Lost Ecstasy/Chapter 29
MR. TULLOSS was at his desk. He could see from where he sat out into the tile-floored, neat-caged banking room, where tidy clerks handled money like merchandise. His bank was the heart of the community. It pumped, and life-giving blood went out, circulated and came back again. But, of course, sometimes it did not come back. That was Mr. Tulloss's tragedy.
Even then, naturally, something came in its place; notes, mortgages, what not, and these paid interest. There were those who said that, asked suddenly to name a number between one and ten, Mr. Tulloss would say nine automatically, and ten if he had his wits about him.
He had seen his bank grow from a one-story wooden affair to its present size; he had lived through two holdups, and in one he had been shot—preferring death to losing money, his enemies insisted. There was a rumor that the bullet was still lodged in the flesh under his left shoulder blade, and that when he was tempted to lend money on adequate security he always leaned back in his chair, so he could feel it.
But if he was a hard man he was a just one. He had been a cattleman in the old easy days; he knew that curious triumph of hope over experience which is at once the cow-man's glory and his destruction. He had warned his customers against overexpansion during and following the war, and had lived to see their ranches go for less than the cost of the fencing and buildings on them. He could not carry them all. Some of them left him and went to little fly-by-night banks which had sprung up overnight during that period of inflation, and, doing business on a shoe string, had promptly collapsed when the hard times came, carrying their wreckage with them.
On this particular morning, however, he was not looking out. The vista of his neat mahogany counters and brass grills did not interest him. He was rereading, not for the first time, a letter he held in his hand. A hand-written letter, the envelope of which had been marked "Private and confidential."
He had had Henry's letter for some time, but this new scrape of Tom's had reminded him of it. He had never cared much for Henry Dowling; old Lucius, with his love for the West, his Rabelaisian jokes, his roistering friends and his disregard of anything under a twenty dollar note as a medium of circulation, had always appealed to him. There had been something rather splendid about him. But he was just, too. He and Henry might have been cut out of the same cloth. Just so, given the same situation, would he have acted. But the fact did not alter his distaste for the letter and the writer.
And now the girl was sitting alone in that hotel, with the heat and the flies, and the stale odors of bad cooking, and Tom McNair was in jail. Perhaps he'd better ask Jennie to go in and see her. But no—better keep the women out of this.
He had an uneasy conviction that the whole matter was somehow not quite respectable.
Then he looked up and saw Kay in the doorway. The feeling could not live before that vision of her, young and steady-eyed and certainly not abased. Oh, certainly not abased. There was a look of her grandfather about her, too. Odd that he had never noticed the resemblance before.
Mr. Tulloss, who made the common masculine mistake of considering that clear eyes and youth were essentially virginal qualities, felt that there had been an essential indecency in his previous thoughts of her, and by way of apology made his greeting unexpectedly warm.
"Well, well!" he exclaimed. "Haven't you been a long time coming in to see me?"
"I didn't think you would care to see me," she said simply.
He passed over that, put her in a chair, drew the shade to keep the sun out of her eyes, and sitting down across from her put the tips of his fingers together.
"And so you are a married woman!"
"Yes."
"Rather sudden, wasn't it?"
"I think I did the right thing, Mr. Tulloss. To marry without love, that isn't even—moral, is it?"
Mr. Tulloss, who had married Jennie because she had ten thousand dollars and he had needed ten thousand dollars at the time, blinked slightly.
"Then you are fond of Tom, I take it."
"I love him. That has to be the answer to everything. All the answer I have, anyhow."
"Still? After—let's see—two months of married life?" He was rather arch about this, but she looked at him gravely, fearlessly.
"After everything. And above everything."
Mr. Tulloss was slightly abashed. There was, for all her virginal appearance, something shameless about this girl. He caught himself remembering the year old Lucius had brought a woman out with him, and how in this very room, brand-new then, he had gravely remonstrated with him. Old Lucius had eyed him with the same bland directness.
"Now see here," he had said. "My business is between you and me, Hank, but my private affairs are between me and my God. I like this woman and she likes me, and I'm damned if I care what you think."
He stirred uneasily in his chair.
"Then you're not sorry, Kay?"
"For my people, yes; and of course it is not always easy," she confessed, still with that strange honesty of hers. "We had lived different lives, you know. The things I think important sometimes don't matter to him, and the other way round, too. Then of course his accident"
"He thinks Little Dog shot him, I understand."
"He has never told me so, but I know that's what he believes. That's why, the other day"
"I see. And this lameness of his? Is it permanent?"
"I'm afraid so. His ankle is stiff, but he is sure he can ride before long. And he knows cattle, Mr. Tulloss. All sorts of men come in to see him, and ask him things. But of course they want men with the outfits who aren't handicapped."
Mr. Tulloss abruptly ceased to be the old family friend, and became the banker.
