The Westerners

by Stewart Edward White

  XXV

  JACK GRAHAM SPEAKS OUT

  The morning when the hunting party had so unhappily terminated on theslope of Tom Custer, proved to be the turning point in Molly'srelations with the camp.

  The Kid forgave her in two hours, but her troubled conscience would notlet her forgive herself. Therefore she was irritated with the Kid.Therefore her old innocent joyful trips into the hills in his companysuddenly came to an end. That is good psychology; not good sense.

  With the first realization of evil, slight though it was, her moralnature began the inevitable two-sided argument. She was no longernaive, but responsible. As a consequence her old careless, thoughtlessmanner of life completely changed. In the beginning she had come fullof confidence to subdue a camp. Speedily she had discovered that itwas not worth the trouble, and that she infinitely preferred to playout in the open with the winds and sunshine and the diverse influencesof nature. Now a subtle, quite unrealized sense of unworthiness, droveher back to a desire for human sympathy, the personal relation. Thispersonal relation took the outward form of an entanglement withCheyenne Harry, complicated by her intellectual admiration of Graham.

  From the first, Cheyenne Harry had possessed for her a certainfascination which had distinguished him from the rest of the men bywhom she was surrounded. It had dated from the evening when he hadkissed her. At the time he had been shown his place swiftly anddecisively enough, but it was a forceful deed, such as women like, andits impression had remained. Besides this, Molly's spirit wasindependent; she respected independence in others; and he, with theexception of Graham, was now the only man in camp who was to someslight extent indifferent. He showed frankly enough, with the rest,that he liked her company and her good opinion; and yet he showed, too,that if her presence and regard were not freely offered as he demandedthem, he could wait, secure in their ultimate possession.

  At first this fascination had been weak and unimportant. Now, however,it rapidly took the ascendancy over everything else. The mere chancethat its influence had been the one first to touch the girl's moralnature counted for much; as did, curiously enough, the fact that, inher relations with Cheyenne Harry, Molly always felt a little guilty.She resented her imperceptible retrogression, and the resentment tookthe reckless form of a desire to go a step further. This was mainlybecause she did not understand herself. She had done nothing wrong, asshe saw it; and yet They had put this heavy uneasy feeling into herheart. Very well! If They, the mysterious unthoughtout They, werebound to make her unhappy without her fault, she would enjoy the sweetsas well as the bitter of it!

  Harry had such a way of forcing her to act against her conscience.

  "But I can't do that!" she would object to some proposition of his."I'd like to. I think it would be great fun. But you know very wellI've promised Dave Kelly to go up with him this afternoon to look athis claim."

  "That doesn't matter," replied Harry cavalierly.

  "But it _does_ matter," she persisted. "I've promised."

  "Oh, shake him. Tell him some yarn. _Do_ something. It isn't everyday I get an afternoon off this way." Though why he did not, it wouldbe difficult to say.

  "I know, but I've _promised_."

  "Oh, very well," said Cheyenne Harry, with cold finality, and began towhistle as if the question were quite disposed of. This did not suitMolly at all.

  "There isn't anything I can do, is there?" she asked after a moment.

  "You know best."

  "Oh, dear, I don't _want_ you to feel like that."

  "Why shouldn't I feel like that?" cried Harry in sudden heat. "Here Ilook forward to a whole afternoon with you, and I'm thrown down justbecause of a kid. I suppose you'd rather trot around with him thanwith me. All right. Go ahead."

  He began to whistle again. He never said what the result would be ifshe did "go ahead," and this very mysterious indifference had itseffect. Molly, genuinely distressed, knit her brows, not knowing whatto do.

  "Now look here!" commanded Harry, after a minute, with great decision;"you go find that Kid, and send him up to Kelly's claim to say youcan't come this afternoon. You can fix it to suit yourself next timeyou see him," and then he would himself find the Kid and despatch him.

