The Westerners

by Zane Grey

  “Phil darling, don’t forget our date tonight. Formal. But we’re painting the town red.”

  IV

  That Phil Cameron would fall in love with her had been a foregone conclusion to Katherine. Not egotism, but experience had taught her that this was almost inevitable. Propinquity with her seemed to have but one result. As a girl up to eighteen she had been sorry over many a boy’s heartbreak, and had excessively grieved herself more than once. As a woman she had learned that men desired her kisses while they were deaf to her thoughts. That had not made her callous. But it had encased her in a mocking unattainable shell, through which men, with the perversity of masculine nature, tried only the harder to break.

  But Katherine knew, not quite at first, but soon, that she was different with Phil. It was the complex situation, the intense resolve to circumvent her mother, the frank manliness of this Western boy, and a revolt in herself that seemed to be the influence of the desert—these were the factors which were apparently placing her restrained past further and further behind her.

  The plot she had concocted to defeat her mother’s aims, which she was convinced would succeed equally well in the case of Mrs. Cameron, she had not yet entirely disclosed to Phil. During these few glamorous days she grew to know him better. He would have to be terribly in love with her before he would consent to her plan. And there was something inexplicably sweet in helping this along by all the honest charms and wiles of woman. When Phil protested that they were letting the hours slide by, doing nothing, while the divorce proceedings were working toward fruition, she merely smiled and bade him wait.

  Katherine had no difficulty, however, in contriving to keep Phil with her from early morning until late at night. They drove all over the desert, which she particularly loved, gambled in the casinos, went to the movies, dressed and dined at the hotels, all the time avoiding their mothers as much as possible. To Katherine’s delight this procedure had begun to annoy and perplex Mrs. Hempstead, as it had distressed Mrs. Cameron. The former saw her darling flirting with a common cowboy, and the latter saw her darling in the clutches of a beautiful siren from Hollywood. If Phil had not been so worried, he, too, would have been gleeful over this mental state of the two mothers.

  In Phil’s case, Kay discerned that it was going to require more than propinquity. He was Western. He had been brought up in the open country. He had been taught respect for women. He was tremendously proud that Kay chose to spend all her time with him, that she never so much as met the eyes of other men. Her beauty dazzled him. He had fallen in love with her from the first. He knew it and had no regrets. But so far, he had not even permitted himself to imagine a closer relation. Kay was a gorgeous creature from another and different world than his. The boyish homage he accorded her was fit for a princess. But to possess her he did not even dream of.

  He’s the finest, cleanest man I ever knew, mused Kay before her mirror that night, as she proceeded with an exquisite toilet. I’m falling in love with Phil . . . and I’m glad. It’s like my few cases when I was sixteen, only worse. It’ll make easier what I must do. . . . But afterward . . . oh, dear!

  And at that stage of soliloquy, Kay studied her image in the mirror. It was not to satisfy her vanity or to draw pleasure from that beautiful reflection. She suddenly felt that she saw another and different Kay Hempstead. The golden hair that crowned her head, the broad low brow, the serious violet eyes, the curved red lips—these she had gazed at innumerable times, but never as now. She imagined there was a new spirit actuating her.

  “I will not think. Sufficient unto the day!” she said, and in those deliberate words crossed her Rubicon.

  That evening at dinner in the spacious dining room of the Reno, Katherine had eyes for no one but Phil. When they danced, she dropped that instinctive bar that she had always placed between her and her partner and leaned to him so close that she felt the pounding of his heart. Immediately her own became unruly.

  From that time on, Katherine drifted into perilous ways with her eyes wide open. Deliberately, she exercised all the arts of coquetry. She gave royally of her smiles, her glances, her laughter and whisper, of the beauty and lure of her person. But such dangerous tactics, although they awakened in Phil all she wanted, reacted with irresistible rebound upon herself. This she deserved, this she made light of, this she hoped would last long and hurt deeply, although the worldly cynicism in her raised wild scornful doubts. Nevertheless, she forgot the fleeting of the days, and almost the vital reason for her sojourn in Nevada.

