Hidden Creek Part 26

"I might say something about asking questions," began Cosme with grimness, but changed his tone quickly with a light, apologetic touch on her arm, "but--but I won't. I ran away from school when I was fourteen and I've been knocking around the West ever since."

"What school?" asked Sheila.

He did not answer for several minutes. They had come to the end of the meadow and were mounting a slope on a narrow trail where the ponies seemed to nose their way among the trees. Now and then Sheila had to put out her hand to push her knee away from a threatening trunk. Below were the vivid paintbrush flowers and the blue mountain lupine and all about the nymph-white aspens with leaves turning to restless gold against the sky. The horses moved quietly with a slight creaking of saddles. There was a feeling of stealth, of mystery--that tiptoe breathless expectation of Pan pipes.... At last Cosme turned in his saddle, rested his hand on the cantle, and looked at Sheila from a bent face with troubled eyes.

"It was an Eastern school," he said. "No doubt you've heard of it. It was Groton."

The name here in these Wyoming woods brought a picture as foreign as the artificiality of a drawing-room.

"Groton? You ran away?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Sheila's suspicions were returning forcibly. "I'll have to ask questions, Mr. Hilliard, because it seems so strange--what you are now, and your running away and never having been brought back to the East by--by whoever it was that sent you to Groton."

"I want you to ask questions," he said rather wistfully. "You have the right."

This forced her into something of a dilemma. She ignored it and waited, looking away from him. He would not leave her this loophole, however.

"Why don't you look at me?" he demanded crossly.

She did, and smiled again.

"You have the prettiest smile I ever saw!" he cried; then went on quickly, "I ran away because of something that happened. I'll tell you.

My mother"--he flushed and his eyes fell--"came up to see me at school one day. My mother was very beautiful.... I was mad about her." Curiously enough, every trace of the Western cowboy had gone out of his voice and manner, which were an echo of the voice and manner of the Groton schoolboy whose experience he told. "I was proud of her--you know how a kid is. I kind of paraded her round and showed her off to the other fellows. No other fellow had such a beautiful mother. Then, as we were saying good-bye, a crowd of the boys all round, I did something--trod on her foot or something, I don't quite know what--and she lifted up her hand and slapped me across the face." He was white at the shocking memory. "Right there before them all, when I--I was adoring her. She had the temper of a devil, a sudden Spanish temper--the kind I have, too--and she never made the slightest effort to hold it down. She hit me and she laughed as though it was funny and she got into her carriage. I cut off to my room. I wanted to kill myself. I couldn't face any one. I wanted never to see her again. I guess I was a queer sort of kid.... I don't know ..." He drew a big breath, dropped back to the present and his vivid color returned. "That's why I ran away from school, Miss Arundel."

"And they never brought you back?"

He laughed. "They never found me. I had quite a lot of money and I lost myself pretty cleverly...a boy of fourteen can, you know. It's a very common history. Well, I suppose they didn't break their necks over me either, after the first panic. They were busy people--my parents--remarkably busy going to the devil.... And they were eternally hard-up. You see, my grandfather had the money--still has it--and he's remarkably tight. I wrote to them after six years, when I was twenty.

They wrote back; at least their lawyer did. They tried, not very sincerely, though, I think, to coax me East again... told me they'd double my allowance if I did--they've sent me a pittance--" He shuddered suddenly, a violent, primitive s.h.i.+ver. "I'm glad I didn't go," he said.

There was a long stillness. That dreadful climax to the special "business" of the Hilliards was relived in both their memories. But it was something of which neither could speak. Sheila wondered if the beautiful mother was that instant wearing the hideous prison dress. She wished that she had read the result of the trial. She wouldn't for the world question this pale and silent young man. The rest of their ride was quiet and rather mournful. They rode back at sunset and Hilliard bade her a troubled good-bye.

She wanted to say something comforting, rea.s.suring. She watched him helplessly from where she stood on the porch as he walked across the clearing to his horse. Suddenly he slapped the pocket of his chaps and turned back. "Thunder!" he cried, "I'd forgotten the mail. A fellow left it at the ford. A paper for Miss Blake and a letter for you."

Sheila held out her hand. "A letter for me?" She took it. It was a strange hand, small and rather unsteady. The envelope was fat, the postmark Millings. Her flush of surprise ebbed. She knew whose letter it was--Sylvester Hudson's. He had found her out.

She did not even notice Cosme's departure. She went up to her loft, sat down on her cot and read.

"MY DEAR MISS SHEILA:

"I don't rightly know how to express myself in this letter because I know what your feelings toward Pap must be like, and they are fierce. But I have got to try to write you a letter just the same, for there are some things that need explaining. At first, when my hotel and my Aura were burned down [here the writing was especially shaky] and I found that you and d.i.c.kie had both vamoosed, I thought that you had paid me out and gone off together. You can't blame me for that thought, Miss Sheila, for I had found him in your room at that time of night or morning and I couldn't help but see that he was aiming to kiss you and you were waiting for his kiss. So I was angry and I had been drinking and I kissed you myself, taking advantage of you in a way that no gentleman would do. But I thought you were different from the Sheila I had brought to be my barmaid.

