Justin Wingate, Ranchman

CHAPTER VIII

AND MARY WENT TO DENVER

Mary Jasper did not know that she went to Denver because she had read Pearl Newcome’s romances; but so it was. She was in love with Ben, and expected to become his wife by and by, but her day-dreams were of conquests and coronets.

The alluringly beautiful lace of Sibyl had reappeared in Paradise Valley. On her first visit, long before, Sibyl had marked the rare dark beauty of Mary Jasper. Mary was now a fair flower bursting into rich bloom, and wherever a fair flower grows some covetous hand is stretched forth to pluck it.

Though Sibyl had flung Curtis Clayton aside with as little compunction as if his pure heart were no more than the gold on the draggled wings of the butterfly crushed in the road, curiosity and vanity had drawn her again and again to the little railroad town at the base of the flat-topped mountain. There in the home of an acquaintance she had found means to gratify her curiosity concerning the life led by Clayton, and could feed her vanity with the thought that he had immured himself because of her.

Twice she had seen him, having taken rides through the valley for the purpose; once beholding him from afar, watching him as he strolled near the willows by the stream, unconscious of her surveillance, his bent left arm swinging as he walked. On the second occasion they had met face to face in the trail, while he was on his way to the town to inspect some books he had ordered conditionally. Sibyl was on a mettlesome bay, and he on his quick-stepping buckskin broncho. She towered above him from the back of the larger horse. He lifted his hat with a gentle gesture, flushing, and holding the reins tightly in his stiff left hand.

“You are looking well!” she cried gaily. It touched her to know that he still carried himself erect, that he was still a handsome, pleasant-eyed man, whom any woman might admire. “And really I’ve been thinking you were moping down here, and suffering from loneliness and hopeless love!”

“Love is no longer hopeless, when it is dead!” he declared, voicing an indifference he did not feel. Her light laugh fell like the sting of a whip. “Oh, dear me! Is it so serious as that? But of course I don’t believe anything you say. Love is a bright little humming-bird of a boy, who never dies. Truly, it must be lonesome down here, in this poky place. I can’t understand why you stay here. You might come to Denver!” She looked at him archly, half veiling her dark eyes with their lustrous lashes, while her horse pawed fretfully at the bank. “I mean it, Curtis. You could be as far from me in Denver as you are down here, if you wished to be. You know that as well as I do.”

“I don’t think I could,” he said, and though his voice showed pain it showed resolution. “I find this a very good place. I like the quiet.”

“So that no one will ever trouble you while you’re studying or writing! You’ll be a great author or scientist some day, I don’t doubt.”

He did not answer.

“Well, good bye, Curtis. I’m not so bad as I seem, perhaps; you don’t see any horns or cloven hoof about me, do you?” She waved her hand. “And I’m glad to know you’re looking so well, and are so contented and happy!”

She gave her horse a cut with her riding whip and galloped away.

How many more times Sibyl Dudley (she had taken her maiden name) came to the little town by the mountain Curtis Clayton did not know, and never sought to discover; but one day he was almost startled, when Justin brought him news that Mary Jasper had accompanied Sibyl to Denver, and was to remain there with her.

Clayton at once mounted his horse and rode up the valley in the waning afternoon, to where Sloan Jasper’s house squatted by the stream in the midst of a green plume of cottonwoods of his own planting. He found Jasper in a stormy temper. There had been heavy August rains and a cloud-burst. The sluggish stream had overleaped its banks, smearing the alfalfa fields with sticky yellow mud and a tangle of weedy drift, in addition to softening the soil until it was a spongy muck. Hundreds of cattle had ploughed through the softened soil during the night, for the storm had torn out a section of fence and let them drift into the cultivated area of the valley. Standing with Jasper was Clem Arkwright.

“Glorious, sublime!” Arkwright was saying.

He had taken off his hat, and stood in reverent attitude before the lighted mountain, a young, red-faced, pudgy man, with thick mustache. Though Sloan Jasper was not gifted with keen discernment he felt the attitude to be that of the Pharisee proclaiming his own excellence rather than that of his Maker. Arkwright seemed to be saying to him, “Behold one who has been endowed with a capacity which you lack, the capacity to appreciate and enjoy this sublime picture!”

All the way up the valley trail Curtis Clayton had been delighting in the beauty of that evening scene. The misty clouds lingering after the storm had hung white draperies about the wide shoulders of the mountain. Into these the descending sun had hurled a sheaf of fire-tipped arrows, and straightway the white draperies had burned red in streaks and the whole top of the mountain had flamed. The colors were fading now.

