The tired blue circles beneath his eyes wore even more noticeable when he returned, to be ushered with much ceremony by Fat Joe to the head of the table.
It was an utterly irresponsible gathering that leaned over the red tablecloth that night--an oddly a.s.sorted group which, from the very first, Joe realized was not at all to Wickersham"s liking. Dexter Allison himself, fairly radiating good-will, sat at the foot of the table, with his son-in-law-to-be on one side and Barbara"s little maid, Cecile, on the other. And between Cecile and Barbara, who sat opposite Garry and Miriam, Fat Joe leaned both elbows upon the table edge and monopolized the conversation. The seating arrangement was Joe"s; it was his party. And the absolute inattention to detail, the large indifference to veracity which his discourse disclosed before that noisy supper was over, grew to be an astonishing thing. His nights of fancy left Steve aghast in more than one instance; they even forced a stiff smile to Wickersham"s lips, and that is saying much for Joe"s success as an entertainer, for in the bearing of those two men toward each other there had been evident from the first a chill antipathy which amounted, actually, to armed truce. And the color in Miriam"s cheeks, whenever his gaze strayed to that side of the table, helped Steve to forget, temporarily, much that he found not pleasant to recall at all.
For Miriam"s tongue was no less irresponsible than was Joe"s. Her mood was so mercurial that she drew, time and again, the eyes of all at the table. She chattered with an abandon that scandalized Barbara; broke in and interrupted every argument with hoydenish trivialities, in one breath, to appeal to Garry the next for refutation. And Garry, the light-tongued and quick-witted, sat almost dumb of lip before her happy garrulity. But his eyes never left her; they spoke his thought aloud.
The quick lift and droop of her eyelids, the brilliancy of her lips, made Miriam"s face a living thing of happiness--made Barbara"s silence seem even more profound. For the latter"s withdrawal from the hilarity, dominated half the time by her father"s booming ba.s.s, was nearly as complete as was that of Wickersham himself.
Just once, shortly before they withdrew for the night, Steve caught a gleam of mischief in the dark eyes she turned toward him. She rose the next moment and started slowly around the room, poking demurely into corners and closetted nooks. Every eye was following her when she finally found the thing for which she was searching. She drew a red felt, yellow-mottoed cushion from beneath the deer-hide covering a chair, and held it up so that all might read. "What Is Home Without a Father?" it ran, and when the joy that stormed through the room made it sure that the exhibition needed no interpreter, Fat Joe turned and hid his face. Miriam rose languidly and joined the other girl in an examination of his handiwork. Smooth face tinted by the firelight, copper hair almost dishevelled in its disarray, she was an exquisitely lovely thing. In her alto voice she expressed her opinion.
"It"s an entirely new st.i.tch to me, Bobs," she averred. "I don"t think I have ever before seen just this method employed." And she turned to Stephen O"Mara. "Do you suppose, Mr. O"Mara," she asked, "that I might learn it from the one who did this work for you? It"s rather"--and her head tilted to one side--"it"s rather a pretty thing!"
Again they succ.u.mbed to mirth, and then Joe rose, bristling, and went forward much as a gamec.o.c.k might step out to do battle. He took the cushion from the hands of the girls, who no longer had strength enough even to hold it.
"If you are aiming to do any sewing around this camp," he stated, "you can start in sewing on b.u.t.tons. This kind of work is entirely too nerve-wearing for amateurs."
He carried the cushion across the room and placed it, not where it had been hidden by the deer-hide, but in colorful prominence against the back of the chair. Long after he had crossed with Steve and Garry to their tents he continued to explode with soft chuckles.
"I never did say," he defended himself, "that that sentiment was strictly appropriate. I always stated that it was the best I could.
And as for my technique--well, either of you guys try it some time!
You just take a needleful of that yellow worsted and start tracking across a couple of yards of red and pathless desert, and see where you come out. I know, because I"ve done it. I"m a pioneer. But if I ever tackle another job like that it"s going to be a crazy-quilt!"
And Joe considered, in spite of the din which answered him, that his challenge was ample.
CHAPTER XVIII
I"M TELLING YOU GOOD-BYE
It was fully an hour after Fat Joe and Garry had rolled themselves up in their blankets when Steve, who had elected to sit up for one last pipe even though his body was aching with fatigue, heard behind him the approach of her footsteps. Outside at the top of the rise some fifty yards in front of the tents, he had seated himself on a log, chin buried in one palm and eyes vacantly steady before him; but even before he turned--before he rose slowly to his feet--he knew who was coming, knew and realized that she should not have come. Wrapped in a long heavy coat, face half-hidden by the upturned collar, bare of head, Barbara came quietly down to where he waited. And without word of greeting on the part of either of them, they sat down together, facing the silvered bowl of the valley.
Time pa.s.sed before Barbara opened her lips for a long, quivering intake of breath.
