It was long after ten in the morning, when Graham, straying about
restlessly and wondering if Paula Forrest ever appeared before the
middle of the day, wandered into the music room. Despite the fact that
he was a several days' guest in the Big House, so big was it that the
music room was new territory. It was an exquisite room, possibly
thirty-five by sixty and rising to a lofty trussed ceiling where a warm
golden light was diffused from a skylight of yellow glass. Red tones
entered largely into the walls and furnishing, and the place, to him,
seemed to hold the hush of music.
Graham was lazily contemplating a Keith with its inevitable triumph of
sun-gloried atmosphere and twilight-shadowed sheep, when, from the tail
of his eye, he saw his hostess come in from the far entrance. Again,
the sight of her, that was a picture, gave him the little catch-breath
of gasp. She was clad entirely in white, and looked very young and
quite tall in the sweeping folds of a _holoku_ of elaborate simplicity
and apparent shapelessness. He knew the _holoku_ in the home of its
origin, where, on the _lanais_ of Hawaii, it gave charm to a plain
woman and double-folded the charm of a charming woman.
While they smiled greeting across the room, he was noting the set of
her body, the poise of head and frankness of eyes--all of which seemed
articulate with a friendly, comradely, "Hello, friends." At least such
was the form Graham's fancy took as she came toward him.
"You made a mistake with this room," he said gravely.
"No, don't say that! But how?"
"It should have been longer, much longer, twice as long at least."
"Why?" she demanded, with a disapproving shake of head, while he
delighted in the girlish color in her cheeks that gave the lie to her
thirty-eight years.
"Because, then," he answered, "you should have had to walk twice as far
this morning and my pleasure of watching you would have been
correspondingly increased. I've always insisted that the _holoku_ is
the most charming garment ever invented for women."
"Then it was my _holoku_ and not I," she retorted. "I see you are like
Dick--always with a string on your compliments, and lo, when we poor
sillies start to nibble, back goes the compliment dragging at the end
of the string.
"Now I want to show you the room," she hurried on, closing his
disclaimer. "Dick gave me a free hand with it. It's all mine, you see,
even to its proportions."
"And the pictures?"
"I selected them," she nodded, "every one of them, and loved them onto
the walls myself. Although Dick did quarrel with me over that
Vereschagin. He agreed on the two Millets and the Corot over there, and
on that Isabey; and even conceded that some Vereschagins might do in a
music room, but not that particular Vereschagin. He's jealous for our
local artists, you see. He wanted more of them, wanted to show his
appreciation of home talent."
"I don't know your Pacific Coast men's work very well," Graham said.
"Tell me about them. Show me that--Of course, that's a Keith, there;
but whose is that next one? It's beautiful."
"A McComas--" she was answering; and Graham, with a pleasant
satisfaction, was settling himself to a half-hour's talk on pictures,
when Donald Ware entered with questing eyes that lighted up at sight of
the Little Lady.
His violin was under his arm, and he crossed to the piano in a brisk,
business-like way and proceeded to lay out music.
"We're going to work till lunch," Paula explained to Graham. "He swears
I'm getting abominably rusty, and I think he's half right. We'll see
you at lunch. You can stay if you care, of course; but I warn you it's
really going to be work. And we're going swimming this afternoon. Four
o'clock at the tank, Dick says. Also, he says he's got a new song he's
going to sing then.--What time is it, Mr. Ware?"
"Ten minutes to eleven," the musician answered briefly, with a touch of
sharpness.
"You're ahead of time--the engagement was for eleven. And till eleven
you'll have to wait, sir. I must run and see Dick, first. I haven't
said good morning to him yet."
Well Paula knew her husband's hours. Scribbled secretly in the back of
the note-book that lay always on the reading stand by her couch were
hieroglyphic notes that reminded her that he had coffee at six-thirty;
might possibly be caught in bed with proof-sheets or books till
eight-forty-five, if not out riding; was inaccessible between nine and
ten, dictating correspondence to Blake; was inaccessible between ten
and eleven, conferring with managers and foremen, while Bonbright, the
assistant secretary, took down, like any court reporter, every word
uttered by all parties in the rapid-fire interviews.
At eleven, unless there were unexpected telegrams or business, she
could usually count on finding Dick alone for a space, although
invariably busy. Passing the secretaries' room, the click of a
typewriter informed her that one obstacle was removed. In the library,
the sight of Mr. Bonbright hunting a book for Mr. Manson, the Shorthorn
manager, told her that Dick's hour with his head men was over.
She pressed the button that swung aside a section of filled
book-shelves and revealed the tiny spiral of steel steps that led up to
Dick's work room. At the top, a similar pivoting section of shelves
swung obediently to her press of button and let her noiselessly into
his room. A shade of vexation passed across her face as she recognized
Jeremy Braxton's voice. She paused in indecision, neither seeing nor
being seen.
