by Zane Grey
Through MacDonald’s courtesy, John was refreshed with a bath and shave, and the dust of desert travel removed from his clothes.
“You may think you’re fussin’ up for a dance, but there ain’t none that I’ve heard of,” said MacDonald. “Or maybe it’s them new young schoolteachers. The one from New York sure is mighty purty.”
“I never was a teacher’s pet,” John returned. “It would be a new experience. I’m half-afraid to try.”
MacDonald laughed and forgot to pry further into his guest’s affairs. “Just lift the latch and walk in when your courtin’s over,” he finished.
The dark leafiness of cottonwoods and poplars shaded the footpath John followed, and he liked this escort of darkness because he felt color beat into his face from the high pulse of his heart. His cold, trembling hands did not seem to belong to him. He thrust them into his pockets out of sight.
“Four houses below Mary’s,” he said to himself.
He had better count down. Still, there was no need of counting. A flare of light burst from all the windows of one house, beacons of welcome. He looked beyond, far down to the white house where Mary lived. It was somewhat like her — white, still, gently present through enveloping shadows. Suddenly he was in a yellow haze of light and his hand irresolutely reached for a gate. Now had come the occasion which unnerved him. But desire was greater than his fear. The gate closed behind him. He was on the walk ... the steps ... in dark silhouette against the light. Before he could knock, Katharine appeared.
The pressure of her hand and a few words quietly spoken were but fleeting incidents. A vision of Mary caught over Katharine’s shoulder stayed his thoughts — Mary, arranging purple asters in a bowl with an unfeigned concentration, and a grace of action which thrilled his hungry heart.
She saw him presently. Perhaps it was only the glow from the rose shade of the lamp that lit her face. Then she smiled.
He had crossed the threshold. He had her slim white hand in his and she was saying, “Katharine said we were to receive a caller. I never dreamed it would be someone from Black Mesa. You’ve come far.”
“I didn’t feel the miles,” said John, happily. “I left and I arrived. It was that quick.”
“And your work at the post is over for the season, I suppose,” came a voice from a remote corner.
Alice was reclining on a couch, half-lost between high piles of gay-colored Indian cushions.
“All over, Queen Alice,” John replied. “And I am the envoy of a dozen lovesick cowboys come to tell you that their affectionate remembrances precede them here.”
Alice frowned on him haughtily. “Be yourself, Mr. John Curry,” she said. “You sound like a sofa-warmer when you talk like that — not at all like a cowboy. It’s unbecoming.”
With her light words Alice put John at his ease. It was no longer strange to be there. The presence of friends, the revival of pleasant associations gave him confidence. It was Mary who seemed suddenly abashed. Katharine led the conversation to Black Mesa activities and drew Mary into an argument about the use of horses for pack animals, defending, as John knew, something she did not really credit, in order to draw reproach from Mary.
“Burros and burros only should be used,” Mary maintained and thus a flood of conversation grew from small currents of thought, Mary contributing volubly to its content, eyes aglow, cheeks flaming, lithe body giving force to the intent of her words.
What they talked about mattered little to John. He was floating down a river of words only because it carried him along with Mary. Time played havoc with him. It halted in its flight, it seemed, till the ticking of a clock through a brief silence reminded him that some occasions slipped too quickly into the past — that time was relentless and favored happy hours least.
Alice and Katharine served lemonade, and delicious squares of cinnamon-covered toast, and cookies which Katharine said Mary had made.
“Not since Mother’s going has anyone given me things as good as this toast and the cookies,” said John. “I hate having the Black Mesa boys miss anything like this, but I warn you, if you’d feed it to them once, they’d pitch their bed-rolls out back of your house and never go home this winter.”
“I’d cook all day for them,” declared Mary. “I can see them like little boys, with fingers in the cookie tin. They’d never find it empty if they were my family.”
A faint rumble of thunder sounded as Mary spoke, and Alice, who hated electrical storms, looked disturbed.