“Glorious, sublime!” Arkwright repeated.

“The sunlight on that mountain don’t interest me a little bit, Arkwright,” said Jasper, with curt emphasis; “what I want to know is how I’m going to protect myself? You say there ain’t any herd law. You’re a justice-of-the-peace, and I reckon a lawyer, or a half of a one. We can have a herd law passed, can’t we? And what’s to keep me from shootin’ them steers when I catch ’em in here? Powder and lead air cheap, and that’s what I’ll do; and then I’ll let Davison do the sum’. I ain’t got nothin’ much, and he’ll find it hard work to git blood out of a turnip. Let him do the sum’, and see if he can collect damages; you say I can’t.”

“You’re hopeless, Jasper!

“'A primrose by the river’s brim, A yellow primrose was to him— And it was nothing more!’”

Arkwright made the quotation and sighed, as Clayton rode up. “But see the fading light on those clouds! Was there ever anything like it? What does it make you think of?”

“It makes me think that if I had my way I could improve on nature a bit in this valley; I wouldn’t send all the rain in a bunch and jump the river out of its banks and roll it over everything, but distribute it a little through some of the other months of the year.”

Arkwright turned his pudgy form about.

“Ah, Doctor! Glad to see you. You ought to get over to the town oftener. You wouldn’t care to ride up this evening, I suppose? The sunlight is going, and I must be going, too.”

Clayton did not care to ride to town. When Arkwright was gone he questioned Jasper concerning the occasion of his visit.

“I reckon he come down for a word with Ben Davison; I don’t know what else. He and Ben air gittin’ thick as fleas lately. It’s my opinion that Ben’s gamblin’ away his wages up there in the town with him, but I don’t know; and I don’t care. I’d be glad to have both of ’em keep away from me. Look at that millet, Doctor; just look at it! Ruined by Davison’s cattle; and Arkwright tells me I can’t do anything, because there ain’t any herd law in this county. But I can shoot ’em; and I’ll do it next time they git in here, see if I don’t.”

Clayton had heard Jasper rave in that way before, and nothing had ever come of it. Other settlers had raved in the same manner, and then realized their helplessness. Looking into Jasper’s angry face, he tried now to speak of Mary.

“I hear that your daughter has gone to Denver, Mr. Jasper!”

Jasper drew himself up, forgetful for the moment of his millet. A look of pride and pain overspread his hairy face.

“Yes, she’s gone there to stay awhile with Mrs. Dudley. I didn’t want her to, but she would go; it makes it mighty lonesome here, but she’ll be happier up there, I reckon. Mrs. Dudley took a likin’ to Mary, and wants to give her a better chance fer an ejication and other things than she can have here. So I reckon it’s all right, though I didn’t see at first how I could git along without her.”

All at once Clayton’s heart seemed to shrivel and shrink. He fumbled with the yellow mane of the broncho and with the reins that swung against its neck. When he spoke after a little, trying to go on, his voice was husky.

“That woman is—”

“Yes, I allow Mrs. Dudley is a fine woman!”

Clayton’s resolution failed utterly.

“And she’s smart,” Jasper declared, “smart as a steel-trap; when she talked with me about takin’ Mary, and what she could do fer her, I could see that. She’s mighty good-lookin’, too; though I don’t think anybody can come up in looks to my Mary. I wisht you could have seen her with some of her new fixin’s on, which Mrs. Dudley bought fer her. She was certainly handsome. And she’s goin’ to enjoy herself there, I don’t doubt. I’ve already had a letter from her, tellin’ me how happy she is. I reckon I ought to be willin’ fer her to have things her mother never had, fer she’s fit fer it, and not have to slave as her mother did, and as I’ve always done. Yes, I reckon I’m glad she’s gone; though ’tis a bit lonesome here, fer I ain’t got anybody with me at all now, you see.”

Though Curtis Clayton had visited Sloan Jasper for the express purpose of uttering a warning against Sibyl, he permitted Jasper to talk on, and the warning words remained unsaid. Jasper was inexpressibily lonely, now that his daughter was gone; yet it was plain that he would not call her back, and equally plain that he knew she would not return if he called never so loudly. And he was trusting that the thing he could not help was the very best thing for the child he loved. Clayton felt that he could not stir up in the heart of this man a useless, peace-destroying, and perhaps a groundless, distrust.

