I
The Kettle Hole Ranch house faces a wide, treeless valley and is backed
by an equally bare hill. To the west the purple peaks of the Rampart
range are visible. It is a group of ramshackle and dispersed cabins--not
Western enough to be picturesque, and so far from being Eastern as to
lack cleanliness or even comfort, and the young Englishman who rode over
the hill one sunset was bitterly disappointed in the "whole plant."
"I shall stay here but one night," said he, as he entered the untidy
house.
He stayed five years, and the cause of this change of mind lay in the
person of Fan Blondell, the daughter of the old man who owned the ranch
and to whom young Lester had been sent to "learn the business" of
cattle-raising.
Fan was only seventeen at this time, but in the full flower of her
physical perfection. Lithe, full-bosomed, and ruddy, she radiated a
powerful and subtle charm. She had the face of a child--happy-tempered
and pure--but every movement of her body appealed with dangerous
directness to the sickly young Englishman who had never known an hour of
the abounding joy of life which had been hers from the cradle. Enslaved
to her at the first glance, he resolved to win her love.
His desire knew no law in affairs of this kind, but his first encounter
with Blondell put a check to the dark plans he had formed--for the
rancher had the bearing of an aged, moth-eaten, but dangerous old bear.
His voice was a rumble, his teeth were broken fangs, and his hands
resembled the paws of a gorilla. Like so many of those Colorado ranchers
of the early days, he was a Missourian, and his wife, big, fat, worried
and complaining, was a Kentuckian. Neither of them had any fear of dirt,
and Fan had grown up not merely unkempt, but smudgy. Her gown was
greasy, her shoes untied, and yet, strange to say, this carelessness
exercised a subduing charm over Lester, who was fastidious to the point
of wasting precious hours in filling his boots with "trees" and folding
his neckties. The girl's slovenly habits of dress indicated, to his
mind, a similar recklessness as to her moral habits, and it sometimes
happens that men of his stamp come to find a fascination in the
elemental in human life which the orderly no longer possess.
Lester, we may explain, was a "remittance man"--a youth sent to America
by his family on the pretense of learning to raise cattle, but in
reality to get him out of the way. He was not a bad man; on the
contrary, he was in most ways a gentleman and a man of some reading--but
he lacked initiative, even in his villainy. Blondell at once called him
"a lazy hound"--provoked thereto by Lester's slowness of toilet of a
morning, and had it not been for Fan--backed by the fifty dollars a
month which Lester was paying for "instruction"--he would have been
"booted off the place."
Fan laughed at her father. "You better go slow; George Adelbert is
heeled."
Blondell snorted. "Heeled! He couldn't unlimber his gun inside of
fifteen minutes."
"Well, he can ride."
The old man softened a little. "Yes, he can ride, and he don't complain,
once he gets mounted, but he carries 'pajammys' in his saddle-bags and a
tooth-brush on his slicker; hanged if he don't use it, too!"
"That's what I like about him," she answered, defiantly. "We're all so
blamed careless about the way we live. I wish he'd jack us all up a
bit."
Truly Fan was under conviction, brought to a realization of her
slouchiness by Lester's care of his own room as well as by his lofty
manners. She no longer wore her dress open at the throat, and she kept
her yellow hair brushed, trying hard to make each meal a little less
like a pig's swilling. She knew how things ought to be done, a little,
for at "The Gold Fish Ranch" and at Starr Baker's everything was spick
and span (Mrs. Baker especially was a careful and energetic
housekeeper), but to keep to this higher level every day was too great
an effort even for a girl in love. She dropped back, now and again,
weary and disheartened.
It was her mating-time. She leaned to Lester from the first glance. The
strangeness of his accent, his reference to things afar off, to London
and Paris, appealed to her in the same way in which poetry moved
her--dimly, vaguely--but his hands, his eyes, his tender, low-toned
voice won her heart. She hovered about him when he was at home, careless
of the comments of the other men, ignoring the caustic "slatting" of her
mother. She had determined to win him, no matter what the father might
say--for to her all men were of the same social level and she as good as
the best. Indeed, she knew no other world than the plains of Colorado,
for she was born in the little dugout which still remained a part of
the kitchen. The conventions of cities did not count with her.
