The Cow Puncher - Robert J. C. Stead (best reads .TXT) 📗

"Oh, nothing," he answered with a laugh, pulling himself together. "This September weather always gets me. I guess I have a streak of Indian; it comes of being brought up on the ranges. And in September, after the first frosts have touched the foliage—" He paused, as though it was not necessary to say more.

"Yes, I know," she said quietly. Then, with a queer little note of confidence, "Don't apologize for it, Dave."

"Apologize?" and his form straightened. "Certainly not… One doesn't apologize for nature, does he?  … But it comes back in September." He smiled, and she thought the subconscious in him was calling up the smell of fire in dry grass, or perhaps even the rumble of buffalo over the hills. And he knew he smiled because he had so completely misled her.

Presently she took out a pocket volume. "Will you read?" she said. Strangely enough he opened it at the lines:

"Oh, you will never hide your soul from me;
I've seen the jewels flash, and know 'tis there
Muffle it as you will."

…It was dusk when they started homeward.

Forsyth was waiting for her. Dave scented stormy weather and excused himself early.

"What does this mean?" demanded Forsyth, angrily, as soon as Dave had gone. "Do you think I'll take second place to that—that coal heaver?"

She straightened, and her bright eyes were charged with a blaze which would have astonished Dave, who had known her only in her milder moods. But she tried to speak without passion.

"That is not to his discredit," she said.

"Straight from the corrals into good society," Forsyth sneered.

Then she made no pretense of composure. "If you have nothing more to urge against Mr. Elden, perhaps you will go."

Forsyth took his hat. At the door he paused and turned, but she was already ostensibly interested in a magazine. He went out into the night.

The week was a busy one with Dave, and he had no opportunity to visit the Duncans. Friday Edith called him on the telephone. She asked an inconsequential question about something which had appeared in the paper, and from that the talk drifted on until it turned on the point of their expedition of the previous Sunday. Dave never could account quite clearly how it happened, but when he hung up the receiver he knew he had asked her to ride with him again on Sunday, and she had accepted. He had ridden with her before, of course, but he had never asked her before. He had been a sort of honoured employee, whose business it was to comply with her wishes. But this time she would ride at his request. He felt that a subtle change had come over their relationship.

He was at the Duncan house earlier than usual Sunday afternoon, but not too early for Edith. She was dressed for the occasion; she seemed more fetching than he had ever seen her. There was the blush of health—or was it altogether the blush of health?—on her cheeks, and a light in her eyes such as he had seen more than once on those last rides with Reenie Hardy. And across her saddle she threw a brown sweater.

She led the way over the path followed the Sunday before until again they sat by the rushing water. Dave had again been filled with a sense of Reenie Hardy, and his conversation was disjointed and uninteresting. She tried unsuccessfully to draw him out with questions about himself; then took the more astute tack of speaking of her own past life. It had begun in an eastern city, ever so many years ago.

Chivalry could not allow that to pass. "Oh, not so very many," said Dave.

"How many?" she teased. "Guess."

He looked judicially on her bright face; it was a good face to look upon. Perhaps his eyes said as much.

"Nineteen," he hazarded.

"Oh, more than that."

"Twenty-one?"

"Oh, less than that." And their first confidence was established.

"Twenty," thought Dave to himself. "Reenie must be about twenty now."

"And I was five when—when Jack died," she went on. "Jack was my brother, you know. He was seven, and a great boy for his daddy. Most boys run to their mother with their hurts, but Jack was different. When father was at the office Jack would save up his little hurts until evening… Well, we were playing, and I stood on the car tracks, signalling the motorman, to make him ring his bell. On came the car, with the bell clanging, and the man in blue looking very cross. Jack must have thought I was waiting too long, for he suddenly rushed on the track to pull me off." She stopped, and sat looking at the rushing water.

"I heard him cry, 'Oh Daddy, Daddy,' above the screech of the brakes," she continued, in a dry voice.

"Sorrow is a strange thing," she went on, after a pause. "I don't pretend to understand, but it seems to have its place in life. I fancy this would soon be a pretty degenerate world if there were no sorrow in it. I have been told that sometimes fruit trees refuse to bear until they have met with adversity. Then the gardener bores a hole in them, or something like that, and, behold, next season they bear. Sounds silly, but they say it's a fact. I guess it's natural law. Well—" She paused again, and when she spoke it was in a lower, more confidential note.

"I shouldn't tell you this, Dave. I shouldn't know it myself. But before that things hadn't been, well, just as good as they might in our home… They've been different since."

The shock of her words brought him upright. To him it seemed that Mr. and Mrs. Duncan were the ideal father and mother. It was impossible to associate them with a home where things "hadn't been just as good as they might." But her half confession left no room for remark.

"Mother told me," she went on, after a long silence, and without looking at him. "A few years ago, 'If some one had only told me, when I was your age,' she said."

"Why do you tell me this?" he suddenly demanded.

"Did you ever feel that you just had to tell someone?"

It was his turn to pause. "Yes," he confessed, at length.

"Then tell me."

So he led her down through the tragedy of his youth and the lonely rudderless course of his boyhood. She followed sympathetically to the day when Dr. Hardy and his daughter Irene became guests at the Elden ranch. And then her interest manifested something deeper than sympathy. But he had become engrossed in his narrative… The September day had drawn to a close, and the dusk was thick about them, ere he reached the end. But before the end he stopped. Should he tell her all? Why not? She had opened her life to him. So he told her of that last evening with Irene, and the compact under the trees and the moon. Her hand had fallen into his as they talked, but here he felt it slowly withdrawn. But he was fired with the flame of love which had sprung up in the breath of his reminiscence… And Edith was his friend and his chum.

"And you have been true?" she said, but her voice was distant and strained.

"Yes."

"And you are waiting for her?"

"Yes, I am waiting… It must be so." …

"It is cold," she said. "Let us go home."

Whatever the effect of this conversation had been upon Edith she concealed it carefully, and Dave counted it one of the fortunate events of his life. It had sealed to him a new friendship, a confidence to support him in days of stress. He had been working under the spur of his passion for Irene, but now this was to be supplemented by the friendship of Edith. That it was more than friendship on her part did not occur to him at all, but he knew she was interested in him, and he was doubly determined that he would justify her interest and confidence. He threw himself into the columns of The Call with greater vigour than ever.

But just at this time another incident occurred which was to turn the flood of his life into strange channels. Dave had been promoted to the distinction of a private office—a little six-by-six "box stall," as the sports editor described it—but none the less a distinction shared only with the managing editor and Bert Morrison, compiler of the woman's page. Her name was Roberta, but she was masculine to the tips, and everybody called her Bert. The remainder of the staff occupied a big, dingy room, with walls pasted with specimen headings, comic cartoons, and racy pictures, and floor carpeted deeply with exchanges. Dave, however, had established some sort of order in his den, and had installed at his own cost a spring lock to prevent depredations upon his paste pot or sudden raids upon his select file of time copy.

Into this sanctuary one afternoon in October came Conward. It was such an afternoon as to set every office-worker at war with the gods; the glories of the foothill October are known only in the foothill country, and Dave, married though he was to his work, felt the call of the sunshine and the open spaces. This was a time for fallen leaves and brown grass