“Senor,” ventured Parker slowly, “this event sure knocks me hell-west and crooked. If the loco you have culled hasn’t paralysed your speaking parts, would you mind telling me what in the name of heaven, hell, and high-water is up?”
“I am going to get married,” announced the Senor calmly.
“What!” shouted Parker; “who to?”
“To a lady,” replied the Senor, “an intelligent and refined lady—of pleasing appearance.”
CHAPTER FOUR
DREAMS
Although the paper was a year old, Senor Johnson in due time received an answer from Kansas. A correspondence ensued. Senor Johnson enshrined above the big fireplace the photograph of a woman. Before this he used to stand for hours at a time slowly constructing in his mind what he had hitherto lacked—an ideal of woman and of home. This ideal he used sometimes to express to himself and to the ironical Jed.
“It must sure be nice to have a little woman waitin’ for you when you come in off’n the desert.”
Or: “Now, a woman would have them windows just blooming with flowers and white curtains and such truck.”
Or: “I bet that Sang would get a wiggle on him with his little old cleaning duds if he had a woman ahold of his jerk line.”
Slowly he reconstructed his life, the life of the ranch, in terms of this hypothesised feminine influence. Then matters came to an understanding, Senor Johnson had sent his own portrait. Estrella Sands wrote back that she adored big black beards, but she was afraid of him, he had such a fascinating bad eye: no woman could resist him. Senor Johnson at once took things for granted, sent on to Kansas a preposterous sum of “expense” money and a railroad ticket, and raided Goodrich’s store at Willets, a hundred miles away, for all manner of gaudy carpets, silverware, fancy lamps, works of art, pianos, linen, and gimcracks for the adornment of the ranch house. Furthermore, he offered wages more than equal to a hundred miles of desert to a young Irish girl, named Susie O’Toole, to come out as housekeeper, decorator, boss of Sang and another Chinaman, and companion to Mrs. Johnson when she should arrive.
Furthermore, he laid off from the range work Brent Palmer, the most skilful man with horses, and set him to “gentling” a beautiful little sorrel. A sidesaddle had arrived from El Paso. It was “centre fire,” which is to say it had but the single horsehair cinch, broad, tasselled, very genteel in its suggestion of pleasure use only. Brent could be seen at all times of day, cantering here and there on the sorrel, a blanket tied around his waist to simulate the long riding skirt. He carried also a sulky and evil gleam in his eye, warning against undue levity.
Jed Parker watched these various proceedings sardonically.
Once, the baby light of innocence blue in his eye, he inquired if he would be required to dress for dinner.
“If so,” he went on, “I’ll have my man brush up my low-necked clothes.”
But Senor Johnson refused to be baited.
“Go on, Jed,” said he; “you know you ain’t got clothes enough to dust a fiddle.”
The Senor was happy these days. He showed it by an unwonted joviality of spirit, by a slight but evident unbending of his Spanish dignity. No longer did the splendour of the desert fill him with a vague yearning and uneasiness. He looked upon it confidently, noting its various phases with care, rejoicing in each new development of colour and light, of form and illusion, storing them away in his memory so that their recurrence should find him prepared to recognise and explain them. For soon he would have someone by his side with whom to appreciate them. In that sharing he could see the reason for them, the reason for their strange bitter-sweet effects on the human soul.
One evening he leaned on the corral fence, looking toward the Dragoons. The sun had set behind them. Gigantic they loomed against the western light. From their summits, like an aureola, radiated the splendour of the dust-moted air, this evening a deep umber. A faint reflection of it fell across the desert, glorifying the reaches of its nothingness.
“I’ll take her out on an evening like this,” quoth Senor Johnson to himself, “and I’ll make her keep her eyes on the ground till we get right up by Running Bear Knob, and then I’ll let her look up all to once. And she’ll surely enjoy this life. I bet she never saw a steer roped in her life. She can ride with me every day out over the range and I’ll show her the busting and the branding and that band of antelope over by the Tall Windmill. I’ll teach her to shoot, too. And we can make little pack trips off in the hills when she gets too hot—up there by Deerskin Meadows ‘mongst the high peaks.”
