In August came the ranch rodeo. The bad string was brought in a day or
two before for the bucking contests, and a long-horned Mexican steer
waited in a paddock to be bulldogged. Half a dozen burros for roping and
tying were there, too, and in the bunk house at night there was a strong
odor of saddle soap and metal polish.
Two days before the rodeo came a mysterious gentleman with long grey
hair parted in the middle and brushed out in tufts over his ears, and
wearing a grey-checked suit of exceeding loudness, bound with black
braid.
The corral, viewing this apparition from a distance, pretended to be
immediately stricken with blindness, and reeled and staggered about.
And, accustomed to the ways of dudes, they waited breathlessly to see
the new arrival in riding clothes.
But he did not ride. He sat on a bench most of the time, rolling
cigarettes with a facility that put even the corral to shame. Once he
wandered up, took a look at the horses and wandered away without a word
or a change of expression.
“I wouldn’t sit in a game of cards with that guy, not for a million
dollars,” said Jack Moncrielle. “I bet he doesn’t open his mouth to eat,
any more than he has to.”
The Kid saw the newcomer, as he saw everything at that time, through a
sort of haze. Even the talk that drifted to him in the bunk house, that
Poker Face was a cruiser looking for talent for a tent show on the water
front in Chicago, passed over his head. He had washed a pan of sand from
the creek and found a fleck or two of gold in it, and already at night,
when he pulled his mouth organ out from under his pillow and poured out
his soul, he was riding in his own automobile, with Rosamond beside him.
He never dreamed that the man in the checked suit was to cost him one
good year of misery.
The rodeo came, and with it half the countryside. It parked its cars in
great lines and brought the children and luncheon boxes, and when the
riders rode into the field, to the blare of the band, it crowded to the
fences and cheered. It cheered them all, but mostly it cheered Janet.
Janet and the Old Man led the procession. Janet was going to ride!
When the Kid learned it, before the procession started, he had a queer
sick feeling. Just for a moment he forgot Rosamond, and he made a
furious protest to Janet herself.
“I think you’ve lost your mind,” he said.
“Why?”
“It’s all right for us. We’re paid to risk our necks to amuse the dudes.
But you! You’re not!”
“Don’t worry about me,” said Janet coldly. “And if you want to know it,
I’m not riding to amuse the guests.”
His rage increased when he saw Janet drawing for her horse like the
others, but when she drew Corkscrew a dull despair settled on him. Even
the Old Man was anxious then, but he need not have worried. Corkscrew
lived up to his name, leaped and twisted, whirled and lunged, but
Janet’s knees hugged him like two slim steel vises, and Corkscrew came
to rest at last, beaten.
When Janet looked around the roaring, cheering field all she saw was
Rosamond, delicately clad, cool and very feminine, watching her with
hard, triumphant eyes.
The rodeo went the way of all rodeos. Al was thrown and knocked out. He
lay quite still, a suddenly pinched and colourless profile turned up to
the sky, in the midst of breathless silence. Then he moved and the crowd
relaxed. He got up and limped off.
The Kid rode and bulldogged with the others, neither better nor worse
than the average, which was good. And he swaggered a bit, with the
thirty-dollar spurs clanking and the nail heads on his chaps gleaming
like silver. When he caught Rosamond’s eye she smiled, and the warm
sense of a secret intimacy between his own perspiring self and her cool
exquisiteness swelled his heart almost to bursting.
But Janet, after all, provided the hit of the day. For she brought out
Midge after the riding was over, when the bull had been retired to rest
his weary neck muscles, and all the little burros, after the thrill of
their lives, had trotted docilely back to tell their families of their
escapes. And Midge performed.
It is not necessary to tell what Midge did. His fame is a part of the
vaudeville history by now, and Janet’s, too, for that matter. Actually
Midge was only an agency for the working out of those certain destinies
with which this story deals. At the time he provided Janet with the
means of release from an intolerable situation, for by nightfall the
ranch knew that the cruiser, which is only a bunk-houseism for a highly
honourable profession, had made Janet an offer for vaudeville and that
she had accepted it.
The bunk house was divided in its opinion that night, but the Kid did
not hear about it until later. He spent the evening sitting on the creek
bank with Rosamond, telling her about the gold.
August wore on, with the Old Man teaching Janet fancy rope work behind
the barn, with divers sluggish Eastern livers renewing their youth, with
the horses a trifle leaner and their riders browner, and with the Kid
out on the bank and gasping, and Rosamond not yet ready to throw him
back.
With the end of August came the general exodus from the ranch.
Apparently new people, who were really the old ones changed by their
city garb, began to appear on the lawn. The truck carried daily
mountains of trunks to the railroad. The line of horses at the rail at
saddling time diminished day by day. The grass in the pastures and on
the high meadows turned in patches to red and brown. The prairie dogs in
Dog Town could emerge without the whistle of a bullet past their heads.
A deer was seen in the cañon, and a guide brought in a small and highly
disagreeable black bear cub. In a word, the early fall of the mountains
was at the door.
And Rosamond was going. The Kid would waken in the morning before the
alarm clock and lie there wondering how he could bear it. He thought of
her exquisiteness, her fastidious daintiness. He saw her going back to
surroundings like herself—although he had not the faintest possible
idea of what such surroundings might be—and the bunk house suddenly
seemed horrible to him; the boots on the floor, the snorings of the men,
the cook’s false teeth in a cup on the chair beside the bed, Dice, in
his underdrawers, his fine body bare and uncovered to the waist.
