was old; and she must lie outside, away from those who had put her there to starve, while in the gray dusk they gathered around the campfire and ate, and laughed, and forgot her. She wished the cool, dark night might last longer, with the sage-scented winds from the plain blowing over her. But morning would come with a blood-red sun shining through the summer haze, and she would have to lie there under the furnace heat through all the long daylight hours, with only a few swallows of water brought to her in the tomato can to quench her intolerable thirst.

They were slowly starving her to death just because she was old. They hated squaws when they got old. They did not tell her so; but she knew. She, too, had hated them once. That was long ago. Long, long ago; when she was young, and strong, and swift.

She was straight then and good to look at. All of the young men of her tribe had striven for her; and two had fought long--had fought wildly and wickedly. That was when the White Man had first come into the country of her people, and they had fought with knives they had taken from the Whites. Knives long, and shining, and sharp. They had fought and slashed, and cut each other till the hard ground was red and slippery where they stood. Then--still fighting--they had fallen down, down; and where they fell, they died. Died for her--a squaw! Well, what of it, now? Tomorrow she, too, would die. She whom they, and others, had loved.

Once, long ago--long before the time when she had become Wi-o-chee’s wife--at the Fort on the other side of the mountain, where the morning sun comes first, there had been a White Man whose eyes were the blue of the soldier-blue he wore; and whose mustache was yellow like the gold he wore on his shoulders.

He, too, was young, and straight, and strong; and one day he had caught her in his arms and held her while he kissed her on mouth and eyes, and under her little round chin. And when she had broken away from him and had run--run fast as the deer runs--he had called after her: “Josie! Josie! Come back!” But she had run the faster till, by and by, when he had ceased calling, she had stolen back and had thrown a handful of grass at him as he sat, with bowed head, on the doorstep of the officers’ quarters; his white fingers pressed tight over his eyelids. Then when he had looked up she had gone shyly to him, and put her hand in his. And when he stood up, looking eagerly in her eyes, she had thrown her head back, where she let it lay against his arm, and laughed, showing the snow-white line of her teeth, till he was dazzled by what he saw and hid the whiteness that gleamed between her lips by the gold that swept across his own.

That was long ago. Not yesterday, nor last week, nor last month; but so long ago that it did not even awaken in her an interest in remembering how he had taught her English words to say to him, and laughed with her when she said them so badly.

She did not care about it, at all, now. She only wanted a drink of water; and her children would not give her what she craved.

Always, she had been brave. She had feared nothing--nothing. She could ride faster, run farther, dare more than other young squaws of the tribe. She had been stronger and suppler. Yet today she was dying here by the stone wall--put out of the camp by her children’s children to die.

She would die tomorrow; or next day, at latest. Perhaps tonight. She had thought she was to die last night when the lean coyote came and stood off from her, and watched with hungry eyes. All night he watched. Going away, and coming back. Coming and going all night. All night his little bright eyes shone like stars. And the stars, too, watched her there dying for water and meat, but they handed nothing down to her from the cool sky.

Oh, for strength again! For life, and to be young! But she was old and weak. She would die; and when she was dead they would take her in her rags, and--winding the shred of a gray blanket about her (the blanket on which she lay)--they would tie it tightly at her head and at her feet; and so she would be made ready for her last journey.

Dragging her to a waiting pony she would be laid across the saddle, face down. To the stirrups, which would be tied together beneath the horse that they might not swing, her head and feet would be fastened--her head at one stirrup, her feet at the other.

Then they would lead the pony off through the greasewood. Along the stony trail across the upland to the foothills the little buckskin pony would pick his way, stumbling on the rocks while his burden would slip and shake about, lying across the saddle. Then they would lay her in a shallow place, and heaping earth and gravel over her, would come away. That was the way they had done with her mother, with Wi-o-chee, and the son who had died.

Tomorrow--yes, tomorrow--they would take her to the foothills. Perhaps the coyote would go there tomorrow night; would go there, and dig.

He had come now, and stood watching her from the shelter of the sagebrush. He was afraid to come nearer--now. She was too weak to move even a finger today, yet he was afraid. He would not come close till she was dead. He knew.

Once he walked a few steps toward her, watching her all the while with his little cruel eyes. Then he turned and trotted back into the sagebrush. He knew. Not yet.

