For almost three years the letters from Manley had been headed “Cold
Spring Ranch.” For quite as long Val had possessed a mental picture of the
place--a picture of a gurgly little brook with rocks and watercress and
distracting little pools the size of a bathtub, and with a great, frowning
boulder--a cliff, almost--at the head. The brook bubbled out and formed
a basin in the shadow of the rock. Around it grew trees, unnamed in the
picture, it is true, but trees, nevertheless. Below the spring stood a
picturesque little cottage. A shack, Manley had written, was but a synonym
for a small cottage, and Val had many small cottages in mind, from which
she sketched one into her picture. The sun shone on it, and the western
breezes flapped white curtains in the windows, and there was a porch where
she would swing her hammock and gaze out over the great, beautiful country,
fascinating in its very immensity.
Somewhere beyond the cottage--“shack,” she usually corrected herself--were
the corrals; they were as yet rather impressionistic; high, round,
mysterious inclosures forming an effective, if somewhat hazy, background to
the picture. She left them to work out their attractive details upon closer
acquaintance, for at most they were merely the background. The front yard,
however, she dwelt upon, and made aglow with sturdy, bright-hued flowers.
Manley had that spring planted sweet peas, and poppies, and pansies, and
other things, he wrote her, and they had come up very nicely. Afterward,
in a postscript, he answered her oft-repeated questions about the flower
garden:
The flowers aren't doing as well as they might. They need your tender care.
I don't have much time to pet them along. The onions are doing pretty well,
but they need weeding badly.
In spite of that, the flowers bloomed luxuriantly in her mental picture,
though she conscientiously remembered that they weren't doing as well as
they might. They were weedy and unkempt, she supposed, but a little time
and care would remedy that; and was she not coming to be the mistress of
all this, and to make everything beautiful? Besides, the spring, and the
brook which ran from it, and the trees which shaded it, were the chief
attractions.
Perhaps she betrayed a lack of domesticity because she had not been able
to “see” the interior of the cottage--“shack”--very clearly. Sunny rooms,
white curtains, bright cushions and books, pictures and rugs mingled
together rather confusingly in her mind when she dwelt upon the inside of
her future home. It would be bright, and cozy, and “homy,” she knew. She
would love it because it would be hers and Manley's, and she could do with
it what she would. She bothered about that no more than she did about the
dresses she would be wearing next year.
Cold Spring Ranch! Think of the allurement of that name, just as it
stands, without any disconcerting qualification whatever! Any girl with
yellow-brown hair and yellow-brown eyes to match, and a dreamy temperament
that beautifies everything her imagination touches, would be sure to build
a veritable Eve's garden around those three small words.
With that picture still before her mental vision, clear as if she had all
her life been familiar with it in reality, she rode beside Manley for three
weary hours, across a wide, wide prairie which looked perfectly level when
you viewed it as a whole, but which proved all hills and hollows when
you drove over it. During those three hours they passed not one human
habitation after the first five miles were behind them. There had been a
ranch, back there against a reddish-yellow bluff. Val had gazed upon it,
and then turned her head away, distressed because human beings could
consent to live in such unattractive surroundings. It was bad in its way as
Hope, she thought, but did not say, because Manley was talking about his
cattle, and she did not want to interrupt him.
After that there had been no houses of any sort. There was a barbed-wire
fence stretching away and away until the posts were mere pencil lines
against the blue, where the fence dipped over the last hill before the sky
bent down and kissed the earth.
The length of that fence was appalling in a vague, wordless way, Val
unconsciously drew closer to her husband when she looked at it, and
shivered in spite of the midsummer heat.
“You're getting tired.” Manley put his arm around her and held her there.
“We're over half-way now. A little longer and we'll be home.” Then he
bethought him that she might want some preparation for that home-coming.
“You mustn't expect much, little wife. It's a bachelor's house, so far.
You'll have to do some fixing before it will suit you. You don't look
forward to anything like Fern Hill, do you?”
Val laughed, and bent solicitously over the suitcase, which her feet had
marred. “Of course I don't. Nothing out here is like Fern Hill. I know our
ranch is different from anything I ever knew--but I know just how it will
be, and how everything will look.”
“Oh! Do you?” Manley looked at her a bit anxiously.
“For three years,” Val reminded him, “you have been describing things
to me. You told me what it was like when you first took the place. You
described everything, from Cold Spring Coulee to the house you built, and
the spring under the rock wall, and even the meadow lark's nest you found
in the weeds. Of _course_ I know.”
“It's going to seem pretty rough, at first,” he observed rather
apologetically.
“Yes--but I shall not mind that. I want it to be rough. I'm tired to death
of the smug smoothness of my life so far. Oh, if you only knew how I have
hated Fern Hill, these last three years, especially since I graduated. Just
the same petty little lives lived in the same petty little way, day in and
day out. Every Sunday the class in Sunday school, and the bells ringing
and the same little walk of four blocks there and back. Every Tuesday and
Friday the club meeting--the Merry Maids, and the Mascot, both just alike,
where you did the same things. And the same round of calls with mamma,
on the same people, twice a month the year round. And the little social
festivities--ah, Manley, if you only knew how I tong for something rough
and real in my life!” It was very nearly what she said to the tired-faced
teacher on the train.