He had a wonderful parting from Rosamond. They rode up the cañon and
watched the moon rise, and she made him promise a dozen ways to be
faithful. She made no promises herself, however, and he was to remember
that later. When late that night he went to the bunk house he found Dice
waiting for him, sitting on the step.
“Well,” was Dice’s greeting, “thank God, that’s over!”
“What’s over?”
“Rosamond. You thick-headed idiot, d’you think you’ll ever see her
again?”
“That’s my affair,” said the Kid loftily.
“Not by a damned sight!” was Dice’s comment. “This outfit has been short
one man for eight weeks, and you’re the man. Now you take some advice.
Can the Lady Rosamond and crawl on your face to Janet—and I hope to God
she puts her foot on you.”
Janet did almost literally that.
By the middle of September the ranch was almost down to what Jack
Moncrielle designated as a prewar basis. A dozen horses saddled in the
morning, six or eight in the evening; in the bunk house long sessions of
poker or blackjack, in the peculiar silence of the gambling puncher;
Janet training her horse; the Old Man shooting ducks out on the flat,
and in close conclave with Janet in the evening; the alarm clock in the
bunk house set at six instead of four; in the pastures cinch sores and
saddle galls slowly healing, and spurs a cruel memory, and in the Kid’s
mind already a faint haze over Rosamond’s memory and an unexpected pang
at the knowledge that Janet was going away.
Then two things happened in quick succession which showed the Kid what
he had done. The first was that Janet was caught in the wire.
Now to be caught in the wire is one of the desperate emergencies and
often one of the tragedies of Western life. Horses caught in the wire
come home with flesh torn to ribbons, deep cuts to the bone, muscles and
tendons severed.
Fortunately it was not Midge, but another horse. Janet knew better than
to lay a fence flat and try to leap over it, but she was possessed those
days by a sort of restless desperation, and it followed the first talk
she had had with the Kid for weeks. He had gone to her, humble enough in
all conscience, unable to bear the thought that she should leave with
the coldness between them. Janet was in the little paddock the Old Man
had given her, with Midge’s curious stage properties scattered about,
for she had just finished a lesson, and she heard him through without a
quiver.
“In all you’re saying,” she said at last, “you are taking for granted
that you have offended me or hurt me. Just why?”
He fingered the hat in his hand nervously.
“Well, we used to be good friends, Janet.”
“Aren’t we still?”
“You didn’t tell me you were going to do this thing.”
“I didn’t tell Dice, either, or any of the boys.”
“That’s different.”
“How is it different?”
“I don’t know. I used to think it was.”
He gave it up then and went away. He didn’t understand it himself, so
how could he explain? All he knew was that it mattered less and less
each day that no letter came from Rosamond, and more and more that Janet
would soon be gone. He went away and sat by himself, staring in the
general direction of the railroad, which seemed somehow to be
interfering with his life. And Janet saddled the Old Man’s bay mare and
got caught in the wire.
When the mare’s foot caught and she leaped forward she pulled the wire
Janet was standing on and threw her on it. Instantly she was caught on a
hundred red-hot, tearing and jerking points of agony. The mare leaped
over her, leaped back again, reared and fell. The wire by that time was
over and under Janet, and the horse was up again. Janet was dragged out
into the field as post after post gave way, and then the mare got free.
The Old Man found Janet there a half hour later, her clothes torn to
ribbons and stained with blood, and he got her out and onto his horse.
She was too dazed to be questioned, but the Old Man knew, and he
muttered most of the way home.
Her going was delayed almost a month by the accident, and in that month
the Kid suffered horribly. Rosamond was like a bad dream by that time,
but if he wanted to forget her the bunk house gave him no chance. He
grew to hate her very name, although not as much as he hated himself.
He was consumed with jealousy too. It was Dice who sat with Mrs. Allenby
and Janet during the convalescence, and Slim who took over the care and
training of Midge. Even the cook, wandering over in the evening with a
bit of specially broiled chicken or trout, had the entrée to the Allenby
cottage. Only the Kid was left out.
The truth, of course, was that under the ice that had frozen over
Janet’s love the current of it still ran fast and furious. But the ice
was there. Even the Old Man finally put in a word for him, but Janet
shook her head.
“If he would do it once he would do it again,” she said. “I used to
mind, but I don’t now.”
The abominable fact that all the ranch had pitied her was, next to the
Kid’s defection, what rankled. And when, the night before she left, the
Kid came again, humbly, and stood before her she went quite pale with
outraged pride.
“I’ve been a fool, Janet, and I know it.”
“About what?”
“You know what I mean, don’t you?”
She was not very strong, yet, and she began to tremble, but her voice
was steady. She even laughed a little.
“I suppose I do. But aren’t we all foolish at times? I was myself, last
spring, but I’ve got over it.”
As old as the hills, this story. The wandering male, the hurt pride of
the woman, four feet of distance and yet a mile or so between them. The
Kid, who had never heard of the vicious pendulum of love, from passion
to hate and back to love again, the Kid turned on his high heels and
went away from this new and different Janet, who was as hard and stiff
and shiny as new leather.
It was entirely clear now that she had never cared a plugged nickel for
him. He had thought once— They called this life, did they, this thing
of working all day and suffering all night? Life!
He went down and sat by the creek. Life! A man poured out his whole
heart at a woman’s feet, and she went on the stage and painted her face,
and a lot of dudes stared at her and sent her notes and took her out to
supper. Life!
Oh, well, let it ride!