Joan had risen from her seat. Her face was alight with a hope that had not been there for many days. The man’s words had taken hold of her. Her troubled mind could not withstand them. He had inspired her with a feeling of security she had not known for weeks. Her tears were no longer tears of despair. They were tears of thankfulness and hope. But when she spoke her words seemed utterly bald and meaningless to express the wave of gratitude that flooded her heart.
“I will; I will,” she cried with glistening eyes. “Oh, Padre!” she went on, with happy impulse, “you don’t know what you’ve done for me—you don’t know——”
“Then, child, do something for me.” The man was smiling gravely down into the bright, upturned face. “You must not live alone down there at the farm. It is not good in a child so young as you. Get some relative to come and share your home with you.”
“But I have no one—except my Aunt Mercy.”
“Ah!”
“You see she is my only relative. But—but I think she would come if I asked her.”
“Then ask her.”
* * *
The Padre was sitting in the chair that Joan had occupied. He too was bending over the stove with his hands outstretched to the warming blaze. Perhaps he too was feeling the nip of the mountain air. Feeling it more than usual to-night. Buck was sitting on the edge of the table close by. He had just returned from taking Joan back to the farm.
The young man’s journey home had been made in a condition of mental exhilaration which left him quite unconscious of all time and distance. The change wrought in Joan had been magical, and Cæsar, for once in his life, felt the sharp spur of impatience in the man’s eager desire to reach his friend and speak something of the gratitude he felt.
But habit was strong upon Buck, and his gratitude found no outlet in words when the moment came. Far from it. On his arrival he found the Padre sitting at their fireside without even the most ordinary welcome on his lips. A matter so unusual that it found Buck dumb, waiting for the lead to come, as he knew it inevitably would, in the Padre’s own good time.
It took longer than he expected, however, and it was not until he had prepared their frugal supper that the elder man stirred from his moody contemplation of the fire.
He looked up, and a smile struggled painfully into his eyes.
“Hungry, Buck?” he inquired.
“So!”
“Ah! then sit right down here, boy, an’ light your pipe. There’s things I want to say—first.”
“Get right ahead.” Buck drew up a chair, and obediently filled and lit his pipe.
“Life’s pretty twisted,” the Padre began, his steady gray eyes smiling contemplatively. “So twisted, it makes you wonder some. That girl’s happier now, because I told her there were no such things as cusses. Yes, it’s all queer.”
He reached out and helped himself from Buck’s tobacco pouch. Then he, too, filled and lit his pipe.
“You’ve never asked me why I live out here,” he went on presently. “Never since I’ve known you. Once or twice I’ve seen the question in your eyes, but—it never stayed there long. You don’t ask many questions, do you, Buck?”
The Padre puffed slowly at his pipe. His manner was that of a man looking back upon matters which had suddenly acquired an added interest for him. Yet the talk he desired to have with this youngster inspired an ill-flavor.
“If folks want to answer questions ther’ ain’t no need to ask ’em.” Buck’s philosophy interested the other, and he nodded.
“Just so. That’s how it is with me—now. I want to tell you—what you’ve never asked. You’ll see the reason presently.”
Buck waited. His whole manner suggested indifference. Yet there was a thoughtful look in his dark eyes.
“That girl,” the Padre went on, his gaze returning to a contemplation of the fire. “She’s put me in mind of something. She’s reminded me how full of twists and cranks life is. She’s full of good. Full of good thoughts and ideals. Yet life seems to take a delight in impressing her with a burden so unwholesome as to come very nearly undoing all the good it has endowed her with. It seems queer. It seems devilish hard. But I generally notice the harder folk try in this world the heavier the cross they have to carry. Maybe it’s the law of fitness. Maybe folks must bear a burden at their full capacity so that the result may be a greater refining. I’ve thought a lot lately. Sometimes I’ve thought it’s better to sit around and—well, don’t worry with anything outside three meals a day. That’s been in weak moments. You see, we can’t help our natures. If it’s in us to do the best we know—well, we’re just going to do it, and—and hang the result.”
“H’m.” Buck grunted and waited.
“I was thinking of things around here,” the other went on. “I was wondering about the camp. It’s a stinking hole now. It’s full of everything—rotten. Yet they think it’s one huge success, and they reckon we helped them to it.”
“How?”
“Why, by feeding them when they were starving, and so making it possible for them to hang on until Nature opened her treasure-house.”
Buck nodded.
“I see.”
“All I see is—perhaps through our efforts—we’ve turned loose a hell of drunkenness and debauchery upon earth. These people—perhaps through our efforts—have been driven along the very path we would rather have saved them from. The majority will end in disaster. Some have already done so. But for our help this would not have been.”