  One night, when the moon was full, she persuaded Phil to drive her out on the desert, to the promontory which had become her favorite place. With furs around her bare arms and shoulders she leaned silently against him, conscious that the critical hour had come. That, or the mystic and profound splendor of the desert by night, somehow saddened her into reticence. The dark gulf of the Mediterranean, the Vale of Cashmir, the Valley of Yumuri, none of the voids in the earth that she had viewed from heights, had ever had power to affect her as this naked rent in the desert, lonely, fierce, primitive as ever back in the ages that had formed it. Again she felt that this primal thing had much to do with the influence the West had upon her. Desert and elements, the men out here were far closer to the primitive than all she had known in the East and abroad. They had awakened a response in her heart. And someday there would come a reckoning and a choice.

  “Have you ever seen anything more wonderful than this desert in the moonlight?” she asked presently.

  “Yes, Kay,” he replied with an unsteady note in his voice. “You!”

  “But you haven’t looked at the desert under the moon,” she complained.

  “How can I?”

  “Oh. . . . Then you like how I look tonight?”

  “Kay, I haven’t caught my breath yet. . . . Aw, what luck for me to be with you . . . to dance with you . . . hold . . . to see you so many different ways, each one lovelier than the last.”

  “Good luck or bad luck?”

  “Good, Kay. Wonderful luck! Something to sustain me . . . when you go back home.”

  “Then you’ll not be unhappy?”

  “I can’t swear that, though my whole life should be a paradise of memory.”

  “Phil, do you love me?”

  “Do you need to ask? Doesn’t every person in Reno, almost, know that I’m mad about you. Didn’t Mom accuse me of being the playboy of a movie queen?”

  “Nevertheless, I do ask.”

  He uttered a short laugh. “Kay, I love you so well it’s heaven to be with you . . . hell to be away from you. No man was ever so uplifted, so happy.”

  “Phil! So well? Yet, my boy, you have never asked me for anything. And your one wild break was to hold my hand in the dark movie theater.”

  He was too sincere, too terribly in earnest to see anything strange in her surprise or the import of her statements, and he let them pass unanswered.

  “Time is flying, Phil. And we have done so little to block these divorce proceedings,” said Kay, at last reverting to the issue at hand.

  “Aw, I get sick when I think of that,” replied Cameron feelingly. “I just hate to see Mom. She won’t give in. She’s more set than ever. And when I do see her, she raves so about you that I rush right away. Kay, I wish you’d let me correct that idea you gave her . . . that you were a much-divorced movie girl.”

  “Not yet. It was an inspiration. Phil, my mother moans about my affair with you. ‘That strapping cowpuncher! Why, he might kidnap you and pack you off to the desert.’ When I told her I hoped you would, she nearly had hysterics. If we could only see the humor of this situation.”

  “Humor? Huh, it’s about as funny as being rolled on by a hoss.”

  “Phil, I’ve solved our problem,” declared Kay solemnly. “I’ve found out how to bring my mother and your mother to their knees.”

  “For Pete’s sake, spring it on me.”

  Kay felt the need of a deep full breath. It was not so easy to make a perfectly at
rocious, deliberately abnormal proposition to this clear-eyed, clean-minded young Westerner who worshipped her and held her little less than an angel. But the exigency of the case justified such an appalling plot as she had conceived. Already she had devoted days and nights of thinking and feeling toward that end.

  “Listen . . . Phil,” she began haltingly, “and hear me through before you break over the traces. . . . There is only one way to change our mothers. That is to justify the dread they already have. We must scare them to death. Ruthlessly. Mother loves me. Your mother adores you. They live in us, if they only knew it. If they could be shown that you and I were going ‘plumb to hell,’ as you call it . . . that their disregard of children’s rights and loves had ruined us, made us bitter, reckless, bad . . . they would be horribly upset. They would weaken. They would give up this divorce proceeding. Well, let’s do it. That is, let’s pretend to go to the bad. We’ll rent a cottage. I already have one picked out! Don’t look at me like that, Phil Cameron. I have. You’ll say it’s swell. We’ll have the car I’ve hired. We’ll move into this cottage, bag and baggage, unmarried, brazen as brazen can be. Then we’ll cut loose to scandalize even Reno. We’ll bet the roof off these gambling places. We’ll mop up hard liquor, apparently, in sight of the high and low of this town. We’ll make them think that we have thrown decency to the winds . . . that my mother’s disgusting affair and your mother’s hard and narrow creed have opened our eyes to the bald realism of life. We’re sick of it all. We’ll have no more of it. We’ll take the fleshpots of Egypt and to hell with the rest. . . . There, Phil! That’s my plan. Whatever you think . . . you can’t say it’s not original. Come. Don’t slay me . . . with your eyes!”

