The Little Lady of the Big House

by Jack London

  Dick shook his head.

  «And so,» she continued, «if you're not using Saunders—»

  Dick nodded acquiescence.

  «I'm using Callahan this afternoon,» he explained, on the instant planning his own time now that Paula was out of the question. «I never can make out, Paul, why you prefer Saunders. Callahan is the better driver, and of course the safest.»

  «Perhaps that's why,» she said with a smile. «Safety first means slowest most.»

  «Just the same I'd back Callahan against Saunders on a speed-track,»

  Dick championed.

  «Where are you bound?» she asked.

  «Oh, to show Colonel Stoddard my one-man and no-horse farm—you know, the automatically cultivated ten-acre stunt I've been frivoling with. A lot of changes have been made that have been waiting a week for me to see tried out. I've been too busy. And after that, I'm going to take him over the colony—what do you think?—five additions the last week.»

  «I thought the membership was full,» Paula said.

  «It was, and still is,» Dick beamed. «But these are babies. And the least hopeful of the families had the rashness to have twins.»

  «A lot of wiseacres are shaking their heads over that experiment of yours, and I make free to say that I am merely holding my judgment— you've got to show me by bookkeeping,» Colonel Stoddard was saying, immensely pleased at the invitation to be shown over in person.

  Dick scarcely heard him, such was the rush of other thoughts. Paula had not mentioned whether Mrs. Wade and the little Wades were coming, much less mentioned that she had invited them. Yet this Dick tried to consider no lapse on her part, for often and often, like himself, she had guests whose arrival was the first he knew of their coming.

  It was, however, evident that Mrs. Wade was not coming that day, else Paula would not be running away thirty miles up the valley. That was it, and there was no blinking it. She was running away, and from him. She could not face being alone with him with the consequent perils of intimacy—and perilous, in such circumstances, could have but the significance he feared. And further, she was making the evening sure. She would not be back for dinner, or till long after dinner, it was a safe wager, unless she brought the whole Wickenberg crowd with her. She would be back late enough to expect him to be in bed. Well, he would not disappoint her, he decided grimly, as he replied to Colonel Stoddard:

  «The experiment works out splendidly on paper, with decently wide margins for human nature. And there I admit is the doubt and the danger—the human nature. But the only way to test it is to test it, which is what I am doing.»

  «It won't be the first Dick has charged to profit and loss,» Paula said.

  «But five thousand acres, all the working capital for two hundred and fifty farmers, and a cash salary of a thousand dollars each a year!» Colonel Stoddard protested. «A few such failures—if it fails—would put a heavy drain on the Harvest.»

  «That's what the Harvest needs,» Dick answered lightly.

  Colonel Stoddard looked blank.

  «Precisely,» Dick confirmed. «Drainage, you know. The mines are flooded—the Mexican situation.»

  It was during the morning of the second day—the day of Graham's expected return—that Dick, who, by being on horseback at eleven, had avoided a repetition of the hurt of the previous day's «Good morning, merry gentleman» across the distance of his workroom, encountered Ah Ha in a hall with an armful of fresh-cut lilacs. The house-boy's way led toward the tower room, but Dick made sure.

  «Where are you taking them, Ah Ha?» he asked.

  «Mr. Graham's room—he come to-day.»

  Now whose thought was that? Dick pondered. Ah Ha's?—Oh Joy's—or Paula's? He remembered having heard Graham more than once express his fancy for their lilacs.

  He deflected his course from the library and strolled out through the flowers near the tower room. Through the open windows of it came Paula's happy humming. Dick pressed his lower lip with tight quickness between his teeth and strolled on.

  Some great, as well as many admirable, men and women had occupied that room, and for them Paula had never supervised the flower arrangement, Dick meditated. Oh Joy, himself a master of flowers, usually attended to that, or had his house-staff ably drilled to do it.

  Among the telegrams Bonbright handed him, was one from Graham, which Dick read twice, although it was simple and unmomentous, being merely a postponement of his return.