“Well, if that's what you want, you've come to the right place,” he told
her dryly.
Later, when they drew close to a red coulee rim which he said was the far
side of Cold Spring Coulee, she forgot how tired she was, and felt every
nerve quiver with eagerness.
Later still, when in the glare of a July sun they drove around a low knoll,
dipped into a wide, parched coulee, and then came upon a barren little
habitation inclosed in a meager fence of the barbed wire she thought so
detestable, she shut her eyes mentally to something she could not quite
bring herself to face.
He lifted her out and tumbled the great trunks upon the ground before he
drove on to the corrals. “Here's the key,” he said, “if you want to go in.
I won't be more than a minute or two.” He did not look into her face when
he spoke.
Val stood just inside the gate and tried to adjust all this to her mental
picture. There was the front yard, for instance. A few straggling vines
against the porch, and a sickly cluster or two of blossoms--those were the
sweet peas, surely. The sun-baked bed of pale-green plants without so much
as a bud of promise, she recognized, after a second glance, as the poppies.
For the rest, there were weeds against the fence, sun-ripened grass trodden
flat, yellow, gravelly patches where nothing grew--and a glaring, burning
sun beating down upon it all.
The cottage--never afterward did she think of it by that name, but always
as a shack--was built of boards placed perpendicularly, with battens nailed
over the cracks to keep out the wind and the snow. At one side was a
“lean-to” kitchen, and on the other side was the porch that was just
a narrow platform with a roof over it. It was not wide enough for a
rocking-chair, to say nothing of swinging a hammock. In the first hasty
inspection this seemed to be about all. She was still hesitating before the
door when Manley came back from putting up the horses.
“I'm afraid your flowers are a lost cause,” he remarked cheerfully. “They
were looking pretty good two or three weeks ago. This hot weather has dried
them up. Next year we'll have water down here to the house. All these
things take time.”
“Oh, of course they do.” Val managed to smile into his eyes. “Let's see how
many dishes you left dirty; bachelors always leave their dishes unwashed on
the table, don't they?”
“Sometimes--but I generally wash mine.” He led the way into the house,
which smelled hot and close, with the odor of food long since cooked
and eaten, before he threw all the windows open. The front room was
clean--after a man's idea of cleanliness. The floor was covered with an
exceedingly dusty carpet, and a rug or two. Her latest photograph was
nailed to the wall; and when Val saw it she broke into hysterical laughter.
“You've nailed your colors to the mast,” she cried, and after that it was
all a joke. The home-made couch, with the calico cushions and the cowhide
spread, was a matter for mirth. She sat down upon it to try it, and was
informed that chicken wire makes a fine spring. The rickety table, with
tobacco, magazines, and books placed upon it in orderly piles, was
something to smile over. The chairs, and especially the one cane rocker
which went sidewise over the floor if you rocked in it long enough, were
pronounced original.
In the kitchen the same masculine idea of cleanliness and order obtained.
The stove was quite red, but it had been swept clean. The table was pushed
against the only window there, and the back part was filled with glass
preserve jars, cans, and a loaf of bread wrapped carefully in paper; but
the oilcloth cover was clean--did it not show quite plainly the marks of
the last washing? Two frying pans were turned bottom up on an obscure table
in an obscure corner of the room, and a zinc water pail stood beside them.
There were other details which impressed themselves upon her shrinking
brain, and though she still insisted upon smiling at everything, she stood
in the middle of the room holding up her skirts quite unconsciously, as if
she were standing at a muddy street crossing, wondering how in the world
she was ever going to reach the Other side.
“Isn't it all--deliciously--primitive?” she asked, in a weak little voice,
when the smile would stay no longer. “I--love it, dear.” That was a lie;
more, she was not in the habit of fibbing for the sake of politeness or
anything else, so that the words stood for a good deal.
Manley looked into the zinc water pail, took it up, and started for an
outer door, rattling the tin dipper as he went. “Want to go up to the
spring?” he queried, over his shoulder, “Water's the first thing--I'm
horribly thirsty.”
Val turned to follow him. “Oh, yes--the spring!” She stopped, however, as
soon as she had spoken. “No, dear. There'll be plenty of other times. I'll
stay here.”
He gave her a glance bright with love and blind happiness in her presence
there, and went off whistling and rattling the pail at his side.
Val did not even watch him go. She stood still in the kitchen and looked at
the table, and at the stove, and at the upturned frying pans. She watched
two great horseflies buzzing against a window-pane, and when she could
endure that no longer, she went into the front room and stared vacantly
around at the bare walls. When she saw her picture again, nailed
fast beside the kitchen door, her face lost a little of its frozen
blankness--enough so that her lips quivered until she bit them into
steadiness.
