by B. M. Bower
He found the girl lying upon a bunk just inside the door, still with closed eyes and that corpse-like look in her face. He was guilty of hoping that she would remain in that oblivious state for at least five minutes longer, but the hope was short-lived; for when he lifted her carefully in his arms, her eyes flew open and stared up at him intently.
Ford shut his lips grimly and tried not to mind that unwinking gaze while he carried her out and up the path, across the little bridge and on to the house, and deposited her gently upon her own bed. He had not spoken a word, nor had she. So he left her thankfully to Kate’s tearful ministrations and hurried from the room.
“Lordy me!” he sighed, as he closed the door upon them and went back to the bunk-house, which he entered with a sigh of relief. One tribute he paid her, and one only: the tribute of feeling perturbed over her presence, and of going hot all over at the memory of her steady stare into his face. She was a queer girl, he told himself; but then, so far as he had discovered, all women were queer; the only difference being that some women were more so than others.
He sat down on the bunk where she had lain, and speedily forgot the girl and the incident in facing the problem of that foremanship. He could not get away from the conviction that he was not to be trusted. He did not trust himself, and there was no reason why any man who knew him at all should trust him. Ches Mason was a good fellow; he meant well, Ford decided, but he simply did not realize what he was up against. He meant, therefore, to enlighten him further, and go his way. He was almost sorry that he had come.
Mason, when Ford confronted him later at the corral and bluntly stated his view of the matter, heard him through without a word, and did not laugh the issue out of the way, as he had been inclined to do before.
“I’ll be all right for a month, maybe,” Ford finished, “and that’s as long as I can bank on myself. I tell you straight, Ches, it won’t work. You may think you’re hiring the same fellow that came out of the North with you—but you aren’t. Why, damn it, there ain’t a man I know that wouldn’t give you the laugh if they knew the offer you’ve made me! They would, that’s a fact. They’d laugh at you. You’re all right, Ches, but I won’t stand for a deal like that. I can’t make good.”
Mason waited until he was through. Then he came closer and put both hands on Ford’s shoulders, so that they stood face to face, and he looked straight into Ford’s discolored eyes with his own shining a little behind their encircling wrinkles.
“You can make good!” he said calmly. “I know it. All you need is a chance to pull up. Seeing you won’t give yourself one, I’m giving it to you. You’ll do for me what you won’t do for yourself, Ford—and if there’s a yellow streak in you, I never got a glimpse of it; and the yellow will sure come to the surface of a man when he’s bucking a proposition like you and me bucked for two months. You didn’t lay down on that job, and you were just a kid, you might say. Gosh, Ford, I’d bank on you any old time—put you on your mettle, and I would! You can make good here—and damn it, you will!”
“I wish I was as sure of that as you seem to be,” Ford muttered uneasily, and turned away. Mason’s easy chuckle followed him, and Ford swung about and faced him again.
“I haven’t made any cast-iron promise—”
“Did I ask you to make any?” Mason’s voice sharpened.
“But—Lordy me, Ches! How do you know I—”
“I know. That’s enough.”
“But—maybe I don’t want the darned job. I never said—”
Mason was studying him, as a man studies the moods of an untamed horse. “I didn’t think you’d dodge,” he drawled, and the blood surged answeringly to Ford’s cheeks. “You do want it.”
“If I should happen to get jagged up in good shape, about the first thing I’d do would be to lick the stuffing out of you for being such a simple-minded cuss,” Ford prophesied grimly, as one who knows well whereof he speaks.
“Ye-es—but you won’t get jagged.”
“Oh, Lord! I wish you’d quit believing in me! You used to have some sense,” Ford grumbled. But he reached out and clenched his fingers upon Mason’s arm so tight that Mason set his teeth, and he looked at him long, as if there was much that he would like to put into words and could not. “Say! You’re white clear down to your toes, Ches,” he said finally, and walked away hurriedly with his hat jerked low over his eyes.
