MORE than three weeks had passed, and Kay had had no letter from Tom. Twice a day she waited for the mail bag to be brought up from the village, twice a day she ran through its contents feverishly, and twice a day, fairly shaken with disappointment, she began again her tense watching of the clock until the next mail was due to arrive.
The strain began to tell on her.
She wakened one morning to see from her balcony the dahlia heads in the fall garden drooping on their stems, and the ground frozen hard. An icy wind from the Northwest was blowing before it leaves that sailed like birds and then settled to the ground. It seemed to her that a cold hand had come out of the West and caught her heart.
"Good gracious, Miss Kay, do come in! You'll catch your death of cold."
"I'm all right, Nora."
But she was not all right. The girls and men she knew were noticing it.
"What's the matter with Kay, anyhow? She has positively no pep any more."
"Maybe Herbert's been naughty!"
"Herbert's idea of being naughty is to forget to go to Sunday school. Try again."
She tried arguing with herself. It was not over, this affair of Tom's and hers. Things did not end like that. Two people who loved each other did not simply separate, without a word, without a farewell. Life might separate them, but not their own voluntary act.
In an increasing agony of mind she reviewed their last meeting, trying to find in it some explanation of his silence. She discarded all her old standards, the ones she would have used in judging Herbert, for instance, and tried to see the affair from Tom's viewpoint. Had he, thinking things over in solitude in the mountains, decided like Aunt Bessie, that there could be no happiness for them together?
Or—she knew by that time the curious pinnacle on which the cowboy places womanhood—had he found something shameless and bold in the way she had met him, in her surrender? It was she who had forced the issue between them that night, and in the end it had been Tom who had sent her back, loved but repudiated.
And then, into her despair, came a day or two when hope bloomed again. Tom had not written because he had not dared. He was in trouble. And while she suffered for him, was indeed frightfully anxious, she was still happier than she had been for weeks.
She had dressed for a dinner dance at the country club, and came downstairs to find Henry in the hall. She had an odd feeling that he had been waiting for her. She came down, a slim little figure in a gay dress of silver cloth, and he watched her almost furtively.
"Off again!" he said. "Gay life you are leading, Kay."
"Frightfully gay."
"By the way,"—how transparent he was!—"by the way, I have a letter here from Jake. You might like to see it. It's about that fellow who used to take you riding out there. What's his name—McNair?"
But there was a certain delicacy in Henry; he did not look at her. He pretended to search his pockets for it, and that gave her a little time. Then, when he had found it, he gave it to her and turned away.
"Better not stay too late tonight," he mumbled. "You've all winter to dance."
She took the letter and went out to the waiting car. She felt quite calm as she switched on the light, although her hands felt rather numb; and she had to ask Hawkins, when they reached the main road, to stop the car. She was not seeing very clearly.
She ran hastily over the earlier portions, which in Jake's labored script referred to the shipping. Then she found it:
"We have had a little trouble out here. Tom McNair found a Indian killing beef, and being hasty fired a shot at him and hurt him pretty bad. At least that's the Indians' story, although Tom says different. Anyhow Tom has got away, as there is a warrant out for him.
"If it comes to a showdown I think we ought to defend him, as it was our beef, but that's up to you. The best man in Ursula according to my thinking for that kind of case"
Of course they would have to defend him. And she must try to get some word to him, some reassurance. She ordered Hawkins to drive through the village to the telegraph station, and there she sent a wire to Tom in care of Jake.
"Have just heard. Sure everything will be all right. Please write details."
She was so kind to Herbert that night that he was almost delirious with happiness, but although he tried to get her off by herself, she managed to elude him.
"Don't you want to sit this out, Kay? There's a moon outside."
"Well, it usually is outside, isn't it? No, I think I'll dance."
In agony of spirit Herbert compared that failure of his with Tom McNair's probable method under the same circumstances.
"This my dance? All right, we're not dancing it."
"But I want to dance."
"You've got plenty of time to dance. You've only got a chance to sit out with me now and then. And this is one of them!"
And girls and women fell for that sort of thing! Well, if they liked it he would try it too.
"I'm going back with you, Kay. I don't like you riding alone so late."
"Don't be silly. Hawkins is driving. I'm not alone."
"I'm going just the same."
"And make Hawkins bring you all the way back here? Don't be foolish."
He tried to say: "To hell with Hawkins. That's what he's for." But the words stuck in his throat.
"I suppose that's so," he said, and smiled painfully. He had failed; he had known he would fail. Damn being a gentleman anyhow. It had never got him anywhere. That roughneck out in the West had it all over him; knew what he wanted and went after it. The thousand and one repressions of his code Tom McNair had never heard of. Damn McNair, too.
He tucked Kay in her car and then sadly got his own little bus and drove back to town. Not recklessly, but with due caution; even the memory of that early reckless drive to the ranch, that dare-devil sardonic figure at the wheel, could not force his law-abiding instinct to violate the speed limit.
