The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  At the very last minute—to be explicit, an hour before the hall was lighted, several hours after smoke first began to rise from the chimney, Val suddenly swerved to a reckless mood. Arline had gone to her own room to dress, too angry to speak what was in her mind. She had worked since five o’clock that morning. She had bullied Val, she had argued, she had begged, she had wheedled. Val would not go. Arline had appealed to Manley, and Manley had assured her, with a suspicious slurring of his esses that he was out of it, and had nothing to say. Val, he said, could not be driven.

  It was after Arline had gone to her room and Manley had returned to the “office” that Val suddenly picked up her hairbrush and, with an impish light in her eyes, began to pile her hair high upon her head. With her lips curved to match the mockery of her eyes, she began hurriedly to dress. Later, she went down to the parlor, where four women from the neighboring ranches were sitting stiffly and in constrained silence, waiting to be escorted to the hall. She swept in upon them, a glorious, shimmery creature all in white and gold. The women steed, wavered, and looked away—at the wall, the floor, at anything but Val’s bare, white shoulders and arms as white. Arline had forgotten to look for gloves.

  Val read the consternation in their weather-tanned faces, and smiled in wicked enjoyment. She would shock all of Hope; she would shock even Arline, who had insisted upon this. Like a child in mischief, she turned and went rustling down the ball to the dining room. She wanted to show Arline. She had not thought of the possibility of finding any one but Arline and Minnie there, so that she was taken slightly aback when she discovered Kent and another man eating a belated supper.

  Kent looked up, eyed her sharply for just an instant, and smiled.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Fleetwood,” he said calmly. “Ready for the ball, I see. We got in late.” He went on spreading butter upon his bread, evidently quite unimpressed by her magnificence.

  The other man stared fixedly at his plate. It was a trifle, but Val suddenly felt foolish and ashamed. She took a step or two toward the kitchen, then retreated; down the hall she went, up the stairs and into her own room, the door of which she shut and locked.

  “Such a fool!” she whispered vehemently, and stamped her white-shod foot upon the carpet. “He looked perfectly disgusted—and so did that other man. And no wonder. Such—it’s vulgar, Val Fleetwood! It’s just ill-bred, and coarse, and horrid!” She threw herself upon the bed and put her face in the pillow.

  Some one—she thought it sounded like Manley—came up and tried the door, stood a moment before it, and went away again. Arline’s voice, sharpened with displeasure, she heard speaking to Minnie upon the stairs. They went down, and there was a confusion of voices below. In the street beneath her window footsteps sounded intermittently, coming and going with a certain eagerness of tread. After a time there came, from a distance, the sound of violins and the “coronet” of which Arline had been so proud; and mingled with it was an undercurrent of shuffling feet, a mere whisper of sound, cut sharply now and then by the sharp commands of the floor manager. They were dancing—in her honor. And she was a fool; a proud, ill-tempered, selfish fool.

  With one of her quick changes of mood she rose, patted her hair smooth, caught up a wrap oddly inharmonious with the gown and slippers, looped her train over her arm, tool her violin, and ran lightly down-stairs. The parlor, the dining room, the kitchen were deserted and the lights turned low. She braced herself mentally, and, flushing at the unaccustomed act, rapped timidly upon the door which opened into the office—which by that time she knew was really a saloon. Hawley himself opened the door, and in his eyes bulged at sight of her.

  “Is Mr. Fleetwood here? I—I thought, after all, I’d go to the dance,” she said, in rather a timid voice, shrinking back into the shadow.

  “Fleetwood? Why, I guess he’s gone on over. He said you wasn’t going. You wait a minute. I—here, Kent! You take Mrs. Fleetwood over to the hall. Man’s gone.”

  “Oh, no! I—really, it doesn’t matter—”

  But Kent had already thrown away his cigarette and come out to her, closing the door immediately after him.

  “I’ll take you over—I was just going, anyway,” He assured her, his eyes dwelling upon her rather intently.

  “Oh—I wanted Manley. I—I hate to go—like this, it seems so—so queer, in this place. At first I—I thought it would be a joke, but it isn’t; it’s silly and,—and ill-bred. You—everybody will be shocked, and—”

  Kent took a step toward her, where she was shrinking against the stairway. Once before she had lost her calm composure and had let him peep into her mind. Then it had been on account of Manley; now, womanlike, it was her clothes.