Mason looked after him as long as he was in sight, and afterwards took off his hat, and wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead. “Gosh!” he whispered fervently. “That was nip and tuck—but I got him, thank the Lord!” Whereupon he blew his nose violently, and went up to his supper with his hands in his pockets and his humorous lips pursed into a whistle.
Before long he was back, chuckling to himself as he bore down upon Ford in the corral, where he was industriously rubbing Rambler’s sprained shoulder with liniment.
“The wife says you’ve got to come up to the house,” he announced gleefully. “You’ve gone and done the heroic again, and she wants to do something to show her gratitude.”
“You go back and tell your wife that I’m a bold, bad man and I won’t come.” Ford, to prove his sincerity, sat down upon the stout manger there, and crossed his legs with an air of finality.
“I did tell her,” Mason confessed sheepishly. “She wanted to know who you was, and I told her before I thought. And she wanted to know what was the matter with your face, ‘poor fellow,’ and I told her that, too—as near as I knew it. I told her,” he stated sweepingly, “that you’d been on a big jamboree and had licked fourteen men hand-running. There ain’t,” he confided with a twinkle, “any use at all in trying to keep a secret from your wife; not,” he qualified, “from a wife like Kate! So she knows the whole darned thing, and she’s sore as the deuce because I didn’t bring you up to the house right away when you came. She thinks you’re sufferin’ from them wounds and she’s going to doctor ’em. That’s the way with a woman—you never can tell what angle she’s going to look at a thing from. You’re the man that packed me down out of the Wrangel mountains on your back, and that’s enough for her—dang it, Kate thinks a lot of me! Besides, you done the heroic this afternoon. You’ve got to come.”
“There ain’t anything heroic in sloshing a few buckets of water on a barrel of burning rags,” Ford belittled, seeking in his pockets for his cigarette papers.
“How about rescuing a lady?” Mason twitted. “You come along. I want you up there myself. Gosh! I want somebody I can talk to about something besides dresses and the proper way to cure sprained ankles, and whether the grocer sent out the right brand of canned peaches. Women are all right—but a man wants some one around to talk to. You ain’t married!”
“Oh. Ain’t I?” Ford snorted. “And what if I ain’t?”
“Say, there’s a mighty nice girl staying with us; the one you rescued. She’s laid up now—got bucked off, or fell off, or something yesterday, and hurt her foot—but she’s a peach, all right. You’ll—”
“I know the lady,” Ford cut in dryly. “I met her yesterday, and we commenced hating each other as soon as we got in talking distance. She sent me to catch her horse, and then she pulled out before I got back. She’s a peach, all right!”
“Oh. You’re the fellow!” Mason regarded him attentively. “Now, I don’t believe she said a word to Kate about that, and she must have known who it was packed her out of the house. I wonder why she didn’t say anything about it to Kate! But she wasn’t to blame for leaving you out there, honest she wasn’t. I went out to hunt her up—Kate got kinda worried about her—and she told me about you, and we did wait a little while. But it was getting cold, and she was hurt pretty bad and getting kinda wobbly, so I put her on my horse and brought her home. But she left a note for you, and I sent a man back after you with a horse. He come back and said he couldn’t locate you. So we thought you’d gone to some other ranch.” He stopped and looked quizzically at Ford. “So you’re the man! And you’re both here f
or the winter—at least, Kate says she’s going to keep her all winter. Gosh! This is getting romantic!”
“Don’t you believe it!” Ford urged emphatically. “I don’t want to bump into her again; a little of her company will last me a long while!”
“Oh, you won’t meet Jo tonight; Josephine, her name is. She’s in bed, and will be for a week or so, most likely. You’ve just got to come, Ford. Kate’ll be down here after you herself, if I go back without you—and she’ll give me the dickens into the bargain. I want you to get acquainted with my kid—Buddy. He’s down in the river field with the boys, but he’ll be back directly. Greatest kid you ever saw, Ford! Only seven, and he can ride like a son-of-a-gun, and wears chaps and spurs, and can sling a loop pretty good, for a little kid! Come on!”
