The Trail Rider/Chapter 8
DUNCAN'S ranch-house was a large T-shaped building, constructed, like nearly all the ranch-houses of that country, of the tenacious prairie sod. It stood on the bank of a weak, shallow stream, and there were cottonwood trees around it, making a cool and pleasant harbor to reach in the middle of a thirsty day, after a ride that grew more desolate and barren as the traveler proceeded southward from Cottonwood.
Texas and Winch had not made a forced ride of it; therefore it was almost noon when they turned their horses into the spacious corral with the little creek cutting across its corner. With the thrift of his Scottish kind Duncan had fenced off land in a little pocket of the creek bottom back of his house, and planted a garden there. Very green and hopeful it looked to the eyes of the two men, and so strange a sight in that land, undisturbed by the plow, that they stood at the fence to admire it.
Mrs. Duncan came to the door and hailed them, the two Misses Duncan showing blonde heads over her shoulders. So the two men turned from the vegetables in Malcolm Duncan's garden to the flowers within his house, where Mrs. Duncan greeted Winch by his first name with the familiarity of an old friend, and shook hands like a man with Texas Hartwell, and presented her daughters.
"Malcolm home?" Winch inquired.
"No. Him and the girls got home about midnight from the fair, and he was in the saddle at daylight this morning to see how things is goin' with the boys."
Mrs. Duncan spoke with the twang of Indiana on her tongue. She was a lady of large girth, with a red wrapper and a red face. Outwardly and inwardly she appeared to be exceedingly hot. Her daughters gave no promise of following the maternal lines. They were straight-backed and tall, rather handsome, and cool as daisies in the field in their white dresses. To Texas they appeared out of place in that island of a home in the great raw sweep of prairie, for they carried themselves as if they had been accustomed to meeting people all their lives.
They recognized Texas as the man who had won first place in the roping contest, and spoke of his work with compliments. Texas felt like a rooster with his tail feathers plucked, he admitted to himself, when it came to sitting down to dinner with those young ladies in his shirt-sleeves. But there was no help for it. The long-tailed coat was in Cottonwood, in the keeping of Mrs. Goodloe at the Woodbine Hotel, and it might be many a long day, he thought, before it would grace his back again.
"We've been lookin' all morning for Sallie McCoy and her mother," Mrs. Duncan said. "They promised the girls they'd come over to-day, but I guess they didn't get an early start."
"They used to be neighbors of ours," the Miss Duncan near Texas explained, nodding her pretty, fair head to indicate the location in a general way. "Their ranch was down* the creek about seven or eight or nine miles."
"Yes, it was ten or 'leven or twelve," said her mother, laughing over the indirect description. "A body never would get anywheres if they had to go by you tellin' 'em the road, Naomi. Them girls"—to Texas—"has been away to school back in Lawrence so long they've plumb got out of the ways of this country."
"They sure speak well for the schools of Lawrence, anyway, ma'am."
Texas spoke with such forceful warmth that the simple compliment seemed something altogether grand.
"Why, mother, we've been coming home for three months every summer," the other one protested, as if hurt by the implication that they were strangers in their own land.
Mrs. Duncan sighed, and said she knew it as well as they did, she guessed, but it didn't seem like they came home oftener than once every five years. Then she went on to tell Texas about her boys, five of them, all big enough to count as men in the work of the range, and that the other girl's name was Ruth, and that she was two years older than Naomi, and that Naomi would be eighteen her next birthday. All of which intimate information—for what can be more intimate among all a lady's secrets than her age—did not appear to disconcert the girls in the least.
Dee Winch did not say much, but there was a sufficiency in what he did say which gave one the feeling that he had said considerable. Texas answered Mrs. Duncan's ramifications from her original subject into an inquiry into his life, adventures, family, and prospects with a shyness of manner and softness in his words that caused the young ladies to lean and listen when he spoke.
He told her as much about himself as he had told the minister's wife, and short cuts and sharp turns could not draw from him anything more. It seemed a simple story for a man who had come to Cottonwood like a whirlwind and made himself a figure in it to such an extent as he had done. Maybe she believed it, maybe she did not.
Winch was off about his new duties immediately after dinner, with a word to Texas that he would return in a day or two and assign him to his post. He took nothing at all to eat but a package of dried beef, and dried beef of the range days was not the tender delicacy of this packing-house age. It was dried, and it required confidence to approach it, teeth to chew it, and a stomach equal to a corn sheller to do the rest. Texas wondered if pulling on dried beef had given Winch's teeth the peculiar outward slant that he had noticed when he saw him first. He believed that it was equal to it, anyhow.
