WHEN EMOTIONS ARE BOTTLED
One day, when the sun was warm and the breeze that filtered down the
gorge was pleasantly cool, Ward straightened his aching back, waded out
to dry ground, and sat down to rest a few minutes and make a smoke.
His interest in the work had oozed steadily since sunrise, and left
nothing but the back-breaking toil. He had found a nugget the size of
a hazelnut in the second pan that morning, so it was not discouragement
that had made his monotonous movements grow slow and reluctant. Until
he had smoked half the cigarette, he himself did not know what it was
that ailed him. Then he flung up his head quite suddenly and gave a
snort of understanding.
"Hang the gold! I'm going visiting for a change."
He concealed the goldpan and his pick, shovel, and sacks in the clump
of service berries and chokeberries that grew at the foot of the ledge
and hid from view the bank where he dug out his pay dirt. That did not
take more than two or three minutes, and he made them up after he had
swung into the saddle on the farther hillside. It was not a good
trail, and except for his first exultant ride home that way, he had
ridden it at a walk. Now he made Rattler trot where loping was too
risky; and so he came clattering down the steep trail into the little
flat beside his cabin. He would have something to eat, and feed
Rattler a little hay, and then ride on to the Wolverine. And now that
he had yielded to his hunger to see the one person in the world for
whom he felt any tenderness, he grudged every minute that separated him
from her. He loosened the cinch with one or two yanks and left the
saddle on Rattler, to save time. He turned him loose in the hay corral
with the bridle off, rather than spend the extra minutes it would take
to put him in a stall and carry him a forkful of hay. He thought he
would not bother to start a fire and boil coffee; he would eat the
sour-dough bread and fried rabbit hams he had taken with him for lunch,
and he would start down the creek in half an hour. He imagined himself
an extremely sensible young man and considerate of his horse's comfort,
to give him thirty precious minutes in which to eat hay. It was not
absolutely necessary; Rattler could travel forty miles instead of
twenty without another mouthful, so far as that was concerned. Ward
was simply behaving in a perfectly normal manner and was not letting
his feelings get the better of him in the slightest degree. As to his
impromptu vacation, he was certainly entitled to it; he ought to have
taken one long ago, he told himself virtuously. He had panned dirt all
day, the Fourth of July; that was last week, he believed. And he had
not made more than two dollars, either. No, he was not behaving
foolishly at all. He had himself well in hand.
Then he flung open the door of his cabin and went white with sheer
astonishment.
"'Lo, Ward!" Billy Louise had been standing behind the door, and she
jumped out at him, laughing, just as if she were ten years old instead
of nearly twenty.
Ward tried to say, "'Lo, Bill," in return, but the words would not
come. His lips trembled too much, and his voice was pinched out in his
throat. His mind refused to tell him what he ought to do; but his arms
did not wait upon his paralyzed mental processes. They shot out of
their own accord, caught Billy Louise, and brought her close against
his pounding heart. Ward was startled and a little shocked at what he
had done, but he held her closer and closer, until Billy Louise was
gasping from something more than surprise.
Next, Ward's lips joined the mutiny against his reason, and laid
themselves upon the parted, panting lips of Billy Louise, as though
that was where they belonged.
Billy Louise had probably not expected anything like that, though of a
truth one can never safely guess at what is in the mind of a girl. She
tried to pull herself free, and when she could make no impression upon
the grip of those arms--they had been growing muscles of iron
manipulating that goldpan, remember!--she very sensibly yielded to
necessity and stood still.
"Stop, Ward! You--I--you haven't any right to--"
"Well, give me the right, then." Ward managed to find voice enough to
make the demand, and then he kissed her many times before he attempted
to say another word. Lord, but he had been hungry for her, these last
three months!
"You'll give me the right, won't you, Wilhemina?" he murmured against
her ear, brushing a lock of hair away with his lips. "You know you
belong to me, don't you? And I belong to you--body and soul. You know
that, don't you? I've known it ever since the world was made. I knew
it when God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. You were
it."
"You sill-y thing." Billy Louise did not seem to know whether she
wanted to laugh or cry. "What do you think you're talking about,
anyway?"