  Molly always acquiesced, but with inward misgivings. She must now doher best to conceal from Dave Kelly the real state of affairs; he mustnot by any chance see her with Harry; he must not hear from outsidesources of her afternoon's excursion with that individual. An elementof the clandestine had crept into it. The idea oppressed her, for, inspite of her store of spirits and her independent temper, she was notof a combative nature when she felt herself at all in the wrong. Thenecessity saddened her, brought to her that guilty feeling againstwhich she so sullenly rebelled. She was uneasy during all theafternoon, and yet she was conscious of an added delicious thrill inher relations with Harry--a thrill that first tingled pleasantlythrough all her veins, then struck her heart numb with vagueculpability. In due course, she came to transfer the emotion from thecircumstances to the man. She experienced the same thrill, the samenumb culpability, at the sight of his figure approaching her on thestreet.

  This tendency was emphasized, perhaps, by the fact that their walkstogether--projected so suddenly, undertaken with so strong a feeling ofblame on her part--consisted always of continual skirmishes as towhether or not Cheyenne Harry should kiss her. The interest of theargument was heightened by the fact that the girl wanted him to do so.This he was never allowed for a moment to suspect--in fact, by allmeans in her power she gave him to understand quite the contrary--buthe could not help feeling subtly the subconscious encouragement, and sogrew always the more insistent. She held him off because her instinctshad told her the act would cheapen her. Molly always obeyed herinstincts. They were strong, insistent, not to be denied. They cameto her suddenly with a great conviction of truth, which she neverdreamed of questioning. Among other things they taught her thatwithout love each kiss adds to the woman's regard for the man, buttakes away from his desire for her.

  Cheyenne Harry used all his arts. He tried force only once, for hefound it unsatisfactory and productive of most disagreeable results.Diplomacy and argument in themselves, as eclectics, contained much ofthe joy of debate. The arguments in such cases were always deliciouslyingenuous.

  "Now, what harm is there in my just putting my arm around you?" heurged.

  "There just is, that's all."

  "I'll have it around you when we dance."

  "That's different; there's people about then."

  "It's just a question of people, then?"

  "I s'pose so."

  "Will you let me put my arm around you to-night in the Little Nugget?"

  "Of course not."

  "But there's people there," triumphantly. "Now what's the harm? It'sdifferent with us. Of course you ought not to let anyone else, butwe're different."

  They were sitting near together, and all this time the Westerner's armwas moving inch by inch along the rock behind Molly. As he talked heclasped her waist, gingerly, in order not to alarm. She shivered asshe became conscious of the touch, and for one instant gave herself up.Then she sternly ordered Cheyenne Harry to take his distance. Thelatter tried to temporize by opening an argument. The half-playfulstruggle always ended in Molly's gaining her point, but the victory waslaughing, and so Cheyenne Harry was encouraged to reopen the attack onnew grounds.

  As one of the inevitable results, the emotion which Molly experiencedin at once denying herself and combating Harry was gradually translatedinto a fascinated sort of passion for him. Then, too, since naturallythe interest of these indecisive encounters increased with each, thetwo came to see each other oftener and oftener, until the habit ofcompanionship was well established. This habit is very real. Theapproach of the accustomed hour for meeting causes the heart to beatfaster, the breath to come quicker, the imagination to kindle; whilethe foregoing of a single appointment is a dull loss difficult to bearwith patience. It
counterfeits well many of the symptoms of love, andfor a short time is nearly as burning a passion.

  Sometimes the attack would be more direct. Cheyenne Harry's stock ofsophistry would give out, as well as his stock of patience.

  "Oh, come on, Molly," he would cry, "just one! I've been real good,now haven't I? Oh, come on!"

  "You've been nothing but a great big brute, Mr. Cheyenne Harry!" shecried in a tone that implied he had not.

  Harry advanced a little, holding out his hands, much as one wouldapproach a timid setter dog. She put one finger on her lips, andwatched him, bright-eyed. When he was near enough, she boxed his ears,and twisted her slender young body out of reach, laughing mockingly,and wrinkling her nose at him.

  But then when they had returned to camp, and once more she foundherself alone, the delicious questions always came up; how far did heintend to go? Did he see through such and such a stratagem? Was hereally vexed at such and such a speech, or was he merely feigning? Inwhat manner would he dare accost her when next they met? And soanother meeting became necessary soon--at once. They saw more and moreof each other, to the neglect of many real duties.

