by Zane Grey
He trotted out of the yard, down by the corrals, to come out on the edge of a gray, open flat that stretched several miles to the slope of a mesa. Florence led, and Madeline saw that she rode like a cowboy. Alfred drew on to her side, leaving Madeline in the rear. Then the leading horses broke into a gallop. They wanted to run, and Madeline felt with a thrill that she would hardly be able to keep Majesty from running, even if she wanted to. He sawed on the tight bridle as the others drew away, and broke from pace to gallop. Then Florence put her horse into a run. Alfred turned and called to Madeline to come along.
“This will never do. They are running away from us,” said Madeline, and she eased up her hold on the bridle. Something happened beneath her just then; she did not know at first exactly what. As much as she had been on horseback she had never ridden at a running gait. In New York it was not decorous or safe. So when Majesty lowered and stretched and changed the stiff, jolting gallop for a wonderful, smooth, gliding run it required Madeline some moments to realize what was happening. It did not take long for her to see the distance diminishing between her and her companions. Still they had gotten a goodly start and were far advanced. She felt the steady, even rush of the wind. It amazed her to find how easily, comfortably she kept to the saddle. The experience was new. The one fault she had heretofore found with riding was the violent shaking-up. In this instance she experienced nothing of that kind, no strain, no necessity to hold on with a desperate awareness of work. She had never felt the wind in her face, the whip of a horse’s mane, the buoyant, level spring of a running gait. It thrilled her, exhilarated her, fired her blood. Suddenly she found herself alive, throbbing; and, inspired by she knew not what, she loosened the bridle and, leaning far forward, she cried, “Oh, you splendid fellow, run!”
She heard from under her a sudden quick clattering roar of hoofs, and she swayed back with the wonderfully swift increase in Majesty’s speed. The wind stung her face, howled in her ears, tore at her hair. The gray plain swept by on each side, and in front seemed to be waving toward her. In her blurred sight Florence and Alfred appeared to be coming back. But she saw presently, upon nearer view, that Majesty was overhauling the other horses, was going to pass them. Indeed, he did pass them, shooting by so as almost to make them appear standing still. And he ran on, not breaking his gait till he reached the steep side of the mesa, where he slowed down and stopped.
“Glorious!” exclaimed Madeline. She was all in a blaze, and every muscle and nerve of her body tingled and quivered. Her hands, as she endeavored to put up the loosened strands of hair, trembled and failed of their accustomed dexterity. Then she faced about and waited for her companions.
Alfred reached her first, laughing, delighted, yet also a little anxious.
“Holy smoke! But can’t he run? Did he bolt on you?”
“No, I called in his ear,” replied Madeline.
“So that was it. That’s the woman of you and forbidden fruit. Flo said she’d do it the minute she was on him. Majesty, you can ride. See if Flo doesn’t say so.”
The Western girl came up then with her pleasure bright in her face.
“It was just great to see you. How your hair burned in the wind! Al, she sure can ride. Oh, I’m so glad! I was a little afraid. And that horse! Isn’t he grand? Can’t he run?”
Alfred led the way up the steep, zigzag trail to the top of the mesa. Madeline saw a beautiful flat surface of short grass, level as a floor. She uttered a little cry of wonder and enthusiasm.
“Al, what a place for golf! This would be the finest links in the world.”
“Well, I’ve thought of that myself,” he replied. “The only trouble would be—could anybody stop looking at the scenery long enough to hit a ball? Majesty, look!”
And then it seemed that Madeline was confronted by a spectacle too sublime and terrible for her gaze. The immensity of this red-ridged, deep-gulfed world descending by incalculable distances refused to be grasped, and awed her, shocked her.
“Once, Majesty, when I first came out West I was down and out—determined to end it all,” said Alfred. “And I happened to climb up here looking for a lonely place to die. When I saw that I changed my mind.”
Madeline was silent. She remained so during the ride around the rim of the mesa and down the steep trail. This time Alfred and Florence failed to tempt her into a race. She had been awe-struck; she had been exalted; she had been confounded; and she recovered slowly without divining exactly what had come to her.
