THE STORY OF ABE
True to her promise to Bruce, Nora had taken Ann in hand. She proposed
that they ride together the day after the man had suggested such a
kindness and the step was met most enthusiastically by the eastern
woman, for it promised her relief from the anxiety provoked by mere
waiting.
"I know nothing about this, so you'll have to tell me everything, Nora,"
she said as, in a new riding skirt, she settled herself in the saddle
and felt her horse move under her.
"I don't know much either," the girl replied, fussing with her blouse
front. "I was learnt to ride by a fine teacher, but I was so busy
learnin' 'bout him that I didn't pay much attention to what he said."
She looked up shyly, yet her mouth was set in determination and she
forced herself to meet Ann Lytton's gaze, to will to be kind to her ...
because Bruce had asked it. Her thinly veiled declaration of interest in
Bayard was not made without guile. It was a timid expression of her
claim to a free field. Perhaps, beneath all her sense of having failed
in the big ambition of her life, was a hope. This eastern woman was
married. Nora knew Bruce, knew his close adherence to his own code of
morals, and she believed that something possibly might come to pass,
some circumstance might arise which would take Ann out of their lives
before the control that Bayard had built about his natural impulses
could be broken down. That would leave her alone with the rancher, to
worship him from a distance, to find a great solace in the fact that
though he refused to be her lover no other woman was more intimately in
his life. That hope prompted her mild insinuation of a right of
priority.
Ann caught something of the subtle enmity which Nora could not wholly
cover by her outward kindness. She had heard Nora's and Bruce's names
associated about the hotel, and when, on speaking of Bayard, she saw her
companion become more shy, felt her unconscious hostility increase
perceptibly, she deduced the reason. With her conclusion came a feeling
of resentment and with a decided shock Ann realized that she was
prompted to be somewhat jealous of this daughter of the west. Indignant
at herself for what she believed was a mean weakness she resolved to
refrain from talking of Bruce to Nora for the sake of the girl's peace
of mind, although she could not help wondering just how far the affair
between the waitress and her own extraordinary lover had gone.
Keeping off the subject was difficult, for the two were so far apart,
their viewpoints so widely removed, that they had little or no matter on
which to converse, aside from Yavapai and its people; and of the
community Bayard was the outstanding feature for them both.
"How long have you been here, Nora?" Ann asked.
"Three years; ever since Bruce got me my job."
There you were!
"Do you like it here?"
"Well, folks have showed me a good time; Bruce especially."
Again the talk was stalled.
"Were you born out here?"
"Yes; that's why I ain't got much education ... except what Bruce gave
me."
Once more; everything on which they could converse went directly back to
Bayard and, finally, Ann abandoned the attempt to avoid the embarrassing
subject and plunged resolutely into it, hoping to dissipate the
intangible barrier that was between them.
"Tell me about Bruce," she said. "He brought you here, he educated you;
he must have been very kind to you. He must be unusual,"--looking at the
other girl to detect, if she could, any misgiving sign.
Nora stared straight ahead.
"He's been good to me," she said slowly. "He's good to everybody, as I
guess you know. The' ain't much to know about him. His name ain't
Bayard; nobody knows what it is. He was picked up out of a railroad
wreck a long time ago an' old Tim Bayard took him an' raised him. They
never got track of his folks; th' wreck burnt.
"Tim died four years ago an' Bruce's runnin' th' outfit. He's got a fine
ranch!"--voice rising in unconscious enthusiasm. "He ain't rich, but
he'll be well fixed some day. He don't care much about gettin' rich;
says it takes too much time. He'd rather read an' fuss with horses an'
things."
"Isn't it unusual to find a man out here or anywhere who feels like
that? Are there more like him in this country, Nora?"
"God, no!"--with a roughness that startled her companion. "None of 'em
are like him. He was born different; you can tell that by lookin' at
him. He ain't their kind, but they all like him, you bet! _He's_
smarter'n they are. Feller from th' East, a perfesser, come out here
with th' consumption once when Tim was alive an' stayed there; he taught
Bruce lots. My!"--with a sigh of mingled pride and hopelessness--"he
sure knows a lot. Just as if he was raised an' educated in th' East,
only with none of th' frills you folks get."
Then she was silent and refused to respond readily to Ann's advances,
but rode looking at her pony's ears, her lips in a straight line.
That was the beginning. Each day the two women rode together, Nora
teaching Ann all she knew of horses and showing her, in her own way, the
mighty beauty of that country.
After the first time, they said little about Bruce; with a better
acquaintance, more matters could be talked about and for that each was
thankful.
Removed as they were from one another by birth and training, each of
these two women, strangers until within a few days, found that a great
part of her life was identical with that of the other. Yet, at the very
point where they came closest to one another, divergence began again.
Their common interest was their feeling for Bruce Bayard, and their
greatest difference was the manner in which each reacted to the emotion.
