Out on the prairie under the light of the stars a man had fought the
first great battle of his life, and had emerged victorious. There are
no drawn battles in the struggles of the soul. As Orlando fought, he was
tortured by the thought that none would believe the truth to-morrow when
it was told; and that there would be penalty though there was no crime.
As for Louise, she could have returned, almost blindly defiant, to her
world, hand in hand with Orlando; and yet, when morning came, and her
eyes opened on the prairie at day-break, with life stirring everywhere,
she was glad of the victory--though the shadow of a great trouble to
come was showing in her eyes.
She knew what she had to face at Tralee, and that she had no proof of
her perfect innocence. It was of little use for them to call upon Heaven
to witness what the night had been; and Joel Mazarine, who distrusted
every man and woman, would distrust her with a sternness which guilt
only could effectively defy!
Orlando’s enforced gaiety as he invited her to a breakfast of a couple
of biscuits, left from yesterday’s broncho-busting, heartened her;
yet both were conscious of the make-believe. They realized they were
helpless in the grip of harsh circumstance. It was almost enough to make
them take advantage of calumny and the traps set for them by Fate, and
join hands for ever.
As they looked into each other’s eyes, the same hopeless yet reckless
thought flickered--flickered, and vanished. Yet as they looked out over
the prairie towards Tralee, to which Louise must presently return, a
rebellious sort of joy possessed them.
.........................
The discord of their thoughts was like music beside what had passed at
Tralee. There nothing relieved the black, sullen rage of Joel Mazarine.
He had returned to the house where his voice had always been able
to summon his slaves, and to know that they would come--Chinaman,
half-breed, wife. Now he called, and the wife did not come. On the new
chestnut she had ridden away on the prairie, so the halfbreed woman
had said, as hard as he could go. He had scanned the prairie till night
came, without seeing a sign of her.
His black imagination instantly conceived the worst that Louise might
do. It was not in him ever to have the decent alternative. He questioned
the half-breed woman closely; he savagely interrogated the Chinaman; and
then he declared that they lied to him, that they knew more than they
said; and when he was unable to bear it any longer, he mounted his horse
and galloped over to Slow Down Ranch. As he went, he kept swearing
to himself that Louise had flown thither; and anger made his brain
malignant. He could scarcely frame his words intelligibly when he
arrived at Slow Down Ranch.
There he was presently convinced that his worst suspicions were true,
for Orlando also had not returned. He saw it all. They had agreed to
meet; they had met; they had eloped and were gone! His beady eyes were
those of serpents watching for the instant to strike, and his words
burst over the head of Orlando’s mother like shrapnel.
For once, however, the futile, fantastic mother rose higher than
herself, and declared that her son had never run away from, or with,
anything in his life; that he--Joel Mazarine--had never had anything
worth her son’s running away with; and that her son, when he came back,
would make him ask forgiveness as he had never asked it of his God.
Indeed, the gaudy little lady stood in her doorway and chattered her
maledictions after him, as he rode back again towards Tralee muttering
curses which no class leader in the Methodist Church ought even to quote
for pious purposes.
Joel Mazarine had flattered himself that he had everything life could
give--money, property and a garden of youth in which his old age could
loiter and be glad; and that he should be defied suddenly and his garden
made desolate, that the lines of his good fortune should be crossed,
caused him to rage like any heathen. His monstrous egotism made him like
some infuriated bull in the arena, with the banderillos sticking in his
hot hide.
The two people whom he cursed were in Elysium compared to the place
where he tortured himself. There are desert birds that silently surround
a rattlesnake, as he sleeps, with little bundles of cactus-heads and
their million needles, so that, when the reptile wakes, it cannot escape
through the palisade of bristling weapons by which it is surrounded; and
in ghoulish anger it strikes its fangs into its own body until it dies.
Just such a helpless rage held Joel Mazarine, and his religion did
not suggest seeking comfort at that Throne of Grace to which he had so
publicly prayed on occasions.
Night held him prowling in his own coverts; morning found him yellow and
mottled, malicious, but now silent. He somehow felt that he would
know the truth and the whole truth soon. He ate his pork and beans for
breakfast with the appetite of a ravenous animal. He put pieces of the
pork chop in his mouth with his fingers; he gulped his coffee; but all
the time he kept his eyes on the open door, as though he expected some
messenger to announce that Providence had stricken his rebellious wife
by sudden death. It seemed to him that Nature and Jehovah must unite to
avenge him.
After three hours of further waiting he determined to go into Askatoon.
He would have bills printed advertising for Louise as he had done for
stray cattle; he would have notices put in the newspapers proclaiming
that his wife was strayed or stolen and must be put in pound when
discovered. At the moment he decided thus, he caught sight of a wagon
approaching from the north. It was near enough for him to see that
there was a woman in it; and the eyes of the half-breed hired woman,
possessing the Indian far-sight, saw that it was Louise, and told her
master so.
Ten minutes later Louise stood in front of the Master of Tralee, and the
Master of Tralee filled the doorway. “What you want here?” he asked of
her with blurred rage in his voice.
“I want to go to my room,” Louise answered quietly but firmly. “Please
stand aside.”
Now that Louise was face to face with her foe, a new spirit had suddenly
possessed her; and standing beside his broncho, a hand on its neck,
Orlando almost smiled, for this was Louise with a new nature. There was
defiance and courage in her face, not the apprehension which had almost
overwhelmed her as they started back to Tralee, having been rescued by
the search-party from Slow Down Ranch. The night had done something to
Louise which was making itself felt.
“You think you can come back here after what you’ve done--after where
you’ve been--the likes of you!” Mazarine snarled unmoving. “You think
you can!”
