only matter that counts.
Lois Murchison drove up to-day in her hateful big car. She did not
find me a very agreeable hostess, I'm afraid, but curled up like a
nonchalant green snake in one of my armchairs and started to smoke and
talk. She asked where Duncan was and I had to explain that he'd been
called out to the mines on imperative business. And that started her
going on the mines. Duncan, she said, should clean up half a million
before he was through with that deal. He had been very successful.
"But don't you feel, my dear," she went on with quiet venom in her
voice, "that a great deal of his success has depended on that
bandy-legged little she-secretary of his?"
"Is she that wonderful?" I asked, trying to seem less at sea than I
was.
"She's certainly wonderful to him!" announced the woman known as
Slinkie. And having driven that poisoned dart well into the flesh,
she was content to drop her cigarette-end into the ash-receiver, reach
for her blue-fox furs, and announce that she'd have to be toddling on
to the hair-dresser's.
Lois Murchison's implication, at that moment, didn't bother me much,
for I had bigger troubles to occupy my thoughts. But the more I dwell
on it, the more I find myself disturbed in spirit. I resent the idea
of being upset by a wicked-tongued woman. She has, however, raised a
ghost which will have to be laid. To-morrow I intend to go down to my
husband's office and see his secretary, "to inspect the whaup," as
Whinnie would express it, for I find myself becoming more and more
interested in her wonderfulness.... Peter sent me a hurried line or
two to-day, telling me to sit tight as he thought he'd have news for
me before the week was out.
I suspect him of trying to trick me into some forlorn new lease of
hope. But I have pinned my faith to Peter--and I know he would not
trifle with anything so sacred as mother-love.
_Saturday the Seventh_
There is no news of my Dinkie.... But there is news of another
nature.
Between ten and eleven this morning I had Hilton motor me down to
Duncan's office in Eighth Avenue. It struck me as odd, at first, that
I had never been there before. But Duncan, I remembered, had never
asked me, the domestic fly, to step into his spider's parlor of
commerce. And I found a ridiculous timidity creeping over me as I went
up in the elevator, and found the door-number, and saw myself
confronted by a cadaverous urchin in horn-rimmed specs, who thrust a
paper-covered novel behind his chair-back and asked me what I wanted.
So I asked him if this was Mr. McKail's office.
"Sure," he said in the established vernacular of the West.
"What is your name, little boy?" I inquired, with the sternest brand
of condescension I could command.
The young monkey drew himself up at that and flushed angrily. "Oh, I
don't know as I'm so little," he observed, regarding me with a
narrowing eye as I stepped unbidden beyond the sacred portals.
"Where will I find Mr. McKail's secretary?" I asked, noticing the door
in the stained-wood partition with "Private" on its frosted glass. The
youth nodded his head toward the door in question and crossed to a
desk where he proceeded languidly to affix postage-stamps to a small
pile of envelopes.
I hesitated for a moment, as though there was something epochal in the
air, as though I was making a step which might mean a great deal to
me. And then I stepped over to the door and opened it.
I saw a young woman seated at a flat-topped desk, with a gold-banded
fountain-pen in her fingers, checking over a column of figures. She
checked carefully on to the end of her column, and then she raised her
head and looked at me.
Her face stood out with singular distinctness, in the strong
side-light from the office-window. And the woman seated at the
flat-topped desk was Alsina Teeswater.
I don't know how long I stood there without speaking. But I could see
the color slowly mount and recede on Alsina Teeswater's face. She put
down her fountain-pen, with much deliberation, and sat upright in her
chair, with her barricaded eyes every moment of the time on my face.
"So this has started again?" I finally said, in little more than a
whisper.
I could see the girl's lips harden. I could see her fortifying herself
behind an entrenchment of quietly marshaled belligerency.
"It has never stopped, Mrs. McKail," she said in an equally low voice,
but with the courage of utter desperation.
It took some time, apparently, for that declaration to filter through
to my brain. Everything seemed suddenly out of focus; and it was hard
to readjust vision to the newer order of things. But I was calmer,
under the circumstances, than I expected to be.
"I'm glad I understand," I finally admitted.
The woman at the desk seemed puzzled. Then she looked from me to her
column of figures and from her column of figures to the huddled roofs
and walls of the city and the greening foot-hills and the solemn white
crowns of the Rockies behind them.
