CHAPTER VII—THE SHADOW OF THE PAST

Marion Harlan and her uncle, Elam Parsons, did not accompany

Carrington to the Castle Hotel. By telegraph, through Danforth,

Carrington had bought a house near Dawes, and shortly after Quinton

Taylor left the station platform accompanied by his friends and

admirers, Marion and her uncle were in a buckboard riding toward the

place that, henceforth, was to be their home.

For that question had been settled before the party left Westwood.

Parsons had declared his future activities were to be centered in

Dawes, that he had no further interests to keep him in Westwood, and

that he intended to make his home in Dawes.

Certainly Marion had few interests in the town that had been the scene

of the domestic tragedy that had left her parentless. She was glad to

get away. For though she had not been to blame for what had happened,

she was painfully conscious of the stares that followed her

everywhere, and aware of the morbid curiosity with which her neighbors

regarded her. Also—through the medium of certain of her “friends,” she

had become cognizant of speculative whisperings, such as: “To think of

being brought up like that? Do you think she will be like her mother?”

Or—“What’s bred in the bone, _et cetera_.”

Perhaps these good people did not mean to be unkind; certainly the

crimson stains that colored the girl’s cheeks when she passed them

should have won their charity and their silence.

There was nothing in Westwood for her; and so she was glad to get

away. And the trip westward toward Dawes opened a new vista of life to

her. She was leaving the old and the tragic and adventuring into the

new and promising, where she could face life without the onus of a

shame that had not been hers.

Before she was half way to Dawes she had forgotten Westwood and its

wagging tongues. She alone, of all the passengers in the Pullman, had

not been aware of the heat and the discomfort. She had loved every

foot of the great prairie land that, green and beautiful, had flashed

past the car window; she had gazed with eager, interested eyes into

the far reaches of the desert through which she had passed, filling

her soul with the mystic beauty of this new world, reveling in its

vastness and in the atmosphere of calm that seemed to engulf it.

Dawes had not disappointed her; on the contrary, she loved it at first

sight. For though Dawes was new and crude, it looked rugged and

honest—and rather too busy to hesitate for the purpose of indulging in

gossip—idle or otherwise. Dawes, she was certain, was occupying itself

with progress—a thing that, long since, Westwood had forgotten.

Five minutes after she had entered the buckboard, the spirit of this

new world had seized upon the girl and she was athrob and atingle with

the joy of it. It filled her veins; it made her cheeks flame and her

eyes dance. And the strange aroma—the pungent breath of the sage,

borne to her on the slight breeze—she drew into her lungs with great

long breaths that seemed to intoxicate her.

“Oh,” she exclaimed delightedly, “isn’t it great! Oh, I love it!”

Elam Parsons grinned at her—the habitual smirk with which he

recognized all emotion not his own.

“It _does_ look like a good field for business,” he conceded.

The girl looked at him quickly, divined the sordidness of his

thoughts, and puckered her brows in a frown. And thereafter she

enjoyed the esthetic beauties of her world without seeking

confirmation from her uncle.

Her delight grew as the journey to the new home progressed. She saw

the fertile farming country stretching far in the big section of

country beyond the water-filled basin; her eyes glowed as the

irrigation ditches, with their locks and gates, came under her

observation; and she sat silent, awed by the mightiness of it all—the

tall, majestic mountains looming somberly many miles distant behind a

glowing mist—like a rose veil or a gauze curtain lowered to partly

conceal the mystic beauty of them.

Intervening were hills and flats and draws and valleys, and miles and

miles of level grass land, green and peaceful in the shimmering

sunlight that came from somewhere near the center of the big,

pale-blue inverted bowl of sky; she caught the silvery glitter of a

river that wound its way through the country like a monstrous serpent;

she saw dark blotches, miles long, which she knew were forests, for

she could see the spires of trees thrusting upward. But from where she

rode the trees seemed to be no larger than bushes.

Looking backward, she could see Dawes. Already the buckboard had

traveled two or three miles, but the town seemed near, and she had

quite a shock when she looked back at it and saw the buildings, mere

huddled shanties, spoiling the beauty of her picture.

A mile or so farther—four miles altogether, Parsons told her—and they

came in sight of a house. She had difficulty restraining her delight

when they climbed out of the buckboard and Parsons told her the place

was to be their permanent home. For it was such a house as she had

longed to live in all the days of her life.

The first impression it gave her was that of spaciousness. For though

only one story in height, the house contained many rooms. Those,

however, she saw later.

The exterior was what intrigued her interest at first glance. So far

as she knew, it was the only brick building in the country. She had

seen none such in Dawes.

There was a big porch across the front; the windows were large; there

were vines and plants thriving in the shade from some big cottonwood

trees near by—in fact, the house seemed to have been built in a grove

of the giant trees; there were several outhouses, one of which had

chickens in an enclosure near it; there was a garden, well-kept; and

the girl saw that back of the house ran a little stream which flowed

sharply downward, later to tumble into the big basin far below the

irrigation dam.

While Parsons was superintending the unloading of the buckboard,

Marion explored the house. It was completely furnished, and her eyes

glowed with pleasure as she inspected it. And when Parsons and the

driver were carrying the baggage in she was outside the house,

standing at the edge of a butte whose precipitous walls descended

sharply to the floor of the irrigation basin, two or three hundred

feet below. She could no longer see the cultivated level, with its

irrigation ditches, but she could see the big dam, a mile or so up the

valley toward Dawes, with the water creeping over it, and the big

valley itself, slumbering in the pure, white light of the morning.

She went inside, slightly awed, and Parsons, noting her excitement,

smirked at her. She left him and went to her room. Emerging later she

discovered that Parsons was not in the house. She saw him, however, at

a distance, looking out into the valley.

And then, in the kitchen, Marion came upon the housekeeper, a negro

woman of uncertain age. Parsons had not told her there was to be a

housekeeper.

The negro woman grinned broadly at her astonishment.

“Lawsey, ma’am; you jes’ got to have a housekeeper, I reckon! How you

ever git along without a housekeeper? You’re too fine an’ dainty to

keep house you’self!”

The woman’s name, the latter told her, was Martha, and there was

honest delight—and, it seemed to Marion, downright relief in her eyes

when she looked at the new mistress.

“You ain’t got no ‘past,’ that’s certain, honey,” she declared, with a

delighted smile. “The woman that lived here befo’ had a past, honey. A

man named Huggins lived in this house, an’ she said she’s his wife.

Wife! Lawsey! No man has a wife like that! She had a past, that woman,

an’ mebbe a present, too—he, he, he!

“He was the man what put the railroad through here, honey. I done hear

the woman say—her name was Blanche, honey—that Huggins was one of them

ultra rich. But whatever it was that ailed him, honey, didn’t help his

looks none. Pig-eye, I used to call him, when I’se mad at him—which

was mostly all the time—he, he, he!”

The girl’s face whitened. Was she never to escape the atmosphere she

loathed? She shuddered and Martha patted her sympathetically on the

shoulder.

“There, there, honey; you ain’t ’sponsible for other folks’ affairs.

Jes’ you hold you’ head up an’ go about you’ business. Nobody say

anything to you because you’ livin’ here.”

But Martha’s words neither comforted nor consoled the girl. She went

again to her room and sat for a long time, looking out of a window.

For now all the cheer had gone out of the house; the rooms looked dull

and dreary—and empty, as of something gone out of them.