AFTER that, among the men, it became a settled thing that, when Kay rode during the day, Tom McNair was to be her escort. It was tacit, but now and then some reckless spirit put it into words.
"If she's playin' with Tom she'd better look out."
And once even Jake came out with a statement which may or may not have been meant for Tom's ears.
"There's nothin' goin' to happen to that girl on this ranch," he said. "If Tom's a damned fool and don't know the way these eastern girls play around, then he'd better find out quick. She doesn't mean a thing by it."
But no one had the courage to repeat that to Tom.
He himself was in a curious state of mind. He was no fool, and he knew better far than Kay herself the gulf between them. At first it is possible that his vanity was pleased, his chivalry aroused, but later on there is no doubt that she began to make a'much more definite appeal.
"What about this fellow you're in love with?" he demanded once. He did not say "feller" any more. "What's he like?"
"I didn't say I was in love at all."
"Are you engaged to him?"
"No."
"Then there is somebody! I hope he gets lumps in his gizzard and chokes to death!"
It was when she looked at him quickly and then glanced away that he had his first inkling of the truth. It confounded him. He brooded over it, tried to laugh it off to himself, but a thousand and one little things began to bear it out. There was a button off his old leather coat one day, and she coaxed it from him and sewed it on. It was the first button she had ever sewed on in all her life, but he did not know that.
To do him justice, while the idea appealed to his vanity, even inflamed him, it gave him no particular pleasure. For the first time in his reckless life he gave serious thought to his relationship with a girl and decided to let her alone. One morning she went to the barn, to find the chestnut gelding ready and Bill saddling his own top horse. She looked around but Tom was not in sight.
"Isn't Mr. McNair coming?"
"Well, no," said Bill. "Tom's gone up to the Reservation for a few days asarep. Saunders has started to round up."
She said nothing, rode dutifully with Bill, dutifully admired a small herd of yearlings, might have been sitting at home for all she saw, and came back with a headache which she blamed on the blazing August sun. It lasted for four days, that headache, which was the exact period of Tom's absence. And it deceived her father and her mother, but it never fooled Herbert.
"Care to ride with me tonight, Kay?"
"I think not, if you don't mind. I don't feel very well."
Or perhaps she would weary of excuses and go with him, only to be very quiet and silent, and not really brighten until they neared the ranch again.
It was a bad time for Herbert, that four days. The books were in fair order by that time, even if the results were worse than Henry Dowling had anticipated. Herbert had more time to himself, and found to his dismay that time was all he did have; that Kay had slipped away into some world of dreams and enchantment where he could not follow her. He would, if he could, have snatched her away from it, have ordered the Mariposa, sitting in the broiling heat on its side-track at Ursula, onto the road again. Or have sent McNair away, to drift South or to hell itself, so far as Herbert was concerned. But as the days went on, and Tom came back, and still no mention of departure was made, he began to despair.
The truth is that Henry Dowling was enjoying himself after his own heavy fashion. He had swallowed his loss, and the resulting mental dyspepsia was not as bad as he had expected; and after all he need not keep the ranch. He could sell it. The Potters had even made him a proposition. His mind, freed of the ranch books, had uncoiled like a spring. He slept late, ate hugely, even began to ride a little. There was not a saddle on the ranch big enough for him, so he sent to town for one, picked out a big quiet mare that could carry him, and with Herbert along to open gates and close them again, would amble about the fields so that he could again sleep late and eat hugely.
It was harvest time. The second crop of alfalfa was in blossom and thick with purple blooms, and when the wind struck the rye it bent before it like waves of a yellow surf. Already the oats and wheat were dead ripe and golden in the sun, Jake watched these experiments of his with anxious eyes. Thank God it was not a grasshopper year, but there was still hail to be feared for the standing crops and rain after they were cut. Sometimes he even rode the mower himself, driving four horses abreast, and stopping now and then by the wagon for a drink of tepid water from the jug there.
