The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  She mounted the steps to the back porch, tried the kitchen door, and found it locked. She went around to the door on the west side, opposite the gate, found that also secured upon the inside, and passed grimly to the next.

  “My grief! I didn’t know any of these doors could be locked!” she muttered angrily. “They never have been before that I ever heard of.” She stopped before Evadna’s window, and saw, through a slit in the green blind, that the old-fashioned bureau had been pulled close before it. “My grief!” she whispered disgustedly, and retraced her steps to the east side, which, being next to the pond, was more secluded. She surveyed dryly a window left wide open there, gathered her brown-and-white calico dress close about her plump person, and crawled grimly through into the sitting-room, where, to the distress of Phoebe’s order-loving soul, the carpet was daily well-sanded with the tread of boys’ boots fresh from outdoors, and where cigarette stubs decorated every window-sill, and the stale odor of Peaceful’s pipe was never long absent.

  She went first to all the outer rooms, and unlocked every one of the outraged doors which, unless in the uproar and excitement of racing, laughing boys pursuing one another all over the place with much slamming and good-natured threats of various sorts, had never before barred the way of any man, be he red or white, came he at noon or at midnight.

  Evadna’s door was barricaded, as Phoebe discovered when she turned the knob and attempted to walk in. She gave the door an indignant push, and heard a muffled shriek within, as if Evadna’s head was buried under her pillow.

  “My grief! A body’d think you expected to be killed and eaten,” she called out unsympathetically. “You open this door! Vadnie Ramsey. This is a nice way to act with my own boys, in my own house! A body’d think—”

  There was the sound of something heavy being dragged laboriously away from the barricaded door; and in a minute a vividly blue eye appeared at a narrow crack.

  “Oh, I don’t see how you dare to l-live in such a place, Aunt Phoebe!” she cried tearfully, opening the door a bit wider. “Those Indians—and that awful man—”

  “That was only Grant, honey. Let me in. There’s a few things I want to say to you, Vadnie. You promised to help me teach my boys to be gentle—it’s all they lack, and it takes gentle women, honey—”

  “I am gentle,” Evadna protested grievedly. “I’ve never once forgotten to be gentle and quiet, and I haven’t done a thing to them—but they’re horrid and rough, anyway—”

  “Let me in, honey, and we’ll talk it over. Something’s got to be done. If you wouldn’t be so timid, and would make friends with them, instead of looking at them as if you expected them to murder you—I must say, Vadnie, you’re a real temptation; they can’t help scaring you when you go around acting as if you expected to be scared. You—you’re too—” The door opened still wider, and she went in. “Now, the idea of a great girl like you hiding her head under a pillow just because Grant asked old Hagar to apologize!”

  Evadna sat down upon the edge of the bed and stared unwinkingly at her aunt. “They don’t apologize like that in New Jersey,” she observed, with some resentment in her voice, and dabbed at her unbelievably blue eyes with a moist ball of handkerchief.

  “I know they don’t, honey.” Phoebe patted her hand reassuringly. “That’s what I want you to help me teach my boys—to be real gentlemen. They’re pure gold, every one of them; but I can’t deny they’re pretty rough on the outside sometimes. And I hope you will be—”

  “Oh, I know. I understand perfectly. You just got me out here as a—a sort of sandpaper for your boys’ manners!” Evadna choked over a little sob of self-pity. “I can just tell you one thing, Aunt Phoebe, that fellow you call Grant ought to be smoothed with one of those funny axes they hew logs with.”

  Phoebe bit her lips because she wanted to treat the subject very seriously. “I want you to promise me, honey, that you will be particularly nice to Grant; particularly nice. He’s so alone, and he’s very proud and sensitive, because he feels his loneliness. No one understands him as I do—”

  “I hate him!” gritted Evadna, in an emphatic whisper which her Aunt Phoebe thought it wise not to seem to hear.

  Phoebe settled herself comfortably for a long talk. The murmur of her voice as she explained and comforted and advised came soothingly from the room, with now and then an interruption while she waited for a tardy answer to some question. Finally she rose and stood in the doorway, looking back at a huddled figure on the bed.

