THE PAPER A YEAR OLD
Sang hurried out for a broom. Senor Johnson sat where he was, his heavy, square brows knit. Suddenly he stooped, seized one of the newspapers, drew near the lamp, and began to read.
It was a Kansas City paper and, by a strange coincidence, was dated exactly a year before. The sheet Senor Johnson happened to pick up was one usually pa.s.sed over by the average newspaper reader. It contained only columns of little two- and three-line advertis.e.m.e.nts cla.s.sified as Help Wanted, Situations Wanted, Lost and Found, and Personal. The latter items Senor Johnson commenced to read while awaiting Sang and the broom.
The notices were five in number. The first three were of the mysterious newspaper-correspondence type, in which Birdie beseeches Jack to meet her at the fountain; the fourth advertised a clairvoyant.
Over the fifth Senor Johnson paused long. It reads
"WANTED.-By an intelligent and refined lady of pleasing appearance, correspondence with a gentleman of means. Object matrimony."
Just then Sang returned with the broom and began noisily to sweep together the debris. The rustling of papers aroused Senor Johnson from his reverie. At once he exploded.
"Get out of here, you debased Mongolian," he shouted; "can"t you see I"m reading?"
Sang fled, sorely puzzled, for the Senor was calm and unexcited and aloof in his everyday habit.
Soon Jed Parker, tall, wiry, hawk-nosed, deliberate, came into the room and flung his broad hat and spurs into the corner. Then he proceeded to light his pipe and threw the burned match on the floor.
"Been over to look at the Grant Pa.s.s range," he announced cheerfully.
"She"s no good. Drier than cork legs. Th" country wouldn"t support three horned toads."
"Jed," quoth the Senor solemnly, "I wisht you"d hang up your hat like I have. It don"t look good there on the floor."
"Why, sure," agreed Jed, with an astonished stare.
Sang brought in supper and slung it on the red and white squares of oilcloth. Then he moved the lamp and retired.
Senor Johnson gazed with distaste into his cup.
"This coffee would float a wedge," he commented sourly.
"She"s no puling infant," agreed the cheerful Jed.
"And this!" went on the Senor, picking up what purported to be plum duff: "Bog down a few currants in dough and call her pudding!"
He ate in silence, then pushed back his chair and went to the window, gazing through its grimy panes at the mountains, ethereal in their evening saffron.
"Blamed c.h.i.n.k," he growled; "why don"t he wash these windows?"
Jed laid down his busy knife and idle fork to gaze on his chief with amazement. Buck Johnson, the austere, the aloof, the grimly taciturn, the dangerous, to be thus complaining like a querulous woman!
"Senor," said he, "you"re off your feed."
Senor Johnson strode savagely to the table and sat down with a bang.
"I"m sick of it," he growled; "this thing will kill me off. I might as well go be a buck nun and be done with it."
With one round-arm sweep he cleared aside the dishes.
"Give me that pen and paper behind you," he requested.
For an hour he wrote and destroyed. The floor became littered with torn papers. Then he enveloped a meagre result. Parker had watched him in silence.
The Senor looked up to catch his speculative eye. His own eye twinkled a little, but the twinkle was determined and sinister, with only an alloy of humour.
"Senor," ventured Parker slowly, "this event sure knocks me h.e.l.l-west and crooked. If the loco you have culled hasn"t paralysed your speaking parts, would you mind telling me what in the name of heaven, h.e.l.l, and high-water is up?"
"I am going to get married," announced the Senor calmly.
"What!" shouted Parker; "who to?"
"To a lady," replied the Senor, "an intelligent and refined lady--of pleasing appearance."
CHAPTER FOUR
DREAMS
Although the paper was a year old, Senor Johnson in due time received an answer from Kansas. A correspondence ensued. Senor Johnson enshrined above the big fireplace the photograph of a woman. Before this he used to stand for hours at a time slowly constructing in his mind what he had hitherto lacked--an ideal of woman and of home. This ideal he used sometimes to express to himself and to the ironical Jed.
"It must sure be nice to have a little woman waitin" for you when you come in off"n the desert."
Or: "Now, a woman would have them windows just blooming with flowers and white curtains and such truck."
Or: "I bet that Sang would get a wiggle on him with his little old cleaning duds if he had a woman ahold of his jerk line."
Slowly he reconstructed his life, the life of the ranch, in terms of this hypothesised feminine influence. Then matters came to an understanding, Senor Johnson had sent his own portrait. Estrella Sands wrote back that she adored big black beards, but she was afraid of him, he had such a fascinating bad eye: no woman could resist him. Senor Johnson at once took things for granted, sent on to Kansas a preposterous sum of "expense" money and a railroad ticket, and raided Goodrich"s store at Willets, a hundred miles away, for all manner of gaudy carpets, silverware, fancy lamps, works of art, pianos, linen, and gimcracks for the adornment of the ranch house. Furthermore, he offered wages more than equal to a hundred miles of desert to a young Irish girl, named Susie O"Toole, to come out as housekeeper, decorator, boss of Sang and another Chinaman, and companion to Mrs. Johnson when she should arrive.
Furthermore, he laid off from the range work Brent Palmer, the most skilful man with horses, and set him to "gentling" a beautiful little sorrel. A sidesaddle had arrived from El Paso. It was "centre fire,"
which is to say it had but the single horsehair cinch, broad, ta.s.selled, very genteel in its suggestion of pleasure use only. Brent could be seen at all times of day, cantering here and there on the sorrel, a blanket tied around his waist to simulate the long riding skirt. He carried also a sulky and evil gleam in his eye, warning against undue levity.
Jed Parker watched these various proceedings sardonically.
Once, the baby light of innocence blue in his eye, he inquired if he would be required to dress for dinner.
"If so," he went on, "I"ll have my man brush up my low-necked clothes."
But Senor Johnson refused to be baited.
"Go on, Jed," said he; "you know you ain"t got clothes enough to dust a fiddle."
The Senor was happy these days. He showed it by an unwonted joviality of spirit, by a slight but evident unbending of his Spanish dignity.
No longer did the splendour of the desert fill him with a vague yearning and uneasiness. He looked upon it confidently, noting its various phases with care, rejoicing in each new development of colour and light, of form and illusion, storing them away in his memory so that their recurrence should find him prepared to recognise and explain them. For soon he would have someone by his side with whom to appreciate them. In that sharing he could see the reason for them, the reason for their strange bitter-sweet effects on the human soul.
One evening he leaned on the corral fence, looking toward the Dragoons.
The sun had set behind them. Gigantic they loomed against the western light. From their summits, like an aureola, radiated the splendour of the dust-moted air, this evening a deep umber. A faint reflection of it fell across the desert, glorifying the reaches of its nothingness.