"HER HEART WONT BE BROKE NONE"
True to her intuition, he came to her, lying in the hammock waiting his coming the next morning.
"I am afraid," he began apologetically, "that I will have to postpone my departure for some time, after all. It is imperative that the ditches be repaired, the crops needing immediate irrigation, and McVey's indisposition leaves us very short-handed. Besides, I am personally responsible for all these mishaps and must make them good."
His speech was almost contrite in its humility and his manner had lost much of its assurance. It was a moment fraught with possibilities and she was fully aware that the smallest concession on her part would pave the way to reconciliation. But she did not know of the bitter travail in which he had labored the livelong night, and the significance of his closing words evaded her understanding.
Attributing all the foregone evils to Matlock's personal hatred of him, and deeming himself therefore solely responsible for the damage inflicted by that worthy, he had quixotically resolved to remain in Carter's employ until his salary had accumulated to an amount sufficient to recoup the latter for all the loss sustained. That end attained, he would find Matlock—the rest was simple.
Nothing of this she knew, and yet she was conscious of a great impellment to be kind to this man. She had half arisen with a gracious word of thanks for his herculean labors in the behalf of her brother on her lips, when, by some fatality, the morning wrap she was wearing dropped from her shoulders. It was unfortunate that his eyes fell on the instant. When he again raised them she had caught up the garment and with a care so exaggerated that it sent the blood to his face, was haughtily fastening it about her throat. Her intent was unmistakable and he hardened like adamant. All too late she repented; that one second of perversity had undone a whole night's chastening and his voice was as cold as ice when he resumed:
"I will therefore be unable to meet your brother on his arrival. You can say to him that he will lose nothing by last night's work. I am going out to the ditch now and will not return until it has been fully restored." Then with an almost imperceptible inclination of his head, he left her without another look.
Turning uneasily in the hammock, she discovered for the first time that the entrance to the bunkhouse was visible through the interstices of the wistaria. The door was open to admit the solace of the balmy air to the wounded man, whose pale face with its closed eyes was plainly discernible in the semi-gloom of the darkened room. Shuddering slightly, she put her hands before her eyes, lowering them at the very moment that Douglass, belted and spurred, led his saddled horse up to the door.
She watched him enter, noting that he removed his sombrero on crossing the threshold. His every movement betokened care and caution, indicating his solicitude not to awaken the sleeper. Unconsciously she admired the sinuous, almost feline grace of the fellow who stood for quite a time looking down on his stricken comrade. Then she was startled to see him turn and raise his clenched fist in the air, his lips moving convulsively, and she shrank from what was written on his face when he again came softly out and mounted his horse. Ten minutes later she watched a cloud of dust blotting the horizon on the crest of the little rise to the north. When it had again settled, she went into her room and came out with a pair of shears in her hand.
McVey, jaded and wan from the manipulations of the surgeon who had come down overnight from Tin Cup, waked to find an exquisite bouquet of freshly cut flowers in a quaint Japanese vase on the little stand beside his bed. He had seen that vase before on the window-sill of Miss Carter's room and he blinked incredulously at it. His wonder was only exceeded by his embarrassment when, a few minutes later, that lady herself in person entered the room, followed by Abigail, who bore a platter of daintily prepared food.
"It's might good o' yuh, ma'am, too good!" he assured her in clumsy gratefulness, as she rearranged his pillows after the refection. "But yuh shouldn't go to so much trouble; I'd rest a heap easier in my mind if I knowed you wasn't puttin' yuhself out none. But," reminiscently, "that chicken soup were shore fine!"
"You shall have some every day until you are well," she beamed on him from the doorway.
He thanked her with a gravity whose solemnity of effect was somewhat offset by his next utterance. "Say, Miss Williams," he said seriously in a stage aside, "when yuh cal'late I am well enough to stand it, yuh go out an' git some other Greaser to come up here and shoot me some more!"
"Yuh shet yuah trap, Red McVey," snapped the vestal addressed reprovingly, "an' rest yuah pore weak brain. Ain't yuh made trouble enough already, gettin' yuhself shot up right here in thu thick o' thu hayin' an' Ken short-handed as it was? What onaccountable idjits men is anyway! Now yuh be good fer a spell!"
She flounced out with assumed asperity, halting at the threshold for a last admonishing look. The big fellow, his head hung in abashment, looked up pleadingly.
"Kiss me, mommer, an' I'll go to sleep!"
Routed horse, foot and dragoons, Abigail fled in confusion, and Red grinned in self-complacency as Miss Carter's silvery laugh tinkled in diminishing crescendo. Then he turned his face to the wall and really fell asleep.
