No message to the Kid at all.
The Old Man was rather worried. The Kid had come to his senses, but
there was still something wrong with Janet. And the Kid was on his mind.
The boy was not eating and—the Old Man strongly suspected—not sleeping
either.
“Maybe I’d better write her how things are,” he said one day to Dice
Barnett.
“It’s no place for a third party, in my opinion,” Dice objected.
“They’ll make the grade or they won’t, but they can’t be pushed.”
So in the long idle days of heavy snow the Old Man pasted Janet’s
clippings in a scrapbook, and Mrs. Allenby mended and stacked linen, and
the Kid slowly ate his heart out, having abundance of time for this sort
of gastronomical misery.
The snow had come early and lay late, and in the open range along the
foothills a dozen or so horses dead from cold and starvation had been
eaten by coyotes, so that only their bones marked their tragedy. Out in
the far meadows the cattle had exhausted the hay, and herculean efforts
on the part of the men failed to open a road by which to send the hay
carts through. In March they got out at last, and the Old Man breathed
again. But the cold continued, and the feed grass was almost exhausted.
On a dismal day in March the Kid rode out to the pasture with his
revolver strapped on his hip, and cut out some twenty lean and sickly
cows to die that the rest of the herd might live.
They looked at him with soft, appealing eyes; and the Kid’s hand shook
as he drew the gun. When it was all over he went back and sat for a long
time in the steaming barn, where the work horses munched their hay and
no one was likely to find him. He would have sold himself for a ten-cent
piece that day, and considered the price high.
But with the opening of the spring he found a bit of hope rising, like
the sap in the cottonwood trees. Janet would come back that summer, and
he would make up for all he had done. He worked solely to that end. He
put a new roof on the saddle shed—for her. He dredged stone and
repaired roads—for her. With the aid of six cow horns which he rubbed
to a high polish and a piece of wood which he varnished, he made a
hatrack, slightly odorous but very sightly in his eyes—for her. And in
the evenings when his work was done he sat by the stove in the bunk
house and played melancholy airs on his mouth organ, to the unprintable
expostulations of the now augmented outfit.
The ranch was preparing for the summer influx. Painters and carpenters
swarmed over the place; the boys came back from New Mexico and Arizona,
jerked off their store clothes, pulled on their chaps, stamped into
their boots and were off to report to the Old Man. An early dude or two
came, and bunches of wild flowers began to appear in the dining room,
while the cook began his summer-long complaint of having to clean the
trout the men brought in.
And then at the end of June came Janet.
V
Afterwards, reviewing the situation, the Old Man blamed himself. He
should never have let Rosamond come back to the ranch. Certainly he
would never have let that fool Crosby Nugent get past his wire if he
could have foreseen what was going to happen.
But who could have foretold that the Kid, for instance, was going to
back out of the field without even giving battle? Or that Janet would
take his withdrawal for indifference? The Old Man, who had forgotten the
inverted psychology of lovers, wanted to shake them both, and nearly
smoked himself to death over them.
Janet arrived first. From the inside of the car she had made certain
that the Kid was with the others on the platform, and was thus able to
adopt a wide smile which included everybody and singled out none. All
winter she had hated herself for refusing the Kid’s overtures, and all
winter she had waited for him to renew them. But he had not. Janet’s
attitude, then, was a sort of feverish, watchful waiting; which was,
unfortunately, also the Kid’s.
So she smiled at everybody, and the men cheered, and Slim stood in the
door of his box car and hi-oo-ed loudly and repeatedly. And the Kid saw
only a beautiful and expensively dressed young woman who might pretend
to be the same old Janet, but who couldn’t put anything over on him.
No, the Kid saw it all quite clearly. He had gone back to Janet, but she
had not come back to him. What was kissing the Old Man and shaking hands
all around was a prosperous, successful and worldly Janet, a—he used
the only word he had to cover the situation—dude Janet.
She couldn’t put anything over on him. Not even when she suddenly
stopped talking and stood still, staring at the mountains with a queer
soft look in her eyes. The Kid remained a little aloof, whistling to
himself to show his complete comprehension, and his indifference to it.
After a while he went over and talked to Slim.
There was no card game in the bunk house that night. In the centre of an
enthralled circle sat Slim, and his talk was of Janet and the act.
Strange theatrical terms fell from his lips, and stranger statements.
Such, for instance, as an offer of ten thousand dollars for Midge, who
had cost the Old Man forty, and that Janet’s buckskin stage outfit had
set her back five hundred iron men; that the act drew down four hundred
a week; that there was a line of Johnnies waiting for Janet every night
that reached to the curb and out into the street.
“What about Janet? Did she fall for them?” inquired Dice, with a side
glance at the Kid.
“Janet! She told me to push in the face of any one who spoke to her, and
you bet I did it.”
The vision of Slim, fighting a path out of the theatre every night for
Janet, held the bunk house silent for a moment.
“She’s a great kid,” said Slim reflectively. “A great kid.” While the
men slept that night the Kid got up, and drawing on his breeches and
boots with extreme caution removed from the wall the almost complete
cow-horn masterpiece. With equal caution he reached the open air and
headed for the creek.
* * * * *
July came, and with it came dudes and yet more dudes. The ranch
overflowed with dudes. Pleasant, genial dudes, who did not expect
metropolitan-hotel service and rode their horses carefully; disagreeable
dudes, who were afraid to bully the Old Man, but tried it out on the
corral with unpleasant results; fool dudes, who sat up all night to make
night hideous and rode their horses to death or near it; men dudes, who
immediately bought neckerchiefs and wide hats, and rubbed themselves
into blisters trying to sit the trot; fat-women dudes in breeches riding
off weight; pretty-girl dudes, who looked up at the ranchmen with soft
romantic eyes, asking but for notice and a little condescension from the
young gods in chaps and spurs.
Once again the alarm clock on the bunk-house window sill exploded at
four A. M., and once again an occasional favoured girl was invited to
crawl out of her warm bed before dawn, to risk her neck in the romantic
West. But there was this difference, that the Kid now rose hopelessly to
what may be called a womanless day. The Kid was definitely and
permanently off women.
Rosamond blew in breezily the first of August, with a chaperon and
Crosby Nugent, and inside of four hours the bunk house had classified
Nugent as yellow. He swaggered up to the corral as soon as he had
changed into riding clothes, and looked over the stock sourly.
“D’you call them horses?” he demanded of the Kid.
“If you’ve got any better name you’re welcome to use it.”
Mr. Nugent approached the bars of the fence and peered through.
“Suppose I can pick my own horse, eh?”
The Kid looked around. There was no one near.
“Well,” he said softly, “we usually make our own selections, but we aim
to please. Which will you have?”
Some ten minutes later Mr. Nugent threw a leg over the back of the blue
roan of his selection, and in so doing lightly touched the blue roan on
the back with his spur. Immediately following this Mr. Nugent struck the
barn wall with a thud, and then dropped to the ground, where he lay for
a moment before the Kid helped him up.
“Must have scratched him somewhere,” said the Kid gently.
“Scratched him! I’m scratched all right. Why the hell don’t you break
your horses?”
“Break them!” The Kid’s tone was pained. “Why, the children ride that
horse. He’s a pet, he is.” He looked off at the blue roan, standing
quietly by the rail. “Al,” he called, “look around for something quiet.
See if Lizzie’s out.”
After that the men of the outfit were as definitely off Nugent as the
Kid was off women. He rode a succession of horses, bringing them in
scratched and sweating, and finding fault with them all. But the bunk
house knew more than that. It perceived quite early that Rosamond was
fatuously in love with him. She trailed him as assiduously as she had
once trailed the Kid, but what had thrilled the Kid to his very soul was
quite clearly beginning to bore Nugent. He took to riding early now and
then to get off by himself, and it was on one of those early trips that
he fell in with Janet.
It is hard to defend Janet. It is necessary to remember that she
considered the Kid entirely lost to her, and to keep in mind Rosamond’s
part in that loss, and of course, too, there was that rankling open
humiliation of the year before. But the real issue was the Kid.
She had made one real effort to bridge the gap between them, but it had
failed. She had asked him to ride with her some evening when his work
was done.
“You don’t want to ride with me,” he said gruffly.
“I’ve asked you.”
“What’s the matter with the dude men who are always hanging round you?”
She flushed.
“I got enough of that last winter, Kid.”
Suddenly all the furious jealousy of that desperately lonely winter
flamed in him.
“So I’ve heard,” he said coldly. She waited rather wistfully, but for a
moment or two he busied himself with a saddle. Then, “Now look here,
Janet!” he burst out angrily, “I don’t want you to be kind to me. I know
you mean well, but—I don’t want it.”
She had had to turn and go away.
It was after that that Nugent met Janet on the trail one morning, and
recognised her as the girl he had seen in a theatre the winter before.
Maybe he considered the women of the stage fair game. Maybe he was bored
with Rosamond. Maybe behind it all there was some genuine sentiment.
Whatever it may have been, it is certain that from that day he spent an
undue amount of time with her.
The Kid, glancing toward Janet’s cottage, could see him curled up on the
step, animated and laughing, and Janet laughing too. When there came
into view the crowd of young people, which followed Janet those days
like the tail of a comet, Nugent would wander away, scowling, to look up
Rosamond and make his peace with her. The Kid, who had begun by merely
disliking him, began to hate him with a terrible hatred.
Just how Rosamond felt no one could know. She went about with a sort of
frozen smile on her face, and made at least one effort to rouse Nugent’s
jealousy by getting the Kid back. But the Kid knew nothing of such
subterfuges, and he had no intention of going back.