“Wel-ll, all right—but Lordy me! I do hate to, Ches, and that’s a fact. Women I’m plumb scared of. I never met one in my life that didn’t hand me a package of trouble so big I couldn’t see around it. Why—” He shut his teeth upon the impulse to confide to Mason his matrimonial mischance.
“These two won’t. My wife’s the real goods, once you get to know her; a little fussy, maybe, over some things—most all women are. But she’s all right, you bet. And Josephine’s the proper stuff too. A little abrupt, maybe—”
“Abrupt!” Ford echoed, and laughed over the word. “Yes, she is what you might call a little—abrupt!”
CHAPTER IX
Impressions
Josephine waited languidly while Kate chose a second-best cushion from the couch and, lifting the bandaged foot as gently as might be, placed it, with many little pats and pulls, under the afflicted member. Josephine screwed her lips into a soundless expression of pain, smiled afterwards when Kate glanced at her commiseratingly, and pulled a long, dark-brown braid forward over her chest.
“Do you want tea, Phenie?—or would you rather have chocolate today? I can make chocolate just as easy as not; I think I shall, anyway. Buddy is so fond of it and—”
“Is that man here yet?” Josephine’s tone carried the full weight of her dislike of him.
“I don’t know why you call him ‘that man,’ the way you do,” Kate complained, turning her mind from the momentous decision between tea and chocolate. “Ford’s simply fine! Chester thinks there’s no one like him; and Buddy just tags him around everywhere. You can always,” asserted Kate, with the positiveness of the person who accepts unquestioningly the beliefs of others, living by faith rather than reason, “depend upon the likes and dislikes of children and dogs, you know.”
“Has the swelling gone out of his eyes?” Josephine inquired pointedly, with the irrelevance which seemed habitual to her and Kate when they conversed.
“Phenie, I don’t think it’s kind of you to harp on that. Yes, it has, if you want to know. He’s positively handsome—or will be when the—when his nose heals perfectly. And I don’t think that’s anything one should hold against Ford; it seems narrow, dear.”
“The skinned place?” Josephine’s tone was perfectly innocent, and her fingers were busy with the wide, black bow which becomingly tied the end of the braid.
“Phenie! If you hadn’t a sprained ankle, and weren’t such a dear in every other respect, I’d shake you! It isn’t fair. Because Ford was pounced upon by a lot of men—sixteen, Chester told me—”
“I suppose he counted the dead after the battle, and told Ches truthfully—”
“Phenie, that sounds catty! When you get down on a man, you’re perfectly unmerciful, and Ford doesn’t deserve it. You shouldn’t judge men by the narrow, Eastern standards. I know it’s awful for a man to drink and fight. But Ford wasn’t altogether to blame. They got him to drinking and,” she went on with her voice lowered to the pitch at which women are wont to relate horrid, immoral things, “—I wouldn’t be surprised if they put something in it! Such things are done; I’ve heard of men being drugged and robbed and all sorts of things. And I’m just as much of an advocate for temperance as you are, Phenie—and I think Ford was just right to fight those men. There are,” she declared wisely, “circumstances where it’s perfectly just and right for a man to fight. I can imagine circumstances under which Chester would be justified in fighting—”
“In case sixteen men should hold his nose and pour drugged whisky down his throat?” Phenie inquired mildly, curling the end of her braid over a slim forefinger.
Mrs. Kate made an inarticulate sound which might almost be termed a snort, and walked from the room with her head well up and a manner which silently made plain to the onlooker that she might say many things which would effectually crush her opponent, but was magnanimously refraining from doing so.
Josephine did not even pay her the tribute of looking at her; she had at that moment heard a step upon the porch, and she was leaning to one side so that she might see who was coming into the dining-room. As it happened, it was Mason himself. Miss Josephine immediately lost interest in the arrival and took to tracing with her finger the outline of a Japanese lady with a startling coiffure and an immense bow upon her spine, who was simpering at a lotus bed on Josephine’s kimono. She did not look up until some one stepped upon the porch again.
