At the side of the house languished a wretched, abortive garden, running over with weeds and sage-brush, and here a man pottered with the purposeless energy of old age, working with an ear cocked in the direction of the house, as he turned a spade of earth again and again in hopeless, pusillanimous industry. But when his strained attention was presently rewarded by a shouted summons to supper, and he stood erect but for the slouching droop of shoulders that was more a matter of temperament than of age, one saw a tall man of massive build, whose keen glance and slightly grizzled hair belied his groping, ineffectual labor. The head, and face were finely modelled. Unless nature had fashioned them in some vagrant, prankish mood, such elegance of line betokened prior generations in which gentlemen and scholars had played some part—the vagabond scion of a good family, perhaps. A multitude of such had grafted on the pioneer stock of the West, under names that carried no significance in the places whence they came.
Weakness and self-indulgence there were, and those writ large and deep, on the face of Warren Rodney; and, in default of an expression of deeper significance, the wavering lines of instability produced a curiously ambiguous effect of a fine head modelled by a ’prentice hand; a lady’s copy of the Belvidere, attempted in the ardors of the first lessons, might approximate it.
A smoking kerosene lamp revealed a supper-table of almost institutional proportions. There were four sons and two daughters of the Tumlin union, strapping lads and lasses all of them, with more than a common dower of lusty health and a beauty that was something deeper than the perishable iridescence of youth. There was Frémont, named for the explorer-soldier; there was Orlando, named from his mother’s vague, idle musings over paper-backed literature at certain “unchancy” seasons; there was Richards, named from pure policy, for a local great man of whom Warren Rodney had anticipated a helping hand at the time; there was Eudora, whose nominal origin was uncertain, unless it bore affiliation to that of Orlando; there was Sadie, thus termed to avoid the painful distinctions of “old Sally” and “young Sally”; and, lastly, like a postscript, came Dan—with him, fancy, in the matter of names, seemed to have failed. Dan was now six, a plump little caricature of a man in blue overalls, which, as they had descended to him from Richards in the nature of an heirloom, reached high under his armpits and shortened the function of his suspenders to the vanishing point.
Eudora was now sixteen, and the woman-famine in all the land had gifted her with a surprising precocity. Eudora knew her value and meant to make the most of it. Unlike her mother in the old Black Hill days, she expected more than a “home of her own.” To-night four suitors sat at table with Eudora, and she might have had forty had she desired it. Any one of the four would have cheerfully murdered the remaining three had opportunity presented itself. Supper was a mockery to them, a Barmecide feast. Each watched his rivals—and Eudora. This was a matter of life and death. There was no time for food. The girl revelled in the situation to the full of her untaught, unthinking, primitive nature. She gave the incident a tighter twist by languishing at them in turns. She smiled, she sighed, she drove them mad by taking crescent bites out of a slice of bread and exhibiting the havoc of her little, white teeth with a delectably dainty gluttony.
Her mother, mumbling her supper with toothless impotency, renewed her youth vicariously, and, while she quarrelled with her daughter from the rising of the sun to the setting of the same, she added the last straw to the burden of the distracted suitors by announcing what a comfort Eudora was to her and how handy she was about the house.
Warren Rodney supported the air of an exile at his own table. Beyond a preliminary greeting to his daughter’s guests, he said nothing. His family, in their dealings with him, seemed to accord him the exemptions of extreme age. He ate with the enthusiasm of a man to whom meals have become the main business in life.
“How’s your mine up to Bad Water comin’ along, Iry?” Orlando inquired, not from any hospitable interest in Ira’s claim, but because he had sundry romantic interests in that neighborhood and hoped to make use of the young prospector’s interest in his sister by securing an invitation to return with him. Ira regarded the inquiry in the light of a special providence. Here was his chance to impress Eudora with the splendor of his prospects and at the same time smite the claims of his rivals, and behold! a brother of his lady had led the way.
Ira cleared his throat. “They tell me she air like to yield a million any day.” At this Eudora gave him the wealth of her eyes, and her mother reached across two of the glowering suitors and dropped a hot flapjack on his plate.
“Who sez that she air likely to yield a million any day?” inquired Ben Swift, openly flouting such prophecy. “Yes, who sez it?” inquired Hawks and Taylor, joining forces for the overthrow of the common enemy.
“‘They sez’ is easy talkin’, shore ’nuff,” mumbled Mrs. Rodney, as she helped herself to butter with her own knife.