VICKY TELLS SECRETS
After what had just taken place at the Crystal Palace the bright
sunshine of Nevada was welcome to both brothers. Inside the gambling
house had been unwholesome excitement, passion, the dregs of cruel
murder lust, and the shadow of death. In the open street were friendly
faces, a sane world going about its business, and God’s sun in the
heavens. The McClintocks had probably snuffed out a life. It had been
one horribly distorted by evil. None the less, it shook their composure
to have sent even such a soul to its last account. They wanted, if
possible, to forget completely the look on the face of that huge figure
collapsing upon the table.
A little girl stood squarely in front of them on the broken sidewalk. To
the casual eye she appeared all patches, flying hair, and knobby legs.
There was the shy wildness of a captured forest creature in her manner,
but in her small body the McClintocks sensed, too, a dauntless spirit.
“Mister Goodmans,” she said, addressing them both, “don’t you ’member
me?”
“Of course. You’re Vicky,” Scot told her.
She came directly to business. “Rob, he’s ’most always drunk ’n we ain’t
got nothin’ to eat. Mollie ’n me’s jist awful hungry.”
“Hungry? Good Lord!” cried Hugh.
His brother took charge of the situation. “Go in to Groton’s with Vicky
and get her a good dinner. I’ll see what supplies I can pick up and go
down to the wagon with them.”
In front of the Delta saloon Scot met a Washoe Indian. He was carrying a
half a sack of wild onions he had brought to town to trade. McClintock
did business with him on the spot. At Lyman Jones’s store the faro
dealer bought some rice and coffee. He also induced the merchant to let
him have the last five pounds of flour he had in stock. With these
supplies he tramped to the edge of town to the place where the Dodsons
had moved their camp.
He ploughed through heavy sand, up a steep slope of shale and loose
rubble, to a narrow flat where the prairie schooner stood. Mollie Dodson
must have heard him coming, for as he reached the wagon she called from
within:
“Did you find Rob, Vicky?”
Perhaps the firmness of his tread told her at once of her mistake. She
leaned out of the open flap and caught sight of Scot. Into her white
face the colour beat in waves. Startled eyes held to his with a
surprised question in them.
“I—I was looking for Vicky,” she said.
“Yes. I met Vicky.” His white teeth flashed in a smile that sought to
win her confidence. “That young lady has a lot of sense. She wanted to
know why the trustees of the Virginia Dodson Fund were not attending to
business. So I’m here.”
“Oh! Vicky oughtn’t to have done that.” Another surge of colour, born of
shame, swept into the cheeks.
For the first time Scot realized how very pretty she was. He found her
diffidence charming, for he lived in a world where the women he knew
could not afford to be shy.
“Vicky did just right,” he protested while he was opening his sack. “Our
baby must be well fed. It’s my business to see to that, and I’m going to
do it from now.”
He built a fire while she watched him, the baby in her arms. Mollie was
acutely uncomfortable. The gambler had taken off his coat in order that
his movements might be freer. In his figured waistcoat, frilled cambric
shirt, close-fitting trousers, and varnished boots he looked too
exquisite for menial labour. She was acutely conscious of her patched
and faded gingham. It was Cophetua and the beggar maid brought down to
date, except that she was a wife and not a girl.
“I wish—you wouldn’t,” she stammered.
He stood up, masterful and dominant. His glance swept round and found a
battered water bucket. “Where’s the spring, Mrs. Dodson?” he asked.
“Let me go,” she begged. “It’s—it’s quite a way.”
“I’m feeling better to-day. Maybe I can make it to the spring and back,”
he said, smiling. “Which way, please?”
Reluctantly she pointed to the spring. It was in an arroyo nearly a
quarter of a mile distant.
“Robert forgot to get water before he left. He’s—away looking for
work,” she explained with a slight tremor of the lips.
He liked her better for the little lie. Scot guessed that Dodson had not
been at the camp for several days. He had seen the man in town yesterday
drunk, and again to-day sleeping under an empty wagon in a vacant lot.
It was a safe bet that Mollie Dodson carried the water for the family
use.
Scot returned with the water and made a batch of biscuits and some hot
coffee. While she ate he put rice on to boil.
When he looked at her he saw tears in her brown eyes. She was choking
over the food and trying to prevent him from seeing it. He decided that
this was a time for plain talk.
“I reckon I can guess how you feel,” he said gently. “But that’s not the
right angle to look at this thing. Back where you come from persons that
take help from others are—well, they don’t hold their heads up. But
this is the West, a new country. The camp’s short of food. It can’t be
bought in the market unless you know the ropes. We share with each other
here. In a kind of way we’re all one big family. I’m your big brother,
and I’m certainly going to see this baby is fed proper.”
She murmured something he could not catch for the break in her voice. He
bustled about the fire cheerfully and let her alone till she had
regained control of herself.
By which time Hugh and Vicky arrived, that long-legged young lady
skipping on the hilltops, with high-pitched voluble comment.
“Looky. Looky here, Sister Mollie, what I got,” she cried in her eager
breathless fashion. “He got it for me, Mister—Mister Santa Claus.” One
finger pointed straight at Hugh while she held out for the inspection of
her sister a doll with blue eyes and flaxen hair.