"Are you quite sure, Mrs. McKail, that you do understand?" she asked
at last, with just a touch of challenge in the question.
"Isn't it quite simple now?" I demanded.
She found the courage to face me again.
"I don't think this sort of thing is ever simple," she replied, with
much more emotion than I had expected of her.
"But it's at least clear how it must end," I found the courage to
point out to her.
"Is that clear to _you_?" demanded the woman who was stepping into my
shoes. It seemed odd, at the moment, that I should feel vaguely sorry
for her.
"Perhaps you might make it clearer," I prompted.
"I'd rather Duncan did that," she replied, using my husband's first
name, obviously, without knowing she had done so.
"Wouldn't it be fairer--for the two of us--now? Wouldn't it be
cleaner?" I rather tremulously asked of her.
She nodded and stared down at the sheet covered with small columns of
figures.
"I don't know whether you know it or not," she said with a studied
sort of quietness, "but last week Mr. McKail began making arrangements
to establish a residence in Nevada. He will have to live there, of
course, for at least six months, perhaps even longer."
I could feel this sinking in, like water going through
blotting-paper. The woman at the desk must have misinterpreted my
silence, for she was moved to say, in a heavier effort at
self-defense, "He _knew_, of course, that you cared for some one
else."
I looked at her, as though she were a thousand miles away. I stood
there impressed by the utter inadequacy of speech. And the thing that
puzzled me was that there was an air of honesty about the woman. She
still so desperately clung to her self-respect that she wanted me to
understand both her predicament and her motives. I could hear her
explaining that my husband had no intention of going to Reno, but
would live in Virginia City, where he was taking up some actual mining
interests. Such things were not pleasant, of course. But this one
could be put through without difficulty. Mr. McKail had been assured
of that.
I tried to pull myself together, wondering why I should so suddenly
feel like a marked woman, a pariah of the prairies, as friendless and
alone as a leper. Then I thought of my children. And that cleared my
head, like a wind sweeping clean a smoky room.
"But a case has to be made out," I began. "It would have to be proved
that I----"
"There will be no difficulty on that point, Mrs. McKail," went on the
other woman as I came to a stop. "Provided the suit is not opposed."
The significance of that quietly uttered phrase did not escape me. Our
glances met and locked.
"There are the children," I reminded her. And she looked a very
commercialized young lady as she sat confronting me across her many
columns of figures.
"There should be no difficulty there--_provided_ the suit is not
opposed," she repeated with the air of a physician confronted by a
hypochondriacal patient.
"The children are mine," I rather foolishly proclaimed, with my first
touch of passion.
"The children are yours," she admitted. And about her hung an air of
authority, of cool reserve, which I couldn't help resenting.
"That is very generous of you," I admitted, not without ironic
intent.
She smiled rather sadly as she sat looking at me.
"It's something that doesn't rest with either of us," she said with
the suspicion of a quaver in her voice. And _she_, I suddenly
remembered, might some day sit eating her pot of honey on a grave. I
realized, too, that very little was to be gained by prolonging that
strangest of interviews. I wanted quietude in which to think things
over. I wanted to go back to my cell like a prisoner and brood over my
sentence....
And I have thought things over. I at last see the light. From this day
forward there shall be no vacillating. I am going back to Casa
Grande.
I have always hated this house; I have always hated everything about
the place, without having the courage to admit it. I have done my
part, I have made my effort, and it was a wasted effort. I wasn't even
given a chance. And now I shall gather my things together and go back
to my home, to the only home that remains to me. I shall still have my
kiddies. I shall have my Poppsy and--But sharp as an arrow-head the
memory of my lost boy strikes into my heart. My Dinkie is gone. I no
longer have him to make what is left of my life endurable....
It is raining to-night, I notice, steadily and dismally. It is a dark
night, outside, for lost children....
Duncan has just come home, wet and muddy, and gone up to his room. The
gray-faced solemnity with which he strode past me makes me feel sure
that he has been conversing with his lady-love. But what difference
does it make? What difference does _anything_ make? In the matter of
women, I have just remembered, what may be one man's meat is another
man's poison. But I can't understand these reversible people, like
house-rugs, who can pretend to love two ways at once.... I only know
one man, in all the wide world, who has not shattered my faith in his
kind. He is one of those neck-or-nothing men who never change.
