The Little Lady of the Big House Part 11

"Oh, one of those naval officers?"

d.i.c.k shook his head.

"The civilian. Don't you remember that big blond fellow--you talked music with him for half an hour while Captain Joyce talked our heads off to prove that the United States should clean Mexico up and out with the mailed fist."

"Oh, to be sure," Paula vaguely recollected. "He'd met you somewhere before... South Africa, wasn't it? Or the Philippines?"

"That's the chap. South Africa, it was. Evan Graham. Next time we met was on the _Times_ dispatch boat on the Yellow Sea. And we crossed trails a dozen times after that, without meeting, until that night in the Cafe Venus.

"Heavens--he left Bora-Bora, going east, two days before I dropped anchor bound west on my way to Samoa. I came out of Apia, with letters for him from the American consul, the day before he came in. We missed each other by three days at Levuka--I was sailing the _Wild Duck_ then.

He pulled out of Suva as guest on a British cruiser. Sir Everard Im Thurm, British High Commissioner of the South Seas, gave me more letters for Graham. I missed him at Port Resolution and at Vila in the New Hebrides. The cruiser was junketing, you see. I beat her in and out of the Santa Cruz Group. It was the same thing in the Solomons. The cruiser, after sh.e.l.ling the cannibal villages at Langa-Langa, steamed out in the morning. I sailed in that afternoon. I never did deliver those letters in person, and the next time I laid eyes on him was at the Cafe Venus two years ago."

"But who about him, and what about him?" Paula queried. "And what's the book?"

"Well, first of all, beginning at the end, he's broke--that is, for him, he's broke. He's got an income of several thousand a year left, but all that his father left him is gone. No; he didn't blow it. He got in deep, and the 'silent panic' several years ago just about cleaned him. But he doesn't whimper.

"He's good stuff, old American stock, a Yale man. The book--he expects to make a bit on it--covers last year's trip across South America, west coast to east coast. It was largely new ground. The Brazilian government voluntarily voted him a honorarium of ten thousand dollars for the information he brought out concerning unexplored portions of Brazil. Oh, he's a man, all man. He delivers the goods. You know the type--clean, big, strong, simple; been everywhere, seen everything, knows most of a lot of things, straight, square, looks you in the eyes--well, in short, a man's man."

Ernestine clapped her hands, flung a tantalizing, man-challenging, man-conquering glance at Bert Wainwright, and exclaimed: "And he comes tomorrow!"

d.i.c.k shook his head reprovingly.

"Oh, nothing in that direction, Ernestine. Just as nice girls as you have tried to hook Evan Graham before now. And, between ourselves, I couldn't blame them. But he's had good wind and fast legs, and they've always failed to run him down or get him into a corner, where, dazed and breathless, he's mechanically muttered 'Yes' to certain interrogatories and come out of the trance to find himself, roped, thrown, branded, and married. Forget him, Ernestine. Stick by golden youth and let it drop its golden apples. Pick them up, and golden youth with them, making a noise like stupid failure all the time you are snaring swift-legged youth. But Graham's out of the running. He's old like me--just about the same age--and, like me, he's run a lot of those queer races. He knows how to make a get-away. He's been cut by barbed wire, nose-twitched, neck-burnt, cinched to a fare-you-well, and he remains subdued but uncatchable. He doesn't care for young things. In fact, you may charge him with being wobbly, but I plead guilty, by proxy, that he is merely old, hard bitten, and very wise."

CHAPTER IX

"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" d.i.c.k shouted, stamping with jingling spurs through the Big House in quest of its Little Lady.

He came to the door that gave entrance to her long wing. It was a door without a k.n.o.b, a huge panel of wood in a wood-paneled wall. But d.i.c.k shared the secret of the hidden spring with his wife, pressed the spring, and the door swung wide.

"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he called and stamped down the length of her quarters.

A glance into the bathroom, with its sunken Roman bath and descending marble steps, was fruitless, as were the glances he sent into Paula's wardrobe room and dressing room. He pa.s.sed the short, broad stairway that led to her empty window-seat divan in what she called her Juliet Tower, and thrilled at sight of an orderly disarray of filmy, pretty, lacy woman's things that he knew she had spread out for her own sensuous delight of contemplation. He fetched up for a moment at a drawing easel, his reiterant cry checked on his lips, and threw a laugh of recognition and appreciation at the sketch, just outlined, of an awkward, big-boned, k.n.o.bby, weanling colt caught in the act of madly whinneying for its mother.

"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he shouted before him, out to the sleeping porch; and found only a demure, brow-troubled Chinese woman of thirty, who smiled self-effacing embarra.s.sment into his eyes.

This was Paula's maid, Oh Dear, so named by d.i.c.k, many years before, because of a certain solicitous contraction of her delicate brows that made her appear as if ever on the verge of saying, "Oh dear!" In fact, d.i.c.k had taken her, as a child almost, for Paula's service, from a fis.h.i.+ng village on the Yellow Sea where her widow-mother earned as much as four dollars in a prosperous year at making nets for the fishermen.

Oh Dear's first service for Paula had been aboard the three-topmast schooner, _All Away_, at the same time that Oh Joy, cabin-boy, had begun to demonstrate the efficiency that enabled him, through the years, to rise to the majordomos.h.i.+p of the Big House.

"Where is your mistress, Oh Dear?" d.i.c.k asked.

Oh Dear shrank away in an agony of bashfulness.

d.i.c.k waited.

"She maybe with 'm young ladies--I don't know," Oh Dear stammered; and d.i.c.k, in very mercy, swung away on his heel.

"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he shouted, as he stamped out under the porte cochere just as a ranch limousine swung around the curve among the lilacs.

