INTO THE PAST AND OUT
It was not without concern that Mrs. Laithe awaited the return of her
brother the following day. The cattle drive that had beguiled him from
habits of extreme and enforced precision had occupied a fortnight, and
she understood the life to be sorely trying to any but the rugged.
Earnestly had she sought to dissuade him from the adventure, for
insomnia had long beset him, and dyspepsia marked him for its plaything.
Eloquently exposed to him had been the folly of hoping for sleep on
stony ground after vainly wooing it in the softest of beds with an air
pillow inflated to the nice degree of resiliency. And the unsuitability
of camp fare to a man who had long been sustained by an invalid's diet
had been shrewdly set forth. None the less he had persisted, caught in
the frenzy of desperation that sometimes overwhelms even the practiced
dyspeptic.
"It can't be worse, Sis," he had tragically assured her at parting. "If
I've got to writhe out my days, why, I shall writhe like a gentleman,
that's all. I can at least chuck those baby foods and perish with some
dignity."
"But you're not leaving your medicines, those drops and things?" she had
asked, in real alarm.
"Every infernal drop. I've struck all along the line--not another morsel
of disinfected zwieback nor sanitary breakfast food nor hygienic prunes
nor glutenized near-food--not even one pepsin tablet. It's come to where
I'd sooner have no stomach at all than be bullied night and day by one."
With which splendid defiance he had ridden desperately off, a steely
flash in his tired gray eyes and a bit of fevered color glowing in his
sallow cheeks.
When Mrs. Pierce loudly announced the return of the men early in the
afternoon, therefore, the invalid's sister was ready to be harrowed.
There would be bitter agonies to relate--chiefly stomachic. She had
heroically resolved, moreover, not immediately to flaw the surface of
her sympathy with any gusty "I told you so!" That was a privilege sacred
unto her, and not to be foregone; but she would defer its satisfaction
until the pangs of confession had been suffered; until the rash one
should achieve a mood receptive to counsel.
At the call of Mrs. Pierce she ran down the flower-bordered walk to join
that lady at the gate, and there they watched the cavalcade as it jolted
down the lacets of the mesa trail--four horsemen in single file, two
laden pack animals, another horseman in the rear. The returning invalid
was equal, then, to sitting a horse. The far-focused eyes of Mrs. Pierce
were the first to identify him. As the line advanced through the willow
growth that fringed the creek she said, pointing, "There's Mr.
Bartell--he's in the lead."
"But Clarence doesn't smoke; the doctors won't let him," his sister
interposed, for she could distinguish a pipe in the mouth of the
foremost horseman. "And, anyway, it couldn't be Clarence; it's too--" On
the point of saying "too disreputable," she reflected that the person
in front looked quite like the run of Mrs. Pierce's nearest friends and
might, indeed, be of her own household.
"It's sure your brother, though," insisted Mrs. Pierce, as the riders
broke into a lope over the level, "and he _don't_ look quite as--" Mrs.
Pierce forbore tactfully in her turn. She had meant to say "dandified."
"And I tell you, Mis' Laithe, he does look husky, too. Not no ways so
squammish as when he started. My suz! Here we've et dinner and they'll
be hungry as bears. I must run in and set back something."
The other men turned with the packhorses off toward the corrals, but
Bartell came on at a stiff gallop to where his sister waited. When he
had pulled his horse up before her with perilous but showy abruptness,
he raised himself in the saddle, swung his hat, and poured into the
still air of the valley a long, high yell of such volume that his sister
stepped hastily within the gate again. She had heard the like of that
yell as they passed through Pagosa Springs, rendered by a cowboy in the
acute stage of alcoholic dementia.
"Why, Clarence, _dear_!" she gasped, fearing the worst. But he hurriedly
dismounted and came, steadily enough, to kiss her. She submitted
doubtfully to this, and immediately held him off for inspection. He was
frankly disreputable. The flannel shirt and corduroy trousers were torn,
bedraggled, gray with the dust of the trail; his boots were past
redemption, his hat a reproach; his face a bronzed and hairy caricature;
and he reeked of the most malignant tobacco Mrs. Laithe had ever
encountered. Only the gold-rimmed spectacles, the nearsighted, peering
gray eyes, and a narrow zone of white forehead under his hat brim served
to recall the somewhat fastidious, sedate, and rather oldish-looking
young man who had parted from her.
