Now Janet was in the ranch, but hardly of it. Her mother was the ranch
housekeeper; but years ago, in the days of the open range and hostile
Indians, when the Old Man was young and believed that the proper place
for dudes was east of the Mississippi River, she had been the great lady
of the cow country. Her husband had been a younger son of the British
aristocracy, a fact which he had proceeded to forget as quickly as
possible, except that he had gone through his money like an English
gentleman, both living and giving generously.
Not that that mattered now, save for a certain breeding, an English sort
of reticence and the excellent horsemanship which were all he had
bequeathed to Janet. His widow was the ranch housekeeper, and during the
long summer she went around from cottage to tent, tent to cottage,
conversing with maids in some such manner as “Get some mouse traps for
22, Maggie. The field mice have eaten Mrs. Brown’s orange sweater.” Or
“Tell Mr. Jenkins in 18 that he’ll have to stop smoking in bed. He burns
holes in his sheets every time.”
Janet taught school in the winter, riding back and forth on Midge, the
little buckskin which she had trained to an uncanny degree of
intelligence. Not that Janet had any idea of the importance Midge was to
assume in her life, but because, until the Kid came into it, she had a
good bit of leisure time. After that, of course—
The Kid had come over from the Powder River country some eight months
before, a big brown boy with a scar on his neck from the Argonne Forest,
a good saddle, a dauntless spirit and ten dollars in coin of the realm,
which he stood ready to bet at any odds or none on anything at all. He
lost the ten dollars and his heart almost simultaneously and for the
rest went through his initiation into the outfit creditably.
He was given bad horses and stuck to them as long as his knees held out;
fought with his two fists when he had to; jibed and was jibed at;
mortgaged his pay in advance on blackjack and poker; drank a variety of
moonshine under different names, with equally disastrous results; and in
sentimental moments was wont to tilt back his chair, draw his hat over
his eyes and, having thus secured the delusion of isolation from his
kind, to produce a mouth organ and pour out his soul in a succession of
dismal sounds.
He had eight words of army French, a cowpuncher’s sense of humour, a
very masculine vanity, an extreme humility about women, and a modesty so
shrinking that he did without bed sheets for a week because he wouldn’t
ask Janet for them.
“What do you get out of all those books, Miss Janet?” he had asked her
once.
“I like to know about things. Don’t you?”
He set about a course of reading then. It irked him horribly, but it was
his idea of decreasing the distance between them. He would sit off,
grimly aloof from the card table, going at full blast, and feel that
with every line, so to speak, he climbed a step. By late spring,
although nothing had been said, Janet and the Kid were keeping steady
company, and the Old Man had his eye on a homestead for them up Indian
Creek. But the summer influx had changed everything. Beginning with the
first of June the ranch took on a strange and exotic blooming, became
colourful and sparkling. The lawn by the big house began to be dotted
with bright hats and sweaters. The corral lost its air of businesslike
austerity and on its high fence perched strange and brilliant birds,
with clear young voices which shouted, “Ride ’er, cowboy!”
The wranglers themselves took on some of this new colouring. They began
to appear in new hats, in pink shirts, in vivid-coloured neck
handkerchiefs. The corral in business hours, which were all day now, was
as full of local colour as a Buffalo Bill show, and slightly reminiscent
of it, for the Old Man knew his business.
And to the Kid a new and bewildering world of women opened up, and with
this difference: He had always looked up to Janet as a sort of superior
being, and now came dozens of girls, clean and sweet and wholesome as
the mountain air, who stood near him, in groups or singly, and gazed at
him as at some supreme and magnificent creature.
They tendered him the homage of all the romance they had built up about
the West, gazing at him with their clear soft eyes, seeing in him the
Virginian or some other hero; but mostly Faversham.
It went to the Kid’s head. He paid thirty dollars for a new pair of
inlaid spurs, and was quite apt, when not otherwise occupied, to play
idly with a hemp rope, with which he could do a variety of things. When,
standing like a star in the centre of a circle of satellites, he let it
settle gently over the head of some pretty creature, she would flush at
the distinction. Generally, that is. For once he saw a new girl,
Rosamond Carter, and roped her neatly. But Rosamond did not flush. She
looked quite squarely into the Kid’s eyes and said, “Now you’ve got me,
what do you intend to do with me?”
It was the Kid who flushed that time.
The cruel thing about it all was that Rosamond very deliberately set to
work to steal the Kid, to sacrifice him to make a summer holiday. Before
she fixed on him she had coolly appraised the masculine situation, the
men of the outfit, the visiting Easterners, even the Old Man himself.
She even knew about Janet, which must be Janet’s excuse, for she will
need one—and Janet knew that she knew.
Perhaps Rosamond maliciously hoped for a struggle, girl against girl;
but Janet never put up a fight. She let the Kid go his blundering,
masculine way, cried herself to sleep at night, rode Midge and trained
him in a sort of desperation, and presented to the Kid and to the world
a sort of frozen friendliness that wrung the Old Man’s heart. The Kid
was gone. He rode with Rosamond in the evenings, and swallowed whole her
bait of his horsemanship and his red-bloodedness and the general lack of
both in Eastern men.
“There’s nothing to the society game,” she would say, sitting on her
horse and looking over the far places through lashes lightly touched
with black paste. “I’m a better woman when I’m here with you.”
The Kid felt rather noble at such times, and very, very strong. Now and
then, however, his conscience hurt him, and he would go and sit on
Janet’s small veranda. But he could not find anything much to say, and
Janet would not help him. She never once told him that he was a
magnificent specimen of manhood, although she felt that the mould had
been broken when the Kid was made. She did tell him that he needed a
haircut, and Rosamond rather gasped when he appeared later with a dark
roof on the ridgepole of his head, so to speak, and from there to the
eaves and below almost entirely unthatched.
