CHAPTER IV
It was almost a week before Bob Flick returned, and during that time Pearl saw Hanson almost constantly, although to do so she had continually to match her quickness and subtlety against that of her father and Hughie; but even while she and her father met each other with move and counter-move, check and checkmate, it was characteristic of both of them that Hanson's obvious infatuation and her equally obvious return of it were never mentioned between them.
With Hughie it was different, and Pearl met his petulant remonstrance, his boyish withdrawal of the usual confiding intimacy which existed between them, with laughter and caresses. As for Mrs. Gallito, she alone was unchanged, apparently quite oblivious to storm conditions in the mental atmosphere. But this was not unusual; when matters of importance were transacted in the Gallito household Mrs. Gallito did not count.
But these disturbing conditions could not daunt Pearl's high spirits; she was like flame, and the light of her eye, the glow on her cheek, the buoyancy of her step were not all due to the ardor of her loving and the joy of being ardently loved. There was also the zest of intrigue.
And, oh! what a mad and splendid game she and Hanson played together! He rose to her every soaring audacity; they took almost impossible chances as lightly as a hunter takes a hurdle. The lift of her eyelash, an imperceptibly significant gesture, a casual word spoken in conversation, these Hanson met with an incredible quickness of understanding. It was a game at which he was master, and which he had played many times before, but never had his intuitions been so keen, his always rapid comprehension been so stimulated.
Beneath the eye of another master of intrigue, Gallito, watchful as a spider, they met and loved until, it seemed to Hanson, that the whole, wide desert rang with their glorious laughter. And through it all Francisco Gallito sat and smoked and sipped his cognac imperturbably; apparently unruffled by defeat, a defeat—the Pearl with subtle femininity saw to that—which was not without its elements of ignominy.
But now Bob Flick had returned and had sat late with Gallito the night before, talking, although Mrs. Gallito, who tendered this information to her daughter, had not been able to overhear any part of their conversation, in spite of her truly persistent efforts to do so. These circumstances, and results which would probably ensue when a definite course of action had been decided upon, occupied the Pearl's thoughts as she stood at the gate gazing out on the gray wastes spread before her in the broad morning sunshine. Lolita was perched on the fence beside her, swaying back and forth, muttering to herself and occasionally dipping down perilously in a curious effort to see the garden upside down through the fence palings.
Pearl turned at last from her contemplation of the subject which absorbed her attention, and smiled as her glance fell upon the gaudy tail, the only part of Lolita now visible, although, even then, the horse-shoe frown, which showed faintly on her smooth forehead, a facsimile of the one graven deep on her father's wrinkled brow, did not disappear.
"They've got it in for us, Lolita—Rudolf and me." She laughed outright now. Pearl's laughter was ever a disagreeable surprise; low, harsh, unpleasantly vibrant, and in strange dissonance to her soft, contralto voice. "Lay you any odds you say, Lolita, that it's poor old Bob that's got to be the goat."
The parrot swung back to a normal position with surprising rapidity. "Bob, Bob," she croaked. "Mi jasmin, Pearl, mi corazon," and she gazed at her mistress with wrinkled, cynical eyes.
"Yes, Bob's got to do the telling." Pearl confided more to Lolita than she ever did in her fellow beings. "Oh, Rudolf, this is where you get knifed! They've been laying for you right from the first. When Bob's got to do a thing, he never wastes any time; he'll be along sure this morning. I guess we'll just wait right here and catch him."
Lolita hopped clumsily on to Pearl's shoulder and tweaked her ear. "Hell and damnation!" she muttered, and then sang:
"Love me to-day,
Love me an hour."
Pearl shrugged impatiently. "Shut up!" she cried, and resting her chin in her cupped hands gazed over the sparkling, shimmering plain, where all unshadowed day-beams seemed to gather as pure light and then, as if fused in some magic alembic, became color. There, the ineffable command: "Let there be light!" included all. It is only in the silence and light of the desert that men may fully realize that the universe is one, that light is music and music is color and color is fragrance, undifferentiated in the eternal harmony of beauty.
Pearl's eyes drank the desert, unconsciously seeking there in its haunting enigmas and unsolved mysteries an answer to the enigma of self. Like life, like truth, like love, like all realities viewed from the angle of human vision, the desert is a paradox. Its vast emptiness is more than full; its unashamed sterility is but the simile for unmeasured fecundity.
