"It looks like it"s all off between you and Alta now."
"Broke off, short up to the handle. Serves a feller right for bein" a fool. I might "a" knowed when she wanted me to shave my mustache off she didn"t have no more heart in her than a fish."
"That was askin" a lot of a man, sure as the world."
"No man can look two ways at once without somebody puttin" something down his back, Duke."
"Referrin" to the lady in Wyoming. Sure."
"She was white. She says: "Mr. Wilson, I"ll always think of you as a gentleman." Them was her last words, Duke."
They were walking their horses past the house, which was dark, careful not to wake Vesta. But their care went for nothing; she was not in bed.
Around the turn of the long porch they saw her standing in the moonlight, looking across the river into the lonely night. It seemed as if she stood in communion with distant places, to which she sent her longing out of a bondage that she could not flee.
"She looks lonesome," Taterleg said. "Well, I ain"t a-goin" to go and pet and console her. I"m done takin" chances."
Lambert understood as never before how melancholy that life must be for her. She turned as they pa.s.sed, her face clear in the bright moonlight.
Taterleg swept off his hat with the grand air that took him so far with the ladies, Lambert saluting with less extravagance.
Vesta waved her hand in acknowledgment, turning again to her watching over the vast, empty land, as if she waited the coming of somebody who would quicken her life with the cheer that it wanted so sadly that calm summer night.
Lambert felt an unusual restlessness that night--no mood over him for his bed. It seemed, in truth, that a man would be wasting valuable hours of life by locking his senses up in sleep. He put his horse away, sated with the comedy of Taterleg"s adventure, and not caring to pursue it further. To get away from the discussion of it that he knew Taterleg would keep going as long as there was an ear open to hear him, he walked to the near-by hilltop to view the land under this translating spell.
This was the hilltop from which he had ridden down to interfere between Vesta and Nick Hargus. With that adventure he had opened his account of trouble in the Bad Lands, an account that was growing day by day, the final balancing of which he could not foresee.
From where he stood, the house was dark and lonely as an abandoned habitation. It seemed, indeed, that bright and full of youthful light as Vesta Philbrook was, she was only one warm candle in the gloom of this great and melancholy monument of her father"s misspent hopes. Before she could warm it into life and cheerfulness, it would encroach upon her with its chilling gloom, like an insidious cold drift of sand, smothering her beauty, burying her quick heart away from the world for which it longed, for evermore.
It would need the noise of little feet across those broad, empty, lonesome porches to wake the old house; the shouting and laughter and gleam of merry eyes that childhood brings into this world"s gloom, to drive away the shadows that draped it like a mist. Perhaps Vesta stood there tonight sending her soul out in a call to someone for whom she longed, these comfortable, natural, womanly hopes in her own good heart.
He sighed, wishing her well of such hope if she had it, and forgot her in a moment as his eyes picked up a light far across the hills. Now it twinkled brightly, now it wavered and died, as if its beam was all too weak to hold to the continued effort of projecting itself so far. That must be the Kerr ranch; no other habitation lay in that direction.
Perhaps in the light of that lamp somebody was sitting, bending a dark head in pensive tenderness with a thought of him.
He stood with his pleasant fancy, his dream around him like a cloak. All the trouble that was in the world for him that hour was near the earth, like the precipitation of settling waters. Over it he gazed, superior to its ugly murk, careless of whether it might rise to befoul the clear current of his hopes, or sink and settle to obscure his dreams no more.
There was a sound of falling shale on the slope, following the disturbance of a quick foot. Vesta was coming. Unseen and unheard through the insulation of his thoughts, she had approached within ten rods of him before he saw her, the moonlight on her fair face, glorious in her uncovered hair.
CHAPTER XX
BUSINESS, AND MORE
"You stand out like an Indian water monument up here," she said reprovingly, as she came scrambling up, taking the hand that he hastened forward to offer and boost her over the last sharp face of crumbling shale.
"I expect Hargus could pick me off from below there anywhere, but I didn"t think of that," he said.
"It wouldn"t be above him," seriously, discounting the light way in which he spoke of it; "he"s done things just as cowardly, and so have others you"ve met."
"I haven"t got much opinion of the valor of men who hunt in packs, Vesta. Some of them might be skulking around, glad to take a shot at us.
Don"t you think we"d better go down?"
"We can sit over there and be off the sky-line. It"s always the safe thing to do around here."
She indicated a point where an inequality in the hill would be above their heads sitting, and there they composed themselves--the sheltering swell of hilltop at their backs.
"It"s not a very complimentary reflection on a civilized community that one has to take such a precaution, but it"s necessary, Duke."
"It"s enough to make you want to leave it, Vesta. It"s bad enough to have to dodge danger in a city, but out here, with all this lonesomeness around you, it"s worse."
"Do you feel it lonesome here?" She asked it with a curious soft slowness, a speculative detachment, as if she only half thought of what she said.
"I"m never lonesome where I can see the sun rise and set. There"s a lot of company in cattle, more than in any amount of people you don"t know."
"I find it the same way, Duke. I never was so lonesome as when I was away from here at school."
"Everybody feels that way about home, I guess. But I thought maybe you"d like it better away among people like yourself."
"No. If it wasn"t for this endless straining and watching, quarreling and contending, I wouldn"t change this for any place in the world. On nights like this, when it whispers in a thousand inaudible voices, and beckons and holds one close, I feel that I never can go away. There"s a call in it that is so subtle and tender, so full of sympathy, that I answer it with tears."
"I wish things could be cleared up so you could live here in peace and enjoy it, but I don"t know how it"s going to come out. It looks to me like I"ve made it worse."
"It was wrong of me to draw you into it, Duke; I should have let you go your way."
"There"s no regrets on my side, Vesta. I guess it was planned for me to come this far and stop."
"They"ll never rest till they"ve drawn you into a quarrel that will give them an excuse for killing you, Duke. They"re doubly sure to do it since you got away from them that night. I shouldn"t have stopped you; I should have let you go on that day."
"I had to stop somewhere, Vesta," he laughed. "Anyway, I"ve found here what I started out to find. This was the end of my road."
"What you started to find, Duke?"
"A man-sized job, I guess." He laughed again, but with a colorless artificiality, sweating over the habit of solitude that leads a man into thinking aloud.
"You"ve found it, all right, Duke, and you"re filling it. That"s some satisfaction to you, I know. But it"s a man-using job, a life-wasting job," she said sadly.
"I"ve only got myself to blame for anything that"s happened to me here, Vesta. It"s not the fault of the job."
"Well, if you"ll stay with me till I sell the cattle, Duke, I"ll think of you as the next best friend I ever had."
"I"ve got no intention of leaving you, Vesta."
"Thank you, Duke."
Lambert sat turning over in his mind something that he wanted to say to her, but which he could not yet shape to his tongue. She was looking in the direction of the light that he had been watching, a gleam of which showed faintly now and then, as if between moving boughs.
"I don"t like the notion of your leaving this country whipped, Vesta,"
he said, coming to it at last.