FATE FLINGS OPEN A CLOSED DOOR
ROWAN McCOY drove his new car—it was a flivver, though they did not
call it that in those days—with the meticulous care of one who still
distrusts the intentions of the brute and his own skill at circumventing
them.
As he skidded to a halt in front of the store with brakes set hard a
woman came out to the porch and nodded to him. She waited until the
noise of the engine had died before she spoke:
“Going down to Wagon Wheel, Mac?”
“If I can stay with this gasoline bronc that far. Anything I can do for
you, Mrs. Stovall?”
The woman hesitated, her thin lips pressed tight in an habitual
expression of dry irony. She moved closer.
“That houn’ Joe Tait has been a-beatin’ up Norma again. She phoned up
she wanted to get down to the train. I’ve a fool notion she’s quittin’
him for good.”
The cattleman waited in silence. It was not a habit of his to waste
words.
“Wanted I should find someone to take her and her traps to Wagon Wheel.
But seems like everybody’s right busy all of a sudden.” A light sarcasm
filtered through the thin, cool voice of the postmistress. “Folks just
hate to be onneighbourly, but their team has done gone lame or the
wife’s sick or the wagon broke a wheel. O’ course it ain’t that any of
them’s afraid to mad that crazy gunman, Tait. Nothin’ like that.”
McCoy looked across at the blue-ribbed mountains. Mrs. Stovall noticed
that the muscles stood out like ropes on the brown cheeks of his
close-gripped jaw. She did not need to ask the reason. Everybody in the
Hill Creek country knew the story of Norma Davis and Rowan.
“I’m not asking you to take her, Mac,” the woman ran on sharply. “You
got more right to have a flat tire than Pete Henderson has to have——”
“Where is she?” interrupted the man.
“You’ll find her the yon side of the creek.”
Mrs. Stovall knew when she had said enough. Silently she watched him
crank the car and drive away. As he disappeared at the rim of the park a
faint, grim smile of triumph touched her sunken mouth.
“I ’most knew he’d take her,” she said aloud to herself. “Course
there’ll be a rookus between him and Joe Tait, but I reckon that’s his
business.”
At intervals during the morning that sardonic smile lit the wrinkled
face. It was an odd swing of the pendulum, she thought, that had
reversed the situation. Years ago Norma had run away from her lover with
good-for-nothing Joe Tait. Now she was escaping from Tait with McCoy by
her side. How far would fate carry the ironic jest? Mrs. Stovall was no
Puritan. If Norma could unravel some scattered threads of happiness from
the tangled skein of her wretched life, Martha Stovall cared little
whether she kept within the code or not. No woman was ever more entitled
to a divorce than the abused wife of the sheepman.
A woman came out from the cottonwoods beyond the ford to meet McCoy. She
was dressed in a cheap gown hopelessly out of date, and she carried a
telescope valise with two broken straps.
If any of the bitterness McCoy had felt toward her when his wound was
fresh survived the years it must have died now. Life had dealt harshly
with her. There had been a time when she was the belle of all this ranch
country, when she had bloomed with health and spirits, had been as full
of fire as an unbroken bronco. Now her step dragged. The spark of
frolicsome deviltry had long been quenched from her eye. Her pride had
been dragged in the dust, her courage brutally derided. Even the good
looks with which she had queened it were marred. She was on the way to
become that unattractive creature, the household drudge. Yet on her
latest birthday she had reached only the age of twenty-six.
At recognition of the man in the car she gave a startled little cry:
“You—Rowan!”
It was the first time they had been alone together in seven years, the
first time she had directly addressed him since the hour of their
quarrel. At the unexpectedness of the meeting emotion welled up in her
throat and registered there like the quicksilver in a thermometer.
He tossed her grip into the back of the car, along with his own, and
turned to help her to the seat beside the driver. For just an instant
she hesitated, then with a bitter, choking little laugh gave way. What
else could she do? It was merely another ironic blow of fate that the
lover she had discarded should be the man to help her fly from the
destiny her wilfulness had invited.
In silence they sat knee to knee while the car rolled the miles. The
distant hills and valleys which slid indistinguishably into each other
detached themselves as they approached, took on individuality, vanished
in the dusty rear.
Neither of them welcomed the chance that had thrown them together again.
It shocked the pride of the woman, put her under an obligation to the
man against whom she had nursed resentment for years. His presence
stressed the degradation into which she seemed to herself to have
fallen. For him, too, the meeting was untimely. To-day of all days he
wanted to forget the past, to turn over a page that was to begin the
story of a new record. Deliberately he had shut the door on the story of
his unhappy love for Norma Davis, and with an impish grin fate had flung
it open again.
