The Fighting Shepherdess

by Lockhart, Caroline

  He stood for a moment uncertainly, fighting for his self-control, then, casting off restraint, he threw his arms about her, crying passionately:

  “I love you! I love you, Katie! There’s nobody like you in the whole world. Kiss me—Sweet!”

  She drew back startled, looking into his eyes. Her own seemed to melt under what she saw there, and she slowly lifted her lips. When she could speak—

  “You’ll love me for always, Hughie?”

  “For always,” huskily. “For ever and ever, Katie.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER VI

  THE WOLF SCRATCHES

  Mormon Joe had underestimated Jasper Toomey’s capacity for extravagance and mismanagement when he had given him five years to “go broke” in, as he had accomplished it in four most effectively—so completely, in fact, that they had moved into town with only enough furniture to furnish a small house, which they spoke of as having “rented,” though as yet the owner had had nothing but promises to compensate him for their occupancy.

  It was close to a year after their advent in Prouty that Mrs. Toomey awakened in the small hours, listened a moment, then prodded her husband sharply:

  “The wind’s coming up, Jap, and I left out my washing.”

  “Never mind—I’ll borrow a saddle horse in the morning and go after it.”

  “Everything will be whipped to ribbons,” she declared plaintively.

  “I’m not going out this time of night to collect laundry; besides, the exercise would make me hungrier.”

  “Are you hungry, Jap?”

  “Hungry! I’ve been lying here thinking of everything I ever left on my plate since I was a baby!”

  Mrs. Toomey sighed deeply.

  “Wouldn’t a fat club sandwich with chicken, lettuce, thin bacon and mayonnaise dressing—”

  “Hush!” Toomey exploded savagely. “If you say that again I’ll dress and go out and rob a hen roost!”

  Mrs. Toomey suggested hopefully:

  “Perhaps if you light the lamp, and smoke, it will take your mind off your stomach.”

  “I surmise that’s all there is on it.” Toomey lighted the lamp on the table beside the bed and looked at the clock on the bureau.

  “Hours yet, my love, before I can gorge myself on a shredded wheat biscuit.”

  Mrs. Toomey braided a wisp of hair to an infinitesimal end and said firmly:

  “Jap, we’ve simply got to do something! Can’t you borrow?”

  “Borrow! I couldn’t throw a rock inside the city limits without hitting some one to whom I owe money. Come again, Old Dear,” mockingly.

  “Wouldn’t Mormon Joe—”

  “I’d starve before I’d ask that sheepherder!” His face darkened to ugliness. “I’m surprised at you—that you haven’t more pride. You know he broke me, shutting me off from water with his leases. I’ve explained all that to you.”

  She was silent; she didn’t have the heart to hit him when he was down, though she had her own opinion as to the cause of his failure.

  Since she did not reply, he went on vindictively:

  “I’ve come to hate the sight of him—his damned insolence. Every time I see him going into his shack over there,” he nodded towards the diagonal corner, “I could burn it.”

  “It’s funny—his building it.”

  “To save hotel bills when he comes to town. Yes,” ironically, “I can see him lending me money.” Mrs. Toomey sat up and cried excitedly:

  “Jap, let’s sell something! There’s that silver punch bowl that your Uncle Jasper gave us for a wedding present, and Aunt Sarah Page’s silver teapot—Mrs. Sudds admires it tremendously.”

  Toomey’s brow cleared instantly.

  “We can do that—I’ll raffle it—the punch bowl—and get a hundred and fifty out of it easily.” He discussed the details enthusiastically, finally blowing out the light and going to sleep as contentedly as though it already had been accomplished.

  But in the darkness Mrs. Toomey cried quietly. Selling tickets for a raffle which was for their personal benefit seemed a kind of genteel begging. She wondered that Jap did not feel as she did about it. And what would Mrs. Pantin think? What Mrs. Abram Pantin thought had come to mean a great deal to Mrs. Toomey.

  The wind had risen to a gale and she thought nervously of fringed napkins and pillow slips—the wind always gave her the “blues” anyway, and now it reminded her of winter, which was close, with its bitter cold—of snow driven across trackless wastes, of gaunt predatory animals, of cattle and horses starving in draws and gulches, and all the other things which winter meant in that barren country. She slept after a time, to find the next morning that the wind still howled and the fringe on her laundry was all she had pictured.