* * * * *

All day the sun had lain in heavy heat on the tangle of vile rags by the stone wall. All day the magpie, hopping along the wall, watched with head bent sidewise at the rags that only moved with the faint breathing of the body beneath. All day long two buzzards far up in the still air swung slowly in great circling sweeps. All day, from early dawn till dusk, a brown hand--skinny and foully dirty--clutched the tomato can; but the can today had been left empty. Forgotten.

When it grew dark and a big, bright star glowed in the West, the coyote came out of the shadows of the sagebrush and stood looking at the tangled rags by the stone wall.

Only a moment he stood there. He threw up his head, and his voice went out in a chilling call to his mate. Then with lifted lip he walked quickly forward. He was no longer afraid.

GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN

“Yes, you’re right, Sid; in these days of multi-millionaires, nothing that is written with less than eight figures is considered ‘wealth.’ Yet, even so, I count this something more than a ‘tidy little sum’ you’ve cleaned up--even if you do not. And now tell me, what are you going to do with it?”

The man sitting at the uncovered pine table in the center of the room opened his lips to answer, checked himself as if doubtful of the reception of what he might say, and then went on nervously sorting and rearranging the handful of papers and letters which he held. However, the light that came into his eyes at Keith’s question, and the smile that played around his weak lips, showed without a doubt that the “tidy little sum” promised to him at least the fulfillment of unspoken dreams.

He was a handsome man of thirty--a man of feminine beauty rather than that which is masculine. And though dressed in rough corduroys and flannels, like his companion, they added to, rather than detracted from his picturesque charm. Slightly--almost delicately proportioned, he seemed to be taller than he really was. In spite of his great beauty, however, his face was not a satisfying one under the scrutiny of a close observer, for it lacked character. There was refinement and a certain sweetness of temperament there, but the ensemble was essentially weak--it was the face of a man of whom one felt it would not be well for any believing, loving woman to pin her faith to.

Keith, sitting with his long legs crossed and his big, strong hands thrust deep into his trousers’ pockets, watched the younger man curiously, wondering what manner of woman she could have been who had chosen Sidney Williston for her lord and master.

“Poor little neglected woman,” thought Keith, with that tender and compassionate feeling he had for every feminine and helpless thing; “poor little patiently waiting wife! Will he ever go back to her, I wonder? I doubt it. And now to think of all this money!”

Williston had said but little to Keith about his wife. In fact, all reference to her very existence had been avoided when possible. Keith even doubted if his friend would ever again recognize the marriage tie between them unless the deserted one should unexpectedly present herself in person and claim her rights. Williston--vacillating, unstable--was the kind of a man in whom loyalty depends on the presence of its object as a continual reminder of obligations. Keith was sure, however, that the woman, whoever she might be, was more than deserving of pity.

“Sidney means well,” thought Keith trying to find excuse for him, “but he is weak--lamentably so--and sadly lacking in moral balance.” And never had Williston been so easily lead, so subservient to the will of another as now, since “that cursed Howard woman” (as Keith called her under his breath) had got him into her toils.

Lovesick as any boy he was befooled to his heart’s content, wilfully blind to the fact that it was the old pitiful story of a woman’s greed, and that her white hands had caresses and her lips kisses for his gold--not for himself. Her arms were eager to hold in their clasp--not him, but--the great wealth which was his, the gold which had come from the fabulously rich strike he had cleaned up on the bedrock of the claim, where a cross reef had held it hidden a thousand years and more. Her red lips were athirst to lay kisses---- On his mouth? Nay! on the piles of minted gold that had lain in the bank vault since he had sold his mine. The Twentieth Century Aspasia has a hundred arts her sister of old knew naught of; and Williston was not the first man who has unwittingly played the part of proxy to another, or blissfully believed in the lying lips whose kisses sting like the sting of wild bees--those honey-sweet kisses that stab one’s soul with needles of passionate pain. All these were for the gold-god, not him; he was but the unconscious proxy.

Keith mused on the situation as he sat in the flickering candle-light blown by the night wind that--coming in through the open window--brought with it the pungent odor of sagebrush-covered hills.

“Strange,” he thought, “how a woman of that particular stamp gets a hold on some fellows! And with a whole world full of other women, too--sweet, good women who are ready to give a man the right sort of love and allegiance, if he’s a half-way decent sort of a fellow with anything at all worthy to give in exchange; God bless ’em!--and confound him! He makes me angry; why can’t he pull himself together and be a man!”