LARRY GOES CALLING
RUTH and Mrs. Flanders sat on the porch at Elkhorn Lodge and watched a rider descend a hill trail toward the ranch. It was late in the season. Except a hunting party, only a few stray boarders remained, and these would soon take flight for the cities. But in spite of the almanac the day had been hot. Even after sunset it was pleasant outdoors.
The rider announced his coming with song. For a fortnight he had been on the round-up, working sixteen hours a day, and now that it was nearly over he was entitled to sing. The words drifted down to the women on the porch:
“Foot in the stirrup and hand on the horn,
Best damned cowboy that ever was born.”
“It’s Larry Silcott,” announced Mrs. Flanders, brightening. She was a born gossip. When the owner of the Open A N C was with her there was a pair of them present.
“Yes,” assented Ruth. She had known for some moments that the approaching rider was Larry.
He offered for their entertainment another selection.
“Sift along, boys, don’t ride so slow.
Haven’t got much time but a long round to go.
Quirt him on the shoulders and rake him down the hip,
I’ll cut you toppy mounts, boys, now pair off and rip.”
After a few moments of silence the wind brought more song to the women on the porch:
“Bunch the herd at the old meet,
Then beat ’em on the tail;
Whip ’em up and down the side
And hit the shortest trail.”
The young man appeared to catch sight of the women and waved his pinched-in felt hat at them, finishing his range ditty with a cowboy cheer for a rider to the last stanza:
“Coma ti yi youpy, youpy ya youpy ya,
Coma ti yi youpy, youpy ya.”
He cantered up to the ranch, flung himself from the saddle without touching the stirrups, grounded the reins, and came forward to the porch with jingling spurs. Ruth did not deny that he was a most engaging youth. The outdoor bloom on his cheeks, the sparkle in his eyes, the nonchalant pose that had just a touch of boyish swagger, all carried their appeal even with women old enough to be his mother.
“Is the round-up finished?” asked Mrs. Flanders.
“They’ve got to comb Eagle Creek yet and the Flat Tops.” He fell into the drawl of the old cowman. “But I’m plumb fed up with the dust of the drag driver. Me, I’m through. Enough’s plenty. The boys can finish without Larry Silcott.”
“Oh, I’m going home
Bullwhacking for to spurn,
I ain’t got a nickel,
And I don’t give a dern.”
“You seem to have quite an attack of doggerel to-night,” suggested Ruth.
“Doggerel nothing. Every one of ’em is a range classic. I got them from old Sam Yerby, who brought them up from Texas. I’ve been giving you the genuwine, blown-in-the-bottle ballads of the man who wears leathers,” defended Larry.
“Who is boss of the round-up this year?” asked Mrs. Flanders.
“Rowan is, and believe me he worked us to a fare-you-well. He’s some driver, Mac is; one of your sixty-horsepower dynamos on two legs. He is good for twenty-four hours a day himself, and he figures the rest of us are made of leather and steel, too. I’m a wreck.”
“What’s that I hear about Falkner and Tait having some more trouble?”
“Trouble is right, Mrs. Flanders. They met over by the creek at Three Willows. One thing led to another, and they both got down from their horses and mixed it. Tait had one of his herders with him, and he took a hand in the fracas. The two of them gave Falkner an awful beating. He was just able to crawl to his horse.”
“Tait ought to be driven out of the country,” pronounced Mrs. Flanders indignantly. “He’s always making trouble.”
“Joe is certainly a bad actor, but it would be some job to drive him away. He hasn’t got sense enough to realize what is going to happen to him. If Falkner ever gets him at the wrong end of a gun——” He left his sentence unfinished. The imagination could supply the rest.
“They say Tait has driven his sheep across the dead line again.” Mrs. Flanders put her statement as if it were a question.
Larry, recalling a warning he had been given, became suddenly discreet. “Do they?”
“Will the Hill Creek cattlemen stand for it?”
There was a sullen, mulish look on his face that suggested he knew more than he intended to tell. “Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t.”
Business called the Mistress of Elkhorn Lodge into the house.
Ruth, with a slant of dark eyes toward her guest, asked him a question: “Do you call this two weeks?”
“I call it a month, reckoning by my feelings.”
She scoffed. “It’s a pity about your feelings. I told you not to come again for two weeks.”
“I thought as I happened to be passing——”
“On your way to nowhere.”
“—that I’d drop in and say ‘Buenas tardes.’ ”
“Good of you, I’m sure.”
He settled himself comfortably on the porch against a pillar. “I want to ask your advice. I’m just a plain cow-puncher and you’re a wise young lady from a city. So you can tell me all about it. I’m getting old and lonesome, and my mind has been running on a girl a heap.”
Her glance took in the slim, wiry youth at her feet. She smiled. “You’d better ask Mrs. Flanders. I’m too young to advise you.”
“No. You’re just the right age. I’ll tell you about her. There never was anybody prettier—not in Wyoming. She’s fresh and sweet, like those wild roses we picked in Bear Creek Cañon. Her eyes are kind o’ rippled by a laugh ’way down deep in them, then sometimes they are dark and still and—sort of tender. She has the kindest heart in the world—and the cruelest. I wouldn’t want a better partner, though she’s as wild as an unbroken bronc sometimes. You never can tell when she’s going to bolt.”