"If we flood we flood," the mine superintendent was saying. "It will
cost a mint--yes, half a dozen mints--to pump out again. And it's a
damned shame to drown the old Harvest that way."
"But for this last year the books show that we've worked at a positive
loss," Paula heard Dick take up. "Every petty bandit from Huerta down
to the last peon who's stolen a horse has gouged us. It's getting too
stiff--taxes extraordinary--bandits, revolutionists, and federals. We
could survive it, if only the end were in sight; but we have no
guarantee that this disorder may not last a dozen or twenty years."
"Just the same, the old Harvest--think of flooding her!" the
superintendent protested.
"And think of Villa," Dick replied, with a sharp laugh the bitterness
of which did not escape Paula. "If he wins he says he's going to divide
all the land among the peons. The next logical step will be the mines.
How much do you think we've coughed up to the constitutionalists in the
past twelvemonth?"
"Over a hundred and twenty thousand," Braxton answered promptly. "Not
counting that fifty thousand cold bullion to Torenas before he
retreated. He jumped his army at Guaymas and headed for Europe with
it--I wrote you all that."
"If we keep the workings afloat, Jeremy, they'll go on gouging, gouge
without end, Amen. I think we'd better flood. If we can make wealth
more efficiently than those rapscallions, let us show them that we can
destroy wealth with the same facility."
"That's what I tell them. And they smile and repeat that such and such
a free will offering, under exigent circumstances, would be very
acceptable to the revolutionary chiefs--meaning themselves. The big
chiefs never finger one peso in ten of it. Good Lord! I show them what
we've done. Steady work for five thousand peons. Wages raised from ten
centavos a day to a hundred and ten. I show them peons--ten-centavo men
when we took them, and five-peso men when I showed them. And the same
old smile and the same old itching palm, and the same old acceptability
of a free will offering from us to the sacred cause of the revolution.
By God! Old Diaz was a robber, but he was a decent robber. I said to
Arranzo: 'If we shut down, here's five thousand Mexicans out of a
job--what'll you do with them?' And Arranzo smiled and answered me pat.
'Do with them?' he said. 'Why, put guns in their hands and march 'em
down to take Mexico City.'"
In imagination Paula could see Dick's disgusted shrug of shoulders as
she heard him say:
"The curse of it is--that the stuff is there, and that we're the only
fellows that can get it out. The Mexicans can't do it. They haven't the
brains. All they've got is the guns, and they're making us shell out
more than we make. There's only one thing for us, Jeremy. We'll forget
profits for a year or so, lay off the men, and just keep the engineer
force on and the pumping going."
"I threw that into Arranzo," Jeremy Braxton's voice boomed. "And what
was his comeback? That if we laid off the peons, he'd see to it that
the engineers laid off, too, and the mine could flood and be damned to
us.--No, he didn't say that last. He just smiled, but the smile meant
the same thing. For two cents I'd a-wrung his yellow neck, except that
there'd have been another patriot in his boots and in my office next
day proposing a stiffer gouge.
"So Arranzo got his 'bit,' and, on top of it, before he went across to
join the main bunch around Juarez, he let his men run off three hundred
of our mules--thirty thousand dollars' worth of mule-flesh right there,
after I'd sweetened him, too. The yellow skunk!"
"Who is revolutionary chief in our diggings right now?" Paula heard her
husband ask with one of his abrupt shifts that she knew of old time
tokened his drawing together the many threads of a situation and
proceeding to action.
"Raoul Bena."
"What's his rank?"
"Colonel--he's got about seventy ragamuffins."
"What did he do before he quit work?"
"Sheep-herder."
"Very well." Dick's utterance was quick and sharp. "You've got to
play-act. Become a patriot. Hike back as fast as God will let you.
Sweeten this Raoul Bena. He'll see through your play, or he's no
Mexican. Sweeten him and tell him you'll make him a general---a second
Villa."
"Lord, Lord, yes, but how?" Jeremy Braxton demanded.
"By putting him at the head of an army of five thousand. Lay off the
men. Make him make them volunteer. We're safe, because Huerta is
doomed. Tell him you're a real patriot. Give each man a rifle. We'll
stand that for a last gouge, and it will prove you a patriot. Promise
every man his job back when the war is over. Let them and Raoul Bena
depart with your blessing. Keep on the pumping force only. And if we
cut out profits for a year or so, at the same time we are cutting down
losses. And perhaps we won't have to flood old Harvest after all."
Paula smiled to herself at Dick's solution as she stole back down the
spiral on her way to the music room. She was depressed, but not by the
Harvest Group situation. Ever since her marriage there had always been
trouble in the working of the Mexican mines Dick had inherited. Her
depression was due to her having missed her morning greeting to him.
But this depression vanished at meeting Graham, who had lingered with
Ware at the piano and who, at her coming, was evidencing signs of
departure.
"Don't run away," she urged. "Stay and witness a spectacle of industry
that should nerve you up to starting on that book Dick has been telling
me about."