"I'll be hanged if I know," a tall, blond man in a light summer suit responded from the car; and the next moment d.i.c.k Forrest and Evan Graham were shaking hands.

Oh My and Oh Ho carried in the hand baggage, and d.i.c.k accompanied his guest to the watch tower quarters.

"You'll have to get used to us, old man," d.i.c.k was explaining. "We run the ranch like clockwork, and the servants are wonders; but we allow ourselves all sorts of loosenesses. If you'd arrived two minutes later there'd have been no one to welcome you but the Chinese boys. I was just going for a ride, and Paula--Mrs. Forrest--has disappeared."

The two men were almost of a size, Graham topping his host by perhaps an inch, but losing that inch in the comparative breadth of shoulders and depth of chest. Graham was, if anything, a clearer blond than Forrest, although both were equally gray of eye, equally clear in the whites of the eyes, and equally and precisely similarly bronzed by sun and weather-beat. Graham's features were in a slightly larger mold; his eyes were a trifle longer, although this was lost again by a heavier droop of lids. His nose hinted that it was a shade straighter as well as larger than d.i.c.k's, and his lips were a shade thicker, a shade redder, a shade more bowed with fulsome-ness.

Forrest's hair was light brown to chestnut, while Graham's carried a whispering advertis.e.m.e.nt that it would have been almost golden in its silk had it not been burned almost to sandiness by the sun. The cheeks of both were high-boned, although the hollows under Forrest's cheek-bones were more p.r.o.nounced. Both noses were large-nostriled and sensitive. And both mouths, while generously proportioned, carried the impression of girlish sweetness and chast.i.ty along with the muscles that could draw the lips to the firmness and harshness that would not give the lie to the square, uncleft chins beneath.

But the inch more in height and the inch less in chest-girth gave Evan Graham a grace of body and carriage that d.i.c.k Forrest did not possess.

In this particular of build, each served well as a foil to the other.

Graham was all light and delight, with a hint--but the slightest of hints--of Prince Charming. Forrest's seemed a more efficient and formidable organism, more dangerous to other life, stouter-gripped on its own life.

Forrest threw a glance at his wrist watch as he talked, but in that glance, without pause or fumble of focus, with swift certainty of correlation, he read the dial.

"Eleven-thirty," he said. "Come along at once, Graham. We don't eat till twelve-thirty. I am sending out a s.h.i.+pment of bulls, three hundred of them, and I'm downright proud of them. You simply must see them.

Never mind your riding togs. Oh Ho--fetch a pair of my leggings. You, Oh Joy, order Altadena saddled.--What saddle do you prefer, Graham?"

"Oh, anything, old man."

"English?--Australian?--McClellan?--Mexican?" d.i.c.k insisted.

"McClellan, if it's no trouble," Graham surrendered.

They sat their horses by the side of the road and watched the last of the herd beginning its long journey to Chili disappear around the bend.

"I see what you're doing--it's great," Graham said with sparkling eyes.

"I've fooled some myself with the critters, when I was a youngster, down in the Argentine. If I'd had beef-blood like that to build on, I mightn't have taken the cropper I did."

"But that was before alfalfa and artesian wells," d.i.c.k smoothed for him. "The time wasn't ripe for the Shorthorn. Only scrubs could survive the droughts. They were strong in staying powers but light on the scales. And refrigerator steams.h.i.+ps hadn't been invented. That's what revolutionized the game down there."

"Besides, I was a mere youngster," Graham added. "Though that meant nothing much. There was a young German tackled it at the same time I did, with a tenth of my capital. He hung it out, lean years, dry years, and all. He's rated in seven figures now."

They turned their horses back for the Big House. d.i.c.k flirted his wrist to see his watch.

"Lots of time," he a.s.sured his guest. "I'm glad you saw those yearlings. There was one reason why that young German stuck it out. He had to. You had your father's money to fall back on, and, I imagine not only that your feet itched, but that your chief weakness lay in that you could afford to solace the itching."

"Over there are the fish ponds," d.i.c.k said, indicating with a nod of his head to the right an invisible area beyond the lilacs. "You'll have plenty of opportunity to catch a mess of trout, or ba.s.s, or even catfish. You see, I'm a miser. I love to make things work. There may be a justification for the eight-hour labor day, but I make the work-day of water just twenty-four hours' long. The ponds are in series, according to the nature of the fish. But the water starts working up in the mountains. It irrigates a score of mountain meadows before it makes the plunge and is clarified to crystal clearness in the next few rugged miles; and at the plunge from the highlands it generates half the power and all the lighting used on the ranch. Then it sub-irrigates lower levels, flows in here to the fish ponds, and runs out and irrigates miles of alfalfa farther on. And, believe me, if by that time it hadn't reached the flat of the Sacramento, I'd be pumping out the drainage for more irrigation."

"Man, man," Graham laughed, "you could make a poem on the wonder of water. I've met fire-wors.h.i.+pers, but you're the first real water-wors.h.i.+per I've ever encountered. And you're no desert-dweller, either. You live in a land of water--pardon the bull--but, as I was saying..."

Graham never completed his thought. From the right, not far away, came the unmistakable ring of shod hoofs on concrete, followed by a mighty splash and an outburst of women's cries and laughter. Quickly the cries turned to alarm, accompanied by the sounds of a prodigious splas.h.i.+ng and floundering as of some huge, drowning beast. d.i.c.k bent his head and leaped his horse through the lilacs, Graham, on Altadena, followed at his heels. They emerged in a blaze of suns.h.i.+ne, on an open s.p.a.ce among the trees, and Graham came upon as unexpected a picture as he had ever chanced upon in his life.