The Westerners Part 27

When he reached the Little Nugget, empty at this time of day, he sat down in his chair and laughed aloud, peal on peal, wagging his head and rubbing his eyes. Frosty, happening in, withdrew with celerity, firmly convinced that his master had gone crazy.

"A fool for luck, a fool for luck!" cried Lafond, "Why, the idiot is playing right into my hands!"

XXV

JACK GRAHAM SPEAKS OUT

The morning when the hunting party had so unhappily terminated on the slope of Tom Custer, proved to be the turning point in Molly's relations with the camp.

The Kid forgave her in two hours, but her troubled conscience would not let her forgive herself. Therefore she was irritated with the Kid.

Therefore her old innocent joyful trips into the hills in his company suddenly came to an end. That is good psychology; not good sense.

With the first realization of evil, slight though it was, her moral nature began the inevitable two-sided argument. She was no longer nave, but responsible. As a consequence her old careless, thoughtless manner of life completely changed. In the beginning she had come full of confidence to subdue a camp. Speedily she had discovered that it was not worth the trouble, and that she infinitely preferred to play out in the open with the winds and sunshine and the diverse influences of nature. Now a subtle, quite unrealized sense of unworthiness, drove her back to a desire for human sympathy, the personal relation. This personal relation took the outward form of an entanglement with Cheyenne Harry, complicated by her intellectual admiration of Graham.

From the first, Cheyenne Harry had possessed for her a certain fascination which had distinguished him from the rest of the men by whom she was surrounded. It had dated from the evening when he had kissed her. At the time he had been shown his place swiftly and decisively enough, but it was a forceful deed, such as women like, and its impression had remained. Besides this, Molly's spirit was independent; she respected independence in others; and he, with the exception of Graham, was now the only man in camp who was to some slight extent indifferent. He showed frankly enough, with the rest, that he liked her company and her good opinion; and yet he showed, too, that if her presence and regard were not freely offered as he demanded them, he could wait, secure in their ultimate possession.

At first this fascination had been weak and unimportant. Now, however, it rapidly took the ascendancy over everything else. The mere chance that its influence had been the one first to touch the girl's moral nature counted for much; as did, curiously enough, the fact that, in her relations with Cheyenne Harry, Molly always felt a little guilty.

She resented her imperceptible retrogression, and the resentment took the reckless form of a desire to go a step further. This was mainly because she did not understand herself. She had done nothing wrong, as she saw it; and yet They had put this heavy uneasy feeling into her heart. Very well! If They, the mysterious unthoughtout They, were bound to make her unhappy without her fault, she would enjoy the sweets as well as the bitter of it!

Harry had such a way of forcing her to act against her conscience.

"But I can't do that!" she would object to some proposition of his.

"I'd like to. I think it would be great fun. But you know very well I've promised Dave Kelly to go up with him this afternoon to look at his claim."

"That doesn't matter," replied Harry cavalierly.

"But it _does_ matter," she persisted. "I've promised."

"Oh, shake him. Tell him some yarn. _Do_ something. It isn't every day I get an afternoon off this way." Though why he did not, it would be difficult to say.

"I know, but I've _promised_."

"Oh, very well," said Cheyenne Harry, with cold finality, and began to whistle as if the question were quite disposed of. This did not suit Molly at all.

"There isn't anything I can do, is there?" she asked after a moment.

"You know best."

"Oh, dear, I don't _want_ you to feel like that."

"Why shouldn't I feel like that?" cried Harry in sudden heat. "Here I look forward to a whole afternoon with you, and I'm thrown down just because of a kid. I suppose you'd rather trot around with him than with me. All right. Go ahead."

He began to whistle again. He never said what the result would be if she did "go ahead," and this very mysterious indifference had its effect. Molly, genuinely distressed, knit her brows, not knowing what to do.

"Now look here!" commanded Harry, after a minute, with great decision; "you go find that Kid, and send him up to Kelly's claim to say you can't come this afternoon. You can fix it to suit yourself next time you see him," and then he would himself find the Kid and despatch him.

Molly always acquiesced, but with inward misgivings. She must now do her best to conceal from Dave Kelly the real state of affairs; he must not by any chance see her with Harry; he must not hear from outside sources of her afternoon's excursion with that individual. An element of the clandestine had crept into it. The idea oppressed her, for, in spite of her store of spirits and her independent temper, she was not of a combative nature when she felt herself at all in the wrong. The necessity saddened her, brought to her that guilty feeling against which she so sullenly rebelled. She was uneasy during all the afternoon, and yet she was conscious of an added delicious thrill in her relations with Harry--a thrill that first tingled pleasantly through all her veins, then struck her heart numb with vague culpability. In due course, she came to transfer the emotion from the circ.u.mstances to the man. She experienced the same thrill, the same numb culpability, at the sight of his figure approaching her on the street.

This tendency was emphasized, perhaps, by the fact that their walks together--projected so suddenly, undertaken with so strong a feeling of blame on her part--consisted always of continual skirmishes as to whether or not Cheyenne Harry should kiss her. The interest of the argument was heightened by the fact that the girl wanted him to do so.

