by James M. Fox
“I won’t. We’re going on a picnic.”
The bedsprings whispered briefly and she came padding across the rug, lifted a single slat in the blinds to peer out at me in my Stetson and boots. One of the horses nickered thirty feet away, where Joe was straining his big ears.
“Oh, Rick, really!”
“All set. Just hop into your jeans, and we’ll be off. Don’t keep the nice man waiting.”
“But I can’t! I don’t want to!”
“Sure you do. We’ll have a lot of fun.”
“I haven’t even had my breakfast.”
“Oh, yeah? My spies tell me you never take any. Come on, hurry up. Papa knows best.”
She dropped the slat, but she didn’t budge from behind the blinds. “I’m not coming,” she told me defiantly. “You’d better ask somebody else to go.”
“Young woman,” I said, “if you’re not on that horse in three minutes flat, I’ll be right in to get you. We’ll have some discipline around this joint.”
“You wouldn’t—” But she padded away, and the lock of the bathroom door clicked shut. I could hear the shower starting with a swish and licked the grin off my lips and leaned against the wall, scuffing holes in the dust like any drugstore cowboy waiting for his girl. She took a little more than three minutes, but when she appeared on the porch there was a touch of meekness about her, in spite of the custom-tailored Levis, silk bandanna, pure white castor hat and silver-plated riding-crop.
“Do I look all right?” It sounded as if she really wanted to know.
“The general effect,” I said, “is very fetching.” It was hard to suppress the inflection of excitement, and she glanced at me quickly before she became suddenly preoccupied daubing her pretty face with a handful of suntan cream.
Joe Cornero said, “’Morning, Miss. Betsy’s a bit skittish this morning. Think you can handle her?” His square, heavy professional-trainer’s mug was expressionless; it startled me to realize that he disapproved of her more than incidentally. She gave him a cool little smile and waited for him to hold the stirrup before she swung into the saddle with a lissome gracefulness of movement. The sorrel looked around at her, its nostrils quivering, and danced aside a step or two, then abruptly lifted its heels. I made a grab for the reins, but she was calmly leaning back against the pitch and correcting the animal with hardly more than a touch of her knees.
“Hey, hey, you didn’t pick that up in Central Park,” Cornero said, visibly disappointed.
I laughed at him and climbed aboard the pinto. From the bedroom window of the bungalow next door came the sudden shrill tinkle of the telephone. I hastily reached out and slapped the fractious Betsy smartly on the crupper.
“Hiyo, Silver!”
We were half a mile away and cantering briskly side by side across the desert’s gaudy carpet of flowers when she spoke at last.
“That was my phone, wasn’t it?”
“Was it?”
“You know perfectly well.”
“Maybe it was. But I had to do something quick to get you away from that old ladies’ home back there.”
She shot me another dubious glance and touched two slender fingers to the sun-tan cream on her cheeks. Her nails were long and glossy with a triple coating of red-carnation polish. “Mr. Biedermayer will be furious,” she said complacently. “I can’t understand it, you know. For a photographer, he’s always been rather punctual on these jobs, and it’s costing the hotel people forty dollars a day just to have me around, not counting my cottage they could rent to somebody else.”
I let that one go with the wind. I had every intention of telling her the whole sordid story and throwing myself upon the mercy of the court. She’d be indignant at first, and incredulous, and helplessly disgusted with me. Then I’d make it clear to her, somehow, what she meant to me—how badly I needed her, and what risk I was taking, and why I had told her about it. I’d remind her that now Bermuda was out, and neither of us could safely return to Hollywood or even stay on the Coast at all, the big fellow would lose too much face, he couldn’t afford to put up with us any more. We’d have to pull stakes and go East where we came from; we’d make out all right; I could probably talk the union and the booking agency into giving me another chance. It was different now; she’d made a new man out of me.
