Lost Ecstasy/Chapter 3
WHEN old Lucius built his ranch house of field stone at the foot of the mountains and furnished it accord ing to the best taste of his time, there had been some who called it Dowling's Folly. He had been one of the first to put in steam heat, ordering his radiators from Chicago and hauling them from Ursula with vast expense and effort.
But when he had finished the ranch became the show place of the county. He had a vast barn, a machine shop, a wagon shed, a salt house where the great cubes of salt were stored for distribution over his ranges. His calf yard was enormous, with its feeding tables and its hay racks. Outside of the barn were his breaking corrals and paddocks, and beyond these again were the feeding yards, one after another, with shelter sheds against the winter snows and a creek for water flowing through them all. Thousands of cattle could old Lucius winter on the home ranch, and these were only the weaklings of his herds. The others, the strong steers, the dry cows, wintered themselves on the range. He had his line camps there, of course, with two or three riders, a cook and a couple of hay shovelers; the line riders rode fence and worked the unthrifty cattle in for feeding, the cook cooked, the hay shovelers shoveled. In bad winters he took a loss, in mild winters he grew rich.
During his later years, after his other interests took him East, he had come only twice a year, in spring for the cow and calf round-up, and in the early fall to ship. Then old Lucius was a happy man; he put on a pair of old Oregon trousers, he thrust his feet—beginning to be gouty—into ancient boots, stuck a battered Stetson on his head and rode out with his boys, as he called them, going like a king to survey his vast domain.
Sometimes he had not even been to bed, for he seldom came alone on these pilgrimages of his. He brought his cronies along, stuck them on horses, laughed at their groans and played poker with them at night by way of reward. Once or twice too there had been women in the party, quiet well-behaved women, but faintly dubious. Then Mrs. Mallory stayed away from the stone house and William came up from the car and took her place. When prohibition came in old Lucius had a great steel safe built in the ranch office and camouflaged it with a bookcase on hinges, and he sent the Mariposa out on a special trip with rare old whiskies and some gin. He was wasting no space on wines.
It was rather characteristic of Henry that one of the first things he did after he arrived that night was to investigate the safe.
"Better inventory that," he said to Herbert.
And he took out one bottle and gave Herbert a mild, a very mild, whisky and soda. He took one, rather stronger, himself.
Mrs. Dowling and Nora had gone upstairs, but Kay remained below. She was still excited and flushed. She moved around, looked at this; touched that. There was a large square hall, furnished in heavy old-fashioned mahogany, and with a sagging leather couch near a wide stone fireplace. Opening off it were the office, where her father and Herbert were sipping their night caps, and a dining room in heavy dark oak. There was another door, closed, and she opened it. She knew at once that old Lucius had slept here, and she slipped in and closed the door.
The window was open, and through it she could hear the cottonwood trees rustling in the night breeze and the sound of swiftly running water. Some little distance off was a separate building, lighted; now and then a door opened and figures moved in and out. She waited by the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of McNair again, but she failed. All the while she knew she was being exceedingly silly. Almost every girl she knew who had been West had developed some romantic attachment for a cowboy, and had forgotten him the moment she went home. Perhaps it was the altitude; she had heard that altitude did queer things to people.
When she went out Herbert was in the hall. He stared at her with mild astonishment.
"I thought you were safely tucked in bed."
"I've been looking around. It's lovely, isn't it?"
"If you say so, it is," said Herbert, slightly warmed by his night cap. And as she turned on the stairs he was gazing up at her, looking rather less tidy and more human than she had ever seen him.
She had quite a good room. Nora had already unpacked her traveling case and placed its gold fittings on the bureau; her dressing gown and slippers were laid out, her thin nightgown folded on the bed. In the bathroom—there were bathrooms, of course. Old Lucius was nothing if not thorough—her mother was bathing, and the delicate odor of violet bath salts had penetrated into the upper hall.
But Kay noted none of these things. She was ascertaining if her windows looked toward the bunk house. Which they did.