This time it was Ford, and he stopped and painstakingly removed the last bit of soil from his boot-soles upon the iron scraper which was attached to one end of the top step; when that duty had been performed, he paid further tribute to the immaculate house he was about to enter, by wiping his feet upon a mat placed with mathematical precision upon the porch, at the head of the steps. Josephine watched the ceremonial, and studied Ford’s profile, and did not lay her head back upon the cushion behind her until he disappeared into the dining-room. Then she stared at a colored-crayon portrait of Buddy which hung on the wall opposite, and her eyes were the eyes of one who sees into the past.
Buddy, when he opened the door and projected himself into the room, startled her into a little exclamation.
“Dad says he’ll carry you out to the table and you can have a whole side to yourself,” he announced without preface. “They’ll just pick up your chair, and pack chair and all in, and set you down as ee-asy—do you want to eat out there with us?”
Josephine hesitated for two seconds. “All right,” she consented then, in a supremely indifferent tone which was of course quite wasted on Buddy, who immediately disappeared with a whoop.
“Come on, dad—she says yes, all right, she’ll come,” he announced gleefully. Buddy was Josephine’s devoted admirer, at this point in their rather brief acquaintance; which, according to his mother’s well-known theory, was convincing proof of her intrinsic worth—Mrs. Kate having frequently strengthened her championship of Ford to his detractor, Miss Josephine, by pointing out that Buddy was fond of him.
Josephine spent the brief interval in tucking back locks of hair and in rearranging the folds of her long, Japanese kimono, and managed to fall into a languidly indifferent attitude by the time Chester opened the door. Behind him came Ford; Miss Josephine moved her lips and tilted her head in a perfunctory greeting, and afterward gave him no more attention than if he had been a Pullman porter assisting with her suitcases. For the matter of that, she gave quite as much attention as she received from him—and Mason’s lips twitched betrayingly at the spectacle.
Through dinner they seemed mutually agreed upon ignoring each other as much as was politely possible, which caused Mason to watch them with amusement, and afterwards relieve his feelings by talking about them to Kate in the kitchen.
“Gosh! Jo and Ford are sure putting up a good bluff,” he chuckled, while he selected the freshest dish towel from the rack behind the pantry door. “They’d be sticking out their tongues at each other if they was twenty years younger; pity they ain’t, too; it would be a relief to ’em both!”
“Phenie provokes me almost past endurance!” Mrs. Kate complained, burying two plump forearms in a dishpan of sudsy hot water, and bringing up a handful of silver. “It’s because Ford had been fighting when he came here, a
nd she knows he has been slightly addicted to liquor. She looks down on him, and I don’t think it’s fair. If a man wants to reform, I believe in helping him instead of pushing him father down.” (Mrs. Kate had certain little peculiarities of speech; one was an italicized delivery, and another was the omission of an r now and then. She always said “father” when she really meant “farther.”) “There’s a lot that one can do to help. I believe in showing trust and confidence in a man, when he’s trying to live down past mistakes. I think it was just fine of you to make him foreman here! If Phenie would only be nice to him, instead of turning up her nose the way she does! You see yourself how she treats Ford, and I just think it’s a shame! I think he’s just splendid!”
“She don’t treat him any worse than he does her,” observed Mason, just to the core. “Seems to me, if I was single, and a girl as pretty as Jo—”
“Well, I’m glad Ford has got spunk enough not to care,” Mrs. Kate interposed hastily. “Phenie’s pretty, of course—but it takes more than that to attract a man like Ford. You can’t expect him to like her when she won’t look at him, hardly; it makes me feel terribly, because he’s sure to think it’s because he—I’ve tried to make her see that it isn’t right to condemn a man because he has made one mistake. He ought to be encouraged, instead of being made to feel that he is a—an outcast, practically. And—”
“Jo don’t like Ford, because she’s stuck on Dick,” stated a shrill, positive young voice behind them, and Mrs. Kate turned sharply upon her offspring. “They was waving hands to each other just now, through the window. I seen ’em,” Buddy finished complacently. “Dick was down fixing the bridge, and—”
“Buddy, you run right out and play! You must not listen to older people and try to talk about some-thing you don’t understand.”