and a woman's intuition. I let it go at that and went off to see that
I didn't get none of the worst of it when this new hay was measured.
I had a busy day, forgetting all scientific problems and the uphill fight
our sex sometimes has in bringing a man to his just mating sense.
I got back about five that night. Here was Miss Lydia, cool and negligent
on the porch, like she'd never had a care in the world; fresh dressed in
something white and blue, with her niftiest hammock stockings, and
tinkling the ukulele in a bored and petulant manner.
"Did you open it?" I says as I went in.
"Open it?" she says, kind of blank. "Oh, you mean that silly old trunk!
Yes, I believe I did. At least I think I did."
It was good stage acting; an audience would of thought she had forgotten.
So I took it as calm as she did and went in to change.
By the time I got out the men was just coming in, the Prof being
enthusiastic about some clamshells of the year six million B. C. and
Oswald bearing his great sorrow with an effort to do it bravely.
Lydia nodded distantly and then ignored the men in a pointed way,
breaking out into rapid chatter to me about the lack of society up
here--didn't I weary of the solitude, never meeting people of the right
sort? It was a new line with her and done for effect, but I couldn't
see what effect.
Supper was ready and we hurried in to it; so I guess Oswald must of
forgot for one time to shake his trunk and listen to the pretty little
keys. And all through the meal Lydia confined her attentions entirely to
me. She ignored Oswald mostly, but if she did notice him she patronized
him. She was painfully superior to him, and severe and short, like he was
a little boy that had been let to come to the table with the grown-ups
for this once. She rattled along to me about the club dances at home,
and how they was going to have better music this year, and how the
assembly hall had been done over in a perfectly dandy colour scheme by
the committee she was on, and a lot of girlish babble that took up much
room but weighed little.
Oswald would give her side looks of dumb appeal from time to time, for
she had not once referred to anything so common as a trunk. He must of
felt that her moral support had been withdrawn and he was left to face
the dread future alone. He probably figured that she'd had to give up
about the trunk and was diverting attention from her surrender. He hardly
spoke a word and disappeared with a look of yearning when we left the
table. The rest of us went out on the porch. Lydia was teasing the
ukulele when Oswald appeared a few minutes later, with great excitement
showing in his worn face.
"I can hear the keys no longer," says he; "not a sound of them! Mustn't
they have fallen from the hook?"
Lydia went on stripping little chords from the strings while she answered
him in lofty accents.
"Keys?" she says. "What keys? What is the man talking of? Oh, you mean
that silly old trunk! Are you really still maundering about that? Of
course the keys aren't there! I took them out when I opened it to-day. I
thought you wanted them taken out. Wasn't that what you wanted the trunk
open for--to get the keys? Have I done something stupid? Of course I can
put them back and shut it again if you only want to listen to them."
Oswald had been glaring at her with his mouth open like an Upper Triassic
catfish. He tried to speak, but couldn't move his face, which seemed to
be frozen. Lydia goes on dealing off little tinkles of string music in a
tired, bored way and turns confidentially to me to say she supposes there
is really almost no society up here in the true sense of the word.
"You opened that trunk?" says Oswald at last in tones like a tragedian at
his big scene.
Lydia turned to him quite prettily impatient, as if he was something
she'd have to brush off in a minute.
"Dear, dear!" she says. "Of course I opened it. I told you again and
again it was perfectly simple. I don't see why you made so much fuss
about it."
Oswald turned and galloped off to his room with a glad shout. That showed
the male of him, didn't it?--not staying for words of gratitude to his
saviour, but beating it straight to the trunk.
Lydia got up and swaggered after him. She had been swaggering all the
evening. She acted like a duchess at a slumming party. The Prof and I
followed her.
Oswald was teetering the trunk in the old familiar way, with one ear
fastened to its shiny side.
"It's true! It's true!" he says in hushed tones. "The keys are gone."
"Naughty, naughty!" says Lydia. "Haven't I told you I took them out?"
Oswald went over and set limply down on his bed, while we stood in the
doorway.
"How did you ever do it?" says he with shining eyes.
"It was perfectly simple," says Lydia. "I simply opened it--that's all!"
"I have always suspected that the great secret of life would be almost
too simple when once solved," says the Prof.
"It only needed a bit of thought," says the chit.
