Code of the West

by Zane Grey

  “. . . done to my little sister?” sounded the ringing voice of Miss Stockwell, in furious scorn and anger.

  “Teacher, it was this heah way,” came Wess’s humble answer. “We busted Cal’s car. But the durned fool run it into a bank. An’ your sister was hurt. But so help me Gawd . . .”

  “You villains!” burst out Miss Stockwell, in terrible tones. “You miserable ruffians! It’s bad enough of you to torment that noble boy Cal, let alone hurt a poor little sick girl. It’s outrageous. You’ve got to be horsewhipped. And if my sister dies I’ll have you hanged!”

  Georgiana squeezed Cal’s arm. “Deep stuff! Here’s where we put it over good.—Now, Cal, cover my face with the blanket and carry me in. Be very solemn and awfully grieved. Then—after you’ve planted the tragedy bluff—set me down on my feet, and leave the rest to me.”

  Cal folded the end flap of the blanket over her face and took her in his arms. She made her body as limp as an empty sack. One arm hung down and her head fell back.

  “Open the door,” he called in a hollow voice. It was opened wide by Tuck Merry who, as he faced Cal, wore the most wonderful expression Cal had ever seen. In his loyalty to further the plot he was making exceedingly strenuous demands on his will power. Manifestly he tried to look sad when he wanted to burst with laughter.

  In one sweeping glance, as Cal entered, he took in the assembly. His mother and sisters, white-aproned for the occasion, gazed at him and his burden in a perturbation wholly real. His old father cocked his head on one side and peered with infinite curiosity. But his slight smile precluded anxiety. Enoch and Boyd appeared dumbfounded. Miss Stockwell had the center of the room—she seemed pale in her white dress—with dark excited eyes, shining wonderfully on Cal. In front of her, lined up as against a wall for execution, stood Wess and Pan Handle and Arizona and Tim, deeply stirred, haggard, and sick, betraying their guilt, honest in their remorse.

  Without more ado Cal set Georgiana upon her feet and with one swift motion stripped the blanket from her. She might have been an apparition to most of these onlookers. Bareheaded, with golden curls disheveled, radiant of face, instinct with palpitating life and joy, she screamed her delight and rushed into her sister’s outstretched arms.

  “Oh, Mary—Mary—how glad I am!” she cried, tremulously.

  “Georgie, darling!” exclaimed the teacher, with deeper emotion, and she folded the girl close and bent to kiss her again and again.

  Cal glanced away to take a look at the four culprits. Then he tasted revenge sweet and full. How utterly astounded and stultified! Their wits worked but slowly. They stared with jaws dropping. The significance was only slowly dawning upon them.

  Suddenly then Georgiana turned in her sister’s arms, and with the lamplight upon her softened, glowing face, her eyes flashing purple, and a dimpled smile breaking on her cheek, she seemed the loveliest creature Cal had ever seen. His great moment had come, but it was not going to be what he had anticipated. That tremendous gathering in his breast seemed to await a sentence.

  “Mr. Cal, we put it over on them, didn’t we?” she cried, joyously.

  Cal could only stare at her. That moment the something about her which he hated had vanished, and she appeared only a young girl, sweet and full of the joy of life and fun, with a wonderful light upon her face. As he gazed the truth flashed upon him. He had fallen in love with her.

  “Aw!” burst from Wess—a huge expulsion of breath indicating realization and relief. He was a beaten trickster, but there was balm in his defeat.

  “Miss—Miss—ain’t you hurted atall?” gasped Arizona, beginning to beam.

  Georgiana roguishly eyed these two speakers and then extended her gaze to the guiltier boys. They were stunned.

  “I wasn’t hurt,” she said, sweetly. “We were just fooling you.”

  Cal ate at the second table that night with the boys and Tuck Merry, and afterward he avoided the living room where his father and Enoch continued the merriment that had been precipitated. Seldom did they get so good a chance to lord it over Wess his contingent. But Cal never reaped all the fun he had anticipated. That experiment bade fair to cost him dear.

  After supper he took Merry to his little bunkhouse, and made him comfortable there.

  “Tuck, you can bunk with me until we fix up a place for you.”