“We can’t be going to have a real storm at this time of year!” she protested.
“Looked rarin’ much like it this afternoon,” John averred. “I thought it would give sooner or later.”
The leaves of the cottonwoods rustled, a jagged fork of lightning rent the sky, thunder rolled and echoed and rolled. Then plashing drops of rain streaked across the window. They multiplied fast and soon a great wave of rain came sweeping over the mesa, drumming on the housetop with a hurried beat.
“My windows!” Mary ejaculated. “Open! Every one of them! I’ll have to go.”
“Goodness, yes!” said Katharine. “That paper house of yours will float in no time. Mr. Curry, you’ll have to take Mary over. I’ll get an umbrella.”
She was at a little cupboard. Beside the umbrella she tossed out a coat. “Make her wear that, too.”
John helped Mary into the raincoat while Katharine opened the door for them, holding it against the wind which would have flung it wide. The light of one lamp blew out. Alice called from over the other which she was lowering, “Shocking! You’re being sent home. Fine hostess my sister is!”
“Thanks for a great time,” called John. “I’m staying on, and would like to rustle some horses to take you ladies riding some day.”
His voice was lost in a clap of thunder.
Once outside, John, placing himself against the rain, felt Mary leaning slightly against his other side. The rain sang all around them like the rush of surf. The umbrella swung and sagged under the weight of the steady wind. John wanted to turn it to the wind and let it go to roll like tumbleweed down the unobstructed avenue, so he could lift Mary in his arms and run with her to shelter; but he clung stoutly to the slender-handled thing, hating its resistance and likewise his own.
Soon they stood at Mary’s door laughing, shaking off the raindrops, watching, for a moment, the stream that poured off the umbrella tip.
The rain and the wind beat upon them. The wind flung the door from Mary’s hand and drove them forward with it. It took all John’s strength to force it shut. Then he struck a match and Mary lit the lamp.
“If you’ll please close these front windows,” Mary directed. “The curtains are soaked already. I’ll take care of the others.”
She was panting heavily when she returned to him, and dropped to a chair near the door.
“Won’t you please sit down?” she said. “This storm is terrific. You never could make the post now. You’d get drenched. Better wait a while.”
John thought of the times and times when he had ridden all night in the rain. It was unpleasant, and it did mess a fellow’s clothes, and — his last thought conscientiously accepted as the vital one — he did not want to leave Mary. He blessed the rain. He hoped it would continue and with it her hospitality.
“Thank you. I will sit down a while,” he said.
There was a chair near the table where he stood, a great, comfortable-looking chair with arms spread invitingly. He was about to sit in it when a cry from Mary checked him.
“No! Not there, please! ... Draw up the rocker if you will.”
Her alarmed tone was baffling. Had he committed some social error? If she had wished to sit in the armchair herself, certainly she would not have corrected him that way. Nevertheless, he reddened.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s waiting for someone — that chair,” Mary went on. “I just couldn’t bear seeing you sit in it because—”
She stopped there, her face the color
of the flaming Indian paintbrush. She was radiantly beautiful. She had shed her calm.
Though John was eager to hear her reason, he would not urge her to go on. He said nothing.
“Perhaps — you understand,” she added weakly.
“I’ll not even think about it. I know you are in trouble. I want to help you, Mrs. Newton, in any way you will let me.”
Fluttering eyelids lifted and Mary looked at him again.
“I’m so used to seeing Mr. Newton in that chair that he seems present this minute. Isn’t it ridiculous to think of you as sitting on him had you taken it? Yet that’s how I would have felt. That just came to me now. Perhaps what I say sounds irrational. Does living alone make people queer?”
“I’d advise you not to live alone for long out in this desert country,” John warned her. “Take in some reliable woman to board with you until the Winfield ladies return in the spring.”
