The Baron of Diamond Tail/Chapter 5
THERE chanced to be nobody working out of headquarters at the time of Barrett's arrival on the range. The long, shed-like bunkhouse stood untenanted, the big corrals were empty of horses. Only old Manuel, the Mexican man of all work, and his fat wife Teresa, were to be seen of all the retainers of that great enterprise when Barrett walked abroad before sunrise that morning. Even Dan Gustin had disappeared. The dusty wagon that had carried them from Saunders to the ranch Barrett saw standing lonely and deserted before the barn. Dan had taken horse and gone off silently the night before to join his detail.
Barrett grinned as he thought he saw a reason behind this silent departure. Dan did not want to be nurse to this beginner. Let somebody else take the greenhorn by the hand and lead him into the rough and rugged trails of adventure which he sought.
The greenhorn did not blame Dan for this. He knew very well what a task it was to break another into the routine that has become second nature to one's self. He was rather relieved than disappointed over Dan's going, knowing that a certain humiliation attaches to the one encumbered by a rookie in any of these hard-handling jobs, such as soldiering and sailing the seas, and riding the range in a Mexican saddle.
Viewed by the light of a new day, and from another angle than his first sight of it, this oasis in the gray plain beside the narrow river revealed wonders and surprises. The ranch-house itself was a commodious, long, low building of pine logs artfully joined at corners, a very buttress against the storms of that unsheltered land. It was built in the Spanish fashion, such as spread eastward from the old civilization of Santa Fe over the range country in those days, two wings running out from the main structure.
In this middle space between the wings of the building was the patio, or court, where the fountain played among the flowers, and trees brought from the distant mountains grew in grateful security. Water was supplied from a huge tank in the barnyard, where a battery of three windmills was already astir in the waking breeze, which blew as unfailingly as the northwest trades.
A row of tall, thick-boughed cedars stood just outside the wire fence in front of the house, a screen against the summer glare of the plain, a barrier between the dwelling and the northern blasts of winter. Within this line of protecting cedars a long, deep lawn spread bedewed and cool.' The great veranda, with broad, white-painted steps, was embowered in honeysuckle and wistaria. The wonder that this place could hold youth against the lure of the world dissolved out of Barrett's mind. It was a place to call one back from wandering, weary seeking, far following after futile dreams. It was home.
Probably not so isolated as it might appear when one looked from the porch into the limitless gray-green world that swept in gentle undulations northward, rising horizonward as the sea seems to lift, denying at last by a sharp-drawn line the further projection of human vision. Dan had spoken of a military post not far away, probably twenty or thirty miles. No doubt the broad hall, with its great fireplace at the end, had heard the jingle of military spurs many a time; had echoed laughter and the swing of dancing feet.
Barrett could picture slim-waisted, brown-skinned cavalry officers dismounting at the gate. He knew the type, eager for life's next moment, let it bring dance or death. He sighed. Even the interest on sixty thousand dollars.
"I told you to sleep late," said Alma, appearing in the door, fresh-washed by the morning, serene in her youthful comeliness as the placid repose of her natal plain.
"I'm used to getting up early," Barrett returned.
"I don't see why you didn't stay in the navy," she said, a bit fretfully he thought, as if she had considered his foolish adventure into that country all night and had risen confirmed in her opinion that it was no place for him. Barrett did not attempt an immediate reply. He watched her as she fastened a white rosebud in her hair just over her ear.
"Maybe," said he at last, detached, his mind a long distance from the navy.
"Just think of the disadvantage a red-head's under!" she laughed. "No flower that grows but a white one will do for such hair, while a blonde or a brunette has the whole garden to choose from."
"What a calamity! But I wouldn't call it red."
"You're the one exception in a long experience, and I doubt if you're sincere. What, then?"
"Come out in the light," he invited, beckoning her away from the door.
She stood turning, arms outstretched as if she balanced on a pivot, in model-like pose of mock seriousness, for him to judge her hair.
"Red," she nodded, with unshaken conviction.
"Not just red," he protested, baffled for another description.
"Not the red that's in the flag, of course, nor the red of a cow," she said; "but the red of a wicked, sullen, revengeful soul. Was that what you wanted to say?"
"You must have been eating some more of your aunt's what-do-you-call-it? bittersweet, or wild parsnip, or something."
"Wait till you know me better," she challenged, a little too serious, he thought, for a matter so banteringly light.
"Why do you dislike cowboys so much, and you born on the range?" he asked her, as if he, too, had been turning something in his mind overnight.
They went down the steps as by common consent, although no such thing had been proposed, and walked toward the wide, double front gate which swung on two immense tree trunks set deeply in the earth.
"I thought I made it plain last night," she replied after a little seeming deliberation, lifting surprised brows as she turned to meet his inquisitorial eyes.
"Not here in this house—you weren't born here?"
"Right here. Why? doesn't it look old enough for that?"
"You'll not joke about your age when it's great enough to concern you, my lady," he corrected her, with a grave way he had over trifles at times.
"Well, it was longer ago than yesterday," said she.
