I do not know with which of the two estimates—Mr. Taylor's or the Virginian's—you agreed. Did you think that Miss Mary Stark Wood of Bennington, Vermont, was forty years of age? That would have been an error. At the time she wrote the letter to Mrs. Balaam, of which letter certain portions have been quoted in these pages, she was in her twenty-first year; or, to be more precise, she had been twenty some eight months previous.
Now, it is not usual for young ladies of twenty to contemplate a journey of nearly two thousand miles to a country where Indians and wild animals live unchained, unless they are to make such journey in company with a protector, or are going to a protector's arms at the other end. Nor is school teaching on Bear Creek a usual ambition for such young ladies.
But Miss Mary Stark Wood was not a usual young lady for two reasons.
First, there was her descent. Had she so wished, she could have belonged to any number of those patriotic societies of which our American ears have grown accustomed to hear so much. She could have been enrolled in the Boston Tea Party, the Ethan Allen Ticonderogas, the Green Mountain Daughters, the Saratoga Sacred Circle, and the Confederated Colonial Chatelaines. She traced direct descent from the historic lady whose name she bore, that Molly Stark who was not a widow after the battle where her lord, her Captain John, battled so bravely as to send his name thrilling down through the blood of generations of schoolboys. This ancestress was her chief claim to be a member of those shining societies which I have enumerated. But she had been willing to join none of them, although invitations to do so were by no means lacking. I cannot tell you her reason. Still, I can tell you this. When these societies were much spoken of in her presence, her very sprightly countenance became more sprightly, and she added her words of praise or respect to the general chorus. But when she received an invitation to join one of these bodies, her countenance, as she read the missive, would assume an expression which was known to her friends as “sticking her nose in the air.” I do not think that Molly's reason for refusing to join could have been a truly good one. I should add that her most precious possession—a treasure which accompanied her even if she went away for only one night's absence—was an heirloom, a little miniature portrait of the old Molly Stark, painted when that far-off dame must have been scarce more than twenty. And when each summer the young Molly went to Dunbarton, New Hampshire, to pay her established family visit to the last survivors of her connection who bore the name of Stark, no word that she heard in the Dunbarton houses pleased her so much as when a certain great-aunt would take her by the hand, and, after looking with fond intentness at her, pronounce: “My dear, you're getting more like the General's wife every year you live.”
“I suppose you mean my nose,” Molly would then reply.
“Nonsense, child. You have the family length of nose, and I've never heard that it has disgraced us.”
“But I don't think I'm tall enough for it.”
“There now, run to your room, and dress for tea. The Starks have always been punctual.”
And after this annual conversation, Molly would run to her room, and there in its privacy, even at the risk of falling below the punctuality of the Starks, she would consult two objects for quite a minute before she began to dress. These objects, as you have already correctly guessed, were the miniature of the General's wife and the looking glass.
So much for Miss Molly Stark Wood's descent.
The second reason why she was not a usual girl was her character. This character was the result of pride and family pluck battling with family hardship.
Just one year before she was to be presented to the world—not the great metropolitan world, but a world that would have made her welcome and done her homage at its little dances and little dinners in Troy and Rutland and Burlington—fortune had turned her back upon the Woods. Their possessions had never been great ones; but they had sufficed. From generation to generation the family had gone to school like gentlefolk, dressed like gentlefolk, used the speech and ways of gentlefolk, and as gentlefolk lived and died. And now the mills failed.
Instead of thinking about her first evening dress, Molly found pupils to whom she could give music lessons. She found handkerchiefs that she could embroider with initials. And she found fruit that she could make into preserves. That machine called the typewriter was then in existence, but the day of women typewriters had as yet scarcely begun to dawn, else I think Molly would have preferred this occupation to the handkerchiefs and the preserves.
There were people in Bennington who “wondered how Miss Wood could go about from house to house teaching the piano, and she a lady.” There always have been such people, I suppose, because the world must always have a rubbish heap. But we need not dwell upon them further than to mention one other remark of theirs regarding Molly. They all with one voice declared that Sam Bannett was good enough for anybody who did fancy embroidery at five cents a letter.
“I dare say he had a great-grandmother quite as good as hers,” remarked Mrs. Flynt, the wife of the Baptist minister.
“That's entirely possible,” returned the Episcopal rector of Hoosic, “only we don't happen to know who she was.” The rector was a friend of Molly's. After this little observation, Mrs. Flynt said no more, but continued her purchases in the store where she and the rector had happened to find themselves together. Later she stated to a friend that she had always thought the Episcopal Church a snobbish one, and now she knew it.
So public opinion went on being indignant over Molly's conduct. She could stoop to work for money, and yet she pretended to hold herself above the most rising young man in Hoosic Falls, and all just because there was a difference in their grandmothers!
Was this the reason at the bottom of it? The very bottom? I cannot be certain, because I have never been a girl myself. Perhaps she thought that work is not a stooping, and that marriage may be. Perhaps—But all I really know is that Molly Wood continued cheerfully to embroider the handkerchiefs, make the preserves, teach the pupils—and firmly to reject Sam Bannett.