He knew that Henry Dowling had no faith in his farming plans, and that he was thinking of selling, but he never told his wife. If the Potters bought he would have to go. Sitting there on the old reaper, his thin hard-bitten body lurching over the rough ground, he mutely prayed—for a good crop, for a decent cattle market, for no hail or rain; and cursed the horses out of pure habit as he did so.
When the old separator had lurched and jolted into the wheat fields, he watched the stream of grain as if it had been gold, and when one day Henry drew up by it and watched it, he was almost pitiable in his excitement.
"Thirty-five bushels to the acre, if there's one!" he said.
Henry however was watching the men feeding the machine. It looked like good exercise; it ought to give a man an appetite. He slid down off his horse and picked up a fork.
"Think I'll do my daily dozen," he said, almost gayly.
It was hard work, much harder than he had expected, but after that every day he came down to the fields and got in the way, and listened because he had to to Jake's hopes and boastings.
"Now look at that wheat," Jake would say, "if that doesn't grade A. one, I don't know what—will."
Henry would labor on, not paying any particular attention, pouring sweat and breathing in great gasps, and finally he would throw down the fork and join Herbert, who did not want an appetite—or anything else very much those days—in the shade behind the straw stack.
"Do you good, young man, to use your muscles."
"I get all I need on a horse," Herbert would say, and resume his endless questioning of a sky that offered him a sun-stroke, but no answer.
Then Henry would light a cigar and perhaps drop asleep. Once or twice he almost fired the straw stack.
Yes, Henry was certainly enjoying himself. He could put a hand inside the waist-band of his trousers, a thing he had not done for fifteen years, and if any one had told him that these were indeed his golden days, never to be repeated, he would have laughed at them. He had even ceased to dress for dinner, a rite which he had maintained was a matter of self-respect, although Bessie had always said that what he meant was respect for his dinner. In the late afternoons, slightly sun-burned and more than a little stiff, he would mix a moderate highball for Herbert and a stronger one for himself, and listen for the dinner gong. And at nine-thirty he would put down his book or the Ursula paper and rise, yawning.
"Good night, Katherine."
"Good night, Henry. Don't forget to open your window."
They had not shared the same room for years.
Herbert did not dare to pierce the wall of solid contentment with which Henry had surrounded himself. Nor was Katherine more accessible. She went through her days, neat, subservient, reserved; made her shy calls, gathered a few flowers for her tea table, entertained her visitors, and looked rather yearningly, when she was alone, at the mountains. Old Dunham had advised her not to ride.
She never tired of the mountains, where little narrow trails wound up and over into the sunset, and sometimes she thought of old Lucius, who had ridden this country so long ago and now was only an unspeakable thing under the ugly shaft. She found a couplet in a book one evening, faintly marked in pencil, and as the book was poetry and was wedged between a treatise on anthrax and a report on pedigreed Hereford cattle, she rather suspected a feminine hand in it. The couplet was:
And gray dawn saw his camp fires in the rain."
On an impulse she went outside to show it to Henry, but he was asleep in his chair with his mouth open.
Herbert was quietly but politely desperate. He could not go to either of them and blurt out what he knew. "Kay is crazy about this ranch hand, McNair. For God's sake let's get the car and get away from here." He had to get up politely when Katherine came into the room, and see that Henry had a sufficient supply of cigars, and send telegrams and write well-worded letters. "Yours very truly, Henry Dowling. Per H. F."
Henry could go to sleep, having dutifully opened his window, but Herbert only went to bed. And in the early mornings he would rouse from a tormented sleep to hear Kay on her way to the corral or the barn, even to get up in his silk pajamas, monogrammed just under the pocket—branded, Tom said once, seeing them on the washing line—and from his window watch her quick nervous determined movements, the bright flash of her neckerchief, the half-defiant upturn of her head. Then he would groan and go back to his bed, to lie there sleepless until the rising bell forced him to meet another day.