The waitress, more elemental, more direct and child-like, wanted the man
with an unequivocal desire. She would have gone through any ordeal,
subjected herself to any ignominious circumstances, for his pleasure.
But she did not want him as a possession, as something which belonged to
her; she wanted him for a master, longed with every fiber of her sensory
system to belong to him. She would have slaved for him, drudged for him,
received any brutal outburst he might have turned on her, gratefully,
just so long as she knew she was his.
Ann Lytton, complicated in her manner of thought by the life she had
lived, hampered by conventions, by preconceived standards of conduct,
would not let herself be whiffed about so wholly by emotion. It was as
though she braced backward and moved reluctantly before a high wind,
urged to flight, resisting the tugging by all the strength of her limbs,
yet losing control with every reluctant step. For her, also, Bruce
Bayard was the most wonderful human being that she had ever experienced.
His roughness, his little uncouth touches, did not jar on her highly
sensitized appreciation of proprieties. With another individual of a
weaker or less cleanly type, the slips in grammar, even, would have been
annoying; but his virility and his unsmirched manner of thought, his
robust, clean body, overbalanced those shortcomings and, deep in her
heart, she idolized him. And yet she would not go further, would not
willingly let that emotion come into the light where it could thrive and
grow with the days; she tried to repress it, keeping it from its natural
sources of nourishment and thereby its growth--for it would grow in
spite of her--became a disrupting progress. One part of her, the real,
natural, unhampered Ann, told her that for his embraces, for his
companionship, she would sell her chances of eternity; she had no desire
to own him, no urge to subject herself to him; the status she wanted was
equal footing, a shoulder-to-shoulder relationship that would be a
joyous thing. And yet that other part, that Puritanical Ann, resisted,
fought down this urge, told her that she must not, could not want Bayard
because, at the Circle A ranch, waited another man who, in the eyes of
the law, of other people, of her God, even, was the one who owned her
loyalty and devotion even though he could not claim her love. Strange
the ways of women who will guard so zealously their bodies but who will
struggle against every natural, holy influence to give so recklessly, so
uselessly, so hopelessly, of their souls!
Nora was the quicker to analyze her companion-rival. Her subjection to
Bayard's every whim was so complete that, when he told her to be kind to
this other woman, she obeyed with all the heart she could muster, in
spite of what she read in his face and in Ann's blue eyes when that
latter-day part of the eastern woman dreamed through them. She went
about her task doggedly, methodically, forcing herself to nurse the bond
between these two, thinking not of the future, of what it meant to her
own relationships with the cattleman, of nothing but the fact that
Bayard, the lover of her dreams, had willed it. The girl was a religious
fanatic; her religion was that of service to Bayard and she tortured
herself in the name of that belief.
And in that she was only reflecting the spirit of the man she loved.
Back at the ranch, Bayard underwent the same ordeal of repressing his
natural desires, only, in his case, he could not at all times control
his revulsion for Lytton, while Nora kept her jealousy well in hand. As
at first, he centered his whole activity about bringing Lytton back to
some semblance of manhood. He nursed him, humored him as much as he
could, watched him constantly to see that the man did not slip away, go
to Yavapai and there, in an hour, undo all that Bruce had accomplished.
Lytton regained strength slowly. His nervous system, racked and torn by
his relentless dissipation, would not allow his body to mend rapidly. He
had been on the verge of acute alcoholism; another day or two of
continued debauchery would have left him a bundle of uncontrollable
nerves, and remedying the condition was no one day task. A fortnight
passed before Lytton was able to sit up through the entire day and, even
then, a walk of a hundred yards would bring him back pale and panting.
Meager as his daily improvement was, nevertheless it was progress, and
the rehabilitation of his strength meant only one thing for Bruce
Bayard. It meant that Lytton, within a short time, must know of Ann's
presence, must go to her, and that, thereafter, Bayard would be excluded
from the woman's presence, for he still felt that to see them together
would strip him of self-restraint, would make him a primitive man,
battling blindly for the woman he desired.
As the days passed and Bruce saw Lytton steadying, gaining physical and
mental force, his composure, already disturbed, was badly shaken. He
tried to tell himself that what must be, must be; that brooding would
help matters not at all, that he must keep up his courage and surrender
gracefully for the sake of the woman he loved, keeping her peace of mind
sacred. At other times, he went over the doctrine of unimpeachable
motive, of individual duty that the clergyman had expounded, but some
inherent reluctance to adopt the new, some latent conservatism in him
rebelled at thought of man's crossing man where a woman was at stake. He
did not know, but he formed the third being who was held to a rigid
course by conscience! Of the four entangled by this situation, Ned
Lytton alone was without scruples, without a code of ethics.