  “You couldn’t be anything but all right, if you tried,” he told her, speaking softly. “It isn’t silly to look the way the Lord meant you to look. You—you—oh, you needn’t worry—nobody’s going to be shocked very hard.” He reached out and took the violin from her; took also her arm and opened the outer door. “You’re late,” he said, speaking in a more commonplace tone. “You ought to have overshoes, or something—those white slippers won’t be so white time you get there. Maybe I ought to carry you.”

  “The idea!” she stepped out daintily upon the slushy walk.

  “Well, I can take you a block or two around, and have sidewalk all the way; that’ll help some. Women sure are a lot of bother—I’m plumb sorry for the poor devils that get inveigled into marrying one.”

  “Why, Mr. Burnett! Do you always talk like that? Because if you do, I don’t wonder—”

  “No,” Kent interrupted, looking down at her and smiling grimly, “as it happens, I don’t. I’m real nice, generally speaking. Say! this is going to be a good deal of trouble, do you know? After you dance with hubby, you’ve got to waltz with me.”

  “Got to?” Val raised her eyebrows, though the expression was lost upon him.

  “Sure. Look at the way I worked like a horse, saving your life—and the cat’s—and now leading you all over town to keep those nice white slippers clean! By rights, you oughtn’t to dance with anybody else. But I ain’t looking for real gratitude. Four or five waltzes is all I’ll insist on, but—” His tone was lugubrious in the extreme.

  “Well, I’ll waltz with you once—for saving the cat; and once for saving the slippers. For saving me, I’m not sure that I thank you.” Val stepped carefully over a muddy spot on the walk. “Mr. Burnett, you—really, you’re an awfully queer man.”

  Kent walked to the next crossing and helped her over it before he answered her. “Yes,” he admitted soberly then, “I reckon you’re right. I am—queer.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  A WEDDING PRESENT

  Sunday it was, and Val had insisted stubbornly upon going back to the ranch; somewhat to her surprise, if one might judge by her face, Arline Hawley no longer demurred, but put up lunch enough for a week almost, and announced that she was going along. Hank would have to drive out, to bring back the team, and she said she needed a rest, after all the work and worry of that dance. Manley, upon whose account it was that Val was so anxious, seemed to have nothing whatever to say about it. He was sullenly acquiescent—as was perhaps to be expected of a man who had slipped into his old habits and despised himself for doing so, and almost hated his wife because she had discovered it and said nothing. Val was thankful, during that long, bleak ride over the prairie, for Arline’s incessant chatter. It was better than silence, when the silence means bitter thoughts.

  “Now,” said Arline, moving excitedly in her seat when they neared Cold Spring Coulee, “maybe I better tell you that the folks round here has kinda planned a little su’prise for you. They don’t make much of a showin’ about bein’ neighborly—not when things go smooth—but they’re right there when trouble comes. It’s jest a little weddin’ present—and if it comes kinda late in the day, why, you don’t want to mind that. My dance that I gave was a weddin’ party, too, if you care to call it that. Anyway, it was to raise the money to pa
y for our present, as far as it went—and I want to tell you right now, Val, that you was sure the queen of the ball; everybody said you looked jest like a queen in a picture, and I never heard a word ag’inst your low-neck dress. It looked all right on you, don’t you see? On me, for instance, it woulda been something fierce. And I’m real glad you took a hold and danced like you did, and never passed nobody up, like some woulda done. You’ll be glad you did, now you know what it was for. Even danced with Polycarp Jenks—and there ain’t hardly any woman but what’ll turn him down; I’ll bet he tromped all over your toes, didn’t he?”

  “Sometimes,” Val admitted. “What about the surprise you were speaking of, Mrs. Hawley?”

  “It does seem as if you might call me Arline,” she complained irrelevantly. “We’re comin’ to that—don’t you worry.”

  “Is it—a piano?”

  “My lands, no! You don’t need a fiddle and a piano both, do you? Man, what’d you rather have for a weddin’ present?”