Thus it went on until she was twenty. There certain members of her family began to tell her how rich Sam was going to be—was, indeed, already. It was at this time that she wrote Mrs. Balaam her doubts and her desires as to migrating to Bear Creek. It was at this time also that her face grew a little paler, and her friends thought that she was overworked, and Mrs. Flynt feared she was losing her looks. It was at this time, too, that she grew very intimate with that great-aunt over at Dunbarton, and from her received much comfort and strengthening.
“Never!” said the old lady, “especially if you can't love him.”
“I do like him,” said Molly; “and he is very kind.”
“Never!” said the old lady again. “When I die, you'll have something—and that will not be long now.”
Molly flung her arms around her aunt, and stopped her words with a kiss. And then one winter afternoon, two years later, came the last straw.
The front door of the old house had shut. Out of it had stepped the persistent suitor. Mrs. Flynt watched him drive away in his smart sleigh.
“That girl is a fool!” she said furiously; and she came away from her bedroom window where she had posted herself for observation.
Inside the old house a door had also shut. This was the door of Molly's own room. And there she sat, in floods of tears. For she could not bear to hurt a man who loved her with all the power of love that was in him.
It was about twilight when her door opened, and an elderly lady came softly in.
“My dear,” she ventured, “and you were not able—”
“Oh, mother!” cried the girl, “have you come to say that too?”
The next day Miss Wood had become very hard. In three weeks she had accepted the position on Bear Creek. In two months she started, heart-heavy, but with a spirit craving the unknown.
On a Monday noon a small company of horsemen strung out along the trail from Sunk Creek to gather cattle over their allotted sweep of range. Spring was backward, and they, as they rode galloping and gathering upon the cold week's work, cursed cheerily and occasionally sang. The Virginian was grave in bearing and of infrequent speech; but he kept a song going—a matter of some seventy-nine verses. Seventy-eight were quite unprintable, and rejoiced his brother cow-punchers monstrously. They, knowing him to be a singular man, forebore ever to press him, and awaited his own humor, lest he should weary of the lyric; and when after a day of silence apparently saturnine, he would lift his gentle voice and begin:
“If you go to monkey with my Looloo girl,
I'll tell you what I'll do:
I'll cyarve your heart with my razor, AND
I'll shoot you with my pistol, too—”
then they would stridently take up each last line, and keep it going three, four, ten times, and kick holes in the ground to the swing of it.
By the levels of Bear Creek that reach like inlets among the promontories of the lonely hills, they came upon the schoolhouse, roofed and ready for the first native Wyoming crop. It symbolized the dawn of a neighborhood, and it brought a change into the wilderness air. The feel of it struck cold upon the free spirits of the cow-punchers, and they told each other that, what with women and children and wire fences, this country would not long be a country for men. They stopped for a meal at an old comrade's. They looked over his gate, and there he was pattering among garden furrows.
“Pickin' nosegays?” inquired the Virginian and the old comrade asked if they could not recognize potatoes except in the dish. But he grinned sheepishly at them, too, because they knew that he had not always lived in a garden. Then he took them into his house, where they saw an object crawling on the floor with a handful of sulphur matches. He began to remove the matches, but stopped in alarm at the vociferous result; and his wife looked in from the kitchen to caution him about humoring little Christopher.
When she beheld the matches she was aghast but when she saw her baby grow quiet in the arms of the Virginian, she smiled at that cow-puncher and returned to her kitchen.
Then the Virginian slowly spoke again: “How many little strangers have yu' got, James?”
“Only two.”
“My! Ain't it most three years since yu' maried? Yu' mustn't let time creep ahaid o' yu', James.”
The father once more grinned at his guests, who themselves turned sheepish and polite; for Mrs. Westfall came in, brisk and hearty, and set the meat upon the table. After that, it was she who talked. The guests ate scrupulously, muttering, “Yes, ma'am,” and “No, ma'am,” in their plates, while their hostess told them of increasing families upon Bear Creek, and the expected school-teacher, and little Alfred's early teething, and how it was time for all of them to become husbands like James. The bachelors of the saddle listened, always diffident, but eating heartily to the end; and soon after they rode away in a thoughtful clump. The wives of Bear Creek were few as yet, and the homes scattered; the schoolhouse was only a sprig on the vast face of a world of elk and bear and uncertain Indians; but that night, when the earth near the fire was littered with the cow-punchers' beds, the Virginian was heard drawling to himself: “Alfred and Christopher. Oh, sugar!”
They found pleasure in the delicately chosen shade of this oath. He also recited to them a new verse about how he took his Looloo girl to the schoolhouse for to learn her A B C; and as it was quite original and unprintable, the camp laughed and swore joyfully, and rolled in its blankets to sleep under the stars.
Upon a Monday noon likewise (for things will happen so) some tearful people in petticoats waved handkerchiefs at a train that was just leaving Bennington, Vermont. A girl's face smiled back at them once, and withdrew quickly, for they must not see the smile die away.