For an hour thus she leaned and gazed, Lolita restlessly walking back and forth, singing and croaking, until, at last, as Pearl had predicted, Bob Flick appeared, a fact not unheralded by Lolita's cries; but Pearl did not alter her languid pose, nor even turn her head to greet him. She was watching a whirling column of sand, polished and white as a colossal marble pillar.
"It's kind of early for them to begin, ain't it, Bob?" she remarked casually.
"Yes." He paused by the gate, leaning one arm on it, and in the swift glance she cast at him from the corners of her eyes she could see that his expressionless face looked worn, the lines about the mouth seemed to have deepened and the eyes were heavy, as if he had not slept.
Lolita had, as usual, perched upon his shoulder, and was murmuring in his ear.
"Say, Pearl," Flick spoke again after an interval of silence, "I wish you'd take a walk with me. I—I got something on my mind that I want to talk about."
"All right," she acquiesced readily, the nicker of a smile about her lips quickly suppressed. "I'll be ready in a minute, as soon as I get my hat."
They walked through the village, the great broken wall of the mountains rising before them, deceptively near, and yet austerely remote, dazzling snow domes and spires crowning the rock-buttressed slopes and appearing sometimes to float, as unsubstantial clouds, in an atmosphere of all commingling and contrasting blues and purples. Presently they turned into a lane of mesquite trees. The growth of these trees was thick on either side and the branches arched above their heads. They had stepped in a footfall's space into a new world. It was one of those surprising, almost unbelievable contrasts in which the desert abounds.
A moment before they had gazed upon the mountains, spectacularly vivid in the clear atmosphere, white peaks and azure skies, green foothills, serrated with black shadows. Behind them the sun-flooded white glare of the great, waste place and behold! all these vanished as they set their feet in this garden inclosed, this bower as green and quiet as the lane of a distant and far softer and more fertile country.
Pearl never made any conventional attempts at conversation, and for a time they walked in silence through those fairy aisles where the light fell golden-green and the sun only filtered in tiny broken disks through the delicate lace of the mesquite leaves. Then Flick spoke:
"Pearl, I got something to say to you, and it's about the hardest thing I ever tried to do, because I know," his mouth twisted a little, "that you're not going to like me any better for it."
"What do you do it for then, Bob?" she asked, and there was more than a half impatient mockery in her tone, there was wonder.
"I got to," he said doggedly. "I guess there's no sense in it, but, whether you like it or not, I always got to do what seems the best thing for you."
It was an inflexible attitude, an ideal of conduct unfalteringly held, and uncompromisingly adhered to, and she knew it. Therefore, she shrugged her shoulders resignedly, the faint horse-shoe frown again appearing in her forehead. "Well—go on, then," her voice as resigned as her shoulders, "and get it over."
"It's this—" he hesitated and looked down at her a moment, and the tenderness his glance expressed she did not lift her eyes to see and would not have noticed if she had; "Pearl, Hanson ain't on the level."
She laughed that slightly grating, almost unpleasant, laugh of hers. "It's no secret to me, Bob, that several of you are thinking that."
"We got cause to," he answered moodily; and then, as if struck by something in her words, he looked at her quickly. "Has your Pop told you anything?" There was surprise in both glance and voice.
"Not a thing," she assured him, scornfully amused by the question, "but there are some things that don't have to be told. Do you suppose I haven't caught on to the way you've all been acting?"
Again he looked his surprise. "We all been acting?" he repeated.
"Yes. I've seen things and I've felt them. Oh, you might just as well out with it, Bob. What is it all about?"
He stared unseeing down the sun-sifted dusk of the green lane. Here the desert silence was like a benediction of peace, broken now and then by the faint, shrill note of an insect, or the occasional soft, mournful plaint of a dove.
"Pearl, you can laugh at me if you want to, and say I'm jealous. That's true, I am. I can't help it; but this time it wasn't all that. I got to size up men quick; that was my business for a good many years, and the first minute I set eyes on Hanson I knew he wasn't straight. And then, Hughie—"
"And so you stirred up Pop to watch him?" she broke in quick as a flash.
"No," he answered patiently, "no, but Hughie's feelings got so strong about him that your Pop kind of woke up and got to studying him, and then he saw what—what neither of you tried to hide," there was bitterness in his tone, "and then he kind of remembered something he'd heard up in Colina, and—"
"And so you've been up to Colina tracking round after a woman." Her verbal strokes were swift and hard as a flail. And again Flick started in surprise. His cheeks flushed faintly, his jaw set.
"What you mean, Pearl? Has he been having me trailed? I don't believe it."