If, lying sleepless in her bed that night, she wondered whether she had made any impression whatever on McNair, a glance into that untidy building would have undeceived her. Tom slept the sleep of those who have been up since dawn, and slept it to the accompaniment of the snores, groans and guttural mutterings of other tired men.
He had put the car away, taken a glance around barn and corrals and then stamped in glumly. His irritation had returned. In the dining room of the bunk house, which served as a sitting room between meals, he found three or four of the men playing black-jack. They looked up, but he said nothing, hung his hat on the nail over his chaps and roping gloves, and stamped across to the door into the long, dormitory-like bedroom.
"Well?" somebody called.
"Well what?"
"Did you wrangle them?"
"I did, and if any lousy son of a gun wakes me at daylight tomorrow I'll"
"Wait a minute, Tom! What's the girl like?"
"Like any other girl. She's a Dowling. That's enough!"
He slammed the door behind him, and they went back to their game. They were not hunting trouble, certainly not with Tom McNair. Not that they lacked courage; they lived their precarious lives cheerfully, broke bad horses, taking their occasional mischances with a grin, rode in contests and spent or gambled away the money they won, fought the winter storms, and took the usual risks of life and limb of their profession. They had drifted in, from the Powder River country or the Rosebud or Hailstone Basin, signed on and were thereafter L. D. men until chance or fortuitous circumstance sent them drifting on again.
"Ridin' the grub line, Joe?"
"Well, I'd take up squatter's rights on a job if it was offered."
But, save for their occasional visits to town, they were dependent on each other for comradeship and amusement.
They preferred peace to conflict, and among the dozen of them who came and went there was an unwritten understanding that McNair was a fighting wildcat, and was better left alone. They discussed him, of course.
"Sure thinks he's God's gift to women."
"May be. But I'm here to say that boy can ride."
Perhaps that paints Tom McNair at that time as well as he can be painted. Later on life was to change him somewhat, but always he was stubborn, proud and sensitive. He was arrogant, too, of his good looks, of his ability to break horses, of his riding and roping, of the attraction he had for women.
"You keep away from my girl," Jake Mallory told him when Nellie was fourteen and began to hang around the corrals.
"You keep your girl away from me!" said Tom coolly, and Jake knew he was right.
Attractive to women he undoubtedly was, dark, strong featured, clean cut. Once—that was when Tom was newly come to the ranch—one of Lucius's quiet well-behaved ladies had tried to paint him. Her drawing was very bad, and she had obviated the necessity of painting the horse, which was beyond her ability, by having it stand rear-end toward her and Tom sit sideways in the saddle. She made a very good job of the creature's rump and tail, and she had somehow managed to give Tom himself a hawk-like intensity that was rather like him. Indeed, she saw it herself, and she painted the words "The Hawk" underneath it and presented it to Lucius.
"Well!" said Lucius, and got out his glasses. "The hawk, eh? And where is his prey, my dear?"
After which he sent Tom out on the Reservation and took good care to leave him there until the lady had departed. He was not a man to leave anything to chance.
It is too much to say, of course, that Kay had made no impression on Tom McNair. She disturbed him not at all, but he certainly knew she was about; a slim boyish figure with a clipped head, clad in riding breeches and a soft shirt mostly, but in the evenings very feminine in her soft light frocks, with her arms bare and that string of pearls that Lucius had bought her grandmother before she died, too late because they came when she had ceased to care to call attention to her neck.
She had a way of standing—Kay, that is—with her chin up and her hands thrust in her breeches pockets, and of being about when he was.
"Good morning, Mr. McNair."
"Morning, Miss Dowling."
"It's a beautiful day, isn't it?"
"Pretty fair. Weather's what we ain't got nothing else ut."
She would look after him as he passed on, leather chaps swishing, neckerchief blowing, flannel shirt stretched taut over his shoulders, his Stetson hat shading his handsome arrogant face. She always felt very small and unimportant at those times; rather, as Bessie might have put it, like something the cat had brought in. And this was the more tragic because she began to realize that the ache of his appeal to her was like a physical pain. Once Herbert caught her looking after him and had a suspicion of the truth, but she was learning guile for the first time.
