Bransford of Rainbow Range Part 28

"I hate a fool worse than a knave, any day in the week," said Jeff: "and the man that would let money keep him from the only girl--why, Johnny, he's so much more of a fool than the other fellow is a scoundrel----"

"I get you!" said Johnny. "You mean that a submarine boat is better built for roping steers than a mogul engine is skilful at painting steeples, and you wonder if you can't get a fresh horse somewhere and go on through to Arcadia to-night?"

"Something like that," admitted Jeff. "Besides," he added lightly, "while I'd like that girl just as well if I didn't have a cent--why, as it happens, I'm pretty well fixed, myself. I've got money to throw at the little d.i.c.ky-birds--all kinds of money. Got a fifty-one-per-cent interest in a copper mine over in Harqua Hala that's been payin' me all the way from ten to five thousand clear per each and every year for the last seven years, besides what I pay a lad for lookout to keep anybody but himself from stealing any of it. He's been buyin' real estate for me in Los Angeles lately."

Johnny's jaw dropped in unaffected amazement.

"All this while? Before you and Leo hit Rainbow?"

"Sure!" said Jeff.

"And you workin' for forty a month and stealin' your own beef?--then saving up and buying your little old brand along with Beebe and Leo and old Wes', joggin' along, workin' like a yaller dog with fleas?"

"Why not? Wasn't I having a heap of fun? Where can I see any better time than I had here, or find better friends? Money's no good by itself. I haven't drawn a dollar from Arizona since I left. It was fun to make the mine go round at first; but when it got so it'd work I looked for something else more amusing."

"I should think you'd want to travel, anyhow."

"Travel?" echoed Jeff. "Travel? Why, you d.a.m.n fool, I'm here now!"

"Will you stay here, if you marry her, Jeff?"

"So you've no objection to make, if I've got a few dollars? That squares everything all right, does it? Not a yeep of protest from you now? See here, you everlasting fool! I'm just the same man I was fifteen minutes ago when you thought I didn't have any money. If I'm fit for her now, I was then. If I wasn't good enough then, I'm not good enough now."

"But I wasn't thinking of her--I was thinking of--how it would look."

"Look? Who cares how it looks? Just a silly prejudice! 'They say--what say they--let them say!' Johnny, maybe I was just stringin' you. If I was lying about the money--how about it then? Changed your mind again?"

"You wasn't lyin', was you?"

"Shan't tell you! It doesn't really make any difference, anyhow."

CHAPTER XVIII

AT THE RAINBOW'S END

"Helen's lips are drifting dust; Ilion is consumed with rust; All the galleons of Greece Drink the ocean's dreamless peace; Lost was Solomon's purple show Restless centuries ago; Stately empires wax and wane-- Babylon, Barbary and Spain-- Only one thing, undefaced, Lasts, though all the worlds lie waste And the heavens are overturned, --Dear, how long ago we learned!"

--FREDERICK LAWRENCE KNOWLES.

Starlit and moonlight leagues, the slow, fresh dawn; in the cool of the morning, Bransford came to the crest of the ground-swell known as Frenchman's Ridge, and saw low-lying Arcadia dim against the north, a toy town huddling close to the shelter of Rainbow Range; he splashed through the shallow waters of Alamo, failing to a trickle before it sank in the desert sands; and so came at last to the moat of Arcadia. With what joyous and eager-choking heart-beat you may well guess: not the needlessness of those swift pulses or of that joy. For Ellinor was not there. With Mrs. Hoffman, she had gone to visit the Sutherlands at Rainbow's End. And Jeff could not go on. Arcadia rose to greet him in impromptu Roman holiday.

Poor Bransford has never known clearly what chanced on that awful day.

There is a jumbled, whirling memory of endless kaleidoscopic troops of joyful Arcadians: Billy White, Monte, Jimmy, Clarke, the grim-smiling sheriff, the judge. It was dimly borne upon him by one or both of the two last, that there were yet certain formalities to be observed in the matter of his escape from custody of the Law and of the horse he had borrowed from the court house square. Indeed, it seemed to Jeff, in a hazy afterthought, that perhaps the sheriff had arrested him again. If so, it had slipped Jeff's mind, swallowed up in a gruesome horror of congratulations, hand-shakings, back-slappings, badinage and questions; heaped on a hero heartsick, dazed and dumb. Pleading weariness, he tore himself away at last, almost by violence, and flung himself down in a darkened bedroom of the Arcadian Atalanta.

One thing was clear. Headlight was there, Aforesaid Smith, Madison: but his nearest friends, Pringle, Beebe and Ballinger, though they had hasted back to Arcadia to fight Jeff's battles, were ostentatiously absent from his hollow and hateful triumph: Johnny Dines had pointedly refused to share his night ride from Helm's: and Jeff knew why, sadly enough. The G.o.ds take pay for the goods they give: and now that goodly fellowship was broken. The thought clung fast: it haunted his tossing and troubled slumbers, where Ellinor came through a sunset glow, swift-footed to meet him: where his friends rode slow and silent into the glimmering dusk, smaller and smaller, black against the sky.

