Claire was almost comically unfit to be a ranchman’s wife, and she too had been a trial on occasions. She was small and delicate, but vivacious, amiable, bright. Her blue eyes always had a childlike wonder in them, and she was fond of wearing her fluffy, golden hair in a girlish knot low on her neck, or even in a long, thick braid down her back, with a blue ribbon bow at the end. She flitted about the house like a butterfly, and yet she had managed somehow to make her home the marvel of Paradise Park.
To begin with it was the ordinary, one-story, rambling house of pine, with spruce-clad hills rising behind it, and a little stream, rollicking down between it and the corrals. But a wide veranda had been constructed on three sides of it, furnished with wicker chairs, and half-screened with boxes of growing flowers. All around the house flowers grew,––old-fashioned garden flowers, roses and geraniums; beds of them everywhere, and blossoming shrubs along the stream.
The house contained, besides the kitchen and the bedrooms, just one big room. This, with its low ceiling, unpainted timbers, and small windows, was not unlike the hall of some old manor house. The floor was covered with Navajo rugs in rich and barbaric colors; the walls were draped with burlap in dull red dyes; and the windows were curtained with chintz in bright 52 yellows and reds. Above the windows and doors hung many heads of deer and elk and mountain sheep, and rifles on racks of horn. Between the two front windows stood the upright piano, and near it a small bookcase filled with novels and volumes of poetry. The big oak table at mealtime was made to look very inviting with white napery and modest china and silver, and a bouquet always in its center. At other times it was a library table, heaped with books and magazines, and in the evening, when the kerosene lamps were lighted, and the piñon was blazing in the great fireplace, the room seemed as remote from Paradise Park as Claire herself.
There was an occasional visitor at Huntington’s in the period of his convalescence, usually a ranchwife eager for another glimpse at Claire’s wonderful housekeeping, or a young cow-puncher drawn by the attraction of two very pretty and unusual women in one house. But the ranchmen themselves, with two or three exceptions, were content to be solicitous at long range––an abstention that relieved and at the same time troubled Huntington. He was not eager to talk with his neighbors about that episode at the post-office, but their aloofness filled him with uneasiness. Well, let them wait! They would hear from him again, and so should Haig!
There was, among the visitors, one whose coming perceptibly lightened the tedium of those days. Marion had the good fortune to see him in time not to be taken by surprise. Seated on the veranda after an exhausting recital for the benefit of Huntington, she perceived the figure of a horseman––yes, it was a horseman––riding 53 out of the pines toward the corrals. She stared. He was so little and so lost between his pony, which seemed extraordinarily big, and his sombrero, which undoubtedly was enormous, that she remained for a moment dumb, and then, choking with laughter, fled into the house.
“Look, Claire, look!” she cried, grabbing her cousin’s arm.
Claire, dragged to the door, looked and giggled.
“Haven’t you seen that before?” she asked.
“No! Never!” answered Marion, her hand upon her mouth.
“Of course. He’s just arrived––for the season. He was here last year, and the year before.”