  Contrary to custom, Dick did not wait for the second lunch-gong. At the sound of the first he started, for he felt the desire for one of Oh Joy's cocktails—the need of a prod of courage, after the lilacs, to meet Paula. But she was ahead of him. He found her—who rarely drank, and never alone—just placing an empty cocktail glass back on the tray.

  So she, too, had needed courage for the meal, was his deduction, as he nodded to Oh Joy and held up one finger.

  «Caught you at it!» he reproved gaily. «Secret tippling. The gravest of symptoms. Little I thought, the day I stood up with you, that the wife I was marrying was doomed to fill an alcoholic's grave.»

  Before she could retort, a young man strolled in whom she and Dick greeted as Mr. Winters, and who also must have a cocktail. Dick tried to believe that it was not relief he sensed in Paula's manner as she greeted the newcomer. He had never seen her quite so cordial to him before, although often enough she had met him. At any rate, there would be three at lunch.

  Mr. Winters, an agricultural college graduate and special writer for the Pacific Rural Press, as well as a sort of protГ©gГ© of Dick, had come for data for an article on California fish-ponds, and Dick mentally arranged his afternoon's program for him.

  «Got a telegram from Evan,» he told Paula. «Won't be back till the four o'clock day after to-morrow.»

  «And after all my trouble!» she exclaimed. «Now the lilacs will be wilted and spoiled.»

  Dick felt a warm glow of pleasure. There spoke his frank, straightforward Paula. No matter what the game was, or its outcome, at least she would play it without the petty deceptions. She had always been that way—too transparent to make a success of deceit.

  Nevertheless, he played his own part by a glance of scarcely interested interrogation.

  «Why, in Graham's room,» she explained. «I had the boys bring a big armful and I arranged them all myself. He's so fond of them, you know.»

  Up to the end of lunch, she had made no mention of Mrs. Wade's coming, and Dick knew definitely she was not coming when Paula queried casually:

  «Expecting anybody?»

  He shook his head, and asked, «Are you doing anything this afternoon?»

  «Haven't thought about anything,» she answered. «And now I suppose I can't plan upon you with Mr. Winters to be told all about fish.»

  «But you can,» Dick assured her. «I'm turning him over to Mr. Hanley, who's got the trout counted down to the last egg hatched and who knows all the grandfather bass by name. I'll tell you what—» He paused and considered. Then his face lighted as with a sudden idea. «It's a loafing afternoon. Let's take the rifles and go potting squirrels. I noticed the other day they've become populous on that hill above the Little Meadow.»

  But he had not failed to observe the flutter of alarm that shadowed her eyes so swiftly, and that so swiftly was gone as she clapped her hands and was herself.

  «But don't take a rifle for me,» she said.

  «If you'd rather not—» he began gently.

  «Oh, I want to go, but I don't feel up to shooting. I'll take Le Gallienne's last book along—it just came in—and read to you in betweenwhiles. Remember, the last time I did that when we went squirreling it was his 'Quest of the Golden Girl' I read to you.»

  CHAPTER XXV

  Paula on the Fawn, and Dick on the Outlaw, rode out from the Big House as nearly side by side as the Outlaw's wicked perversity permitted. The conversation she permitted was fragmentary. With tiny ears laid back and teeth exposed, she would attempt to evade Dick's restraint of rein
and spur and win to a bite of Paula's leg or the Fawn's sleek flank, and with every defeat the pink flushed and faded in the whites of her eyes. Her restless head-tossing and pitching attempts to rear (thwarted by the martingale) never ceased, save when she pranced and sidled and tried to whirl.

  «This is the last year of her,» Dick announced. «She's indomitable. I've worked two years on her without the slightest improvement. She knows me, knows my ways, knows I am her master, knows when she has to give in, but is never satisfied. She nourishes the perennial hope that some time she'll catch me napping, and for fear she'll miss that time she never lets any time go by.»

  «And some time she may catch you,» Paula said.

  «That's why I'm giving her up. It isn't exactly a strain on me, but soon or late she's bound to get me if there's anything in the law of probability. It may be a million-to-one shot, but heaven alone knows where in the series of the million that fatal one is going to pop up.»