"He certainly looks the part, doesn't he?" she said.
"He does," said Herbert dryly. "But take all that junk off him, the spurs and the rest, and he might be a total loss. You can't tell."
She looked at Herbert. He was dressed in riding clothes, English boots and breeches; he looked very nice and very much the gentleman, but perhaps not quite the man Tom was. It is significant that he was Tom to her already, in her thoughts.
"You will admit he can ride," she said coldly.
"That's his business. So can these other fellows. And it's about all they can do."
But after that Herbert was watchful.
"Why," he demanded of Jake, sitting pathetically in the ranch office a day or so later while Henry and Herbert went over the books, "why does the McNair fellow draw extra pay? He's down for sixty-five dollars a month."
"Well, it's like this," said Jake. "He's a top hand, for one thing, and good cow hands are scarce. Then it's not a bad thing for the ranch to have the best rider and roper in the state in the outfit. Old—your father—" he turned to Henry "—used to feel right proud when our boys carried off the money at the fair."
"What for?" said Henry, who was finding the hole even deeper than he expected. "It's my opinion we're carrying a lot of trimmings here that can be done away with. Just because this man can ride"
"He's a good cow-man," Jake insisted obstinately. "Of course Tom's got his faults, but"
"What sort of faults?"
"He hits it up a bit now and then," Jake explained apologetically. "About two or three times a year. Just goes to town and disappears like. But he comes back sick and sorry, and—that's all there is to it."
Henry, who had his back to the wall safe, stiffened virtuously.
"That's all, is it?"
"Well, he's likely to pick a fight if there's one handy, after he's had a drink or two. And he gambles, of course, but then where'll you find one of these fellows that won't? That's all they need money for; all the rest's found for them."
It was in Herbert's mind to pursue the subject, but Mr. Dowling turned back to the list in his hand.
"All right," he said. "McNair goes at sixty-five. Let's get on with this."
He was in a very bad humor, and not the less that he knew he was himself to blame. Some of the old cattlemen, seeing the homesteaders come in and cut up the grazing grounds with their wire, had reluctantly faced the new conditions, had turned their bottom lands into fields and themselves into farmers. They were raising wheat, sugar beets, even experimenting with flax. But these were the men who had arable land. The others, men whose wealth still lay only in their herds, were in bad condition. Their credit was exhausted. The banks were refusing to lend money on their cattle, and along with the slump which had paralyzed business the country over came the failure of the beef market. A couple of years before the winter had been long and severe and the spring late and muddy. Even when they could buy hay and oil cake they could not get the feed to the cattle.
Mallory, foreseeing the situation, had begged Henry by mail and wire to sell when he could, or to ship South for feeding. But Henry was stubborn. Shipping cost money, and he had put enough in the hole as it was. And still later on Jake had had the pleasure of knowing he had been right, and the agony of seeing his herds freezing and starving to death through a terrible winter. He bought hay and oil cake, and was close to having to pay for it himself! And when he had paid his prohibitive prices at the railroad, through a wet and muddy spring he labored to get the feed to them, only too often to be too late. The sticky gumbo caught his wagons and held them tight, his trucks went into ditches and stayed there. And in March and early April he had ridden out himself with his revolver, and shot the ones who lay dying in the fields. The rest were sold for less than the cost of wintering them.
The ranch had never recovered and now Henry was facing a calamitous loss. It would not wipe him out; unlike most of his neighbors he had other interests. He was still a rich man. And of course half the loss was Bessie's. He preferred not to think about Bessie just then.
The morning went on. Herbert made his neat figures in columns and added them. Later on they would go into ledgers, and a good many would be in red ink. But he worked automatically, glancing out of the window as often as he dared. He never saw the great sweep of the valley, treeless save where some stream wound like a green snake from the mountains; or the rolling grassy hills, or the tawny buttes, rising like vast prehistoric monsters of the plain. Or beyond it the distant misty range which bounded it far away to the East. For Herbert that morning there were no mountains rising stark and sheer behind him, no circling golden eagles, no anything.