  “Fine and dandy,” returned Tuck. “Buddy, I hope you don’t wake me out of this dream.—Did you see me stuff myself? Talk about your luck. I’ve gotten soft.—Cal, I like your folks. Your dad made a hit with me. And how he did lam it into your cousin Wess. Funny! You Tonto folks get a lot of kick out of jokes.”

  “I’m afraid we run it into the ground sometimes,” replied Cal, soberly.

  “I expect you do. And I suppose you scrap the same way?”

  “Scrap! Why, Tuck, fightin’ is about as common as ridin’ horses. But at that most of it is fun—among our own outfit.”

  “And I’m to be one of the Thurman 4’s, hey?”

  “You bet. Father was plumb glad I’d got you. An’ say, Tuck, when he sees you slug some of these fresh riders—whoopee!”

  “Buddy, with all respect to your hopes, I’d like to make friends with the boys first.”

  “Tuck, you’ll never make friends until after you’ve licked them. Just you leave it to me. You go about your work and be—like you were in front of Bloom—Oh, that tickled me!—An’ when I give you the wink do the same as you did to him.”

  “Right-o. And tomorrow let me begin your boxing lessons.”

  “I should smile” responded Cal, but without his former enthusiasm.

  “Buddy, you’ve lost your pep,” went on Merry, kindly.

  “Reckon I have. It’s been a hard day for me.”

  “But, Buddy, you certainly put it over on those boneheads.—That kid Georgiana is a wonder. Don’t you think so?”

  “Tuck, I don’t know what I think,” replied Cal, dropping his head.

  “Buddy, I saw how you fell for her,” continued Tuck, earnestly. “So did I. So did Wess and his gang. So’ll everything that wears pants, my boy. These modern kids have got the dope. I have a sister like Georgiana. Some kid! I’ll tell you about her. But not tonight. I’m kinda weary myself. Let’s fade into our hammocks.”

  Cal, however, did not want to go to bed just yet. He went out to walk around a bit. Many and many a night he had seen like this one, yet it seemed vastly different. He climbed the pasture fence and walked across the level grassy field toward the bold dark ridge that towered almost mountain high. The loneliness and silence seemed to help him to think. The air was cool. A faint wind swept his cheek. He heard the low crunch of horses grazing. All was shadowy and gloomy around him. Above, the blue sky was radiant with white blinking stars. He walked to and fro.

  Five, six hours before he had been Cal Thurman, who was now changed. It seemed a long time. A quarter of a day! Somewhere during that period he had fallen in love with this Georgiana May Stockwell. Pondering over the strange, undeniable circumstance, he decided he had done so on first sight. It was not so remarkable, after all. His brothers and cousins and friends were always falling in love. But it was new for Cal. He tried to be practical, positive, sensible. And all was well in his reasoning as long as he stuck to the fact of love as a happening, an experience. When, however, he thought of Georgiana—the newness and strangeness of her—the slim grace and dainty elegance—the pale sweet face, the golden curls, the dark blue eyes that could look as no others he had ever seen—when he remembered the alluring proximity of her and how audaciously she had intruded that fact upon him, then his reasoning went into eclipse. His heart was stormed. What availed the faint cries of his intelligence? She was not the kind of a girl he wanted to love. He could not decide what she really was. Only it did not matter. Every remembrance of her actions submerged him deeper. He was frightened, distressed. But she would never find it out and surely he would soon get over it. Tomorrow, perhaps! Judging from the affairs of Tonto youths, this was n
ot so terrible. Yet how humiliating! Love at first sight! It was a mixture of queer sensations. He grew conscious of inward excitement, a throbbing of heart, a pang in his breast, a vague longing to abandon thought and revel in the sweetness of dream, languor, thrill. Yet it was bitter, too. What had she meant by “choosies”? What had she meant by all she had said and done? Then her face seemed close to him again, a pale oval with its mysterious black holes for eyes, its tempting lips.

  Thus Cal paced the pasture, a prey to all that constituted the torment and pain and ecstasy of dawning love in a true heart.