  Manley, upon the front seat beside Hank, gave his shoulders an impatient twitch. “Fifty thousand dollars,” he replied glumly.

  “I’m glad you’re real modest about it,” Arline retorted sharply. She was beginning to tell herself quite frequently that she “didn’t have no time for Man Fleetwood, seeing he wouldn’t brace up and quit drinkin.”

  Val’s lips curled as she looked at Manley’s back. “What I should like,” she said distinctly, “is a great, big pile of wood, all cut and ready for the stove, and water pails that never would go empty. It’s astonishing how one’s desires eventually narrow down to bare essentials, isn’t it? But as we near the place, I find those two things more desirable than a piano!” Then she bit her lip angrily because she had permitted herself to give the thrust.

  “Why, you poor thing! Man Fleetwood, do you—”

  Val impulsively caught her by the arm. “Oh, hush! I was only joking,” she said hastily. “I was trying to balance Manley’s wish for fifty thousand dollars, don’t you see? It was stupid of me, I know.” She laughed unconvincingly. “Let me guess what the surprise is. First, is it large or small?”

  “Kinda big,” tittered Arline, falling into the spirit of the joke.

  “Bigger than a—wait, now. A sewing machine?”

  Arline covered her mouth with her hand and nodded dumbly.

  “You say all the neighbors gave it and the dance helped pay for it—let me see. Could it possibly be—what in the world could it be? Manley, help me guess! Is it something useful, or just something nice?”

  “Useful,” said Arline, and snapped her jaws together as if she feared to let another word loose.

  “Larger than a sewing machine, and useful.” Val puckered her brows over the puzzle. “And all the neighbors gave it. Do you know, I’ve been thinking all sorts of nasty things about our poor neighbors, because they refused to sell Manley any hay. And all the while they were planning this sur—” She never finished that sentence, or the word, even.

  With a jolt over a rock, and a sharp turn to the right, Hank had brought them to the very brow of the hill, where they could look down into the coulee, and upon the house standing in its tiny, unkempt yard, just beyond the sparse growth of bushes which marked the spring creek. Involuntarily every head turned that way, and every pair of eyes looked downward. Hank chirped to the horses, threw all his weight upon the brake, and they rattled down the grade, the brake block squealing against the rear wheels. They were half-way down before any one spoke. It was Val, and she almost whispered one word:

  “Manley!”

  Arline’s eyes were wet, and there was a croak in her voice when she cried jubilantly: “Well, ain’t that better ’n a sewin’ machine—or a piano?”

  But Val did not attempt an answer. She was staring—staring as if she could not convince herself of the reality. Even Manley was jarred out of his gloomy meditations, and half rose in the seat that he might see over Hank’s shoulder.

  “That’s what your neighbors have done,” Arline began eagerly, “and they nearly busted tryin’ to git through in time, and to keep it a dead secret. They worked like whiteheads, lemme tell you, and never even stopped for the storm. The night of the dance I heard all about how they had to hurry. And I guess Kent’s there an’ got a fire started, like I told him to. I was afraid it might be colder’n what it is. I asked him if he wouldn’t ride over an’ warm up the house t’day—and I see there’s a smoke, all right.” She looked at Manley, and then turned to Val. “Well, ain’t you goin’ to say anything? You dumb, both of you?”

  Val took a deep breath. “We should be dumb,” she said contritely. “We should go down on our knees and beg their pardon and yours—I especially. I think I’ve never in my life felt quite so humbled—so overwhelmed with the goodness of my fellows, and my own unworthiness. I—I can’t put it into words—all the resentment I have felt against the country and the people in it—as if—oh, tell them all how I want them to forgive me for—for the way I have felt. And—Arline—”

  “There, now—I didn’t bargain for you to make it so serious,” Arline expostulated, herself near to crying. “It ain’t nothing much—us folks believe in helpin’ when help’s needed, that’s all. For Heaven’s sake, don’t go ’n’ cry about it!”