  Toomey set forth gaily immediately after breakfast with the punch bowl wrapped in a newspaper, and Mrs. Toomey nerved herself to negotiate for the sale of the teapot to Mrs. Sudds, in the event of his being unsuccessful.

  She watched for his return eagerly, but it was two o’clock before she saw him coming, leaning against the wind and clasping the punch bowl to his bosom. Her heart sank, for his face told her the result without asking.

  Toomey set Uncle Jasper’s wedding gift upon the dining room table with disrespectful violence.

  “You must be crazy to think I could sell that in Prouty! You should have known better!”

  “Didn’t anybody want it, Jap?” Mrs. Toomey asked timidly.

  “Want it?” angrily. “‘Tinhorn’ thought it was some kind of a tony cuspidor, and a round-up cook offered me a dollar and a half for it to set bread sponge in.”

  “Never mind,” soothingly, “I’m sure Mrs. Sudds will take the teapot.”

  “We can’t live all winter on a teapot,” he answered gloomily.

  “But you’re sure to get into something pretty quick now.”

  “When I land, I’ll land big—I’ll land with both feet,” he responded more cheerfully.

  “Of course, you will—I never doubt it.” Mrs. Toomey endeavored to make her tone convincing. “Let’s have tea in the heirloom before we part with it,” she suggested brightly. “It’s never been used that I can remember.”

  “It’s ugly enough to be valuable,” Toomey observed, eyeing the teapot as she took it from the top of the bookcase.

  “Solid, nearly, and came over in the Mayflower,” Mrs. Toomey replied proudly. “We’ll have tea and toast and codfish.”

  “The information is superfluous.” Toomey sniffed the air and made a wry face. “I’d as soon eat billposter’s paste as codfish.”

  “To-night we’ll have steak—thick, like that—” Mrs. Toomey measured with her thumb and finger as she went into the kitchen.

  Toomey eyed the codfish darkly when his wife placed it on the table.

  “Sit down, Jap,” she urged. “The tea will be steeped in just a second. Don’t wait—” A scream completed the sentence.

  Toomey overturned his chair as he rushed to the kitchen. He arrived in time to see the lid of the priceless heirloom disappearing in a puddle of pewter. It seemed to the Toomeys that the Fates had singled them out as special objects for their malevolence.

  The wind continued to blow as though it meant never to stop. It was a wind of which the people of the East who speak awesomely of their own “gales” and “tempest” wot not.

  This wind which had kept Prouty indoors for close to a week came out of a cloudless sky, save for a few innocent looking streaks on the western horizon. It had blown away everything that would move. All the loose papers had sailed through the air to an unknown destination—Nebraska, perhaps—while an endless procession of tumble weed had rolled in the same direction from an apparently inexhaustible supply in the west.

  Housewives who had watched their pile of tin cans move on to the next lot found their satisfaction short-lived, for as quickly they acquired the rubbish that belonged to their neighbor on the other side. Shingles flew off and chimney bricks, and ends of corrugated iron roofing sl
apped and banged as though frantic to be loose. Houses shivered on their foundations, and lesser buildings lay on their sides. Clouds of dust obscured the sun at intervals, and the sharp-edged gravel driven before the gale cut like tiny knives.

  Any daring chicken that ventured from its coop slid away as if it were on skates. Pitchforks were useless, and those who had horses to feed carried the hay in sacks. The caged inhabitants stood at their windows and made caustic comments upon the legs and general contour of such unfortunates as necessity took out, while those pedestrians who would converse, upon catching sight of each other made a dive for the nearest telephone pole. There, clinging by an arm like a shipwrecked sailor to a mast, they ventured to opine that it must be “getting ready for something.” It seemed as though the earth would soon be denuded of its soil, leaving the rocks exposed like a skeleton stripped of its flesh. Yet, day after day, it blew without respite, and the effect of it upon different temperaments was as varied as that of drink.