He smiled at her with a complacency that made it almost a smirk. Then he
boisterously kissed her again before she could evade him, and uttered
once more that yell of lawless abandon.
"Clarence!" she expostulated, but he waved her to silence with an
imperious hand.
"Quickest way to tell the story, Nell--that's my paean of victory. Sleep?
Slept like a night watchman. Eat? I debauched myself with the rowdiest
sort of food every chance I got--fried bacon, boiled beans,
baking-powder biscuit, black coffee that would bite your finger
off--couldn't get enough; smoked when I wasn't eating or sleeping; drank
raw whisky, too--whisky that would etch copper. Work? I worked harder
than a Coney Island piano player, fell over asleep at night and got up
asleep in the morning--when they kicked me the third time. And I
galloped up and down cliffs after runaway steers where I wouldn't have
crawled on my hands and knees two weeks before. And now that whole bunch
of boys treat me like one of themselves. I found out they called me
'Willie Four-eyes' when I first came here. Now they call me 'Doc,' as
friendly as you can imagine, and Buck Devlin told me last night I could
ride a streak of lightning with the back cinch busted, if I tried."
He broke off to light the evil pipe ostentatiously, while she watched
him, open eyed, not yet equal to speech.
"Now run in like a good girl and see if Ma Pierce has plenty of
fragments from the noonday feast. Anything at all--I could eat a deer
hide with the hair on."
Wavering incredulously, she left to do his bidding. As he led his horse
around to the corral he roared a snatch from Buck Devlin's favorite
ballad, with an excellent imitation of the cowboy manner:
"Oh, bur-ree me _not_ on the lone prai-_ree-e_--"
After he had eaten he slouched into a hammock on the veranda with
extravagant groans of repletion, and again lighted his pipe. His sister
promptly removed her chair beyond the line of its baleful emanations.
"Well, Sis," he began, "that trip sure did for me good and plenty. Me
for the high country uninterrupted hereafter!"
She regarded him with an amused smile.
"I'm so glad, dear, about the health. It's a miracle, but don't overdo
it, don't attempt everything at once. And the trip 'sure' seems to have
'done' you in another way--how is it--'good and plenty'? You walk like a
cowboy and talk and sing and act generally like one----"
"Do I, really, though?" A sort of half-shamed pleasure glowed in his
eyes. "Well, you know they're good, companionable fellows, and a man
takes on their ways of speech unconsciously. But I didn't think it would
be noticed in me so soon. Do I seem like the real thing, honestly, now?"
She reassured him, laughing frankly.
"Well, you needn't laugh. It's all fixed--I'm going to be one."
"But, Clarence, not for long, surely!"
"It's all settled, I tell you. I've bought a ranch, old Swede Peterson's
place over on Pine River; corking spot, three half sections under fence
and ditch, right at the mouth of a box canyon where nobody can get in
above me, plenty of water, plenty of free range close at hand."
"Clarence Bartell, you're--what do you call it?--stringing."
"Not a bit of it. Wait till I come on in about two years, after selling
a train load of fat steers at Omaha or Kansas City--sashaying down
Fifth Avenue and rounding into Ninth Street with my big hat and
long-shanked spurs and a couple of forty-fours booming into the air.
_You'll_ see, and won't dad say it's deuced unpleasant!"
"But I'll not believe until I see."
He spoke ruminantly between pulls at the pipe.
"Lots of things to do now, though. Got to go down to Pagosa this week to
pay over the money, get the deed, and register my brand. How does
'Bar-B' strike you? Rather neat, yes? It'll make a tasty little monogram
on the three hundred critters I start with. I'm on track of a herd of
shorthorns already."
"And a little while ago you were off to the Philippines, and before that
to Porto Rico, and last summer you were going on one of those
expeditions that come back and tell why they didn't reach the North
Pole, and you came out here to be a miner and you've----"
There was an impatient, silencing wave of the pipe.