She had with her a little money, a few clothes, and in her mind a rigid determination neither to be a burden to her mother nor to give in to that mother's desires. Absence alone would enable her to carry out this determination. Beyond these things, she possessed not much except spelling-books, a colonial miniature, and that craving for the unknown which has been mentioned. If the ancestors that we carry shut up inside us take turns in dictating to us our actions and our state of mind, undoubtedly Grandmother Stark was empress of Molly's spirit upon this Monday.
At Hoosic Junction, which came soon, she passed the up-train bound back to her home, and seeing the engineer and the conductor,—faces that she knew well,—her courage nearly failed her, and she shut her eyes against this glimpse of the familiar things that she was leaving. To keep herself steady she gripped tightly a little bunch of flowers in her hand.
But something caused her eyes to open; and there before her stood Sam Bannett, asking if he might accompany her so far as Rotterdam Junction.
“No!” she told him with a severity born from the struggle she was making with her grief. “Not a mile with me. Not to Eagle Bridge. Good-by.”
And Sam—what did he do? He obeyed her, I should like to be sorry for him. But obedience was not a lover's part here. He hesitated, the golden moment hung hovering, the conductor cried “All aboard!” the train went, and there on the platform stood obedient Sam, with his golden moment gone like a butterfly.
After Rotterdam Junction, which was some forty minutes farther, Molly Wood sat bravely up in the through car, dwelling upon the unknown. She thought that she had attained it in Ohio, on Tuesday morning, and wrote a letter about it to Bennington. On Wednesday afternoon she felt sure, and wrote a letter much more picturesque. But on the following day, after breakfast at North Platte, Nebraska, she wrote a very long letter indeed, and told them that she had seen a black pig on a white pile of buffalo bones, catching drops of water in the air as they fell from the railroad tank. She also wrote that trees were extraordinarily scarce. Each hour westward from the pig confirmed this opinion, and when she left the train at Rock Creek, late upon that fourth night,—in those days the trains were slower,—she knew that she had really attained the unknown, and sent an expensive telegram to say that she was quite well.
At six in the morning the stage drove away into the sage-brush, with her as its only passenger; and by sundown she had passed through some of the primitive perils of the world. The second team, virgin to harness, and displeased with this novelty, tried to take it off, and went down to the bottom of a gully on its eight hind legs, while Miss Wood sat mute and unflinching beside the driver. Therefore he, when it was over, and they on the proper road again, invited her earnestly to be his wife during many of the next fifteen miles, and told her of his snug cabin and his horses and his mine. Then she got down and rode inside, Independence and Grandmother Stark shining in her eye. At Point of Rocks, where they had supper and his drive ended, her face distracted his heart, and he told her once more about his cabin, and lamentably hoped she would remember him. She answered sweetly that she would try, and gave him her hand. After all, he was a frank-looking boy, who had paid her the highest compliment that a boy (or a man for that matter) knows; and it is said that Molly Stark, in her day, was not a New Woman.
The new driver banished the first one from the maiden's mind. He was not a frank-looking boy, and he had been taking whiskey. All night long he took it, while his passenger, helpless and sleepless inside the lurching stage, sat as upright as she possibly could; nor did the voices that she heard at Drybone reassure her. Sunrise found the white stage lurching eternally on across the alkali, with a driver and a bottle on the box, and a pale girl staring out at the plain, and knotting in her handkerchief some utterly dead flowers. They came to a river where the man bungled over the ford. Two wheels sank down over an edge, and the canvas toppled like a descending kite. The ripple came sucking through the upper spokes, and as she felt the seat careen, she put out her head and tremulously asked if anything was wrong. But the driver was addressing his team with much language, and also with the lash.
Then a tall rider appeared close against the buried axles, and took her out of the stage on his horse so suddenly that she screamed. She felt splashes, saw a swimming flood, and found herself lifted down upon the shore. The rider said something to her about cheering up, and its being all right, but her wits were stock-still, so she did not speak and thank him. After four days of train and thirty hours of stage, she was having a little too much of the unknown at once. Then the tall man gently withdrew leaving her to become herself again. She limply regarded the river pouring round the slanted stage, and a number of horsemen with ropes, who righted the vehicle, and got it quickly to dry land, and disappeared at once with a herd of cattle, uttering lusty yells.
She saw the tall one delaying beside the driver, and speaking. He spoke so quietly that not a word reached her, until of a sudden the driver protested loudly. The man had thrown something, which turned out to be a bottle. This twisted loftily and dived into the stream. He said something more to the driver, then put his hand on the saddle-horn, looked half-lingeringly at the passenger on the bank, dropped his grave eyes from hers, and swinging upon his horse, was gone just as the passenger opened her mouth and with inefficient voice murmured, “Oh, thank you!” at his departing back.
The driver drove up now, a chastened creature. He helped Miss Wood in, and inquired after her welfare with a hanging head; then meek as his own drenched horses, he climbed back to his reins, and nursed the stage on toward the Bow Leg Mountains much as if it had been a perambulator.
