TWO ON THE HILLTOPS
It was the morning after his return. Emerson Crawford helped himself to
another fried egg from the platter and shook his knife at the bright-eyed
girl opposite.
"I tell you, honey, the boy's a wonder," he insisted. "Knows what he
wants and goes right after it. Don't waste any words. Don't beat around
the bush. Don't let any one bluff him out. Graham says if I don't want
him he'll give him a responsible job pronto."
The girl's trim head tilted at her father in a smile of sweet derision.
She was pleased, but she did not intend to say so.
"I believe you're in love with Dave Sanders, Dad. It's about time for me
to be jealous."
Crawford defended himself. "He's had a hard row to hoe, and he's comin'
out fine. I aim to give him every chance in the world to make good. It's
up to us to stand by him."
"If he'll let us." Joyce jumped up and ran round the table to him. They
were alone, Keith having departed with a top to join his playmates. She
sat on the arm of his chair, a straight, slim creature very much alive,
and pressed her face of flushed loveliness against his head. "It won't be
your fault, old duck, if things don't go well with him. You're good--the
best ever--a jim-dandy friend. But he's so--so--Oh, I don't know--stiff
as a poker. Acts as if he doesn't want to be friends, as if we're all
ready to turn against him. He makes me good and tired, Dad. Why can't he
be--human?"
"Now, Joy, you got to remember--"
"--that he was in prison and had an awful time of it. Oh, yes, I remember
all that. He won't let us forget it. It's just like he held us off all
the time and insisted on us not forgetting it. I'd just like to shake the
foolishness out of him." A rueful little laugh welled from her throat at
the thought.
"He cayn't be gay as Bob Hart all at onct. Give him time."
"You're so partial to him you don't see when he's doing wrong. But I see
it. Yesterday he hardly spoke when I met him. Ridiculous. It's all right
for him to hold back and be kinda reserved with outsiders. But with his
friends--you and Bob and old Buck Byington and me--he ought not to shut
himself up in an ice cave. And I'm going to tell him so."
The cattleman's arm slid round her warm young body and drew her close.
She was to him the dearest thing in the world, a never-failing, exquisite
wonder and mystery. Sometimes even now he was amazed that this rare
spirit had found the breath of life through him.
"You wanta remember you're a li'l lady," he reproved. "You wouldn't want
to do anything you'd be sorry for, honeybug."
"I'm not so sure about that," she flushed, amusement rippling her face.
"Someone's got to blow up that young man like a Dutch uncle, and I think
I'm elected. I'll try not to think about being a lady; then I can do my
full duty, Dad. It'll be fun to see how he takes it."
"Now--now," he remonstrated.
"It's all right to be proud," she went on. "I wouldn't want to see him
hold his head any lower. But there's no sense in being so offish that
even his friends have to give him up. And that's what it'll come to if he
acts the way he does. Folks will stand just so much. Then they give up
trying."
"I reckon you're right about that, Joy."
"Of course I'm right. You have to meet your friends halfway."
"Well, if you talk to him don't hurt his feelin's."
There was a glint of mirth in her eyes, almost of friendly malice. "I'm
going to worry him about _my_ feelings, Dad. He'll not have time to think
of his own."
Joyce found her chance next day. She met David Sanders in front of a
drug-store. He would have passed with a bow if she had let him.
"What does the oil expert Mr. Graham sent think about our property?" she
asked presently, greetings having been exchanged.
"He hasn't given out any official opinion yet, but he's impressed. The
report will be favorable, I think."
"Isn't that good?"
"Couldn't be better," he admitted.
It was a warm day. Joyce glanced in at the soda fountain and said
demurely, "My, but it's hot! Won't you come in and have an ice-cream soda
on me?"
Dave flushed. "If you'll go as my guest," he said stiffly.
"How good of you to invite me!" she accepted, laughing, but with a tint
of warmer color in her cheeks.
Rhythmically she moved beside him to a little table in the corner of the
drug-store. "I own stock in the Jackpot. You've got to give an accounting
to me. Have you found a market yet?"
"The whole Southwest will be our market as soon as we can reach it."
"And when will that be?" she asked.
"I'm having some hauled to relieve the glut. The railroad will be
operating inside of six weeks. We'll keep Number Three capped till then
and go on drilling in other locations. Burns is spudding in a new well
to-day."
The clerk took their order and departed. They were quite alone, not
within hearing of anybody. Joyce took her fear by the throat and plunged
in.