"Beats all," confided Abigail that afternoon, to Grace, watching her deft manipulation of the dinner's pie crust, "what misonderstandable fools these men critters be. Thar's thet Ken Douglas o' yourn,"—watching slyly out of the corner of her eye the flushing face and compressing lips of her auditor—"now 'tain't sca'cely six months since he was sky-hootin' around yeah, wishful o' killin' every blessed cowpuncha in this outfit; an' now they ain't ary one o' the pin-headed dogies that ain't a beggin' to be allowed to do his killin' fer him! He had quite a time makin' 'em promise not ter cut in on Matlock, las' night. I hear 'm jawbonin' about it oveh to thu shack. But they finally allows he's Ken's meat an' 'grees ter keep han's off. I'd feel some sorry fer that Matlock ef he wa'nt sech a pizen skunk. I r'ally do wisht he was moah of a man! Ken's too clean a boy to hev ter stomp out sech a snake."
Miss Carter was not a woman of iron nerve and this dispassionate talk of killing affected her visibly. As the old woman proceeded with her disquieting recital, her face blanched, but with a great effort at self-control she held her peace; this was evidently the hour of revelations—and she had to know!
"But he has it ter do—he suah has! An' I wisht 'twas oveh. I doan reckon Matlock will ketch him nappin'—Ken's eye tooths is cut—but yuh nevah kin tell!" She sighed lugubriously and the girl's blood ran cold in her veins. "Thar's allus a chanct—an' Ken is a heap keerless at times. I hope he gits him soon!"
"But why?" said Grace unevenly, making a heroic struggle to retain the composure that was fast deserting her. "You talk as if he were compelled to kill this man."
"Well, hain't he?" replied Abbie, with naïve surprise in her voice, as she stopped pinching the edges of a pie and looked up in astonishment. "Hain't Matlock declar'd hisself? Hain't he bragged as how he'd cut thu heart out o' Ken an' show it ter him? Didn't he crawfish like a cowardly coyote when Ken called his bluff in thu Alcazar, an' then came sneakin' around yeah in thu night an' buhn yuh haystacks? Why, what moah d'yuh want him to do?" The indignation in her voice was genuine.
"But why—I cannot understand—" began the girl confusedly, "why is it necessary for Mr. Douglass to personally undertake the punishment of this wretch? Have you no laws that can be invoked to punish the one and protect the other?"
"Laws!" snorted the old woman contemptuously, "what good would all the laws be to Ken arter Matlock had him pumped full o' lead? Thar's only one law fer rattlesnakes on ther range, honey—kill 'em befoah they gits a chanct ter strike!" The leathery old face twitched venomously and she slashed the pie top with suggestive vigor.
"But that would be murder!" gasped the girl, her face gray with horror.
"Murder, huh! An' what would it be if Matlock has his way? Didn't he kill thet sheepherd—who whopped him fair an' squar'—in cold blood? Didn't he jest nat'rally butcher thet pore Dutch boy arter fust cripplin' o' his gun on ther sly, ther tre'cherous haound! Murder—!"
Her gray crest was erect and she was breathing audibly through passion-pinched nostrils. She put her hand kindly on the girl's shoulder. "Hit's got ter be one or t'other on 'em, honey. They hain't no other way. An' out yeah whar wimmin 'n children air left alone a heap at times hit's every good man's duty ter pertect his own. Did yuh heah what happened ter thet sheepman's wife thet night arter they killed her man?
"Hit war one man done hit arter the rest was gone. He was masked, o' cose, but all thu rest o' yuh outfit was at thu Alcazar—Matlock with 'em—so's ter prove a alleyby. Thu one that were shy was thu feller they found on Hoss Creek a week later with nine buckshot in his rotten heart." And then she avoided the girl's eyes as she whispered something that brought Grace to her feet screaming with horror.
"Naow I ain't sayin'," she went on slowly, "thet Matlock is as low as thet. T'other was a half-breed 'n some say a convick. But thar's no room fer him on this range naow, an' he knows it. An' that kind o' man allus goes bad. He's got it in specul fer Ken, an' hit's suah one er t'other on 'em." And then she shot her last bolt mercilessly:
"Would yuh ruther he killed Ken?"
Outside somewhere a raven, scavengering indolently about the corrals, croaked gutturally; never again as long as she lived would Grace Carter hear without shuddering the uncanny dissonance of that foul bird. In the silence of that suddenly oppressive room the ticking of the little cheap alarm clock on the mantel beat upon her brain like the strokes of a drum, seeming to her disordered mind to say "Kill-Ken!—Kill-Ken!"