He was watching Kay perched like a little boy on top of a corral fence while Tom McNair broke a horse.
If he had only known it he need not have worried. Not yet anyhow. Tom was extremely busy, as a man who breaks a horse must be. So far he had spoken to her only once:
"When I get on, you get off."
"What do you mean, get off?"
"Off. Down," he said impatiently. "This pot-gutted bronc's as likely as not to try to butt through or try to climb over. Then where'd you be?"
"I can jump if he tries it."
He paid no more attention to her, got his saddle on, eased into it and then taking his hat off, slapped the creature with it. It blew up immediately. Through the dust Kay, white to the lips, could see a strange mixture of man and snorting, leaping, rearing horse.
"He'll kill you," she yelled; and was astounded to have Tom glance up at her and grin broadly.
"Pretty good on his feet!" he called.
He showed his first disconcertion when, the horse having given up, weary, hard-breathing and covered with foam, he dismounted and picked up from the ground a letter in a pink envelope which had fallen from his pocket. He stroked the creature's dripping neck without glancing at Kay.
"Sure tried to shake the daylights out of me, didn't you?" he said. "Well, we can't play any more today. I've got work to do."
He led the horse out, leaving Kay alone on top of the corral, and although she waited for some time he did not come back.
It was this small drama that Herbert had watched, sitting unheroically in the ranch office and making his neat figures on a pad.
Whatever was to come, there is no question that it was Kay who made the first overtures. They were young, delicate in a way, tentative and half timid. Perhaps she was left too much to her own devices. Henry sat most of the day in the office, smoking to keep up his courage, and Herbert had to sit with him. Katherine rose late; she was already showing symptoms of the malady which was to attack her later on, but with that painful reticence of hers she said nothing about it. And in the afternoons there were callers. Mr. Tulloss, the elderly banker from Ursula, who had helped old Lucius in that long drive from the border, and Jennie his wife, who was supposed to have had money; the kindly rector of the Episcopal church; Senator Kirkenbride, still a cattleman, and out from Washington to look after his fences, political and otherwise. Even old Doctor Dunham, crabbed, skillful and eying: Katherine with a shrewd professional glance.
"Feeling pretty well, are you?"
"The altitude always bothers me a little. That's one reason we have not been out more. Cream or lemon, doctor?"
"I never spoil the appetite the good God gives me with that sort of pap. Hasn't Henry still got some of that liquor old Lucius left?"
The ranchers came, of course. They brought their wives, left them on the verandah and wandered, with or without Henry, about the place. Some of them wore breeches rather better cut than Herbert's, and English boots also. They lived like the gentlemen they were, on vast estates which no longer paid them to hold. Some of them were still solvent, but Tulloss, meeting them there, would shake his great gray head and wonder how long they would last. They were breeding and training polo ponies; some of them, like the Potters, were experimenting with sheep. They had all the cow-man's dislike of sheep, and it went against the grain, but what else could they do? It required anything from twenty five to fifty acres of land to graze a cow, and in the end they might have to give her away.
But the point is that their coming left Kay free to do what she liked. She would make her dutiful bows, shake hands and wander off; she tried, to do her justice, to make friends with Nellie Mallory, who was sixteen then, but Nellie was aloof and more than a little jealous. She would sit on the porch of the foreman's house and watch Kay interminably, but when Kay sauntered over to speak to her she had little to say.
"I never get tired of looking at the mountains."
"You would if you hadn't anything else."
"Don't you ride?"
"Not if I can help it. Give me an auto any time."
Nellie always said "auto." She considered it more elegant than car.
And Kay, rather daunted, would wander off, to watch horses being shod or vaccinated, to look at the calves, to see farm wagons being repaired. The men, apparently absorbed in their work, greeted her civilly and went on with their business, but it was quickly obvious to them where her interest lay. If they smiled among themselves it was when Tom was far enough away for safety. Not one of them saw any element of possible tragedy. Here was another girl who had fallen for Tom, and that was all there was to it.
