He looked half ashamed.
"Well, I didn't know I was, either, till it popped out," he grinned. "But
I suppose 'most every man has sentimental spells. Maybe, even, he wouldn't
be worth his salt if he hadn't. Sometimes I think that way. But my spells
don't come on often. When they do, it's generally nights in spring--like
this, when special kinds of night-thoughts come flyin' along like
moths--thoughts about past and future. But lately, since that blessed
little oil town has been croppin' up like a bed of mushrooms round my big
gusher--or rather, the company's gusher, as it is now--I've had my mind on
that more than anything else, unless it's been my ditches. Gee! there's as
much romance about irrigation in this country, I guess, as there is about
angels which you can see only in dreams; for you see every day, when
you're wide awake, the miracle of your ditches. You just watch your desert
stretches or your meanest grazin' meadows turn into fairyland. I say, Mrs.
Gaylor, have you ever read a mighty fine book--old but good and fresh as
to-morrow's bread--called _The Arabian Nights?_"
"I don't know. I dare say I read some of it when I was a little girl,"
replied Carmen, wondering what Nick was leading up to. "It's for children,
isn't it?"
"I reckon it's for every one with the right stuff in 'em," said Nick.
"Anyhow, I haven't grown up enough to get beyond it. I don't mean ever to
turn the boy that lives inside of me out-of-doors. If I ever do anything
to make him so mad that he quits, I'll be finished--dried up. That book,
_The Arabian Nights_, has got a dead clinch on me. You know, when I run
into Bakersfield, I like to have a browse in the bookstores. It sort of
rests me, and seein' the pictures in that book made me buy it--a birthday
present for my affectionate self----"
"Your birthday!" Carmen broke in, tired of this book talk, but not tired
of anything that concerned him. "You never told me. That was bad of you.
How old, Nick? I'm not sure to a year or so."
"Twenty-nine. Quite some age, isn't it? But there's lots I want to do
before I'm old. I don't know, though, as I mean ever to be old."
"Of course, you never will be." Carmen agreed with him aloud, but she was
thinking in an undertone: "Only twenty-nine, and I'm thirty-three. He
won't be old ever, or for a long time, but I will. I'm that kind, I'm
afraid. My mother was. I've got no time to lose; but to-day's mine. Nick
must love me really, though maybe he's too used to me to know it, without
being stirred up by something unusual. But I'll try my hardest to make him
know it to-night."
"Go on about your 'Arabian Nights,'" she said, to give herself time for
the arranging of her tactics.
"Oh, well, all I really began to say was this: I was reading the story of
Aladdin and an enchanted cave of jewels he dropped into. There was a magic
ring and a lamp in the story too, that you could rub and get pretty near
anything you wanted; so I was thinking this irrigation business of ours in
California is like rubbing that lamp. It throws open doors of dark caves
in deserts, and gives up enchanted gardens full of jewelled fruit and
flowers. Then rub the smoky old lamp again and you get a spout of
oil--another gift, which makes you feel as if a genie'd chucked it to you.
Look at my gusher, for instance! Just think, Mrs. Gaylor, if you don't
mind my talking this way about, myself--you sold me my land, sliced it
right off your own ranch--let me have it darn cheap, too, when the boss
died----"
"I wanted to keep you as near as possible, Nick, when people began to be
silly and say I oughtn't to have a young man like you on the place as
foreman, with me alone, and Eld gone. I needed you badly, and I'd have
been glad to give you land for nothing if you'd have taken it. Gracious!
I've got so much left I don't know what to do with it, or wouldn't if you
weren't where you can advise me."
"That's your generous way of puttin' things," said Nick. "And it was
walkin' along toward you, brought up these fairy-book thoughts so strong.
My land's all right, though my house is a shack and I haven't got any
flower-garden except in my head. But over here is another world; and I was
sayin' to myself, how I owe the biggest things of my life to you. True, I
was taking out my wages in calves while the boss was alive, and he was
lettin' me put my brand on 'em by the hundred. But square as he was with
me, he'd never have sold the land for the price you did. Not only that,
but when I struck oil, a month or so after he went, look what happened. I
hadn't the capital to do any good. 'Twas you put the money in my hand for
the well-sinking and----"
"But you insisted on mortgaging every acre you bought--your cattle and
everything you had, to me; so that took away the credit," cried Carmen,
touched by his gratitude, and happy in the renewed assurance that this man
was hers. "Besides, all you did and spent seemed likely to harm more than
help, when everybody said you wouldn't get enough oil to pay for sinking
your wells. It was only when the gusher burst out by accident and took
every one by surprise that your troubles were over."