She reached the ranch-house far behind her companions, and at supper-time was unusually thoughtful. Later, when they assembled on the porch to watch the sunset, Stillwell’s humorous complainings inspired the inception of an idea which flashed up in her mind swift as lightning. And then by listening sympathetically she encouraged him to recite the troubles of a poor cattleman. They were many and long and interesting, and rather numbing to the life of her inspired idea.
“Mr. Stillwell, could ranching here on a large scale, with up-to-date methods, be made—well, not profitable exactly, but to pay—to run without loss?” she asked, determined to kill her new-born idea at birth or else give it breath and hope of life.
“Wal, I reckon it could,” he replied, with a short laugh. “It’d sure be a money-maker. Why, with all my bad luck an’ poor equipment I’ve lived pretty well an’ paid my debts an’ haven’t really lost any money except the original outlay. I reckon thet’s sunk fer good.”
“Would you sell—if some one would pay your price?”
“Miss Majesty, I’d jump at the chance. Yet somehow I’d hate to leave hyar. I’d jest be fool enough to go sink the money in another ranch.”
“Would Don Carlos and these other Mexicans sell?”
“They sure would. The Don has been after me fer years, wantin’ to sell thet old rancho of his; an’ these herders in the valley with their stray cattle, they’d fall daid at sight of a little money.”
“Please tell me, Mr. Stillwell, exactly what you would do here if you had unlimited means?” went on Madeline.
“Good Lud!” ejaculated the rancher, and started so he dropped his pipe. Then with his clumsy huge fingers he refilled it, relighted it, took a few long pulls, puffed great clouds of smoke, and, squaring round, hands on his knees, he looked at Madeline with piercing intentness. His hard face began to relax and soften and wrinkle into a smile.
“Wal, Miss Majesty, it jest makes my old heart warm up to think of sich a thing. I dreamed a lot when I first come hyar. What would I do if I hed unlimited money? Listen. I’d buy out Don Carlos an’ the Greasers. I’d give a job to every good cowman in this country. I’d make them prosper as I prospered myself. I’d buy all the good horses on the ranges. I’d fence twenty thousand acres of the best grazin’. I’d drill fer water in the valley. I’d pipe water down from the mountains. I’d dam up thet draw out there. A mile-long dam from hill to hill would give me a big lake, an’ hevin’ an eye fer beauty, I’d plant cottonwoods around it. I’d fill that lake full of fish. I’d put in the biggest field of alfalfa in the Southwest. I’d plant fruit trees an’ garden. I’d tear down them old corrals an’ barns an’ bunk-houses to build new ones. I’d make this old rancho some comfortable an’ fine. I’d put in grass an’ flowers all around an’ bring young pine trees down from the mountains. An’ when all thet was done I’d sit in my chair an’ smoke an’ watch the cattle stringin’ in fer water an’ stragglin’ back into the valley. An’ I see the cowboys ridin’ easy an’ heah them singin’ in their bunks. An’ thet red sun out there wouldn’t set on a happier man in the world than Bill Stillwell, last of the old cattlemen.”
Madeline thanked the rancher, and then rather abruptly retired to her room, where she felt no restraint to hide the force of that wonderful idea, now full-grown and tenacious and alluring.
Upon the next day, late in the afternoon, she asked Alfred if it would be safe for her to ride out to the mesa.
“I’ll go with you,” he said, gaily.
“Dear
fellow, I want to go alone,” she replied.
“Ah!” Alfred exclaimed, suddenly serious. He gave her just a quick glance, then turned away. “Go ahead. I think it’s safe. I’ll make it safe by sitting here with my glass and keeping an eye on you. Be careful coming down the trail. Let the horse pick his way. That’s all.”
She rode Majesty across the wide flat, up the zigzag trail, across the beautiful grassy level to the far rim of the mesa, and not till then did she lift her eyes to face the southwest.
Madeline looked from the gray valley at her feet to the blue Sierra Madres, gold-tipped in the setting sun. Her vision embraced in that glance distance and depth and glory hitherto unrevealed to her. The gray valley sloped and widened to the black sentinel Chiricahuas, and beyond was lost in a vast corrugated sweep of earth, reddening down to the west, where a golden blaze lifted the dark, rugged mountains into bold relief. The scene had infinite beauty. But after Madeline’s first swift, all-embracing flash of enraptured eyes, thought of beauty passed away. In that darkening desert there was something illimitable. Madeline saw the hollow of a stupendous hand; she felt a mighty hold upon her heart. Out of the endless space, out of silence and desolation and mystery and age, came slow-changing colored shadows, phantoms of peace, and they whispered to Madeline. They whispered that it was a great, grim, immutable earth; that time was eternity; that life was fleeting. They whispered for her to be a woman; to love some one before it was too late; to love any one, every one; to realize the need of work, and in doing it to find happiness.