"Oh, let all that go, can't you?--let the dead past bury its dead. I'm
fixed for life. You and dad won't laugh at me any more. Come on out now
and see me throw a rope, if you don't believe me. I've been practicing
every day. And say, you didn't happen to notice the diamond hitch on
that forward pack horse, did you? Well, I'm the boy that did most of
that."
She followed him dutifully to the corrals and for half an hour watched
him hurl thirty feet of rope at the horned skull of a steer nailed to
the top of a post. When the noose settled over this mark his boyish
delight was supreme. When it flew wide, which was oftener, his look was
one of invincible determination.
As his sister left him he was explaining to Red Phinney, who had
sauntered up to be a help in the practice, that the range of Bar-B had a
lucky lie--no "greaser" could come along and "sleep" him.
She went back to her chair and book, shaping certain questions she would
put to this brother. But it was not until after the evening meal that
she could again talk with him, for the ardent novice found occupation
about the stable and corrals the rest of the afternoon, and even sat for
a time with the men in the evening, listening avidly to their small talk
of the range, watchful to share in it. When he dared ask a question
knowingly, or venture a swift comment couched in the vernacular, he
thrilled with a joy not less poignant because it must be dissembled.
But conscience pricked him at length to leave those fascinating
adventurers in the bunkhouse and to condescend for an interval to mere
brotherhood. He found his sister alone in the "front" room, ensconced on
the bearskin rug before a snapping and fragrant fire of cedar wood.
He drew up the wooden rocker and remarked that the fire smelled like a
thousand burning leadpencils. He would have gone on to talk of his great
experience, but the woman wisely forestalled him.
"Clarence," she began directly, "I've been thinking over that old affair
of Randall Teevan and his wife, Kitty Lowndes, you know. Do you happen
to recall the name of the man--the man Kitty went away with?"
"Lord, no! That was before I'd learned to remember anything. If you want
to rake that affair up, ask Randy Teevan himself. I'll wager he hasn't
forgotten the chap's name. But why desecrate the grave of so antique a
scandal? Ask me about something later. I remember he had a cook once,
when I was six----"
"Because--because I was thinking, just thinking. Are you certain you
remember nothing about it, not even the man's name, nor what sort of man
he was, nor what he did, nor anything?"
"I only know what you must know. Randall Teevan's wife decided that the
Bishop had made two into the wrong one. I doubt if I ever heard the
chap's name. I seem to remember that they took Alden with them--he was a
baby of four or five, I believe, and that Randy scurried about and got
him back after no end of fuss. I've heard dad speak of that."
"Did Kitty and that man ever marry?"
"No; you can be sure Teevan saw to that. He took precious good care not
to divorce her. They manage those things more politely nowadays;
everything formal, six months' lease of a furnished house in Sioux
Falls, with the chap living at a hotel and dropping in for tea every day
at five; and felicitations from the late husband when the decree is
granted in the morning and the new knot tied in the afternoon--another
slipknot like the first, so that the merest twitch at a loose end
will----"
"Please don't! And did you never know anything more about them, where
they lived or how they ended?"
"Never a thing, Sis. It's all so old, everybody's forgotten it, except
Teevan. Of course he'd not forget the only woman who ever really put a
lance through his shirt-of-mail vanity."
"You forget Kitty's mother. She remembers."
"That's so, by Jove. Teevan got what was coming to him, he got his
'cone-uppance' as the boys say; but old Kitty--yes, it was rough on her.
But she's always put a great face on it. No one would know if they
_didn't_ know."
"She's proud. Even though she's been another mother to me she rarely
lets me see anything, and she's tried so hard to find comfort in Kitty's
boy, in Alden. She's failed in that, though, for some reason."
Her brother glanced sharply at her. "I'll tell you why she's failed,
Nell. Alden Teevan wasn't designed to be a comfort to anyone, not even
to himself. There was too much Teevan in him at the start, and too much
Teevan went into his raising."
"They're back in town, you know."
"Yes; Teevan must have realized that old Kitty is getting on in years,
and has a bit of money for Alden. Say, Sis, I hate to seem prying, but
you don't--you're not thinking about Alden Teevan seriously, are you?
