A Woman’s Loyalty

The first instinctive thought of a man reveals innate character; those that follow, the moral that he has acquired through environment and circumstances. That Jack Payson was at bottom good man is shown by his first emotion, which was joy, and his first impulse, which was to impart the glad news to everybody, upon receiving the letter from Dick Lane telling that he was alive and soon to come home. He was in his house at the time. Bud Lane had just brought in the packet of mail from Florence, and was riding away. Jack uttered a cry of joy which brought the young man back to the door. “What is it?” asked Bud. But Jack had already had time for his damning second thought. He was stunned by the consideration that the promulgation of the news in the letter meant his loss of Echo Allen. He dissembled, though as yet he was not able to tell an outright falsehood:

“It’s a letter telling me that I may expect to receive enough money in a month or so to pay off the mortgage. Now your brother’s debt needn’t trouble you any longer, Bud.”

“Whew-w!” whistled Bud. “That’s great! Where does it come from?”

“Oh, from an old friend that I lent the money to some time ago. But, say, Bud, there’s another matter I want to talk with you about. You’ve got to shake Buck McKee. I’ve got it straight that he is the worst man in Arizona Territory, yes, worse than an Apache. Why, he has been with Geronimo, torturing and massacring lone prospectors, and robbing them of their gold.”

“That’s a damned lie, Jack Payson, and you know it!” cried the hot-headed young man. “It was Buck McKee who stood by Dick’s side and fought the Apaches. And I’ll stand by Buck against all the world. Everybody is in a conspiracy against him, Polly and Slim Hoover and you. Why are you so ready now to take a slanderer’s word against his? You were keen enough to accept his story, when it let you out of going to Dick’s rescue, and gave you free swing to court his girl. Let me see the name of the damned snake-in-the-grass that’s at the bottom of all this!” And he snatched for the letter in Payson’s hand.

The ranchman quickly thrust the missive into pocket. The injustice of Bud’s reflections on former actions gave to his uneasy conscience just the pretext he desired for justifying his present course. His cause being weak and unworthy, he whipped up his indignation by adopting a high tone and overbearing manner, even demeaning himself by using his position as Bud’s employer to crush the younger man. Indeed, at the end of the scene which ensued he well-nigh convinced himself that he had been most ungratefully treated by Bud while sincerely attempting to save the boy from the companionship of a fiend in human guise.

“No matter who told me, young man,” he exclaimed; “I got it straight, and you can take it straight from me. You either give up Buck McKee or the Sweetwater Ranch. Snake-in-the-grass!” he was working himself up into false passion; “it is you, ungrateful boy, who are sinking the serpent’s tooth in the hand that would have helped you. I tell you that I intended to make you foreman, though Sage-brush Charley is an older and better man. It was for Dick’s sake I would have done it.”

“No!” Bud burst forth; “for your guilty conscience’s sake. It would have been to pay for stepping into Dick’s place in the heart of a faithless girl. To hell with your job; I’m through with you!”

And, leaping on his horse, Bud rode furiously back to rejoin Buck McKee in Florence.

Jack Payson’s purpose was now cinched to suppress Dick Lane’s letter until Echo Allen was irrevocably joined to him in marriage. He argued with himself that she loved him, Jack Payson, yet so loyal was she by nature that if Dick Lane returned before the wedding and claimed her, she would sacrifice her love to her sense of duty. This would ruin her life, he reasoned, and he could not permit it. There was honesty in this argument, but he vitiated it by deferring to act upon the suggestion that naturally arose with it: Why, then, not take Jim Allen, Écho’s father, to whom her happiness was the chief purpose in life, into confidence in regard to the matter? There will be time enough to tell the Colonel before the wedding, he thought. In the meantime something might happen to Dick,, and he may never return. He is certain not to get back ahead of his money.