  For a time the influence of Jack Graham did something to stem the driftof this affair, but that lasted only until he himself fell in love withher.

  With him her first emotion had been of eager intellectual awakening;her second, that of piqued curiosity; her third, of reactionarydulness. As time went on she came to pass and repass through thosethree phases with ever increased rapidity, until at the last theirconstant reiteration might almost have relegated them to the categoryof whims. She liked to be with him, because he made her aware of newpossibilities in herself. She could not understand him, because hisattitude toward her was never that of the lover. She experiencedmoments of revolt, when she cried out passionately but ineffectuallyagainst an influence which would compel her to elevations rarer thanthe atmosphere of her everyday, easy-going pleasure-taking life.Ineffectually, I say, for something always forced her back.

  Not that Graham ever preached. Preaching would have presentedsomething tangible against which to revolt, something orthodox to becried down. In fact, reformation of Molly Lafond's manners of mind orbody was the farthest from Graham's thought. He merely represented toher a state of being to which she must rise. The rise was slight, butit was real. It meant the difference between thinking in the abstractor in the concrete. It meant that she was compelled to feel that tomen like him, or to women like her, this animal existence, with itsfiner pleasures of riding, climbing, flirting and sitting on bars,while well enough in its way, was after all but a small and incidentalpart of life. If the girl had been requested to formulate it, shewould not have been able to do so. She apprehended it more in itsresult; which was to make her just a little ashamed of her everydaymanner of existence, without, however, furnishing her with a strongenough motive to rise permanently above it. This, in turn, translateditself into a certain impotent mental discomfort.

  As long as Jack Graham preserved the personally indifferent standpoint,the mere fact that he caused her momentary disquiet did not antagonizeMolly Lafond against him. Rather it added a certain piquancy to theirinterviews. He threw out his observations on men and manners lazily,with the true philosopher's delight in rolling a good thing under histongue. None of them possessed an easily fitted personal application.And his utter indifference as to whether she talked or listened, wentor tarried, always secretly pleased her. She liked his way of lookingat her through half-closed lids, in the manner of one examining astrange variety of tree or fern; the utter lack of enthusiasm in thefashion of his greetings when she came, or his farewell when shedeparted; his quite impersonal manner of pointing truths which mightonly too easily have been given a personal application. And this wasthe very reason of it, although again she might not have been able toformulate the idea; that although his methods of thought, his mentalstand-points, his ways of life constantly accused hers of inertia,carelessness and moral turpiture, nevertheless his personallyindifferent attitude toward her relieved them of too direct anapplication. She enjoyed the advantages of a mental cold shower, withthe added satisfaction that no one saw her bedraggled locks.

  But when in time the young man went the way of the rest of the camp andbegan to show a more intimate interest in her, the conditions werequite altered. We may rejoice in anathema against the sins ofhumanity, in which we may acknowledge a share; we always resent beingpersonally blamed.

  Graham indeed went the way of the rest of the camp. His progress fromindifference to love he could not have traced himself, although hemight with tolerable accuracy have indicated the landmarks--a look, agesture, a flash of spirit, revealing by a little more the woman whomhe finally came to idealize. That her's was a rich nature he had earlydiscovered. That it was not inherently a frivolous or vicious nature,he saw only gradually, and after many days. Then his self-disguise ofphilosophic indifference fell. He realized fully that he loved her,not for what she did or said, but for herself; and with the knowledgecame an acuter consciousness that, whatever her possibilities, hertendency was now to pervert rather than develop them. For the firsttime he opened his eyes and examined her environment as well as herself.

  She spent half of her day alone with Cheyenne Harry. The other halfshe was restless. The evening she passed in the Little Nugget saloon,where the men, convinced that she was now the mistress of CheyenneHarry, took even less pains than formerly to restrain the accustomedfreedom of their words and actions. Graham viewed her indifference toall this, and her growing absorption by Cheyenne Harry, with somealarm. He conceived that the state of affairs came about more becauseof a dormant moral nature than because of moral perversity; and as tothis he was partly right. But he could not fail to perceive theinevitable trend of it all, no matter what the permitting motive. Hewould have been less--or more--than human, if he had let it passwithout a protest.

