BUSINESS, AND MORE
“You stand out like an Indian
water monument up here,” she said reprovingly,
as she came scrambling up, taking the hand that he
hastened forward to offer and boost her over the last
sharp face of crumbling shale.
“I expect Hargus could pick
me off from below there anywhere, but I didn’t
think of that,” he said.
“It wouldn’t be above
him,” seriously, discounting the light way in
which he spoke of it; “he’s done things
just as cowardly, and so have others you’ve
met.”
“I haven’t got much opinion
of the valor of men who hunt in packs, Vesta.
Some of them might be skulking around, glad to take
a shot at us. Don’t you think we’d
better go down?”
“We can sit over there and be
off the sky-line. It’s always the safe
thing to do around here.”
She indicated a point where an inequality
in the hill would be above their heads sitting, and
there they composed themselves the sheltering
swell of hilltop at their backs.
“It’s not a very complimentary
reflection on a civilized community that one has to
take such a precaution, but it’s necessary, Duke.”
“It’s enough to make you
want to leave it, Vesta. It’s bad enough
to have to dodge danger in a city, but out here, with
all this lonesomeness around you, it’s worse.”
“Do you feel it lonesome here?”
She asked it with a curious soft slowness, a speculative
detachment, as if she only half thought of what she
said.
“I’m never lonesome where
I can see the sun rise and set. There’s
a lot of company in cattle, more than in any amount
of people you don’t know.”
“I find it the same way, Duke.
I never was so lonesome as when I was away from here
at school.”
“Everybody feels that way about
home, I guess. But I thought maybe you’d
like it better away among people like yourself.”
“No. If it wasn’t
for this endless straining and watching, quarreling
and contending, I wouldn’t change this for any
place in the world. On nights like this, when
it whispers in a thousand inaudible voices, and beckons
and holds one close, I feel that I never can go away.
There’s a call in it that is so subtle and tender,
so full of sympathy, that I answer it with tears.”
“I wish things could be cleared
up so you could live here in peace and enjoy it, but
I don’t know how it’s going to come out.
It looks to me like I’ve made it worse.”
“It was wrong of me to draw
you into it, Duke; I should have let you go your way.”
“There’s no regrets on
my side, Vesta. I guess it was planned for me
to come this far and stop.”
“They’ll never rest till
they’ve drawn you into a quarrel that will give
them an excuse for killing you, Duke. They’re
doubly sure to do it since you got away from them
that night. I shouldn’t have stopped you;
I should have let you go on that day.”
“I had to stop somewhere, Vesta,”
he laughed. “Anyway, I’ve found here
what I started out to find. This was the end of
my road.”
“What you started to find, Duke?”
“A man-sized job, I guess.”
He laughed again, but with a colorless artificiality,
sweating over the habit of solitude that leads a man
into thinking aloud.
“You’ve found it, all
right, Duke, and you’re filling it. That’s
some satisfaction to you, I know. But it’s
a man-using job, a life-wasting job,” she said
sadly.
“I’ve only got myself
to blame for anything that’s happened to me here,
Vesta. It’s not the fault of the job.”
“Well, if you’ll stay
with me till I sell the cattle, Duke, I’ll think
of you as the next best friend I ever had.”
“I’ve got no intention of leaving you,
Vesta.”
“Thank you, Duke.”
Lambert sat turning over in his mind
something that he wanted to say to her, but which
he could not yet shape to his tongue. She was
looking in the direction of the light that he had
been watching, a gleam of which showed faintly now
and then, as if between moving boughs.
“I don’t like the notion
of your leaving this country whipped, Vesta,”
he said, coming to it at last.
“I don’t like to leave it whipped, Duke.”
“That’s the way they’ll look at
it if you go.”
Silence again, both watching the far-distant, twinkling
light.
“I laid out the job for myself
of bringing these outlaws around here up to your fence
with their hats in their hands, and I hate to give
it up before I’ve made good on my word.”
“Let it go, Duke; it isn’t worth the fight.”
“A man’s word is either
good for all he intends it to be, or worth no more
than the lowest scoundrel’s, Vesta. If I
don’t put up works to equal what I’ve
promised, I’ll have to sneak out of this country
between two suns.”
“I threw off too much on the
shoulders of a willing and gallant stranger,”
she sighed. “Let it go, Duke; I’ve
made up my mind to sell out and leave.”
He made no immediate return to this
declaration, but after a while he said:
“This will be a mighty bleak
spot with the house abandoned and dark on winter nights
and no stock around the barns.”
“Yes, Duke.”
“There’s no place so lonesome
as one where somebody’s lived, and put his hopes
and ambitions into it, and gone away and left it empty.
I can hear the winter wind cuttin’ around the
house down yonder, mournin’ like a widow woman
in the night.”
A sob broke from her, a sudden, sharp,
struggling expression of her sorrow for the desolation
that he pictured in his simple words. She bent
her head into her hands and cried. Lambert was
sorry for the pain that he had unwittingly stirred
in her breast, but glad in a glowing tenderness to
see that she had this human strain so near the surface
that it could be touched by a sentiment so common,
and yet so precious, as the love of home. He
laid his hand on her head, stroking her soft, wavy
hair.
“Never mind, Vesta,” he
petted, as if comforting a child. “Maybe
we can fix things up here so there’ll be somebody
to take care of it. Never mind don’t
you grieve and cry.”
“It’s home the
only home I ever knew. There’s no place
in the world that can be to me what it has been, and
is.”