  «You're a wonder, Red Cloud,» Paula smiled.

  «Why?»

  «You think in statistics and percentages, averages and exceptions. I wonder, when we first met, what particular formula you measured me up by.»

  «I'll be darned if I did,» he laughed back. «There was where all signs failed. I didn't have a statistic that applied to you. I merely acknowledged to myself that here was the most wonderful female woman ever born with two good legs, and I knew that I wanted her more than I had ever wanted anything. I just had to have her—»

  «And got her,» Paula completed for him. «But since, Red Cloud, since.

  Surely you've accumulated enough statistics on me.»

  «A few, quite a few,» he admitted. «But I hope never to get the last one—»

  He broke off at sound of the unmistakable nicker of Mountain Lad. The stallion appeared, the cowboy on his back, and Dick gazed for a moment at the perfect action of the beast's great swinging trot.

  «We've got to get out of this,» he warned, as Mountain Lad, at sight of them, broke into a gallop.

  Together they pricked their mares, whirled them about, and fled, while from behind they heard the soothing «Whoas» of the rider, the thuds of the heavy hoofs on the roadway, and a wild imperative neigh. The Outlaw answered, and the Fawn was but a moment behind her. From the commotion they knew Mountain Lad was getting tempestuous.

  Leaning to the curve, they swept into a cross-road and in fifty paces pulled up, where they waited till the danger was past.

  «He's never really injured anybody yet,» Paula said, as they started back.

  «Except when he casually stepped on Cowley's toes. You remember he was laid up in bed for a month,» Dick reminded her, straightening out the Outlaw from a sidle and with a flicker of glance catching the strange look with which Paula was regarding him.

  There was question in it, he could see, and love in it, and fear—yes, almost fear, or at least apprehension that bordered on dismay; but, most of all, a seeking, a searching, a questioning. Not entirely ungermane to her mood, was his thought, had been that remark of his thinking in statistics.

  But he made that he had not seen, whipping out his pad, and, with an interested glance at a culvert they were passing, making a note.

  «They missed it,» he said. «It should have been repaired a month ago.»

  «What has become of all those Nevada mustangs?» Paula inquired.

  This was a flyer Dick had taken, when a bad season for Nevada pasture had caused mustangs to sell for a song with the alternative of starving to death. He had shipped a trainload down and ranged them in his wilder mountain pastures to the west.

  «It's time to break them,» he answered. «And I'm thinking of a real old-fashioned rodeo next week. What do you say? Have a barbecue and all the rest, and invite the country side?»

  «And then you won't be there,» Paula objected.

  «I'll take a day off. Is it a go?»

  They reined to one side of the road, as she agreed, to pass three farm tractors, all with their trailage of ganged discs and harrows.

  «Moving them across to the Rolling Meadows,» he explained. «They pay over horses on the right ground.»

  Rising from the home valley, passing through cultivated fields and wooded knolls, they took a road busy with many wagons hauling road– dressing from the rock-crusher they could hear growling and crunching higher up.

  «Needs more exercise than I've been giving her,» Dick remarked, jerking the Outlaw's bared teeth away from dangerous proximity to the Fawn's flank.

  «And it's disgraceful the way I've neglected Duddy and Fuddy,» Paula said. «I've kept their feed down like a miser, but they're a lively handful just the same.»

  Dick heard her idly, but within forty-eight hours he was to remember with hurt what she had said.

  They continued on till the crunch of the rock-crusher died away, penetrated a belt of woodland, crossed a tiny divide where the afternoon sunshine was wine-colored by the manzanita and rose-colored by madronos, and dipped down through a young planting of eucalyptus to the Little Meadow. But before they reached it, they dismounted and tied their horses. Dick took the .22 automatic rifle from his saddle– holster, and with Paula advanced softly to a clump of redwoods on the edge of the meadow. They disposed themselves in the shade and gazed out across the meadow to the steep slope of hill that came down to it a hundred and fifty yards away.

  «There they are—three—four of them,» Paula whispered, as her keen eyes picked the squirrels out amongst the young grain.