  At first the protest took the form of action. He tried to persuade thegirl to spend the evening in other ways. While the novelty lasted,this was all very well. He epitomized and peptonized his knowledge onall subjects to suit her intellectual digestion. They called it their"lesson time," and he made the mistake of taking it too seriously. Hewas very much in earnest himself, so he thought she should be so. Theytalked of nothing but the matter in hand. After a little, there camean evening when she was a trifle tired. The matter in hand did notinterest her as much as it should. She leaned the back of her headagainst her two clasped hands, and sighed.

  "I'm stupid to-night," she confessed. "Let's talk. Tell me a story."

  Graham was much in love, and so incapable of readjustments. He hadthought out carefully several new and interesting things to say.

  "I thought you said you were really in earnest about this," hereproached her. "If you are going to improve yourself, you must work;and work cannot depend on one's mood."

  All of which was very true, but Jack Graham could not see that thereinheres in truth no imperative demand for its expression.

  But when another night came, her enthusiasm was less marked, for shesaw no escape. After a time she skipped an evening. Then at last shegave it up altogether.

  "I'm afraid I'm not intellectual," she confessed, smiling doubtfully."I told you I'd be a disappointment. It is all interesting and veryimproving, but--well, I don't know--it seems to make us both cross. Iguess we'd better quit."

  Jack Graham seemed to indicate by his manner that he was disappointed.A good deal of his disapproval was because he saw that her renunciationof these "improving" evenings meant not only the loss of theimprovement, but her exposure to worse influences; but of course MollyLafond did not know that. She took the young man's condemnationentirely to herself, and consequently, when in his presence, felt justa little inferior. She concealed the feeling with an extra assumptionof flippancy.

  Because of these things, as time went on, she came to see more and moreof Cheyenne Harry and less and less of Jack Graham. T
he latter's merepresence made her ashamed of her lack of earnest purpose. He, for hispart, viewed with growing uneasiness the augmenting influence of thedashing Westerner; for he knew the man thoroughly, and believed thathis attentions meant no good. In that, at least for the present, hedid him a wrong. Cheyenne Harry merely amused himself with a newexperience--that of entering into relations of intimacy with a womanintrinsically pure. The other sort was not far to seek, should hisfancy turn that way. But to Graham these marked attentions could meanbut one thing.

  His resolve to speak openly was not carried into effect for a number ofdays. Finally, quite unexpectedly, he found his chance.

  Toward evening, as he was returning from a day's exploitation on histhree claims in Teepee, he came across her sitting on a fallen log nearthe lower ford. The shadows of the hills were lying across thelandscape, even out on the brown prairie. A bird or so sang in thethicket. A light wind breathed up the gulch. Altogether it was sopeaceful; and the girl sitting there idly, her hands clasped over herknees, gazing abstractedly into the waters of the brook, was so pensiveand contemplative and sad, that Graham had to spur his resolution hardto induce it to take the leap. But he succeeded in making himselfangry by thinking of Cheyenne Harry.

  She saw him coming and shrank vaguely. She felt herself in some subtleway, which she could not define, quite in the wrong. What wrong shecould not have told. When, however, she saw that plainly his intentionwas to speak to her, she smiled at him brilliantly with no trace ofembarrassment.

  They exchanged the commonplaces of such a meeting.

  "Why are you so solemn?" she broke in finally. "You look as if you'dlost your last friend."

  He looked at her. "That is the way I feel."

  "Oh," said she.

  They fell silent. She did not like at all the gloomy fashion of hisscrutiny. It made her nervous. She felt creeping on her heart thatmysterious heaviness, the weight of something unknowable, which she hadlately been at such pains to forget. She did not like it. With aneffort, she shook it off and laughed.

  "What's the matter?" she cried with forced gayety. "Didn't he sleepwell? Don't he like my looks, or the freckle on my nose, or the way Iwear my cap?"--she tossed the latter rakishly on her curls, and tiltedher head sideways.

  "What is the matter?" she asked with a sudden return to gravity.

  "You are the matter," he answered briefly.

  "Oh dear!" she cried with petulance; "has it come to that?"

