Down past the court-house, refurbished and deeper sunk in trees, Lee Virginia rode, recalling the wild night when three hundred armed and vengeful cowboys surrounded it, holding three cattle-barons and their hired invaders against all comers, resolute to be their own judge, jury, and hangman. It was all as peaceful as a Sunday afternoon at this moment, with no sign of the fierce passions of the past.
There were new store-buildings and cement walks along the main street of the town, and here and there a real lawn, cut by a lawn-mower; but as the machine buzzed on toward the river the familiar little old battlemented buildings came to view. The Palace Hotel, half log, half battlement, remained on its perilous site beside the river. The triangle where the trails met still held Halsey’s Three Forks Saloon, and next to it stood Markheit’s general store, from which the cowboys and citizens had armed themselves during the ten days’ war of cattle-men and rustlers.
The car crossed the Roaring Fork and drew up before two small shacks, one of which bore a faded sign, “The Wetherford House,” and the other in fresher paint, “The Wetherford Café.” On the sidewalk a group of Indians were sitting, and a half-dozen slouching white men stood waiting at the door.
At sight of her mother’s hotel Virginia forgot every other building, every other object, and when the driver asked, respectfully, “Where will you want to get off, miss?” she did not reply, but rose unsteadily in her seat, blindly reaching for her bag and her wraps. Her slim, gray-robed figure, graceful even in her dismay, appealed to every onlooker, but Gregg was the one to offer a hand.
“Allow me, miss,” he said, with the smile of a wolf.
Declining his aid, she took her bag from the driver and walked briskly up the street as if she were a resident and knew precisely where she wanted to go. “One o’ those Eastern tourists, I reckon?” she heard the old woman say.
As she went past the hotel-porch her heart beat hard and her breath shortened. In a flash she divined the truth. She understood why her mother had discouraged her coming home. It was not merely on account of the money—it was because she knew that her business was wrong.
What a squalid little den it was! How cheap, bald, and petty the whole town seemed of a sudden. Lee Virginia halted and turned. There was only one thing to be done, and that was to make herself known. She retraced her steps, pulled open the broken screen door, and entered the café. It was a low, dingy dining-room filled with the odor of ham and bad coffee. At the tables ten or fifteen men, a motley throng, were busily feeding their voracious jaws, and on her left, behind a showcase filled with cigars, stood her mother, looking old, unkempt, and worried. The changes in her were so great that the girl stood in shocked alarm. At last she raised her veil. “Mother,” she said, “don’t you know me?”
A look of surprise went over the older woman’s flabby face—a glow which brought back something of her other self, as she cried: “Why, Lee Virginny, where did you come from?”
The boarders stopped chewing and stared in absorbed interest, while Virginia kissed her blowsy mother.
“By the Lord, it’s little Virginny!” said one old fellow. “It’s her daughter.”
Upon this a mutter of astonishment arose, and the waiter-girls, giggling, marvelling, and envious, paused, their platters in hand, to exchange comment on the new-comer’s hat and gown. A cowboy at the washing-sink in the corner suspended his face-polishing and gaped over his shoulder in silent ecstasy.
For a full minute, so it seemed, this singular, interesting, absorbed immobility lasted; then a seedy little man rose, and approached the girl. His manner was grotesquely graceful as he said: “We are all glad to greet you home again, Miss Virginia.”
She gave her hand hesitatingly. “It’s Mr. Sifton, isn’t it?”
“It is,” he replied; “the same old ha’penny, only a little more worn—worn, not polished,” he added, with a smile.
She remembered him then—an Englishman, a remittance man, a “lord,” they used to say. His eyes were kind, and his mouth, despite its unshaved stubble of beard, was refined. A harmless little man—his own worst enemy, as the saying goes.
Thereupon others of the men came forward to greet her, and though she had some difficulty in recognizing one or two of them (so hardly had the years of her absence used them), she eventually succeeded in placing them all.