"About the way the world was made." Ward loosened his clasp a little
and looked down deep into her eyes. "My world, I mean." He bent and
kissed her again, gravely and very, very tenderly. "Oh, Wilhemina, you
know--" he waited, gazing down with that intent look which had a new
softness behind it--"you know there's nothing in this world but you.
As far as I'm concerned, there isn't. There never will be."
Billy Louise reached up her hands to his shoulders and tried to give
him a shake. "Is that why you've stuck yourself in these hills for
three whole months and never come near? You fibber!"
"That's why, lady-girl. I've been sticking here, working like one
son-of-a-gun--for you. So I could have you sooner." He lifted his
bent head and looked around the little cabin like a man who has just
wakened to his surroundings. "I knocked off work a little while ago,
and I was going to see you. I couldn't stand it any longer. And--here
you iss!" he went on, giving her shoulders a little squeeze. "A
straight case of 'two souls with but a single thought,' don't you
reckon?"
Billy Louise, by a visible effort, brought the situation down to earth.
She twisted herself free and went over to the stove and saved a
frying-pan of potatoes from burning to a crisp.
"I don't know about your soul," she said, glancing back at him. "I
happen to have two or three thoughts in mine. One is that I'm half
starved. The second is that you're not acting a bit nice, under the
circumstances; no perfectly polite young man makes love to a girl when
she is supposedly helpless and under his protection." She stopped
there to wrinkle her nose at him and twist her mouth humorously. "The
third thought is that if you don't behave, I shall go straight home and
never be nice to you again. And," she added, getting back of the
coffee-pot--which looked new--"the rest of my soul is one great big
blob of question-marks. If you can eat and talk at the same time, you
may tell me what this frantic industry is all about. If you can't,
I'll have to wait till after dinner; not even my curiosity is going to
punish my poor tummy any longer." She pulled a pan of biscuits from
the oven, lifted them out one at a time with dainty little nabs because
they were hot, and stole a glance now and then at Ward from under her
eyebrows.
Ward stood and looked at her until the food was all on the table. He
was breathing unnaturally, and his jaws were set hard together. When
she pushed a box up to the table and sat down upon it, and rested her
elbows on the oilcloth and looked straight at him with her chin nested
in her two palms, he drew a long breath, hunched his shoulders with
some mental surrender, and grinned wryly.
"So be it," he yielded, throwing his hat upon the bunk. "I kinda
overplayed my hand, anyway. I most humbly ask your pardon!" He bowed
farcically and took up the wash-basin from its bench just outside the
door.
"You see, William Louisa," he went on quizzically, when he had seated
himself opposite her and was helping himself to the potatoes, "when a
young lady invades strange territory, and hides behind strange doors,
and jumps out at an unsuspecting but terribly well-meaning young man,
she's apt to get a surprise. When emotions are bottled--"
"Never mind the bottled emotions. I'd like some potatoes, if you don't
want them all. I see you haven't the faintest idea how to treat a
guest. Charlie Fox would have died before he would help himself and
set down the dish away out of my reach. You could stick pins into him
till he howled, but you couldn't make him be rude to a lady."
"I'd sure like to," muttered Ward ambiguously and handed her every bit
of food within his reach.
"You can talk and eat at the same time, I see. So tell me what you've
been doing all this while." Billy Louise spoke lightly, even
flippantly, but her eyes were making love to him shyly, whether she
knew it or not.
"Working," answered Ward promptly and briefly. He was thinking at the
rate of a million thoughts a minute, it seemed to him, and he was
afraid to let go of himself and say what he thought. One thing he knew
beyond all doubt, and that was that he must be careful or he would see
his air-castle blow up in small fragments and come down a hopeless
ruin. He needed time to think, and Billy Louise was not giving him
even a minute. So he clutched at two decisions which instinct told him
might help him win to safety: He would not make love, and he would not
tell Billy Louise about the gold.
