"Yep! That light flooded out its golden rays on the reprehensible person of C. Wilbur Todd," she crisply announced. "And like they say in the stories, little remains to be told.
"I let out a kind of strangled yell, and Wilbur beat it right across my new lawn, and I beat it downstairs. But that girl was like a sleepwalker--not to be talked to, I mean, like you could talk to persons.
""Aunty," she says in creepy tones, "I have brought myself to the ultimate surrender. I know the chains are about me, already I feel the shackles, but I glory in them." She kind of gasped and shivered in horrible delight. "I"ve kissed the cross at last," she mutters.
"I was so weak I dropped into a chair and I just looked at her. At first I couldn"t speak, then I saw it was no good speaking. She was free, white, and twenty-one. So I never let on. I"ve had to take a jolt or two in my time. I"ve learned how. But finally I did manage to ask how about Chet Timmins.
""I wronged dear Chester," she says. "I admit it freely. He has a heart of gold and a nature in a thousand. But, of course, there could never be anything between him and a nature like mine; our egos function on different planes," she says. "Dear Chester came to see it, too. It"s only in the last week we"ve come to understand each other. It was really that wonderful song that brought us to our mutual knowledge. It helped us to understand our mutual depths better than all the ages of eternity could have achieved." On she goes with this mutual stuff, till you"d have thought she was reading a composition or something. "And dear Chester is so radiant in his own new-found happiness," she says. "What!"
I yells, for this was indeed some jolt.
""He has come into his own," she says. "They have eloped to Spokane, though I promised to observe secrecy until the train had gone. A very worthy creature I gather from what Chester tells me, a Miss Macgillicuddy--"
""Not the manicure party?" I yells again.
""I believe she has been a wage-earner," says Nettie. "And dear Chester is so grateful about that song. It was her favourite song, too, and it seemed to bring them together, just as it opened my own soul to Wilbur.
He says she sings the song very charmingly herself, and he thought it preferable that they be wed in Spokane before his father objected. And oh, aunty, I do see how blind I was to my destiny, and how kind you were to me in my blindness--you who had led the fuller life as I shall lead it at Wilbur"s side."
""You beat it to your room," I orders her, very savage and disorganized.
For I had stood about all the jolts in one day that G.o.d had meant me to. And so they was married, Chester and his bride attending the ceremony and Oscar Teetz" five-piece orchestra playing the--" She broke off, with a suddenly blazing glance at the disk, and seized it from the table rather purposefully. With a hand firmly at both edges she stared inscrutably at it a long moment.
"I hate to break the darned thing," she said musingly at last. "I guess I"ll just lock it up. Maybe some time I"ll be feeling the need to hear it again. I know I can still be had by it if all the circ.u.mstances is right."
Still she stared at the thing curiously.
"Gee! It was hot getting them calves out to-day, and old Safety First moaning about all over the place how he"s being stuck with "em, till more than once I come near forgetting I was a lady--and, oh, yes"--she brightened--"I was going to tell you. After it was all over, Wilbur, the gallant young tone poet, comes gushing up to me and says, "Now, aunty, always when you are in town you must drop round and break bread with us." Aunty, mind you, right off the reel. "Well," I says, "if I drop round to break any bread your wife bakes I"ll be sure to bring a hammer." I couldn"t help it. He"ll make a home for the girl all right, but he does something sinful to my nerves every time he opens his face.
And then coming back here, where I looked for G.o.d"s peace and quiet, and being made to hear that darned song every time I turned round!
"I give orders plain enough, but say, it"s like a brush fire--you never know when you got it stamped out."
From the kitchen came the sound of a dropped armful of stove wood. Hard upon this, the unctuous whining tenor of Jimmie Time:
Oh-h-h mem-o-reez thu-hat blu-hess and bu-hurn!
"You, Jimmie Time!" It is a voice meant for Greek tragedy and a theatre open to the heavens. I could feel the terror of the aged va.s.sal.
"Yes, ma"am!" The tone crawled abasingly. "I forgot myself."
I was glad, and I dare say he had the wit to be, that he had not to face the menace of her glare.
III
THE REAL PERUVIAN DOUGHNUTS
The affairs of Arrowhead Ranch are administered by its owner, Mrs.
Lysander John Pettengill, through a score or so of hired experts. As a trout-fishing guest of the castle I found the retainers of this excellent feudalism interesting enough and generally explicable. But standing out among them, both as a spectacle and by reason of his peculiar activities, is a shrunken little man whom I would hear addressed as Jimmie Time. He alone piqued as well as interested. There was a tang to all the surmises he prompted in me.
I have said he is a man; but wait! The years have had him, have scoured and rasped and withered him; yet his face is curiously but the face of a boy, his eyes but the fresh, inquiring, hurt eyes of a boy who has been misused for years threescore. Time has basely done all but age him. So much for the wastrel as Nature has left him. But Art has furthered the piquant values of him as a spectacle.