  “Now dry your eyes and be a good girl, and remember what you’ve promised,” she admonished kindly. “Aunt Phoebe didn’t mean to scold you, honey; she only wants you to feel that you belong here, and she wants you to like her boys and have them like you. They’ve always wanted a sister to pet; and Aunt Phoebe is hoping you’ll not disappoint her. You’ll try; won’t you, Vadnie?”

  “Y—yes,” murmured Vadnie meekly from the pillow. “I know you will.” Phoebe looked at her for a moment longer rather wistfully, and turned away. “I do wish she had some spunk,” she muttered complainingly, not thinking that Evadna might hear her. “She don’t take after the Ramseys none—there wasn’t anything mushy about them that I ever heard of.”

  “Mushy! Mushy!” Evadna sat up and stared at nothing at all while she repeated the word under her breath. “She wants me to be gentle—she preached gentleness in her letters, and told how her boys need it, and then—she calls it being mushy!”

  She reached mechanically for her hair-brush, and fumbled in a tumbled mass of shining, yellow hair quite as unbelievable in its way as were her eyes—Grant had shown a faculty for observing keenly when he called her a Christmas angel—and drew out a half-dozen hairpins, letting them slide from her lap to the floor. “Mushy!” she repeated, and shook down her hair so that it framed her face and those eyes of hers. “I suppose that’s what they all say behind my back. And how can a girl be nice without being mushy?” She drew the brush meditatively through her hair. “I am scared to death of Indians,” she admitted, with analytical frankness, “and tarantulas and snakes—but—mushy!”

  Grant stood smoking in the doorway of the sitting-room, where he could look out upon the smooth waters of the pond darkening under the shade of the poplars and the bluff behind, when Evadna came out of her room. He glanced across at her, saw her hesitate, as if she were meditating a retreat, and gave his shoulders a twitch of tolerant amusement that she should be afraid of him. Then he stared out over the pond again. Evadna walked straight over to him.

  “So you’re that other savage whose manners I’m supposed to smooth, are you?” she asked abruptly, coming to a stop within three feet of him, and regarding him carefully, her hands clasped behind her.

  “Please don’t tease the animals,” Grant returned, in the same impersonal tone which she had seen fit to employ—but his eyes turned for a sidelong glance at her, although he appeared to be watching the trout rise lazily to the insects skimming over the surface of the water.

  “I’m supposed to be nice to you—par-tic-ularly nice—because you need it most. I dare say you do, judging from what I’ve seen of you. At any rate, I’ve promised. But I just want you to understand that I’m not going to mean one single bit of it. I don’t like you—I can’t endure you!—and if I’m nice, it will just be because I’ve promised Aunt Phoebe. You’re not to take my politeness at its face value, for back of it I shall dislike you all the time.”

  Grant’s lips twitched, and there was a covert twinkle in his eyes, though he looked around him with elaborate surprise.

  “It’s early in the day for mosquitoes,” he drawled; “but I was sure I heard one buzzing somewhere close.”

  “Aunt Phoebe ought to get a street roller to smooth your manners,” Evadna observed pointedly.

  “Instead it’s as if she hung her picture of a Christmas angel up before the wolf’s den, eh?” he suggested calmly, betraying his Indian blood in the unconsciously symbolic form of expression. “No doubt the wolf’s nature will
be greatly benefited—his teeth will be dulled for his prey, his voice softened for the nightcry—if he should ever, by chance, discover that the Christmas angel is there.”

  “I don’t think he’ll be long in making the discovery.” The blue of Evadna’s eyes darkened and darkened until they were almost black. “Christmas angel,—well, I like that! Much you know about angels.”

  Grant turned his head indolently and regarded her.

  “If it isn’t a Christmas angel—they’re always very blue and very golden, and pinky-whitey—if it isn’t a Christmas angel, for the Lord’s sake what is it?” He gave his head a slight shake, as if the problem was beyond his solving, and flicked the ashes from his cigarette.

  “Oh, I could pinch you!” She gritted her teeth to prove she meant what she said.

  “It says it could pinch me.” Grant lazily addressed the trout. “I wonder why it didn’t, then, when it was being squashed?”

  “I just wish to goodness I had! Only I suppose Aunt Phoebe—”

  “I do believe it’s got a temper. I wonder, now, if it could be a live angel?” Grant spoke to the softly swaying poplars.

