Steve"s answer was long in coming.
"Miss--Allison?" he wanted to know.
"--and her maid," Joe corrected promptly. "Her maid, Cecile. She"s comin", too, and that tall, red-headed one. I don"t remember her name?"
As studiously as he had done a moment before, Garry again avoided Steve"s eyes.
"Miriam Burrell," the latter supplied the omission. "And that"s fine, isn"t it? How long are they going to stay, Joe?"
But Joe had finished with trifling.
"Where are we going to put them?" he insisted doggedly.
"Why, we have a couple of shelter tents somewhere in the duffle, haven"t we? We might pitch those if----" he looked about, ruminatively--"if you think this is too squalid."
Joe turned appealingly to Garry, only to meet eyes flaring with deviltry.
"If you think that I"m going to give up my quarters for a troup of curious sight-seers, you"re mistaken. If that"s what you turned toward me for, don"t allow yourself to dwell upon it another minute. I"m a laboring man and I have to have decent rest at nights. . . . Do you suppose Cecile would really mind a tent?"
And then Joe"s face went red.
"Now ain"t you the pair of rough jokers?" he whined. "Ain"t you, though? But what"s it going to be--this room or Garry"s? The way I look at it we"re elected to camp out ourselves. We"re hardened sons of the wilderness, you know. That"s what they always call us in print.
But how am I going to get this place cleaned up?"
For another hour Joe argued it, and at last settled upon the store-house building as the likeliest for sleeping quarters for the feminine portion of the visitors.
"We have to eat in here, anyhow," he argued, "so I guess it"s the best arrangement we can hit on. Honey won"t be here much to meals, either.
That"ll be one nice thing about it. He"ll be going north directly.
And now--now I guess I"ll go out and have a look at the pantry, even if it does make me feel sort of faint every time I think of the grub we"ve got on hand. Canned beans and boiled potatoes, and ham and bacon, to round out a banquet. Why couldn"t a couple of mighty hunters like you bring home more than one little haunch of venison? Bacon and beans!
Steve, you sure have been living mighty low-down on this job!"
He went out with a great show of haste, but returned almost immediately, forgot the urgency of matters in general in finding Garry idly shuffling a deck of cards. Throughout the evening Joe had exhibited an unwillingness to meet the third man"s glances directly, but it was impossible for him to remain oblivious to the clicking of the chips. He balanced first on one foot and then on the other for a moment; then diffidently drew up a chair.
"Just a friendly hand or two, I suppose," he suggested, when the other made no move to begin. "Low limit and wide open, eh?"
Garry still toyed with the cards.
"I don"t suppose you"ve ever forgotten the first game in which we indulged, have you, Joe?" he asked at length. Joe was not comfortable.
"Scarcely," he admitted. "Scarcely."
"Nor the--stakes?" pursued Garry.
"I--I seem to recall "em, faintly."
Garry"s peal of amus.e.m.e.nt was as rollicking as a boy"s.
"So do I," he exclaimed. "And if I remember rightly you stated on that occasion that cash was no consideration with you. Does that still hold good?"
It was the first good look Joe had had at the other"s face. The change he found in it seemed to perplex him more than a little.
"I take it that it does." Garry did not wait for his reply. "And now--what do you say to that same full bottle against a--a ninety-nine year blanket restriction, with me at the wrong end of the odds?"
Joe slitted his eyes.
"When they tuck a ninety-nine year clause into a franchise they mean it"s forever, don"t they?" he wanted to know.
"Forever, to all intents and purposes!" said Garry.
Joe"s chest sank and rose in a long, long breath.
"It"s no word to trifle with," he cautioned at last. "If you lose it"ll be a considerable drouth."
"Cut!" invited Garry, and they started to play.
That other night Garry"s stack of chips had lasted far longer than they did on this second occasion. A half hour later, when he rose to go to bed, his ninety-nine year promise of abstinence was piled symmetrically before Fat Joe. But his good-night was gay. For a time after his departure Joe eyed Steve, sidewise.
"Hum-m-m," he cleared his throat. "Hum-m-m! And I was expectin" you to turn up any hour of the last twenty-four with a request that I come and help bring home the remains. You must be quite a silver-tongued exhorter, aren"t you, Steve?"
Stephen O"Mara was silent over the paper which Joe had handed him earlier in the evening, and the lack of any offer on his part to go into details did not trouble his questioner. Fat Joe sat and bobbed his head over what would never cease to be a miracle in his eyes.
"And he"ll stick this time," he vented his wonder aloud. "He"s surely going to stick!" Then he smiled widely. "And I reckon you"ll have to admit that I handled the small part that come my way with ease and dispatch, when I tell you that he didn"t catch so much as one lonesome pair, all the time I was dealing. I"m ashamed of myself. I haven"t seen such a mean, crooked game of stud dealt since I come East!"
