The little, garish woman did not reply directly, but shook back her red hair and caught her boy to her breast and kissed him; then she said in that staccato manner which had given her words on the stage such point and emphasis, “Oh, this house is a’most too warm for me, Aunt Kate!”
Then she moved towards the door with the grave, kindly old woman, her son’s hand in her own.
“You can see the Lumleys’ place from your window, Cassy,” said Black Andy grimly. “We got a mortgage on it, and foreclosed it, and it’s ours now; and Jerry Lumley’s stock-riding for us. Anyhow, he’s better off than Abner, or Abner’s wife.”
Cassy turned at the door and faced him. Instinctively she caught at some latent conflict with old Abel Baragar in what Black Andy had said, and her face softened, for it suddenly flashed into her mind that he was not against her.
“I’m glad to be back West,” she said. “It meant a lot to me when I was at Lumley’s.” She coughed a little again, but turned to the door with a laugh.
“How long have you come to stay here—out West?” asked the old man furtively.
“Why, there’s plenty of time to think of that!” she answered brusquely, and she heard Black Andy laugh derisively as the door closed behind her.
In a blaze of joy the sun swept down behind the southern hills, and the windows of Lumley’s house at the Forks, catching the oblique rays, glittered and shone like flaming silver. Nothing of life showed, save the cattle here and there, creeping away to the shelter of the foothills for the night. The white, placid snow made a coverlet as wide as the vision of the eye, save where spruce and cedar trees gave a touch of warmth and refuge here and there. A wonderful, buoyant peace seemed to rest upon the wide, silent expanse. The birds of song were gone South over the hills, and the living wild things of the prairies had stolen into winter quarters. Yet, as Cassy Mavor looked out upon the exquisite beauty of the scene, upon the splendid outspanning of the sun along the hills, the deep plangent blue of the sky and the thrilling light, she saw a world in agony and she heard the moans of the afflicted. The sun shone bright on the windows of Lumley’s house, but she could hear the crying of Abner’s wife, and of old Ezra and Eliza Lumley, when their children were stricken or shamed; when Abel Baragar drew tighter and tighter the chains of the mortgage, which at last made them tenants in the house once their own. Only eight years ago, and all this had happened. And what had not happened to her, too, in those eight years!
With George—reckless, useless, loving, lying George—she had left Lumley’s with her sickness cured, as it seemed, after a long year in the West, and had begun life again. What sort of life had it been? “Kicking up her heels on the stage,” as Abel Baragar had said; but, somehow, not as it was before she went West to give her perforated lung to the healing air of the plains, and to live outdoors with the men—a man’s life. Then she had never put a curb on her tongue, or greatly on her actions, except that, though a hundred men quarrelled openly, or in their own minds, about her, no one had ever had any right to quarrel about her. With a tongue which made men gasp with laughter, with as comic a gift as ever woman had, and as equally comic a face, she had been a good-natured little tyrant in her way. She had given a kiss here and there, and had taken one, but always there had been before her mind the picture of a careworn woman who struggled to bring up her three children honestly, and without the help of charity, and, with a sigh of content and weariness, had died as Cassy made her first hit on the stage and her name became a household word. And Cassy, garish, gay, freckled, witty and whimsical, had never forgotten those days when her mother prayed and worked her heart out to do her duty by her children. Cassy Mavor had made her following, had won her place, was the idol of “the gallery”; and yet she was “of the people,” as she had always been, until her first sickness came, and she had gone out to Lumley’s, out along the foothills of the Rockies.
What had made her fall in love with George Baragar?