It had required but one generation to ripen the fruits of "Old Ed"
Austin's lawlessness, and upon his son heredity had played one of her
grimmest pranks. The father had had faults, but they were those of his
virtues; he had been a strong man, at least, and had "ridden herd" upon
his unruly passions with the same thoroughness as over his wild cattle.
The result was that he had been universally respected. At first the son
seemed destined to be like his father. It was not until "Young Ed" had
reached his full manhood that his defects had become recognizable evil
tendencies, that his infirmity had developed into a disease. Like
sleeping cancers, the Austin vices had lain dormant in him during
boyhood; it had required the mutation from youth to manhood, and the
alterative effect of marriage, to rouse them; but, once awakened, their
ravages had been swift and destructive. Ed's marriage to Alaire had
been inevitable. They had been playmates, and their parents had
considered the union a consummation of their own lifelong friendship.
Upon her mother's death, Alaire had been sent abroad, and there she
remained while "Young Ed" attended an Eastern college. For any child
the experience would have been a lonesome one, and through it the
motherless Texas girl had grown into an imaginative, sentimental
person, living in a make-believe world, peopled, for the most part,
with the best-remembered figures of romance and fiction. There were, of
course, some few flesh-and-blood heroes among the rest, and of these
the finest and the noblest had been "Young Ed" Austin.
When she came home to marry, Alaire was still very much of a child, and
she still considered Ed her knight. As for him, he was captivated by
this splendid, handsome girl, whom he remembered only as a shy,
red-headed little comrade.
Never was a marriage more propitious, never were two young people more
happily situated than these two, for they were madly in love, and each
had ample means with which to make the most of life.
As Las Palmas had been the elder Austin's wedding-gift to his son, so
Alaire's dowry from her father had been La Feria, a grant of lands
across the Rio Grande beyond the twenty-league belt by which Mexico
fatuously strives to guard her border. And to Las Palmas had come the
bride and groom to live, to love, and to rear their children.
But rarely has there been a shorter honeymoon, seldom a swifter
awakening. Within six months "Young Ed" had killed his wife's love and
had himself become an alcoholic. Others of his father's vices revived,
and so multiplied that what few virtues the young man had inherited
were soon choked. The change was utterly unforeseen; its cause was
rooted too deeply in the past to be remedied. Maturity had marked an
epoch with "Young Ed"; marriage had been the mile-post where his whole
course veered abruptly.
To the bride the truth had come as a stunning tragedy. She was
desperately frightened, too, and lived a nightmare life, the while she
tried in every way to check the progress of that disintegration which
was eating up her happiness. The wreck of her hopes and glad imaginings
left her sick, bewildered, in the face of "the thing that couldn't."
Nor had the effect of this transformation in "Young Ed" been any less
painful to his father. For a time the old man refused to credit it, but
finally, when the truth was borne in upon him unmistakably, and he saw
that Las Palmas was in a fair way to being ruined through the boy's
mismanagement, the old cattleman had risen in his wrath. The ranch had
been his pride as Ed had been his joy; to see them both go wrong was
more than he could bear. There had been a terrible scene, and a
tongue-lashing delivered in the language of early border days. There
had followed other visits from Austin, senior, other and even bitterer
quarrels; at last, when the girl-wife remained firm in her refusal to
divorce her husband, the understanding had been reached by which the
management of Las Palmas was placed absolutely in her hands.
Of course, the truth became public, as it always does. This was a new
country--only yesterday it had been the frontier, and even yet a
frontier code of personal conduct to some extent prevailed.
Nevertheless, "Young Ed" Austin's life became a scorn and a hissing
among his neighbors. They were not unduly fastidious, these neighbors,
and they knew that hot blood requires more than a generation to cool,
but everything Ed did outraged them. In trying to show their sympathy
for his wife they succeeded in wounding her more deeply, and Alaire
withdrew into herself. She became almost a recluse, and fenced herself
away not only from the curious, but also from those who really wished
to be her friends. In time people remarked that Ed Austin's
metamorphosis was no harder to understand than that of his wife.
It was true. She had changed. The alteration reached to the very bone
and marrow of her being. At first the general pity had wounded her,
then it had offended, and finally angered her. That people should
notice her affliction, particularly when she strove so desperately to
hide it, seemed the height of insolence.
The management of Las Palmas was almost her only relief. Having sprung
from a family of ranchers, the work came easy, and she grew to like
it--as well as she could like anything with that ever-present pain in
her breast. The property was so large that it gave ample excuse for
avoiding the few visitors who came, and the range boss, Benito
Gonzales, attended to most of the buying and selling. Callers gradually
became rarer; friends dropped away almost entirely. Since Las Palmas
employed no white help whatever, it became in time more Mexican than in
the days of "Old Ed" Austin's ownership.
In such wise had Alaire fashioned her life, living meanwhile under a
sort of truce with her husband.
But Las Palmas had prospered to admiration, and La Feria would have
prospered equally had it not been for the armed unrest of the country
across the border. No finer stock than the "Box A" was to be found
anywhere. The old lean, long-horned cattle had been interbred with
white-faced Herefords, and the sleek coats of their progeny were
stretched over twice the former weight of beef. Alaire had even
experimented with the Brahman strain, importing some huge, hump-backed
bulls that set the neighborhood agog. People proclaimed they were
sacred oxen and whispered that they were intended for some outlandish
pagan rite--Alaire by this time had gained the reputation of being
"queer"--while experienced stockmen declared the venture a woman's
folly, affirming that buffaloes had never been crossed successfully
with domestic cattle. It was rumored that one of these imported animals
cost more than a whole herd of Mexican stock, and the ranchers
speculated freely as to what "Old Ed" Austin would have said of such
extravagance.