  No one could seem to remember that the wind had not always blown, or realize that it would sometime stop. No character was strong enough to maintain a perfect equilibrium after three days of it. Logic or philosophy made no more impression upon the mental state than water slipping over a rock. It set the nerves on edge. Irritation, restlessness and discontent were as uncontrollable as great fear. Two wildcats tied together were not more incompatible than husbands and wives, who under normal conditions lived together happily. Doting mothers became shrews; fond fathers, brutes, lambasting their offspring on the smallest pretext; while seven was too conservative an estimate to place upon the devils of which the children who turned the house into Bedlam seemed to be possessed.

  Optimists grew green with melancholia, pessimists considered suicide as an escape from the futility of life, neighbors resurrected buried hatchets. Friends found fault with friends. Enemies vowed to kill each other as soon as the wind let up.

  If the combination of wind and altitude had this effect upon phlegmatic temperaments, something of Mrs. Toomey’s state may be surmised. With nerves already overwrought this prolonged windstorm put her in a condition in which, as she declared hysterically to her husband, she was “ready to fly.”

  Lying on his back on the one-time handsome sofa, where he spent many of his waking hours, Toomey responded, grimly:

  “I’m getting so light on that breakfast-food diet that we’ll both fly if I don’t make a ‘touch’ pretty quick. I’m 'most afraid to go out in a high wind without running a little shot in the bottoms of my trousers.”

  Mrs. Toomey, who was standing at the dining room table laying a section of a newspaper pattern upon a piece of serge, felt an uncontrollable desire to weep. Furthermore, the conviction seized her that, turn and twist the pattern as she might, she was not going to have material enough unless she pieced.

  Her lids turned pink and her eyes filled up.

  “Isn’t it awful, Jap, to think of us being like this?”

  “You make me think of a rabbit when you sniffle like that. Can’t you cry without wiggling your nose?”

  Mrs. Toomey’s quavering voice rose to the upper register:

  “Do you suppose I care how I look when I feel like this?”

  “How do you think I feel,” ferociously, “with my stomach slumping in so I can hardly straighten up?” He raised a long arm and shook a fist as though in defiance of the Fate that had brought him to this. “I’d sell my soul for a ham! I’m going to Scales and put up a talk.”

  Toomey found his hat and coat. “Don’t cut your throat with the scissors while I’m gone, Little Sunbeam, and I’ll be back with food pretty quick—unless I blow off.”

  He spoke with such confidence that Mrs. Toomey looked at him hopefully. When he opened the door the furious gust that shook the house and darkened the room with a cloud of dust seemed to suck him into a vortex. Mrs. Toomey watched him round the corner with a sense of relief. Now that she was alone she could cry comfortably and look as ugly as she liked, so the tears flowed copiously as she stood at the table puzzling over the pattern and cloth. They flowed afresh when she proved beyond the question of a doubt that she would have to piece the under-arm sleeve. Simultaneously she wondered if she could do it so skilfully that Mrs. Abram Pantin would not see the piece. Then she frowned in vexation at the realization that it was becoming second nature to wonder what Prissy Pantin would think. Was it possible that there had been a time when she had debated as to whether she wanted to know Mrs. Abram Pantin at all?

  When she had married Jap she had thought she was done forever with the miserable poverty and hateful economies that are the lot of the family of a small-town minister; that after years of suppression of opinions and tastes in order not to evoke criticism or give offense, she at last was in a position to assert herself.

  And now after a taste of freedom, of power and opulence, here she was back in practically the same position and rapidly developing the same mental attitude towards those more affluent and, therefore, more socially important than herself. Mrs. Toomey’s thoughts were much the color of the serge into which she slashed.

  Finally, after a glance at the clock, she walked to the window to look for her husband. He was not in sight. As she lingered her glance fell on Mormon Joe’s tar-paper shack that set in the middle of the lot on the diagonal corner from their house, and she told herself bitterly that even that drunken renegade, that social pariah, had enough to eat.

  Her face brightened as Toomey turned the corner and promptly lengthened when she saw that he was empty-handed and walking with the exaggerated swagger which she was coming to recognize as a sign of failure.

