Over the Pass Part 13

"I believe so. In fact, I'll tell you a secret: That's the fashion in wounds."

"Mother will be glad to know she's right. She sets a lot by her opinion, does mother. Say, do you like plums?"

Jack already had a peck of plums, but another peck would not add much to the redundancy as far as he was concerned.

"I'll bring you some. We've got the biggest plums in Little Rivers--oh, so big! Bigger'n Mr. Ewold's! I'll bring some right away." She paused, however, in the doorway. "Don't you tell anybody I said they were bigger'n Mr. Ewold's," she went on. "It might hurt his feelings. He's what they call the o-rig-i-nal set-tler, and we always agree that he grows the biggest of everything, because--why, because he's got such a big laugh and such a big smile. Mother says sour-faced people oughtn't to have a face any bigger'n a crab apple; but Mr. Ewold's face couldn't be too big if it was as big as all outdoors! Good-by. I reckon you won't be s'prised to hear that I'm the dreadful talker of our family."

"Wait!" Jack called. "You haven't told me your name."

"Belvedere Smith. Father says it ain't a name for living things. But mother is dreadfully set in her ideas of names, and she doesn't like it because people call me Belvy; but they just naturally will."

"Belvedere, did you ever hear of the three little blue mice"--Jack was leaning toward her with an air of fascinating mystery--"that thought they could hide in the white clover from the white cat that had two black stripes on her back?"

There was a pellmell dash across the room and her face, with wide-open eyes dancing in curiosity, was pressed close to his:

"Why did the cat have two black stripes? Why? why?"

"Just what I was going to tell," said the pacifier of desperadoes.

"They were off on a tremendous adventure, with anthills for mountains and clover-stems for the tree-trunks of forests in the path. Tragedy seemed due for the mice, when a bee dropped off a thistle blossom for a remarkable reason--none other than that a hummingbird cuffed him in the ear with his wing--and the bee, looking for revenge with his stinger on the first vulnerable spot, stung the cat right in the Achilles tendon of his paw, just as that paw was about to descend with murderous purpose.

The cat ran away crying, with both black stripes ridges of fur sticking up straight, while the rest of the fur lay nice and smooth; and the mice giggled so that their ears nearly wiggled off their heads. So all ended happily."

"He does beat all!" thought Mrs. Galway, who had overheard part of the nonsense from the doorway. "Wouldn't it make Pete Leddy mad if he could hear the man who took his gun away getting off fairy stuff like that!"

Mrs. Galway had brought in a cake of her own baking. She was slightly jealous of the neighbors' pastry as entering into her own particular field of excellence. Jack saw that the supply of cake in the Galway pantry must be as limitless as the pigments on the Eternal Painter's palette.

"The doctor said that I was to have a light diet," he expostulated; "and I am stuffed to the brim."

"I'll make you some floating island," said Mrs. Galway, refusing to strike her colors.

"That isn't filling and pa.s.ses the time," Jack admitted.

"Jim says if you had to Fletcherize on floating island you would starve to death and your teeth would get so used to missing a step on the stairs that they would never be able to deal with real victuals at all."

"Mrs. Galway," Jack observed sagely, dropping his head on the back of the chair, "I see that it has occurred to you and Jim that it is an excellent world and full of excellent nonsense. I am ready to eat both fluffy isles and the yellow sea in which they float. I am ready to keep on getting hungry with my efforts, even though you make it continents and oceans!"

From his window he had a view, over the dark, polished green of Jim's orange trees, of the range, brown and gray and bare, holding steady shadows of its own and host to the shadows of journeying clouds, with the pa.s.s set in the centre as a cleft in a forbidding barrier. In the yard Wrath of G.o.d, Jag Ear, and P.D. were tethered. Deep content illumined the faces of P.D. and Jag Ear; but Wrath of G.o.d was as sorrowful as ever. A cheerful Wrath of G.o.d would have excited fears for his health.

"Yet, maybe he is enjoying his rest more than the others," Jack told Firio, who kept appearing at the window on some excuse or other. "Perhaps he takes his happiness internally. Perhaps the external signs are only the last stand of a lugubriousness driven out by overwhelming forces of internal joy."

"_Si, si_!" said Firio.

"Firio, you are eminently a conversationalist," said Jack. "You agree with any foolishness as if it were a new theory of ethics. You are an ideal companion. I never have to listen to you in order that I may in turn have my say."

"_Si_," said Firio. He leaned on the windowsill, his black eyes shining with ingenuous and flattering appeal: "I will broil you a quail on a spit," he whispered. "It's better than stove cooking."

