The Ranch at the Wolverine Part 11

Some day he hoped he would have her with him always. He put it stronger than that: Some day he would have her with him, there in that little valley he had chosen; riding with him over those hills that smiled and seemed to stand there waiting for their invasions, with the echoes ready to fling back his exultant voice when he called to her or sang for her or laughed at her; ready to imitate enviously her voice when she laughed back at him. He wanted that day to come soon, and so with days and hours and minutes he became a miser and would not spend them in the luxury of a visit to her. It seemed to him that his longing for her measured itself by the enormous appet.i.te he had for work, that summer.

Week followed week as he followed that thin, fluctuating streak of pay gravel along the ledge. Sometimes it was rich enough to set the pulse pounding in his temples; sometimes it was so poor that he was disgusted to the point of abandoning the work. But every day he worked, it yielded him something--though there was a week when he averaged about fifty cents a day and lived with a scowl on his face--and he kept at it.

He went out in June and bought a mower and rake and then spent precious days getting them into his valley. There was no road, you see, and he was compelled to haul them in a wagon, through country where nature never meant four wheels to pa.s.s. He hired a man for a month--one of those migratory individuals who works for a week or a month in one place and then wanders on till his money is spent--and he drove that man as relentlessly as he drove himself. Together they accomplished much, while the goldpan lay hidden under a buck brush and Ward's waking moments were filled with an uneasy sense of wasted time. Still, it was for the good of his ranch and his cattle and his air-castle that he toiled in the gulch, and it was necessary that he should put up what hay he could. There would be calves to feed next winter, he hoped; and when the hardest storms came, his horse would need a little. The rest of the stock would have to rustle; and that was why he had chosen this nook among the hills, where the wind would sweep the high slopes bare of snow, and the gulches would give shelter with their heavy thickets of quaking aspens and willow and alder.

He was thankful when the creek bottom was shaved clean of gra.s.s, and the stack beside his corral was of a satisfying length and height. The summer had been kind to the gra.s.s-growth, and his hay crop was larger than he had expected. A few days had remained of the month, and Ward had used them to extend his fence so as to give more pasturage to his calves in mild weather. After that he paid the man, directed him to the nearest point on the stage road, and breathed thanks that he was alone again, and could go back to his plan of digging a nice little hunch of cattle out of that bank before snow flew.

CHAPTER IX

WHEN EMOTIONS ARE BOTTLED

One day, when the sun was warm and the breeze that filtered down the gorge was pleasantly cool, Ward straightened his aching back, waded out to dry ground, and sat down to rest a few minutes and make a smoke.

His interest in the work had oozed steadily since sunrise, and left nothing but the back-breaking toil. He had found a nugget the size of a hazelnut in the second pan that morning, so it was not discouragement that had made his monotonous movements grow slow and reluctant. Until he had smoked half the cigarette, he himself did not know what it was that ailed him. Then he flung up his head quite suddenly and gave a snort of understanding.

"Hang the gold! I'm going visiting for a change."

He concealed the goldpan and his pick, shovel, and sacks in the clump of service berries and chokeberries that grew at the foot of the ledge and hid from view the bank where he dug out his pay dirt. That did not take more than two or three minutes, and he made them up after he had swung into the saddle on the farther hillside. It was not a good trail, and except for his first exultant ride home that way, he had ridden it at a walk. Now he made Rattler trot where loping was too risky; and so he came clattering down the steep trail into the little flat beside his cabin. He would have something to eat, and feed Rattler a little hay, and then ride on to the Wolverine. And now that he had yielded to his hunger to see the one person in the world for whom he felt any tenderness, he grudged every minute that separated him from her. He loosened the cinch with one or two yanks and left the saddle on Rattler, to save time. He turned him loose in the hay corral with the bridle off, rather than spend the extra minutes it would take to put him in a stall and carry him a forkful of hay. He thought he would not bother to start a fire and boil coffee; he would eat the sour-dough bread and fried rabbit hams he had taken with him for lunch, and he would start down the creek in half an hour. He imagined himself an extremely sensible young man and considerate of his horse's comfort, to give him thirty precious minutes in which to eat hay. It was not absolutely necessary; Rattler could travel forty miles instead of twenty without another mouthful, so far as that was concerned. Ward was simply behaving in a perfectly normal manner and was not letting his feelings get the better of him in the slightest degree. As to his impromptu vacation, he was certainly ent.i.tled to it; he ought to have taken one long ago, he told himself virtuously. He had panned dirt all day, the Fourth of July; that was last week, he believed. And he had not made more than two dollars, either. No, he was not behaving foolishly at all. He had himself well in hand.

