"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" Dick shouted, stamping with jingling
spurs through the Big House in quest of its Little Lady.
He came to the door that gave entrance to her long wing. It was a door
without a knob, a huge panel of wood in a wood-paneled wall. But Dick
shared the secret of the hidden spring with his wife, pressed the
spring, and the door swung wide.
"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he called and stamped down the length of
her quarters.
A glance into the bathroom, with its sunken Roman bath and descending
marble steps, was fruitless, as were the glances he sent into Paula's
wardrobe room and dressing room. He passed the short, broad stairway
that led to her empty window-seat divan in what she called her Juliet
Tower, and thrilled at sight of an orderly disarray of filmy, pretty,
lacy woman's things that he knew she had spread out for her own
sensuous delight of contemplation. He fetched up for a moment at a
drawing easel, his reiterant cry checked on his lips, and threw a laugh
of recognition and appreciation at the sketch, just outlined, of an
awkward, big-boned, knobby, weanling colt caught in the act of madly
whinneying for its mother.
"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he shouted before him, out to the
sleeping porch; and found only a demure, brow-troubled Chinese woman of
thirty, who smiled self-effacing embarrassment into his eyes.
This was Paula's maid, Oh Dear, so named by Dick, many years before,
because of a certain solicitous contraction of her delicate brows that
made her appear as if ever on the verge of saying, "Oh dear!" In fact,
Dick had taken her, as a child almost, for Paula's service, from a
fishing village on the Yellow Sea where her widow-mother earned as much
as four dollars in a prosperous year at making nets for the fishermen.
Oh Dear's first service for Paula had been aboard the three-topmast
schooner, _All Away_, at the same time that Oh Joy, cabin-boy, had
begun to demonstrate the efficiency that enabled him, through the
years, to rise to the majordomoship of the Big House.
"Where is your mistress, Oh Dear?" Dick asked.
Oh Dear shrank away in an agony of bashfulness.
Dick waited.
"She maybe with 'm young ladies--I don't know," Oh Dear stammered; and
Dick, in very mercy, swung away on his heel.
"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he shouted, as he stamped out under the
porte cochère just as a ranch limousine swung around the curve among
the lilacs.
"I'll be hanged if I know," a tall, blond man in a light summer suit
responded from the car; and the next moment Dick Forrest and Evan
Graham were shaking hands.
Oh My and Oh Ho carried in the hand baggage, and Dick accompanied his
guest to the watch tower quarters.
"You'll have to get used to us, old man," Dick was explaining. "We run
the ranch like clockwork, and the servants are wonders; but we allow
ourselves all sorts of loosenesses. If you'd arrived two minutes later
there'd have been no one to welcome you but the Chinese boys. I was
just going for a ride, and Paula--Mrs. Forrest--has disappeared."
The two men were almost of a size, Graham topping his host by perhaps
an inch, but losing that inch in the comparative breadth of shoulders
and depth of chest. Graham was, if anything, a clearer blond than
Forrest, although both were equally gray of eye, equally clear in the
whites of the eyes, and equally and precisely similarly bronzed by sun
and weather-beat. Graham's features were in a slightly larger mold; his
eyes were a trifle longer, although this was lost again by a heavier
droop of lids. His nose hinted that it was a shade straighter as well
as larger than Dick's, and his lips were a shade thicker, a shade
redder, a shade more bowed with fulsome-ness.
Forrest's hair was light brown to chestnut, while Graham's carried a
whispering advertisement that it would have been almost golden in its
silk had it not been burned almost to sandiness by the sun. The cheeks
of both were high-boned, although the hollows under Forrest's
cheek-bones were more pronounced. Both noses were large-nostriled and
sensitive. And both mouths, while generously proportioned, carried the
impression of girlish sweetness and chastity along with the muscles
that could draw the lips to the firmness and harshness that would not
give the lie to the square, uncleft chins beneath.
But the inch more in height and the inch less in chest-girth gave Evan
Graham a grace of body and carriage that Dick Forrest did not possess.
In this particular of build, each served well as a foil to the other.
Graham was all light and delight, with a hint--but the slightest of
hints--of Prince Charming. Forrest's seemed a more efficient and
formidable organism, more dangerous to other life, stouter-gripped on
its own life.
Forrest threw a glance at his wrist watch as he talked, but in that
glance, without pause or fumble of focus, with swift certainty of
correlation, he read the dial.
"Eleven-thirty," he said. "Come along at once, Graham. We don't eat
till twelve-thirty. I am sending out a shipment of bulls, three hundred
of them, and I'm downright proud of them. You simply must see them.
Never mind your riding togs. Oh Ho--fetch a pair of my leggings. You,
Oh Joy, order Altadena saddled.--What saddle do you prefer, Graham?"