"No," she drawled, taking a malicious amusement in this unwonted perturbation on his part, "he hasn't. You slipped away so quiet and easy that you didn't stop to say good-by, even to me. Were you afraid I'd put him on to it?"
She did not hesitate to plant her banderillos where they would sting most, and Flick winced at this imputation which struck so near home. "How did you know about the woman, then?" he asked quickly.
Pearl lifted her head and laughed aloud, and, at the unwonted sound breaking the desert silence, three pairs of brilliant eyes gazing through the screening mesquite branches vanished and the gray, shadowy figures of three coyotes disappeared as noiselessly as they had come.
"How did I know about the woman?" She repeated the question and considered it, still with amused scorn, as if debating whether she would enlighten him or not. "Well—" drawling aggravatingly, "I knew you and Pop had the knife ready for Ru—Mr. Hanson." Flick's mouth twisted again. "That wasn't very hard to see. So when you hit the trail, Bob, I gave him the chance to clear out. I did so, tipped him off, you know. Now I guess if he'd been wanted bad for anything that would—well, put him behind the bars, say, he'd have gotten out pretty quick. And, anyway, if he'd been wanted like that he wouldn't have stayed here so long, for they wouldn't have had any trouble in nailing a man as well known as him before, so, you see, I knew it wasn't any of the usual things. But," and here she stopped and, looking up into his face, spoke more emphatically, "I gave him the chance, too, to tell me all about himself and he didn't take it. Now, there isn't a man living that wouldn't have taken it—under the circumstances—" she spoke with a deliberately cruel emphasis, and Flick's shoulders contracted a little as the dart pricked him—"unless it was some mix-up about a woman."
"It's about a woman, all right," grimly.
"What about her?" Pearl's voice cut the air like the swift, downward stroke of a whip.
"She's his wife," returned Flick. "She's been living up near Colina. She owns a part of a mine there and has been managing it."
Pearl took this in silence; and they had walked a dozen yards or so before they spoke again.
"Well, what of it?" she said at last, carelessly, almost gaily. "Divorces are easy."
His expressionless face showed a cynical amusement, with just a hint of triumph in the lighting of his eye. He shook his head. "I talked to her," he said. "She's a good, decent woman, but she ain't quite straight in her head when it comes to Hanson. He lied to her right along about the others, even from the first; played fast and loose with her, and finally eloped with one of his burlesque head-liners. She took it. What else was there for her to do? But she spends about all of her time watching her fences to see that there's no divorce in question. He's done everything, tried to buy her off more than once, but it's no good. Every place he goes she follows him up sooner or later, and she writes him letters, too, every once in so often, offering to come back to him. And he can't get anything on her, for she lives as straight as a string. Oh, no, Pearl, Mr. Rudolf Hanson'll never marry again as long as that lady's living, or I miss my guess."
It was evidently with difficulty that Pearl had controlled herself, her brow had darkened and her upper lip had curled back from her white teeth in a particularly unpleasant and disfiguring fashion. Again they walked in one of those silences in which she was wont to entrench herself, and then she looked up at him with a faintly scornful smile. "Well, you've sure done your duty, Bob, and I guess you've got just about as much thanks as folks usually do for that."
He drew his hand across his brow and looked before him a little drearily. "I didn't expect anything else," he said simply. "I knew what I'd get. But whether you like it or not," and here he caught her shoulder, his eyes holding hers, "as I told you before, I always got to do what seems the best for you, no matter what's the cost."
Her face did not soften. She merely accepted this as she did all else that he had to give her, himself included.
They had reached the end of a long alley, and now they turned and retraced their steps, but they had traversed almost half of the distance they had come before Pearl spoke again. "Well, now you've told me, what else are you and Pop planning to do?"
He weighed his answer for a few moments. "I guess nothing," he said at last. "I guess we'll leave it to you to send him about his business."
She stopped in the path and looked at him; her blue cotton gown fell in long lines of grace about her slender figure. "If you and Pop want to know what I'm going to do," she said, "I'll tell you. I'm going to accept Rudolf's offer and go out on the road, that's what. You know by this time that I can take care of myself."
He pondered this seriously, but without a change in the expression of his face. "Would you go with him," he asked, "if Sweeney offers you as much or more money?"
"Sweeney won't offer me more money. I know Sweeney and his limits," significantly, "and you won't make up the balance of what Sweeney lacks, either, do you hear? Now you, and Pop, too, can just keep your hands off. I manage this affair myself."
