Produced by Curtis A. Weyant, David Maddock, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.










[Illustration: ]



THE LITTLE LADY OF THE BIG HOUSE

BY

JACK LONDON



Author of "The Valley of the Moon," "The Star Rover," "The Sea Wolf,"
Etc.





CHAPTER I



He awoke in the dark. His awakening was simple, easy, without movement
save for the eyes that opened and made him aware of darkness. Unlike
most, who must feel and grope and listen to, and contact with, the
world about them, he knew himself on the moment of awakening, instantly
identifying himself in time and place and personality. After the lapsed
hours of sleep he took up, without effort, the interrupted tale of his
days. He knew himself to be Dick Forrest, the master of broad acres,
who had fallen asleep hours before after drowsily putting a match
between the pages of "Road Town" and pressing off the electric reading
lamp.

Near at hand there was the ripple and gurgle of some sleepy fountain.
From far off, so faint and far that only a keen ear could catch, he
heard a sound that made him smile with pleasure. He knew it for the
distant, throaty bawl of King Polo--King Polo, his champion Short Horn
bull, thrice Grand Champion also of all bulls at Sacramento at the
California State Fairs. The smile was slow in easing from Dick
Forrest's face, for he dwelt a moment on the new triumphs he had
destined that year for King Polo on the Eastern livestock circuits. He
would show them that a bull, California born and finished, could
compete with the cream of bulls corn-fed in Iowa or imported overseas
from the immemorial home of Short Horns.

Not until the smile faded, which was a matter of seconds, did he reach
out in the dark and press the first of a row of buttons. There were
three rows of such buttons. The concealed lighting that spilled from
the huge bowl under the ceiling revealed a sleeping-porch, three sides
of which were fine-meshed copper screen. The fourth side was the house
wall, solid concrete, through which French windows gave access.

He pressed the second button in the row and the bright light
concentered at a particular place on the concrete wall, illuminating,
in a row, a clock, a barometer, and centigrade and Fahrenheit
thermometers. Almost in a sweep of glance he read the messages of the
dials: time 4:30; air pressure, 29:80, which was normal at that
altitude and season; and temperature, Fahrenheit, 36°. With another
press, the gauges of time and heat and air were sent back into the
darkness.

A third button turned on his reading lamp, so arranged that the light
fell from above and behind without shining into his eyes. The first
button turned off the concealed lighting overhead. He reached a mass of
proofsheets from the reading stand, and, pencil in hand, lighting a
cigarette, he began to correct.

The place was clearly the sleeping quarters of a man who worked.
Efficiency was its key note, though comfort, not altogether Spartan,
was also manifest. The bed was of gray enameled iron to tone with the
concrete wall. Across the foot of the bed, an extra coverlet, hung a
gray robe of wolfskins with every tail a-dangle. On the floor, where
rested a pair of slippers, was spread a thick-coated skin of mountain
goat.

Heaped orderly with books, magazines and scribble-pads, there was room
on the big reading stand for matches, cigarettes, an ash-tray, and a
thermos bottle. A phonograph, for purposes of dictation, stood on a
hinged and swinging bracket. On the wall, under the barometer and
thermometers, from a round wooden frame laughed the face of a girl. On
the wall, between the rows of buttons and a switchboard, from an open
holster, loosely projected the butt of a .44 Colt's automatic.

At six o'clock, sharp, after gray light had begun to filter through the
wire netting, Dick Forrest, without raising his eyes from the
proofsheets, reached out his right hand and pressed a button in the
second row. Five minutes later a soft-slippered Chinese emerged on the
sleeping-porch. In his hands he bore a small tray of burnished copper
on which rested a cup and saucer, a tiny coffee pot of silver, and a
correspondingly tiny silver cream pitcher.

"Good morning, Oh My," was Dick Forrest's greeting, and his eyes smiled
and his lips smiled as he uttered it.

"Good morning, Master," Oh My returned, as he busied himself with
making room on the reading stand for the tray and with pouring the
coffee and cream.

This done, without waiting further orders, noting that his master was
already sipping coffee with one hand while he made a correction on the
proof with the other, Oh My picked up a rosy, filmy, lacy boudoir cap
from the floor and departed. His exit was noiseless. He ebbed away like
a shadow through the open French windows.

At six-thirty, sharp to the minute, he was back with a larger tray.
Dick Forrest put away the proofs, reached for a book entitled
"Commercial Breeding of Frogs," and prepared to eat. The breakfast was
simple yet fairly substantial--more coffee, a half grape-fruit, two
soft-boiled eggs made ready in a glass with a dab of butter and piping
hot, and a sliver of bacon, not over-cooked, that he knew was of his
own raising and curing.

By this time the sunshine was pouring in through the screening and
across the bed. On the outside of the wire screen clung a number of
house-flies, early-hatched for the season and numb with the night's
cold. As Forrest ate he watched the hunting of the meat-eating
yellow-jackets. Sturdy, more frost-resistant than bees, they were
already on the wing and preying on the benumbed flies. Despite the
rowdy noise of their flight, these yellow hunters of the air, with
rarely ever a miss, pounced on their helpless victims and sailed away
with them. The last fly was gone ere Forrest had sipped his last sip of
coffee, marked "Commercial Breeding of Frogs" with a match, and taken
up his proofsheets.

After a time, the liquid-mellow cry of the meadow-lark, first vocal for
the day, caused him to desist. He looked at the clock. It marked seven.
He set aside the proofs and began a series of conversations by means of
the switchboard, which he manipulated with a practiced hand.

"Hello, Oh Joy," was his first talk. "Is Mr. Thayer up?... Very well.
Don't disturb him. I don't think he'll breakfast in bed, but find
out.... That's right, and show him how to work the hot water. Maybe he
doesn't know... Yes, that's right. Plan for one more boy as soon as you
can get him. There's always a crowd when the good weather comes on....
Sure. Use your judgment. Good-by."

"Mr. Hanley?... Yes," was his second conversation, over another switch.
"I've been thinking about the dam on the Buckeye. I want the figures on
the gravel-haul and on the rock-crushing.... Yes, that's it. I imagine
that the gravel-haul will cost anywhere between six and ten cents a
yard more than the crushed rock. That last pitch of hill is what eats
up the gravel-teams. Work out the figures. ... No, we won't be able to
start for a fortnight. ... Yes, yes; the new tractors, if they ever
deliver, will release the horses from the plowing, but they'll have to
go back for the checking.... No, you'll have to see Mr. Everan about
that. Good-by."

 And his third call:

"Mr. Dawson? Ha! Ha! Thirty-six on my porch right now. It must be white
with frost down on the levels. But it's most likely the last this
year.... Yes, they swore the tractors would be delivered two days
ago.... Call up the station agent. ... By the way, you catch Hanley for
me. I forgot to tell him to start the 'rat-catchers' out with the
second instalment of fly-traps.... Yes, pronto. There were a couple of
dozen roosting on my screen this morning.... Yes.... Good-by."

At this stage, Forrest slid out of bed in his pajamas, slipped his feet
into the slippers, and strode through the French windows to the bath,
already drawn by Oh My. A dozen minutes afterward, shaved as well, he
was back in bed, reading his frog book while Oh My, punctual to the
minute, massaged his legs.

They were the well-formed legs of a well-built, five-foot-ten man who
weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. Further, they told a tale of the
man. The left thigh was marred by a scar ten inches in length. Across
the left ankle, from instep to heel, were scattered half a dozen scars
the size of half-dollars. When Oh My prodded and pulled the left knee a
shade too severely, Forrest was guilty of a wince. The right shin was
colored with several dark scars, while a big scar, just under the knee,
was a positive dent in the bone. Midway between knee and groin was the
mark of an ancient three-inch gash, curiously dotted with the minute
scars of stitches.

A sudden, joyous nicker from without put the match between the pages of
the frog book, and, while Oh My proceeded partly to dress his master in
bed, including socks and shoes, the master, twisting partly on his
side, stared out in the direction of the nicker. Down the road, through
the swaying purple of the early lilacs, ridden by a picturesque cowboy,
paced a great horse, glinting ruddy in the morning sun-gold, flinging
free the snowy foam of his mighty fetlocks, his noble crest tossing,
his eyes roving afield, the trumpet of his love-call echoing through
the springing land.

Dick Forrest was smitten at the same instant with joy and anxiety--joy
in the glorious beast pacing down between the lilac hedges; anxiety in
that the stallion might have awakened the girl who laughed from the
round wooden frame on his wall. He glanced quickly across the
two-hundred-foot court to the long, shadowy jut of her wing of the
house. The shades of her sleeping-porch were down. They did not stir.
Again the stallion nickered, and all that moved was a flock of wild
canaries, upspringing from the flowers and shrubs of the court, rising
like a green-gold spray of light flung from the sunrise.

He watched the stallion out of sight through the lilacs, seeing visions
of fair Shire colts mighty of bone and frame and free from blemish,
then turned, as ever he turned to the immediate thing, and spoke to his
body servant.

"How's that last boy, Oh My? Showing up?"

"Him pretty good boy, I think," was the answer. "Him young boy.
Everything new. Pretty slow. All the same bime by him show up good."

"Why? What makes you think so?"

"I call him three, four morning now. Him sleep like baby. Him wake up
smiling just like you. That very good."

"Do I wake up smiling?" Forrest queried.

Oh My nodded his head violently.

"Many times, many years, I call you. Always your eyes open, your eyes
smile, your mouth smile, your face smile, you smile all over, just like
that, right away quick. That very good. A man wake up that way got
plenty good sense. I know. This new boy like that. Bime by, pretty
soon, he make fine boy. You see. His name Chow Gam. What name you call
him this place?"

Dick Forrest meditated.

"What names have we already?" he asked.

"Oh Joy, Ah Well, Ah Me, and me; I am Oh My," the Chinese rattled off.
"Oh Joy him say call new boy--"

He hesitated and stared at his master with a challenging glint of eye.
Forrest nodded.

"Oh Joy him say call new boy 'Oh Hell.'"

"Oh ho!" Forrest laughed in appreciation. "Oh Joy is a josher. A good
name, but it won't do. There is the Missus. We've got to think another
name."

"Oh Ho, that very good name."

Forrest's exclamation was still ringing in his consciousness so that he
recognized the source of Oh My's inspiration.

"Very well. The boy's name is Oh Ho."

Oh My lowered his head, ebbed swiftly through the French windows, and
as swiftly returned with the rest of Forrest's clothes-gear, helping
him into undershirt and shirt, tossing a tie around his neck for him to
knot, and, kneeling, putting on his leggings and spurs. A Baden Powell
hat and a quirt completed his appareling--the quirt, Indian-braided of
rawhide, with ten ounces of lead braided into the butt that hung from
his wrist on a loop of leather.

But Forrest was not yet free. Oh My handed him several letters, with
the explanation that they had come up from the station the previous
night after Forrest had gone to bed. He tore the right-hand ends across
and glanced at the contents of all but one with speed. The latter he
dwelt upon for a moment, with an irritated indrawing of brows, then
swung out the phonograph from the wall, pressed the button that made
the cylinder revolve, and swiftly dictated, without ever a pause for
word or idea:

"In reply to yours of March 14, 1914, I am indeed sorry to learn that
you were hit with hog cholera. I am equally sorry that you have seen
fit to charge me with the responsibility. And just as equally am I
sorry that the boar we sent you is dead.

"I can only assure you that we are quite clear of cholera here, and
that we have been clear of cholera for eight years, with the exception
of two Eastern importations, the last two years ago, both of which,
according to our custom, were segregated on arrival and were destroyed
before the contagion could be communicated to our herds.

"I feel that I must inform you that in neither case did I charge the
sellers with having sent me diseased stock. On the contrary, as you
should know, the incubation of hog cholera being nine days, I consulted
the shipping dates of the animals and knew that they had been healthy
when shipped.

"Has it ever entered your mind that the railroads are largely
responsible for the spread of cholera? Did you ever hear of a railroad
fumigating or disinfecting a car which had carried cholera? Consult the
dates: First, of shipment by me; second, of receipt of the boar by you;
and, third, of appearance of symptoms in the boar. As you say, because
of washouts, the boar was five days on the way. Not until the seventh
day after you receipted for same did the first symptoms appear. That
makes twelve days after it left my hands.

"No; I must disagree with you. I am not responsible for the disaster
that overtook your herd. Furthermore, doubly to assure you, write to
the State Veterinary as to whether or not my place is free of cholera.

"Very truly yours..."




CHAPTER II



When Forrest went through the French windows from his sleeping-porch,
he crossed, first, a comfortable dressing room, window-divaned,
many-lockered, with a generous fireplace, out of which opened a
bathroom; and, second, a long office room, wherein was all the
paraphernalia of business--desks, dictaphones, filing cabinets, book
cases, magazine files, and drawer-pigeonholes that tiered to the low,
beamed ceiling.

Midway in the office room, he pressed a button and a series of
book-freightened shelves swung on a pivot, revealing a tiny spiral
stairway of steel, which he descended with care that his spurs might
not catch, the bookshelves swinging into place behind him.

At the foot of the stairway, a press on another button pivoted more
shelves of books and gave him entrance into a long low room shelved
with books from floor to ceiling. He went directly to a case, directly
to a shelf, and unerringly laid his hand on the book he sought. A
minute he ran the pages, found the passage he was after, nodded his
head to himself in vindication, and replaced the book.

A door gave way to a pergola of square concrete columns spanned with
redwood logs and interlaced with smaller trunks of redwood, all rough
and crinkled velvet with the ruddy purple of the bark.

It was evident, since he had to skirt several hundred feet of concrete
walls of wandering house, that he had not taken the short way out.
Under wide-spreading ancient oaks, where the long hitching-rails,
bark-chewed, and the hoof-beaten gravel showed the stamping place of
many horses, he found a pale-golden, almost tan-golden, sorrel mare.
Her well-groomed spring coat was alive and flaming in the morning sun
that slanted straight under the edge of the roof of trees. She was
herself alive and flaming. She was built like a stallion, and down her
backbone ran a narrow dark strip of hair that advertised an ancestry of
many range mustangs.

"How's the Man-Eater this morning?" he queried, as he unsnapped the
tie-rope from her throat.

She laid back the tiniest ears that ever a horse possessed--ears that
told of some thoroughbred's wild loves with wild mares among the
hills--and snapped at Forrest with wicked teeth and wicked-gleaming
eyes.

She sidled and attempted to rear as he swung into the saddle, and,
sidling and attempting to rear, she went off down the graveled road.
And rear she would have, had it not been for the martingale that held
her head down and that, as well, saved the rider's nose from her
angry-tossing head.

So used was he to the mare, that he was scarcely aware of her antics.
Automatically, with slightest touch of rein against arched neck, or
with tickle of spur or press of knee, he kept the mare to the way he
willed. Once, as she whirled and danced, he caught a glimpse of the Big
House. Big it was in all seeming, and yet, such was the vagrant nature
of it, it was not so big as it seemed. Eight hundred feet across the
front face, it stretched. But much of this eight hundred feet was
composed of mere corridors, concrete-walled, tile-roofed, that
connected and assembled the various parts of the building. There were
patios and pergolas in proportion, and all the walls, with their many
right-angled juts and recessions, arose out of a bed of greenery and
bloom.

Spanish in character, the architecture of the Big House was not of the
California-Spanish type which had been introduced by way of Mexico a
hundred years before, and which had been modified by modern architects
to the California-Spanish architecture of the day. Hispano-Moresque
more technically classified the Big House in all its hybridness,
although there were experts who heatedly quarreled with the term.

Spaciousness without austerity and beauty without ostentation were the
fundamental impressions the Big House gave. Its lines, long and
horizontal, broken only by lines that were vertical and by the lines of
juts and recesses that were always right-angled, were as chaste as
those of a monastery. The irregular roof-line, however, relieved the
hint of monotony.

Low and rambling, without being squat, the square upthrusts of towers
and of towers over-topping towers gave just proportion of height
without being sky-aspiring. The sense of the Big House was solidarity.
It defied earthquakes. It was planted for a thousand years. The honest
concrete was overlaid by a cream-stucco of honest cement. Again, this
very sameness of color might have proved monotonous to the eye had it
not been saved by the many flat roofs of warm-red Spanish tile.

In that one sweeping glance while the mare whirled unduly, Dick
Forrest's eyes, embracing all of the Big House, centered for a quick
solicitous instant on the great wing across the two-hundred-foot court,
where, under climbing groups of towers, red-snooded in the morning sun,
the drawn shades of the sleeping-porch tokened that his lady still
slept.

About him, for three quadrants of the circle of the world, arose
low-rolling hills, smooth, fenced, cropped, and pastured, that melted
into higher hills and steeper wooded slopes that merged upward,
steeper, into mighty mountains. The fourth quadrant was unbounded by
mountain walls and hills. It faded away, descending easily to vast far
flatlands, which, despite the clear brittle air of frost, were too vast
and far to scan across.

The mare under him snorted. His knees tightened as he straightened her
into the road and forced her to one side. Down upon him, with a
pattering of feet on the gravel, flowed a river of white shimmering
silk. He knew it at sight for his prize herd of Angora goats, each with
a pedigree, each with a history. There had to be a near two hundred of
them, and he knew, according to the rigorous selection he commanded,
not having been clipped in the fall, that the shining mohair draping
the sides of the least of them, as fine as any human new-born baby's
hair and finer, as white as any human albino's thatch and whiter, was
longer than the twelve-inch staple, and that the mohair of the best of
them would dye any color into twenty-inch switches for women's heads
and sell at prices unreasonable and profound.

The beauty of the sight held him as well. The roadway had become a
flowing ribbon of silk, gemmed with yellow cat-like eyes that floated
past wary and curious in their regard for him and his nervous horse.
Two Basque herders brought up the rear. They were short, broad, swarthy
men, black-eyed, vivid-faced, contemplative and philosophic of
expression. They pulled off their hats and ducked their heads to him.
Forrest lifted his right hand, the quirt dangling from wrist, the
straight forefinger touching the rim of his Baden Powell in
semi-military salute.

The mare, prancing and whirling again, he held her with a touch of rein
and threat of spur, and gazed after the four-footed silk that filled
the road with shimmering white. He knew the significance of their
presence. The time for kidding was approaching and they were being
brought down from their brush-pastures to the brood-pens and shelters
for jealous care and generous feed through the period of increase. And
as he gazed, in his mind, comparing, was a vision of all the best of
Turkish and South African mohair he had ever seen, and his flock bore
the comparison well. It looked good. It looked very good.

He rode on. From all about arose the clacking whir of manure-spreaders.
In the distance, on the low, easy-sloping hills, he saw team after
team, and many teams, three to a team abreast, what he knew were his
Shire mares, drawing the plows back and forth across, contour-plowing,
turning the green sod of the hillsides to the rich dark brown of
humus-filled earth so organic and friable that it would almost melt by
gravity into fine-particled seed-bed. That was for the corn--and
sorghum-planting for his silos. Other hill-slopes, in the due course of
his rotation, were knee-high in barley; and still other slopes were
showing the good green of burr clover and Canada pea.

Everywhere about him, large fields and small were arranged in a system
of accessibility and workability that would have warmed the heart of
the most meticulous efficiency-expert. Every fence was hog-tight and
bull-proof, and no weeds grew in the shelters of the fences. Many of
the level fields were in alfalfa. Others, following the rotations, bore
crops planted the previous fall, or were in preparation for the
spring-planting. Still others, close to the brood barns and pens, were
being grazed by rotund Shropshire and French-Merino ewes, or were being
hogged off by white Gargantuan brood-sows that brought a flash of
pleasure in his eyes as he rode past and gazed.

He rode through what was almost a village, save that there were neither
shops nor hotels. The houses were bungalows, substantial, pleasing to
the eye, each set in the midst of gardens where stouter blooms,
including roses, were out and smiling at the threat of late frost.
Children were already astir, laughing and playing among the flowers or
being called in to breakfast by their mothers.

Beyond, beginning at a half-mile distant to circle the Big House, he
passed a row of shops. He paused at the first and glanced in. One smith
was working at a forge. A second smith, a shoe fresh-nailed on the
fore-foot of an elderly Shire mare that would disturb the scales at
eighteen hundred weight, was rasping down the outer wall of the hoof to
smooth with the toe of the shoe. Forrest saw, saluted, rode on, and, a
hundred feet away, paused and scribbled a memorandum in the notebook he
drew from his hip-pocket.

He passed other shops--a paint-shop, a wagon-shop, a plumbing shop, a
carpenter-shop. While he glanced at the last, a hybrid machine,
half-auto, half-truck, passed him at speed and took the main road for
the railroad station eight miles away. He knew it for the morning
butter-truck freighting from the separator house the daily output of
the dairy.

The Big House was the hub of the ranch organization. Half a mile from
it, it was encircled by the various ranch centers. Dick Forrest,
saluting continually his people, passed at a gallop the dairy center,
which was almost a sea of buildings with batteries of silos and with
litter carriers emerging on overhead tracks and automatically dumping
into waiting manure-spreaders. Several times, business-looking men,
college-marked, astride horses or driving carts, stopped him and
conferred with him. They were foremen, heads of departments, and they
were as brief and to the point as was he. The last of them, astride a
Palomina three-year-old that was as graceful and wild as a half-broken
Arab, was for riding by with a bare salute, but was stopped by his
employer.

"Good morning, Mr. Hennessy, and how soon will she be ready for Mrs.
Forrest?" Dick Forrest asked.

"I'd like another week," was Hennessy's answer. "She's well broke now,
just the way Mrs. Forrest wanted, but she's over-strung and sensitive
and I'd like the week more to set her in her ways."

Forrest nodded concurrence, and Hennessy, who was the veterinary, went
on:

"There are two drivers in the alfalfa gang I'd like to send down the
hill."

"What's the matter with them?"

"One, a new man, Hopkins, is an ex-soldier. He may know government
mules, but he doesn't know Shires."

Forrest nodded.

"The other has worked for us two years, but he's drinking now, and he
takes his hang-overs out on his horses--"

"That's Smith, old-type American, smooth-shaven, with a cast in his
left eye?" Forrest interrupted.

The veterinary nodded.

"I've been watching him," Forrest concluded. "He was a good man at
first, but he's slipped a cog recently. Sure, send him down the hill.
And send that other fellow--Hopkins, you said?--along with him. By the
way, Mr. Hennessy." As he spoke, Forrest drew forth his pad book, tore
off the last note scribbled, and crumpled it in his hand. "You've a new
horse-shoer in the shop. How does he strike you?"

"He's too new to make up my mind yet."

"Well, send him down the hill along with the other two. He can't take
your orders. I observed him just now fitting a shoe to old Alden Bessie
by rasping off half an inch of the toe of her hoof."

"He knew better."

"Send him down the hill," Forrest repeated, as he tickled his champing
mount with the slightest of spur-tickles and shot her out along the
road, sidling, head-tossing, and attempting to rear.

Much he saw that pleased him. Once, he murmured aloud, "A fat land, a
fat land." Divers things he saw that did not please him and that won a
note in his scribble pad. Completing the circle about the Big House and
riding beyond the circle half a mile to an isolated group of sheds and
corrals, he reached the objective of the ride: the hospital. Here he
found but two young heifers being tested for tuberculosis, and a
magnificent Duroc Jersey boar in magnificent condition. Weighing fully
six hundred pounds, its bright eyes, brisk movements, and sheen of hair
shouted out that there was nothing the matter with it. Nevertheless,
according to the ranch practice, being a fresh importation from Iowa,
it was undergoing the regular period of quarantine. Burgess Premier was
its name in the herd books of the association, age two years, and it
had cost Forrest five hundred dollars laid down on the ranch.

Proceeding at a hand gallop along a road that was one of the spokes
radiating from the Big House hub, Forrest overtook Crellin, his hog
manager, and, in a five-minute conference, outlined the next few months
of destiny of Burgess Premier, and learned that the brood sow, Lady
Isleton, the matron of all matrons of the O. I. C.'s and blue-ribboner
in all shows from Seattle to San Diego, was safely farrowed of eleven.
Crellin explained that he had sat up half the night with her and was
then bound home for bath and breakfast.

"I hear your oldest daughter has finished high school and wants to
enter Stanford," Forrest said, curbing the mare just as he had
half-signaled departure at a gallop.

Crellin, a young man of thirty-five, with the maturity of a long-time
father stamped upon him along with the marks of college and the
youthfulness of a man used to the open air and straight-living, showed
his appreciation of his employer's interest as he half-flushed under
his tan and nodded.

"Think it over," Forrest advised. "Make a statistic of all the college
girls--yes, and State Normal girls--you know. How many of them follow
career, and how many of them marry within two years after their degrees
and take to baby farming."

"Helen is very seriously bent on the matter," Crellin urged.

"Do you remember when I had my appendix out?" Forrest queried. "Well, I
had as fine a nurse as I ever saw and as nice a girl as ever walked on
two nice legs. She was just six months a full-fledged nurse, then. And
four months after that I had to send her a wedding present. She married
an automobile agent. She's lived in hotels ever since. She's never had
a chance to nurse--never a child of her own to bring through a bout
with colic. But... she has hopes... and, whether or not her hopes
materialize, she's confoundedly happy. But... what good was her nursing
apprenticeship?"

Just then an empty manure-spreader passed, forcing Crellin, on foot,
and Forrest, on his mare, to edge over to the side of the road. Forrest
glanced with kindling eye at the off mare of the machine, a huge,
symmetrical Shire whose own blue ribbons, and the blue ribbons of her
progeny, would have required an expert accountant to enumerate and
classify.

"Look at the Fotherington Princess," Forrest said, nodding at the mare
that warmed his eye. "She is a normal female. Only incidentally,
through thousands of years of domestic selection, has man evolved her
into a draught beast breeding true to kind. But being a draught-beast
is secondary. Primarily she is a female. Take them by and large, our
own human females, above all else, love us men and are intrinsically
maternal. There is no biological sanction for all the hurly burly of
woman to-day for suffrage and career."

"But there is an economic sanction," Crellin objected.

"True," his employer agreed, then proceeded to discount. "Our present
industrial system prevents marriage and compels woman to career. But,
remember, industrial systems come, and industrial systems go, while
biology runs on forever."

"It's rather hard to satisfy young women with marriage these days," the
hog-manager demurred.

Dick Forrest laughed incredulously.

"I don't know about that," he said. "There's your wife for an instance.
She with her sheepskin--classical scholar at that--well, what has she
done with it?... Two boys and three girls, I believe? As I remember
your telling me, she was engaged to you the whole last half of her
senior year."

"True, but--" Crellin insisted, with an eye-twinkle of appreciation of
the point, "that was fifteen years ago, as well as a love-match. We
just couldn't help it. That far, I agree. She had planned unheard-of
achievements, while I saw nothing else than the deanship of the College
of Agriculture. We just couldn't help it. But that was fifteen years
ago, and fifteen years have made all the difference in the world in the
ambitions and ideals of our young women."

"Don't you believe it for a moment. I tell you, Mr. Crellin, it's a
statistic. All contrary things are transient. Ever woman remains
Avoman, everlasting, eternal. Not until our girl-children cease from
playing with dolls and from looking at their own enticingness in
mirrors, will woman ever be otherwise than what she has always been:
first, the mother, second, the mate of man. It is a statistic. I've
been looking up the girls who graduate from the State Normal. You will
notice that those who marry by the way before graduation are excluded.
Nevertheless, the average length of time the graduates actually teach
school is little more than two years. And when you consider that a lot
of them, through ill looks and ill luck, are foredoomed old maids and
are foredoomed to teach all their lives, you can see how they cut down
the period of teaching of the marriageable ones."

"A woman, even a girl-woman, will have her way where mere men are
concerned," Crellin muttered, unable to dispute his employer's figures
but resolved to look them up.

"And your girl-woman will go to Stanford," Forrest laughed, as he
prepared to lift his mare into a gallop, "and you and I and all men, to
the end of time, will see to it that they do have their way."

Crellin smiled to himself as his employer diminished down the road; for
Crellin knew his Kipling, and the thought that caused the smile was:
"But where's the kid of your own, Mr. Forrest?" He decided to repeat it
to Mrs. Crellin over the breakfast coffee.

Once again Dick Forrest delayed ere he gained the Big House. The man he
stopped he addressed as Mendenhall, who was his horse-manager as well
as pasture expert, and who was reputed to know, not only every blade of
grass on the ranch, but the length of every blade of grass and its age
from seed-germination as well.

At signal from Forrest, Mendenhall drew up the two colts he was driving
in a double breaking-cart. What had caused Forrest to signal was a
glance he had caught, across the northern edge of the valley, of great,
smooth-hill ranges miles beyond, touched by the sun and deeply green
where they projected into the vast flat of the Sacramento Valley.

The talk that followed was quick and abbreviated to terms of
understanding between two men who knew. Grass was the subject. Mention
was made of the winter rainfall and of the chance for late spring rains
to come. Names occurred, such as the Little Coyote and Los Cuatos
creeks, the Yolo and the Miramar hills, the Big Basin, Round Valley,
and the San Anselmo and Los Banos ranges. Movements of herds and
droves, past, present, and to come, were discussed, as well as the
outlook for cultivated hay in far upland pastures and the estimates of
such hay that still remained over the winter in remote barns in the
sheltered mountain valleys where herds had wintered and been fed.

Under the oaks, at the stamping posts, Forrest was saved the trouble of
tying the Man-Eater. A stableman came on the run to take the mare, and
Forrest, scarce pausing for a word about a horse by the name of Duddy,
was clanking his spurs into the Big House.




CHAPTER III



Forrest entered a section of the Big House by way of a massive,
hewn-timber, iron-studded door that let in at the foot of what seemed a
donjon keep. The floor was cement, and doors let off in various
directions. One, opening to a Chinese in the white apron and starched
cap of a chef, emitted at the same time the low hum of a dynamo. It was
this that deflected Forrest from his straight path. He paused, holding
the door ajar, and peered into a cool, electric-lighted cement room
where stood a long, glass-fronted, glass-shelved refrigerator flanked
by an ice-machine and a dynamo. On the floor, in greasy overalls,
squatted a greasy little man to whom his employer nodded.

"Anything wrong, Thompson?" he asked.

"There _was,"_ was the answer, positive and complete.

Forrest closed the door and went on along a passage that was like a
tunnel. Narrow, iron-barred openings, like the slits for archers in
medieval castles, dimly lighted the way. Another door gave access to a
long, low room, beam-ceilinged, with a fireplace in which an ox could
have been roasted. A huge stump, resting on a bed of coals, blazed
brightly. Two billiard tables, several card tables, lounging corners,
and a miniature bar constituted the major furnishing. Two young men
chalked their cues and returned Forrest's greeting.

"Good morning, Mr. Naismith," he bantered. "--More material for the
_Breeders' Gazette?"_

Naismith, a youngish man of thirty, with glasses, smiled sheepishly and
cocked his head at his companion.

"Wainwright challenged me," he explained.

"Which means that Lute and Ernestine must still be beauty-sleeping,"
Forrest laughed.

Young Wainwright bristled to acceptance of the challenge, but before he
could utter the retort on his lips his host was moving on and
addressing Naismith over his shoulder.

"Do you want to come along at eleven:thirty? Thayer and I are running
out in the machine to look over the Shropshires. He wants about ten
carloads of rams. You ought to find good stuff in this matter of Idaho
shipments. Bring your camera along.--Seen Thayer this morning?"

"Just came in to breakfast as we were leaving," Bert Wainwright
volunteered.

"Tell him to be ready at eleven-thirty if you see him. You're not
invited, Bert... out of kindness. The girls are sure to be up then."

"Take Rita along with you anyway," Bert pleaded.

"No fear," was Forrest's reply from the door. "We're on business.
Besides, you can't pry Rita from Ernestine with block-and-tackle."

"That's why I wanted to see if you could," Bert grinned.

"Funny how fellows never appreciate their own sisters." Forrest paused
for a perceptible moment. "I always thought Rita was a real nice
sister. What's the matter with her?"

Before a reply could reach him, he had closed the door and was jingling
his spurs along the passage to a spiral stairway of broad concrete
steps. As he left the head of the stairway, a dance-time piano measure
and burst of laughter made him peep into a white morning room, flooded
with sunshine. A young girl, in rose-colored kimono and boudoir cap,
was at the instrument, while two others, similarly accoutered, in each
other's arms, were parodying a dance never learned at dancing school
nor intended by the participants for male eyes to see.

The girl at the piano discovered him, winked, and played on. Not for
another minute did the dancers spy him. They gave startled cries,
collapsed, laughing, in each other's arms, and the music stopped. They
were gorgeous, healthy young creatures, the three of them, and
Forrest's eye kindled as he looked at them in quite the same way that
it had kindled when he regarded the Fotherington Princess.

Persiflage, of the sort that obtains among young things of the human
kind, flew back and forth.

"I've been here five minutes," Dick Forrest asserted.

The two dancers, to cover their confusion, doubted his veracity and
instanced his many well-known and notorious guilts of mendacity. The
girl at the piano, Ernestine, his sister-in-law, insisted that pearls
of truth fell from his lips, that she had seen him from the moment he
began to look, and that as she estimated the passage of time he had
been looking much longer than five minutes.

"Well, anyway," Forrest broke in on their babel, "Bert, the sweet
innocent, doesn't think you are up yet."

"We're not... to him," one of the dancers, a vivacious young Venus,
retorted. "Nor are we to you either. So run along, little boy. Run
along."

"Look here, Lute," Forrest began sternly. "Just because I am a decrepit
old man, and just because you are eighteen, just eighteen, and happen
to be my wife's sister, you needn't presume to put the high and mighty
over on me. Don't forget--and I state the fact, disagreeable as it may
be, for Rita's sake--don't forget that in the past ten years I've
paddled you more disgraceful times than you care to dare me to
enumerate.

"It is true, I am not so young as I used to was, but--" He felt the
biceps of his right arm and made as if to roll up the sleeve. "--But,
I'm not all in yet, and for two cents..."

"What?" the young woman challenged belligerently.

"For two cents," he muttered darkly. "For two cents... Besides, and it
grieves me to inform you, your cap is not on straight. Also, it is not
a very tasteful creation at best. I could make a far more becoming cap
with my toes, asleep, and... yes, seasick as well."

Lute tossed her blond head defiantly, glanced at her comrades in
solicitation of support, and said:

"Oh, I don't know. It seems humanly reasonable that the three of us can
woman-handle a mere man of your elderly and insulting avoirdupois. What
do you say, girls? Let's rush him. He's not a minute under forty, and
he has an aneurism. Yes, and though loath to divulge family secrets,
he's got Meniere's Disease."

Ernestine, a small but robust blonde of eighteen, sprang from the piano
and joined her two comrades in a raid on the cushions of the deep
window seats. Side by side, a cushion in each hand, and with proper
distance between them cannily established for the swinging of the
cushions, they advanced upon the foe.

Forrest prepared for battle, then held up his hand for parley.

"'Fraid cat!" they taunted, in several at first, and then in chorus.

He shook his head emphatically.

"Just for that, and for all the rest of your insolences, the three of
you are going to get yours. All the wrongs of a lifetime are rising now
in my brain in a dazzling brightness. I shall go Berserk in a moment.
But first, and I speak as an agriculturist, and I address myself to
you, Lute, in all humility, in heaven's name what is Meniere's Disease?
Do sheep catch it?"

"Meniere's Disease is," Lute began,... "is what you've got. Sheep are
the only known living creatures that get it."

Ensued red war and chaos. Forrest made a football rush of the sort that
obtained in California before the adoption of Rugby; and the girls
broke the line to let him through, turned upon him, flanked him on
either side, and pounded him with cushions.

He turned, with widespread arms, extended fingers, each finger a hook,
and grappled the three. The battle became a whirlwind, a be-spurred man
the center, from which radiated flying draperies of flimsy silk,
disconnected slippers, boudoir caps, and hairpins. There were thuds
from the cushions, grunts from the man, squeals, yelps and giggles from
the girls, and from the totality of the combat inextinguishable
laughter and a ripping and tearing of fragile textures.

Dick Forrest found himself sprawled on the floor, the wind half knocked
out of him by shrewdly delivered cushions, his head buzzing from the
buffeting, and, in one hand, a trailing, torn, and generally disrupted
girdle of pale blue silk and pink roses.

