He looked at her curiously, waiting for her to round it out with a personal citation. But she said no more.
"That"s why you"re here, hoping like the rest of us to draw Number One?"
"Any number up to six hundred will do for me," she laughed, sitting erect once more and seeming to shake her bitter mood off as she spoke.
"And what will you do with it? Sell out as soon as the law allows?"
"I"ll live on it," dreamily, as if giving words to an old vision which she had warmed in her heart. "I"ll stay there and work through the hope of summer and the bleakness of winter, and make a home. I"ll smooth the wild land and plant trees and green meadows, and roses by the door, and we"ll stay there and it will be--_home_!"
"Yes," he nodded, understanding the feeling better than she knew. "You and mother; you want it just that way."
"How did you know it was mother?" she asked, turning to him with a quick, appreciative little start.
"You"re the kind of a woman who has a mother," he answered. "Mothers leave their stamp on women like you."
"Thank you," said she.
"I"ve often wanted to run away from it that way, too," he owned, "for failure made a coward of me more than once in those hard years. There"s a prospect of independence and peace in the picture you make with those few swift strokes. But I don"t see any--you haven"t put any--any--_man_ in it. Isn"t there one somewhere?"
"No," simply and frankly; "there isn"t any man anywhere. He doesn"t belong in the picture, so why should I draw him in?"
Dr. Slavens sighed.
"Yes; I"ve wanted to run away from it more than once."
"That"s because you"ve lost your nerve," she charged. "You shouldn"t want to run away from it--a big, broad man like you--and you must not run away. You must stay and fight--and fight--and _fight_! Why, you talk as if you were seventy instead of a youth of thirty-five!"
"Don"t rub it in so hard on that failure and nerve business," he begged, ashamed of his hasty confession.
"Well, _you_ mustn"t talk of running away then. There are no ghosts after you, are there?"
The moonlight was sifting through the loose strands of her gleaming hair as she sat there bareheaded at his side, and the strength of his life reached out to her, and the deep yearning of his lonely soul. He knew that he wanted that woman out of all the world full of women whom he had seen and known--and pa.s.sed. He knew that he wanted her with such strong need that from that day none other could come across the mirror of his heart and dim her image out of it.
Simply money would not win a woman like her; no slope-headed son of a ham factory could come along and carry her off without any recommendation but his cash. She had lived through that kind of lure, and she was there on his own level because she wanted to work out her clean life in her own clean way. The thought warmed him. Here was a girl, he reflected, with a piece of steel in her backbone; a girl that would take the world"s lashings like a white elm in a storm, to spring resiliently back to stately poise after the turmoil had pa.s.sed. Trouble would not break her; sorrow would only make her fineness finer. There was a girl to stand up beside a man!
He had not thought of it before--perhaps he had been too melancholy and bitter over his failure to take by storm the community where he had tried to make his start--but he believed that he realized that moment what he had needed all along. If, amid the contempt and indifference of the successful, he"d had some incentive besides his own ambition to struggle for all this time, some splendid, strong-handed woman to stand up in his gloom like the G.o.ddess of Liberty offering an ultimate reward to the poor devils who have won their way to her feet across the bitter seas from hopeless lands, he might have stuck to it back there and won in the end.
"That"s what I"ve needed," said he aloud, rising abruptly.
She looked up at him quickly.
"I"ve needed somebody"s sympathy, somebody"s sarcasm, somebody"s soft hand--which could be correctional on occasion--and somebody"s heart-interest all along," he declared, standing before her dramatically and flinging out his hands in the strong feeling of his declaration.
"I"ve been lonely; I"ve been morose. I"ve needed a woman like you!"
Without sign of perturbation or offense, Agnes rose and laid her hand gently upon his arm.
"I think, Dr. Slavens," she suggested, "we"d better be going back to camp."
They walked the mile back to camp with few words between them. The blatant noises of Comanche grew as they drew nearer.
The dance was still in progress; the others had not returned to camp.
"Do you care to sit out here and wait for them?" he asked as they stopped before the tent.
"I think I"ll go to bed," she answered. "I"m tired."
"I"ll stand sentry," he offered.
She thanked him, and started to go in. At the door she paused, went back to him, and placed her hand in her soothing, placid way upon his arm again.
"You"ll fight out the good fight here," said she, "for this is a country that"s got breathing-room in it."
She looked up into his face a bit wistfully, he thought, as if there were more in her heart than she had spoken. "You"ll win here--I know you"ll win."
He reached out to put his arm about her, drawn by the same warm attraction that had pulled the words from him at the riverside. The action was that of a man reaching out to lean his weary weight upon some familiar object, and there was something of old habit in it, as if he had been doing it always.
But she did not stay. He folded only moonlight, in which there is little substance for a strong man, even in Wyoming. Dr. Slavens sighed as the tent-flap dropped behind her.
"Yes; that"s what I"ve needed all the time," said he.
He sat outside with his pipe, which never had seemed so sweet. But, for all of its solace, he was disturbed by the thought that perhaps he had made a blunder which had placed him in a false light with Miss Horton--only he thought of her as Agnes, just as if he had the right.
For there were only occasions on which Dr. Slavens admitted himself to be a fizzle in the big fireworks of the world. That was a charge which he sometimes laid to himself in mortification of spirit, or as a flagellant to spur him along the hard road. He had not meant to let it slip him aloud over there by the river, because he didn"t believe it at all--at least not in that high-hoping hour.
So he sat there in the moonlight before the tent, the noises of the town swelling louder and louder as the night grew older, his big frame doubled into the stingy lap of a canvas chair, his knees almost as high as his chin. But it was comfortable, and his tobacco was as pleasant to his senses as the distillation of youthful dreams.
He had not attained the automobile stage of prosperity and arrogance, certainly. But that was somewhere ahead; he should come to it in time.
Out of the smoke of his pipe that dreamy night he could see it. Perhaps he might be a little gray at the temples when he came to it, and a little lined at the mouth, but there would be more need of it then than now, because his legs would tire more easily.
But Agnes had taken that foolishly blurted statement for truth. So it was his job henceforward to prove to Agnes that he was not bankrupt in courage. And he meant to do it he vowed, even if he had to get a tent and hang out his shingle in Comanche. That would take nerve unquestionably, for there were five doctors in the place already, none of them making enough to buy stamps to write back home for money.
Already, he said, he was out of the rut of his despondency; already the rust was knocked off his back, and the eagerness to crowd up to the starting-line was on him as fresh again as on the day when he had walked away from all compet.i.tors in the examination for a license before the state board.
At midnight the others came back from the dance and broke the trend of his smoke-born dreams. Midnight was the hour when respectable Comanche put out its lights and went to bed. Not to sleep in every case, perhaps, for the din was at crescendo pitch by then; but, at any event, to deprive the iniquitous of the moral support of looking on their debaucheries and sins.
Dr. Slavens was in no mood for his sagging canvas cot, for his new enthusiasm was bounding through him as if he had been given an intravenous injection of nitroglycerin. There was Wyoming before him, all white and virginal and fresh, a big place for a big deed. Certainly, said Dr. Slavens. Just as if made to order for his needs.
So he would look around a bit before turning in, with his high-stepping humor over him, and that spot on his arm, where her hand had lain, still aglow with her mysterious fire.
CHAPTER IV
THE FLAT-GAME MAN
The noises of the tented town swelled in picturesque chorus as Dr.
Slavens walked toward them, rising and trailing off into the night until they wore themselves out in the echoless plain.