As for Miss Wood, she sat recovering, and she wondered what the man on the horse must think of her. She knew that she was not ungrateful, and that if he had given her an opportunity she would have explained to him. If he supposed that she did not appreciate his act—Here into the midst of these meditations came an abrupt memory that she had screamed—she could not be sure when. She rehearsed the adventure from the beginning, and found one or two further uncertainties—how it had all been while she was on the horse, for instance. It was confusing to determine precisely what she had done with her arms. She knew where one of his arms had been. And the handkerchief with the flowers was gone. She made a few rapid dives in search of it. Had she, or had she not, seen him putting something in his pocket? And why had she behaved so unlike herself? In a few miles Miss Wood entertained sentiments of maidenly resentment toward her rescuer, and of maidenly hope to see him again.
To that river crossing he came again, alone, when the days were growing short. The ford was dry sand, and the stream a winding lane of shingle. He found a pool,—pools always survive the year round in this stream,—and having watered his pony, he lunched near the spot to which he had borne the frightened passenger that day. Where the flowing current had been he sat, regarding the now extremely safe channel.
“She cert'nly wouldn't need to grip me so close this mawnin',” he said, as he pondered over his meal. “I reckon it will mightily astonish her when I tell her how harmless the torrent is lookin'.” He held out to his pony a slice of bread matted with sardines, which the pony expertly accepted. “You're a plumb pie-biter you Monte,” he continued. Monte rubbed his nose on his master's shoulder. “I wouldn't trust you with berries and cream. No, seh; not though yu' did rescue a drownin' lady.”
Presently he tightened the forward cinch, got in the saddle, and the pony fell into his wise mechanical jog; for he had come a long way, and was going a long way, and he knew this as well as the man did.
To use the language of Cattle Land, steers had “jumped to seventy-five.” This was a great and prosperous leap in their value. To have flourished in that golden time you need not be dead now, nor even middle-aged; but it is Wyoming mythology already—quite as fabulous as the high-jumping cow. Indeed, people gathered together and behaved themselves much in the same pleasant and improbable way. Johnson County, and Natrona, and Converse, and others, to say nothing of the Cheyenne Club, had been jumping over the moon for some weeks, all on account of steers; and on the strength of this vigorous price of seventy-five, the Stanton Brothers were giving a barbecue at the Goose Egg outfit, their ranch on Bear Creek. Of course the whole neighborhood was bidden, and would come forty miles to a man; some would come further—the Virginian was coming a hundred and eighteen. It had struck him—rather suddenly, as shall be made plain—that he should like to see how they were getting along up there on Bear Creek. “They,” was how he put it to his acquaintances. His acquaintances did not know that he had bought himself a pair of trousers and a scarf, unnecessarily excellent for such a general visit. They did not know that in the spring, two days after the adventure with the stage, he had learned accidentally who the lady in the stage was. This he had kept to himself; nor did the camp ever notice that he had ceased to sing that eightieth stanza he had made about the A B C—the stanza which was not printable. He effaced it imperceptibly, giving the boys the other seventy-nine at judicious intervals. They dreamed of no guile, but merely saw in him, whether frequenting camp or town, the same not over-angelic comrade whom they valued and could not wholly understand.
All spring he had ridden trail, worked at ditches during summer, and now he had just finished with the beef round-up. Yesterday, while he was spending a little comfortable money at the Drybone hog-ranch, a casual traveller from the north gossiped of Bear Creek, and the fences up there, and the farm crops, the Westfalls, and the young schoolmarm from Vermont, for whom the Taylors had built a cabin next door to theirs. The traveller had not seen her, but Mrs. Taylor and all the ladies thought the world of her, and Lin McLean had told him she was “away up in G.” She would have plenty of partners at this Swinton barbecue. Great boon for the country, wasn't it, steers jumping that way?
The Virginian heard, asking no questions; and left town in an hour, with the scarf and trousers tied in his slicker behind his saddle. After looking upon the ford again, even though it was dry and not at all the same place, he journeyed in attentively. When you have been hard at work for months with no time to think, of course you think a great deal during your first empty days. “Step along, you Monte hawss!” he said, rousing after some while. He disciplined Monte, who flattened his ears affectedly and snorted. “Why, you surely ain' thinkin' of you'-self as a hero? She wasn't really a-drowndin', you pie-biter.” He rested his serious glance upon the alkali. “She's not likely to have forgot that mix-up, though. I guess I'll not remind her about grippin' me, and all that. She wasn't the kind a man ought to josh about such things. She had a right clear eye.” Thus, tall and loose in the saddle, did he jog along the sixty miles which still lay between him and the dance.
Two camps in the open, and the Virginian's Monte horse, untired, brought him to the Swintons' in good time for the barbecue. The horse received good food at length, while his rider was welcomed with good whiskey. GOOD whiskey—for had not steers jumped to seventy-five?