Between the two men was the same attitude that had prevailed from the
first. Bayard kept Lytton in restraint by his physical and mental
dominance. He gave up attempting to persuade, attempting to appeal to
the spark of manhood left in his patient, after that day when Lytton
stole and drank the whiskey. He relied entirely on his superiority and
frankly kept his charge in subjection. When strength came back to the
debauched body, Bayard told himself, he could begin to plead, to argue
for his results; not before.
For the greater portion of the time Lytton was morose, quarrelsome. Now
and again came flashes of a better nature, but invariably they were
followed by spiteful, reasonless outbursts and remonstrances. To these
Bayard listened with tolerance, accepting the other man's curses and
insults as he would the reasonless pet of a child, and each time that
Ned showed a desire to act as a normal human being, to interest himself
in life or the things about him, the big rancher was on the alert to
give information, to encourage thought that would take the sick man's
mind from his own difficulties.
One factor of the life at the ranch evidently worried Lytton, but of it
he did not speak. This was the manner with which Bayard kept one room,
the room in which he slept, to himself. The door through which he
entered never stood open, Lytton was never asked to cross the sill.
Bayard never referred to it in conversation. A secret chamber, it was,
rendered mysterious by the fact that its occupant took pains that it
should never be mentioned. Lytton instinctively respected this attitude
and never asked a question touching on it, though at times his annoyance
at being so completely excluded from a portion of the house was evident.
Once Lytton, sitting in the shade of the ash tree, watched Bayard riding
in from the valley on his sorrel horse. The animal nickered as his
master let him head for the well beside the house.
"He likes to drink here," Bruce laughed, dropping off and wiping the
dust from his face. "He thinks that because this well's beside the
house, it's better than drinkin' out yonder in th' corral. Kind of a
stuck up old pup, ain't you, Abe?" slapping the horse's belly until he
lifted one hind foot high in a meaningless threat of destruction. "Put
down that foot you four-flusher!" setting his boot over the hoof and
forcing it back to earth.
He pulled off the saddle, dropped it, drew the bridle over the sleek,
finely proportioned ears and let the big beast shake himself mightily,
roll in the dooryard dust and drink again.
"Where'd he come from?" Lytton asked, after staring at the splendid
lines of the animal for several minutes.
"Oh, Abe run hog-wild out on th' valley," Bayard answered, with a
laugh, waving his hand out toward the expanse of country, now a fine
lilac tinted with green under the brilliant sunlight, purple and
uncertain away out where the heat waves distorted the horizon. "He was a
hell bender of a horse for a while....
"You see, he come from some stock that wasn't intended to get out.
Probably, an army stallion got away from some officer at Whipple
Barracks and fell in with a range mare. That kind of a sire accounts for
his weight and that head and neck, an' his mammy must have been a
leather-lunged, steel-legged little cuss--'cause he's that, too. He's
got the lines of a fine bred horse, with the insides of a first class
bronc."
"He attracted attention when he was a two year old and some of th' boys
tried to get him, but couldn't. They kept after him until he was four
and then sort of give up. He was a good horse gone bad. He drove off
gentle mares and caused all kind of trouble and would 'a been shot, if
he hadn't been so well put up. He was no use at all that way; he was a
peace disturber an' he was fast an' wise. That's a bad combination to
beat in a country like ours,"--with another gesture toward the valley.
"But his fifth summer was th' dry year--no rain--creeks dryin' up--hell
on horses; Tim and I went to get him.
"There was just three waterin' places left on that range. One on Lynch
Creek, one under Bald Mountain, other way over by Sugar Block. We fenced
the first two in tight so nothin' but birds could get to 'em, built a
corral around th' third, that was clean across th' valley
there,"--indicating as he talked-"an' left th' gate open."
"Well, first day all th' horses on th' valley collected over other side
by those fenced holes, wonderin' what was up,"--he scratched his head
and grinned at the memory, "an' Tim and I set out by Sugar Block in th'
sun waitin'.... Lord, it was hot, an' there wasn't no shade to be had.
That night, some of the old mares come trailin' across th' valley
leadin' their colts, whinnerin' when they smelled water. We was sleepin'
nearby and could kind 'a' see 'em by th' starlight. They nosed around
th' corral and finally went in and drunk. Next day, th' others was
hangin' in sight, suspicious, an' too thirsty to graze. All of 'em stood
head toward th' water, lookin' an' lookin' hours at a time. 'Long toward
night in they come, one at a time, finally, with a rush; unbranded
mares, a few big young colts, all drove to it by thirst.
"Old Abe, though, he stood up on th' far rim of a wash an' watched an'
hollered an' trotted back an' forth. He wouldn't come; not much! We had
a glass an' could see him switch his tail an' run back a little ways
with his ears flat down. Then, he'd stop an' turn his head an' stick up
his ears stiff as starch; then he'd turn 'round an' walk towards us,
slow for a few steps. Never got within pistol shot, though. All next day
he hung there alone, watchin' us, dryin' up to his bones under that
sun. Antelope come up, a dozen in a bunch, an' hung near him all
afternoon. Next mornin' come th' sun an' there was Mr. Abe, standin'
with his neck straight in th' air, ears peekin' at our camp to see if we
was there yet. Gosh, how hot it got that day!" He rose, drew a bucket of
water from the well and lifting it in his big hands, drank deeply from
the rim at the memory.
