“I’m sure you ought to have stayed longer,” Helen Anderson said. “Such a hurt as you had can’t be well by now.”
Gard, from the saddle, thrust forth his hurt foot and moved it about.
“It has got well, first rate,” said he, meditatively. “Your father can sure get his certificate off me, any day.”
He spoke lightly, not glancing at the upturned, troubled face. He spoke truthfully. His foot was well on the road to recovery, but he knew, in his heart of hearts, that he was running away from the Palo Verde, and that his resolution to do so was not very strong.
“It’s the first time you have been on a horse since that day,” Helen continued. “Wouldn’t you do better to go in the buckboard, after all?”
He knew that hers was but the solicitude of the hostess; but the kindly interest of her tone was like nectar to him. It drew his eyes to hers, which suddenly sought his stirrup. Gard pulled himself up with a jerk.
“I’ll be all right,” said he, with a sudden stiffening of voice and manner. “I ought to ’ve gone before.”
She drew back, a little coldly.
“It’s too bad you’ve been detained,” she said, and he could not bear it.
“It ain’t that,” he said, quickly. “I’d like to stay. I don’t know how to tell you how I’d like to stay. But I’ve got to go. And anyway, I must be in Sylvania soon ’s possible. There’s a heap of things I’ve got to do. I—”
He realized that he was getting beyond bounds, and was glad that Morgan Anderson came up from the corrals just then.
“Here’s your last chance, if you want to change your mind and go in the buckboard,” the cattleman called.
The buckboard, with a team of broncos driven by one of the men, was already driving away. Strapped at the back was Gard’s suit-case, which Anderson had insisted upon having brought out from the hotel in Sylvania. Gard felt quite sure that he preferred to ride, and Anderson gave it as his opinion that that was the best way to travel.
“Better ’n railroad trains, or automobiles,” he declared, and quoted, as a clincher to his opinion, “‘A good man on a good horse is nobody’s slave.’”
Gard had been at the rancho five days; five wonderful days, they were to him, and he felt that he dared not stay another hour. The cattleman had not been able to help him much, on the business that had been his errand to the Palo Verde. Ashley Westcott had been diligent in seeking, a couple of years before, to learn what had become of Sawyer, after he acknowledged the Oliphant deed to Ed Hallard; but it had never occurred to him to mention the young notary to Morgan Anderson.
Curiously enough, however, the first person whom Gard had asked about the notary, after learning of Mrs. Hallard’s trouble, had referred him to the cattleman. It was this fact that had brought him out to the Palo Verde.
Anderson remembered the young fellow. Sawyer had “developed lungs” in Sacramento, and had come down to the desert in search of health. He had got better, Anderson knew, and had “gone back inside”—he thought to San Francisco. He gave Gard the address of a correspondent of his own in that city, who might, he thought, be able to furnish Sawyer’s address.
“I wish I could have helped you more in what you wanted to know,” Anderson said, shaking hands with his guest. “But you come out again while you’re down this way, and maybe we’ll have better luck all round.”
Gard thanked him, and with another word or two to Helen, rode away. Anderson stood watching him, long after the horse and rider had become a mere speck on the yellow desert.
“There’s something awfully likable about that chap, Sis,” he remarked to the girl at his side. “But he puzzles me, too.”
“Yes?” Helen answered, absently, and her father glanced at her quickly.
What he saw seemed to reassure him. She was bending over Patsy, whose paw had come into painful contact with prickly pear.
“That means, little dog,” she told him, “that you will have to stay at home.”
She searched the hurt member to make sure that the thorns were all out.
“Yes”—she was still bent over Patsy’s foot as she answered her father’s remark—“he is likable.... There, Patsy, don’t make a fuss.” She bound up the paw in her handkerchief.
“I do not know that he puzzled me,” she went on, straightening up. “I thought he seemed rather lonely, though.”
“He’s not likely to be that, long,” was Anderson’s reply. “It’s a thundering pity, too. I understand he’s in deep with that Hallard woman, though I’ve tried not to believe it. She don’t seem his kind. I asked him to come here again,” he went on, a little ruefully; “and yet I’m not sure I meant it.”
“What kind of woman is this Mrs. Hallard, Father?” Helen regarded her father now, with interest in her level grey eyes.
