"Of course, there's no way of telling what anybody wants from what they
say." Daylight rubbed Bob's rebellious ear with his quirt and
pondered with dissatisfaction the words he had just uttered. They did
not say what he had meant them to say. "What I'm driving at is that
you say flatfooted that you won't meet me again, and you give your
reasons, but how am I to know they are your real reasons? Mebbe you
just don't want to get acquainted with me, and won't say so for fear of
hurting my feelings. Don't you see? I'm the last man in the world to
shove in where I'm not wanted. And if I thought you didn't care a
whoop to see anything more of me, why, I'd clear out so blamed quick
you couldn't see me for smoke."
Dede smiled at him in acknowledgment of his words, but rode on
silently. And that smile, he thought, was the most sweetly wonderful
smile he had ever seen. There was a difference in it, he assured
himself, from any smile she had ever given him before.
It was the smile of one who knew him just a little bit, of one who was
just the least mite acquainted with him. Of course, he checked himself
up the next moment, it was unconscious on her part. It was sure to
come in the intercourse of any two persons.
Any stranger, a business man, a clerk, anybody after a few casual
meetings would show similar signs of friendliness. It was bound to
happen, but in her case it made more impression on him; and, besides,
it was such a sweet and wonderful smile. Other women he had known had
never smiled like that; he was sure of it.
It had been a happy day. Daylight had met her on the back-road from
Berkeley, and they had had hours together. It was only now, with the
day drawing to a close and with them approaching the gate of the road
to Berkeley, that he had broached the important subject.
She began her answer to his last contention, and he listened gratefully.
"But suppose, just suppose, that the reasons I have given are the only
ones?--that there is no question of my not wanting to know you?"
"Then I'd go on urging like Sam Scratch," he said quickly. "Because,
you see, I've always noticed that folks that incline to anything are
much more open to hearing the case stated. But if you did have that
other reason up your sleeve, if you didn't want to know me, if--if,
well, if you thought my feelings oughtn't to be hurt just because you
had a good job with me..." Here, his calm consideration of a
possibility was swamped by the fear that it was an actuality, and he
lost the thread of his reasoning. "Well, anyway, all you have to do is
to say the word and I'll clear out.
"And with no hard feelings; it would be just a case of bad luck for me.
So be honest, Miss Mason, please, and tell me if that's the reason--I
almost got a hunch that it is."
She glanced up at him, her eyes abruptly and slightly moist, half with
hurt, half with anger.
"Oh, but that isn't fair," she cried. "You give me the choice of lying
to you and hurting you in order to protect myself by getting rid of
you, or of throwing away my protection by telling you the truth, for
then you, as you said yourself, would stay and urge."
Her cheeks were flushed, her lips tremulous, but she continued to look
him frankly in the eyes.
Daylight smiled grimly with satisfaction.
"I'm real glad, Miss Mason, real glad for those words."
"But they won't serve you," she went on hastily. "They can't serve
you. I refuse to let them. This is our last ride, and... here is the
gate."
Ranging her mare alongside, she bent, slid the catch, and followed the
opening gate.
"No; please, no," she said, as Daylight started to follow.
Humbly acquiescent, he pulled Bob back, and the gate swung shut between
them. But there was more to say, and she did not ride on.
"Listen, Miss Mason," he said, in a low voice that shook with
sincerity; "I want to assure you of one thing. I'm not just trying to
fool around with you. I like you, I want you, and I was never more in
earnest in my life. There's nothing wrong in my intentions or anything
like that. What I mean is strictly honorable--"
But the expression of her face made him stop. She was angry, and she
was laughing at the same time.
"The last thing you should have said," she cried. "It's like a--a
matrimonial bureau: intentions strictly honorable; object, matrimony.
But it's no more than I deserved. This is what I suppose you call
urging like Sam Scratch."
The tan had bleached out of Daylight's skin since the time he came to
live under city roofs, so that the flush of blood showed readily as it
crept up his neck past the collar and overspread his face. Nor in his
exceeding discomfort did he dream that she was looking upon him at that
moment with more kindness than at any time that day. It was not in her
experience to behold big grown-up men who blushed like boys, and
already she repented the sharpness into which she had been surprised.