And so things were the early days of September. Already some of the cattle were moving down from their summer pastures in the mountains. By twos, by eights, by twenties, they worked down the cattle trails. The green pastures up above had dried up in the summer heat, the coyote pups were growing large and hungry for young beef, and so they were coming home. Along with the threshing came the preparations for the autumn round-up. The wagons were being overhauled, a young woman from Judson, a bare little town on the Reservation, had come as cook at the bunk house, to replace Slim who was to go with the outfit. And Henry began to talk of staying on for the shipping.
Then one day, and quite by accident, Herbert overheard something which cheered him considerably, which even gave him in a small way a weapon to his hand.
Henry was asleep in the shade of the straw stack and Herbert, who had tired of asking the sky questions and getting nothing but a sun burn in reply, had closed his eyes and was apparently so. Thus he caught a bit of conversation over the roar and rattle of the thresher.
"She's sure sore on him. I seen her in town, Sunday."
"She oughta know Tom by this time."
"That's what I told her, but she seemed to feel right bad."
"How'd she hear it?"
"Nellie, I guess. That kid sure doesn't miss anything."
Herbert lay still, hat over his eyes, and pondered. So Tom had had a girl, a town girl, and even she knew about Kay. The whole gossiping town knew, probably, the county, the state. And Kay was going on in her headstrong way, not knowing or not caring, and her people were both blind and complacent. But what could he do? He had his own code, had Herbert, and this code would have permitted him to warn Henry had his own interest not been involved. But to run whining to her father, that Kay was slipping away from him and into the hands of another man, never.
He looked at Henry, whose head was lolling against the straw stack. Under his unbuttoned waistcoat his figure suggested that he had swallowed one melon, whole, and between his parted lips Herbert could see gleaming a portion of the gold work which kept in place that piece of dental engineering which Henry called his "bridge." It came to Herbert with sickening force that life did these things to men, his kind anyhow. Youth and love slipped away, and after that food counted, and a soft bed and good cigars, but romance no longer lurked around the next corner, and perhaps after a time they did not care.
He hoped so, anyhow.
The point is, however, that he decided to say nothing and probably would have kept to his decision had not one or two things occurred which rather forced his hand.
One was that Kay deliberately refused to ride with him that evening, and went out with Tom instead. And the other was that Herbert, when she came in later on with her cheeks flushed and her eyes like stars, felt impelled to take a long walk before bed and thus happened on something he was not meant to see.
Had he known it, it was not such a great matter that had sent Kay home in such excitement. Her relations with Tom were still largely impersonal on those rides of theirs. He still had himself well in hand. He would stop on top of a knoll and gaze at the mountains, outlined against the setting sun.
"You ever been across? To Europe, I mean?"
"Yes. Why?"
"Well, I'll bet there's nothing prettier than that over there."
But there were times on those rides together when he seemed to forget her, to be absorbed in a nature he worshiped inarticulately, or again to be concerned with that mysterious man-life of his which he never shared with any one. She was miserably jealous then. But again he talked of his people. His father had come up from the South during the gold rush into the Black Hills, but had found no gold. And the end of free land killed him, finally.
"He'd always been used to moving," he said. "He was kind of restless, and finally there weren't any more places to go. The very sight of wire made him feel crowded. He always thought there would be a chance over the next hill, provided it lay West."
Kay nodded. She knew nothing about free land, or the sudden shutting off that took place at the beginning of the new century. But because it was Tom's father she felt vaguely sad.
"Why, say," he drawled on, "if he'd lived to have to take out a license to go hunting, he'd have had a fit. He'd shot his own meat for twenty years. He believed in free land and free silver—and he got six feet of one and none of the other."
Only once did he mention his mother. She gathered that, in his queer way, he was afraid of showing feeling.
"She was sure a good woman," he told her. "She stuck by, when her folks back home were trying to rope her back every way they knew." He hesitated. "She got her comfort out of religion," he added.
"Don't you believe in God, Tom?"
