Winner Take All Part 5

Even callow young Ostermoor, hair slick and scented, a thick-limbed, small-town Brummel confident in his best-clothes smartness, had not had quite the courage to tell her to her uplifted, flushed face what his father had shouted:--That he'd have no blood of his crossed with hers; that it was dangerous blood--tainted--wild.

"He says," he finished lamely instead, "it's better to wait."

Yet how easily she read his lameness, and estimated his father's words.

Dangerous blood--tainted? Ostermoor had feared her tongue; the women in his household talked shrilly and long upon far less provocation.

But she only sat and seemed to smile.

"I see," was all she said.

And while she smiled, her cheeks hot, his eyes had crept over her. Her slenderness was rounded, her slimness soft and full. A girl, it came upon him, for whom a man's arms might still yearn in spite of himself.

"This--this needn't mean any real break between us," he hoped, with what he intended as a worldly careless air. He'd never have dared that a week earlier; he had always been too conscious until that moment of a certain unapproachability, a transcendent daintiness, audacious and the reverse from fragile, which nevertheless had kept him at arms' length.

But with his father's words in his ears--dangerous!--tainted!--he managed it easily.

"Of course we couldn't arrange it here in town, where we're known--"

"Arrange what?"

"Well, I thought maybe--" Her calmness, hers by right of breeding, lamed him again and angered him to coa.r.s.e effrontery.

"I don't suppose there's many in town now who'd care to take a chance--"

"A chance on what?"

"Well, on marrying you. This is a pretty conservative community. But I thought if we could find a place quietly, not too far away, where we--"

She rang a bell and summoned a butler who was also cook, and coachman too.

"Show Mr. Ostermoor out," she directed, calm still. But the terms of that order were only out of regard for the extreme age of the servitor.

He would attempt to obey her she knew; had he been younger she would have directed that Mr. Ostermoor be thrown out.

A week later the estate was settled up. Naturally Ostermoor's father, who was president of the local bank, knew that there wasn't going to be any estate, yet the total of her father's paper must have staggered him. I hope so. And when she was proved to be practically penniless, immediately they all felt that they had evened their score with her.

For what? Oh, for driving so sweet and cool along a dusty, maple-shaded main street, as pleasant and courteous to ordinary tradespeople as she was to better folk.

Then, in a surprisingly short while, whenever somebody happened to mention her and wonder where she had gone, they found that they had already started to forget her.

"Somewhere West. I did hear the name of the place. But I can't remember it."

They were above reproach,--in their geography. She had gone somewhere west, and sometimes I am not sure that there isn't a heartache in the reason for her going.

Romance was in her hungry heart; such romance as the Sunday-groomed youths who frequented the house on the hill might never satisfy. She'd read books, all sorts of books, but one of the plains she loved. In it a somewhat saturnine horseman, a son of the sage-brush, unlettered but tutored much by life, had wooed and won a prim little schoolmistress from the East. Whether she went with the hope of emulation in her heart or not none can venture to say. Maybe it was in search of manhood, a different kind of man.

Anyhow, she went. And found a school to teach. And disillusionment.

She could not teach school; she knew more than her scholars, yet not so much more of what they needed to be taught. It was not always clear in her mind whether it had been the Delaware or the Rappahannock which furnished Was.h.i.+ngton's transportation problem. And two and two didn't always make four; not if she didn't keep her mind terribly concentrated, when she wanted to dream.

The children loved her; they cried, unaccountably to their parents, when she had to leave. But the parents were ruthless about it; they weren't paying school taxes to support a slip of a girl who couldn't hammer the three essential R's into their undoubtedly gifted offsprings' heads, even though her hair was high-piled and tawny-red, and her skin like cream; even though there were violet lights in her singularly eager eyes.

When one less practical than the rest tried to point out that she had a bearing different from theirs; "genteel" he called it, yet without offense to the most humble, and that she "talked good, too," and in a less nasal way, they rode him down. Their progeny was yet a long step from a drawing-room they averred, or the need to know how to enter one.

