“Come here,” he said authoritatively, and drew her to him.
She did not resist, and her head dropped to his shoulder in a movement of disheartened weariness.
“Oh, Hughie—I’m so tired of fighting—so tired—of everything.”
He smoothed her hair as he would have soothed a child, and said decisively—yet with a big tenderness:
“And you shan’t do any more of it!”
He felt his heart breaking with the love he felt for her.
“Kiss me—Honey!” he said softly.
She winced at the old sweet term of endearment, then with a sharp intake of breath she raised her lips to his. He was sure that no other woman’s kiss could so draw the soul out of him. Beth seemed only a shadow—like someone long dead whose personality is recalled with an effort.
This was love—this was the sort of feeling the Creator intended men and women to have for each other—mysterious, inexplicable, yet real as Nature. It was as it should be. These thoughts passed through Disston’s mind swiftly. Up there on top of the world, in the moonlight, any consideration which interfered seemed trifling and indefensible.
“You do love me?” He held her off a little and looked at her. He did not doubt it—he merely wanted to hear her say it.
She replied simply:
“Yes, Hughie. I have always.”
“You’re so unexpectedly sweet!” he cried, as he again drew her close to him. “I’ve never forgotten that about you.” He laughed softly as he added, “I can’t understand why everyone that knows you isn’t in love with you.”
“There’s no one else who has ever seen this side of me. I am not even likable to most people.”
“It isn’t so! But if it were, it doesn’t make any difference, for you’re going to marry me—you’re going home with me and live a woman’s life—the kind for which you were intended.”
The radiance that illuminated her face transformed and glorified it.
She was woman—all woman, at heart—he had not been mistaken, he thought rapturously as he looked at her.
She stared at him wide-eyed, dazzled by the picture as she breathed rather than whispered:
“To be with you always—never to be lonely again—to have some one that cared really when I was sick or tired or heavy-hearted—never to be savage and bitter and vindictive, but to be glad every morning just to be living, and to know that each day would be a little nicer than the last one! It would be that way, wouldn’t it, Hughie?”
“How could it be otherwise when just being together is happiness?” he answered.
“It’s like peeking into Paradise,” she said, wistfully.
“But you will—you’ll promise me? You’ll give up this?” There was a faint note of anxiety in his earnestness as he laid a hand upon her shoulder and looked at her steadily.
In the long space of time that she took to answer, the radiance died out of her face like a light that is extinguished slowly:
“I’ll tell you in the morning, Hughie. I must think. I make mistakes when I do what my heart impels me to. My impulses have been wrong always. I rely upon my head nowadays. I am weak to-night, and I’ve just judgment enough left to know it.”
“But, Kate!” he expostulated in a kind of terror. “There isn’t anything to argue about—to consider. This isn’t business.”
She shook her head.
“I must think, Hughie. I’ll tell you in the morning. You’d better go down to camp now,” she urged gently. “There isn’t anything to be done up here, for every sheep will die that got enough poison.”
“I can’t bear to think of leaving you alone up here,” he protested vehemently. “Why not let me stay and you go down to the wagons?”
She shook her head.
“There’s not the slightest danger. He’s done his work for the present, and it may be a long time before I’m again molested.”
“Whom do you mean?” he asked quickly.
“A ‘breed’ named Mullendore that hates me.”
“Do you mean to say,” incredulously, “that since you know who did it, he’ll ever have another opportunity?”
“I can’t prove it; and, besides,” bitterly, “you don’t know Prouty.”
With a swift transition of mood she crept into his arms voluntarily, crying chokingly:
“Hold me close, Hughie! I feel so safe with your arms about me, as though nothing or nobody could hurt me ever!”
In the morning Kate drove down to the camp at daylight the few sheep that had not eaten enough of the saltpeter to kill them, or had missed it altogether—only a small percentage of the valuable herd that had started up the mountain.
Brusque, businesslike, she was as different from the girl who had clung to Hugh for love and sympathy as could well be imagined.
They had breakfast together in the cook tent, which in the summer camp was used as a dining tent also. It was while she was standing by the stove that she turned suddenly and said impulsively:
“Do you know, Hughie, I love to cook, this morning, and ordinarily I hate it! It’s because it’s for you—isn’t it curious?” Her eyes were shining with a look of love that was warm and generous; then the tears filled them and she turned her back quickly.
“If I hadn’t the same feeling about you, I might think so,” he responded. “I’m simply aching to do something for you—to help you in some way—that’s what I came for.”
“Did you—really?” She looked at him gratefully.
“That—and because I couldn’t stay away any longer. All the way up the trail I had a feeling that you had hold of my heartstrings pulling me to you, and as if they would break if I didn’t get to you faster. I can’t describe it exactly, but it was as real as an actual physical sensation.”
She looked her understanding, though she made no response.
When breakfast was over and they had washed the dishes together in a silence which each felt momentous, Kate said finally:
“You’d better tack a shoe on your horse before you go. If you don’t know how, I’ll show you.” He took her hand and looked at her searchingly:
“Is that my answer?”
As she stood with her back against the table she gripped the edge of it tightly.
“I guess it is, Hughie. I’ve thought it all out and it seems best.”
