“Or kicked her. That fellow is a brute.”
“Aren’t you going back?”
“Going back? What would we get for our pains? Make it all the worse for the woman. You noticed he called her his wife? The rurales are not supposed to marry. It’s their unwritten law. But if she is, do you know what that means? She’s his goods, his chattel; his horse, his ox, his anything. You’re not in the states. We can’t do anything.”
There is perhaps no more absorbing topic than “wife” to the man who has not yet acquired one. Rickard and MacLean let an unrecorded silence fall between them. The word had sent them both traveling down secret trails. MacLean was thinking of the girl he intended to marry, when he was grown, of a girl with yellow eyes; Rickard of a mistake he had once nearly made. His wife, if ever he had one, must be steadier than that; she must not carry her sex like a gay flag to the breeze. His instinct of flight, distaste had justified itself at camp. She was a light little woman. He was beginning to feel a little sorry for Hardin!
“I’ll race you into camp, MacLean!”
Their horses, released, sprang toward the Heading.
CHAPTER XXVII
A WHITE WOMAN AND A BROWN
FOR a few weeks, Mrs. Hardin found the mess-tent diverting. Before the Delta had expanded the capacity of the camp, her soft nook had been overtaxed, her hospitality strained. The men of the Reclamation Service, thrown into temporary inactivity, were eager to accept the opportunity created for another. Failing that other, her zeal had flagged. Events were moving quickly at the break; Rickard was absorbed. Mrs. Hardin told herself that it was the heat she wished to escape; not to her own ear did she whisper that she was following Rickard, nor that the percolator and chafing-dish, her shelves and toy kitchen were a wasted effort. As inevitably as a diamond finds a setting, so did Gerty Hardin. She would return to it later, gathering luster from its suggestion of womanliness. Sometime, the pretty play would be resumed. All this subconsciously, for she hung a veil between her processes. She kept on good terms with herself by ignoring self-confidences. She would have called morbidness the self-analysis of those who dig deep into their psychology for roots of motives, who question each trailing vine.
Rickard, the discovery unfolded slowly, took his meals irregularly. His breakfast was gulped down before the women appeared; his dinners where he found them.
“No wonder!” reflected Gerty Hardin. “Ling’s cooking is so bad.” Discontentedly, she pictured Rickard as finding solace in the Hamlin kitchen; reveling in Mrs. Silent’s chickens and eggs. The camp butter was shocking. She found Ling’s large quantities unpalatable.