THE LAUGHTER OF HELGA STRAWN
"Will you tell your mistress," Sledge Hume commanded, "that I want to
speak with her immediately? Immediately, do you hear?"
The capable looking maid favoured him with swift, keen scrutiny,
noticed that Endymion, tied to the gate post, was sweating and dust
covered, saw that Hume was dusty from riding and that his eyes were
full of purpose, and went upon her errand. Hume stalked into the
living room where he had grown to be so much at home, and driving his
hands into his pockets stood frowning out of the window through which
the warm fragrant June air came in from the sunny fields.
With the determination in his eyes there was the unhidden, black anger
that had not been absent from them during the man's waking hours for a
week. The spirit under the hard shell of a cool indifference had been
touched, and was raw and quivering beneath the lashes his fate had
brought upon him. On the day of the races he had lost five thousand
dollars that he could ill afford to lose, and with it counted that he
had lost another five thousand which he had told himself had always
been as good as his. He had shown men that he was a bad loser, by
flying into an ungovernable rage that vented its fury upon Endymion
until savage voices cried to him to hold his quirt or he would be
jerked from the saddle. He had seen that the slow turning tables were
turning at last. He had seen Wayne Shandon, the man always in his way,
white and fainting from sheer loss of blood, turn smiling and give
himself up to the sheriff. He had seen Red Shandon the hero of a crowd
that went wild over him; had heard even MacKelvey's rough voice crying
bluntly, "There's a man for you!"
But anger and hatred, swelling venemously in his heart, had only
hardened him, making him the more determined. He did not doubt, he did
not fear. Not enough had happened to undermine the man's cold,
dominating strength, to alter the essential fact in his mind that he
was Hume and that people who strove against him were fools doomed to
defeat. But before he heard the silken rustle of Helga Strawn's
approach there was to come to him a new sign of the future that was
rushing down upon him.
As usual Helga kept him waiting. He tapped at the window with a hand
that he jerked impatiently from his pocket; he turned, thinking that he
heard her steps; he walked back and forth in the room. And thus it
happened that his eyes fell upon a large sheet of paper lying upon the
table, his own name typed in capitals across the top. His frowning
eyes read the few lines swiftly:
"Your tunnel is already one hundred and fifty-three feet upon Shandon
property. That is far enough."
There was no signature.
A child has an instinctive fear of the dark; the thing a man does not
understand brings from the obscurity of the unknown a certain, vague
dread. Who had written this thing? There was no answer. Why? No
answer. How did it come here, who could have known that Hume would see
it here? No answer. It was as though a warning, taking form from the
invisible air had fallen from the air before his startled eyes.
He swept up the paper, crumpling it in his fingers. He had not heard
Helga Strawn, did not know that she was in the room until she spoke
quietly.
"Is fate relenting? Or are you still playing the losing game?"
He swung upon her sharply. His eyes, glittering and hard, met hers
softly luminous. He had never seen the woman so radiantly, regally
beautiful, perhaps because he had never seen her so keenly alive as she
was to-day. Although his brain was riotous with other things he could
not fail to note the superb carriage, the rich gown daringly
fashionable, the warm whiteness of arms and throat, the finely
chiselled red lips that were unsmiling.
"The losing game?" he cried, coming swiftly toward her, stopping only
when his tall form towered over her. "By God, no! I have lost a trick
here, a trick there. A man counts upon that sort of thing. That
little shrimp Conway is scared of his life and is for pulling out. I'm
glad of it. He'll sell to me before he'll go to Shandon. Let Leland
pull out, too. We'll take him over. I'm going to win, I tell you,
Claire Hazleton! We're going to win, you and I. Win big!"
There was no change in her cool eyes. She swept by him, not turning
out an inch to pass, her skirts brushing him, and dropped idly into her
chair. He followed, and stood over her again.
"Shandon is going to be acquitted," she said. "You know that. He'll
be set free in ten days. Then what?"
"Then we'll take him in with us. We'll get the water and that's all we
want any way you put it. Inside six months we'll be subdividing and
getting our money back."
She laughed.
"So you think that Shandon will jump at the chance to go into any sort
of partnership with you?"
"We'll make him," crisply. "He has retained Brisbane, the biggest,
highest priced criminal lawyer this side the Rockies. He has cleared
up his mortgage but he's had to mortgage again to do it. He's in debt
up to his eyes. We'll make him a proposition that will show him the
way to clear himself. I tell you, Claire, he'll have to do it."
"You say _we_," she reminded him, lifting her white shoulders.