"Don't talk of that!" Jack exclaimed, almost sharply. The suggestion brought a swift change to sadness over his face and drew a veil of vagueness over his eyes. "No, Firio, and I'll tell you why: the odor of a quail broiled on a spit belongs at the end of a day's journey, when you camp in sight of no habitation. You should sit on a dusty blanket-roll; you should eat by the light of the embers or a guttering candle. No, Firio, we'll wait till some other day. And it's not exactly courtesy to our hostess to bring in provender from the outside."

The trail had apparently taught Firio all the moods of his master. He knew when it was unwise to persist.

"_Si_!" he whispered, and withdrew.

Jack looked at Galeria and then back quickly, as if resisting its call.

He smiled half wryly and readjusted his position in the chair. Over the hedge he could see the heads and shoulders of pa.s.sers-by. Jim Galway had come into the room, when Jasper Ewold's broad back and great head hove in sight with something of the steady majesty of progress of a full-rigged ship.

"The Doge!" Jack exclaimed, brightening.

Jim was taken unawares. Was it the name of a new kind of semi-tropical fruit not yet introduced into Arizona?

"Not the Doge of Venice--hardly, when Mr. Ewold's love runs to Florence!

The Doge of Little Rivers!"

"Why, the Doge--of course!" Jim was "on" now and grinning. "I didn't think of my history at first. That's a good one for Jasper Ewold!"

"O Doge of Little Rivers, I expected you in a gondola of state!" said Jack, with a playfully grandiloquent gesture, as Jasper's abundance filled the doorway. "But it is all the more compliment to me that you should walk."

"Doge, eh?" Jasper tasted the word. "Pooh!" he said. "Persiflage!

persiflage! I saw at once yesterday that you had a weakness for it."

"And Miss Ewold? How is she?" Jack asked. Remembering the promise that Mary had exacted from him, he took care not to refer to her part in the duel.

His question fell aptly for what Jasper had to say. Being a man used to keeping the gate ever open to the full flood of spontaneity, he became stilted in the repet.i.tion of anything he had thought out and rehea.r.s.ed.

He was overcheerful, without the mellowness of tone which gave his cheer its charm on the previous evening.

"She's not a bit the worse. Why, she went for a ride out to the pa.s.s this afternoon as usual! I've had the whole story, from the pa.s.s till the minute that Jim put the tourniquet on your leg. She recognizes the great kindness you did her."

"Not a kindness--an inevitable interruption by any pa.s.ser-by,"

Jack put in.

"Naturally she felt that it was a kindness, a service, and when she knew you were in danger she acted promptly for herself, with a desert girl's self-reliance. When it was all over she saw the whole thing in its proper perspective, as an unpleasant, preposterous piece of barbarism which had turned out fortunately."

"Oh, I am glad of that!" Jack exclaimed, in relief that spoke rejoicing in every fibre. "I had worried. I had feared lest I had insisted too much on going on. But I had to. And I know that it was a scene that only men ought to witness--so horrible I feared it might leave a disagreeable impression."

"Ah, Mary has courage and humor. She sees the ridiculous. She laughs at it all, now!"

"Laughs?" asked Jack. "Yes, it was laughable;" and he broke into laughter, in which Jasper joined thunderously.

Jasper kept on laughing after Jack stopped, and in genuine relief to find that the affair was to be as uninfluencing a chapter in the easy traveller's life as in Mary's.

"Our regret is that we may have delayed you, sir," Jasper proceeded. "You may have had to postpone an important engagement. I understand that you had planned to take the train this morning."

"When one has been in the desert for a long time," Jack answered, "a few days more or less hardly matter in the time of his departure. In a week Dr. Patterson says that I may go. Meanwhile, I shall have the pleasure of getting acquainted with Little Rivers, which, otherwise, I should have missed."

"I am glad!" Jasper Ewold exclaimed with dramatic quickness. "Glad that your wound is so slight--glad that you need not be shut up long when you are due elsewhere."

What books should he bring to the invalid to while away the time? "The Three Musketeers" or "Cyrano"? Jack seemed to know his "Cyrano" so well that a copy could be only a prompt. He settled deeper in his chair and, more to the sky than to Jasper Ewold, repeated Cyrano's address to his cadets, set to a tune of his own. His body might be in the chair, with a bandaged leg, but clearly his mind was away on the trail.

"Yes, let me see," he said, coming back to earth. "I should like the 'Road to Rome,' something of Charles Lamb, Aldrich's 'Story of a Bad Boy,' Heine---but no! What am I saying? Bring me any solid book on economics. I ought to be reading economics. Economics and Charles Lamb, that will do. Do you think they could travel together?"