Louise turned swiftly to look at Orlando and the three men, one
riding and two in the wagon, as though to call them in evidence of her
innocence; but there came to her eyes a sudden fire of courage, and she
turned again to Mazarine and said:
“I’m your wife by the law--just as much your wife to-day as yesterday.
You treat me before strangers as if I were a criminal. I’m not going to
be treated that way. I’ve got my rights. Stand back and let me in--stand
back, Joel Mazarine,” she said, and she took a step forward, child
though she was, as if she would strike him. Something had transformed
her.
To Orlando she seemed scarcely real. The shrinking, colourless child of
a few weeks had suddenly become a woman--and such a woman!
“I’ll tell you in my own time where I’ve been and what I’ve done,” she
continued. “I want to go upstairs. Stand out of the doorway.”
There was a movement behind her. A man in the wagon and the one on his
horse seemed to grow angry and threatening. The ranchman dropped from
his horse. Only Orlando stood cool, quiet and ominously watchful.
Mazarine did not fail to notice the movement of the two men.
Presently Orlando’s voice said slowly and calmly: “Stand back, Mazarine.
Let her go to her room. This is a free country, and she’s free in her
own house. It’s her house until you’ve proved she’s got no right there.”
Then he added with sharp insistence and menace: “Stand back--damn you,
Mazarine!”
Orlando did not move as he spoke, but there was a look in his face which
an enemy would not care to see. Mazarine, in spite of his rage, quailed
before the sharp, menacing voice so little in tune with its reputation
for giggling, and stepping back, he let Louise pass. Then he plunged
forward out of the doorway.
“That’s right. Come outside,” said Orlando scornfully. “Come out into
the open.” His voice became lower. There was something deadly in it, boy
as he was. “Come out, you hypocrite, and listen to what I’ve got to
say. Listen to the truth I’ve got to tell you. If you don’t listen,
I’ll horsewhip you, that’d horsewhip a woman, till you can’t stand--you
loathsome old dog.... Yes, he took his horsewhip to her yesterday,”
he added to the spectators, who muttered angrily, for the West is
chivalrous towards women.
Something near to madness possessed Orlando. No one had ever seen him
as he was at that moment. Down through generations had come to him some
iron thing that suddenly revealed itself in him, as something had just
suddenly revealed itself in Louise.
The other three men--two in the wagon and one beside his horse-stared
at him as though they had seen him for the first time. They were unready
for the passion that possessed him. Not a muscle of his body appeared to
move; he was as motionless as the trunk of a tree. But in his eyes and
his voice there was, as one of the ranchers said afterwards, “Hell--and
then some more.”
“Listen to me,” he said again, and his voice was low and husky now.
“Yesterday I was broncho-busting--”
Thereupon he told the whole story of what had happened since he had seen
Louise thrown from her chestnut on the prairie. He told how Louise was
too shaken and ill to attempt the journey back to Tralee, and how they
had camped where they were, near the dead horse.
As Orlando talked, the old man was seized by terrible hatred and
jealousy. “You needn’t tell me the rest,” he broke in, his hands
savagely opening and shutting. “I guess I understand everything.”
The words had scarcely left his mouth when from the wagon a man said:
“Wait--wait, Mister. I got something to say.”
He sprang to the ground, and ran between Mazarine and Orlando.
“This is where I come in,” he said, as Louise’s face appeared at an
upper window, and she listened. “You don’t know me. Well, I know you.
Everybody knows you, and nobody likes you. I know what happened last
night. I’m a brother of your fellow Christian Rigby, the druggist, over
there in Askatoon. He’s a Methodist. I’m not. I’m only good. I been a
lot o’ things, and nothing in the end. Well, you hearken to my tale.
“I was tramping with my bundle on my back acrost the prairie to Askatoon
from Waterway. I’m a sundowner, as they say in Australia. When the
sun goes down, I down to my bed wherever I be on the prairie. I was
asleep-I’d been half drunk--when the chestnut threw your wife and broke
its leg; but I was awake when he rode up.” He pointed to Orlando. “I
was awake, and so I watched. I knew who she was; I knew who he was.” He
pointed to Orlando again. “I guessed I’d see something. I did.
“I watched them two people all night. There was a moon. I could see. I
wasn’t fifteen feet from her all night, and I jined the others when they
come to rescue. I guess I got the truth, and I guess if you want any
evidence about me you can get it. Lots of people know me out here. I
ain’t got any house or any home, and I get drunk sometimes, and I ain’t
got money to buy meals with, lots of times, but nobody ever knowed me
lie. That’s what ruined me--I been too truthful. Well, I’m not lying
now, Mister. I’m telling you the God-help-me truth. He’s a gentleman.”
He pointed again to Orlando. “He’s a gentleman from away back in God’s
country, wherever that is, and she’s the best of the best of the very
best.
“You can bet your greasy old boots and ugly face that you’ve got a
bigger fortune in that wife of yours than you’ve any right to. Say,
she’s a queen, Mister, and don’t you forget it, and”--he drawled out his
words--“you go inside your house and get down on your knees, same as you
do in the Meeting House, and thank the Lord you love so well for all his
blessings. As my friend here said a little while back”--he pointed to
Orlando again--“‘Damn you, Mazarine!’ Go and hide yourself.”
The old man stood for a moment dumbfounded; then, without a word, he
turned and hunched inside the house.
“He raised his horsewhip ag’in’ a woman, did he?” said one of Orlando’s
ranchmen. “Ain’t that a matter we got to take notice of?”
“Boys,” said Orlando as he motioned them to be off, “Mrs. Mazarine can
take care of herself. You’ll forget what’s happened, if you want to play
up to her. If she needs you, she’ll be sure to let you know.”
A moment afterwards they were all on their way on the road leading to
Slow Down Ranch.
“He didn’t giggle much that time,” said one of the ranchmen of Orlando,
as they moved on.