“I’d like to. Not that I’m afraid to be alone. Government positions pay so little, and I want to meet certain obligations and later save some money. I’m not getting any younger!”
One could think only of youth in Mary’s presence. The thought burned on John’s tongue, but he did not voice it.
“Take in an Indian girl if you can’t rent. Do it for company’s sake,” he suggested. “I sort of wish you’d promise me to do that because I might be going away some this winter, and I’d be worrying sure. I hate to think of you alone while it’s possible your husband might return. Don’t be hurt by my saying this. Sometimes wife-deserters come back changed — that is, harder than before, especially men who hit a trail for the desert. They often pick up a grievance out there.”
“But Mr. Newton went to Texas. He sent his trunk there,” said Mary.
John felt that Mary was sadly mistaken about her husband’s destination. A flash of lightning and a break of thunder followed after her words angrily. It saved him from remarking on what she had just said. Indeed, her momentary attitude of concentration on something removed from their immediate presence showed that she expected no comment.
“Do you intend to make Taho your headquarters this winter?” she asked presently.
As brief a time as an hour ago John had made that very decision, so with conscience free he said, “I’ve been making plans to do so.”
“And not go to your brother’s ranch in Colorado as you usually do?”
Again a deafening roar! But it could not have been the interrupting clap of thunder that made Mary’s eyes widen with fear. The muscles in John’s mouth tightened. How much she reminded him now of the terror-stricken girl he had rescued from the cliff edge! His blood raced with his thoughts.
“Not go!” he repeated.
“But you must!” she pleaded. Her voice pleaded, her great luminous brown eyes pleaded, and her hands turned outward in her lap, fingers half-curled.
“And why must I go?” asked John, now hopelessly baffled.
“Your — your cattle,” stammered Mary.
He laughed, but he was not amused. Mary was so obviously avoiding the issue.
“The cattle get along without me for eight months. They can stand it once for a full twelve. It’s the mavericks I like to look over. They are the new-borns, you know. They arrive during my absence. They can’t miss me if they’ve never seen me.”
“There’s your brother! He depends upon your coming, I’m sure!”
It was disturbing to have Mary look away, talk at him and not to him. He could not reach the cause of her distress unless she trusted him. Again he tried to treat her evasions lightly.
“On the ranch I’m just another hired man. By staying away I’ll help Colorado’s army of the unemployed.”
“And here in Arizona you plan to help me, you think,” Mary concluded in a low tone.
John waited for her to look at him before he replied. But she continued to stare at her fingers, and she spoke again without lifting her eyes.
“Staying here won’t help me, Mr. Curry. You must go.”
Something stirred in John’s mind, linking this occasion with the predictions Katharine had made. Yet he received her words incredulously. “If my motive were selfish, I wouldn’t be staying on. I swear I wouldn’t.”
She met his eyes at last, and hers burned with a strange light. She seemed to sway toward him. Her breath and voice appeared almost to embrace him.
“You must go, John, because I wanted you to come. I’ve repeated to myself daily a catechism of deceit. ‘I don’t want to see him,’ I would say, and tried to make myself believe it. Before, when you were about to sit in Wilbur’s chair, I cried out. My catechism again — I did not want you there. Truth is, I did want you there, with all my heart, as I have seen you in a dream, crushing Wilbur’s insistent image out of sight.”
She rose, pushing her chair back violently. John watched her move from him. Shock, joy, and a nameless longing emerged through turbulent waves of thought. He felt the fire of her courage entering him. He, too, rose. He strode toward the window. The width of the room was between them. When he turned she stood expectant, her head inclined attentively.
“Thank you for being so frank,” John said. “The truth is best and easiest met. I’ve been wanting to come to you. Ever since one day on the desert when it came to me that you were dearer to me than anyone on earth. You are. If Newton had been the finest fellow in the world I couldn’t change what I feel, and I wouldn’t feel I was hurting him any. It’s no sin to love a woman, whatever her connection, if you have reverence for her and for honor. And for that reason, if Newton were any kind of a worthy chap, I wouldn’t be here now. He didn’t make you happy, and now he’s cut and run. What’s wrong, then, if I want to help you honorably — asking nothing, expecting nothing except the permission to serve?”