"I never dreamed it could be so big," she murmured in awe. "And then to think that some day--within a few months in reality--engines will go screeching their signals across this very place. It doesn"t seem possible; it seems almost a shame to spoil it, too."
Her earnestness was so unconsciously wistful that Steve could not help but smile at it a little, even though he had been telling himself, since the moment of her coming, that he must not let himself dwell just then upon that wistfulness which, for many hours, had been most apparent to him.
"I"ve felt that way about it often," he answered, almost dully. "I like it better myself, as it is. It does appear to be a long way ahead, doesn"t it--that day of completion which you cover in the screech of the whistles? Only to-day, when we were scrambling about down there in the alders, it took nearly all the imagination I possessed to see two streaks of steel where there is nothing but thicket now. But as for the bigness of it"--he laughed deprecatingly--"it isn"t so very big, you know. It"s just a--a mean sort of proposition."
Barbara leaned forward, delicate chin resting upon interlocked fingers.
She was not quite certain whether she had caught a thread of weariness in those words.
"To me," she said, "to me it is colossal! Why, I thought the work at Morrison seemed complicated and tangled enough, but there--there isn"t even a beginning or an ending here. There"s nothing but woods and water."
She pointed out across the valley toward a mound-like outline yellow under the moon; pointed into the north and asked another question.
"Is that part of the embankment?" she wanted to know. "Is that the direction in which Mr. Wickersham"s timber lies?"
The man nodded.
"Just a few miles up through that notch," he told her. "That"s the end of the rail-bed which we have been building along the river-edge."
Her next words made him start and then try to cover that moment with a readjustment of his long body.
"I"m going up there to-morrow. Mr. Wickersham has asked me to ride with him, in the morning." She waited a moment or two. "That--that"s why I came out here to-night. We"ll be going back to town the next day or two, and I wanted to have a chance to bid you good-bye, before I left Morrison for the winter."
He had known that she would not be likely to remain in the hills much longer. He had realized that each day which he checked off, always hopeful that the next might open the way for him to see her again, was steadily bringing nearer the date of her departure. But he had not let himself think that it would come so soon. There was no doubt this time about the heaviness of his voice.
"I see," he said. "I see."
There came another long silence. Rising out of it, Barbara"s voice sounded very, very little.
"I"ve never known a sky in which the stars were so thick.
They"re--they"re like a field of b.u.t.tercups. And have you ever seen such an irrepressibly happy creature as Miriam was to-night. She was radiant--positively shameless! Did you know that Garry knows----"
"I told him, myself," said Steve, simply.
The girl faced around in her surprise.
"You?"
"Most certainly! Why not?" His voice was not quite so unenthusiastic now. "It"s one of the few unmistakable opportunities I"ve ever had to make two people permanently as happy as Miriam was to-night. I"d feel guilty all my life if I didn"t help all I could, knowing how happy I am going to be, myself!"
Thus did he work around, quite without abruptness, to a renewal of that discussion which she had thought to close, weeks before.
"Are you trying to infer that I am to be a part of that happiness?" she asked none too promisingly.
"You ought to know. I said "all my life.""
And there, suddenly, Barbara laughed.
"I suppose now they"ll marry and live happily ever after!" she exclaimed with an attempt at airiness.
"Most certainly," a.s.serted Steve, although her mirth puzzled him. "Why is it funny to you?"
"It isn"t, but--yes it is too, now that it"s no longer a thing one need worry about. That"s always the trouble with emotions which are too intense. They"re either very sad to contemplate, or very, very absurd.
And they will persist in exchanging faces, to the confusion of the on-lookers. Garry was so dangerously in love with Mary Graves, you see!"
"He was in love with an idea," the man contradicted flatly. "He was in love with just that. And it is not safe for any man to live alone with an abstract conception of anything. He"s bound, sooner or later, to lose his grip on tangible things if he does. He"s likely to start destroying property to further the cause of labor, or liable to turn to shooting men who were born to jobs I"m certain some of them never wanted--kings and that sort, I mean--figuring on solving the social problems of men and women who must solve that problem themselves.
Perfection is a fine thing to antic.i.p.ate; expectations of it are dangerous. And women aren"t made that way."
"No?" her voice slid coolly upward.
"No," he told her, and smiled with that serenity she had come to know so well. "Not even you, though I suppose I"d about annihilate anyone else if he ever hinted at it." He chose to be didactic in tone. "No, you"re not perfect; you"ve too much intelligence for that. Why, right now you"re fighting with your brain against the dictates of your heart, and if you were above mortal error in judgment you"d know that you are wasting your time."
The girl forgot entirely that she, too, had promised herself that their leave-taking should not cross the border of personalities. And with that lazy joy of her on his tongue she might not have been quite so quick to hold that she could love no man, had she stopped to give it thought. Her advance to the skirmish was most spirited.
"Your opinion has the merit of sincerity," she said, "although, looking back upon a--a certain day, I can"t help but wonder whether you haven"t been guilty of mouthing pretty nothings for my poor ears."