At length her mother led her through the archway which connected the two shanties, thence along a narrow hall into a small bedroom, into which the western sunset fell. It was a shabby place, but as a refuge from the crowd in the restaurant it was grateful.
Lize looked at her daughter critically. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with a girl like you.—Why, you’re purty—purty as a picture. You were skinny as a child—I’m fair dazed. Great snakes, how you have opened out!—You’re the living image of your dad.—What started you back? I told you to stay where you was.”
The girl stared at her helplessly, trying to understand herself and her surroundings. There was, in truth, something singularly alien in her mother’s attitude. She seemed on the defensive, not wishing to be too closely studied. “Her manner is not even affectionate—only friendly. It is as if I were only an embarrassing visitor,” the girl thought. Aloud she said: “I had no place to go after Aunt Celia died. I had to come home.”
“You wrote they was willing to keep you.”
“They were, but I couldn’t ask it of them. I had no right to burden them, and, besides, Mrs. Hall wrote me that you were sick.”
“I am; but I didn’t want you to come back. Lay off your things and come out to supper. We’ll talk afterward.”
The eating-house, the rooms and hallways, were all of that desolate shabbiness which comes from shiftlessness joined with poverty. The carpets were frayed and stained with tobacco-juice, and the dusty windows were littered with dead flies. The curtains were ragged, the paper peeling from the walls, and the plastering cracked into unsightly lines. Everything on which the girl’s eyes fell contrasted strongly with her aunt’s home on the Brandywine—not because that house was large or luxurious, but because it was exquisitely in order, and sweet with flowers and dainty arrangement of color.
She understood now the final warnings uttered by her friends. “You will find everything changed,” they had said, “because you are changed.”
She regretted bitterly that she had ever left her Eastern friends. Her mother, in truth, showed little pleasure at her coming, and almost nothing of the illness of which a neighbor had written. It was, indeed, this letter which had decided her to return to the West. She had come, led by a sense of duty, not by affection, for she had never loved her mother as a daughter should—they were in some way antipathetic—and now she found herself an unwelcome guest.
Then, too, the West had called to her: the West of her childhood, the romantic, chivalrous West, the West of the miner, the cattle-man, the wolf, and the eagle. She had returned, led by a poetic sentiment, and here now she sat realizing as if by a flash of inward light that the West she had known as a child had passed, had suddenly grown old and commonplace—in truth, it had never existed at all!
One of the waitresses, whose elaborately puffed and waved hair set forth her senseless vanity, called from the door: “You can come out now, your ma says! Your supper’s ready!”
With aching head and shaking knees Virginia reentered the dining-room, which was now nearly empty of its “guests,” but was still misty with the steam of food, and swarming with flies. These pests buzzed like bees around the soiled places on the table-cloths, and one of her mother’s first remarks was a fretful apology regarding her trials with those insects. “Seems like you can’t keep ’em out,” she said.
Lee Virginia presented the appearance of some “settlement worker,” some fair lady on a visit to the poor, as she took her seat at the table and gingerly opened the small moist napkin which the waiter dropped before her. Her appetite was gone. Her appetite failed at the very sight of the fried eggs and hot and sputtering bacon, an
d she turned hastily to her coffee. A fly was in that! She uttered a little choking cry, and buried her face in her handkerchief and sobbed.
Lize turned upon the waitress and lashed her with stinging phrases. “Can’t you serve things better than this? Take that cup away! My God, you make me tired—fumblin’ around here with your eyes on the men! Pay more attention to your work and less to your crimps, and you’ll please me a whole lot better!”
With desperate effort Lee conquered her disgust. “Never mind, I’m tired and a little upset. I don’t need any dinner.”
“The slob will go, just the same. I’ve put up with her because help is scarce, but here’s where she gits off!”
In this moment Virginia perceived that her mother was of the same nature with Mrs. McBride—not one whit more refined—and the gulf between them swiftly widened. Hastily sipping her coffee, she tried hard to keep back the tears, but failed; and no sooner did her mother turn away than she fled to her room, there to sob unrestrainedly her despair and shame. “Oh, I can’t stand it,” she called. “I can’t! I can’t!”
