Lost Ecstasy/Chapter 5
THE vast empty back country began to show signs of life as shipping time approached, and the railroad in the valley, along which the little towns were strung like beads, awakened to new activity. Locomotives pulled great lines of empty cattle cars and left them, so many here, so many there, on the various side-tracks by the shipping pens. Up in the mountains and North on the Reservation the round-ups were beginning; small informal processions were starting out, the pilot on horseback leading the chuck and bed wagons, cowboys in chaps and gloves, their ropes hung to their saddles, drove ahead of them the remudas of loose horses which were to provide their extra mounts. And in the upland pastures or out on the plains, where the blues and pinks of the spring flowers had given way to the sturdier reds, yellows and purples of the early fall, the cattle stood or moved slowly about, the cows with their calves, the steers, the range bulls with their flat backs and wide heavy heads.
Already the nights were cold. At the early round-ups the night guards came in chilled to thaw their hands over the stove, and to draw their beds into the shelter of the cook-tent. The quaking aspens were bright gold; there was a thin scum of ice on the mountain pools in the mornings. And in the fields the country was threshing its grain. Trucks and wagons, their bodies built high with temporary boardings, rocked and careened along the roads on their way to the railroad or the small red grain elevators along the track. First grade wheat was bringing a dollar and twenty cents a bushel, but the profit was small. The old cow-men turned farmers figured patiently; cost of ploughing, cost of seeding, cost of harvesting and threshing. Even at a dollar twenty
Sometimes a herd on the way to the railroad blocked the passage of a wagon of grain; the old West and the new West met and intermingled. Cowboys turned for the time into farm hands eyed the cattle appraisingly while the way was being cleared for them.
"Look pretty good this year."
"Not so bad." Or:
"Kinda poor, aren't they?"
"Shipping to the feeders. Got some better stuff coming next Thursday."
Thursday. It was always Thursday, for the Monday morning market in Chicago.
The cattle would plod on, ten miles a day, to save all the weight possible. The dust hung over them in clouds, the cowboys sagged in their saddles at ease, now that the hard riding of the round-up itself was over. But there was still much to do. In the empty fields out beyond the pens they would again work their cattle, cutting out and holding the cut, and throwing back the unwanted stock that had drifted along with the herd. Then there would be the final loading, the nervous spooky cattle balking at the gangway and milling frantically, the final triumphant start up, the prodding and slapping until the car was full, and the signal for the engine to shunt another car into its place.
But before the L. D. was ready to round-up things had come to a crisis between Tom McNair and Kay.
Fair-time was approaching. In the bunk house in the evenings the men talked of little else. "If I draw that Romannosed pony of Saunders's again I'll bust out cryin'. It gave a couple of crow-hops last year and then looked around for a piece of sugar!"
"The fellow that gets old Abe'll get first money."
"He'll get a doctor bill."
The Indians were already driving down their animals from the Reservation, fast running horses and buckers, and putting their money on Little Dog, their best rider. And in his spare moments Tom was going over his equipment; fastening new leathers to his spurs, looking over his chaps, examining the green silk shirt in which he meant to stand out "like a sore thumb" before the grand-stand.
Then one evening he learned from Kay that the Dowlings were not going to the Fair, and took matters into his own hands with his usual readiness for trouble. He came to the ranch house, where Henry was drowsily reading the Ursula paper.
"Mr. and Mrs. Bill Sawyer are entertaining the five-hundred club this evening."
"Dicer's Emporium reports a new importation of corsets. That's right, Sam. We still believe in 'em."
Herbert was playing solitaire, and Kay had already gone up to bed. Tom rapped outside, opened the screen and clumped in his high-heeled boots to the living room door. Henry looked up and Herbert continued to move his cards, but he had stiffened.
"Understand you're not going in to the Fair," Tom said, tall and handsome and arrogant in the doorway.
"Not this year; Mrs. Dowling"
"How about my taking Miss Kay, then? She sure ought to see it."
Herbert put down his cards and rose.
"If Miss Dowling wants to go to the Fair I'll take her," he said.
Tom eyed him.
"She's got to decline my invitation first."
"Not necessarily!"
"How do you get that way?" Tom demanded angrily.
"Where do you come in on this anyhow? I'm talking to Mr. Dowling."
Henry, thus brought in, was puzzled and startled. He had never associated Kay's riding with this cowboy save in the way he associated Herbert with himself, as somebody to open gates. Now he was considerably outraged. He looked at the two, each so fiercely confronting the other, and put up his hand.
"That's enough," he said. "More than enough." And to Tom: "If Kay wants to go to the Fair, Tom, Mr. Forrest will take her."
"That's not"
"That's all. I don't intend to argue the matter," said Henry, and lifted his paper once more.
Tom hesitated. A dark color rose in his face, and he twisted his hat in his hands. Then he turned on his heel and flung out again without a word.
