The Boss of the Lazy Y

by Charles Alden Seltzer

Dade snuffed out the candle and followed Malcolm out. The latter went immediately to the ranchhouse, but Dade lingered until Calumet stepped down from the door of the bunkhouse.

"Bed suits me," suggested Dade. "Comin'?"

"I'm smokin' a cigarette first," said Calumet. "Mebbe two," he added as an afterthought.

He watched Malcolm go in; saw the light from the lamp on the table in the kitchen flare its light out through the kitchen door as Dade entered; heard the door close. The lamp still burned after he had seen Dade's shadow vanish, and he knew that Dade had gone upstairs. Dade had left the light burning for him.

Alone, Calumet rolled the cigarette he had promised himself, lit it, and then, in the flood of moonlight, walked slowly around the bunkhouse, estimating the material and work that would be necessary to repair it. Then, puffing at his cigarette, he made a round of the corral fence. It was a long trip, and he stopped twice to roll new cigarettes before he circled it. Then he examined the stable. This finished, he stepped over to the corral fence, leaned his arms on the top rail, and, in the moonlight that came over his shoulder, reread his father's letter, making out the picturesque chirography with difficulty.

As during the first days of his return, when he had watched the army of memories pass in review, he lingered over them now, and, to his surprise, discovered that he felt some little regret over his own conduct in those days preceding his leave-taking. To be sure, he had been only a boy at that time, but he had been a man since, and the cold light of reason should have shown him that there must have been cause for his father's brutal treatment of him—if indeed it had been brutal. In fact, if he had acted in his youth as he had acted since reaching maturity, there was small reason to wonder that he had received blows. Boys needed to be reprimanded, punished, and perhaps he had deserved all he had received.

The tone of his father's letters was distinctly sorrowful. Remorse, sincere remorse, had afflicted him. His father had been wronged, misled, betrayed, and humiliated by the Taggarts, and as Calumet stood beside the corral fence he found that all his rage—the bitter, malignant hatred which had once been in his heart against his father—had vanished, that it had been succeeded by an emotion that was new to him—pity. An hour, two hours, passed before he turned and walked toward the ranchhouse. His lips were grim and white, tell-tale signs of a new resolve, as he stepped softly upon the rear porch, stealthily opened the kitchen door, and let himself in. He halted at the table on which stood the kerosene lamp, looking at the chair in which he had been sitting some hours before talking to Betty, blinking at the chair in which she had sat, summoning into his mind the picture she had made when he had voiced his suspicions about her knowledge of the contents of the letter she had given him. "Nobody but a fool could hate Betty," the letter had read. And at the instant he had read the words he had known that he didn't hate her. But he was a fool, just the same; he was a fool for treating her as he did—as Dade had said. He had known that all along; he knew that was the reason why he had curbed his rage when it would have driven him to commit some rash action. He had been a fool, but had he let himself go he would have been a bigger one.

Betty had appraised him correctly—"sized him up," in Dade's idiomatic phraseology—and knew that his vicious impulses were surface ones that had been acquired and not inherited, as he had thought. And he was strangely pleased.

He looked once around the room, noting the spotless cleanliness of it before he blew out the light. And then he stepped across the floor and into the dining-room, tip-toeing toward the stairs, that he might awaken no one. But he halted in amazement when he reached a point near the center of the room, for he saw, under the threshold of the door that led from the dining-room to his father's office, a weak, flickering beam of light.

The door was tightly closed. He knew from the fact that no light shone through it except from the space between the bottom of it and the threshold that it was barred, for he had locked the door during the time he was repairing the house, and had satisfied himself that it could not be tightly closed unless barred. Someone was in the room, too. He heard the scuffle of a foot, the sound of a chair scraping on the floor. He stood rigid in the darkness of the dining-room, straining his ears to catch another sound.