She rode back across the mesa and down the trail, and, once more upon the flat, she called to the horse and made him run. His spirit seemed to race with hers. The wind of his speed blew her hair from its fastenings. When he thundered to a halt at the porch steps Madeline, breathless and disheveled, alighted with the mass of her hair tumbling around her.
Alfred met her, and his exclamation, and Florence’s rapt eyes shining on her face, and Stillwell’s speechlessness made her self-conscious. Laughing, she tried to put up the mass of hair.
“I must—look a—fright,” she panted.
“Wal, you can say what you like,” replied the old cattleman, “but I know what I think.”
Madeline strove to attain calmness.
“My hat—and my combs—went on the wind. I thought—my hair would go, too.… There is the evening star.… I think I am very hungry.”
And then she gave up trying to be calm, and likewise to fasten up her hair, which fell again in a golden mass.
“Mr. Stillwell,” she began, and paused, strangely aware of a hurried note, a deeper ring in her voice. “Mr. Stillwell, I want to buy your ranch—to engage you as my superintendent. I want to buy Don Carlos’s ranch and other property to the extent, say, of fifty thousand acres. I want you to buy horses and cattle—in short, to make all those improvements which you said you had so long dreamed of. Then I have ideas of my own, in the development of which I must have your advice and Alfred’s. I intend to better the condition of those poor Mexicans in the valley. I intend to make life a little more worth living for them and for the cowboys of this range. Tomorrow we shall talk it all over, plan all the business details.”
Madeline turned from the huge, ever-widening smile that beamed down upon her and held out her hands to her brother.
“Alfred, strange, is it not, my coming out to you? Nay, don’t smile. I hope I have found myself—my work, my happiness—here under the light of that western star.”
CHAPTER 7
HER MAJESTY’S RANCHO
Five months brought all that Stillwell had dreamed of, and so many more changes and improvements and innovations that it was as if a magic touch had transformed the old ranch. Madeline and Alfred and Florence had talked over a fitting name, and had decided on one chosen by Madeline. But this instance was the only one in the course of developments in which Madeline’s wishes were not complied with. The cowboys named the new ranch “Her Majesty’s Rancho.” Stillwell said the names cowboys bestowed were felicitous, and as unchangeable as the everlasting hills; Florence went over to the enemy; and Alfred, laughing at Madeline’s protest, declared the cowboys had elected her queen of the ranges, and that there was no help for it. So the name stood “Her Majesty’s Rancho.”
The April sun shone down upon a slow-rising green knoll that nestled in the lea of the foothills, and seemed to center bright rays upon the long ranch-house, which gleamed snow-white from the level summit. The grounds around the house bore no semblance to Eastern lawns or parks; there had been no landscape-gardening; Stillwell had just brought water and grass and flowers and plants to the knoll-top, and there had left them, as it were, to follow nature. His idea may have been crude, but the result was beautiful. Under that hot sun and balmy air, with cool water daily soaking into the rich soil, a green covering sprang into life, and everywhere upon it, as if by magic, many colored flowers rose in the sweet air. Pale wild flowers, lavender daisies, fragile bluebells, white four-petaled lilies, like Eastern Mayflowers, and golden poppies, deep sunset gold, color of the West, bloomed in happy confusion. California roses, crimson as blood, nodded heavy heads and trembled with the weight of bees. Low down in bare places, isolated, open to the full power of the sun, blazed the vermilion and magenta blossoms of cactus plants.
Green slopes led all the way down to where new adobe barns and sheds had been erected, and wide corrals stretched high-barred fences down to the great squares of alfalfa gently inclining to the gray of the valley. The bottom of a dammed-up hollow shone brightly with its slowly increasing acreage of water, upon which thousands of migratory wild fowl whirred and splashed and squawked, as if reluctant to leave this cool, wet surprise so new in the long desert journey to the northland. Quarters for the cowboys—comfortable, roomy adobe houses that not even the lamest cowboy dared designate as crampy bunks—stood in a row upon a long bench of ground above the lake. And down to the edge of the valley the cluster of Mexican habitations and the little church showed the touch of the same renewing hand.
