Lonesome Land (19 page)

He looked for Kent, found him just as he was mounting at the stables, and let him go almost without a word. After all, no one could help him. He stood there smoking after Kent had gone, and when
his cigar was finished he wandered back to the hotel. As was always the case after hard drinking, he had a splitting headache. He got a room as close to Val’s as he could, shut himself into
it, and gave himself up to his headache and to gloomy meditation. All day he lay upon the bed, and part of the time he slept. At supper time he rapped upon Val’s door, got no answer, and went
down alone, to find her in the dining room. There was an empty chair beside her, and he took it as his right. She talked a little—about the fire and the damage it had done. She said she was
worried because she had forgotten to bring the cat, and what would it find to eat out there?

“Everything’s burned perfectly black for miles and miles, you know,” she reminded him.

They left the room together, and he followed her upstairs and to her door. This time she did not shut him out, and he went in and sat down by the window, and looked out upon the meager little
street. Never, in the years he had known her, had she been so far from him. He watched her covertly while she searched for something in her suitcase.

“I’m afraid I didn’t bring enough clothes to last more than a day or two,” she remarked. “I couldn’t seem to think of anything that night. Arline did most of
the packing for me. I’m afraid I misjudged that woman, Manley; there’s a good deal to her, after all. But she
is
funny.”

“Val, I want to tell you I’m going to—to be different. I’ve been a beast, but I’m going to—” So much he had rushed out before she could freeze him to
silence again.

“I hope so,” she cut in, as he hesitated. “That is something you must judge for yourself, and do by yourself. Do you think you will be able to get a team tomorrow?”

“Oh—to hell with a team!” Manley exploded.

Val dropped her hairbrush upon the floor. “Manley Fleetwood! Has it come to that, also? Isn’t it enough to—” She choked. “Manley, you can be a—a drunken sot,
if you choose—I’ve no power to prevent you; but you shall not swear in my presence. I thought you had some of the instincts of a gentleman, but—” She set her teeth hard
together. She was white around the mouth, and her whole, slim body was aquiver with outraged dignity.

There was something queer in Manley’s eyes as he looked at her, the length of the tiny room between them.

“Oh, I beg your pardon. I remember, now, your Fern Hill ethics. I may
go
to hell, for all of you—you will simply hold back your immaculate, moral skirts so that I may pass
without smirching them; but I must not mention my destination—that is so unrefined!” He got up from the chair, with a laugh that was almost a snort. “You refuse to discuss a
certain subject, though it’s almost a matter of life and death with me; at least, it was. Your happiness and my own was at stake, I thought. But it’s all right—I needn’t
have worried about it. I still have some of the instincts of a gentleman, and your pure ears shall not be offended by any profanity or any disagreeable ‘conventional confessions.’ The
absolution, let me say, I expected to do without.” He started, full of some secret intent, for the door.

Val humanized suddenly. By the time his fingers touched the doorknob she had read his purpose, had reached his side, and was clutching his arm with both her hands.

“Manley Fleetwood, what are you going to do?” She was actually panting with the jump of her heart.

He turned the knob, so that the latch clicked. “Get drunk. Be the drunken sot you expect me to be. Go to that vulgar place which I must not mention in your presence. Let go my arm,
Val.”

She was all woman, then. She pulled him away from the door and the unnamed horror which lay outside. She was not the crying sort, but she cried, just the same—heartbrokenly, her head
against his shoulder, as if she herself were the sinner. She clung to him, she begged him to forgive her hardness.

She learned something which every woman must learn if she would keep a little happiness in her life: she learned how to forgive the man she loved, and to trust him afterward.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A
RLINE
G
IVES A
D
ANCE

A
HOUSE, IT WOULD SEEM, IS ALMOST THE LEAST IMPORTANT PART OF A
ranch; one can camp, with frying pan and blankets, in the shade of a bush or the shelter
of canvas. But to do anything upon a ranch, one must have many things—burnable things, for the most part, as Manley was to learn by experience when he left Val at the hotel and rode out, the
next day, to Cold Spring Coulee.

To ride over twenty miles of blackness is depressing enough in itself, but to find, at the end of the journey, that one’s work has all gone for nothing, and one’s money and
one’s plans and hopes, is worse than depressing. Manley sat upon his horse and gazed rather blankly at the heap of black cinders that had been his haystacks, and at the cold embers where had
stood his stables, and at the warped bits of iron that had been his buckboard, his wagon, his rake and mower—all the things he had gathered around him in the three years he had spent upon the
place.

The house merely emphasized his loss. He got down and picked up the cat, which was mewing plaintively beside his horse, snuggled it into his arm, and remounted. Val had told him to be sure and
find the cat, and bring it back with him. His horses and his cattle—not many, to be sure, in that land of large holdings—were scattered, and it would take the round-up to gather them
together again. So the cat, and the horse he rode, the bleak coulee, and the unattractive little house with its three rooms and its meager porch, were all that he could visualize as his worldly
possessions. And when he thought of his bank account he winced mentally. Before snow fell he would be debt-ridden, the best he could do. For he must have a stable, and corral, and hay, and a wagon,
and—he refused to remind himself of all the things he must have if he would stay on the ranch.

His was not a strong nature at best, and now he shrank from facing his misfortune and wanted only to get away from the place. He loped his horse halfway up the hill, which was not merciful
riding. The half-starved cat yowled in his arms, and struck her claws through his coat till he felt the prick of them, and he swore; at the cat, nominally, but really at the trick fate had played
upon him.