"You mad at me, Mr. Sanders?" she asked jauntily.
"You know I'm not."
"How do I know it?" she asked innocently. "You say as little to me as you
can, and get away from me as quick as you can. Yesterday, for instance,
you'd hardly say 'Good-morning.'"
"I didn't mean to be rude. I was busy." Dave felt acutely uncomfortable.
"I'm sorry if I didn't seem sociable."
"So was Mr. Hart busy, but he had time to stop and say a pleasant word."
The brown eyes challenged their vis-à-vis steadily.
The young man found nothing to say. He could not explain that he had not
lingered because he was giving Bob a chance to see her alone, nor could
he tell her that he felt it better for his peace of mind to keep away
from her as much as possible.
"I'm not in the habit of inviting young men to invite me to take a soda,
Mr. Sanders," she went on. "This is my first offense. I never did it
before, and I never expect to again.... I do hope the new well will come
in a good one." The last sentence was for the benefit of the clerk
returning with the ice-cream.
"Looks good," said Dave, playing up. "Smut's showing, and you know that's
a first-class sign."
"Bob said it was expected in to-day or to-morrow.... I asked you because
I've something to say to you, something I think one of your friends ought
to say, and--and I'm going to do it," she concluded in a voice modulated
just to reach him.
The clerk had left the glasses and the check. He was back at the fountain
polishing the counter.
Sanders waited in silence. He had learned to let the burden of
conversation rest on his opponent, and he knew that Joyce just now
was in that class.
She hesitated, uncertain of her opening. Then, "You're disappointing your
friends, Mr. Sanders," she said lightly.
He did not know what an effort it took to keep her voice from quavering,
her hand from trembling as it rested on the onyx top of the table.
"I'm sorry," he said a second time.
"Perhaps it's our fault. Perhaps we haven't been ... friendly enough."
The lifted eyes went straight into his.
He found an answer unexpectedly difficult. "No man ever had more generous
friends," he said at last brusquely, his face set hard.
The girl guessed at the tense feeling back of his words.
"Let's walk," she replied, and he noticed that the eyes and mouth had
softened to a tender smile. "I can't talk here, Dave."
They made a pretense of finishing their sodas, then walked out of the
town into the golden autumn sunlight of the foothills. Neither of them
spoke. She carried herself buoyantly, chin up, her face a flushed cameo
of loveliness. As she took the uphill trail a small breath of wind
wrapped the white skirt about her slender limbs. He found in her a new
note, one of unaccustomed shyness.
The silence grew at last too significant. She was driven to break it.
"I suppose I'm foolish," she began haltingly. "But I had been
expecting--all of us had--that when you came home from--from Denver--the
first time, I mean--you would be the old Dave Sanders we all knew and
liked. We wanted our friendship to--to help make up to you for what you
must have suffered. We didn't think you'd hold us off like this."
His eyes narrowed. He looked away at the cedars on the hills painted in
lustrous blues and greens and purples, and at the slopes below burnt to
exquisite color lights by the fires of fall. But what he saw was a gray
prison wall with armed men in the towers.
"If I could tell you!" He said it in a whisper, to himself, but she just
caught the words.
"Won't you try?" she said, ever so gently.
He could not sully her innocence by telling of the furtive whisperings
that had fouled the prison life, made of it an experience degrading and
corrosive. He told her, instead, of the externals of that existence, of
how he had risen, dressed, eaten, worked, exercised, and slept under
orders. He described to her the cells, four by seven by seven, barred,
built in tiers, faced by narrow iron balconies, each containing a stool,
a chair, a shelf, a bunk. In his effort to show her the chasm that
separated him from her he did not spare himself at all. Dryly and in
clean-cut strokes he showed her the sordidness of which he had been the
victim and left her to judge for herself of its evil effect on his
character.
When he had finished he knew that he had failed. She wept for pity and
murmured, "You poor boy.... You poor boy!"
He tried again, and this time he drew the moral. "Don't you see, I'm a
marked man--marked for life." He hesitated, then pushed on. "You're fine
and clean and generous--what a good father and mother, and all this have
made you." He swept his hand round in a wide gesture to include the sun
and the hills and all the brave life of the open. "If I come too near
you, don't you see I taint you? I'm a man who was shut up because--"
"Fiddlesticks! You're a man who has been done a wrong. You mustn't grow
morbid over it. After all, you've been found innocent."
"That isn't what counts. I've been in the penitentiary. Nothing can wipe
that out. The stain of it's on me and can't be washed away."