Then Oswald must of had a sudden pang of fear. He flew over and examined
the lock and all the front surface of his treasure. He was looking for
signs of rough work, thinking she might of broken into it in some coarse
manner. But not a scratch could he find. He looked up at Lydia out of
eyes moist with gratitude.
"You wonderful, wonderful woman!" says he, and any one could know he
meant it from the heart out.
Lydia was still superior and languid, and covered up a slight yawn.
She said she was glad if any little thing she could do had made life
pleasanter for him. This has been such a perfectly simple thing--very,
very far from wonderful.
Oswald now begun to caper round the room like an Airedale pup, and says
let's have the keys and open the trunk up, so he can believe his own
eyes.
Then Lydia trifled once more with a human soul. She froze in deep thought
a long minute then says:
"Oh, dear! Now what did I do with those wretched old keys?"
Oswald froze, too, with a new agony. Lydia put a hand to her pale
forehead and seemed to try to remember. There was an awful silence.
Oswald was dashed over the cliff again.
"Can't you think?" says the wounded man. "Can't you remember? Try! Try!"
"Now let me see," says Lydia. "I know I had them out in the living
room--"
"Why did you ever take them out there?" demands Oswald in great terror;
but the heroine pays no attention whatever to this.
"--and later, I think--I think--I must have carried them into my room.
Oh, yes; now I remember I did. And then I emptied my wastebasket into the
kitchen stove. Now I wonder if they could have been in with that rubbish
I burned! Let me think!" And she thought again deeply.
Oswald give a hollow groan, like some of the very finest chords in his
being had been tore asunder. He sunk limp on the bed again.
"Wouldn't it be awkward if they were in that rubbish?" says Lydia.
"Do you suppose that fire would destroy the silly things? Let me think
again."
The fiend kept this up for three minutes more. It must of seemed longer
to Oswald than it takes for a chinch bug to become a carboniferous
Jurassic. She was committing sabotage on him in the cruellest way.
Then, after watching his death agony with cold eyes and pretending to
wonder like a rattled angel, she brightens up and says:
"Oh, goody! Now I remember everything. I placed them right here." And she
picked the keys off the table, where they had been hid under some
specimens of the dead and gone.
Oswald give one athletic leap and had the precious things out of her
feeble grasp in half a second. His fingers trembled horrible, but he
had a key in the lock and turned it and threw the sides of the grand
old monument wide open. He just hung there a minute in ecstasy, fondling
the keys and getting his nerve back. Then he turns again on Lydia the
look of a proud man who is ready to surrender his whole future life to
her keeping.
Lydia had now become more superior than ever. She swaggered round the
room, and when she didn't swagger she strutted. And she says to Oswald:
"I'm going to make one little suggestion, because you seem so utterly
helpless: You must get a nice doormat to lay directly in front of your
trunk, and you must always keep the key under this mat. Lock the trunk
and hide the key there. It's what people always do, and it will be quite
safe, because no one would ever think of looking under a doormat for a
key. Now isn't that a perfectly darling plan?"
Oswald had looked serious and attentive when she begun this talk, but he
finally got suspicious that she was making some silly kind of a joke. He
grinned at her very foolish and again says: "You wonderful woman!" It was
a caressing tone--if you know what I mean.
Lydia says "Oh, dear, won't he ever stop his silly chatter about his
stupid old trunk?" It seems to her that nothing but trunk has been talked
of in this house for untold ages. She's tired to death of the very word.
Then she links her arm in mine in a sweet girlish fashion and leads me
outside, where she becomes a mere twittering porch wren once more.
Oswald followed, you can bet. And every five minutes he'd ask her how did
she ever--really now--open the trunk. But whenever he'd ask she would put
the loud pedal on the ukulele and burst into some beachy song about You
and I Together in the Moonlight, Love. Even the Prof got curious and
demanded how she had done what real brains had failed to pull off--and
got the same noisy answer. Later he said he had been wrong to ask. He
said the answer would prove to be too brutally simple, and he always
wanted to keep it in his thought life as a mystery. It looked like he'd
have to. I was dying to know myself, but had sense enough not to ask.
The girl hardly spoke to Oswald again that night, merely giving him these
cold showers of superiority when he would thrust himself on her notice.
