XI
SENOR DON'T CARE RECEIVES
Jack lounged in an armchair in the Galway sitting-room with his bandagedleg bolstered on a stool after Dr. Patterson had fished a bit of leadout of the wound. Tribute overflowed from the table to the chairs andfrom the chairs to the floor; pineapples, their knobby jackets allyellow from ripening in the field, with the full succulency of root-fedand sun-drawn flavor; monstrous navel oranges, leaden with the weight ofjuice, richer than cloth of gold and velvet soft; and every fruit of thefertile soil and benignant climate; and jellies, pies, and custards. Butthese were only the edibles. There were flowers in equal abundance. Theybanked the windows.
"It's Jasper Ewold's idea to bring gifts when you call," explained JimGalway. "Jasper is always sowing ideas and lots of them have sprung upand flourished."
Jack had not been in Little Rivers twenty-four hours, and he had played apart in its criminal annals and become subject to all the embarrassmentof favors of a royal bride or a prima donna who is about to sail. In abower, amazed, he was meeting the world of Little Rivers and its wife.Men of all ages; men with foreign accent; men born and bred as farmers;men to whom the effect of indoor occupation clung; men still weak, butwith red corpuscles singing a song of returning health in theirarteries--strapping, vigorous men, all with hands hardened by manuallabor and in their eyes the far distances of the desert, in contrast tothe sparkle of oasis intimacy.
Women with the accent of college classrooms; women who made plural nounsthe running mates of singular verbs; women who were novices inhousework; women drilled in drudgery from childhood--all expanding, alldwelling in a democracy that had begun its life afresh in a new land,and all with the wonder of gardens where there had been only sagebrushin their beings.
There was something at odds with Jack's experience of desert towns in thepicture of a bronzed rancher, his arms loaded with roses, saying, inboyish diffidence:
"Mister, you fit him fair and you sure fixed him good. Just a fewroses--they're so thick over to our place that they're getting a pest.Thought mebbe they'd be nice for you to look at while you was tied up toa chair nursing Pete's soovenir!"
One visitor whose bulk filled the doorway, the expansion of his smilespreading over a bounteous rotundity of cheek, impressed himself as apersonality who had the distinction in avoirdupois that Jim Galway had inleanness. In his hand he had five or six peonies as large as saucers.
"Every complete community has a fat man, seh!" he announced, with acertain ample bashfulness in keeping with his general amplitude and amusical Southern accent.
"If it wants to feel perfectly comfortable it has!" said Jack, by wayof welcome.
"Well, I'm the fat man of Little Rivers, name being Bob Worther!"said he, grinning as he came across the room with an amazingly quick,easy step.
"No rivals?" inquired Jack.
"No, seh! I staked out the first claim and I've an eye out for anynew-comers over the two hundred mark. I warn them off! Jasper Ewold is upto two hundred, but he doesn't count. Why, you ought to have seen me,seh, before I came to this valley!"
"A living skeleton?"
"No, seh! Back in Alabama I had reached a point where I broke so manychairs and was getting so nervous from sudden falls in the midst ofconversation, when I made a lively gesture that I didn't dare sit downaway from home except at church, where they had pews. I weighed threehundred and fifty!"
"And now?"
"I acknowledge two hundred and forty, including my legs, which are verypowerful, having worked off that extra hundred. I've got the boss jobfor making a fat man spider-waisted--inspector of ditches and dams. Anyother man would have to use a horse, but I hoof it, and that's economyall around. And being big I grow big things. Violets wouldn't be muchmore in my line than drawnwork. I've got this whole town beat onpeonies and pumpkins. Being as it's a fat man's pleasure to cheerpeople up, I dropped in to bring you a few peonies and to say that,considering the few well-selected words you spoke to Pete Leddy on thistown's behalf, I'm prepared to vote for you for anything from coronerto president, seh!"
Later, after Bob had gone, a small girl brought a spray of gladiolus,their slender stems down to her toe-tips and the opening blossoms halfhiding her face. Jack insisted on having them laid across his knee Shewas not a fairy out of a play, as he knew by her conversation.
"Mister, did you yell when you was hit?" she asked.
Jack considered thoughtfully. It would not do to be vagarious under sucha shrewd examination; he must be exact.
"No, I don't think I did. I was too busy."
"I'll bet you wanted to, if you hadn't been so busy. Did it hurt much?"
"Not so very much."
"Maybe that was why you didn't yell. Mother says that all you can see isa little black spot--except you can't see it for the bandages. Is thatthe way yours is?"
"I believe so. In fact, I'll tell you a secret: That's the fashionin wounds."
"Mother will be glad to know she's right. She sets a lot by her opinion,does mother. Say, do you like plums?"
Jack already had a peck of plums, but another peck would not add much tothe redundancy as far as he was concerned.
