worried about."
"Why, goodness gracious!" she cried; "what's wrong with Shirley?"
"Look at her. That's all I ask--just look at her."
Mrs. Gatling, who was slightly near-sighted in more ways than one,
squinted at the withdrawing figure.
"Why, the child never seemed happier or healthier in her life," she
protested, still peering. "Why, only last Monday--or was it Tuesday;
no, Monday--I remember distinctly now it was Monday because that was
the day we got caught in the snow-storm coming through Swift Current
Pass--only last Monday you were saying yourself how well and rosy she
was looking."
"I don't mean that--she's a bunch of limber young whalebones. Look
where she's going! That's what I mean. Look what she's doing!"
"Why, what is she doing that's out of the way, I'd like to know?"
demanded his puzzled wife, now jealously on the defensive for her young.
"She's doing what she's been doing every chance she got these last
four-five days, that's what." Mr. Gatling was manifesting an attitude
somewhat common in husbands and fathers when dealing with their
domestic problems. He preferably would flank the subject rather than
bore straight at it, hoping by these round-about tactics to obtain
confirmation for his suspicions before he ever voiced them. "Got eyes
in your head, haven't you? All right then, use 'em."
"Hector Gatling, for a sane man, you do get the queerest notions in
your brain sometimes! What on earth possesses you? Hasn't the child a
perfect right to stroll down there and watch those three guides packing
up? You know she's been trying to learn to make that pearl knot or
turquoise knot or whatever it is they call it. What possible harm can
there be in her learning how to tie a pearl knot?"
"Diamond hitch, diamond hitch," he corrected her testily. "Not pearls,
but diamonds; not knots, but hitches! You'd better try to remember it,
too--diamonds and hitches usually figure in the thing that I've got on
my mind. And, if you'll be so kind as to observe her closely, you'll
see that it isn't those three guides she's so interested in. It's one
guide out of the three. And it's getting serious, or I'm all wrong. Now
then, do you get my drift, or must I make plans and specifications?"
"Oh!" The exclamation was freighted with shock and with sorrow but with
incredulity too.
"Oh!" said Mrs. Gatling again and now she was fluttering her feathers
in alarm, if a middle-aged lady dressed in tweed knickerbockers and a
Boy Scout's shirt may be said to have any feathers to flutter. "Oh,
Hector, you don't mean it! You can't mean it! A child who's traveled
and seen the world! A child who's had every advantage that wealth
and social position and all could give her! A child who's a member
of the Junior League! A child who's--who-- Hector, you're crazy.
Hector, you know it's utterly impossible--utterly! It's preposterous!"
Womanlike, she debated against a growing private dread. Then, still
being womanlike, she pressed the opposing side for proof to destroy
her counter-argument: "Hector, you've seen something--you've overheard
something. Tell me this minute what it was you overheard!"
"I've overheard nothing. Think I'm going snooping around eavesdropping
and spying on Shirley? I've never done any of that on her yet and I'm
too old to begin now--and too fat. But I've seen a-plenty."
"Oh, pshaw! I guess if there'd been anything afoot I'd have seen it
myself first, what with my mother's intuition and all! Oh, pshaw!" But
Mrs. Gatling's derisive rejoinder lacked conviction.
"I've had the feeling for longer than just these last few days,"
continued Mr. Gatling despondently. "But I couldn't put my hand on it,
not at first. I tried to fool myself by saying it was this Wild Western
flubdub and stuff getting into her blood and she'd get over it, soon as
the attack had run its course. First loading up with all that Indian
junk, then saying she felt as though she never wanted to do anything
but be natural and stay out here and rough it for the rest of her life,
and now here all of a sudden getting so much more flip and slangy than
usual. That's the worst symptom yet--that slang is.
"In your day, ma'am, when a girl fell in love or thought she had,
she went and got all mushed-up and sentimental; went mooning around
sentimentalizing and rhapsodizing and romanticking and everything.
All of you but the strong-minded ones did and I guess they must have
mushed-up some too, on the sly. Yes'm, that's what you did--you
mushed-up." His tone was accusing, condemning, as though he dealt with
ancient offenses which not even the passage of the years might condone.
