Bad Man's Gulch (5 page)

A crowd swirled around him with noisy congratulations, but Lazy Purdue had eyes for only one face. She was leaning forward with parted lips, a face flushed with excitement, and one hand was caught to her breast. Her eyes had found him in the moving crowd, and he turned with a sigh from the appeal in her eyes.

“Wait a minute, boys,” called the heavy voice of Henry McLane, “don't go to bustin' my hand shakin' it this way! I reckon there ought to be one man in the crowd willin' to shoot ag'in' me. There's
never been a shootin' before where a Conover didn't take part. There's a new Conover here today, I hear. Will he shoot?”

The crowd gave back between them and left McLane and Lazy Purdue face to face. Their eyes met and held.

“I sure appreciate this,” remarked Lazy Purdue, “but I ain't used to any such marks in my part of the country.”

“It must be a terrible long ways off!” called a voice.

A suppressed titter ran through the crowd, and Lazy Purdue saw one face, high above the rest, go pale. He took off his hat and bowed to the throne. “I'm goin' to beat your score,” he remarked calmly to McLane, “not because winnin' gives me any pleasure in particular, except that I got a sort of han-kerin' to dance with Marion Conover tonight. It'll make this here fair a sort of family party, you know.”

“By the Lord,” called a man, “he may not be a real Conover, but he's a Conover in spirit!”

Old Conover offered Lazy Purdue his rifle as the latter stepped toward the firing position, but Lazy waved him away.

“I don't take to them sort of shootin' irons,” he remarked quietly. “In my part of the country we use a different kind.” As he spoke, he drew from each hip pocket a long, shining Colt and stood balancing them in either hand and facing the target, which had been renewed. The crowd caught a breath of suppressed excitement. Never in the history of the backwoods had a man been known to prefer a pistol to a rifle.

“Here's where you lie down,” directed the umpire of the shooting.

“I reckon I don't care to get my clothes all dirty.”
Lazy Purdue smiled. “They're such nice clothes. I'll do the shootin' standin'.”

He raised the revolver in his right hand and fired one shot. The ten strings still hung glimmering. He fired once with his left hand, but still with no result. By the rules of the contest he must now beat McLane's score of eight shots. Lazy Purdue lowered the guns calmly and turned to where old Conover stood in the crowd.

“I reckon that these guns are a little cold,” he said casually.

“That's like a Conover all right,” said a voice, “blamin' a bad eye onto a good gun.”

Purdue turned and met the sneer of Henry McLane. Then he smiled and turned back to his shooting. The crowd was snickering softly now and talking behind their hands. He could visualize the pale, intent face of Marion behind him. Suddenly Lazy Purdue went cold and on his face came a look that few men had seen and none cared to see twice. The hands rose as steadily as springs with the revolvers. One after another he told off the shots with alternate hands. One by one the bits of string snapped in two. Five—six—seven. He lowered the revolvers and turned to Henry McLane amid a chill silence.

“It isn't what you do”—Lazy Purdue smiled—“it's how you do it.” He turned to the throne behind him. “Lady,” he said, “will you give this shot luck for the sake of the dance we shall have together tonight?”

She made no answer, but sat with staring, incredulous eyes.

Purdue laughed softly and turned back toward the mark. The right-hand revolver rose, a stream of fire leaped from its muzzle, and the eighth string parted.

Physical skill is dearer than religion to the hearts of the backwoodsmen, and, at the sight of such shooting, the mountaineers forgot, at least for a moment, all their prejudices against this calm-eyed stranger. They crowded about Lazy Purdue, slapping him on the shoulder and calling out the clumsy terms of familiar praise. He had become the hero of the day. It was something to tell over on winter evenings. It was a tale to remember for one's children.

After a while old Conover shouldered a way to him through the crowd. “Oh, boy,” he said softly, “I'm desperate proud of you!
Desperate
proud! I c'n hardly wait to tell Mary about this.”

But Lazy Purdue had turned and stared up to the figure on the throne. She had dropped her head with a noticeable flush on her face, and her fingers were interwound in her lap.

Lazy Purdue sighed. He was content.

