AT supper time she told them, graphically, and with full and generous
credit to the Ranger, about the mountain lion and the fawn, and was
entirely amiable about repeating in detail to any one who wished to
hear more.
She said to the doctor, while they were at table, lifting her voice a
little over the neighboring talk, that she was delighted to see Dean
Wolcott so robust. This life must agree tremendously with him. How
long--she was brightly, coolly interested--had he been in the west?
“Well, he’s been west of Boston for almost a year, I should say, what
with his work at the School of Forestry, and riding in Wyoming, and
all, and he’s been here in the Big Sur since early in June.”
The doctor was a little puzzled; he did not quite understand and he
did not at all like this hard serenity; she had not the look of a girl
reunited to her lover, he told himself rather anxiously. Later on,
when they were settling to bridge, he managed a worried word aside to
Mrs. Featherstone.
“I wonder, Miss Fanny, if we bungled it?”
“Certainly not,” said Ginger’s Aunt Fan, comfortably. “She’ll have to
stand off and act like her great-grandmother Valdés for awhile, of
course--that’s part of the picture, but _I’m_ not worrying--not about
_them_, at least!” She reached a plump hand into a candy box on the
next table. “Doctor, can’t you make it a camp misdemeanor for those
girls to leave this stuff around?--Chocolate creams the size of young
sofa cushions--”
And when she and her niece had gone to their joint cabin, three hours
later, and the girl maintained her cool serenity, she rode blithely
over it.
“All right, my dear! Keep it up! I glory in your spunk. But don’t you
ever think you’re putting anything over on your Aunt Frances May!”
* * * * *
Dean Wolcott came to supper on Saturday night. The doctor said he was
sorry he had not thought to include the little Scout, but the Ranger
shook his head. “No, I’ve parked him at the cottage with Rusty, the
Airedale, inside and the Mabel horse saddled and ready in case he has
to do a hasty Paul Revere to get me. He’s reading _Pontiac, Chief
of the Ottawas_, and listening for the telephone, and reflecting,
chestily, that Edna couldn’t call him a ’Fraid-Cat if she saw him now.
Edna is a slightly older cousin who has been a great help to her mother
in making life miserable for him.”
“I’m simply mad about him,” the very blond girl whispered to Ginger.
She was wearing a baby blue organdie and looked like the fairest of
all the very young angels, and she had a slight lisp which one felt
she had not made very stern efforts to eradicate. “I adore the way he
talks, and the things he says--and that golden, patent-leather effect
of hair--oh, and the way he carries himself, and everything!”
“Aside from that, you don’t admire him especially, I gather,” said
Ginger, smiling carefully at her. She felt like a swarthy gypsy beside
her, and crudely strong and weathered.
Dean asked the very blond girl for the first dance, and Ginger for the
second, and the betrothed girl with the dreaming eyes for the third,
and he did not dance with Ginger again after that, but divided himself
among the rest, with two or three extras with the pale blue organdie.
Ginger knew and was sure that he knew that the doctor and her aunt and
some of the others were watching them keenly, and she held her Scotch
chin at a firm angle, and her Spanish mouth did not look in the least
as it had that day upon Aleck’s bridge. She asked him if he had been
able to save the skin of the mountain lion and was cordially pleased to
hear that it was in excellent shape, and had been sent into San José to
be mounted. Dean inquired for her henchmen at Dos Pozos with especial
emphasis on Estrada, to whom he sent his remembrances.
If the contact set their hearts to galloping as Snort had done in the
historic runaway, there was no visible evidence of it. They danced
beautifully together, and Dean applauded enthusiastically for an
encore, and they finished it out, and then he relinquished her to a
gray-haired, black-eyed gallant whose heels had remained as light as
his heart, and sat chatting pleasantly with Mrs. Featherstone. Almost
at once he was aware that she and her niece had spent the greater
portion of the winter in the far east, and when he went away to dance
again he said bitterly to himself:
“Well, that does settle it. Months in the east, and never a sign, never
a word--” and he asked the Fra Angelico angel in the blue organdie
to walk down to the creek in the moonlight after their next fox trot
together.