Inside the Goose Egg kitchen many small delicacies were preparing, and a steer was roasting whole outside. The bed of flame under it showed steadily brighter against the dusk that was beginning to veil the lowlands. The busy hosts went and came, while men stood and men lay near the fire-glow. Chalkeye was there, and Nebrasky, and Trampas, and Honey Wiggin, with others, enjoying the occasion; but Honey Wiggin was enjoying himself: he had an audience; he was sitting up discoursing to it.
“Hello!” he said, perceiving the Virginian. “So you've dropped in for your turn! Number—six, ain't he, boys?”
“Depends who's a-runnin' the countin',” said the Virginian, and stretched himself down among the audience.
“I've saw him number one when nobody else was around,” said Trampas.
“How far away was you standin' when you beheld that?” inquired the lounging Southerner.
“Well, boys,” said Wiggin, “I expect it will be Miss Schoolmarm says who's number one to-night.”
“So she's arrived in this hyeh country?” observed the Virginian, very casually.
“Arrived!” said Trampas again. “Where have you been grazing lately?”
“A right smart way from the mules.”
“Nebrasky and the boys was tellin' me they'd missed yu' off the range,” again interposed Wiggin. “Say, Nebrasky, who have yu' offered your canary to the schoolmarm said you mustn't give her?”
Nebrasky grinned wretchedly.
“Well, she's a lady, and she's square, not takin' a man's gift when she don't take the man. But you'd ought to get back all them letters yu' wrote her. Yu' sure ought to ask her for them tell-tales.”
“Ah, pshaw, Honey!” protested the youth. It was well known that he could not write his name.
“Why, if here ain't Bokay Baldy!” cried the agile Wiggin, stooping to fresh prey. “Found them slippers yet, Baldy? Tell yu' boys, that was turruble sad luck Baldy had. Did yu' hear about that? Baldy, yu' know, he can stay on a tame horse most as well as the schoolmarm. But just you give him a pair of young knittin'-needles and see him make 'em sweat! He worked an elegant pair of slippers with pink cabbages on 'em for Miss Wood.”
“I bought 'em at Medicine Bow,” blundered Baldy.
“So yu' did!” assented the skilful comedian. “Baldy he bought 'em. And on the road to her cabin there at the Taylors' he got thinkin' they might be too big, and he got studyin' what to do. And he fixed up to tell her about his not bein' sure of the size, and how she was to let him know if they dropped off her, and he'd exchange 'em, and when he got right near her door, why, he couldn't find his courage. And so he slips the parcel under the fence and starts serenadin' her. But she ain't inside her cabin at all. She's at supper next door with the Taylors, and Baldy singin' 'Love has conqwered pride and angwer' to a lone house. Lin McLean was comin' up by Taylor's corral, where Taylor's Texas bull was. Well, it was turruble sad. Baldy's pants got tore, but he fell inside the fence, and Lin druv the bull back and somebody stole them Medicine Bow galoshes. Are you goin' to knit her some more, Bokay?”
“About half that ain't straight,” Baldy commented, with mildness.
“The half that was tore off yer pants? Well, never mind, Baldy; Lin will get left too, same as all of yu'.”
“Is there many?” inquired the Virginian. He was still stretched on his back, looking up at the sky.
“I don't know how many she's been used to where she was raised,” Wiggin answered. “A kid stage-driver come from Point of Rocks one day and went back the next. Then the foreman of the 76 outfit, and the horse-wrangler from the Bar-Circle-L, and two deputy marshals, with punchers, stringin' right along,—all got their tumble. Old Judge Burrage from Cheyenne come up in August for a hunt and stayed round here and never hunted at all. There was that horse thief—awful good-lookin'. Taylor wanted to warn her about him, but Mrs. Taylor said she'd look after her if it was needed. Mr. Horse-thief gave it up quicker than most; but the schoolmarm couldn't have knowed he had a Mrs. Horse-thief camped on Poison Spider till afterwards. She wouldn't go ridin' with him. She'll go with some, takin' a kid along.”
“Bah!” said Trampas.
The Virginian stopped looking at the sky, and watched Trampas from where he lay.
“I think she encourages a man some,” said poor Nebrasky.
“Encourages? Because she lets yu' teach her how to shoot,” said Wiggin. “Well—I don't guess I'm a judge. I've always kind o' kep' away from them good women. Don't seem to think of anything to chat about to 'em. The only folks I'd say she encourages is the school kids. She kisses them.”
“Riding and shooting and kissing the kids,” sneered Trampas. “That's a heap too pussy-kitten for me.”
They laughed. The sage-brush audience is readily cynical.
“Look for the man, I say,” Trampas pursued. “And ain't he there? She leaves Baldy sit on the fence while she and Lin McLean—”
They laughed loudly at the blackguard picture which he drew; and the laugh stopped short, for the Virginian stood over Trampas.
“You can rise up now, and tell them you lie,” he said.
The man was still for a moment in the dead silence. “I thought you claimed you and her wasn't acquainted,” said he then.
“Stand on your laigs, you polecat, and say you're a liar!”
Trampas's hand moved behind him.