He mused, turning over in his mind a new picture of his own life, aims, and pursuits as modified by the sympathetic and understanding companionship of a woman. He pictured himself as he must seem to her in his different pursuits. The picturesqueness pleased him. The simple, direct vanity of the man—the wholesome vanity of a straightforward nature—awakened to preen its feathers before the idea of the mate.
The shadows fell. Over the Chiricahuas flared the evening star. The plain, self-luminous with the weird lucence of the arid lands, showed ghostly. Jed Parker, coming out from the lamp-lit adobe, leaned his elbows on the rail in silent company with his chief. He, too, looked abroad. His mind’s eye saw what his body’s eye had always told him were the insistent notes—the alkali, the cactus, the sage, the mesquite, the lava, the choking dust, the blinding beat, the burning thirst. He sighed in the dim half recollection of past days.
“I wonder if she’ll like the country?” he hazarded.
But Senor Johnson turned on him his steady eyes, filled with the great glory of the desert.
“Like the country!” he marvelled slowly. “Of course! Why shouldn’t she?”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ARRIVAL
The Overland drew into Willets, coated from engine to observation with white dust. A porter, in strange contrast of neatness, flung open the vestibule, dropped his little carpeted step, and turned to assist someone. A few idle passengers gazed out on the uninteresting, flat frontier town.
Senor Johnson caught his breath in amazement. “God! Ain’t she just like her picture!” he exclaimed. He seemed to find this astonishing.
For a moment he did not step forward to claim her, so she stood looking about her uncertainly, her leather suit-case at her feet.
She was indeed like the photograph. The same full-curved, compact little figure, the same round face, the same cupid’s bow mouth, the same appealing, large eyes, the same haze of doll’s hair. In a moment she caught sight of Senor Johnson and took two steps toward him, then stopped. The Senor at once came forward.
“You’re Mr. Johnson, ain’t you?” she inquired, thrusting her little pointed chin forward, and so elevating her baby-blue eyes to his.
“Yes, ma’am,” he acknowledged formally. Then, after a moment’s pause: “I hope you’re well.”
“Yes, thank you.”
The station loungers, augmented by all the ranchmen and cowboys in town, were examining her closely. She looked at them in a swift side glance that seemed to gather all their eyes to hers. Then, satisfied that she possessed the universal admiration, she returned the full force of her attention to the man before her.
“Now you give me your trunk checks,” he was saying, “and then we’ll go right over and get married.”
“Oh!” she gasped.
“That’s right, ain’t it?” he demanded.
“Yes, I suppose so,” she agreed faintly.
A little subdued, she followed him to the clergyman’s house, where, in the presence of Goodrich, the storekeeper, and the preacher’s wife, the two were united. Then they mounted the buckboard and drove from town.
Senor Johnson said nothing, because he knew of nothing to say. He drove skilfully and fast through the gathering dusk. It was a hundred miles to the home ranch, and that hundred miles, by means of five relays of horses already arranged for, they would cover by morning. Thus they would avoid the dust and heat and high winds of the day.
The
sweet night fell. The little desert winds laid soft fingers on their checks. Overhead burned the stars, clear, unflickering, like candles. Dimly could be seen the horses, their flanks swinging steadily in the square trot. Ghostly bushes passed them; ghostly rock elevations. Far, in indeterminate distance, lay the outlines of the mountains. Always, they seemed to recede. The plain, all but invisible, the wagon trail quite so, the depths of space—these flung heavy on the soul their weight of mysticism. The woman, until now bolt upright in the buckboard seat, shrank nearer to the man. He felt against his sleeve the delicate contact of her garment and thrilled to the touch. A coyote barked sharply from a neighbouring eminence, then trailed off into the long-drawn, shrill howl of his species.
“What was that?” she asked quickly, in a subdued voice.
“A coyote—one of them little wolves,” he explained.
The horses’ hoofs rang clear on a hardened bit of the alkali crust, then dully as they encountered again the dust of the plain. Vast, vague, mysterious in the silence of night, filled with strange influences breathing through space like damp winds, the desert took them to the heart of her great spaces.
