AT THE H-LAZY Z
Cockney Aikens was striding up and down the little gravel walk before
the ranch-house--the walk that Mary herself had built from the loose
rock of the river-bed--his hands thrust deep in his pockets. Mary,
raising her head sadly from her work to peer at him through the
window, read the symptoms. So did the cluster of grinning cowboys
from the darkened depths of the cookhouse.
Presently Cockney stopped in his stride to stare off over the valley
to the opposite cliff, his eyes returning slowly to the trail and
away up it toward town, sixty miles away.
Muck Norsley, from far back in the cook-house, looked through the
window, watch in hand.
"Yer winning, Gin'ral, o.k. Jest about seventeen minutes now, I
reckon, and he'll be saddling--unless he has to black his boots and
crease his pants."
Cockney turned suddenly, kicked two innocent stones into the grass,
and pushed open the ranch-house door.
"Mary, I'm off to town."
He spoke roughly. She lifted the sock she was darning and set it on
the table.
"You'll take me this time, won't you, Jim?"
"Haven't you enough here to keep you busy?" He would not meet her
eyes. "A fellow don't want a woman tagging after him every time he
goes to town."
"He doesn't have her," she replied with quiet dignity.
She might have told him that one of the troubles was that she had
_too much_ to do about the H-Lazy Z. Most of her married life had
been a drudgery, girls refusing to drown themselves in the isolation
of the Red Deer--sixty miles from town, without a living soul
between, and the nearest ranch ten miles to the east. Westward was
nothing but wilds for further than anyone had travelled.
A tear squeezed into her eyes. He saw her struggling to hold it
back, and hastily retreated outside.
The H-Lazy Z ranch may not have been quite equal to its reputation in
a district where not a dozen citizens had ever visited it, but it
could boast of luxuries--especially its ranch-house--that few other
ranches considered worth the trouble and expense. This ranch-house
was a two-story structure of numerous and ample rooms, erected by one
with money to spare and English ideas of expenditure.
When Cockney Aikens selected his wife in a mid-Western American town
on one of the many unreasonable and indefinite trips he made in those
days to distant parts, he insisted on leaving her at her own home
until he had built for her a residence his uncertain conscience told
him was fit for a woman.
In those days Mary Aikens wanted her Jim more than _any_ house but
Cockney was obdurate, with a stubbornness that hurt her lovesick
heart early in their married life. He had won her rapidly, with his
big, joyous, reckless ways, and his pictures of the life in the
Canadian West. With four years to look back on since she left the
Eastern seminary, her little body crammed with romance, his pictures
were all the more alluring from the monotonous similarity and
repetition of the letters of her late schoolmates, each of whom,
according to her own story, had captured the one and only sample of
real American manhood.
When a girl's friends write month after month of home magnificence
that radiates largely round the conventional "carriage and pair" that
is the dream of schoolgirls, a whole ranch of horses and cattle looks
like the earmarks of a fairy prince, especially when they belong to
such a stunning big chap as Jim Aikens.
Mary Aikens often looked back on those days now with a sad smile.
Jim was still the stunning big chap--at times. At other times----
But that was the effect of Western haze. In the two years of their
married life she had never become really acquainted with her husband.
At the very moment--it happened again and again--when the sympathy
she craved was lifting the latch, Jim Aikens kicked it from the door
with brutal foot and rode madly off on the southern trail on one of
his periodical sprees in town.
The ranch-house stood half way down a long slope that stretched
northward to the Red Deer River. A half-mile away, across a valley
that might have been a garden in a wilderness, rose a sheer line of
jagged cliffs, before which ran the tumbling river. Up and down the
stream, on both sides of it, sometimes crowding the current,
sometimes set back of a deep valley filled with weirdly protuberant
mounds of rock from about which the soft clays had been washed by the
rains and currents of ages, the cliffs were repeated. Only at long
intervals did the banks slope to the river as they did before the
H-Lazy Z ranch buildings, and that only on the southern shore.
Elsewhere the Red Deer rushed through hundreds of miles of a
hundred-and-fifty-foot canyon.
Two hundred yards from the house--Dakota Fraley had insisted on the
distance--the cook-house, bunk-house, stables and corrals began, and
spread out over the eastern end of the valley in conventional
disarray, the bottom corral touching the rough beach that there lined
the river. Dakota had no stomach for skirts about the place,
especially the kind he imagined his wild master would bring. In that
he failed to understand Cockney.
Before the ranch-house door Dakota met his partner retreating from
Mary's tears. Behind the foreman two or three cowboys lounged in the
open doorway. Three others rolled off toward the stables.
Cockney stood still, watching them with lowering eyes.
"Why the samhill, Dakota, do we need such a bunch of roughnecks about
the place?" he exploded. "Every time I see them they make me think
of a gang of Whitechapel foreigners fresh from Russia, or Hungary, or
Poland. If they hadn't guns on their hips, there'd be knives in
their bootlegs or stilettos up their sleeves."