“I can’t—I won’t believe you mean that!” he exclaimed, passionately.
“But I do. There are many reasons why I can’t leave here and do as you ask.”
“And,” incredulously, “the fact that we love each other doesn’t count?” He shook his head. “I must say I don’t understand. I didn’t know that you were so happy here—”
“Happy!” The color flooded her face as she cried fiercely, “Mostly it’s—hell!”
“I don’t comprehend at all.”
“In the first place, your world and mine are far apart—that girl you brought to the corrals made me see that clearer than ever before. I might, in time, adapt myself—I don’t know. I’m not ignorant of the things one can learn from books, and I’m not dull, but it would be an experiment, and if it failed it might be like that experience at the Prouty House on a larger scale. I would humiliate you and make you ashamed.” Then, looking at him searchingly, she added: “Tell me the truth, Hughie—haven’t you thought something of this yourself?”
“I realize, of course,” he admitted candidly, “that naturally there would be situations which would be difficult for you at first; but what of that? You’ll learn. You are more than intelligent—you have brains, and your instincts are right from first to last. I tell you I love you, and nothing else counts. I’m so sure of the result that I’m willing to risk the experiment.”
Her eyes, fixed upon him, shone with pride, and there was a note of exultation in her voice as she cried:
“I hoped you would say that!”
He smiled back:
“You’re tricky, Kate. You set traps for me. But,” impatiently, “go on; if your other r
easons are not more serious than this—”
She looked at him speculatively and doubtfully:
“I wonder, if I can make you see things from my point of view—if it’s possible for you to understand how I feel. Our lives and experiences have been so different. I’m afraid I shall fail. It’s just this—” an expression of grim purpose which he saw was not new to it settled upon her face—“I’ve set myself a goal; it’s in sight now and I’ve got to reach it. If I stopped, I know that the feeling that I had been a quitter when a real temptation came to me would gnaw inside of me until I was restless and discontented, and I would have a contempt for myself that I don’t believe ever would leave me.
“When people live alone a lot they get to know themselves—the way their minds work, their moods and the causes, their dispositions; and I know that whether my judgment is right or wrong I’ve got to follow the trail stretching away before me until I’ve reached my destination.”
“What is it you want to do, Kate? Why can’t I help you?”
“I want success—money! It’s the only weapon for a woman in my position. Without it she’s as helpless as though her hands were shackled and left a target for every one who chooses to throw a stone at her. It’s an obsession with me. I’ve sworn to win out here, by myself, single-handed; it’s a vow as sacred as an oath to me! It means time, patience, hardships and more hardships; and after this I’m going to suffer because you’ve shown me what I’m turning my back on. But no matter,” fiercely, “I can crucify myself, if necessary!”
“It isn’t yet clear to me why success means so much to you,” he said, bewildered.
“Because,” she cried, “soon after you left I went through purgatory for that want of money, and because I was nobody—because I was 'Mormon Joe’s Kate,' accused of murder, and the daughter of 'Jezebel of the Sand Coulee,' and have nobody for a father!”
“Why didn’t you ask me to come when I telegraphed you!”
“I didn’t dare—I was afraid to test you. If you, too, had failed me, it would have crushed me. Perhaps all this sounds absurd and melodramatic, but I can’t help it.
“You know, everybody has some little quirk in his brain that makes him different—some trait that isn’t quite normal. I’ve come to watch for it, and it’s always there, even in the most commonplace people. It’s the quirk which, when accentuated, makes religious fanatics, screaming suffragists and anarchists. My ‘twist’ takes the form of an uncontrollable desire to retaliate upon those who have deliberately, through sheer cruelty and without any personal reason for their animosity, gone out of their way to hurt me.”
That was it, then—she had been hurt—terribly!
Her eyes were like steel, her voice trembled with the intensity of the passion that shook her as she continued:
“I hate them in Prouty! I can’t conceive of any other feeling towards the town or its inhabitants. I don’t suppose it will ever come in my way to pay in full the debt I owe them, but I can at least by my own efforts rise above them and force their grudging recognition!”
“I understand now,” Disston said slowly. “But, Kate, is it worth the price you’ll pay for it?”
“I’m used to paying well for everything, whether it’s success or experience,” she replied bitterly. “As I feel now, it’s worth the sacrifice demanded, and I’m willing to make it.”
“It’s like seeing a great musician concentrate his energies upon the banjo—he may dignify the instrument, but he belittles himself in doing it. Kate,” he pleaded, “don’t throw away any years of happiness! Don’t hurt your own character for a handful of nonentities whose importance you exaggerate! I’m right, believe me.”
“I am as I am, and I have to learn all my lessons by experience.”
“It may be too late when you’ve learned this one,” he said sadly.
“Too late!” She shivered. A specter rose before her that she had seen before—hard-featured, domineering, unloved, unloving, chafing in ghastly solitude, alone with her sheep and her money, and the best years of her life behind her. She saw herself as her work and her thoughts would make her. For an instant she wavered. If Disston had known, he might have swayed her then, but, since he could not, he only said with an effort:
“If your love for me isn’t big enough to make you abandon this purpose, I shan’t urge you. I know it would be useless. You have a strange nature, Kate—a mixture of steel and velvet, of wormwood and honey.”