  “Oh, you—there now!” She made a swift little rush at him, nipped his biceps between a very small thumb and two fingers, and stood back, breathing quickly and regarding him in a shamed defiance. “I’ll show you whether I’m alive!” she panted vindictively.

  “It’s alive, and it’s a humming-bird. Angels don’t pinch.” Grant laid a finger upon his arm and drawled his solution of a trivial mystery. “It mistook me for a honeysuckle, and gave me a peck to make sure.” He smiled indulgently, and exhaled a long wreath of smoke from his nostrils. “Dear little humming-birds—so simple and so harmless!”

  “And I’ve promised to be nice to—that!” cried Evadna, in bitterness, and rushed past him to the porch.

  Being a house built to shelter a family of boys, and steps being a superfluity scorned by their agile legs, there was a sheer drop of three feet to the ground upon that side. Evadna made it in a jump, just as the boys did, and landed lightly upon her slippered feet.

  “I hate you—hate you—hate you!” she cried, her eyes blazing up at his amused face before she ran off among the trees.

  “It sings a sweet little song,” he taunted, and his laughter followed her mockingly as she fled from him into the shadows.

  “What’s the joke, Good Injun? Tell us, so we can laugh too.” Wally and Jack hurried in from the kitchen and made for the doorway where he stood.

  From under his straight, black brows Grant sent a keen glance into the shade of the grove, where, an instant before, had flickered the white of Evadna’s dress. The shadows lay there quietly now, undisturbed by so much as a sleepy bird’s fluttering wings.

  “I was just thinking of the way I yanked that dog down into old Wolfbelly’s camp,” he said, though there was no tangible reason for lying to them. “Mister!” he added, his eyes still searching the shadows out there in the grove, “we certainly did go some!”

  CHAPTER V

  “I DON’T CARE MUCH ABOUT GIRLS”

  “There’s no use asking the Injuns to go on the warpath,” Gene announced disgustedly, coming out upon the porch where the rest of the boys were foregathered, waiting for the ringing tattoo upon the iron triangle just outside the back door which would be the supper summons. “They’re too lazy to take the trouble—and, besides, they’re scared of dad. I was talking to Sleeping Turtle just now—met him down there past the Point o’ Rocks.”

  “What’s the matter with us boys going on the warpath ourselves? We don’t need the Injuns. As long as she knows they’re hanging around close, it’s all the same. If we could just get mum off the ranch—”

  “If we could kidnap her—say, I wonder if we couldn’t!” Clark looked at the others tentatively.

  “Good Injun might do the rescue act and square himself with her for what happened at the milk-house,” Wally suggested dryly.

  “Oh, say, you’d scare her to death. There’s no use in piling it on quite so thick,” Jack interposed mildly. “I kinda like the kid sometimes. Yesterday, when I took her part way up the bluff, she acted almost human. On the dead, she did!”

  “Kill the traitor! Down with him! Curses on the man who betrays us!” growled Wally, waving his cigarette threateningly.

  Whereupon Gene and Clark seized the offender by heels and shoulders, and with a brief, panting struggle heaved him bodily off the porch.

  “Over the cliff he goes—so may all traitors perish!” Wally declaimed approvingly, drawing up his legs hastily out of the way of Jack’s clutching fingers.

  “Say, old Peppajee’s down at the stable with papa,” Donny informed them breathlessly. “I told Marie to put him right next to Vadnie if he stays to supper—and, uh course, he will. If mamma don’t get next and change his place, it’ll be fun to watch her; watch Vad, I mean. She’s scared plum to death of anything that wears a blanket, and to have one right at her elbow—wonder where she is—”

  “That girl’s got to be educated some if she’s going to live in this family,” Wally observed meditatively. “There’s a whole lot she’s got to learn, and the only way to learn her thorough is—”

  “You forget,” Grant interrupted him ironically, “that she’s going to make gentlemen of us all.”

  “Oh, yes—sure. Jack’s coming down with it already. You oughta be quarantined, old-timer; that’s liable to be catching.” Wally snorted his disdain of the whole proceeding. “I’d rather go to jail myself.”

  Evadna by a circuitous route had reached the sitting-room without being seen or heard; and it was at this point in the conversation that she tiptoed out again, her hands doubled into tight little fists, and her teeth set hard together. She did not look, at that moment, in the least degree “mushy.”

