LITTLE DOG had not yet come back to the Reservation, although shortly after he had shot Tom he had left the show. And little by little Tom's thoughts of revenge died before the situation in which he found himself. Once he came back with the news that he could get work at the new filling station near the railroad, but he found Kay opposed to it and oddly anxious to get out of town.
"You're a good cow-man, Tom. All these men say that. Then why?"
"You can't run cattle unless you've got cattle to run, girl. I've tried every outfit in the country."
He went on doggedly, borrowed cars and made his long trips into the back country, over roads now deep in dust; coming back at night or the next day, disheartened and weary from a region drying up and desolate, and from ranchers as discouraged as himself. The streams were low and getting lower, the pastures were baked as hard as brick, and the grass—the life of the cow-country—had ceased to grow and lay brown and burnt in the fields.
He was bitter, sometimes. Bill, coming to call on them and relaxing after a time, told some railroad stories of old Lucius Dowling and the billion-dollar crowd he had brought with him one summer.
"Sure was a great old man, your grandfather," he said to Kay. "Why, say, it wasn't anything for those fellows to bet a thousand dollars on the turn of a card."
Tom had been lounging on the bed, a habit which set Kay's nerves on edge. Now he sat up suddenly.
"Huh!" he said. "And where'd they get it? How'd they get it? Where'd they get money to throw around like that?"
"Don't ask me!" said Bill, good-humoredly.
"Well, I'm telling you. You're a cow-man, Bill. What happens to cattle if before you sell them you feed them a lot of salt and then fill them up with water? That's what those fellows did, and still do. Watering stock's the name for it."
"If you're speaking of my grandfather, Tom"
"You've named him," he said, and relapsed into sulky silence.
But if he sang and whistled less around the room, he still had his moments of boyish passionate love for Kay. He would come in, weary and lamer than usual, to draw her down into his arms and sit for long periods of quiet, content just to hold her and rest his head against her.
"You still loving me, Kay?"
"I'll never stop. I can't. You know that."
Her personal daintiness never ceased to surprise and delight him, her fragrant bath powder and soap, the care she gave to her short sleek hair, the ribbons in her undergarments, laboriously inserted after each laundering.
"Say, I believe you'd put ruffles on a bunk house towel!"
"You see them, don't you? And like them?"
"I like everything about you," he would tell her solemnly. "You're prouder'n a wildcat, and you can be right ornery at times too. But I'm for you."
But sometimes he picked up and looked at her delicate, fastidiously cared for hands.
"You brought them to the wrong market," he told her once. "I can just remember my old lady's hands; they sure felt like shoe leather."
She suspected him of inarticulate depths of sentiment about his mother.
He tried to please her, too, those early days when each was painfully learning the other. Put on his coat to go down to meals, with only a protest now and then. "Making a regular dude out of me, aren't you?" Shaved carefully and often, even blacked his boots!
"What pains me," he told her once, surveying himself in the mirror, "I can't go out and hire a hall to show myself off in!"
Clare seldom entered his mind at all. So lightly had the engagement weighed on him that he was astounded when he found that she took his marriage as an injury. What had she lost? He had never pretended to care for her. It was she who had put that fool announcement in the paper. And perhaps, with that queer intuition of his where girls and women were concerned, he was not far wrong when he suspected her of secretly enjoying her grievance, of dramatizing herself, publicly and privately, and so indirectly injuring him.
But he underrated one thing. Dramatize herself she could and did, going about with a sad smile that made Sarah Cain long to slap her. He underestimated her passion for him. She had never given him up. What did that deadalive girl over there in the window of the Martin House know about Tom McNair or his kind? When to relax control, and when to tighten it up? How to give and then withhold, so as to keep him guessing?
"I'll give her three months," she said, to Sarah Cain.
"Yes, and you'd give her poison if you had the chance!" said Sarah Cain.
And so things were with all of them when one hot day Tom, standing on a street corner, saw Little Dog passing by in a Ford car.
Carrying weapons was as much against the law in Ursula as in any other civilized town, and it was twenty years since the six-gun on the hip had been a part of the cowboy's outfit, like his chaps and spurs. So Tom's revolver was safely back at the hotel. That fact, and that only, saved him from committing murder that day.
But he did the next best thing, leaped onto the running board and jerked the Indian out, and was in process of choking him to death when the crowd intervened.
As it was, he went to jail for ten days
Kay was bewildered and shocked, her severance from her old world of polite amenities and amiable hypocrisies practically complete. She had a letter from Bessie at that time—Bessie, who loathed writing letters—but she did not reply. What could she say? "We are both well, although Tom is not working yet. Just now he is in jail."
Never.
It was Mrs. Mallory who softened the blow for her.
"What he should have done was to kill that Indian," she said, bloodthirstily. "First he shot Tom's horse—and he set a lot of store by that horse—and then he shot Tom. Don't tell me different. I know."
Kay got permission to visit Tom in the jail. He looked sheepish and wretched, and he had little to say about the trouble.
"He had it coming to him," he told her grimly.
After that she sat around and waited. There was nothing in particular to wait for, except Tom. They seemed to be in a hopeless eddy, each still clinging to the other but both slowly drowning. But she did some thinking too, with that brain that she had inherited from old Lucius.
She knew nothing of money. The unfitness of the feminine mind to comprehend even the ABC's of finance had been one of her father's basic principles, a part of the tradition of his type. Never in all his married life had he as much as told Katherine the amount of his income or the extent of his holdings. It was not so much that he distrusted her intelligence; it was, as with most men of his type and training, an obstinate holding to the string of domestic power and sovereignty. By that and that only was he overlord, and this dominion of his was even carefully planned by will to extend beyond the grave.
To Kay, then, banks heretofore had been places where the silver and jewels were deposited on emergency, and where, as to money, one first put it in and then drew it out again. But by this time she learned that they had another function; they loaned money. Sometimes on a ranch, sometimes on cattle, even more rarely, on a man's character.
Tom was still in jail when she visited Mr. Tulloss. Mostly he rolled and smoked cigarettes. He had no regrets, except that he had not killed Little Dog, but he had a great deal of time to think. Most of his thinking was extremely bitter: thus, he could not support Kay. Then she'd better go back to her people. If it was a question between his pride and her comfort, better swallow his pride. Anyhow, what reason for pride had he? He was crippled. He could still work, but nobody believed it. And how long would she keep on caring, the way things were? A corner loafer, a
When that got too bitter for him, he had devised a series of tortures for his bad ankle, as if by main force to make a joint where no joint existed. And he would keep on until the bars of his cell retreated into a gray and misty distance, and faint with pain he would have to sit down.
It was when things had reached that point that Kay had set her mouth one day, placed Bessie's check in her purse, and went to the bank.