Ewing's Lady Part 5

"It isn't far enough," he answered, still searching her face. "Not half far enough--I have so much thinking--so much thinking to do."

CHAPTER V

INTO THE PAST AND OUT

It was not without concern that Mrs. Laithe awaited the return of her brother the following day. The cattle drive that had beguiled him from habits of extreme and enforced precision had occupied a fortnight, and she understood the life to be sorely trying to any but the rugged.

Earnestly had she sought to dissuade him from the adventure, for insomnia had long beset him, and dyspepsia marked him for its plaything.

Eloquently exposed to him had been the folly of hoping for sleep on stony ground after vainly wooing it in the softest of beds with an air pillow inflated to the nice degree of resiliency. And the unsuitability of camp fare to a man who had long been sustained by an invalid's diet had been shrewdly set forth. None the less he had persisted, caught in the frenzy of desperation that sometimes overwhelms even the practiced dyspeptic.

"It can't be worse, Sis," he had tragically a.s.sured her at parting. "If I've got to writhe out my days, why, I shall writhe like a gentleman, that's all. I can at least chuck those baby foods and perish with some dignity."

"But you're not leaving your medicines, those drops and things?" she had asked, in real alarm.

"Every infernal drop. I've struck all along the line--not another morsel of disinfected zwieback nor sanitary breakfast food nor hygienic prunes nor glutenized near-food--not even one pepsin tablet. It's come to where I'd sooner have no stomach at all than be bullied night and day by one."

With which splendid defiance he had ridden desperately off, a steely flash in his tired gray eyes and a bit of fevered color glowing in his sallow cheeks.

When Mrs. Pierce loudly announced the return of the men early in the afternoon, therefore, the invalid's sister was ready to be harrowed.

There would be bitter agonies to relate--chiefly stomachic. She had heroically resolved, moreover, not immediately to flaw the surface of her sympathy with any gusty "I told you so!" That was a privilege sacred unto her, and not to be foregone; but she would defer its satisfaction until the pangs of confession had been suffered; until the rash one should achieve a mood receptive to counsel.

At the call of Mrs. Pierce she ran down the flower-bordered walk to join that lady at the gate, and there they watched the cavalcade as it jolted down the lacets of the mesa trail--four hors.e.m.e.n in single file, two laden pack animals, another horseman in the rear. The returning invalid was equal, then, to sitting a horse. The far-focused eyes of Mrs. Pierce were the first to identify him. As the line advanced through the willow growth that fringed the creek she said, pointing, "There's Mr.

Bartell--he's in the lead."

"But Clarence doesn't smoke; the doctors won't let him," his sister interposed, for she could distinguish a pipe in the mouth of the foremost horseman. "And, anyway, it couldn't be Clarence; it's too--" On the point of saying "too disreputable," she reflected that the person in front looked quite like the run of Mrs. Pierce's nearest friends and might, indeed, be of her own household.

"It's sure your brother, though," insisted Mrs. Pierce, as the riders broke into a lope over the level, "and he _don't_ look quite as--" Mrs.

Pierce forbore tactfully in her turn. She had meant to say "dandified."

"And I tell you, Mis' Laithe, he does look husky, too. Not no ways so squammish as when he started. My suz! Here we've et dinner and they'll be hungry as bears. I must run in and set back something."

The other men turned with the packhorses off toward the corrals, but Bartell came on at a stiff gallop to where his sister waited. When he had pulled his horse up before her with perilous but showy abruptness, he raised himself in the saddle, swung his hat, and poured into the still air of the valley a long, high yell of such volume that his sister stepped hastily within the gate again. She had heard the like of that yell as they pa.s.sed through Pagosa Springs, rendered by a cowboy in the acute stage of alcoholic dementia.

"Why, Clarence, _dear_!" she gasped, fearing the worst. But he hurriedly dismounted and came, steadily enough, to kiss her. She submitted doubtfully to this, and immediately held him off for inspection. He was frankly disreputable. The flannel s.h.i.+rt and corduroy trousers were torn, bedraggled, gray with the dust of the trail; his boots were past redemption, his hat a reproach; his face a bronzed and hairy caricature; and he reeked of the most malignant tobacco Mrs. Laithe had ever encountered. Only the gold-rimmed spectacles, the nearsighted, peering gray eyes, and a narrow zone of white forehead under his hat brim served to recall the somewhat fastidious, sedate, and rather oldish-looking young man who had parted from her.

He smiled at her with a complacency that made it almost a smirk. Then he boisterously kissed her again before she could evade him, and uttered once more that yell of lawless abandon.

"Clarence!" she expostulated, but he waved her to silence with an imperious hand.

"Quickest way to tell the story, Nell--that's my paean of victory. Sleep?