  It had been his piercing gaze that made Kay falter at the close. She had expected anything but cool stern composure.

  “My God! You’re a wonder. The nerve of you! Kay, it’s a swell idea. But I cain’t see it your way.”

  “Do you think it’d work?” she queried.

  “Shore it would. Absolutely. Mom just couldn’t see my falling that way on her account. And that stuck-up mother of yours would fall like a ton of bricks. They’d be knocked out, Kay.”

  “You are sure, Phil? From your man’s viewpoint?”

  “Yes. It’d work. Pity we cain’t floor them. But we just cain’t, Kay.”

  “Why not?” began Katherine, gathering strength with the rebellious query.

  “It’d ruin you . . . disgrace you.”

  “Boy, we’d only pretend. We’d play a game . . . a great game. Be actors. All for a good purpose. Oh, the idea thrills me!”

  “But the harm would be done, darling. No matter where you went afterward, there’d be some dirty hombre or some catty woman bobbing up to tell it.”

  “Let the future take care of itself,” retorted Kay enigmatically. “We must win this game. I tell you that, even if we really went to the bad . . . it’d be worth it to save little Polly’s love for her mother and save your mother from a lonely miserable old age.”

  “I get you, Kay,” returned Phil hoarsely. “But I happen to love you . . . and your honor . . . more than the good you name.”

  “Won’t you do it, Phil?” entreated Kay.

  “I shore won’t.”

  “Please . . . darling.”

  “No, by God!”

  “We could correct . . . all the slander, the misunderstanding . . . somehow . . . later.”

  “Even if we could . . . which I shore doubt. . . .”

  “Phil, wouldn’t it mean anything, if you really love me, to have me alone that way . . . seeing me at all hours . . . and every way . . . trusting you where I would trust no other man on earth?”

  “Yes. I reckon it’d mean a hell of a lot,” burst out Phil, his eyes flaming. “But I’m damned if I’ll give these men heah . . . that you wouldn’t wipe your little shoes on . . . a chance to point the finger of shame at you.”

  “Why, you child, what do I care for the opinions of men? I’d never see them point . . . never hear them speak. I am aloof from all that.”

  “Kay, it hurts me to see you so daid set on this,” rejoined Phil hurriedly. “I never reckoned I could refuse you anything. Aw, you’re putting me in a tough spot.”

  “Yes. But it’s for me.” She threw wide the furs that enveloped her and, turning, lay back in his arms. The moonlight shone upon her golden head, upon her lovely neck and breast. “Phil, don’t let me fail in this. I give you my word . . . I’ll pay whatever it costs.”

  “Kay, you’re talking wild,” he said hoarsely.

  “You’re the dearest boy I ever knew,” she rejoined dreamily.

  “Boy? I reckon . . . and pretty callow at that.”

  She lay there gazing up at him, conscious of an emotion which she took for happiness at being in his arms, mocking herself with the thought that it was only stooping to gain her end.

  “Kiss me, Phil,” she whispered presently.

  “Kay . . . you. . . . Aw, it’s only you want your way,” he cried in torment.

  “Suppose it is. I ask you. Here I am in your arms. I must care . . . something . . . or I wouldn’t want to. . . .”

  Cameron wrenched his powerful shoulders in his effort to resist, yet they were bending closer over her all the time. He was so blind that his lips did not at first find hers. When they did, they merged a boy’s soul into a man’s passion. Kay felt suffocating in that embrace. But the response she gave, which her sincerity made her think was the least she could do, rewarded her with the sweetest sensation of her whole life, and then flooded her heart with sadness over a hollow victory. He was won. But then her conscience flayed her.