The end of the first week, however, saw a change in the relationship with Kay and McNair. So far Kay had ridden mainly in the evenings with Herbert, and Herbert was no horseman.
"I don't want a trick horse," he had announced with great firmness, when they were selecting one for him. "I want to enjoy the scenery. How about that bay?"
"He'll show you more scenery than you ever knew there was," said Bill, the corral boss, who was doing the selecting, not too graciously.
But by the beginning of the second week Kay had got herself in hand once more, was determined to fight her infatuation. For an entire day she stayed around the ranch: house, listening to the conversations on the verandah; New York, San Francisco, Chicago. The wealthier ranchers, it appeared, had been in the habit of going East or West to escape the bitter winters. And that night she made her own effort to escape.
"Why don't we go on to Santa Barbara, mother?"
"I thought you loved it here," said Katherine, astonished.
"So I do, but—I don't think it's very good for you."
"I can't leave your father."
And, as if he had missed her the day before, the next morning Tom came to the house and asked her to ride with him.
"I've got to go up the North fork to look for some horses, and I thought maybe you'd like to come along."
She almost paled with excitement.
"If I won't be in the way."
He looked at her with his attractive smile.
"You're going to work," he told her. "You can ride, which is more than your little friend Percy can do." He glanced toward the office window. "I'm taking out an assistant wrangler, and you're it."
She ran into the house, caught up her hat and gloves and flew out again. She never heard Jake's voice from the office: "I figure if we would put that lower fifteen hundred into wheat" The golden haze over the valley was star dust, and Tom McNair waiting at the foot of the steps was a young god, condescending to her.
"We're going into the mountains, aren't we?"
"Unless the North fork's moved down!"
It was only later that she realized how sure of her he had been. The chestnut gelding she had been riding was already saddled beside his horse in the barn. He had even provided a lunch for two, rolled in a slicker and tied to his cantle. She was too breathless, too tremulous, to notice it then.
It was a day to dream of. Tom was on his best behavior, soft-voiced, solicitous, southern.
"Comfortable?"
"Yes, indeed."
"Stirrups all right?"
"Perfectly."
"Then let's go."
Just what impulse had actuated him that morning it is hard to say. Perhaps he had genuinely missed her the day before. Perhaps it was only a matter of pride. Bill, reading a mail order catalogue the night before, had raised his head when Tom came in, said: "Haven't seen your lady friend around today. Not sick, is she?" and promptly dodged under the table.
"Not as sick as you'll look if you'll come out of there," said Tom dangerously.
Perhaps it was, like so much that he did, a gesture of pure bravado. But whatever was the reason, having made his point he was chivalrous, kindly, even tender.
"Want to kinda watch your step here. Trail's bad," or, after they had climbed to the high upland meadows and his big gray, the Miller, broke into a lope,—
"Going too fast for you?"
"I like it."
"There's no hurry. We've got all day."
She hugged that thought to her as they cantered along. All day. All day. All day.
Although the plains had already dried under the August sun, the upland meadows were still lush with grass. They passed salt licks, huge brown trampled nests in which the square white salt cakes lay like eggs, and around which the cattle stood or lay, eying them indifferently as they moved by. There was still larkspur and lupin, and here and there the paintbrush. Magpies darted back and forth, small tawny marmots watched them from the rocks, and Kay's heart kept pace with the beat of the horses' hoofs. All day. All day. All day.
Tom too was happy, for him. As she knew him better she was to learn that he had a black streak in him, a bitter and morose side, but that day he was light hearted and cheerful. A good horse under him, a pretty girl beside him, and all about him that back country he inarticulately loved,—what more could a man want? And after awhile he threw back his head and began to sing softly:
I'm a poor lonesome cowboy,
I'm a poor lonesome cowboy,
And a long ways from home."
He had a fair baritone voice, and when he had finished he glanced at Kay. He was astounded to see tears in her eyes.
"I never did think I could sing," he said whimsically, "but I didn't think I was as bad as all that!"