In dress, speech, and demeanour Jimmie seems to be of the West, Western--of the old, bad West of informal vendetta, when a man"s increase of years might lie squarely on his quickness in the "draw"; when he went abundantly armed by day and slept lightly at night--trigger fingers instinctively crooked. Of course such days have very definitely pa.s.sed; wherefore the engaging puzzle of certain survivals in Jimmie Time--for I found him still a two-gun man. He wore them rather consciously sagging from his lean hips--almost pompously, it seemed. Nor did he appear properly unconscious of his remaining attire--of the broad-brimmed hat, its band of rattlesnake skin; of the fringed buckskin shirt, opening gallantly across his pinched throat; of his corduroy trousers, fitting bedraggled; of his beautiful beaded moccasins.
He was perfect in detail--and yet he at once struck me as being too acutely aware of himself. Could this suspicion ensue, I wondered, from the circ.u.mstance that the light duties he discharged in and about the Arrowhead Ranch house were of a semidomestic character; from a marked incongruity in the sight of him, full panoplied for homicide, bearing armfuls of wood to the house; or, with his wicked hat pulled desperately over a scowling brow, and still with his flaunt of weapons, engaging a sinkful of soiled dishes in the kitchen under the eyes of a mere unarmed Chinaman who sat by and smoked an easy cigarette at him, scornful of firearms?
There were times, to be sure, when Jimmie"s behaviour was in nice accord with his dreadful appearance--as when I chanced to observe him late the second afternoon of my arrival. Solitary in front of the bunk house, he rapidly drew and snapped his side arms at an imaginary foe some paces in front of him. They would be simultaneously withdrawn from their holsters, fired from the hip and replaced, the performer snarling viciously the while. The weapons were unloaded, but I inferred that the foe crumpled each time.
Then the old man varied the drama, vastly increasing the advantage of the foe and the peril of his own emergency by turning a careless back on the scene. The carelessness was only seeming. Swiftly he wheeled, and even as he did so twin volleys came from the hip. It was spirited--the weapons seemed to smoke; the smile of the marksman was evil and masterly. Beyond all question the foe had crumpled again, despite his tremendous advantage of approach.
I drew gently near before the arms were again holstered and permitted the full exposure of my admiration for this readiness of retort under difficulties. The puissant one looked up at me with suspicion, hostile yet embarra.s.sed. I stood admiring ingenuously, stubborn in my fascination. Slowly I won him. The coldness in his bright little eyes warmed to awkward but friendly apology.
"A gun fighter lets hisself git stiff," he winningly began; "then, first thing he knows, some fine day--crack! Like that! All his own fault, too, "cause he ain"t kep" in trim." He jauntily twirled one of the heavy revolvers on a forefinger. "Not me, though, pard! Keep m"self up and comin", you bet! Ketch me not ready to fan the old forty-four! I guess not! Some has thought they could. Oh, yes; plenty has thought they could. Crack! Like that!" He wheeled, this time fatally intercepting the foe as he treacherously crept round a corner of the bunk house. "Buryin"
ground for you, mister! That"s all--bury-in" ground!"
The desperado replaced one of the weapons and patted the other with grisly affection. In the excess of my admiration I made bold to reach for it. He relinquished it to me with a mother"s yearning. And all too legible in the polished b.u.t.t of the thing were notches! Nine sinister notches I counted--not fresh notches, but emphatic, eloquent, chilling.
I thrust the b.l.o.o.d.y record back on its gladdened owner.
"Never think it to look at me?" said he as our eyes hung above that grim bit of bookkeeping.
"Never!" I warmly admitted.
"Me--I always been one of them quiet, mild-mannered ones that you wouldn"t think b.u.t.ter would melt in their mouth--jest up to a certain point. Lots of "em fooled that way about me--jest up to a certain point, mind you--then, crack! Buryin" ground--that"s all! Never go huntin"
trouble--understand? But when it"s put on me--say!"
He lovingly replaced the weapon--with its mortuary statistics--doffed the broad-brimmed hat with its snake-skin garniture, and placed a forefinger athwart an area of his shining scalp which is said by a certain pseudoscience to shield several of man"s more spiritual attributes. The finger traced an ancient but still evil looking scar.
"One creased me there," he confessed--"a depity marshal--that time they had a reward out for me, dead or alive."
I was for details.
"What did you do?"
Jimmie Time stayed laconic.
"Left him there--that"s all!"
It was arid, yet somehow informing. It conveyed to me that a marshal had been cleverly put to needing a new deputy.
"Burying ground?" I guessed.
"That"s all!" He laughed venomously--a short, dry, restrained laugh.
"They give me a nickname," said he. "They called me Little Sure Shot. No wonder they did! Ho! I should think they would of called me something like that." He lifted his voice. "Hey! Boogles!"
I had been conscious of a stooping figure in the adjacent vegetable garden. It now became erect, a figure of no distinction--short, rounded, decked in carelessly worn garments of no elegance. It slouched inquiringly toward us between rows of sprouted corn. Then I saw that the head surmounting it was a n.o.ble head. It was uncovered, burnished to a half circle of grayish fringe; but it was shaped in the grand manner and well borne, and the full face of it was beautified by features of a very Roman perfection. It was the face of a judge of the Supreme Court or the face of an ideal senator. His large grave eyes bathed us in a friendly regard; his full lips of an orator parted with leisurely and promising unction. I awaited courtly phrases, richly rounded periods.
"A regular h.e.l.l-cat--what he is!"
Thus vocalized the able lips. Jimmie Time glowed modestly.