  Next day Katherine and Phil moved into the cottage she had chosen. It was one block from the center of town, directly across, with several other cottages, from Reno’s second large and fashionable hotel. It sat back among green shrubbery, quite isolated, but the gravel driveway and the path were open to idle, curious eyes. It had been newly decorated and furnished, and contained one bedroom with bath, a living room, a kitchen, and a small room for a servant. Kay had to put part of her baggage in the living room. She assured the dubious Phil that to dispense for once with maid and luxury would be a very good experience for her, and one she expected to enjoy because of its novelty.

  When they had established themselves, Kay and Phil sat down deliberately to plan their campaign of deviltry. Whatever had been Phil’s scruples and pangs, they were gone or hidden under a rapt reckless cowboy’s exterior. Kay could not doubt that he was in a transport. She could not probe his thought as to the future, after this débacle. She feared he had burned his bridges behind him, and that the future beyond was blank. It did not take long for their quick wit to shape events.

  Phil made off downstreet to purchase cowboy garb, to ingratiate himself into the good graces of the press reporters, to make friends with the chief of police whom he already knew.

  Kay drove to the Hotel Reno, and the opening shot fired in the battle was to snub her mother deliberately in front of guests who knew Kay’s relation to her. Leroyd she passed with an icy stare. When Mrs. Hempstead could not hide the sting of a cut, it was pretty deep. Well satisfied with this start, Kay sat down to wait for Phil and to think about him. Actually, the grave side of this drama had reverted to this Western boy. Kay had made no other acquaintances, and her part was to be absolutely oblivious to her surroundings. An expert in the art of make-up, she was to strive for as tragic and lost an appearance as possible, and to act accordingly.

  At last Phil strode in, somehow different, although spurs and boots and belt with empty gun sheath, and a huge sombrero in his hand scarcely accounted for the change. He looked the true range man, splendid, lithe, hard, and the shyness, the diffidence that had marked his demeanor were gone. It struck Kay that Phil was not an actor. He was being himself.

  “Howdy, honey,” he called, loud enough for nearby watchers to hear. “What do you know about this?”

  He laid an open letter upon Kay’s lap
. It was a notification from the Desert Bank of Indio, California, that there was a balance of twenty-five thousand dollars there to his account.

  “Oh, that? I’d forgotten,” she replied, with a smile, as she handed it back. “I notified my banker in New York to forward this amount. Just a loan, Phil . . . or an interest in your ranch, as you like.”

  His eyes were beautiful to see and terrible to look into. He bent over to whisper: “Kay, what good will saving my ranch do . . . if I die of love?”

  “Boy, that never kills.”

  “¿Quién sabe?. . . Com’ on, beautiful, let’s go tear things.”

  Kay drove the big white car with such speed, and apparent recklessness, that a traffic officer caught up with them, and presented them with a ticket. Phil gave the officer such a berating that a crowd gathered. After that incident, they ran the gamut of the more pretentious gambling halls. To all appearanees they had been drinking. In places frequented by all classes of people, where nothing save a big wager or a fight ever caused gamblers and spectators to turn away from the games, Phil and Kay created a sensation. He looked like a handsome motion picture cowboy, enamored of his companion. Kay knew she could play a part, and hers was that of a wealthy Easterner with a passion to gamble, to whom money was as the dust under her feet. A crowd followed them from table to table. Phil lost more than he won. But Kay could not lose, and her wagers were as large as the games permitted.

  That night Kay, resplendent and patrician in white, blazing with jewels, walked with Phil into the fashionable dining room of the Reno, timing her advent to her mother’s dinner hour. It so happened that Mrs. Hempstead had guests that evening. The head waiter, generously bribed by Kay beforehand, had reserved a table close to her mother’s. Kay might not have known her mother was alive, so oblivious did she appear to all save this stalwart cowboy, pale, fire-eyed, by far the handsomest man in a room full of handsome men.

  They were the cynosure of all eyes. They must have been the despair of Kay’s mother and the little drab woman who sat in a far corner, fascinated as by a snake, clasping and unclasping her hands. Like all cowboys, Phil could stand a few drinks of hard liquor. But this night they had champagne. It went to Phil’s head. To Kay’s delight and intense gratification he transgressed all the laws of etiquette, as well as decorum. Phil simply overplayed his part. But Kay felt sure she was perfect in hers—that of a disillusioned woman to whom the world was dross, who knew her class to be rank with hypocrisy, who had chosen a primitive cowboy to be her dissolute consort.