  A glimpse of his face as he came in, banged the door, and flung off his hat and coat made her hesitate to speak.

  “Well?” he glared at her. “Why don’t you say something?”

  “What is there to say, Jap?” meekly. “I see he refused you.”

  “Refused me? He insulted me!”

  Mrs. Toomey looked hurt.

  “What did he say, Jap?”

  “He offered me fifteen dollars a week to clerk.”

  Toomey resented fiercely the pleased and hopeful expression on his wife’s face, and added:

  “I suppose you’d like to see me cutting calico and fishing salt pork out of the brine?”

  She ventured timidly:

  “I thought you might take it until something worth while turned up.”

  “Maybe,” he sneered, “I could get a job swamping in ‘Tinhorn’s’ place—washing fly specks off the windows and sweeping out.”

  “Of course, you’re right, Jap,” conciliatingly, but she sighed unconsciously as she went back to her work.

  Toomey paced the floor for a time, then sank into his usual place on the sofa. Mrs. Toomey permitted herself to observe sarcastically:

  “It’s a wonder to me you don’t get bed sores—the amount of time you spend on the flat of your back.”

  “What do you mean by that?” suspiciously. “Do you mean I’m lazy because I didn’t take that job?”

  Since she made no denial, conversation ceased, and the silence was broken only by the sound of her scissors upon the table and the howling of the gale.

  He smoked cigarette after cigarette in gloomy thought, finally getting up and going to a closet off the kitchen.

  “What are you looking for, Jap?” she called as she heard him rummaging.

  He did not reply, but evidently found what he sought for he came out presently carrying a shotgun.

  “Are you going to try and raffle that?”

  Still he did not deign to answer, but preserved his injured air, and getting once more into his hat and coat started off with the martyred manner of a man who has been driven from home.

  Mrs. Toomey finally threw down her scissors with a gesture of despair. She was too nervous to do any more. The wind, her anxious thoughts, the exacting task of cutting a suit from an inadequate amount of cloth, was a combination that proved to be too much. She glanced at the clo
ck on the bookcase—only three o’clock! Actually there seemed forty-eight hours in days like this. She stood uncertainly for a moment, then determination settled on her tense worried face. Why put it off any longer? It must be done sooner or later—she was sure of that. Besides, nothing ever was as hard as one anticipates. This was a cheering thought, and the lines in Mrs. Toomey’s forehead smoothed out as she stood before the mirror buttoning her coat and tying a veil over her head.

  It took no small amount of physical courage for a person of Mrs. Toomey’s frailty to face such a gale. But with her thin lips in a determined line and her gaze straight ahead, she managed, by tacking judiciously and stopping at intervals to clasp a telephone pole while she recovered her breath, to reach the iron fence imported from Omaha which gave such a look of exclusiveness to the Pantins’ residence.

  Mr. Pantin thought he heard the gate slam and peered out through the dead wild-cucumber vines which framed the bow window to see Mrs. Toomey coming up the only cement walk in Prouty. He immediately thrust his stockinged feet back in his comfortable Romeos preparatory to opening the door, but before he got up he stooped and looked again, searchingly. Mr. Pantin was endowed with a gift that was like a sixth sense, which enabled him to detect a borrower as far as his excellent eyesight could see one. This intuition, combined with experience, had been developed to the point of uncanniness. No borrower, however adroit, could hope to conceal from Mr. Pantin for a single instant the real purpose of his call by irrelevant talk and solicitous inquiries about his health. In the present instance it did not require great acumen to guess that something urgent had brought Mrs. Toomey out on a day like this, nor any particular keenness to detect the signs of agitation which Mr. Pantin noted in his swift glance. She was coming to borrow—he was as sure of that as though she already had asked, and if any further confirmation were needed, her unnatural gayety when he admitted her and the shortness of her breath finished that.

  It availed Mrs. Toomey nothing to tell herself that Mrs. Pantin was her best friend, and that what she was asking was merely a matter of business—the sort of thing that Mr. Pantin was doing every day. Her heart beat ridiculously and she was rather shocked to hear herself laughing shrilly at Mr. Pantin’s banal inquiry as to whether she had not “nearly blown off.” He added in some haste: