Hidden Creek Part 15

And then, there was Sheila's memory. d.i.c.kie had come upon her in a confusion of boxes, her little trunk half-unpacked, its treasures scattered over the chairs and floor. Sheila had lifted to him from where she knelt a glowing and excited face. "Oh, d.i.c.kie," she had said, her relief at the escape from Mrs. Hudson pouring music into her voice, "have you heard?"

He had sat down on one of the plush chairs of "the suite" as though he felt weak. Then he had got up and had walked to and fro while she described her dream, the beauty of her chosen mission, the glory of the saloon whose high priestess she had become. And d.i.c.kie had listened with the bitter and disillusioned and tender face of a father hearing the prattle of a beloved child.

"You honest think all that, Sheila?" he had asked her patiently.

She had started again, standing now to face him and beginning to be angry at his look. This boy whom she had lifted up to be her friend!

"Say," d.i.c.kie had drawled, "Poppa's some guardian!" He had advanced upon her as though he wanted to shake her. "You gotta give it right up, Sheila," he had said sternly. "Sooner than immediately. It's not to go through. Say, girl, you don't know much about bars." He had drawn a picture for her, drawing partly upon experience, partly upon his imagination, the gift of vivid metaphor descending upon him. He used words that bit into her memory. Sheila had listened and then she had put her hands over her ears. He pulled them down. He went on. Sheila's Irish blood had boiled up into her brain. She stormed back at him.

"It's you, it's your use of The Aura that has been its only shame, d.i.c.kie," was the last of all the things she had said.

At which, d.i.c.kie standing very still, had answered, "If you go there and stand behind the bar all night with Carthy to keep hands off, I--I swear I'll never set foot inside the place again. You ain't agoin' to be _my_ beacon light--"

"Well, then," said Sheila, "I shall have done one good thing at least by being there."

d.i.c.kie, going out, had pa.s.sed a breathless Sylvester on his way in. The two had looked at each other with a look that cut in two the tie between them, and Sheila, running to Sylvester, had burst into tears.

The motor hummed evenly on its way. It began, with a change of tune, to climb the graded side of one of the enormous mesas. Sheila, having lived through again that scene with d.i.c.kie, took out a small handkerchief and busied herself with it under her veil. She laughed shakily.

"Perhaps a beacon does more good by warning people away than by attracting them," she said. "d.i.c.kie has certainly kept his word. I don't believe he's touched a drop since I've been barmaid, Mr. Hudson. I should think you'd be proud of him."

Sylvester was silent while they climbed the hill. He changed gears and sounded his horn. They pa.s.sed another motor on a dangerous curve. They began to drop down again.

"Some day," said Sylvester in a quiet voice, "I'll break every bone in d.i.c.kie's body." He murmured something more under his breath in too low a tone, fortunately, for Sheila's ear. From her position behind the bar, she had become used to swearing. She had heard a strange variety of language. But when Sylvester drew upon his experience and his fancy, the artist in him was at work.

"Do you suppose," asked his companion in an impersonal tone, "that it was really a hard thing for d.i.c.kie to do--to give it up, I mean?"

"By the look of him the last few months," snarled Sylvester, "I should say it had taken out of him what little real feller there ever was in."

Sheila considered this. She remembered d.i.c.kie, as he had risen behind the desk half an hour before. She did not contradict Sylvester. She had learned not to contradict him. But d.i.c.kie's face with its tight-knit look of battle stood out very clear to refute the accusation of any loss of manliness. He was still a quaint and ruffled d.i.c.kie. But he was vastly aged. From twenty to twenty-seven, he seemed to have jumped in a few weeks. A key had turned in the formerly open door of his spirit. The indeterminate lips had shut hard, the long-lashed eyes had definitely put a guard upon their dreams. He was shockingly thin and colorless, however.

Sheila dwelt painfully upon the sort of devastation she had wrought.

Girlie's face, and d.i.c.kie's, and Jim's. A grieving pressure squeezed her heart; she lifted her chest with an effort on a stifled breath.

"G.o.d! Sheila," said Sylvester harshly. The car wobbled a little. "Ain't you happy, girl?"

Sheila looked up at him. Her veil was wet against her cheeks.

"Last night," she said unevenly, "a man was going to kiss me on my mouth and--and he changed his mind and kissed my hand instead. He left a smear of blood on my fingers from where those--those other men had struck his lips. I don't know why it f-frightens me so to think about that. But it does."

She seemed to collapse before him into a little sobbing child.

"And every day when I wake up," she wailed, "I t-taste whiskey on my tongue and I--I smell cigarette smoke in my hair. And I d-dream about men looking at me--the way Jim looks. And I can't let myself think of Father any more. He used to hold his chin up and walk along as if he looked above every one and everything. I don't believe he'd ever seen a barmaid or a drunken man--not really seen them, Mr. Hudson."

"Then he wasn't a real artist after all," Sylvester spoke slowly and carefully. He was pale.

"He l-loved the stars," sobbed Sheila, her broken reserve had let out a flood; "he told me to keep looking at the stars."