On cottage verandas the great burglary was much under discussion, and
sympathy was entirely with Janet. Even the Kid came in for his share.
“The poor fish!” was one gentleman’s comment. “She’s got him out of
water and gasping, and when he’s good and dead she’ll throw him back.”
Certainly the Kid was gasping. He was not sleeping well, and in the long
night watches he lay and thought to the accompaniment of a chorus of
snores in which the cook sang the bass. Even the Kid knew that Rosamond
would be expensive, and that red-blooded manhood was hardly a sufficient
asset in supporting a wife; and somehow he could not see Rosamond on a
one-hundred-and-sixty-acre homestead, in a log house, washing dishes. He
was divided between going East to make a fortune and prospecting the
mountains for a gold mine. On the whole he leaned toward the gold mine.
It was quicker, and certainly there were traces of gold in the creek.
He took a camping trip up into the mountains, and on his return the boss
had a bad time with one of the campers.
“The next time I go out, for God’s sake send me with a guide. That boy
we had was hunting gold instead of firewood half the time.”
“Gold!” said the Old Man thoughtfully.
Now the Old Man was no fool, and he was fond of his boys. Especially he
was fond of the Kid. So that evening, cigarette in hand, he wandered up
to the corral. Generally during the dude season he stayed away from the
corral, for out of every hundred intelligent and considerate riders
there was sure to be one congenital idiot who thought it highly Western
to take a horse stiff with hours of standing and spur him into a wild
gallop at the start.
The Old Man, at such times, according to the corral, was likely to go
off by himself and tell God all about it, and later to tell the horse
killer himself.
So he wandered up, cigarette between his teeth and battered hat on his
head, and stood off by himself, watching; and, since he was no fool, he
got the Carter situation in a minute. He saw her standing watching the
Kid, and the Kid saddling with the highest sort of efficiency, but
conscious of her every second. And when she had got her horse at last he
saw her go down the road and stop there waiting while the Kid roped out
his own animal and threw the saddle on his back. The Old Man smiled and
called to the Kid.
“Going somewhere?” he inquired.
“I’m through, sir. I’ve been teaching Miss Carter to ride, and I
thought—”
“Ride!” snorted the Old Man. “That girl rode in a horse show before you
were out of short pants, son. What’s she been putting over on you?”
The Kid gulped and said nothing.
“Now see here!” said the Old Man. “You’re new to this dude stuff, and
it’s gone to your head. All the boys get it at first, but it’s like
being vaccinated. They’re safe after that, and the scar hardly shows.”
He surveyed the Kid, who looked like the picture on a coloured jacket of
a Western novel, and grinned. “It’s the trimmings, boy, the trimmings!”
Then his smile died and his face hardened. “But I’ll tell you this: If
this local colour is going to turn one of my best men into a damn fool,
then by the Almighty I’ll put the outfit in overalls. I don’t see any
women going crazy over the blacksmith or the irrigator.”
He started off, but turned and spoke over his shoulder.
“Put your horse up,” he said. “One of the principles of this ranch is to
teach its guests self-confidence. Maybe she can manage alone—if she has
to. And another thing: There isn’t any gold in these mountains. I’ve
prospected them for forty years.”
It was that night that the Kid proposed to Rosamond Carter. There was a
dance going on, with the band from the town forty miles away. The band
arrogated to itself certain prerogatives, in addition to a fair amount
in money. Thus, once each evening, after looking over the ground, the
gentleman at the bass drum would pick out the best dancer, signal to her
with a lifted finger and thus indicate, no matter what her previous
engagement, that the next dance was his. And once also each evening the
cornetist would, instrument to mouth and blowing lustily, cut in and
send some discomfited youth to the wall.
The bass drummer chose Rosamond that night, and she shot a glance of
visible triumph around the room. It was when it was over that the Kid
took her outside and asked her to marry him. He was so husky that she
had to ask him to repeat it.
“I don’t mean now, Rosamond. All I want is to know that you care. After
that—” He made a large gesture, implying no doubt that if she cared the
rest was easy.
“Of course I care, Kid dear. I’m crazy about you.”
He nearly broke her hand, so convulsively did he grab it.
“But—marriage!” Rosamond said gently, loosening her hand and
surreptitiously rubbing her fingers. “That’s different, isn’t it?”
“Why different? If you love me and I love you—”
“‘Marry’ is such a long, long word,” she said. “Let’s not worry about
that part of it. There’s no hurry about it. Let’s just be happy
together.”
That suited him well enough. He was too content to force things, and he
knew extremely well that there could be no hurry about it, anyhow. Of
course he kissed her, and he was trembling all over when he released
her. Quite certainly he considered that the kiss had sealed her to him,
that she was his and he was hers. He didn’t go back to the dance at all.
He wandered out and half dazedly climbed a butte, where he sat in the
starlight, not thinking so much as feeling, while tired horses grazed
around him and the lights of the ranch below were a constellation of
planets, reflected in an ink-black lake.
But—and here was a queer thing—Janet suddenly came into his mind, and
his first thought was that now he had lost her! He had never heard that
a man may have a passion for one woman while he loves another, and
certainly it did not occur to him then.
One of the stars below was Janet’s, and he sat and gazed at it for some
time. Then—such a strange creature is man—he went down from the butte
and stood watching the dance from outside a window, just to catch a
glimpse of Rosamond.