And Ginger, for her part, had told herself a hundred times, “He has
been here since early in June; he has never let me know; it is simply
over, that’s all; finished between us,” and she wondered just how soon
she could reasonably and with dignity persuade Aunt Fan to go back to
town.
Before the Ranger left that evening the doctor had persuaded him to go
with them on a riding trip, or rather, to let them time their excursion
with his regular ride to Slate’s Springs. The very blond girl was
to go; she had had a riding suit made by the smartest tailor in San
Francisco for just such an occasion as this, and--last and greatest
wonder of the world--Mrs. Featherstone was to go. The doctor had
told her seriously that the heroism of her diet must be supplemented
by exercise if she meant to melt her too too solid flesh--strenuous
exercise, not chugging down to the camp gate in her high heels and
short vamps after supper--and she had dared two or three very brief
equestrian outings on old Sam.
Ginger was amazed. “I think it’s sporting of you, Aunt Fan, but I don’t
think you realize how hard it’s going to be--and the doctor doesn’t
realize how soft you are! You keep telling that you lead an active
life, and he believes you, but if he knew that you think it’s activity
to walk from the St. Agnes to the Palace Hotel for lunch--”
“Now, don’t be a crape hanger, my child,” said her aunt, severely.
“Just because you’re out of sorts yourself--honestly, Ginger, the way
you let Dean Wolcott be gobbled up alive by that little, pale blue
string bean--”
Ginger was brushing her mane of black hair, and it hung over her head
and down before her face in a thick curtain. Her voice came through it,
muffled but wholly amiable, “He seems to be enjoying it, doesn’t he?”
“_Seems_, of course! That’s just it. Any man with the spirit of a
caterpillar-- Do you expect him to sit in a corner and twiddle his
thumbs until--”
“I expect him to do just as he’s doing,” said her niece, pleasantly.
She was giving her hair, it appeared, an especially thorough brushing.
“Ginger,” said Mrs. Featherstone, sniffing, “_Ginger!_ I guess we’ll
have to get another nickname for you. _Very_ weak Lemon Extract ...
Vanilla....”
The girl flung up her head and the black mane swung back over her
shoulders, thick and shining. Her face was a little flushed. “I’m
worrying about your riding to Slate’s, Aunt Fan. I’m positive it will
be too much for you.”
“Well, I don’t say I’ll enjoy it,” Mrs. Featherstone conceded. “That
isn’t the idea; I shall take it as I would take a dose of medicine.”
“But you can’t swallow it down with one brave gulp, Aunt Fan! You
haven’t any idea what it will be like, hours and hours--and _hours_!
Three days in the saddle, and one of the nights you’ll camp out and
sleep on the ground--”
“I’m not going to sleep on the ground; the doctor’s loaning me his
pneumatic-cushioned sleeping bag!” Then, as Ginger still shook her
head, “I’ll tell you, dearie, it’s this way. I haven’t quite made up
my mind about the doctor yet, but I’m making it up, and if I do--well,
I must learn to like the sort of things he likes, mustn’t I?” She
finished very sweetly, with a great deal of wistful earnestness in her
blue eyes.
“Well, I wish I could follow you with an ambulance, that’s all,” said
her niece, darkly.
* * * * *
The doctor was much surprised and a little hurt to find that Ginger was
going to stay in camp and not make the ride with them, but she was very
logical about it. She knew his well-known preference for taking only a
small party; more than six made a cumbersome excursion, he held--they
were only as fast as the slowest horse in the string, and there was
constant dismounting for cinching and saddle-setting, and endless
delays; there would be seven in this party without her. She pointed
out, gently, that riding wasn’t after all such a treat, such a new
experience to her as it was to Aunt Fan, and the very blond girl.