In one doorway, cheeks flaming from the struggle, stood Rita, alert as
a fawn and ready to flee. In the other doorway, likewise flame-checked,
stood Ernestine in the commanding attitude of the Mother of the
Gracchi, the wreckage of her kimono wrapped severely about her and held
severely about her by her own waist-pressing arm. Lute, cornered behind
the piano, attempted to run but was driven back by the menace of
Forrest, who, on hands and knees, stamped loudly with the palms of his
hands on the hardwood floor, rolled his head savagely, and emitted
bull-like roars.

"And they still believe that old prehistoric myth," Ernestine
proclaimed from safety, "that once he, that wretched semblance of a
man-thing prone in the dirt, captained Berkeley to victory over
Stanford."

Her breasts heaved from the exertion, and he marked the pulsating of
the shimmering cherry-colored silk with delight as he flung his glance
around to the other two girls similarly breathing.

The piano was a miniature grand--a dainty thing of rich white and gold
to match the morning room. It stood out from the wall, so that there
was possibility for Lute to escape around either way of it. Forrest
gained his feet and faced her across the broad, flat top of the
instrument. As he threatened to vault it, Lute cried out in horror:

"But your spurs, Dick! Your spurs!"

"Give me time to take them off," he offered.

As he stooped to unbuckle them, Lute darted to escape, but was herded
back to the shelter of the piano.

"All right," he growled. "On your head be it. If the piano's scratched
I'll tell Paula."

"I've got witnesses," she panted, indicating with her blue joyous eyes
the young things in the doorways.

"Very well, my dear." Forrest drew back his body and spread his resting
palms. "I'm coming over to you."

Action and speech were simultaneous. His body, posited sidewise from
his hands, was vaulted across, the perilous spurs a full foot above the
glossy white surface. And simultaneously Lute ducked and went under the
piano on hands and knees. Her mischance lay in that she bumped her
head, and, before she could recover way, Forrest had circled the piano
and cornered her under it.

"Come out!" he commanded. "Come out and take your medicine!"

"A truce," she pleaded. "A truce, Sir Knight, for dear love's sake and
all damsels in distress."

"I ain't no knight," Forrest announced in his deepest bass. "I'm an
ogre, a filthy, debased and altogether unregenerate ogre. I was born in
the tule-swamps. My father was an ogre and my mother was more so. I was
lulled to slumber on the squalls of infants dead, foreordained, and
predamned. I was nourished solely on the blood of maidens educated in
Mills Seminary. My favorite chophouse has ever been a hardwood floor, a
loaf of Mills Seminary maiden, and a roof of flat piano. My father, as
well as an ogre, was a California horse-thief. I am more reprehensible
than my father. I have more teeth. My mother, as well as an ogress, was
a Nevada book-canvasser. Let all her shame be told. She even solicited
subscriptions for ladies' magazines. I am more terrible than my mother.
I have peddled safety razors."

"Can naught soothe and charm your savage breast?" Lute pleaded in
soulful tones while she studied her chances for escape.

"One thing only, miserable female. One thing only, on the earth, over
the earth, and under its ruining waters--"

A squawk of recognized plagiarism interrupted him from Ernestine.

"See Ernest Dowson, page seventy-nine, a thin book of thin verse ladled
out with porridge to young women detentioned at Mills Seminary,"
Forrest went on. "As I had already enunciated before I was so rudely
interrupted, the one thing only that can balm and embalm this savage
breast is the 'Maiden's Prayer.' Listen, with all your ears ere I chew
them off in multitude and gross! Listen, silly, unbeautiful, squat,
short-legged and ugly female under the piano! Can you recite the
'Maiden's Prayer'?"

Screams of delight from the young things in the doorways prevented the
proper answer and Lute, from under the piano, cried out to young
Wainwright, who had appeared:

"A rescue, Sir Knight! A rescue!"

"Unhand the maiden!" was Bert's challenge.

"Who art thou?" Forrest demanded.

"King George, sirrah!--I mean, er, Saint George."

"Then am I thy dragon," Forrest announced with due humility. "Spare
this ancient, honorable, and only neck I have."

"Off with his head!" the young things encouraged.

"Stay thee, maidens, I pray thee," Bert begged. "I am only a Small
Potato. Yet am I unafraid. I shall beard the dragon. I shall beard him
in his gullet, and, while he lingeringly chokes to death over my
unpalatableness and general spinefulness, do you, fair damsels, flee to
the mountains lest the valleys fall upon you. Yolo, Petaluma, and West
Sacramento are about to be overwhelmed by a tidal wave and many big
fishes."

"Off with his head!" the young things chanted. "Slay him in his blood
and barbecue him!"

"Thumbs down," Forrest groaned. "I am undone. Trust to the unstrained
quality of mercy possessed by Christian young women in the year 1914
who will vote some day if ever they grow up and do not marry
foreigners. Consider my head off, Saint George. I am expired. Further
deponent sayeth not."

And Forrest, with sobs and slubberings, with realistic shudders and
kicks and a great jingling of spurs, lay down on the floor and expired.

Lute crawled out from under the piano, and was joined by Rita and
Ernestine in an extemporized dance of the harpies about the slain.

In the midst of it, Forrest sat up, protesting. Also, he was guilty of
a significant and privy wink to Lute.

"The hero!" he cried. "Forget him not. Crown him with flowers."

And Bert was crowned with flowers from the vases, unchanged from the
day before. When a bunch of water-logged stems of early tulips,
propelled by Lute's vigorous arm, impacted soggily on his neck under
the ear, he fled. The riot of pursuit echoed along the hall and died
out down the stairway toward the stag room. Forrest gathered himself
together, and, grinning, went jingling on through the Big House.

He crossed two patios on brick walks roofed with Spanish tile and
swamped with early foliage and blooms, and gained his wing of the
house, still breathing from the fun, to find, in the office, his
secretary awaiting him.

"Good morning, Mr. Blake," he greeted. "Sorry I was delayed." He
glanced at his wrist-watch. "Only four minutes, however. I just
couldn't get away sooner."




CHAPTER IV



From nine till ten Forrest gave himself up to his secretary, achieving
a correspondence that included learned societies and every sort of
breeding and agricultural organization and that would have compelled
the average petty business man, unaided, to sit up till midnight to
accomplish.

For Dick Forrest was the center of a system which he himself had built
and of which he was secretly very proud. Important letters and
documents he signed with his ragged fist. All other letters were
rubber-stamped by Mr. Blake, who, also, in shorthand, in the course of
the hour, put down the indicated answers to many letters and received
the formula designations of reply to many other letters. Mr. Blake's
private opinion was that he worked longer hours than his employer,
although it was equally his private opinion that his employer was a
wonder for discovering work for others to perform.

At ten, to the stroke of the clock, as Pittman, Forrest's show-manager,
entered the office, Blake, burdened with trays of correspondence,
sheafs of documents, and phonograph cylinders, faded away to his own
office.

From ten to eleven a stream of managers and foremen flowed in and out.
All were well disciplined in terseness and time-saving. As Dick Forrest
had taught them, the minutes spent with him were not minutes of
cogitation. They must be prepared before they reported or suggested.
Bonbright, the assistant secretary, always arrived at ten to replace
Blake; and Bonbright, close to shoulder, with flying pencil, took down
the rapid-fire interchange of question and answer, statement and
proposal and plan. These shorthand notes, transcribed and typed in
duplicate, were the nightmare and, on occasion, the Nemesis, of the
managers and foremen. For, first, Forrest had a remarkable memory; and,
second, he was prone to prove its worth by reference to those same
notes of Bonbright.

A manager, at the end of a five or ten minute session, often emerged
sweating, limp and frazzled. Yet for a swift hour, at high tension,
Forrest met all comers, with a master's grip handling them and all the
multifarious details of their various departments. He told Thompson,
the machinist, in four flashing minutes, where the fault lay in the
dynamo to the Big House refrigerator, laid the fault home to Thompson,
dictated a note to Bonbright, with citation by page and chapter to a
volume from the library to be drawn by Thompson, told Thompson that
Parkman, the dairy manager, was not satisfied with the latest wiring up
of milking machines, and that the refrigerating plant at the slaughter
house was balking at its accustomed load.

Each man was a specialist, yet Forrest was the proved master of their
specialties. As Paulson, the head plowman, complained privily to
Dawson, the crop manager: "I've worked here twelve years and never have
I seen him put his hands to a plow, and yet, damn him, he somehow seems
to know. He's a genius, that's what he is. Why, d'ye know, I've seen
him tear by a piece of work, his hands full with that Man-Eater of his
a-threatenin' sudden funeral, an', next morning, had 'm mention
casually to a half-inch how deep it was plowed an' what plows'd done
the plowin'!--Take that plowin' of the Poppy Meadow, up above Little
Meadow, on Los Cuatos. I just couldn't see my way to it, an' had to cut
out the cross-sub-soiling, an' thought I could slip it over on him.
After it was all finished he kind of happened up that way--I was
lookin' an' he didn't seem to look--an', well, next A.M. I got mine in
the office. No; I didn't slip it over. I ain't tried to slip nothing
over since."

At eleven sharp, Wardman, his sheep manager, departed with an
engagement scheduled at eleven: thirty to ride in the machine along
with Thayer, the Idaho buyer, to look over the Shropshire rams. At
eleven, Bonbright having departed with Wardman to work up his notes,
Forrest was left alone in the office. From a wire tray of unfinished
business--one of many wire trays superimposed in groups of five--he
drew a pamphlet issued by the State of Iowa on hog cholera and
proceeded to scan it.

Five feet, ten inches in height, weighing a clean-muscled one hundred
and eighty pounds, Dick Forrest was anything but insignificant for a
forty years' old man. The eyes were gray, large, over-arched by bone of
brow, and lashes and brows were dark. The hair, above an ordinary
forehead, was light brown to chestnut. Under the forehead, the cheeks
showed high-boned, with underneath the slight hollows that necessarily
accompany such formation. The jaws were strong without massiveness, the
nose, large-nostriled, was straight enough and prominent enough without
being too straight or prominent, the chin square without harshness and
uncleft, and the mouth girlish and sweet to a degree that did not hide
the firmness to which the lips could set on due provocation. The skin
was smooth and well-tanned, although, midway between eyebrows and hair,
the tan of forehead faded in advertisement of the rim of the Baden
Powell interposed between him and the sun.

Laughter lurked in the mouth corners and eye-corners, and there were
cheek lines about the mouth that would seem to have been formed by
laughter. Equally strong, however, every line of the face that meant
blended things carried a notice of surety. Dick Forrest was sure--sure,
when his hand reached out for any object on his desk, that the hand
would straightly attain the object without a fumble or a miss of a
fraction of an inch; sure, when his brain leaped the high places of the
hog cholera text, that it was not missing a point; sure, from his
balanced body in the revolving desk-chair to the balanced back-head of
him; sure, in heart and brain, of life and work, of all he possessed,
and of himself.

He had reason to be sure. Body, brain, and career were long-proven
sure. A rich man's son, he had not played ducks and drakes with his
father's money. City born and reared, he had gone back to the land and
made such a success as to put his name on the lips of breeders wherever
breeders met and talked. He was the owner, without encumbrance, of two
hundred and fifty thousand acres of land--land that varied in value
from a thousand dollars an acre to a hundred dollars, that varied from
a hundred dollars to ten cents an acre, and that, in stretches, was not
worth a penny an acre. The improvements on that quarter of a million
acres, from drain-tiled meadows to dredge-drained tule swamps, from
good roads to developed water-rights, from farm buildings to the Big
House itself, constituted a sum gaspingly ungraspable to the
country-side.

Everything was large-scale but modern to the last tick of the clock.
His managers lived, rent-free, with salaries commensurate to ability,
in five--and ten-thousand-dollar houses--but they were the cream of
specialists skimmed from the continent from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. When he ordered gasoline-tractors for the cultivation of the
flat lands, he ordered a round score. When he dammed water in his
mountains he dammed it by the hundreds of millions of gallons. When he
ditched his tule-swamps, instead of contracting the excavation, he
bought the huge dredgers outright, and, when there was slack work on
his own marshes, he contracted for the draining of the marshes of
neighboring big farmers, land companies, and corporations for a hundred
miles up and down the Sacramento River.

He had brain sufficient to know the need of buying brains and to pay a
tidy bit over the current market price for the most capable brains. And
he had brain sufficient to direct the brains he bought to a profitable
conclusion.

And yet, he was just turned forty was clear-eyed, calm-hearted,
hearty-pulsed, man-strong; and yet, his history, until he was thirty,
had been harum-scarum and erratic to the superlative. He had run away
from a millionaire home when he was thirteen. He had won enviable
college honors ere he was twenty-one and after that he had known all
the purple ports of the purple seas, and, with cool head, hot heart,
and laughter, played every risk that promised and provided in the wild
world of adventure that he had lived to see pass under the sobriety of
law.

In the old days of San Francisco Forrest had been a name to conjure
with. The Forrest Mansion had been one of the pioneer palaces on Nob
Hill where dwelt the Floods, the Mackays, the Crockers, and the
O'Briens. "Lucky" Richard Forrest, the father, had arrived, via the
Isthmus, straight from old New England, keenly commercial, interested
before his departure in clipper ships and the building of clipper
ships, and interested immediately after his arrival in water-front real
estate, river steamboats, mines, of course, and, later, in the draining
of the Nevada Comstock and the construction of the Southern Pacific.

He played big, he won big, he lost big; but he won always more than he
lost, and what he paid out at one game with one hand, he drew back with
his other hand at another game. His winnings from the Comstock he sank
into the various holes of the bottomless Daffodil Group in Eldorado
County. The wreckage from the Benicia Line he turned into the Napa
Consolidated, which was a quicksilver venture, and it earned him five
thousand per cent. What he lost in the collapse of the Stockton boom
was more than balanced by the realty appreciation of his key-holdings
at Sacramento and Oakland.

And, to cap it all, when "Lucky" Richard Forrest had lost everything in
a series of calamities, so that San Francisco debated what price his
Nob Hill palace would fetch at auction, he grubstaked one, Del Nelson,
to a prospecting in Mexico. As soberly set down in history, the result
of the said Del Nelson's search for quartz was the Harvest Group,
including the fabulous and inexhaustible Tattlesnake, Voice, City,
Desdemona, Bullfrog, and Yellow Boy claims. Del Nelson, astounded by
his achievement, within the year drowned himself in an enormous
quantity of cheap whisky, and, the will being incontestible through
lack of kith and kin, left his half to Lucky Richard Forrest.

Dick Forrest was the son of his father. Lucky Richard, a man of
boundless energy and enterprise, though twice married and twice
widowed, had not been blessed with children. His third marriage
occurred in 1872, when he was fifty-eight, and in 1874, although he
lost the mother, a twelve-pound boy, stout-barreled and husky-lunged,
remained to be brought up by a regiment of nurses in the palace on Nob
Hill.

Young Dick was precocious. Lucky Richard was a democrat. Result: Young
Dick learned in a year from a private teacher what would have required
three years in the grammar school, and used all of the saved years in
playing in the open air. Also, result of precocity of son and democracy
of father, Young Dick was sent to grammar school for the last year in
order to learn shoulder-rubbing democracy with the sons and daughters
of workmen, tradesmen, saloon-keepers and politicians.

In class recitation or spelling match his father's millions did not aid
him in competing with Patsy Halloran, the mathematical prodigy whose
father was a hod-carrier, nor with Mona Sanguinetti who was a wizard at
spelling and whose widowed mother ran a vegetable store. Nor were his
father's millions and the Nob Hill palace of the slightest assistance
to Young Dick when he peeled his jacket and, bareknuckled, without
rounds, licking or being licked, milled it to a finish with Jimmy
Botts, Jean Choyinsky, and the rest of the lads that went out over the
world to glory and cash a few years later, a generation of
prizefighters that only San Francisco, raw and virile and yeasty and
young, could have produced.

The wisest thing Lucky Richard did for his boy was to give him this
democratic tutelage. In his secret heart, Young Dick never forgot that
he lived in a palace of many servants and that his father was a man of
power and honor. On the other hand, Young Dick learned two-legged,
two-fisted democracy. He learned it when Mona Sanguinetti spelled him
down in class. He learned it when Berney Miller out-dodged and out-ran
him when running across in Black Man.

And when Tim Hagan, with straight left for the hundredth time to
bleeding nose and mangled mouth, and with ever reiterant right hook to
stomach, had him dazed and reeling, the breath whistling and sobbing
through his lacerated lips--was no time for succor from palaces and
bank accounts. On his two legs, with his two fists, it was either he or
Tim. And it was right there, in sweat and blood and iron of soul, that
Young Dick learned how not to lose a losing fight. It had been uphill
from the first blow, but he stuck it out until in the end it was agreed
that neither could best the other, although this agreement was not
reached until they had first lain on the ground in nausea and
exhaustion and with streaming eyes wept their rage and defiance at each
other. After that, they became chums and between them ruled the
schoolyard.

Lucky Richard died the same month Young Dick emerged from grammar
school. Young Dick was thirteen years old, with twenty million dollars,
and without a relative in the world to trouble him. He was the master
of a palace of servants, a steam yacht, stables, and, as well, of a
summer palace down the Peninsula in the nabob colony at Menlo. One
thing, only, was he burdened with: guardians.

On a summer afternoon, in the big library, he attended the first
session of his board of guardians. There were three of them, all
elderly, and successful, all legal, all business comrades of his
father. Dick's impression, as they explained things to him, was that,
although they meant well, he had no contacts with them. In his
judgment, their boyhood was too far behind them. Besides that, it was
patent that him, the particular boy they were so much concerned with,
they did not understand at all. Furthermore, in his own sure way he
decided that he was the one person in the world fitted to know what was
best for himself.

Mr. Crockett made a long speech, to which Dick listened with alert and
becoming attention, nodding his head whenever he was directly addressed
or appealed to. Messrs. Davidson and Slocum also had their say and were
treated with equal consideration. Among other things, Dick learned what
a sterling, upright man his father had been, and the program already
decided upon by the three gentlemen which would make him into a
sterling and upright man.

When they were quite done, Dick took it upon himself to say a few
things.

"I have thought it over," he announced, "and first of all I shall go
traveling."

"That will come afterward, my boy," Mr. Slocum explained soothingly.
"When--say--when you are ready to enter the university. At that time a
year abroad would be a very good thing... a very good thing indeed."

"Of course," Mr. Davidson volunteered quickly, having noted the annoyed
light in the lad's eyes and the unconscious firm-drawing and setting of
the lips, "of course, in the meantime you could do some traveling, a
limited amount of traveling, during your school vacations. I am sure my
fellow guardians will agree--under the proper management and
safeguarding, of course--that such bits of travel sandwiched between
your school-terms, would be advisable and beneficial."

"How much did you say I am worth?" Dick asked with apparent irrelevance.

"Twenty millions--at a most conservative estimate--that is about the
sum," Mr. Crockett answered promptly.

"Suppose I said right now that I wanted a hundred dollars!" Dick went
on.

"Why--er--ahem." Mr. Slocum looked about him for guidance.

"We would be compelled to ask what you wanted it for," answered Mr.
Crockett.

"And suppose," Dick said very slowly, looking Mr. Crockett squarely in
the eyes, "suppose I said that I was very sorry, but that I did not
care to say what I wanted it for?"

"Then you wouldn't get it," Mr. Crockett said so immediately that there
was a hint of testiness and snap in his manner.

Dick nodded slowly, as if letting the information sink in.

"But, of course, my boy," Mr. Slocum took up hastily, "you understand
you are too young to handle money yet. We must decide that for you."

"You mean I can't touch a penny without your permission?"

"Not a penny," Mr. Crockett snapped.

Dick nodded his head thoughtfully and murmured, "Oh, I see."

"Of course, and quite naturally, it would only be fair, you know, you
will have a small allowance for your personal spending," Mr. Davidson
said. "Say, a dollar, or, perhaps, two dollars, a week. As you grow
older this allowance will be increased. And by the time you are
twenty-one, doubtlessly you will be fully qualified--with advice, of
course--to handle your own affairs."

"And until I am twenty-one my twenty million wouldn't buy me a hundred
dollars to do as I please with?" Dick queried very subduedly.

Mr. Davidson started to corroborate in soothing phrases, but was waved
to silence by Dick, who continued:

"As I understand it, whatever money I handle will be by agreement
between the four of us?"

The Board of Guardians nodded.

"That is, whatever we agree, goes?"

Again the Board of Guardians nodded.

"Well, I'd like to have a hundred right now," Dick announced.

"What for?" Mr. Crockett demanded.

"I don't mind telling you," was the lad's steady answer. "To go
traveling."

"You'll go to bed at eight:thirty this evening," Mr. Crockett retorted.
"And you don't get any hundred. The lady we spoke to you about will be
here before six. She is to have, as we explained, daily and hourly
charge of you. At six-thirty, as usual, you will dine, and she will
dine with you and see you to bed. As we told you, she will have to
serve the place of a mother to you--see that your ears are clean, your
neck washed--"

"And that I get my Saturday night bath," Dick amplified meekly for him.

"Precisely."

"How much are you--am I--paying the lady for her services?" Dick
questioned in the disconcerting, tangential way that was already
habitual to him, as his school companions and teachers had learned to
their cost.

Mr. Crockett for the first time cleared his throat for pause.

"I'm paying her, ain't I?" Dick prodded. "Out of the twenty million,
you know."

"The spit of his father," said Mr. Slocum in an aside.

"Mrs. Summerstone, the lady as you elect to call her, receives one
hundred and fifty a month, eighteen hundred a year in round sum," said
Mr. Crockett.

"It's a waste of perfectly good money," Dick sighed. "And board and
lodging thrown in!"

He stood up--not the born aristocrat of the generations, but the reared
aristocrat of thirteen years in the Nob Hill palace. He stood up with
such a manner that his Board of Guardians left their leather chairs to
stand up with him. But he stood up as no Lord Fauntleroy ever stood up;
for he was a mixer. He had knowledge that human life was many-faced and
many-placed. Not for nothing had he been spelled down by Mona
Sanguinetti. Not for nothing had he fought Tim Hagan to a standstill
and, co-equal, ruled the schoolyard roost with him.

He was birthed of the wild gold-adventure of Forty-nine. He was a
reared aristocrat and a grammar-school-trained democrat. He knew, in
his precocious immature way, the differentiations between caste and
mass; and, behind it all, he was possessed of a will of his own and of
a quiet surety of self that was incomprehensible to the three elderly
gentlemen who had been given charge of his and his destiny and who had
pledged themselves to increase his twenty millions and make a man of
him in their own composite image.

"Thank you for your kindness," Young Dick said generally to the three.
"I guess we'll get along all right. Of course, that twenty millions is
mine, and of course you've got to take care of it for me, seeing I know
nothing of business--"

"And we'll increase it for you, my boy, we'll increase it for you in
safe, conservative ways," Mr. Slocum assured him.

"No speculation," Young Dick warned. "Dad's just been lucky--I've heard
him say that times have changed and a fellow can't take the chances
everybody used to take."

From which, and from much which has already passed, it might
erroneously be inferred that Young Dick was a mean and money-grubbing
soul. On the contrary, he was at that instant entertaining secret
thoughts and plans so utterly regardless and disdainful of his twenty
millions as to place him on a par with a drunken sailor sowing the
beach with a three years' pay-day.

"I am only a boy," Young Dick went on. "But you don't know me very well
yet. We'll get better acquainted by and by, and, again thanking you...."

He paused, bowed briefly and grandly as lords in Nob Hill palaces early
learn to bow, and, by the quality of the pause, signified that the
audience was over. Nor did the impact of dismissal miss his guardians.
They, who had been co-lords with his father, withdrew confused and
perplexed. Messrs. Davidson and Slocum were on the point of resolving
their perplexity into wrath, as they went down the great stone stairway
to the waiting carriage, but Mr. Crockett, the testy and snappish,
muttered ecstatically: "The son of a gun! The little son of a gun!"

The carriage carried them down to the old Pacific Union Club, where,
for another hour, they gravely discussed the future of Young Dick
Forrest and pledged themselves anew to the faith reposed in them by
Lucky Richard Forrest. And down the hill, on foot, where grass grew on
the paved streets too steep for horse-traffic, Young Dick hurried. As
the height of land was left behind, almost immediately the palaces and
spacious grounds of the nabobs gave way to the mean streets and wooden
warrens of the working people. The San Francisco of 1887 as
incontinently intermingled its slums and mansions as did the old cities
of Europe. Nob Hill arose, like any medieval castle, from the mess and
ruck of common life that denned and laired at its base.

Young Dick came to pause alongside a corner grocery, the second story
of which was rented to Timothy Hagan Senior, who, by virtue of being a
policeman with a wage of a hundred dollars a month, rented this high
place to dwell above his fellows who supported families on no more than
forty and fifty dollars a month.

In vain Young Dick whistled up through the unscreened, open windows.
Tim Hagan Junior was not at home. But Young Dick wasted little wind in
the whistling. He was debating on possible adjacent places where Tim
Hagan might be, when Tim himself appeared around the corner, bearing a
lidless lard-can that foamed with steam beer. He grunted greeting, and
Young Dick grunted with equal roughness, just as if, a brief space
before, he had not, in most lordly fashion, terminated an audience with
three of the richest merchant-kings of an imperial city. Nor did his
possession of twenty increasing millions hint the slightest betrayal in
his voice or mitigate in the slightest the gruffness of his grunt.

"Ain't seen yeh since yer old man died," Tim Hagan commented.

"Well, you're seein' me now, ain't you?" was Young Dick's retort. "Say,
Tim, I come to see you on business."

"Wait till I rush the beer to the old man," said Tim, inspecting the
state of the foam in the lard-can with an experienced eye. "He'll roar
his head off if it comes in flat."

"Oh, you can shake it up," Young Dick assured him. "Only want to see
you a minute. I'm hitting the road to-night. Want to come along?"

Tim's small, blue Irish eyes flashed with interest.

"Where to?" he queried.

"Don't know. Want to come? If you do, we can talk it over after we
start? You know the ropes. What d'ye say?"

"The old man'll beat the stuffin' outa me," Tim demurred.

"He's done that before, an' you don't seem to be much missing," Young
Dick callously rejoined. "Say the word, an' we'll meet at the Ferry
Building at nine to-night. What d'ye say? I'll be there."

"Supposin' I don't show up?" Tim asked.

"I'll be on my way just the same." Young Dick turned as if to depart,
paused casually, and said over his shoulder, "Better come along."

Tim shook up the beer as he answered with equal casualness, "Aw right.
I'll be there."

After parting from Tim Hagan Young Dick spent a busy hour or so looking
up one, Marcovich, a Slavonian schoolmate whose father ran a chop-house
in which was reputed to be served the finest twenty-cent meal in the
city. Young Marcovich owed Young Dick two dollars, and Young Dick
accepted the payment of a dollar and forty cents as full quittance of
the debt.

Also, with shyness and perturbation, Young Dick wandered down
Montgomery Street and vacillated among the many pawnshops that graced
that thoroughfare. At last, diving desperately into one, he managed to
exchange for eight dollars and a ticket his gold watch that he knew was
worth fifty at the very least.

Dinner in the Nob Hill palace was served at six-thirty. He arrived at
six-forty-five and encountered Mrs. Summerstone. She was a stout,
elderly, decayed gentlewoman, a daughter of the great Porter-Rickington
family that had shaken the entire Pacific Coast with its financial
crash in the middle seventies. Despite her stoutness, she suffered from
what she called shattered nerves.

"This will never, never do, Richard," she censured. "Here is dinner
waiting fifteen minutes already, and you have not yet washed your face
and hands."

"I am sorry, Mrs. Summerstone," Young Dick apologized. "I won't keep
you waiting ever again. And I won't bother you much ever."

At dinner, in state, the two of them alone in the great dining room,
Young Dick strove to make things easy for the lady, whom, despite his
knowledge that she was on his pay-roll, he felt toward as a host must
feel toward a guest.

"You'll be very comfortable here," he promised, "once you are settled
down. It's a good old house, and most of the servants have been here
for years."

"But, Richard," she smiled seriously to him; "it is not the servants
who will determine my happiness here. It is you."

"I'll do my best," he said graciously. "Better than that. I'm sorry I
came in late for dinner. In years and years you'll never see me late
again. I won't bother you at all. You'll see. It will be just as though
I wasn't in the house."

When he bade her good night, on his way to bed, he added, as a last
thought:

"I'll warn you of one thing: Ah Sing. He's the cook. He's been in our
house for years and years--oh, I don't know, maybe twenty-five or
thirty years he's cooked for father, from long before this house was
built or I was born. He's privileged. He's so used to having his own
way that you'll have to handle him with gloves. But once he likes you
he'll work his fool head off to please you. He likes me that way. You
get him to like you, and you'll have the time of your life here. And,
honest, I won't give you any trouble at all. It'll be a regular snap,
just as if I wasn't here at all."




CHAPTER V

 AT nine in the evening, sharp to the second, clad in his oldest
clothes, Young Dick met Tim Hagan at the Ferry Building.

"No use headin' north," said Tim. "Winter'll come on up that way and
make the sleepin' crimpy. D'ye want to go East--that means Nevada and
the deserts."

"Any other way?" queried Young Dick. "What's the matter with south? We
can head for Los Angeles, an' Arizona, an' New Mexico--oh, an' Texas."

"How much money you got?" Tim demanded.

"What for?" Young Dick countered.

"We gotta get out quick, an' payin' our way at the start is quickest.
Me--I'm all hunkydory; but you ain't. The folks that's lookin' after
you'll raise a roar. They'll have more detectives out than you can
shake at stick at. We gotta dodge 'em, that's what."

"Then we will dodge," said Young Dick. "We'll make short jumps this way
and that for a couple of days, layin' low most of the time, paying our
way, until we can get to Tracy. Then we'll quit payin' an' beat her
south."

All of which program was carefully carried out. They eventually went
through Tracy as pay passengers, six hours after the local deputy
sheriff had given up his task of searching the trains. With an excess
of precaution Young Dick paid beyond Tracy and as far as Modesto. After
that, under the teaching of Tim, he traveled without paying, riding
blind baggage, box cars, and cow-catchers. Young Dick bought the
newspapers, and frightened Tim by reading to him the lurid accounts of
the kidnapping of the young heir to the Forrest millions.

Back in San Francisco the Board of Guardians offered rewards that
totaled thirty thousand dollars for the recovery of their ward. And Tim
Hagan, reading the same while they lay in the grass by some water-tank,
branded forever the mind of Young Dick with the fact that honor beyond
price was a matter of neither place nor caste and might outcrop in the
palace on the height of land or in the dwelling over a grocery down on
the flat.

"Gee!" Tim said to the general landscape. "The old man wouldn't raise a
roar if I snitched on you for that thirty thousand. It makes me scared
to think of it."

And from the fact that Tim thus openly mentioned the matter, Young Dick
concluded that there was no possibility of the policeman's son
betraying him.

Not until six weeks afterward, in Arizona, did Young Dick bring up the
subject.

"You see, Tim," he said, "I've got slathers of money. It's growing all
the time, and I ain't spending a cent of it, not so as you can
notice... though that Mrs. Summerstone is getting a cold eighteen
hundred a year out of me, with board and carriages thrown in, while you
an' I are glad to get the leavings of firemen's pails in the
round-houses. Just the same, my money's growing. What's ten per cent,
on twenty dollars?"

Tim Hagan stared at the shimmering heat-waves of the desert and tried
to solve the problem.

"What's one-tenth of twenty million?" Young Dick demanded irritably.

"Huh!--two million, of course."

"Well, five per cent's half of ten per cent. What does twenty million
earn at five per cent, for one year?"

Tim hesitated.

"Half of it, half of two million!" Young Dick cried. "At that rate I'm
a million richer every year. Get that, and hang on to it, and listen to
me. When I'm good and willing to go back--but not for years an'
years--we'll fix it up, you and I. When I say the word, you'll write to
your father. He'll jump out to where we are waiting, pick me up, and
cart me back. Then he'll collect the thirty thousand reward from my
guardians, quit the police force, and most likely start a saloon."

"Thirty thousand's a hell of a lot of money," was Tim's nonchalant way
of expressing his gratitude.

"Not to me," Young Dick minimized his generosity. "Thirty thousand goes
into a million thirty-three times, and a million's only a year's
turnover of my money."

But Tim Hagan never lived to see his father a saloon keeper. Two days
later, on a trestle, the lads were fired out of an empty box-car by a
brake-man who should have known better. The trestle spanned a dry
ravine. Young Dick looked down at the rocks seventy feet below and
demurred.

"There's room on the trestle," he said; "but what if the train starts
up?"

"It ain't goin' to start--beat it while you got time," the brakeman
insisted. "The engine's takin' water at the other side. She always
takes it here."

But for once the engine did not take water. The evidence at the inquest
developed that the engineer had found no water in the tank and started
on. Scarcely had the two boys dropped from the side-door of the
box-car, and before they had made a score of steps along the narrow way
between the train and the abyss, than the train began to move. Young
Dick, quick and sure in all his perceptions and adjustments, dropped on
the instant to hands and knees on the trestle. This gave him better
holding and more space, because he crouched beneath the overhang of the
box-cars. Tim, not so quick in perceiving and adjusting, also overcome
with Celtic rage at the brakeman, instead of dropping to hands and
knees, remained upright to flare his opinion of the brakeman, to the
brakeman, in lurid and ancestral terms.

"Get down!--drop!" Young Dick shouted.

But the opportunity had passed. On a down grade, the engine picked up
the train rapidly. Facing the moving cars, with empty air at his back
and the depth beneath, Tim tried to drop on hands and knees. But the
first twist of his shoulders brought him in contact with the car and
nearly out-balanced him. By a miracle he recovered equilibrium. But he
stood upright. The train was moving faster and faster. It was
impossible to get down.

Young Dick, kneeling and holding, watched. The train gathered way. The
cars moved more swiftly. Tim, with a cool head, his back to the fall,
his face to the passing cars, his arms by his sides, with nowhere save
under his feet a holding point, balanced and swayed. The faster the
train moved, the wider he swayed, until, exerting his will, he
controlled himself and ceased from swaying.

And all would have been well with him, had it not been for one car.
Young Dick knew it, and saw it coming. It was a "palace horse-car,"
projecting six inches wider than any car on the train. He saw Tim see
it coming. He saw Tim steel himself to meet the abrupt subtraction of
half a foot from the narrow space wherein he balanced. He saw Tim
slowly and deliberately sway out, sway out to the extremest limit, and
yet not sway out far enough. The thing was physically inevitable. An
inch more, and Tim would have escaped the car. An inch more and he
would have fallen without impact from the car. It caught him, in that
margin of an inch, and hurled him backward and side-twisting. Twice he
whirled sidewise, and two and a half times he turned over, ere he
struck on his head and neck on the rocks.

He never moved after he struck. The seventy-foot fall broke his neck
and crushed his skull. And right there Young Dick learned death--not
the ordered, decent death of civilization, wherein doctors and nurses
and hypodermics ease the stricken one into the darkness, and ceremony
and function and flowers and undertaking institutions conspire to give
a happy leave-taking and send-off to the departing shade, but sudden
death, primitive death, ugly and ungarnished, like the death of a steer
in the shambles or a fat swine stuck in the jugular.

And right there Young Dick learned more--the mischance of life and
fate; the universe hostile to man; the need to perceive and to act, to
see and know, to be sure and quick, to adjust instantly to all instant
shiftage of the balance of forces that bear upon the living. And right
there, beside the strangely crumpled and shrunken remnant of what had
been his comrade the moment before, Young Dick learned that illusion
must be discounted, and that reality never lied.

In New Mexico, Young Dick drifted into the Jingle-bob Ranch, north of
Roswell, in the Pecos Valley. He was not yet fourteen, and he was
accepted as the mascot of the ranch and made into a "sure-enough"
cowboy by cowboys who, on legal papers, legally signed names such as
Wild Horse, Willie Buck, Boomer Deacon, and High Pockets.