“Quit that,” said the Southerner, “or I'll break your neck!”
The eye of a man is the prince of deadly weapons. Trampas looked in the Virginian's, and slowly rose. “I didn't mean—” he began, and paused, his face poisonously bloated.
“Well, I'll call that sufficient. Keep a-standin' still. I ain' going to trouble yu' long. In admittin' yourself to be a liar you have spoke God's truth for onced. Honey Wiggin, you and me and the boys have hit town too frequent for any of us to play Sunday on the balance of the gang.” He stopped and surveyed Public Opinion, seated around in carefully inexpressive attention. “We ain't a Christian outfit a little bit, and maybe we have most forgotten what decency feels like. But I reckon we haven't forgot what it means. You can sit down now, if you want.”
The liar stood and sneered experimentally, looking at Public Opinion. But this changeful deity was no longer with him, and he heard it variously assenting, “That's so,” and “She's a lady,” and otherwise excellently moralizing. So he held his peace. When, however, the Virginian had departed to the roasting steer, and Public Opinion relaxed into that comfort which we all experience when the sermon ends, Trampas sat down amid the reviving cheerfulness, and ventured again to be facetious.
“Shut your rank mouth,” said Wiggin to him, amiably. “I don't care whether he knows her or if he done it on principle. I'll accept the roundin' up he gave us—and say! You'll swallo' your dose, too! Us boys'll stand in with him in this.”
So Trampas swallowed. And what of the Virginian?
He had championed the feeble, and spoken honorably in meeting, and according to all the constitutions and by-laws of morality, he should have been walking in virtue's especial calm. But there it was! he had spoken; he had given them a peep through the key-hole at his inner man; and as he prowled away from the assemblage before whom he stood convicted of decency, it was vicious rather than virtuous that he felt. Other matters also disquieted him—so Lin McLean was hanging round that schoolmarm! Yet he joined Ben Swinton in a seemingly Christian spirit. He took some whiskey and praised the size of the barrel, speaking with his host like this: “There cert'nly ain' goin' to be trouble about a second helpin'.”
“Hope not. We'd ought to have more trimmings, though. We're shy on ducks.”
“Yu' have the barrel. Has Lin McLean seen that?”
“No. We tried for ducks away down as far as the Laparel outfit. A real barbecue—”
“There's large thirsts on Bear Creek. Lin McLean will pass on ducks.”
“Lin's not thirsty this month.”
“Signed for one month, has he?”
“Signed! He's spooning our schoolmarm!”
“They claim she's a right sweet-faced girl.”
“Yes; yes; awful agreeable. And next thing you're fooled clean through.”
“Yu' don't say!”
“She keeps a-teaching the darned kids, and it seems like a good growed-up man can't interest her.”
“YU' DON'T SAY!”
“There used to be all the ducks you wanted at the Laparel, but their fool cook's dead stuck on raising turkeys this year.”
“That must have been mighty close to a drowndin' the schoolmarm got at South Fork.”
“Why, I guess not. When? She's never spoken of any such thing—that I've heard.”
“Mos' likely the stage-driver got it wrong, then.”
“Yes. Must have drownded somebody else. Here they come! That's her ridin' the horse. There's the Westfalls. Where are you running to?”
“To fix up. Got any soap around hyeh?”
“Yes,” shouted Swinton, for the Virginian was now some distance away; “towels and everything in the dugout.” And he went to welcome his first formal guests.
The Virginian reached his saddle under a shed. “So she's never mentioned it,” said he, untying his slicker for the trousers and scarf. “I didn't notice Lin anywheres around her.” He was over in the dugout now, whipping off his overalls; and soon he was excellently clean and ready, except for the tie in his scarf and the part in his hair. “I'd have knowed her in Greenland,” he remarked. He held the candle up and down at the looking-glass, and the looking-glass up and down at his head. “It's mighty strange why she ain't mentioned that.” He worried the scarf a fold or two further, and at length, a trifle more than satisfied with his appearance, he proceeded most serenely toward the sound of the tuning fiddles. He passed through the store-room behind the kitchen, stepping lightly lest he should rouse the ten or twelve babies that lay on the table or beneath it. On Bear Creek babies and children always went with their parents to a dance, because nurses were unknown. So little Alfred and Christopher lay there among the wraps, parallel and crosswise with little Taylors, and little Carmodys, and Lees, and all the Bear Creek offspring that was not yet able to skip at large and hamper its indulgent elders in the ball-room.
“Why, Lin ain't hyeh yet!” said the Virginian, looking in upon the people. There was Miss Wood, standing up for the quadrille. “I didn't remember her hair was that pretty,” said he. “But ain't she a little, little girl!”
Now she was in truth five feet three; but then he could look away down on the top of her head.
“Salute your honey!” called the first fiddler. All partners bowed to each other, and as she turned, Miss Wood saw the man in the doorway. Again, as it had been at South Fork that day, his eyes dropped from hers, and she divining instantly why he had come after half a year, thought of the handkerchief and of that scream of hers in the river, and became filled with tyranny and anticipation; for indeed he was fine to look upon. So she danced away, carefully unaware of his existence.