“That’s so, that’s
so. I remember, I know. The wind don’t
blow as soft, the sun don’t shine as bright,
anywhere else as it does at home. It’s
been a good while since I had one, and it wasn’t
much to see, but I’ve got the recollection of
it by me always I can see every log in the
walls.”
He felt her shiver with the sobs she
struggled to repress as his hand rested on her hair.
His heart went out to her in a surge of tenderness
when he thought of all she had staked in that land her
youth and the promise of life of all she
had seen planned in hope, built in expectation, and
all that lay buried now on the bleak mesa marked by
two white stones.
And he caressed her with gentle hand,
looking away the while at the spark of light that
came and went, came and went, as if through blowing
leaves. So it flashed and fell, flashed and fell,
like a slow, slow pulse, and died out, as a spark
in tinder dies, leaving the far night blank.
Vesta sat up, pushed her hair back
from her forehead, her white hand lingering there.
He touched it, pressed it comfortingly.
“But I’ll have to go,”
she said, calm in voice, “to end this trouble
and strife.”
“I’ve been wondering,
since I’m kind of pledged to clean things up
here, whether you’d consider a business proposal
from me in regard to taking charge of the ranch for
you while you’re gone, Vesta.”
She looked up with a quick start of eagerness.
“You mean I oughtn’t sell the cattle,
Duke?”
“Yes, I think you ought to clean
them out. The bulk of them are in as high condition
as they’ll ever be, and the market’s better
right now that it’s been in years.”
“Well, what sort of a proposal were you going
to make, Duke?”
“Sheep.”
“Father used to consider turning
around to sheep. The country would come to it,
he said.”
“Coming to it more and more
every day. The sheep business is the big future
thing in here. Inside of five years everybody
will be in the sheep business, and that will mean
the end of these rustler camps that go under the name
of cattle ranches.”
“I’m willing to consider
sheep, Duke. Go ahead with the plan.”
“There’s twice the money
in them, and not half the expense. One man can
take care of two or three thousand, and you can get
sheepherders any day. There can’t be any
possible objection to them inside your own fence,
and you’ve got range for ten or fifteen thousand.
I’d suggest about a thousand to begin with,
though.”
“I’d do it in a minute,
Duke I’ll do it whenever you say the
word. Then I could leave Ananias and Myrtle here,
and I could come back in the summer for a little while,
maybe.”
She spoke with such eagerness, such
appeal of loneliness, that he knew it would break
her heart ever to go at all. So there on the hilltop
they planned and agreed on the change from cattle
to sheep, Lambert to have half the increase, according
to the custom, with herder’s wages for two years.
She would have been more generous in the matter of
pay, but that was the basis upon which he had made
his plans, and he would admit no change.
Vesta was as enthusiastic over it
as a child, all eagerness to begin, seeing in the
change a promise of the peace for which she had so
ardently longed. She appeared to have come suddenly
from under a cloud of oppression and to sparkle in
the sun of this new hope. It was only when they
came to parting at the porch that the ghost of her
old trouble came to take its place at her side again.
“Has she cut the fence lately
over there, Duke?” she asked.
“Not since I caught her at it.
I don’t think she’ll do it again.”
“Did she promise you she wouldn’t cut
it, Duke?”
She did not look at him as she spoke,
but stood with her face averted, as if she would avoid
prying into his secret too directly. Her voice
was low, a note of weary sadness in it that seemed
a confession of the uselessness of turning her back
upon the strife that she would forget.
“No, she didn’t promise.”
“If she doesn’t cut the
fence she’ll plan to hurt me in some other way.
It isn’t in her to be honest; she couldn’t
be honest if she tried.”
“I don’t like to condemn
anybody without a trial, Vesta. Maybe she’s
changed.”
“You can’t change a rattlesnake.
You seem to forget that she’s a Kerr.”
“Even at that, she might be different from the
rest.”
“She never has been. You’ve
had a taste of the Kerr methods, but you’re
not satisfied yet that they’re absolutely base
and dishonorable in every thought and deed. You’ll
find it out to your cost, Duke, if you let that girl
lead you. She’s a will-o’-the-wisp
sent to lure you from the trail.”
Lambert laughed a bit foolishly, as
a man does when the intuition of a woman uncovers
the thing that he prided himself was so skilfully
concealed that mortal eyes could not find it.
Vesta was reading through him like a piece of greased
parchment before a lamp.
“I guess it will all come out right,”
he said weakly.
“You’ll meet Kerr one
of these days with your old score between you, and
he’ll kill you or you’ll kill him.
She knows it as well as I do. Do you suppose
she can be sincere with you and keep this thing covered
up in her heart? You seem to have forgotten what
she remembers and plots on every minute of her life.”
“I don’t think she knows
anything about what happened to me that night, Vesta.”
“She knows all about it,” said Vesta coldly.
“I don’t know her very
well, of course; I’ve only passed a few words
with her,” he excused.
“And a few notes hung on the
fence!” she said, not able to hide her scorn.
“She’s gone away laughing at you every
time.”
“I thought maybe peace and quiet
could be established through her if she could be made
to see things in a civilized way.”
Vesta made no rejoinder at once.
She put her foot on the step as if to leave him, withdrew
it, faced him gravely.
“It’s nothing to me, Duke,
only I don’t want to see her lead you into another
fire. Keep your eyes open and your hand close
to your gun when you’re visiting with her.”
She left him with that advice, given
so gravely and honestly that it amounted to more than
a warning. He felt that there was something more
for him to say to make his position clear, but could
not marshal his words. Vesta entered the house
without looking back to where he stood, hat in hand,
the moonlight in his fair hair.