He showed her the front door, told her where to find matches and lamp, and went to the barn with the horses. When he came back a warm gold glow was pouring out through his living room windows, and he thought, “It’s the first time I ever rode back at this time of night and found lights on and somebody waiting.” It was a queerly pleasant sensation.
She had even started a fire in his fireplace; on top of a few bits of split pine, half a dozen pine cones were blazing up like torches and the room was sweet with their smoky fragrance.
He stood a moment at the door smiling at her. At first no answering smile touched her lips or eyes. She was thinking, “I never noticed before how Jeff’s smile changes him, how all the lean hardness of his face breaks up and is softened.”
“Seems pretty homey,” he said and got the door closed and came on to join her in front of the bright brisk blaze she had started.
She did smile then; she said, “It is homey.” She had never been here before and looked about her with lively interest, then with a quick exclamation, “Oh, it’s lovely!”
He nodded and she noticed how his eyes grew shadowy; that was because he remembered the mortgage that Warbuck held.
“It was the old Hernando place, you know,” he told her. “About a hundred years old now, and I guess it takes a house about that long to get seasoned, to turn into what you might call a home. I’m glad you like it; after a while you’ll have to look through the other rooms. And as long as you wish to stay, Arlene, it’s all yours.”
She looked quite gay as she said, “The Hernandos must have bequeathed you their absurd and beautiful old Spanish courtesies along with the house! And—Oh, the windows! The shades are all up and the doors unlocked!”
He barred the door; he helped her draw the shades down. He even did as she asked and without question when she wanted him to make sure that all outside doors in the house were locked, all windows fastened. When he returned to the living room he found her seated on a bench by the fire; he stood over her, leaning against the mantel and reached for a pipe.
“Better tell me just what’s up, Arlene, hadn’t you?” he said. “It was something that happened tonight at Halcyon, wasn’t it?” She stirred restlessly and he went on without waiting for her to look up: “Something you heard Warbuck talking about to Nick Balff and Frank Bruce?”
“Yes! I had just run out and was standing there in the dark, not knowing where to go, when they came out and began talking. I heard what—what he told the two men. He wants me brought back; he said that they were to find me and bring me to him no matter what I had to say about it. And I’m not going back. Ever.”
Jeff loaded his pipe with due care; then put it back on the mantel.
“You’re of age, Arlene; you’re grown up and your own boss.”
“I know, but what difference would that make? You see, he had had a talk with Jim Ogden; I suppose Jim told him all about you and me overhearing them and that old woman—”
“Go on,” said Jeff. “And so?”
“Anyhow he wanted to have me brought back home. And so I asked you to bring me up here—where they can’t find me.”
All this while she hadn’t even glanced up once. Jeff stood looking down at the top of her head and trying not to think of her hair, soft and bronze-brown and curly; not to dwell on the soft round of a cheek, not to grow intrigued by her clasped hands on the round of her knee. He sensed that while she was telling him the truth she was not telling all of it. Yes, Warbuck and Ogden had talked; they had even gone away together, concluding evidently that their two interests were best to be served by their sticking together instead of cutting each other down. Well, you could never tell what a man like Bart Warbuck, a man like Jim Ogden, would do.
He said thoughtfully, “Warbuck didn’t want you to do any talking, to tell what you’d overheard. That’s natural.—Why didn’t you lock yourself in your room at the hotel? Both Still Jeff and Red Shirt Bill would have torn all hell apart rather than let your father or any other man barge in on you. You know that.”
“I—I was afraid.”
“Fair enough. But—Look here, Arlene: there’s something else. If Warbuck wanted your mouth shut, how about mine? If Ogden told him that you were on the job while he squabbled with old lady Grayle and shot Jim, then he told him that I was there, too! And when Warbuck was talking with Balff and Bruce, he spoke a line or two about me, didn’t he?”
“Yes, Jeff. I was going to tell you—later. Tomorrow morning or—”
“Let’s have it now, huh? Better get all this mess as straight as we can. What was it?”