It was the next day that Kay took her courage in her hands and went to Henry.
"Are you going to defend Tom McNair, father?"
He eyed her, his chin sunk on his breast, his mouth pursed.
"If the fellow had stayed and taken his medicine, I might have considered it. Now"
"I don't see what that has to do with it. It was our beef."
"That's no excuse for shooting a man. He got himself into this scrape; let him get himself out."
He ran his hands over some papers on his desk—he was entrenched behind it, an old trick of his—and she knew he had said the last word. But Henry after his usual fashion with his family had blundered; Bessie could have told him that. It was Bessie who, when Katherine had wanted a crest and motto for her note paper, had flippantly suggested, "Get, beget and forget," as the Dowling motto for their womenkind.
To the truths and half-truths from which Kay had built up a superman in Tom were now added a yearning pity and a hot-eyed championship. She saw him making his escape with every man's hand against him. She saw him riding hell-for-leather along dangerous trails, skirting precipices, sitting on his tired horse, a dramatic and wonderful figure outlined against the setting sun, and gazing from under his broad hat down the mountain slopes for a revengeful sheriff and a posse.
When the following Sunday the family motored in to church—it was the opening of the church season, so to speak; during the warm weather Henry played golfi—she prayed for his escape and his safety. It seemed strange and incongruous that she should be kneeling there, in that decorous opulent silence, praying for a cowboy who had shot a man. She was almost self-conscious when she sat back and looked around. But her mother was opening her prayer book at Morning Prayer and Henry, leaning back for easier access to his pocket, was feeling for the twenty dollar bill with which he always decorated the top of the plate. Henry had been a vestryman for many years.
That was the day before Tom's arrival; it was a Monday afternoon when she saw him.
She had been playing tennis. Now she sat on the terrace of the country club drinking tea. Around the wicker table were a half dozen girls and a man or two, all indolent from exercise and the sun. They talked desultory personalities, yawned, sipped their tea or highballs and drew on cigarettes, in the effortless ease of people who knew each other intimately.
"Where's Hugh?"
"Gone home. He was pretty well teed up last night."
"Anybody coming over tonight? You coming, Kay?"
"I don't know. I'm tired of dancing."
"Seems to me our Kay's kind of sore on the world lately." One of the men said this. "What's the matter, Kay? Not troubled in your little mind, are you?"
The group glanced at her, smiling.
"Maybe Herbert's been acting the cave-man again!" some one suggested. And with this picture of Herbert there came light-hearted delighted laughter.
"But I always say this," a girl drawled, "when Herbert does settle down, he will be all right. Don't you let them discourage you, Kay."
Kay was hardly listening. She was used to their humor, their little jokes among themselves. But she roused enough to answer them.
"What I was thinking was whether to listen to any more drivel here, or go home and read a book and learn something."
"Quick! I can't bear suspense. What did you decide?"
"I'm going home," she told them, and got up.
It was then that she saw Tom. He was standing at the foot of the steps, his hat in his hand, gazing up at her, and at first she did not know him. So faint was the resemblance of this rather haggard and certainly untidy youth in his absurd clothes to the heroic figure of her dreams that she hesitated. Then he smiled, and with that half-humorous, half-reckless smile she got up.
The group around the table was absorbed in itself once more. They had seen nothing, and deliberately, so as not to catch their attention, Kay moved to the steps. Her knees were shaking, her lips felt stiff and dry. And Tom never took his eyes from her.
"Tom!" she said. "Why, Tom!"
"It's me, all right."
He had whipped off the disfiguring hat, and he looked more himself. But she was aware, too, of a silence behind her, broken by a voice carefully non-committal.
"Cool in summer, you know, but with enough thatch on top to keep out the rain."
She flushed; the reference she knew was to Tom's hair, which had been carefully clipped to the skull except for the top, which was much as Nature had intended it. But Tom had not heard it.
"Listen," he said. "Can't we get away from that bunch of mavericks over there and talk somewhere? I've sure got a lot to say, and just about between now and the next train back to say it."
There came another voice, this time feminine.
"But who? And what? And why? I ask you!"
She did the only thing she could think of, took him up on the terrace, passed the group with her head high, and ordered tea.
"I wired you the other day, Tom, but I suppose you never got it. I didn't know you'd been in trouble."
"Trouble?" He was genuinely surprised. "What sort of trouble?"
"Why, you shot an Indian, didn't you?"
"Oh, that!" He threw back his head and laughed. "Shooting Indians doesn't count. Don't you worry about that."
But he had raised his voice, and at the nearby table the Greek chorus took it up.
"It appears that another Redskin has bit the dust. Reloading his trusty revolver, our hero"
Tom heard it. Kay went a little cold as he turned quietly in his chair and surveyed the intent group behind him.
