The Westerners

by Zane Grey

  “Yeah? Well, it’s marvelous, all right. And I’ll be game. But it’s my finish, Kay.”

  III

  Late in the afternoon of that day Kay sought her mother. She had deliberately refrained from an earlier meeting because she had found, on previous occasions, that the longer her mother waited the more amenable she became. Mrs. Hempstead was a nervous, imperious, high-strung woman, more governed by emotion than by reason. Katherine entered the room with her usual cool poise, and for the first time in her life she omitted to kiss this parent. It was an omission that apparently stung.

  “Well, Missus Henry Watson Hempstead, here I am.”

  “So I observe. It took you a long time. I’ve waited all day.”

  “Now that I’ve gotten here, I’ll make my appeal short and to the point.”

  “Appeal? Oh, Kay! You insulted me last night. . . . You freeze me today. I’m your mother. I’m not an old woman, nor a stone. Have you no feeling?”

  “I am conscious of a great deal of feeling. But how much of it is sympathy with your mad project will appear presently.”

  “Kay, how stunning you look!” exclaimed Mrs. Hempstead, as if impelled against her will. “I never saw you look so wonderful!”

  “Thanks, Mother. You can lay it to this glorious West. I’ve got the desert air in my lungs . . . the sun in my. . . . blood Forgive me, if I fail to return the compliment in any measure. You don’t look so well.”

  Mrs. Hempstead’s pale worn face flushed. She looked all of her forty-eight years. Her make-up failed to hide a pallor of lassitude. She was still handsome, but there was a shadow, a blight of worry and strain on her face.

  Katherine became prey to a suspicion that had not before beset her in her brooding. It rankled. It motivated against the love and pity she still had in goodly measure. Nevertheless, her sense of tolerance and justice, her own outlook on life, rebuked her with the thought that her mother had a right to love. On the moment, but for one single fact, Katherine would have made friends with her mother and have abandoned her resolve to prevent the divorce. If Jimmy Leroyd had not been a ruined man about town, a spendthrift, and a fortune-hunter, Katherine would have surrendered gracefully and have sanctioned the affair. But she knew Leroyd. She sensed here that the intimacy between him and her mother had gone far. Such a thing was as common in her set as conversation over the breakfast table. But coming at last to her own home, it sickened Katherine a little and steeled her nerve.

  “How far have you gone with your divorce proceedings?” queried Katherine abruptly, as she sat down opposite Mrs. Hempstead’s reclining chair.

  “I haven’t engaged my lawyer yet. They ask too much. Twenty-five hundred dollars seems excessive to pay . . . even for desirable freedom.”

  “You can get your divorce for two hundred and fifty,” returned Katherine brusquely. “If you must go through with it, don’t let them rob you. That’s far too much to pay for Jimmy Leroyd.”

  “Don’t be catty, Kay. Let me tell you once for all, I . . . I must go through with it.”

  “Nevertheless, Mother darling, I will have my say, as a dutiful daughter. . . . Father is sorry. He told me he thought you knew . . . that you just wanted an excuse you didn’t need. He would not have opposed your friendship with Leroyd. But to go to extremes . . . to divorce him . . . that cut Father deeply. He cannot see any sense in it. Neither can I.”

  “I want my freedom,” protested Mrs. Hempstead. “I never loved Henry. It was my mother’s match.”

  “Like your obsession to give me to Brelsford,” murmured Katherine. “It’s a fine world to live in . . . if you don’t weaken. Mother, it’s not true that you never cared for Father. I know better than that.”

  “Kay, I . . . I . . . care a great deal for Jimmy Leroyd.”

  “I confess there must be something,” rejoined Katherine with a calculated brutality. “You’re a sentimental old woman.”

  “I am not . . . at least not old,” cried her mother, cruelly hurt.

  “Listen, Mother, before I lose my temper and tell you what you don’t know. Never mind Father. And leave me out of your consideration. But think of Polly. She loves you . . . far more than you deserve. She loves Father, too. It’ll be rotten of you to turn her over to the ranks of children without mothers. Polly is fine, sweet, deep. She has brains and soul. If you do this absurd thing, it will absolutely damn that child . . . wreck her life.”

