"Is--ah--Mrs. Meilke in?" One could not accuse the young man of craning, but he certainly did try to get another glimpse of the person on the table and failed because of Ward.
"She"s down in the meadow," Billy Louise murmured.
"She"s down in the meadow," Ward repeated to the bespattered young man.
"You just go down past the stable and follow on down--" he waved a hand vaguely before he took up the broom again. "You"ll find her, all right," he added encouragingly.
"Oh, Ward! That must be Marthy"s nephew. What will he think?"
"Does it matter such a h-- a deuce of a lot what he thinks?" Ward went on with his interrupted scrubbing.
"His name is Charlie Fox, and he"s been to college and he worked in a bank," Billy Louise went on nervously. "He"s going to live here with Marthy and run the ranch. What must he have thought! To have you sweep all that dirty water on him--"
"Oh, not all!" Ward corrected cheerfully. "Quite a lot missed him."
Billy Louise giggled. "What does he look like, Ward? You stood squarely in the way, so I--"
"He looked," said Ward dispa.s.sionately, "like a pretty mad young man with nose, eyes, and a mouth, and a mole in front of his left ear."
"He was real polite," said Billy Louise reprovingly, "and his voice is nice."
"Yes? I mind-read a heap of cussing. The politeness was all on top."
Ward chuckled and swept more water outside. "I expect you saved me a licking that time, Miss William the Conqueror."
"Can you think of any more names to call me, besides my own, I wonder?"
Billy Louise leaned and inspected the floor like a chicken preparing to hop off its roost.
"Heaps more." The glow in Ward"s eyes was dangerous to their calm friendship. "Want to hear them?"
"No, I don"t. I want to get off this table before that college youth comes back to be shocked silly again. I want to see if he"s really--got a mole in front of his ear!"
"You know what inquisitiveness did to old lady Lot, don"t you?
However--" He lifted her in his arms and set her down outside the door. "There, Wilhemina; trot along and see the nice young man."
Billy Louise sat down on the wheelbarrow, remembered its latest service, and got up hastily. "I won"t go a step," she a.s.serted positively.
Ward had not wanted her to go. He gave her a smile and finished off his scrubbing with the mop, which he handled with quite surprising skill for a young man who seemed more at home in the saddle than anywhere else.
"I"m awfully glad he came, anyway." Billy Louise pulled down a budded lilac branch and sniffed at it. "I won"t have to stay all night, now.
I was going to."
"In that case, the young man is welcome as a gold mine. Here they come--he and Mrs. Martha. You"ll have to introduce me, Bill-the-Conk; I have never met the lady." Ward hastily returned the mop to its corner, rolled down his sleeves, and picked up his gloves. Then he stepped outside and waited beside Billy Louise, looking not in the least like a man who has just wiped a lot of dishes and scrubbed a floor.
The nephew, striding along behind Marthy and showing head and shoulders above her, seemed not to resent any little mischance, such as muddy water flirted upon him from a broom. He grinned reminiscently as he came up, shook hands with the two of them, and did not let his glance dwell too long or too often upon Billy Louise, nor too briefly upon Ward.
"You"ve got a splendid place here, Aunt Martha," he told the old woman appreciatively. "I"d no idea there was such a little beauty-spot down here. This is even more picturesque than that homey-looking ranch we pa.s.sed a few miles back, down in that little valley. I was hoping that was your ranch when I first saw it; and when I found it wasn"t, I came near stopping, anyway. I"m glad I resisted the temptation, now. This is worth coming a long way to see."
"I ain"t never had a chance to do all I wanted to with it," said Marthy, with the first hint of apology Billy Louise had ever heard from her. "I only had one pair of hands to work with--"
"We"ll fix that part. Don"t you worry a minute. You"re going to sit in a rocking-chair and give orders, from now on. And if I can"t make good here, I ought to be booted all the way up that spooky gorge.
Isn"t that right?" He turned to Warren with a certain air of apprais.e.m.e.nt behind the unmistakable cordiality of his voice.
"A man ought to make good here, all right," Ward agreed neutrally.
"It"s a fine place."
"It ain"t as fine as I"d like to see it," began Marthy depreciatingly.
"As you will see it, let"s say--if that doesn"t sound too conceited from a tenderfoot," supplemented the nephew, and laid his hand upon her shoulder with a gentle little pat. "Folks, I don"t want to seem too exuberantly sure of myself, but--" he waved a carefully-kept hand eloquently at the luxuriance around him, "--I"m all fussed up over this place, honest. I thought I was coming to a shack in the middle of the sage-brush; I was primed to buckle down and make good even in the desert. And b.u.mping into this sort of thing without warning has gone to my alleged brain a bit. What I don"t know about ranching would fill a library; but there"s this much, anyway. There won"t be any more ditch-digging for a certain game little lady in this Cove." He gave the shoulder another pat, and he smiled down at her in a way that made Billy Louise blink. And Marthy, who had probably never before been called a game little lady, came near breaking down and crying before them all.
When Ward went to the stable after Blue, half an hour later, Charlie Fox went with him. His manner when they were alone was different; not so exuberantly cheerful--more frank and practical.