She passed her hand numbly over her forehead, mechanically adjusting a stray wisp of hair. She was dimly conscious of an agony of compunction on the wrinkled face before her, but it excited in her only a dull wonder. Why was Abbie looking so strangely at her? If only that tiresome clock would cease its muttering! What was this strange thing now happening to her, this slipping away of a part of herself, this new and perturbing sense of sudden oldness and wisdom and—and heart-wrenching fear! For a moment she plucked petulantly at the velvet band about her throat; the room seemed reeling about her and she swayed unsteadily on her feet.
With a cry of keen self-reproach, Abigail threw her arm around the tottering girl and bore her into the darkened bedroom. When she emerged later it was with a sorely troubled mien.
"I'm not quite settled in my mind thet I've done ther right thing in tellin' her so suddenly. Still, since he's goin' ter do it she hed best be prepared. Pore lamb! Why didn't Ken finish ther job in thu fust place and be done with it! Now it'll come between 'em an' like as not she won't hav' him on account of it. Ther Lawd do move in myster'ous ways fer a fac'! An' they do say thet ther trail o' troo love is rough an' crooked. An' them sech a well-matched span, too!"
Abigail had evidently jumped to conclusions of her own, in her range-born simplicity overlooking the obvious disparity that a more captious conventionality would have interposed between the respective social planes of a society blossom and a "wild and woolly" cowpuncher. And if she had drawn any comparisons they would have been indubitably in favor of the latter. For in her environment she had acquired the faculty of properly estimating the worth of a real man. And then, again, Abigail was a woman, and there is a proverb about the contempt of familiarity.
"I reckon 'twer ther heat," she opined barefacedly when the young woman, a girl no longer since the ticking of that clock, expressed her inability to account for her sudden indisposition. "I heve nevah fainted mahself; reckon I wouldn't know how," with a grim attempt at jocularity. "Nevah had the time, anyhow. Yuh feelin' peart again, honey?"
Grace assented languidly. The antelope kid, fed to repletion, was blinking at her from his blanket nest in the corner. As she spoke he arose and wabbled over to her side, laying his cool, moist muzzle against her hand.
"Jest look at thet, now!" said Abbie delightedly. "Thu leetle cuss wants ter be petted an' coddled. Well, he's like all other he-critters, got ter be humored an' made much of, whether they desarve it or not. An' I guess," with shrewd philosophy and a certain deliberate emphasis, "thet's what we poor she-males was mos'ly created for. Take Hank, now. He's a reg'lar baby about sech things—an' whines like a sick pup ef he's overlooked in the slightest. Thar now, you Buffo!—lawks a mussy, dearie, he's got yuh hand all slobbered up—you hont yuah hole! It don't do to giv' 'em too much rope. Ef yuh do they's suah ter run on it an' thar's trouble all raound. Feed 'em well, speak 'em kind, an' give 'em theah haids on a hahd pull er in a tight place, an' they gentle quick, an' easy an' come up pullin' arter every fall. But doan yuh never go to crowdin' of 'em onreasonable at thu wrong time er they'll balk an' lay down, er kick over thu dash-boahd an' run away, accordin' to thu natuah o' thu brute. Yuh kin keep 'em up on thu bit when thu goin's good, but doan spur 'em when they's excited 'n feelin' they cawn!
"Thu mos' on 'ems ondependable at times! some on 'ems loco all thu time—thet kind espeshully" pointing toward the bunkhouse from which was issuing the tinkle of a guitar to the accompaniment of a stentorian wail:
"Haow d-r-r-y I am! Haow d-r-r-y I am!
Gawd o-h-h-nly knows haow-w-w dry I am!"
"Yuah takin' thet tuhn quite upsot me, and I done quite forgot thet no 'count Red. Heah him yowl! Long ways from daid yet, 'pears to me!"
Nevertheless, the cool hand laid on his hot brow was invested with a motherly tenderness, and the chiding voice was gentle and kind.
"Yuh better go and lay in yuah hammock, dearie," she suggested to Grace, "an' rest up a bit; I got a lot o' tidyin' up to do yeah." The room was already painfully clean and the man on the bed knit his brows quizzically.
"I do want my hair curled 'n' my mustache waxed 'n' some ody-kolone on my hank-chy," he murmured plaintively. "I shore do!"
Abigail glared at him, but Grace, with a final pat to the pillows, smiled indulgently. "Get well quickly; we need you too much; and it must be dreadful to have to stay indoors in this weather." Then she went out rather abstractedly, McVey's eyes following her with the wistfulness of a dog's. Abbie, watching him, smiled satirically.
