And for the only time in the struggle, Wayland let go; or rather—his manhood got from under leash. You can be stoical all right when you get the blow. It's another thing to be stoical when the blow hits what you love. When the curtain-drop fell on Moyese, it fell on a man pounding the desk, kicking furniture, eating up the telephone, turning the air blue. It fell on the Ranger sitting crunched in his chair gazing through misty eyes at a picture painted by an artist, who was an idealist. Was he down and out? Was Right the sport of fools?
CHAPTER XXII
A DOWNY-LIPPED YOUTH IN GRAY FLANNELS
I suppose it was owing to the fact that she was woman and he was man that she spent that first night of the home-coming in dumb hurt wonder that he had not come immediately to her; and that he passed the night in restless fevered fury, knowing well that you cannot both control fire and fan it, fuse metals molten and expect them not to forge, keep a resolution and break it. She had listened eagerly to the old frontiersman's account of the adventures on the trail, up the Pass precipice, crossing the snow slide and in the desert, where the Ranger had refused to save his own life by abandoning his companion; and the narrative lost nothing in Matthews' recital with his Scottish-Canadian R's rolling out sonorous and strong, where he was moved to admiration or anger. The sheep rancher sat silent through the stirring story with only an occasional glint of fire from his black eyes gazing aimlessly at the floor.
"'Cast your bread upon the waters and after many days it shall return to you again.' 'Minds me of what A saw you do for this woman you call Calamity, in our old Rebellion Days."
Eleanor was sitting on the arm of her father's leather chair. The sheepman glanced up warningly, but Matthews was going ahead full steam.
"We're both older than we were in those days, MacDonald, older an' wiser, an' for m'self, A should add, a good bit steadier! You, y' were always a sober-faced secret lad, MacDonald; an' till yon day in front o' th' Agency house, A don't think, A hardly think, we men knew what a devil was in y'! A can see y' yet as y' kicked th' gun out o' yon blackguard's hand an' let him take the load o' buckshot square between th' shoulders! 'Twas a handsome thing o' you to take th' poor buddy in an' give her a shelter! How does she come to call herself Calamity?"
MacDonald's foot came down on the floor with a clamp, and he rose. "She didn't. 'Twas the miners in the Black Hills. She used to bring in so many hard-luck chaps, shot up by the Sioux, bring 'em in on her shoulders from the hills to the camp, that the boys got to calling her Calamity. She had lost her good looks, and—" MacDonald shot a glance of warning in the direction of his daughter—"and the same old story, I guess; she was off the market! One of my trips to the mining camps up state, I found her in a mess of rags picking crusts out of the garbage barrels along a back lane! I brought her back with me. Gave her a week's soak in the bath house—" he paused as if reflecting, "and that it seems was foundation enough for the hog-wash that appeared in one of the papers here. Suppose we take a walk as we discuss old days; they were pretty wild days for discussion before a girl, who didn't know her dad before she was born."
And Eleanor went out on the Ranch House piazza off her room, while the two frontiersmen strolled down the river. How different her outlook on life was from two months before when reference to Calamity had called up mingled fury and horror. Now that she understood, anything in this Western Country might be possible, and understandable, and explainable. She had his hurried pencil note where she could feel it, under her locket; only the locket was outside above; and the fly leaf of that field book was inside next. "Dick (nth)," he had signed himself; and he had not come down. She could see the dark shadowy Ridge from her piazza chair, and hear the subdued laughter and lipping of the waters, and he was there—not a half hour's walk away—and he had not come. There was a full moon. She could see its silver sheen on the River, on the tremulous poplar leaves, sifting through the pine needles and in opal wings round the far luminous cross of snow on the mountain. The night hawks and the swallows dipped and darted and cut the air with humming wings; and once the wire gate squeaked to some one entering. Eleanor sprang up with her heart beating so that she could not speak; but it was only a white hatted youth in light gray flannels asking Calamity at the basement door "when MacDonald would be back." Did Eleanor imagine it; or did the citified young person in the gray flannels with the red necktie look up towards her hesitatingly, with the suggestion of an ingratiating smile in the pale blue eyes, a suggestion which she could not define but which somehow infuriated her? Poor pale anaemic youth! He was not used to having his waiting smiles met by the blaze of red fury that flashed to her eyes.
"Calamity, if that person wants anything, tell him to go out to the bunkhouse and see the foreman."