A Touch of Sun and Other Stories Part 19

Tom made no secret with me of their scheme, and I fell upon him at once.

"You are not taking advantage of that innocent in your own house!" I said.

"Do you take him for an innocent? He has about as shrewd a business head--but he has no money, anyhow. I shall have to put up for the whole trip."

To be honest, that was just what I had feared; but it didn't sound well to say so. Tom is always putting up for things that never come to anything--for us.

He tried to propitiate me with the news that I was to go with them.

"And what do you propose to do with our guest?"

"Take her along. Why not? It's as hard a trip as any I know of, for the distance. Her troubles won't keep her awake, nor spoil her appet.i.te, after the first day's ride."

"I don't know but you are right," I said; "but wild horses couldn't drag her if _he_ goes. And how about the other Harshaw--the one she has promised to marry?"

"She isn't going to marry him, is she? I should think she had gone about far enough, to meet that fellow halfway."

Even if she wasn't going to marry him, I said, it might be civil to tell him so. She had listened to his accuser; she could hardly refuse to listen to him.

"I think, myself, the dear boy has skipped the country," said Tom, who is unblushingly on Cecil's side. "If he hasn't, the letter will fetch him. She will have time to settle his hash before we start."

"Before we start! And when do you propose to start?"--I shouldn't have been surprised if he had said "to-morrow," but he considerately gives me until Thursday.

The truth is, Lou, it is years and years since I have been on one of these wild-goose chases with Tom. I have no more faith in this goose than in any of the other ones, but who wants to be forever playing the part of Wisdom "that cries in the streets and no man regards her"? One might as well be merry over one's folly, to say nothing of the folly of other people. I confess I am dying to go; but of course nothing can be decided till the recreant bridegroom has been heard from.

This morning, when I went to Kitty's door for her letter, I found she hadn't written it. She made me come in while she "confessed," as she said.

"I couldn't submit to the facts last night," she faltered. "I had to pretend that I thought he didn't know; but of course he does--he must. I wrote him from home before I started, and again from New York. I can't suppose that Cecil would intercept my letters. He is not a stage villain.

No; I must face the truth. But how can I ever tell it to mamma!"

"We will arrange all that by and by," I a.s.sured her (but I don't see myself how she can tell the truth about this transaction to anybody, her mother least of all, who would be simply wild if she knew how the girl has been betrayed and insulted, among utter strangers); meantime I begged her to promise me that she would not waste--

She interrupted me quickly. "I have wasted enough, I think. No; don't be afraid for me, Mrs. Daly, and for Heaven's sake don't pity me!"

I had just written the above when Tom came in and informed me that the "regular candidate had arrived," and requested to know if we were to have them both to dinner, or if the "dark horse" was to be told he needn't come.

"Of course he can't come!" I screamed; "let him keep himself as dark as possible."

"Then you needn't expect me," said Tom. "Cecy and I will dine at the Louvre." And I would give a good deal if I could dine there too, or any where but with this extraordinary pair of lovers.

I went out to meet the real Harshaw, embarra.s.sed with the guilty consciousness of having allowed my sympathies to go astray; for though in theory I totally disapprove of Cecil Harshaw, personally I defy anybody not to like him. I will except prejudiced persons, like his cousin and the lady he is so bent on making, by hook or by crook, _a_ Mrs. Harshaw.

Mr. Harshaw the first (and last to arrive) has shaved his mustache quite recently, I should say, and the nakedness of his upper lip is not becoming.

I wonder if she ever saw him with his mouth bare? I wonder if she would have accepted him if she had? He was so funny about his cousin, the promoter; so absolutely unconscious of his own asinine position. He argued very sensibly that if, after waiting four years for him, she couldn't wait one day longer, she must have changed in her feelings very decidedly, and that was a fact it behooved him to find out. Better now than later. I think he has found out.

Possibly he was nicer four years ago. Men get terribly down at heel, mentally, morally, and mannerly, poking off by themselves in these out-of-the-way places. But she has been seeing people and steadily making growth since she gave him her promise at eighteen. The promise itself has helped to develop her. It must have been a knot of perpetual doubt and self-questioning. No one need tell me that she really loves him; if she did, if she had, she could not take his treatment of her like this. Perhaps the family circ.u.mstances constrained her. They may have thought Harshaw had a fortune in the future of his ranch, with its river boundary of placer-mines. English girls are obedient, and English mammas are practical, we read.