"Well, ma'am," Sylvester spoke again, "I never knowed the stars to turn their backs on anything. Barmaids or drunks or kings--they all look about alike to the stars, I reckon. Say, Sheila, maybe you haven't got the pluck for real living. Maybe you're the kind of doll-baby girl that craves sheltering. I reckon I made a big mistake."

Sheila moved slightly as though his speech had p.r.i.c.ked her.

"It kind of didn't occur to me," went on Sylvester, "that you'd care a whole lot about being ig-nored by Momma and Mr. and Mrs. Greely and Girlie. Say, Girlie's got to take her chance same's anybody else. Why don't you give Jim a jolt?"

Sheila at this began to laugh. She caught her breath. She laughed and cried together.

Sylvester patted her shoulder. "Poor kid! You're all in. Late hours too much for you, I reckon. Come on now--tell Pap everything. Ease off your heart. It's wonderful what crying does for the nervous system. I laid out on a prairie one night when I was about your age and just naturally bawled. You'd 'a' thought I was a baby steer, hanged if you wouldn't 'a'

thought so. It's the fight scared you plumb to pieces. Carthy told me about it and how you let the good-looking kid out by the back. I seen him ride off toward Hidden Creek this morning. He was a real pretty boy too.

Say, Sheila, wasn't you ever kissed?"

"No," said Sheila. "And I don't want to be." Sylvester laughed with a little low cackle of intense pleasure and amus.e.m.e.nt. "Well, you shan't be. No, you shan't. n.o.body shall kiss Sheila!"

His method seemed to him successful. Sheila stopped crying and stopped laughing, dried her eyes, murmured, "I'm all right now, thank you, Mr.

Hudson," and fell into an abysmal silence.

He talked smoothly, soothingly, skillfully, confident of his power to manage "gels." Once in a while he saw her teeth gleam as though she smiled. As they came back to Millings in the afterglow of a brief Western twilight, she unfastened her veil and showed a quiet, thoughtful face.

She thanked him, gave him her hand. "Don't come up, please, Mr. Hudson,"

she said with that cool composure of which at times she was surprisingly capable. "I shall have my dinner sent up and take a little rest before I go to work."

"You feel O.K.?" he asked her doubtfully. His brown eyes had an almost doglike wistfulness.

"Quite, thank you." Her easy, effortless smile pa.s.sed across her face and in and out of her eyes.

Hudson stood beside his wheel tapping his teeth and staring after her.

The rockers on the veranda stopped their rocking, stopped their talking, stopped their breathing to see Sheila pa.s.s. When she had gone, they fastened their attention upon Sylvester. He was not aware of them. He stood there a full three minutes under the glare of publicity. Then he sighed and climbed into his car.

CHAPTER XII

HUDSON'S QUEEN

The lobby, empty of its crowd when Sheila pa.s.sed through it on her way up to her rooms, was filled by a wheezy, bullying voice. In front of the desk a little barrel of a man with piggish eyes was disputing his bill with d.i.c.kie. At the sound of Sheila's entrance he turned, stopped his complaint, watched her pa.s.s, and spat into a near-by receptacle. Sheila remembered that he had visited the bar early in the evening before, and had guzzled his whiskey and made some wheezy attempts at gallantry.

d.i.c.kie, flushed, his hair at wild odds with composure, was going over the bill. In the midst of his calculations the man would interrupt him with a plump dirty forefinger pounced upon the paper. "Wa.s.sa meanin' of this item, f'rinstance? Highway robbery, tha.s.sa meanin' of it. My wife take breakfast in her room? I'd like to see her try it!"

Sheila went upstairs. She took off her things, washed off the dust, and changed into the black-and-white barmaid's costume, fastening the frilly ap.r.o.n, the cuffs, the delicate fichu with mechanical care. She put on the silk stockings and the buckled shoes and the tiny cap. Then she went into her sitting-room, chose the most dignified chair, folded her hands in her lap, and waited for d.i.c.kie. Waiting, she looked out through the window and saw the glow fade from the snowy crest of The Hill. The evening star let itself delicately down through the sweeping shadows of the earth from some mysterious fastness of invisibility. The room was dim when d.i.c.kie's knock made her turn her head.

"Come in."

He appeared, shut the door without looking at her, then came unwillingly across the carpet and stopped at about three steps from her chair, standing with one hand in his pocket. He had slicked down his hair with a wet brush and changed his suit. It was the dark-blue serge he had worn at the dance five months before. What those five months had been to d.i.c.kie, through what abas.e.m.e.nts and exaltations, furies and despairs he had traveled since he had looked up from Sheila's slippered feet with his heart turned backward like a pilot's wheel, was only faintly indicated in his face. And yet the face gave Sheila a pang. And, unsupported by anger, he was far from formidable, a mere youth. Sheila wondered at her long and sustained persecution of him. She smiled, her lips, her eyes, and her heart.

"Aren't you going to sit down, d.i.c.kie? This isn't a school examination."

"If it was," said d.i.c.kie, with an uncertain attempt at ease, "I wouldn't pa.s.s." He felt for a chair and got into it. He caught a knee in his hand and looked about him. "You've made the room awful pretty, Sheila."