“Why,” Anderson said, doubtfully. “She’s not the kind I should think would catch him. It’s a case of catch, all right, though, I guess; even Westcott seemed to know about it.”
He considered a moment, frowning.
“She’s loud, and coarse, I suppose; but she’s a mighty handsome woman, if a man don’t care about some other things. And I somehow should think Gard would. I like a different sort, myself.”
He glanced proudly at the figure beside him. Helen was in her riding-habit, waiting for her horse to be brought round.
“But she—she’s only a rough kind, is all you mean, isn’t it?” Her face flushed, ever so little.
“Oh, Kate Hallard’s a decent sort, all right enough, I dare say,” Anderson hastened to answer. “Of course there’s always talk. I’ve heard some myself, but I discounted it. In the first place, she’s hard as nails. No nonsense about her. Not her. Her tongue ’s tipped with vitriol, and when she opens her mouth the men catch it.” Anderson shrugged his shoulder a trifle.
“And then, of course,” said he, “There’s no telling about Gard. He may be a little more attracted than he might want to be, and yet have strength enough to pull out of it and get away.”
“I should call that being weak, if he cared!” cried Helen, indignantly.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Her father took Dickens’ bridle-rein from the puncher who had brought the pony up.
“It all depends upon how a man looks at some things,” he said, throwing the reins into place.
Helen took them and prepared to mount, a hand on the cantel.
“The one thing I don’t like about this way of riding,” said Anderson, “is that it curtails our privileges. You don’t need helping on.”
Helen sprang to the saddle, adjusting herself with a little shake.
“’Twould only hinder,” said she, smiling, “like every other help we don’t need.”
She flushed suddenly, as she realized that she was quoting a saying of Gard’s.
“You keep Patsy here, won’t you?” she called as she rode away, leaving her father looking after her with an expression half proud, half wistful and wholly tender.
“She’s clean grown up,” said he, to himself, as he stooped and snapped the leash into Patsy’s collar.
“The bonnie thing! Lord! How I wish her mother was alive!”
He stood staring out upon the sun-washed desert, wide, silent, baffling, and spoke the yearning thought of his heart.
“I don’t know how to be a mother to her, and she’s sure going to need one. Lord, Lord!” He cast a comprehensive glance over the fierce, brilliant landscape. “This is an all-right country for men and burros,” he said, with a half-whimsical sigh, “but it’s a mighty hard one for women and horses!”
Helen had promised Jacinta to ride as far as Old Joe Papago’s, to see Mrs. Old Joe about a young Indian girl who was to come and help Jacinta with the work of the casa. Old Joe was better off, financially, than any other Papago in the section, and his wife, who was reputed to have some Spanish blood, exercised a sort of guardianship over the women and young girls of their settlement. This latter was only three or four miles distant, and there was a slight ting in the December air that quickened Dickens’ nerves, and made him ready for a frolic, but Helen was in no mood to gratify him. She ignored all his invitations to run, and kept him to the slow little walk of the bronco.
He hated it and fretted under the steady rein; but for once Helen did not heed him. She was going over in her mind the events of the past five days. Westcott, in the brief space of his hour with her, had sought to sow the seeds of doubt of Gard in her mind. He had spoken vaguely of certain tricky games that the stranger was trying to play upon him, and an imagination less pure than the girl’s might have inferred much from the subtle little that he let fall regarding Kate Hallard.
The carefully chosen seed, however, had found no favoring soil—no fostering care. Helen was herself of too true and sturdy a fiber to doubt the truth and the stability of Gard’s nature. She dismissed, with hardly a thought, the suggestion of trickery on his part, and the other poisoned arrows wholly missed their intended mark.
“There’s a lot of ways of thinking about any one thing,” Gard had said one day, as they talked out long, long thoughts of life, and right, “But a man—he’s got to follow the straightest path he sees; for he’s got to live so he can like himself, and care to be with himself.”
Yes: that was what he would do, without fail. He saw straight, and he would follow the straight path. Oh! It was good to feel trust in one’s friends! Something of the peace and serenity that Gard himself had won out of solitude and despair fell upon her spirit at thought of his clear vision, and steady holding of the right.