After the time that the note secured by the mortgage fell due, the young ranchman had already secured two extensions of it for three months each. He arranged a third, and began negotiating for the sale of some of his cattle to take up the note at the time of payment. “I can’t take the money from Dick,” he thought, “even if he does owe it to me. And yet if I refuse it, it will be like buying Echo ’paying for stepping into Dick’s place,’ as Bud expressed it. What to do I don’t know. Well, events will decide.” And by this favorite reflection of the moral coward, Jack Payson marked the lowest depths of his degradation.

That afternoon Payson rode to Allen Hacienda to see Echo, and to sound her upon her feelings to Dick Lane. He wished thoroughly to convince himself that he, Jack Payson, held complete sway over her heart. Perhaps he might dare to put her love to the test, and fulfil the trust his friend had imposed on him, by giving her Dick’s letter.

Payson overtook Polly riding slowly on her way home from Florence. She barely greeted him. “Has she met Bud, and has he been slurring me?” he thought. He checked his pacing horse to the half-trot, half-walk, of Polly’s mount, and, ignoring her incivility, began talking to her.

“’D’yeh see Bud in Florence?”

“Yep. Couldn’t help it. Him an’ Buck McKee are about the whole of Florence these days.”

“Too bad about Bud consorting with that rustler. I’ve had to fire him for it.”

“Fire him? Well you are a good friend. Talk about men’s loyalty! If women threw men down that easy you all would go to the bowwows too fast for us to bake dog-biscuit. Now, I’ve settled Buck McKee’s hash by putting Slim Hoover wise to that tongue-slittin’. Oh, I’ll bring Bud around, all right, all right, even if men that ought to be his friends go back on him.”

“But, Pollykins ”

“Don’t you girlie me, Jack Payson. I’m a woman, and I’m goin’ to be a married one, too, in spite of all you do to Bud. Yes, sirree, bob. I’ve set out to make a man of him, and I’ll marry him to do it if he ain’t a dollar to his name. But money’d make it lots quicker an’ easier. He was savin’ up till he run in with Buck McKee.”

A sudden thought struck Payson. Here was a way to dispose of Dick Lane’s money when it came.

“All right, Mrs. Bud Lane to be. Promise not tell Bud, and through you I’ll soon make good to him many times over for the foreman’s wages he’s lost. It’s money that’s coming from an enterprise that his brother and I were partners in, and Bud shall Dick’s share. He’s sore on me now, and I can’t tell him. Besides, he’d gamble it away before he got it to Buck McKee. Bud isn’t strictly ethical in regard to money matters, Polly, and you must manage the exchequer.”

“Gee, what funny big words you use, Jack! But I know what you mean; he’s too free-handed. Well, he’ll be savin’ as a trade rat until we get our home paid for. And I’ll manage the checker business when we’re married. No more poker and keno for Bud. Thank you, Jack. I always knew you was square.”

Polly’s sincere praise of his “squareness” was the sharpest thrust possible at Payson’s guilty conscience. Well, he resolved to come as near being square and level as he could. He had told half-truths to Bud and Polly; he would present the situation to Echo as a possible, though not actual, one. If Polly were wrong, and Echo loved him so much that she would break the word she had pledged to Dick Lane, then he would confess all, and they would do what could be done to make it right with the discarded lover.

Echo, observing from the window who was Polly’s companion, ran out to Jack with a cry of joy. He looked meaningly at Polly. She said: “Oh, give me your bridle; I know how many’s a crowd.” Jack leaped to the ground and took Echo in his arms while Polly rode off with the horses to the corral, singing significantly:

“Spoon, spoon, spoon,
While the dish ran away with the spoon.”

Jack and Echo embraced clingingly and kissed lingeringly. “It takes a crazy old song like that to express how foolish we lovers are,” said Jack. “Why, I feel that I could outfiddle the cat, outjump the cow, outlaugh the dog, and start an elopement that would knock the performance of the tableware as silly as well, as I am talking now. I’m living in a dream a Midsummer Night’s Dream, such as you were reading to me.”

