"Every infernal drop. I've struck all along the line—not another morsel of disinfected zwieback nor sanitary breakfast food nor hygienic prunes nor glutenized near-food—not even one pepsin tablet. It's come to where I'd sooner have no stomach at all than be bullied night and day by one."
With which splendid defiance he had ridden desperately off, a steely flash in his tired gray eyes and a bit of fevered color glowing in his sallow cheeks.
When Mrs. Pierce loudly announced the return of the men early in the afternoon, therefore, the invalid's sister was ready to be harrowed. There would be bitter agonies to relate—chiefly stomachic. She had heroically resolved, moreover, not immediately to flaw the surface of her sympathy with any gusty "I told you so!" That was a privilege sacred unto her, and not to be foregone; but she would defer its satisfaction until the pangs of confession had been suffered; until the rash one should achieve a mood receptive to counsel.
At the call of Mrs. Pierce she ran down the flower-bordered walk to join that lady at the gate, and there they watched the cavalcade as it jolted down the lacets of the mesa trail—four horsemen in single file, two laden pack animals, another horseman in the rear. The returning invalid was equal, then, to sitting a horse. The far-focused eyes of Mrs. Pierce were the first to identify him. As the line advanced through the willow growth that fringed the creek she said, pointing, "There's Mr. Bartell—he's in the lead."
"But Clarence doesn't smoke; the doctors won't let him," his sister interposed, for she could distinguish a pipe in the mouth of the foremost horseman. "And, anyway, it couldn't be Clarence; it's too—" On the point of saying "too disreputable," she reflected that the person in front looked quite like the run of Mrs. Pierce's nearest friends and might, indeed, be of her own household.
"It's sure your brother, though," insisted Mrs. Pierce, as the riders broke into a lope over the level, "and he don't look quite as—" Mrs. Pierce forbore tactfully in her turn. She had meant to say "dandified."
"And I tell you, Mis' Laithe, he does look husky, too. Not no ways so squammish as when he started. My suz! Here we've et dinner and they'll be hungry as bears. I must run in and set back something."
The other men turned with the packhorses off toward the corrals, but Bartell came on at a stiff gallop to where his sister waited. When he had pulled his horse up before her with perilous but showy abruptness, he raised himself in the saddle, swung his hat, and poured into the still air of the valley a long, high yell of such volume that his sister stepped hastily within the gate again. She had heard the like of that yell as they passed through Pagosa Springs, rendered by a cowboy in the acute stage of alcoholic dementia.
"Why, Clarence, dear!" she gasped, fearing the worst. But he hurriedly dismounted and came, steadily enough, to kiss her. She submitted doubtfully to this, and immediately held him off for inspection. He was frankly disreputable. The flannel shirt and corduroy trousers were torn, bedraggled, gray with the dust of the trail; his boots were past redemption, his hat a reproach; his face a bronzed and hairy caricature; and he reeked of the most malignant tobacco Mrs. Laithe had ever encountered. Only the gold-rimmed spectacles, the nearsighted, peering gray eyes, and a narrow zone of white forehead under his hat brim served to recall the somewhat fastidious, sedate, and rather oldish-looking young man who had parted from her.
He smiled at her with a complacency that made it almost a smirk. Then he boisterously kissed her again before she could evade him, and uttered once more that yell of lawless abandon.