"Oh, anything, old man."
"English?--Australian?--McClellan?--Mexican?" Dick insisted.
"McClellan, if it's no trouble," Graham surrendered.
They sat their horses by the side of the road and watched the last of
the herd beginning its long journey to Chili disappear around the bend.
"I see what you're doing--it's great," Graham said with sparkling eyes.
"I've fooled some myself with the critters, when I was a youngster,
down in the Argentine. If I'd had beef-blood like that to build on, I
mightn't have taken the cropper I did."
"But that was before alfalfa and artesian wells," Dick smoothed for
him. "The time wasn't ripe for the Shorthorn. Only scrubs could survive
the droughts. They were strong in staying powers but light on the
scales. And refrigerator steamships hadn't been invented. That's what
revolutionized the game down there."
"Besides, I was a mere youngster," Graham added. "Though that meant
nothing much. There was a young German tackled it at the same time I
did, with a tenth of my capital. He hung it out, lean years, dry years,
and all. He's rated in seven figures now."
They turned their horses back for the Big House. Dick flirted his wrist
to see his watch.
"Lots of time," he assured his guest. "I'm glad you saw those
yearlings. There was one reason why that young German stuck it out. He
had to. You had your father's money to fall back on, and, I imagine not
only that your feet itched, but that your chief weakness lay in that
you could afford to solace the itching."
"Over there are the fish ponds," Dick said, indicating with a nod of
his head to the right an invisible area beyond the lilacs. "You'll have
plenty of opportunity to catch a mess of trout, or bass, or even
catfish. You see, I'm a miser. I love to make things work. There may be
a justification for the eight-hour labor day, but I make the work-day
of water just twenty-four hours' long. The ponds are in series,
according to the nature of the fish. But the water starts working up in
the mountains. It irrigates a score of mountain meadows before it makes
the plunge and is clarified to crystal clearness in the next few rugged
miles; and at the plunge from the highlands it generates half the power
and all the lighting used on the ranch. Then it sub-irrigates lower
levels, flows in here to the fish ponds, and runs out and irrigates
miles of alfalfa farther on. And, believe me, if by that time it hadn't
reached the flat of the Sacramento, I'd be pumping out the drainage for
more irrigation."
"Man, man," Graham laughed, "you could make a poem on the wonder of
water. I've met fire-worshipers, but you're the first real
water-worshiper I've ever encountered. And you're no desert-dweller,
either. You live in a land of water--pardon the bull--but, as I was
saying..."
Graham never completed his thought. From the right, not far away, came
the unmistakable ring of shod hoofs on concrete, followed by a mighty
splash and an outburst of women's cries and laughter. Quickly the cries
turned to alarm, accompanied by the sounds of a prodigious splashing
and floundering as of some huge, drowning beast. Dick bent his head and
leaped his horse through the lilacs, Graham, on Altadena, followed at
his heels. They emerged in a blaze of sunshine, on an open space among
the trees, and Graham came upon as unexpected a picture as he had ever
chanced upon in his life.
Tree-surrounded, the heart of the open space was a tank, four-sided of
concrete. The upper end of the tank, full width, was a broad spillway,
sheened with an inch of smooth-slipping water. The sides were
perpendicular. The lower end, roughly corrugated, sloped out gently to
solid footing. Here, in distress that was consternation, and in fear
that was panic, excitedly bobbed up and down a cowboy in bearskin
chaps, vacuously repeating the exclamation, "Oh God! Oh God!"--the
first division of it rising in inflection, the second division
inflected fallingly with despair. On the edge of the farther side,
facing him, in bathing suits, legs dangling toward the water, sat three
terrified nymphs.
And in the tank, the center of the picture, a great horse, bright bay
and wet and ruddy satin, vertical in the water, struck upward and
outward into the free air with huge fore-hoofs steel-gleaming in the
wet and sun, while on its back, slipping and clinging, was the white
form of what Graham took at first to be some glorious youth. Not until
the stallion, sinking, emerged again by means of the powerful beat of
his legs and hoofs, did Graham realize that it was a woman who rode
him--a woman as white as the white silken slip of a bathing suit that
molded to her form like a marble-carven veiling of drapery. As marble
was her back, save that the fine delicate muscles moved and crept under
the silken suit as she strove to keep her head above water. Her slim
round arms were twined in yards of half-drowned stallion-mane, while
her white round knees slipped on the sleek, wet, satin pads of the
great horse's straining shoulder muscles. The white toes of her dug for
a grip into the smooth sides of the animal, vainly seeking a hold on
the ribs beneath.