Yet her heart was heavy. She told herself that this was because she feared for the ultimate happiness of one friend. She remembered her father’s words about Mrs. Hallard: “coarse; hard; her tongue tipped with vitriol.” Surely they must be unjust, or this man, who was fine and true, would not care. He could not care. Perhaps he would come to see before it was too late, and would “pull out and get away.” But no: that he would not do. His was a steadfast nature; of that she was sure!
Before Old Joe Papago’s door, reins dropped to the sand, stood a stout roan horse, and leaning against the door-post, talking to Mrs. Old Joe, was a woman dressed in khaki. It needed but a single glance to tell Helen who it was.
The blonde head turned as the girl rode up, and the big black eyes surveyed her comprehensively, but there was no sign of recognition in the hard, impassive face. Mrs. Old Joe grunted a response to Helen’s greeting, and the latter dismounted.
Acting upon a sudden impulse she came close to the woman by the doorway.
“Good-morning,” she said, simply, holding out her hand. “This is Mrs. Hallard, isn’t it? I am Helen Anderson.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Mrs. Hallard said, apparently not seeing the outstretched hand. Kate Hallard had no mind to be patronized: but she studied the girl’s face, stealthily, and the bold eyes grew a shade softer.
She did not know that Gard had left the Palo Verde that morning. Westcott, who had tried hard to come to some sort of terms with her, in the other man’s absence, had told her that the latter would probably let himself be detained at the rancho for a fortnight, at least. He had drawn a vivid picture of Gard making the most of this opportunity to win a way into Miss Anderson’s good graces. The lawyer’s methods had been primitive. He sought to play upon the woman’s presumable capacity for jealousy, and thus set her against Gard.
He might have saved himself the mental wear and tear. Kate Hallard was not a fool; nor a devotee of the heart-complication school of fiction. She held no illusions about Gard’s attitude toward herself, and she had come to believe in him, passionately. Nevertheless, Westcott’s efforts had awakened in her a keen interest in Helen.
“I expect you are on the same errand as myself,” the girl was saying, determined not to be repulsed. “Mrs. Joe keeps all the girls in her reboso.”
She spoke in Spanish, that the Indian woman might not feel left out of their talk, and the latter smiled, toothlessly.
“My, no!” exclaimed Mrs. Hallard. “You don’t catch me taking on girls to look after. I’m on the buscar for a boy.”
“And have you succeeded?”
“Not I! They ain’t lookin’ for work; not the bucks; an’ she wouldn’t trust me with a girl, not even if I’d take one.”
She laughed, defiantly, and the young girl divined, instinctively, that she did so because she was ill at ease. She stood looking at her, wistfully.
Did Gabriel Gard really love this woman? Was she really coarse, and hard, and vitriolic of tongue, as her father had said? It could not be; or such a man could not care. There must be another side, and shame be upon her, Helen Anderson, if she could not win it to the surface.
“I wonder—” she began, with some hesitation. “Of course I don’t know what you want, but Wing Chang, our cook, has a young cousin—or something—visiting him. He came a few days ago, with some teamsters from the mines. I think Chang does not want to take him on. He was scolding about it, yesterday.”
The defiance was gone from Mrs. Hallard’s face, and a little look of friendliness crept among its hard lines.
“Why, if he’s old enough to wait on table,” said she, “I dare say he’d be just what I want.”
“Oh,” Helen replied, “I know that he can do that. He must be about sixteen years old, and he has waited in restaurants.” She did not add that that was one reason why neither she nor Chang cared for the lad’s services. “Why can’t you ride back to the rancho with me and see him yourself?” she asked, instead.
“Why, I’d take it right good of you if I could,” Kate Hallard said, after a moment’s hesitation. Mrs. Old Joe had departed to find the mother of Jacinta’s prospective handmaiden, and they were speaking English.
“’Tain’t no meanness in me that won’t have a girl round,” she added, as if wishing to set herself right with her hearer, “but I want some one to sling victuals, at the grille, an’ I can’t have any half-baked girl-squaws round. Men’s devils; I can’t look after them an’ girls too.”
“Oh!” Helen spoke in impulsive protest, and Mrs. Hallard’s laugh was hard again.
