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

floated down stream with him as far as I dared. But just as the current got too swift I struck for shore. Oh, we made a scene, all right, but nobody knew me there, so the family name is safe and you can rest in peace. I called a taxi and when he tried to follow me in I slapped him and kicked him. Kicked him, mother. Dreadfully undignified, wasn't it?… And that's what you want me to marry, in place of a man!"

Mrs. Hardy was chattering with mortification and excitement. Her plans had miscarried. Irene had misbehaved. Irene was a difficult, headstrong child. It was useless to argue with her in her present mood. It was useless to argue with her in any mood. No doubt Carlton had been impetuous. Nevertheless, he stood high in his set, and his father was something of a power in the financial world. As the wife of such a man Irene might have a career before her—a career from which at least some of the glory would reflect upon the silvering head of the mother of Mrs. Carlton. And now Irene, by her folly and her ungovernable temper, had spoiled all the carefully laid plans. Mrs. Hardy was a very badly used woman.

"Go to your room," she said, at length. "You are in no condition to talk to-night. I must say it is a shame that you can't go out for an evening without drinking too much and making a scene.… In a public place, too.… What will Mr. Carlton think of you?"

"If he remembers all I told him about himself he'll have enough to think of," the girl blazed back. "You know—what I have told you—and still Mister Carlton stands as high in your sight as ever. I am the one to blame. Very well. I've tried your choice, and I've tried my own. Now I am in a position to judge. There will be nothing to talk about in the morning. Mention Carlton's name to me again and I will give the whole incident to the papers. With photographs. And names. Fancy the feature heading, 'Society girl, intoxicated, kicks escort out of taxi.' Good night."

But other matters were to demand the attention of mother and daughter in the morning. While the scene was occurring in Mrs. Hardy's bed-room her husband, clad in white, toiled in the operating room to save the life of a fellow being. It was an emergency operation, performed by artificial light, and without adequate assistance. There was a slip of an instrument, but the surgeon toiled on; he could not, at that juncture, pause; the life of the patient was at stake. When the operation was finished he found his injury deeper than he supposed, and Irene was summoned from her heavy sleep that morning to attend his bedside. He talked to her as a philosopher; said his life's work was done, and he was just as glad to go in the harness; the estate should yield something, and there was his life insurance—a third would be for her. And when Mrs. Hardy was not at his side he found opportunity to whisper, "And if you really love that boy out west, marry him."

The sudden bereavement wrought a reconciliation between Mrs. Hardy and her daughter. Mrs. Hardy took her loss very much to heart. While Irene grieved for her father, Mrs. Hardy grieved for herself. It was awful to be left alone like this. There was something in her demeanour that suggested that Andrew had been rather unkind in departing as he did. And when the lawyers found that instead of a hundred thousand dollars the estate would yield a bare third of that sum she spoke openly of her husband's improvidence. He had enjoyed a handsome income, upon which his family had lived in luxury. That it was unequal to the strain of providing for them in that fashion and at the same time accumulating a reserve for such an eventuality as had occurred was a matter which his wife could scarcely overlook.

About this time it came to the notice of Mrs. Hardy that when the late Mr. Deware had departed this life Mrs. Deware, with her two daughters, had gone on a trip to England to dull the poignancy of their bereavement. The Dewares moved in the best circles, Mr. Deware having amassed a considerable fortune in the brewing business. It was obvious that whatever Mrs. Deware might do under such circumstances would be correct. Upon arrival at this conclusion Mrs. Hardy lost no time in buying two tickets for London.

Her health, however, had suffered a severe shock, for beneath her ostentation she felt as deep a regard for her late husband as was possible in one who measured everything in life by various social formulae. On the ocean voyage she contracted a cough, which the fogs of London did little to dispel, and February found her again on the Atlantic, with her mind occupied by more personal affairs than a seat at the captain's table. The voyage was a particularly unhappy one, and the widow's first concern upon reaching home was to consult a specialist who had enjoyed a close professional acquaintanceship with Dr. Hardy. The specialist gave her a careful, meditative, and solemn examination.

"Your condition is serious," he told her, "but not alarming. You must have a drier climate, and, preferably, a higher altitude. Fortunately, your heart is good, or I should have to keep you at sea level; that is, I should have had to sacrifice your lungs for your heart." The doctor spoke as though the sacrifice would have been all his, after the manner of a specialist. "As it is, I am convinced that the conditions your health demands are to be found in…" He named the former cow-town from which Irene's fateful automobile journey had had its start, and the young woman, who was present with her mother, felt herself go suddenly pale with the thought of a great prospect.

