BY three o’clock Estrada had mended the road and propped the bridge and
gotten the four machines under way. Ginger saw them off very patiently.
They were volubly grateful and expressive and she let them take all the
time they wanted for the thanks and farewells, and waited to wave them
out of sight. The last car to round the curve was the one containing
the widower and his children--forlorn no longer but exuding sticky
satiety and clutching their new treasures.
Then she hurried into the house. The soldier guest was still sleeping,
the housekeeper reported. Ginger went on tiptoe to the door and
listened. There were the countless questions to ask him about Aleck;
she grudged every missed moment.
“We dare not wake him,” said Manuela with authority. “And he must eat
before he talks again. Go away, my heart. I will keep watch.” She sat
down again in a chair in the corridor and folded her hard brown hands
on her stomach. “Listen! Some one comes!”
There was the sound of a motor and Ginger went to see who it was--the
house party might have found worse going beyond, and turned back. It
was a car from the garage at San Luis Obispo, and before it reached the
house she saw that it carried one person beside the driver--a young man
who held himself singularly erect. He was, he announced, the cousin who
had been waiting, waiting all day, at San Luis Obispo, for Mr. Dean
Wolcott. He wanted to know where Mr. Wolcott was. His manner rather
conveyed that Mr. Wolcott might have met with foul play; that almost
anything might occur in a wilderness of this character.
Miss McVeagh explained that Mr. Dean Wolcott was sleeping; he was
greatly exhausted and had been asleep since morning.
The other Mr. Wolcott was clearly annoyed. The trip from Boston to
California, undertaken only a day after his cousin had landed from
England, had been wholly against his advice and judgment. He had been
unable to understand why his cousin could not have _mailed_ Miss
McVeagh her brother’s letter, and written her any details.
Ginger, looking levelly at him, saw at once that he had been and always
would be unable to understand. She said, very civilly, that she hoped
they would both rest for a few days at Dos Pozos before making the
return journey.
“Thank you, but that will be quite impossible,” said the young man,
hastily. “It will be necessary to leave Los Angeles to-morrow. The
entire Wolcott connection--” it was as if he had said--“The Allied
Nations,” or “The Nordic Peoples”--“will postpone the holiday
festivities until Mr. Dean Wolcott’s return.” He desired to be shown
where his cousin was sleeping, and he went briskly in to rouse him,
past the protesting Manuela.
Ginger went out of the house. Large as it was, there did not seem to be
room enough in it for the newcomer and herself. He brought her sharply
out of her mood of whispering gentleness, and she walked a little way
toward the bridge and planned to begin work at once on the permanent
structure of Aleck’s intention. A big and beautiful idea came to her;
there was no way of marking Aleck’s grave, but this bridge should be
built in his memory, inscribed to him. It brought the tears to her
eyes and she turned, at sound of feet on the path, and saw Dean Wolcott
coming toward her, and now, as in the morning, the sun was on him--this
time the evening sun, slipping swiftly down behind the hills.
He was faintly flushed with sleep and his voice was stronger and
steadier. “I am ashamed,” he said. “I have slept away my one day with
you. I had concentrated for so long on the single purpose of bringing
Aleck’s message to you that, once it was done, everything seemed to be
done. I sank into that sleep as if it were a bottomless pit. I must go
back to-night. My mother--my people--You see, I spent only a day with
them.”
“You must go,” said Ginger. “You were good--oh, you were _good_ to
come!”
They stood then without talking, looking at each other, gravely. They
seemed to be groping toward each other through the mists of grief
and tragedy and strangeness which encompassed them. The little scene
had--and would always have in their memories--a lovely and lyric
quality. It was a fresh-washed world; the hills, the roads, the trails,
the _chaparral_ were a clean and shining bronze; the distant alfalfa
fields were emerald counterpanes and the _toyon_ berries, freed from
the last stubborn summer dust, were little shouts of color.
He passed a hand across his troubled eyes. “There is so much to tell
you.... Every day, every hour, things grow clearer; I remember more and
more. But I will write to you. I will write you everything.”
“I don’t know, I can’t explain--” Ginger was whispering again--“but
it almost seems as if you’d brought Aleck back to me. I can never see
him again, but--it’s different, somehow. That dreadful, black, _lost_
feeling is gone. I won’t wear black any more; Aleck hated black. And
I’m going to build that bridge, as he planned to build it, of stone,
and--and put his name on it. It’s--all I can do for him.”