All these things I really believed, as much as I was sure that she’d understand and take me up on them. We would get married that same evening, on our way through Arizona. I had it all figured out, with no idea of any possible hitch. There was nothing whimsical about it to me, no pipe-dream stuff. I was sold on the deal, and satisfied that I could sell her just as easily. The little matter of logic didn’t enter into it in any way; it was all quite simple and natural and right, like breathing. The wheel was fixed, and we were playing with the house.
Already the mountains were closing in, and rounding a grove of cottonwoods and tamarisk I picked up the first marker, an inconspicuous little heap of glittering quartz in the bend of the trail, where it split into the rolling green foothills. The horses bore left, without hesitation, and slowed down to a trot as if by common consent. There were not so many flowers now, and the smell of sagebrush and creosote grew more pungent. The sun had rectified much of its early-morning slant. I dug out a handkerchief and cheerfully mopped up the sweat.
“Where are we going?”
I told her where, and she nodded gravely. “Oh, yes. Eve mentioned it to me. She’s been there.”
“Alone?”
“Of course. She went to look for the lost mine. She heard the Indians around here tell about a daring young paleface who captured the daughter of a tribal chief and fled with her into the hills. They found a big sapphire and lots of other precious stones, somewhere down the canyon, but the discovery delayed their flight, and the braves caught up with them and burned them at the stake. But it all happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago, the Indians say. Isn’t that a wonderful story?”
“It needs a switch,” I protested. “That ending isn’t box office.”
“Silly. Anyway, Eve says it’s all symbolic, about the jewels and everything. You’ll see.”
The trail crossed a dry arroyo and forked again, one branch curving off around the mountain, the other tapering sharply into a single craggy defile that seemed to run smack into the rocks. There was another small pile of quartz to mark this apparent dead end. The pinto edged forward and eagerly took the lead; where the towering cliffside rose to block our progress, a narrow passage between two formidable boulders offered unexpected access to the canyon’s mouth, half-hidden under the overhang’s thickly matted chaparral. Here it was suddenly cooler, and the distant brawl of running water reached my ears. A rattlesnake coiled in the sun on a ledge twenty yards off the trail, ignoring the clatter of hoofs; from the opposite slope a pair of buzzards flapped adrift and hovered drunkenly against the burnished cyanide-blue of the sky.
For a mile or two the going was a little tricky, even at a walking pace, and there were moments when I’d have felt a lot safer in a jeep. The horses did not seem to agree. They were plainly enjoying themselves, and as much in a hurry to get there as the track would allow. The water noise approached more quickly, a sizable creek that foamed through a series of spirited little rapids. We splashed across without much difficulty, but it failed to match the booming sound that echoed down the gorge.
“There’s a fall ahead,” I said, turning around in the saddle.
She smiled at me, mischievously, as if she’d got the best of me in a game of hide-and-seek. She nudged the sorrel forward, laid the riding-crop along its flank and recklessly charged up the trail in a cloud of dust. She had vanished among the rocks before I could kick Prince into chasing after her. It took me twenty minutes to catch up, and by then the falls were in sight, spurting from lofty battlements, twin jets thundering down on a granite shelf and leaping from there through sun-slashed rainbow mists into the strangely placid oval pond they had carved for themselves in the canyon’s b
ottom.
Here there were flowers again, verbena and primrose and Spanish bayonet, terraced sweepingly down to the edge of the pond, and a dozen ancient sycamores wept into the limpid waters. They cast harsh shadows over it that joined together in an Oriental-temple silhouette. A lonely chipmunk scampered up the nearest tree at our approach and twittered angrily at us about the penalties for trespassing. The horses whinnied in their eagerness to get at the wild grapes covering the banks.
I unbuckled my saddlebags, packed tight with our picnic lunch, and turned them loose. The girl I had brought here to propose to stood expectantly watching me, childishly pleased. “Rick, don’t you think this is super?”
“You really want to know what I think?”
“Do I?” She parried the look in my eyes in a hurry and preoccupied herself with pulling off her boots and socks, and rolling up the legs of her jeans. “My feet are hot,” she confessed in a very small voice, and ran like a yearling gazelle for the pond.