There are many ranchers, out in this country, who keep what they call
a blizzard-line. It's a rope that stretches in winter from their
house-door to their shed or their stable, a rope that keeps them from
getting lost when a blizzard is raging. Peter, I know, has been my
blizzard-line. And in some way, please God, he will yet lead me back
to warmth. He is himself out there in the cold, accepting it, all the
time, with the same quiet fortitude that a Polar bear might. But he
will thole through, in the end. For with all his roughness he can be
unexpectedly adroit. Whinstane Sandy once told me something he had
learned about Polar bears in his old Yukon days: with all their
heaviness, they can go where a dog daren't venture. If need be, they
can flatten out and slide over a sheet of ice too thin to support a
running dog. And the drift-ice may be widening, but I refuse to give
up my hope of hope. "Let the mother go," as the Good Book says, "that
it may be well with thee!" ...
I have just remembered that I tried to shoot my husband once. He may
make use of _that_, when he gets down to Virginia City. It might, in
fact, help things along very materially. And Susie's eyes will
probably pop out, when she reads it in a San Francisco paper....
I've thought of so many clever things I should have said to Alsina
Teeswater. As I look back, I find it was the other lady who did about
all the talking. There were old ulcerations to be cleared away, of
course, and I let her talk about the same as you let a dentist work
with his fingers in your mouth.... But now I must go up and make sure
my Poppsy is safely tucked in. I have just opened the door and looked
out. It is storming wretchedly. God pity any little boys who are
abroad on such a night!
_Two Hours Later_
It is well past midnight. But there is no sleep this night for Chaddie
McKail. I am too happy to sleep. I am too happy to act sane. For my
boy is safe. _Peter has found my Dinkie!_
I was called to the telephone, a little after eleven, but couldn't
hear well on the up-stairs extension, so I went to the instrument
down-stairs, where the operator told me it was long-distance, from
Buckhorn. So I listened, with my heart in my mouth. But all I could
get was a buzz and crackle and an occasional ghostly word. It was the
storm, I suppose. Then I heard Peter's voice, thin and faint and far
away, but most unmistakably Peter's voice.
"Can you hear me now?" he said, like a man speaking from the bottom of
the sea.
"Yes," I called back. "What is it?"
"Get ready for good news," said that thin but valorous voice that
seemed to be speaking from the tip-top mountains of Mars. But the
crackling and burring cut us off again. Then something must have
happened to the line, or we must have been switched to a better
circuit. For, the next moment, Peter's voice seemed almost in the next
room. It seemed to come closer at a bound, like a shore-line when you
look at it through a telescope.
"Is that any better?" he asked through his miles and miles of
rain-swept blackness.
"Yes, I can hear you plainly now," I told him.
"Ah, yes, that _is_ better," he acknowledged. "And everything else is,
too, my dear. For I've found your Dinkie and----"
"You've found Dinkie?" I gasped.
"I have, thank God. And he's safe and sound!"
"Where?" I demanded.
"Fast asleep at Alabama Ranch."
"Is he all right?"
"As fit as a fiddle--all he wants is sleep."
"_Oh, Peter!_" It was foolish. But it was all I could say for a full
minute. For my boy was alive, and safe. My laddie had been found by
Peter--by good old Peter, who never, in the time of need, was known to
fail me.
"Where are you now?" I asked, when reason was once more on her
throne.
"At Buckhorn," answered Peter.
"And you went all that way through the mud and rain, just to tell me?"
I said.
"I had to, or I'd blow up!" acknowledged Peter. "And now I'd like to
know what you want me to do."
"I want you to come and get me, Peter," I said slowly and distinctly
over the wire.
There was a silence of several seconds.
"Do you understand what that means?" he finally demanded. His voice, I
noticed, had become suddenly solemn.
"Yes, Peter, I understand," I told him. "Please come and get me!" And
again the silence was so prolonged that I had to cut in and ask: "Are
you there?"
And Peter's voice answered "Yes."
"Then you'll come?" I exacted, determined to burn all my bridges
behind me.
"I'll be there on Monday," said Peter, with quiet decision. "I'll be
there with Tithonus and Tumble-Weed and the old prairie-schooner. And
we'll all trek home together!"
"_Skookum!_" I said with altogether unbecoming levity.