Here, during a stay of six months, Young Dick, soft of frame and
unbreakable, achieved a knowledge of horses and horsemanship, and of
men in the rough and raw, that became a life asset. More he learned.
There was John Chisum, owner of the Jingle-bob, the Bosque Grande, and
of other cattle ranches as far away as the Black River and beyond. John
Chisum was a cattle king who had foreseen the coming of the farmer and
adjusted from the open range to barbed wire, and who, in order to do
so, had purchased every forty acres carrying water and got for nothing
the use of the millions of acres of adjacent range that was worthless
without the water he controlled. And in the talk by the camp-fire and
chuck wagon, among forty-dollar-a-month cowboys who had not foreseen
what John Chisum foresaw, Young Dick learned precisely why and how John
Chisum had become a cattle king while a thousand of his contemporaries
worked for him on wages.

But Young Dick was no cool-head. His blood was hot. He had passion, and
fire, and male pride. Ready to cry from twenty hours in the saddle, he
learned to ignore the thousand aching creaks in his body and with the
stoic brag of silence to withstain from his blankets until the
hard-bitten punchers led the way. By the same token he straddled the
horse that was apportioned him, insisted on riding night-herd, and knew
no hint of uncertainty when it came to him to turn the flank of a
stampede with a flying slicker. He could take a chance. It was his joy
to take a chance. But at such times he never failed of due respect for
reality. He was well aware that men were soft-shelled and cracked
easily on hard rocks or under pounding hoofs. And when he rejected a
mount that tangled its legs in quick action and stumbled, it was not
because he feared to be cracked, but because, when he took a chance on
being cracked, he wanted, as he told John Chisum himself, "an even
break for his money."

It was while at the Jingle-bob, but mailed by a cattleman from Chicago,
that Young Dick wrote a letter to his guardians. Even then, so careful
was he, that the envelope was addressed to Ah Sing. Though unburdened
by his twenty millions, Young Dick never forgot them, and, fearing his
estate might be distributed among remote relatives who might possibly
inhabit New England, he warned his guardians that he was still alive
and that he would return home in several years. Also, he ordered them
to keep Mrs. Summerstone on at her regular salary.

But Young Dick's feet itched. Half a year, he felt, was really more
than he should have spent at the Jingle-bob. As a boy hobo, or
road-kid, he drifted on across the United States, getting acquainted
with its peace officers, police judges, vagrancy laws, and jails. And
he learned vagrants themselves at first hand, and floating laborers and
petty criminals. Among other things, he got acquainted with farms and
farmers, and, in New York State, once picked berries for a week with a
Dutch farmer who was experimenting with one of the first silos erected
in the United States. Nothing of what he learned came to him in the
spirit of research. He had merely the human boy's curiosity about all
things, and he gained merely a huge mass of data concerning human
nature and social conditions that was to stand him in good stead in
later years, when, with the aid of the books, he digested and
classified it.

His adventures did not harm him. Even when he consorted with jail-birds
in jungle camps, and listened to their codes of conduct and
measurements of life, he was not affected. He was a traveler, and they
were alien breeds. Secure in the knowledge of his twenty millions,
there was neither need nor temptation for him to steal or rob. All
things and all places interested him, but he never found a place nor a
situation that could hold him. He wanted to see, to see more and more,
and to go on seeing.

At the end of three years, nearly sixteen, hard of body, weighing a
hundred and thirty pounds, he judged it time to go home and open the
books. So he took his first long voyage, signing on as boy on a
windjammer bound around the Horn from the Delaware Breakwater to San
Francisco. It was a hard voyage, of one hundred and eighty days, but at
the end he weighed ten pounds the more for having made it.

Mrs. Summerstone screamed when he walked in on her, and Ah Sing had to
be called from the kitchen to identify him. Mrs. Summerstone screamed a
second time. It was when she shook hands with him and lacerated her
tender skin in the fisty grip of his rope-calloused palms.

He was shy, almost embarrassed, as he greeted his guardians at the
hastily summoned meeting. But this did not prevent him from talking
straight to the point.

"It's this way," he said. "I am not a fool. I know what I want, and I
want what I want. I am alone in the world, outside of good friends like
you, of course, and I have my own ideas of the world and what I want to
do in it. I didn't come home because of a sense of duty to anybody
here. I came home because it was time, because of my sense of duty to
myself. I'm all the better from my three years of wandering about, and
now it's up to me to go on with my education--my book education, I
mean."

"The Belmont Academy," Mr. Slocum suggested. "That will fit you for the
university--"

Dick shook his head decidedly.

"And take three years to do it. So would a high school. I intend to be
in the University of California inside one year. That means work. But
my mind's like acid. It'll bite into the books. I shall hire a coach,
or half a dozen of them, and go to it. And I'll hire my coaches
myself--hire and fire them. And that means money to handle."

"A hundred a month," Mr. Crockett suggested.

Dick shook his head.

"I've taken care of myself for three years without any of my money. I
guess. I can take care of myself along with some of my money here in
San Francisco. I don't care to handle my business affairs yet, but I do
want a bank account, a respectable-sized one. I want to spend it as I
see fit, for what I see fit."

The guardians looked their dismay at one another.

"It's ridiculous, impossible," Mr. Crockett began. "You are as
unreasonable as you were before you went away."

"It's my way, I guess," Dick sighed. "The other disagreement was over
my money. It was a hundred dollars I wanted then."

"Think of our position, Dick," Mr. Davidson urged. "As your guardians,
how would it be looked upon if we gave you, a lad of sixteen, a free
hand with money."

"What's the _Freda_ worth, right now?" Dick demanded irrelevantly.

"Can sell for twenty thousand any time," Mr. Crockett answered.

"Then sell her. She's too large for me, and she's worth less every
year. I want a thirty-footer that I can handle myself for knocking
around the Bay, and that won't cost a thousand. Sell the _Freda_ and
put the money to my account. Now what you three are afraid of is that
I'll misspend my money--taking to drinking, horse-racing, and running
around with chorus girls. Here's my proposition to make you easy on
that: let it be a drawing account for the four of us. The moment any of
you decide I am misspending, that moment you can draw out the total
balance. I may as well tell you, that just as a side line I'm going to
get a business college expert to come here and cram me with the
mechanical side of the business game."

Dick did not wait for their acquiescence, but went on as from a matter
definitely settled.

"How about the horses down at Menlo?--never mind, I'll look them over
and decide what to keep. Mrs. Summerstone will stay on here in charge
of the house, because I've got too much work mapped out for myself
already. I promise you you won't regret giving me a free hand with my
directly personal affairs. And now, if you want to hear about the last
three years, I'll spin the yarn for you."

 Dick Forrest had been right when he told his guardians that his mind
was acid and would bite into the books. Never was there such an
education, and he directed it himself--but not without advice. He had
learned the trick of hiring brains from his father and from John Chisum
of the Jingle-bob. He had learned to sit silent and to think while cow
men talked long about the campfire and the chuck wagon. And, by virtue
of name and place, he sought and obtained interviews with professors
and college presidents and practical men of affairs; and he listened to
their talk through many hours, scarcely speaking, rarely asking a
question, merely listening to the best they had to offer, content to
receive from several such hours one idea, one fact, that would help him
to decide what sort of an education he would go in for and how.

Then came the engaging of coaches. Never was there such an engaging and
discharging, such a hiring and firing. He was not frugal in the matter.
For one that he retained a month, or three months, he discharged a
dozen on the first day, or the first week. And invariably he paid such
dischargees a full month although their attempts to teach him might not
have consumed an hour. He did such things fairly and grandly, because
he could afford to be fair and grand.

He, who had eaten the leavings from firemen's pails in round-houses and
"scoffed" mulligan-stews at water-tanks, had learned thoroughly the
worth of money. He bought the best with the sure knowledge that it was
the cheapest. A year of high school physics and a year of high school
chemistry were necessary to enter the university. When he had crammed
his algebra and geometry, he sought out the heads of the physics and
chemistry departments in the University of California. Professor Carey
laughed at him... at the first.

"My dear boy," Professor Carey began.

Dick waited patiently till he was through. Then Dick began, and
concluded.

"I'm not a fool, Professor Carey. High school and academy students are
children. They don't know the world. They don't know what they want, or
why they want what is ladled out to them. I know the world. I know what
I want and why I want it. They do physics for an hour, twice a week,
for two terms, which, with two vacations, occupy one year. You are the
top teacher on the Pacific Coast in physics. The college year is just
ending. In the first week of your vacation, giving every minute of your
time to me, I can get the year's physics. What is that week worth to
you?"

"You couldn't buy it for a thousand dollars," Professor Carey rejoined,
thinking he had settled the matter.

"I know what your salary is--" Dick began.

"What is it?" Professor Carey demanded sharply.

"It's not a thousand a week," Dick retorted as sharply. "It's not five
hundred a week, nor two-fifty a week--" He held up his hand to stall
off interruption. "You've just told me I couldn't buy a week of your
time for a thousand dollars. I'm not going to. But I am going to buy
that week for two thousand. Heavens!--I've only got so many years to
live--"

"And you can buy years?" Professor Carey queried slyly.

"Sure. That's why I'm here. I buy three years in one, and the week from
you is part of the deal."

"But I have not accepted," Professor Carey laughed.

"If the sum is not sufficient," Dick said stiffly, "why name the sum
you consider fair."

And Professor Carey surrendered. So did Professor Barsdale, head of the
department of chemistry.

Already had Dick taken his coaches in mathematics duck hunting for
weeks in the sloughs of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. After his
bout with physics and chemistry he took his two coaches in literature
and history into the Curry County hunting region of southwestern
Oregon. He had learned the trick from his father, and he worked, and
played, lived in the open air, and did three conventional years of
adolescent education in one year without straining himself. He fished,
hunted, swam, exercised, and equipped himself for the university at the
same time. And he made no mistake. He knew that he did it because his
father's twenty millions had invested him with mastery. Money was a
tool. He did not over-rate it, nor under-rate it. He used it to buy
what he wanted.

"The weirdest form of dissipation I ever heard," said Mr. Crockett,
holding up Dick's account for the year. "Sixteen thousand for
education, all itemized, including railroad fares, porters' tips, and
shot-gun cartridges for his teachers."

"He passed the examinations just the same," quoth Mr. Slocum.

"And in a year," growled Mr. Davidson. "My daughter's boy entered
Belmont at the same time, and, if he's lucky, it will be two years yet
before he enters the university."

"Well, all I've got to say," proclaimed Mr. Crockett, "is that from now
on what that boy says in the matter of spending his money goes."

"And now I'll have a snap," Dick told his guardians. "Here I am, neck
and neck again, and years ahead of them in knowledge of the world. Why,
I know things, good and bad, big and little, about men and women and
life that sometimes I almost doubt myself that they're true. But I know
them.

"From now on, I'm not going to rush. I've caught up, and I'm going
through regular. All I have to do is to keep the speed of the classes,
and I'll be graduated when I'm twenty-one. From now on I'll need less
money for education--no more coaches, you know--and more money for a
good time."

Mr. Davidson was suspicious.

"What do you mean by a good time?"

"Oh, I'm going in for the frats, for football, hold my own, you
know--and I'm interested in gasoline engines. I'm going to build the
first ocean-going gasoline yacht in the world--"

"You'll blow yourself up," Mr. Crockett demurred. "It's a fool notion
all these cranks are rushing into over gasoline."

"I'll make myself safe," Dick answered, "and that means experimenting,
and it means money, so keep me a good drawing account--same old
way--all four of us can draw."




CHAPTER VI



Dick Forrest proved himself no prodigy at the university, save that he
cut more lectures the first year than any other student. The reason for
this was that he did not need the lectures he cut, and he knew it. His
coaches, while preparing him for the entrance examinations, had carried
him nearly through the first college year. Incidentally, he made the
Freshman team, a very scrub team, that was beaten by every high school
and academy it played against.

But Dick did put in work that nobody saw. His collateral reading was
wide and deep, and when he went on his first summer cruise in the
ocean-going gasoline yacht he had built no gay young crowd accompanied
him. Instead, his guests, with their families, were professors of
literature, history, jurisprudence, and philosophy. It was long
remembered in the university as the "high-brow" cruise. The professors,
on their return, reported a most enjoyable time. Dick returned with a
greater comprehension of the general fields of the particular
professors than he could have gained in years at their class-lectures.
And time thus gained, enabled him to continue to cut lectures and to
devote more time to laboratory work.

Nor did he miss having his good college time. College widows made love
to him, and college girls loved him, and he was indefatigable in his
dancing. He never cut a smoker, a beer bust, or a rush, and he toured
the Pacific Coast with the Banjo and Mandolin Club.

And yet he was no prodigy. He was brilliant at nothing. Half a dozen of
his fellows could out-banjo and out-mandolin him. A dozen fellows were
adjudged better dancers than he. In football, and he gained the Varsity
in his Sophomore year, he was considered a solid and dependable player,
and that was all. It seemed never his luck to take the ball and go down
the length of the field while the Blue and Gold host tore itself and
the grandstand to pieces. But it was at the end of heart-breaking,
grueling slog in mud and rain, the score tied, the second half imminent
to its close, Stanford on the five-yard line, Berkeley's ball, with two
downs and three yards to gain--it was then that the Blue and Gold arose
and chanted its demand for Forrest to hit the center and hit it hard.

He never achieved super-excellence at anything. Big Charley Everson
drank him down at the beer busts. Harrison Jackson, at hammer-throwing,
always exceeded his best by twenty feet. Carruthers out-pointed him at
boxing. Anson Burge could always put his shoulders to the mat, two out
of three, but always only by the hardest work. In English composition a
fifth of his class excelled him. Edlin, the Russian Jew, out-debated
him on the contention that property was robbery. Schultz and Debret
left him with the class behind in higher mathematics; and Otsuki, the
Japanese, was beyond all comparison with him in chemistry.

But if Dick Forrest did not excel at anything, he failed in nothing. He
displayed no superlative strength, he betrayed no weakness nor
deficiency. As he told his guardians, who, by his unrelenting good
conduct had been led into dreaming some great career for him; as he
told them, when they asked what he wanted to become:

"Nothing. Just all around. You see, I don't have to be a specialist. My
father arranged that for me when he left me his money. Besides, I
couldn't be a specialist if I wanted to. It isn't me."

And thus so well-keyed was he, that he expressed clearly his key. He
had no flare for anything. He was that rare individual, normal,
average, balanced, all-around.

When Mr. Davidson, in the presence of his fellow guardians, stated his
pleasure in that Dick had shown no wildness since he had settled down,
Dick replied:

"Oh, I can hold myself when I want to."

"Yes," said Mr. Slocum gravely. "It's the finest thing in the world
that you sowed your wild oats early and learned control."

Dick looked at him curiously.

"Why, that boyish adventure doesn't count," he said. "That wasn't
wildness. I haven't gone wild yet. But watch me when I start. Do you
know Kipling's 'Song of Diego Valdez'? Let me quote you a bit of it.
You see, Diego Valdez, like me, had good fortune. He rose so fast to be
High Admiral of Spain that he found no time to take the pleasure he had
merely tasted. He was lusty and husky, but he had no time, being too
busy rising. But always, he thought, he fooled himself with the
thought, that his lustiness and huskiness would last, and, after he
became High Admiral he could then have his pleasure. Always he
remembered:

  "'--comrades--
       Old playmates on new seas--
     When as we traded orpiment
       Among the savages--
     A thousand leagues to south'ard
       And thirty years removed--
     They knew not noble Valdez,
       But me they knew and loved.

  "'Then they that found good liquor
       They drank it not alone,
    And they that found fair plunder,
       They told us every one,
    Behind our chosen islands
       Or secret shoals between,
     When, walty from far voyage,
       We gathered to careen.

  "'There burned our breaming-fagots,
       All pale along the shore:
    There rose our worn pavilions--
       A sail above an oar:
    As flashed each yearning anchor
       Through mellow seas afire,
     So swift our careless captains
       Rowed each to his desire.

  "'Where lay our loosened harness?
       Where turned our naked feet?
    Whose tavern mid the palm-trees?
       What quenchings of what heat?
    Oh fountain in the desert!
       Oh cistern in the waste!
     Oh bread we ate in secret!
       Oh cup we spilled in haste!

  "'The youth new-taught of longing,
       The widow curbed and wan--
    The good wife proud at season,
       And the maid aware of man;
     All souls, unslaked, consuming,
       Defrauded in delays,
     Desire not more than quittance
       Than I those forfeit days!'

"Oh, get him, get him, you three oldsters, as I've got him! Get what he
saws next:

  "'I dreamed to wait my pleasure,
       Unchanged my spring would bide:
     Wherefore, to wait my pleasure,
       I put my spring aside,
    Till, first in face of Fortune,
       And last in mazed disdain,
     I made Diego Valdez
       High Admiral of Spain!'

"Listen to me, guardians!" Dick cried on, his face a flame of passion.
"Don't forget for one moment that I am anything but unslaked,
consuming. I am. I burn. But I hold myself. Don't think I am a dead one
because I am a darn nice, meritorious boy at college. I am young. I am
alive. I am all lusty and husky. But I make no mistake. I hold myself.
I don't start out now to blow up on the first lap. I am just getting
ready. I am going to have my time. I am not going to spill my cup in
haste. And in the end I am not going to lament as Diego Valdez did:

  "'There walks no wind 'neath heaven
       Nor wave that shall restore
     The old careening riot
       And the clamorous, crowded shore--
     The fountain in the desert,
       The cistern in the waste,
     The bread we ate in secret,
       The cup we spilled in haste.'

"Listen, guardians! Do you know what it is to hit your man, to hit him
in hot blood--square to the jaw--and drop him cold? I want that. And I
want to love, and kiss, and risk, and play the lusty, husky fool. I
want to take my chance. I want my careening riot, and I want it while I
am young, but not while I am too young. And I'm going to have it. And
in the meantime I play the game at college, I hold myself, I equip
myself, so that when I turn loose I am going to have the best chance of
my best. Oh, believe me, I do not always sleep well of nights."

"You mean?" queried Mr. Crockett.

"Sure. That's just what I mean. I haven't gone wild yet, but just watch
me when I start."

"And you will start when you graduate?"

The remarkable youngster shook his head.

"After I graduate I'm going to take at least a year of post-graduate
courses in the College of Agriculture. You see, I'm developing a
hobby--farming. I want to do something ... something constructive. My
father wasn't constructive to amount to anything. Neither were you
fellows. You struck a new land in pioneer days, and you picked up money
like a lot of sailors shaking out nuggets from the grass roots in a
virgin placer--"

"My lad, I've some little experience in Californian farming," Mr.
Crockett interrupted in a hurt way.

"Sure you have, but you weren't constructive. You were--well, facts are
facts--you were destructive. You were a bonanza farmer. What did you
do? You took forty thousand acres of the finest Sacramento Valley soil
and you grew wheat on it year after year. You never dreamed of
rotation. You burned your straw. You exhausted your humus. You plowed
four inches and put a plow-sole like a cement sidewalk just four inches
under the surface. You exhausted that film of four inches and now you
can't get your seed back.

"You've destroyed. That's what my father did. They all did it. Well,
I'm going to take my father's money and construct. I'm going to take
worked-out wheat-land that I can buy as at a fire-sale, rip out the
plow-sole, and make it produce more in the end than it did when you
fellows first farmed it."

It was at the end of his Junior year that Mr. Crockett again mentioned
Dick's threatened period of wildness.

"Soon as I'm done with cow college," was his answer. "Then I'm going to
buy, and stock, and start a ranch that'll be a ranch. And then I'll set
out after my careening riot."

"About how large a ranch will you start with?" Mr. Davidson asked.

"Maybe fifty thousand acres, maybe five hundred thousand. It all
depends. I'm going to play unearned increment to the limit. People
haven't begun to come to California yet. Without a tap of my hand or a
turn over, fifteen years from now land that I can buy for ten dollars
an acre will be worth fifty, and what I can buy for fifty will be worth
five hundred."

"A half million acres at ten dollars an acre means five million
dollars," Mr. Crockett warned gravely.

"And at fifty it means twenty-five million," Dick laughed.

But his guardians never believed in the wild oats pilgrimage he
threatened. He might waste his fortune on new-fangled farming, but to
go literally wild after such years of self-restraint was an unthinkable
thing.

Dick took his sheepskin with small honor. He was twenty-eighth in his
class, and he had not set the college world afire. His most notable
achievement had been his resistance and bafflement of many nice girls
and of the mothers of many nice girls. Next, after that, he had
signalized his Senior year by captaining the Varsity to its first
victory over Stanford in five years. It was in the day prior to
large-salaried football coaches, when individual play meant much; but
he hammered team-work and the sacrifice of the individual into his
team, so that on Thanksgiving Day, over a vastly more brilliant eleven,
the Blue and Gold was able to serpentine its triumph down Market Street
in San Francisco.

In his post-graduate year in cow college, Dick devoted himself to
laboratory work and cut all lectures. In fact, he hired his own
lecturers, and spent a sizable fortune on them in mere traveling
expenses over California. Jacques Ribot, esteemed one of the greatest
world authorities on agricultural chemistry, who had been seduced from
his two thousand a year in France by the six thousand offered by the
University of California, who had been seduced to Hawaii by the ten
thousand of the sugar planters, Dick Forrest seduced with fifteen
thousand and the more delectable temperate climate of California on a
five years' contract.

Messrs. Crockett, Slocum, and Davidson threw up their hands in horror
and knew that this was the wild career Dick Forrest had forecast.

But this was only one of Dick Forrest's similar dissipations. He stole
from the Federal Government, at a prodigal increase of salary, its star
specialist in livestock breeding, and by similar misconduct he robbed
the University of Nebraska of its greatest milch cow professor, and
broke the heart of the Dean of the College of Agriculture of the
University of California by appropriating Professor Nirdenhammer, the
wizard of farm management.

"Cheap at the price, cheap at the price," Dick explained to his
guardians. "Wouldn't you rather see me spend my money in buying
professors than in buying race horses and actresses? Besides, the
trouble with you fellows is that you don't know the game of buying
brains. I do. That's my specialty. I'm going to make money out of them,
and, better than that, I'm going to make a dozen blades of grass grow
where you fellows didn't leave room for half a blade in the soil you
gutted."

So it can be understood how his guardians could not believe in his
promise of wild career, of kissing and risking, and hitting men hot on
the jaw. "One year more," he warned, while he delved in agricultural
chemistry, soil analysis, farm management, and traveled California with
his corps of high-salaried experts. And his guardians could only
apprehend a swift and wide dispersal of the Forrest millions when Dick
attained his majority, took charge of the totality of his fortune, and
actually embarked on his agricultural folly.

The day he was twenty-one the purchase of his principality, that
extended west from the Sacramento River to the mountain tops, was
consummated.

"An incredible price," said Mr. Crockett.

"Incredibly cheap," said Dick. "You ought to see my soil reports. You
ought to see my water-reports. And you ought to hear me sing. Listen,
guardians, to a song that is a true song. I am the singer and the song."

Whereupon, in the queer quavering falsetto that is the sense of song to
the North American Indian, the Eskimo, and the Mongol, Dick sang:

  "Hu'-tim yo'-kim koi-o-di'!
    Wi'-hi yan'-ning koi-o-di'!
    Lo'-whi yan'-ning koi-o-di'!
    Yo-ho' Nai-ni', hal-u'-dom yo nai, yo-ho' nai-nim'!"

"The music is my own," he murmured apologetically, "the way I think it
ought to have sounded. You see, no man lives who ever heard it sung.
The Nishinam got it from the Maidu, who got it from the Konkau, who
made it. But the Nishinam and the Maidu and the Konkau are gone. Their
last rancheria is not. You plowed it under, Mr. Crockett, with you
bonanza gang-plowing, plow-soling farming. And I got the song from a
certain ethnological report, volume three, of the United States Pacific
Coast Geographical and Geological Survey. Red Cloud, who was formed out
of the sky, first sang this song to the stars and the mountain flowers
in the morning of the world. I shall now sing it for you in English."

And again, in Indian falsetto, ringing with triumph, vernal and
bursting, slapping his thighs and stamping his feet to the accent, Dick
sang:

  "The acorns come down from heaven!
    I plant the short acorns in the valley!
    I plant the long acorns in the valley!
    I sprout, I, the black-oak acorn, sprout, I sprout!"

Dick Forrest's name began to appear in the newspapers with appalling
frequency. He leaped to instant fame by being the first man in
California who paid ten thousand dollars for a single bull. His
livestock specialist, whom he had filched from the Federal Government,
in England outbid the Rothschilds' Shire farm for Hillcrest Chieftain,
quickly to be known as Forrest's Folly, paying for that kingly animal
no less than five thousand guineas.

"Let them laugh," Dick told his ex-guardians. "I am importing forty
Shire mares. I'll write off half his price the first twelvemonth. He
will be the sire and grandsire of many sons and grandsons for which the
Californians will fall over themselves to buy of me at from three to
five thousand dollars a clatter."

Dick Forrest was guilty of many similar follies in those first months
of his majority. But the most unthinkable folly of all was, after he
had sunk millions into his original folly, that he turned it over to
his experts personally to develop along the general broad lines laid
down by him, placed checks upon them that they might not go
catastrophically wrong, bought a ticket in a passenger brig to Tahiti,
and went away to run wild.

Occasionally his guardians heard from him. At one time he was owner and
master of a four-masted steel sailing ship that carried the English
flag and coals from Newcastle. They knew that much, because they had
been called upon for the purchase price, because they read Dick's name
in the papers as master when his ship rescued the passengers of the
ill-fated _Orion_, and because they collected the insurance when Dick's
ship was lost with most of all hands in the great Fiji hurricane. In
1896, he was in the Klondike; in 1897, he was in Kamchatka and
scurvy-stricken; and, next, he erupted with the American flag into the
Philippines. Once, although they could never learn how nor why, he was
owner and master of a crazy tramp steamer, long since rejected by
Lloyd's, which sailed under the aegis of Siam.

From time to time business correspondence compelled them to hear from
him from various purple ports of the purple seas. Once, they had to
bring the entire political pressure of the Pacific Coast to bear upon
Washington in order to get him out of a scrape in Russia, of which
affair not one line appeared in the daily press, but which affair was
secretly provocative of ticklish joy and delight in all the
chancellories of Europe.

Incidentally, they knew that he lay wounded in Mafeking; that he pulled
through a bout with yellow fever in Guayaquil; and that he stood trial
for brutality on the high seas in New York City. Thrice they read in
the press dispatches that he was dead: once, in battle, in Mexico; and
twice, executed, in Venezuela. After such false flutterings, his
guardians refused longer to be thrilled when he crossed the Yellow Sea
in a sampan, was "rumored" to have died of beri-beri, was captured from
the Russians by the Japanese at Mukden, and endured military
imprisonment in Japan.

The one thrill of which they were still capable, was when, true to
promise, thirty years of age, his wild oats sown, he returned to
California with a wife to whom, as he announced, he had been married
several years, and whom all his three guardians found they knew. Mr.
Slocum had dropped eight hundred thousand along with the totality of
her father's fortune in the final catastrophe at the Los Cocos mine in
Chihuahua when the United States demonetized silver. Mr. Davidson had
pulled a million out of the Last Stake along with her father when he
pulled eight millions from that sunken, man-resurrected, river bed in
Amador County. Mr. Crockett, a youth at the time, had "spooned" the
Merced bottom with her father in the late 'fifties, had stood up best
man with him at Stockton when he married her mother, and, at Grant's
Pass, had played poker with him and with the then Lieutenant U.S. Grant
when all the little the western world knew of that young lieutenant was
that he was a good Indian fighter but a poor poker player.

And Dick Forrest had married the daughter of Philip Desten! It was not
a case of wishing Dick luck. It was a case of garrulous insistence on
the fact that he did not know how lucky he was. His guardians forgave
him all his wildness. He had made good. At last he had performed a
purely rational act. Better; it was a stroke of genius. Paula Desten!
Philip Desten's daughter! The Desten blood! The Destens and the
Forrests! It was enough. The three aged comrades of Forrest and Desten
of the old Gold Days, of the two who had played and passed on, were
even severe with Dick. They warned him of the extreme value of his
treasure, of the sacred duty such wedlock imposed on him, of all the
traditions and virtues of the Desten and Forrest blood, until Dick
laughed and broke in with the disconcerting statement that they were
talking like a bunch of fanciers or eugenics cranks--which was
precisely what they were talking like, although they did not care to be
told so crassly.

At any rate, the simple fact that he had married a Desten made them nod
unqualified approbation when he showed them the plans and building
estimates of the Big House. Thanks to Paula Desten, for once they were
agreed that he was spending wisely and well. As for his farming, it was
incontestible that the Harvest Group was unfalteringly producing, and
he might be allowed his hobbies. Nevertheless, as Mr. Slocum put it:
"Twenty-five thousand dollars for a mere work-horse stallion is a
madness. Work-horses are work-horses; now had it been running stock...."




CHAPTER VII



While Dick Forrest scanned the pamphlet on hog cholera issued by the
State of Iowa, through his open windows, across the wide court, began
to come sounds of the awakening of the girl who laughed from the wooden
frame by his bed and who had left on the floor of his sleeping porch,
not so many hours before, the rosy, filmy, lacy, boudoir cap so
circumspectly rescued by Oh My.

Dick heard her voice, for she awoke, like a bird, with song. He heard
her trilling, in and out through open windows, all down the long wing
that was hers. And he heard her singing in the patio garden, where,
also, she desisted long enough to quarrel with her Airedale and scold
the collie pup unholily attracted by the red-orange, divers-finned, and
many-tailed Japanese goldfish in the fountain basin.

He was aware of pleasure that she was awake. It was a pleasure that
never staled. Always, up himself for hours, he had a sense that the Big
House was not really awake until he heard Paula's morning song across
the patio.

But having tasted the pleasure of knowing her to be awake, Dick, as
usual, forgot her in his own affairs. She went out of his consciousness
as he became absorbed again in the Iowa statistics on hog cholera.

"Good morning, Merry Gentleman," was the next he heard, always adorable
music in his ears; and Paula flowed in upon him, all softness of
morning kimono and stayless body, as her arm passed around his neck and
she perched, half in his arms, on one accommodating knee of his. And he
pressed her, and advertised his awareness of her existence and
nearness, although his eyes lingered a full half minute longer on the
totals of results of Professor Kenealy's hog inoculations on Simon
Jones' farm at Washington, Iowa.

"My!" she protested. "You are too fortunate. You are sated with riches.
Here is your Lady Boy, your 'little haughty moon,' and you haven't even
said, 'Good morning, Little Lady Boy, was your sleep sweet and gentle?'"

And Dick Forrest forsook the statistical columns of Professor Kenealy's
inoculations, pressed his wife closer, kissed her, but with insistent
right fore-finger maintained his place in the pages of the pamphlet.

Nevertheless, the very terms of her "reproof prevented him from asking
what he should have asked--the prosperity of her night since the
boudoir cap had been left upon his sleeping porch. He shut the pamphlet
on his right fore-finger, at the place he intended to resume, and added
his right arm to his left about her.

"Oh!" she cried. "Oh! Oh! Listen!"

From without came the flute-calls of quail. She quivered against him
with the joy she took in the mellow-sweet notes.

"The coveys are breaking up," he said.

"It means spring," Paula cried.

"And the sign that good weather has come."

"And love!"

"And nest-building and egg-laying," Dick laughed. "Never has the world
seemed more fecund than this morning. Lady Isleton is farrowed of
eleven. The angoras were brought down this morning for the kidding. You
should have seen them. And the wild canaries have been discussing
matrimony in the patio for hours. I think some free lover is trying to
break up their monogamic heaven with modern love-theories. It's a
wonder you slept through the discussion. Listen! There they go now. Is
that applause? Or is it a riot?"

Arose a thin twittering, like elfin pipings, with sharp pitches and
excited shrillnesses, to which Dick and Paula lent delighted ears,
till, suddenly, with the abruptness of the trump of doom, all the
microphonic chorus of the tiny golden lovers was swept away,
obliterated, in a Gargantuan blast of sound--no less wild, no less
musical, no less passionate with love, but immense, dominant,
compelling by very vastitude of volume.

The eager eyes of the man and woman sought instantly the channel past
open French windows and the screen of the sleeping porch to the road
through the lilacs, while they waited breathlessly for the great
stallion to appear who trumpeted his love-call before him. Again,
unseen, he trumpeted, and Dick said:

"I will sing you a song, my haughty moon. It is not my song. It is the
Mountain Lad's. It is what he nickers. Listen! He sings it again. This
is what he says: 'Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills. I fill
the wide valleys. The mares hear me, and startle, in quiet pastures;
for they know me. The grass grows rich and richer, the land is filled
with fatness, and the sap is in the trees. It is the spring. The spring
is mine. I am monarch of my kingdom of the spring. The mares remember
my voice. They know me aforetime through their mothers before them.
Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills, and the wide valleys are my
heralds, echoing the sound of my approach.'"

And Paula pressed closer to her husband, and was pressed, as her lips
touched his forehead, and as the pair of them, gazing at the empty road
among the lilacs, saw it filled with the eruptive vision of Mountain
Lad, majestic and mighty, the gnat-creature of a man upon his back
absurdly small; his eyes wild and desirous, with the blue sheen that
surfaces the eyes of stallions; his mouth, flecked with the froth and
fret of high spirit, now brushed to burnished knees of impatience, now
tossed skyward to utterance of that vast, compelling call that shook
the air.

Almost as an echo, from afar off, came a thin-sweet answering whinney.

"It is the Fotherington Princess," Paula breathed softly.

Again Mountain Lad trumpeted his call, and Dick chanted:

"Hear me! I am Eros! I stamp upon the hills!"

And almost, for a flash of an instant, circled soft and close in his
arms, Paula knew resentment of her husband's admiration for the
splendid beast. And the next instant resentment vanished, and, in
acknowledgment of due debt, she cried gaily:

"And now, Red Cloud! the Song of the Acorn!" Dick glanced half absently
to her from the pamphlet folded on his finger, and then, with equal
pitch of gaiety, sang:

   "The acorns come down from heaven!
    I plant the short acorns in the valley!
    I plant the long acorns in the valley!
    I sprout, I, the black-oak acorn, sprout, I sprout!"

She had impressed herself very close against him during his moment of
chanting, but, in the first moments that succeeded she felt the
restless movement of the hand that held the finger-marked hog-pamphlet
and caught the swift though involuntary flash of his eye to the clock
on his desk that marked 11:25. Again she tried to hold him, although,
with equal involuntariness, her attempt was made in mild terms of
resentment.

"You are a strange and wonderful Red Cloud," she said slowly.
"Sometimes almost am I convinced that you are utterly Red Cloud,
planting your acorns and singing your savage joy of the planting. And,
sometimes, almost you are to me the ultramodern man, the last word of
the two-legged, male human that finds Trojan adventures in sieges of
statistics, and, armed with test tubes and hypodermics, engages in
gladiatorial contests with weird microorganisms. Almost, at times, it
seems you should wear glasses and be bald-headed; almost, it seems...."

"That I have no right of vigor to possess an armful of girl," he
completed for her, drawing her still closer. "That I am a silly
scientific brute who doesn't merit his 'vain little breath of sweet
rose-colored dust.' Well, listen, I have a plan. In a few days...."

But his plan died in birth, for, at their backs, came a discreet cough
of warning, and, both heads turning as one they saw Bonbright, the
assistant secretary, with a sheaf of notes on yellow sheets in his hand.

"Four telegrams," he murmured apologetically. "Mr. Blake is confident
that two of them are very important. One of them concerns that Chile
shipment of bulls...."

And Paula, slowly drawing away from her husband and rising to her feet,
could feel him slipping from her toward his tables of statistics, bills
of lading, and secretaries, foremen, and managers.

"Oh, Paula," Dick called, as she was fading through the doorway; "I've
christened the last boy--he's to be known as 'Oh Ho.' How do you like
it?"

Her reply began with a hint of forlornness that vanished with her
smile, as she warned:

"You _will_ play ducks and drakes with the house-boys' names."

"I never do it with pedigreed stock," he assured her with a solemnity
belied by the challenging twinkle in his eyes.

"I didn't mean that," was her retort. "I meant that you were exhausting
the possibilities of the language. Before long you'll have to be
calling them Oh Bel, Oh Hell, and Oh Go to Hell. Your 'Oh' was a
mistake. You should have started with 'Red.' Then you could have had
Red Bull, Red Horse, Red Dog, Red Frog, Red Fern--and, and all the rest
of the reds."