"Insolent young rascal!" said Henry, still astonished. "Acting as if—close that door, Herbert."
Herbert closed the door, very quietly, like a conspirator.
"What do you make out of that? What about him, anyhow?"
"I don't know anything about him," said Herbert. And nobly added: "He's a good cow-man, according to Jake."
"He has had time enough, apparently, to see a good bit of Kay."
Herbert said nothing. His face was carefully non-committal.
"I don't like it, Herbert. Kay has never seen this sort of life before. God knows it's not romantic, but she may think itis. Just why a fellow who can ride a horse and look after cattle should make an appeal to women, I'm damned if I know."
"He's a handsome devil."
"Handsome is as handsome does," Henry snapped, and picked up his paper again. "Mr. and Mrs. George Pinckney are receiving congratulations today on the birth of a son and heir." Suppose Kay was really interested in this chap? Suppose she fancied herself in love with him? Kay! A man who always smelled of the stable, who earned sixty-five dollars a month and used it to gamble with! A periodic drinker, going on sprees when he disappeared for days at a time, wallowing in who knew what filth? "Lightning struck a hay stack at" Oh, hell!
"What did you mean by saying he's a handsome devil?"
"He is, rather."
"You think she is interested in him, then?"
"I don't see any use in denying it. Yes, I think she is."
"What you really mean is that she's built up some sort of romantic figure out of him. Isn't that it?"
"That's a part of it."
"And what's the rest?"
Herbert hesitated.
"I hardly know, sir," he said at last. "I think it may be more than that. She's no child, and she's got a good hard brain. I think she knows exactly what he is, in the back of her mind anyhow. She mayn't know any details, but she suspects them. Only—they don't make any difference."
"You are talking as though she is in love with the fellow!"
"Don't you think she is, sir? Infatuated, anyhow?"
"I know damned well she's getting out of here if she is."
Shortly after that Henry went up to bed. He was very stiff; his back ached, and into the bargain he was more uneasy than he cared to admit. There was a little stubborn streak in Kay. She was like her grandfather in that. And Herbert was right, she had a good hard brain. Two weeks ago or three, she might have been only romantically interested. But by now she knew the fellow, or ought to; she'd had chances enough.
He grunted, and opened the door into his wife's room. She was reading by the light of a lamp on the end of the wash-stand beside her bed, and when he entered she wiped the cold cream from around her mouth with a handkerchief, preparatory to his good night kiss. But he did not kiss her at once. He sat down on the foot of her bed.
"What about Kay, Katherine? Is she making a fool of herself?"
"I don't know what you mean?"
"With Tom McNair?"
"Oh, Tom!" There was relief in her voice. "She's playing around with him, of course, but that's all. She's accustomed to attention, and he's about all that offers out here."
"There's Herbert," he said sturdily.
"She can always have Herbert, and she knows it. I wouldn't worry, she's only amusing herself. And there's nothing much else for her to do."
He got up. His back was really very troublesome; he must have twisted something in the field that day. Well
"We'd better be getting on anyhow," he said, not entirely convinced. "I'm about through."
He kissed her perfunctorily.
"Good night."
"Good night, Henry. Be sure to open your window."
Lying sleepless in his bed that night Henry planned to leave the next day. But when he wakened in the morning he had a bad case of lumbago. He had never had anything much before, and he was convinced that he was in a serious condition. Every time he moved he groaned. It was, indeed, between groans that he had his interview with Kay.
"You mean," said Kay, staring down at him, white and angry, "that you forbid me to ride out with Tom McNair?"
"That's what I've said. I generally mean what I say."
"But—how dare you, father? Howcan you? You would think I'd done something wicked."
"Not necessarily." He groaned again. "Unwise, certainly."
"But what has happened? You haven't objected before. Just what is it you are afraid of, father?" she asked, more gently. "I won't disgrace you. You know that."
"He's not your kind."
"He's a man. And because you know he's a man and not a tailor's dummy, you're afraid. Isn't that it?" And when he said nothing to that she was suddenly frightened. "You haven't spoken to him, have you?"
"I think he understands my position."
Later on he told Katherine.
"I tell you she's infatuated with him. Infatuated! That's the only word I can think of."
"Temporarily, perhaps, that's all. Is that pillow right?"
"No, damn it. Take it out. What do you mean, temporarily? We'll look well if she walks into town while I'm laid up here and marries him."
"I don't think she has the remotest intention of marrying him."
"Oh, you don't? Well then, I wish you'd seen and heard her in here a while ago."
"I daresay you weren't very tactful."
"Tactful hell! Why should I be tactful? She's lost her mind."
When Doctor Dunham arrived he had worked himself into a frenzy.
"What have you been doing to yourself, anyhow?"
"Nothing. Pitched a little hay, that's all."