  “Does she . . . know yet?” asked Mrs. Hempstead in a suffocated voice.

  “No. Father didn’t tell her. But if you persist, I must tell her.”

  “She will get over it,” said the mother, breathing hard.

  “You force me to be brutal,” returned Katherine with cold scorn, as she arose. “I see that you have lost all sense of responsibility. You are conscienceless. Your fortune-hunting gambler has made you lose all sense of proportion and decency, has enmeshed you in a middle-aged love affair that makes you ridiculous.”

  “Say your worst, Kay. You always had a two-edged tongue. But you . . . can’t change me,” whispered Mrs. Hempstead, looking as if she were on the point of collapse.

  “I’ve lost my desire to,” returned Kay bitterly. “Go to hell in your own way. I’ll go in mine.”

  “You’ll . . . what?” cried her mother hoarsely, revived as by a lash on a raw wound.

  “I’ll dispense with a lot of my ideas on the subject of decency. A fine example you give me to marry. My God . . . the idea turns my stomach. Father will take Polly. That leaves me free. The Hempsteads are done. What do I care?” The scorn and bitterness that Kay managed to inject into her voice was not all acting.

  “But my daughter! You have Brelsford. He adores you. He can save your name, at least. For heaven’s sake, don’t let my . . . my affair ruin you.”

  “Victor is probably all any woman might want. But I don’t love him. I won’t marry him.”

  “Oh, Kay! You’ve decided that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Since you came West?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mercy! You’ll be the death of me. Have you forgotten . . . your position . . . your wealth . . . your duty to your class?”

  “Almost, thank God. After all, such things don’t amount to anything in this country out here.”

  “This country! This wilderness of dust and wind? These sordid little towns . . . these crude people? You wouldn’t live here?”

  “Why couldn’t I? I’m sick of that idle deceitful world. I’d love some dust and wind in my face. I have begun to believe these Westerners you call crude are fine, simple, honest, true. True! They work . . . I think I’ll go to the movies.”

  Mrs. Hempstead screamed and sank back almost fainting. Katherine’s random shot seemed to her mother a terrible threat.

  In the hall outside, Katherine encountered Leroyd. He appeared younger, more debonair than when she had met him last, some months ago. Well-groomed, handsome in his fair way, a man of good family, Leroyd looked more than ever the cavalier for such idle and unsatisfied women as Mrs. Hempstead. He greeted Katherine in his smooth manner, not in the least concerned by the intent look she bestowed upon him.

  “Lovelier than ever, Kay. It’s great to see you,” he added.

  “Jimmy, I’ve had it out with Mother,” replied Katherine peremptorily. “You will please give me a few minutes of your valuable time.”

  “Delighted, I’m sure. Where shall we proceed to the execution?”

  “There’s a sitting room on this floor.”

  “Will you smoke? It might soothe your ruffled nerves.”

  Katherine declined with thanks and led him to the far end of the corridor, where an intimate little lounge opened upon a balcony above spacious gardens. But she did not go outside. Kay sat down and motioned him to a seat beside her.

  “Jimmy, I came West to try to persuade Mother not to sue for a divorce,” began Katherine deliberately. “She refused.”

  “I fear yours are vain oblations, my dear Kay.”


  “Indeed, they are. But it just struck me that you might not be so difficult.”

  “How flattering! Go on.”

  “Jimmy, you have taken money from my mother. I have found out. A considerable sum, altogether.”

  “Certainly, I borrowed it,” replied Leroyd blandly, but the red came up in his face.

  “Permit me to be slangy,” retorted Kay flippantly. “Baloney to that. You never intended to pay it back. You never will. Jimmy, you’d not the kind of gambler who pays.”

  “Gambler? You are disposed to be facetious,” he said not so imperturbably as before.

  “I mean what I say. I had you looked up, Jimmy. And in further parlance of the age, I have your number. . . . What’ll you take in cold cash to ditch my mother?”

  “Kay, you surprise me . . . not to say more.”