“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,” quoted Echo suggestively.

Dusk was falling. From the bunk-house rose the tinkling notes of a mandolin; after a few preliminary chords, the player, a Mexican, began a love-song in Spanish. The distant chimes of Mission bells sounded softly on the evening air.

Jack and Echo sat down upon the steps of the piazza. Jack continued the strain of his thought, but in a more serious vein:

“Echo, I’m so happy that I am frightened.”

“Frightened?” she asked wonderingly.

“Yes, scared downright scared,” he answered. “I reckon I’m like an Indian. An Indian doesn’t believe it’s good medicine to let the gods know he’s big happy. For there’s the Thunder Bird ”

“The Thunder Bird?”

“The evil spirit of the storm,” continued Jack. “When the Thunder Bird hears a fellow saying he’s big happy, he sends him bad luck ”

Echo laid her hand softly on the mouth of her sweetheart. “We won’t spoil our happiness, then, by talking about it. We will just feel it just be it.”

She laid her head upon Jack’s knee. He placed his arm lightly but protectingly over her shoulder. They sat in silence listening to the Mexican’s song. Finally Jack bent over and whispered gently in her ear:

“Softly, so the Thunder Bird won’t hear, Echo; tell me you love me; that you love only me; that you will always love me, no matter what shall happen; that you never loved, until you loved me.”

Echo sat upright, with a start. “What do you mean?” she exclaimed. “Of course I love you, and you only, but the future and the past are beyond our control. Unless you know of something that is going to happen which may mar our love, your question is silly, not at all like your Mother Goose nonsense that was dear. And as for the past, you mean Dick Lane.”

“Yes, I mean Dick Lane,” confessed Payson, in a subdued tone. “I am jealous of him that is even of his memory.”

“That is not like Jack Payson. What has come over you? It is the shadow of your Thunder Bird. You know what my feeling was for Dick Lane, and what it is, for it remains the same, the only difference being that now I know it never was love. Even if it were, he is dead, and I love you, Jack, you alone. Oh, how you shame me by forcing me to speak of such things! I have tried to put poor Dick out of my mind, for every time I think of him it is with a wicked joy that he is dead, that he cannot come home to claim me as his wife. Oh, Jack, Jack, I didn’t think it of you!”

And the girl laid her face within her hands on her lover’s knee and burst into a fit of sobbing.

Jack Payson shut his teeth.

“Well, since I have lowered myself so far in your esteem, and since your mind is already sinning against Dick Lane, we might as well go on and settle this matter. I promise I will not mention it again. I, too, have troubles of the mind. I am as I am, and you ought to know it. I said I was jealous of Dick Lane’s memory. It is more. I am jealous of Dick Lane himself. If he should return, would you leave me and go with him as his wife?”

Again she sat upright. By a strong effort she controlled her sobbing.

“The man I admired does not deserve an answer, but the child he has proved himself to be and whom I cannot help loving, shall have it. Yes, if Dick Lane returns true to his promise I shall be true to mine.”

She arose and went into the house. Payson rode homeward through the starlight resolved of tormenting doubt only to be consumed by torturing jealousy. He now had no thought of confiding in Jim Allen. He regretted that he had touched so dangerously near the subject of Dick Lane’s return in talking to Bud and Polly. His burning desire was to be safely married to Echo Allen before the inevitable return of her former lover.

“Fool that I was not to ask her one more question: Would she forgive her husband where she would not forgive her lover? What will she think of me when all is discovered, as it surely will be? Well, I must take my chances. Events will decide.”

On his return to Sweetwater Ranch he put the place in charge of his new foreman, Sage-brush Charlie, and went out to a hunting-cabin he had built in the Tortilla Mountains. Here he fought the problem over with his conscience and his selfishness won. He returned, fixed in his decision to suppress Dick Lane’s letter, and to go ahead with the marriage.