In a breath, or the half of a breath, Graham saw the whole breathless
situation, realized that the white wonderful creature was a woman, and
sensed the smallness and daintiness of her despite her gladiatorial
struggles. She reminded him of some Dresden china figure set absurdly
small and light and strangely on the drowning back of a titanic beast.
So dwarfed was she by the bulk of the stallion that she was a midget,
or a tiny fairy from fairyland come true.
As she pressed her cheek against the great arching neck, her
golden-brown hair, wet from being under, flowing and tangled, seemed
tangled in the black mane of the stallion. But it was her face that
smote Graham most of all. It was a boy's face; it was a woman's face;
it was serious and at the same time amused, expressing the pleasure it
found woven with the peril. It was a white woman's face--and modern;
and yet, to Graham, it was all-pagan. This was not a creature and a
situation one happened upon in the twentieth century. It was straight
out of old Greece. It was a Maxfield Parrish reminiscence from the
Arabian Nights. Genii might be expected to rise from those troubled
depths, or golden princes, astride winged dragons, to swoop down out of
the blue to the rescue.
The stallion, forcing itself higher out of water, missed, by a shade,
from turning over backward as it sank. Glorious animal and glorious
rider disappeared together beneath the surface, to rise together, a
second later, the stallion still pawing the air with fore-hoofs the
size of dinner plates, the rider still clinging to the sleek,
satin-coated muscles. Graham thought, with a gasp, what might have
happened had the stallion turned over. A chance blow from any one of
those four enormous floundering hoofs could have put out and quenched
forever the light and sparkle of that superb, white-bodied,
fire-animated woman.
"Ride his neck!" Dick shouted. "Catch his foretop and get on his neck
till he balances out!"
The woman obeyed, digging her toes into the evasive muscle-pads for the
quick effort, and leaping upward, one hand twined in the wet mane, the
other hand free and up-stretched, darting between the ears and
clutching the foretop. The next moment, as the stallion balanced out
horizontally in obedience to her shiftage of weight, she had slipped
back to the shoulders. Holding with one hand to the mane, she waved a
white arm in the air and flashed a smile of acknowledgment to Forrest;
and, as Graham noted, she was cool enough to note him on his horse
beside Forrest. Also, Graham realized that the turning of her head and
the waving of her arm was only partly in bravado, was more in aesthetic
wisdom of the picture she composed, and was, most of all, sheer joy of
daring and emprise of the blood and the flesh and the life that was she.
"Not many women'd tackle that," Dick said quietly, as Mountain Lad,
easily retaining his horizontal position once it had been attained,
swam to the lower end of the tank and floundered up the rough slope to
the anxious cowboy.
The latter swiftly adjusted the halter with a turn of chain between the
jaws. But Paula, still astride, leaned forward, imperiously took the
lead-part from the cowboy, whirled Mountain Lad around to face Forrest,
and saluted.
"Now you will have to go away," she called. "This is our hen party, and
the stag public is not admitted."
Dick laughed, saluted acknowledgment, and led the way back through the
lilacs to the road.
"Who ... who was it?" Graham queried.
"Paula--Mrs. Forrest--the boy girl, the child that never grew up, the
grittiest puff of rose-dust that was ever woman."
"My breath is quite taken away," Graham said. "Do your people do such
stunts frequently?"
"First time she ever did that," Forrest replied. "That was Mountain
Lad. She rode him straight down the spill-way--tobogganed with him,
twenty-two hundred and forty pounds of him."
"Risked his neck and legs as well as her own," was Graham's comment.
"Thirty-five thousand dollars' worth of neck and legs," Dick smiled.
"That's what a pool of breeders offered me for him last year after he'd
cleaned up the Coast with his get as well as himself. And as for Paula,
she could break necks and legs at that price every day in the year
until I went broke--only she doesn't. She never has accidents."
"I wouldn't have given tuppence for her chance if he'd turned over."
"But he didn't," Dick answered placidly. "That's Paula's luck. She's
tough to kill. Why, I've had her under shell-fire where she was
actually disappointed because she didn't get hit, or killed, or
near-killed. Four batteries opened on us, shrapnel, at mile-range, and
we had to cover half a mile of smooth hill-brow for shelter. I really
felt I was justified in charging her with holding back. She did admit a
'trifle.' We've been married ten or a dozen years now, and, d'ye know,
sometimes it seems to me I don't know her at all, and that nobody knows
her, and that she doesn't know herself--just the same way as you and I
can look at ourselves in a mirror and wonder who the devil we are
anyway. Paula and I have one magic formula: _Damn the expense when fun
is selling_. And it doesn't matter whether the price is in dollars,
hide, or life. It's our way and our luck. It works. And, d'ye know,
we've never been gouged on the price yet."