Sallie McCoy came riding to the ranch alone along toward evening. Her mother had not felt equal to making the trip in the sun, Texas heard her explaining from where he sat on a bench under a cottonwood reading the poems of Robert Burns. He closed the book, moved more by the living poetry of Sallie McCoy's eyes than the written word, and went forward to take her horse.
She appeared taller afoot than in the saddle, still not too tall for a man whose heart was the proper distance from the ground. And there was something in her way of putting down her feet when she walked, something in the grace of her body and the soft charm of her voice, that told him she was not of common stock.
Blood may wander far, and lodge like blown seed in strange places, but it will set its mark as unfailingly in the wilderness as in the palace. Blood had set its mark in this girl's face, in the true modeling of her body, slender and strong. Somewhere in the race of McCoys there had been a hero, near or far.
Texas thought her shy when Mrs. Duncan introduced them, yet there was something in her eyes which seemed to be for him alone, a struggling expression, he felt it to be, for what convention could not allow from lips. It was gratitude, with something softer which eluded him like a swift bird, and tingled him to the toes. Texas put his arm round the neck of the little cow pony that had stood him in such friendly service the day before, and stroked its nose.
"I'm under great obligations to you for tendin' this horse to me yesterday, Miss McCoy. I didn't have any chance to thank you then, for I didn't know till after he carried me to victory whose horse he was—Uncle Boley didn't tell me. I want to thank you now, and pay inter-est on it."
"If you ever owed me even thanks, it is paid, Mr. Hartwell," she told him with great seriousness. "The debt and the interest are on the other side."
Hearing them talk so right at the beginning, and knowing the history of the encounter between Texas and the mayor, and the subsequent attempt to kill Hartwell in the street, the Duncans looked on him as Sallie's personal champion. It was doubtless out of this feeling that he belonged peculiarly to Sallie that the Misses Duncan found a great deal to do in the kitchen, although Mrs. Duncan's broad back was left ordinarily to bear such tasks alone, after the ways of daughters the world across.
They were very well acquainted by the time supper was ready, old friends when it was over, and the Misses Duncan were clattering the dishes off. The girls were in a flutter now to have things out of the way, for more company was coming, young men, to be sure, from the ranch above.
A young man was a young man in that country then, no matter what his occupation or whence he came, but these two proved to be exceptions to whom advantages had been given, just as Duncan and his wife, and the Kansas pioneers more than the pioneers of any place in the nation, had made sacrifices to outfit their children for a higher plane. They were the sons of a rancher, and they had been at Lawrence attending the university, also. They were rather boisterous, and unduly familiar in their way of addressing young ladies, Miss McCoy included, by their first names. So it seemed to Texas, at least, his culture being of another kind.
There was a good deal of singing, between the Duncan girls and the young men, with loud accompaniment on the large hoarse piano which, Texas understood, was a historic instrument, and a notable one, in that section. Texas could not see much improvement over Viney Kelly's efforts to entertain in the roistering tunes which the young men shouted, with the bits of sentimental embroidery contributed by Ruth and Naomi. He didn't take a deep interest in it, although he tried to appear greatly entertained, for many things came drifting into his mind calling for serious consideration. Sallie had hung back out of it on the plea that she did not know the new songs. She would not approach the piano, in spite of their entreaties and light banter.
"And you the only one in the crowd that can really sing—unless it's Mr. Hartwell?" Naomi said.
Texas was quick to assure her that he could not lift a note. But his mind leaped back from following the trend of graver things to the pleasant conjecture of what kind of a song Sallie McCoy would select if she should sing. As for her voice, he felt that he knew how it would sound, felt that he had heard it many a time before, indeed. There came over him suddenly a longing for its satisfying cadence, as for something known in happier times, denied through hardship and lonely days.
But he would not ask her to sing, feeling that her heart would not be in it. The others were beginning it all over again when Malcolm Duncan came home. Texas was thankful that greetings made it necessary to suspend the din.
Duncan was a splendid figure of manhood, tall and rugged, with the health of his clean life in his eyes. His broad forehead and short gray beard gave him an appearance more suited to a chair in a university than a seat in the saddle. It was plain where the girls got their comeliness.
The Duncan girls took their strong-lunged admirers out to gabble under the moon while the master of the house had his supper, leaving Texas and Sallie to follow, pairing off as ingeniously as birds. Sallie lingered a little behind the others, answering Duncan's inquiries about her mother, and whether she had brought him the Kansas City paper. Texas waited in the hall-like passage between the two sections of the house, where a bracketlamp shone over the saddles and guns which hung along the wall.
