CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
REDDY took his mother West. It was a journey that he ===conducted with much ostentatious display, but the opportunities in this respect were far less extended than he could have wished. It was only when they were West of Chicago, however, that he felt perfectly at home; for out of Chicago the sleeper was crowded with men who talked tirelessly of cattle and mines, and who told how much they were worth, or any other little personal matter that might be accounted of general public interest, with simple candour and without shame. In their presence Reddy parted with the last vestige of suspicion that the conservative East had bred in him.
“These are the people!” he thought.
Mrs. Crittendon, a mild little woman who had not yet recovered from the shock of Reddy's reformation, and who regarded that redeemed young man with wordless awe, since it was all really too good to be true, bore him company with much inward trepidation. She was small and placid, with smooth grey hair neatly parted and plainly drawn back of her ears; she was not only small and slight, she was trim and graceful as well, with a youthful walk and sprightly carriage. The top of the small tight-fitting black bonnet that framed her face came just on a level with Reddy's broad shoulders. All her life had been spent in Benson, she had never been fifty miles away from there before; and she was the victim of a depressing fear that Reddy had made some fatal mistake in the train, and that they were speeding recklessly in the wrong direction; a circumstance it was impossible for her to conceive could end otherwise than tragically. Indeed the flippancy with which her son bought tickets and changed cars impressed her as bordering on a suicidal folly. Afterward she always said it was a mercy they reached the ranch; but Reddy never understood what she meant by this, and she never enlightened him. But reach the ranch they did—a trifling matter of forty miles from Carson, the nearest point on the railway—and in a cloud of dust, and behind a span of half-broken colts that were the apple of Reddy's eye. Here she began to adjust herself to the wide horizon, to the barrenness of the grey rolling plains, the distant fringe of mountain peaks.
Strangely enough she was not lonely; she hardly missed the gossiping friends she had parted from at Benson; she had Reddy, and there was the ranch foreman and the ranch foreman's wife who cooked for the boys, and the boys themselves, who spent their days either in idleness or on horseback. They had neighbours, too, whose ranches dotted a strip of territory that stretched away to the south a hundred miles, and to the north another hundred. With these, she discovered, Reddy maintained a sparse but cordial intimacy; many of them he saw as often as two or three times a year, but this was not true of all; there was Colonel Rogers, whose comfortable ranch house was distant a hard day's ride, and whose powerful patronage gave Reddy a position in that region he could not otherwise have had.
In due time the colonel and his wife drove over in a light buck-board for a stay of several days with Reddy and his mother, and while the ladies sat in the ranch parlour, which Reddy had furnished in hot and stuffy red plush, and exchanged confidences or gossiped; the two men, in their shirt-sleeves, sat on the top rail of the corral fence for the most part, smoked pipes, and talked cattle.
The colonel was a tall grizzled man, with a gentle kindly manner; no one would have supposed him a millionaire and a man of determined but quiet force of character, while Mrs. Rogers was a motherly woman, whose faith in the colonel—she always gave him this military title—had never experienced any shocks; and her reminiscences of the early days when as a young bride he had brought her into the country, impressed Mrs. Crittendon with a profound sense of that mild-mannered gentleman's capabilities. She was glad Reddy had such a friend.
But what impressed her most was that while they were on such intimate terms with her son, and though he was going to marry their daughter, they yet apparently knew nothing of him beyond such limited confidences as he had chosen to indulge in; indeed Reddy's standing in the community seemed to be a strictly personal matter, and it belonged to the present absolutely. He had come into the country, a stranger with a bunch of cattle, he had proven himself an excellent neighbour, and above all he had not shown any desire to put his brand on cattle he had not paid for. She discovered that beyond the fact that Reddy originally came from Ohio, nothing was known of his antecedents. This discovery she made one day at dinner, and she proceeded to enlighten their guests; since to her, Reddy belonged as much to Benson as did the soldiers' monument on the square. She was well into the family history when the colonel, who had been placidly listening, suddenly put aside his knife and fork.
“What was that you said about a town called Benson?” he asked.
Mrs. Crittendon had merely said that Reddy had been born in Benson—she had given the year, the day of the month, and hour of his birth.