"If there's any such thing as accident," Nick mumbled, his eyes far away
from Carmen. "The longer I live, the more I think there isn't. It's all
arranged by Something Big up there beyond where the sun's sinking and the
moon's rising. But maybe you'll say that's sentimental, like the
angel-thought. I don't mean it that way, though I've got an almighty lot
to thank the Something for--as well as to thank you."
"It wasn't I who took the gusher off your hands, anyhow, and saved you the
expense of coping with it," said Carmen. "So I suppose you think it was
Heaven sent you those men to buy what oil land you wanted to sell, and
start Lucky Star City."
"I guess that's Who it was. Not that I deserve any special kindness from
that quarter," Nick laughed. "My mother used to talk a lot about those
things, you know, and though I was only a little shaver when she died,
I've remembered most all that was connected with her."
Carmen did not speak. She knew the history of Nick's terrible childhood
and early youth. Long ago he had told her how his grandfather, a
California pioneer of good Southern family, a successful judge, had turned
an only son away, penniless, because the boy of twenty chose to take for
a wife a pretty little dressmaker, of no family at all; how the couple had
gone East, to live on a few hundred dollars left to the boy by an aunt;
how he had hoped and expected to succeed in New York as a journalist and
writer; how he had failed and starved with his bride; how he had faded out
of life while Nick was a baby; how the girl-widow had taken in sewing to
support her child, and when she couldn't get that, had washed or scrubbed;
and how, as Nick became a wise, worried old man of four or five years, he
had been able to help earn the family living by selling the newspapers
which had refused his dead father's contributions. Nick had not enlarged
upon his adventures after this stage of his youthful career, merely
sketching them in the baldest manner, when it had been necessary to
present his credentials to the "boss"--"old Grizzly Gaylor." But in one
way or other it had leaked out that the boy had learned to read and write
and cipher at a night school in New York, not having time for such
"frills" as schooling by day. And Carmen could not help knowing that he
had gone on studying, and thinking out his own rather queer ideas about
heaven and earth, ever since, in spite of the most strenuous
interruptions--for she had been ashamed occasionally by happening to
discover how much Nick knew. He had read everybody and everything from
Plato to Schopenhauer, whereas it bored Carmen unspeakably to read
anything except novels, and verses which she liked sometimes in magazines,
because their pathos or passion might have been written round her.
She knew how Nick, as a little boy, had swept shops and found all sorts of
odd jobs; how he had been errand boy, and district messenger in a uniform
of which he had been proud because it made him feel "almost like a
soldier"; how after his mother's death he had got his long-cherished wish
to "go West," by working on the railway and eventually becoming a
brakesman. After that short experience "cowpunching" days had come, and
after several years in a subordinate position on Eldridge Gaylor's ranch
he had at twenty-five been made foreman. But by this time he was already a
familiar figure in her life--the life which she had chosen, and hated
after it was chosen, except for Nick Hilliard, who had always loomed large
in it, though she saw little of him until a year ago.
Except perhaps with the old man she had married for his money and hated
for his brutality, Carmen believed that Nick Hilliard's "ways" and good
looks had helped, even more than his courage and cleverness, to win him
success and recognition. With Eldridge Gaylor it had been different. He
thought of no man's pleasant looks or ways, though even upon the
corrugated iron of his nature, a woman's beauty had had influence, and he
had married Carmen off the comic opera stage, in the City of Mexico, where
he had gone to see a great bullfight ten years ago. When he had brought
her home to his famous ranch, willing for a while to be her slave and give
her everything she wanted, she had found Nick a cowpuncher among other
cowpunchers. And she had seen how he made "old Grizzly" respect him. But
his promotion had come through a row and an attempt at murdering the
"boss" by a drunken foreman driven mad by a blow from the short whip
Gaylor carried about the ranch. Nick had saved his employer's life,
risking his own--for he was unarmed at the moment; and to his surprise
the reward had been the discharged foreman's place. Carmen shivered a
little even now, remembering that night, and how she had worshipped Nick
for his bravery. She had never since ceased to worship him, though he had
done a great many things which irritated her extremely, such as saving
"old Grizzly's" life once again: but those years were past.
As she wondered whether Nick would like her to talk with him about his
mother, or whether that subject was too delicate to pursue, a musical
Japanese gong sounded from a side gallery.
"Oh, it must be half-past seven," she said. "I ordered dinner early, so we
could talk afterward by moonlight (I love talking in moonlight!) before
the time for you to go. You can give me your arm, if you like, Nick."
Of course, Nick "liked," though he had never taken a lady to dinner in
that way before, and he felt proud, if a little awkward, as a bare, creamy
arm laid itself on his coat-sleeve.
Slowly and without speaking, they walked along a flower-bordered path that
skirted the lawn on one side, and on the other a canal full to the brim of
glittering water, which reflected the sky and the two figures.
It was a place and an hour made for love.