And she kept me out there with her till bedtime, not giving the happy
trunk owner a chance at her alone. That girl had certainly learned a few
things beyond fudge and cheese straws in her time. She knew when she had
the game won.
Sure, it was all over with Oswald. He had only one more night when he
could call himself a free man; he tried hard enough not to have even
that. He looked like he wanted to put a fence round the girl, elk-high
and bull-tight. Of course it's possible he was landed by the earnest wish
to find out how she had opened his trunk; but she never will tell him
that. She discussed it calmly with me after all was over. She said poor
Oswald had been the victim of scientific curiosity, but really it was
time for her to settle down.
We was in her room at the time and she was looking at the tiny lines
round her eyes when she said it. She said, further, that she was about
to plan her going-away gown. I asked what it would be, and she said she
hadn't decided yet, but it would be something youth-giving. Pretty game,
that was! And now Oswald has someone to guard his trunk keys for him--to
say nothing of this here new specimen of organic fauna.
* * * * *
Then I talked. I said I was unable to reach the lofty altitude of the
Prof when even a fair mystery was concerned. I was more like Oswald with
his childish curiosity. How, then, did the young woman open the trunk?
Of course, I could guess the answer. She had found she could really do it
with a hairpin, and had held off for effect. Still, I wanted to be told.
"Nothing easy like that," said Ma Pettengill. "She'd been honest with the
hairpins. She didn't tell me till the day before they were leaving. 'It
was a perfectly simple problem, requiring only a bit of thought,' she
says. 'It was the simple thing people do when they find their front door
locked. They go round to the back of the house and pry up a kitchen
window, or something.' She pledged me to secrecy, but I guess you won't
let it go any farther.
"Anyway, this is what she done: It was a time for brutal measures, so
she'd had Abner wheel that trunk over to the blacksmith shop and take the
hinges off. Abner just loves to do any work he don't have to do, and he
had entered cordially into the spirit of this adventure. It used up his
whole day, for which he was drawing three dollars from me. He took off
one side of four pair of hinges, opened the trunk at the back far enough
to reach in for the keys, unlocked it and fastened the hinges back on
again.
"It was some job. These hinges was riveted on and didn't come loose easy.
The rear of that trunk must of been one sad mutilation. It probably won't
ever again be the trunk it once was. Abner had to hustle to get through
in one day. I wish I could get the old hound to work for me that way.
They'd just got the trunk back when I rode in that night. It was nervy,
all right! I asked her if she wasn't afraid he would see the many traces
of this rough work she had done.
"'Not a chance on earth!' says Lydia. 'I knew he would never look at any
place but the front. He has the mind of a true scientist. It wouldn't
occur to him in a million years that there is any other way but the
front way to get into a trunk. I painted over the rivets and the bruises
as well as I could, but I'm sure he will never look there. He may notice
it by accident in the years to come, but the poor chap will then have
other worries, I hope.'
"Such was the chit. I don't know. Mebbe woman has her place in the great
world after all. Anyway, she'll be a help to Oswald. Whatever he ain't
she is."
VII
CHANGE OF VENUS
Ma Pettengill and I rode labouring horses up a steep way between two
rocky hillsides that doubled the rays of the high sun back upon us and
smothered the little breeze that tried to follow us up from the flat
lands of the Arrowhead. We breathed the pointed smell of the sage and we
breathed the thick, hot dust that hung lazily about us; a dust like
powdered chocolate, that cloyed and choked.
As recreation it was blighting; and I said almost as much. Ma Pettengill
was deaf to it, her gray head in its broad-brimmed hat sternly bowed in
meditation as she wove to her horse's motion. Then I became aware that
she talked to another; one who was not there. She said things I was sure
he would not have liked to hear. She hung choice insults upon his name
and blistered his fair repute with calumnies. She was a geyser of
invective, quiet perhaps for fifty yards, then grandly in action.
"Call yourself a cowman, hey? What you ought to be is matron of a
foundling asylum. Yes, sir!"
This was among the least fearful of her dusty scornings. And I knew
she would be addressing one Homer Gale, temporary riding boss of the
Arrowhead. Indeed, Homer's slightly pleading accents were now very
colourably imitated by his embittered employer:
"Yes'm, Mis' Pettengill, it's a matter of life and death; no less. I got
to git off for two days--a matter of life and death. Yes'm; I just got
to!"