This he was never allowed for a moment to suspect--in fact, by all means in her power she gave him to understand quite the contrary--but he could not help feeling subtly the subconscious encouragement, and so grew always the more insistent. She held him off because her instincts had told her the act would cheapen her. Molly always obeyed her instincts. They were strong, insistent, not to be denied. They came to her suddenly with a great conviction of truth, which she never dreamed of questioning. Among other things they taught her that without love each kiss adds to the woman's regard for the man, but takes away from his desire for her.

Cheyenne Harry used all his arts. He tried force only once, for he found it unsatisfactory and productive of most disagreeable results.

Diplomacy and argument in themselves, as eclectics, contained much of the joy of debate. The arguments in such cases were always deliciously ingenuous.

"Now, what harm is there in my just putting my arm around you?" he urged.

"There just is, that's all."

"I'll have it around you when we dance."

"That's different; there's people about then."

"It's just a question of people, then?"

"I s'pose so."

"Will you let me put my arm around you to-night in the Little Nugget?"

"Of course not."

"But there's people there," triumphantly. "Now what's the harm? It's different with us. Of course you ought not to let anyone else, but we're different."

They were sitting near together, and all this time the Westerner's arm was moving inch by inch along the rock behind Molly. As he talked he clasped her waist, gingerly, in order not to alarm. She shivered as she became conscious of the touch, and for one instant gave herself up.

Then she sternly ordered Cheyenne Harry to take his distance. The latter tried to temporize by opening an argument. The half-playful struggle always ended in Molly's gaining her point, but the victory was laughing, and so Cheyenne Harry was encouraged to reopen the attack on new grounds.

As one of the inevitable results, the emotion which Molly experienced in at once denying herself and combating Harry was gradually translated into a fascinated sort of pa.s.sion for him. Then, too, since naturally the interest of these indecisive encounters increased with each, the two came to see each other oftener and oftener, until the habit of companionship was well established. This habit is very real. The approach of the accustomed hour for meeting causes the heart to beat faster, the breath to come quicker, the imagination to kindle; while the foregoing of a single appointment is a dull loss difficult to bear with patience. It counterfeits well many of the symptoms of love, and for a short time is nearly as burning a pa.s.sion.

Sometimes the attack would be more direct. Cheyenne Harry's stock of sophistry would give out, as well as his stock of patience.

"Oh, come on, Molly," he would cry, "just one! I've been real good, now haven't I? Oh, come on!"

"You've been nothing but a great big brute, Mr. Cheyenne Harry!" she cried in a tone that implied he had not.

Harry advanced a little, holding out his hands, much as one would approach a timid setter dog. She put one finger on her lips, and watched him, bright-eyed. When he was near enough, she boxed his ears, and twisted her slender young body out of reach, laughing mockingly, and wrinkling her nose at him.

But then when they had returned to camp, and once more she found herself alone, the delicious questions always came up; how far did he intend to go? Did he see through such and such a stratagem? Was he really vexed at such and such a speech, or was he merely feigning? In what manner would he dare accost her when next they met? And so another meeting became necessary soon--at once. They saw more and more of each other, to the neglect of many real duties.

For a time the influence of Jack Graham did something to stem the drift of this affair, but that lasted only until he himself fell in love with her.

With him her first emotion had been of eager intellectual awakening; her second, that of piqued curiosity; her third, of reactionary dulness. As time went on she came to pa.s.s and repa.s.s through those three phases with ever increased rapidity, until at the last their constant reiteration might almost have relegated them to the category of whims. She liked to be with him, because he made her aware of new possibilities in herself. She could not understand him, because his att.i.tude toward her was never that of the lover. She experienced moments of revolt, when she cried out pa.s.sionately but ineffectually against an influence which would compel her to elevations rarer than the atmosphere of her everyday, easy-going pleasure-taking life.

Ineffectually, I say, for something always forced her back.

Not that Graham ever preached. Preaching would have presented something tangible against which to revolt, something orthodox to be cried down. In fact, reformation of Molly Lafond's manners of mind or body was the farthest from Graham's thought. He merely represented to her a state of being to which she must rise. The rise was slight, but it was real. It meant the difference between thinking in the abstract or in the concrete. It meant that she was compelled to feel that to men like him, or to women like her, this animal existence, with its finer pleasures of riding, climbing, flirting and sitting on bars, while well enough in its way, was after all but a small and incidental part of life. If the girl had been requested to formulate it, she would not have been able to do so. She apprehended it more in its result; which was to make her just a little ashamed of her everyday manner of existence, without, however, furnishing her with a strong enough motive to rise permanently above it. This, in turn, translated itself into a certain impotent mental discomfort.

As long as Jack Graham preserved the personally indifferent standpoint, the mere fact that he caused her momentary disquiet did not antagonize Molly Lafond against him. Rather it added a certain piquancy to their interviews. He threw out his observations on men and manners lazily, with the true philosopher's delight in rolling a good thing under his tongue. None of them possessed an easily fitted personal application.