"Well, ma'am, for a while after the fire, I was pretty near crazy. I was about loco. Then I was sick. When I got well again, a fellow who come over from Hidden Creek told me you had gone over to be at a ranch there and that you had come in alone. That sort of got me to thinking about you more and more and studying you out, and I begun to see that I had made a bad mistake. Whatsoever reason brought that d.a.m.n fool d.i.c.kie to your room that morning, it wasn't your doings, and the way you was waiting for his kiss was more a mother's way. I have had some hard moments with myself, Miss Sheila, and I have come to this that I have got to write and tell you how I feel. And ask your forgiveness. You see you were something in my life, different from anything that had ever been there. I don't rightly know--I likely never will know--what you meant in my life. I handled you in my heart like a flower. Before G.o.d, I had a religion for you. And that was just why, when I thought you was bad, that it drove me crazy. I wonder if you will understand this. You are awful young and awful ignorant. And I have hurt your pride. You are terrible proud for your years, Miss Sheila. I ache all over when I think that I hurt your pretty mouth. I hope it is smiling now. I am moving out of Millings,--Me and Momma and Babe. But Girlie is agoing to marry Jim. He run right back to her like a little lost lamb the second you was gone. Likely, he'll never touch liquor again. I haven't heard from d.i.c.kie. I guess he's gone where the saloons are bigger and where you can get oysters with your drinks. He always was a d.a.m.n fool. I would dearly like to go over to Hidden Creek and see you, but I feel like I'd better not. It would hurt me if I got a turn-down from you like it will hurt me if you don't answer this letter, which is a mighty poor attempt to tell you my bad reasons for behaving like I did. I am not sorry I thrashed d.i.c.kie. He had ought to be thrashed good and plenty. And he has sure paid me off by burning down my Aura. That was a saloon in a million, Miss Sheila, and the picture of you standing there back of my bar, looking so dainty and sweet and fine in your black dress and your frills--well, ma'am, I'll sure try to be thinking of that when I cash in.

"Well, Miss Sheila, I wish you good fortune in whatever you do, and I hope that if you ever need a friend you will overlook my bad break and remember the artist that tried to put you in his big work and--failed."

This extraordinary doc.u.ment was signed--"Sylvester." Sheila was left bewildered with strange tears in her throat.

CHAPTER VII

SANCTUARY

There came to the restaurant where d.i.c.kie worked, a certain sallow and irritable man, no longer in his early youth. He came daily for one of his three meals: it might be lunch or dinner or even breakfast, d.i.c.kie was always in haste to serve him. For some reason, the man's clever and nervous personality intrigued his interest. And this, although his customer never threw him a glance, scowled at a newspaper, barked out an order, gulped his food, stuck a fair-sized tip under the edge of his plate, and jerked himself away.

On a certain sluggish noon hour in August, d.i.c.kie, as far as the kitchen door with a tray balanced on his palm, realized that he had forgotten this man's order. He hesitated to go back. "Like as not,"

reasoned d.i.c.kie, "he didn't rightly know what the order was. He never does look at his food. I'll fetch him a Spanish omelette and a salad and a gla.s.s of iced tea. It's a whole lot better order than he'd have thought of himself."

Nevertheless, it was with some trepidation that he set the omelette down before that lined and averted countenance. Its owner was screwed into his chair as usual, eyes, with a sharp cleft between their brows, bent on his folded newspaper, and he put his right hand blindly on the fork. But as it p.r.i.c.ked the contents of the plate a savory fragrance rose and the reader looked.

"Here, you d.a.m.n fool--that's not my order," he snapped out.

d.i.c.kie tasted a homely memory--"d.i.c.kie d.a.m.n fool." He stood silent a moment looking down with one of his quaint, impersonal looks.

"Well, sir," then he said slowly, "it ain't your order, but you look a whole lot more like a feller that would order Spanish omelette than like a feller that would order Hamburger steak."

For the first time the man turned about, flung his arm over his chair-back, and looked up at d.i.c.kie. In fact, he stared. His thin lips, enclosed in an ill-tempered parenthesis of double lines, twisted themselves slightly.

"I'll be derned!" he said. "But, look here, my man, I didn't order Hamburger steak; I ordered chicken."

d.i.c.kie deliberately smoothed down the cowlick on his head. He wore his look of a seven-year-old with which he was wont to face the extremity of Sylvester's exasperation.

"I reckon I clean forgot your order, sir," he said. "I figured out that you wouldn't be caring what was on your plate. This heat," he added, "sure puts a blinder on a feller's memory."

The man laughed shortly. "It's all right," he said. "This'll go down."

He ate in silence. Then he glanced up again. "What are you waiting for, anyway?"

d.i.c.kie flushed faintly. "I was sort of wishful to see how it would go down."

"Oh, I don't mean that kind of waiting. I mean--why are you a waiter in this--hash-hole?"

d.i.c.kie meditated. "There ain't no answer to that," he said. "I don't know why--" He added--"Why anything. It's a sort of extry word in the dictionary--don't mean much any way you look at it."

He gathered up the dishes. The man watched him, tilting back a little in his chair, his eyes twinkling under brows drawn together. A moment afterwards he left the restaurant.

It was a few nights later when d.i.c.kie saw him again--or rather when d.i.c.kie was again seen by him. This time d.i.c.kie was not in the restaurant.

He was at a table in a small Free Library near Greenwich Avenue, and he was copying painstakingly with one hand from a fat volume which he held down with the other. The strong, heavily-shaded light made a circle of brilliance about him; his fair hair shone silvery bright, his face had a sort of seraphic pallor. The orderer of chicken, striding away from the desk with a hastily obtained book of reference, stopped short and stared at him; then came close and touched the thin, s.h.i.+ny shoulder of the blue serge coat.

"This the way you take your pleasure?" he asked abruptly.

d.i.c.kie looked up slowly, and his consciousness seemed to travel even more slowly back from the fairy doings of a midsummer night. Under the observant eyes bent upon it, his face changed extraordinarily from the face of untroubled, almost immortal childhood to the face of struggling and reserved manhood.

"Hullo," he said with a smile of recognition. "Well--yes--not always."