She mingled her laughter with his, as she vanished, and, the next
moment, the telegram before him, he was immersed in the details of the
shipment, at two hundred and fifty dollars each, F. O. B., of three
hundred registered yearling bulls to the beef ranges of Chile. Even so,
vaguely, with vague pleasure, he heard Paula sing her way back across
the patio to her long wing of house; though he was unaware that her
voice was a trifle, just the merest trifle, subdued.




CHAPTER VIII



Five minutes after Paula had left him, punctual to the second, the four
telegrams disposed of, Dick was getting into a ranch motor car, along
with Thayer, the Idaho buyer, and Naismith, the special correspondent
for the _Breeders' Gazette_. Wardman, the sheep manager, joined them at
the corrals where several thousand young Shropshire rams had been
assembled for inspection.

There was little need for conversation. Thayer was distinctly
disappointed in this, for he felt that the purchase of ten carloads of
such expensive creatures was momentous enough to merit much
conversation.

"They speak for themselves," Dick had assured him, and turned aside to
give data to Naismith for his impending article on Shropshires in
California and the Northwest.

"I wouldn't advise you to bother to select them," Dick told Thayer ten
minutes later. "The average is all top. You could spend a week picking
your ten carloads and have no higher grade than if you had taken the
first to hand."

This cool assumption that the sale was already consummated so perturbed
Thayer, that, along with the sure knowledge that he had never seen so
high a quality of rams, he was nettled into changing his order to
twenty carloads.

As he told Naismith, after they had regained the Big House and as they
chalked their cues to finish the interrupted game:

"It's my first visit to Forrest's. He's a wizard. I've been buying in
the East and importing. But those Shropshires won my judgment. You
noticed I doubled my order. Those Idaho buyers will be wild for them. I
only had buying orders straight for six carloads, and contingent on my
judgment for two carloads more; but if every buyer doesn't double his
order, straight and contingent, when he sees them rams, and if there
isn't a stampede for what's left, I don't know sheep. They're the
goods. If they don't jump up the sheep game of Idaho ... well, then
Forrest's no breeder and I'm no buyer, that's all."

As the warning gong for lunch rang out--a huge bronze gong from Korea
that was never struck until it was first indubitably ascertained that
Paula was awake--Dick joined the young people at the goldfish fountain
in the big patio. Bert Wainwright, variously advised and commanded by
his sister, Rita, and by Paula and her sisters, Lute and Ernestine, was
striving with a dip-net to catch a particularly gorgeous flower of a
fish whose size and color and multiplicity of fins and tails had led
Paula to decide to segregate him for the special breeding tank in the
fountain of her own secret patio. Amid high excitement, and much
squealing and laughter, the deed was accomplished, the big fish
deposited in a can and carried away by the waiting Italian gardener.

"And what have you to say for yourself?" Ernestine challenged, as Dick
joined them.

"Nothing," he answered sadly. "The ranch is depleted. Three hundred
beautiful young bulls depart to-morrow for South America, and
Thayer--you met him last night--is taking twenty carloads of rams. All
I can say is that my congratulations are extended to Idaho and Chile."

"Plant more acorns," Paula laughed, her arms about her sisters, the
three of them smilingly expectant of an inevitable antic.

"Oh, Dick, sing your acorn song," Lute begged.

He shook his head solemnly.

"I've got a better one. It's purest orthodoxy. It's got Red Cloud and
his acorn song skinned to death. Listen! This is the song of the little
East-sider, on her first trip to the country under the auspices of her
Sunday School. She's quite young. Pay particular attention to her lisp."

And then Dick chanted, lisping:

  "The goldfish thwimmeth in the bowl,
    The robin thiths upon the tree;
    What maketh them thit so eathily?
    Who stuckth the fur upon their breasths?
      God! God! He done it!"

"Cribbed," was Ernestine's judgment, as the laughter died away.

"Sure," Dick agreed. "I got it from the _Rancher and Stockman_, that
got it from the _Swine Breeders' Journal_, that got it from the
_Western Advocate_, that got it from _Public Opinion_, that got it,
undoubtedly, from the little girl herself, or, rather from her Sunday
School teacher. For that matter I am convinced it was first printed in
_Our Dumb Animals_."

The bronze gong rang out its second call, and Paula, one arm around
Dick, the other around Rita, led the way into the house, while,
bringing up the rear, Bert Wainwright showed Lute Ernestine a new tango
step.

"One thing, Thayer," Dick said in an aside, after releasing himself
from the girls, as they jostled in confusion where they met Thayer and
Naismith at the head of the stairway leading down to the dining room.
"Before you leave us, cast your eyes over those Merinos. I really have
to brag about them, and American sheepmen will have to come to them. Of
course, started with imported stock, but I've made a California strain
that will make the French breeders sit up. See Wardman and take your
pick. Get Naismith to look them over with you. Stick half a dozen of
them in your train-load, with my compliments, and let your Idaho
sheepmen get a line on them."

They seated at a table, capable of indefinite extension, in a long, low
dining room that was a replica of the hacienda dining rooms of the
Mexican land-kings of old California. The floor was of large brown
tiles, the beamed ceiling and the walls were whitewashed, and the huge,
undecorated, cement fireplace was an achievement in massiveness and
simplicity. Greenery and blooms nodded from without the deep-embrasured
windows, and the room expressed the sense of cleanness, chastity, and
coolness.

On the walls, but not crowded, were a number of canvases--most
ambitious of all, in the setting of honor, all in sad grays, a twilight
Mexican scene by Xavier Martinez, of a peon, with a crooked-stick plow
and two bullocks, turning a melancholy furrow across the foreground of
a sad, illimitable, Mexican plain. There were brighter pictures, of
early Mexican-Californian life, a pastel of twilight eucalyptus with a
sunset-tipped mountain beyond, by Reimers, a moonlight by Peters, and a
Griffin stubble-field across which gleamed and smoldered California
summer hills of tawny brown and purple-misted, wooded canyons.

"Say," Thayer muttered in an undertone across to Naismith, while Dick
and the girls were in the thick of exclamatory and giggling banter,
"here's some stuff for that article of yours, if you touch upon the Big
House. I've seen the servants' dining room. Forty head sit down to it
every meal, including gardeners, chauffeurs, and outside help. It's a
boarding house in itself. Some head, some system, take it from me. That
Chiney boy, Oh Joy, is a wooz. He's housekeeper, or manager, of the
whole shebang, or whatever you want to call his job--and, say, it runs
that smooth you can't hear it."

"Forrest's the real wooz," Naismith nodded. "He's the brains that picks
brains. He could run an army, a campaign, a government, or even a
three-ring circus."

"Which last is some compliment," Thayer concurred heartily.

"Oh, Paula," Dick said across to his wife. "I just got word that Graham
arrives to-morrow morning. Better tell Oh Joy to put him in the
watch-tower. It's man-size quarters, and it's possible he may carry out
his threat and work on his book."

"Graham?--Graham?" Paula queried aloud of her memory. "Do I know him?"

"You met him once two years ago, in Santiago, at the Café Venus. He had
dinner with us."

"Oh, one of those naval officers?"

Dick shook his head.

"The civilian. Don't you remember that big blond fellow--you talked
music with him for half an hour while Captain Joyce talked our heads
off to prove that the United States should clean Mexico up and out with
the mailed fist."

"Oh, to be sure," Paula vaguely recollected. "He'd met you somewhere
before... South Africa, wasn't it? Or the Philippines?"

"That's the chap. South Africa, it was. Evan Graham. Next time we met
was on the _Times_ dispatch boat on the Yellow Sea. And we crossed
trails a dozen times after that, without meeting, until that night in
the Café Venus.

"Heavens--he left Bora-Bora, going east, two days before I dropped
anchor bound west on my way to Samoa. I came out of Apia, with letters
for him from the American consul, the day before he came in. We missed
each other by three days at Levuka--I was sailing the _Wild Duck_ then.
He pulled out of Suva as guest on a British cruiser. Sir Everard Im
Thurm, British High Commissioner of the South Seas, gave me more
letters for Graham. I missed him at Port Resolution and at Vila in the
New Hebrides. The cruiser was junketing, you see. I beat her in and out
of the Santa Cruz Group. It was the same thing in the Solomons. The
cruiser, after shelling the cannibal villages at Langa-Langa, steamed
out in the morning. I sailed in that afternoon. I never did deliver
those letters in person, and the next time I laid eyes on him was at
the Café Venus two years ago."

"But who about him, and what about him?" Paula queried. "And what's the
book?"

"Well, first of all, beginning at the end, he's broke--that is, for
him, he's broke. He's got an income of several thousand a year left,
but all that his father left him is gone. No; he didn't blow it. He got
in deep, and the 'silent panic' several years ago just about cleaned
him. But he doesn't whimper.

"He's good stuff, old American stock, a Yale man. The book--he expects
to make a bit on it--covers last year's trip across South America, west
coast to east coast. It was largely new ground. The Brazilian
government voluntarily voted him a honorarium of ten thousand dollars
for the information he brought out concerning unexplored portions of
Brazil. Oh, he's a man, all man. He delivers the goods. You know the
type--clean, big, strong, simple; been everywhere, seen everything,
knows most of a lot of things, straight, square, looks you in the
eyes--well, in short, a man's man."

Ernestine clapped her hands, flung a tantalizing, man-challenging,
man-conquering glance at Bert Wainwright, and exclaimed: "And he comes
tomorrow!"

Dick shook his head reprovingly.

"Oh, nothing in that direction, Ernestine. Just as nice girls as you
have tried to hook Evan Graham before now. And, between ourselves, I
couldn't blame them. But he's had good wind and fast legs, and they've
always failed to run him down or get him into a corner, where, dazed
and breathless, he's mechanically muttered 'Yes' to certain
interrogatories and come out of the trance to find himself, roped,
thrown, branded, and married. Forget him, Ernestine. Stick by golden
youth and let it drop its golden apples. Pick them up, and golden youth
with them, making a noise like stupid failure all the time you are
snaring swift-legged youth. But Graham's out of the running. He's old
like me--just about the same age--and, like me, he's run a lot of those
queer races. He knows how to make a get-away. He's been cut by barbed
wire, nose-twitched, neck-burnt, cinched to a fare-you-well, and he
remains subdued but uncatchable. He doesn't care for young things. In
fact, you may charge him with being wobbly, but I plead guilty, by
proxy, that he is merely old, hard bitten, and very wise."




CHAPTER IX



"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" Dick shouted, stamping with jingling
spurs through the Big House in quest of its Little Lady.

He came to the door that gave entrance to her long wing. It was a door
without a knob, a huge panel of wood in a wood-paneled wall. But Dick
shared the secret of the hidden spring with his wife, pressed the
spring, and the door swung wide.

"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he called and stamped down the length of
her quarters.

A glance into the bathroom, with its sunken Roman bath and descending
marble steps, was fruitless, as were the glances he sent into Paula's
wardrobe room and dressing room. He passed the short, broad stairway
that led to her empty window-seat divan in what she called her Juliet
Tower, and thrilled at sight of an orderly disarray of filmy, pretty,
lacy woman's things that he knew she had spread out for her own
sensuous delight of contemplation. He fetched up for a moment at a
drawing easel, his reiterant cry checked on his lips, and threw a laugh
of recognition and appreciation at the sketch, just outlined, of an
awkward, big-boned, knobby, weanling colt caught in the act of madly
whinneying for its mother.

"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he shouted before him, out to the
sleeping porch; and found only a demure, brow-troubled Chinese woman of
thirty, who smiled self-effacing embarrassment into his eyes.

This was Paula's maid, Oh Dear, so named by Dick, many years before,
because of a certain solicitous contraction of her delicate brows that
made her appear as if ever on the verge of saying, "Oh dear!" In fact,
Dick had taken her, as a child almost, for Paula's service, from a
fishing village on the Yellow Sea where her widow-mother earned as much
as four dollars in a prosperous year at making nets for the fishermen.
Oh Dear's first service for Paula had been aboard the three-topmast
schooner, _All Away_, at the same time that Oh Joy, cabin-boy, had
begun to demonstrate the efficiency that enabled him, through the
years, to rise to the majordomoship of the Big House.

"Where is your mistress, Oh Dear?" Dick asked.

Oh Dear shrank away in an agony of bashfulness.

Dick waited.

"She maybe with 'm young ladies--I don't know," Oh Dear stammered; and
Dick, in very mercy, swung away on his heel.

"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he shouted, as he stamped out under the
porte cochère just as a ranch limousine swung around the curve among
the lilacs.

"I'll be hanged if I know," a tall, blond man in a light summer suit
responded from the car; and the next moment Dick Forrest and Evan
Graham were shaking hands.

Oh My and Oh Ho carried in the hand baggage, and Dick accompanied his
guest to the watch tower quarters.

"You'll have to get used to us, old man," Dick was explaining. "We run
the ranch like clockwork, and the servants are wonders; but we allow
ourselves all sorts of loosenesses. If you'd arrived two minutes later
there'd have been no one to welcome you but the Chinese boys. I was
just going for a ride, and Paula--Mrs. Forrest--has disappeared."

The two men were almost of a size, Graham topping his host by perhaps
an inch, but losing that inch in the comparative breadth of shoulders
and depth of chest. Graham was, if anything, a clearer blond than
Forrest, although both were equally gray of eye, equally clear in the
whites of the eyes, and equally and precisely similarly bronzed by sun
and weather-beat. Graham's features were in a slightly larger mold; his
eyes were a trifle longer, although this was lost again by a heavier
droop of lids. His nose hinted that it was a shade straighter as well
as larger than Dick's, and his lips were a shade thicker, a shade
redder, a shade more bowed with fulsome-ness.

Forrest's hair was light brown to chestnut, while Graham's carried a
whispering advertisement that it would have been almost golden in its
silk had it not been burned almost to sandiness by the sun. The cheeks
of both were high-boned, although the hollows under Forrest's
cheek-bones were more pronounced. Both noses were large-nostriled and
sensitive. And both mouths, while generously proportioned, carried the
impression of girlish sweetness and chastity along with the muscles
that could draw the lips to the firmness and harshness that would not
give the lie to the square, uncleft chins beneath.

But the inch more in height and the inch less in chest-girth gave Evan
Graham a grace of body and carriage that Dick Forrest did not possess.
In this particular of build, each served well as a foil to the other.
Graham was all light and delight, with a hint--but the slightest of
hints--of Prince Charming. Forrest's seemed a more efficient and
formidable organism, more dangerous to other life, stouter-gripped on
its own life.

Forrest threw a glance at his wrist watch as he talked, but in that
glance, without pause or fumble of focus, with swift certainty of
correlation, he read the dial.

"Eleven-thirty," he said. "Come along at once, Graham. We don't eat
till twelve-thirty. I am sending out a shipment of bulls, three hundred
of them, and I'm downright proud of them. You simply must see them.
Never mind your riding togs. Oh Ho--fetch a pair of my leggings. You,
Oh Joy, order Altadena saddled.--What saddle do you prefer, Graham?"

"Oh, anything, old man."

"English?--Australian?--McClellan?--Mexican?" Dick insisted.

"McClellan, if it's no trouble," Graham surrendered.

 They sat their horses by the side of the road and watched the last of
the herd beginning its long journey to Chili disappear around the bend.

"I see what you're doing--it's great," Graham said with sparkling eyes.
"I've fooled some myself with the critters, when I was a youngster,
down in the Argentine. If I'd had beef-blood like that to build on, I
mightn't have taken the cropper I did."

"But that was before alfalfa and artesian wells," Dick smoothed for
him. "The time wasn't ripe for the Shorthorn. Only scrubs could survive
the droughts. They were strong in staying powers but light on the
scales. And refrigerator steamships hadn't been invented. That's what
revolutionized the game down there."

"Besides, I was a mere youngster," Graham added. "Though that meant
nothing much. There was a young German tackled it at the same time I
did, with a tenth of my capital. He hung it out, lean years, dry years,
and all. He's rated in seven figures now."

They turned their horses back for the Big House. Dick flirted his wrist
to see his watch.

"Lots of time," he assured his guest. "I'm glad you saw those
yearlings. There was one reason why that young German stuck it out. He
had to. You had your father's money to fall back on, and, I imagine not
only that your feet itched, but that your chief weakness lay in that
you could afford to solace the itching."

 "Over there are the fish ponds," Dick said, indicating with a nod of
his head to the right an invisible area beyond the lilacs. "You'll have
plenty of opportunity to catch a mess of trout, or bass, or even
catfish. You see, I'm a miser. I love to make things work. There may be
a justification for the eight-hour labor day, but I make the work-day
of water just twenty-four hours' long. The ponds are in series,
according to the nature of the fish. But the water starts working up in
the mountains. It irrigates a score of mountain meadows before it makes
the plunge and is clarified to crystal clearness in the next few rugged
miles; and at the plunge from the highlands it generates half the power
and all the lighting used on the ranch. Then it sub-irrigates lower
levels, flows in here to the fish ponds, and runs out and irrigates
miles of alfalfa farther on. And, believe me, if by that time it hadn't
reached the flat of the Sacramento, I'd be pumping out the drainage for
more irrigation."

"Man, man," Graham laughed, "you could make a poem on the wonder of
water. I've met fire-worshipers, but you're the first real
water-worshiper I've ever encountered. And you're no desert-dweller,
either. You live in a land of water--pardon the bull--but, as I was
saying..."

Graham never completed his thought. From the right, not far away, came
the unmistakable ring of shod hoofs on concrete, followed by a mighty
splash and an outburst of women's cries and laughter. Quickly the cries
turned to alarm, accompanied by the sounds of a prodigious splashing
and floundering as of some huge, drowning beast. Dick bent his head and
leaped his horse through the lilacs, Graham, on Altadena, followed at
his heels. They emerged in a blaze of sunshine, on an open space among
the trees, and Graham came upon as unexpected a picture as he had ever
chanced upon in his life.

Tree-surrounded, the heart of the open space was a tank, four-sided of
concrete. The upper end of the tank, full width, was a broad spillway,
sheened with an inch of smooth-slipping water. The sides were
perpendicular. The lower end, roughly corrugated, sloped out gently to
solid footing. Here, in distress that was consternation, and in fear
that was panic, excitedly bobbed up and down a cowboy in bearskin
chaps, vacuously repeating the exclamation, "Oh God! Oh God!"--the
first division of it rising in inflection, the second division
inflected fallingly with despair. On the edge of the farther side,
facing him, in bathing suits, legs dangling toward the water, sat three
terrified nymphs.

And in the tank, the center of the picture, a great horse, bright bay
and wet and ruddy satin, vertical in the water, struck upward and
outward into the free air with huge fore-hoofs steel-gleaming in the
wet and sun, while on its back, slipping and clinging, was the white
form of what Graham took at first to be some glorious youth. Not until
the stallion, sinking, emerged again by means of the powerful beat of
his legs and hoofs, did Graham realize that it was a woman who rode
him--a woman as white as the white silken slip of a bathing suit that
molded to her form like a marble-carven veiling of drapery. As marble
was her back, save that the fine delicate muscles moved and crept under
the silken suit as she strove to keep her head above water. Her slim
round arms were twined in yards of half-drowned stallion-mane, while
her white round knees slipped on the sleek, wet, satin pads of the
great horse's straining shoulder muscles. The white toes of her dug for
a grip into the smooth sides of the animal, vainly seeking a hold on
the ribs beneath.

In a breath, or the half of a breath, Graham saw the whole breathless
situation, realized that the white wonderful creature was a woman, and
sensed the smallness and daintiness of her despite her gladiatorial
struggles. She reminded him of some Dresden china figure set absurdly
small and light and strangely on the drowning back of a titanic beast.
So dwarfed was she by the bulk of the stallion that she was a midget,
or a tiny fairy from fairyland come true.

As she pressed her cheek against the great arching neck, her
golden-brown hair, wet from being under, flowing and tangled, seemed
tangled in the black mane of the stallion. But it was her face that
smote Graham most of all. It was a boy's face; it was a woman's face;
it was serious and at the same time amused, expressing the pleasure it
found woven with the peril. It was a white woman's face--and modern;
and yet, to Graham, it was all-pagan. This was not a creature and a
situation one happened upon in the twentieth century. It was straight
out of old Greece. It was a Maxfield Parrish reminiscence from the
Arabian Nights. Genii might be expected to rise from those troubled
depths, or golden princes, astride winged dragons, to swoop down out of
the blue to the rescue.

The stallion, forcing itself higher out of water, missed, by a shade,
from turning over backward as it sank. Glorious animal and glorious
rider disappeared together beneath the surface, to rise together, a
second later, the stallion still pawing the air with fore-hoofs the
size of dinner plates, the rider still clinging to the sleek,
satin-coated muscles. Graham thought, with a gasp, what might have
happened had the stallion turned over. A chance blow from any one of
those four enormous floundering hoofs could have put out and quenched
forever the light and sparkle of that superb, white-bodied,
fire-animated woman.

"Ride his neck!" Dick shouted. "Catch his foretop and get on his neck
till he balances out!"

The woman obeyed, digging her toes into the evasive muscle-pads for the
quick effort, and leaping upward, one hand twined in the wet mane, the
other hand free and up-stretched, darting between the ears and
clutching the foretop. The next moment, as the stallion balanced out
horizontally in obedience to her shiftage of weight, she had slipped
back to the shoulders. Holding with one hand to the mane, she waved a
white arm in the air and flashed a smile of acknowledgment to Forrest;
and, as Graham noted, she was cool enough to note him on his horse
beside Forrest. Also, Graham realized that the turning of her head and
the waving of her arm was only partly in bravado, was more in aesthetic
wisdom of the picture she composed, and was, most of all, sheer joy of
daring and emprise of the blood and the flesh and the life that was she.

"Not many women'd tackle that," Dick said quietly, as Mountain Lad,
easily retaining his horizontal position once it had been attained,
swam to the lower end of the tank and floundered up the rough slope to
the anxious cowboy.

The latter swiftly adjusted the halter with a turn of chain between the
jaws. But Paula, still astride, leaned forward, imperiously took the
lead-part from the cowboy, whirled Mountain Lad around to face Forrest,
and saluted.

"Now you will have to go away," she called. "This is our hen party, and
the stag public is not admitted."

Dick laughed, saluted acknowledgment, and led the way back through the
lilacs to the road.

"Who ... who was it?" Graham queried.

"Paula--Mrs. Forrest--the boy girl, the child that never grew up, the
grittiest puff of rose-dust that was ever woman."

"My breath is quite taken away," Graham said. "Do your people do such
stunts frequently?"

"First time she ever did that," Forrest replied. "That was Mountain
Lad. She rode him straight down the spill-way--tobogganed with him,
twenty-two hundred and forty pounds of him."

"Risked his neck and legs as well as her own," was Graham's comment.

"Thirty-five thousand dollars' worth of neck and legs," Dick smiled.
"That's what a pool of breeders offered me for him last year after he'd
cleaned up the Coast with his get as well as himself. And as for Paula,
she could break necks and legs at that price every day in the year
until I went broke--only she doesn't. She never has accidents."

"I wouldn't have given tuppence for her chance if he'd turned over."

"But he didn't," Dick answered placidly. "That's Paula's luck. She's
tough to kill. Why, I've had her under shell-fire where she was
actually disappointed because she didn't get hit, or killed, or
near-killed. Four batteries opened on us, shrapnel, at mile-range, and
we had to cover half a mile of smooth hill-brow for shelter. I really
felt I was justified in charging her with holding back. She did admit a
'trifle.' We've been married ten or a dozen years now, and, d'ye know,
sometimes it seems to me I don't know her at all, and that nobody knows
her, and that she doesn't know herself--just the same way as you and I
can look at ourselves in a mirror and wonder who the devil we are
anyway. Paula and I have one magic formula: _Damn the expense when fun
is selling_. And it doesn't matter whether the price is in dollars,
hide, or life. It's our way and our luck. It works. And, d'ye know,
we've never been gouged on the price yet."




CHAPTER X



It was a stag lunch. As Forrest explained, the girls were
"hen-partying."

"I doubt you'll see a soul of them till four o'clock, when Ernestine,
that's one of Paula's sisters, is going to wallop me at tennis--at
least so she's threatened and pledged."

And Graham sat through the lunch, where only men sat, took his part in
the conversation on breeds and breeding, learned much, contributed a
mite from his own world-experiences, and was unable to shake from his
eyes the persistent image of his hostess, the vision of the rounded and
delicate white of her against the dark wet background of the swimming
stallion. And all the afternoon, looking over prize Merinos and
Berkshire gilts, continually that vision burned up under his eyelids.
Even at four, in the tennis court, himself playing against Ernestine,
he missed more than one stroke because the image of the flying ball
would suddenly be eclipsed by the image of a white marble figure of a
woman that strove and clung on the back of a great horse.

Graham, although an outlander, knew his California, and, while every
girl of the swimming suits was gowned for dinner, was not surprised to
find no man similarly accoutered. Nor had he made the mistake of so
being himself, despite the Big House and the magnificent scale on which
it operated.

Between the first and second gongs, all the guests drifted into the
long dining room. Sharp after the second gong, Dick Forrest arrived and
precipitated cocktails. And Graham impatiently waited the appearance of
the woman who had worried his eyes since noon. He was prepared for all
manner of disappointment. Too many gorgeous stripped athletes had he
seen slouched into conventional garmenting, to expect too much of the
marvelous creature in the white silken swimming suit when it should
appear garbed as civilized women garb.

He caught his breath with an imperceptible gasp when she entered. She
paused, naturally, for just the right flash of an instant in the arched
doorway, limned against the darkness behind her, the soft glow of the
indirect lighting full upon her. Graham's lips gasped apart, and
remained apart, his eyes ravished with the beauty and surprise of her
he had deemed so small, so fairy-like. Here was no delicate midget of a
child-woman or boy-girl on a stallion, but a grand lady, as only a
small woman can be grand on occasion.

Taller in truth was she, as well as in seeming, than he had judged her,
and as finely proportioned in her gown as in her swimming suit. He
noted her shining gold-brown hair piled high; the healthy tinge of her
skin that was clean and clear and white; the singing throat, full and
round, incomparably set on a healthy chest; and the gown, dull blue, a
sort of medieval thing with half-fitting, half-clinging body, with
flowing sleeves and trimmings of gold-jeweled bands.

She smiled an embracing salutation and greeting. Graham recognized it
as kin to the one he had seen when she smiled from the back of the
stallion. When she started forward, he could not fail to see the
inimitable way she carried the cling and weight of her draperies with
her knees--round knees, he knew, that he had seen press desperately
into the round muscle-pads of Mountain Lad. Graham observed, also, that
she neither wore nor needed corseting. Nor could he fail, as she
crossed the floor, to see two women: one, the grand lady, the mistress
of the Big House; one, the lovely equestrienne statue beneath the
dull-blue, golden-trimmed gown, that no gowning could ever make his
memory forget.

She was upon them, among them, and Graham's hand held hers in the
formal introduction as he was made welcome to the Big House and all the
hacienda in a voice that he knew was a singing voice and that could
proceed only from a throat that pillared, such as hers, from a chest
deep as hers despite her smallness.

At table, across the corner from her, he could not help a surreptitious
studying of her. While he held his own in the general fun and
foolishness, it was his hostess that mostly filled the circle of his
eye and the content of his mind.

It was as bizarre a company as Graham had ever sat down to dinner with.
The sheep-buyer and the correspondent for the _Breeders' Gazette_ were
still guests. Three machine-loads of men, women, and girls, totaling
fourteen, had arrived shortly before the first gong and had remained to
ride home in the moonlight. Graham could not remember their names; but
he made out that they came from some valley town thirty miles away
called Wickenberg, and that they were of the small-town banking,
professional, and wealthy-farmer class. They were full of spirits,
laughter, and the latest jokes and catches sprung in the latest slang.

"I see right now," Graham told Paula, "if your place continues to be
the caravanserai which it has been since my arrival, that I might as
well give up trying to remember names and people."

"I don't blame you," she laughed concurrence. "But these are neighbors.
They drop in any time. Mrs. Watson, there, next to Dick, is of the old
land-aristocracy. Her grandfather, Wicken, came across the Sierras in
1846. Wickenberg is named after him. And that pretty dark-eyed girl is
her daughter...."

And while Paula gave him a running sketch of the chance guests, Graham
heard scarce half she said, so occupied was he in trying to sense his
way to an understanding of her. Naturalness was her keynote, was his
first judgment. In not many moments he had decided that her key-note
was joy. But he was dissatisfied with both conclusions, and knew he had
not put his finger on her. And then it came to him--pride. That was it!
It was in her eye, in the poise of her head, in the curling tendrils of
her hair, in her sensitive nostrils, in the mobile lips, in the very
pitch and angle of the rounded chin, in her hands, small, muscular and
veined, that he knew at sight to be the hard-worked hands of one who
had spent long hours at the piano. Pride it was, in every muscle,
nerve, and quiver of her--conscious, sentient, stinging pride.

She might be joyous and natural, boy and woman, fun and frolic; but
always the pride was there, vibrant, tense, intrinsic, the basic stuff
of which she was builded. She was a woman, frank, outspoken,
straight-looking, plastic, democratic; but toy she was not. At times,
to him, she seemed to glint an impression of steel--thin, jewel-like
steel. She seemed strength in its most delicate terms and fabrics. He
fondled the impression of her as of silverspun wire, of fine leather,
of twisted hair-sennit from the heads of maidens such as the Marquesans
make, of carven pearl-shell for the lure of the bonita, and of barbed
ivory at the heads of sea-spears such as the Eskimos throw.

"All right, Aaron," they heard Dick Forrest's voice rising, in a lull,
from the other end of the table. "Here's something from Phillips Brooks
for you to chew on. Brooks said that no man 'has come to true greatness
who has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to his race, and
that what God gives him, he gives him for mankind.'"

"So at last you believe in God?" the man, addressed Aaron, genially
sneered back. He was a slender, long-faced olive-brunette, with
brilliant black eyes and the blackest of long black beards.

"I'm hanged if I know," Dick answered. "Anyway, I quoted only
figuratively. Call it morality, call it good, call it evolution."

"A man doesn't have to be intellectually correct in order to be great,"
intruded a quiet, long-faced Irishman, whose sleeves were threadbare
and frayed. "And by the same token many men who are most correct in
sizing up the universe have been least great."

"True for you, Terrence," Dick applauded.

"It's a matter of definition," languidly spoke up an unmistakable
Hindoo, crumbling his bread with exquisitely slender and small-boned
fingers. "What shall we mean as _great?"_

"Shall we say _beauty?"_ softly queried a tragic-faced youth, sensitive
and shrinking, crowned with an abominably trimmed head of long hair.

Ernestine rose suddenly at her place, hands on table, leaning forward
with a fine simulation of intensity.

 "They're off!" she cried. "They're off! Now we'll have the universe
settled all over again for the thousandth time. Theodore"--to the
youthful poet--"it's a poor start. Get into the running. Ride your
father ion and your mother ion, and you'll finish three lengths ahead."

A roar of laughter was her reward, and the poet blushed and receded
into his sensitive shell.

Ernestine turned on the black-bearded one:

"Now, Aaron. He's not in form. You start it. You know how. Begin: 'As
Bergson so well has said, with the utmost refinement of philosophic
speech allied with the most comprehensive intellectual outlook
that....'"

More laughter roared down the table, drowning Ernestine's conclusion as
well as the laughing retort of the black-bearded one.

"Our philosophers won't have a chance to-night," Paula stole in an
aside to Graham.

"Philosophers?" he questioned back. "They didn't come with the
Wickenberg crowd. Who and what are they? I'm all at sea."

"They--" Paula hesitated. "They live here. They call themselves the
jungle-birds. They have a camp in the woods a couple of miles away,
where they never do anything except read and talk. I'll wager, right
now, you'll find fifty of Dick's latest, uncatalogued books in their
cabins. They have the run of the library, as well, and you'll see them
drifting in and out, any time of the day or night, with their arms full
of books--also, the latest magazines. Dick says they are responsible
for his possessing the most exhaustive and up-to-date library on
philosophy on the Pacific Coast. In a way, they sort of digest such
things for him. It's great fun for Dick, and, besides, it saves him
time. He's a dreadfully hard worker, you know."

"I understand that they... that Dick takes care of them?" Graham asked,
the while he pleasured in looking straight into the blue eyes that
looked so straight into his.

As she answered, he was occupied with noting the faintest hint of
bronze--perhaps a trick of the light--in her long, brown lashes.
Perforce, he lifted his gaze to her eyebrows, brown, delicately
stenciled, and made sure that the hint of bronze was there. Still
lifting his gaze to her high-piled hair, he again saw, but more
pronounced, the bronze note glinting from the brown-golden hair. Nor
did he fail to startle and thrill to a dazzlement of smile and teeth
and eye that frequently lived its life in her face. Hers was no thin
smile of restraint, he judged. When she smiled she smiled all of
herself, generously, joyously, throwing the largess of all her being
into the natural expression of what was herself and which domiciled
somewhere within that pretty head of hers.

"Yes," she was saying. "They have never to worry, as long as they live,
over mere bread and butter. Dick is most generous, and, rather immoral,
in his encouragement of idleness on the part of men like them. It's a
funny place, as you'll find out until you come to understand us.
They... they are appurtenances, and--and hereditaments, and such
things. They will be with us always until we bury them or they bury us.
Once in a while one or another of them drifts away--for a time. Like
the cat, you know. Then it costs Dick real money to get them back.
Terrence, there--Terrence McFane--he's an epicurean anarchist, if you
know what that means. He wouldn't kill a flea. He has a pet cat I gave
him, a Persian of the bluest blue, and he carefully picks her fleas,
not injuring them, stores them in a vial, and turns them loose in the
forest on his long walks when he tires of human companionship and
communes with nature.

"Well, only last year, he got a bee in his bonnet--the alphabet. He
started for Egypt--without a cent, of course--to run the alphabet down
in the home of its origin and thereby to win the formula that would
explain the cosmos. He got as far as Denver, traveling as tramps
travel, when he mixed up in some I. W. W. riot for free speech or
something. Dick had to hire lawyers, pay fines, and do just about
everything to get him safe home again.

"And the one with a beard--Aaron Hancock. Like Terrence, he won't work.
Aaron's a Southerner. Says none of his people ever did work, and that
there have always been peasants and fools who just couldn't be
restrained from working. That's why he wears a beard. To shave, he
holds, is unnecessary work, and, therefore, immoral. I remember, at
Melbourne, when he broke in upon Dick and me, a sunburnt wild man from
out the Australian bush. It seems he'd been making original researches
in anthropology, or folk-lore-ology, or something like that. Dick had
known him years before in Paris, and Dick assured him, if he ever
drifted back to America, of food and shelter. So here he is."

"And the poet?" Graham asked, glad that she must still talk for a
while, enabling him to study the quick dazzlement of smile that played
upon her face.

"Oh, Theo--Theodore Malken, though we call him Leo. He won't work,
either. His people are old Californian stock and dreadfully wealthy;
but they disowned him and he disowned them when he was fifteen. They
say he is lunatic, and he says they are merely maddening. He really
writes some remarkable verse... when he does write; but he prefers to
dream and live in the jungle with Terrence and Aaron. He was tutoring
immigrant Jews in San Francisco, when Terrence and Aaron rescued him,
or captured him, I don't know which. He's been with us two years now,
and he's actually filling out, despite the facts that Dick is absurdly
generous in furnishing supplies and that they'd rather talk and read
and dream than cook. The only good meals they get is when they descend
upon us, like to-night."

"And the Hindoo, there--who's he?"

"That's Dar Hyal. He's their guest. The three of them invited him up,
just as Aaron first invited Terrence, and as Aaron and Terrence invited
Leo. Dick says, in time, three more are bound to appear, and then he'll
have his Seven Sages of the Madroño Grove. Their jungle camp is in a
madroño grove, you know. It's a most beautiful spot, with living
springs, a canyon--but I was telling you about Dar Hyal.

"He's a revolutionist, of sorts. He's dabbled in our universities,
studied in France, Italy, Switzerland, is a political refugee from
India, and he's hitched his wagon to two stars: one, a new synthetic
system of philosophy; the other, rebellion against the tyranny of
British rule in India. He advocates individual terrorism and direct
mass action. That's why his paper, _Kadar,_ or _Badar,_ or something
like that, was suppressed here in California, and why he narrowly
escaped being deported; and that's why he's up here just now, devoting
himself to formulating his philosophy.