Flick merely shrugged his shoulders, and they walked on without further speech on the matter. Presently Bob's keen eyes descried some one walking down the mesquite avenue toward them. "Why, it's Hughie!" he exclaimed.
Even as he spoke the boy stopped and listened intently. He stood motionless, waiting until they drew nearer, and then he lifted his head, which he had bent sidewise the better to hear their almost soundless footsteps.
Pearl, seeing that her interview with Flick was soon to be interrupted, stopped short in the path and laid one hand detainingly upon his arm. "Bob," she said, in her softest tone, "Bob, you and I have been pals for a good while; you aren't going against me now?"
He stopped, obedient to her touch, and looked at her unwillingly. He could always hold to his resolution in the face of her anger, but to withstand her when she chose to coax! That was another and more difficult matter. But if he met her gaze reluctantly there was no wavering in either his glance or his voice.
"I'm going to save you from Hanson, Pearl," he paused for the fraction of a second, "by any means I got to use."
She flashed one swift, violent glance of resentment, and then immediately controlled herself, as she could always do when she chose and when she was playing to win; so now she cast down her eyes and sighed.
The motes of the glancing sunbeams fell over her like a shower of gold, spangling the blue cotton frock until it appeared a more regal vesture than purple and ermine; her head was bent, her body drooped like a lily in the noonday heat, her whole attitude was soft, and forlorn and appealing, as if she, this wilful, untamed creature, subdued herself to accept a wounding decree, and bore it with all the pathos of unmurmuring resignation.
Flick's heart smote him, he longed to clasp her to his breast and give her everything she impossibly craved. And now it was he who sighed, and then clinched his hands as if to steel his resolution.
She heard the sigh: she saw from the quick movement of his hands, the sudden, involuntary straightening of the shoulders that the struggle was on, so she lifted her eyes half wistfully, half doubtingly to his and thus gazed a moment and then smiled her faintly crooked heart-shattering smile:
"You and I have been friends too long for us to begin to quarrel now, isn't that so, Bob?" Again she laid her hand on his arm.
He caught it in both of his and pressed it hard. "I guess you know we'll never quarrel, Pearl. I guess you know that, no matter what you say or do, it'll never make any difference to me."
"'Course I know it. And you're not going against me now, Bob, either, are you?" She lifted his hand, and with one of her rare, caressing gestures laid it against her cheek for a moment and, turning her face a little, lightly brushed his palm with her lips.
He shivered and quickly drew his hand away. There was silence between them for a few moments and then he sighed again and more heavily than ever. "Oh, Pearl," he cried, "what do you want to make things so hard for? Let that dog—" he checked himself hastily, seeing her expression. "I beg your pardon, you don't look at him that way. Let Hanson go. I know you about as well as anybody in the world, don't I?"
"Better," she nodded her head affirmatively, answering without hesitation.
"Well, won't you believe me when I tell you that you couldn't be happy with him. Won't you listen to me, Pearl?"
She looked at him a little slyly out of the corners of her eyes, a little one-sided, cynical smile on her lips. "We're always so dead sure what's going to make other people happy, ain't we, Bob? Always can see what's good for them so much better than they ever can see for themselves."
Flick looked away from her, down the long, shaded alley; once or twice he swallowed hard. "It ain't easy to say what I got to," a faint flush on his cheek, "'cause I hate to talk that-a-way to a lady, especially to you, Pearl; but I know you; and you can't be happy, you just naturally can't, with a man that's married for keeps to one woman, and that'll—God, Pearl! It hurts me to talk like this to you—that'll throw you over when he's tired of you just like he's thrown over several others."
She caught his arm and shook it violently, as if she scarcely knew what she did. "Throw me over! Me! the Black Pearl!" she cried hoarsely, and broke into a torrent of Spanish oaths. "Dios!" she paused at last, panting for breath, "you must be crazy to talk to me like that, Bob Flick."
"I told you how I hated it," he answered, with that sad, unaltered patience with which he always took her unspared blame, "but I had to do it. You got to know these things, Pearl, and it's better for me to tell you than for your Pop to try."
"He wouldn't have gotten very far," she muttered.
"That's just it. You'd both have got to scrapping and screaming at each other and nothing told."
"Better nothing told, as far as you are concerned," she flashed at him fiercely, and then lapsed into sullen silence.
"Hello! Hello!" Hughie's voice came to them from a side avenue or narrower path down which he had wandered.
"Hello, yourself," Flick answered. "We'll wait for you right here."
