WHEN old Lucius Dowling lay dying he sent for his will and reread it. He lay in his wide walnut bed, which Henry's wife had vainly tried to exchange for a mahogany four-poster in the best period of early American, with his spectacles firmly fixed on his hawk-like nose, and studied it with a certain grimness.
"I give and devise to my son, Henry, and my daughter Elizabeth Osborne, the L. D. ranch property, in joint and equal ownership"
He read on through the paragraph, laid the typed sheets down on the counterpane and closed his eyes. Should he change that? Leave it in trust, insist that it be held together and carried on, as Henry and Bessie never would do? Leave it in trust to Henry's girl, and defy them to get rid of it? He smiled a little at that. They would probably try to break the will if he did so; still, there were ways.
He had lived past any illusions as regarded his children. Henry was phlegmatic, cautious; he had been a good son and a good husband. Almost too good: He had not had enough imagination to stray from the proper and correct path, nor old Lucius' own capacity for robust adventure and even occasional easy sinning. And Bessie, who had this last capacity of his in full, he disapproved of because she had it. He had a phrase for Bessie; he called her to himself a "retarded adolescent," and chuckled over it. He had invented it the day, at forty-one, when she had shingled her hair.
But in the end he let the will ride, as he put it, and in due time—not so repentant for his sins as he should have been, but carrying over with him a sort of delicate savoring of them—he passed away. And within a week the walnut bedroom set followed him, going to some graveyard of dead sentiments and ancient dreams and, unlike old Lucius, leaving nothing behind to preserve its memory but an unfaded spot in the carpet where it had stood for twenty years.
Unlike old Lucius. He had left behind him much more than the securities in his boxes and the clothes they gave to his valet. The ranch he had left to Henry and Bessie, but those qualities of his which Henry had missed he had passed, without the sinning of course, to his grandchild; the love of adventure and the will to seek it, a craving for the open, a certain honesty and a capacity for passionate adventure, both of which latter qualities the old man had concealed in later life with rather less success than he imagined.
Kay Dowling, his grandchild, was the only person in the house who cried when the walnut bed was moved out.
She went into the room. The carpet, which was green, was much brighter where it had stood than anywhere else. It was like a patch of fresh grass, and on the mantel the faded picture of old Lucius, taken on horseback when he had lived in the West and been a cowboy, seemed to be looking at it. She knew by name all the things he wore in the picture, including a six-shooter in his belt; she knew the name of the horse he rode—which was Pronto—the details of his inlaid Mexican saddle, the purpose of the rope coiled on it. She could even see, in that young eager face, so unlike the one she had known, a certain resemblance to herself. And she wondered, young as she was then, if he had been satisfied. Had he missed that life? What if he had never come East, and she had been born out there, free to ride a horse, to follow the trail? True, she rode now; but always with a groom following her, or the riding master. It was not the same.
It was only a mood, and like the walnut bed and old Lucius himself it passed. But once or twice in later years she was to remember it, and to wonder just what influence that heritage of hers had had in her life.
Surprisingly little was changed by the old man's death. As he had outlived his illusions so he had outlived most of his friends. Henry and Bessie dutifully erected a tall shaft, and voted down Henry's wife's suggestion that it say: "He has followed the trail into the sunset." It was odd that Katherine should have made it, really. Perhaps she had had a politely veiled sentiment for the old man, or for the more respectable portions of his past; anyhow she withdrew it at once when Bessie said that sentiments on monuments were as extinct as the dodo.
"Where'd you get that?" Henry asked her.
"I think I saw it somewhere," she said vaguely. But she lied. She had thought of it herself.
Then for several years Kay heard little of the ranch but as a hole; it was a hole one sunk money in and nothing came out. It was a liability and not an asset. Connected with this was a further fact that Bessie thought they were all made of money, and that she was a fool to want to hold on. And somewhat later further talk about Aunt Bessie, but not connected with the ranch. This time she seemed to have lost Uncle Ronald, but when she came back from Paris, having done so, she was not in mourning, and Kay learned that there were other ways than death by which one lost husbands. It was, however, not to be discussed, and if after that one wandered into Aunt Bessie's house and found a young man loudly declaiming in her boudoir while Aunt Bessie was having a marcel or a manicure through a half-opened door in her dressing room, one was not to discuss that either.