Dakota laughed in a nasty way.
"Best bunch of cowpunchers in Alberta--in America, for that matter.
Look at the ranch they've made for you."
Cockney made a wry face. "Gad! I could do without some of the
dollars for cheerier countenances about me. They look as if they'd
murdered their mothers and were looking for the rest of the family."
"What's it matter to you," Dakota growled, "so long's they fix you up
for your gambling and boozing? You better cut butting in on
personnel. That's _my_ third of the partnership."
Cockney was in a vile humour--that always came with his craving for
town; and his wife's wet eyes had not improved matters.
"Don't forget, Dakota," he said, with deadly calmness, "it's only a
third. I provided all the capital."
"And don't _you_ forget, _Mister_ Aikens, that I purvided all the
experience--and I'm still purviding it, far's anyone can notice--and
all the work and the worry. You better go and get drunk. We don't
need you. We got _real_ work to do."
Cockney restrained himself.
"What are you on now?" he enquired.
Dakota's eyes fell. He turned about and looked back toward the
cook-house.
"Oh, nothing special; just the usual rush. This time it's a lot of
riding, looking up a bunch of mavericks that uv been kicking up the
devil. Missed 'em in the round-up and they've got chirpy."
"You're sure they're ours?"
Dakota swung on him angrily.
"What the h--l you mean? Think I'm rustling? _Shore_ they're ours.
They've gone rampaging down Irvine way with a little bunch of steers
that broke from the nighthawks a couple of days ago."
"Be away long?"
"Four or five days, I guess. You needn't worry your head. You
couldn't help none."
Cockney made no reply, though he winced a little at the sneer.
"Off to town, I see," jeered Dakota. "Best place for you--when you
feel that way. Taking the missus?"
Cockney remained silent, thinking.
"Or are you leaving her to us?"
Without moving his feet, Cockney's great fist shot out and caught the
side of Dakota's head. As his back struck the prairie the cowboy
reached for his gun, but Cockney was on him with a bound, wrenching
one gun from his hand and another from a loose pocket in his chaps.
With one hand he lifted Dakota to his feet and released him.
"I don't like the way you speak of my wife," he thundered.
Dakota, helpless and a little cowed without his guns, glared his fury.
"It's as good as you _treat_ her," he snarled.
Cockney started.
"She's my wife," he said, with a new dignity.
"I don't know what you was brung up to, but in this country we'd
think that something to _show_, not just to talk about."
"Don't let me hear you talking about her," warned Cockney, "or anyone
else," he added, raising his voice and looking over Dakota's shoulder
to the cook-house.
He tossed the guns contemptuously at Dakota's feet and wheeled about.
The cowboy muttered oaths at his retreating back, and rubbed the
cords of his neck where the strain of the blow had come.
Mary Aikens had seen nothing of the incident--her eyes were too wet.
With a dead weight at her heart she sank her head in her arms on the
table and let the tears flow.
Cockney came on her that way and softly retreated, drawing the door
gently behind him. After a few noisy crunches among the gravel and a
preliminary kick to the outside step, he took a long breath and
entered. She was darning then, her head held low. He passed quickly
through to the bedroom door, but there he stopped, and, without
turning, stood with his hand on the knob. Then he disappeared. Ten
minutes later he reappeared in town attire.
In Cockney Aikens' ways were so many strange conventions that his
friends had ceased to marvel at them. One of them was the formality
of his dress for his visits to Medicine Hat. His boots were soft,
light-soled, and natty, with drab cloth tops, like nothing ever seen
on the prairie before; his socks silken, with white clocks. A
delicate grey suit enclosed his huge frame in graceful lines that
betrayed their Bond Street origin. His collar was a straight white
upstanding affair with delicately rounded corners, and his cravat
Irish poplin or barathea--always one of these silks, the former with
a coloured diagonal stripe, the latter adorned with clusters of
flowers. Above it all rested a light grey hat. From his breast
pocket peeped the tips of chamois gloves, and on one little finger
was a curious ring of triple cameos.
Mary Aikens always gasped when she saw him thus. It was thus she had
learned to love him, thus he had turned the heads of half the girls
of the northern United States towns from Seattle to Duluth. For
Cockney Aikens wore his clothes as one accustomed to them. One suit
he always kept in town at his tailor's, pressed and cleaned, changing
at each visit.
His wife drew a sharp breath, forgetting that she was staring at him
with uplifted hand. The evil temper had left his face with his
leather chaps and neckerchief. He regarded her with an embarrassed
twist to his face.
"Better get into your grey," he said, looking anywhere but into her
eyes. "I'll be ready for you in fifteen minutes."
"Oh, Jim!"
That was all. She dropped her darning on the table and fled
ecstatically to the bedroom. And big Cockney Aikens picked up the
ball of darning wool and kissed it furtively.