“He said—he just the same as said—that those men were to kill you tonight! Those five that you saw going into the bar—you were just at the side of the door, and if they’d seen you—” She sprang up; he saw her head tilted back as she was all but convulsed by the agony which gripped her young, valiant-soul; he saw how hard-clenched were the hands at her sides, how rigid she had gone.
“Oh, good God in Heaven!” she cried out in anguish. “Why does a thing like this have to happen to me? To know my own father for the horrible, murderous beast he is! To be blood of his blood, bone of his bone—and of my mother’s—a dance hall girl once and—worse!”
“Steady, kid,” said Jeff, and sounded very stern.
“Oh, Jeff!”
“Hold it. You just hang on, I tell you. And remember an old saying that has lasted as long as it has because it’s true: ‘A man’s not to blame for his parents, seeing that he had nothing to say about picking ’em out.’ It’s tough; sure it’s tough.” He came mighty close to pulling her quivering form into his arms. “But it’s beginning to dawn on me a man’s got to take the tough along with the easy, hasn’t he? And I’d say you’ve had it pretty damn easy all your life. Now’s your turn and—Well, I’m betting on you.”
She breathed deeply through her parted lips, then sat down on her bench again, her hands once more tight-clasped on her knee. He noted the strength and character in those hands; small they were and shapely, but firm.
“I’ll go make us a pot of coffee,” said Jeff.
“I’ll go with you,” said Arlene and got up again quickly. He started a small hot fire in the old wood stove in the kitchen while she made sure that all shades were well down and the back door locked. The kitchen was spick and span, absolutely shining: “Ah Wong’s work,” he explained and told her about the old Chinaman who had been with him seven years. He put on coffee to come to a boil and suggested food, but she shook her head. They took their cups back to the fireplace and Jeff made a cigarette and offered casually, “So it was really to save my hide that you came all the way out here with me. And you wouldn’t tell me—”
“I knew you wouldn’t come! You’d have stayed—and those five men would have killed you. I know!”
“Maybe,” said Jeff. “Maybe. Well, Arlene, you’re a friend. I am glad to know that. Count me the same way, will you? A friend?”
She looked up at him brightly—too brightly—for of a sudden that brightness in her soft gray eyes betrayed itself in tears which began to spill over.
“I—I guess I’m awfully tired,” she said, and put her cup aside; it rattled ever so slightly in the saucer.
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” he said, and put his own cup on the mantel. There were candles there; he lighted one and invited, “Come ahead and I’ll show you your room.” They went down the old Spanish corridor with arched doors, set into the thick adobe walls on both sides, and to a spacious bedroom fitted simply but pleasingly with old things; a big dark oak bed, a long black oak table, chairs with high backs and comfortable leather seats, small bright rugs and a lovely small Madonna in its wall niche.
“I haven’t changed a thing in here since I moved in,” he said. “I hope you like it and sleep well.” He showed her an old silken bell cord at the head of the bed. “The bell’s still in the hall,” he said. “Al
l you’ve got to do to wake the house is jerk that. Now as for sleeping equipment, well the best I can do you’ll find in that chest of drawers.” He grinned at her good-naturedly. “Maybe you’ll get lost in a pair of my pajamas, but you can find your way out again when it’s daylight. The bath is through that door. Want the lamp lighted? No? Well, good night.”
“Good night,” said Arlene, and did her best to smile properly as a guest should.… In that great big room, so still in the deep hush of the mountains, in that great big bed, in those great big pajamas, she felt the size of a little girl of six. She buried her face in her arms, her arms in the pillow, and wept.
All her silly little life she had been so proud—of what? Of being a rich man’s daughter, or being Arlene Warbuck. She had been proud and top-lofty; she had looked down, earthward, from golden heights—and she had been vain and un-understanding. A Warbuck! Now she shuddered; she shrank away from herself and from her mother and father; from the heights of worldly vanity she went down into the depths of shame. She had been shocked, humiliated, made so terribly ashamed. And she felt dirty; as unclean as a leper. She wanted to scream, to jump up and run; to take a knife and slash her white body and let that soiled blood out.