I pretended to ignore her and proceeded to lay out supplies on a caterer’s napkin in a convenient shady spot. Joe Cornero had thought of everything in a hurry. But his sense of humor, if that was the word for it, appealed to me about as much as an open elevator shaft. There was a whole cold chicken, two paper containers of mixed antipasto, a dozen Italian bread sticks, a jug of Chianti, and a double serving of spumone ice cream carefully preserved in a Thermos pack. I gazed upon this elegant culinary array with my lips drawn back to here and the little hairs bristling down my neck until I remembered that this might be exactly his idea of a high-class alfresco repast. It was in either case too late to pick up the stitches. Lorna came racing back barelegged through the flowers, excitedly waving a rock at me the size of a fist.
“Look what I found! The water’s full of them, would you believe it?”
I looked, and took it away from her and tossed it aside with a shrug.
“Mica ore. The hills are full of it. Fool’s gold, they call it.”
“Isn’t that a shame.” She inspected the festive board with casual approval. “You’ve picked all my favorite dishes, and I’m simply ravenous—”
But the damage was done. Half an hour later, holding hands with her as we lay back among the scents of verbena and incenso grass, I felt a good deal less sure of myself. I wondered if by any chance I was about to throw away my aces on the draw. The jackass in me reasoned that I had, as it was, gone pretty far out on a limb. For all I knew, and in spite of Eve Garand’s prompting, she might still consider the Hitchcock boy a valuable catch. She’d be twenty-one next month—Vanni’s contemptuous dismissal of the fact twitched through my mind—after that, keed, you’re on your own. Even if she’d give me an edge on this wealthy if somewhat temperamental young swain, I’d have to offer her something a little more appetizing than outright squalor in return. The big fellow had perceived this clearly enough, and for that very purpose had provided the Bermuda bait, the ready-made glamour of an orchestra leader on the resort hotel merry-go-round.
I decided I couldn’t afford to tell her first and ask her later. It sounds calculating now, fairly nastily so, but actually what made me back out was the abrupt and devastating realization that I couldn’t face the risk, that the mere thought of losing her was completely unbearable.
“You’re worrying again,” she told me suddenly, matter-of-factly, as if there were nothing unusual about this disturbing faculty of hers that could probe my moods with almost telepathic accuracy.
“Just trying to figure out something.”
“Can I help?”
“I don’t know. I guess you could, if you wanted to. It’s about a remark you made last night that’s been bothering me ever since. You said that when people are in love there’s never any doubt.”
“You don’t agree?”
“It’s like saying that aspirins will cure a headache. I’m not a doctor, so I couldn’t give you much of an argument on that, either, not without sounding off. I’ve always heard that the one essential element of love is doubt, a million different kinds of it. Doubt of yourself and doubt of each other. You’re supposed to wonder if you can possibly, with all your faults and weaknesses, measure up to the occasion; you can’t understand what the other sees in you, and you fully expect to prove yourself a bitter disappointment. You can’t believe your own good fortune in ever having met someone who could be genuinely fond of you, and you’re tempted to suspect an ulterior motive, or even a deliberate hoax. You feel sure there must be others who have a much better claim staked out long ago. They tell me even people who’ve been married happily for many years still need to reassure each other all the time. But I don’t know enough about it myself. You see, I’ve never been in love before.”
Her hand in mine was very cool and small and tense. “You’re being awfully serious now,” she accused me in a tiny voice.
“Sorry. It sort of proves the point, though, doesn’t it? Because it seems I can’t make up my mind on how to handle this. There’s doubt for you again; not for a moment in the sense of questioning my love for you, but in feeling hopelessly confused about how to convince you. I made a mess of that last night, and now I’ve lost the light touch altogether. I guess you’ll have to help me after all.”
She drew back a little and sat up slowly, turning half around to look at me. It was a pose of such bewitching grace as to verge on the provocative, but the clear dark-blue eyes were searching mine, solemnly inquisitive. “Are you making this up as you go along?”
“You asked me what I was worrying about, and I told you. Maybe I made a mistake.”