"I thought it was goin' to burn th' valley up.
"'This'll bring him,' says Tim.
"'Not him,' I says! 'He'll die first.'
"'He's too damn good a sport to die,' Tim said. 'He'll quit when he's
licked.'
"An' he did."
The man walked to the sorrel, who stood still idly switching at flies.
He threw his arm about the great head and the horse, swaying forward,
pushed against his body with playful affection until Bayard was shoved
from his footing.
"You did, didn't you, Abe? He didn't wait for dark. It was still light
an' after waitin' all that time on us, you'd thought he'd stuck it out
until we couldn't see so well. But it seemed as if Tim was right, as if
he quit when he saw he was licked, like a good sport. He just
disappeared into that wash an' come up on th' near side an' walked slow
toward us, stoppin' now an' then, sidesteppin' like he was goin' to turn
back, but always comin' on an' on. He made a big circle toward the
corral an', when he got close, 'bout fifty yards off, he started to
trot an' he went through that gate on a high lope, comin' to stop plumb
in th' middle of that hole, spatterin' water an' mud all over himself
an' half th' country.
"'Twasn't much then. We made it to th' gate on our horses. He could see
us, but we knew after bein' dried out that long he'd just naturally have
to fill up. When I reached for th' gate, he made one move like he tried
to get away but 'twas too late. We had him trapped. He was licked. He
looked us over an' then went to lay down in th' water."
He stroked the long, fine neck slowly.
"After that 'twas easy. I knew he was more or less man even if he was
horse. We put th' first rope on him he'd ever felt next mornin'. Of
course, 'twas kind of a tournament for a while, but, finally we both
tied on an' started home with him between us. He played around some, but
finally let up; not licked, not discouraged, understand, but just as if
he admitted we had one on him an' he was goin' to see our game through
for curiosity.
"We put him in th' round corral an' left him there for a straight month,
foolin' with him every day, of course. Then I got up an' rode him.
That's all there is to it.
"He was my best friend th' minute I tied on to him; he is yet. We never
had no trouble. I treat him square an' white. He's never tried to pitch
with me, never has quit runnin' until I told him to, an', for my part,
I've never abused him or asked him to go th' limit."
He walked out to the corral then, horse following at his heels like a
dog, nosing the big brown hand that swung against Bayard's thigh.
"That's always been a lesson to me," Bruce said, on his return as he
prepared to wash in the tin basin beside the wall. "Runnin' hog-wild
never got him nothin' but enemies, never did him no good. He found out
that it didn't pay, that men was too much for him, an' he's a lot
happier, lot better off, lot more comfortable than he was when he was
hellin' round with no restraint on him. He knows that. I can tell.
"So,"--as he lathered his hands with soap--"I've always figured that
when us men got runnin' too loose we was makin' mistakes, losin' a lot.
It may seem a little hard on us to stop doin' what we've had a good time
doin' for a while, but, when you stop to consider all sides, I guess
there's about as much pleasure for us when we think of others as there
is when we're so selfish that we don't see nothin' but our own desires."
Lytton stirred uneasily in his chair and tossed his chin scornfully.
"Don't you ever get tired playing the hero?" he taunted. "That's what
you are, you know. You're the hero; I'm the villain. You're the one
who's always saying the things heroes say in books. You're the one who's
always right, while I'm always wrong.
"You know, Bayard, when a man gets to be so damn heroic it's time he
watched himself. I've never seen one yet whose foot didn't slip sooner
or later. The higher you fly, understand, the harder you fall. You're
pretty high; mighty superior to most of us. Look out!"
The other regarded him a moment, cheeks flushing slowly under the taunt.
"Lytton, if I was to ask a favor of you, would you consider it?"
"Fire away! The devil alone knows what I could do for anybody."
"Just this. Be careful of me, please. I might, sometime, sort of choke
you or something!"
He turned back to the wash basin at that and soused his face and head in
the cold water.
A moment before he had looked through that red film which makes killers
of gentle men. He had mastered himself at the cost of a mighty effort,
but in the wake of his rage came a fresh loathing for that other man ...
the man he was grooming, rehabilitating, only to blot out the
possibility of having a bit of Ann's life for himself. He was putting
his best heart, his best mind, his best strength into that discouraging
task, hoping against hope that he might lift Lytton to a level where Ann
would find something to attract and hold her, something to safeguard her
against the true lover who might ride past on his fire-shod stallion.
And it was bitter work.