“Buck,” she whispered, a little tremblingly. It was the first time she had spoken his name.
“What is it?” he asked, a new note in his voice.
But for a time she did not reply. Only the contact against his sleeve increased by ever so little.
“Buck,” she repeated, then all in a rush and with a sob, “Oh, I’m afraid.”
Tenderly the man drew her to him. Her head fell against his shoulder and she hid her eyes.
“There, little girl,” he reassured her, his big voice rich and musical. “There’s nothing to get scairt of, I’ll take care of you. What frightens you, honey?”
She nestled close in his arm with a sigh of half relief.
“I don’t know,” she laughed, but still with a tremble in her tones. “It’s all so big and lonesome and strange—and I’m so little.”
“There, little girl,” he repeated.
They drove on and on. At the end of two hours they stopped. Men with lanterns dazzled their eyes. The horses were changed, and so out again into the night where the desert seemed to breathe in deep, mysterious exhalations like a sleeping beast.
Senor Johnson drove his horses masterfully with his one free hand. The road did not exist, except to his trained eyes. They seemed to be swimming out, out, into a vapour of night with the wind of their going steady against their faces.
“Buck,” she murmured, “I’m so tired.”
He tightened his arm around her and she went to sleep, half-waking at the ranches where the relays waited, dozing again as soon as the lanterns dropped behind. And Senor Johnson, alone with his horses and the solemn stars, drove on, ever on, into the desert.
By grey of the early summer dawn they arrived. The girl wakened, descended, smiling uncertainly at Susie O’Toole, blinking somnolently at her surroundings. Susie put her to bed in the little southwest room where hung the shiny Colt’s forty-five in its worn leather “Texas-style” holster. She murmured incoherent thanks and sank again to sleep, overcome by the fatigue of unaccustomed travelling, by the potency of the desert air, by the excitement of anticipation to which her nerves had long been strung.
Senor Johnson did not sleep. He was tough, and used to it. He lit a cigar and rambled about, now reading the newspapers he had brought with him, now prowling softly about the building, now visiting the corrals and outbuildings, once even the thousand-acre pasture where his saddle-horse knew him and came to him to have its forehead rubbed. The dawn broke in good earnest, throwing aside its gauzy draperies of mauve. Sang, the Chinese cook, built his fire. Senor Johnson forbade him to clang the rising bell, and himself roused the cow-punchers. The girl slept on. Senor Johnson tiptoed a dozen times to the bedroom door. Once he ventured to push it open. He looked long within, then shut it softly and tiptoed out into the open, his eyes shining.
“Jed,” he said to his foreman, “you don’t know how it made me feel. To see her lying there so pink and soft and pretty, with her yaller hair all tumbled about and a little smile on her—there in my old bed, with my old gun hanging over her that way—By Heaven, Jed, it made me feel almost HOLY!”
CHAPTER SIX
THE WAGON TIRE
About noon she emerged from the room, fully refreshed and wide awake. She and Susie O’Toole had unpacked at least one of the trunks, and now she stood arrayed in shirtwaist and blue skirt.
At once she stepped into the open air and looked about her with considerable curiosity.
“So this is a real cattle ranch,” was her comment.
Senor Johnson was at her side pressing on her with boyish eagerness the sights of the place. She patted the stag hounds and inspected the garden. Then, confessing herself hungry, she obeyed with alacrity Sang’s call to an early meal. At the table she ate coquettishly, throwing her birdlike side glances at the man opposite.
“I want to see a real cowboy,” she announced, as she pushed her chair back.
“Why, sure!” cried Senor Johnson joyously. “Sang! hi, Sang! Tell Brent Palmer to step in here a minute.”
After an interval the cowboy appeared, mincing in on his high-heeled boots, his silver spurs jingling, the fringe of his chaps impacting softly on the leather. He stood at ease, his broad hat in both hands, his dark, level brows fixed on his chief.
“Shake hands with Mrs. Johnson, Brent. I called you in because she said she wanted to see a real cow-puncher.”