She asked him one night if she might wrangle with him the next morning,
and he uncomfortably agreed. Maybe she misunderstood the reason for the
moody silence in which he worked in the dawn, his taciturnity on the
homeward ride. But she was as desperate as he was, and less resigned.
She swayed toward him in the saddle.
“Kid,” she said softly, “I’ve treated you very badly, haven’t I?”
“How?”
“Don’t you want to talk about it?”
He faced her squarely and honestly.
“I don’t see much use in it. Do you?”
“I want you to forgive me, Kid.”
“Forgive you for me having a brain storm? Well, I guess not!” Then he
smiled boyishly. “I’m not holding any hard feelings,” he said. “I guess
I liked being crazy while it lasted.”
That effectually closed any further negotiations so far as Rosamond was
concerned.
The Kid was becoming an extremely difficult person to live with. He no
longer joined in the card game in the bunk house at night, and if he
wore his hat with the rim curled at the sides and the front tilted
toward his right eye it was from pure habit. The swagger had gone from
his walk and the lilt from his voice. When sent after strays he went
alone, by choice, riding as though all the devils of hell were after
him.
And Janet? Janet was suffering from a complex, which is a bad thing at
any time, but which when constituted of love and hurt pride makes an
insoluble compound with some of the attributes of revenge. She could not
sit on her heel behind the saddle shed and whistle melancholy dirges.
She could not yell at any crowd playing poker around the lamps to “For
God’s sake put the light out and let a fellow sleep.” All she could do
was to give hurt for hurt, and this she did with a Janetlike
thoroughness.
After two weeks or so, when Crosby Nugent haunted Janet’s every step,
and Rosamond’s eyes had a feverish glitter and her laugh was shrill and
forced, one night Dice Barnett took his hat in his hand and presented
himself at the Old Man’s office door.
“Come in,” said the Old Man from the lamplight by his desk. “I’ve been
expecting you for a day or two.”
“Yes, sir,” said Dice. “I guess you were right last winter. They’re not
making the grade after all. I don’t know but somebody’d better do some
shoving.”
The Old Man nodded.
“Things are pretty bad, are they?”
“If he gets any worse to live with he’ll have to be roped and tied.”
The Old Man rolled a cigarette thoughtfully.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It strikes me, Dice, that this thing is
between the two women now, and it is no place for us. I don’t know that
I blame Janet, but I’ll tell you this: If she was half her age I’d give
her a good spanking.”
He sighed and got up.
“It’s a good bit like a boil, Dice,” he went on. “It’s got to come to a
head before it can be cut.”
Dice moved to the door. It was all right for the Old Man to be
philosophical; he didn’t have to live with the Kid.
“He’s likely to do Nugent some harm some of these days,” he offered.
“Looks to me like he’s just waiting his chance.”
The Old Man smiled grimly.
“The one rule of this ranch,” he said, “is first-class care of our
guests. I insist on that.” Dice nodded and stepped out on the doorstep.
“Of course,” the Old Man added, “what I don’t know won’t hurt me.”
Dice was smiling faintly as he went back to the bunk house.
The ranch meanwhile was watching the play with avid interest. It saw the
foppish Nugent spending hours in Janet’s paddock in the heat and dust,
hauling out and putting away props, holding horses, saddling and
unsaddling, his face smeared with sweat and his clothing dirty and
disarranged. Janet was training a new pony, and once it kicked him. He
walked with a limp for days.
Just what he thought, what furtive and secret hope he had, cannot be
known. Certainly he had no intimation of any situation save the Rosamond
one, which must have been pretty acute sometimes. To him the Kid was
merely a good-looking cowpuncher with a grouch, and certainly a small
flare-up which occurred between them at that time must have puzzled him
considerably. It came about, oddly enough, through the gold in the creek
sand.
Certainly the Kid had never given a thought to any gold in the mountains
after the Old Man’s statement relative to it. And so far as gold is
concerned, if there ever was any there it is still there, for it has
never been found. But although the Kid did not believe there was gold,
if there was any—if this can be made clear—he meant to find it. And
the breaking point came one day when Nugent came up to the bunk-house
porch with a pan in his hand, with a few pin-point specks in it which he
said were gold.
The Kid had watched him coming with malevolent eyes.
“Gold!” he said nastily. “Fool’s gold!”
“Real gold,” said Nugent.
“Fool’s gold!” said the Kid belligerently.
Nugent gave him a contemptuous glance.
“You may know how to ride,” he said coldly, “although I’d like to see
you on an English saddle before I can say. But there may be one or two
other little things you don’t know.”
The Kid got up slowly, with a dangerous smile, but Dice Barnett pushed
him back and stepped in front of him.
“Better take it away, Mr. Nugent,” he said firmly. “There isn’t enough
there to have any difference of opinion about.”
Over Dice’s shoulder Nugent got a look at the Kid’s face, and it must
have startled him. There seemed to be no particular reason for the dull
hatred that blazed in the Kid’s eyes. He was a trifle startled.