She is practical, and she is beginning to look her situation in the face.

"I shall want you to help me find some way to return that money," she said to me later, with an angry blush--"that money which Cecil Harshaw kindly advanced me for my journey. I shall hate every moment of my life till that debt is paid. But for the insult I never can repay him, never!

"We are a large family at home--four girls besides me, and three boys; and boys are so expensive. I cannot ask mamma to help me; indeed, I was hoping to help her. I should have gone for a governess if I had not been duped into coming over here. Would there be any one in this town, do you think, who might want a governess for her children? I have a few 'accomplishments,' and though I've not been trained for a teacher, I am used to children, and they like me, when I want them to."

I thought this a good idea for the future; it would take time to work it up. But for the present an inspiration came to me,--on the strength of something Tom had said,--that he wished I could draw or paint, because he could make an artist useful on this trip, he condescended to say, if he could lay his hand on one. All the photographs of the Springs, it seems, have the disastrous effect of dwarfing their height and magnitude. There is a lagoon and a weedy island directly beneath them, and in the camera pictures taken from in front, the reeds and willows look gigantic in the foreground, and the Springs--out of all proportion--insignificant. This would be fatal to our schemers' claims as to the volume of water they are supposed to furnish for an electrical power plant to supply the Silver City mines, one hundred miles away. Hence the demand of Science for Art, with her point of view.

"Just the thing for her," I thought. "She can draw and water-color, of course; all English girls do." And I flew and proposed it to Tom. "Pay her well for her pictures, and she'll make your Thousand Springs look like Ten Thousand." (That was only my little joke, dear; I am always afraid of your conscience.) But the main thing is settled; we have found a way of inducing Kitty to go. Tom was charmed with my intelligence, and Kitty, poor child, would go anywhere, in any conceivable company, to get even with Cecil Harshaw on that hateful money transaction. When I told her she would have to submit to his presence on the trip, she shrugged her shoulders.

"It's one of 'life's little ironies,'" she said.

"And," I added, "we shall have to pa.s.s the ranch that was to have been"--

"Oh, well, that is another. I must get used to the humorous side of my situation. One suffers most, perhaps, through thinking how other people will think one suffers. If they would only give one credit for a little common sense, to say nothing of pride!"

You see, she will wear no willows for him. We shall get on beautifully, I've no doubt, even with the "irony" of the situation rubbed in, as it inevitably will be, in the course of this journey.

Tom solemnly a.s.sures me that the other Harshaw's name is not Micky, but "Denis;" and he explains his having got into the legislature (quite unnecessarily, so far as I am concerned) on the theory that he is too lazy even to make enemies.

I shall get the governess project started, so it can be working while we are away. If you know of anybody who would be likely to want her, and could pay her decently, and would know how to treat a nursery governess who is every bit a lady, but who is not above her business (I take for granted she is not, though of course I don't know), do, pray, speak a word for her.

I'll answer for it she is bright enough; better not mention that she is pretty. There must be a hundred chances for her there to one in Idaho. We are hardly up to the resident-governess idea as yet. It is thought to be wanting in public spirit for parents not to patronize the local schools.

If they are not good enough for the rich families, the poor families feel injured, and want to know the reason why.

To return to these Harshaws. Does it not strike you that the English are more original, not to say queer, than we are; more indifferent to the opinions of others--certain others? They don't hesitate to do a thing because on the face of it it's perfectly insane. Witness the lengths they go, these young fellows out here, for anything on earth they happen to set their crazy hearts upon. The young fancy bloods, I mean, who have the love of sport developed through generations of tough old hard-riding, high-playing, deep-drinking ancestors; the "younger sons," who have inherited the sense of having the ball at their feet, without having inherited the ball. They are certainly great fun, but I should hate to be responsible for them.