She was already aware of her power, too, and walked among the rough men
of her acquaintance with the step of an Amazonian queen, unafraid,
unabashed. She was not in awe of Lester; on the contrary, her love for
him was curiously mingled with a certain sisterly, almost maternal pity;
he was so easily "flustered." He was, in a certain sense, on her hands
like an invalid.
She soon learned that he was wax beneath her palm--that the touch of a
finger on his arm made him uneasy of eye and trembling of limb. It
amused her to experiment with him--to command him, to demand speech of
him when he was most angry and disgusted with the life he was living.
That he despised her father and mother she did not know, but that he was
sick of the cowboys and their "clack" she did know, and she understood
quite as well as if he had already told her that she alone kept him from
returning at once to Denver to try some other manner of earning a
living. This realization gave her pride and joy.
She had but one jealousy--he admired and trusted Mrs. Baker and
occasionally rode over there to talk with her, and Fan could not
understand that he sought intellectual refuge from the mental squalor of
the Blondells, but she perceived a difference in his glance on his
return. Mrs. Baker, being a keen-sighted, practical little woman, soon
fell upon the plainest kind of speech with the young Englishman.
"This is no place for you," she defiantly said. "The rest of us are all
more or less born to the plains and farm-life, but you're not; you're
just 'sagging,' that's all. You're getting deeper into the slough all
the time."
"Quite right," he answered, "but I don't know what else I can do. I have
no trade--I know nothing of any art or profession, and my brother is
quite content to pay my way so long as he thinks I'm on a ranch, and in
the way of learning the business."
She, with her clear eyes searching his soul, replied: "The longer you
stay the more difficult it will be to break away. Don't you see that?
You're in danger of being fastened here forever."
He knew what she meant, and his thin face flushed. "I know it and I am
going to ask Starr to give me a place here with you, and I'm about to
write my brother stating full reasons for the change. He might advance
me enough to buy into Starr's herd."
She considered this. "I'll take the matter up with Starr," she replied,
after a pause. "Meanwhile, you can come over and stay as a visitor as
long as you please--but don't bring Fan," she added, sharply. "I can't
stand slatterns, and you must cut loose from her once for all."
Again he flushed. "I understand--but it isn't easy. Fan has been mighty
good to me; life would have been intolerable over there but for her."
"I should think life would have been intolerable _with_ her," Mrs. Baker
answered, with darkening brow, and then they talked of other things till
he rose to ride away.
He headed his horse homeward, fully resolved to give notice of removal,
but he did not. On the contrary, he lost himself to Fan. The girl,
glowing with love and anger and at the very climax of her animal beauty,
developed that night a subtlety of approach, a method of attack, which
baffled and in the end overpowered him. She was adroit enough to make no
mention of her rivals; she merely set herself to cause his committal, to
bend him to her side. As the romping girl she played round him,
indifferent to the warning glances of her mother, her eyes shining, her
cheeks glowing, till the man he was, the life he had lived, the wishes
of his brother, were fused and lost in the blind passion of the present.
"This glorious, glowing creature can be mine. What does all the rest
matter?" was his final word of renunciation.
In this mood he took her to his arms, in this madness he told her of his
love (committing himself into her hands, declining into her life), and
in the end requested of her parents the honor of their daughter's hand.
Mrs. Blondell wept a tear or two and weakly gave her consent, but the
old ranchman thundered and lightened. "What can you do for my girl?" he
demanded. "As I understand it, you haven't a cent--the very clothes
you've got on your back are paid for by somebody else! What right have
you to come to me with such a proposal?"
To all this Lester, surprised and disconcerted, could but meekly answer
that he hoped soon to buy a ranch of his own--that his brother had
promised to "set him up" as soon as he had mastered the business.
Blondell opened his jaws to roar again when Fan interposed and, taking a
clutch in his shaggy beard, said, calmly: "Now, dad, you hush! George
Adelbert and I have made it all up and you better fall in gracefully. It
won't do you any good to paw the dirt and beller."
Lester grew sick for a moment as he realized the temper of the family
into which he was about to marry, but when Fan, turning with a gay
laugh, put her round, smooth arm about his neck, the rosy cloud closed
over his head again.