It was Blaze Jones, one of the few county residents granted access to
Las Palmas, who first acquainted himself with the outcome of Alaire's
experiment, and it was he who brought news of it to some visiting
stock-buyers at Brownsville.
Blaze was addicted to rhetorical extravagance. His voice was loud; his
fancy ran a splendid course.
"Gentlemen," said he, "you-all interest me with your talk about your
prize Northern stock; but I claim that the bigger the state the bigger
the cattle it raises. That's why old Texas beats the world."
"But it doesn't," some one contradicted.
"It don't, hey? My boy"--Blaze jabbed a rigid finger into the speaker's
ribs, as if he expected a ground-squirrel to scuttle forth--"we've got
steers in this valley that are damn near the size of the whole state of
Rhode Island. If they keep on growin' I doubt if you could fatten one
of 'em in Delaware without he'd bulge over into some neighboring
commonwealth. It's the God's truth! I was up at Las Palmas last month--"
"Las Palmas!" The name was enough to challenge the buyers' interest.
Blaze nodded. "You-all think you know the stock business. You're all
swollen up with cow-knowledge, now, ain't you?" He eyed them from
beneath his black eyebrows. "Well, some of our people thought they did,
too. They figured they'd inherited all there was to know about live
stock, and they grew plumb arrogant over their wisdom. But--pshaw! They
didn't know nothing. Miz Austin has bred in that Brayma strain and made
steers so big they run four to the dozen. And here's the remarkable
thing about 'em--they 'ain't got as many ticks as you gentlemen."
Some of the cattlemen were incredulous, but Blaze maintained his point
with emphasis. "It's true. They're a grave disappointment to every kind
of parasite."
But Alaire had not confined her efforts to cattle; she had improved the
breed of "Box A" horses, too, and hand in hand with this work she had
carried on a series of agricultural experiments.
Las Palmas, so people used to say, lay too far up the river to be good
farming-land; nevertheless, once the pumping-plant was in, certain
parts of the ranch raised nine crops of alfalfa, and corn that stood
above a rider's head.
There was no money in "finished" stock; the border was too far from
market--that also had long been an accepted truism--yet this woman
built silos which she filled with her own excess fodder in scientific
proportions, and somehow or other she managed to ship fat beeves direct
to the packing-houses and get big prices for them.
These were but a few of her many ventures. She had her hobbies, of
course, but, oddly enough, most of them paid or promised to do so. For
instance, she had started a grove of paper-shelled pecans, which was
soon due to bear; the ranch house and its clump of palms was all but
hidden by a forest of strange trees, which were reported to ripen
everything from moth-balls to bicycle tires. Blaze Jones was perhaps
responsible for this report, for Alaire had shown him several thousand
eucalyptus saplings and some ornamental rubber-plants.
"That Miz Austin is a money-makin' piece of furniture," he once told
his daughter Paloma. "I'm no mechanical adder--I count mostly on my
fingers--but her and me calculated the profits on them
eucher--what's-their-name trees?--and it gave me a splittin' headache.
She'll be a drug queen, sure."
"Why don't you follow her example?" asked Paloma. "We have plenty of
land."
Blaze, in truth, was embarrassed by the size of his holdings, but he
shook his head. "No, I'm too old to go rampagin' after new gods. I
'ain't got the imagination to raise anything more complicated than a
mortgage; but if I was younger, I'd organize myself up and do away with
that Ed Austin. I'd sure help him to an untimely end, and then I'd
marry them pecan-groves, and blooded herds, and drug-store orchards.
She certainly is a heart-breakin' device, with her red hair and red
lips and--"
"FATHER!" Paloma was deeply shocked.
Complete isolation, of course, Alaire had found to be impossible, even
though her ranch lay far from the traveled roads and her Mexican guards
were not encouraging to visitors. Business inevitably brought her into
contact with a considerable number of people, and of these the one she
saw most frequently was Judge Ellsworth of Brownsville, her attorney.
It was perhaps a week after Ed had left for San Antonio that Alaire
felt the need of Ellsworth's counsel, and sent for him. He responded
promptly, as always. Ellsworth was a kindly man of fifty-five, with a
forceful chin and a drooping, heavy-lidded eye that could either blaze
or twinkle. He was fond of Alaire, and his sympathy, like his
understanding, was of that wordless yet comprehensive kind which is
most satisfying. Judge Ellsworth knew more than any four men in that
part of Texas; information had a way of seeking him out, and his head
was stored to repletion with facts of every variety. He was a good
lawyer, too, and yet his knowledge of the law comprised but a small
part of that mental wealth upon which he prided himself. He knew human
nature, and that he considered far more important than law. His mind
was like a full granary, and every grain lay where he could put his
hand upon it.
He motored out from Brownsville, and, after ridding himself of dust,
insisted upon spending the interval before dinner in an inspection of
Alaire's latest ranch improvements. He had a fatherly way of walking
with his arm about Alaire's shoulders, and although she sometimes
suspected that his warmth of good-fellowship was merely a habit
cultivated through political necessities, nevertheless it was
comforting, and she took it at its face value.
Not until the dinner was over did Ellsworth inquire the reason for his
summons.
"It's about La Feria. General Longorio has confiscated my stock,"
Alaire told him.