“No, not wrong!” Mary shook her head as if to emphasize her denial. “I don’t mean it would be wrong. You’d be honorable and keep it free from scandal. But if I saw you continually, if what I feel strengthens and then Wilbur comes back—”
She finished with a hopeless gesture.
“You’d feel you had willfully put me between you and him,” John supplemented.
“I would know that I had.”
John saw then his own naïveté. Mary was right.
“And if he should never come back — this year, next year, the year following?”
“Then I would know he will never return.”
“And my banishment would end?”
“Banishment!” she echoed in confused haste. “That is an unkind word. It suggests that you have offended me. Believe me that you haven’t! I see you as someone big, splendid, and true, far stronger than I am and almost incapable of wrong. I was not suggesting that you go out of my life altogether. I wouldn’t want that. I want you to go on with your own life as you would have before this crisis came into mine. Go to Colorado. That is what you originally planned. When you return to the reservation, if you come through Taho, visit me as you would your other friends.”
John grasped at once this less harsh sentence which was being so graciously given. “I’m very likely to come through Taho,” he said. “I can think this minute of a dozen things that make it imperative.”
Mary advanced to the pool of light that spread between them. “You will take us riding before you leave for Colorado?” she asked.
“Gladly. I can’t leave for several days. Have to wait for my pal, High-Lo.”
John suddenly found that he had nothing more to say. So much that boiled in his mind was inhibited by the obligation Mary had imposed upon him. Moreover, he was conscious now that they were alone in her house, that the hour was late, that a storm, completely forgotten, still raged outside. And Mary, manifestly, had gone adrift in her thoughts and could not reach him again. He knew he must go, and ventured to remark upon it.
“It’s still raining,” Mary replied.
That was the thing for her to say under the circumstances. It sounded too conventional, and she seemed ashamed of the
implied insincerity for she quickly added, “Still, you must go — if only because I must not want you to stay.”
So he left, his hand warmed by the touch of hers. He resisted her insistence that he take Katharine’s umbrella. He forgot about the discomfort of soaked clothing. He wanted the feel of rain in his face. Snug in the depth of his pocket his right hand retained its gift. The outside world was dark. The rain stung him. Clouds still emitted lightning. Thunder reverberated through the blackness which closed with a rush on each flash of illumination. Halfway to the post he cut through an alfalfa field toward the open desert. The naked wasteland, vast, imperturbable, ignored the elements that flayed it.
* * * * *
The riding excursion materialized as John promised it would, and he had Mary’s smiles again. As they rode he watched Katharine’s furtive glances at every mention of Colorado. When the day ended and Mary said, “I’ll look for your return in the spring,” he accepted his dismissal quietly. He would not see her again until spring, unless they met by chance during the day or two that he remained in Taho. He was pressed by restlessness to put out for Colorado at once, but High-Lo had not returned.
That evening he called on Katharine. Alice, weary from the afternoon’s strenuous ride, had retired early, a circumstance which John found favorable. He had come to talk about Mary. Katharine accepted his news tolerantly.
“We must try to believe that Mary’s judgment is best,” she advised him. “I’ve changed my opinions a bit. I’m afraid of Wilbur Newton. He gets white-mad and white-mean and unreasonable about nothing. And if we’re wrong about his carrying on further with Hanley, and he should return, he’d act the offended one and he’d make her pay. For the present it may be well for you to disappear. What Mary plans for herself six months from now, a slacker husband will have little right to question.”
“Your talking like that makes me stand going some better than I thought I would,” John confessed. “Yet I do get skeerish when I think you’ll be leaving soon. But I know how it is. Alice is your first consideration.”