"Red, too!" she ejaculated mentally; "well, why not? He's a whole lot of a man, hisself, an cats kin look at queens ef they likes. An' queens hev a lot o' things ter be done fer 'em thet only men kin do. I wonder now—!"
She looked at him speculatively, her lips tightening with a sudden determination. The cowboy grinned with quick prescience.
"Spit it out, Abbie. I caint help myself."
"Red," she said quietly without an attempt at preamble, "will yuh kill Matlock fer me?"
He stared his astonishment undisguisedly. There was absolutely no doubt as to the seriousness of her question; the grim set of her jaws, the anxiety in her eyes and general tenseness of muscle throughout the whole lean body betokened that.
In this man's life surprises were not infrequent and now as ever he displayed only the nonchalance characteristic of all typical frontiersmen in moments of crisis. Something in her manner and attitude repressed the almost irresistible desire to answer her humorously, and his reply was grave to solemnity.
"Yuh see, Miss Abbie, we-all promised Ken thet we wouldn't cut in on thet deal. But I'd jest love to oblige yuh, an' if yuh can square me with the old man I'll take Matlock's trail soon as I can straddle m' hoss agin. Yuh see, Ken's kinder got hes heart sot on doin' thet leetle stunt hisself, an' he's apt to r'ar up an' sweat under thu collar when anybody musses with hes things. Yuh onderstand how 'tis—"
She withered him with a measureless scorn: "Yes, I onderstan'. Yuah afraid o' Matlock!" She turned to go. "An' I thought this was a man!"
"Stop a minnit, Miss Willi'ms!" The words were scarcely audible but she wheeled instanter. He had not moved a muscle so far as she could detect but she felt as though she had been clutched in a grasp of steel and whirled on a pivot. But the erstwhile pallid face was now justifying his nickname and his eyes were black with menace. "Thet's not eggsactly squar' now, is it?" His voice was almost pleading, the trembling hands alone betrayed the strain he was laboring under.
Mountain born and range bred, Abigail Williams was a woman of undaunted courage, but even her invincible spirit recoiled momentarily from the task she set herself. It was like plowing in a powder magazine with a red-hot share, but she was only concerned with the end in view and, deliberately considering the risk, employed the only means at hand.
"Squar' er raound," she said incisively, "It's thu mizzable truth. Ef it wa'nt, yuh would take thu job offen Ken's ban's an' keep my lamb's heart from breakin'!"
She could hear the beating of his heart in the absolute quiet that followed her audacious words. When she dared to raise her eyes he was very pale and wan but he met her pitying glance with a brave smile although his lips were twitching.
"I reckon that I've been a bit thick-haided," he said simply. "I ought have knowed thet you wa'nt the kind o' woman to take no sech mean advantage of a feller. Yuh'll excuse me, Miss Abbie! Yuh see, I didn't savvy the how o' things."
Abbie, torn with remorse and pity, was all woman again. In the reaction she wished she had left her words unsaid and impulsively went over and laid her hand on his. The cowboy covered it with his other bronzed paw and for a long time neither spoke. It was McVey who broke the silence.
"I'll kill him, o' cose. Reckon it'll cost me me' job—an' then some! It's goin' to be mahnst'ous hard to make Ken see it thu right way an' he'll be some rambunctuous about it. He's awful sot in hes ways an' it's goin' to be hard to explain. I'd shore hate to have some one play me thet trick, I suttinly would!"
The woman was crying now and as the weak drawl ended she grew hysterical. "Oh! Gawd, what hev I done?" she moaned under her breath; then she frantically implored him to forget what she had said, insisting that it was all a joke, that she was merely "tryin' to pay him back fer his imperence" the night before. But Red smiled his entire conviction.
"Miss Abbie, don't yuh do it no moah, don't yuh, now! It shore ain't yuah strong suit, yuh giv' yuah han' away. Lyin's man's work, an' a powerful bad business it is, too! Gawd nevah intended a woman's lips to be dirtied that away."
"An' besides, it's too late," he went on dispassionately. "Yuh've made many things plain to me that I was too locoed to see before. But tell me straight, is that true about her'n Ken?"
She nodded mutely, not daring to meet his eyes.
He looked long into the starlit sky, and Abbie, emboldened after a time by his seeming composure, rose and bade him good night. He reached out for the cigarette materials laid convenient to his hand.
"Guess I'll make a terbacco smoke." Abbie struck a match and he luxuriously filled his capacious lungs. Then slowly exhaling the pungent wreath he flicked the ash from the cigarette tip and tentatively extended his sinewy arm. It was as devoid of tremor as that of a bronze statue and he nodded his satisfaction.
"Her heart won't be broke none."
His voice was very calm and even.