Slept like a night watchman. Eat? I debauched myself with the rowdiest sort of food every chance I got--fried bacon, boiled beans, baking-powder biscuit, black coffee that would bite your finger off--couldn't get enough; smoked when I wasn't eating or sleeping; drank raw whisky, too--whisky that would etch copper. Work? I worked harder than a Coney Island piano player, fell over asleep at night and got up asleep in the morning--when they kicked me the third time. And I galloped up and down cliffs after runaway steers where I wouldn't have crawled on my hands and knees two weeks before. And now that whole bunch of boys treat me like one of themselves. I found out they called me 'Willie Four-eyes' when I first came here. Now they call me 'Doc,' as friendly as you can imagine, and Buck Devlin told me last night I could ride a streak of lightning with the back cinch busted, if I tried."

He broke off to light the evil pipe ostentatiously, while she watched him, open eyed, not yet equal to speech.

"Now run in like a good girl and see if Ma Pierce has plenty of fragments from the noonday feast. Anything at all--I could eat a deer hide with the hair on."

Wavering incredulously, she left to do his bidding. As he led his horse around to the corral he roared a s.n.a.t.c.h from Buck Devlin's favorite ballad, with an excellent imitation of the cowboy manner:

"Oh, bur-ree me _not_ on the lone prai-_ree-e_--"

After he had eaten he slouched into a hammock on the veranda with extravagant groans of repletion, and again lighted his pipe. His sister promptly removed her chair beyond the line of its baleful emanations.

"Well, Sis," he began, "that trip sure did for me good and plenty. Me for the high country uninterrupted hereafter!"

She regarded him with an amused smile.

"I'm so glad, dear, about the health. It's a miracle, but don't overdo it, don't attempt everything at once. And the trip 'sure' seems to have 'done' you in another way--how is it--'good and plenty'? You walk like a cowboy and talk and sing and act generally like one----"

"Do I, really, though?" A sort of half-shamed pleasure glowed in his eyes. "Well, you know they're good, companionable fellows, and a man takes on their ways of speech unconsciously. But I didn't think it would be noticed in me so soon. Do I seem like the real thing, honestly, now?"

She rea.s.sured him, laughing frankly.

"Well, you needn't laugh. It's all fixed--I'm going to be one."

"But, Clarence, not for long, surely!"

"It's all settled, I tell you. I've bought a ranch, old Swede Peterson's place over on Pine River; corking spot, three half sections under fence and ditch, right at the mouth of a box canon where n.o.body can get in above me, plenty of water, plenty of free range close at hand."

"Clarence Bartell, you're--what do you call it?--stringing."

"Not a bit of it. Wait till I come on in about two years, after selling a train load of fat steers at Omaha or Kansas City--sashaying down Fifth Avenue and rounding into Ninth Street with my big hat and long-shanked spurs and a couple of forty-fours booming into the air.

_You'll_ see, and won't dad say it's deuced unpleasant!"

"But I'll not believe until I see."

He spoke ruminantly between pulls at the pipe.

"Lots of things to do now, though. Got to go down to Pagosa this week to pay over the money, get the deed, and register my brand. How does 'Bar-B' strike you? Rather neat, yes? It'll make a tasty little monogram on the three hundred critters I start with. I'm on track of a herd of shorthorns already."

"And a little while ago you were off to the Philippines, and before that to Porto Rico, and last summer you were going on one of those expeditions that come back and tell why they didn't reach the North Pole, and you came out here to be a miner and you've----"

There was an impatient, silencing wave of the pipe.

"Oh, let all that go, can't you?--let the dead past bury its dead. I'm fixed for life. You and dad won't laugh at me any more. Come on out now and see me throw a rope, if you don't believe me. I've been practicing every day. And say, you didn't happen to notice the diamond hitch on that forward pack horse, did you? Well, I'm the boy that did most of that."

She followed him dutifully to the corrals and for half an hour watched him hurl thirty feet of rope at the horned skull of a steer nailed to the top of a post. When the noose settled over this mark his boyish delight was supreme. When it flew wide, which was oftener, his look was one of invincible determination.

As his sister left him he was explaining to Red Phinney, who had sauntered up to be a help in the practice, that the range of Bar-B had a lucky lie--no "greaser" could come along and "sleep" him.

She went back to her chair and book, shaping certain questions she would put to this brother. But it was not until after the evening meal that she could again talk with him, for the ardent novice found occupation about the stable and corrals the rest of the afternoon, and even sat for a time with the men in the evening, listening avidly to their small talk of the range, watchful to share in it. When he dared ask a question knowingly, or venture a swift comment couched in the vernacular, he thrilled with a joy not less poignant because it must be dissembled.

But conscience p.r.i.c.ked him at length to leave those fascinating adventurers in the bunkhouse and to condescend for an interval to mere brotherhood. He found his sister alone in the "front" room, ensconced on the bearskin rug before a snapping and fragrant fire of cedar wood.

He drew up the wooden rocker and remarked that the fire smelled like a thousand burning leadpencils. He would have gone on to talk of his great experience, but the woman wisely forestalled him.