Aunt Bessie had a flair for what she called talented youth. There was another name for them, however, among her friends. They were generally called "Bessie's sympathizers."
Time went on, as it has a way of doing. The shaft was finished. It was ugly, but it was solid and dominating and uncompromising, which was rather fitting after all. Mademoiselle went back to France and Kay was sent to boarding school. She was sixteen then; a slim bit of a thing, aping her elders as well as she could, but with wide childish eyes which betrayed her essential innocence. On the night before she left Katherine summoned all her courage and went in to talk to her. She wanted, this queer reserved Katherine, to break the shocks which life would have in store for her, to pave the way a little for the woman-world she was so soon to enter.
But there was Kay beside her dainty bed on her knees, saying her prayers, and propped up on the pillow was the Princess Mary, which had been her last doll years ago. Katherine, whose own knees had been shaking anyhow, withdrew quietly and closed the door. She never found the courage to try again. When Kay came home for her first vacation she was still loving but slightly remote, and she had made her first step toward independent action. She took off her pull-on hat with hands that were cold and clammy, and they saw she had cut her hair.
"Oh, Kay!" said her mother, and tears stood in her eyes. But Kay's father only looked at her and said nothing about it. Later on he told her mother that he was afraid she was going to be like Bessie. He said this in the privacy of their bedroom, however, so the servants could not hear. He always had an eye out for the servants, had Henry Dowling.
He was quite sure of this one day a year or so later, after Kay had made her début—oh, yes, she-made her début; frock by Lucille, photographers and society editors, and baskets of flowers which went to the various hospitals afterwards—and had been taken to England to be presented. He came into the drawing room of the town house and found her with a half dozen other young and fluttering creatures, and she was smoking a cigarette. She put it down at once and said: "Sorry, father," but he was surer than ever.
"What we have to remember," he said that night to Katherine, sitting neat and small and subservient before her toilet table, which was covered with chaste ivory appliances, "is that there is a streak of weakness in the blood."
"Not on my side," Katherine ventured. "My people"
"My father had it. He was a strong man in some ways, but in others And Bessie has let her love of adventure, to call it by a polite name, run away with her common sense."
"Kay is not at all like Bessie."
"I'm-not so sure of that," he said obstinately.
It was this mistaken preconception of his perhaps which made Kay's emergence into her social world only an antonym for freedom. She was always chaperoned; he himself, when Katherine had one of her weak spells—she was liable to weak spells—would remain resolutely at balls, smoking innumerable cigars in anterooms. Or he would call himself, or send Nora and the car, to bring her home aiter dinners. Kay herself felt rather ridiculous, but nothing in the world could make Henry Dowling ridiculous.
He was a pompous, somewhat florid man, not so tall as old Lucius and already slightly curved under his well-cut waistcoats. He liked his food; his place in the community; being a vestryman at Saint Mark's; and exclusive of Bessie, he was fond of his family. The humble origin of that family, on his side at least, he did not like and preferred to ignore, and when eligible young men called more than once or twice he would look them up furtively in the Social Register.
"Who was that boy last night, Kay?"
"Smith's his name."
"One of the Mortimer Smiths?"
"I didn't ask him. I will if you like."
"Certainly not," he would splutter, "I merely wondered."
And all that time the L. D. ranch was lying fallow, so to speak. Not even so very fallow at that. Superintendents came, demanded more money to put in the hole, failed to get it and went away again. Only Mallory, old Lucius's range foreman, remained faithful, and his requests for farming machinery to put the bottom lands into hay and grain so he could winter the more unthrifty of his cattle met with little response.
He wrote his cramped, pathetic letters: the great ranges on the Indian Reservation and in the mountains were badly overgrazed, and homesteaders were coming in and putting up wire fences.
