IN Dick Willoughby’s presence Marshall Thurston contented himself with
sullen looks. But beyond his sight and hearing he spoke truculently of
what he was going to do some day to get level with “the hired hand who
had had the infernal insolence to call him down in public.” So all the
little world on the rancho knew, or at least believed, that a bitter
feud was in progress.
Two or three of the cowboys fostered young Marshall’s feelings of
animosity, partly out of sheer devilment, partly because they deemed
it good policy to keep in the good graces of the heir to the rancho.
Moreover, so long as old Ben Thurston knew nothing about it, they were
always willing to break a bottle with the dissipated spendthrift, not
only because good liquor was not to be despised at any time, but also
for the sake of the amusement afforded by Marshall, in his cups, with
his stories of fast life in New York and his apparently inexhaustible
fund of highly spiced anecdotes. Even his braggart threats against
Willoughby had an element of fun.
“Why don’t you cut him out with the girl?” one of his boon companions
had suggested on an occasion of this kind.
“By gad, I will,” Marshall had responded with vehemence. “You just watch
me.”
Thenceforward this thought was uppermost in his alcohol-sodden brain.
Marshall Thurston had met Mrs. Darlington and her daughter on several
occasions, but, although he had been formally introduced, he had never
been invited to call at La Siesta. Nor up to the present had he felt any
inducement to take the initiative. Like clings to like, and these people
were not of his kind—in the presence of pure and refined womanhood the
human toad becomes uncomfortably conscious of his own loathsomeness.
But now there was a valid reason to egg him on. He would show Dick
Willoughby who was who on the San Antonio Rancho. If the heir to all
those broad acres chose to pay court to Merle Farnsworth, the girl would
only be too glad to jump at him and his millions. He would tell her,
too, that Willoughby was going to be fired and that the fellow was not
worth a moment’s consideration.
Such was his mood one afternoon when, his motor car being in the repair
shop, he had not made his usual trip to Bakersfield. “Yes, he would
ride over that very day to La Siesta;” and he proceeded to fortify the
resolve by opening a bottle of champagne in the solitary seclusion of
his den. After gulping down the wine he felt brave enough to face
the devil himself. Yet, when mounted on his horse, he still evinced
sufficient discretion to make a wide detour lest Willoughby should catch
sight of him and divine his intentions.
As he rode along young Thurston nursed his wrath to keep it warm. At
the same time the desire to possess the girl for her own sake began to
inflame his imagination. Unscrupulous passion had been bred in the very
bone of this worthless degenerate. Just as his father, Ben Thurston, had
thirty years before trampled on the virtue of the young Spanish beauty,
Senorita Rosetta, the sister of Don Manuel, so now was the son hatching
in his brain a foul plot of spoliation.
“I’ll get even with Willoughby, by God, in the very way that will
hurt his pride the most. Women!—pshaw, they’re all alike. And she’s a
peacherino all right—those flashing dark eyes—she sure looks good to
me.” This was now the tenor of his musing as his pony cantered up the
slope to La Siesta.
He advanced on foot to the portico with a swagger and a smile, and
there, as luck would have it, he found Merle seated in a rocker,
reading, and alone. She rose with quiet courtesy and returned his
greeting.
“I am sorry,” she said, “mother is not at home. She and my sister Grace
have driven over to the dairy. We have a model dairy, you know, on La
Siesta,” she went on, anxious to make conversation that would not prove
embarrassing. For already she divined some particular object in the
young man’s visit, knowing as she did that he and Willoughby had
recently exchanged angry words.
“Won’t you show me your famous rose gardens?” asked Thurston, boldly.
“With pleasure,” she replied, assenting with a sweet smile of
politeness, although there was sore reluctance in her heart, as she
stepped from under the portico.
But, unknown to herself, she did not go unattended, for as Merle and her
visitor passed round the house and through the shrubberies there glided
after them the figure of a woman, clothed in black, wearing over her
head and shoulders a Spanish mantilla. It was Tia Teresa, the ever
watchful duenna.
The roses of La Siesta, as Marshall Thurston had said, were indeed
famous. Here were all the finest varieties, growing in the perfection
to which only care and scientific skill applied under ideal climatic
conditions can attain. Merle was glad to point out the different blooms
and give them their names—the topic was certainly an innocuous one,
and she smiled at the thought as they strolled along. She was vaguely
wondering, too, whether Dick Willoughby would approve even this slight
measure of courtesy toward the visitor to her home. Although she had
as yet not the remotest conception that the quarrel at the round-up had
been in any way connected with her name, she knew that the two young men
were at daggers drawn, and toward Dick there was the instinctive loyalty
in her heart that prompted her to count his enemies as her enemies, his
friends as her friends.
The young girl was too unversed in the ways of the world to notice
that Marshall Thurston was under the influence of wine. He was too
experienced a toper to show any signs of unsteadiness on his feet, but
all the same there was undoubted tipsiness in his leering side-glances
and occasional slurring of his words. Of this Merle in her maidenly
innocence was supremely unconscious, nor did she dream that the very
sparkle of her eyes was completing the intoxication of wine fumes.
Once she cast a look up the hill and asked herself whether the wizard
of the red-tiled tower had his spy-glass on La Siesta and was even
then quietly surveying the scene in the gardens. The thought made her
uncomfortable; she felt sure that her kind friend, Mr. Robles, would
not look with favor on her condescending to show even the slightest
attention to one whose evil ways of living were notorious.
Suddenly she came to a halt, close beside a little clump of oleander
trees laden with rich blossoms.
“I am sorry I must leave you now,” she said, quite abruptly.
“Leave me?” stammered Thurston. “What for?”
“I have other things to attend to,” she replied.
“Oh, I say, Miss Farnsworth”—the inebriate as he spoke made a gesture of
appeal—“I hope you are not angry with me. If that scalawag of a fellow
Willoughby told you I said anything disrespectful of you the other
day, he is a demed liar—that’s what he is, a derned liar, and a poor
penniless beggar as well, whom my father’s going to fire off the ranch.”
Merle stood speechless. She stepped back when Thurston advanced with
outstretched hands.
“The truth of the whole matter is,” he rambled on, with growing
incoherence, “I am madly in love with you myself. That’s what I am, and
I’m going to have you, too.” And he grabbed her fiercely and attempted
to draw her to him.
Merle screamed both in fear and in repulsion as she tried to push him
away.
Just then, from among the oleanders, rushed Tia Teresa. The old duenna
came like a cyclone. Her eyes blazed with anger. Grasping the young
libertine by the collar of his coat, she pulled him madly from the now
half-fainting girl. Then, whirling him around, she rushed him, with
the strength and ferocity of a tigress defending her whelps, down the
gravelled path and flung him bodily over the low retaining wall along
the embankment that separated the rose gardens from the public road. She
spat upon his prostrate figure below and rained down on him a torrent of
imprecations in the Spanish tongue.
It was all over in one brief minute. When young Thurston picked himself
up, it was to see the aged fury half-leading, half-carrying Merle away
in the direction of the house.
“The hell cat,” he murmured.
Then he brushed the dirt from his coat and straightened out his tumbled
appearance as best he could. His horse was tied to the gate post a
hundred yards along the road. He slunk toward it, climbed into the
saddle, and rode slowly away in the falling twilight. He had been
thoroughly sobered by the incident, yet continued somewhat dazed, for
his horse was headed toward the woods and hills and not in the direction
of home.