"Bob." Pearl's soft voice held no evidence of rancor. "Tell me something quick, before he reaches us. Tell me true, and I'll be good friends, honest, I will."
"You know I'll tell you anything I can."
"Then—then—is she—that woman in Colina—pretty? As pretty as I am?"
He smiled bitterly. "No one's as pretty as you, Pearl. No, she ain't pretty."
"Well, what does she look like?" impatiently.
"Nothing much. Why, I don't know, just looks like most every other woman you see."
"Oh, Bob, quick! Is she little or big? Is she kind of saucy and quick, or is she quiet and slow? Quick, now, Hughie's almost here."
"Why—why," he rubbed his hand across his brow, "she's kind of—kind of motherly."
Pearl threw back her head and laughed, then she took a few dancing steps up and down the road.
"It's Pearl and Bob," called Hughie. "I knew it a while back when I stopped to listen, and then I heard a bird note down yonder," with a wave of his hand toward the direction in which he had come, "and I wanted to hear it closer, so I didn't wait for you. I can always tell you two by the sound of your footsteps. Pearl walks in better rhythm than you do, Bob."
"Of course. What do you expect?" It was Flick who spoke. "What are you doing so far away from home, anyway, Hughie?"
The boy's wistful, delicate face clouded. "I had to go somewhere," he said. "That Hanson has been there all morning, and mother has been sitting with her head so close to his, talking, talking."
Pearl laughed a single note, like her father's. "Poor Rudolf!" she muttered, "the men are all jealous of him, even Hugh."
Fortunately, the boy did not hear her, although Bob Flick did, as she intended he should.
"I do love mother," Hugh added plaintively, "but I can't love the people she mostly likes, so I came as far away as I could, and here," his face was irradiated in one of its quick changes, "I've been walking up and down and hearing and seeing things; listening to the quail and the doves; and a while ago there was a humming-bird; and did you ever smell the desert as sweet as it is this morning?" He lifted his head and sniffed ecstatically. "I've been turning the whole morning into music. It's all gold and green and gay with little silver trumpets through it, and now and again the moan of the doves. I'm going to work it out as soon as we get home. That is," he shrugged his shoulders impatiently, "if that Hanson has gone. He stops all the music and the color." This was Hugh's invariable plaint when any one was about whom he disliked.
"Oh, forget him," cried Pearl. "Don't be a cross, Hughie." She spoke with a half impatient, half teasing tenderness. It was remarkable that she showed no resentment toward the boy for the difficulties in which she found herself entangled, although his intuitions and the almost superstitious respect which they were accorded in the Gallito household might be said to have caused the disturbing investigations into Hanson's past. That Pearl herself disregarded these intuitions in this case was to those about her the strongest proof of her infatuation; but she never dreamed of blaming the boy or harboring rancor against him for this mischief he had done. On the contrary, she accepted it fatalistically. He never could account himself for these instinctive likes and dislikes of his; therefore, they were to be accepted and borne with as something of him, and yet apart from him; and that was all there was to it.
"I'll tell you what to do, Hugh. You help me work out some new dances," she cried. "A lot has been coming to me. One shall be 'Night on the Desert.' We can get some great effects. Something really artistic for the big cities, not the old waltz things we have to do for the desert and mountain villages. We might try that 'Desert Morning' that you've just been planning to compose, and I've been thinking of another one—a Cactus Blossom Dance. Something like this." She began to dance.
"Tell me the steps, Pearl; tell me the steps," called the boy impatiently. "Oh, that's a great idea!" His face was flushed; and then suddenly it fell. "Oh!" he cried despairingly to Flick, "she always gets all sorts of ideas for new dances when she's in love—always. I never knew it fail."
He flung himself away pettishly, and started off alone. Hugh never had any difficulty about direction. In a locality with which he was familiar he would walk about with the utmost confidence. Occasionally he would stop, rap his leg sharply with one hand, listen a moment, and then, apparently satisfied, walk on. Those who pressed him for an explanation of this merely received the vague and unilluminating reply that he could feel the earth that way and tell from the sound of it, probably meaning the vibration, just where he was.
Pearl and Flick followed him in a more leisurely way, although no word was spoken between them until they reached home. Pearl's eyes scanned the house, but it was evident that Hanson had gone, for her mother sat in a rocking-chair before the window, her head tilted back, fast asleep.
"What do you suppose your Pop'll say to your signing up with Hanson?" asked Flick, as they passed through the gate.
"I suppose we'll have a row that'll make the house rock," she answered indifferently, dismissing him with a nod.