THE LION’S WHELP
It was late, almost dark, that evening when Cannon left his office. He
had sat on after Berny’s departure, sunk in a reverie, which was not
compounded of those gentle thoughts that are usually associated with
that state of being. In the past, when he had been struggling up from
poverty, he had had his fierce fights, and his mortifying defeats. He
had risen from them tougher and more combative than ever, filled with
the lust of vengeance which in the course of time was assuaged. But of
late years few (and these antagonists of his own measure) had had the
temerity to cross swords with him.
Now he had been defied in his stronghold and by the sort of person
that he looked upon as a worm in the path--the kind of worm a man did
not even tread on but simply brushed aside. It was incredible in its
audacity, its bold insolence. As he walked down Montgomery Street
to the car, he pondered on Berny, wonderingly and with a sort of
begrudging, astonished admission of a courage that he could not but
admire. What a nerve the woman had to dare to threaten him! To threaten
Bill Cannon! There was something wild, uncanny, preposterous in it
that was almost sublime, had the large, elemental quality of a lofty
indifference to danger, that seemed to belong more to heroic legend
than to modern life in the West. But his admiration was tempered by his
alarm at the thought of his daughter’s learning of the sordid intrigue.
The bare idea of Rose’s censuring him--and he knew she would if she
ever learned of his part in the plot--was enough to make him decide
that some particularly heavy punishment would be meted out to the woman
who dared shatter the only ideal of him known to exist.
But he did not for a moment believe that Berny would tell. She was
angry and was talking blusteringly, as angry women talk. He did not
know why she was in such a state of ill temper, but at this stage of
the proceedings he did not bother his head about that. For the third
time she had refused the money--that was the only thing that concerned
him. If she refused three hundred thousand dollars, she would refuse
anything. It was as much to her as a million would be. She would know
it was as large a sum as she could expect. If that would not buy her,
nothing would. Her threats were nonsense, bluff and bluster; the
important thing was, she had determined, for some reason of her own,
to stick to Dominick Ryan.
How she had found out about Rose he could not imagine, only it was
very enraging that she should have done so. It was the last, and most
detestable fact in the whole disagreeable business. Brooding on the
subject as the car swept him up the hill, he decided that she had
guessed it. She was as sharp as a needle and she had put this and that
together, the way women do, and had guessed the rest. Pure ugliness
might be actuating her present line of conduct, and that state of mind
was rarely of long duration. The jealous passions of women soon burn
themselves out. Those shallow vessels could not long contain feelings
of such a fiery potency, especially when harboring the feeling was so
inconvenient and expensive. No one knew better than Berny how well
worth her while it would be to cultivate a sweet reasonableness. This
was the only gleam of hope left. Her power to endure the present
conditions of her life might give out.
That was all the consolation the Bonanza King could extract from the
situation, and it did not greatly mitigate his uneasiness and bad
humor. This latter condition of being had other matter to feed it,
matter which in the interview of the afternoon had been pushed into
the background, but which now once again obtruded itself upon his
attention. It was the first of May. By the morning’s mail he had
received a letter from Gene announcing, with the playful blitheness
which marked all the young man’s allusions to the transfer of the Santa
Trinidad Ranch, that the year of probation was up and he would shortly
arrive in San Francisco to claim his own.
Gene’s father had read this missive in grim-visaged silence. The
sense of self-approval that he might have experienced was not his; he
only felt that he had been “done”. Two months before, thinking that
the ranch was slipping too easily from his grasp, that he was making
too little effort to retain his own, he had hired a detective to go
to San Luis Obispo and watch the career of Gene for signs of his old
waywardness. On the thirtieth of April the man had reported that Gene’s
course had been marked by an abstinence as genuine and complete as the
most exacting father could wish.
The old man crumpled up the letter and threw it into the waste-paper
basket, muttering balefully, like a cloud charged with thunder. It
was not that he wished Gene to drink again; it was that he hated most
bitterly giving him the finest piece of ranch land in California. It
was not that he did not wish his son to be prosperous and respectable,
only he wished that this happy condition had been achieved at some one
else’s expense.