"And I mean you and I," he returned bluntly. "I've come here to do
some straight talking." There leaped up into his eyes a light she had
never seen there until now, a quick colour ran into his cheeks. "I
want you to marry me, Claire."
Perhaps the woman's pulse quickened. Certainly no change in her
expression, no quiver of a muscle, no deepened breathing told that a
supreme moment had come into her life, a moment she had long and
unceasingly striven for.
"Do you?" she asked indifferently. "Why?"
"Because," he cried, "you are like no other woman in all the world.
Because the things that I want are the things that you want. Because
we should be a man and a woman, mated, to take our places in the world
and hold them. Where there is man's work I can do it; where there is
woman's work you can do it. We are young; in ten years' time we can
rise to whatever we care to set our eyes upon. Why do I want you?
Just because in brain and in body you are the woman in the world fitted
to occupy the place that shall be my wife's."
"Other men have asked me to marry them," she said coolly. "I think
that all of them have said something about love."
"And I love you," he told her. "A man cannot come to care for a woman
without her knowing it. I don't come to you bleating about a breaking
heart, because you are no fool and I am no fool. If you were the kind
to care about a lot of sentimental rot you wouldn't be the woman you
are, you wouldn't be the woman I'd want. I'd be good to you. I'd give
you the power that a beautiful woman with a strong, rich husband can
come to have in San Francisco, in New York, in London if you like.
When I rise you'll rise with me. I'll have men know that my wife shall
have the place, above the heads of their wives, that she wants. And
I'll be proud of you!"
Then he got his answer as seldom a woman has answered a man. She
lifted her eyes to his, she put back her head with the tossing regal
gesture he knew so well, her lips parted slowly--and she laughed.
Laughed at him in a sudden mirth of leaping scorn, that was hard and
cruel, that mocked and sneered at him, that took supreme toll of the
supreme moment. Laughed as she saw the light quiver and die in his
eyes, as the colour faded from his cheeks and ran back red.
"Love me!" she cried scornfully. "You'd be proud of me! Why? When
you answered you forgot to tell the truth, Mr. Hume. Because you need
me, because you are beaten now and must come hiding a whimper under big
words, come to a woman who holds you so in the hollow of her hand that
she can break you so utterly that your own overweening conceit cannot
find the fragments with the microscope of a distorted vanity! Love me
as you'd love any other fine thing just because it was yours. Because
you'd use me, because you see that such a wife as I could be would be
but a stone for you to stand on to climb up a little higher. And you
think that of all men in the world I should choose a man like _you_ for
husband?"
She jeered openly at him, disdaining to see the red anger flaring in
his eyes. She remembered the reason that had brought her to him in the
beginning and a savage gladness in her rejoiced at finding the victory
all that she had yearned for. Her dominant blood was seething to the
surface. And it was Hume blood.
"Listen to me a minute," she cried sharply as he was about to speak.
"You've come for straight talk to-day, you say. Let us have it then.
You have gone your way boastfully, arrogantly, unscrupulously and it
has been the fool's way. You are playing the losing game and it isn't
even in you to lose like a man. You have stared at the glitter of gold
so long that you have gone blind looking at it. Your own infallibility
has loomed so large before you that you have lost your sanity. I say
listen to me!" her voice ringing with its command. "I am going to tell
you something. I am going to tell you why I came to you, why I
suffered you day after day to come to me. And what I came for I am
going to get. You are going to give it to me!"
She had sprung to her feet, twin spots of colour upon her white cheeks,
her eyes blazing.
"You told me that you had paid five thousand dollars to Helga Strawn
for her interest in the Dry Lands! Liar! You paid her twenty-five
thousand!"
"Well?" he snarled harshly. "What of it?"
"You laughed about it. You said that she was a fool like most women.
Like all women, was what you thought! And women were made just for you
to tread upon and sneer at. You did not know that I knew a great deal
more about Helga Strawn than you ever guessed!"
"You--know--Helga--Strawn!"
The words beat at her like stinging, separate blows. And now it had
come into his eyes, the thing that had never been there, the thing that
would never die out of the man's soul while life clung to him,--fear.
"I know you, to the last spot you think you've covered up," she ran on
swiftly. "So well that I know I am about to stir you into one of your
mad fits of rage. And I am not afraid to do it. You'd kill me if you
dared, but you won't dare. For after all I think that in your
braggadocio way you are a coward, Sledge Hume."
"You cat!" he flung at her with an attempt at his old manner.
"I have two men working out yonder," she said coolly. "If I called to
them--" She shrugged her shoulders. "I want to tell you all that you
are hungering to know even while you are afraid to hear it. Helga
Strawn got your check for five thousand dollars. She got, also, a
Wells Fargo order from Sacramento for twenty thousand. Sent by a
fictitious Arnold Wentworth. Ah!"