  These were the wary ones, the sports in the direction of infinite caution who had shunned the poisoned grain and steel traps of Dick's vermin catchers. They were the survivors, each of a score of their fellows not so cautious, themselves fit to repopulate the hillside.

  Dick filled the chamber and magazine with tiny cartridges, examined the silencer, and, lying at full length, leaning on his elbow, sighted across the meadow. There was no sound of explosion when he fired, only the click of the mechanism as the bullet was sped, the empty cartridge ejected, a fresh cartridge flipped into the chamber, and the trigger re-cocked. A big, dun-colored squirrel leaped in the air, fell over, and disappeared in the grain. Dick waited, his eye along the rifle and directed toward several holes around which the dry earth showed widely as evidence of the grain which had been destroyed. When the wounded squirrel appeared, scrambling across the exposed ground to safety, the rifle clicked again and he rolled over on his side and lay still.

  At the first click, every squirrel but the stricken one, had made into its burrow. Remained nothing to do but wait for their curiosity to master caution. This was the interval Dick had looked forward to. As he lay and scanned the hillside for curious heads to appear, he wondered if Paula would have something to say to him. In trouble she was, but would she keep this trouble to herself? It had never been her way. Always, soon or late, she brought her troubles to him. But, then, he reflected, she had never had a trouble of this nature before. It was just the one thing that she would be least prone to discuss with him. On the other hand, he reasoned, there was her everlasting frankness. He had marveled at it, and joyed in it, all their years together. Was it to fail her now?

  So he lay and pondered. She did not speak. She was not restless. He could hear no movement. When he glanced to the side at her he saw her lying on her back, eyes closed, arms outstretched, as if tired.

  A small head, the color of the dry soil of its home, peeped from a hole. Dick waited long minutes, until, assured that no danger lurked, the owner of the head stood full up on its hind legs to seek the cause of the previous click that had startled it. Again the rifle clicked.

  «Did you get him?» Paula queried, without opening her eyes.

  «Yea, and a fat one,» Dick answered. «I stopped a line of generations right there.»

  An hour passed. The afternoon sun beat down but was not uncomfortable in the shade. A gentle breeze fanned the young grain into lazy wavelets at times, and stirred the redwood boughs above them. Dick added a third squi
rrel to the score. Paula's book lay beside her, but she had not offered to read.

  «Anything the matter?» he finally nerved himself to ask.

  «No; headache—a beastly little neuralgic hurt across the eyes, that's all.»

  «Too much embroidery,» he teased.

  «Not guilty,» was her reply.

  All was natural enough in all seeming; but Dick, as he permitted an unusually big squirrel to leave its burrow and crawl a score of feet across the bare earth toward the grain, thought to himself: No, there will be no talk between us this day. Nor will we nestle and kiss lying here in the grass.

  His victim was now at the edge of the grain. He pulled trigger. The creature fell over, lay still a moment, then ran in quick awkward fashion toward its hole. Click, click, click, went the mechanism. Puffs of dust leaped from the earth close about the fleeing squirrel, showing the closeness of the misses. Dick fired as rapidly as he could twitch his forefinger on the trigger, so that it was as if he played a stream of lead from a hose.

  He had nearly finished refilling the magazine when Paula spoke.

  «My! What a fusillade.—Get him?»

  «Yea, grandfather of all squirrels, a mighty graineater and destroyer of sustenance for young calves. But nine long smokeless cartridges on one squirrel doesn't pay. I'll have to do better.»

  The sun dropped lower. The breeze died out. Dick managed another squirrel and sadly watched the hillside for more. He had arranged the time and made his bid for confidence. The situation was as grave as he had feared. Graver it might be, for all he knew, for his world was crumbling about him. Old landmarks were shifting their places. He was bewildered, shaken. Had it been any other woman than Paula! He had been so sure. There had been their dozen years to vindicate his surety…

  «Five o'clock, sun he get low,» he announced, rising to his feet and preparing to help her up.

  «It did me so much good—just resting,» she said, as they started for the horses. «My eyes feel much better. It's just as well I didn't try to read to you.»