“First lady, centre!” said her partner, reminding her of her turn. “Have you forgotten how it goes since last time?”
Molly Wood did not forget again, but quadrilled with the most sprightly devotion.
“I see some new faces to-night,” said she, presently.
“Yu' always do forget our poor faces,” said her partner.
“Oh, no! There's a stranger now. Who is that black man?”
“Well—he's from Virginia, and he ain't allowin' he's black.”
“He's a tenderfoot, I suppose?”
“Ha, ha, ha! That's rich, too!” and so the simple partner explained a great deal about the Virginian to Molly Wood. At the end of the set she saw the man by the door take a step in her direction.
“Oh,” said she, quickly, to the partner, “how warm it is! I must see how those babies are doing.” And she passed the Virginian in a breeze of unconcern.
His eyes gravely lingered where she had gone. “She knowed me right away,” said he. He looked for a moment, then leaned against the door. “'How warm it is!' said she. Well, it ain't so screechin' hot hyeh; and as for rushin' after Alfred and Christopher, when their natural motheh is bumpin' around handy—she cert'nly can't be offended?” he broke off, and looked again where she had gone. And then Miss Wood passed him brightly again, and was dancing the schottische almost immediately. “Oh, yes, she knows me,” the swarthy cow-puncher mused. “She has to take trouble not to see me. And what she's a-fussin' at is mighty interestin'. Hello!”
“Hello!” returned Lin McLean, sourly. He had just looked into the kitchen.
“Not dancin'?” the Southerner inquired.
“Don't know how.”
“Had scyarlet fever and forgot your past life?”
Lin grinned.
“Better persuade the schoolmarm to learn it. She's goin' to give me instruction.”
“Huh!” went Mr. McLean, and skulked out to the barrel.
“Why, they claimed you weren't drinkin' this month!” said his friend, following.
“Well, I am. Here's luck!” The two pledged in tin cups. “But I'm not waltzin' with her,” blurted Mr. McLean grievously. “She called me an exception.”
“Waltzin',” repeated the Virginian quickly, and hearing the fiddles he hastened away.
Few in the Bear Creek Country could waltz, and with these few it was mostly an unsteered and ponderous exhibition; therefore was the Southerner bent upon profiting by his skill. He entered the room, and his lady saw him come where she sat alone for the moment, and her thoughts grew a little hurried.
“Will you try a turn, ma'am?”
“I beg your pardon?” It was a remote, well-schooled eye that she lifted now upon him.
“If you like a waltz, ma'am, will you waltz with me?”
“You're from Virginia, I understand?” said Molly Wood, regarding him politely, but not rising. One gains authority immensely by keeping one's seat. All good teachers know this.
“Yes, ma'am, from Virginia.”
“I've heard that Southerners have such good manners.”
“That's correct.” The cow-puncher flushed, but he spoke in his unvaryingly gentle voice.
“For in New England, you know,” pursued Miss Molly, noting his scarf and clean-shaven chin, and then again steadily meeting his eye, “gentlemen ask to be presented to ladies before they ask them to waltz.”
He stood a moment before her, deeper and deeper scarlet; and the more she saw his handsome face, the keener rose her excitement. She waited for him to speak of the river; for then she was going to be surprised, and gradually to remember, and finally to be very nice to him. But he did not wait. “I ask your pardon, lady,” said he, and bowing, walked off, leaving her at once afraid that he might not come back. But she had altogether mistaken her man. Back he came serenely with Mr. Taylor, and was duly presented to her. Thus were the conventions vindicated.
It can never be known what the cow-puncher was going to say next; for Uncle Hughey stepped up with a glass of water which he had left Wood to bring, and asking for a turn, most graciously received it. She danced away from a situation where she began to feel herself getting the worst of it. One moment the Virginian stared at his lady as she lightly circulated, and then he went out to the barrel.
Leave him for Uncle Hershey! Jealousy is a deep and delicate thing, and works its spite in many ways. The Virginian had been ready to look at Lin McLean with a hostile eye; but finding him now beside the barrel, he felt a brotherhood between himself and Lin, and his hostility had taken a new and whimsical direction.
“Here's how!” said he to McLean. And they pledged each other in the tin cups.
“Been gettin' them instructions?” said Mr. McLean, grinning. “I thought I saw yu' learning your steps through the window.”
“Here's your good health,” said the Southerner. Once more they pledged each other handsomely.
“Did she call you an exception, or anything?” said Lin.
“Well, it would cipher out right close in that neighborhood.”
“Here's how, then!” cried the delighted Lin, over his cup.
“Jest because yu' happen to come from Vermont,” continued Mr. McLean, “is no cause for extra pride. Shoo! I was raised in Massachusetts myself, and big men have been raised there, too,—Daniel Webster and Israel Putnam: and a lot of them politicians.”
“Virginia is a good little old state,” observed the Southerner.