“Oh, BUCK!” cried the woman.
For an instant the cow-puncher’s level brows drew together. Then he caught the woman’s glance fair. He smiled.
“Well, I ain’t much to look at,” he proffered.
“That’s not for you to say, sir,” said Estrella, recovering.
“Brent, here, gentled your pony for you,” exclaimed Senor Johnson.
“Oh,” cried Estrella, “have I a pony? How nice. And it was so good of you, Mr. Brent. Can’t I see him? I want to see him. I want to give him a piece of sugar.” She fumbled in the bowl.
“Sure you can see him. I don’t know as he’ll eat sugar. He ain’t that educated. Think you could teach him to eat sugar, Brent?”
“I reckon,” replied the cowboy.
They went out toward the corral, the cowboy joining them as a matter of course. Estrella demanded explanations as she went along. Their progress was leisurely. The blindfolded pump mule interested her.
“And he goes round and round that way all day without stopping, thinking he’s really getting somewhere!” she marvelled. “I think that’s a shame! Poor old fellow, to get fooled that way!”
“It is some foolish,” said Brent Palmer, “but he ain’t any worse off than a cow-pony that hikes out twenty mile and then twenty back.”
“No, I suppose not,” admitted Estrella.
“And we got to have water, you know,” added Senor Johnson.
Brent rode up the sorrel bareback. The pretty animal, gentle as a kitten, nevertheless planted his forefeet strongly and snorted at Estrella.
“I reckon he ain’t used to the sight of a woman,” proffered the Senor, disappointed. “He’ll get used to you. Go up to him soft-like and rub him between the eyes.”’
Estrella approached, but the pony jerked back his head with every symptom of distrust. She forgot the sugar she had intended to offer him.
“He’s a perfect beauty,” she said at last, “but, my! I’d never dare ride him. I’m awful scairt of horses.”
“Oh, he’ll come around all right,” assured Brent easily. “I’ll fix him.”
“Oh, Mr. Brent,” she exclaimed, “don’t think I don’t appreciate what you’ve done. I’m sure he’s really just as gentle as he can be. It’s only that I’m foolish.”
“I’ll fix him,” repeated Brent.
The two men conducted her here and there, showing her the various institutions of the place. A man bent near the shed nailing a shoe to a
horse’s hoof.
“So you even have a blacksmith!” said Estrella. Her guides laughed amusedly.
“Tommy, come here!” called the Senor.
The horseshoer straightened up and approached. He was a lithe, curly-haired young boy, with a reckless, humorous eye and a smooth face, now red from bending over.
“Tommy, shake hands with Mrs. Johnson,” said the Senor. “Mrs. Johnson wants to know if you’re the blacksmith.” He exploded in laughter.
“Oh, BUCK!” cried Estrella again.
“No, ma’am,” answered the boy directly; “I’m just tacking a shoe on Danger, here. We all does our own blacksmithing.”
His roving eye examined her countenance respectfully, but with admiration. She caught the admiration and returned it, covertly but unmistakably, pleased that her charms were appreciated.
They continued their rounds. The sun was very hot and the dust deep. A woman would have known that these things distressed Estrella. She picked her way through the debris; she dropped her head from the burning; she felt her delicate garments moistening with perspiration, her hair dampening; the dust sifted up through the air. Over in the large corral a bronco buster, assisted by two of the cowboys, was engaged in roping and throwing some wild mustangs. The sight was wonderful, but here the dust billowed in clouds.
“I’m getting a little hot and tired,” she confessed at last. “I think I’ll go to the house.”
But near the shed she stopped again, interested in spite of herself by a bit of repairing Tommy had under way. The tire of a wagon wheel had been destroyed. Tommy was mending it. On the ground lay a fresh cowhide. From this Tommy was cutting a wide strip. As she watched he measured the strip around the circumference of the wheel.
“He isn’t going to make a tire of that!” she exclaimed, incredulously.
“Sure,” replied Senor Johnson.
“Will it wear?”
“It’ll wear for a month or so, till we can get another from town.”
Arizona Nights Page 17