protruded six inches or so above the sand. Of course she could not see
over the ridge--she could not have done that if she had climbed a
telegraph pole; only there was no pole to climb--but she felt a little
closer to seeing. That dust did not look like stage dust!
You would be surprised to know how much Helen May had learned about dust
clouds. She could tell an automobile ten miles away, just by the swift
gathering of the gray cloud. She could tell where bands of sheep or herds
of cattle were being driven across the plain. She even knew when a saddle
horse was coming, or a freight team or--the stage.
She suddenly owned to herself that she was disappointed and rather
worried. For behind this cloud that troubled her there was no second one
building up over the skyline and growing more dense as the disturber
approached. She could not imagine what had happened to that
red-whiskered, tobacco-chewing stage driver. She looked at her wrist
watch and saw that he was exactly twenty minutes later than his very
latest arrival, and she felt personally slighted and aggrieved.
For that reason she sat under her pink silk parasol and stared crossly
under her eyebrows at the horse and man and the dust-grimed
rattle-wheeled buggy that eventually emerged from the gray cloud. The
horse was a pudgy bay that set his feet stolidly down in the trail, and
dragged his toes through it as though he delighted in kicking up all the
dust he could. By that trick he had puzzled Helen May a little, just at
first, though he had not been able to simulate the passing of four
horses. The buggy was such as improvident farmers used to drive (before
they bought Fords) near harvest time; scaly as to paint, warped and
loose-spoked as to wheels, making more noise than progress along the
country roads.
The man held the lines so loosely that they sagged under the wire-mended
traces of sunburned leather. He leaned a little forward, as though it was
not worth while sitting straight on so hot a day. He wore an old Panama
hat that had cost him a good deal when it was new and had saved him a
good deal since in straw hats which he had not been compelled to buy so
long as this one held together. It was pulled down in front so that it
shaded his face--a face lean and lined and dark, with thin lips that
could be tender and humorous in certain moods. His eyes were hazel, like
the eyes of Starr, yet one never thought of them as being at all like
Starr's eyes. They burned always with some inner fire of life; they
laughed at life, and yet they did not seem to express mirth. They seemed
to say that life was a joke, a damnable joke on mankind; that they saw
the joke and resented it even while they laughed at it. For the rest, the
man was more than fifty years old, but his hair was thick and black as a
crow, and his eyebrows were inclined to bushiness, inclined also to slant
upward. A strong face; an unusual face, but a likeable one, it was. And
that is a fair description of Holman Sommers as Helen May first saw him.
He drove up to where she sat, and she tilted her pink silk parasol
between them as though to keep the dust from settling thick upon her
stained khaki skirt and her desert-dingy high-laced boots. She was not
interested in him, and her manner of expressing indifference could not
have misled a horned toad. She was too fresh from city life to have
fallen into the habit of speaking to strangers easily and as a matter of
country courtesy. Even when the buggy stopped beside her, she did not
show any eagerness to move the pink screen so that they might look at
each other.
"How do you do?" said he, quite as though he were greeting her in her own
home. "You are Miss Stevenson, I feel sure. I am Holman Sommers, at your
service. I am under the impression that I have with me a few articles
which may be of some interest to you, Miss Stevenson. I chanced to come
upon the stage several miles farther down the road. A wheel had given
away, and there was every indication that the delay would prove serious,
so when the driver mentioned the fact that he had mail and merchandise
for you, I volunteered to act as his substitute and deliver them safely
into your hands. I hope therefore that the service will in some slight
measure atone for my presumption in forcing my acquaintance upon you."
At the second sentence the pink parasol became violently agitated. At the
third Helen May was staring at him, mentally if not actually
open-mouthed. At the last she was standing up and reaching for her mail,
and she had not yet decided in her mind whether he was joking or whether
he expected to be taken seriously. Even when he laughed, with that odd,
dancing light in his eyes, she could not be sure. But because his voice
was warm with human sympathy and the cordiality of a man who is very
sure of himself and can afford to be cordial, she smiled back at him.
"That's awfully good of you, Mr. Sommers," she said, shuffling her
handful of letters eagerly to see who had written them; more particularly
to see if Chum's brother had written one of them. "I hope you didn't
drive out of your way to bring them" (there _was_ one; a big, fat one
that had taken two stamps! And one from Chum herself, and--but she went
back gloatingly to the thick, heavy envelope with the bold, black
handwriting that needed the whole face of the envelope for her name and
address), "because I know that miles are awfully long in this country."
"Yes? You have discovered that incontrovertible fact, have you? Then I
hope you will permit me to drive you home, especially since these
packages are much too numerous and too weighty for you to carry in your
arms. As a matter of fact, I have been hoping for an opportunity to meet
our new neighbors. Neighbors are precious in our sight, I assure you,
Miss Stevenson, and only the misfortune of illness in the household has
prevented my sister from looking you up long ago. How long have you been
here? Three weeks, or four?" His tone added: "You poor child," or
something equally sympathetic, and he smiled while he cramped the old
buggy so that she could get into it without rubbing her skirt against the
dustladen wheel.
Helen May certainly had never seen any one just like Holman Sommers,
though she had met hundreds of men in a business way. She had met men who
ran to polysyllables and pompousness, but she had never known the
polysyllables to accompany so simple a manner. She had seen men slouching
around in old straw hats-and shoddy gray trousers and negligée shirts
with the tie askew, and the clothes had spelled poverty or shiftlessness.
Whereas they made Holman Sommers look like a great man indulging himself
in the luxury of old clothes on a holiday.
He seemed absolutely unconscious that he and his rattly buggy and the
harness on the horse were all very shabby, and that the horse was fat and
pudgy and scrawny of mane; and for that she admired him.
Before they reached the low adobe cabin, she felt that she was much
better acquainted with Holman Sommers than with Starr, whose name she
still did not know, although he had stayed an hour talking to Vic and
praising her cooking the night before. She did not, for all the time
she had spent with him, know anything definite about Starr, whereas
she presently knew a great deal about Holman Sommers, and approved of
all she knew.
He had a past which, she sensed vaguely, had been rather brilliant. He
must have been a war correspondent, because he compared the present great
war with the Japanese-Russian War and with the South African War, and he
seemed to have been right in the middle of both, or he could not have
spoken so intimately of them. He seemed to know all about the real,
underlying causes of them and knew just where it would all end, and what
nations would be drawn into it before they were through. He did not say
that he knew all about the war, but after he had spoken a few casual
sentences upon the subject Helen May felt that he knew a great deal more
than he said.
He also knew all about raising goats. He slid very easily, too, from the
war to goat-raising. He had about four hundred, and he gave her a lot of
valuable advice about the most profitable way in which to handle them.
When he saw Vic legging it along the slope behind the Basin to head off
Billy and his slavish nannies, he shook his head commiseratingly. "There
is not a scintilla of doubt in my mind," he told her gently, "that a
trained dog would be of immeasurable benefit to you. I fear you made a
grave mistake, Miss Stevenson, when you failed to possess yourself of a
good dog. I might go so far as to say that a dog is absolutely
indispensable to the successful handling of goats, or, for that matter,
of sheep, either." (He pronounced the last word eyether.)
"That's what my desert man told me," said Helen May demurely, "only he
didn't tell me that way, exactly."
"Yes? Then I have no hesitation whatever in assuring you that your desert
man was unqualifiedly accurate in his statement of your need."
Helen May bit her lip. "Then I'll tell him," she said, still more
demurely.
Secretly she hoped that he would rise to the bait, but he apparently
accepted her words in good faith and went on telling her just how to
range goats far afield in good weather so that the grazing in the Basin
itself would be held in reserve for storms. It was a very grave error,
said Holman Sommers, to exhaust the pasturage immediately contiguous to
the home corral. It might almost be defined as downright improvidence.
Then he forestalled any resentment she might feel by apologizing for his
seeming presumption. But he apprehended the fact that she and her brother
were both inexperienced, and he would be sorry indeed to see them suffer
any loss because of that inexperience. His practical knowledge of the
business was at her service, he said, and he should feel that he was
culpably negligent of his duty as a neighbor if he failed to point out to
her any glaring fault in their method.
Helen May had felt just a little resentful of the words downright
improvidence. Had she not walked rather than spend money and grass on a
horse? Had she not daily denied herself things which she considered
necessities, that she might husband the precious balance of Peter's
insurance money? But she swallowed her resentment and thanked him quite
humbly for his kindness in telling her how to manage. She owned to her
inexperience, and she said that she would greatly appreciate any advice
which he might care to give.
Her Man of the Desert, she remembered, had not given her advice, though
he must have seen how badly she needed it. He had asked her where her dog
was, taking it for granted, apparently, that she would have one. But when
she had told him about not buying the dog, he had not said another word
about it. And he had not said anything about their letting the goats eat
up all the grass in the Basin, first thing, instead of saving it for bad
weather. This Holman Sommers, she decided, was awfully kind, even if he
did talk like a professor or something; kinder than her desert man. No,
not kinder, but perhaps more truly helpful.
At the house he told her just how to fix a "coolereupboard" under the
lone mesquite tree which stood at one end of the adobe cabin. It was
really very simple, as he explained it, and he assured her, in his
scientific terminology, that it would be cool. He went to the spring and
showed her where she could have Vic dig out the bank and fit in a rock
shelf for butter. He assured her that she was fortunate in having a
living spring so near the house. It was, he said, of incalculable
importance in that country to have cold, pure water always at hand.
When he discovered that she was a stenographer, and that she had her
typewriter with her, he was immensely pleased, so pleased that his eyes
shone with delight.
"Ah! now I see why the fates drove me forth upon the highway this
morning," said he. "Do you know that I have a large volume of work for an
expert typist, and that I have thus far felt that my present isolation in
the desert wastes was an almost unsurmountable obstacle to having the
work done in a satisfactory manner? I have been engaged upon a certain
work on sociological problems and how they have developed with the growth
of civilization. You will readily apprehend that great care must be
exercised in making the copy practically letter perfect. Furthermore, I
find myself constantly revising the manuscript. I should want to
supervise the work rather closely, and for that reason I have not as yet
arranged for the final typing.
"Now if you care to assume the task, I can assure you that I shall feel
tremendously grateful, besides making adequate remuneration for the labor
involved."
That is the way he put it, and that is how it happened that Helen May let
herself in for the hardest piece of work she had ever attempted since she
sold gloves at Bullocks' all day and attended night school all the
evening, learning shorthand and typewriting and bookkeeping, and
permitting the white plague to fasten itself upon her while she bent to
her studies.
She let herself in for it because she believed she had plenty of time,
and because Holman Sommers was in no hurry for the manuscript, which he
did not expect to see completed for a year or so, since a work so erudite
required much time and thought, being altogether different from current
fiction, which requires none at all.
Helen May was secretly aghast at the pile of scrawled writing interlined
and crossed out, with marginal notes and footnotes and references and
what not; but she let herself in for the job of typing his book for
him--which is enough for the present.
CHAPTER NINE
PAT, A NICE DOGGUMS
"'The human polyp incessantly builds upon a coral reef. They become
lithified as it were and constitute the strata of the psychozoic
stage'--I told you the butter's at the spring. Will you leave me alone?
That's the third page I've spoiled over psycho-what-you-call-it. Go on
back and herd your goats, and for gracious sake, can that tulip-and-rose
song! I hate it." Helen May ripped a page with two carbon copies out of
the machine, pulled out the carbons and crumpled three sheets of paper
into a ball which she threw into a far corner.
"Gee, but you're pecky to-day! You act like an extra slammed into a sob
lead and gettin' up stage about it. I wish that long-worded hide had
never showed up with his soiled package of nut science. A feller can't
_live_ with you, by gosh, since you--"
"Well, listen to this, Vic! 'There is a radical difference between
organic and social evolution, the formula most easily expressing this
distinction being that environment transforms the animal, while man
transforms the environment. This transformation--'"
"Hel-up! Hel-up!" Vic went staggering out of the door with his palm
pressed against his forehead in the gesture meant to register great
mental agony, while his face was split with that nearly famous comedy
grin of his. "Serves you right," he flung hack at her in his normal tone
of brotherly condescension. "The way you fell for that nut, like you was
a starved squirrel shut up in a peanut wagon, by gosh! Hope you're bogged
down in jawbreakers the rest of the summer. Serves yuh right, but you
needn't think you can take it out on me. And," he draped himself around
the door jamb to add pointedly, "you should worry about the tulip song.
If I'm willing to stand for you yawping day and night about the sun
growin' co-old, and all that bunk--"
"Oh, beat it, and shut up!" Helen May looked up from evening the edges of
fresh paper and carbon to say sharply: "You better take a look and see
where Billy is. And I'll tell you one thing: If you go and lose any more
goats, you needn't think for a minute that I'll walk my head off getting
them for you."
"Aw, where do you get that line--walk your head off? I seem to remember a
close-up of you riding home on horseback with moonlight atmosphere and a
fellow to drive your goats. And you giving him the baby-eyed stare like
he was a screen idol and you was an extra that was strong for him.
Bu-lieve me, Helen Blazes, I'm wise. You're wishing a goat would get
lost--now, while the moon's workin' steady!"
"Oh, beat it, Vic! I've got work to do, if you haven't." And to prove it,
Helen May began to type at her best speed.
Vic languidly removed himself from the door jamb and with a parting "I
should bibble," started back to his goats, which he had refused to graze
outside the Basin as Holman Sommers advised. Helen May began valiantly to
struggle with the fine, symmetrical, but almost unreadable chirography of
the man of many words. She succeeded in transcribing the human polyp
properly lithified and correctly constituting the strata of the
psychozoic age, when Vic stuck his head in at the door again.
"From the des-urt he comes to thee-ee-ee,
And he's got a dog for thee to see-ee."
He paraphrased mockingly, going down to that terrifically deep-sea bass
note of a boy whose voice is changing.
Helen May threw her eraser at him and missed. It went hurtling out into
the yard and struck Starr on the point of the jaw, as he was riding up to
the cabin.
Whereat Vic gave a brazenly exultant whoop and rushed off to his goats,
bellowing raucously:
"When you wore a too-lup, a sweet yellow too-lup
'N I wore a big red ro-o-ose--"
and looking back frequently in a half curious, half wistful way. Vic, if
you will stop to think of it, had been transplanted rather suddenly from
the midst of many happy-go-lucky companions to an isolation lightened
only by a mere sister's vicarious comradeship. If he yearned secretly for
a share of Starr's interest, surely no one can blame him; but that he
should voluntarily remove himself from Starr's presence in the belief
that he had come to see Helen May exclusively, proves that Vic had the
makings of a hero.
Starr dismounted and picked up the eraser from under the investigative
nose of a coarse-haired, ugly, brown and black dog that had been
following Rabbit's heels. He took the eraser to Helen May, standing
embarrassed in the doorway, and the dog followed and sniffed first her
slipper toes and then her hands, which she held out to it ingratiatingly;
after which appraisement the dog waggled its stub of a tail in token of
his friendliness.
"If you was a Mexican he'd a showed you his teeth," Starr observed
pridefully. "How are you, after your jaunt the other night?"
"Just fine," Helen May testified graciously. It just happened (or had it
just happened?) that she was dressed that day in a white crêpe de chine
blouse and a white corduroy skirt, and had on white slippers and white
stockings. At the top button of her blouse (she could not have touched
that button with her chin if she had tried) was a brown velvet bow the
exact shade of her eyes. Her hair was done low and loose with a negligent
wave where it turned back from her left eyebrow. Peter had worshipped
dumbly his Babe in that particular dress, and had considered her
beautiful. One cannot wonder then that Starr's eyes paid tribute with a
second long glance.
Starr had ridden a good many miles out of his way and had argued for a
good while, and had finally paid a good many dollars to get the dog that
sniffed and wagged at Helen May. The dog was a thoroughbred Airedale and
had been taught from its puppyhood to herd goats and fight all intruders
upon his flock and to hate Mexicans wherever he met them. He had learned
to do both very thoroughly, hence the argument and the dollars necessary
before Starr could gain possession of him.
Starr did not need a dog; certainly not that dog. He had no goats to
herd, and he could hate Mexicana without any help or encouragement when
they needed hating. But he had not grudged the trouble and expense,
because Helen May needed it. He might have earned more gratitude had he
told her the truth instead of hiding it like guilt. This was his way of
going at the subject, and he waited, mind you, until he had announced
nonchalantly that he must be getting along, and that he had just stopped
to get a drink and to see how they were making out!