"I'll bring you some. We've got the biggest plums in Little Rivers--oh,so big! Bigger'n Mr. Ewold's! I'll bring some right away." She paused,however, in the doorway. "Don't you tell anybody I said they werebigger'n Mr. Ewold's," she went on. "It might hurt his feelings. He'swhat they call the o-rig-i-nal set-tler, and we always agree that hegrows the biggest of everything, because--why, because he's got such abig laugh and such a big smile. Mother says sour-faced people oughtn't tohave a face any bigger'n a crab apple; but Mr. Ewold's face couldn't betoo big if it was as big as all outdoors! Good-by. I reckon you won't bes'prised to hear that I'm the dreadful talker of our family."
"Wait!" Jack called. "You haven't told me your name."
"Belvedere Smith. Father says it ain't a name for living things. Butmother is dreadfully set in her ideas of names, and she doesn't like itbecause people call me Belvy; but they just naturally will."
"Belvedere, did you ever hear of the three little blue mice"--Jack wasleaning toward her with an air of fascinating mystery--"that thought theycould hide in the white clover from the white cat that had two blackstripes on her back?"
There was a pellmell dash across the room and her face, with wide-openeyes dancing in curiosity, was pressed close to his:
"Why did the cat have two black stripes? Why? why?"
"Just what I was going to tell," said the pacifier of desperadoes.
"They were off on a tremendous adventure, with anthills for mountainsand clover-stems for the tree-trunks of forests in the path. Tragedyseemed due for the mice, when a bee dropped off a thistle blossom for aremarkable reason--none other than that a hummingbird cuffed him in theear with his wing--and the bee, looking for revenge with his stinger onthe first vulnerable spot, stung the cat right in the Achilles tendon ofhis paw, just as that paw was about to descend with murderous purpose.The cat ran away crying, with both black stripes ridges of fur stickingup straight, while the rest of the fur lay nice and smooth; and themice giggled so that their ears nearly wiggled off their heads. So allended happily."
"He does beat all!" thought Mrs. Galway, who had overheard part of thenonsense from the doorway. "Wouldn't it make Pete Leddy mad if he couldhear the man who took his gun away getting off fairy stuff like that!"
Mrs. Galway had brought in a cake of her own baking. She wasslightly jealous of the neighbors' pastry as entering into her ownparticular field of excellence. Jack saw that the supply of cake inthe Galway pantry must be as limitless as the pigments on theEternal Painter's palette.
"The doctor said that I was to have a light diet," he expostulated; "andI am stuffed to the brim."
"I'll make you some floating island," said Mrs. Galway, refusing tostrike her colors.
"That isn't filling and passes the time," Jack admitted.
"Jim says if you had to Fletcherize on floating island you wo
uld starveto death and your teeth would get so used to missing a step on the stairsthat they would never be able to deal with real victuals at all."
"Mrs. Galway," Jack observed sagely, dropping his head on the back of thechair, "I see that it has occurred to you and Jim that it is an excellentworld and full of excellent nonsense. I am ready to eat both fluffy islesand the yellow sea in which they float. I am ready to keep on gettinghungry with my efforts, even though you make it continents and oceans!"
From his window he had a view, over the dark, polished green of Jim'sorange trees, of the range, brown and gray and bare, holding steadyshadows of its own and host to the shadows of journeying clouds, with thepass set in the centre as a cleft in a forbidding barrier. In the yardWrath of God, Jag Ear, and P.D. were tethered. Deep content illumined thefaces of P.D. and Jag Ear; but Wrath of God was as sorrowful as ever. Acheerful Wrath of God would have excited fears for his health.
"Yet, maybe he is enjoying his rest more than the others," Jack toldFirio, who kept appearing at the window on some excuse or other. "Perhapshe takes his happiness internally. Perhaps the external signs are onlythe last stand of a lugubriousness driven out by overwhelming forces ofinternal joy."
"_Si, si_!" said Firio.
"Firio, you are eminently a conversationalist," said Jack. "You agreewith any foolishness as if it were a new theory of ethics. You are anideal companion. I never have to listen to you in order that I may inturn have my say."
"_Si_," said Firio. He leaned on the windowsill, his black eyes shiningwith ingenuous and flattering appeal: "I will broil you a quail on aspit," he whispered. "It's better than stove cooking."
"Don't talk of that!" Jack exclaimed, almost sharply. The suggestionbrought a swift change to sadness over his face and drew a veil ofvagueness over his eyes. "No, Firio, and I'll tell you why: the odor of aquail broiled on a spit belongs at the end of a day's journey, when youcamp in sight of no habitation. You should sit on a dusty blanket-roll;you should eat by the light of the embers or a guttering candle. No,Firio, we'll wait till some other day. And it's not exactly courtesy toour hostess to bring in provender from the outside."