"He and Aaron quarrel tremendously--that is, on philosophical matters.
And now--" Paula sighed and erased the sigh with her smile--"and now,
I'm done. Consider yourself acquainted. And, oh, if you encounter our
sages more intimately, a word of warning, especially if the encounter
be in the stag room: Dar Hyal is a total abstainer; Theodore Malken can
get poetically drunk, and usually does, on one cocktail; Aaron Hancock
is an expert wine-bibber; and Terrence McFane, knowing little of one
drink from another, and caring less, can put ninety-nine men out of a
hundred under the table and go right on lucidly expounding epicurean
anarchy."

One thing Graham noted as the dinner proceeded. The sages called Dick
Forrest by his first name; but they always addressed Paula as "Mrs.
Forrest," although she called them by their first names. There was
nothing affected about it. Quite unconsciously did they, who respected
few things under the sun, and among such few things not even
work--quite unconsciously, and invariably, did they recognize the
certain definite aloofness in Dick Forrest's wife so that her given
name was alien to their lips. By such tokens Evan Graham was not slow
in learning that Dick Forrest's wife had a way with her, compounded of
sheerest democracy and equally sheer royalty.

It was the same thing, after dinner, in the big living room. She dared
as she pleased, but nobody assumed. Before the company settled down,
Paula seemed everywhere, bubbling over with more outrageous spirits
than any of them. From this group or that, from one corner or another,
her laugh rang out. And her laugh fascinated Graham. There was a
fibrous thrill in it, most sweet to the ear, that differentiated it
from any laugh he had ever heard. It caused Graham to lose the thread
of young Mr. Wombold's contention that what California needed was not a
Japanese exclusion law but at least two hundred thousand Japanese
coolies to do the farm labor of California and knock in the head the
threatened eight-hour day for agricultural laborers. Young Mr. Wombold,
Graham gleaned, was an hereditary large land-owner in the vicinity of
Wickenberg who prided himself on not yielding to the trend of the times
by becoming an absentee landlord.

From the piano, where Eddie Mason was the center of a group of girls,
came much noise of ragtime music and slangtime song. Terrence McFane
and Aaron Hancock fell into a heated argument over the music of
futurism. And Graham was saved from the Japanese situation with Mr.
Wombold by Dar Hyal, who proceeded to proclaim Asia for the Asiatics
and California for the Californians.

Paula, catching up her skirts for speed, fled down the room in some
romp, pursued by Dick, who captured her as she strove to dodge around
the Wombold group.

"Wicked woman," Dick reproved her in mock wrath; and, the next moment,
joined her in persuading Dar Hyal to dance.

And Dar Hyal succumbed, flinging Asia and the Asiatics to the winds,
along with his arms and legs, as he weirdly parodied the tango in what
he declared to be the "blastic" culmination of modern dancing.

"And now, Red Cloud, sing Mr. Graham your Acorn Song," Paula commanded
Dick.

Forrest, his arm still about her, detaining her for the threatened
punishment not yet inflicted, shook his head somberly.

"The Acorn Song!" Ernestine called from the piano; and the cry was
taken up by Eddie Mason and the girls.

"Oh, do, Dick," Paula pleaded. "Mr. Graham is the only one who hasn't
heard it."

Dick shook his head.

"Then sing him your Goldfish Song."

"I'll sing him Mountain Lad's song," Dick bullied, a whimsical sparkle
in his eyes. He stamped his feet, pranced, nickered a not bad imitation
of Mountain Lad, tossed an imaginary mane, and cried:

"Hear me! I am Eros! I stamp upon the hills!"

"The Acorn Song," Paula interrupted quickly and quietly, with just the
hint of steel in her voice.

Dick obediently ceased his chant of Mountain Lad, but shook his head
like a stubborn colt.

"I have a new song," he said solemnly. "It is about you and me, Paula.
I got it from the Nishinam."

"The Nishinam are the extinct aborigines of this part of California,"
Paula shot in a swift aside of explanation to Graham.

Dick danced half a dozen steps, stiff-legged, as Indians dance, slapped
his thighs with his palms, and began a new chant, still retaining his
hold on his wife.

"Me, I am Ai-kut, the first man of the Nishinam. Ai-kut is the short
for Adam, and my father and my mother were the coyote and the moon. And
this is Yo-to-to-wi, my wife. She is the first woman of the Nishinam.
Her father and her mother were the grasshopper and the ring-tailed cat.
They were the best father and mother left after my father and mother.
The coyote is very wise, the moon is very old; but who ever heard much
of anything of credit to the grasshopper and the ring-tailed cat? The
Nishinam are always right. The mother of all women had to be a cat, a
little, wizened, sad-faced, shrewd ring-tailed cat."

Whereupon the song of the first man and woman was interrupted by
protests from the women and acclamations from the men.

"This is Yo-to-to-wi, which is the short for Eve," Dick chanted on,
drawing Paula bruskly closer to his side with a semblance of savage
roughness. "Yo-to-to-wi is not much to look at. But be not hard upon
her. The fault is with the grasshopper and the ring-tailed cat. Me, I
am Ai-kut, the first man; but question not my taste. I was the first
man, and this, I saw, was the first woman. Where there is but one
choice, there is not much to choose. Adam was so circumstanced. He
chose Eve. Yo-to-to-wi was the one woman in all the world for me, so I
chose Yo-to-to-wi."

And Evan Graham, listening, his eyes on that possessive, encircling arm
of all his hostess's fairness, felt an awareness of hurt, and arose
unsummoned the thought, to be dismissed angrily, "Dick Forrest is
lucky--too lucky."

"Me, I am Ai-kut," Dick chanted on. "This is my dew of woman. She is my
honey-dew of woman. I have lied to you. Her father and her mother were
neither hopper nor cat. They were the Sierra dawn and the summer east
wind of the mountains. Together they conspired, and from the air and
earth they sweated all sweetness till in a mist of their own love the
leaves of the chaparral and the manzanita were dewed with the honey-dew.

"Yo-to-to-wi is my honey-dew woman. Hear me! I am Ai-kut. Yo-to-to-wi
is my quail woman, my deer-woman, my lush-woman of all soft rain and
fat soil. She was born of the thin starlight and the brittle dawn-light
before the sun . . .

"And," Forrest concluded, relapsing into his natural voice and
enunciation, having reached the limit of extemporization,--"and if you
think old, sweet, blue-eyed Solomon has anything on me in singing the
Song of Songs, just put your names down for the subscription edition of
_my_ Song of Songs."




CHAPTER XI



It was Mrs. Mason who first asked that Paula play; but it was Terrence
McFane and Aaron Hancock who evicted the rag-time group from the piano
and sent Theodore Malken, a blushing ambassador, to escort Paula.

"'Tis for the confounding of this pagan that I'm askin' you to play
'Reflections on the Water,'" Graham heard Terrence say to her.

"And 'The Girl with Flaxen Hair,' after, please," begged Hancock, the
indicted pagan. "It will aptly prove my disputation. This wild Celt has
a bog-theory of music that predates the cave-man--and he has the
unadulterated stupidity to call himself ultra-modern."

"Oh, Debussy!" Paula laughed. "Still wrangling over him, eh? I'll try
and get around to him. But I don't know with what I'll begin."

Dar Hyal joined the three sages in seating Paula at the concert grand
which, Graham decided, was none too great for the great room. But no
sooner was she seated than the three sages slipped away to what were
evidently their chosen listening places. The young poet stretched
himself prone on a deep bearskin forty feet from the piano, his hands
buried in his hair. Terrence and Aaron lolled into a cushioned
embrasure of a window seat, sufficiently near to each other to nudge
the points of their respective contentions as Paula might expound them.
The girls were huddled in colored groups on wide couches or garlanded
in twos and threes on and in the big koa-wood chairs.

Evan Graham half-started forward to take the honor of turning Paula's
music, but saw in time that Dar Hyal had already elected to himself
that office. Graham glimpsed the scene with quiet curious glances. The
grand piano, under a low arch at the far-end of the room, was cunningly
raised and placed as on and in a sounding board. All jollity and banter
had ceased. Evidently, he thought, the Little Lady had a way with her
and was accepted as a player of parts. And from this he was perversely
prepared for disappointment.

Ernestine leaned across from a chair to whisper to him:

"She can do anything she wants to do. And she doesn't work . . . much.
She studied under Leschetizky and Madame Carreno, you know, and she
abides by their methods. She doesn't play like a woman, either. Listen
to that!"

Graham knew that he expected disappointment from her confident hands,
even as she rippled them over the keys in little chords and runs with
which he could not quarrel but which he had heard too often before from
technically brilliant but musically mediocre performers. But whatever
he might have fancied she would play, he was all unprepared for
Rachmaninoff's sheerly masculine Prelude, which he had heard only men
play when decently played.

She took hold of the piano, with the first two ringing bars,
masterfully, like a man; she seemed to lift it, and its sounding wires,
with her two hands, with the strength and certitude of maleness. And
then, as only he had heard men do it, she sank, or leaped--he could
scarcely say which--to the sureness and pureness and ineffable softness
of the _Andante_ following.

She played on, with the calm and power of anything but the little,
almost girlish woman he glimpsed through half-closed lids across the
ebony board of the enormous piano, which she commanded, as she
commanded herself, as she commanded the composer. Her touch was
definite, authoritative, was his judgment, as the Prelude faded away in
dying chords hauntingly reminiscent of its full vigor that seemed still
to linger in the air.

While Aaron and Terrence debated in excited whispers in the window
seat, and while Dar Hyal sought other music at Paula's direction, she
glanced at Dick, who turned off bowl after bowl of mellow light till
Paula sat in an oasis of soft glow that brought out the dull gold
lights in her dress and hair.

Graham watched the lofty room grow loftier in the increasing shadows.
Eighty feet in length, rising two stories and a half from masonry walls
to tree-trunked roof, flung across with a flying gallery from the rail
of which hung skins of wild animals, hand-woven blankets of Oaxaca and
Ecuador, and tapas, woman-pounded and vegetable-dyed, from the islands
of the South Pacific, Graham knew it for what it was--a feast-hall of
some medieval castle; and almost he felt a poignant sense of lack of
the long spread table, with pewter below the salt and silver above the
salt, and with huge hound-dogs scuffling beneath for bones.

Later, when Paula had played sufficient Debussy to equip Terrence and
Aaron for fresh war, Graham talked with her about music for a few vivid
moments. So well did she prove herself aware of the philosophy of
music, that, ere he knew it, he was seduced into voicing his own pet
theory.

"And so," he concluded, "the true psychic factor of music took nearly
three thousand years to impress itself on the Western mind. Debussy
more nearly attains the idea-engendering and suggestive serenity--say
of the time of Pythagoras--than any of his fore-runners--"

Here, Paula put a pause in his summary by beckoning over Terrence and
Aaron from their battlefield in the windowseat.

"Yes, and what of it?" Terrence was demanding, as they came up side by
side. "I defy you, Aaron, I defy you, to get one thought out of Bergson
on music that is more lucid than any thought he ever uttered in his
'Philosophy of Laughter,' which is not lucid at all."

"Oh!--listen!" Paula cried, with sparkling eyes. "We have a new
prophet. Hear Mr. Graham. He's worthy of your steel, of both your
steel. He agrees with you that music is the refuge from blood and iron
and the pounding of the table. That weak souls, and sensitive souls,
and high-pitched souls flee from the crassness and the rawness of the
world to the drug-dreams of the over-world of rhythm and vibration--"

"Atavistic!" Aaron Hancock snorted. "The cave-men, the monkey-folk, and
the ancestral bog-men of Terrence did that sort of thing--"

"But wait," Paula urged. "It's his conclusions and methods and
processes. Also, there he disagrees with you, Aaron, fundamentally. He
quoted Pater's 'that all art aspires toward music'--"

"Pure prehuman and micro-organic chemistry," Aaron broke in. "The
reactions of cell-elements to the doggerel punch of the wave-lengths of
sunlight, the foundation of all folk-songs and rag-times. Terrence
completes his circle right there and stultifies all his windiness. Now
listen to me, and I will present--"

"But wait," Paula pleaded. "Mr. Graham argues that English puritanism
barred music, real music, for centuries...."

"True," said Terrence.

"And that England had to win to its sensuous delight in rhythm through
Milton and Shelley--"

"Who was a metaphysician." Aaron broke in.

"A lyrical metaphysician," Terrence defined instantly. "_That_ you must
acknowledge, Aaron."

"And Swinburne?" Aaron demanded, with a significance that tokened
former arguments.

"He says Offenbach was the fore-runner of Arthur Sullivan," Paula cried
challengingly. "And that Auber was before Offenbach. And as for Wagner,
ask him, just ask him--"

And she slipped away, leaving Graham to his fate. He watched her,
watched the perfect knee-lift of her draperies as she crossed to Mrs.
Mason and set about arranging bridge quartets, while dimly he could
hear Terrence beginning:

"It is agreed that music was the basis of inspiration of all the arts
of the Greeks...."

Later, when the two sages were obliviously engrossed in a heated battle
as to whether Berlioz or Beethoven had exposited in their compositions
the deeper intellect, Graham managed his escape. Clearly, his goal was
to find his hostess again. But she had joined two of the girls in the
whispering, giggling seclusiveness of one of the big chairs, and, most
of the company being deep in bridge, Graham found himself drifted into
a group composed of Dick Forrest, Mr. Wombold, Dar Hyal, and the
correspondent of the _Breeders' Gazette_.

"I'm sorry you won't be able to run over with me," Dick was saying to
the correspondent. "It would mean only one more day. I'll take you
tomorrow."

"Sorry," was the reply. "But I must make Santa Rosa. Burbank has
promised me practically a whole morning, and you know what that means.
Yet I know the _Gazette_ would be glad for an account of the
experiment. Can't you outline it?--briefly, just briefly? Here's Mr.
Graham. It will interest him, I am sure."

"More water-works?" Graham queried.

"No; an asinine attempt to make good farmers out of hopelessly poor
ones," Mr. Wombold answered. "I contend that any farmer to-day who has
no land of his own, proves by his lack of it that he is an inefficient
farmer."

"On the contrary," spoke up Dar Hyal, weaving his slender Asiatic
fingers in the air to emphasize his remarks. "Quite on the contrary.
Times have changed. Efficiency no longer implies the possession of
capital. It is a splendid experiment, an heroic experiment. And it will
succeed."

"What is it, Dick?" Graham urged. "Tell us."

"Oh, nothing, just a white chip on the table," Forrest answered
lightly. "Most likely it will never come to anything, although just the
same I have my hopes--"

"A white chip!" Wombold broke in. "Five thousand acres of prime valley
land, all for a lot of failures to batten on, to farm, if you please,
on salary, with food thrown in!"

"The food that is grown on the land only," Dick corrected. "Now I will
have to put it straight. I've set aside five thousand acres midway
between here and the Sacramento River."

"Think of the alfalfa it grew, and that you need," Wombold again
interrupted.

"My dredgers redeemed twice that acreage from the marshes in the past
year," Dick replied. "The thing is, I believe the West and the world
must come to intensive farming. I want to do my share toward blazing
the way. I've divided the five thousand acres into twenty-acre
holdings. I believe each twenty acres should support, comfortably, not
only a family, but pay at least six per cent."

"When it is all allotted it will mean two hundred and fifty families,"
the _Gazette_ man calculated; "and, say five to the family, it will
mean twelve hundred and fifty souls."

"Not quite," Dick corrected. "The last holding is occupied, and we have
only a little over eleven hundred on the land." He smiled whimsically.
"But they promise, they promise. Several fat years and they'll average
six to the family."

"Who is _we_?" Graham inquired.

"Oh, I have a committee of farm experts on it--my own men, with the
exception of Professor Lieb, whom the Federal Government has loaned me.
The thing is: they _must_ farm, with individual responsibility,
according to the scientific methods embodied in our instructions. The
land is uniform. Every holding is like a pea in the pod to every other
holding. The results of each holding will speak in no uncertain terms.
The failure of any farmer, through laziness or stupidity, measured by
the average result of the entire two hundred and fifty farmers, will
not be tolerated. Out the failures must go, convicted by the average of
their fellows.

"It's a fair deal. No farmer risks anything. With the food he may grow
and he and his family may consume, plus a cash salary of a thousand a
year, he is certain, good seasons and bad, stupid or intelligent, of at
least a hundred dollars a month. The stupid and the inefficient will be
bound to be eliminated by the intelligent and the efficient. That's
all. It will demonstrate intensive farming with a vengeance. And there
is more than the certain salary guaranty. After the salary is paid, the
adventure must yield six per cent, to me. If more than this is
achieved, then the entire hundred per cent, of the additional
achievement goes to the farmer."

"Which means that each farmer with go in him will work nights to make
good--I see," said the _Gazette_ man. "And why not? Hundred-dollar jobs
aren't picked up for the asking. The average farmer in the United
States doesn't net fifty a month on his own land, especially when his
wages of superintendence and of direct personal labor are subtracted.
Of course able men will work their heads off to hold to such a
proposition, and they'll see to it that every member of the family does
the same."

"'Tis the one objection I have to this place," Terrence McFane, who had
just joined the group, announced. "Ever one hears but the one
thing--work. 'Tis repulsive, the thought of the work, each on his
twenty acres, toilin' and moilin', daylight till dark, and after
dark--an' for what? A bit of meat, a bit of bread, and, maybe, a bit of
jam on the bread. An' to what end? Is meat an' bread an' jam the end of
it all, the meaning of life, the goal of existence? Surely the man will
die, like a work horse dies, after a life of toil. And what end has
been accomplished? Bread an' meat an' jam? Is that it? A full belly and
shelter from the cold till one's body drops apart in the dark moldiness
of the grave?"

"But, Terrence, you, too, will die," Dick Forrest retorted.

"But, oh, my glorious life of loafing," came the instant answer. "The
hours with the stars and the flowers, under the green trees with the
whisperings of breezes in the grass. My books, my thinkers and their
thoughts. Beauty, music, all the solaces of all the arts. What? When I
fade into the dark I shall have well lived and received my wage for
living. But these twenty-acre work-animals of two-legged men of yours!
Daylight till dark, toil and moil, sweat on the shirts on the backs of
them that dries only to crust, meat and bread in their bellies, roofs
that don't leak, a brood of youngsters to live after them, to live the
same beast-lives of toil, to fill their bellies with the same meat and
bread, to scratch their backs with the same sweaty shirts, and to go
into the dark knowing only meat and bread, and, mayhap, a bit of jam."

"But somebody must do the work that enables you to loaf," Mr. Wombold
spoke up indignantly.

"'Tis true, 'tis sad 'tis true," Terrence replied lugubriously. Then
his face beamed. "And I thank the good Lord for it, for the
work-beasties that drag and drive the plows up and down the fields, for
the bat-eyed miner-beasties that dig the coal and gold, for all the
stupid peasant-beasties that keep my hands soft, and give power to fine
fellows like Dick there, who smiles on me and shares the loot with me,
and buys the latest books for me, and gives me a place at his board
that is plenished by the two-legged work-beasties, and a place at his
fire that is builded by the same beasties, and a shack and a bed in the
jungle under the madroño trees where never work intrudes its monstrous
head."

Evan Graham was slow in getting ready for bed that night. He was
unwontedly stirred both by the Big House and by the Little Lady who was
its mistress. As he sat on the edge of the bed, half-undressed, and
smoked out a pipe, he kept seeing her in memory, as he had seen her in
the flesh the past twelve hours, in her varied moods and guises--the
woman who had talked music with him, and who had expounded music to him
to his delight; who had enticed the sages into the discussion and
abandoned him to arrange the bridge tables for her guests; who had
nestled in the big chair as girlish as the two girls with her; who had,
with a hint of steel, quelled her husband's obstreperousness when he
had threatened to sing Mountain Lad's song; who, unafraid, had
bestridden the half-drowning stallion in the swimming tank; and who, a
few hours later, had dreamed into the dining room, distinctive in dress
and person, to meet her many guests.

The Big House, with all its worthy marvels and bizarre novelties,
competed with the figure of Paula Forrest in filling the content of his
imagination. Once again, and yet again, many times, he saw the slender
fingers of Dar Hyal weaving argument in the air, the black whiskers of
Aaron Hancock enunciating Bergsonian dogmas, the frayed coat-cuffs of
Terrence McFane articulating thanks to God for the two-legged
work-beasties that enabled him to loaf at Dick Forrest's board and
under Dick Forrest's madroño trees.

Graham knocked out his pipe, took a final sweeping survey of the
strange room which was the last word in comfort, pressed off the
lights, and found himself between cool sheets in the wakeful dark.
Again he heard Paula Forrest laugh; again he sensed her in terms of
silver and steel and strength; again, against the dark, he saw that
inimitable knee-lift of her gown. The bright vision of it was almost an
irk to him, so impossible was it for him to shake it from his eyes.
Ever it returned and burned before him, a moving image of light and
color that he knew to be subjective but that continually asserted the
illusion of reality.

He saw stallion and rider sink beneath the water, and rise again, a
flurry of foam and floundering of hoofs, and a woman's face that
laughed while she drowned her hair in the drowning mane of the beast.
And the first ringing bars of the Prelude sounded in his ears as again
he saw the same hands that had guided the stallion lift the piano to
all Rachmaninoff's pure splendor of sound.

And when Graham finally fell asleep, it was in the thick of marveling
over the processes of evolution that could produce from primeval mire
and dust the glowing, glorious flesh and spirit of woman.




CHAPTER XII



The next morning Graham learned further the ways of the Big House. Oh
My had partly initiated him in particular things the preceding day and
had learned that, after the waking cup of coffee, he preferred to
breakfast at table, rather than in bed. Also, Oh My had warned him that
breakfast at table was an irregular affair, anywhere between seven and
nine, and that the breakfasters merely drifted in at their convenience.
If he wanted a horse, or if he wanted a swim or a motor car, or any
ranch medium or utility he desired, Oh My informed him, all he had to
do was to call for it.

Arriving in the breakfast room at half past seven, Graham found himself
just in time to say good-by to the _Gazette_ man and the Idaho buyer,
who, finishing, were just ready to catch the ranch machine that
connected at Eldorado with the morning train for San Francisco. He sat
alone, being perfectly invited by a perfect Chinese servant to order as
he pleased, and found himself served with his first desire--an
ice-cold, sherried grapefruit, which, the table-boy proudly informed
him, was "grown on the ranch." Declining variously suggested breakfast
foods, mushes, and porridges, Graham had just ordered his soft-boiled
eggs and bacon, when Bert Wainwright drifted in with a casualness that
Graham recognized as histrionic, when, five minutes later, in boudoir
cap and delectable negligee, Ernestine Desten drifted in and expressed
surprise at finding such a multitude of early risers.

Later, as the three of them were rising from table, they greeted Lute
Desten and Rita Wainwright arriving. Over the billiard table with Bert,
Graham learned that Dick Forrest never appeared for breakfast, that he
worked in bed from terribly wee small hours, had coffee at six, and
only on unusual occasions appeared to his guests before the
twelve-thirty lunch. As for Paula Forrest, Bert explained, she was a
poor sleeper, a late riser, lived behind a door without a knob in a
spacious wing with a rare and secret patio that even he had seen but
once, and only on infrequent occasion was she known to appear before
twelve-thirty, and often not then.

"You see, she's healthy and strong and all that," he explained, "but
she was born with insomnia. She never could sleep. She couldn't sleep
as a little baby even. But it's never hurt her any, because she's got a
will, and won't let it get on her nerves. She's just about as tense as
they make them, yet, instead of going wild when she can't sleep, she
just wills to relax, and she does relax. She calls them her `white
nights,' when she gets them. Maybe she'll fall asleep at daybreak, or
at nine or ten in the morning; and then she'll sleep the rest of the
clock around and get down to dinner as chipper as you please."

"It's constitutional, I fancy," Graham suggested.

Bert nodded.

"It would be a handicap to nine hundred and ninety-nine women out of a
thousand. But not to her. She puts up with it, and if she can't sleep
one time--she should worry--she just sleeps some other time and makes
it up."

More and other things Bert Wainwright told of his hostess, and Graham
was not slow in gathering that the young man, despite the privileges of
long acquaintance, stood a good deal in awe of her.

"I never saw anybody whose goat she couldn't get if she went after it,"
he confided. "Man or woman or servant, age, sex, and previous condition
of servitude--it's all one when she gets on the high and mighty. And I
don't see how she does it. Maybe it's just a kind of light that comes
into her eyes, or some kind of an expression on her lips, or, I don't
know what--anyway, she puts it across and nobody makes any mistake
about it."

"She has a ... a way with her," Graham volunteered.

 "That's it!" Bert's face beamed. "It's a way she has. She just puts
it over. Kind of gives you a chilly feeling, you don't know why. Maybe
she's learned to be so quiet about it because of the control she's
learned by passing sleepless nights without squealing out or getting
sour. The chances are she didn't bat an eye all last night--excitement,
you know, the crowd, swimming Mountain Lad and such things. Now
ordinary things that'd keep most women awake, like danger, or storm at
sea, and such things, Dick says don't faze her. She can sleep like a
baby, he says, when the town she's in is being bombarded or when the
ship she's in is trying to claw off a lee shore. She's a wonder, and no
mistake. You ought to play billiards with her--the English game. She'll
go some."

A little later, Graham, along with Bert, encountered the girls in the
morning room, where, despite an hour of rag-time song and dancing and
chatter, he was scarcely for a moment unaware of a loneliness, a lack,
and a desire to see his hostess, in some fresh and unguessed mood and
way, come in upon them through the open door.

Still later, mounted on Altadena and accompanied by Bert on a
thoroughbred mare called Mollie, Graham made a two hours' exploration
of the dairy center of the ranch, and arrived back barely in time to
keep an engagement with Ernestine in the tennis court.

He came to lunch with an eagerness for which his keen appetite could
not entirely account; and he knew definite disappointment when his
hostess did not appear.

"A white night," Dick Forrest surmised for his guest's benefit, and
went into details additional to Bert's of her constitutional inaptitude
for normal sleep. "Do you know, we were married years before I ever saw
her sleep. I knew she did sleep, but I never saw her. I've seen her go
three days and nights without closing an eye and keep sweet and
cheerful all the time, and when she did sleep, it was out of
exhaustion. That was when the _All Away_ went ashore in the Carolines
and the whole population worked to get us off. It wasn't the danger,
for there wasn't any. It was the noise. Also, it was the excitement.
She was too busy living. And when it was almost all over, I actually
saw her asleep for the first time in my life."

A new guest had arrived that morning, a Donald Ware, whom Graham met at
lunch. He seemed well acquainted with all, as if he had visited much in
the Big House; and Graham gathered that, despite his youth, he was a
violinist of note on the Pacific Coast.

"He has conceived a grand passion for Paula," Ernestine told Graham as
they passed out from the dining room.

Graham raised his eyebrows.

"Oh, but she doesn't mind," Ernestine laughed. "Every man that comes
along does the same thing. She's used to it. She has just a charming
way of disregarding all their symptoms, and enjoys them, and gets the
best out of them in consequence. It's lots of fun to Dick. You'll be
doing the same before you're here a week. If you don't, we'll all be
surprised mightily. And if you don't, most likely you'll hurt Dick's
feelings. He's come to expect it as a matter of course. And when a
fond, proud husband gets a habit like that, it must hurt terribly to
see his wife not appreciated."

"Oh, well, if I am expected to, I suppose I must," Graham sighed. "But
just the same I hate to do whatever everybody does just because
everybody does it. But if it's the custom--well, it's the custom,
that's all. But it's mighty hard on one with so many other nice girls
around."

There was a quizzical light in his long gray eyes that affected
Ernestine so profoundly that she gazed into his eyes over long, became
conscious of what she was doing, dropped her own eyes away, and flushed.

"Little Leo--the boy poet you remember last night," she rattled on in a
patent attempt to escape from her confusion. "He's madly in love with
Paula, too. I've heard Aaron Hancock chaffing him about some sonnet
cycle, and it isn't difficult to guess the inspiration. And
Terrence--the Irishman, you know--he's mildly in love with her. They
can't help it, you see; and can you blame them?"

"She surely deserves it all," Graham murmured, although vaguely hurt in
that the addle-pated, alphabet-obsessed, epicurean anarchist of an
Irishman who gloried in being a loafer and a pensioner should even
mildly be in love with the Little Lady. "She is most deserving of all
men's admiration," he continued smoothly. "From the little I've seen of
her she's quite remarkable and most charming."

"She's my half-sister," Ernestine vouchsafed, "although you wouldn't
dream a drop of the same blood ran in our veins. She's so different.
She's different from all the Destens, from any girl I ever knew--though
she isn't exactly a girl. She's thirty-eight, you know--"

"Pussy, pussy," Graham whispered.

The pretty young blonde looked at him in surprise and bewilderment,
taken aback by the apparent irrelevance of his interruption.

"Cat," he censured in mock reproof.

"Oh!" she cried. "I never meant it that way. You will find we are very
frank here. Everybody knows Paula's age. She tells it herself. I'm
eighteen--so, there. And now, just for your meanness, how old are you?"

"As old as Dick," he replied promptly.

"And he's forty," she laughed triumphantly. "Are you coming swimming?
--the water will be dreadfully cold."

Graham shook his head. "I'm going riding with Dick."

Her face fell with all the ingenuousness of eighteen.

"Oh," she protested, "some of his eternal green manures, or hillside
terracing, or water-pocketing."

"But he said something about swimming at five."

Her face brightened joyously.

"Then we'll meet at the tank. It must be the same party. Paula said
swimming at five."

As they parted under a long arcade, where his way led to the tower room
for a change into riding clothes, she stopped suddenly and called:

"Oh, Mr. Graham."

He turned obediently.

"You really are not compelled to fall in love with Paula, you know. It
was just my way of putting it."

"I shall be very, very careful," he said solemnly, although there was a
twinkle in his eye as he concluded.

Nevertheless, as he went on to his room, he could not but admit to
himself that the Paula Forrest charm, or the far fairy tentacles of it,
had already reached him and were wrapping around him. He knew, right
there, that he would prefer the engagement to ride to have been with
her than with his old-time friend, Dick.

As he emerged from the house to the long hitching-rails under the
ancient oaks, he looked eagerly for his hostess. Only Dick was there,
and the stable-man, although the many saddled horses that stamped in
the shade promised possibilities. But Dick and he rode away alone. Dick
pointed out her horse, an alert bay thoroughbred, stallion at that,
under a small Australian saddle with steel stirrups, and double-reined
and single-bitted.

"I don't know her plans," he said. "She hasn't shown up yet, but at any
rate she'll be swimming later. We'll meet her then."

Graham appreciated and enjoyed the ride, although more than once he
found himself glancing at his wrist-watch to ascertain how far away
five o'clock might yet be. Lambing time was at hand, and through home
field after home field he rode with his host, now one and now the other
dismounting to turn over onto its feet rotund and glorious Shropshire
and Ramboullet-Merino ewes so hopelessly the product of man's selection
as to be unable to get off, of themselves, from their own broad backs,
once they were down with their four legs helplessly sky-aspiring.

"I've really worked to make the American Merino," Dick was saying; "to
give it the developed leg, the strong back, the well-sprung rib, and
the stamina. The old-country breed lacked the stamina. It was too much
hand-reared and manicured."

"You're doing things, big things," Graham assured him. "Think of
shipping rams to Idaho! That speaks for itself."

Dick Forrest's eyes were sparkling, as he replied:

"Better than Idaho. Incredible as it may sound, and asking forgiveness
for bragging, the great flocks to-day of Michigan and Ohio can trace
back to my California-bred Ramboullet rams. Take Australia. Twelve
years ago I sold three rams for three hundred each to a visiting
squatter. After he took them back and demonstrated them he sold them
for as many thousand each and ordered a shipload more from me.
Australia will never be the worse for my having been. Down there they
say that lucerne, artesian wells, refrigerator ships, and Forrest's
rams have tripled the wool and mutton production."

Quite by chance, on the way back, meeting Mendenhall, the horse
manager, they were deflected by him to a wide pasture, broken by wooded
canyons and studded with oaks, to look over a herd of yearling Shires
that was to be dispatched next morning to the upland pastures and
feeding sheds of the Miramar Hills. There were nearly two hundred of
them, rough-coated, beginning to shed, large-boned and large for their
age.

"We don't exactly crowd them," Dick Forrest explained, "but Mr.
Mendenhall sees to it that they never lack full nutrition from the time
they are foaled. Up there in the hills, where they are going, they'll
balance their grass with grain. This makes them assemble every night at
the feeding places and enables the feeders to keep track of them with a
minimum of effort. I've shipped fifty stallions, two-year-olds, every
year for the past five years, to Oregon alone. They're sort of
standardized, you know. The people up there know what they're getting.
They know my standard so well that they'll buy unsight and unseen."

"You must cull a lot, then," Graham ventured.

"And you'll see the culls draying on the streets of San Francisco,"
Dick answered.

"Yes, and on the streets of Denver," Mr. Mendenhall amplified, "and of
Los Angeles, and--why, two years ago, in the horse-famine, we shipped
twenty carloads of four-year geldings to Chicago, that averaged
seventeen hundred each. The lightest were sixteen, and there were
matched pairs up to nineteen hundred. Lord, Lord, that was a year for
horse-prices--blue sky, and then some."

As Mr. Mendenhall rode away, a man, on a slender-legged, head-tossing
Palomina, rode up to them and was introduced to Graham as Mr. Hennessy,
the ranch veterinary.

"I heard Mrs. Forrest was looking over the colts," he explained to his
employer, "and I rode across to give her a glance at The Fawn here.
She'll be riding her in less than a week. What horse is she on to-day?"

"The Fop," Dick replied, as if expecting the comment that was prompt as
the disapproving shake of Mr. Hennessy's head.

"I can never become converted to women riding stallions," muttered the
veterinary. "The Fop is dangerous. Worse--though I take my hat off to
his record--he's malicious and vicious. She--Mrs. Forrest ought to ride
him with a muzzle--but he's a striker as well, and I don't see how she
can put cushions on his hoofs."

"Oh, well," Dick placated, "she has a bit that _is_ a bit in his mouth,
and she's not afraid to use it--"

"If he doesn't fall over on her some day," Mr. Hennessy grumbled.
"Anyway, I'll breathe easier when she takes to The Fawn here. Now
_she's_ a lady's mount--all the spirit in the world, but nothing
vicious. She's a sweet mare, a sweet mare, and she'll steady down from
her friskiness. But she'll always be a gay handful--no riding academy
proposition."

"Let's ride over," Dick suggested. "Mrs. Forrest'll have a gay handful
in The Fop if she's ridden him into that bunch of younglings.--It's her
territory, you know," he elucidated to Graham. "All the house horses
and lighter stock is her affair. And she gets grand results. I can't
understand it, myself. It's like a little girl straying into an
experimental laboratory of high explosives and mixing the stuff around
any old way and getting more powerful combinations than the graybeard
chemists."

The three men took a cross-ranch road for half a mile, turned up a
wooded canyon where ran a spring-trickle of stream, and emerged on a
wide rolling terrace rich in pasture. Graham's first glimpse was of a
background of many curious yearling and two-year-old colts, against
which, in the middleground, he saw his hostess, on the back of the
bright bay thoroughbred, The Fop, who, on hind legs, was striking his
forefeet in the air and squealing shrilly. They reined in their mounts
and watched.

"He'll get her yet," the veterinary muttered morosely. "That Fop isn't
safe."

But at that moment Paula Forrest, unaware of her audience, with a sharp
cry of command and a cavalier thrust of sharp spurs into The Fop's
silken sides, checked him down to four-footedness on the ground and a
restless, champing quietness.

"Taking chances?" Dick mildly reproached her, as the three rode up.

"Oh, I can manage him," she breathed between tight teeth, as, with ears
back and vicious-gleaming eyes, The Fop bared his teeth in a bite that
would have been perilously near to Graham's leg had she not reined the
brute abruptly away across the neck and driven both spurs solidly into
his sides.

The Fop quivered, squealed, and for the moment stood still.

"It's the old game, the white man's game," Dick laughed. "She's not
afraid of him, and he knows it. She outgames him, out-savages him,
teaches him what savagery is in its intimate mood and tense."

Three times, while they looked on, ready to whirl their own steeds away
if he got out of hand, The Fop attempted to burst into rampage, and
three times, solidly, with careful, delicate hand on the bitter bit,
Paula Forrest dealt him double spurs in the ribs, till he stood,
sweating, frothing, fretting, beaten, and in hand.