She lost her position. In Estabrook, loath to acknowledge herself disappointed, she found another, and lost that. But she considered this scarcely a mishap, for she couldn't have lived upon what it paid anyway. Moreover she was becoming rapidly afraid of this country; it was bigger and she was littler than she had supposed. And no das.h.i.+ng hors.e.m.e.n had ridden up to her schoolhouse door and handed her nosegays and a.s.sured her that her eyes were the same shade of blue. She'd p.r.i.c.ked that bubble! Most of them chewed tobacco with no delicate regard for outward appearances.

With her money running perilously low she had taken stock of her wardrobe and found it already shabby, and decided to go back East while there was still time. She'd try New York. Her pride would not handicap her there any more than it had here, for no one would know her. She'd find something to do in New York; of course she would.

She'd have to!

Then the toad-person had laid unclean eyes upon her in the dining-room of the Cactus House, and contrived meetings where their bodies must brush close in pa.s.sing. And followed her to the station. And she was biting her lip now to keep from being silly and screaming; trying to plan in panic the scathing things which she must say.

It was dark there. The toad could not see her face and thus learn that her eyes were dilated. The East-bound roared in as he came up. She tried to run--it was her train--and couldn't. The toad put a hand upon her. And then Blue Jeans--blue serge now--dropped off the steps of the smoker in the shadow close behind her, and became instantly absorbed in the tableau.

Blue Jeans had whipped Condit. Indeed, he had considered it an unfair thing. Why, Condit was only a boy--not more than twenty-one or twenty-two at the most--a baby!--no bigger than himself. Not half so big as the superintendent! And he could not fight well, either. He danced a lot, and feinted, and made a great show of annihilation, but he couldn't really fight. Blue Jeans had been sorry for him a little; not much, because he'd ought to be in some other business if he couldn't take care of himself. But he'd dropped so still, the first time Blue Jeans. .h.i.t him. So huddled like!

"Have I killed him?" he asked Larrabie, remorsefully, after it had happened.

Condit had folded up like a sick accordion.

"Have I killed him?"

"h.e.l.l, no!" And Larrabie had stared curiously while neither of them heard the applause.

Before an hour pa.s.sed Larrabie wired the huge man who had an office in New York, an office lined with books. The books were never used; the office saw strange usage.

"A bear-cat," Larrabie wired. "What shall I do with him?"

And an answer had come back:

"Keep him under cover. Work him a little. Will send Devereau when the time is right."

So Blue Jeans had suddenly found his Dream in the process of coming true. For he had done, not happy at heart, just what the huge man had said he would do; he had decided to acc.u.mulate other and just as easy two hundreds.

"I'll herd by myself," was the way he argued himself to this decision.

"I'm no lily, but I'll not soil myself worse with this bunch."

And Larrabie had kept him under cover, and worked him twice, until another telegram had finally come, advising them that Devereau was on his way West,--that the "time was right." But Larrabie had been perplexed again on this occasion by Blue Jeans' lack of enthusiasm. He reread the telegram aloud and emphasized the other's great luck.

"There's not a man that wouldn't give up a big slice to get him for a manager," he said. "He's in right, too. He's the ace!"

"Huh!" remarked Blue Jeans. Indeed, Blue Jeans baffled him.

And when Devereau arrived in Estabrook on a train twenty minutes late, Blue Jeans was not there to keep the appointment which Larrabie, duly aware of the Easterner's importance, had arranged.

"Devereau'll be taking you East, likely," he had surmised. So waiting not an instant past the hour when he was scheduled to arrive, Blue Jeans had gone, stricken with homesickness at the thought of leaving her, to see Girl o' Mine. It took him twenty miles down the line, but he'd made the appointment with her before he knew Devereau was coming, anyhow, and he'd keep it. Therefore Devereau--but you've guessed it.

Devereau is Fox-face of the private car. Devereau is the toad.

It was dark at the end of the platform. He could not see that her eyes were dilated. He laid his hand upon her. She couldn't run; her legs felt frozen and useless.

"No hurry, dearie," said Devereau. "Let's talk this over. Maybe you'll be glad you missed your train."

But Blue Jeans, who had landed lightly on the gravel, saw what Devereau had missed. He saw that Tweed-Suit was afraid--that she was numbed with fear. His single back-hand thrust sent Devereau spinning under a truck.