Absorbed in the swiftly moving panorama that was passing before her, she scarcely heard him. She was gazing at a bizarre figure in a wreath of paper roses trip down a staircase, radiant and eager—to be greeted by mocking eyes and unsuppressed titters; at a crowded courtroom, staring mercilessly, tense, with unfriendly curiosity; at Neifkins with his insolent stare, his skin, red, shiny, stretched to cracking across his broad, square-jawed face; at Wentz, listening in cold amusement to a frightened, tremulous voice pleading for leniency; at a sallow face with dead brown eyes leering through a cloud of smoke, suggesting in contemptuous familiarity, “Why don’t you fade away—open a dance hall in some live burg and get a liquor license?”; at Mrs. Toomey, pinched with worry and malnutrition, a look of craven cowardice in her blue eyes, blurting out in the candor of desperation, “Your friendship might hurt us in our business!”
She saw it all—figures and episodes passed in review before her, even to irrelevant details, and each contributed its weight to turn the scales in this crisis.
“It’s the fork of the road,” she said in curt decision, “and I’ve chosen.”
There was something so implacable in her face and voice and manner that Disston felt like one shut out behind a door that is closed and bolted; he had a sensation as though his heart while warm and beating had been laid upon the unresponsive surface of cold marble. The chill of it went all through him. With another woman than Kate he might still have argued. But he could only look at her sorrowfully:
“When you are older, and have grown more tolerant and forgiving, I’m afraid you will find that you have chosen wrongly.”
“If ever I should grow tolerant and forgiving,” she cried fiercely, “then I will have failed miserably.”
* * *
CHAPTER XXI
“HEART AND HAND”
“Come in, Bowers.” Kate looked up from the market report she was reading as her trusted lieutenant scraped his feet on the soap box which did duty as a step to the tongue of the sheep wagon.
After a final glance at the report, during which Bowers eyed the mail sack with interest, she folded the sheet and turned to him inquiringly.
“I wisht you’d order some turpentine—'bout two quarts of it,” he said.
“What do you want with so much?” She reached for a pad and pencil to make a note.
“Ticks. I never seen the beat of ’em. I bet I picked a thousand off me a'ready this season. They ain’t satisfied with grabbin’ me from a sagebrush as I go by, but when they gits wind of me they trails me up and jumps me. All the herders is complainin’.”
“How’s the new herder doing?”
Bowers’s face clouded. “Dibert’s havin’ trouble with Neifkins’s herder—says the feller does most of his herdin’ in the wagon, and there would a been a ‘mix’ a dozen times if he hadn’t been with his sheep every minute. Dibert says it looks to him like the feller’s doin’ it on purpose.”
“I don’t know but what I’d rather have it that way than for them to be too friendly. More 'mixes’ come from herders visiting than any other cause, and I wouldn’t run that band through the chutes for three hundred dollars. It would take that much fat off of them, to say nothing of the bother. Who is Neifkins’s herder?”
“I ain’t seen him. Dibert says he’s an o’nery looker.”
“Next time you go over, notify him that he’s to herd lines closer. If he keeps on crowding, I’ll take a dog and set his sheep back where they belong so they won’t forget it. You can tell him. You think Dibert’s all right, do you?”<
br />
“Well,” Bowers replied judicially, “he’s one of these fellers that would fight like hell fer his sheep one day, and the next, if you brought him prunes instead of the aprycots he’d ordered, he’d turn ’em loose to the coyotes to git hunks with you. He’s all right, only he’s crazy.”
Kate shrugged a shoulder.
“Is there much water-hemlock in the gulch this summer?”
“Quite a bit of it—it’s spreadin’. Neifkins has lost several sheep a'ready by poison, but it’s careless herdin’.”
“I should own that section,” Kate commented. “It’s public land. I could have it put up at auction and buy it in, but I suppose they’d run the price up on me just to make me pay for it. How are Svenson’s lambs doing?”
“They’re so fat they can’t play—and Woods’s got twenty-five hundred of the best wethers that ever blatted!”
Kate’s eyes sparkled.
“I’m going to be a real Sheep Queen, Bowers, if wool and mutton keep climbing. The price of wool is the highest in its history.”
Bowers looked at her in mute admiration. He was always loyal, but when she was sociable and friendly like this he adored her. Alas, however, the times when she was so were yearly growing rarer.
Kate went on tentatively:
“I think I’ll ‘cut’ for a hard winter. You know my motto, 'Better be sure than sorry.'”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if 'twan’t a humdinger—last winter was so open. I think we’d be safer if we ship everything that’s fat enough.”
Bowers always said “we” when he spoke of the Outfit, though he was still only a camptender working for wages.
Kate relied upon him to keep her informed of the details of the business, which she had less time than formerly to look after personally. His judgment was sometimes at fault, but she trusted his honesty implicitly and, though she gave him little of her confidence, it was so much more than she gave to any other person that he was flattered by it.
“Guess what that Boston woolbuyer is offering me?” She tapped a letter.
The Fighting Shepherdess Page 22