"But now it's different with them. They get slangier and flippier and
they let on to make fun of their own affections. And that's what Miss
Shirley is doing right now, this very minute, or else I'm the worst
misled man in the entire state of Montana."
"Maybe--maybe--" The matron sputtered as her distress mounted. "Of
course I'm not admitting that you're right, Hector--the mere suggestion
of such a thing is simply incredible--but on the bare chance that the
child might be getting silly notions into her head, maybe I'd better
speak to her. I'm so much older than she is that--"
"You said it then!" With a grim firmness Mr. Gatling interrupted.
"You're so much older than she is; that's your trouble. And I'm
suffering from the same incurable complaint. People our age who've
got children growing up go around bleating that young people are
different from the way young people were when we were young. They're
not. They're just the same as we were--same impulses, same emotions,
same damphoolishness, same everything--but they've got a new way
of expressing 'em. And then we say we can't understand them. Knock
thirty years off of our lives and we'd understand all right because
then we'd be just the same as they are. So you'll not say a word to
that youngster of ours--not yet awhile, you won't. Nor me, neither."
Grammar, considered as such, never had meant very much to Mr. Gatling,
that masterful, self-educated man.
"But if I pointed out a few things to her--if I warned her--"
"Ma'am, you'll perhaps remember your own daddy wasn't so terribly happy
over the prospect when I started sparking you. After I'd come courting
and had gone on home again I guess it was as much as the old man could
do to keep from taking a shovel and shoveling my tracks out of the
front yard. But he had sense enough to keep his mouth shut where you
were concerned. Suppose he'd tried to influence you against me, tried
to break off the match--what would have happened? You'd have thought
you were oppressed and persecuted and you'd have grabbed for me even
quicker than you did."
"Why, Hector Gatling, I never grabbed--"
"I'm merely using a figure of speech. But no, he had too much gumption
to undertake the stern-father racket. He locked his jaw and took it out
in nasty looks and let nature take its course, and the consequence was
we got married in the First Methodist Church with bridesmaids and old
shoes and kins folks and all the other painful details instead of me
sneaking you out of a back window some dark night and us running off
together in a side-bar buggy. No, ma'am, if you'll take a tip from an
old retired yardmaster of the Lackawanna, forty-seven years, man and
boy, with one road, you'll--"
"You never worked a day as a railroad man and you know it."
"Just another figure of speech, my dear. Understand now, you're to keep
mum for a while and I keep mum and we just sit back in our reserved
seats up in the grandstand and see how the game comes out. A nice
polite quiet game of watchful waiting--that's our line and we're both
going to follow it. We'll stand by for future developments and then
maybe I'll frame up a little campaign. With your valuable advice and
assistance, of course!"
* * * * *
With a manner which she strove to make casual and unconcerned, the
disturbed Mrs. Gatling that day watched. It was the manner rather of a
solicitous hen with one lone chick, and she continually oppressed by
dreads of some lurking chicken-hawk. It would have deceived no one who
closely studied the lady's bearing and demeanor. But then, none in the
party closely studied these.
The camp dunnage being miraculously bestowed upon the patient backs
of various pack-animals, their expedition moved. They overtook and
passed Dad Wheelis and his crew, caravaning with provender for the
highway contractors on up under the cloud-combing parapet of the Garden
Wail Wall, and behind them heard for a while his frank and aboveboard
reflections upon the immediate ancestries, the present deplorable
traits, the darkened future prospects of his work stock. They swung
away from the rutted wagon track and took the steeper horseback trail
and for hours threaded it like so many plodding ants against the slant
of a tilted bowl. They stopped at midday on a little plateau fixed
so high toward heaven that it was a picture-molding on Creation's
wall above a vast mural of painted buttes and playful cataracts and a
straggling timber-line and two jeweled glaciers.
They stretched their legs and uncramped their backs; they ate and
remounted and on through the afternoon single-filed along the farther
slope where a family herd of mountain-goats browsed among the stones
and paid practically no heed to them. They saw a solitary bighorn
ram with a twisted double cornucopia springing out of his skull and
likewise they saw a pair of indifferent mule-deer and enough landscapes
to fill all the souvenir post-card racks of the world; for complete
particulars consult the official guide-book of Our National Playgrounds.