“You don’t believe what I said about men, I guess,” she said, and Helen answered very simply:
“Of course not; it couldn’t be true you know, so long as women are not—what you said.”
“I ain’t so sure about the women—not most of ’em—” Mrs. Hallard’s handsome face wore a sneer now.
“Anyway,” she argued, “they’s plenty of ’em doin’ their share o’ the devil’s business in the world.”
“But there are good men,” Helen persisted, “and good women, too.”
“Right you are about there bein’ some,” was the reply; “but I draw the line at there bein’ many. I’ve lived in this world thirty years, nearly, child, an’ I ain’t found such a lot. I know one good man though.”
Her face softened, and at the sight a thrill stirred Helen’s pulses. She felt sure that Mrs. Hallard was speaking of Gard. There was softness under that hard shell after all.
Before she could say anything more, however, Mrs. Old Joe returned to the hut with the Papago girl and her mother, and she set her mind to the faithful performance of Jacinta’s errand. It was quickly arranged that the handmaiden should be brought at once to the Palo Verde, and the matter completed, the two white women rode away together.
A soft wind was blowing across their faces; a wind full of the essential odor of the desert: impalpable, a little acrid, bracing withal, and subtly suggestive of mystery, and of vastness. Helen threw back her head, yielding to the desert spell.
“Oh!” she cried, “this is the place to be, after all. Don’t you feel so about it?” she demanded of her companion.
“I don’t know,” Kate Hallard was watching her, puzzled. “I never was away from it. Sometimes it makes me ache.”
“Ache?” It was the girl’s turn to be mystified.
“Yes.” The woman could not have told why the hidden thoughts of her heart suddenly became articulate at this girl’s invitation to speech.
“It always seems to me as if the desert—wants something,” she explained, hesitatingly. “I d’ know what ’tis, but the feeling’s there: a sort of emptiness, as if it wanted to cry and couldn’t. Sometimes at night, when I hear a burro ‘yee-haw,’ or a coyote howlin’, seems to me like’s if, if the desert could cry that’s the kind o’ noise it would make. It’s like lonesome women—if there’s any sense in that!” she added with a half-ashamed laugh.
Helen’s heart was full of sympathy that she felt was but partially understanding. So this was what the desert had brought to this hard-seeming woman. She had a sudden sorry realization that the marvelous waste had never told its ache to her, dearly as she loved it, and with the realization came the knowledge that the woman beside her understood because she had truly lived and suffered in it. It came to her to wonder if Gard had ever felt the ache of the desert.
“Do you ever want to get away from it?” she asked, softly.
“I d’ know,” her companion considered.
“I ain’t never known what anything else is like,” she finally said, helplessly, “but seems to me you git to feel like’s if you was part of the desert, an’ something would break if you got too far off.”
Ah! That Helen knew. She had hungered for the desert, even if she had never ached with it.
“It’s the place of places for me,” cried she, taking off her hat and letting the wind stir her hair.
Kate Hallard studied her, wonderingly. She had known few women in her life; never before so youthful a one. She wondered what Gabriel Gard had thought of this girl.
“Mr. Gard’s at the rancho ain’t he?” she asked, and Helen’s cheek paled for an instant. The older woman noted the fact with a fierce little pang.
“He went back to Sylvania this morning,” Helen answered, and the other looked her surprise.
“I didn’t suppose he’d git away so quick,” she said. “Sandy Larch was in yesterday an’ said he was in for another week. If I’d known he was comin’ in I wouldn’t a’ gone off,” she added, and a sense of the desert’s ache crept into Helen’s own heart.
Yes: Mrs. Hallard was right: it was a lonely place.
Arrived at the Palo Verde, the girl called Wing Chang, telling him the business of the moment, and directed him to send in his young relative. Then she took Mrs. Hallard to her own room, a big, low-ceilinged place, with wide windows looking out toward the far mountains. Kate gazed about her wistfully. She had seen few women’s rooms in her lifetime.
This one was the sort of composite suggestion of dear girl and nice boy that the modern college girl’s room is apt to be. Cushions blazoned with the initials of Radcliffe and of Harvard heaped a couch covered with the skin of a mountain lion that Helen herself had shot. Among the pretty trifles on the dresser was a practical-looking little revolver, and from one of the two hooks that held her light rifle hung an illumined panel bearing the arms of Radcliffe. A cartridge-belt hung from another hook, and beneath it, on a stand, lay a bit of dainty embroidery which she had been working on that very morning.