  CHAPTER

  6

  M

  ISS STOCKWELL was reflecting that she had come to dread Sundays, where formerly they had been welcome days of rest from her school duties. The cause was Georgiana. Never in her life had a three weeks’ period been so filled with love, bewilderment, distress, and fear. And on this quiet Sabbath morning, while Georgiana was making up the hours of sleep she had lost, Miss Stockwell undertook to unravel the chaos of the situation.

  The one outstanding and consolable fact about Georgiana’s coming was that the love she had born her older sister years before as a child had never died, and had now reopened in these few weeks of intimacy to the one and only good, developing influence in her life. That love and that alone had kept Miss Stockwell true to the tremendous responsibility that her parents had thrust upon her.

  Judged superficially, Georgiana had appeared to be a very lively and pretty young girl, bringing with her the clothes, habits, and tricks of speech of the East, and she had not been understood. The young men of the Tonto had been drawn to her as bees to honey. To them she was a new species of the female, strange, alluring, irresistible. To the young girls she had been a revelation, a wonderful creature heralding the freedom, independence, and mastery that seemed born in all the women of the modern day. They had already begun to shape her dress, her manner, her slang, even to the bobbing of their hair. The matter bade fair to upset the tranquil Tonto. To the older women Georgiana was a girl beyond their understanding, a menace and an intruder.

  To Miss Stockwell this little sister was adorable despite all that could be said against her, and that was an exceeding great deal. As long as Georgiana was loved, petted, and given her own way she was sweet, lovable, absolutely a comfort and a joy. But cross her in the slightest and she was another creature. And it was impossible to keep from crossing her because Georgiana was endlessly thinking of something never before heard of in the Tonto.

  Miss Stockwell realized that she now had in her charge, in the person of her seventeen-year-old sister, one of the modern girls forced by the war and the seething renascence of the world into the type which was bewildering teachers, ministers, educators, and horrifying the staid old Americans.

  Georgiana was bright, though she hated study. She despised housework, though her mother had seen to it that she could do it. She abhorred any kind of work. There was a hard, sophisticated, maternal, worldly side of her most difficult to understand. Miss Stockwell had cudgeled her brain, attempting to reach this side of Georgiana. In vain! The girl had come from a world positively new to Miss Stockwell, who had been in the West only six years. But those six years had changed life, unseated the old ideals, throned a new order of things, which, if it were permanent, meant a vastly different America. It distressed Miss Stockwell. She had either to change Georgiana or accept the inevitable, for it looked as if she must make a permanent home for her in the West. Georgiana’s health had already greatly improved, verifying the judgment of the home physician. In spite of her running wild out here, riding the horses, and upon several occasions dancing the whole night long, she had gained in flesh. That part of the question was a happy one.

  How deep really was this strange sophistication of Georgiana’s? Was it merely a veneer, a matter of environment, a new-woman, feministic sort of pose, or was it a permanent adaptation to an altered condition of civilization? Georgiana was brazen, and did not seem to care how that distressed her sister. She used the most extraordinary vocabulary of slang, some of which jarred on Miss Stockwell’s ear worse than profanity. She absolutely would not stop painting her face, and in fact she had to paint it more because exposure to sun had begun to burn her skin gold and brown. She would not lengthen her skirts nor roll up her stockings. She would not admit that she gloried in the sensation she roused, but Miss Stockwell knew it well enough.

  But these things, seemingly so serious at first, had paled into insignificance before other developments. Georgiana was a flirt, roguish, sweet, playful, and apparently innocent of deliberation, but nevertheless a flirt. Her attractiveness and her newness made this propensity to flirt a vastly more serious matter than if she had not brought the Eastern immodesty of dress, freedom of speech, unrestraint of action, and the fatal fascination of a possible attainableness. For Miss Stockwell had come to realize that this sort of thing would not do in the West. The code of these clean, fine, virile young men of the Tonto would not long abide Georgiana. If no one of them grew serious, then perhaps there might not be a catastrophe. But Miss Stockwell believed one of these young men had already prostrated himself at the altar of her charm—Cal Thurman, the finest of the lot. Cal had grown strangely older in these few weeks. What would that lead to if Georgiana persisted in her flirting?