"Honest, it floored me completely to see what that poor old woman has been up against down here," he told Warren, stuffing tobacco into a silver-rimmed, briar pipe while Ward saddled Blue. "I don"t know a h.e.l.l of a lot about this ranch game; but if that old lady can put it across, I guess I can wobble along somehow. Too bad the old man cashed in just now; but Aunt Martha as good as told me he wasn"t much force, so maybe I can play a lone hand here as easy as I could have done with him. Live near here?"
"Fifteen miles or so." Ward was not in his most expansive mood, chiefly for the reason that this man was a stranger, and of strangers he was inclined to fight shy.
"Oh, well--it might have been fifty. I know how you fellows measure distances out here. I"m likely to need a little coaching, now and then, if I live up to what I just now told the old lady."
"From all I know of her, you won"t need to go out of the Cove for advice."
"Well, that"s right, judging from the looks of things. A woman that can go up against a proposition like she did to-day and handle it alone, is no mental weakling; to say nothing of the way this ranch looks. All right, Warren; I"ll make out alone, I reckon."
Afterwards, when Ward thought it over, he remembered gratefully that Charlie Fox had refrained from attempting any discussion of Billy Louise or from asking any questions even remotely personal. He knew enough about men to appreciate the tactful silences of the stranger, and when Billy Louise, on the way home, predicted that the nephew was going to be a success, Ward did not feel like qualifying the verdict.
"He"s going to be a G.o.dsend to the old lady," he said. "He seems to have his sights raised to making things come easier for her from now on."
"Well, she certainly deserves it. For a college young man--the ordinary, smart young man who comes out here to astonish the natives--he"s almost human. I was so afraid that Marthy"d get him out here and then discover he was a perfect nuisance. So many men are."
CHAPTER VI
A MATTER OF TWELVE MONTHS OR SO
Out in the wide s.p.a.ces, where homes are but scattered oases in the general emptiness, life does not move uniformly, so far as it concerns incidents or acquaintanceships. A man or a ranch may experience complete isolation, and the unbroken monotony which sometimes accompanies it, for a month at a time. Summer work or winter storm may be the barrier temporarily raised, and life resolves itself into a succession of days and nights unbroken by outside influences. They leave their mark upon humans--these periods of isolation. For better, for worse, the man changes slowly with the months; he grows more bovine in his phlegmatic acceptance of his environment, or he becomes restless and fired with a surplus energy of ambition, or he falls to dreaming dreams; whatever angle he takes, he changes, imperceptibly perhaps, but inevitably.
Then the monotony is broken and sometimes with violence. Incident rushes in upon the heels of incident, and life becomes as tumultuous as the many moods of nature when it has a wide, open land for a playground.
That is why, perhaps, so much of western life is painted with broad strokes and raw colors. You are given the crowded action, the unleashing of emotions and temperaments that have smoldered long under the blanket of solitary living. You are shown an effect without being given the cause of that effect. You p.r.o.nounce the West wild, and you never think of the long winters that bred in silence and brooding solitude those storm-periods which seem so primitively savage; of the days wherein each nature is thrown upon its own resources, with nothing to feed upon but itself and its own personal interests. And so characters change, and one wonders why.
There was Billy Louise, with her hands and her mind full of the problems her father had died still trying to solve. She did not in the least realize that she was attempting anything out of the ordinary when she took a half-developed ranch in the middle of a land almost as wild as it had been when the Indians wandered over it unmolested, a few cattle and horses and a bundle of debts to make her head swim, and set herself the problem of increasing the number of cattle and eliminating the debts, and of wresting prosperity out of a condition of picturesquely haphazard poverty. She went about it with the pathetic confidence of youth and ignorance. She rode up and down the canyons and over the higher, gra.s.sier ridges, to watch the cattle on their summer range and keep them from straying. She went with John Pringle after posts and helped him fence certain fertile slopes and hollows for winter grazing. She drove the rickety old mower through the waving gra.s.s along the creek bottom and hummed little, contented tunes while she watched the gra.s.s sway and fall evenly when the sickle shuttled through. She put on her gymnasium bloomers and drove the hay wagon, and felt only a pleasurable thrill of excitement when John Pringle inadvertently pitched an indignant rattlesnake up to her with a forkful of hay. She killed the snake with her pitchfork and pinched off the rattles, proud of their size and number.
When she sold seven fat, three-year-old steers that fall and paid a note twice renewed, managing besides to buy the winter supply of "grub"
and a sewing-machine and a set of silver teaspoons for her mother, oh, but she was proud!
Ward rode down to the ranch that night, and Billy Louise showed him the note with its red stamp, oblong and imposing and slightly blurred on the "paid" side. Ward was almost as proud as she, if looks and tones went for anything, and he helped Billy Louise a good deal by telling her just how much she ought to pay for the yearlings old Johnson, over on Snake River, had for sale. Also he told her how much hay it would take to winter them--though she knew that already--and just what percentage of profit she might expect from a given number in a given period of time.
He spoke of his own work and plans, as well. He was going into cattle, also, as fast as possible, he said. In a few years the sheep would probably come in and crowd them out, but in the meantime there was money in cattle--and the more cattle, the more money. He was going to work for wages till the winter set in. He didn"t know when he would see Billy Louise, he said, but he would stop on his way back.