"I thought I knew that belt," said Sallie, stopping where Texas had hung his gun. "I wonder how it came here?"
"It's mine—Uncle Boley gave it to me," he explained. "He told me it was carried once by the best man he ever knew."
"It was father's gun," she said softly. She had taken it down, and stood now looking at the heavy gear with her head bowed over it. Texas saw a tear fall on the chafed leather. He put out his hand as if to comfort or assure her.
"I hope I'll always be worthy of it, Miss McCoy."
"I'm sure you will," she said, in simple sincerity. "Did you have it—was this the gun you—" She faltered over the thing she wanted him to understand.
"I owe my life to it already," he said, with gratitude almost reverential.
"I didn't see Uncle Boley before I left; I didn't know. I'm glad he gave it to you; I'm glad you had it when that gang—" She lifted the holster to her lips, as if moved by a sudden emotion, and kissed the stock of the great black gun. She gave it to him then, her head thrown high, her eyes bright in the dim lamplight for the tears that hung in them unspilled.
The others were out by the gate, filling the night with laughter.
"Let's sit here," Sallie suggested, stopping where the moonlight came sowing down through the cottonwood upon a bench.
Youth was with them, also, but laughter seemed to have gone its way out of their hearts that night. Not much was said between them as they sat there, for the thoughts of each were busy as weaving spiders working to stretch their nets before the dawn. But in a quarter of an hour of such halfsilent communion much good or much hurt may come to a pair of young hearts all open for the writing of the Great Adventure.
When Duncan appeared in the door with his pipe and called to Sallie, they started like children out of sleep.
"Come in and sing me my song, Sallie," he requested.
She laughed a soft little protest, but rose at once.
"It sounds better from a distance, the greater the distance the better," she said, putting out her hand to stop Texas when he would have gone with her. "He never wants but that one song—his song, he always calls it. I'll come back when the agony is over."
Presently the prelude to the sweet old melody came to Texas where he waited beneath the cottonwood, his heart almost over at the window, it seemed to him, straining lest he lose one chord. The words of the song came softly:
Thy gentle voice my spirit can cheer;
Thou art the star that mildly beaming
Shone on my path when all was dark and drear."
Texas stood up, as if he were in church. He closed his eyes and listened, and it seemed that tears were burning behind the lids, and that all the tender recollections of his life were coming back to him. Her voice was so soft, so clear in the rising notes, so appealing in the tender tribute of the heart disinherited of its love. He felt that a lonely man must have written that song, and that only a pure woman could make the rest of the indifferent world understand how deep his sincerity had been, how sweetly pathetic his constancy.
He did not know whether he breathed at all until she came to the end, and Malcolm Duncan clapped his great hands, and praised her in his great voice. But when she returned to him in the shadow of the cottonwood Texas took her hands and held them a moment in the grateful expression for which his heart could find no words.
"I'd travel many a day to hear you sing that song again, Miss McCoy," he said, his act of taking her hands so sincerely a gallant, and at once grateful, expression of his emotions that a girl more prudish than Sallie McCoy could not have taken offense. She was fine enough to feel the unusual beauty of his compliment, and thanked him for it, with no pretense of concealing her pleasure.
Texas went to make his bed in the haymow with the sound of dove's notes in his ears. When he should have been asleep, repairing himself against to-morrow's work, he lay speculating on what had passed that night, marveling over the additions one day can put to the long sum of a man's experiences. For above all the experiences of his life thus far, this meeting and knowing Sallie McCoy was by far the most marvelous and beautiful.
It was a refreshing interlude in the adventures of violence which had been his lot in that strange country, and it was too rare, no doubt, to come into his days again. In the morning, very likely, Dee Winch would come for him, and he would go away to ride the border trails.
That was not a situation that could last long, nor one in which he should care to continue. In a month or two, perhaps, he would be following the wavering trail of his fortunes into some other place, and Sallie McCoy would be behind him, among the dear things of this world which his hand never could hope to reach. She was not for a footless man like him, and there was nothing on the horizon to promise the speedy mending of his condition. He must ride on, and forget, or, if not quite forget, think of returning only in dreams.
He put his hand on the weapon that had been her father's, feeling a new comradeship for it. Why had she kissed it with such deep emotion, and given it into his hand with such high pride? Surely not because of anything that it had done for him. The fact that it had saved his life could be nothing to her. She had caressed it for the sake of its old association. What might have been a bond between them under happier circumstances could only be a dear memento now, for a man of honor could not think of a maiden when he did not even own the horse that he rode.