“Do you love me, Rick?”
“You know I do.”
“Then say it.”
“I love you. Believe it or not. I haven’t got the brains to say it any other way.”
“I wouldn’t want to hear it any other way,” she whispered, and with an adorable childish dignity of movement she suddenly leaned over me and found my lips.
You are the promised kiss of springtime—
The falls were roaring in my ears, and taking me down with them, fast and spinning dizzily through the rainbow mists, the heady fragrance of Cassandra—silk and velvet and the ardor of the desert sun itself. Tenderness, and the defiant flash of red-carnation nails, arms like twin bands of steel, a timeless dark of tears and strangest rapture—all the things you are—until she cried my name, a high-pitched cry of ecstasy and sweet despair. Then, after a while, there was light again, and the temple of the sycamores around us, the flowers and the rushing waters and our horses browsing patiently among the wild grapes on the bank.
Time passed us by while words had lost their meaning. The sun’s decline below the canyon’s ramparts brought a sudden chill and broke the spell.
“I’ve got to know—”
“What, Rick?”
“When it happened. What made you decide. I’m an idiot to ask you, because I haven’t the faintest idea myself.”
“I don’t either. Cross my heart. Not when it happened. But I’ve a horrible confession to make. It was me who talked Eve into coming over to your table in the card room, Tuesday night, when you were playing that silly game all by yourself. See what a brazen wench I am?”
“Yeah, I see. That’s just too bad. Now you’ll have to make an honest man of me.”
She drew herself up with mock severity. “Such gallantry, Sir Knight!”
“I mean it. You can’t expect to toy with my affections like this and get away with it.”
“I should hope not. Are you by any chance proposing?”
“Yes, ma’am, I am.”
“Go right ahead. I’ll listen carefully.”
“Sweet lady, will you marry me?”
“Yes, Rick. Yes, yes, yes. Any time, anywhere. If you really want me to.” Once more the canyon walls reeled crazily.
“Tonight?”
“Yes, darling, tonight. Do you think we can?”
“It’s only a hundred and fifty miles to Yuma, Arizona. They give you service round t
he clock.”
“Then we won’t need to drive so fast. I don’t want anything to happen now. Not until we get there.” She picked up her hat and shook out her glossy black locks and smiled at me. The smile was both gay and serene, and it shook me to the marrow. I fished my pockets for a cigarette with trembling hands and thought, This is it, last call for purgatory; play it straight or in a day or two you’ll be stepping off a chair with your belt around your neck. But somehow the target kept eluding me, so finally I got off a deflection shot.
“You want to know what really had me worried?”
“Oh, I can guess. It was Eve needling you behind my back.” She looked as mischievous as a small kitten with a ball of yarn. “I put her up to it. Wasn’t that mean of me?”
“You didn’t put her up to telling me about a lad with a big foreign car,” I said.
She would have giggled, if she d been the giggling type, but my ears caught a certain overtone.
“Not Stu Hitchcock! He’s just a little boy—”
“The way I heard you were engaged to him.”
“I was not!” The dark-blue eyes were bright with indignation. “He’s spread that story over town, and all I ever did was go out on a date with him once or twice, and then only because he twisted my arm. Rick, have you ever met him?”
“You could call it that, I suppose.”
“Well, then you must know. He’s so spoiled and conceited and possessive and altogether insufferable, and still he’ll make a pass at anything in skirts, on sight. I couldn’t even help feeling sorry for him at first. So I tried to be nice to him, in a sisterly way, and the next thing I knew there were two of those gushing society editors on the phone, asking me to confirm that we were about to elope! I got rid of them, somehow, and I called Stu, and when he came over I almost had to hit him before he would behave.”
“And you went on from there letting him take you for a ride,” I said.
“Yes, two days later he dropped by, just when I’d got this job at the hotel, and he sort of apologized and promised not to see me again for two weeks. So I told him he could drive me out, if he’d be sure and keep his hands to himself. Anyway, I can manage him,” she wound up naïvely.