The heady wilfulness of the girl had given place to the tight-lipped
self-repression of a suffering woman. Not once in all the years had she
complained to an outsider. But her flight was a confession. The stress
of her feeling overflowed into words bitter and stinging.
“You’ve got your revenge, Rowan McCoy. If I treated you shabbily you can
say ‘I told you so’ now. They used to say I was too proud. Maybe I was.
Well, I’ve been paid for it a thousand times. I’ve got mighty little to
be proud of to-day.”
“Norma!” he pleaded in a low voice.
With the instinct of one who bites on an ulcerated tooth to accent the
pain, she drew up a loose sleeve and showed him blue-and-yellow bruises.
“Look!” she ordered in an ecstasy of self-contempt. “I’ve hidden this
sort of thing for years—and worse—a hundred times worse.”
“The hound!” His strong, clenched teeth smothered the word.
Instantly the mood of the woman changed. She would have none of his
sympathy.
“I’m a fool,” she snapped. “I’ve made my bed. I’ll lie in it. This world
wasn’t built for women, anyhow. Why should I complain?”
Never a talkative man, McCoy said nothing now.
They had reached the Fryingpan, and the road wound down beside the
little river as it tumbled toward the plains over bowlders and around
them. The trout were feeding, and occasionally one leaped for a fly, a
flash of silver in the sunlight. Both of them recalled vividly the time
they had last gone fishing here. They had taken a picnic lunch, and it
had been on the way home that a quarrel had flashed between them about
the attentions of Joe Tait to her. That night she had eloped.
The woman noticed that McCoy was not wearing to-day the broad-rimmed
white felt hat and the wrinkled corduroys that were so much an
expression of his personality. He was in a new, dark suit, new shoes,
and an up-to-date straw hat. The suitcase that jostled her shabby
telescope valise would have done credit to a Chicago travelling
salesman.
“You’re going to take the train,” she suggested.
“To Cheyenne,” he answered.
“Why, I’m going to Laramie, if——”
She cut her sentence short. It was not to be presumed that he cared
where she was going. Moreover, she could not finish without telling more
than she wanted to. But McCoy guessed the condition. She would go if she
could borrow at Wagon Wheel the money for a ticket.
They drove into the county seat long before train time.
“Where shall I take you?” he asked.
“To Moody’s, if you will.”
He helped her from the car and carried the valise into the store. Moody
was in the cubby-hole that had been cut off from the store for an
office. Rowan hailed him cheerfully.
“Look here, Trent. What’s the best price you can give me for those
hides?” He walked toward the storekeeper and bargained with him audibly,
but he found time to slip in an undertone: “If Mrs. Tait wants any
money, give it to her. I’ll be responsible. But don’t tell her I said
so.”
Moody grinned dubiously. He was a little embarrassed and not a little
curious. “All right, Mac. Whatever you say.”
As Rowan went out of the office Norma timidly entered. Moody was a
tight, hard little man, and she did not expect him to let her have the
money. If he refused she did not know what she would do.
McCoy strolled down to the station to inquire about the lower he had
reserved in the Pullman.
“You’re in luck, Mac,” the station agent told him. “Travel is heavy.
There isn’t another berth left—not even an upper. You got the last.”
“Then I’m out of luck, Tim,” smiled the cattleman. “A lady from our part
of the country is going to Laramie. Give her my berth, but don’t let her
know I had reserved it. The lady is Mrs. Tait.”
A quarter of an hour later Norma Tait, not yet fully recovered from her
surprise at the ease with which she had acquired the small roll of bills
now in her pocketbook, learned from the station agent that there was one
sleeper berth left. She exchanged three dollars for the ticket, and sat
down to wait until the Limited arrived. It was a nervous hour she spent
before her train drew in, for at any moment her husband might arrive to
make trouble. That she saw nothing more of Rowan McCoy before the
Limited reached Wagon Wheel was a relief. Tait had always been jealous
of him, and would, she knew, jump to the wrong conclusion if he saw them
ready to leave together. At the first chance she vanished into the
Pullman.
Just as the conductor shouted his “All aboard!” a big, rawboned man
galloped up to the station and flung himself from the saddle. He caught
sight of McCoy standing by the last sleeper.
“What have you done with my wife?” he roared.
The train began to move. McCoy climbed to the step and looked down
contemptuously at the furious man. “Try not to be a fool, Tait,” he
advised.
The man running beside the train answered the spirit of the words rather
than the letter. “You’re a liar. She’s in that car. You’re running away
with her. You sneak, I’m going in to see.”
He caught at the railing to swing himself up.
The cattleman wasted no words. His left fist doubled, shot forward a
scant six inches, collided with the heavy chin of Tait. The big
sheepman’s head snapped back, and he went down heavily like a sack of
meal.