  "No, it has not come to that, not what you mean. But it has come tothis: that your conduct has made every true friend of yours feel justas I do."

  She stared at him a moment, gasping.

  "Heavens! you frighten me! What _have_ I done? Come over here on thislog and tell me about it."

  Graham's vehement little speech had vented the more explosive portionof his emotion. Whatever he should say now would be inspired rather byconviction than impulse; and the lover's natural unwillingnessdeliberately to antagonize his mistress made it exceedingly difficultto continue. He hesitated.

  "You _must_ tell me now," she commanded; "I insist. Now, what have Idone?"

  "It isn't so much what you have done," began Graham lamely, "as whatyou might do. You see you are very young, and you don't know theworld; and so you might walk right into something very wrong withoutrealizing in the least what you are doing, and without meaning to dowrong at all. Everybody owes it to himself to make the best out ofhimself, and you must know that you have great possibilities. But itisn't that so much. I wish I knew how to tell you exactly. You oughtto have a mother. But if you'd only let us advise you, because we knowmore about it than you----"

  The girl had watched him with gleaming eyes. "That doesn't _mean_anything," she interrupted. "What is it, now? Out with it!"

  "It's Cheyenne Harry," blurted Graham desperately; "you oughtn't to goaround with him so much."

  "Now we have it," said the girl with dangerous calm; "I'm not to goaround with Harry. Will you tell me why?"

  "Well," replied Graham, floundering this side of the main fact; "itisn't a healthy thing for anybody to see any one person to theexclusion of others."

  "Yourself, for instance," stabbed the girl wickedly. "Go on."

  Graham flushed. "No, it isn't that," he asserted earnestly. "It isn'tfor the benefit of the others that I speak, but because of the effecton yourself. It isn't _healthy_. You are wasting time that might bevery much better employed; you get into an abnormal attitude towardother people; you are laying stress on a _means_ to which there is no_end_, and that is abnormal. I don't know that you understand what Imean; it's philosophy," he concluded, smiling in an attempt to endlightly.

  "No, I do not understand in the least. All I understand is that youobject to my seeing a certain man, without giving any particular reasonfor your objections."

  "It isn't especially elevating for you to sit every evening in a barroom crowded with swearing and drinking men who are not at all of yourclass," suggested Graham. "The language they use ought to teach youthat."

  "They are my people," cried Molly with a sudden flash of indignation,"and they are honest and brave and true-hearted. They do not speak asgrammatically as you or I; but you have been to college, and I havebeen blessed with a chance to read. And whatever language they speak,they do not use it to talk of other people behind their backs!" Shereflected a moment. "But that isn't the question," she went on, with atouch of her native shrewdness. "I understood you to make a request ofme."

  Graham had not so understood himself, but he had a request ready,nevertheless. "That you be a little more careful in the way you goabout with Mortimer, then," he begged.

  "And why?" she asked again.

  "Because--because he means to do you harm!" cried Jack Graham, drivento the point at last.

  She rose from the log. "Ah, that is what I wanted to hear!" shereturned in level tones--"the accusation. You will tell him this tohis face?"

  Graham paused. His anxiety was a tangle of suspicions born of hisknowledge of men, his intuitions, and his fears. Looking at itdispassionately from the outside, what right had he to interfere?Graham was much in love, brave enough to carry through the inevitablerow, and quite willing as far as himself was concerned, to do so; buthe could not fail to see that, however the affair came out, it wouldirretrievably injure the girl's reputation. No one would believe thathe would go to such lengths on suspicion of merely future harm. To thecamp it would mean his proved knowledge of present facts. So hehesitated.

  "You will not, I see," concluded the girl, moving away; "rest easy, Ishall say nothing to Harry about it. I don't know what he would do ifhe heard of it."

  She began to walk toward the ford, every motion expressing contempt.She believed she had proved Graham a coward, and this had rehabilitatedher self-respect. She was no longer ashamed before him. At thewater's brink she turned back.

  "And remember this, Mr. Jack Graham!" she cried, her repressed angersuddenly blazing out; "I may be young, and I may not know much of theworld, but I know enough to take care of myself without any of yourhelp."

  She picked her way across the stepping-stones and disappeared, withoutonce looking back.