“They’d jest have starved.”
“We should not have sold our farm, and Ike and Pete would have been alive now.”
“In Ike’s case it would have been a pity.”
The Padre smiled. He took Buck’s protest for what it was worth.
“Yes, life’s pretty twisted. It’s always been the same with me. Wherever I’ve got busy trying to help those I had regard for I generally managed to find my efforts working out with a result I never reckoned on. That’s why I am here.”
The Padre smoked on for some moments in silence.
“I was hot-headed once,” he went on presently. “I was so hot-headed that I—I insulted the woman I loved. I insulted her beyond forgiveness. You see, she didn’t love me. She loved my greatest friend. Still, that’s another story. It’s the friend I want to talk about. He was a splendid fellow. A bright, impetuous gambler on the New York Stock Exchange. We were both on Wall Street. I was a gambler too. I was a lucky gambler, and he was an unlucky one. In spite of my love for the woman, who loved him, it was my one great desire to help him. My luck was such that I believed I could do it—my luck and my conceit. You see, next to the woman I loved he was everything in the world to me. Do you get that?”
Buck nodded.
“Well, in spite of all I could and did do, after a nice run of luck which made me think his affairs had turned for the better, a spell of the most terrible ill-luck set in. There was no checking it. He rode headlong for a smash. I financed him time and again, nearly ruining myself in my effort to save him. He took to drink badly. He grew desperate in his gambling. In short, I saw he had given up all hope. Again I did the best I could. I was always with him. My object was to endeavor to keep him in check. In his drinking bouts I was with him, and when he insisted on poker and other gambling I was there to take a hand. If I hadn’t done these things—well, others would have, but with a different object. By a hundred devices I managed to minimize the bad results of his wild, headstrong career.
“Then the end came. Had I been less young, had I been less hopeful for him, less wrapped up in him, I must have foreseen it. We were playing cards in his apartments. His housekeeper and his baby girl were in a distant room. They were in bed. You see, it was late at night. It was the last hand. His luck had been diabolical, but the stakes were comparatively low. I shall never forget the scene. His nerves were completely shattered. He picked up his hand, glanced at it—we were playing poker—jack pots—and flung it down. ‘I’m done,’ he cried, and, kickin
g back his chair, rose from the table. He moved a pace away as though to go to the side-table where the whisky and soda stood. I thought he meant having a drink. His back was turned to me. The next moment I heard shots. He seemed to stumble, swung round with a sort of jerk, and fell face downward across the table.
“I jumped to his assistance. But—he was dead. He had shot himself through the heart and in the stomach. My horror? Well, it doesn’t matter now. I was utterly and completely unnerved. If I hadn’t been perhaps I should have acted differently. I should have called his—housekeeper. I should have summoned the police—a doctor. But I did none of these. My horror and grief were such that I—fled; fled like the coward I was. Nor did I simply flee from the house. I left everything, and fled from the city that night. It was not until some days afterward that I realized what my going meant to me. You see, I had left behind me, in his housekeeper, the woman I loved—and had insulted past forgiveness. I was branded as his murderer. Do you see? She loved him, and was his housekeeper. Oh, there was nothing wrong in it! I knew that. His baby girl was the child of his dead wife. Several times I thought of returning to establish my innocence, but somehow my conduct and my story wouldn’t have fitted in the eyes of a jury. Besides, there was that insulted woman. She had accused me of the murder. It was quite useless to go back. It meant throwing away my life. It was not worth it. So I came here.”
Buck offered no comment for a long time. Comment seemed unnecessary. The Padre watched him with eyes striving to conceal their anxiety.
Finally, Buck put a question that seemed unnecessary.
“Why d’you tell me now?” he asked. His pipe had gone out and he pushed it into his hip-pocket.
The Padre’s smile was rather drawn.
“Because of you. Because of my friend’s—baby girl.”
“How?”
“The child’s name was Joan. Joan Rest is the daughter of Charles Stanmore—the man I am accused of murdering. This afternoon I advised her to have some one to live with her—a relative. She is sending for the only one she has. It is her aunt, Stanmore’s housekeeper—the woman I insulted past forgiveness.”
Not for an instant did Buck’s expression change.
“Why did you advise—that?” he asked.
The Padre’s eyes suddenly lit with a subdued fire, and his answer came with a passion such as Buck had never witnessed in him before.
“Why? Why? Because you love this little Joan, daughter of my greatest friend. Because I owe it to you—to her—to face my accusers and prove my innocence.”
The two men looked long and earnestly into each other’s eyes. Then the Padre’s voice, sharp and strident, sounded through the little room.