The dance began that night at nine o'clock. The signal for the opening of the grand march was a wave of the hand from the queen of the fair, whose throne was by this time removed from the field and placed at one end of the huge barn that served as a dance hall.

In the upper reaches of the hall the wavering light of the host of lanterns at times showed great cobwebs, tattered and fluttering in the uncertain breezes from many cracks in the wall, but this upper region of gloom was, on the whole, shut off from the attention of the dancers by the throng of streamers and flags that hung from the lower rafters on the barn, and it was further obliterated by long streams of twisted papers of bright colors that were strung from side to side.

A double row of chairs on each side of the great room accommodated the dancers. In the first row sat the youths and girls who still retained any claims to youth and agility, and in the back row the gossiping parents sat. For the two-step and the waltz were
still in their heyday, and the time was long before white-haired elders should perambulate dancing floors to the easy measure of the one-step.

The girls and the young men still sat somewhat stiffly aware of their best clothes, and conversations were, on the whole, still formal. Remarks upon the weather still vied with remembered bits of dialogue from popular magazines. Laughter was low and controlled, and the men were still wriggling their necks uncomfortably in the high, white collars.

The scene was fairly familiar to Lazy Purdue, but he had never seen to his remembrance such a collection of flashing eyes and ardent cheeks. In Texas, things moved with more abandon, perhaps, but also with a certain easy good-fellowship that destroyed half the lure of a party, which set the men almost too much at their ease, and destroyed that enchanting aloofness upon which the country girl depends, as the city cousin depends upon an elaborate toilet.

But the time came when the queen, seeming very white and far away under the light of a cluster of lanterns about the throne, waved her hand, and Lazy Purdue rose to claim her. He experienced a feeling of elation as he strode across the floor to her glittering throne. The thought that this shining beauty would be in a moment walking on his arm at the head of the long line of the grand march and that in a few moments more she would be whirling with him through the mazes of a two-step was almost too dazzling to be true. But the very consciousness that all eyes were upon him nerved him to a super-nonchalance.

He handed her down the steps of the throne with the ease of a Louis XIV courtier, and he proceeded with her at the head of the grand march as if this were an ordinary after-dinner formality of his life. But all the while he was aware of the light touch of
her hand upon his arm. She in turn, who had resolved to maintain her part in that inevitable dance with an ice-like calm, why was it that her breath came shorter and quicker as the march proceeded, that her lips parted to what was almost a smile, that her eyes shone, that the hand upon his arm increased its pressure?

Gods of the eternally lifting spirit of springtime, and all ye gods who preside over the uplifted faces of youth, explain it. I cannot!

But when they heard the change of the music, and when they whirled into the rapid two-step, she gave to the pressure of his arm about her, and they danced as one body filled with one spirit. And he looked down to the flushed face and to the indescribable curve of throat and shoulder and white breast, and she looked up to eyes that had lost their usual indifferent caress and were now flaming with a light about which she trembled at the thought of question.

So when the dance ended and she knew that he was asking her when he might dance with her again, her thoughts were far away, and she looked at him through a mist. She promised him, after much urging, a waltz far on in the evening, and then she was free.

Free? No, for his eyes followed her and held her. She found herself grown absent-minded in the midst of her conversations, and, whenever she raised her eyes, they fell as if fate directed them upon the steady eyes of this new George Conover.

It was maddening. It was strangely and sweetly thrilling at the same time. And when the time came when he stood in front of her and claimed his second dance, she rose half willingly, half afraid of herself and of him.

“We are not goin' to dance this,” he stated. “I've got a lot to say that can't be said while we're dancing. We're goin' outside to talk.”

She stopped to protest, but the silent compulsion of his arm through hers forced her on, and, as they walked, her heart commenced to beat a tremendous tattoo so loud that she looked at him fearfully to see if he had heard. But he strode on unconsciously with his eyes straight ahead.

They crossed the brilliant entrance to the hall; they stepped out into the soft, May night, and down the path from the barn, and through the orchard, which gave a keen sweet scent of apple blossoms to the air, and at last to the stream that bubbled and played over its rocky course through the orchard. He pointed to a rock.

“Let's sit here,” he said, “and then you listen to me.”

She sat down obediently—yes, thrilling to the fact that she should be obedient to his command—but she clenched the hand he could not see to recall her self-possession.

He sat for some moments beside her, frowning, his chin resting on his clenched hand and his eyes straight forward.

“Ain't it tolerably queer?” he began at last. “In there under the lights an' with the noise and the movement o' the crowd, an' all that, I reckoned that I had about a thousand things to say to you, Marion Conover. But when I come out here, with just the beat o' the music comin' to us like the hummin' of a bee, and the purlin' of the stream here, and the smell o' the apple blossoms . . . say, these here apple blossoms are powerful sweet, don't you reckon, an' . . . an' strange-like?”

She eyed him swiftly and smiled away into the
shadows under the trees again, the softly mottled shadows that the moonlight cast from the stirless branches.

“I reckon they's powerful sweet, an' . . . an' strange-like,” she agreed.

He was still studying out his thoughts with a frown. “I reckon that there was never any McLane had any use for a Conover, an' no Conover ever had any use for a McLane?” he queried at last.

“No,” she said faintly and angrily because her voice was weak.

“I reckon this feud's about as old as these here hills,” he continued in a soft drawl, different from the mountaineers' harsh guttural or piercing nasal whine.

“I reckon it must be about as old,” she agreed.

“I reckon the feud has jus' naturally broke loose again an' is goin' to raise hell with everyone?” he continued.

“I reckon it is,” she said with a peculiar closing of the heart.

“Then if a McLane should get to like a Conover 'round about now, he'd be nothin' better'n a fool?” he inquired. He turned his glance and regarded her anxiously as he asked this.

She had to drop her eyes and clench the hand he could not see harder before she could manage an answer. “I reckon he'd be a tolerable big fool,” she agreed, and then: “Are you comin' to like one of the McLanes, George?” She hesitated softly over the name.

“No,” he said fiercely, “but I have come to like . . . Oh,” he broke out in a different tone, “ain't it terrible hard, ain't it terrible hard to want to say something, and know you should say it, an' not dare say it because you know that, if you did, you'd lose the
thing you want more'n all the world, somehow? Oh, God, how I hate all this feud!”

She drew a little back and stared at him, surprised by his sudden violence, and yet attracted by it. He had gone back to staring miserably before him.

“But after all,” he went on in a hard voice, “they's only you an' I to consider in this here matter. Feud or no feud, they's only you an' I. If they was a thousand feuds, it couldn't change me. If they was a thousand feuds, it couldn't make your hair any more like gold or your lips any redder, could they, Marion?”

She sheltered her face from his inquiry with one hand and shook her head in mute agreement.

“Now I'm goin' to ask you a queer sort of question,” he said. “I'm goin' to ask you if anything sort of strange happened to you today?”

“No,” she breathed, “not a thing that I can say.”

“Well,” he pondered, “it's mighty queer, that's all. But something happened to me while I was standing in the crowd at the fair today, and I thought you might have noticed it.” He was silent again, frowning heavily. “Somehow,” he said deliberately, “I reckon you're an almighty big liar when you say a thing like that.”

“I . . . I . . . What do you mean?” she stammered.

He turned to her swiftly and caught her hand. “Honest to God, Marion Conover,” he said, “didn't you notice nothin' while I was standin' in that crowd?”

She dropped her head and shook it faintly. He turned and sighed.

“It sort of appeared to me,” he continued, “that, when my eye crossed yours, something clicked, and then my eyes went wrong . . . and, when they
looked at yours, they was seein' way deep into them. Did
you
feel it? No, I reckon you didn't, because you didn't see yourself. An' here I've been all these days at your house and seein' you every day, an' yet all these days I never seen you the way I seen you today, with all the crowd around, an' you so far away, an' lookin' so powerful pretty and white and sunshiny, Marion girl, that I reckoned half the time you might just up and blow away in the wind. Doesn't that sound funny for a chap who hasn't touched a drop of whiskey all day?”