But—she was very young and very healthy and very tired. She cried until it seemed she must cry her heart out; she cried herself to sleep.
In the morning she woke and stretched luxuriously and smiled—just because she felt so good. All rested with every bit of yesterday wiped clean from the slate of her lazily awaking mind. The big bed was so deliciously comfy, and cradled her so tenderly; the old-fashioned room was so lovely, the morning peeping in through cracks at the edges of her drawn shades so perfectly glorious, heady like champagne.
Then she remembered.
But even blighting memory couldn’t altogether sponge out the fact that she was young, filled with youth’s bubbling effervescence, and was rested. She flipped up the shades; a golden sun stood high in a deep blue sky and the wooded slopes across which she looked were as fresh as ramparts of Eden. She dressed hurriedly and went looking for Jeff and breakfast. She found the kitchen and Ah Wong.
Ah Wong when he greeted her—and that was only after a prolonged scrutiny—greeted her effusively, and for the most part Ah Wong was not an effusive gentleman. He called her Missee Ah Lee, and it was quite a while before it dawned on her that Ah Lee was his rendition of the name Arlene.
Having come as far as the kitchen door, looking for Jeff, she stopped, uncertain about the next step, and regarded Ah Wong with enquiring morning eyes, and Arlene’s eyes in the morning were as lovely as little mountain lakes from which the mist is just rising. For his part, Ah Wong put his hands on his aproned hips, butcher knife in one and a half peeled potato in the other, and gave himself up wholeheartedly to an intense study of her. When he had done, she felt he knew her; he could have told you the size of her feet, the sort of cloth in her riding rig, how in general she was shaped, how big around the slim waist and how deeply bosomed and what her hands and throat and chin and mouth and hair and ears and eyes were like—probably whether she had brushed her teeth. Well, she hadn’t. How could she?
“You see, I didn’t bring a toothbrush with me,” she told Ah Wong as friend to friend. “And I couldn’t very well steal one of Mr. Cody’s, could I? And I’m five-feet-five and weigh one hundred and nineteen pounds, and I think you’re nice, too.”
Ah Wong’s seraphic grin had started before she had spoken the first ten words. He nodded vigorously, a man approving.
“H’lo, Missee Ah Lee,” he greeted her then. “You darn’ nice plitty lilly gal. Heap hungly? All light, go dinin’ loom, me ketchee plenty bleakfas’, bimeby plitty qlick.”
“Where’s Mr. Cody?” she asked.
“Bossee Jeff’son? Outside long time. Come back plitty qlick.” He turned his back on her, going on with potato peeling, and Arlene went on into the dining room, adjoining the living room and looking out through sun-goldened windows into a fresh, cool and smiling patio.
“Why did he call me Ah Lee?” she wondered. Then she laughed, understandingly: Chinese for Arlene. Jeff must have told Ah Wong that Arlene Warbuck was an overnight guest.
All the lively appreciation which this mellow old home had started up in her last night came surging back this morning; she thought it the most delightful place she had ever entered. How different from the Warbuck “castle” over in Long Valley where every rug and drape and article of furniture might just as well have had a big red lettered tag on it screaming at you: “This cost five hundred dollars. This cost two thousand. This six thousand, believe it or not. This—” Ah Wong scuttled in with breakfast, enough she thought for five working men with plenty left over for them to carry home for tomorrow’s lunch; biscuits and hotcakes stacked high, jelly and jam and marmalade, coffee and cream, orange juice, an enormous platter of bacon at one end and ham at the other, a bowl of fruit, apples and oranges—he even brought in waffles and maple syrup.
“Goodness!” gasped Arlene. Then she asked him his name. “Ah Wong? All right, Ah Wong. Now tell me and tell me the truth: Do I look as starved as all that?”
He made her laugh with his Chinese giggle.