I patted the telephone instrument as I hung up the receiver. Then I
sat staring at it in a brown study.
Then I went careening up-stairs and woke Poppsy out of a sound sleep
and hugged her until her bones were ready to crack and told her that
our Dinkie had been found again. And Poppsy, not being quite able to
get it through her sleepy little head, promptly began to bawl. But
there was little to bawl over, once she was thoroughly awake. And then
I went careening down to the telephone again, and called up Lossie's
boarding-house, and had her landlady root the poor girl out of bed,
and heard _her_ break down and have a little cry when I told her our
Dinkie had been found. And the first thing she asked me, when she was
able to talk again, was if Gershom Binks had been told of the good
news. And I had to acknowledge that I hadn't even _thought_ of poor
old Gershom, but that Peter Ketley would surely have passed the good
word on to Casa Grande, for Peter always seemed to think of the right
thing.
And then I remembered about Duncan. For Duncan, whatever he may have
been, was still the boy's father. And he must be told. It was my duty
to tell him. So once more I climbed the stairs, but this time more
slowly. I had to wait a full minute before I found the courage, I
don't know why, to knock on Duncan's bedroom door.
I knocked twice before any answer came.
"What is it?" asked the familiar sleepy _bass_--and I realized what
gulfs yawned between us when my husband on one side of that closed
door could be lying lost in slumber and I on the other side of it
could find life doing such unparalleled things to me. I felt for him
as a girl home, tired from her first dance, feels for a young brother
asleep beside a Noah's Ark.
"What is it?" I heard Duncan's voice repeating from the bed.
"It's me," I rather weakly proclaimed.
"What has happened?" was the question that came after a moment's
silence.
I leaned with my face against the painted door-panel. It was smooth
and cool and pleasant to press one's skin against.
"They've found Dinkie," I said. I could hear the squeak of springs as
my husband sat up in bed.
"Is he all right?"
"Yes, he's all right," I said with a great sigh. And I listened for an
answering sigh from the other side of the door.
But instead of that Duncan's voice asked: "Where is he?"
"At Alabama Ranch," I said, without realizing what that acknowledgment
meant. And again a brief period of silence intervened.
"Who found him?" asked my husband, in a hardened voice.
"Peter Ketley," I said, in as collected a voice as I could manage. And
this time the significance of the silence did not escape me.
"Then your cup of happiness ought to be full," I heard the voice on
the other side of the door remark with heavy deliberateness. I stood
there with my face leaning against the cool panel.
"It is," I said with a quiet audacity which surprised me almost as
much as it must have surprised the man on the bed a million miles away
from me.
_Sunday the Eighth_
How different is life from what the fictioneers would paint it! How
hopelessly mixed-up and macaronic, how undignified in what ought to be
its big moments and how pompous in so many of its pettinesses!
I told my husband to-day that Poppsy and I were going back to Casa
Grande. And that, surely, ought to have been the Big Moment in the
career of an unloved invertebrate. But the situation declined to take
off, as the airmen say.
"I guess that means it's about time we got unscrambled," the man I had
once married and lived with quietly remarked.
"Wasn't that your intention?" I just as quietly inquired.
"It's what I've had forced on me," he retorted, with a protective
hardening of the Holbein-Astronomer jaw-line.
"I'm sorry," was all I could find to say.
He turned to the window and stared out at his big white iron fountain
set in his terraced lawn behind his endless cobble-stone walls. I
couldn't tell, of course, what he was thinking about. But I myself was
thinking of the past, the irrecoverable past, the irredeemable past,
the singing years of my womanly youth that seemed to be sealed in a
lowered coffin on which the sheltering earth would soon be heaped, on
which the first clods were already dropping with hollow sounds. We
each seemed afraid to look the other full in the eyes. So we armored
ourselves, as poor mortals must do, in the helmets of pretended
diffidence and the breast-plates of impersonality.
"How are you going back?" my husband finally inquired. Whatever ghosts
it had been necessary to lay, I could see, he had by this time laid.
He no longer needed to stare out at the white iron fountain of which
he was so proud.
"I've sent for the prairie-schooner," I told him.
His flush of anger rather startled me.
"Doesn't that impress you as rather cheaply theatrical?" he demanded.
"I fancy it will be very comfortable," I told him, without looking up.