So he rode away as the night shadows were falling, and gathered a great contempt for himself as he returned slowly homeward. He had no right to judge Sibyl, and possibly, very probably, misjudge her, he thought; yet he had a fear, amounting almost to conviction, that she was not a woman to whom should be given the charge and training of such a girl as Mary Jasper. That fear had sent him to Jasper; his retreat seemed a cowardly flight.

As for Mary, she was childishly happy in Denver. The only present cloud on the sky of her life was that her father had not really wished her to go. He had objected stoutly at first, but ever since her mother’s departure from the earthly Paradise, which had been full of all manner of hard labor, to that upper and better one where, her simple faith had assured her, she should toil no more, Mary had contrived to do pretty much as she pleased. Her head was filled with romantic ideas, garnered from Pearl Newcome’s much-read novels. In this matter, as in all others, she had taken her own way, like a high-headed young horse clamping the bit tightly between its teeth and choosing its road in defiance of the guiding rein. And her father had submitted, when he could do nothing else, had admired and praised her in the wonderful new clothing provided for her by Mrs. Dudley, and had driven her to the station with her little trunk packed with pretty trifles. He had kissed her good bye there, bravely enough, with hardly a quiver in his voice, and so she had gone away. She recalled him often now, standing, a pathetic figure, in his cheap clothing, waving his hand to her as she looked from the car window to throw a kiss as a final farewell.

But this picture seldom troubled her long. Denver was too attractive to the girl who had scarcely in her whole life seen a place larger than the little town at the base of the familiar flat-topped mountain. And what a gay, care-free life Denver led, as viewed by her through the eyes of Mrs. Dudley! This was Vanity Fair, though Mary had never even heard that name. Mrs. Dudley kept a carriage, which rolled with shining wheels through the Denver streets to the merry tattoo of trotting hoofs and the glint of silver-mounted harness. A driver sat on the box in blue livery, and the easy sway and jounce of the springs made her feel as if she were being lifted forward on velvet cushions.

Young men and old men turned about to admire her and the woman who sat by her side, as the carriage rolled along. Women looked at them, too, sometimes with shining eyes of envy; looked at the carriage, at the beautiful clothing, and the two bright faces. Mary wore jewels now, and Sibyl had roped her slender neck with a heavy gold thread which bore a neat little locket at its end. Into that locket Mary had put the gnarled wisp of hair which in a moment of devotion at home she had clipped from her father’s head. To wear it now was something of a penance for leaving him in his loneliness.

Sibyl had a “set,” which was very gay and overflowed with parties where cards were played for favors, and in little dances which were said to be very “select.” Gay debonair men and handsomely dressed women attended these dances and parties and made life one never-ending round of merriment. Mary thought she had never known what it was to really live until now. Sibyl delighted in her; the girl’s fresh flower-like face and inevitable gaucherie set off and added to Sibyl’s own attractiveness.

Mary wrote to her father with religious regularity every Sunday. Sunday was a religious day, and the writing of a letter to her father was performed almost as a sacred duty, so that Sunday seemed the appropriate day for it. She wrote also to Ben Davison, more fully than to her father, describing to him the joys of her new mode of life, and appealing to him not to be “savage” about her comments concerning some of the young men she met.

“Dear Ben,” she said in one of her letters, “Sibyl Dudley is a perfect darling. I am surprised that you didn’t know she had been married. I thought you knew all the time. She is divorced now, I think, though she never says anything to me about it. I’m sure there must be a beautiful romance in her life, as lovely as any of those Pearl reads, for sometimes when she thinks I’m busy she sits for a long time perfectly silent, as if thinking of something serious. But in spite of that she is as gay and happy as can be. Yes, she is a darling; and so are you, you old grumpy, grizzly bear! I wish you could send me a pony—not a broncho! It would be such fun to go galloping on my own pony through the streets. I ride a good deal, but these Denver horses are such big things. Mrs. Dudley is a superb horsewoman. Is that right, horsewoman?—it sounds funny, worse than cowboy. Sometimes when we meet people she introduces me as her niece, and the people smile and say how much we look alike. Isn’t that funny, too?”

Sibyl abounded in “charities,” and had numbers of feeble men and old women who devoutly, or otherwise, blest her shadow as she passed. Under her tutelage Mary also found it pleasant to play Lady Bountiful. It gave her quite as much comfort as the penning of that Sunday letter to her father. Her father had lived a saving and scrimping life and had never given anything to anybody, so that to Mary this was an entirely new and pleasing phase of life’s conduct. It made her feel so superior to bestow with unstinting hand, and be blest for the largess, as if the donor were a veritable gift-showering angel, or luxury-distributing fairy, with red gold on her wings.