On the completion of this a hoarse hoot of scorn boomed through the haze
and Homer was told that men like himself often caused perfectly decent
people to be tried for murder. And again Homer's rightful job was echoed
as "Matron of a foundling asylum!"
I felt the embarrassment of one unwittingly come upon the adjustment of
a private grievance. I dropped delicately a few paces behind, unnoticed,
I thought; but Ma Pettengill waited for me to overtake her again.
Then, as we pushed through the dust together, she told me that her days
were swifter than a weaver's shuttle and spent without hope. If it wasn't
one thing it was another. What she'd like--she'd like to wake up in a
strange place and find she'd clean forgot her name and address, like
these here parties you read about in the papers. And why wouldn't she? A
dry year; feed short on the range; water holes dusty that never did go
dry before; half a hay crop and winter threatening right spang in the
summertime! Think of having to gather cattle off the range in the middle
of August when other times you could let 'em run till the middle of
October! In fact, this was the kind of a year that cattle raisers had a
technical term for. It was known technically as one hell of a year, if
I wanted to be told.
And having to do the work with mental defectives and cripples and
Bolsheviki, because every able-bodied puncher in the country had
gone over to create a disturbance in Europe! Hadn't she combed out
the county hospital and poor farm to get a haying crew? Didn't the
best cowboy now on the pay roll wear a derby hat and ride a motorcycle
by preference? And paying seventy-five dollars to these imitation
punchers to fight her gentle saddle horses, no colt, it seemed, having
been ridden on the place in the memory of man.
She didn't know; taking one thing with another, sometimes she almost
wished that the world was going to stay unsafe for democracy.
Of course this technically described bad year wasn't so bad one way,
because the sheepmen would sure get a tasty wallop, sheep being mighty
informal about dying with the weather below zero and scant feed. When
cattle wasn't hardly feeling annoyed sheep would lie down and quit
intruding on honest cattle raisers for all time. Just a little attention
from a party with a skinning knife was all they needed after that. And so
on, back to Homer Gale, who had gone to Red Gap for two days on a matter
of life and death--and of this the less repeated here the better.
Now our narrow way spread to a valley where the sun's rays were more
widely diffused and the dust less pervasive. We could see a mile ahead
to a vaster cloud of dust. This floated over a band of Arrowhead cattle
being driven in from a range no longer sustaining. They were being driven
by Bolsheviki, so my informant disclosed.
We halted above the road and waited for the dusty creatures to plod by us
down to the pleasant lea where feed was still to be had and water was
sweet. Then came the Bolshevik rear guard. It consisted of Silas
Atterbury and four immature grandchildren.
Grandpa Atterbury was ninety-three and doing his first labour since he
retired, at eighty-five. The grandchildren, two male and two female,
should have been playing childish games. And they were Bolsheviki,
all because they had refused to bring in this bunch of stock except
for the wage customarily paid to trained adults. Even the youngest,
known as Sissy Atterbury, aged eight and looking younger, despite her
gray coating of powdered alkali, had tenaciously held out for a grown
man's pay, which made her something even worse than a Bolshevik; it
made her an I.W.W.
But, as Ma Pettengill said, what could a lady do when Fate had a
stranglehold on her. There was, indeed, nothing to do but tell Sissy to
tell one of her incendiary brothers to get up close to grandpa, and yell
good and loud at him, and make him understand he was to get a count on
that bunch at the first gate, because it didn't look to us that there was
over three hundred head where there ought to be at least five hundred.
And then there was nothing to do but ride ahead of the toiling beasts
and again down the narrow way that would bring us to the lowlands of the
Arrowhead, where the dust no longer choked and one could see green and
smell water. From the last mesa we looked out over the Arrowhead's flat
fields, six thousand acres under fence, with the ranch house and
outbuildings hazy in the distance.
It was a pleasant prospect and warmed Ma Pettengill from her mood of
chill negation. She remarked upon the goodliness of the scene, quite as
if the present were not a technical year for cattle raisers. Then, as
we jogged the six miles home by peaceful thoroughfares, the lady, being
questioned persistently and suitably, spoke with utter freedom of Homer
Gale, who had shamefully deserted his job for two days at the busiest
end of the season, when a white man wouldn't of thought of leaving, even
on a matter of life and death.