She went then to the door and stood looking dully out into the parched
yard, and at the wizened little pea vines clutching feebly at their
white-twine trellis. Beyond stretched the bare hills with the wavering
brown line running down the nearest one--the line that she knew was the
trail from town. She was guilty of just one rebellious sentence before she
struggled back to optimism.
“I said I wanted it to be rough, but I didn't mean--why, this is just
squalid!” She looked down the coulee and glimpsed the river flowing calmly
past the mouth of it, a majestic blue belt fringed sparsely with green.
It must be a mile away, but it relieved wonderfully the monotony of brown
hills, and the vivid coloring brightened her eyes. She heard Manley enter
the kitchen, set down the pail of water, and come on to where she stood.
“I'd forgotten you said we could see the river from here,” she told him,
smiling over her shoulder. “It's beautiful, isn't it? I don't suppose,
though, there's a boat within millions of miles.”
“Oh, there's a boat down there. It leaks, though. I just use it for ducks,
close to shore. Admiring our view? Great, don't you think?”
Val clasped her hands before her and let her gaze travel again over the
sweep of rugged hills. “It's--wonderful. I thought I knew, but I see I
didn't. I feel very small, Manley; does one ever grow up to it?”
He seemed dimly to catch the note of utter desolation. “You'll get used to
all that,” he assured her. “I thought I'd reached the jumping-off place, at
first. But now--you couldn't dog me outa the country.”
He was slipping into the vernacular, and Val noticed it, and wondered dully
if she would ever do likewise. She had not yet admitted to herself that
Manley was different. She had told herself many times that it would take
weeks to wipe out the strangeness born of three years' separation. He was
the same, of course; everything else was new and--different. That was all.
He seemed intensely practical, and he seemed to feel that his love-making
had all been done by letter, and that nothing now remained save the
business of living. So, when he told her to rest, and that he would get
dinner and show her how a bachelor kept house, she let him go with no reply
save that vague, impersonal smile which Kent had encountered at the depot.
While he rattled things about in the kitchen, she stood still in the
doorway with her fingers doubled into tight little fists, and stared out
over the great, treeless, unpeopled land which had swallowed her alive. She
tried to think--and then, in another moment, she was trying not to think.
Glancing quickly over her shoulder, to make sure Manley was too busy to
follow her, she went off the porch and stood uncertain in the parched
inclosure which was the front yard.
“I may as well see it all, and be done,” she whispered, and went stealthily
around the corner of the house, holding up her skirts as she had done in
the kitchen. There was a dim path beaten in the wiry grass--a path which
started at the kitchen door and wound away up the coulee. She followed it.
Undoubtedly it would lead her to the spring; beyond that she refused to let
her thoughts travel.
In five minutes--for she went slowly--she stopped beside a stock-trampled
pool of water and yellow mud. A few steps farther on, a barrel had been
sunk in the ground at the base of a huge gray rock; a barrel which filled
slowly and spilled the overflow into the mud. There was also a trough, and
there was a barrier made of poles and barbed wire to keep the cattle from
the barrel. One crawled between two wires, it would seem, to dip up water
for the house. There were no trees--not real trees. There were some
chokecherry bushes higher than her head, and there were other bushes that
did not look particularly enlivening.
With a smile of bitter amusement, she tucked her skirts tightly around her,
crept through the fence, and filled a chipped granite cup which stood upon
a rock ledge, and drank slowly. Then she laughed aloud.
“The water really _is_ cold,” she said. “Anywhere else it would be
delicious. And that's a spring, I suppose.” Mercilessly she was stripping
her mind of her illusions, and was clothing it in the harsher weave of
reality. “All these hills are Manley's--our ranch.” She took another sip
and set down the cup. “And so Cold Spring Ranch means--all this.”
Down the coulee she heard Manley call. She stood still, pushing back a
fallen lock of fine, yellow hair. She turned toward the sound, and the sun
in her eyes turned them yellow as the hair above them. She was beautiful,
in an odd, white-and-gold way. If her eyes had been blue, or gray--or even
brown--she would have been merely pretty; but as they were, that amber tint
where one looked for something else struck one unexpectedly and made her
whole face unforgettably lovely. However, the color of her eyes and her
hair did not interest her then, or make life any easier. She was quite
ordinarily miserable and homesick, as she went reluctantly back along the
grassy trails The odor of fried bacon came up to her, and she hated bacon.
She hated everything.
“I've been to the spring,” she called out, resolutely cheerful, as soon as
she came in sight of Manley, waiting in the kitchen door; she ran toward
him lightly. “However does the water keep so deliciously cool through this
hot weather? I don't wonder you call this Cold Spring Ranch.”
Manley straightened proudly. “I'm glad you like it; I was afraid you might
not, just at first. But you're the right stuff--I might have known it. Not
every woman could come out here and appreciate this country right at the
start.”
Val stopped at the steps, panting a little from her run, and smiled
unflinchingly up into his face.