His mood was unusually black when he entered the house. The servant,
who came forward to help him off with his coat, knew it the moment
he saw the heavy, scowling face. The piece of intelligence the man
had to convey--that Mr. Gene Cannon had arrived half an hour earlier
from San Luis Obispo--was not calculated to abate the Bonanza King’s
irritation. He received it with the expressionless grunt he reserved
for displeasing information, and, without further comment or inquiry,
went up the stairs to his own rooms. From these he did not emerge till
dinner was announced, when he greeted Gene with a bovine glance of
inspection and the briefest sentence of welcome.
Gene, however, was not at all abashed by any lack of cordiality. At
the best of times, he was not a sensitive person, and as this had been
his portion since his early manhood, he was now used to it. Moreover,
to-night he was in high spirits. In his year of exile he had learned
to love the outdoor life for which he was fitted, and had conceived
a passionate desire to own the splendid tract of land for which he
felt the love and pride of a proprietor. Now it was his without let or
hindrance. He was the owner of a principality, the lord of thousands
of teeming acres, watered by crystal streams and shadowed by ancient
oaks. He glowed with the joy of possession, and if anything was needed
to complete his father’s discomfiture, it was Gene’s naïve and bridling
triumph.
Always a loquacious person, a stream of talk flowed from him to which
the old man offered no interruption, and in which even Rose found it
difficult to insert an occasional, arresting question. Gene had any
number of new plans. His head was fuller than it had been for years
with ideas for the improvement of his land, the development of his
irrigating system, the planting of new orchards, the erecting of
necessary buildings. He used the possessive pronoun continually, rolled
it unctuously on his tongue with a new, rich delight. He directed most
of his conversation toward Rose, but every now and then he turned
on his father, enthusiastically dilating on a projected improvement
certain to increase the ranch’s revenues by many thousands per annum.
The old man listened without speaking, his chin on his collar, his eyes
fixed in a wide, dull stare on his happy boy. At intervals--Gene almost
clamoring for a response--he emitted one of those inarticulate sounds
with which it was his custom to greet information that he did not like
or the exact purport of which he did not fathom.
The only thing which would have sweetened his mood would have been a
conversation, peaceful and uninterrupted, with his daughter. He had not
seen as much of her as usual during the last few days, as she had been
confined to her room with a cold. This was the first evening she had
been at dinner for four days, and the old man had looked forward to
one of their slow, enjoyable meals together, with a long, comfortable
chat over the black coffee, as was their wont. Even if Rose did not
know of his distractions and schemes, she soothed him. _She_ never,
like this chattering jackass from San Luis Obispo--and he looked
sulkily at his son--rubbed him the wrong way. And he had hardly had a
word with her, hardly, in fact, had heard her voice during the whole
meal.
When it was over, and she rose from her seat, he asked her to play on
the piano in the sitting-room near by.
“Give us some music,” he said, “I want to hear something pleasant. The
whole day I’ve been listening to jays and knaves and fools, and I want
to hear something different that doesn’t make me mad or make me sick.”
Rose left the room and presently the sound of her playing came softly
from the sitting-room across the hall. Neither of the men spoke for a
space, and the old man, casting a side look at Gene, was maliciously
gratified by the thought that his son was offended. But he had reckoned
without his offspring’s amiable imperviousness to the brutalities
of the parental manner, wrought to-night to a condition of absolute
invulnerability by the young man’s unclouded gladness. Gene, his eyes
on his coffee-cup, was in anything but a state of insulted sullenness,
as was proved by his presently looking up and remarking, with innocent
brightness,
“You didn’t expect I’d get it, did you, Pop? I knew from the start you
were sure I’d slip up before the year was out.”
His father eyed him without replying, a blank, stony stare, before
which Gene did not show the slightest sign of quailing. He went on
jubilantly in his high, throaty voice.
“I wasn’t dead certain of it myself at the start. You know it isn’t
the easiest thing in the world to break off drinking habits that have
had you as long as mine had me. But when I went down there and lived
right on the land, when I used to get up in the morning and look out
of my window across the hills and see the cattle dotted all over them,
and the oaks thick and big and bushy, and feel the air just as soft as
silk, I said to myself, ‘By gum, Gene Cannon, you’ve got to have this
ranch if you die for want of whisky.’”
“Well, you’ve got it!” said his father in a loud, pugnacious tone.
“You’ve got it, haven’t you?”
“Well, I guess I have,” said Gene, his triumph tempered by an air of
modesty, “and I guess I earned it fair. I stuck to the bargain and
there were times when I can tell you it was a struggle. I never once
slipped up. If you don’t believe my word, I can bring you men from down
there that know me well, and they’ll testify that I speak the truth.”
The father raised his eyebrows but said nothing. If there was anything
further needed to show him what a complete, consistent fool his son
was, it was the young man’s evident impression that the Santa Trinidad
Ranch had been relinquished upon his own unsupported testimony. That
was just like Gene. For weeks the detective had trotted at his heels,
an entirely unsuspected shadow.
“It was Rose who really put me up to it,” he went on. “She’d say to me
I could do it, I only had to try; any one could do anything they really
made their minds up to. If you said you couldn’t do a thing, why, then
you couldn’t, but if you said you could, you got your mind into that
attitude, and it wasn’t hard any more. And she was right. When I got
my mind round to looking at it that way, it came quite easily. Rose’s
always right.”
This, the first statement of his son’s to which the Bonanza King could
subscribe, did not placate the old man. On the contrary, it still
further inflamed his sense of angry grievance. It was bad enough to
have Gene stealing the ranch--that’s all it was--but to have him
chuckling and grinning over it, when that very day Rose’s chances of
happiness had come to a deadlock, was just what you might expect of
such a fool. Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth spoke, growled
rather,
“I was just waiting to hear you give some credit to Rose. Here you are
talking all through dinner like a megaphone all about yourself and your
affairs, and not giving a thought to your sister.”
Gene stared at his parent in ingenuous, concerned amaze.
“Not a thought to Rose?” he repeated, in a high, surprised key. “Oh,
yes I have--lots of thoughts. I was just telling you now about how she
braced me up.”
“Braced you up! Of course she braced you up. Hasn’t she been doing it
all her life? But you can’t think of anything but yourself. Don’t you
ever look at your sister and think about her and how _she_ feels?”
“Yes,” said Gene, giving his head a confirmatory wag, “I do, I do
whenever I’m in town. You see, being away on the ranch so much----”
The old man leaned back in his chair, emitting a loud, interrupting
groan. Gene stared at him with a dawning uneasiness. He had begun
to grasp the fact that his father was in a state of mind which had
complications that included more than the old familiar contemptuousness
of his every-day mood. He decided to advance more gingerly, for even
Gene’s imperviousness to snubs did not make him proof against the
Bonanza King’s roused displeasure.
“I’m sure,” he said mildly, “no man ever had a more unselfish sister
than I have, or was more devoted to her than I am.”
“Then, why the hell,” said the old man, “do you go on talking about
yourself and your damned concerns, bothering the life out of her when
she’s got troubles of her own?”
The look of foolish amaze on Gene’s face deepened into one of genuine
concern.
“Troubles of her own? What troubles has she got?”
One of the most aggravating features of the situation was that Gene
could not be told why Rose was troubled and his father was cross. While
they were bent under unaccustomed cares, he went happy and free, with
nothing to think of except the ranch he had stolen. If he had been
any other kind of person, he could have been taken into the secret
and might have helped them out. The Bonanza King had thought of ways
in which a young and intelligent man could have been of assistance in
inducing Mrs. Dominick Ryan to listen to reason. Gene, if he’d had any
ability, if he’d had the brains of a mouse, could have made love to
her, induced her to run away with him, and then they could have given
her the money and got rid of her without any more fuss. He could have
been of incalculable value and here he was, perfectly useless, too much
of a fool even to be _told_ the position, moved by the mere gross
weight of his stupidity into an outside place of tranquil ignorance.
That his father could not force him to be a sharer in the family
troubles made the old man still more angry, and it was a poignant
pain to him that the only way he could show his rage was by roaring
wrathfully.