  When the triangle clanged its supper call, however, she came slowly down from her favorite nook at the head of the pond, her hands filled with flowers hastily gathered in the dusk.

  “Here she comes—let’s get to our places first, so mamma can’t change Peppajee around,” Donny implored, in a whisper; and the group on the porch disappeared with some haste into the kitchen.

  Evadna was leisurely in her movements that night. The tea had been poured and handed around the table by the Portuguese girl, Marie, and the sugar-bowl was going after, when she settled herself and her ruffles daintily between Grant and a braided, green-blanketed, dignifiedly loquacious Indian.

  The boys signaled each another to attention by kicking surreptitiously under the table, but nothing happened. Evadna bowed a demure acknowledgment when her Aunt Phoebe introduced the two, accepted the sugar-bowl from Grant and the butter from Peppajee, and went composedly about the business of eating her supper. She seemed perfectly at ease; too perfectly at ease, decided Grant, who had an instinct for observation and was covertly watching her. It was unnatural that she should rub elbows with Peppajee without betraying the faintest trace of surprise that he should be sitting at the table with them.

  “Long time ago,” Peppajee was saying to Peaceful, taking up the conversation where Evadna had evidently interrupted it, “many winters ago, my people all time brave. All time hunt, all time fight, all time heap strong. No drinkum whisky all same now.” He flipped a braid back over his shoulder, buttered generously a hot biscuit, and reached for the honey. “No brave no more—kay bueno. All time ketchum whisky, get drunk all same likum hog. Heap lazy. No hunt no more, no fight. Lay all time in sun, sleep. No sun come, lay all time in wikiup. Agent, him givum flour, givum meat, givum blanket, you thinkum bueno. He tellum you, kay bueno. Makum Injun lazy. Makum all same wachee-typo” (tramp). “All time eat, all time sleep, playum cards all time, drinkum whisky. Kay bueno. Huh.” The grunt stood for disgust of his tribe, always something of an affectation with Peppajee.

  “My brother, my brother’s wife, my brother’s wife’s—ah—” He searched his mind, frowning, for an English word, gave it up, and substituted a phrase. “All th
e folks b’longum my brother’s wife, heap lazy all time. Me no likum. Agent one time givum plenty flour, plenty meat, plenty tea. Huh. Them damn’ folks no eatum. All time playum cards, drinkum whisky. All time otha fella ketchum flour, ketchum meat, ketchum tea—ketchum all them thing b’longum.” In the rhetorical pause he made there, his black eyes wandered inadvertently to Evadna’s face. And Evadna, the timid one, actually smiled back.

  “Isn’t it a shame they should do that,” she murmured sympathetically.

  “Huh.” Peppajee turned his eyes and his attention to Peaceful, as if the opinion and the sympathy of a mere female were not worthy his notice. “Them grub all gone, them Injuns mebbyso ketchum hungry belly.” Evadna blushed, and looked studiously at her plate.

  “Come my wikiup. Me got plenty flour, plenty meat, plenty tea. Stay all time my wikiup. Sleepum my wikiup. Sun come up”—he pointed a brown, sinewy hand toward the east—“eatum my grub. Sun up there”—his finger indicated the zenith—“eatum some more. Sun go ’way, eatum some more. Then sleepum all time my wikiup. Bimeby, mebbyso my flour all gone, my meat mebbyso gone, mebbyso tea—them folks all time eatum grub, me no ketchum. Me no playum cards, all same otha fella ketchum my grub. Kay bueno. Better me playum cards mebbyso all time.

  “Bimeby no ketchum mo’ grub, no stopum my wikiup. Them folks pikeway. Me tellum ‘Yo’ heap lazy, heap kay bueno. Yo’ all time eatum my grub, yo’ no givum me money, no givum hoss, no givum notting. Me damn’ mad all time yo’. Yo’ go damn’ quick!’” Peppajee held out his cup for more tea. “Me tellum my brother,” he finished sonorously, his black eyes sweeping lightly the faces of his audience, “yo’ no come back, yo’—”

  Evadna caught her breath, as if someone had dashed cold water in her face. Never before in her life had she heard the epithet unprintable, and she stared fixedly at the old-fashioned, silver castor which always stood in the exact center of the table.