Evening brought them across a bony hip of the Divide to within sight of
the distant rear boundary of the governmental domain. So they pitched
the tents and coupled up the collapsible stove there in a sheltered
small cove in the Park's back yard and watched the sun go down in his
glory. When the moon rose it was too good to believe. You almost could
reach up and jingle the tambourines of little circling stars; anyhow,
you almost thought you could. It was a magic hour, an ideal place for
love-making among the young of the species. Realizing the which, Mrs.
Gatling had a severe sinking and apprehensive sensation directly behind
the harness buckle on the ample belt which girthed her weary form
amidships. She'd been apprehensive all day but now the sinking was more
pronounced.
She strained at the tethers of her patience though until supper
was over and it was near hushaby-time for the tired forms of the
middle-aged. Within the shelter of their small tent she spoke then to
her husband, touching on the topic so stedfastly uppermost in her brain.
"Oh, Hector," she quavered, "I'm actually beginning to be afraid you're
right. They've been together this livelong day. Neither one of them had
eyes for anything or anybody else. The way he helped her on and off her
horse! The way he fetched and carried for her! And the way she let him
do it! And they're--they're together outside now. Oh, Hector!"
"They certainly are," he stated. "Sitting on a slab of rock in that
infernal moonlight like a couple of feeble-minded turtle-doves. Why
in thunder couldn't it 'a' rained tonight--good and hard? Romola, I
don't want to harry you up any more than's necessary but you take,
say, about two or three more nights like this and they're liable to do
considerable damage to tender hearts."
"Don't I know it? O-oh, Hector!"
"Well, anyhow, I had the right angle on the situation before you
tumbled," he said with a sort of melancholy satisfaction. "I can give
myself credit for that much intelligence anyhow." It was quite plain
that he did.
He stepped, a broad shape in his thick pajamas and quilted
sleeping-boots, to the door flap and he drew the canvas back and peeped
through the opening.
The pair under discussion had found the night air turning chill and
their perch hard. They got up and stood side by side in the shimmering
white glow. Against a background of luminous blue-black space, it
revealed their supple figures in strong, sharp relief. The youth made a
handsome shadowgraph. His wide-brimmed sugar-loaf hat; his blue flannel
blouse with its flaunting big buttons; his Angora chaps with wings
on them that almost were voluminous enough for an eagle's wings; his
red silk neckerchief reefed in by a carved bone ring to fit a throat
which Mr. Gatling knew to be sun-tanned and wind-tanned to a healthy
mahogany-brown; his beaded, deep-cuffed gauntlets; his sharp-toed,
high-heeled, silver-roweled boots of a dude cowboy--they all matched
and modeled in with the slender waist and the flat thighs and the
sinewy broad shoulders and the alert head of the wearer.
His name was Hayes Tripler, but the other two guides generally called
him "Slick" and they looked up to him, for he had ridden No Name,
the man-killer, at last year's Pendleton Round-up and hoped this
year to be in the bulldogging money over the line at Calgary. Within
his limitations he was an exceedingly competent person and given to
deporting himself accordingly.
At this present moment he appeared especially well pleased with his own
self-cast horoscope. There was a kind of proud proprietary aura all
about him.
The watcher inside the tent saw a caressing arm slip from about his
daughter's body and he caught the sounds but did not make out the sense
of words that passed between them. Then the two silhouettes swung apart
and the boy laughed contentedly and flung an arm aloft in a parting
salute and began singing a catch as he went teetering off toward the
spot where his mates of the outfit already were making the low tilt of
a tarpaulin roof above them pulse to some very sincere snoring. But
before she betook herself to quarters, the girl bided for a long minute
on the verge of the cliff and looked off and away into the studded void
beyond her. She seemed to be checking up on the minor stars to see
whether any of them were missing. But her father knew better than that.
The sidewise cant of her head showed that one of the things she did
was to listen while her late companion served due notice on the night
to such effect as this:
"You monkey with my Lulu,
Tell you what I'll do:
Take out a gun and shoot you,
And carve you plenty too!"
Mr. Gatling drew the flaps together in an abstracted way and _mmphed_
several times.