"Blame dog's taken a notion to you. Followed me out from town. I throwed
rocks at him till my arm ached--"
"Why, you mean thing! You might have hit him and hurt him, and he's a
nice dog. Poor old purp! Did he throw rocks, honest? He _did_? Well, just
for that, I've got a nice ham bone that you can have to gnaw on, and he
can't have a snippy bit of it. All he can do is eat a piece of lemon pie
that will probably make him sick. We hope so, don't we? Throwing rocks at
a nice, ugly, stubby dog that wanted to follow!"
Starr accepted the pie gratefully and looked properly ashamed of himself.
The dog accepted the ham bone and immediately stretched himself out with
his nose and front paws hugging it close, and growling threats at
imaginary vandals. Now and then he glanced up gratefully at Helen May,
who continued to speak of him in a commiserating tone.
"He sure has taken a notion to you," Starr persisted between mouthfuls.
"You can have him, for all of me. I don't want the blame cur tagging me
around. I'm liable to take a shot at him if I get peeved over
something--"
"You dare!" Helen May regarded him sternly from under her lashes, her
chin tilted downward. "Do you always take a shot at something when you
get peeved?"
"Well, I'm liable to," Starr admitted darkly. "A dog especially. You
better keep him if you don't want him hurt or anything." He took a bite
of pie. (It was not very good pie. The crust was soggy because Johnny
Calvert's cook stove was not a good baker, and the frosting had gone
watery, because the eggs were stale, and Helen May had made a mistake and
used too much sugar in the filling; but Starr liked it, anyway, just
because she had made it.) "Maybe you can learn him to herd goats," he
suggested, as though the idea had just occurred to him.
"Oh, I wonder if he would! Would you, doggums?"
"We'll try him a whirl and see," Starr offered cheerfully. He finished
the pie in one more swallow, handed back the plate, and wiped his
fingers, man-fashion, on his trousers.
"Come on, Pat. He likes Pat for a name," he explained carefully to Helen
May. "I called him about every name I could think of, and that's the one
he seems to sabe most."
"I should say he does! Why, he left his bone when you called Pat. Now
that's a shame, doggums!"
"Oh, well, we'll let him polish off his bone first." Starr made the offer
with praiseworthy cheerfulness, and sat down on his heels with his back
against the adobe wall to wait the dog's pleasure.
"Well, that makes up for some of the rocks," Helen May approved
generously, "and for some of the names you say you called him. And that
reminds me, Man of the Desert, I suppose you have a name of some sort. I
never heard what it was. Is it--Smith, perhaps?"
"My name's Starr," he told her, with a little glow under the tan of his
cheeks. "S, t, a, double r, Starr. I forgot I never told you. I've got a
couple of given names, but I'd want to shoot a man that called me by
'em. Folks always call me just Starr, and maybe a few other things
behind my back."
Helen May dropped her chin and looked at him steadily from under her
eyebrows. "If there's anything that drives me perfectly wild," she said
finally, "it's a mystery. I've just simply got to know what those names
are. I'll never mention them, honest. But--"
"Chauncy DeWitt," Starr confessed. "Forget 'em. They was wished onto me
when I wasn't able to defend myself."
"Given names are horrid things, aren't they?" Helen May sympathized.
"I think mine is perfectly imbecile. Fathers and mothers shouldn't be
allowed to choose names for their children. They ought to wait till
the kids are big enough to choose for themselves. If I ever have any,
I'll call them It. When they grow up they can name themselves anything
they like."
"You've got no right to kick," Starr declared bluntly. "Your name suits
you fine."
His eyes said more than that, so that Helen May gave her attention to the
dog. "There, now, you've licked it and polished it and left teeth marks
all over it," she said, meaning the bone. "Come on, Pat, and let's see if
you're a trained doggums." She looked up at Starr and smiled. "Suppose he
starts running after them; he might chase them clear off the ranch, and
then what?"
"I guess the supply of rocks'll hold out," Starr hinted, and snapped his
fingers at the dog, which went to heel as a matter of course.
"If you throw rocks at that dog, I'll throw rocks at you," Helen May
threatened viciously.
"And I'll hit, and you'll miss," Starr added placidly. "Come on, let's
get busy and see if you deserved that bone."