By the time he was back from the stables with a lively team hitched
to a buggy, she was almost dressed, and a suitcase stood packed
outside the bedroom door. He drew a second suitcase from beneath the
bed and began to fill it with his ranch clothes. She watched him,
surprised.
"Why, Jim, what are you taking those for?"
He muttered something about going to do some riding perhaps, and
snapped the catches, hurrying out with the suitcase to the buggy.
Mary bustled to the kitchen and began to lay various tins on the
table. A side of bacon she wrapped up and suspended from a hook in
the ceiling. When she was finished she stood back and struck off a
list on her fingers:
"Bacon, flour, cheese, oatmeal, matches--there, I forgot the matches
again."
He laughed.
"Lord, Mary, you're still expecting visitors to this corner of the
moon!"
She tilted her head. "You never know. We couldn't leave the house
with nothing to eat in it. Some day--perhaps---- We _should_ have
visitors----" She ended the sentence by a noisy clustering of the
tins, and ran to her suitcase.
He took it from her hand and carried it out. One of the horses was
trying to get back into the buggy, but he quieted it with masterful
hand. With one foot on the step she paused.
"Why--that's Pink Eye! He's never been harnessed before, has he?"
"I've been breaking him to it. Good time to try him out on a long
trip like this. He'll have the spirit taken out of him in that sixty
miles--seventy by the Double Bar-O. We're going across there first.
Maybe Cherry Gerard would like to come too; you may be lonesome."
"I don't want Cherry, Jim," she pouted.
He lifted her in and took his seat beside her before he replied:
"It's possible I'll be leaving you for a couple of days in there."
She was looking straight ahead without a word of what was in her
mind. But as the horses galloped madly up the sloping trail to the
east her spirits rose, and she laughed exultantly.
"Seventy miles won't tire Pink Eye," she gurgled. "He's steel."
Dakota, standing before the door of the cook-house, watched them go,
scorning to reply to Mary Aikens' waving hand. It was Bean Slade,
emerging hastily from the interior of the shack, who returned it, as
Pink Eye and his mate tore along the indistinct eastern trail over
the edge of the prairie above.
"Hoorah!" shouted Dakota, when the moving speck had vanished over the
ridge.
"Hoorah!" responded a half-dozen voices; and the Dude and Alkali
seized each other for a musicless dance.
"Dassent leave her t'yore tender mercies, Dakota, ole sport," chaffed
Alkali. "Yo're a reg'lar lady-killer, that's what yo are."
"Oh, I dunno," grunted the Dude jealously, buttoning the loose front
of his brilliant vest. "There's others."
"Go 'long with you, Dude," jeered General. "She never looks at you.
Jest about two days o' Dakota's slippery manners, and the missus ud
be shore climbing his neck."
Bean Slade unwound his lanky legs from a chair and spat through the
doorway.
"Yer a tarnation liar, Gin'ral. Not a doggone neck ud the missus
climb that she hadn't oughter. An' you're a dang lot o' sap-heads to
talk it."
"You oughter know, Bean," grinned General. "Y'ain't licking her pots
fer nothing, I bet."
Bean was on his feet so quickly that no one else had moved by the
time a chair whirled aloft in his hands. General slid to the cover
of the table in desperate haste.
Dakota flung himself between them.
"Drop it, you fools! Nobody's saying nothing again the missus, Bean.
They're just joshing you. You needn't get so touchy anyway; she
ain't _your_ wife."
Bean, whose anger rose and fell with disturbing unexpectedness,
dropped the chair.
"No sech luck!" he growled. "If she was I wudn't risk her where you
slimy coyotes was."
Alkali broke in:
"And now what's the agendar, Dakota? Takin' on that Irvine job this
week. 'T should be a good time with the boss away."
Dakota screwed his eyes up thoughtfully. "That's what I had in mind."
"No rifles this time," protested Bean Slade. "We've toted 'em once
too often--I don't know but _twice_ too often. Br-r-r! I won't ever
forget----"
"Shut your clap, Bean! You've had your man in your day, heaps of
'em."
"They allus had their chance," growled Bean. "No rifles, I say, or I
don't go."
Three or four insulting guffaws greeted the threat.
"The Reverend Beanibus Slade, him of Dead Gulch memory and Two-Shot
Dick fame, will now lead us in singing the twenty-third Psalm!"
scoffed General Jones. "Come along with us, Reverend sir--and bring
yore burial service."
"I've said it," repeated Bean stubbornly.
Dakota tried to oil the surface. "We don't need rifles this
time--it's an easy job.... But we'll shore miss the Kid. He shore
was the handy kid with the blinkers on a dark night, and he'd hold a
close second to yours truly with a gun. Poor Kid! I'd give my left
ear to get even with the guy that got him. I've a bit o' lead
resarved for him."