"Now, look here, Miss Mason," he began, slowly and stumblingly at
first, but accelerating into a rapidity of utterance that was almost
incoherent; "I'm a rough sort of a man, I know that, and I know I don't
know much of anything. I've never had any training in nice things.
I've never made love before, and I've never been in love before
either--and I don't know how to go about it any more than a thundering
idiot. What you want to do is get behind my tomfool words and get a
feel of the man that's behind them. That's me, and I mean all right, if
I don't know how to go about it."
Dede Mason had quick, birdlike ways, almost flitting from mood to mood;
and she was all contrition on the instant.
"Forgive me for laughing," she said across the gate. "It wasn't really
laughter. I was surprised off my guard, and hurt, too. You see, Mr.
Harnish, I've not been..."
She paused, in sudden fear of completing the thought into which her
birdlike precipitancy had betrayed her.
"What you mean is that you've not been used to such sort of proposing,"
Daylight said; "a sort of on-the-run, 'Howdy,
glad-to-make-your-acquaintance, won't-you-be-mine' proposition."
She nodded and broke into laughter, in which he joined, and which
served to pass the awkwardness away. He gathered heart at this, and
went on in greater confidence, with cooler head and tongue.
"There, you see, you prove my case. You've had experience in such
matters. I don't doubt you've had slathers of proposals. Well, I
haven't, and I'm like a fish out of water. Besides, this ain't a
proposal. It's a peculiar situation, that's all, and I'm in a corner.
I've got enough plain horse-sense to know a man ain't supposed to argue
marriage with a girl as a reason for getting acquainted with her. And
right there was where I was in the hole. Number one, I can't get
acquainted with you in the office. Number two, you say you won't see
me out of the office to give me a chance. Number three, your reason is
that folks will talk because you work for me. Number four, I just got
to get acquainted with you, and I just got to get you to see that I
mean fair and all right. Number five, there you are on one side the
gate getting ready to go, and me here on the other side the gate pretty
desperate and bound to say something to make you reconsider. Number
six, I said it. And now and finally, I just do want you to reconsider."
And, listening to him, pleasuring in the sight of his earnest,
perturbed face and in the simple, homely phrases that but emphasized
his earnestness and marked the difference between him and the average
run of men she had known, she forgot to listen and lost herself in her
own thoughts. The love of a strong man is ever a lure to a normal
woman, and never more strongly did Dede feel the lure than now, looking
across the closed gate at Burning Daylight. Not that she would ever
dream of marrying him--she had a score of reasons against it; but why
not at least see more of him? He was certainly not repulsive to her.
On the contrary, she liked him, had always liked him from the day she
had first seen him and looked upon his lean Indian face and into his
flashing Indian eyes. He was a figure of a man in more ways than his
mere magnificent muscles. Besides, Romance had gilded him, this
doughty, rough-hewn adventurer of the North, this man of many deeds and
many millions, who had come down out of the Arctic to wrestle and fight
so masterfully with the men of the South.
Savage as a Red Indian, gambler and profligate, a man without morals,
whose vengeance was never glutted and who stamped on the faces of all
who opposed him--oh, yes, she knew all the hard names he had been
called. Yet she was not afraid of him. There was more than that in
the connotation of his name. Burning Daylight called up other things
as well. They were there in the newspapers, the magazines, and the
books on the Klondike. When all was said, Burning Daylight had a
mighty connotation--one to touch any woman's imagination, as it touched
hers, the gate between them, listening to the wistful and impassioned
simplicity of his speech. Dede was after all a woman, with a woman's
sex-vanity, and it was this vanity that was pleased by the fact that
such a man turned in his need to her.
And there was more that passed through her mind--sensations of
tiredness and loneliness; trampling squadrons and shadowy armies of
vague feelings and vaguer prompting; and deeper and dimmer whisperings
and echoings, the flutterings of forgotten generations crystallized
into being and fluttering anew and always, undreamed and unguessed,
subtle and potent, the spirit and essence of life that under a thousand
deceits and masks forever makes for life. It was a strong temptation,
just to ride with this man in the hills. It would be that only and
nothing more, for she was firmly convinced that his way of life could
never be her way. On the other hand, she was vexed by none of the
ordinary feminine fears and timidities. That she could take care of
herself under any and all circumstances she never doubted. Then why
not? It was such a little thing, after all.