"It's the way the white man has always done," Dick moralized, while
Graham suffered a fluttery, shivery sensation of admiration of the
beast-conquering Little Lady. "He's out-savaged the savage the world
around," Dick went on. "He's out-endured him, out-filthed him,
out-scalped him, out-tortured him, out-eaten him--yes, out-eaten him.
It's a fair wager that the white man, in extremis, has eaten more of
the genus homo, than the savage, in extremis, has eaten."

"Good afternoon," Paula greeted her guest, the ranch veterinary, and
her husband. "I think I've got him now. Let's look over the colts. Just
keep an eye, Mr. Graham, on his mouth. He's a dreadful snapper. Ride
free from him, and you'll save your leg for old age."

Now that The Fop's demonstration was over, the colts, startled into
flight by some impish spirit amongst them, galloped and frisked away
over the green turf, until, curious again, they circled back, halted at
gaze, and then, led by one particularly saucy chestnut filly, drew up
in half a circle before the riders, with alert pricking ears.

Graham scarcely saw the colts at first. He was seeing his protean
hostess in a new role. Would her proteanness never end? he wondered, as
he glanced over the magnificent, sweating, mastered creature she
bestrode. Mountain Lad, despite his hugeness, was a mild-mannered pet
beside this squealing, biting, striking Fop who advertised all the
spirited viciousness of the most spirited vicious thoroughbred.

"Look at her," Paula whispered to Dick, in order not to alarm the saucy
chestnut filly. "Isn't she wonderful! That's what I've been working
for." Paula turned to Evan. "Always they have some fault, some miss, at
the best an approximation rather than an achievement. But she's an
achievement. Look at her. She's as near right as I shall probably ever
get. Her sire is Big Chief, if you know our racing register. He sold
for sixty thousand when he was a cripple. We borrowed the use of him.
She was his only get of the season. But look at her! She's got his
chest and lungs. I had my choices--mares eligible for the register. Her
dam wasn't eligible, but I chose her. She was an obstinate old maid,
but she was the one mare for Big Chief. This is her first foal and she
was eighteen years old when she bred. But I knew it was there. All I
had to do was to look at Big Chief and her, and it just had to be
there."

"The dam was only half thoroughbred," Dick explained.

"But with a lot of Morgan on the other side," Paula added instantly,
"and a streak along the back of mustang. This shall be called Nymph,
even if she has no place in the books. She'll be my first unimpeachable
perfect saddle horse--I know it--the kind I like--my dream come true at
last."

"A hoss has four legs, one on each corner," Mr. Hennessy uttered
profoundly.

"And from five to seven gaits," Graham took up lightly,

"And yet I don't care for those many-gaited Kentuckians," Paula said
quickly, "--except for park work. But for California, rough roads,
mountain trails, and all the rest, give me the fast walk, the fox trot,
the long trot that covers the ground, and the not too-long,
ground-covering gallop. Of course, the close-coupled, easy canter; but
I scarcely call that a gait--it's no more than the long lope reduced to
the adjustment of wind or rough ground."

"She's a beauty," Dick admired, his eyes warm in contemplation of the
saucy chestnut filly, who was daringly close and alertly sniffing of
the subdued Fop's tremulous and nostril-dilated muzzle.

"I prefer my own horses to be near thoroughbred rather than all
thoroughbred," Paula proclaimed. "The running horse has its place on
the track, but it's too specialized for mere human use."

"Nicely coupled," Mr. Hennessy said, indicating the Nymph. "Short
enough for good running and long enough for the long trot. I'll admit I
didn't have any faith in the combination; but you've got a grand animal
out of it just the same."

"I didn't have horses when I was a young girl," Paula said to Graham;
"and the fact that I can now not only have them but breed them and mold
them to my heart's desire is always too good to be true. Sometimes I
can't believe it myself, and have to ride out and look them over to
make sure."

She turned her head and raised her eyes gratefully to Forrest; and
Graham watched them look into each other's eyes for a long half-minute.
Forrest's pleasure in his wife's pleasure, in her young enthusiasm and
joy of life, was clear to Graham's observation. "Lucky devil," was
Graham's thought, not because of his host's vast ranch and the success
and achievement of it, but because of the possession of a wonder-woman
who could look unabashed and appreciative into his eyes as the Little
Lady had looked.

Graham was meditating, with skepticism, Ernestine's information that
Paula Forrest was thirty-eight, when she turned to the colts and
pointed her riding whip at a black yearling nibbling at the spring
green.

"Look at that level rump, Dick," she said, "and those trotting feet and
pasterns." And, to Graham: "Rather different from Nymph's long wrists,
aren't they? But they're just what I was after." She laughed a little,
with just a shade of annoyance. "The dam was a bright sorrel--almost
like a fresh-minted twenty-dollar piece--and I did so want a pair out
of her, of the same color, for my own trap. Well, I can't say that I
exactly got them, although I bred her to a splendid, sorrel trotting
horse. And this is my reward, this black--and, wait till we get to the
brood mares and you'll see the other, a full brother and mahogany
brown. I'm so disappointed."

She singled out a pair of dark bays, feeding together: "Those are two
of Guy Dillon's get--brother, you know, to Lou Dillon. They're out of
different mares, not quite the same bay, but aren't they splendidly
matched? And they both have Guy Dillon's coat."

She moved her subdued steed on, skirting the flank of the herd quietly
in order not to alarm it; but a number of colts took flight.

"Look at them!" she cried. "Five, there, are hackneys. Look at the lift
of their fore-legs as they run."

"I'll be terribly disappointed if you don't get a prize-winning
four-in-hand out of them," Dick praised, and brought again the flash of
grateful eyes that hurt Graham as he noted it.

"Two are out of heavier mares--see that one in the middle and the one
on the far left--and there's the other three to pick from for the
leaders. Same sire, five different dams, and a matched and balanced
four, out of five choices, all in the same season, is a stroke of luck,
isn't it?"

She turned quickly to Mr. Hennessy: "I can begin to see the ones that
will have to sell for polo ponies--among the two-year-olds. You can
pick them."

"If Mr. Mendenhall doesn't sell that strawberry roan for a clean
fifteen hundred, it'll be because polo has gone out of fashion," the
veterinary approved, with waxing enthusiasm. "I've had my eye on them.
That pale sorrel, there. You remember his set-back. Give him an extra
year and he'll--look at his coupling!--watch him turn!--a
cow-skin?--he'll turn on a silver dollar! Give him a year to make up,
and he'll stand a show for the international. Listen to me. I've had my
faith in him from the beginning. Cut out that Burlingame crowd. When
he's ripe, ship him straight East."

Paula nodded and listened to Mr. Hennessy's judgment, her eyes kindling
with his in the warmth of the sight of the abounding young life for
which she was responsible.

"It always hurts, though," she confessed to Graham, "selling such
beauties to have them knocked out on the field so quickly."

Her sheer absorption in the animals robbed her speech of any hint of
affectation or show--so much so, that Dick was impelled to praise her
judgment to Evan.

"I can dig through a whole library of horse practice, and muddle and
mull over the Mendelian Law until I'm dizzy, like the clod that I am;
but she is the genius. She doesn't have to study law. She just knows it
in some witch-like, intuitional way. All she has to do is size up a
bunch of mares with her eyes, and feel them over a little with her
hands, and hunt around till she finds the right sires, and get pretty
nearly what she wants in the result--except color, eh, Paul?" he teased.

She showed her laughing teeth in the laugh at her expense, in which Mr.
Hennessy joined, and Dick continued: "Look at that filly there. We all
knew Paula was wrong. But look at it! She bred a rickety old
thoroughbred, that we wanted to put out of her old age, to a standard
stallion; got a filly; bred it back with a thoroughbred; bred its filly
foal with the same standard again; knocked all our prognostications
into a cocked hat, and--well, look at it, a world-beater polo pony.
There is one thing we have to take off our hats to her for: she doesn't
let any woman sentimentality interfere with her culling. Oh, she's
cold-blooded enough. She's as remorseless as any man when it comes to
throwing out the undesirables and selecting for what she wants. But she
hasn't mastered color yet. There's where her genius falls down, eh,
Paul? You'll have to put up with Duddy and Fuddy for a while longer for
your trap. By the way, how is Duddy?"

"He's come around," she answered, "thanks to Mr. Hennessy."

"Nothing serious," the veterinarian added. "He was just off his feed a
trifle. It was more a scare of the stableman than anything else."




CHAPTER XIII



From the colt pasture to the swimming tank Graham talked with his
hostess and rode as nearly beside her as The Fop's wickedness
permitted, while Dick and Hennessy, on ahead, were deep in ranch
business.

"Insomnia has been a handicap all my life," she said, while she tickled
The Fop with a spur in order to check a threatened belligerence. "But I
early learned to keep the irritation of it off my nerves and the weight
of it off my mind. In fact, I early came to make a function of it and
actually to derive enjoyment from it. It was the only way to master a
thing I knew would persist as long as I persisted. Have you--of course
you have--learned to win through an undertow?"

"Yes, by never fighting it," Graham answered, his eyes on the spray of
color in her cheeks and the tiny beads of sweat that arose from her
continuous struggle with the high-strung creature she rode.
Thirty-eight! He wondered if Ernestine had lied. Paula Forrest did not
look twenty-eight. Her skin was the skin of a girl, with all the
delicate, fine-pored and thin transparency of the skin of a girl.

"Exactly," she went on. "By not fighting the undertow. By yielding to
its down-drag and out-drag, and working with it to reach air again.
Dick taught me that trick. So with my insomnia. If it is excitement
from immediate events that holds me back from the City of Sleep, I
yield to it and come quicker to unconsciousness from out the entangling
currents. I invite my soul to live over again, from the same and
different angles, the things that keep me from unconsciousness.

"Take the swimming of Mountain Lad yesterday. I lived it over last
night as I had lived it in reality. Then I lived it as a spectator--as
the girls saw it, as you saw it, as the cowboy saw it, and, most of
all, as my husband saw it. Then I made up a picture of it, many
pictures of it, from all angles, and painted them, and framed them, and
hung them, and then, a spectator, looked at them as if for the first
time. And I made myself many kinds of spectators, from crabbed old
maids and lean pantaloons to girls in boarding school and Greek boys of
thousands of years ago.

"After that I put it to music. I played it on the piano, and guessed
the playing of it on full orchestras and blaring bands. I chanted it, I
sang it-epic, lyric, comic; and, after a weary long while, of course I
slept in the midst of it, and knew not that I slept until I awoke at
twelve to-day. The last time I had heard the clock strike was six. Six
unbroken hours is a capital prize for me in the sleep lottery."

As she finished, Mr. Hennessy rode away on a cross path, and Dick
Forrest dropped back to squire his wife on the other side.

"Will you sport a bet, Evan?" he queried.

"I'd like to hear the terms of it first," was the answer.

"Cigars against cigars that you can't catch Paula in the tank inside
ten minutes--no, inside five, for I remember you're some swimmer."

"Oh, give him a chance, Dick," Paula cried generously. "Ten minutes
will worry him."

"But you don't know him," Dicked argued. "And you don't value my
cigars. I tell you he is a swimmer. He's drowned kanakas, and you know
what that means."

"Perhaps I should reconsider. Maybe he'll slash a killing crawl-stroke
at me before I've really started. Tell me his history and prizes."

"I'll just tell you one thing. They still talk of it in the Marquesas.
It was the big hurricane of 1892. He did forty miles in forty-five
hours, and only he and one other landed on the land. And they were all
kanakas. He was the only white man; yet he out-endured and drowned the
last kanaka of them--"

"I thought you said there was one other?" Paula interrupted.

"She was a woman," Dick answered. "He drowned the last kanaka."

"And the woman was then a white woman?" Paula insisted.

Graham looked quickly at her, and although she had asked the question
of her husband, her head turned to the turn of his head, so that he
found her eyes meeting his straightly and squarely in interrogation.
Graham held her gaze with equal straightness as he answered: "She was a
kanaka."

"A queen, if you please," Dick took up. "A queen out of the ancient
chief stock. She was Queen of Huahoa."

"Was it the chief stock that enabled her to out-endure the native men?"
Paula asked. "Or did you help her?"

"I rather think we helped each other toward the end," Graham replied.
"We were both out of our heads for short spells and long spells.
Sometimes it was one, sometimes the other, that was all in. We made the
land at sunset--that is, a wall of iron coast, with the surf bursting
sky-high. She took hold of me and clawed me in the water to get some
sense in me. You see, I wanted to go in, which would have meant finish.

"She got me to understand that she knew where she was; that the current
set westerly along shore and in two hours would drift us abreast of a
spot where we could land. I swear I either slept or was unconscious
most of those two hours; and I swear she was in one state or the other
when I chanced to come to and noted the absence of the roar of the
surf. Then it was my turn to claw and maul her back to consciousness.
It was three hours more before we made the sand. We slept where we
crawled out of the water. Next morning's sun burnt us awake, and we
crept into the shade of some wild bananas, found fresh water, and went
to sleep again. Next I awoke it was night. I took another drink, and
slept through till morning. She was still asleep when the bunch of
kanakas, hunting wild goats from the next valley, found us."

"I'll wager, for a man who drowned a whole kanaka crew, it was you who
did the helping," Dick commented.

"She must have been forever grateful," Paula challenged, her eyes
directly on Graham's. "Don't tell me she wasn't young, wasn't
beautiful, wasn't a golden brown young goddess."

"Her mother was the Queen of Huahoa," Graham answered. "Her father was
a Greek scholar and an English gentleman. They were dead at the time of
the swim, and Nomare was queen herself. She _was_ young. She was
beautiful as any woman anywhere in the world may be beautiful. Thanks
to her father's skin, she as not golden brown. She was tawny golden.
But you've heard the story undoubtedly--"

He broke off with a look of question to Dick, who shook his head.

Calls and cries and splashings of water from beyond a screen of trees
warned them that they were near the tank.

"You'll have to tell me the rest of the story some time," Paula said.

"Dick knows it. I can't see why he hasn't told you."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Perhaps because he's never had the time or the provocation."

"God wot, it's had wide circulation," Graham laughed. "For know that I
was once morganatic--or whatever you call it--king of the cannibal
isles, or of a paradise of a Polynesian isle at any rate.--'By a purple
wave on an opal beach in the hush of the Mahim woods,'" he hummed
carelessly, in conclusion, and swung off from his horse.

"'The white moth to the closing vine, the bee to the opening clover,'"
she hummed another line of the song, while The Fop nearly got his teeth
into her leg and she straightened him out with the spur, and waited for
Dick to help her off and tie him.

"Cigars!--I'm in on that!--you can't catch her!" Bert Wainwright called
from the top of the high dive forty feet above. "Wait a minute! I'm
coming!"

And come he did, in a swan dive that was almost professional and that
brought handclapping approval from the girls.

"A sweet dive, balanced beautifully," Graham told him as he emerged
from the tank.

Bert tried to appear unconscious of the praise, failed, and, to pass it
off, plunged into the wager.

"I don't know what kind of a swimmer you are, Graham," he said, "but I
just want in with Dick on the cigars."

"Me, too; me, too!" chorused Ernestine, and Lute, and Rita.

"Boxes of candy, gloves, or any truck you care to risk," Ernestine
added.

"But I don't know Mrs. Forrest's records, either," Graham protested,
after having taken on the bets. "However, if in five minutes--"

"Ten minutes," Paula said, "and to start from opposite ends of the
tank. Is that fair? Any touch is a catch." Graham looked his hostess
over with secret approval. She was clad, not in the single white silk
slip she evidently wore only for girl parties, but in a coquettish
imitation of the prevailing fashion mode, a suit of changeable light
blue and green silk--almost the color of the pool; the skirt slightly
above the knees whose roundedness he recognized; with long stockings to
match, and tiny bathing shoes bound on with crossed ribbons. On her
head was a jaunty swimming cap no jauntier than herself when she urged
the ten minutes in place of five.

Rita Wainwright held the watch, while Graham walked down to the other
end of the hundred-and-fifty-foot tank.

"Paula, you'll be caught if you take any chances," Dick warned. "Evan
Graham is a real fish man."

"I guess Paula'll show him a few, even without the pipe," Bert bragged
loyally. "And I'll bet she can out-dive him."

"There you lose," Dick answered. "I saw the rock he dived from at
Huahoa. That was after his time, and after the death of Queen Nomare.
He was only a youngster--twenty-two; he had to be to do it. It was off
the peak of the Pau-wi Rock--one hundred and twenty-eight feet by
triangulation. And he couldn't do it legitimately or technically with a
swan-dive, because he had to clear two lower ledges while he was in the
air. The upper ledge of the two, by their own traditions, was the
highest the best of the kanakas had ever dared since their traditions
began. Well, he did it. He became tradition. As long as the kanakas of
Huahoa survive he will remain tradition--Get ready, Rita. Start on the
full minute."

"It's almost a shame to play tricks on so reputable a swimmer," Paula
confided to them, as she faced her guest down the length of the tank
and while both waited the signal.

"He may get you before you can turn the trick," Dick warned again. And
then, to Bert, with just a shade of anxiety: "Is it working all right?
Because if it isn't, Paula will have a bad five seconds getting out of
it."

"All O.K.," Bert assured. "I went in myself. The pipe is working.
There's plenty of air."

"Ready!" Rita called. "Go!"

Graham ran toward their end like a foot-racer, while Paula darted up
the high dive. By the time she had gained the top platform, his hands
and feet were on the lower rungs. When he was half-way up she
threatened a dive, compelling him to cease from climbing and to get out
on the twenty-foot platform ready to follow her to the water. Whereupon
she laughed down at him and did not dive. "Time is passing--the
precious seconds are ticking off," Ernestine chanted.

When he started to climb, Paula again chased him to the half-way
platform with a threat to dive. But not many seconds did Graham waste.
His next start was determined, and Paula, poised for her dive, could
not send him scuttling back. He raced upward to gain the thirty-foot
platform before she should dive, and she was too wise to linger. Out
into space she launched, head back, arms bent, hands close to chest,
legs straight and close together, her body balanced horizontally on the
air as it fell outward and downward.

"Oh you Annette Kellerman!" Bert Wamwright's admiring cry floated up.

Graham ceased pursuit to watch the completion of the dive, and saw his
hostess, a few feet above the water, bend her head forward, straighten
out her arms and lock the hands to form the arch before her head, and,
so shifting the balance of her body, change it from the horizontal to
the perfect, water-cleaving angle.

The moment she entered the water, he swung out on the thirty-foot
platform and waited. From this height he could make out her body
beneath the surface swimming a full stroke straight for the far end of
the tank. Not till then did he dive. He was confident that he could
outspeed her, and his dive, far and flat, entered him in the water
twenty feet beyond her entrance.

But at the instant he was in, Dick dipped two flat rocks into the water
and struck them together. This was the signal for Paula to change her
course. Graham heard the concussion and wondered. He broke surface in
the full swing of the crawl and went down the tank to the far end at a
killing pace. He pulled himself out and watched the surface of the
tank. A burst of handclapping from the girls drew his eyes to the
Little Lady drawing herself out of the tank at the other end.

Again he ran down the side of the tank, and again she climbed the
scaffold. But this time his wind and endurance enabled him to cut down
her lead, so that she was driven to the twenty-foot platform. She took
no time for posturing or swanning, but tilted immediately off in a
stiff dive, angling toward the west side of the tank. Almost they were
in the air at the same time. In the water and under it, he could feel
against his face and arms the agitation left by her progress; but she
led into the deep shadow thrown by the low afternoon sun, where the
water was so dark he could see nothing.

When he touched the side of the tank he came up. She was not in sight.
He drew himself out, panting, and stood ready to dive in at the first
sign of her. But there were no signs.

"Seven minutes!" Rita called. "And a half! ... Eight!... And a half!"

And no Paula Forrest broke surface. Graham refused to be alarmed
because he could see no alarm on the faces of the others.

"I lose," he announced at Rita's "Nine minutes!"

"She's been under over two minutes, and you're all too blessed calm
about it to get me excited," he said. "I've still a minute--maybe I
don't lose," he added quickly, as he stepped off feet first into the
tank.

As he went down he turned over and explored the cement wall of tank
with his hands. Midway, possibly ten feet under the surface he
estimated, his hands encountered an opening in the wall. He felt about,
learned it Was unscreened, and boldly entered. Almost before he was in,
he found he could come up; but he came up slowly, breaking surface in
pitchy blackness and feeling about him without splashing.

His fingers touched a cool smooth arm that shrank convulsively at
contact while the possessor of it cried sharply with the startle of
fright. He held on tightly and began to laugh, and Paula laughed with
him. A line from "The First Chanty" flashed into his
consciousness--"_Hearing her laugh in the gloom greatly I loved her._"

"You did frighten me when you touched me," she said. "You came without
a sound, and I was a thousand miles away, dreaming..."

"What?" Graham asked.

"Well, honestly, I had just got an idea for a gown--a dusty, musty,
mulberry-wine velvet, with long, close lines, and heavy, tarnished gold
borders and cords and things. And the only jewelery a ring--one
enormous pigeon-blood ruby that Dick gave me years ago when we sailed
the _All Away_."

"Is there anything you don't do?" he laughed.

She joined with him, and their mirth sounded strangely hollow in the
pent and echoing dark.

"Who told you?" she next asked.

"No one. After you had been under two minutes I knew it had to be
something like this, and I came exploring."

"It was Dick's idea. He had it built into the tank afterward. You will
find him full of whimsies. He delighted in scaring old ladies into fits
by stepping off into the tank with their sons or grandsons and hiding
away in here. But after one or two nearly died of shock--old ladies, I
mean--he put me up, as to-day, to fooling hardier persons like
yourself.--Oh, he had another accident. There was a Miss Coghlan,
friend of Ernestine, a little seminary girl. They artfully stood her
right beside the pipe that leads out, and Dick went off the high dive
and swam in here to the inside end of the pipe. After several minutes,
by the time she was in collapse over his drowning, he spoke up the pipe
to her in most horrible, sepulchral tones. And right there Miss Coghlan
fainted dead away."

"She must have been a weak sister," Graham commented; while he
struggled with a wanton desire for a match so that he could strike it
and see how Paula Forrest looked paddling there beside him to keep
afloat.

"She had a fair measure of excuse," Paula answered. "She was a young
thing--eighteen; and she had a sort of school-girl infatuation for
Dick. They all get it. You see, he's such a boy when he's playing that
they can't realize that he's a hard-bitten, hard-working,
deep-thinking, mature, elderly benedict. The embarrassing thing was
that the little girl, when she was first revived and before she could
gather her wits, exposed all her secret heart. Dick's face was a study
while she babbled her--"

"Well?--going to stay there all night?" Bert Wainwright's voice came
down the pipe, sounding megaphonically close.

"Heavens!" Graham sighed with relief; for he had startled and clutched
Paula's arm. "That's the time I got my fright. The little maiden is
avenged. Also, at last, I know what a lead-pipe cinch is."

"And it's time we started for the outer world," she suggested. "It's
not the coziest gossiping place in the world. Shall I go first?"

"By all means--and I'll be right behind; although it's a pity the water
isn't phosphorescent. Then I could follow your incandescent heel like
that chap Byron wrote about--don't you remember?"

He heard her appreciative gurgle in the dark, and then her: "Well, I'm
going now."

Unable to see the slightest glimmer, nevertheless, from the few sounds
she made he knew she had turned over and gone down head first, and he
was not beyond visioning with inner sight the graceful way in which she
had done it--an anything but graceful feat as the average swimming
woman accomplishes it.

"Somebody gave it away to you," was Bert's prompt accusal, when Graham
rose to the surface of the tank and climbed out.

"And you were the scoundrel who rapped stone under water," Graham
challenged. "If I'd lost I'd have protested the bet. It was a crooked
game, a conspiracy, and competent counsel, I am confident, would
declare it a felony. It's a case for the district attorney."

"But you won," Ernestine cried.

"I certainly did, and, therefore, I shall not prosecute you, nor any
one of your crooked gang--if the bets are paid promptly. Let me
see--you owe me a box of cigars--"

"One cigar, sir!"

"A box! A box!" "Cross tag!" Paula cried. "Let's play
cross-tag!--You're IT!"

Suiting action to word, she tagged Graham on the shoulder and plunged
into the tank. Before he could follow, Bert seized him, whirled him in
a circle, was himself tagged, and tagged Dick before he could escape.
And while Dick pursued his wife through the tank and Bert and Graham
sought a chance to cross, the girls fled up the scaffold and stood in
an enticing row on the fifteen-foot diving platform.




CHAPTER XIV.



An indifferent swimmer, Donald Ware had avoided the afternoon sport in
the tank; but after dinner, somewhat to the irritation of Graham, the
violinist monopolized Paula at the piano. New guests, with the casual
expectedness of the Big House, had drifted in--a lawyer, by name Adolph
Well, who had come to confer with Dick over some big water-right suit;
Jeremy Braxton, straight from Mexico, Dick's general superintendent of
the Harvest Group, which bonanza, according to Jeremy Braxton, was as
"unpetering" as ever; Edwin O'Hay, a red-headed Irish musical and
dramatic critic; and Chauncey Bishop, editor and owner of the _San
Francisco Dispatch_, and a member of Dick's class and frat, as Graham
gleaned.

Dick had started a boisterous gambling game which he called "Horrible
Fives," wherein, although excitement ran high and players plunged, the
limit was ten cents, and, on a lucky coup, the transient banker might
win or lose as high as ninety cents, such coup requiring at least ten
minutes to play out. This game went on at a big table at the far end of
the room, accompanied by much owing and borrowing of small sums and an
incessant clamor for change.

With nine players, the game was crowded, and Graham, rather than draw
cards, casually and occasionally backed Ernestine's cards, the while he
glanced down the long room at the violinist and Paula Forrest absorbed
in Beethoven Symphonies and Delibes' Ballets. Jeremy Braxton was
demanding raising the limit to twenty cents, and Dick, the heaviest
loser, as he averred, to the tune of four dollars and sixty cents, was
plaintively suggesting the starting of a "kitty" in order that some one
should pay for the lights and the sweeping out of the place in the
morning, when Graham, with a profound sigh at the loss of his last
bet--a nickel which he had had to pay double--announced to Ernestine
that he was going to take a turn around the room to change his luck.

"I prophesied you would," she told him under her breath.

"What?" he asked.

She glanced significantly in Paula's direction.

"Just for that I simply must go down there now," he retorted.

"Can't dast decline a dare," she taunted.

"If it were a dare I wouldn't dare do it."

"In which case I dare you," she took up.

He shook his head: "I had already made up my mind to go right down
there to that one spot and cut that fiddler out of the running. You
can't dare me out of it at this late stage. Besides, there's Mr. O'Hay
waiting for you to make your bet."

Ernestine rashly laid ten cents, and scarcely knew whether she won or
lost, so intent was she on watching Graham go down the room, although
she did know that Bert Wainwright had not been unobservant of her gaze
and its direction. On the other hand, neither she nor Bert, nor any
other at the table, knew that Dick's quick-glancing eyes, sparkling
with merriment while his lips chaffed absurdities that made them all
laugh, had missed no portion of the side play.

Ernestine, but little taller than Paula, although hinting of a plus
roundness to come, was a sun-healthy, clear blonde, her skin sprayed
with the almost transparent flush of maidenhood at eighteen. To the
eye, it seemed almost that one could see through the pink daintiness of
fingers, hand, wrist, and forearm, neck and cheek. And to this
delicious transparency of rose and pink, was added a warmth of tone
that did not escape Dick's eyes as he glimpsed her watch Evan Graham
move down the length of room. Dick knew and classified her wild
imagined dream or guess, though the terms of it were beyond his
divination.

What she saw was what she imagined was the princely walk of Graham, the
high, light, blooded carriage of his head, the delightful carelessness
of the gold-burnt, sun-sanded hair that made her fingers ache to be
into with caresses she for the first time knew were possible of her
fingers.

Nor did Paula, during an interval of discussion with the violinist in
which she did not desist from stating her criticism of O'Hay's latest
criticism of Harold Bauer, fail to see and keep her eyes on Graham's
progress. She, too, noted with pleasure his grace of movement, the
high, light poise of head, the careless hair, the clear bronze of the
smooth cheeks, the splendid forehead, the long gray eyes with the hint
of drooping lids and boyish sullenness that fled before the smile with
which he greeted her.

She had observed that smile often since her first meeting with him. It
was an irresistible smile, a smile that lighted the eyes with the
radiance of good fellowship and that crinkled the corners into tiny,
genial lines. It was provocative of smiles, for she found herself
smiling a silent greeting in return as she continued stating to Ware
her grievance against O'Hay's too-complacent praise of Bauer.

But her engagement was tacitly with Donald Ware at the piano, and with
no more than passing speech, she was off and away in a series of
Hungarian dances that made Graham marvel anew as he loafed and smoked
in a window-seat.

He marveled at the proteanness of her, at visions of those nimble
fingers guiding and checking The Fop, swimming and paddling in
submarine crypts, and, falling in swan-like flight through forty feet
of air, locking just above the water to make the diver's
head-protecting arch of arm.

In decency, he lingered but few minutes, returned to the gamblers, and
put the entire table in a roar with a well-acted Yiddisher's chagrin
and passion at losing entire nickels every few minutes to the fortunate
and chesty mine superintendent from Mexico.

Later, when the game of Horrible Fives broke up, Bert and Lute Desten
spoiled the Adagio from Beethoven's _Sonata Pathetique_ by
exaggeratedly ragging to it in what Dick immediately named "The Loving
Slow-Drag," till Paula broke down in a gale of laughter and ceased from
playing.

New groupings occurred. A bridge table formed with Weil, Rita, Bishop,
and Dick. Donald Ware was driven from his monopoly of Paula by the
young people under the leadership of Jeremy Braxton; while Graham and
O'Hay paired off in a window-seat and O'Hay talked shop.

After a time, in which all at the piano had sung Hawaiian _hulas_,
Paula sang alone to her own accompaniment. She sang several German
love-songs in succession, although it was merely for the group about
her and not for the room; and Evan Graham, almost to his delight,
decided that at last he had found a weakness in her. She might be a
magnificent pianist, horsewoman, diver, and swimmer, but it was patent,
despite her singing throat, that she was not a magnificent singer. This
conclusion he was quickly compelled to modify. A singer she was, a
consummate singer. Weakness was only comparative after all. She lacked
the magnificent voice. It was a sweet voice, a rich voice, with the
same warm-fibered thrill of her laugh; but the volume so essential to
the great voice was not there. Ear and voice seemed effortlessly true,
and in her singing were feeling, artistry, training, intelligence. But
volume--it was scarcely a fair average, was his judgment.

But quality--there he halted. It was a woman's voice. It was haunted
with richness of sex. In it resided all the temperament in the
world--with all the restraint of discipline, was the next step of his
analysis. He had to admire the way she refused to exceed the
limitations of her voice. In this she achieved triumphs.

And, while he nodded absently to O'Hay's lecturette on the state of
the--opera, Graham fell to wondering if Paula Forrest, thus so
completely the mistress of her temperament, might not be equally
mistress of her temperament in the deeper, passional ways. There was a
challenge there--based on curiosity, he conceded, but only partly so
based; and, over and beyond, and, deeper and far beneath, a challenge
to a man made in the immemorial image of man.

It was a challenge that bade him pause, and even look up and down the
great room and to the tree-trunked roof far above, and to the flying
gallery hung with the spoils of the world, and to Dick Forrest, master
of all this material achievement and husband of the woman, playing
bridge, just as he worked, with all his heart, his laughter ringing
loud as he caught Rita in renig. For Graham had the courage not to shun
the ultimate connotations. Behind the challenge in his speculations
lurked the woman. Paula Forrest was splendidly, deliciously woman, all
woman, unusually woman. From the blow between the eyes of his first
striking sight of her, swimming the great stallion in the pool, she had
continued to witch-ride his man's imagination. He was anything but
unused to women; and his general attitude was that of being tired of
the mediocre sameness of them. To chance upon the unusual woman was
like finding the great pearl in a lagoon fished out by a generation of
divers.

"Glad to see you're still alive," Paula laughed to him, a little later.

She was prepared to depart with Lute for bed. A second bridge quartet
had been arranged--Ernestine, Bert, Jeremy Braxton, and Graham; while
O'Hay and Bishop were already deep in a bout of two-handed pinochle.

"He's really a charming Irishman when he keeps off his one string,"
Paula went on.

"Which, I think I am fair, is music," Graham said.

"And on music he is insufferable," Lute observed. "It's the only thing
he doesn't know the least thing about. He drives one frantic."

"Never mind," Paula soothed, in gurgling tones. "You will all be
avenged. Dick just whispered to me to get the philosophers up to-morrow
night. You know how they talk music. A musical critic is their awful
prey."

"Terrence said the other night that there was no closed season on
musical critics," Lute contributed.

"Terrence and Aaron will drive him to drink," Paula laughed her joy of
anticipation. "And Dar Hyal, alone, with his blastic theory of art, can
specially apply it to music to the confutation of all the first words
and the last. He doesn't believe a thing he says about blastism, any
more than was he serious when he danced the other evening. It's his bit
of fun. He's such a deep philosopher that he has to get his fun
somehow."

"And if O'Hay ever locks horns with Terrence," Lute prophesied, "I can
see Terrence tucking arm in arm with him, leading him down to the stag
room, and heating the argument with the absentest-minded variety of
drinks that ever O'Hay accomplished."

"Which means a very sick O'Hay next day," Paula continued her gurgles
of anticipation.

"I'll tell him to do it!" exclaimed Lute.

"You mustn't think we're all bad," Paula protested to Graham. "It's
just the spirit of the house. Dick likes it. He's always playing jokes
himself. He relaxes that way. I'll wager, right now, it was Dick's
suggestion, to Lute, and for Lute to carry out, for Terrence to get
O'Hay into the stag room. Now, 'fess up, Lute."

"Well, I will say," Lute answered with meticulous circumspection, "that
the idea was not entirely original with me."

At this point, Ernestine joined them and appropriated Graham with:

"We're all waiting for you. We've cut, and you and I are partners.
Besides, Paula's making her sleep noise. So say good night, and let her
go."

Paula had left for bed at ten o'clock. Not till one did the bridge
break up. Dick, his arm about Ernestine in brotherly fashion, said good
night to Graham where one of the divided ways led to the watch tower,
and continued on with his pretty sister-in-law toward her quarters.

"Just a tip, Ernestine," he said at parting, his gray eyes frankly and
genially on hers, but his voice sufficiently serious to warn her.

"What have I been doing now?" she pouted laughingly.

"Nothing... as yet. But don't get started, or you'll be laying up a
sore heart for yourself. You're only a kid yet--eighteen; and a darned
nice, likable kid at that. Enough to make 'most any man sit up and take
notice. But Evan Graham is not 'most any man--"

"Oh, I can take care of myself," she blurted out in a fling of quick
resentment.

"But listen to me just the same. There comes a time in the affairs of a
girl when the love-bee gets a buzzing with a very loud hum in her
pretty noddle. Then is the time she mustn't make a mistake and start in
loving the wrong man. You haven't fallen in love with Evan Graham yet,
and all you have to do is just not to fall in love with him. He's not
for you, nor for any young thing. He's an oldster, an ancient, and
possibly has forgotten more about love, romantic love, and young
things, than you'll ever learn in a dozen lives. If he ever marries
again--"

"Again!" Ernestine broke in.

"Why, he's been a widower, my dear, for over fifteen years."

"Then what of it?" she demanded defiantly.

"Just this," Dick continued quietly. "He's lived the young-thing
romance, and lived it wonderfully; and, from the fact that in fifteen
years he has not married again, means--"

"That he's never recovered from his loss?" Ernestine interpolated. "But
that's no proof--"

"--Means that he's got over his apprenticeship to wild young romance,"
Dick held on steadily. "All you have to do is look at him and realize
that he has not lacked opportunities, and that, on occasion, some very
fine women, real wise women, mature women, have given him foot-races
that tested his wind and endurance. But so far they've not succeeded in
catching him. And as for young things, you know how filled the world is
with them for a man like him. Think it over, and just keep your
heart-thoughts away from him. If you don't let your heart start to warm
toward him, it will save your heart from a grievous chill later on."