  Hank pulled up at the gate with a loud whoa and a grip of the brake. From the kitchen stovepipe a blue ribbon of smoke waved high in the clear air. Kent appeared, grinning amiably, in the doorway, but Val was looking beyond, and scarcely saw him—beyond, where stood a new stable upon the ashes of the old; a new corral, the posts standing solidly in the holes dug for those burned away; a new haystack—when hay was almost priceless! A few chickens wandered about near the stable, and Val recognized them as Arline’s prized Plymouth Rocks. Small wonder that she and Manley were stunned to silence. Manley still looked as if some one had dealt him an unexpected blow in the face. Val was white and wide-eyed.

  Together they walked out to the stable. When they stopped, she put her hand timidly upon his aim. “Dear,” she said softly, “there is only one way to thank them for this, and that is to be the very best it is in us to be. We will, won’t we? We—we haven’t been our best, but we’ll start in right now. Shall we, Manley?”

  Manley looked down at her for a moment, saying nothing.

  “Shall we, Manley? Let us start now, and try again. Let’s play the fire burned up our old selves, and we’re all new, and strong—shall we? And we won’t feel any resentment for what is past, but we’ll work together, and think together, and talk together, without any hidden thing we can’t discuss freely. Please, Manley!”

  He knew what she meant, well enough. For the last two days he had been drinking again. On the night of the dance he had barely kept within the limit of decent behavior. He had read Val’s complete understanding and her disgust the morning after—and since then they had barely spoken except when speech was necessary. Oh, he knew what she meant! He stood for another minute, and she let go his arm and stood apart, watching his face.

  A good deal depended upon the next minute, and they both knew it, and hardly breathed. His hand went slowly into a deep pocket of his overcoat, his fingers closed over something, and drew it reluctantly to the light. Shamefaced, he held it up for her to see—a flat bottle of generous size, full to within a inch of the cork with a pale, yellow liquid.

  “There—take it, and break it into a million pieces,” he said huskily. “I’ll try again.”

  Her yellow-brown eyes darkened perceptibly. “Manley Fleetwood, you must throw it away. This is your fight—be a man and fight.”

  “Well—there! May God damn me forever if I touch liquor again! I’m through with the stuff for keeps!” He held the bottle high, without looking at it, and sent it crashing against the stable door.

  “Manley!” She stopped her ears, aghast at his words, but for all that her eyes were ashine. She went up to him and put her arms around him. “Now we can start all over again,” she said. “We’ll count our lives from
this minute, dear, and we’ll keep them clean and happy. Oh, I’m so glad! So glad and so proud, dear!”

  Kent had got half-way down the path from the house; he stopped when Manley threw the bottle, and waited. Now he turned abruptly and retraced his steps, and he did not look particularly happy, though he had been smiling when he left the kitchen.

  Arline turned from the window as he entered.

  “Looks like Man has swore off ag’in,” she observed dryly. “Well, let’s hope ’n’ pray he stays swore off,”

  CHAPTER XV

  A COMPACT

  The blackened prairie was fast hiding the mark of its fire torture under a cloak of tender new grass, vividly green as a freshly watered, well-kept lawn. Meadow larks hopped here and there, searching long for a sheltered nesting place, and missing the weeds where they were wont to sway and swell their yellow breasts and sing at the sun. They sang just as happily, however, on their short, low flights over the levels, or sitting upon gray, half-buried boulders upon some barren hilltop. Spring had come with lavish warmth. The smoke of burning ranges, the bleak winter with its sweeping storms of snow and wind, were pushed info the past, half forgotten in this new heaven and new earth, when men were glad simply because they were alive.

  On a still, Sunday morning—that day which, when work does not press, is set apart in the range land for slight errands, attention to one’s personal affairs, and to the pursuit of pleasure—Kent jogged placidly down the long hill into Cold Spring Coulee and pulled up at the familiar little unpainted house of rough boards, with its incongruously dainty curtains at the windows and its tiny yard, green and scrupulously clean.

  The cat with white spots on its sides was washing its face on the kitchen doorstep. Val was kneeling beside the front porch, painstakingly stringing white grocery twine upon nails, which she drove into the rough posts with a small rock. The primitive trellis which resulted was obviously intended for the future encouragement of the sweet-pea plants just unfolding their second clusters of leaves an inch above ground. She did not see Kent at first, and he sat quiet in the saddle, watching her with a flicker of amusement in his eyes; but in a moment she struck her finger and sprang up with a sharp little cry, throwing the rock from her.