I Begin to Realize.
If I had hoped that I'd gotten over any foolishness by spending the fall
and winter away from White Divide--or the sight of it--I commenced right
away to find out my mistake. No sooner did the big ridge rise up from the
green horizon, than every scar, and wrinkle, and abrupt little peak fairly
shouted things about Beryl King.
She wasn't there; she was back in New York, and that blasted Terence
Weaver was back there, too, making all kinds of love to her according to
the letters of Edith. But I hadn't realized just how seriously I was
taking it, till I got within sight of the ridge that had sheltered her
abiding-place and had made all the trouble.
Like a fool I had kept telling myself that I was fair sick for the range;
for range-horses and range-living; for the wind that always blows over the
prairies, and for the cattle that feed on the hills and troop down the
long coulée bottoms to drink at their favorite watering-places. I thought
it was the boys I wanted to see, and to gallop out with them in the soft
sunrise, and lie down with them under a tent roof at night; that I wanted
to eat my meals sitting cross-legged in the grass, with my plate piled
with all the courses at once and my cup of coffee balanced precariously
somewhere within reach.
That's what I thought. When things tasted flat in old Frisco, I wasn't
dead sure why, and maybe I didn't want to be sure why. When I couldn't get
hold of anything that had the old tang, I laid it all to a hankering after
round-up.
Even when we drove around the end of White Divide, and got up on a ridge
where I could see the long arm that stretched out from the east side of
King's Highway, I wouldn't own up to myself that there was the cause of
all my bad feelings. I think Frosty knew, all along; for when I had sat
with my face turned to the divide, and had let my cigarette go cold while
I thought and thought, and remembered, he didn't say a word. But when
memory came down to that last ride through the pass, and to Shylock shot
down by the corral, at last to Frosty standing, tall and dark, against the
first yellow streak of sunrise, while I rode on and left him afoot beside
a half-dead horse, I turned my eyes and looked at his thin, thoughtful
face beside me.
His eyes met mine for half a minute, and he had a little twitching at the
corners of his mouth. "Chirk up," he said quietly. "The chances are she'll
come back this summer."
I guess I blushed. Anyway, I didn't think of anything to say that would be
either witty or squelching, and could only relight my cigarette and look
the fool I felt. He'd caught me right in the solar plexus, and we both
knew it, and there was nothing to say. So after awhile we commenced
talking about a new bunch of horses that dad had bought through an agent,
and that had to be saddle-broke that summer, and I kept my eyes away from
White Divide and my mind from all it meant to me.
The old ranch did look good to me, and Perry Potter actually shook hands;
if you knew him as well as I do you'd realize better what such a
demonstration means, coming from a fellow like him. Why, even his lips are
always shut with a drawstring--from the looks--to keep any words but what
are actually necessary from coming out. His eyes have the same look, kind
of pulled in at the corners. No, don't ever accuse Perry Potter of being a
demonstrative man, or a loquacious one.
I had two days at the ranch, getting fitted into the life again; on the
third the round-up started, and I packed a "war-bag" of essentials, took
my last summer's chaps down off the nail in the bunk-house where they had
hung all that time as a sort of absent-but-not-forgotten memento, one of
the boys told me, and started out in full regalia and with an enthusiasm
that was real--while it lasted.
If you never slept on the new grass with only a bit of canvas between you
and the stars; if you have never rolled out, at daylight, and dressed
before your eyes were fair open, and rushed with the bunch over to the
mess-wagon for your breakfast; if you have never saddled hurriedly a
range-bred and range-broken cayuse with a hump in his back and seven
devils in his eye, and gone careening across the dew-wet prairie like a
tug-boat in a choppy sea; if you have never--well, if you don't know what
it's all like, and how it gets into the very bones of you so that the
hankering never quite leaves you when you try to give it up, I'm not going
to tell you. I can't. If I could, you'd know just how heady it made me
feel those first few days after we started out to "work the range."
I was fond of telling myself, those days, that I'd been more scared than
hurt, and that it was the range I was in love with, and not Beryl King at
all. She was simply a part of it--but she wasn't the whole thing, nor even
a part that was going to be indispensable to my mental comfort. I was a
free man once more, and so long as I had a good horse under me, and a
bunch of the right sort of fellows to lie down in the same tent with,
I wasn't going to worry much over any girl.
That, for as long as a week; and that, more than pages of description,
shows you how great is the spell of the range-land, and how it grips a
man.