"Oh, I could never live there," Mrs. Hardy protested. "It is so crude. Cow punchers, you know, and all that sort of thing."

The specialist smiled. "You will probably not find it so crude, although I daresay some of its customs may jar on you," he remarked, dryly. "Still, I would recommend you to take your best gowns along. And it is not a case of not being able to live there. It is a case of not being able to live here. If you take my advice you should die of old age, so far, at least, as your present ailment is concerned. If you don't"—and he dropped his voice to just the correct note of gravity, which pleased Mrs. Hardy very much—"if you don't, I can't promise you a year."

Confronted with such an alternative, the good lady had no option but to suppress her repugnance toward cow punchers. Irene had expected opposition born of a more subtle reason, but it soon became evident that so deeply was her mother concerned with her own affairs that she had quite failed to associate the proposed change with any possibility of a re-opening of Irene's affair with the young rancher. It was years since they had discussed him, and the probability was that, although the incident remained in the back of Mrs. Hardy's memory, even his name had been forgotten.

Arrangements for the journey were made with the despatch which characterized Mrs. Hardy. She was a stickler for precedent; any departure from the beaten paths was in her decalogue the unpardonable sin, but when she had arrived at a decision she was no trifler. She accepted the situation with the resignation which she deemed to be correct under such circumstances, but the boundless prairies were to her so much desolation and ugliness. It was apparent that dwellers in the little four-cornered houses of the plains must be sadly lacking in any sense of the artistic, and as Mrs. Hardy gazed from the car window she acquired a habit of making with her tongue a sound which, owing to the limitations of the alphabet, cannot be represented to the reader, but which Irene understood to be an expression of mingled surprise, pity, and contempt. Irene gathered that her mother did not approve of prairies. They were something new to her life, and it was greatly to be suspected that they were improper.

With very different emotions did the girl find herself speeding again toward the scene of the first great event of her conscious life. For her the boundlessness, the vastness, the immeasurable sweep of the eye, suggested an environment out of which should grow a manhood and womanhood that should weigh mightily in the scales of destiny of a great nation; a manhood and womanhood defiant of the things that are, eager for the adventure of life untrammeled by traditions. She had a mental vision of the type which such a land must produce; her mind ran to riots of daring as it fashioned a picture which should fairly symbolize this people.… The day was drawing to a close, and a prairie sunset glowed upon them in a flush of colouring that stirred her artist soul. A cloudless sky, transparent as an ocean of glass; fathomless, infinite, save when in the west inverted islands of gold and brass and ruddy copper floated in a sea that gently deepened from saffron to opal; and under that sky the yellow prairies; ever, forever, and ever.… Up from the East came the night, and large, bright stars stood out, and the click-clack of the car wheels came louder and louder, and mimic car lamps raced along against the darkness outside. And then the settlers' lights began to blink across the prairie, and Irene's eyes were wet with an emotion she could not define; but she knew her painting had missed something; it had been all outline and no soul, and the prairies in the night are all soul and no outline; all softness and vagueness and yearning unutterable.…

"How tiresome it is," said her mother. "Ask the porter to make up the berths."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Mrs. Hardy accepted the surroundings she found in the city that was to be her home with not a little incredulity. For some days she treated the city as a deep rascal which had disguised its true nature in order to deceive her. She smiled at the ease with which she saw through all disguises. One of these days the cloak of respectability would be thrown off, and the shouting and shooting of the cow punchers would proclaim the West as it really was.

Very slowly it dawned upon Mrs. Hardy that this respectable, thriving city, with its well dressed, properly mannered people, its public spirit, its aggressiveness, its churches and theatres and schools, its law and order—and its afternoon teas ("My dear, who would have thought it possible?" She half expected a cowboy to ride in and overthrow the china)—very slowly it dawned upon her that this, after all, was the real West; sincere, earnest; crude, perhaps; bare, certainly; the scars of its recent battle with the wilderness still fresh upon its person; lacking the finish that only time can give to a landscape or a civilization; but lacking also the mouldiness, the mustiness, the insufferable artificiality of older communities. And the atmosphere! Day after day brought its cloudless sky, the weather, for once, having failed to observe the rule of contraries; evening after evening flooded valley and hilltop with its deluge of golden glory; night after night a crisp temperature sent her reaching for comforters. Sleep? She felt that she had never slept before. Eat? Her appetite was insatiable; all day long she lived in a semi-intoxication born of an unaccustomed altitude. And, best of all, something had happened to her cough; she did not know just what or when, but presently she discovered it was gone. Even Mrs. Hardy, steeped for sixty years in a life of precedent and rule