She turned on him with a little burst of feminine ferocity. "How dare you
talk that way, Dave Sanders! I want to be proud of you. We all do. But
how can we be if you give up like a quitter? Don't we all have to keep
beginning our lives over and over again? Aren't we all forever getting
into trouble and getting out of it? A man is as good as he makes himself.
It doesn't matter what outside thing has happened to him. Do you dare
tell me that my dad wouldn't be worth loving if he'd been in prison forty
times?"
The color crept into his face. "I'm not quitting. I'm going through. The
point is whether I'm to ask my friends to carry my load for me."
"What are your friends for?" she demanded, and her eyes were like stars
in a field of snow. "Don't you see it's an insult to assume they don't
want to stand with you in your trouble? You've been warped. You're
eaten up with vain pride." Joyce bit her lip to choke back a swelling in
her throat. "The Dave we used to know wasn't like that. He was friendly
and sweet. When folks were kind to him he was kind to them. He wasn't
like--like an old poker." She fell back helplessly on the simile she had
used with her father.
"I don't blame you for feeling that way," he said gently. "When I first
came out I did think I'd play a lone hand. I was hard and bitter and
defiant. But when I met you-all again--and found you were just like home
folks--all of you so kind and good, far beyond any claims I had on
you--why, Miss Joyce, my heart went out to my old friends with a rush.
It sure did. Maybe I had to be stiff to keep from being mushy."
"Oh, if that's it!" Her eager face, flushed and tender, nodded approval.
"But you've got to look at this my way too," he urged. "I can't repay
your father's kindness--yes, and yours too--by letting folks couple your
name, even in friendship, with a man who--"
She turned on him, glowing with color. "Now that's absurd, Dave Sanders.
I'm not a--a nice little china doll. I'm a flesh-and-blood girl. And I'm
not a statue on a pedestal. I've got to live just like other people.
The trouble with you is that you want to be generous, but you don't want
to give other folks a chance to be. Let's stop this foolishness and be
sure-enough friends--Dave."
He took her outstretched hand in his brown palm, smiling down at her.
"All right. I know when I'm beaten."
She beamed. "That's the first honest-to-goodness smile I've seen on your
face since you came back."
"I've got millions of 'em in my system," he promised. "I've been hoarding
them up for years."
"Don't hoard them any more. Spend them," she urged.
"I'll take that prescription, Doctor Joyce." And he spent one as evidence
of good faith.
The soft and shining oval of her face rippled with gladness as a mountain
lake sparkles with sunshine in a light summer breeze. "I've found again
that Dave boy I lost," she told him.
"You won't lose him again," he answered, pushing into the hinterland
of his mind the reflection that a man cannot change the color of his
thinking in an hour.
"We thought he'd gone away for good. I'm so glad he hasn't."
"No. He's been here all the time, but he's been obeying the orders of a
man who told him he had no business to be alive."
He looked at her with deep, inscrutable eyes. As a boy he had been
shy but impulsive. The fires of discipline had given him remarkable
self-restraint. She could not tell he was finding in her face the quality
to inspire in a painter a great picture, the expression of that brave
young faith which made her a touchstone to find the gold in his soul.
Yet in his gravity was something that disturbed her blood. Was she
fanning to flame banked fires better dormant?
She felt a compunction for what she had done. Maybe she had been
unwomanly. It is a penalty impulsive people have to pay that later they
must consider whether they have been bold and presumptuous. Her spirits
began to droop when she should logically have been celebrating her
success.
But Dave walked on mountain-tops tipped with mellow gold. He threw off
the weight that had oppressed his spirits for years and was for the hour
a boy again. She had exorcised the gloom in which he walked. He looked
down on a magnificent flaming desert, and it was good. To-day was his.
To-morrow was his. All the to-morrows of the world were in his hand. He
refused to analyze the causes of his joy. It was enough that beside him
moved with charming diffidence the woman of his dreams, that with her
soft hands she had torn down the barrier between them.
"And now I don't know whether I've done right," she said ruefully. "Dad
warned me I'd better be careful. But of course I always know best. I
'rush in.'"
"You've done me a million dollars' worth of good. I needed some good
friend to tell me just what you have. Please don't regret it."
"Well, I won't." She added, in a hesitant murmur, "You
won't--misunderstand?"
His look turned aside the long-lashed eyes and brought a faint flush of
pink to her cheeks.
"No, I'll not do that," he said.