The trail had apparently taught Firio all the moods of his master. Heknew when it was unwise to persist.
"_Si_!" he whispered, and withdrew.
Jack looked at Galeria and then back quickly, as if resisting its call.He smiled half wryly and readjusted his position in the chair. Over thehedge he could see the heads and shoulders of passers-by. Jim Galway hadcome into the room, when Jasper Ewold's broad back and great head hovein sight with something of the steady majesty of progress of afull-rigged ship.
"The Doge!" Jack exclaimed, brightening.
Jim was taken unawares. Was it the name of a new kind of semi-tropicalfruit not yet introduced into Arizona?
"Not the Doge of Venice--hardly, when Mr. Ewold's love runs to Florence!The Doge of Little Rivers!"
"Why, the Doge--of course!" Jim was "on" now and grinning. "I didn'tthink of my history at first. That's a good one for Jasper Ewold!"
"O Doge of Little Rivers, I expected you in a gondola of state!" saidJack, with a playfully grandiloquent gesture, as Jasper's abundancefilled the doorway. "But it is all the more compliment to me that youshould walk."
"Doge, eh?" Jasper tasted the word. "Pooh!" he said. "Persiflage!persiflage! I saw at once yesterday that you had a weakness for it."
"And Miss Ewold? How is she?" Jack asked. Remembering the promisethat Mary had exacted from him, he took care not to refer to her partin the duel.
His question fell aptly for what Jasper had to say. Being a man used tokeeping the gate ever open to the full flood of spontaneity, he becamestilted in the repetition of anything he had thought out and rehearsed.He was overcheerful, without the mellowness of tone which gave his cheerits charm on the previous evening.
"She's not a bit the worse. Why, she went for a ride out to the pass thisafternoon as usual! I've had the whole story, from the pass till theminute that Jim put the tourniquet on your leg. She recognizes the greatkindness you did her."
"Not a kindness--an inevitable interruption by any passer-by,"Jack put in.
"Naturally she felt that it was a kindness, a service, and when she knewyou were in danger she acted promptly for herself, with a desert girl'sself-reliance. When it was all over she saw the whole thing in its properperspective, as an unpleasant, preposterous piece of barbarism which hadturned out fortunately."
"Oh, I am glad of that!" Jack exclaimed, in relief that spoke rejoicingin every fibre. "I had worried. I had feared lest I had insisted too muchon going on. But I had to. And I know that it was a scene that only menought to witness--so horrible I feared it might leave a disagreeableimpression."
"Ah, Mary has courage and humor. She sees the ridiculous. She laughs atit all, now!"
"Laughs?" asked Jack. "Yes, it was laughable;" and he broke intolaughter, in which Jasper joined thunderously.
Jasper kept on laughing after Jack stopped, and in genuine relief to findthat the affair was to be as uninfluencing a chapter in the easytraveller's life as in Mary's.
"Our regret is that we may have delayed you, sir," Jasper proceeded. "Youmay have had to postpone an important engagement. I understand that youhad planned to take the train this morning."
"When one has been in the desert for a long time," Jack answered, "a fewdays more or less hardly matter in the time of his departure. In a weekDr. Patterson says that I may go. Meanwhile, I shall have the pleasureof getting acquainted with Little Rivers, which, otherwise, I shouldhave missed."
"I am glad!" Jasper Ewold exclaimed with dramatic quickness. "Glad thatyour wound is so slight--glad that you need not be shut up long when youare due elsewhere."
What books should he bring to the invalid to while away the time? "TheThree Musketeers" or "Cyrano"? Jack seemed to know his "Cyrano" so wellthat a copy could be only a prompt. He settled deeper in his chair and,more to the sky than to Jasper Ewold, repeated Cyrano's address to hiscadets, set to a tune of his own. His body might be in the chair, with abandaged leg, but clearly his mind was away on the trail.
"Yes, let me see," he said, coming back to earth. "I should like the'Road to Rome,' something of Charles Lamb, Aldrich's 'Story of a BadBoy,' Heine---but no! What am I saying? Bring me any solid book oneconomics. I ought to be reading economics. Economics and Charles Lamb,that will do. Do you think they could travel together?"
"All printed things can, if you choose. I'll include Lamb."
"And any Daudet lying loose," Jack added.
"And Omar?"
"I carry Omar in my head, thank you, O Doge!"
"Sir Chaps of the enormous spurs, you have a broad taste for one whorides over the pass of Galeria after five years in Arizona," said theDoge as he rose. He was covertly surveying that soft, winning, dreamyprofile which had turned so hard when the devil that was within came tothe surface.
"I was fed on books and galleries in my boyhood," Jack said; butwith a reticence that indicated that this was all he cared to tellabout his past.
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