“Oh, but you shouldn’t—you ought not,” Mollie protested to the boy.
“Did she ask you for it?”
“No, ma’am. I wanted to get it for her. It was the only doll for sale in
Virginia, far as I know. I been hankerin’ to buy that doll. Now I feel a
heap better.”
Vicky herself was so clearly in a seventh heaven of delight that her
sister had not the heart to say anything more about it. But she was
uneasy in her mind. She wondered if their obligations to these young men
would never end. What would Rob say? How would he make her pay for the
charity he had forced her to accept?
In the days that followed she had occasion many times to feel weighted
by the kindnesses of Scot McClintock. Hugh had departed to report for
duty with the express company, but his brother made it a point to see
that the little family in the prairie schooner did not lack for food.
He hunted the cañons and brought back a young buck deer with him. One
hind quarter of it went to Mollie Dodson to keep the pot boiling. Fish,
rabbits, a prairie hen, three dozen eggs brought by a rancher all the
way from Honey Lake Valley; these and other delicacies were forced upon
the protesting woman.
Robert Dodson’s attitude was one of sneering suspicion. He was willing
that another man should supply his family with the food it needed, but
he was mean enough to jeer at his wife and bully her because of it. Even
while he ate the meat brought by McClintock his tongue was a whip that
lashed Mollie and the man. His whole attitude implied that the two were
carrying on a clandestine love affair.
Mollie wept herself to sleep more nights than one. By nature a dependent
woman, she did not now know which way to turn. Her husband was a broken
reed. He no longer even pretended to be looking for work. Humiliating
though it was, she had to accept Scot’s favours. She could not let the
family starve. A thousand times Robert Dodson had trampled her pride and
affection in the dust. She knew that life with him held nothing for her,
but it must go on through the long gray years that stretched ahead till
the end of things. She was not the sort of woman to contemplate suicide
with any fortitude. Both the courage and the cowardice for it she
lacked.
Scot returned from the Dodson camp one day, lips close set and eyes
dangerously lit with a smouldering fire. Mollie was nursing a black eye.
She had fallen, she told him, against the corner of the wagon. He had
not believed her when she told this tremulous lie. But Vicky had settled
the matter past doubt. She was waiting for him in a little gulch near
the camp, waiting to tell him in a burst of impotent childish passion
that Dodson had beaten Mollie because she did not have supper ready for
him when he came home hours after the fire was out.
As it chanced, McClintock met the ne’er-do-well a hundred yards farther
down the gulch. Dodson was, for a wonder, sober. He had no money of his
own and he had been unable to wheedle many free drinks from miners.
At sight of the gambler Dodson scowled. He had plenty of reasons for
disliking Scot. He nursed a continuous spleen because he would not let
him get at the money collected for the baby. His pride suffered at
accepting favours from a man who scorned him. He was jealous of the
interest McClintock must have aroused in his “woman,” Mollie Dodson. No
matter how he stormed and sneered at her he could not keep her mind from
a comparison of the men who just now were most present in her life, and
in that silent judgment he knew he must play a sorry part.
The bummer, to use the phrase of the day, would have passed without
speaking. A sulky dignity was the rôle he judged the most effective. But
Scot caught him by the coat lapel and swung him sharply round.
“I’m going to teach you not to lay a hand on—on a woman,” McClintock
said, his voice thick with suppressed passion.
Dodson’s thin mask of offended dignity fell away instantly. He tried to
back off, snarling at the man whose steel grip held him.
“She’s been tellin’ lies on me, has she?” he retorted, showing his
teeth.
“Mrs. Dodson says she fell against the wagon. I don’t believe it. You
struck her, you yellow wolf. Right now I’m going to give you the
thrashing of your life.”
The eyes of the loafer flashed fear. “You lemme go,” he panted, trying
to break away. “Don’t you dass touch me. Think I don’t know about you
an’ her? Think I’m a plumb idjit?”
An open-handed smash across the mouth stopped his words. He made a swift
pass with his right hand. Scot’s left shot out and caught the wrist,
twisting it back and up. A bullet was flung into the sky; then, under
the urge of a pain which leaped from wrist to shoulder of the tortured
arm, the revolver dropped harmlessly to the ground.
“Goddlemighty, you’re breakin’ my arm,” Dodson shrieked, sagging at the
knees as he gave to the pressure.
Scot sent home a stiff right. “You’ll be nursing a black eye from that
to-morrow,” he said evenly.
The craven in Dodson came out at once. He tried to escape punishment by
whining and begging. He promised anything the other man might demand of
him. He made an attempt to fling himself to the ground and cover up.
McClintock set his teeth and went through with the job.
Afterwards to the bully who lay on the sand sobbing with rage and pain,
he gave curt orders. “You’ll go back to town and not show up at the
wagon to-night. To-morrow you’ll tell Mrs. Dodson you had a fight.
You’ll not tell her who with or what it was about. If you ever lay a
hand on her again or on Vicky, I’ll break every bone in your body.
Understand?”
The beaten man gulped out what might be taken for an assent.
Scot turned away, sick at heart. Already he questioned the wisdom of
what he had done.