CHAPTER XVIII
McLagan Achieves an End
CLAIRE CARVER was alone in the sun-parlour, which was one of the many small comforts she had added to the square, frame building which, since the bettering of her fortunes, had become her home. She was occupying a large rocker-chair, engaged upon a task hardly to be expected in a woman whose nights were spent at the gaming tables of the Speedway, and whose skill, and nerve, and capacity in holding her own against the vulture-like flotsam haunting that gambling hell, was a by-word of the countryside.
Her busy needle was plying swiftly and skilfully upon some intimate silken garment, the contemplation of which gave her the deepest sense of womanly satisfaction. A small table was near to her hand littered with all the odds and ends which usually overflow a woman’s work-basket. She was quite alone with her work and her thoughts. She was even glad that her mother was somewhere in the domestic quarters of the house engaged, as was her wont at all times, upon matters relating to creature comfort. She knew that the older woman had found solace in their new life and she was glad. She had found something like happiness in the care of her one remaining offspring who had become all in all to her since those days of her earlier disaster.
The afternoon was well advanced. The sun was pouring out of the western sky, moving on with that speed which ever seems to increase as the day progresses. It was hot but pleasant. The day was quite windless, and the hum of mosquitoes and flies was incessant beyond the netting covering to the range of open windows with which the place was almost completely surrounded.
After a while the girl looked up and her pretty blue eyes were unsmiling. The satisfaction she had in her work found no reflection in them. There was even a suggestion of unhappiness in the preoccupation of the gaze she turned upon the scene beyond the netted windows.
Perhaps she was tired. Perhaps there was weariness of mind behind her eyes. Her beauty was no less. There were no outward and visible signs of wear for all the high pressure of the artificial sort of life she lived. But the buoyancy, the intensity her wonderful eyes usually displayed under the shaded lights of the Speedway’s poker room were utterly lacking now. It almost suggested that the fierce fires of the gambler spirit had already begun to burn the youth out of her.
The scene beyond the netted windows seemed to hold her. The city lay there sprawling on the lake shore. A scattering of small dwellings intervened between her and the main buildings. It was squalid. It was as ugly as only a collection of primitive human dwellings could make it. From where she sat she could see the pretentious dome of Max’s Speedway, which was the medium of her fortune. She could see a flash of the sunlit waters of the lake, and then beyond, overshadowing all the puny human handiwork, rose the dark outline of the splendid hills of her childhood.
It was the latter that held her, and in a moment the precious silken garment upon which she had spent more dollars than a year ago she could have spent cents, was completely forgotten.
Her thought had flung back to another life and its people; folk, who, unlike herself, lived in the open and the daylight. She was thinking of the rugged coast with its fiercely alluring bays, its inlets and its upstanding headlands. She was thinking of the rough, strong man who lived in a home like an eagle’s eyrie so that he could gaze upon God’s good world and revel in those fierce, bracing elements which so appealed to and matched his own nature. She remembered that last recent meeting with him on the deck of the wreck in the bay from which she had fled in utter and complete panic.