I note what you say about my tendency to slang, and how it "seems to grow upon me." It "seems" to, alas! for the simple reason, I fear, that it does. I can remember when I used carefully to corral all my slang words in apologetic quote-marks, as if they were range-cattle to be fenced out from the home herd--our mother-tongue which we brought with us from the East, and which you have preserved in all its conscientious purity. But I give it up. I hardly know any longer, in regard to my own speech, which are my native expressions and which are the wild and woolly ones adopted off the range. It will serve all human purposes of a woman irretrievably married into the West. If the worst come to the worst, I can make a virtue of necessity and become a member of the "American Dialect Society"--a member in good standing.

This is the morning of our glorious start. I am s.n.a.t.c.hing a few words with you while the men are packing the wagon, which stands before the door.

What a sensation it would make drawn up in front of--Mrs. Percifer's, for instance, in Park Avenue! Here no one turns the head to look at it.

I told Tom he need make no concessions to the fact that he is to have two fairly well-dressed women along. We will go as they go, without any fuss, or they may leave us at home. I despise those condescending, make-believe-rough-it trips, with which men flatter women into thinking themselves genuine campaigners. Consequently our outfit is a big, bony ranch-team and a Shuttler wagon with the double-sides in; spring seats, of course, and the bottom well bedded down with tents and rolls of blankets.

We don't go out of our way to be uncomfortable; that is the tenderfoot's pet weakness. The "kitchen-box" and the "grub-box" sit shoulder to shoulder in the back of the wagon. The stovepipe, tied with rope in sections, keeps up a lively clatter in concert with the jiggling of the tinware and the thumps and b.u.mps of the camp-stove, which has swallowed its own feet, and, by the internal sounds, doesn't seem to have digested them.

I spent last evening covering the canteens with canvas. The maiden was quite cheerful, sorting her drawing-materials and packing her colors and sketch-blocks. She laughs at everything Tom says, whether she sees the point or not, and most when there is none to see. Tom will be cook, because he prefers his own messing to any of ours, and we can't spare room in the wagon for a regular camp chef. Mr. Harshaw is the "swamper," because he makes himself useful doing things my lord doesn't like to do. And Kitty is not Miss Co-myn, as we called it, but Miss "c.u.mmin," as they call it,--"the Comin' woman," Tom calls her. Mr. Billings, the teamster, completes our party.

Sept.--Never mind the date. This is to-morrow morning, and we are at Walter's Ferry. It seems a week since we left Bisuka. We started yesterday on the flank of a dust-storm, and soon were with the main column, the wind pursuing us and hurling the sweepings of the road into the backs of our necks. The double-sides raised us out of the worst of the dust, else I think we should have been smothered. It was a test of our young lady's traveling manners. She kept her head down and her mouth shut; but when I shrieked at her to ask how she was standing it, she plucked her dusty veil from between her lips and smiled for answer.

We two have the back seat, Tom sits in front with Billings, and the "swamper" sits anywhere on the lumps and b.u.mps which our baggage makes, covered by the canvas wagon-sheet. He might have ridden his horse--everybody supposed he would; but that would have separated him from the object of his existence; the object sternly ignoring him, and riding for miles with her face turned away, her hand to her hat, which the wind persistently s.n.a.t.c.hed at. It was her wide-brimmed sketching-hat--rather a daring creation but monstrously becoming, and I had persuaded her to wear it, the morning being delusively clear, thinking we were to have one of our midsummer scorchers that would have burned her fair English face to a blister.

Mr. Harshaw thought she would be tired, wearing her hand continually in the air, and suggested various mechanical subst.i.tutes,--a string attached to the hat-tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, a scarf tied over her head; but a snubbing was all the reward he got for his sympathy.

"When this hand is tired I take the other one," she said airily.

We lunched at Ten Mile, by the railroad track. Do you remember that desolate place? The Oregon Short Line used to leave us there at a little station called Kuna. There is no Kuna now; the station-house is gone; the station-keeper's little children are buried between four stakes on the bare hill--diphtheria, I think it was. Miss Kitty asked what the stakes were there for. Tom didn't like to tell her, so he said some traveler had made a "cache" there of something he couldn't carry with him, and the stakes were to mark the spot till his return.

"And will n.o.body disturb the cache?" asked Miss Kitty. I couldn't bear to hear them. "They are graves," I whispered. "Two little children--the station-keeper's--all they had." And she asked no more questions.