For a week he dallied in town, without heart or courage, though Val urged him to buy lumber and build, and cheered him as best she could. He did make a half-hearted attempt to get lumber to the
place, but there seemed to be no team in town which he could hire. Everyone was busy, and put him off. He tried to buy hay of Blumenthall, of the Wishbone, of every man he met who had hay. No one
had any hay to sell, however. Blumenthall complained that he was short, himself, and would buy if he could, rather than sell. The Wishbone foreman declared profanely that hay was going to be worth
a dollar a pound to
them,
before spring. They were all sorry for Manley, and told him he was “sure playing tough luck,” but they couldn’t sell any hay, that was
certain.

“But we must manage somehow to fix the place so we can live on it this winter,” Val would insist, when he told her how every move seemed blocked. “You’re very brave,
dear, and I’m proud of the way you are holding out—but Hope is not a good place for you. It would be foolish to stay in town. Can’t you buy enough hay here in town—baled hay
from the store—to keep our horses through the winter?”

“Well, I tried,” Manley responded gloomily. “But Brinberg is nearly out. He’s expecting a carload in, but it hasn’t come yet. He said he’d let me know when it
gets here.”

Meanwhile the days slipped away, and imperceptibly the heat and haze of the fires gave place to bright sunlight and chill winds, and then to the chill winds without the sunshine. One morning the
ground was frozen hard, and all the roofs gleamed white with the heavy frost. Arline bestirred herself, and had a heating stove set up in the parlor, and Val went down to the dry heat and the
peculiar odor of a rusted stove in the flush of its first fire since spring.

The next day, as she sat by her window upstairs, she looked out at the first nip of winter. A few great snowflakes drifted down from the slaty sky; a puff of wind sent them dancing down the
street, shook more down, and whirled them giddily. Then the storm came and swept through the little street and whined lonesomely around the hotel.

Over at the saloon—“Pop’s Place,” it proclaimed itself in washed-out lettering—three tied horses circled uneasily until they were standing back to the storm, their
bodies hunched together with the chill of it, their tails whipping between their legs. They accentuated the blank dreariness of the empty street. The snow was whitening their rumps and clinging, in
tiny drifts, upon the saddle skirts behind the cantles.

All the little hollows of the rough, frozen ground were filling slowly, making white patches against the brown of the earth—patches which widened and widened until they met, and the whole
street was blanketed with fresh, untrodden snow. Val shivered suddenly, and hurried downstairs where the air was warm and all a-steam with cooking, and the odor of frying onions smote the nostrils
like a blow in the face.

“I suppose we must stay here, now, till the storm is over,” she sighed, when she met Manley at dinner. “But as soon as it clears we must go back to the ranch. I simply cannot
endure another week of it.”

“You’re gitting uneasy—I seen that, two or three days ago,” said Arline, who had come into the dining room with a tray of meat and vegetables, and overheard her.
“You want to stay, now, till after the dance. There’s going to be a dance Friday night, you know—everybody’s coming. You got to wait for that.”

“I don’t attend public dances,” Val stated calmly. “I am going home as soon as the storm clears—if Manley can buy a little hay, and find our horses, and get some
sort of a driving vehicle.”

“Well, if he can’t, maybe he can round up a
ridin’
vee-hicle,” Arline remarked dryly, placing the meat before Manley, the potatoes before Val, and the gravy
exactly between the two, with mathematical precision. “I’m givin’ that dance myself. You’ll have to go—I’m givin’ it in your honor.”

“In—my—why, the
idea!
It’s good of you, but—”

“And you’re goin’, and you’re goin’ to take your vi’lin over and play us some pieces. I tucked it into the rig and brought it in, on purpose. I planned out
the hull thing, driving out to your place. In case you wasn’t all burned up, I made up my mind I was going to give you a dance, and git you acquainted with folks. You needn’t to hang
back—I’ve told everybody it was in your honor, and that you played the vi’lin swell, and we’d have some real music. And I’ve sent to Chinook for the dance
music—harp, two fiddles, and a coronet—and you ain’t going to stall the hull thing now. I didn’t mean to tell you till the last minute, but you’ve got to have time to
make up your mind you’ll go to a public dance for oncet in your life. It ain’t going to hurt you none. I’ve went, ever sence I was big enough to reach up and grab holt of my
pardner—and I’m every bit as virtuous as you be. You’re going, and you ’n Man are going to head the grand march.”

Val’s face was flushed, her lips pursed, and her eyes wide. Plainly she was not quite sure whether she was angry, amused, or insulted. She descended straight to a purely feminine
objection.

“But I haven’t a thing to wear, and—”

“Oh, yes, you have. While you was dillydallying out in the front room, that night, wondering whether you’d have hysterics, or faint, or what all, I dug deep in that biggest trunk of
yourn, and fished up one of your party dresses—white satin, it is, with embroid’ry all up ’n’ down the front, and slimpsy lace; it’s kinda
low-’n’-behold—one of them—”

“My white satin—why, Mrs. Hawley! That—you must have brought the gown I wore to my farewell club reception. It has a train, and—why, the
idea!
”

“You can cut off the trail—you got plenty of time—or you can pin it up. I didn’t have time that night to see how the thing was made, and I took it because I found white
skirts and stockin’s, and white satin slippers to go with it, right handy. You’re a bride, and white ’ll be suitable, and the dance is in your honor. Wear it just as it is, fer
all me. Show the folks what real clothes look like. I never seen a woman dressed up that way in my hull life. You wear it, Val, trail ’n’ all. I’ll back you up in it, and tell
folks it’s my idee, and not yourn.”