Garry was very quiet the next morning when he and Steve went back to their work; before noon came his uneasiness had become very apparent to the man whom he was a.s.sisting. But neither his silence nor his nervousness any longer worried Steve. Instead, the latter let himself smile over both those outward evidences of inward panic, whenever his thoughts were on Garry at all. For the latter"s diffidence as the day aged became a flushed and warm-checked thing, until at four in the afternoon Steve could no longer withhold the suggestion for which wordlessly, Garry was asking.
"Joe was more than half right," he remarked, one eye to his level, "in spite of the fact that we refused to take him seriously. We can"t let those people come in and find everything too hopelessly uncomfortable, so perhaps you"d better run ahead now, Garry, and see what he has accomplished. I don"t want to leave this spot myself until I have some figures upon which I know I can rely. But you might run ahead, if you will. I"ll be along later."
It was couched in the form of a request, but Garry"s face flamed. He went, albeit a bit reluctantly. And he stopped more than a few times in his climb from the edge of the timber to the door of Steve"s shack.
But once he had pa.s.sed over the threshold to find that unrecognizably trim room empty, his face grew heavy with disappointment; he was on the point of going back outside to scan the bowl of the valley when a tall, short-skirted figure, enveloped in a voluminous ap.r.o.n which Fat Joe in a moment of mistaken zeal had once provided for the cook-boy, flashed through the pa.s.sage-way from the kitchen annex and barely missed catapulting into his arms. Miriam Burrell, pink-faced from the heat of the roaring wood-stove, and smudged with flour on forehead and cheek, lifted her ap.r.o.n and swung it like a flag of victory.
"I"ve found it," she sang triumphantly. "I"ve found out what was the matter! I"d just forgotten the baking-powder, that was all! Next time----"
Then she recognized him. With outstretched hands still clutching the edge of her ap.r.o.n, she stood, almond eyes widening, and scanned him from head to foot. Even Steve, who had been with him every moment, had noticed the hour to hour change that had been taking place in Garry"s appearance. To the girl who had not seen him for weeks, that flushed, self-conscious man was a different Garry than she had ever known before. Hungrily her gaze went from open shirt to caked boots, from steady hands to clear eyes which made her own eyes shy. And then Miriam Burrell, cool and poised Miriam, did what many another maid in a checkered ap.r.o.n has done in similar situations. She lifted that stiff gingham to hide her unutterable happiness. But before he could speak she found her voice; nor was it very steady, at that.
"I thought you were that party of idlers come back," she hesitated.
"How--how tanned you are becoming, Garry! I thought they--oh, I can"t tell you how glad I am to see you so--so well. I"m making biscuits for supper--that is, I"ve just been practising until now. It seemed as though I"d forgotten something that was necessary to the recipe, because they were flatter after they were cooked than when I put them in the oven. And most marvelously heavy, too! But it was just the baking-powder, that was all. Do you--do you think you"d care to help?"
[Ill.u.s.tration: "Oh, I can"t tell you how glad I am to see you--so well."]
Steve was very late in returning to camp that night. Throughout the rest of the afternoon he set himself a pace, knee-deep in slushy mud, which Garry could not have maintained. But when he paused there in the dark where he always stopped for a moment and a tumult of voices swept down to meet him, he forgot his fatigue. He had lifted his battered hat from his head, striving to distinguish a single note in all that treble of girlish laughter when, framed suddenly against the background of light within, he saw a slender silhouette take up its station in the doorframe. Barbara was still peering out across the darkness when he came up to her.
"We"ve been waiting dinner for you for almost an hour," she rebuked him, in place of what might have been a commonplace greeting. "We"ve been waiting in the face of Mr. Morgan"s insistence that it was practically useless. He has been telling us that when a man here in the hills fails to turn up for a meal you never bother to look for him; you know that the worst has happened."
Over her head the first eyes that Steve encountered that evening were those of Archibald Wickersham. While shaking hands with the girl, he bowed in grave welcome to the tall figure in leather puttees and whipcord riding-breeches, and Wickersham, from the far side of the room, bowed back in equal gravity. Then Caleb Hunter grasped Steve"s elbow and spun him around toward the light and peered at him accusingly. Barbara had not noticed until then how tired Steve looked.
"Before the others get to talking," said Caleb, "before the tide grows too strong for my weak voice, young man, I want to deliver a message.
Miss Sarah wants it explicitly understood that unless you stop in to say h.e.l.lo on your next trip down, she herself will take the trail up here. And lest that ultimatum sound too little threatening, I might add that when Miss Sarah takes the trail she never travels with less than six trunks."
Caleb clung so tightly to his arm that it brought a tinge of color to Steve"s cheeks. It was minutes before he could get away to change his wet clothes, and in that minute or two he could not help but contrast, grimly, his own mud-spattered attire with that of Archie Wickersham.