She led an ordinary, humdrum life at best. She ate and slept and
worked, and that was about all. As if in review, her anchorite
existence passed before her: six days of the week spent in the office
and in journeying back and forth on the ferry; the hours stolen before
bedtime for snatches of song at the piano, for doing her own special
laundering, for sewing and mending and casting up of meagre accounts;
the two evenings a week of social diversion she permitted herself; the
other stolen hours and Saturday afternoons spent with her brother at
the hospital; and the seventh day, Sunday, her day of solace, on Mab's
back, out among the blessed hills. But it was lonely, this solitary
riding. Nobody of her acquaintance rode. Several girls at the
University had been persuaded into trying it, but after a Sunday or two
on hired livery hacks they had lost interest. There was Madeline, who
bought her own horse and rode enthusiastically for several months, only
to get married and go away to live in Southern California. After years
of it, one did get tired of this eternal riding alone.
He was such a boy, this big giant of a millionaire who had half the
rich men of San Francisco afraid of him. Such a boy! She had never
imagined this side of his nature.
"How do folks get married?" he was saying. "Why, number one, they
meet; number two, like each other's looks; number three, get
acquainted; and number four, get married or not, according to how they
like each other after getting acquainted. But how in thunder we're to
have a chance to find out whether we like each other enough is beyond
my savvee, unless we make that chance ourselves. I'd come to see you,
call on you, only I know you're just rooming or boarding, and that
won't do."
Suddenly, with a change of mood, the situation appeared to Dede
ridiculously absurd. She felt a desire to laugh--not angrily, not
hysterically, but just jolly. It was so funny. Herself, the
stenographer, he, the notorious and powerful gambling millionaire, and
the gate between them across which poured his argument of people
getting acquainted and married. Also, it was an impossible situation.
On the face of it, she could not go on with it. This program of
furtive meetings in the hills would have to discontinue. There would
never be another meeting. And if, denied this, he tried to woo her in
the office, she would be compelled to lose a very good position, and
that would be an end of the episode. It was not nice to contemplate;
but the world of men, especially in the cities, she had not found
particularly nice. She had not worked for her living for years without
losing a great many of her illusions.
"We won't do any sneaking or hiding around about it," Daylight was
explaining. "We'll ride around as bold if you please, and if anybody
sees us, why, let them. If they talk--well, so long as our consciences
are straight we needn't worry. Say the word, and Bob will have on his
back the happiest man alive."
She shook her head, pulled in the mare, who was impatient to be off for
home, and glanced significantly at the lengthening shadows.
"It's getting late now, anyway," Daylight hurried on, "and we've
settled nothing after all. Just one more Sunday, anyway--that's not
asking much--to settle it in."
"We've had all day," she said.
"But we started to talk it over too late. We'll tackle it earlier next
time. This is a big serious proposition with me, I can tell you. Say
next Sunday?"
"Are men ever fair?" she asked. "You know thoroughly well that by
'next Sunday' you mean many Sundays."
"Then let it be many Sundays," he cried recklessly, while she thought
that she had never seen him looking handsomer. "Say the word. Only
say the word. Next Sunday at the quarry..."
She gathered the reins into her hand preliminary to starting.
"Good night," she said, "and--"
"Yes," he whispered, with just the faintest touch of impressiveness.
"Yes," she said, her voice low but distinct.
At the same moment she put the mare into a canter and went down the
road without a backward glance, intent on an analysis of her own
feelings. With her mind made up to say no--and to the last instant she
had been so resolved--her lips nevertheless had said yes. Or at least
it seemed the lips. She had not intended to consent. Then why had
she? Her first surprise and bewilderment at so wholly unpremeditated
an act gave way to consternation as she considered its consequences.
She knew that Burning Daylight was not a man to be trifled with, that
under his simplicity and boyishness he was essentially a dominant male
creature, and that she had pledged herself to a future of inevitable
stress and storm. And again she demanded of herself why she had said
yes at the very moment when it had been farthest from her intention.