Outside, the mountains deepened in splendor, growing each moment more mysterious and beautiful under the sunset sky, but the girl derived no comfort from them. Her loneliness and her perplexities had closed her eyes to their majestic drama. She felt herself alien and solitary in the land of her birth.
Lize came in half an hour later, pathetic in her attempt at “slicking up.” She was still handsome in a large-featured way, but her gray hair was there, and her face laid with a network of fretful lines. Her color was bad. At the moment her cheeks were yellow and sunken.
She complained of being short of breath and lame and tired. “I’m always tired,” she explained. “’Pears like sometimes I can’t scarcely drag myself around, but I do.”
A pang of comprehending pain shot through Virginia’s heart. If she could not love, she could at least pity and help; and reaching forth her hand, she patted her mother on the knee. “Poor old mammy!” she said. “I’m going to help you.”
Lize was touched by this action of her proud daughter, and smiled sadly. “This is no place for you. It’s nothin’ but a measly little old cow-town gone to seed—and I’m gone to seed with it. I know it. But what is a feller to do? I’m stuck here, and I’ve got to make a living or quit. I can’t quit. I ain’t got the grit to eat a dose, and so I stagger along.”
“I’ve come back to help you, mother. You must let me relieve you of some of the burden.”
“What can you do, child?” Lize asked, gently.
“I can teach.”
“Not in this town you can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Well, there’s a terrible prejudice against—well, against me. And, besides, the places are all filled for the next year. The Wetherfords ain’t among the first circles any more.”
This daunted the girl more than she could express, but she bravely made advance. “But there must be other schools in the country.”
“There are—a few. But I reckon you better pull out and go back, at least, to Sulphur; they don’t know so much about me there, and, besides, they’re a little more like your kind.”
Lee Virginia remembered Gregg’s charge against her mother. “What do you mean by the prejudice against you?” she asked.
Lize was evasive. “Since I took to running this restaurant my old friends kind o’ fell off—but never mind that to-night. Tell me about things back East. I don’t s’pose I’ll ever get as far as Omaha again; I used to go with Ed every time I felt like it. He was good to me, your father. If ever there was a prince of a man, Ed Wetherford was him.”
The girl’s thought was now turned into other half-forgotten channels. “I wish you would tell me more about father. I don’t remember where he was buried.”
“Neither do I, child—I mean I don’t know exactly. You see, after that cattle-war, he went away to Texas.”
“I remember, but it’s all very dim.”
“Well, he never came back and never wrote, and by-and-by word came that he had died and was buried; but I never could go down to see where his grave was at.”
“Didn’t you know the name of the town?”
“Yes; but it was a new place away down in the Pan Handle, and nobody I knew lived there. And I never knew anything more.”
Lee sighed hopelessly. “I hate to think of him lying neglected down there.”
“’Pears like the whole world we lived in in them days has slipped off the map,” replied the older woman; and as the room was darkening, she rose and lighted a dusty electric globe which dangled from the ceiling over the small table. “Well, I must go back into the restaurant; I hain’t got a girl I can trust to count the cash.”
Left alone, Lee Virginia wept no more, but her face settled into an expression of stern sadness. It seemed as if her girlhood had died out of her, and that she was about to begin the same struggle with work and worry which had marked the lives of all the women she had known in her childhood.
Out on the porch a raw youth was playing wailing tunes on a mouth-organ, and in the “parlor” a man was uttering silly jokes to a tittering girl. The smell of cheap cigars filled the hallway and penetrated to her nostrils. Every sight and sound sickened her. “Can it be that the old town, the town of my childhood, was of this character—so sordid, so vulgar?” she asked herself. “And mother—what is the matter with her? She is not even glad to see me!”
Weary with her perplexities, she fastened her door at last, and went to bed, hoping to end—for a few hours, at least—the ache in her heart and the benumbing whirl of her thought.