"I'll believe in Santa Claus if you say so," he said, and smiled at her. But he added, seeing that she expected him to: "When I'm in a fix I do. Once or twice it's seemed like He was the only one who could get me out. And I'm still here."
He had enlarged on that, seeing that she had rather liked it, and even blinded as she was she perceived that in the adventures he related it was he and not God who received the major portion of the credit.
But he did believe in God. He had admitted it. It somehow justified her own belief in him.
Only by the sheerest accident did she discover that he had gone to France during the war. He had volunteered "for a change," he told her, and the exploit of which he was apparently most proud had been the stealing of a mule for some nefarious purpose of his own. But like his belief in a God who got one out of tight places, this too served to solidify the pedestal on which she was placing him. He had been a soldier.
"Did you get any fighting?"
"Fired a gun now and then."
She was not fooled.
Attracted he might be. Was, indeed. She had burst on his drab life, the exotic product of a civilization he hardly knew. He was as curious about her as he was interested. But that even in a small degree he reciprocated the devouring infatuation she felt she had no reason to believe.
And then, on the night in question, she began to wonder.
They had traveled along a narrow trail over the foot hills, and at last they could see down in the valley the lights of Ursula. Tom gazed at them thoughtfully, then suddenly laughed. She glanced at him.
"I was thinking about the night you folks came here. I sure was sore."
"What about?"
"I'd had some plans of my own," he said, eying her.
"What were you going to do?"
"Oh, I don't know. Play around some." And with a certain malice: "Maybe see a girl. You never can tell."
A burst of sudden and primitive jealousy sent the blood away from her face. Her lips stiffened.
"Was it a girl you were thinking of just now?"
"You'd like to know, wouldn't you!"
But she had herself in hand by that time.
"Not necessarily. You have your own life to live, as—I have mine."
She was not prepared for his answer, however, or for the steady direct gaze which accompanied it.
"Yes," he said. "That's the hell of it."
He turned his horse abruptly and started back, and their talk thereafter was of unimportant matters. But she knew, and knew that he knew, that the relationship between them had definitely changed with that declaration of his. And later in the evening Herbert knew it too, and took his walk so that he might be too tired to lie awake and think.
Kay had gone upstairs when he started, and Henry was about to follow her, yawning.
"Good night, Katherine."
"Good night, Henry. Be sure to raise your window."
Herbert picked up a cap and went out. Was that all it came to in the end? All this agony of spirit, and then perhaps—only perhaps—a brief interval of happiness and consummation, and after that nothing but habit and association? It could not be, it must not be. He straightened his young shoulders and started down the lane.
There was a full moon. When he reached the cottonwoods he turned around, and he was certain he saw Kay at her window. Over at the bunk house some one was indolently twanging a banjo, and in one of the cattle yards a cow was calling, a persistent melancholy sound. All at once he hated the place. He wanted the cheerful lights and sounds of the city, the roar of cars, the clanging of tram-bells. He wanted his own comfortable apartment, and to dress and dine out, with Kay next to him and the orderly service of the meal going on:
"Champagne or whisky and soda, sir?"
He went a long way that evening in the moonlight, clear across the alfalfa and the wheat stubble to the main road. A stray bull with a white face eyed him indifferently; a skunk watched him warily from the bank of a ditch; but he trudged on, busy with his thoughts.
Out on the road he turned back toward the main gate, to be overtaken by a ramshackle Ford, driven by a girl, a rather pretty girl, he thought. She glanced at him and glanced away without interest, and at the main gate she turned in.
He forgot her at once, until some time later he came across the Ford, parked out of sight of the ranch house, and saw the gleam of her white dress among the timber by the creek. She was not alone; a man was leaning negligently against a tree, apparently listening to her in silence.
Herbert could hear the shrill half-hysterical quality of her voice, saw the man light a match and probably a cigarette, and realized that some small emotional drama was taking place in the twilight. He went by hastily and without a second glance toward them, but he knew that the man was Tom McNair.