"Working! Well, so have I. But working at what? Did you hire out to
Junkins again? I thought you said you wouldn't till fall." Billy
Louise was watching Ward rather closely, perhaps to see how far she
might trust his recovered inscrutability. "Why don't you show some
human inquisitiveness about my being here?" she asked irrelevantly,
just as Ward was hastily choosing how he would answer her without
saying too much.
"It wouldn't be polite to be inquisitive about a lady, would it?" Ward
retorted, thankful for the change of subject.
"N-no--but, then, you never bother about being just polite! Charlie
Fox would--"
"Charlie Fox would think you came to see him," Ward asserted
uncharitably. "My head isn't swelled to that extent. Why did you
come, anyway?"
"To see you." Billy Louise lost her nerve when she saw the light leap
into his eyes. "To see whether you were dead or not," she revised
hastily, "so mommie would stop worrying about you. Mommie has pestered
the life out of me for the last month, thinking you might be sick or
hurt or something. So--I was riding up this way, anyway, and--"
"I see I'll have to ride down and prove to mommie that I'm very much
alive. I'm sure glad to know that somebody takes an interest in me--as
if I were a real human." Ward's eyes watched furtively her face, but
Billy Louise refused even to nibble at the bait.
"Why didn't you come before, then? You know mommie likes to have you."
"How about mommie's child?" Ward's look was dangerous to his good
resolutions.
"Listen here, Ward." Billy Louise took refuge behind her terrible
frankness. "If you make love, I won't like you half as well. Don't
you know that all the time when I used to play with my pretend Ward
Warren, he--he never made love?" A dimple tried to show itself in her
cheek and was sent about its business with a twist of her lips. "My
pretend Ward was lovely; he liked me to pieces, but he never came right
out and said so. He--he skated around the subject--" Billy Louise
illustrated the skating process by drawing her forefinger in a wide
circle around her cup. "He made love--with his eyes--and he kissed me
with his--voice--but he never spoiled it with words."
Ward grunted a word that sounded like "damchump."
"Nothing of the kind!" Billy Louise flew to the defense of her
"pretend." "He knew just exactly how a girl likes to be made love to.
And, anyway, you've been doing the selfsame thing yourself, Ward
Warren, till just now. And--"
"Oh, have I?"
"Yes, you have. And I might have known better than to--to startle you.
You always, eternally, do something nobody'd ever dream of your doing.
The first time, when I threw that chip, you pulled a gun on me--" The
voice of Billy Louise squeezed down to a wisp of a whisper. Her eyes
were remorseful. "Oh, Ward, I didn't mean to--to--"
"It's all right. I've got it coming." It was as if a mask had dropped
before Ward's features. Even his eyes looked strange and hard in that
face of set muscles, though the thin, bitter lips and quivering
nostrils showed that there was feeling behind it all. "I see where
you're right, William. You needn't be afraid; I won't make love again."
Billy Louise looked as though she wanted to beat something--herself,
most likely. She stared as they stare who watch from the dock while a
loved one slips farther and farther away on a voyage from which there
may be no return; only Billy Louise was not one to watch and do nothing
else.
"Now, Ward, don't be silly." The fright in her voice was overlaid with
a sharpened tenderness. "You know perfectly well I didn't mean that.
You're only proving that in the human problem you're raised to-- Stop
looking darning-needles at that coffee-pot and listen here!" Billy
Louise leaned over the table and caught at his nearest hand, which was
a closed fist. With her own little fingers digging persistently into
the tensed muscles, she pried the fist open. "Ward, behave yourself,
or I'll go straight home!" She held his straightened fingers in her
own and drew a sharp breath because they lay inert--dead things so far
as any response came to her clasp; the first and middle fingers
yellowed a little from cigarettes, the nails soft and pink from much
immersion in water. A tale they told, if Billy Louise had been paying
attention.
"Ward, you certainly are--the limit! You know as well as I do that
that doesn't make a particle of difference. If I had been a boy
instead of a girl, and had bucked the world for a living, I'd probably
have done worse; and, anyway, it doesn't matter!" Her voice rose as if
she were growing desperate. "I--I--like you--to pieces, Ward, and
I'd--I'd rather marry you--than anyone else. But I don't want to think
about that for a long while. I don't want to be engaged, or--or any
different than the way we've been. It was good to be just pals. It
was like my pretend Ward. I--I always wanted him--to love me, but I
wouldn't play that he--told me, Ward. Oh, don't you see?" She shut
her teeth hard together, because if she hadn't she would have been
crying in another ten seconds.