* * *
All that had been left of the old Spanish house, which had been Stillwell’s home for so long, was the bare, massive structure, and some of this had been cut away for new doors and windows. Every modern convenience, even to hot and cold running water and acetylene light, had been installed; and the whole interior painted and carpentered and furnished. The ideal sought had not been luxury, but comfort. Every door into the patio looked out upon dark, rich grass and sweet-faced flowers, and every window looked down the green slopes.
Madeline’s rooms occupied the west end of the building and comprised four in number, all opening out upon the long porch. There was a small room for her maid, another which she used as an office, then her sleeping apartment; and, lastly, the great light chamber which she had liked so well upon first sight, and which now, simply yet beautifully furnished and containing her favorite books and pictures, she had come to love as she had never loved any room at home. In the morning the fragrant, balmy air blew the white curtains of the open windows; at noon the drowsy, sultry quiet seemed to creep in for the siesta that was characteristic of the country; in the afternoon the westering sun peeped under the porch-roof and painted the walls with gold bars that slowly changed to red.
Madeline Hammond cherished a fancy that the transformation she had wrought in the old Spanish house and in the people with whom she had surrounded herself, great as that transformation had been, was as nothing compared to the one wrought in herself. She had found an object in life. She was busy, she worked with her hands as well as mind, yet she seemed to have more time to read and think and study and idle and dream than ever before. She had seen her brother through his difficulties, on the road to all the success and prosperity that he cared for. Madeline had been a conscientious student of ranching and an apt pupil of Stillwell. The old cattleman, in his simplicity, gave her the place in his heart that was meant for the daughter he had never had. His pride in her, Madeline thought, was beyond reason o
r belief or words to tell. Under his guidance, sometimes accompanied by Alfred and Florence, Madeline had ridden the ranges and had studied the life and work of the cowboys. She had camped on the open range, slept under the blinking stars, ridden forty miles a day in the face of dust and wind. She had taken two wonderful trips down into the desert—one trip to Chiricahua, and from there across the waste of sand and rock and alkali and cactus to the Mexican border-line; and the other through the Aravaipa Valley, with its deep, red-walled cañons and wild fastnesses.
This breaking-in, this training into Western ways, though she had been a so-called outdoor girl, had required great effort and severe pain; but the education, now past its primary grades, had become a labor of love. She had perfect health, abounding spirits. She was so active that she had to train herself into taking the midday siesta, a custom of the country and imperative during the hot summer months. Sometimes she looked in her mirror and laughed with sheer joy at sight of the lithe, audacious, brown-faced, flashing-eyed creature reflected there. It was not so much joy in her beauty as sheer joy of life. Eastern critics had been wont to call her beautiful in those days when she had been pale and slender and proud and cold. She laughed. If they could only see her now! From the tip of her golden head to her feet she was alive, pulsating, on fire.
Sometimes she thought of her parents, sister, friends, of how they had persistently refused to believe she could or would stay in the West. They were always asking her to come home. And when she wrote, which was dutifully often, the last thing under the sun that she was likely to mention was the change in her. She wrote that she would return to her old home sometime, of course, for a visit; and letters such as this brought returns that amused Madeline, sometimes saddened her. She meant to go back East for a while, and after that once or twice every year. But the initiative was a difficult step from which she shrank. Once home, she would have to make explanations, and these would not be understood. Her father’s business had been such that he could not leave it for the time required for a Western trip, or else, according to his letter, he would have come for her. Mrs. Hammond could not have been driven to cross the Hudson River; her un-American idea of the wilderness westward was that Indians still chased buffalo on the outskirts of Chicago. Madeline’s sister Helen had long been eager to come, as much from curiosity, Madeline thought, as from sisterly regard. And at length Madeline concluded that the proof of her breaking permanent ties might better be seen by visiting relatives and friends before she went back East. With that in mind she invited Helen to visit her during the summer, and bring as many friends as she liked.