"Trying to show these cowboys you're as good a man as they are!" chuckled old Dunham, and was rather hurt later when none of old Lucius's liquor was forthcoming.
So the day wore on, Katherine applying hot water bags to Henry's back and occasionally looking at the mountains with that far-away glance of hers. Long ago she had forgotten the dreams and passions of her youth; sometimes it seemed to her that she had always been married to this heavy bodied, occasionally truculent and domineering husband of hers. But for Kay she had had a dream of her own, of love and marriage.
It was vague, like much of her dreaming. She did not care greatly for Herbert; secretly she shared Bessie's opinion of him. But he meant safety. This cowboy If she could only talk to Kay! But she had never overcome the feeling that as to mother and daughter, the gulf between the knowledge of the one and the ignorance of the other was somehow shameful.
She had, this queer Katherine, an odd feeling that if old Lucius had been around he would have known what to do.
Kay stayed in her room all morning. She was frightened and desperate. Never before had she resented the domestic hierarchy under which she lived, but now she did. Her face, when the lunch gong sounded, was hard and sullen, and when before descending she went to her window and once more glanced out in the hope of seeing Tom, what she saw only increased her anger and resentment.
The early midday dinner at the bunk house was over; the long table with its brown oil-cloth cover was deserted. By ones and twos the men came out, to sit on their heels or lounge about, rolling their endless cigarettes. It was the one bit of leisure in their hard-working, hard-riding days. Bill was off by himself, plaintively playing a mouth organ, and near him Tom was standing, over-cheerfully humming the words of a song. At the chorus he discreetly stopped, to the laughter of the group.
You're a good natured bull-dogging son of a ."
Perhaps he saw Kay at the window, and there was deliberate malice in what he did next, for the new girl from Judson appearing with a dishpan, he promptly called to her.
"Come on out here, pretty one! Come out and give the sun a treat."
She came, giggling, and he threw an arm about her and waved his free hand at the landscape.
"Ain't that pretty?" he said. "Just you and me and nature, eh! Don't count those roughnecks over there."
The next moment, having made his effect, he released her and forgot her. But Kay recoiled into the room and held her hands to her burning face.
"He's crazy," she thought. "Crazy and wild. Maybe bad too, for all I know. I've got to get out of this somehow, or I'll go crazy too."
But it is typical of her state that within the next few minutes she was seeing it for the bravado it largely was, and that he was in his own way returning hurt for hurt. Up to that time she had not considered Herbert in the situation, but during the meal—Mrs. Dowling was lunching upstairs—she was suddenly certain that Herbert was responsible. It would be like him, she reflected, not to come to her, but to go as indirectly as possible to her father. Somebody had certainly gone to him. Well, she would soon find out.
"I suppose you think you did a good job last night," she began, resting her chin in her hands and staring across at him.
"As to what?"
"You know well enough. It was you who spoke to father. He never notices such things himself."
"Then you're wrong. It was he who brought up the subject."
"And you didn't help it any."
"Good Lord, Kay!" he said, exasperated. "What was I to say? Every one who chose could see the thing for himself"
"Just what thing?"
"You don't really want me to say it, do you?"
"Go on. Let's hear the worst."
Her tone angered him.
"All right," he said. "That you're in love with Tom McNair. You needn't bother to deny it. I know you."
Suddenly she laughed, rather breathlessly.
"Oh, so that's it! I'm in love with him! And what about him? Is he in love with me?"
She was not laughing now, but watching him intently.
"Is he in love with me?" she repeated, when Herbert hesitated.
"I don't know. Maybe he thinks he is. You're different from the girls he's known, of course."
"Thanks!"
But there was something subdued in her now that encouraged Herbert to go on.
"There's another thing, too, Kay. These fellows out here are all right. They're a fine lot, most of them. But they don't understand eastern girls, how they can be crazy about a fellow one minute and be all through the next. It's not their game. McNair now—I'm not saying anything against him—McNair may think you're in earnest about all this. Leaving everything else aside, you ought to be fair to him."
She had a wild desire to cry out: "But I am in earnest. It's horrible, dreadful earnest. I'm in and I can't get out!" But the sight of Herbert, taking out a cigarette and delicately tapping it on the back of his hand, killed the impulse. Herbert, with his neatly pressed trousers, his neatly brushed hair, his neatly arranged and docketed mind, how could he understand?
"It's not I who am unfair to him," she said. "It's the rest of you."
"And again," said Herbert carefully, still tapping, "I happen to know that he has a girl of his own already. You can't marry him. Then why spoil him for what he can have?"
"Why on earth don't you light that cigarette and stop tapping it?" she demanded in a sort of frenzy.
She got up. Herbert was too late to pull out her chair, but he did manage to open the door for her.
She went upstairs, took off her riding clothes, and lay down on the bed. She could hear across the hall the rattle of dishes on her father's tray and his voice now and then, querulously raised in protest.