All in all, Mary found Denver to be a place of unheard-of delights, in which, especially to those who were not poor and in want, life passed like one of the plays which she sometimes witnessed from a box in the opera house, or after the fashion of the rollicking fanfare of the romances in Pearl Newcome’s wonderful trunk. And it was good, all of it; much better than Paradise Valley, or even the society of Ben Davison, though she was sure that she still loved Ben.

CHAPTER IX

A REVELATION OF CHARACTER

William Sanders did not forget nor forgive.

He ceased to annoy Lucy Davison, and even in time affected to overlook the humiliation to which he felt Justin had subjected him; but deep in his heart he nursed both for Philip Davison and Justin an ineradicable hate, which revealed itself at times in disputes fomented with the farmers.

Sanders’ half-veiled enmity troubled Justin less than the discovery which came to him one day of the innate dishonesty of Ben Davison’s character.

Philip Davison was in one of the bunk rooms, paying off his “hands,” when Justin and Ben arrived from the high mesa where for a month they had been line-riding together. Bronchos stood outside on the trampled grass. Within, where the walls above the rude wooden bunks were hung with bridles and quirts, saddles and ponchos, ropes and spurs, sat Davison, at a small unpainted table, counting out money to his employes and keeping a record of the amounts paid by writing names and sums with a stub pencil in a soiled account book. Davison was fifty years of age now, red-faced, blue-eyed, and bearded. Justin had learned to admire and like him, for there were admirable traits in his character. Though he swore horrible oaths at times, which he complained a man had to do if he handled cattle and cowboys, he had generally been kind to Justin, and he had conceived a fondness for Clayton, whom he respected for his learning and skill as a physician.

Having received his wages from the hands of Philip Davison, Justin went out behind the bunk house, and was counting his bills in the drizzle that was falling, when Ben appeared, his manner nervous and his eyes shining.

“I’m ahead this time!” he said.

Then, to Justin’s astonishment, he lifted one of his boots, and there, sticking to the muddy sole, was a five-dollar bill. He pulled it away with a chuckle, wiped off the mud as well as he could, and added it to the pile in his hands.

Justin stared at him, with a look which Ben resented.

“Some money was on the table and the wind flirted that bill to the floor. I set my boot on it, and when I walked out it walked out with me.”

“You didn’t do that!”

“What’s the difference? Father will never know! And he’s got plenty more where that came from. He only pays me beastly cowboy’s wages, when I’m his own son. So I helped myself, when I saw my chance.”

Justin’s look showed reproof, and Ben flushed in angry irritation.

“You’d tell, would you?”

“That’s stealing!”

A flush of red waved into Ben’s face. Stung by the inner knowledge of his wrong, this blunt condemnation roused the latent devil in him. He leaped at Justin blindly, and struck him in the face.

Justin had never fought any one in his life, nor could he remember that he had ever before been struck in anger. But when that blow fell on his face with stinging force, his head became unaccountably hot, he trembled violently, and with a hoarse cry gurgling from his lips he sprang upon Ben and struck him to the earth with one blow of his fist.

Having done that, he drew back, shaken and dismayed. He had knocked Ben Davison down, when but a moment before they had been friends! He stared at Ben, who had dropped heavily to the ground. Already he was remorseful and almost frightened. Ben scrambled up, cursing.

“I’ll make you pay for that!” he said, wiping a speck of blood from his trembling lips with his hand.

“It—it was your fault! I—”

Philip Davison came round the corner of the building upon this scene, having heard the blows and the fall. He saw Ben’s cut and quivering lip, his clothing wet and muddy, and Justin standing before him with hot, flushed face.

“You struck Ben?” he cried.

Ben was his pride.

Justin looked at him, after an appealing glance at Ben.

“Yes,” he acknowledged, with humility and a feeling of repentant uneasiness. He had gained Ben’s enmity, and he feared he had lost Philip Davison’s regard, which he valued highly.

Ben was crumpling together the wad of bills, and thrust them into his pocket.

“Yes, he struck me, but I hit him first,” he confessed. “We had a little quarrel, a few words, that’s all.”

Though no larger than Justin, he was older, and it humiliated him to confess even this much.