She was furious at herself, and yet she was helpless. How could she tell him that it was not his absurd song that had made her cry: that he had the strange power to stir in her emotions so profound that they shook her?
"It's the wind in my eyes," she told him. And maybe he believed her, but he sang no more that day.
They found the horses, scattered over a valley, and lunched before they wrangled them. And curiously enough the one disharmony of the day came then. After the meal she lighted a cigarette, and he reached calmly over and took it away from her.
"Don't be absurd," she said. "Everybody smokes nowadays."
"Not ladies. You leave that for the other sort."
"But nice women, ladies, do smoke nowadays, Tom."
"Not out here," he said firmly.
She thought a moment, put her case away. After all, why spoil the perfect day? And she had called him by his first name. Had he noticed it? Did he mind? Apparently not.
They had lunched by the creek, and now he rolled himself a cigarette and surveyed the panorama of mountain and valley before them.
"Pretty nice here," he said. "I stop sometimes and kinda enjoy it. I bet you haven't anything better in the East."
"Nothing so good," she said, looking at him. "Nothing so—wonderful."
"That's the way. You come out here and stay, and maybe the old L. D. will weather the storm. How about it?"
She colored; her absurd heart fluttered. But he did not see it. He was lying down, his head on his elbow, staring at the creek.
"Ought to be fish there," he reflected. "I'll bring a rod up some day and try it out. Like to fish?"
"I never have."
"You're a funny girl." He glanced at her lazily. "What do you do, anyhow?"
"Dance. Play around. Fill in time."
"My God! That's a life for you! You've got too much money."
"I haven't any money. Of course father"
"Well, you'll marry money, I suppose. That's the game, isn't it?"
"Not necessarily. I might marry for love."
She said it painfully but bravely; not looking at him, tearing up little handfuls of grass.
"Love?" He rolled over on his elbow and stared at her. "What do you know about love?"
And laughed delightedly when she made no reply. "That's like a girl!" he said. "Talking about something you don't know anything about. I'll bet you've never been in love."
"But—suppose I have?"
"Who with?" he demanded. "Some movie actor? Or maybe" he sat up and inspected her. "Maybe it's this secretary feller! Percy! How about it?"
"Certainly not."
For some reason, connected with vanity rather than sentiment, he seemed relieved at that.
"That's right," he said. "Take a man while you're about it." He got up. "We'd better be moving," he told her. "We've got a right smart job of work to do."
He resaddled the horses, tightening her cinch carefully, and they commenced the wrangling. It was hard exciting labor. The horses were wild after months of freedom; they ran up the mountain sides, with Tom like an avenging fury racing above to haze them down and Kay trying to hold them as they came. In the end, after the manner of their kind they accepted their fate, stood huddled together, and when the time came to start down took the trail in single file and thudded along as though no other thought had even entered their wise heads.
Even at that, now and then one of them would leave the trail and endeavor by circling around to get back again, but no such tactics answered with Tom. Spurs to his horse he would be off, up the steep hill side or breaking through the brush to head off the truant, and Kay would watch with a sort of agony of apprehension. But back he would come, cool and nonchalant, rolling a cigarette perhaps, and with the recalcitrant trotting meekly ahead of him.
It was at the bottom of the trail that he did a queer thing. The ranch buildings were in sight; the horses were moving on, subdued and resigned, when he stopped his horse, took off his hat and held out his hand.
"Good-bye, Kay."
So he had heard her!
"You're not going away, are you?" she asked in a small voice.
"As far as the bunk house. That's about a thousand miles from where you belong."
A moment later he was on the tails of the loose horses, whistling and calling, driving them at full gallop and leaving her to follow, alone. And that night in the bunk house he was in high spirits. Somewhere he had located a pair of old Lucius's broad-beamed riding breeches, and he appeared with them pinned around him, his hair gummed down with soap and a silver dollar stuck in his eye for a monocle.
"What I want in a horse," he said, in a fair imitation of Herbert's voice, "is scenery. The more scenery and the less horse the bettah."
The bunk house roared and rocked with laughter.