Come, let's be confidential for twenty seconds."
She mused a moment, then faced him frankly.
"There's something I like in Alden, and something I don't. I know what I
like and I don't know what I don't like--I only feel it. There!"
He reached over to take one of her hands.
"Well, Sis, you trust to the feeling. You couldn't be happy there. And
you deserve something fine, poor child! You deserve to be happy again."
His inner eye looked back six years to see the body of poor Dick Laithe
carried into the Adirondack camp by two silent guides who had found him
where a stray bullet left him.
She turned a tired, smiling face into the light.
"I _was_ happy, so happy; yet I wonder if you can understand how vague
it seems now. It was so brief and ended so terribly. I think the shock
of it made me another woman. Dick and I seem like a boy and girl I once
knew who laughed and played childish games and never became real. I find
myself sympathizing with them sometimes, as I would with two dear young
things in a story that ended sadly."
He awkwardly stroked and patted the hand he still held.
"Come and live with me, Nell. There's only a one-room cabin at that
place now, with a carpet of hay on the dirt floor. But I'll have a
mansion there next summer that will put the eye out of this shack at
Bar-7. I believe in getting back to Nature, but I don't want to land
clear the other side of her. You'd be comfy with me. And it's a great
life; not a line of dyspepsia in it. And think of _feeling_ yourself
sliding off to sleep the moment you touch the pillow, as plainly as you
feel yourself going down in an elevator. That reminds me, I'm going to
bed down with the boys in the bunkhouse to-night. I'm afraid to trust
myself in that bed upstairs again--I've lain awake there so many
nights."
For a time she lost the thread of his rambling talk, busied with her own
thoughts. She was faintly aware that for luncheon he had been eating a
biscuit, a thick, soggy, dangerous biscuit, caught up in the hurry of
the morning's packing, wrenched in half and sopped in bacon grease.
There was a word about shooting. He was learning to "hold down" the
Colt's 44, and had almost hit a coyote. Later, words reached her of a
cold night on the divide, when ice formed in the pail by the cooking
fire. What at last brought her back was a yawn and his remark that he
must "hole up" for the night.
"Clarence," she began, looking far into a little white-hot chamber
between two half-burned logs, "listen, please, and advise me. If you
were going to do something that might, just possibly, and not by any
means certainly, rake up rather an ugly mess, in a sort of remote
way--that might make some people uncomfortable, you understand--I mean
if you saw something that ought to be done, because the person deserved
it, and it was by no means that person's fault, not in the least, and
the person didn't even know about it nor suspect anything, would you
stop because it might be painful to some one else--just possibly it
might--or to a number of people, or even to the person himself, after he
knew it? Or would you go ahead and trust to luck, especially when
there's a chance that it mightn't ever come out?--though I'm quite sure
it's true, you see, and that's what makes it so hard to know what to
do."
She looked up at him with bright expectancy. Clutching his head with
both hands, he stared at her, alarm leaping in his eyes.
"Would you mind repeating that slowly?" he began, in hushed, stricken
tones. "No, no--I shouldn't ask that. One moment, please--now it all
comes back to me. I see in fancy the dear old home, and hear faithful
Rover barking his glad welcome. Ah, now I have the answer; I knew it
would come. It's because one is a toiler of the sea and the other is a
soiler of the tea--then the ball is snapped back for a run around the
end and the man on third must return to his base."
"I might have known you couldn't understand," she said regretfully; "but
I can't possibly be more explicit. I thought if I stated the case
clearly in the abstract--but I dare say it's a waste of time to ask
advice in such matters."
"You've wasted yours, my child, if that's the last chance I get. Do you
really want help about something?"
"No, dear, it wasn't anything. Never mind."
"All right, if you say so. And now, me for the blankets!"
When he had gone she stepped out into the night under the close, big
stars. She breathed deeply of the thin, sharp air and looked over at the
luminous pearl of a moon that seemed to hang above the cabin where
Ewing's kid would doubtless be dreaming. Her lips fell into a little
smile, half cynical, half tender.
"I'll do it anyway!" The inflection was defiant, but the words were
scarcely more than a whisper. She said them again, giving them tone.