"Maybe I"d better go," the boy offered. "You"ll want to go to bed."
But Van Alen held him. "I always smoke first," he said, and, wrapped in his dressing-gown, he flung himself into a chair on the opposite side of the fireplace.
And after a time he brought the conversation around to Mazie Wetherell.
He found the boy rather sure of his success with her.
"All women are alike," he said; "you"ve just got to keep after them long enough."
To Van Alen the idea of this hulking youngster as a suitor for such a woman seemed preposterous. He was not fit to touch the hem of her garment. He was unmannerly, uneducated; he was not of her cla.s.s--and even as he a.n.a.lyzed, the boy stood up, perfect in his strong young manhood.
"I"ve never had much trouble making women like me," he said; "and I ain"t goin" to give up, just because she thinks she"s better than the rest round about here."
He went away, and Van Alen stared long into the fire, until the flames left a heart of opal among the ashes.
He had not been unsuccessful with women himself. Many of them had liked him, and might have loved him if he had cared to make them. But until he met Mazie Wetherell he had not cared.
Desperately he wished for some trial of courage where he might be matched against Otto Brand. He grew melodramatic in his imaginings, and saw himself at a fire, fighting the flames to reach Mazie, while Otto Brand shrank back. He stood in the path of runaway horses, and Otto showed the white feather. He nursed her through the plague, and Otto fled fearfully from the disease.
And then having reached the end of impossibilities, he stood up and shook himself.
"I"m a fool," he said to the flames, shortly, and went to bed, to lie awake, wondering whether Mazie Wetherell had reached that chapter of his book where he had written of love, deeply, reverently, with a foreknowledge of what it might mean to him some day. It was that chapter which had a.s.sured the success of his novel. Would it move her, as it had moved him when he reread it? That was what love ought to be--a thing fine, tender, touching the stars! That was what love might be to him, to Mazie Wetherell, what it could never be to Otto Brand.
At breakfast the next morning he found Mrs. Brand worrying about her waitress.
"I guess she couldn"t get back, and I"ve got a big day"s work."
"I"ll go and look her up," Van Alen offered; but he found that he was not to go alone, for Otto was waiting for him at the gate.
"I ain"t got nothin" else to do," the boy said; "everything is held up by the rain."
It was when they came to the little stream that Van Alen had forded the night before that they saw Mazie Wetherell.
"I can"t get across," she called from the other side.
The bridge, which had been covered when Van Alen pa.s.sed, was now washed away, and the foaming brown waters overflowed the banks.
"I"ll carry you over," Otto called, and straightway he waded through the stream, and the water came above his high boots to his hips.
He lifted her in his strong arms and brought her back, with her bright hair fluttering against his lips, and Van Alen, raging impotently, stood and watched him.
It seemed to him that Otto"s air was almost insultingly triumphant as he set the girl on her feet and smiled down at her. And as she smiled back, Van Alen turned on his heel and left them.
Presently he heard her running after him lightly over the sodden ground.
And when she reached his side she said: "Your book was wonderful."
"But he carried you over the stream."
Her eyes flashed a question, then blazed. "There, you"ve come back to it," she said. "What makes you?"
"Because I wanted to carry you myself."
"Silly," she said; "any man could carry me across the stream--but only you could write that chapter in the middle of the book."
"You liked it?" he cried, radiantly.
"Like it?" she asked. "I read it once, and then I read it again--on my knees."
Her voice seemed to drop away breathless. Behind them Otto Brand tramped, whistling; but he might have been a tree, or the sky, or the distant hills, for all the thought they took of him.
"I wanted to beg your pardon," the girl went on, "for what I said the other day--it is a great thing to write a book like that--greater than fighting a battle or saving a life, for it saves people"s ideals; perhaps in that way it saves their souls."
"Then I may sleep in the canopy bed?" His voice was calm, but inwardly he was much shaken by her emotion.
Her eyes, as she turned to him, had in them the dawn of that for which he had hoped.
"Why not?" she said, quickly. "You are greater than your grandfather--you are--" She stopped and laughed a little, and, in this moment of her surrender, her beauty shone like a star.
"Oh, little great man," she said, tremulously, "your head touches the skies!"
SANDWICH JANE
I
"No man," said O-liver Lee, "should earn more than fifteen dollars a week. After that he gets--soft."
"Soft nothing!"
O-liver sat on a box in front of the post-office. He was lean and young and without a hat. His bare head was one of the things that made him unique. The other men within doors and without wore hats--broad hats that shielded them from the California sun; or, as in the case of Atwood Jones, who came from the city, a Panama of an up-to-the-minute model.
But O-liver"s blond mane waved in every pa.s.sing breeze. It was only when he rode forth on his mysterious journeys that he crowned himself with a Chinese straw helmet.
Because he wore no hat his skin was tanned. He had blue eyes that twinkled and, as I have said, a blond mane.
"Fifteen dollars a week," he reaffirmed, "is enough."
Fifteen dollars was all that O-liver earned. He was secretary to an incipient oil king. As the oil king"s monarchy was largely on paper he found it hard at times to compa.s.s even the fifteen dollars that went to his secretary.
The other men scorned O-liver"s point of view and told him so. They were a rather prosperous bunch, all except Tommy Drew, who dealt in a dilettante fashion in insurance, and who sat at O-liver"s feet and worshiped him.
It was Sat.u.r.day and some of the men had drifted in from the surrounding ranches; others from the cities, from the mountains, from the valleys, from the desert, from the sea. Tinkersfield had a.s.sumed a sudden importance as an oil town. All of the men had business connected in some way with Tinkersfield. And all of them earned more than fifteen dollars a week.
Therefore they disputed O-liver"s statement. "If you had a wife--" said one.