There was a faint flush of pink in her cheeks, but her eyes danced. “You don’t make her sound like a really nice girl.”
“Oh, she’s nice enough, when she isn’t a little divvle. The trouble is she isn’t foot-loose.”
“Of course she is tremendously in love with you.”
“She likes me a heap better than she pretends.”
“I’m sure she would adore you if she knew how modest you are,” Ruth answered with amiable malice.
Silcott’s gaze absorbed her dainty sweetness. He spoke with an emphasis of the cattleman’s drawl.
“I’d like right well to take her up on my hawss and ride away with her like that Lochinvar fellow did in the poetry book y’u lent me onct—the one that busted up the wedding of the laggard guy and went a-fannin’ off with his gyurl behind him, whilst the no’count bridegroom and her paw hollered ‘Help!’ ”
“Lochinvar. Oh, he’s out of date.”
“Maybe so. But it’s a great thing to know when to butt in.” He watched her covertly as he spoke.
“And when not to,” added Ruth, with the insolent little tilt of her chin that made men want to demonstrate. “Come on. Let’s go over to the mesa and look at the desert in the moonlight.”
Beneath the stars this land of splintered peaks and ragged escarpments always took on a glory denied to it by day. The obscuration of detail, the vagueness of outline, lent magic to the hills. Below, the valley swam in a sheen of gleaming silver.
Ruth drew a deep breath of sensuous delight and lifted her face to the star-strewn sky. Her companion watched her, his eyes shining. She was standing lance straight, everything forgotten but the beauty of the night. In the air was a faint, murmurous stir of desert denizens.
“The world’s going to bed,” she whispered. “It always says its prayers first—wonderful prayers full of the fragrance of roses and the sough of wind just touching the pines, and the far, far song of birds. You have to listen—oh, so still!—before you can hear them. The world is sad because the lovely day is dead and because life is so short and so filled with loss, and it’s just a wee bit afraid of the darkness. So God lights up millions of candles in His sky as a sign that He’s up there and all’s well with the universe.”
Larry had another Ruth to add to his list of portraits of her. It was amazing how many women were wrapped up in her slim young body, not to mention the Ruth that was a naughty child and the one that was all eager boy. He had known her in the course of a morning grave and gay, whimsical and coquettish, sulky and passionate. She was given to generous impulses and unjust resentments. At times her soul danced on the hilltops of life, and again she beat with her fists indignantly at the bars that prisoned her. Of late he had more than once surprised her with the traces of tears on her face.
He knew that all was not well between her and Rowan, but he did not know what was amiss. Only Mrs. Flanders guessed that, and for once she kept her own counsel.
Larry slipped his big brown hand over her little one.
“But you’re not happy just the same,” he told her.
He was one of those men whose attitude toward a young and attractive woman is always that of the lover potential or actual. He was never quite satisfied until the talk became personal and intimate, until he had established an individual relationship with any woman who interested him.
Ruth nodded agreement.
She let her hand lie in his. Since her break with Rowan she was often the victim of moods when she craved a sympathy such as Larry offered, one that took her trouble for granted without discussing it. There were other times when her spirit flared into rebellion, when she was eager to punish her husband’s faithlessness by letting Silcott make veiled love to her with only a pretense of disapproval.
“Why don’t you chuck it all overboard and make a new start?” he asked her abruptly.
She looked at him, a little startled. He had never before made so direct a reference to her situation.
“I don’t care to talk about that.”
“But you’ll have to talk about it some time. You can’t go on like this for ever, and—you know I love you, that I’d do anything in the world for you.”
“I know you talk a lot of foolishness, Larry,” she retorted sharply. “I may be a goose, but I’m not silly enough to take you seriously all the time. Let’s go back to the house.”
“I don’t see why you can’t take me seriously,” he said sulkily.
“Because you’re only a boy. You think you want the moon, but you don’t; at least the only reason you want it is because it’s in somebody else’s yard.”
“It doesn’t need to stay there always, does it?”
“That isn’t a matter for you and me to discuss,” she flashed at him with spirit. “Whenever I need your advice I’ll ask for it, my friend.”
She led the way to the house, her slender limbs moving rhythmically with light grace. Larry walked beside her sullenly. What was the matter with her to-night? Last week she had almost let him kiss her. If she had held him back, still it had been with the promise in her manner that next time he might be more successful. But now she had pushed him back into the position of a friend rather than a lover.
Larry had no intention of being her friend. It was not in his horoscope to be merely a friend to any charming woman. Moreover, he was as much in love with Ruth as he could be with anybody except himself.
Just before they reached the porch she asked him a question: “When will they be through with the round-up?”
“In two or three days. Why?”
“I just wondered.”
Her eyes evaded his. His annoyance flashed suddenly into words.
“If it’s Rowan you want, why don’t you go back to him like a good little girl and say you’re sorry? I expect he would forgive you.”
Anger, sudden and imperious, leaped into her eyes. “I wish you’d learn, Larry Silcott, to mind your own business.”
She turned and fled into the house.