Then he flung open the door of his cabin and went white with sheer astonishment.

"'Lo, Ward!" Billy Louise had been standing behind the door, and she jumped out at him, laughing, just as if she were ten years old instead of nearly twenty.

Ward tried to say, "'Lo, Bill," in return, but the words would not come. His lips trembled too much, and his voice was pinched out in his throat. His mind refused to tell him what he ought to do; but his arms did not wait upon his paralyzed mental processes. They shot out of their own accord, caught Billy Louise, and brought her close against his pounding heart. Ward was startled and a little shocked at what he had done, but he held her closer and closer, until Billy Louise was gasping from something more than surprise.

Next, Ward's lips joined the mutiny against his reason, and laid themselves upon the parted, panting lips of Billy Louise, as though that was where they belonged.

Billy Louise had probably not expected anything like that, though of a truth one can never safely guess at what is in the mind of a girl. She tried to pull herself free, and when she could make no impression upon the grip of those arms--they had been growing muscles of iron manipulating that goldpan, remember!--she very sensibly yielded to necessity and stood still.

"Stop, Ward! You--I--you haven't any right to--"

"Well, give me the right, then." Ward managed to find voice enough to make the demand, and then he kissed her many times before he attempted to say another word. Lord, but he had been hungry for her, these last three months!

"You'll give me the right, won't you, Wilhemina?" he murmured against her ear, brus.h.i.+ng a lock of hair away with his lips. "You know you belong to me, don't you? And I belong to you--body and soul. You know that, don't you? I've known it ever since the world was made. I knew it when G.o.d said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. You were it."

"You sill-y thing." Billy Louise did not seem to know whether she wanted to laugh or cry. "What do you think you're talking about, anyway?"

"About the way the world was made." Ward loosened his clasp a little and looked down deep into her eyes. "My world, I mean." He bent and kissed her again, gravely and very, very tenderly. "Oh, Wilhemina, you know--" he waited, gazing down with that intent look which had a new softness behind it--"you know there's nothing in this world but you.

As far as I'm concerned, there isn't. There never will be."

Billy Louise reached up her hands to his shoulders and tried to give him a shake. "Is that why you've stuck yourself in these hills for three whole months and never come near? You fibber!"

"That's why, lady-girl. I've been sticking here, working like one son-of-a-gun--for you. So I could have you sooner." He lifted his bent head and looked around the little cabin like a man who has just wakened to his surroundings. "I knocked off work a little while ago, and I was going to see you. I couldn't stand it any longer. And--here you iss!" he went on, giving her shoulders a little squeeze. "A straight case of 'two souls with but a single thought,' don't you reckon?"

Billy Louise, by a visible effort, brought the situation down to earth.

She twisted herself free and went over to the stove and saved a frying-pan of potatoes from burning to a crisp.

"I don't know about your soul," she said, glancing back at him. "I happen to have two or three thoughts in mine. One is that I'm half starved. The second is that you're not acting a bit nice, under the circ.u.mstances; no perfectly polite young man makes love to a girl when she is supposedly helpless and under his protection." She stopped there to wrinkle her nose at him and twist her mouth humorously. "The third thought is that if you don't behave, I shall go straight home and never be nice to you again. And," she added, getting back of the coffee-pot--which looked new--"the rest of my soul is one great big blob of question-marks. If you can eat and talk at the same time, you may tell me what this frantic industry is all about. If you can't, I'll have to wait till after dinner; not even my curiosity is going to punish my poor tummy any longer." She pulled a pan of biscuits from the oven, lifted them out one at a time with dainty little nabs because they were hot, and stole a glance now and then at Ward from under her eyebrows.

Ward stood and looked at her until the food was all on the table. He was breathing unnaturally, and his jaws were set hard together. When she pushed a box up to the table and sat down upon it, and rested her elbows on the oilcloth and looked straight at him with her chin nested in her two palms, he drew a long breath, hunched his shoulders with some mental surrender, and grinned wryly.

"So be it," he yielded, throwing his hat upon the bunk. "I kinda overplayed my hand, anyway. I most humbly ask your pardon!" He bowed farcically and took up the wash-basin from its bench just outside the door.