The Sutherland place made an outer corner of Rainbow's End, bowered about by a double row of close and interlaced cottonwoods on two sides, by vigorous orchards on the other two.

The house had once been a one-storied adobe, heroically proportioned, thick-walled, cool against summer, warm in what went by the name of winter. The old-time princely hospitality was unchanged, but Sutherland had bought lots in Arcadia of early days; and now, the old gray walls of the house were smooth with creamy stucco, wrought of gypsum from the White Sands; the windows were widened and there was a superimposed story, overhanging, wide and low. The gables were double-windowed, shingled and stained nut-brown, the gently sloping roof shingled, dormered and soft green: the overflow projecting to broad verandas on either side, very like an umbrella: a bungalow with two birthdays--1866 : 1896.

Miss Ellinor Hoffman had deserted veranda, rocking-chair and hammock.

With a sewing basket beside her, she sat on a pine bench under a cottonwood of 1867, ostensibly basting together a kimono tinted like a dripping sea sh.e.l.l, and faced with peach-blossom.

The work went slowly. Her seat was at the desert corner of the homestead which was itself the desert outpost of a desert town: and her blood stirred to these splendid horizons. The mysterious desert scoffed and questioned, drew her with promise of strange joys and strange griefs.

The iron-hard mountains beckoned and challenged from afar, wove her their spells of wavering lights and shadows; the misty warp and woof of them shifting to swift fantastic hues of trembling rose and blue and violet, half-veiling, half-revealing, steeps unguessed and dreamed-of sheltered valleys--and all the myriad-voice of moaning waste and world-r.i.m.m.i.n.g hill cried "Come!"

Faint, fitful undertone of drowsy chords, far pealing of elfin bells; that was pulsing of busy _acequias_, tinkling of mimic waterfalls. The clean breath of the desert crooned by, bearing a grateful fragrance of apple-blossoms near; it rippled the deepest green of alfalfa to undulating sheen of purple and flashing gold.

The broad fields were dwarfed to play-garden prettiness by the vastness of overwhelming desert, to right, to left, before; whose nearer blotches of black and gray and brown faded, far off, to a nameless shimmer, its silent leagues dwindling to immeasurable blur, merging indistinguishable in the burning sunset.

"East by up," overguarding the oasis, the colossal bulk of Rainbow walled out the world with grim-tiered cliffs, cleft only by the deep-gashed gates of Rainbow Pa.s.s, where the swift river broke through to the rich fields of Rainbow's End, bringing fulfilment of the fabled pot of gold--or, unused, to shrink and fail and die in the thirsty sand.

Below, the whilom channel wandered forlorn--Rainbow no longer, but Lost River--to a disconsolate delta, waterless save as infrequent floods found turbulent way to the Sink, when wild horse and antelope revisited their old haunts for the tender green luxury of these brief, belated springs.

Incidentally, Miss Hoffman's outpost commanded a good view of Arcadia road, winding white through the black tar-brush. Had she looked, she might have seen a slow horseman, tiny on the bare plain below the tar-brush, larger as he climbed the gentle slope along that white-winding road.

But she bent industrious to her work, smiling to herself, half-singing, half-humming a foolish and lilty little tune:

"A tisket, a tasket--a green and yellow basket; I wrote a letter to my love and on the road I lost it-- I crissed it, I crossed it--I locked it in a casket; I missed it, I lost it----"

And here Miss Hoffman did an unaccountable thing. Wise Penelope unraveled by night the work she wove by day. Like her in this, Miss Ellinor Hoffman now placidly snipped and ripped the basting threads, unraveled them patiently, and set to work afresh.

"Now, there's no such thing as a Ginko tree; There never was--though there ought to be.

And 'tis also true, though most absurd, There's no such thing as a Wallabye bird!"

Miss Hoffman was all in white, with a white middy blouse trimmed in scarlet, a scarlet ribbon in her dark hair: a fine-linked gold chain showed at her neck. A very pretty picture she made, cool and fresh against the deep shade and the green--but of course she did not know it.

She held the shaping kimono at arm's length, admiring the delicate color, and fell to work again.

"Oh, the jolly miller, he lives by himself!

As the wheel rolls around he gathers in his pelf, A hand in the hopper and another in the bag-- As the wheel rolls around he calls out, '_Grab!_'"

So intent and preoccupied was she, that she did not hear the approaching horse.

"Good evening!"

"Oh!" Miss Hoffman jumped, dropping the long-suffering kimono. A horseman, with bared head, had reined up in the shaded road alongside.

"How silly of me not to hear you coming! If you're looking for Mr.

Sutherland, he's not here--Mr. David Sutherland, that is. But Mr. Henry Sutherland is here--or was awhile ago--maybe half an hour since. He was trying to get up a set of tennis. Perhaps they're playing--over there on the other side of the house. And yet, if they were there, we'd hear them laughing--don't you think?"

Mr. Bransford--for it was Mr. Bransford, and he was all dressed in clothes--waited with extreme patience for the conclusion of these feverish and hurried remarks.

"But I'm not looking for Sutherland. I'm looking for you!"