They got off at nine on a blue-and-gold morning and Ginger was very
helpful and attentive to her aunt, who was large and impressive upon
old Sam in her borrowed riding things. Some one among the women had
produced an old-fashioned divided skirt of corduroy and her legs were
wound with spiral puttees of khaki. She was not ill-pleased with
herself. “Of course, I’m stout,” she whispered to Ginger, “but I do
taper. I have the wrists and ankles of a woman half my weight. This
isn’t a very snappy outfit, is it? But who knows--if I keep up this
sort of thing, by next summer I may be able to ride in pants and get
away with it!”
The doctor rode up to them. “Won’t change your mind, Ginger, even if I
let you ride Ted?”
“Thank you, no, Doctor. I’m going to be a magazine and hammock person.”
She held, indeed, a magazine, one of the sober and substantial ones.
She waved them out of sight and then found a hammock in the sun and
devoted herself to a rather stiff article on California’s attitude
toward the Japanese problem, and at luncheon she was very gay with
every one, and let the black-eyed gallant (who was just a little
flattered at her staying behind) take her down to his improvised golf
course and instruct her in driving off, which involved a good deal of
minute demonstration as to the position of her hands on the club.
Later in the afternoon she saddled a horse and rode over the hills to
the ocean and visited the valiant little old grandmother of most of
the families in the vicinity. She had come from Alsace when she was
a child, and she had crossed the plains in a prairie schooner when
she was a very young girl, and married and settled in that remote and
difficult spot. She had borne and reared nine children and buried four
of them, and she had been a widow for long years. Ginger had come to
see her on her last visit to the camp, and the old lady remembered her
perfectly and thought she was even prettier than she had given promise
of being, but she was a little worried to find she was not married,
at twenty-three, and had no prospects. Twenty-three was high time,
“Gramma” considered, to be about the real business of life. Clearly
sorry for her, she made haste to show her all her treasures--the many
patchwork quilts which she made in the wet winters when she couldn’t
work out-of-doors, slowly, because she had two paralyzed fingers
and the rest somewhat warped with work and rheumatism, the quaint,
water-colored picture which symbolized her father’s honorable discharge
from the French army, the curios her most venturesome son had brought
back from Alaska, her clock. This was a massive affair of onyx,
elaborately embellished, and there was a plate upon its front with an
inscription. The old lady had risen, one night of wild and violent wind
and rain, impelled by she knew not what impulse, and placed a lighted
lamp in her upper window, and hours later the shipwrecked crew of a
coast steamer had groped to her door. “Gramma” had warmed and dried and
fed them and put them to bed, and after their sojourn with her they had
sent the clock from San Francisco, inscribed with their names and her
name and the date.
“The boys fetched it down in the hay wagon, dearie, and it’s never
run,” she said regretfully, looking up at its silent and impassive
countenance--it was stating, mendaciously, in late afternoon, that it
was only ten o’clock--but clearly she bore it no grudge; it was almost
too much, she seemed to feel, to expect a clock as handsome as that to
keep time; the kitchen clock could do that: this one was dedicated to
being a thing of beauty, and therefore a joy forever.
Ginger, looking down at the dauntless small figure, the work-warped
hands and the unconquered brightness of the eyes, put an arm about
her suddenly and gave her a little hug. If the very blond girl and the
betrothed girl made her feel old and wise, “Gramma” made her feel her
untried youth. She had crossed an ocean and a continent, and helped
to hew a home out of a stubborn wilderness; she had borne and reared
and buried--there was a little graveyard on the high hill above the
ranch--done a woman’s work and a man’s work: three wars had roared and
flamed and guttered out again in her ken; the world had leaped forward
in science and invention, but she had lived on in her quiet corner, and
she seemed as old and as wise as the hills, and as glad as the morning.
She pulled Ginger down and kissed her warm cheek. “You hurry up,
dearie,” she said, urgently. “You hurry up! And I’ll give you a
quilt--that’s what I’ll do! A basket pattern, or a log cabin, or a
rising sun--you can take your choice!” She stood nodding and beaming
like an ancient seeress at the door of her cave. “You hurry up! You’re
young, dearie, but time goes fast--spring and summer, and then the fall
comes and the winter--_you hurry_!”