“You eat plenty, Missee Ah Lee. Lilly mo’ fat, you look lilly mo’ plitty. Think so.”
She really was hungry and did eat “plenty,” much to Ah Wong’s gratification. With a long sigh of satisfaction, feeling like a little well-filled animal, she at last arose and loitered into the living room. There on the mantel was Jeff’s pipe; he had filled it last night and put it down; it was there as he had left it. She thought, “I’ve never seen him smoke a pipe.” She went to a window, knelt on a long hardwood bench and looked out across green, sunlit fields rippling away to the wooded hills. It was all, she thought, like a secret corner of paradise.
After that she moved about restlessly. Every moment she expected Young Jeff to be returning, but hours passed and she had the Hernando ranch pretty much to herself. She went to look at herself in her bedroom mirror; she thought, “I look like something that had been thrown away last week.” But it was only her clothes that she was regarding. Of a sudden the realization dawned on her. “They’re all I’ve got in the world!” The wrinkled riding garb she stood in, that save for the few articles Still Jeff had bought for her, constituted the sum total of Arlene Warbuck’s possessions. “And even these clothes, the boots I stand in, were given me by—by Barton Warbuck.”
At last Jeff came back. She saw him from afar, cutting a straight path across a wide pathless meadow, riding a beautiful red-bay horse she had never seen before, looking, she thought, like a part of his horse, as though the same sculptor of magnificent virility had created the two together to indicate power and speed and grace. He disappeared, behind the big red barn, only a corner of which came within her line of vision.
But he reappeared soon enough, striding along, his broad-brimmed hat swinging in his hand, his fingers running up with an impatient gesture through his dark, unruly hair.
She was curled up on a couch, looking lazily at a dull old oil painting, one left by the departed Hernandos, when he came in. He saw only the top of her head, curling brown tresses above the deep couch’s back.
“Say! It’s good to come home and find you here!” said Jeff.
Arlene had a way of blushing which seems to be almost a lost art of latter years; there didn’t seem to have to be any particular reason for a blush, it just came the way other lovely things come. “Good to come home—and find you here!” Why should a girl blush?
“I’m simply crazy over your place, Jeff!”
“I kind of like it myself,” he said.
But she saw how of a sudden a shadow drifted across his face; it was as though her words had hurt him like a stab. She didn’t know then about the mortgage Bart Warbuck had acquired, nor how desperately Young Jeff was seeking ways and means to take care of it in time; how he
went to sleep at night and awoke in the morning with that mortgage heavy on him like an incubus.
But his smile came back as quick as a flash, making little laughing lines in his lean brown face, and she thought, “He’s just remembered that I’m his guest, he my host, and he must be pleasant.” But it was more than that; it had been good to come drifting home and find Arlene waiting.
“You were asleep when I got up,” he explained. “And I’d promised to see Ed Spurlock; he’s a neighbor, you know. Both of us are trying—well,” he grinned good-humoredly as he went seeking his pipe, “to save us our hides. There’s a chance for a sale of a few head of horses and high-grade cows; I’ve got the horses, Ed’s got the cows, and we’re counting on that sale.”
She had seen some of his colts frisking in the meadow beyond the corrals that flanked the red barn, long-legged and high-headed younglings with a sort of glory about them. She said, pursing a ripe lower lip, “I don’t see how you can sell your horses, Jeff! I’d fall in love with every one of them and want to keep them always.”
This time he did light his pipe. Those gray, blue and then opalescent curls of smoke, drawn toward the sunny window, drew her eyes; and his eyes went the way hers did.
Then the blue-gray swirls faded away into nothingness and Jeff and Arlene found themselves looking at each other.
“I know how it is,” she said quietly. “A rancher has to ranch, doesn’t he? A horse raiser has to sell horses. I’ve often wondered about the people who breed those cute little puppies you see in shop windows in the cities. I’ll bet they’d like to keep every one of them if they could.”
The Fifth Western Novel Page 66