"You see, William Louisa," he went on quizzically, when he had seated himself opposite her and was helping himself to the potatoes, "when a young lady invades strange territory, and hides behind strange doors, and jumps out at an unsuspecting but terribly well-meaning young man, she's apt to get a surprise. When emotions are bottled--"

"Never mind the bottled emotions. I'd like some potatoes, if you don't want them all. I see you haven't the faintest idea how to treat a guest. Charlie Fox would have died before he would help himself and set down the dish away out of my reach. You could stick pins into him till he howled, but you couldn't make him be rude to a lady."

"I'd sure like to," muttered Ward ambiguously and handed her every bit of food within his reach.

"You can talk and eat at the same time, I see. So tell me what you've been doing all this while." Billy Louise spoke lightly, even flippantly, but her eyes were making love to him shyly, whether she knew it or not.

"Working," answered Ward promptly and briefly. He was thinking at the rate of a million thoughts a minute, it seemed to him, and he was afraid to let go of himself and say what he thought. One thing he knew beyond all doubt, and that was that he must be careful or he would see his air-castle blow up in small fragments and come down a hopeless ruin. He needed time to think, and Billy Louise was not giving him even a minute. So he clutched at two decisions which instinct told him might help him win to safety: He would not make love, and he would not tell Billy Louise about the gold.

"Working! Well, so have I. But working at what? Did you hire out to Junkins again? I thought you said you wouldn't till fall." Billy Louise was watching Ward rather closely, perhaps to see how far she might trust his recovered inscrutability. "Why don't you show some human inquisitiveness about my being here?" she asked irrelevantly, just as Ward was hastily choosing how he would answer her without saying too much.

"It wouldn't be polite to be inquisitive about a lady, would it?" Ward retorted, thankful for the change of subject.

"N-no--but, then, you never bother about being just polite! Charlie Fox would--"

"Charlie Fox would think you came to see him," Ward a.s.serted uncharitably. "My head isn't swelled to that extent. Why did you come, anyway?"

"To see you." Billy Louise lost her nerve when she saw the light leap into his eyes. "To see whether you were dead or not," she revised hastily, "so mommie would stop worrying about you. Mommie has pestered the life out of me for the last month, thinking you might be sick or hurt or something. So--I was riding up this way, anyway, and--"

"I see I'll have to ride down and prove to mommie that I'm very much alive. I'm sure glad to know that somebody takes an interest in me--as if I were a real human." Ward's eyes watched furtively her face, but Billy Louise refused even to nibble at the bait.

"Why didn't you come before, then? You know mommie likes to have you."

"How about mommie's child?" Ward's look was dangerous to his good resolutions.

"Listen here, Ward." Billy Louise took refuge behind her terrible frankness. "If you make love, I won't like you half as well. Don't you know that all the time when I used to play with my pretend Ward Warren, he--he never made love?" A dimple tried to show itself in her cheek and was sent about its business with a twist of her lips. "My pretend Ward was lovely; he liked me to pieces, but he never came right out and said so. He--he skated around the subject--" Billy Louise ill.u.s.trated the skating process by drawing her forefinger in a wide circle around her cup. "He made love--with his eyes--and he kissed me with his--voice--but he never spoiled it with words."

Ward grunted a word that sounded like "damchump."

"Nothing of the kind!" Billy Louise flew to the defense of her "pretend." "He knew just exactly how a girl likes to be made love to.

And, anyway, you've been doing the selfsame thing yourself, Ward Warren, till just now. And--"

"Oh, have I?"

"Yes, you have. And I might have known better than to--to startle you.

You always, eternally, do something n.o.body'd ever dream of your doing.

The first time, when I threw that chip, you pulled a gun on me--" The voice of Billy Louise squeezed down to a wisp of a whisper. Her eyes were remorseful. "Oh, Ward, I didn't mean to--to--"

"It's all right. I've got it coming." It was as if a mask had dropped before Ward's features. Even his eyes looked strange and hard in that face of set muscles, though the thin, bitter lips and quivering nostrils showed that there was feeling behind it all. "I see where you're right, William. You needn't be afraid; I won't make love again."

Billy Louise looked as though she wanted to beat something--herself, most likely. She stared as they stare who watch from the dock while a loved one slips farther and farther away on a voyage from which there may be no return; only Billy Louise was not one to watch and do nothing else.