“Yes, Rose has troubles. Of course she has, but what have they got to
do with you, who don’t care about a thing but your damned ranch?”
“What’s the matter with her?” said Gene, roused into active uneasiness
and quite oblivious to his father’s insults. “I didn’t know anything
was wrong. She didn’t tell me.”
“No, and she won’t,” said the father. “And let me tell you if I catch
you asking her any questions or giving her any hints that I’ve said
anything to you, you can stay on your ranch and never come back into
this house. I won’t have Rose worried and upset by every fool that
comes along.”
“Well, but how am I to find out what’s the matter with her,” said the
altogether baffled brother, “if you won’t tell me, and I’m not to ask
her?”
“You needn’t find out. It’s her affair--hers and mine. Don’t you go
poking your nose in and trying to find out. I don’t want you butting
into Rose’s affairs.”
“Just now,” said Gene in an aggrieved tone, “you said I didn’t take
any interest in anything but my ranch. Now, when I want to take an
interest in Rose, you tell me not to butt in. I love my sister more
than most men, and I’d like to know if anything’s wrong with her.”
“She’s got a cold,” said Cannon.
He spoke sharply and looked at Gene with a sidelong eye full of
observant malice. The young man gazed back at him, confused, for
a moment half inclined to laugh, thinking his father, in a sudden
unaccustomed playfulness, was joking with him.
“Well, if it’s only a cold,” he stammered, “it’s nothing to tear up the
ground about. I thought it was something serious, that Rose was unhappy
about something. But a cold----”
He was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Rose herself, her hand
drawing back the portière that veiled the doorway. She, who knew her
father so well, had decided that in his present mood it was better to
curtail his after-dinner chat with Gene. Her quick eye took in their
two faces, and she felt that her brother had probably had a trying
half-hour.
“I’m tired of making music,” she said. “I’ve played my whole
repertoire. Now I want Gene to come back into the sitting-room with me
and tell me about the linen and the furniture I’m to send down to the
ranch. We’ll talk it over to-night and make a list and arrange for the
packing to-morrow.”
The young man rose, very glad to go with her, still uneasy and puzzled.
“How’s your cold, Rosey?” he said. “I didn’t know it was bad or I’d
have asked more about it.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” she said carelessly. “It was never really bad,
but I stayed in my room for a few days to be safe.” Her eye caught
her father’s, half-shut and full of brooding scorn, shot through with
a gleam of sardonic humor. Gene’s half-hour must have been even more
trying than she had at first thought.
“Come along, Gene,” she said, holding out her hand to him, “we’ll leave
the old man to his dreams. I know he never listened to a note of my
music and only told me to play as an excuse to get rid of me.”
She threw a laughing look at her father, who answered it with a lazy,
fond cast of his eye in her direction. Taking Gene’s hand, she drew him
into the hall and dropped the portière. The father could hear their
voices diminishing and growing muffled as they passed up the hall to
the sitting-room.
He sat on as they had left him in his favorite crumpled-up attitude.
After all, it was a good thing the boy did not know, was of the kind
who could not be trusted with any information of importance. He did
not want Gene or anybody else to interfere. He, Rose’s father, and he
alone, without any outside assistance, would reach up and pick out
for her any star that sparkled in the heavens, any moon for which she
might choose to cry. She wanted Dominick Ryan for her husband. She
should have him and it would be her father who would get him for her.
He would give her Dominick Ryan, as he would a pearl necklace or a new
automobile to which she had taken a fancy.
It whetted the old man’s lust of battle that Dominick was so hard to
get. Sitting fallen together in his chair he thought about new ways of
approaching Berny, new ways of bribing, or wheedling, or terrifying
her into giving up her husband. He was not at the end of his rope
yet, by any means. And it lent an added zest to the game that he had
an adversary of so much spirit. He was beginning to respect her. Even
if he had not been fighting for Rose, he would have gone on with the
struggle for its own sake. It was not Bill Cannon’s way to enter a
contest, and then be beaten--a contest with a spitfire woman at that.