Beside it was a fat little book bound in age-yellowed vellum. Kate Hallard picked this up and glanced through it, curiously.
“Is this Chinese?” she asked, bewildered.
Helen explained that it was Greek, and the woman laid it down with a weary little laugh.
“I ain’t never been out’n the territory, as I said,” she explained, half defiantly. “Men’s about the only books I ever read, an’ Lord! they’re mostly writ plainer’n that.”
“I haven’t known many,” Helen answered, “except my father—and one or two others.”
“One or two’s likely to be samples o’ the rest,” the other remarked, carelessly. “I suppose you know an awful lot?” she continued, glancing at Helen’s book-shelves. She had never before seen so many books together.
“I know just enough to realize that I am dreadfully ignorant.” Helen’s face was troubled; the older woman yearned toward her. She, alas! could think of nothing in her own experience that was likely to be of use to the girl.
Wing Chang’s cousin just at this instant appeared, silently, in the doorway.
“Oh, Lee,” Helen cried; “Mrs. Hallard wants to see you.”
“Chang say come,” the boy replied, “I come quick’s could. Me velly good waiter boy,” he added without preamble, turning to Kate Hallard. “Thinkee takee your job.”
“Land sakes!” laughed she; “he’s none so slow, is he?”
“Can you wait on customers as prompt as all that?” she asked of the boy.
“Me velly good boy,” he repeated, gravely, “makee hash fli allee same like hellee.”
“Lee!” Helen looked shocked. “You should wait to see whether Mrs. Hallard wants you,” she finished, rather tamely.
Lee looked at her in surprise. “No can help,” he announced, conclusively, “China boy velly scarce; no can get many; him got take me; one velly good boy.” He glanced again at Mrs. Hallard.
“I go get clo’,” he concluded, imperturbably. “Go skippee Sylvania. See you later.”
He was gone, without circumlocution, and Helen surveyed her visitor a little helplessly. “I’ll have Chang talk to him,” she said.
“No need,” laughed the other. “But my! He’s sure something of a hustler, that boy. I reckon I’d better hit the trail or he’ll be runnin’ the grille before I git to it.”
“Do you really think he will do for you?” Helen was somewhat dismayed.
“Sure,” was the reply. “He’ll do first rate. He means well; don’t I know Chinks?”
“You have to take ’em the way they mean,” she added, philosophically. “That’s the way to git along with ’em.”
“You seem to know a great deal,” murmured Helen, wistfully. She felt somehow very young and inexperienced.
“I suppose you’ll see Mr. Gard when you get home,” she added, tentatively. “We—that is—Father was afraid he ought not to go so soon—on account of his foot. We hope it will be all right.”
Again Kate Hallard crushed down the little pang that would come.
“Mr. Gard, he took hold of a little piece o’ business for me...” she spoke very casually, “I reckon it’s bothering him a lot. I expect he wants to get done with it an’ git away from here. He’s been mighty kind about it.”
“Oh! He would be that.” Helen could not have explained why her heart seemed suddenly lighter. She was conscious of a quick, friendly feeling toward this woman of the desert.
“You’ll come again to see me, won’t you?” she asked, detaining her guest when the latter had swung to the saddle.
Kate Hallard hesitated. “I reckon I can’t git away from the grille much,” she said, evasively. “I never go nowhere much.”
The girl’s instinctive wisdom prompted her not to press the point then. She would let it wait, but her wistfulness sounded in her voice when she spoke again.
“At any rate we’re friends, are we not?” queried she, looking up into the black eyes.
They returned her gaze with a sudden glisten, as of ice-bound pools when Spring has touched them. In their fundamental honesty the two natures stood for the moment upon common ground.
“Friends.” Kate Hallard drew a long breath as she took up her bridle-rein. “Child,” she said, “if the friendship of a woman like me is ever any use to you, it’s yours while there’s a drop o’ blood in my heart,” and ere Helen could make answer she was well down the avenue toward the great gate.