“Well?”
Buck rose from his seat.
“Let’s eat, Padre,” he said calmly. “I’m mighty hungry.” Then he came a step nearer and gripped the elder man’s hand. “I’m right with you, when things—get busy.”
* * *
CHAPTER XXIV
BEASLEY PLAYS THE GAME
Joan lost no time in carrying out the Padre’s wishes. Such was her changed mood, such was the strength of her new-born hope, such was the wonderful healing his words had administered to her young mind, that, for the time at least, her every cloud was dispersed, lost in a perfect sheen of mental calm.
The change occurred from the moment of her return home. So changed indeed was she that her rough but faithful housekeeper, dull of perception to all those things outside the narrow focus of her life in domestic service, caught a faint glimpse of it without anything approaching a proper understanding. She realized an added energy, which seriously affected her own methods of performing her duties and caused her to make a mental note that her young mistress was assuming “airs” which did not fit in with her inexperience of those things amidst which she, the farm-wife, had floundered all her life. She heard her moving about the house, her joy and hope finding outlet in song such as had never echoed through the place before. And promptly she set this new phase down to the result of her associations with the young “scallawag” Buck. She noted, too, an added care in her toilet, and this inspired the portentous belief that she was “a-carryin’ on” with the same individual. But when it came to a general “turning-out” of the living-rooms of the house, a matter which added an immense amount of effort to her own daily duties, her protest found immediate vent in no uncertain terms.
It came while the midday dinner was in preparation. It rose to boiling-point amidst the steam from her cooking pots. Finally it bubbled over, much as might one of her own kettles.
Joan was standing in the kitchen giving her orders preparatory to departing to the camp, whither she was going to mail her letter to her aunt at Beasley’s store.
“You see,” she was saying, “I’ll have to make some changes in the house. I’m expecting my aunt from St. Ellis to come and stay with me. She won’t be able to do with the things which have been sufficient for me. She will have my room. I shall buy new furniture for it. I shall get Beasley to order it for me from Leeson Butte. Then I shall use the little room next yours. And while we’re making these changes we’ll have a general housecleaning. You might begin this afternoon on the room I am going to move into.”
The old woman turned with a scarlet face. It may have been the result of the heat of cooking. Then again it may have had other causes.
“An’ when, may I ast, do I make bricks?” she inquired with ponderous sarcasm.
Joan stood abashed for a moment. So unexpected was the retort, so much was it at variance with her own mood that she had no answer ready, and the other was left with the field to herself.
“Now jest look right here, Miss Joan—ma’m,” she cried, flourishing a cooking spoon to point her words. “I ain’t a woman of many words by no means, as you might say, but what I sure says means what I mean, no more an’ no less, as the sayin’ is. I’ve kep’ house all my life, an’ I reckon ther’s no female from St. Ellis ken show me. I’ve bin a wife an’ a mother, an’ raised my offsprings till they died. I did fer a man as knew wot’s wot in my George D. An’ if I suffered fer it, it was jest because I know’d my duty an’ did it, no matter the consequences to me an’ mine. I tell you right here, an’ I’m a plain-spoken woman who’s honest, as the sayin’ is, I turn out no house, nor room, nor nothin’ of an afternoon. I know my duty an’ I do it. Ther’s a chapter of the Bible fer every day o’ my life, an’ it needs digestin’ good—with my dinner. An’ I don’t throw it up fer nobody.”
“But—but——” Joan began to protest, but the other brushed objection aside with an added flourish of her spoon.
“It ain’t no use fer you to persuade, nor cajole, nor argify. What I says goes fer jest so long as I’m willin’ to accept your ter’ble ordinary wages, which I say right here won’t be fer a heap long time if things don’t change some. I’m a respectable woman an’ wife that was, but isn’t, more’s the pity, an’ it ain’t my way to chase around the house a-screechin’ at the top o’ my voice jest as though I’d come from a cirkis. You ain’t got your mind on your work. You ain’t got your heart in it, singin’ all over the house, like—like one o’ them brazen cirkis gals. No, nor wot with scallawags a-comin’ around sparkin’ you, an’ the boys shootin’ theirselves dead over you, an’ folks in the camp a-callin’ of you a Jony gal, I don’t guess I’ll need to stay an’ receive con—contamination, as you might say. That’s how I’m feelin’; an’ bein’ a plain woman, an’ a ’specterble widow of George D., who was a man every inch of him, mind you, if he had his failin’s, chasin’ other folks’ cattle, an’ not readin’ their brands right, why, out it comes plump like a bad tooth you’re mighty glad to be rid of, as the sayin’ is.”
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