I'd apparently been attributing to him feelings which, after all, were
not so desolating as I might have wished.
"Every one to his own taste," he observed as he called rather sharply
to Tokudo to bring him his humidor. Then he took out a cigar and
lighted it and ordered the car. And that was the lee and the long of
it. That was the way we faced our Great Divide, our forked trail that
veered off East and West into infinity!
_Thursday the Eleventh_
The trek is over. And it was not one of triumph. For we find
ourselves, sometimes, in deeper water than we imagine. Then we have to
choke and gasp for a while before we can get our breath back.
Peter, in the first place, didn't appear with the prairie-schooner. He
left that to come later in the day, with Whinnie and Struthers. He
appeared quite early Monday morning, with fire in his eye, and with a
demand to see the master of the house. Heaven knows what he had heard,
or how he had heard it. But the two men were having it hot and heavy
when I felt it was about time for me to step into the room. To be
quite frank, I had not expected any such outburst from Duncan. I knew
his feelings were not involved, and where you have a vacuum it is
impossible, of course, to have an explosion. I interpreted his
resentment as a show of opposition to save his face. But I was wrong.
And I was wrong about Peter. That mild-eyed man is no plaster saint.
He can fight, if he's goaded into it, and fight like a bulldog. He
was saying a few plain truths to Duncan, when I stepped into the room,
a few plain truths which took the color out of the Dour Man's face and
made him shake with anger.
"For two cents," Duncan was rather childishly shouting at him, "I'd
fill you full of lead!"
"Try it!" said Peter, who wasn't any too steady himself. "Try it, and
you'd at least end up with doing something in the open!"
Duncan studied him, like a prize-fighter studying his waiting
opponent.
"You're a cheap actor," he finally announced. "This sort of thing
isn't settled that way, and you know it."
"And it's not going to be settled the way you intended," announced
Peter Ketley.
"What do you know about my intentions?" demanded Duncan.
"Much more than you imagine," retorted Peter. "I've got your record,
McKail, and I've had it for three years. I've stood by, until now; but
the time has come when I'm going to have a hand in this thing. And
you're not going to get your freedom by dragging this woman's name
through a divorce-court. If there's any dragging to be done, it's
your carcass that's going to be tied to the tail-board!"
Duncan stood studying him with a face cheese-colored with hate.
"Aren't you rather double-crossing yourself?" he mocked.
"I'm not thinking about myself," said Peter.
"Then what's prompting all the heroics?" demanded Duncan.
"For two years and more, McKail," Peter cried out as he stepped closer
to the other man, "you've given this woman a pretty good working idea
of hell. And I've seen enough of it. It's going to end. It's got to
end. But it's not going to end the way you've so neatly figured out!"
"Then how do you propose to end it?" Duncan demanded, with a sort of
second-wind of composure. But his face was still colorless.
"You'll see when the time comes," retorted Peter.
"You may have rather a long wait," taunted Duncan.
"I have waited a number of years," answered the other man, with a
dignity which sent a small thrill up and down my spine. "And I can
wait a number of years more if I have to."
"We all knew, of course, that you were waiting," sneered my husband.
Peter turned to fling back an answer to that, but I stepped between
them. I was tired of being haggled over, like marked-down goods on a
bargain-counter. I was tired of being a passive agent before forces
that seemed stripping me of my last shred of dignity. I was tired of
the shoddiness of the entire shoddy situation.
And I told them so. I told them I'd no intention of being bargained
over, and that I'd had rather enough of men for the rest of my natural
life, and if Duncan wanted his freedom he was at liberty to take it
without the slightest opposition from me. And I said a number of other
things, which I have no wish either to remember or record. But it
resulted in Duncan staring at me in a resurrection-plant sort of way,
and in Peter rather dolorously taking his departure. I wanted to call
him back, but I couldn't carpenter together any satisfactory excuse
for his coming back, and I couldn't see any use in it.
So instead of journeying happily homeward in the cavernous old
prairie-schooner, I felt a bit ridiculous as Tokudo impassively
carried our belongings out to the canvas-covered wagon and Poppsy and
I climbed aboard. The good citizens of American Hill stared after us
as we rumbled down through the neatly boulevarded streets, and I felt
suspiciously like a gypsy-queen who'd been politely requested by the
local constabulary to move on.