Had Homer the shadow of an excuse? We shall see.
Well, then, this here celluloid imitation of a cowman that I been using
violent words about come into the valley three years ago and rapidly got
a lot of fame by reason of being a confirmed bachelor and hating the
young of the human species with bitterness and constancy. I was the one
that brought him in; I admit that. First time I seen him he was being a
roistering blade in the Fashion Waffle Kitchen down at Red Gap. He was
with Sandy Sawtelle and a couple other boys from the ranch here, and
Sandy tells me later that he is looking for work, being a good cowhand.
I said he looked like something else, being dressed in an uproarious
check suit of clothes that would instantly of collected a crowd in most
city streets. But Sandy says that's all right; he's a regler cowman and
had to wear these startling garments for a disguise to get him safe out
of Idaho.
It seems he'd been crowded out of that thriving state by a yearning
and determined milliner that had witnesses a-plenty and intended to
do something about it. Defendant claimed he hadn't even meant anything
of the sort and was just being a good pal; but it looked like the cruel
teeth of the law was going to bite right into his savings if this
breach-of-promise suit ever come to trial, the lady having letters from
him in black and white. So Homer had made a strategic retreat, avoiding
contact with the enemy, and here he was. And how about taking him on at
the Arrowhead, where he could begin a new life?
Needing another hand just then, I fussed none at all about Homer's
scandalous past. I said he could throw in with us; and he did. When he
got dressed in a legal manner he looked like he couldn't be anything else
but a cowhand. About forty and reliable, he looked. So I sent him to a
summer camp over on the Madeline plains, where I had a bunch of cattle on
government range. Bert Glasgow lived in a shack with his wife and family
there and had general charge, and Homer was to begin his new life by
helping Bert.
His new life threatened to be short. He showed up here late the third
night after he went over, looking sad and desperate and hunted. He did
look that way more or less at all times, having one of these long, sad
moustaches and a kind of a bit-into face. This night he looked worse than
usual. I thought the hellhounds of the law from Idaho might of took up
his winding trail; but no. It was the rosy-cheeked tots of Mr. and Mrs.
Bert Glasgow that had sent him out into the night.
"Say," he says, "I wouldn't have you think I was a quitter, but if you
want to suicide me just send me back to that horrible place. Children!"
he says. "That's all; just children! Dozens of 'em! Running all over the
place, into everything, under everything, climbing up on you, sticking
their fingers into your eyes--making life unbearable for man and beast.
You never once let on to me," he says reproachfully, "that this Bert had
children."
"No," I says; "and I never let on to you that he's got a mole on his chin
either. What of that?"
Then the poor lollop tries to tell me what of it. I saw he really had
been under a nervous strain, all right. Suffering had put its hot iron
on him. First, he just naturally loathed children anyway. Hadn't he run
away from a good home in Iowa when he was sixteen, account of being the
oldest of seven? He said some things in general about children that would
of got him no applause at a mothers' meeting. He was simply afraid to
look a child in the eye; and, from what he'd like to do to 'em all, it
seemed like his real middle name was Molech. Wasn't that the party with
hostile views about children? Anyway, you could see that Homer's idea of
a real swell festivity would be to hide out by an orphan asylum some
night until the little ones had said their prayers and was tucked all
peaceful into their trundle beds and then set fire to the edifice in
eight places after disconnecting the fire alarm. That was Homer, and he
was honest; he just couldn't help it.
And Bert's tikes had drove him mad with their playful antics. He said
he'd be set down for a bite of dinner and one of 'em would climb up his
back and feel his hair--not saying a word, just taking hold of it; then
it would jump down and another would climb up and do the same thing, and
him not daring to defend himself. He'd got so worked up he was afraid to
stay on the place.
"And you know," he says--"what I can't understand--danged if Bert don't
seem to kind of like 'em. You may think I'm a liar, but he waited for one
the other morning when it squealed at him and kept a hold of its hand
clean down to the hay barn. What do you think of that? And besides these
that go round infesting the place outside he's got a short yearling and a
long two-year-old that have to be night-herded. I listened to 'em every
night. One yelled and strangled all last night, till I s'posed, of
course, it was going to perish everlastingly; but here this morning it
was acting like nothing at all had happened.