“Both of 'em's a sight ahead of Vermont. She told me I was the first exception she'd struck.”
“What rule were you provin' at the time, Lin?”
“Well yu' see, I started to kiss her.”
“Yu' didn't!”
“Shucks! I didn't mean nothin'.”
“I reckon yu' stopped mighty sudden?”
“Why, I'd been ridin' out with her—ridin' to school, ridin' from school, and a-comin' and a-goin', and she chattin' cheerful and askin' me a heap o' questions all about myself every day, and I not lyin' much neither. And so I figured she wouldn't mind. Lots of 'em like it. But she didn't, you bet!”
“No,” said the Virginian, deeply proud of his lady who had slighted him. He had pulled her out of the water once, and he had been her unrewarded knight even to-day, and he felt his grievance; but he spoke not of it to Lin; for he felt also, in memory, her arms clinging round him as he carried her ashore upon his horse. But he muttered, “Plumb ridiculous!” as her injustice struck him afresh, while the outraged McLean told his tale.
“Trample is what she has done on me to-night, and without notice. We was startin' to come here; Taylor and Mrs. were ahead in the buggy, and I was holdin' her horse, and helpin' her up in the saddle, like I done for days and days. Who was there to see us? And I figured she'd not mind, and she calls me an exception! Yu'd ought to've just heard her about Western men respectin' women. So that's the last word we've spoke. We come twenty-five miles then, she scootin' in front, and her horse kickin' the sand in my face. Mrs. Taylor, she guessed something was up, but she didn't tell.”
“Miss Wood did not tell?”
“Not she! She'll never open her head. She can take care of herself, you bet!” The fiddles sounded hilariously in the house, and the feet also. They had warmed up altogether, and their dancing figures crossed the windows back and forth. The two cow-punchers drew near to a window and looked in gloomily.
“There she goes,” said Lin.
“With Uncle Hughey again,” said the Virginian, sourly. “Yu' might suppose he didn't have a wife and twins, to see the way he goes gambollin' around.”
“Westfall is takin' a turn with her now,” said McLean.
“James!” exclaimed the Virginian. “He's another with a wife and fam'ly, and he gets the dancin', too.”
“There she goes with Taylor,” said Lin, presently.
“Another married man!” the Southerner commented. They prowled round to the store-room, and passed through the kitchen to where the dancers were robustly tramping. Miss Wood was still the partner of Mr. Taylor. “Let's have some whiskey,” said the Virginian. They had it, and returned, and the Virginian's disgust and sense of injury grew deeper. “Old Carmody has got her now,” he drawled. “He polkas like a landslide. She learns his monkey-faced kid to spell dog and cow all the mawnin'. He'd ought to be tucked up cosey in his bed right now, old Carmody ought.”
They were standing in that place set apart for the sleeping children; and just at this moment one of two babies that were stowed beneath a chair uttered a drowsy note. A much louder cry, indeed a chorus of lament, would have been needed to reach the ears of the parents in the room beyond, such was the noisy volume of the dance. But in this quiet place the light sound caught Mr. McLean's attention, and he turned to see if anything were wrong. But both babies were sleeping peacefully.
“Them's Uncle Hughey's twins,” he said.
“How do you happen to know that?” inquired the Virginian, suddenly interested.
“Saw his wife put 'em under the chair so she could find 'em right off when she come to go home.”
“Oh,” said the Virginian, thoughtfully. “Oh, find 'em right off. Yes. Uncle Hughey's twins.” He walked to a spot from which he could view the dance. “Well,” he continued, returning, “the schoolmarm must have taken quite a notion to Uncle Hughey. He has got her for this quadrille.” The Virginian was now speaking without rancor; but his words came with a slightly augmented drawl, and this with him was often a bad omen. He now turned his eyes upon the collected babies wrapped in various colored shawls and knitted work. “Nine, ten, eleven, beautiful sleepin' strangers,” he counted, in a sweet voice. “Any of 'em your'n, Lin?”
“Not that I know of,” grinned Mr. McLean.
“Eleven, twelve. This hyeh is little Christopher in the blue-stripe quilt—or maybe that other yello'-head is him. The angels have commenced to drop in on us right smart along Bear Creek, Lin.”
“What trash are yu' talkin' anyway?”
“If they look so awful alike in the heavenly gyarden,” the gentle Southerner continued, “I'd just hate to be the folks that has the cuttin' of 'em out o' the general herd. And that's a right quaint notion too,” he added softly. “Them under the chair are Uncle Hughey's, didn't you tell me?” And stooping, he lifted the torpid babies and placed them beneath a table. “No, that ain't thorough,” he murmured. With wonderful dexterity and solicitude for their wellfare, he removed the loose wrap which was around them, and this soon led to an intricate process of exchange. For a moment Mr. McLean had been staring at the Virginian, puzzled. Then, with a joyful yelp of enlightenment, he sprang to abet him.
And while both busied themselves with the shawls and quilts, the unconscious parents went dancing vigorously on, and the small, occasional cries of their progeny did not reach them.