He took one of her hands in his, and drew her against him, an arm
soothingly about her shoulder. For several minutes of silence Dick idly
speculated on what her thoughts might be.

"You know, we hard-bitten old fellows--" he began half-apologetically,
half-humorously.

But she made a restless movement of distaste, and cried out:

"Are the only ones worth while! The young men are all youngsters, and
that's what's the matter with them. They're full of life, and coltish
spirits, and dance, and song. But they're not serious. They're not big.
They're not--oh, they don't give a girl that sense of all-wiseness, of
proven strength, of, of... well, of manhood."

"I understand," Dick murmured. "But please do not forget to glance at
the other side of the shield. You glowing young creatures of women must
affect the old fellows in precisely similar ways. They may look on you
as toys, playthings, delightful things to whom to teach a few fine
foolishnesses, but not as comrades, not as equals, not as sharers--full
sharers. Life is something to be learned. They have learned it... some
of it. But young things like you, Ernestine, have you learned any of it
yet?"

"Tell me," she asked abruptly, almost tragically, "about this wild
young romance, about this young thing when he was young, fifteen years
ago."

"Fifteen?" Dick replied promptly. "Eighteen. They were married three
years before she died. In fact--figure it out for yourself--they were
actually married, by a Church of England dominie, and living in
wedlock, about the same moment that you were squalling your first
post-birth squalls in this world."

"Yes, yes--go on," she urged nervously. "What was she like?"

"She was a resplendent, golden-brown, or tan-golden half-caste, a
Polynesian queen whose mother had been a queen before her, whose father
was an Oxford man, an English gentleman, and a real scholar. Her name
was Nomare. She was Queen of Huahoa. She was barbaric. He was young
enough to out-barbaric her. There was nothing sordid in their marriage.
He was no penniless adventurer. She brought him her island kingdom and
forty thousand subjects. He brought to that island his fortune--and it
was no inconsiderable fortune. He built a palace that no South Sea
island ever possessed before or will ever possess again. It was the
real thing, grass-thatched, hand-hewn beams that were lashed with
cocoanut sennit, and all the rest. It was rooted in the island; it
sprouted out of the island; it _belonged_, although he fetched Hopkins
out from New York to plan it.

"Heavens! they had their own royal yacht, their mountain house, their
canoe house--the last a veritable palace in itself. I know. I have been
at great feasts in it--though it was after their time. Nomare was dead,
and no one knew where Graham was, and a king of collateral line was the
ruler.

"I told you he out-barbaricked her. Their dinner service was gold.--Oh,
what's the use in telling any more. He was only a boy. She was
half-English, half-Polynesian, and a really and truly queen. They were
flowers of their races. They were a pair of wonderful children. They
lived a fairy tale. And... well, Ernestine, the years have passed, and
Evan Graham has passed from the realm of the young thing. It will be a
remarkable woman that will ever infatuate him now. Besides, he's
practically broke. Though he didn't wastrel his money. As much
misfortune, and more, than anything else."

"Paula would be more his kind," Ernestine said meditatively.

"Yes, indeed," Dick agreed. "Paula, or any woman as remarkable as
Paula, would attract him a thousand times more than all the sweet,
young, lovely things like you in the world. We oldsters have our
standards, you know."

"And I'll have to put up with the youngsters," Ernestine sighed.

"In the meantime, yes," he chuckled. "Remembering, always, that you,
too, in time, may grow into the remarkable, mature woman, who can
outfoot a man like Evan in a foot-race of love for possession."

"But I shall be married long before that," she pouted.

"Which will be your good fortune, my dear. And, now, good night. And
you are not angry with me?"

She smiled pathetically and shook her head, put up her lips to be
kissed, then said as they parted:

"I promise not to be angry if you will only show me the way that in the
end will lead me to ancient graybeards like you and Graham."

Dick Forrest, turning off lights as he went, penetrated the library,
and, while selecting half a dozen reference volumes on mechanics and
physics, smiled as if pleased with himself at recollection of the
interview with his sister-in-law. He was confident that he had spoken
in time and not a moment too soon. But, half way up the book-concealed
spiral staircase that led to his work room, a remark of Ernestine,
echoing in his consciousness, made him stop from very suddenness to
lean his shoulder against the wall.--_"Paula would be more his kind."_

"Silly ass!" he laughed aloud, continuing on his way. "And married a
dozen years!"

Nor did he think again about it, until, in bed, on his sleeping porch,
he took a glance at his barometers and thermometers, and prepared to
settle down to the solution of the electrical speculation that had been
puzzling him. Then it was, as he peered across the great court to his
wife's dark wing and dark sleeping porch to see if she were still
waking, that Ernestine's remark again echoed. He dismissed it with a
"Silly ass!" of scorn, lighted a cigarette, and began running, with
trained eye, the indexes of the books and marking the pages sought with
matches.




CHAPTER XV



It was long after ten in the morning, when Graham, straying about
restlessly and wondering if Paula Forrest ever appeared before the
middle of the day, wandered into the music room. Despite the fact that
he was a several days' guest in the Big House, so big was it that the
music room was new territory. It was an exquisite room, possibly
thirty-five by sixty and rising to a lofty trussed ceiling where a warm
golden light was diffused from a skylight of yellow glass. Red tones
entered largely into the walls and furnishing, and the place, to him,
seemed to hold the hush of music.

Graham was lazily contemplating a Keith with its inevitable triumph of
sun-gloried atmosphere and twilight-shadowed sheep, when, from the tail
of his eye, he saw his hostess come in from the far entrance. Again,
the sight of her, that was a picture, gave him the little catch-breath
of gasp. She was clad entirely in white, and looked very young and
quite tall in the sweeping folds of a _holoku_ of elaborate simplicity
and apparent shapelessness. He knew the _holoku_ in the home of its
origin, where, on the _lanais_ of Hawaii, it gave charm to a plain
woman and double-folded the charm of a charming woman.

While they smiled greeting across the room, he was noting the set of
her body, the poise of head and frankness of eyes--all of which seemed
articulate with a friendly, comradely, "Hello, friends." At least such
was the form Graham's fancy took as she came toward him.

"You made a mistake with this room," he said gravely.

"No, don't say that! But how?"

"It should have been longer, much longer, twice as long at least."

"Why?" she demanded, with a disapproving shake of head, while he
delighted in the girlish color in her cheeks that gave the lie to her
thirty-eight years.

"Because, then," he answered, "you should have had to walk twice as far
this morning and my pleasure of watching you would have been
correspondingly increased. I've always insisted that the _holoku_ is
the most charming garment ever invented for women."

"Then it was my _holoku_ and not I," she retorted. "I see you are like
Dick--always with a string on your compliments, and lo, when we poor
sillies start to nibble, back goes the compliment dragging at the end
of the string.

"Now I want to show you the room," she hurried on, closing his
disclaimer. "Dick gave me a free hand with it. It's all mine, you see,
even to its proportions."

"And the pictures?"

"I selected them," she nodded, "every one of them, and loved them onto
the walls myself. Although Dick did quarrel with me over that
Vereschagin. He agreed on the two Millets and the Corot over there, and
on that Isabey; and even conceded that some Vereschagins might do in a
music room, but not that particular Vereschagin. He's jealous for our
local artists, you see. He wanted more of them, wanted to show his
appreciation of home talent."

"I don't know your Pacific Coast men's work very well," Graham said.
"Tell me about them. Show me that--Of course, that's a Keith, there;
but whose is that next one? It's beautiful."

"A McComas--" she was answering; and Graham, with a pleasant
satisfaction, was settling himself to a half-hour's talk on pictures,
when Donald Ware entered with questing eyes that lighted up at sight of
the Little Lady.

His violin was under his arm, and he crossed to the piano in a brisk,
business-like way and proceeded to lay out music.

"We're going to work till lunch," Paula explained to Graham. "He swears
I'm getting abominably rusty, and I think he's half right. We'll see
you at lunch. You can stay if you care, of course; but I warn you it's
really going to be work. And we're going swimming this afternoon. Four
o'clock at the tank, Dick says. Also, he says he's got a new song he's
going to sing then.--What time is it, Mr. Ware?"

"Ten minutes to eleven," the musician answered briefly, with a touch of
sharpness.

"You're ahead of time--the engagement was for eleven. And till eleven
you'll have to wait, sir. I must run and see Dick, first. I haven't
said good morning to him yet."

Well Paula knew her husband's hours. Scribbled secretly in the back of
the note-book that lay always on the reading stand by her couch were
hieroglyphic notes that reminded her that he had coffee at six-thirty;
might possibly be caught in bed with proof-sheets or books till
eight-forty-five, if not out riding; was inaccessible between nine and
ten, dictating correspondence to Blake; was inaccessible between ten
and eleven, conferring with managers and foremen, while Bonbright, the
assistant secretary, took down, like any court reporter, every word
uttered by all parties in the rapid-fire interviews.

At eleven, unless there were unexpected telegrams or business, she
could usually count on finding Dick alone for a space, although
invariably busy. Passing the secretaries' room, the click of a
typewriter informed her that one obstacle was removed. In the library,
the sight of Mr. Bonbright hunting a book for Mr. Manson, the Shorthorn
manager, told her that Dick's hour with his head men was over.

She pressed the button that swung aside a section of filled
book-shelves and revealed the tiny spiral of steel steps that led up to
Dick's work room. At the top, a similar pivoting section of shelves
swung obediently to her press of button and let her noiselessly into
his room. A shade of vexation passed across her face as she recognized
Jeremy Braxton's voice. She paused in indecision, neither seeing nor
being seen.

"If we flood we flood," the mine superintendent was saying. "It will
cost a mint--yes, half a dozen mints--to pump out again. And it's a
damned shame to drown the old Harvest that way."

"But for this last year the books show that we've worked at a positive
loss," Paula heard Dick take up. "Every petty bandit from Huerta down
to the last peon who's stolen a horse has gouged us. It's getting too
stiff--taxes extraordinary--bandits, revolutionists, and federals. We
could survive it, if only the end were in sight; but we have no
guarantee that this disorder may not last a dozen or twenty years."

"Just the same, the old Harvest--think of flooding her!" the
superintendent protested.

"And think of Villa," Dick replied, with a sharp laugh the bitterness
of which did not escape Paula. "If he wins he says he's going to divide
all the land among the peons. The next logical step will be the mines.
How much do you think we've coughed up to the constitutionalists in the
past twelvemonth?"

"Over a hundred and twenty thousand," Braxton answered promptly. "Not
counting that fifty thousand cold bullion to Torenas before he
retreated. He jumped his army at Guaymas and headed for Europe with
it--I wrote you all that."

"If we keep the workings afloat, Jeremy, they'll go on gouging, gouge
without end, Amen. I think we'd better flood. If we can make wealth
more efficiently than those rapscallions, let us show them that we can
destroy wealth with the same facility."

"That's what I tell them. And they smile and repeat that such and such
a free will offering, under exigent circumstances, would be very
acceptable to the revolutionary chiefs--meaning themselves. The big
chiefs never finger one peso in ten of it. Good Lord! I show them what
we've done. Steady work for five thousand peons. Wages raised from ten
centavos a day to a hundred and ten. I show them peons--ten-centavo men
when we took them, and five-peso men when I showed them. And the same
old smile and the same old itching palm, and the same old acceptability
of a free will offering from us to the sacred cause of the revolution.
By God! Old Diaz was a robber, but he was a decent robber. I said to
Arranzo: 'If we shut down, here's five thousand Mexicans out of a
job--what'll you do with them?' And Arranzo smiled and answered me pat.
'Do with them?' he said. 'Why, put guns in their hands and march 'em
down to take Mexico City.'"

In imagination Paula could see Dick's disgusted shrug of shoulders as
she heard him say:

"The curse of it is--that the stuff is there, and that we're the only
fellows that can get it out. The Mexicans can't do it. They haven't the
brains. All they've got is the guns, and they're making us shell out
more than we make. There's only one thing for us, Jeremy. We'll forget
profits for a year or so, lay off the men, and just keep the engineer
force on and the pumping going."

"I threw that into Arranzo," Jeremy Braxton's voice boomed. "And what
was his comeback? That if we laid off the peons, he'd see to it that
the engineers laid off, too, and the mine could flood and be damned to
us.--No, he didn't say that last. He just smiled, but the smile meant
the same thing. For two cents I'd a-wrung his yellow neck, except that
there'd have been another patriot in his boots and in my office next
day proposing a stiffer gouge.

"So Arranzo got his 'bit,' and, on top of it, before he went across to
join the main bunch around Juarez, he let his men run off three hundred
of our mules--thirty thousand dollars' worth of mule-flesh right there,
after I'd sweetened him, too. The yellow skunk!"

"Who is revolutionary chief in our diggings right now?" Paula heard her
husband ask with one of his abrupt shifts that she knew of old time
tokened his drawing together the many threads of a situation and
proceeding to action.

"Raoul Bena."

"What's his rank?"

"Colonel--he's got about seventy ragamuffins."

"What did he do before he quit work?"

"Sheep-herder."

"Very well." Dick's utterance was quick and sharp. "You've got to
play-act. Become a patriot. Hike back as fast as God will let you.
Sweeten this Raoul Bena. He'll see through your play, or he's no
Mexican. Sweeten him and tell him you'll make him a general---a second
Villa."

"Lord, Lord, yes, but how?" Jeremy Braxton demanded.

"By putting him at the head of an army of five thousand. Lay off the
men. Make him make them volunteer. We're safe, because Huerta is
doomed. Tell him you're a real patriot. Give each man a rifle. We'll
stand that for a last gouge, and it will prove you a patriot. Promise
every man his job back when the war is over. Let them and Raoul Bena
depart with your blessing. Keep on the pumping force only. And if we
cut out profits for a year or so, at the same time we are cutting down
losses. And perhaps we won't have to flood old Harvest after all."

Paula smiled to herself at Dick's solution as she stole back down the
spiral on her way to the music room. She was depressed, but not by the
Harvest Group situation. Ever since her marriage there had always been
trouble in the working of the Mexican mines Dick had inherited. Her
depression was due to her having missed her morning greeting to him.
But this depression vanished at meeting Graham, who had lingered with
Ware at the piano and who, at her coming, was evidencing signs of
departure.

"Don't run away," she urged. "Stay and witness a spectacle of industry
that should nerve you up to starting on that book Dick has been telling
me about."




CHAPTER XVI



On Dick's face, at lunch, there was no sign of trouble over the Harvest
Group; nor could anybody have guessed that Jeremy Braxton's visit had
boded anything less gratifying than a report of unfailing earnings.
Although Adolph Weil had gone on the early morning train, which
advertised that the business which had brought him had been transacted
with Dick at some unheard of hour, Graham discovered a greater company
than ever at the table. Besides a Mrs. Tully, who seemed a stout and
elderly society matron, and whom Graham could not make out, there were
three new men, of whose identity he gleaned a little: a Mr. Gulhuss,
State Veterinary; a Mr. Deacon, a portrait painter of evident note on
the Coast; and a Captain Lester, then captain of a Pacific Mail liner,
who had sailed skipper for Dick nearly twenty years before and who had
helped Dick to his navigation.

The meal was at its close, and the superintendent was glancing at his
watch, when Dick said:

"Jeremy, I want to show you what I've been up to. We'll go right now.
You'll have time on your way to the train."

"Let us all go," Paula suggested, "and make a party of it. I'm dying to
see it myself, Dick's been so obscure about it."

Sanctioned by Dick's nod, she was ordering machines and saddle horses
the next moment.

"What is it?" Graham queried, when she had finished.

"Oh, one of Dick's stunts. He's always after something new. This is an
invention. He swears it will revolutionize farming--that is, small
farming. I have the general idea of it, but I haven't seen it set up
yet. It was ready a week ago, but there was some delay about a cable or
something concerning an adjustment."

"There's billions in it... if it works," Dick smiled over the table.
"Billions for the farmers of the world, and perhaps a trifle of royalty
for me... if it works."

"But what is it?" O'Hay asked. "Music in the dairy barns to make the
cows give down their milk more placidly?"

"Every farmer his own plowman while sitting on his front porch," Dick
baffled back. "In fact, the labor-eliminating intermediate stage
between soil production and sheer laboratory production of food. But
wait till you see it. Gulhuss, this is where I kill my own business, if
it works, for it will do away with the one horse of every ten-acre
farmer between here and Jericho."

In ranch machines and on saddle animals, the company was taken a mile
beyond the dairy center, where a level field was fenced squarely off
and contained, as Dick announced, just precisely ten acres.

"Behold," he said, "the one-man and no-horse farm where the farmer sits
on the porch. Please imagine the porch."

In the center of the field was a stout steel pole, at least twenty feet
in height and guyed very low.

From a drum on top of the pole a thin wire cable ran to the extreme
edge of the field and was attached to the steering lever of a small
gasoline tractor. About the tractor two mechanics fluttered. At command
from Dick they cranked the motor and started it on its way.

"This is the porch," Dick said. "Just imagine we're all that future
farmer sitting in the shade and reading the morning paper while the
manless, horseless plowing goes on."

Alone, unguided, the drum on the head of the pole in the center winding
up the cable, the tractor, at the circumference permitted by the cable,
turned a single furrow as it described a circle, or, rather, an inward
trending spiral about the field.

"No horse, no driver, no plowman, nothing but the farmer to crank the
tractor and start it on its way," Dick exulted, as the uncanny
mechanism turned up the brown soil and continued unguided, ever
spiraling toward the field's center. "Plow, harrow, roll, seed,
fertilize, cultivate, harvest--all from the front porch. And where the
farmer can buy juice from a power company, all he, or his wife, will
have to do is press the button, and he to his newspaper, and she to her
pie-crust."

"All you need, now, to make it absolutely perfect," Graham praised, "is
to square the circle."

"Yes," Mr. Gulhuss agreed. "As it is, a circle in a square field loses
some acreage."

Graham's face advertised a mental arithmetic trance for a minute, when
he announced: "Loses, roughly, three acres out of every ten."

"Sure," Dick concurred. "But the farmer has to have his front porch
somewhere on his ten acres. And the front porch represents the house,
the barn, the chicken yard and the various outbuildings. Very well. Let
him get tradition out of his mind, and, instead of building these
things in the center of his ten acres, let him build them on the three
acres of fringe. And let him plant his fruit and shade trees and berry
bushes on the fringe. When you come to consider it, the traditionary
method of erecting the buildings in the center of a rectangular ten
acres compels him to plow around the center in broken rectangles."

Gulhuss nodded enthusiastically. "Sure. And there's always the roadway
from the center out to the county road or right of way. That breaks the
efficiency of his plowing. Break ten acres into the consequent smaller
rectangles, and it's expensive cultivation."

"Wish navigation was as automatic," was Captain Lester's contribution.

"Or portrait painting," laughed Rita Wainwright with a significant
glance at Mr. Deacon.

"Or musical criticism," Lute remarked, with no glance at all, but with
a pointedness of present company that brought from O'Hay:

"Or just being a charming young woman."

"What price for the outfit?" Jeremy Braxton asked.

"Right now, we could manufacture and lay down, at a proper profit, for
five hundred. If the thing came into general use, with up to date,
large-scale factory methods, three hundred. But say five hundred. And
write off fifteen per cent, for interest and constant, it would cost
the farmer seventy dollars a year. What ten-acre farmer, on
two-hundred-dollar land, who keeps books, can keep a horse for seventy
dollars a year? And on top of that, it would save him, in labor,
personal or hired, at the abjectest minimum, two hundred dollars a
year."

"But what guides it?" Rita asked.

"The drum on the post. The drum is graduated for the complete
radius--which took some tall figuring, I assure you--and the cable,
winding around the drum and shortening, draws the tractor in toward the
center."

"There are lots of objections to its general introduction, even among
small farmers," Gulhuss said.

Dick nodded affirmation.

"Sure," he replied. "I have over forty noted down and classified. And
I've as many more for the machine itself. If the thing is a success, it
will take a long time to perfect it and introduce it."

Graham found himself divided between watching the circling tractor and
casting glances at the picture Paula Forrest was on her mount. It was
her first day on The Fawn, which was the Palomina mare Hennessy had
trained for her. Graham smiled with secret approval of her femininity;
for Paula, whether she had designed her habit for the mare, or had
selected one most peculiarly appropriate, had achieved a triumph.

In place of a riding coat, for the afternoon was warm, she wore a tan
linen blouse with white turnback collar. A short skirt, made like the
lower part of a riding coat, reached the knees, and from knees to
entrancing little bespurred champagne boots tight riding trousers
showed. Skirt and trousers were of fawn-colored silk corduroy. Soft
white gauntlets on her hands matched with the collar in the one
emphasis of color. Her head was bare, the hair done tight and low
around her ears and nape of neck.

"I don't see how you can keep such a skin and expose yourself to the
sun this way," Graham ventured, in mild criticism.

"I don't," she smiled with a dazzle of white teeth. "That is, I don't
expose my face this way more than a few times a year. I'd like to,
because I love the sun-gold burn in my hair; but I don't dare a
thorough tanning."

The mare frisked, and a breeze of air blew back a flap of skirt,
showing an articulate knee where the trouser leg narrowed tightly over
it. Again Graham visioned the white round of knee pressed into the
round muscles of the swimming Mountain Lad, as he noted the firm
knee-grip on her pigskin English saddle, quite new and fawn-colored to
match costume and horse.

When the magneto on the tractor went wrong, and the mechanics busied
themselves with it in the midst of the partly plowed field, the
company, under Paula's guidance, leaving Dick behind with his
invention, resolved itself into a pilgrimage among the brood-centers on
the way to the swimming tank. Mr. Crellin, the hog-manager, showed them
Lady Isleton, who, with her prodigious, fat, recent progeny of eleven,
won various naïve encomiums, while Mr. Crellin warmly proclaimed at
least four times, "And not a runt, not a runt, in the bunch."

Other glorious brood-sows, of Berkshire, Duroc-Jersey, and O. I. C.
blood, they saw till they were wearied, and new-born kids and lambs,
and rotund does and ewes. From center to center, Paula kept the
telephones warning ahead of the party's coming, so that Mr. Manson
waited to exhibit the great King Polo, and his broad-backed Shorthorn
harem, and the Shorthorn harems of bulls that were only little less
than King Polo in magnificence and record; and Parkman, the Jersey
manager, was on hand, with staffed assistants, to parade Sensational
Drake, Golden Jolly, Fontaine Royal, Oxford Master, and Karnak's Fairy
Boy--blue ribbon bulls, all, and founders and scions of noble houses of
butter-fat renown, and Rosaire Queen, Standby's Dam, Golden Jolly's
Lass, Olga's Pride, and Gertie of Maitlands--equally blue-ribboned and
blue-blooded Jersey matrons in the royal realm of butter-fat; and Mr.
Mendenhall, who had charge of the Shires, proudly exhibited a string of
mighty stallions, led by the mighty Mountain Lad, and a longer string
of matrons, headed by the Fotherington Princess of the silver whinny.
Even old Alden Bessie, the Princess's dam, retired to but part-day's
work, he sent for that they might render due honor to so notable a dam.

As four o'clock approached, Donald Ware, not keen on swimming, returned
in one of the machines to the Big House, and Mr. Gulhuss remained to
discuss Shires with Mr. Mendenhall. Dick was at the tank when the party
arrived, and the girls were immediately insistent for the new song.

"It isn't exactly a new song," Dick explained, his gray eyes twinkling
roguery, "and it's not my song. It was sung in Japan before I was born,
and, I doubt not, before Columbus discovered America. Also, it is a
duet--a competitive duet with forfeit penalties attached. Paula will
have to sing it with me.--I'll teach you. Sit down there, that's
right.--Now all the rest of you gather around and sit down."

Still in her riding habit, Paula sat down on the concrete, facing her
husband, in the center of the sitting audience. Under his direction,
timing her movements to his, she slapped her hands on her knees,
slapped her palms together, and slapped her palms against his palms
much in the fashion of the nursery game of "Bean Porridge Hot." Then he
sang the song, which was short and which she quickly picked up, singing
it with him and clapping the accent. While the air of it was orientally
catchy, it was chanted slowly, almost monotonously, but it was quickly
provocative of excitement to the spectators:

  "_Jong-Keena, Jong-Keena,
    Jong-Jong, Keena-Keena,
    Yo-ko-ham-a, Nag-a-sak-i,
    Kobe-mar-o--hoy!!!_"

The last syllable, _hoy_, was uttered suddenly, explosively, and an
octave and more higher than the pitch of the melody. At the same moment
that it was uttered, Paula's and Dick's hands were abruptly shot toward
each other's, either clenched or open. The point of the game was that
Paula's hands, open or closed, at the instant of uttering hoy, should
match Dick's. Thus, the first time, she did match him, both his and her
hands being closed, whereupon he took off his hat and tossed it into
Lute's lap.

"My forfeit," he explained. "Come on, Paul, again." And again they sang
and clapped:

  "_Jong-Keena, Jong-Keena,
    Jong-Jong, Keena-Keena,
    Yo-ko-ham-a, Nag-a-sak-i,
    Kobe-mar-o--hoy!!!_"

This time, with the _hoy_, her hands were closed and his were open.

"Forfeit!--forfeit!" the girls cried.

She looked her costume over with alarm, asking, "What can I give?"

"A hair pin," Dick advised; and one of her turtleshell hair pins joined
his hat in Lute's lap.

"Bother it!" she exclaimed, when the last of her hair pins had gone the
same way, she having failed seven times to Dick's once. "I can't see
why I should be so slow and stupid. Besides, Dick, you're too clever. I
never could out-guess you or out-anticipate you."

Again they sang the song. She lost, and, to Mrs. Tully's shocked
"Paula!" she forfeited a spur and threatened a boot when the remaining
spur should be gone. A winning streak of three compelled Dick to give
up his wrist watch and both spurs. Then she lost her wrist watch and
the remaining spur.

"Jong-Keena, Jong-Keena," they began again, while Mrs. Tully
remonstrated, "Now, Paula, you simply must stop this.--Dick, you ought
to be ashamed of yourself."

But Dick, emitting a triumphant "_Hoy!_" won, and joined in the
laughter as Paula took off one of her little champagne boots and added
it to the heap in Lute's lap.

"It's all right, Aunt Martha," Paula assured Mrs. Tully. "Mr. Ware's
not here, and he's the only one who would be shocked.--Come on, Dick.
You can't win every time."

"Jong-Keena, Jong-Keena," she chanted on with her husband. The
repetition, at first slow, had accelerated steadily, so that now they
fairly rippled through with it, while their slapping, striking palms
made a continuous patter. The exercise and excitement had added to the
sun's action on her skin, so that her laughing face was all a rosy glow.

Evan Graham, a silent spectator, was aware of hurt and indignity. He
knew the "Jong-Keena" of old time from the geishas of the tea houses of
Nippon, and, despite the unconventionality that ruled the Forrests and
the Big House, he experienced shock in that Paula should take part in
such a game. It did not enter his head at the moment that he would have
been merely curious to see how far the madness would go had the player
been Lute, or Ernestine, or Rita. Not till afterward did he realize
that his concern and sense of outrage were due to the fact that the
player was Paula, and that, therefore, she was bulking bigger in his
imagination than he was conscious of. What he was conscious of at the
moment was that he was growing angry and that he had deliberately to
check himself from protesting.

By this time Dick's cigarette case and matches and Paula's second boot,
belt, skirt-pin, and wedding ring had joined the mound of forfeits.
Mrs. Tully, her face set in stoic resignation, was silent.

"Jong-Keena, Jong-Keena," Paula laughed and sang on, and Graham heard
Ernestine laugh to Bert, "I don't see what she can spare next."

"Well, you know her," he heard Bert answer. "She's game once she gets
started, and it certainly looks like she's started."

"_Hoy_!" Paula and Dick cried simultaneously, as they thrust out their
hands.

But Dick's were closed, and hers were open. Graham watched her vainly
quest her person for the consequent forfeit.

"Come on, Lady Godiva," Dick commanded. "You hae sung, you hae danced;
now pay the piper."

"Was the man a fool?" was Graham's thought. "And a man with a wife like
that."

"Well," Paula sighed, her fingers playing with the fastenings of her
blouse, "if I must, I must."

Raging inwardly, Graham averted his gaze, and kept it averted. There
was a pause, in which he knew everybody must be hanging on what she
would do next. Then came a giggle from Ernestine, a burst of laughter
from all, and, "A frame-up!" from Bert, that overcame Graham's
resoluteness. He looked quickly. The Little Lady's blouse was off, and,
from the waist up, she appeared in her swimming suit. It was evident
that she had dressed over it for the ride.

"Come on, Lute--you next," Dick was challenging.

 But Lute, not similarly prepared for _Jong-Keena_, blushingly
led the retreat of the girls to the dressing rooms.

Graham watched Paula poise at the forty-foot top of the diving scaffold
and swan-dive beautifully into the tank; heard Bert's admiring "Oh, you
Annette Kellerman!" and, still chagrined by the trick that had
threatened to outrage him, fell to wondering about the wonder woman,
the Little Lady of the Big House, and how she had happened so
wonderfully to be. As he fetched down the length of tank, under water,
moving with leisurely strokes and with open eyes watching the shoaling
bottom, it came to him that he did not know anything about her. She was
Dick Forrest's wife. That was all he knew. How she had been born, how
she had lived, how and where her past had been--of all this he knew
nothing.

Ernestine had told him that Lute and she were half sisters of Paula.
That was one bit of data, at any rate. (Warned by the increasing
brightness of the bottom that he had nearly reached the end of the
tank, and recognizing Dick's and Bert's legs intertwined in what must
be a wrestling bout, Graham turned about, still under water, and swam
back a score or so of feet.) There was that Mrs. Tully whom Paula had
addressed as Aunt Martha. Was she truly an aunt? Or was she a courtesy
Aunt through sisterhood with the mother of Lute and Ernestine?

He broke surface, was hailed by the others to join in bull-in-the-ring;
in which strenuous sport, for the next half hour, he was compelled more
than once to marvel at the litheness and agility, as well as strategy,
of Paula in her successful efforts at escaping through the ring.
Concluding the game through weariness, breathing hard, the entire party
raced the length of the tank and crawled out to rest in the sunshine in
a circle about Mrs. Tully.

Soon there was more fun afoot, and Paula was contending impossible
things with Mrs. Tully.

"Now, Aunt Martha, just because you never learned to swim is no reason
for you to take such a position. I am a real swimmer, and I tell you I
can dive right into the tank here, and stay under for ten minutes."

"Nonsense, child," Mrs. Tully beamed. "Your father, when he was young,
a great deal younger than you, my dear, could stay under water longer
than any other man; and his record, as I know, was three minutes and
forty seconds, as I very well know, for I held the watch myself and
kept the time when he won against Harry Selby on a wager."

"Oh, I know my father was some man in his time," Paula swaggered; "but
times have changed. If I had the old dear here right now, in all his
youthful excellence, I'd drown him if he tried to stay under water with
me. Ten minutes? Of course I can do ten minutes. And I will. You hold
the watch, Aunt Martha, and time me. Why, it's as easy as--"

"Shooting fish in a bucket," Dick completed for her.

Paula climbed to the platform above the springboard.

"Time me when I'm in the air," she said.

"Make your turn and a half," Dick called.

She nodded, smiled, and simulated a prodigious effort at filling her
lungs to their utmost capacity. Graham watched enchanted. A diver
himself, he had rarely seen the turn and a half attempted by women
other than professionals. Her wet suit of light blue and green silk
clung closely to her, showing the lines of her justly proportioned
body. With what appeared to be an agonized gulp for the last cubic inch
of air her lungs could contain, she sprang up, out, and down, her body
vertical and stiff, her legs straight, her feet close together as they
impacted on the springboard end. Flung into the air by the board, she
doubled her body into a ball, made a complete revolution, then
straightened out in perfect diver's form, and in a perfect dive, with
scarcely a ripple, entered the water.

"A Toledo blade would have made more splash," was Graham's verdict.

"If only I could dive like that," Ernestine breathed her admiration.
"But I never shall. Dick says diving is a matter of timing, and that's
why Paula does it so terribly well. She's got the sense of time--"

"And of abandon," Graham added.

"Of willed abandon," Dick qualified.

"Of relaxation by effort," Graham agreed. "I've never seen a
professional do so perfect a turn and a half."

"And I'm prouder of it than she is," Dick proclaimed. "You see, I
taught her, though I confess it was an easy task. She coordinates
almost effortlessly. And that, along with her will and sense of
time--why her first attempt was better than fair."

"Paula is a remarkable woman," Mrs. Tully said proudly, her eyes
fluttering between the second hand of the watch and the unbroken
surface of the pool. "Women never swim so well as men. But she
does.--Three minutes and forty seconds! She's beaten her father!"

"But she won't stay under any five minutes, much less ten," Dick
solemnly stated. "She'll burst her lungs first."

At four minutes, Mrs. Tully began to show excitement and to look
anxiously from face to face. Captain Lester, not in the secret,
scrambled to his feet with an oath and dived into the tank.

"Something has happened," Mrs. Tully said with controlled quietness.
"She hurt herself on that dive. Go in after her, you men."

But Graham and Bert and Dick, meeting under water, gleefully grinned
and squeezed hands. Dick made signs for them to follow, and led the way
through the dark-shadowed water into the crypt, where, treading water,
they joined Paula in subdued whisperings and gigglings.

"Just came to make sure you were all right," Dick explained. "And now
we've got to beat it.--You first, Bert. I'll follow Evan."

And, one by one, they went down through the dark water and came up on
the surface of the pool. By this time Mrs. Tully was on her feet and
standing by the edge of the tank.

"If I thought this was one of your tricks, Dick Forrest," she began.

But Dick, paying no attention, acting preternaturally calmly, was
directing the men loudly enough for her to hear.

"We've got to make this systematic, fellows. You, Bert, and you, Evan,
join with me. We start at this end, five feet apart, and search the
bottom across. Then move along and repeat it back."

"Don't exert yourselves, gentlemen," Mrs. Tully called, beginning to
laugh. "As for you, Dick, you come right out. I want to box your ears."

"Take care of her, you girls," Dick shouted. "She's got hysterics."

"I haven't, but I will have," she laughed.

"But damn it all, madam, this is no laughing matter!" Captain Lester
spluttered breathlessly, as he prepared for another trip to explore the
bottom.

"Are you on, Aunt Martha, really and truly on?" Dick asked, after the
valiant mariner had gone down.

Mrs. Tully nodded. "But keep it up, Dick, you've got one dupe. Elsie
Coghlan's mother told me about it in Honolulu last year."

Not until eleven minutes had elapsed did the smiling face of Paula
break the surface. Simulating exhaustion, she slowly crawled out and
sank down panting near her aunt. Captain Lester, really exhausted by
his strenuous exertions at rescue, studied Paula keenly, then marched
to the nearest pillar and meekly bumped his head three times against
the concrete.

"I'm afraid I didn't stay down ten minutes," Paula said. "But I wasn't
much under that, was I, Aunt Martha?"

"You weren't much under at all," Mrs. Tully replied, "if it's my
opinion you were asking. I'm surprised that you are even wet.--There,
there, breathe naturally, child. The play-acting is unnecessary. I
remember, when I was a young girl, traveling in India, there was a
school of fakirs who leaped into deep wells and stayed down much longer
than you, child, much longer indeed."

"You knew!" Paula charged.

"But you didn't know I did," her Aunt retorted. "And therefore your
conduct was criminal. When you consider a woman of my age, with my
heart--"

"And with your blessed, brass-tack head," Paula cried.

"For two apples I'd box your ears."

"And for one apple I'd hug you, wet as I am," Paula laughed back.
"Anyway, we did fool Captain Lester.--Didn't we, Captain?"

"Don't speak to me," that doughty mariner muttered darkly. "I'm busy
with myself, meditating what form my vengeance shall take.--As for you,
Mr. Dick Forrest, I'm divided between blowing up your dairy, or
hamstringing Mountain Lad. Maybe I'll do both. In the meantime I am
going out to kick that mare you ride."

Dick on The Outlaw, and Paula on The Fawn, rode back side by side to
the Big House.

"How do you like Graham?" he asked.

"Splendid," was her reply. "He's your type, Dick. He's universal, like
you, and he's got the same world-marks branded on him--the Seven Seas,
the books, and all the rest. He's an artist, too, and pretty well
all-around. And he's good fun. Have you noticed his smile? It's
irresistible. It makes one want to smile with him."