"Did any one over there refer to me?" he said, with deadly calmness.
Out of the general stupefaction only one individual retained his self-possession; he jumped to his feet and came over, smiling.
"I apologize," he said. "My fault entirely. It isn't often we dubs can sit here and get a thrill like the one you have just given us."
Tom eyed his outstretched hand suspiciously. It was a white, well-cared-for hand. Suddenly he grinned.
"No," he said. "I couldn't fight that. It would be murder. All right, partner. We'll forget it."
He shook hands.
Never afterwards could Kay remember that nightmarish afternoon in any detail. She saw Tom swallowed up by a crowd of thrilled and amused young people, to which gradually gravitated a half dozen or so of older men. She saw girls flattering him, drawing him out, and turning aside to mutter: "Isn't it precious!" She saw bottles brought out from lockers, with tall glasses and soda, and Tom in the center of the hubbub, bland and cool but growing increasingly expansive.
"No, sister, I haven't got my gun with me. I'm a little hasty-like at times, and so I take it off when I'm going to be in a crowd like this."
"Can I ride? Well, say, that's what I don't do anything else but."
His drawl and good looks fascinated them. They drew him out; when they wanted to know how he had come East, and he told them in the caboose of a cattle train, they would have been less thrilled if he had said he had made a pair of wings and flown. But all the time Kay felt that they were somehow cheapening him, taking advantage of him for a half hour's amusement. And later on they would talk and take him off. She knew them. "As Kay's cowboy would say"
She did not know how little he had eaten that day, but she did know they were giving him too much to drink. And to add to her confusion and growing distress was the certainty that the episode could not be kept from her people. It was madness; they were all mad, and she was the maddest of the lot.
They were certainly drinking too much. One youth was raising a highball glass to Tom.
"Are we all friends?" he inquired solemnly.
"We are all friends," said Tom with equal solemnity, and emptied his glass. The crowd had grown in—size and noise. Her head ached and her heart was heavy. When at six o'clock the man who had precipitated the situation at the start appeared with a necktie tied around his head and a feather stuck in it, wearing a striped blanket around his shoulders and solemnly beating a tomtom consisting of a wooden chopping bowl from the club kitchen, she had reached the limit of her endurance.
She worked her way through the crowd.
"I'm sorry, Tom," she said, "but I must be getting home. When are you going back?"
He was exhilarated, but more with excitement than with liquor. He had been sitting negligently on a table, and now he got up.
"Going home? But I haven't talked to you yet."
"You've been too popular. I'll have to see you another time."
He looked at her oddly, then he drew himself to his full height and glanced on the crowd around him with a certain arrogant good-humor.
"Now," he drawled, "you children run along and amuse yourselves somewhere else. I've got some business to attend to."
They took their dismissal with laughter, scattering about the terrace. The short October twilight had ended, and out of the darkness cars began to drive up, golf clubs were collected, there was stir and movement. But Kay was aware even then of polite but acutely interested espionage; she could not think, she could not talk.
"Now we've got rid of that bunch of loafers"
"I must go, Tom. I must."
"And is this going to be all of it? How-d'ye-do, good-bye?"
"Be careful, please. They're watching."
"What do I care? What do you care?" He moved impatiently. "All right, I'll go back tonight. That's all I wanted to know."
"I'll come over this evening, Tom. I may be late, but I'll come. You can get your dinner here; I'll arrange about it."
"One of these play-boys has asked me to eat with him. You'll come, will you?"
"Of course."
He was still suspicious. In a way, the sight of Kay in this new environment had not had the effect on him that it had had on Kay to see him transplanted. He had expected something of the sort. But each scene and group at the club had been unconsciously emphasizing the difference between her familiar world and his. Here was not only luxury, but the involved machinery of play, and to utilize it people to whom play was a part of their daily lives, like food or beds to sleep in.
It made him feel inferior, and fiercely resent that inferiority. His pride was in arms, and to do him justice he had seen at once through the curiosity of the crowd.
But after one look at her face his voice softened.
"God knows I don't want to make you any trouble, girl," he said. "I've come a long ways just to look at you."
"Is that why you came, Tom?"
His charm for her was reasserting itself; she felt breath—less.
"What else?" He glanced around, but no one at the moment was observing them. "Look here, you may hear things about me as time goes on. You will, maybe; I'm human. But this goes, now and for keeps. There's only you for me. I've been trying to think different, but it isn't any use."
Then the lights were switched on and he drew back.
She looked back at him from the top of the steps. He was standing alone gazing after her with a sort of smouldering intensity, a queer, incongruous and lonely figure. She felt a choking pity for him, so out of place, his big muscles bursting through his horrible coat, the fatigue of his long journey and even the dust of it plainly in evidence. But with that pity there was pride, too. He was a man; beside those easy, well-dressed popinjays who had been amusing themselves with him, he loomed head and shoulders. He was a man.