So that was the legacy. An old diary just interesting enough to be tantalizing, with half the pages cut out; Bible references probably given to King, of the Mounted, by his mother. And a worn old Bible that had never been read. Rawley stacked the books one upon the other and leaned back in his chair, staring at them meditatively while he filled his pipe. He took three puffs before he laughed silently.
“He was a speedy old bird, I’ll say that much for him,” he told himself. “I’ll bet those pages he cut out fairly sizzled. And I’ll bet he cut them out about the time he married Grandmother. Also, I think he left one or two pages by mistake. Well, I’ll say he lived! As long as he had two good legs under him he was up and coming. I don’t suppose there’s a chance in the world of getting him to talk about Anita. ‘El gusto de mi corazon—’ There’s nothing like the Spanish for love-making words. And that was in July—and he married Grandmother in November. Poor little half-breed girl who should have been white! But then, I reckon he’d have gone back to her if he could. But they sent him home—crippled for life. You can’t blame Grandfather, after all. And I notice he mentioned the fact that Grandmother wanted to marry him. Sorry for the handsome young soldier on crutches, but it’s darned hard on Anita, just the same. And I don’t suppose he could even get word to her.”
He smoked the pipe out, his thoughts gone a-questing into the long ago, where the black arrows were dipped in loathsome poison, and young Indian girls had the fire and grace of the Spaniards.
“She’d be old, too, by now—if she’s alive,” he thought, as he knocked the ashes from his pipe and yawned. “I wonder if she ever forgot. And I wonder if Grandfather ever thinks of her now. He does, I’ll bet. Those terrible, blue eyes! They couldn’t forget.”
He went to bed, his imagination still held to the days of the fighting old frontier; still building adventures and romances for the dashing, blue-eyed King, of the Mounted.
He was dreaming of an Indian fight when a sharp tapping on his window woke him to gray dawn. He sprang out of bed, still knuckling the sleep out of his eyes, and saw Johnny Buffalo standing close to the open screen. The Indian raised a hand.
“You come quick. Your grandfather is dead.”
CHAPTER THREE
“MY HEART IS DEAD”
It was the evening after the funeral, and Rawley was sitting again on the porch, staring out gloomily over a cold pipe into the yard. His grandfather’s death had hit him a harder blow than he would have thought possible. The shock of it, coming close on the heels of his first keen realization that Grandfather King was a vivid personality, left him numbed with a sense of loss.
His mother’s evident relief at the removal of an unpleasant problem chilled and irritated him. Her calm assumption that the Indian must also be removed from the place, now that his master was gone, seemed to Rawley almost like sacrilege. The place belonged to his mother only by right of his grandfather’s generosity. To rob the Indian of a home he had enjoyed since boyhood was unthinkable.