"Why can't they make a decent cup of coffee? This bellywash"
"I'll have Nora make some, Henry."
"And get it an hour from now! No."
She was frantic with jealousy. Did Herbert really know that Tom had a girl, or had he made it up? Was it this Vera, the girl from Judson? If not, who was it? There had been an effort at casualness in Herbert's voice. "I happen to know he has a girl already." Well, suppose he had? What could it possibly mean to her? They had her; and they would hold on to her. She could never get away. She would end by marrying Herbert, and she knew what that would be:
"Good night, Kay."
"Good night, Herbert. Be sure to open your window."
She thought about her Aunt Bessie and Uncle Ronald, her husband. He had been a dapper little man with a hideous habit of posing before the servants, especially the women. No wonder Aunt Bessie had had what the younger crowd ribaldly called "sympathizers." She even thought about old Lucius and the occasional women who had come to the ranch. That was what loveless marriage was.
She was not as ignorant as Katherine believed. Much of those earnest and wide-eyed discoveries of sex by young writers to a world already sex-wise and sex-weary before they were fledged, had come her way. Even the unloading of degenerate sex complexes by older men and women who sold themselves for commercial purposes as cheaply in the market place as any prostitute.
And she knew that this love of hers was no light thing, to be dismissed by order. That it was a primitive savage thing, stronger than she was. After all, she was no child. She had had her small affairs, her light romances. This was different.
At five o'clock she dressed herself carefully and went down to the verandah. It was, in a way, a test she set herself. If Tom came to her there he cared, if he did not
It was an hour before he came, and then he was gentler than she had expected, even rather ill at ease.
"Well," he drawled with his faint smile, "it seems like we're kinda out of luck all round, don't it?"
"You mean, about the Fair?"
"So they've told you; have they?"
When she made no reply, but sat gazing out with miserable eyes across the plains, he rolled a cigarette slowly and sat down on the step at her feet.
"Just what is the big idea? Is it the bunch-quitting they object to? Or just me?"
"It's not you," she said hastily. "It's just—anybody."
"I notice they don't mind this Percy of yours."
"It has nothing to do with Herbert. He's a member of the family."
"Like hell he is!" he said, with sudden resentment. "Oh, I get you all right. You're not telling me anything I don't know. I suppose you'll up and marry him some of these days. That's what they're saying around here, anyhow."
"Never."
"Still, you're a good little girl. You'll do what they tell you. You're doing it now, aren't you?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, you'd like to go to the Fair tomorrow. With me," he added, glancing up at her. "But you won't."
"I don't want to worry them."
"Worry them? What are they worrying about?" he demanded. "I'm not going to kidnap you. You're safe with me—safe as a church."
But now that the issue had come she found a certain courage with which to meet it.
"You don't really care now whether I go or not," she said. "What you really want now is to have your own way. You hate to be beaten."
He threw back his head and laughed.
"Smart, aren't you?" he scoffed. "Maybe it's partly that," he added honestly. "But about my not wanting you to go, Kay—God, what do you think I'm making all this fuss about?"
"I didn't know."
"Well, now that you know," he said, lightly, as if he had not been betrayed into that moment of real feeling, "what about it? Do we go, or don't we? Be yourself! Let's show them who's who in this part of the world!"
But she only shook her head. His moment of passion was gone. She knew that it was not her he really wanted, but to humiliate the rest. And although he continued to argue, cajole and bully her in turn, she persisted in her refusal. At last he leaped to his feet, jamming his hat on his head with a gesture at once dramatic and final.
"All right," he said. "All I wanted was to know where I stand. Now I know. Good night."
"Tom! Come back a minute."
But he went swinging along toward the barn, chaps rustling and spurs jingling, and as he went he whistled. Ten minutes later he was loping down the road on the Miller, in the general direction of Ursula.
She did not see him again until two days after the Fair was over.
Now and then some word of the doings in town filtered out to the ranch. Bill was brought out in a car one day, pale and sheepish, with a sprained ankle and a story of hard luck, but Tom it appeared was riding as if he wore shock absorbers and was up to the finals.
Herbert politely invited Kay to go in for the last day, and she as politely refused. Henry was able to turn over in his bed without yelping, and was planning to start East as soon as he could travel. And then on the evening of that last day the outfit came back, tired but triumphant, driving its bucking string ahead of it. And Tom McNair was not with it.
Kay could not believe her eyes. When Jake passed the house on the way to his own cottage she stopped him.
"Who won, Jake?"
"Tom McNair got first money."
"That's fine. I didn't see him with the rest."
He rested his kindly faded old eyes on her for a moment, looked away.
"Well, Tom's Tom," he said. "Maybe he's playin' poker in town. You see, ever so often Tom's got to have a little time to himself. There's no harm in him; he's just like a young colt, a bit wild and not halter broke yet."