They stood at the gate, as children of the dawn who had reached the barrier of their fair land and must not venture beyond it. The top bar was shoulder-high to her; she crossed her arms, bare to the elbows in her loose-fitting blouse, and looked away over the range. The blue of its distances was dissolving into gray before the sun, like a veil in a flame. Soon it would lie harsh and unbeautified under the blaze of day.
"I don't suppose you ever want to leave it," he said, in a conviction founded on his reflections of a little while hefore.
"Leave it!" she echoed, her chin on her folded arms, her eyes fixed on the treeless sweep of sparse grass and low, melancholy, sapless gray sage. "There are times when I could run in my bare feet over rocks and thorns for a thousand miles, and put it behind me forever!"
"I was wrong," said he, confessing to himself, his voice soft, low; "I missed my guess."
"We used to go away, we were more away than here, but we're too poor now to take a trip, the post is the boundary of my world. My father used to be superintendent of this ranch," she explained, lifting her head, arms dropped to her sides. "The rustlers killed him five years ago, out there on that—that—damned, damned range!"
"You've got reason enough for hating it," he said, startled not so much by her revelation as her dramatic way of making it. "I never heard of that tragedy."
"No, it was only an everyday incident, a pebble dropped into this big bowl where we're immersed. A little news like that doesn't make noise enough to sound out of this country."
"I didn't suppose the immensity of it, the vast emptiness like the sea, would be felt by a person born to it," he speculated, a mental picture forming of the dead man lying face to the sky, dust of retreating horsemen on the horizon.
"It's echoless," said she, her searching eyes set on its distances; "there's nothing to hurl back remorse for a cruel deed upon the guilty one. It goes out from a man like the passing wind, and troubles him no more. It's a land without an echo to strike back on the conscience and the heart."
"That makes sinning easy," he said, understanding her. "But why shouldn't it make a good man better, hold him up to himself, I mean, and steady him with a new nobility?"
"It does seem to work out that way now and then, but not often. Mainly its—its—mere boundlessness"—lifting her hands to support the impotency of her words—"enlarges the passions of men. Their appetites become grosser, their hates, their lusts, their wild, mad loves. All is intensified in them here out of proportion with the rest of the world. Passions seem to enlarge in men to fill the immensity of this thing without conscious boundary, this cruel thing that makes them a part of itself."
It seemed to Barrett that this bitter indictment from the lips of youth and beauty who had suffered the cruelties of that land, cast a gloom over the morning. It was as if he had turned from the contemplation of a fair garden to see a black storm-cloud rising in silent portent of destruction, of lashing fury of wind, fierce shrapnel of driven hail. Yet he felt as if he should speak, to persuade her away from that brooding bitterness, so destructive to the soul of youth.
"Maybe all things grow big in men here," he said, "and out of bounds as we set them in our more conventional lives, because their tasks are bigger, their daily contact with immensity"
"You could have killed a man anywhere, you didn't need to come here to do it!"
The words burst from her as a charge laid at his door of a thing already done, bitterly reproving, dramatically severe.
"I didn't come here to kill anybody," Barrett returned, not even indignant over her implication of his intentions, his frank face lighting with his ready smile. "A man isn't under any obligation, it isn't a part of the cowboy curricula, is it?"
"As much a part of it as Latin to your alma mater," she insisted, still too grave even to reflect his smile. "If you ever expect to amount to anything in the judgment of men out here, you'll have to kill a man."
"Then I'll never be a master cowboy," he declared.
He felt that her judgment was prejudiced, due to what she had suffered in the tragedy that had clouded her life. He did not believe that she meant to have him accept her reading of range life and range men literally. But it was strange that revulsion against that life had struck with roots so tenacious and deep into her young heart. The shadow of its somber days had clouded out all memory of its delights. He could not believe, even so, that she was quite sincere.
"But you like it here, you'd be lonesome for it and wish you were back if you went away," he said.
"Yes," she owned, with unexpected frankness, "I'd gtieve my heart out for it if I had to go away and never come back."
So she was only another woman after the original, the universal pattern, he thought, not smiling now as he looked with feeling sympathy into her quickly averted eyes. Not only a woman after the universal pattern, but a human being after the mold of the best and the worst, in all of whom there is the flaw of impatience and unrest with the best that today can give, and grief and heartbreak when they have thrown it away to speed to world's end after the fatuous promises which rise green and beckoning out of the desert Places of despair.
"How far is it to the post?" he asked her, seeing again with his quick imagery, perhaps with a tinge of jealous envy—considering what lay, before him of rough life in a blanket among the ants—young cavalry officers dismounting at the gate.
"Eighteen miles, due north over the military road. That's it," indicating the trail that passed the gate; "you came over it from Saunders."
"You have dances here sometimes, the folks coming over from the post?"
"Oh, plenty of them. I wish I could have delayed your eager plunge into the romance of the range—I intended to have them over. After you go, you know"
"After I go?"
"The officers and cowboys don't mix socially," she said, with some reluctance, expressing a great deal more in her repression than her words.
"Oh, I see."
More mental pictures of officers, waltzing officers, a succession of waltzing officers, but only one lady, as if the world contained but one. Cowbcy life had its disadvantages, not hithertofore seen.
"There's Uncle Hal in the door looking for you. I think he's going to introduce you to romance after breakfast—he's got on his fighting clothes."