"Pretty dog-gone spry-looking young geezer at that," he remarked
absently. "Yes, sir, pretty spry-looking."
"Who?"
"Him."
"You actually mean that cowboy?"
"None other than which."
"Oh, Hector! That--that vulgarian, that country bumpkin, that
clodhopper!"
"Now hold on there, Romola. Let's try to be just even if we are
prejudiced. All the clods that kid ever hopped you could put 'em in
your eye without interfering with your eyesight. He's no farm-hand;
he's a cow-hand or was before he got this job of steering tourists
around through these mountains--and that's a very different thing, I
take it. And what he knows he knows blame' well. I wish I could mingle
in with a horse the way he does. When he gets in a saddle he's riveted
there but I only come loose and work out of the socket. And I'd give
about five years off my life to be able to handle a trout-rod like
he can. I claim that in his departments he's a fairly high-grade
proposition. He's aware of it, too, but I don't so much blame him for
that, either. If you don't think well of yourself who else is going to?"
"Why, Hector Gatling, I believe you're really--but no, you couldn't
be! Look at the difference in their stations! Look at their different
environments! Look at their different view-points!"
"I'm looking--just as hard as you are. You don't get what I'm driving
at. I wouldn't fancy having this boy for a son-in-law any more than
you would--although at that I'm not saying I couldn't maybe make some
use of him in another capacity. Still, you needn't mind worrying
so much about their respective stations in life. I didn't have any
station in life to start from myself--it was a whistling-post. And
yet I've managed to stagger along fairly well. I'd a heap rather see
Shirley tied up to pretty near any decent, ambitious, self-respecting
young cuss that came along than to have her fall for one of those
plush-headed lounge-lizards that keep hanging round her back home. I
know the breed. In my day they used to be guitar-pickers--and some of
'em played a snappy game of Kelly pool. Now they're Charleston dancers
and the only place most of 'em carry any weight is on the hip.
"But that's not the point. The point is that if Shirley fell for this
party she'd probably be a mighty regretful young female when the bloom
began to rub off the peach. They haven't been raised to talk the
same language--that's the trouble. I don't want her to make a mistake
that'll gum up her life before it's fairly started; don't want that
happening any more than you do. I don't want her to have a husband that
she's liable later on to be ashamed to show him off before the majority
of her friends, or anyhow one that she'd maybe have to go around
making excuses for the way he handled his knife and fork in company;
or something. Right now, the fix she's in, she's probably saying to
herself that she could be perfectly satisfied to settle down in a cabin
somewhere out here and wet-nurse a lot of calves for the next forty or
fifty years. But that's only her heart talking, not her head. After a
while she'd get to brooding on Palm Beach.
"But if she's set her mind--and you know how stubborn she is when she
gets her mind set--thank Heavens she didn't get that from my side of
the family!--I say, if she's set her mind on him, Heavens above only
knows what's going to happen. She's bewitched, she's hypnotized; it's
this free-and-easy Western life that's fascinated her. I can't believe
she's in love with him!"
"Well, I don't know. Maybe she's in love with a two-gallon hat and
a pair of cowboy pants with silver dewdabs down the sides, or then
again on the other hand maybe it's the real thing with her, or a close
imitation of it. That's for us to find out if we can."
"I won't believe it. She's distracted, she's glamoured, she's--"
"All right, then, let's get her unglammed."
"But how?"
"Well, for one thing, by not rushing in and interfering with her little
dream. By not letting either one of 'em see how anxious we are over
this thing. By remaining as calm, cool and collected as we can."
"And in the meanwhile?"
"Well, in the meanwhile I, for one, am going to tear off a few winks.
I hurt all over and there's quite a lot of me measured that way--all
over."
"You can go to sleep with that--that dreadful thought hanging over us?"
"I can and I will. Watch me for about another minute and you'll see me
doing it." He settled himself on his air mattress and drew the blankets
over him.
"Well, I know I won't close my eyes this whole night through."
"I've heard you say that before and then had to shake you like a dish
towel in the morning to make you snap out of it."
"This time I won't. I don't want to sleep. I want to plan something
since you won't help me. Hector"--she reached across from her side and
plucked at his top coverlid--"Hector, listen, I've got an idea--let's
break off this trip tomorrow. Let's bundle right up and start back
East. You can say you've got a message calling you back to the
office--say you forgot something important, say--"
"And tip our hands just at the most critical time! We will not!...