"That's natural. A man handling cattle needs all his arms and legs and then some. Tom had better put cattle out of his mind and get something else to do."
"But he knows cattle; he doesn't know anything else."
"He can learn. I had to. So have a lot of others."
Kay sat forward desperately.
"I think he ought to get out of town, Mr. Tulloss."
"Has he been drinking again?" he asked, shrewdly if brutally. She flushed.
"Just the first night, a little. Not since. But—if you could only lend him money, to start in business for himself!'
"What kind of business?"
"He only knows one thing. But he does know that."
"And on what am I to lend this money? It isn't my money, you know. On what security?"
"On character. Character and experience. You do that, don't you?"
He laughed grimly.
"Once in a blue moon," he said. "What between the inscrutable acts of Providence and the Federal Farm Loan, a man who lends on character these days is plumb out of luck. Then, just now Tom's character"
Quite unexpectedly she reached up and fumbled at her neck.
"Then, on these?" she said. "They were my grandmother's. She left them to me. I believe they are quite valuable."
She laid a string of pearls on the table. They were still warm from her neck when Mr. Tulloss, surprised into silence, picked them up. As if that shocked him he put them down again quickly.
"I could get some imitations," she told him breathlessly. "They make quite good ones. You see, I don't want Tom to know. What I thought you could do would be to send for him and say that you believed in him, and were going to give him a start. You know what I mean."
"Just like a fairy-tale, eh?" he said wryly. "The fatherly old banker and"
He checked himself when he saw her face. His eyes rested on Henry's letter, still on the desk. "I beg you to stand by me." But what did Dowling want? She was going to stick to the fellow. Did he want her to starve?
"Perhaps I ought to tell you," she went on hurriedly. "I have a check for a thousand dollars, too. My aunt sent it to me. But I have not told Tom about it. He doesn't"
"He doesn't want them to keep you, so he'll let you do without," he commented. "Well, that's the nature of a man, Kay."
Nevertheless his opinion of Tom McNair rose somewhat, and of Henry Dowling's perspicacity decreased. If this was the brief infatuation, the romantic nonsense he had contemptuously dubbed it, then there was no such thing as lasting love. And this girl across was no fool. Reading faces was a part of his business; he saw clearly in hers that any illusions she might have cherished were gone, but that she had replaced them with something else, perhaps even deeper and more profound. He had been prepared to pity her. He found himself respecting her.
"Did he know you were coming here today?"
"No. I don't want him to know, Mr. Tulloss."
"I see! I'm to call him in and offer him—just what am I to offer him, anyhow?"
And then she said something that might have come from old Lucius himself.
"A chance," she told him. "When a man who's worth while is down and out, and he gets a chance, he makes ood."
It touched him. And was it such a chance, after all? He knew McNair was a good cow-man, provided he kept sober and let women alone. He would have to make that a part of the agreement. That Hamel girl, for instance.
"I'll do this," he said, in his dry old voice. "I'll make it a point to see Tom anyhow, and maybe we can work out something." He shoved the pearls toward her. "You'd better put those on again."
"Aren't you going to keep them?"
"I don't run a pawnbroker's shop. But I'd be right careful of them around the hotel. That nigger there may be light-fingered."
After she had gone he leaned back in his chair, maybe to remind himself of the bullet under his shoulder blade. But if he did he dismissed it. He was going back, a very long time back, to the time when he had stood at the cross-roads of life. On the one hand had been the open range and the great herds—they had been great in those days. He had owned a horse and saddle then and not much else; where he had unrolled his bed had been home. When he wanted money in the winter he had gone wolfing; he had killed one big gray with his hands once, and got a hundred and fifty dollars for it from the stockmen around. And when he had time off he had ridden into town like the rest and got drunk at Hamel's Last Chance saloon, and ridden howling and shouting out of town, firing his revolver into the air.
Then one day they began to survey for the railroad. He had stopped his horse on a hill and watched the men at work, and he got off then and there, sat down and watched them. Ursula was going to be quite a town some day. Cass Woodson, the trader, wouldn't be able to supply it. The place was a shame anyhow, with its stinking sheepskins and cowhides piled up to be freighted out, its cheap canned goods and calicoes, its fraudulent scales and the odor of blood from the shed in the back where he killed his beef. No. Stores would come in, and money, and somebody would have to take care of that money.
The bank down at Easton had flourished. Cattlemen, pocketing their big checks in the fall from Chicago or Omaha were taking them there for deposit. It came in in bulk, was parceled out in loans, and paid interest. High interest. But why should they go to Easton? There would have been no answer perhaps had he not met Jennie. But Jennie had ten thousand dollars, and here he was.
Sitting inside the window of the Prairie Rose café later on, he realized that had Kay been an older woman or an ugly one the result of the interview might have been entirely different. Well, that too was the nature of a man.