Impressions
Josephine waited languidly while Kate chose a second-best cushion from
the couch and, lifting the bandaged foot as gently as might be, placed
it, with many little pats and pulls, under the afflicted member.
Josephine screwed her lips into a soundless expression of pain, smiled
afterwards when Kate glanced at her commiseratingly, and pulled a long,
dark-brown braid forward over her chest.
"Do you want tea, Phenie?--or would you rather have chocolate to-day? I
can make chocolate just as easy as not; I think I shall, anyway. Buddy
is so fond of it and--"
"Is that man here yet?" Josephine's tone carried the full weight of her
dislike of him.
"I don't know why you call him 'that man,' the way you do," Kate
complained, turning her mind from the momentous decision between tea
and chocolate. "Ford's simply fine! Chester thinks there's no one like
him; and Buddy just tags him around everywhere. You can always,"
asserted Kate, with the positiveness of the person who accepts
unquestioningly the beliefs of others, living by faith rather than
reason, "depend upon the likes and dislikes of children and dogs, you
know."
"Has the swelling gone out of his eyes?" Josephine inquired pointedly,
with the irrelevance which seemed habitual to her and Kate when they
conversed.
"Phenie, I don't think it's kind of you to harp on that. Yes, it has, if
you want to know. He's positively handsome--or will be when the--when
his nose heals perfectly. And I don't think that's anything one should
hold against Ford; it seems narrow, dear."
"The skinned place?" Josephine's tone was perfectly innocent, and her
fingers were busy with the wide, black bow which becomingly tied the end
of the braid.
"Phenie! If you hadn't a sprained ankle, and weren't such a dear in
every other respect, I'd shake you! It isn't fair. Because Ford was
pounced upon by a lot of men--sixteen, Chester told me--"
"I suppose he counted the dead after the battle, and told Ches
truthfully--"
"Phenie, that sounds catty! When you get down on a man, you're perfectly
unmerciful, and Ford doesn't deserve it. You shouldn't judge men by the
narrow, Eastern standards. I know it's awful for a man to drink and
fight. But Ford wasn't altogether to blame. They got him to drinking
and," she went on with her voice lowered to the pitch at which women are
wont to relate horrid, immoral things, "--I wouldn't be surprised if
they put something in it! Such things are done; I've heard of men being
drugged and robbed and all sorts of things. And I'm just as much of an
advocate for temperance as you are, Phenie--and I think Ford was just
right to fight those men. There are," she declared wisely,
"circumstances where it's perfectly just and right for a man to fight. I
can imagine circumstances under which Chester would be justified in
fighting--"
"In case sixteen men should hold his nose and pour drugged whisky down
his throat?" Phenie inquired mildly, curling the end of her braid over a
slim forefinger.
Mrs. Kate made an inarticulate sound which might almost be termed a
snort, and walked from the room with her head well up and a manner which
silently made plain to the onlooker that she might say many things which
would effectually crush her opponent, but was magnanimously refraining
from doing so.
Josephine did not even pay her the tribute of looking at her; she had at
that moment heard a step upon the porch, and she was leaning to one side
so that she might see who was coming into the dining-room. As it
happened, it was Mason himself. Miss Josephine immediately lost interest
in the arrival and took to tracing with her finger the outline of a
Japanese lady with a startling coiffure and an immense bow upon her
spine, who was simpering at a lotus bed on Josephine's kimono. She did
not look up until some one stepped upon the porch again.
This time it was Ford, and he stopped and painstakingly removed the last
bit of soil from his boot-soles upon the iron scraper which was attached
to one end of the top step; when that duty had been performed, he paid
further tribute to the immaculate house he was about to enter, by wiping
his feet upon a mat placed with mathematical precision upon the porch,
at the head of the steps. Josephine watched the ceremonial, and studied
Ford's profile, and did not lay her head back upon the cushion behind
her until he disappeared into the dining-room. Then she stared at a
colored-crayon portrait of Buddy which hung on the wall opposite, and
her eyes were the eyes of one who sees into the past.
Buddy, when he opened the door and projected himself into the room,
startled her into a little exclamation.
"Dad says he'll carry you out to the table and you can have a whole side
to yourself," he announced without preface. "They'll just pick up your
chair, and pack chair and all in, and set you down as ee-asy--do you
want to eat out there with us?"
Josephine hesitated for two seconds. "All right," she consented then, in
a supremely indifferent tone which was of course quite wasted on Buddy,
who immediately disappeared with a whoop.
"Come on, dad--she says yes, all right, she'll come," he announced
gleefully. Buddy was Josephine's devoted admirer, at this point in their
rather brief acquaintance; which, according to his mother's well-known
theory, was convincing proof of her intrinsic worth--Mrs. Kate having
frequently strengthened her championship of Ford to his detractor, Miss
Josephine, by pointing out that Buddy was fond of him.