"I see." Ward spoke dully, evenly, and he still stared at the
coffee-pot with that gimlet gaze of his that made Billy Louise want to
scream. "I see a whole lot that I'd been shutting my eyes to. Why
don't you feel insulted--"
"Ward Warren, if you're going to act like a--a--" I suspect that Billy
Louise, in her desperation, was tempted to use a swear word, but she
resisted the temptation. She got up and went around to him, hesitated
while she looked down at his set face, drew a long breath, and blinked
back some tears of self-reproach because of the devils of memory she
had unwittingly turned loose to jibe at this man.
"This is why," she said softly; and leaning, she pressed her lips down
upon his bitter ones and let them lie there for a dozen heart-beats.
Ward's face relaxed, and his eyes went to hers with the hungry
tenderness she had seen so often there. He leaned his head against her
and threw up an arm to clasp her close. He did not say a word.
"After I have kissed a man," said Billy Louise, struggling back to her
old whimsical manner, "it won't be a bit polite for him to have any
doubts of my feelings toward him, or my belief in him, or his belief in
himself." Her fingers tangled themselves in his hair, just where the
wave was the most pronounced.
She had drawn the poison. Now she set herself to restore a perfectly
normal atmosphere.
"He's going to be just exactly the same good pal he was before," she
went on, speaking softly. "And he's going to bring some water so I can
wash the dishes, and then bring Blue so I can go home, and he isn't
going to say a single thing more about--anything that matters two
whoops."
Ward's clasp tightened and then grew loose. He drew a long breath and
let her go.
"You do like me--a little bit, don't you?" His eyes were like the eyes
of the damned asking for water.
"I like you two little bits." Billy Louise took his face between her
two palms and smiled down at him bravely, with the pure candor that was
a part of her. "But I don't want us to be anything but pals; not for a
long while. It's so good, just being friends. And once we get away
from that point, we can't go back to it again, ever. And I'm sure it's
good enough to be worth while making it last as long as we can. So
now--"
"It's going to be quite a contract, Wilhemina." Ward still looked at
her with his heart in his eyes.
"Oh, no, it won't! You've had lots of practice," Billy Louise assured
him confidently and began putting the few dishes in a neat little pile.
"And, anyway, you are perfectly able to handle any kind of a contract.
All you need do is make up your mind. And that's made up already. So
the next thing on the programme is to bring a bucket of water. Did you
notice anything different about your cabin? I thought you bragged to
me about being such a good housekeeper! Why, you hadn't swept the
floor, even, since goodness knows when. And I've made up a bundle of
your dirty shirts and things that I found under the bed, and I'm going
to take them home and let Phoebe wash them. She can do them this
evening and have them ready for you to bring back to-morrow. When I
was a kid and went to see Marthy and Jase, I used to promise them
cookies with 'raisings' in the middle. I thought there was nothing
better in the world. I was just thinking--I'll maybe bake you some
cookies with raisings on top, to bring home. You don't seem to waste
much time cooking stuff. Bacon and beans, and potatoes and sour-dough
bread: that seems to be your regular bill of fare. And tomatoes for
Sunday, I reckon; I saw some empty cans outside. Don't you ever feel
like coming down to the ranch and getting a square meal?"
"Oh, you William the Conqueror!" Ward stood with the water bucket in
his hand, and looked at her with that smile hidden just behind his lips
and his eyes. "You sure sabe how to make things come your way, don't
you?" He started for the door, stopped with his toes over the
threshold, and looked back at her. "If I knew how to get what I want,
as easily as you do," he said, "we'd be married and keeping house
before to-morrow night!" He laughed grimly at the start she gave. "As
it is, you're the doctor, William Louisa. We remain mere friends!"
With that he went off to the creek.
He was gone at least four times as long as was necessary, but he came
back whistling, and he did not make love to her except with his eyes.