  It seemed that Georgiana had arrived at Green Valley just a product of her day, a shallow, selfish, thoughtless, mindless, soulless girl, whose only apparent object was to make herself attractive and irresistible to the opposite sex, and to trifle with them. To run, ride, dance, flirt—which constituted her idea of a good time! That was how she struck Miss Stockwell for the first ten days. Then began a modifying of that conception. Georgiana was not mindless or soulless, nor really bad. It almost seemed that she desired to give that last impression or at least she made no effort to repudiate it. From this discovery Miss Stockwell had derived hope to go on with the problem. It was everything in the world to her to satisfy herself that Georgiana, wild and willful and brazen as she was, despite the impression of utter materialism that she gave, had never been really bad. And the succeeding days, after this conclusion, had proved to Miss Stockwell, beyond any further question, that her sister was not what she pretended to be. She was very young. Time and change of environment would work wonders with her. The West with its openness and naturalness, the simplicity of its people, the necessity for development of physical strength, would inevitably remake the girl—unless some catastrophe intervened to send her back East or drag her down.

  Miss Stockwell made a decision that day, for herself as well as Georgiana, and it was that the West should claim them both for good. Whereupon she wrote a long letter to her mother, telling much about Georgiana, though omitting the things that would worry and distress, and concluded with mention of the important decision and how it was best for all concerned, and that some day she and Georgiana would make a visit back home.

  When this was done she sat looking out of her window, across the green pasture, across the orchard red with apples, across the yellowing corn and sorghum, to the rise of rugged hills that lifted fringed domes of rock and brush to the wild purple ranges beyond. This Tonto country had claimed her forever, whether or not her secret romance had a happy ending. The children of these mountain people needed education. It was a wild, lonely, sparsely settled region, where only for a few months in spring and summer could the children go to school. She loved the work and knew it to be noble, and if necessary she could devote her life to it. But she had vague hope of the fulfillment of her dream.

  She saw horses in the pasture, the favorites of the riders, off duty that one day of the week. Cattle were lowing somewhere in the brush. And she was slowly realizing a strange content in the prospect of the future when her musings were disturbed.

  “Mary, air you aboot heah this mawnin?” came in Georgiana’s languid voice from the little room beyond. This room had been a sort of shed adjoining that end of the house. Georgiana had coaxed Cal to fix it
up with Indian blankets on the walls and deerskins on the floor, and here in very cramped quarters, with the furniture necessary and her belongings, she was happy.

  “Yes, I’m here, Georgie, I’ve been up for hours and have written a long letter to mother.”

  “For Heaven’s sake bring me a drink of water,” cried Georgiana. “Talk about a dark-brown taste! Good night! The stuff these Tonto jakes call white mule has some kick.”

  Mary poured out a glass of water from her pitcher, and carrying it in to Georgiana, sat down upon her little bed. The girl half sat up and propped herself on her pillows, and with her sleepy eyes and soft rosy golden tints of complexion, fresh as the morning, and with her slender arms bare on the coverlet, she was indeed distractingly pretty.

  Georgiana drank all of the water and then evidently was not satisfied.

  “Georgie, did you really drink any of that liquor they call white mule?” queried Mary, seriously.

  “I’ll say I did,” replied Georgiana, with a giggle. “But no more for muh! Little Georgie May thought she’d been kicked by worse than a mule.”

  “Where’d you get the drink?”

  “Some of us went into that Ryson restaurant to eat a bite, about midnight. We had to stop dancing at twelve on Saturday night. Well, Bid Hatfield was with us at our table and he had a flask. He dared us girls to take a sip of his white mule. I was curious, but I didn’t want it. I hate booze. The girls took a sip, and then I swallowed a mouthful quick, just for a new experience. I got it. Holy Moses! I’ll never touch that stuff again, believe me.”

  “You won’t? You promise me?”

  “Now see here, Sis. I don’t have to make promises about that. I hate promises, anyway. I’ll never drink it again because it made me sick.”

  “Georgie, I don’t care much for Bid Hatfield,” said Mary, thoughtfully. “I’m surprised he’d come up to you when you were with the Thurmans.”