Josephine spent the brief interval in tucking back locks of hair and in
rearranging the folds of her long, Japanese kimono, and managed to fall
into a languidly indifferent attitude by the time Chester opened the
door. Behind him came Ford; Miss Josephine moved her lips and tilted her
head in a perfunctory greeting, and afterward gave him no more
attention than if he had been a Pullman porter assisting with her
suitcases. For the matter of that, she gave quite as much attention as
she received from him--and Mason's lips twitched betrayingly at the
spectacle.
Through dinner they seemed mutually agreed upon ignoring each other as
much as was politely possible, which caused Mason to watch them with
amusement, and afterwards relieve his feelings by talking about them to
Kate in the kitchen.
"Gosh! Jo and Ford are sure putting up a good bluff," he chuckled, while
he selected the freshest dish towel from the rack behind the pantry
door. "They'd be sticking out their tongues at each other if they was
twenty years younger; pity they ain't, too; it would be a relief to 'em
both!"
"Phenie provokes me almost past endurance!" Mrs. Kate complained,
burying two plump forearms in a dishpan of sudsy hot water, and bringing
up a handful of silver. "It's because Ford had been fighting when he
came here, and she knows he has been slightly addicted to liquor. She
looks down on him, and I don't think it's fair. If a man wants to
reform, I believe in helping him instead of pushing him father down."
(Mrs. Kate had certain little peculiarities of speech; one was an
italicized delivery, and another was the omission of an r now and then.
She always said "father" when she really meant "farther.") "There's a
lot that one can do to help. I believe in showing trust and confidence
in a man, when he's trying to live down past mistakes. I think it was
just fine of you to make him foreman here! If Phenie would only be nice
to him, instead of turning up her nose the way she does! You see
yourself how she treats Ford, and I just think it's a shame! I think
he's just splendid!"
"She don't treat him any worse than he does her," observed Mason, just
to the core. "Seems to me, if I was single, and a girl as pretty as
Jo--"
"Well, I'm glad Ford has got spunk enough not to care," Mrs. Kate
interposed hastily. "Phenie's pretty, of course--but it takes more than
that to attract a man like Ford. You can't expect him to like her when
she won't look at him, hardly; it makes me feel terribly, because he's
sure to think it's because he--I've tried to make her see that it isn't
right to condemn a man because he has made one mistake. He ought to be
encouraged, instead of being made to feel that he is a--an outcast,
practically. And--"
"Jo don't like Ford, because she's stuck on Dick," stated a shrill,
positive young voice behind them, and Mrs. Kate turned sharply upon her
offspring. "They was waving hands to each other just now, through the
window. I seen 'em," Buddy finished complacently. "Dick was down fixing
the bridge, and--"
"Buddy, you run right out and play! You must not listen to older people
and try to talk about some-thing you don't understand."
"Aw, I understand them two being stuck on each other," Buddy maintained
loftily. "And I seen Dick--"
"Chase yourself outdoors, like your mother said; and don't butt in on--"
"Chester!" reproved Mrs. Kate, waving Buddy out of the kitchen. "How
can you expect the child to learn good English, when you talk to him
like that? Run along, Buddy, and play like a good boy." She gave him a
little cake to accelerate his departure and to turn his mind from
further argument, and after he was gone she swung the discussion to
Buddy and his growing tendency toward grappling with problems beyond his
seven years. Also, she pointed out the necessity for choosing one's
language carefully in his presence.
Mason, therefore, finished wiping the dishes almost in silence, and left
the house as soon as he was through, with the feeling that women were
not by nature intended to be really companionable. He had, for instance,
been struck with the humorous side of Ford and Josephine's perfectly
ridiculous antipathy, and had lingered in the kitchen because of a
half-conscious impulse to enjoy the joke with some one. And Mrs. Kate
had not taken the view-point which appealed to him, but had been
self-consciously virtuous in her determination to lend Ford a helping
hand, and resentful because Josephine failed to feel also the urge of
uplifting mankind.
Mason, poor man, was vaguely nettled; he did not see that Ford needed
any settlement-worker encouragement. If he was let alone, and his moral
regeneration forgotten, and he himself treated just like any other man,
Mason felt that Ford would thereby have all the encouragement he needed.
Ford was once more plainly content with life, and was taking it in
twenty-four-hour doses again; healthful doses, these, and different in
every respect from those days spent in the sordid round of ill-living in
town; nor did he flay his soul with doubts lest he should disappoint
this man who trusted him so rashly and so implicitly. Ford was busy at
work which appealed to the best of him. He was thrown into companionship
with men who perforce lived cleanly and naturally, and with Ches Mason,
who was his friend. At meals he sometimes gave thought to Mrs. Kate, and
frequently to Josephine. The first he admired impersonally for her
housewifely skill, and smiled at secretly for her purely feminine
outlook upon life and her positive views upon subjects of which she knew
not half the alphabet. He had discovered that Mason did indeed refrain
from smoking in the house because she discountenanced tobacco; and since
she had a talent for making a man uncomfortably aware of her disapproval
by certain wordless manifestations of scorn for his weaknesses, Ford
also took to throwing away his cigarette before he crossed the bridge on
his way to her domain. He did not, however, go so far as Ches, who kept
his tobacco, pipe, and cigarette papers in the stable, and was always
borrowing "the makings" from his men.
Ford also followed Mason's example in sterilizing his vocabulary
whenever he crossed that boundary between the masculine and feminine
element on the ranch, the bridge. Mrs. Kate did not approve of slang.
Ford found himself carefully eliminating from his speech certain
grammatical inaccuracies in her presence, and would not so much as split
an infinitive if he remembered in time. It was trying, to be sure. Ford
thanked God that he still retained a smattering of the rules he had
reluctantly memorized in school, and that he was not married (at least,
not uncomfortably so), and that he was not compelled to do more than eat
his meals in the house. Mrs. Kate was a nice woman; Ford would tell any
man so in perfect sincerity. He even considered her nice looking, with
her smooth, brown hair which was never disordered, her fine, clear skin,
her white teeth, her clear blue eyes, and her immaculate shirt-waists.
But she was not a comfortable woman to be with; an ordinary human
wearied of adjusting his speech, his manners, and his morals to her
standard of propriety. Ford, quietly studying matrimony from the
well-ordered example before him, began to congratulate himself upon not
being able to locate his own wife--since accident had afflicted him with
one. When he stopped, during these first busy days at the Double Cross,
to think deeply or seriously upon the mysterious entanglement he had
fallen into, he was inclined to the opinion that he had had a narrow
escape. The woman might have remained in Sunset--and Ford flinched at
the thought.
As to Josephine, Ford's thoughts dwelt with her oftener than they did
with Mrs. Kate. The thought of her roused a certain resentment which
bordered closely upon dislike. Still, she piqued his interest; for a
week she was invisible to him, yet her presence in the house created a
tangible atmosphere which he felt but could not explain. His first sight
of her--beyond a fleeting glimpse once or twice through the window--had
been that day when he had helped Mason carry her and her big chair into
the dining-room. The brief contact had left with him a vision of the
delicate parting in her soft, brown hair, and of long, thick lashes
which curled daintily up from the shadow they made on her cheeks. He did
not remember ever having seen a woman with such eyelashes. They impelled
him to glance at her oftener than he would otherwise have done, and to
wonder, now and then, if they did not make her eyes seem darker than
they really were. He thought it strange that he had not noticed her
lashes that day when he carried her from the house and back again--until
he remembered that at first his haste had been extreme, and that when
he took her from the bunk-house she had stared at him so that he would
not look at her.
He did not know that Ches Mason was observant of his rather frequent
glances at her during the meal, and he would have resented Mason's
diagnosis of that particular symptom of interest. Ford would, if put to
the question, have maintained quite sincerely that he was perfectly
indifferent to Josephine, but that she did have remarkable eyelashes,
and a man couldn't help looking at them.
After all, Ford's interest was centered chiefly upon his work. They were
going to start the wagons out again to gather the calves for weaning,
and he was absorbed in the endless details which fall upon the shoulders
of the foreman. Even the fascination of a woman's beauty did not follow
him much beyond the bridge.
Mason, hurrying from the feminine atmosphere at the house, found him
seriously discussing with Buddy the diet and general care of Rambler,
who had been moved into a roomy box stall for shelter. Buddy was to
have the privilege of filling the manger with hay every morning after
breakfast, and every evening just before supper. Upon Buddy also
devolved the duty of keeping his drinking tub filled with clean water;
and Buddy was making himself as tall as possible during the conference,
and was crossing his heart solemnly while he promised, wide-eyed, to
keep away from Rambler's heels.
"I never knew him to kick, or offer to; but you stay out of the stall,
anyway. You can fill his tub through that hole in the wall. And you let
Walt rub him down good every day--you see that he does it, Bud! And when
he gets well, I'll let you ride him, maybe. Anyway, I leave him in your
care, old-timer. And it's a privilege I wouldn't give every man. I think
a heap of this horse." He turned at the sound of footsteps, and lowered
an eyelid slowly for Mason's benefit. "Bud's going to have charge of
Rambler while we're gone," he explained seriously. "I want to be sure
he's in good hands."
The two men watched Buddy's departure for the house, and grinned over
the manifest struggle between his haste to tell his mother and Jo, and
his sense of importance over the trust.
"A kid of your own makes up for a whole lot," Mason observed
abstractedly, reaching up to the narrow shelf where he kept his tobacco.
"I wish I had two or three more; they give a man something to work for,
and look ahead and plan for."
Ford, studying his face with narrowed eyelids, was more than ever
thankful that he was not hampered by matrimony.