But this respite was denied her. Almost at once she began to fancy that a multitudinous minute creeping and stirring was going on about her—in her hair, over her neck, across her feet. For a time she explained this by reference to her disordered nerves, but at last some realization of the truth came to her, and she sprang out upon the floor in horror and disgust. Lighting the lamp, she turned to scrutinize her couch. It swarmed with vermin. The ceiling was spattered with them. They raced across the walls in platoons, thin and voracious as wolves.
With a choking, angry, despairing moan she snatched her clothing from the chair and stood at bay. It needed but this touch to complete her disillusionment.
* * *
II
THE FOREST RANGER
From her makeshift bed in the middle of the floor Lee Virginia was awakened next morning by the passing of some one down the hall calling at each door, “Six o’clock!” She had not slept at all till after one. She was lame, heart-weary, and dismayed, but she rose and dressed herself as neatly as before. She had decided to return to Sulphur. “I cannot endure this,” she had repeated to herself a hundred times. “I will not!”
Hearing the clatter of dishes, she ventured (with desperate courage) into the dining-room, which was again filled with cowboys, coal-miners, ranchers and their tousled families, and certain nondescript town loafers of tramp-like appearance. The flies were nearly as bad as ever—but not quite, for under Mrs. Wetherford’s dragooning the waiters had made a nerveless assault upon them with newspaper bludgeons, and a few of them had been driven out into the street.
Slipping into a seat at the end of the table which offered the cleanest cloth, Lee Virginia glanced round upon her neighbors with shrinking eyes. All were shovelling their food with knife-blades and guzzling their coffee with bent heads; their faces scared her, and she dropped her eyes.
At her left, however, sat two men whose greetings were frank and manly, and whose table-manners betrayed a higher form of life. One of them was a tall man with a lean red face against which his blond mustache lay like a chalk-mark. He wore a corduroy jacket, cut in Norfolk style, and in the collar of his yellow shirt a green tie was loosely knotted. His hands were long and freckled, but were manifestly trained to polite usages.
The other man was younger and browner, and of a compact, athletic figure. On the breast of his olive-green coat hung a silver badge wh
ich bore a pine-tree in the centre. His shirt was tan-colored and rough, but his head was handsome. He looked like a young officer in the undress uniform of the regular army. His hands were strong but rather small, and the lines of his shoulders graceful. Most attractive of all were his eyes, so brown, so quietly humorous, and so keen.
In the rumble of cheap and vulgar talk the voices of these men appealed to the troubled girl with great charm. She felt more akin to them than to any one else in the room, and from time to time she raised her eyes to their faces.
They were aware of her also, and their gaze was frankly admiring as well as wondering; and in passing the ham and eggs or the sugar they contrived to show her that they considered her a lady in a rough place, and that they would like to know more about her.
She accepted their civilities with gratitude, and listened to their talk with growing interest. It seemed that the young man had come down from the hills to meet his friend and take him back to his cabin.
“I can’t do it to-day, Ross,” said the older man. “I wish I could, but one meal of this kind is all I can stand these days.”
“You’re getting finicky,” laughed the younger man.
“I’m getting old. Time was when my fell of hair would rise at nothing, not even flies in the butter, but now—”
“That last visit to the ancestral acres is what did it.”
“No, it’s age—age and prosperity. I know now what it is to have broiled steak.”
Mrs. Wetherford, seizing the moment, came down to do the honors. “You fellers ought to know my girl. Virginny, this is Forest Supervisor Redfield, and this is Ross Cavanagh, his forest ranger in this district. You ought to know each other. My girl’s just back from school, and she don’t think much of the Fork. It’s a little too coarse for her.”
Lee flushed under this introduction, and her distress was so evident that both men came to her rescue.
The older man bowed, and said: “I didn’t know you had a daughter, Mrs. Wetherford,” and Cavanagh, with a glance of admiration, added: “We’ve been wondering who you might be.”
Cavanaugh-Forest Ranger Page 2