Mmph!" With a drowsy scornfulness he added this. Ten seconds later he
_mmphed_ again, then again. But the third one merged into a snore.
Undeniably Mr. Hector Gatling could be one of the most aggravating
persons on earth when he set out to be. Any husband can.
* * * * *
Speaking with regard to the ripening effect of summer nights upon the
spirits of receptive and impressionable youth, Mr. Gatling had listed
the cumulative possibilities of three moonlit ones hand-running.
Specifically he had not included in his perilous category those
languishing soft gloamings and those explosive sunrises and those long
lazy mornings when the sun baked resiny perfumes out of the cedars,
and the unseen heart-broken little bird that the mountaineers call the
lonesome bird sang his shy lament in the thickets; nor had he mentioned
slow journeys through deep defiles where the ferns grew with a tropical
luxuriance out of the cinders of old forest-fires and, in a paradoxical
defiance, shook their fronds toward the never-melting snow-caps on the
_sierras_ across the cañon; nor yet the fordings of tumbling streams
when it might seem expedient on the part of a thoughtful young man to
push up alongside and steady a young equestrian of the opposite sex
while her horse's hoofs fumbled over the slick, drowned boulders. But
vaguely he had lumped all these contingencies.
Three more nights of moon it was with three noble days of pleasant
adventuring in between; and on the late afternoon of the third day
when camp was being made beside a river which mostly was rapids, Miss
Shirley Gatling sought out her father in a secluded spot somewhat apart
from the rest. It was in the nature of a rendezvous, she having told
him a little earlier that presently she desired to have speech with
him. Only, her way of putting it had been different.
"Harken, O most revered Drawing Account," she said, dropping back on
a broad place in the trail to be near him. "If you can spare the time
for being saddle-sore I want to give you an earful as soon as this
procession, as of even date, breaks up. You find a quiet retreat away
from the flock and wait there until I find you, savvy?"
So now he was waiting, and from yonder she came toward him, stepping
lightly, swinging forward from her hips with a sort of impudent freedom
of movement; and to his father's eyes she never had seemed more
graceful or more delectable or more independent-looking.
"Dad," she began, without preamble, and meeting him eye to eye, "in me
you behold a Sabine woman. I'm bespoken."
"Mmph," he answered, and the answer might be interpreted, by a person
who knew him, in any one of half a dozen ways.
"Such is the case," she went on, quite unafraid. "That caveman over
there in the blue shirt"--she pointed--"he's the nominee. We're
engaged."
"I can't plead surprise, kid," he stated, taking on for the moment
her bantering tone. "The report that you two had come to a sort of
understanding has been in active circulation on this reservation for
the past forty-eight hours or so--maybe longer."
Her eyebrows went up.
"I don't get you," she said. "Who circulated it?"
"You did, for one," he told her. "And he did, for another. I may be
failing, what with increasing age and all, but I'm not more than half
blind yet. Have you been to your mother with this piece of news?"
"I came to you first. I--I"--for the first time she faltered an
instant--"I figured you might be able to get the correct slant a little
quicker than she would. This is only the curtain-raiser. I'm saving the
big scene with the melodramatic touches for her. I have a feeling that
she may be just a trifle difficult. So I picked on something easy to
begin with."
"I see," he said. "Kind of an undress rehearsal, eh?" He held her off
at arm's length from him, studying her face hungrily. "But what's the
reason your young man didn't come along with you or ahead of you,
in fact? In my time it generally was the young man that brought the
message to Garcia."
"He wanted to come--he wasn't scared. I wouldn't let him. I told
him I'd been knowing you longer than he had and I could handle
the job better by myself. Well, that's your cue. What's it
going to be, daddy--the glad hand of approval and the parental
bless you, my children, bless you, or a little line of that
go-forth-ungrateful-hussy-and-never-darken-my-doors-again stuff?
Only, we're a trifle shy on doors around here."
He drew her to him and spoke downward at the top of her cropped head,
she snuggling her face with a quick nervous little jerk against his
wool-clad breast.