  “Would you take a hundred thousand dollars?”

  “No,” he replied.

  “That’s my limit. Has it occurred to you, Jimmy, that I could take you away from Mother, if I wanted to?”

  “It has not. What an enchanting prospect.”

  “You know I could do it?”

  “Kay, a denial of that would be absurd. You could take any man away from any woman.”

  “You’re not worth what it’d cost. Nor is Mother worth it. Nor is Father. But poor Polly!”

  “Kay, I swear I love that child as dearly as if she were my own,” declared Leroyd with indubitable sincerity.

  “Your one saving grace, Jimmy. But who could help loving that exquisite little girl? Well, there doesn’t seem to be any more to say. There isn’t any more . . . to you.”

  “I’m sorry, Kay. I bear you no resentment. Really. But I’m devoted to your mother. And that’s that. . . . I advise you to go back home.”

  “Not much. I’m going to paint this Reno the most beautiful flaming red that it ever saw.”

  “Kay! You’re not serious!” he expostulated in consternation, his languid eyes starting and his jaw dropping.

  “I was serious. Now I will be gay.”

  “But your mother could not stand your . . . such notoriety . . . here in the limelight. Good God!”

  “I’ll wash my hands of her. Go your dirty ways, both of you.”

  “Kay!”

  But Katherine was sweeping down the corridor, her head high, with bells of inspiration and triumph in her ears.

  Not until the following day did opportunity arise for Katherine to make the acquaintance of Phil Cameron’s mother. Then, as luck decreed, it came about naturally and without the slightest apparent design on her part.

  She found Mrs. Cameron a comely woman somewhat over fifty with a lined sweet face upon which was written a record of the years of hard Western life. She had been handsome once. Katherine traced some resemblance to Phil in her features. A few minutes of casual conversation were sufficient for Katherine to discern the woman’s simplicity, that she was as transparent as an inch of crystal water. That was long enough, too, to divine that her heart was almost broken. Katherine experienced a warm rush of emotion at the thought that this was Phil’s mother and that she might help her.

  Mrs. Cameron, evidently, in this crisis of her life, was not proof against sympathy, and the evident interest Katherine did not need to pretend. The distracted mother and wronged wife wanted to unburden herself. She needed a women to confide in. Fate had it in the fact that, with a hotel full of women from all over the United States, society women, business women, motion picture stars and stage actresses, all wronged or unsatisfied or dissatisfied wives seeking freedom from their fetters, Katherine should be the one to draw lovely unhappy Mary Cameron.

  “What are you here for, Miss . . . Miss Wales, I think the clerk said was your name?” asked Mrs. Cameron earnestly, on the full tide of her yearning to unburden herself, yet dubious about this brilliant girl who appeared so kindly.

  “Hilda Wales. But that’s not my real name. I’ll tell you my story sometime. Oh, such a miserable story! I hate to think of it.”

  “But you’re so young! You don’t wear a wedding ring. So you cain’t be heah to . . . for the same reason all these poor women are.”

  “Including you, Missus Cameron?”

  “Alas, too true. I came to divorce my husband.”

  “Ah, I’m so sorry. What is wrong? Don’t you care for him . . . forgive me. That just popped out. I can see whatever the trouble is, it’s not your fault.”

  Then briefly the sordid little drama, as old and bitter as life, yet different because of the anguish and intimacy of the sufferer, unfolded itself to Katherine’s ears. She replied as earnestly and simply as she knew how, intensely relieved and glad that she could be honestly sorry. There could be only one reason in the world why Phil Cameron’s father could wound so mortally the woman who had grown up with him, fought the desert and the battle of life beside him, and then, because nature is crueler than life, had faded and lost her bloom, her youth, her response. The blame and the wrong, if there were one, could not be laid to Mary Cameron, and, viewed with the wisdom and understanding of modern thought, hardly upon Frank Cameron.

  Katherine asked a number of simple questions, easy for the troubled woman to answer, the last of which brought the scarlet to her livid cheek.

  “Does he want you to divorce him?”

  “Oh, dear, no. All Frank wanted was to keep me from finding out. He could never manage that ranch without me.”

