PRAIRIE BELL
When Juliet Bissell rode back to the Bar T ranch after her parting with
Larkin at the fork of Grass Creek, she was a decidedly more thoughtful and
sober young woman than she had been at the same hour the day previous.
Although blessed with an adoring father and a rather eccentric mother, she
had, for the last year, begun to feel the stirrings of a tiny discontent.
Her life was a good example of the familiar mistake made by many a wealthy
cattle-owner. Her parents, realizing their crudity and lack of education,
had seen to it that she should be given all the advantages denied them,
and had sent her East to Chicago for eight consecutive years.
During this time, while hating the noise and confinement of the city, she
had absorbed much of its glamour, and enjoyed its alluring pleasures with
a keen appreciation. Music had been her chief study, and her very decided
talent had opened a busy career for her had she chosen to follow it.
But Julie was true to her best instincts, and refused to consider such a
thing. Her father and mother had done all in their power for her, she
reasoned, and therefore it was but fair that she should return to them and
make the closing years of their lives happy.
Though nothing had ever been said, the girl knew that when she had left
the ranch house, even for a week's visit with a girl friend two hundred
miles away, the sun might as well have fallen from the heavens,
considering the gloom that descended upon the Bar T.
It was this knowledge of their need for her that had brought her back to
fulfill what she considered her greatest happiness and duty in life.
Now, a monkey cannot wear clothes, smoke cigarettes, perform before
applauding audiences and return to the jungle without a certain feeling of
hateful unfitness among his gibbering brethren.
No more could this wild, lovely creature of the plains become one of the
most sought-after girls of Chicago's North Shore set, and return to the
painful prose of the Bar T ranch without paying the penalty.
With the glory of health and outdoor life, she had failed to realize
this, but since the sudden appearance of Bud Larkin she had done little
else.
He had brought back to her a sudden powerful nostalgia for the life she
had once known. And had old Beef Bissell been aware of this nostalgia, he
would have realized for the first time that in his desire to give his
daughter everything he had created a situation that was already
unfortunate and might, with very little prompting, be unhappy.
But this knowledge was not vouchsafed to him, and Julie certainly would
never make it plain.
The evening after Bud's departure, that same evening, in fact, when he was
fighting toward water with his flocks, the cattleman and his daughter sat
outside on the little veranda that ran across the front of the ranch
house.
"That feller Larkin," remarked Bissell, terminating a long pause. "Kind of
a dude or something back East, wasn't he?"
"That's what the punchers would call him, father," returned the girl
gravely. "But he was never anything but a gentleman in his treatment of
me."
"I don't know what you mean exactly by that word 'gentleman,' Julie, but I
allow that no real man ever went into raisin' sheep."
"Perhaps not, dear," she said, taking his rough, ungainly hand in both of
hers, "but I think there is bound to be money in it. Mr. Larkin himself
says that in the end the cattle will have to give way before the sheep."
"An' he thought he was tellin' you something new when he said it, too,
didn't he? Well, I've knowed that fact for the last five years. That's the
main reason I won't let his animals through my range. Once they get a
foothold, there's no stoppin' 'em. Judas! I'm tired of fightin' for
things!"
"Poor father," and the girl's voice was full of tenderness. "You're not
discouraged, are you, dear?"
"No, Prairie Bell, but I reckon I'm gettin' old, an' I can't get up the
fight I used to. I thought I had my hands full with the rustlers, but now
with the sheep comin'--well, between you and me, little girl, I wish I had
somebody to stand up and take the licks."
"There's Mike; he certainly can give and take a few."
"Yes, of course I've got Mike, but, when you're all done, he's only a
foreman, an' his interest don't go much beyond his seventy-five a month
an' grub. Yet--by George!" He sat suddenly erect and slapped his thigh
with his disengaged hand.
"What is it?"
"Oh, nothin'." They talked on in the affectionate, intimate way that had
always characterized their relations since Julie had been a girl just big
enough to listen to involved harangues about cattle without actually going
to sleep. In the course of an hour Bissell suddenly asked:
"Did you ever think of marryin', Prairie Bell?"
"If thinking ever helped any, I would have been a Mormon by this time."
"Well, you are growed up, ain't you?" and Bissell spoke in the wondering
tone of a man who has just realized a self-evident fact "Fancy my little
girl old enough to marry! How old are you, anyhow? 'Bout eighteen?"
"Twenty-five, you dear, old goose. Eighteen! The idea."
"Well, twenty-five, then. Of course, Julie, when I die I will leave this
place to you, and that's what made me think about your marryin'. I want a
good, sharp man to fight fer my cows an' my range, a man that knows it and
could make a success of it, an' yet wouldn't care because it was in your
name."
"Would you mind if I loved him a little bit, too?" asked the girl, with
elaborately playful sarcasm.