"We've had a dry summer, Mr. Dowling," he wrote once. "If we have a bad winter the cattle will be in poor shape. I recomend—" he was a good cow-man but a poor speller—"that we buy hay and oil cake now before the price goes up. If we don't"
Kay went cheerfully on her way. She had almost forgotten the ranch, or those old stories about the drive up from the Mexican border to the abundant water and grass of the Northwest; the long-horned herds stampeding and scattering to the four corners of the earth, being bogged down in the quicksands of rivers they forded, being levied on by Indians as toll for their passage, going blind with thirst, falling down, dying. There had been a last eighty miles of desert, too, when men and cattle were alike exhausted; when the drive went on night and day, and grim death followed their wide dusty trail and picked up the stragglers as they lagged. But after that had come a river, and beyond it the great green valley, and rest and grass and peace.
Kay had almost forgotten, and perhaps the valley had almost forgotten too. The Mexican cattle had almost disappeared; here and there among the Indian cattle could still be seen a pair of great horns on a long-legged small-bodied animal, but white-faced pedigreed stock was the rule. Through the long valley, bounded by its mountains to East and West, now ran a thread of railroad, a string on which like beads were strung the little towns. Tourists on through trains looked out and saw, not the West of their dreams but—men in straw hats like their own.
Cars were parked along the platform, muddy from the back country. Now and then a cowboy, bronzed under his Stetson, pulled up his horse and watched the train move out.
"There's a cowboy! Look, quick!"
"Probably dressed up by one of these dude ranches."
Tom McNair, top cow hand on the L. D., once had a woman call out of a car window:
"Tell me, are you a real cowboy?"
And Tom took off his hat with a great sweep and bowed to her.
"Real as hell, lady," he said, and the train moved on.
They never saw beyond the railroad and the little town, these tourists. They did not see that where the hamlets ended the back country began. There was no transition. And the back country had not changed, nor the mountains. Spring still saw its plains bringing forth grass, and August saw them burning dry and brown. Dawn still painted its dry buttes with rose, and twilight turned them mauve. In winter the whole land died and froze in rigor mortis, and men and cattle froze and died with it.
One day Kay, clearing her desk in her small orchid and blue boudoir-dressing room, came across that old photograph of her grandfather and took it out curiously and looked at it. She felt for a moment a quick wave of sympathy for that young and valiant figure which had had to grow old and die in the walnut bed, and with that some of her memories came back. She picked up the picture and went downstairs to her father's library. She knew he would be there; it was the sacred hour of whisky and soda before dressing for dinner.
"Don't you want this, father? I've just found it."
"What is it?"
He took it and looked at it. "I wondered where it had gone," he said, and locked it in his desk. He had a drawer there which was always locked. But she did not go, as he plainly expected her to do.
"Why don't we ever go out there, father?" she asked. "I'd like to see it. The ranch, I mean."
"Well, I wouldn't," he said coldly. "If it keeps on as it's doing it will bankrupt me."
"Are there still cowboys there?"
"Crowd of lazy young devils who call themselves cowboys."
She had a bright thought.
"Couldn't you turn it into a dairy ranch?" she asked. "There must be a lot of cows."
And then and there he gave one of his rare spontaneous laughs.
"My dear child," he said, "you can't milk range cattle. They're raised to sell for beef. At least," he added more sourly, "I believe that is the idea, but the packers seem to think we're running an eleemosynary institution."
After that life seized her again. The ranch drifted out of her mind. She fell in love, foolish sentimental affairs which gave her a thrill at the time, added interest to what was the real monotony of her existence; Rutherford or James brought up boxes of flowers with small neatly engraved cards inside; Nora laid out her clothing before going to dress her mother; in the spring, while Bessie opened her cottage at Bar Harbor, they moved to the country house outside of town and the only difference was tennis or golf.
And then suddenly one day in July the valley and all the back country returned to her, never to be lost again. She learned that things at the ranch were very bad indeed, and that they were all to go out. Even Herbert was going.
There was not much time. She ordered a riding suit and boots. Her mother fluttered about, seeing that the striped linen bags were hung over the brocaded curtains, and that the needle-point chairs were covered. The Mariposa, old Lucius's private car, was cleaned and put in order in the yards, Bessie was firmly telegraphed to remain in Bar Harbor, and then one day Kay found herself facing toward the setting sun, which was exceedingly hot, and that curious mixture of romance, grim stark tragedy and passionate love which was to be her life thereafter.