  “Missus Cameron, I . . . I wonder if you are doing right.”

  “That’s just what Phil said,” flashed the mother, showing that she still had spirit and fire. “You young folks are all alike. Naturally, of course, I’m old-fashioned, I know. But so Frank ought to be.”

  “Phil, your son, tell me about him,” suggested Katherine. She desired to hear this boy’s praises sung by his mother.

  They were sung in full measure, and Katherine reflected that, if Phil were worthy of them, he was a paragon among mothers’ only sons.

  “Phil is heah at Reno now,” went on Mrs. Cameron. “He came to stop me from getting the divorce. We quarreled last night. He didn’t come to see me this mawnin’. . . . Phil didn’t take Frank’s part, Miss Wales. Don’t misjudge him. Why, he knocked his father flat for. . . . You see, Frank was furious, and he swore at me . . . slapped my face. I reckon I . . . I was some sharp. But I was jealous of that black-eyed little hussy. Jealous! There, it’s out, and it’ll do me good. Marcheta is the prettiest girl in Southern California. . . . Well, Phil cain’t see my side. And I cain’t see his.”

  “Tell me Phil’s side, Missus Cameron.”

  “Oh, it’s kept me awake all night,” replied the mother, in distress. “I know I’m old and out of date. But I cain’t help my feelings. Phil says I’m wrong. That I should never have let on I knew. That if there was anything wrong, it was Frank and me marrying when we were the same age. Because only for so long was I able to be Frank’s mate. He didn’t say wife or comrade. He just said mate, as if I was some kind of an animal Oh, it was terrible to heah Phil say such things. I felt like the world had gone on leaving me out, which it has! Then he softened it all by saying this . . . this thing would peter out of its own accord. Marcheta would marry some young buck and everything would be all right again. But I cain’t see that. I’ll never get over it. I . . . I want to make Frank suffer.”

  “Being a woman, I’m on your side,” returned Katherine. “But Phil is right. The bitter fact is one of evolution, not right or wrong.”

  “That may all be true. I don’t understand it, and I don’t care,” replied Mrs. Cameron stubbornly.

  “Have you thought that you might lose your son by this step?”

  “Oh, never! My son! Phil? He would not desert me,” cried the little woman, in poignant anguish.

  “He might. If he’s such a wonderful boy, I wouldn’t risk it. I can tell he’s modern. If I were you, Missus Cameron, I’d settle this vexatious question on one score only. I’d let my decision depend on what it did to my son.”
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br />   “Decision! I’ve sued my husband for a divorce. The case will come up presently. It’s too late, even if . . . if. . . .”

  “You can withdraw your suit.”

  “I won’t do it.”

  “But suppose this home-breaking course of yours threatens to ruin your son?” asked Katherine, launching her last and strangest shaft.

  It struck home. Of all catastrophes, Mrs. Cameron had never imagined such a one. She was shocked. Doubt and fear added their dark shadows to her sad face. Katherine’s heart ached for her. Yet it was singing, too, for she saw sure victory for Phil in his mother’s love. Through that she could be won or driven.

  And on the moment Phil entered the hotel reception room, hat in hand, his striking face and form instinct with vivid life. He gave a start at sight of Katherine with his mother, then he came up to them, smiling, his eyes like blue flames.

  “Mom Cameron! How’d you meet my girl friend?”

  “Phil, do you . . . know Miss Wales?”

  “I’m happy to say I do.”

  “But you said a Miss Hemp . . . something or other,” faltered his mother.

  Katherine rose, to give Phil a significant glance of hope, of assurance.

  “I have a number of names, Missus Cameron,” she said with a laugh. “Missus Hempstead is my last. I’m here to divorce my third husband. Hilda Wales is my screen name. I’m a motion picture actress. . . . We’ll talk again about this miserable divorce business. For me, though, it’s good publicity. I’m awfully happy to find you’re Phil’s mother. We must be great friends.”

  Then ignoring the utter consternation in Mrs. Cameron’s countenance, she faced Phil, finding him pale, stern, yet with a fascinated understanding.