His tired eyes lighted. “Will you let me share it with you--let me
design it? I do that sort of thing, you know. I should love helping
you with Aleck’s bridge.” His voice was kindling to warmth now. “A
bridge--there could be nothing better for a memorial.” He fumbled in
his pocket and brought out a notebook and pencil. “Shall we go a
little nearer? I’ll make just a rough sketch of the situation.” They
walked on.
The cousin came to the edge of the veranda and called a warning; there
was very little time. Dean Wolcott frowned and kept steadily on, Ginger
walking beside him in her strange new silence. He did not speak again
until he had made the small, unsteady sketch on a leaf of his notebook.
Then he came a little closer to her, peering at her through the fading
light. The sun had gone and the brief afterglow was going. “I will send
the design as soon as I am sure of doing it decently--within a few
weeks, I hope.” It was as if he were seeing her--_her_--not merely the
person to whom with incredible difficulty and delay he had delivered
a message. “And after a while, when I am--myself--may I come again?”
His voice was huskily eager. “May I come back? I want to know Aleck’s
country; I want to know Aleck’s--_you_.”
She took his thin fingers into a warm brown grasp. “Please come! Please
come and stay!” The other Mr. Wolcott was coming down the path, picking
his way neatly through the mud, but she did not let Dean Wolcott’s
hand go. “And please come--soon!”
* * * * *
The capable cousin took him away at dusk. They would get a train out
of San Luis Obispo at midnight and leave Los Angeles for Boston the
next forenoon. He had it all compactly figured out. If they made proper
connections--and he looked as if trains rarely if ever trifled with
him--they would reach home on the day and at the hour when he had
planned to reach home.
Ling and Manuela had hastily cooked and served an early supper and
Ginger sat across the table from her two guests, looking at them and
listening to them, eating nothing herself. It was to be observed that
the worn young soldier and his kinsman shared certain characteristics
of face and figure--the same established look of race--but they were
two distinct variations on the family theme.
For the first time in her assured and unquestioning life Ginger was
acutely aware of her table--of the contrast between the fine old silver
and glass which her mother, Rosalía Valdés, had brought with her to
Dos Pozos as a bride and the commonplace and stupid modern china
which she herself had bought at San Luis Obispo; of old Manuela’s
serene crudities of service. The other Mr. Wolcott was carefully
civil, but he managed to make her stingingly conscious of the number
and variety of miles between Boston and her ranch: he had rather the
air of a cautious and tactful explorer among wild tribes. Whenever
he looked at her, which was not often, she felt like a picture in a
travel magazine--“native belle in holiday attire”--like a young savage
princess with strings of wampum and a copper ring in her nose.
But she did feel, at any rate, like a princess: he aroused in her an
absurd desire to talk about the McVeaghs in Scotland and the Valdés
family in Spain; to drag out heirlooms and ancient treasures.
Dean Wolcott was very white again and said little. When they were
in the machine he rallied himself with a visible effort. “I will
send the sketch soon,” he said, rather hollowly, “and I will write
you--everything.” Then he seemed to sink back into his weary weakness;
even the glow died out of his eyes.
Ginger watched the machine’s little red tail light disappear around the
curve. She was certain that, directly they were under way, the other
Mr. Wolcott was telling him how very much wiser and more sensible, how
much less exhausting and expensive it would have been to mail Aleck’s
letter to her.
Then she went briskly into her own room and came out into the corridor
presently with her arms overflowing with black clothing--black riding
things, black waists and skirts, black dresses.
“Manuela,” she said, as the old woman came up to her, staring, “these
are for you and your daughters. I’ve done with them.”
Manuela squealed with rapture. “_Mil gracias y gracias a Dios, Señorita
mía!_” she purled. She had begged her mistress to leave off mourning,
much as her Spanish soul approved it, and now she had her wish, and
this bountiful precipitation of manna besides. She gathered it up
gleefully and waddled off with her dark face creased into lines of
supreme content.
Ginger was very much pleased with herself. This was the way in which
she--Ginger McVeagh--did things. She decided to lay off black, and
instantly, with one gesture, she cleansed her wardrobe completely and
forever of its somber presence.
The next morning she was early on her horse and she wore her worn and
mellow brown corduroys and her seasoned old Stetson, and Estrada and
his men nodded knowingly at each other and smiled shyly at her. It
was curious how shy and how respectful they were, the hard-riding,
hard-drinking _vaqueros_. The Spanish and Mexican ones among them had
a manner which was just as good and decidedly pleasanter than that of
the other Mr. Wolcott, and the Americans, old grizzled chaps in the
main who had ridden for her father, had a whimsical poise and a rugged
picturesqueness of diction.
It was an oddly feudal life for a twenty-two-year-old girl in the
up-to-the-minute days of the twentieth century, the more so, of
course, because of her brother’s death, but it had been sufficiently
so, even before he went to war. Her mother had died when she was a
baby, her father when she was a child; Aleck had firmly sent her away
to boarding school three times, and three times he had weakly let her
come home. He was bleakly lonesome without her; he concurred, in his
happy and simple soul, with the ranchers who laughed and said--“Oh,
let her alone--she knows twice as much now as most young ones of her
age!” Family connections in San Francisco and Los Angeles protested
mildly, but they were busy with their own problems and Dos Pozos was a
marvelous place to take the children and spend vacations, and Ginger
had probably had about all the schooling she needed for that life
and that was undoubtedly the life she meant always to lead. Thus,
comfortably, they dismissed the matter, and sent her an occasional new
novel for cultural purposes and came months later to find half the
leaves uncut. Ginger would have read it with a good deal of enjoyment
if she could have stayed indoors long enough; evenings she was apt to
be sleepy very early.
Now the word went over the wide neighborhood that Aleck McVeagh’s
buddy had come and brought a letter from him, and told his sister all
about his life over there, and his death, and Ginger had given away
all her mourning and put on her regular clothes and the ranchers rode
over on their hard-mouthed, wind-swift horses or drove up in their
comfortable, battered cars and asked her to barbecues and _rodeos_
again.
’Rome Ojeda, who lived thirty miles away, heard the news, came the
thirty miles at a Spanish canter in a little over four hours, flung the
reins over the head of his lathered horse to the ground, walked with
jingling spurs on to her veranda and made hearty love to her.
He had intended to marry her ever since she came home from boarding
school for the last time and he saw her in a scarlet sport coat and a
scarlet tam. He was Aleck’s best friend and Aleck had looked on with
satisfaction; he wasn’t keen to give Ginger up to anybody, but it
wouldn’t be really giving her up to have her marry old ’Rome, and she’d
be mortally certain to marry somebody. Ginger, however, wasn’t at all
sure that she was. By and by, _perhaps_; certainly not now, when she
had many much more interesting things to do. So ’Rome Ojeda had bided
his time good-naturedly; she was pretty young, and he wasn’t so old
himself; just as well, probably, to play around awhile. He let it be
rather well known, however, that she was going to marry him as soon as
she was ready to marry anybody.
Now he was direct and forceful. “Ginger, look here! You’re old enough
now, and you’re all alone, and I’ve waited the deuce of a while. No
sense waiting any longer!” He showed his very white teeth in a sudden
smile and flung a quick arm about her. He was a big and beautiful
creature, Jerome Ojeda, Spanish-American, hot-headed, hot-tongued,
warm-hearted. He had almost graduated from the High School at San
Luis Obispo; there had been a _rodeo_ in which he wanted to ride, so
he rode in it. He took a spectacular first place in the “Big Week” as
the affair was called, and he had never experienced the palest pang of
regret for the little white cylinder tied with a blue ribbon.
Ginger got herself promptly out of his arms. She wasn’t in the least
shocked or resentful but she was disconcertingly cool. “I don’t want to
marry--anybody, ’Rome,” she said.
He caught her shoulders in his dark hands and gave her a small shake.
“Don’t be a little fool! Of course you want to marry somebody.
It’s--what you’re _for_. You want to marry me, only you don’t know it
yet. But you will.” He brought his brown face nearer. “When I make up
my mind, I generally put it over, don’t I?” He gave her another little
shake. “Don’t I?”
She considered him calmly. “Generally, yes,” she said.
He enveloped her swiftly in a rough, breathtaking hug, and as swiftly
let her go again. “All right; I can wait a while longer.” He strode,
spurs jingling, toward his horse.
Ginger called after him, hospitably: “Don’t go now,’Rome! Stay for
dinner. Look at Pedro--he’s dead tired.”
He swung himself into the saddle without touching the stirrups and
smiled back at her. His smile was very white and dazzling in his brown
face. “When I stay, _querida_, I’ll stay--right. And Pedro’ll take me
where I want to go; there’ll be horses when I’m gone.” He struck spurs
into the dripping horse and was off at a smooth and rhythmic gallop.
Ginger frowned, looking after him. She did like old ’Rome a lot. She
liked everything about him except the way he treated his stock. Still,
he was no worse than most of them. But she didn’t want to marry him;
she didn’t want to marry anybody; she was much too busy and happy.