"Bless you, no. Love him all you want to, but I 'low you couldn't love a
man very long who didn't have all them qualifications I mentioned. I
figger love out somethin' like this. First there's a rockbed of ability,
then a top soil of decency, an' out o' these two, admiration kind o' grows
like corn. Of course you always grind up the corn and soak it with
sentiment; then you've got mush. An' the trouble with most people is they
only think of the mush an' forget the rock an' the top soil."
"Why, you old philosopher!" cried the girl, laughing and squeezing his big
shoulders. "You're awfully clever, really." Which remark brought a
confused but pleased blush to Bissell's hard face that had become
wonderfully soft and tender during this hour with his daughter.
"Now, see here," went on the girl severely, "I think there's something
back of all this talk about marriage. What is it?"
Bissell looked at her, startled, not having expected to encounter feminine
intuition.
"Nothin', only I wish you could marry somebody that'd look out fer you the
way I mentioned. Then I could die happy, though I don't expect to be on
that list fer a long while."
"Anybody in mind?" asked Julie banteringly.
"Well, not exactly," hesitated her father, with another sharp glance. "But
I allow I could dig up one if I tried very hard."
"Go ahead and try."
"Well, now there's Billy Speaker over on the Circle Arrow, as gentle a man
for a blond as I ever see."
"I've only met him twice in my life," remarked the girl. "Try again."
"There's Red Tarken, foreman on the M Square. He'd be good to yuh, I know,
and he's a hum-dinger about cows."
"I am glad he has one qualification aside from his red hair," put in Julie
seriously. "However, I am afraid that as a husband Red would be about as
steady as a bronco saddled for the first time after the winter feeding.
He'd better have free range as long as he lives. Once more, father."
"Well, see here, Julie, it seems to me you could do a lot worse than take
our own Mike Stelton. I've never thought of it much before, but to-night
it sort of occurred to me an'--"
Juliet Bissell broke into an uncontrollable fit of laughter, at which her
father fixed her with a regard as wondering as it was hurt. His cherished
inspiration so tactfully approached had burst like a soap-bubble under the
gale of Juliet's merriment.
"Bud was right, after all," said the girl, after her nervous outbreak. "He
told me Mike had some silly hope or other, and I believe Stelton has given
you absent treatment until you have made this suggestion. Father, he's
just as preposterous as the others."
"I don't agree with you," contended Bissell stubbornly. "Mike is faithful,
and has been for years. He knows the ins and outs of the business, and is
willing to take the hard knocks that I'm getting tired of. Then there's
another thing. I could be half-blind an' still see what Mike has been
wanting these last five years."
Juliet suddenly rose to her feet, all the laughter gone from her eyes and
her heart. With a feeling of frightened helplessness she realized that her
father was serious.
"Are you taking Mike's part against me?" she asked calmly.
"Well, I still don't see why you couldn't marry him."
"You've forgotten the mush, father, but that isn't all. There's something
different about Mike lately, something I have never noticed before. His
eye seems shifty; he avoids all the family. If I didn't know him so well,
I should think he was a criminal. Leaving out the fact that I don't love
him, and that the very thought of his ever touching me makes me shudder,
this distrust of him would be enough to block any such arrangements.
Why"--and her lip curled scornfully--"I would marry Bud Larkin a hundred
times rather than Mike Stelton once."
"What!"
Bissell rose to his feet with the quiet, amazed exclamation. He could
hardly credit his ears.
"Marry that dirty sheepman?" he continued in a tense, even voice. "I'd
like to know what put that crazy notion in yore head. Don't tell me you
are in love with that dude."
"No, I am not," answered the girl just as evenly, "but I may as well tell
you frankly, that he is the only man within a radius of three hundred
miles who has certain things I must have in a husband. I'm sorry if I
displease you, father!" she cried, going to him affectionately, "but I
could never love any one not of our class."
That diplomatic "our" did not deceive Bissell. For the first time he saw
that the greatest treasure of his whole life had grown beyond him; that
there were needs and ideals in her existence of which he had but the
faintest inkling, and that in her way she was as much of a "dude" as the
man she had mentioned.
He was encountering the seemingly cruel fate of parents who glorify their
children by their own immolation, and who watch those same children pass
up and out of their humble range of vision and understanding nevermore to
return. Henceforth he could never see his daughter without feeling his own
lack of polish.
Such a moment of realization is bitter on both sides, but especially for
the one who has given all and can receive less in return than he had
before the giving. The iron of this bitterness entered into Beef Bissell's
soul as he stood there, silent, on the low, rickety veranda under the
starlight of the plains.
With the queer vagary of a mind at great tension, his senses became
particularly acute for a single moment. He saw the silver-pierced vault of
the sky, smelled the fragrance of the plains borne on the gentle wind, and
heard the rustle of the dappled cottonwoods and the howling of the distant
coyotes.
Then he came back to the reality of the moment, and exhibited the simple
greatness that had always been his in dealings with his daughter. He
slipped his heavy arm across her shoulders and drew her to him.
"Never mind, Prairie Bell," he said gently. "You know best in everything.
Do as your heart dictates." He sighed and added: "I wish I was your mother
to-night."