For he had cried out sharply, his face was dead white, his eyes were
filled with horror. His premonition had come.
"Who committed the crime you charged Wayne Shandon with?" she demanded
fearlessly. "Who killed Arthur Shandon and robbed him of twenty-five
thousand dollars? If Helga Strawn came into court and told all that
she knows do you realise what a jury would say about it?"
"The things you are saying are lies," he cried back at her, driving his
hands into his pockets that she might not see that they were shaking.
He stared after her in wonder as she went swiftly to the table and
unlocked a drawer. He wondered more as she snatched out a folded paper
and brought it to him.
"Sign that," she said curtly. "Get it witnessed before a notary and
send it to me and Helga Strawn will forget what she knows."
A glance showed him the significance of the document. It was a deed,
properly drawn, needing but his own signature to return to Helga Strawn
the lands he had bought from her.
"So," he sneered, "you are trying a little blackmail, are you? You are
a spy and Helga Strawn's agent, I suppose?"
Again she laughed at him.
"I attend to my own business, my dear cousin," her voice very like his.
"If you hadn't been a fool you'd have known that I was Helga Strawn six
months ago. Blackmail? Call it what you like. It is your one chance
to save your neck. I know that in one of your mad fits of anger you
killed Arthur Shandon. I know that you took his money. And I am not
the only one in the country who knows or suspects it. Your chance is
slim enough as it is, Mr. Hume. Don't make it worse."
Blow after blow until the man set his muscles like iron to keep his
body from shaking as his soul shook. This was the greatest shock of
all because it struck at the keynote of his nature, this knowledge that
a woman had tricked him, that she had played with him, that now she
held him as she said so bluntly, in the hollow of her hand.
"You traitress!" he cried hoarsely. "You miserable traitress!"
And Helga Strawn laughed.
"It will take you a couple of hours to ride into El Toyon," she said.
"That will give you time to think it over. If you decide to sign the
deed and send it to me to-night I'll do my part. If I don't get the
deed to-night I'll go into town in the morning for a talk with the
district attorney. I think I've got you where I want you, Mr. Hume."
The things which Hume said to her she accepted indifferently. She had
never known that a man could find such words to utter to a woman. When
she has listened long enough she turned and went out of the room, going
upstairs and standing by her window where she could see him as he went
out. As she saw him striding down the walk toward his horse, jamming
the deed into his pocket as he went, her eyes suddenly grew wet, and
she stamped her foot angrily.
"Of all men living I hate you most!" she cried passionately. And then,
softly, more softly than any one had ever heard her speak, "And you
come closer to being a man than any man I ever knew. I wonder--"
The fury within him demanding some sort of expression found it in the
swift stride that carried him blindly down the walk. He came almost at
a run to his horse. Endymion, mindful of the unprovoked blows and
tearing spurs of a week ago, distrustful, afraid, whirled, rearing and
plunging, and broke the reins that had been tossed over the post.
Hume, venting upon a trifle the wrath that seethed within him, shouted
angrily, cursing the horse that dashed by him.
The horse, seeing his way through the gate shut off, turned and dashed
around the house, seeking a break in the yard fence. Hume ran after
him, still cursing. The two men who were working in the yard lay down
their rakes and shovels and came up. The three of them cornered the
frightened brute. But when Hume, his hand outstretched for the
dangling, broken rein, came within half a dozen feet, Endymion,
snorting his fear, plunged by him, racing into another corner.
Again they closed about him, again he plunged through, mad with fear,
making the madness in Sledge Hume a speechless, raging fury. A third
time they tried, and as the big horse shot by Hume's temper mastered
him as it had mastered him once before.
"God damn you!" he shouted wildly. "Take that!"
As he shouted he jerked his revolver from his pocket and fired. Fired,
saw the big animal stagger and fired again.
He went to the stable for one of Helga's horses. His hands were
shaking as he saddled and got the bit into the animal's mouth. With no
look behind him he mounted, spurred out into the road and galloped off
toward El Toyon.
Helga Strawn from her window coolly ordered the two men to put the
wounded horse out of his misery and to drag him where she could not see
him, But her eyes did not tarry with them, did not leave the big bulk
of Sledge Hume until it had disappeared around a bend In the road.
Then she went to her mirror and stood looking at herself with large,
luminous eyes.
"I wonder," she whispered, "if he did love me, after all?"
She could never know. She knew that she could never know. And she
went and threw herself, face down, on her bed.