"And he's got his serious scars, as well," Dick nodded concurrence.

"Yes--right in the corners of the eyes, just after he has smiled,
you'll see them come. They're not tired marks exactly, but rather the
old eternal questions: Why? What for? What's it worth? What's it all
about?"

       *       *        *       *        *

And bringing up the rear of the cavalcade, Ernestine and Graham talked.

"Dick's deep," she was saying. "You don't know him any too well. He's
dreadfully deep. I know him a little. Paula knows him a lot. But very
few others ever get under the surface of him. He's a real philosopher,
and he has the control of a stoic or an Englishman, and he can play-act
to fool the world."

       *       *        *       *        *

At the long hitching rails under the oaks, where the dismounting party
gathered, Paula was in gales of laughter.

"Go on, go on," she urged Dick, "more, more."

"She's been accusing me of exhausting my vocabulary in naming the
house-boys by my system," he explained.

"And he's given me at least forty more names in a minute and a
half.--Go on, Dick, more."

"Then," he said, striking a chant, "we can have Oh Sin and Oh Pshaw, Oh
Sing and Oh Song, Oh Sung and Oh Sang, Oh Last and Oh Least, Oh Ping
and Oh Pong, Oh Some, Oh More, and Oh Most, Oh Naught and Oh Nit..."

And Dick jingled away into the house still chanting his extemporized
directory.




CHAPTER XVII



A week of dissatisfaction and restlessness ensued for Graham. Tom
between belief that his business was to leave the Big House on the
first train, and desire to see, and see more of Paula, to be with her,
and to be more with her--he succeeded in neither leaving nor in seeing
as much of her as during the first days of his visit.

At first, and for the five days that he lingered, the young violinist
monopolized nearly her entire time of visibility. Often Graham strayed
into the music room, and, quite neglected by the pair, sat for moody
half-hours listening to their "work." They were oblivious of his
presence, either flushed and absorbed with the passion of their music,
or wiping their foreheads and chatting and laughing companionably in
pauses to rest. That the young musician loved her with an ardency that
was almost painful, was patent to Graham; but what hurt him was the
abandon of devotion with which she sometimes looked at Ware after he
had done something exceptionally fine. In vain Graham tried to tell
himself that all this was mental on her part--purely delighted
appreciation of the other's artistry. Nevertheless, being man, it hurt,
and continued to hurt, until he could no longer suffer himself to
remain.

Once, chancing into the room at the end of a Schumann song and just
after Ware had departed, Graham found Paula still seated at the piano,
an expression of rapt dreaming on her face. She regarded him almost
unrecognizingly, gathered herself mechanically together, uttered an
absent-minded commonplace or so, and left the room. Despite his
vexation and hurt, Graham tried to think it mere artist-dreaming on her
part, a listening to the echo of the just-played music in her soul. But
women were curious creatures, he could not help moralizing, and were
prone to lose their hearts most strangely and inconsequentially. Might
it not be that by his very music this youngster of a man was charming
the woman of her?

With the departure of Ware, Paula Forrest retired almost completely
into her private wing behind the door without a knob. Nor did this seem
unusual, Graham gleaned from the household.

"Paula is a woman who finds herself very good company," Ernestine
explained, "and she often goes in for periods of aloneness, when Dick
is the only person who sees her."

"Which is not flattering to the rest of the company," Graham smiled.

"Which makes her such good company whenever she is in company,"
Ernestine retorted.

The driftage through the Big House was decreasing. A few guests, on
business or friendship, continued to come, but more departed. Under Oh
Joy and his Chinese staff the Big House ran so frictionlessly and so
perfectly, that entertainment of guests seemed little part of the
host's duties. The guests largely entertained themselves and one
another.

Dick rarely appeared, even for a moment, until lunch, and Paula, now
carrying out her seclusion program, never appeared before dinner.

"Rest cure," Dick laughed one noon, and challenged Graham to a
tournament with boxing gloves, single-sticks, and foils.

"And now's the time," he told Graham, as they breathed between bouts,
"for you to tackle your book. I'm only one of the many who are looking
forward to reading it, and I'm looking forward hard. Got a letter from
Havely yesterday--he mentioned it, and wondered how far along you were."

So Graham, in his tower room, arranged his notes and photographs,
schemed out the work, and plunged into the opening chapters. So
immersed did he become that his nascent interest in Paula might have
languished, had it not been for meeting her each evening at dinner.
Then, too, until Ernestine and Lute left for Santa Barbara, there were
afternoon swims and rides and motor trips to the pastures of the
Miramar Hills and the upland ranges of the Anselmo Mountains. Other
trips they made, sometimes accompanied by Dick, to his great dredgers
working in the Sacramento basin, or his dam-building on the Little
Coyote and Los Cuatos creeks, or to his five-thousand-acre colony of
twenty-acre farmers, where he was trying to enable two hundred and
fifty heads of families, along with their families, to make good on the
soil.

That Paula sometimes went for long solitary rides, Graham knew, and,
once, he caught her dismounting from the Fawn at the hitching rails.

"Don't you think you are spoiling that mare for riding in company?" he
twitted.

Paula laughed and shook her head.

"Well, then," he asserted stoutly, "I'm spoiling for a ride with you."

"There's Lute, and Ernestine, and Bert, and all the rest."

"This is new country," he contended. "And one learns country through
the people who know it. I've seen it through the eyes of Lute, and
Ernestine and all the rest; but there is a lot I haven't seen and which
I can see only through your eyes."

"A pleasant theory," she evaded. "A--a sort of landscape vampirism."

"But without the ill effects of vampirism," he urged quickly.

Her answer was slow in coming. Her look into his eyes was frank and
straight, and he could guess her words were weighed and gauged.

"I don't know about that," was all she said finally; but his fancy
leaped at the several words, ranging and conjecturing their possible
connotations.

"But we have so much we might be saying to each other," he tried again.
"So much we... ought to be saying to each other."

"So I apprehend," she answered quietly; and again that frank, straight
look accompanied her speech.

So she did apprehend--the thought of it was flame to him, but his
tongue was not quick enough to serve him to escape the cool, provoking
laugh as she turned into the house.

Still the company of the Big House thinned. Paula's aunt, Mrs. Tully,
much to Graham's disappointment (for he had expected to learn from her
much that he wanted to know of Paula), had gone after only a several
days' stay. There was vague talk of her return for a longer stay; but,
just back from Europe, she declared herself burdened with a round of
duty visits which must be performed before her pleasure visiting began.

O'Hay, the critic, had been compelled to linger several days in order
to live down the disastrous culmination of the musical raid made upon
him by the philosophers. The idea and the trick had been Dick's. Combat
had joined early in the evening, when a seeming chance remark of
Ernestine had enabled Aaron Hancock to fling the first bomb into the
thick of O'Hay's deepest convictions. Dar Hyal, a willing and eager
ally, had charged around the flank with his blastic theory of music and
taken O'Hay in reverse. And the battle had raged until the hot-headed
Irishman, beside himself with the grueling the pair of skilled
logomachists were giving him, accepted with huge relief the kindly
invitation of Terrence McFane to retire with him to the tranquillity
and repose of the stag room, where, over a soothing highball and far
from the barbarians, the two of them could have a heart to heart talk
on real music. At two in the morning, wild-eyed and befuddled, O'Hay
had been led to bed by the upright-walking and unshakably steady
Terrence.

"Never mind," Ernestine had told O'Hay later, with a twinkle in her eye
that made him guess the plot. "It was only to be expected. Those
rattle-brained philosophers would drive even a saint to drink."

"I thought you were safe in Terrence's hands," had been Dick's mock
apology. "A pair of Irishmen, you know. I'd forgot Terrence was
case-hardened. Do you know, after he said good night to you, he came up
to me for a yarn. And he was steady as a rock. He mentioned casually of
having had several sips, so I... I... never dreamed ... er... that he
had indisposed you."

When Lute and Ernestine departed for Santa Barbara, Bert Wainwright and
his sister remembered their long-neglected home in Sacramento. A pair
of painters, proteges of Paula, arrived the same day. But they were
little in evidence, spending long days in the hills with a trap and
driver and smoking long pipes in the stag room.

The free and easy life of the Big House went on in its frictionless
way. Dick worked. Graham worked. Paula maintained her seclusion. The
sages from the madrono grove strayed in for wordy dinners--and wordy
evenings, except when Paula played for them. Automobile parties, from
Sacramento, Wickenberg, and other valley towns, continued to drop in
unexpectedly, but never to the confusion of Oh Joy and the house boys,
whom Graham saw, on occasion, with twenty minutes' warning, seat a
score of unexpected guests to a perfect dinner. And there were even
nights--rare ones--when only Dick and Graham and Paula sat at dinner,
and when, afterward, the two men yarned for an hour before an early
bed, while she played soft things to herself or disappeared earlier
than they.

But one moonlight evening, when the Watsons and Masons and Wombolds
arrived in force, Graham found himself out, when every bridge table was
made up. Paula was at the piano. As he approached he caught the quick
expression of pleasure in her eyes at sight of him, which as quickly
vanished. She made a slight movement as if to rise, which did not
escape his notice any more than did her quiet mastery of the impulse
that left her seated.

She was immediately herself as he had always seen her--although it was
little enough he had seen of her, he thought, as he talked whatever
came into his head, and rummaged among her songs with her. Now one and
now another song he tried with her, subduing his high baritone to her
light soprano with such success as to win cries of more from the bridge
players.

"Yes, I am positively aching to be out again over the world with Dick,"
she told him in a pause. "If we could only start to-morrow! But Dick
can't start yet. He's in too deep with too many experiments and
adventures on the ranch here. Why, what do you think he's up to now? As
if he did not have enough on his hands, he's going to revolutionize the
sales end, or, at least, the California and Pacific Coast portion of
it, by making the buyers come to the ranch."

"But they do do that," Graham said. "The first man I met here was a
buyer from Idaho."

"Oh, but Dick means as an institution, you know--to make them come en
masse at a stated time. Not simple auction sales, either, though he
says he will bait them with a bit of that to excite interest. It will
be an annual fair, to last three days, in which he will be the only
exhibitor. He's spending half his mornings now in conference with Mr.
Agar and Mr. Pitts. Mr. Agar is his sales manager, and Mr. Pitts his
showman."

She sighed and rippled her fingers along the keyboard.

"But, oh, if only we could get away--Timbuctoo, Mokpo, or Jericho."

"Don't tell me you've ever been to Mokpo," Graham laughed.

She nodded. "Cross my heart, solemnly, hope to die. It was with Dick in
the _All Away_ and in the long ago. It might almost be said we
honeymooned in Mokpo."

And while Graham exchanged reminiscences of Mokpo with her, he cudgeled
his brain to try and decide whether her continual reference to her
husband was deliberate.

"I should imagine you found it such a paradise here," he was saying.

"I do, I do," she assured him with what seemed unnecessary vehemence.
"But I don't know what's come over me lately. I feel it imperative to
be up and away. The spring fret, I suppose; the Red Gods and their
medicine. And if only Dick didn't insist on working his head off and
getting tied down with projects! Do you know, in all the years of our
marriage, the only really serious rival I have ever had has been this
ranch. He's pretty faithful, and the ranch _is_ his first love. He had
it all planned and started before he ever met me or knew I existed."

"Here, let us try this together," Graham said abruptly, placing the
song on the rack before her.

"Oh, but it's the 'Gypsy Trail,'" she protested. "It will only make my
mood worse." And she hummed:

  "'Follow the Romany patteran
     West to the sinking sun,
     Till the junk sails lift through the homeless drift,
     And the East and the West are one.'

"What is the Romany patteran?" she broke off to ask. "I've always
thought of it as patter, or patois, the Gypsy patois, and somehow it
strikes me as absurd to follow a language over the world--a sort of
philological excursion."

"In a way the patteran is speech," he answered. "But it always says one
thing: 'This way I have passed.' Two sprigs, crossed in certain ways
and left upon the trail, compose the patteran. But they must always be
of different trees or shrubs. Thus, on the ranch here, a patteran could
be made of manzanita and madrono, of oak and spruce, of buckeye and
alder, of redwood and laurel, of huckleberry and lilac. It is a sign of
Gypsy comrade to Gypsy comrade, of Gypsy lover to Gypsy lover." And he
hummed:

  "'Back to the road again, again,
      Out of a clear sea track;
    Follow the cross of the Gypsy trail,
      Over the world and back.'"

She nodded comprehension, looked for a moment with troubled eyes down
the long room to the card-players, caught herself in her momentary
absentness, and said quickly:

"Heaven knows there's a lot of Gypsy in some of us. I have more than
full share. In spite of his bucolic proclivities, Dick is a born Gypsy.
And from what he has told of you, you are hopelessly one."

"After all, the white man is the real Gypsy, the king Gypsy," Graham
propounded. "He has wandered wider, wilder, and with less equipment,
than any Gypsy. The Gypsy has followed in his trails, but never made
trail for him.--Come; let us try it."

And as they sang the reckless words to their merry, careless lilt, he
looked down at her and wondered--wondered at her--at himself. This was
no place for him by this woman's side, under her husband's roof-tree.
Yet here he was, and he should have gone days before. After the years
he was just getting acquainted with himself. This was enchantment,
madness. He should tear himself away at once. He had known enchantments
and madnesses before, and had torn himself away. Had he softened with
the years? he questioned himself. Or was this a profounder madness than
he had experienced? This meant the violation of dear things--things so
dear, so jealously cherished and guarded in his secret life, that never
yet had they suffered violation.

And still he did not tear himself away. He stood there beside her,
looking down on her brown crown of hair glinting gold and bronze and
bewitchingly curling into tendrils above her ears, singing a song that
was fire to him--that must be fire to her, she being what she was and
feeling what she had already, in flashes, half-unwittingly, hinted to
him.

She is a witch, and her voice is not the least of her witchery, he
thought, as _her_ voice, so richly a woman's voice, so essentially her
voice in contradistinction to all women's voices in the world, sang and
throbbed in his ear. And he knew, beyond shade of doubt, that she felt
some touch of this madness that afflicted him; that she sensed, as he
sensed, that the man and the woman were met.

They thrilled together as they sang, and the thought and the sure
knowledge of it added fuel to his own madness till his voice warmed
unconsciously to the daring of the last lines, as, voices and thrills
blending, they sang:

  "'The wild hawk to the wind-swept sky,
      The deer to the wholesome wold,
      And the heart of a man to the heart of a maid
      As it was in the days of old--
      The heart of a man to the heart of a maid,
    Light of my tents be fleet,
      Morning waits at the end of the world,
    And the world is all at our feet.'"

He looked for her to look up as the last notes died away, but she
remained quiet a moment, her eyes bent on the keys. And then the face
that was turned to his was the face of the Little Lady of the Big
House, the mouth smiling mischievously, the eyes filled with roguery,
as she said:

"Let us go and devil Dick--he's losing. I've never seen him lose his
temper at cards, but he gets ridiculously blue after a long siege of
losing.

"And he does love gambling," she continued, as she led the way to the
tables. "It's one of his modes of relaxing. It does him good. About
once or twice a year, if it's a good poker game, he'll sit in all night
to it and play to the blue sky if they take off the limit."




CHAPTER XVIII



Almost immediately after the singing of the "Gypsy Trail," Paula
emerged from her seclusion, and Graham found himself hard put, in the
tower room, to keep resolutely to his work when all the morning he
could hear snatches of song and opera from her wing, or laughter and
scolding of dogs from the great patio, or the continuous pulse for
hours of the piano from the distant music room. But Graham, patterning
after Dick, devoted his mornings to work, so that he rarely encountered
Paula before lunch.

She made announcement that her spell of insomnia was over and that she
was ripe for all gaieties and excursions Dick had to offer her.
Further, she threatened, in case Dick grudged these personal
diversions, to fill the house with guests and teach him what liveliness
was. It was at this time that her Aunt Martha--Mrs. Tully--returned for
a several days' visit, and that Paula resumed the driving of Duddy and
Fuddy in the high, one-seated Stude-baker trap. Duddy and Fuddy were
spirited trotters, but Mrs. Tully, despite her elderliness and
avoirdupois, was without timidity when Paula held the reins.

As Mrs. Tully told Graham: "And that is a concession I make to no woman
save Paula. She is the only woman I can trust myself to with horses.
She has the horse-way about her. When she was a child she was wild over
horses. It's a wonder she didn't become a circus rider."

More, much more, Graham learned about Paula in various chats with her
aunt. Of Philip Desten, Paula's father, Mrs. Tully could never say
enough. Her eldest brother, and older by many years, he had been her
childhood prince. His ways had been big ways, princely ways--ways that
to commoner folk had betokened a streak of madness. He was continually
guilty of the wildest things and the most chivalrous things. It was
this streak that had enabled him to win various fortunes, and with
equal facility to lose them, in the great gold adventure of Forty-nine.
Himself of old New England stock, he had had for great grandfather a
Frenchman--a trifle of flotsam from a mid-ocean wreck and landed to
grow up among the farmer-sailormen of the coast of Maine.

"And once, and once only, in each generation, that French Desten crops
out," Mrs. Tully assured Graham. "Philip was that Frenchman in his
generation, and who but Paula, and in full measure, received that same
inheritance in her generation. Though Lute and Ernestine are her
half-sisters, no one would imagine one drop of the common blood was
shared. That's why Paula, instead of going circus-riding, drifted
inevitably to France. It was that old original Desten that drew her
over."

And of the adventure in France, Graham learned much. Philip Desten's
luck had been to die when the wheel of his fortune had turned over and
down. Ernestine and Lute, little tots, had been easy enough for
Desten's sisters to manage. But Paula, who had fallen to Mrs. Tully,
had been the problem--"because of that Frenchman."

"Oh, she is rigid New England," Mrs. Tully insisted, "the solidest of
creatures as to honor and rectitude, dependableness and faithfulness.
As a girl she really couldn't bring herself to lie, except to save
others. In which case all her New England ancestry took flight and she
would lie as magnificently as her father before her. And he had the
same charm of manner, the same daring, the same ready laughter, the
same vivacity. But what is lightsome and blithe in her, was debonaire
in him. He won men's hearts always, or, failing that, their bitterest
enmity. No one was left cold by him in passing. Contact with him
quickened them to love or hate. Therein Paula differs, being a woman, I
suppose, and not enjoying man's prerogative of tilting at windmills. I
don't know that she has an enemy in the world. All love her, unless, it
may well be, there are cat-women who envy her her nice husband."

And as Graham listened, Paula's singing came through the open window
from somewhere down the long arcades, and there was that ever-haunting
thrill in her voice that he could not escape remembering afterward. She
burst into laughter, and Mrs. Tully beamed to him and nodded at the
sound.

"There laughs Philip Desten," she murmured, "and all the Frenchwomen
behind the original Frenchman who was brought into Penobscot, dressed
in homespun, and sent to meeting. Have you noticed how Paula's laugh
invariably makes everybody look up and smile? Philip's laugh did the
same thing."

"Paula had always been passionately fond of music, painting, drawing.
As a little girl she could be traced around the house and grounds by
the trail she left behind her of images and shapes, made in whatever
medium she chanced upon--drawn on scraps of paper, scratched on bits of
wood, modeled in mud and sand.

"She loved everything, and everything loved her," said Mrs. Tully. "She
was never timid of animals. And yet she always stood in awe of them;
but she was born sense-struck, and her awe was beauty-awe. Yes, she was
an incorrigible hero-worshiper, whether the person was merely beautiful
or did things. And she never will outgrow that beauty--awe of anything
she loves, whether it is a grand piano, a great painting, a beautiful
mare, or a bit of landscape.

"And Paula had wanted to do, to make beauty herself. But she was sorely
puzzled whether she should devote herself to music or painting. In the
full swing of work under the best masters in Boston, she could not
refrain from straying back to her drawing. From her easel she was lured
to modeling.

 "And so, with her love of the best, her soul and heart full of
beauty, she grew quite puzzled and worried over herself, as to which
talent was the greater and if she had genius at all. I suggested a
complete rest from work and took her abroad for a year. And of all
things, she developed a talent for dancing. But always she harked back
to her music and painting. No, she was not flighty. Her trouble was
that she was too talented--"

"Too diversely talented," Graham amplified.

"Yes, that is better," Mrs. Tully nodded. "But from talent to genius is
a far cry, and to save my life, at this late day, I don't know whether
the child ever had a trace of genius in her. She has certainly not done
anything big in any of her chosen things."

"Except to be herself," Graham added.

"Which _is_ the big thing," Mrs. Tully accepted with a smile of
enthusiasm. "She is a splendid, unusual woman, very unspoiled, very
natural. And after all, what does doing things amount to? I'd give more
for one of Paula's madcap escapades--oh, I heard all about swimming the
big stallion--than for all her pictures if every one was a masterpiece.
But she was hard for me to understand at first. Dick often calls her
the girl that never grew up. But gracious, she can put on the grand air
when she needs to. I call her the most mature child I have ever seen.
Dick was the finest thing that ever happened to her. It was then that
she really seemed for the first time to find herself. It was this way."

And Mrs. Tully went on to sketch the year of travel in Europe, the
resumption of Paula's painting in Paris, and the conviction she finally
reached that success could be achieved only by struggle and that her
aunt's money was a handicap.

"And she had her way," Mrs. Tully sighed. "She--why, she dismissed me,
sent me home. She would accept no more than the meagerest allowance,
and went down into the Latin Quarter on her own, batching with two
other American girls. And she met Dick. Dick was a rare one. You
couldn't guess what he was doing then. Running a cabaret--oh, not these
modern cabarets, but a real students' cabaret of sorts. It was very
select. They were a lot of madmen. You see, he was just back from some
of his wild adventuring at the ends of the earth, and, as he stated it,
he wanted to stop living life for a while and to talk about life
instead.

"Paula took me there once. Oh, they were engaged--the day before, and
he had called on me and all that. I had known 'Lucky' Richard Forrest,
and I knew all about his son. From a worldly standpoint, Paula couldn't
have made a finer marriage. It was quite a romance. Paula had seen him
captain the University of California eleven to victory over Stanford.
And the next time she saw him was in the studio she shared with the two
girls. She didn't know whether Dick was worth millions or whether he
was running a cabaret because he was hard up, and she cared less. She
always followed her heart. Fancy the situation: Dick the uncatchable,
and Paula who never flirted. They must have sprung forthright into each
other's arms, for inside the week it was all arranged, and Dick made
his call on me, as if my decision meant anything one way or the other.

"But Dick's cabaret. It was the Cabaret of the Philosophers--a small
pokey place, down in a cellar, in the heart of the Quarter, and it had
only one table. Fancy that for a cabaret! But such a table! A big round
one, of plain boards, without even an oil-cloth, the wood stained with
the countless drinks spilled by the table-pounding of the philosophers,
and it could seat thirty. Women were not permitted. An exception was
made for Paula and me.

"You've met Aaron Hancock here. He was one of the philosophers, and to
this day he swaggers that he owed Dick a bigger bill that never was
paid than any of his customers. And there they used to meet, all those
wild young thinkers, and pound the table, and talk philosophy in all
the tongues of Europe. Dick always had a penchant for philosophers.

"But Paula spoiled that little adventure. No sooner were they married
than Dick fitted out his schooner, the All Away, and away the blessed
pair of them went, honeymooning from Bordeaux to Hongkong."

"And the cabaret was closed, and the philosophers left homeless and
discussionless," Graham remarked.

Mrs. Tully laughed heartily and shook her head.

"He endowed it for them," she gasped, her hand to her side. "Or
partially endowed it, or something. I don't know what the arrangement
was. And within the month it was raided by the police for an anarchist
club."

After having learned the wide scope of her interests and talents,
Graham was nevertheless surprised one day at finding Paula all by
herself in a corner of a window-seat, completely absorbed in her work
on a piece of fine embroidery.

"I love it," she explained. "All the costly needlework of the shops
means nothing to me alongside of my own work on my own designs. Dick
used to fret at my sewing. He's all for efficiency, you know,
elimination of waste energy and such things. He thought sewing was a
wasting of time. Peasants could be hired for a song to do what I was
doing. But I succeeded in making my viewpoint clear to him.

"It's like the music one makes oneself. Of course I can buy better
music than I make; but to sit down at an instrument and evoke the music
oneself, with one's own fingers and brain, is an entirely different and
dearer satisfaction. Whether one tries to emulate another's
performance, or infuses the performance with one's own personality and
interpretation, it's all the same. It is soul-joy and fulfilment.

"Take this little embroidered crust of lilies on the edge of this
flounce--there is nothing like it in the world. Mine the idea, all
mine, and mine the delight of giving form and being to the idea. There
are better ideas and better workmanship in the shops; but this is
different. It is mine. I visioned it, and I made it. And who is to say
that embroidery is not art?"

She ceased speaking and with her eyes laughed the insistence of her
question.

"And who is to say," Graham agreed, "that the adorning of beautiful
womankind is not the worthiest of all the arts as well as the sweetest?"

"I rather stand in awe of a good milliner or modiste," she nodded
gravely. "They really are artists, and important ones, as Dick would
phrase it, in the world's economy."

       *       *        *       *        *

Another time, seeking the library for Andean reference, Graham came
upon Paula, sprawled gracefully over a sheet of paper on a big table
and flanked by ponderous architectural portfolios, engaged in drawing
plans of a log bungalow or camp for the sages of the madroño grove.

"It's a problem," she sighed. "Dick says that if I build it I must
build it for seven. We've got four sages now, and his heart is set on
seven. He says never mind showers and such things, because what
philosopher ever bathes? And he has suggested seriously seven stoves
and seven kitchens, because it is just over such mundane things that
philosophers always quarrel."

"Wasn't it Voltaire who quarreled with a king over candle-ends?" Graham
queried, pleasuring in the sight of her graceful abandon. Thirty-eight!
It was impossible. She seemed almost a girl, petulant and flushed over
some school task. Then he remembered Mrs. Tully's remark that Paula was
the most mature child she had ever known.

It made him wonder. Was she the one, who, under the oaks at the
hitching rails, with two brief sentences had cut to the heart of an
impending situation? "So I apprehend," she had said. What had she
apprehended? Had she used the phrase glibly, without meaning? Yet she
it was who had thrilled and fluttered to him and with him when they had
sung the "Gypsy Trail." _That_ he knew. But again, had he not seen her
warm and glow to the playing of Donald Ware? But here Graham's ego had
its will of him, for he told himself that with Donald Ware it was
different. And he smiled to himself and at himself at the thought.

"What amuses you?" Paula was asking.

"Heaven knows I am no architect. And I challenge you to house seven
philosophers according to all the absurd stipulations laid down by
Dick."

Back in his tower room with his Andean books unopened before him,
Graham gnawed his lip and meditated. The woman was no woman. She was
the veriest child. Or--and he hesitated at the thought--was this
naturalness that was overdone? Did she in truth apprehend? It must be.
It had to be. She was of the world. She knew the world. She was very
wise. No remembered look of her gray eyes but gave the impression of
poise and power. That was it--strength! He recalled her that first
night when she had seemed at times to glint an impression of steel, of
thin and jewel-like steel. In his fancy, at the time, he remembered
likening her strength to ivory, to carven pearl shell, to sennit
twisted of maidens' hair.

And he knew, now, ever since the brief words at the hitching rails and
the singing of the "Gypsy Trail," that whenever their eyes looked into
each other's it was with a mutual knowledge of unsaid things.

In vain he turned the pages of the books for the information he sought.
He tried to continue his chapter without the information, but no words
flowed from his pen. A maddening restlessness was upon him. He seized a
time table and pondered the departure of trains, changed his mind,
switched the room telephone to the house barn, and asked to have
Altadena saddled.

It was a perfect morning of California early summer. No breath of wind
stirred over the drowsing fields, from which arose the calls of quail
and the notes of meadowlarks. The air was heavy with lilac fragrance,
and from the distance, as he rode between the lilac hedges, Graham
heard the throaty nicker of Mountain Lad and the silvery answering
whinney of the Fotherington Princess.

Why was he here astride Dick Forrest's horse? Graham asked himself. Why
was he not even then on the way to the station to catch that first
train he had noted on the time table? This unaccustomed weakness of
decision and action was a new rôle for him, he considered bitterly.
But--and he was on fire with the thought of it--this was his one life,
and this was the one woman in the world.

He reined aside to let a herd of Angora goats go by. Each was a doe,
and there were several hundred of them; and they were moved slowly by
the Basque herdsmen, with frequent pauses, for each doe was accompanied
by a young kid. In the paddock were many mares with new-born colts; and
once, receiving warning in time, Graham raced into a crossroad to
escape a drove of thirty yearling stallions being moved somewhere
across the ranch. Their excitement was communicated to that entire
portion of the ranch, so that the air was filled with shrill nickerings
and squealings and answering whinneys, while Mountain Lad, beside
himself at sight and sound of so many rivals, raged up and down his
paddock, and again and again trumpeted his challenging conviction that
he was the most amazing and mightiest thing that had ever occurred on
earth in the way of horse flesh.

Dick Forrest pranced and sidled into the cross road on the Outlaw, his
face beaming with delight at the little tempest among his many
creatures.

"Fecundity! Fecundity!"--he chanted in greeting, as he reined in to a
halt, if halt it might be called, with his tan-golden sorrel mare
a-fret and a-froth, wickedly reaching with her teeth now for his leg
and next for Graham's, one moment pawing the roadway, the next moment,
in sheer impotence of resentfulness, kicking the empty air with one
hind leg and kicking the air repeatedly, a dozen times.

"Those youngsters certainly put Mountain Lad on his mettle," Dick
laughed. "Listen to his song:

"'Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills. I fill the wide valleys.
The mares hear me, and startle, in quiet pastures; for they know me.
The land is filled with fatness, and the sap is in the trees. It is the
spring. The spring is mine. I am monarch of my kingdom of the spring.
The mares remember my voice. They knew me aforetime through their
mothers before them. Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills, and
the wide valleys are my heralds, echoing the sound of my approach.'"




CHAPTER XIX



After Mrs. Tully's departure, Paula, true to her threat, filled the
house with guests. She seemed to have remembered all who had been
waiting an invitation, and the limousine that met the trains eight
miles away was rarely empty coming or going. There were more singers
and musicians and artist folk, and bevies of young girls with their
inevitable followings of young men, while mammas and aunts and
chaperons seemed to clutter all the ways of the Big House and to fill a
couple of motor cars when picnics took place.

And Graham wondered if this surrounding of herself by many people was
not deliberate on Paula's part. As for himself, he definitely abandoned
work on his book, and joined in the before-breakfast swims of the
hardier younger folk, in the morning rides over the ranch, and in
whatever fun was afoot indoors and out.

Late hours and early were kept; and one night, Dick, who adhered to his
routine and never appeared to his guests before midday, made a night of
it at poker in the stag-room. Graham had sat in, and felt well repaid
when, at dawn, the players received an unexpected visit from
Paula--herself past one of her white nights, she said, although no sign
of it showed on her fresh skin and color. Graham had to struggle to
keep his eyes from straying too frequently to her as she mixed golden
fizzes to rejuvenate the wan-eyed, jaded players. Then she made them
start the round of "jacks" that closed the game, and sent them off for
a cold swim before breakfast and the day's work or frolic.

Never was Paula alone. Graham could only join in the groups that were
always about her. Although the young people ragged and tangoed
incessantly, she rarely danced, and then it was with the young men.
Once, however, she favored him with an old-fashioned waltz. "Your
ancestors in an antediluvian dance," she mocked the young people, as
she stepped out; for she and Graham had the floor to themselves.

Once down the length of the room, the two were in full accord. Paula,
with the sympathy Graham recognized that made her the exceptional
accompanist or rider, subdued herself to the masterful art of the man,
until the two were as parts of a sentient machine that operated without
jar or friction. After several minutes, finding their perfect mutual
step and pace, and Graham feeling the absolute giving of Paula to the
dance, they essayed rhythmical pauses and dips, their feet never
leaving the floor, yet affecting the onlookers in the way Dick voiced
it when he cried out: "They float! They float!" The music was the
"Waltz of Salomé," and with its slow-fading end they postured slower
and slower to a perfect close.

There was no need to speak. In silence, without a glance at each other,
they returned to the company where Dick was proclaiming:

"Well, younglings, codlings, and other fry, that's the way we old folks
used to dance. I'm not saying anything against the new dances, mind
you. They're all right and dandy fine. But just the same it wouldn't
injure you much to learn to waltz properly. The way you waltz, when you
do attempt it, is a scream. We old folks do know a thing or two that is
worth while."

"For instance?" queried one of the girls.

"I'll tell you. I don't mind the young generation smelling of gasoline
the way it does--"

Cries and protests drowned Dick out for a moment.

"I know I smell of it myself," he went on. "But you've all failed to
learn the good old modes of locomotion. There isn't a girl of you that
Paula can't walk into the ground. There isn't a fellow of you that
Graham and I can't walk into a receiving hospital.--Oh, I know you can
all crank engines and shift gears to the queen's taste. But there isn't
one of you that can properly ride a horse--a real horse, in the only
way, I mean. As for driving a smart pair of roadsters, it's a screech.
And how many of you husky lads, hell-scooting on the bay in your
speed-boats, can take the wheel of an old-time sloop or schooner,
without an auxiliary, and get out of your own way in her?"

"But we get there just the same," the same girl retorted.

"And I don't deny it," Dick answered. "But you are not always pretty.
I'll tell you a pretty sight that no one of you can ever
present--Paula, there, with the reins of four slashing horses in her
hands, her foot on the brake, swinging tally-ho along a mountain road."

 On a warm morning, in the cool arcade of the great patio, a chance
group of four or five, among whom was Paula, formed about Graham, who
had been reading alone. After a time he returned to his magazine with
such absorption that he forgot those about him until an awareness of
silence penetrated to his consciousness. He looked up. All the others
save Paula had strayed off. He could hear their distant laughter from
across the patio. But Paula! He surprised the look on her face, in her
eyes. It was a look bent on him, concerning him. Doubt, speculation,
almost fear, were in her eyes; and yet, in that swift instant, he had
time to note that it was a look deep and searching--almost, his quick
fancy prompted, the look of one peering into the just-opened book of
fate. Her eyes fluttered and fell, and the color increased in her
cheeks in an unmistakable blush. Twice her lips moved to the verge of
speech; yet, caught so arrantly in the act, she was unable to phrase
any passing thought. Graham saved the painful situation by saying
casually:

"Do you know, I've just been reading De Vries' eulogy of Luther
Burbank's work, and it seems to me that Dick is to the domestic animal
world what Burbank is to the domestic vegetable world. You are
life-makers here--thumbing the stuff into new forms of utility and
beauty."

Paula, by this time herself again, laughed and accepted the compliment.

"I fear me," Graham continued with easy seriousness, "as I watch your
achievements, that I can only look back on a misspent life. Why didn't
I get in and _make_ things? I'm horribly envious of both of you."

"We _are_ responsible for a dreadful lot of creatures being born," she
said. "It makes one breathless to think of the responsibility."

"The ranch certainly spells fecundity," Graham smiled. "I never before
was so impressed with the flowering and fruiting of life. Everything
here prospers and multiplies--"

"Oh!" Paula cried, breaking in with a sudden thought. "Some day I'll
show you my goldfish. I breed them, too--yea, and commercially. I
supply the San Francisco dealers with their rarest strains, and I even
ship to New York. And, best of all, I actually make money--profits, I
mean. Dick's books show it, and he is the most rigid of bookkeepers.
There isn't a tack-hammer on the place that isn't inventoried; nor a
horse-shoe nail unaccounted for. That's why he has such a staff of
bookkeepers. Why, do you know, calculating every last least item of
expense, including average loss of time for colic and lameness, out of
fearfully endless columns of figures he has worked the cost of an
hour's labor for a draught horse to the third decimal place."

"But your goldfish," Graham suggested, irritated by her constant
dwelling on her husband.

"Well, Dick makes his bookkeepers keep track of my goldfish in the same
way. I'm charged every hour of any of the ranch or house labor I use on
the fish--postage stamps and stationery, too, if you please. I have to
pay interest on the plant. He even charges me for the water, just as if
he were a city water company and I a householder. And still I net ten
per cent., and have netted as high as thirty. But Dick laughs and says
when I've deducted the wages of superintendence--my superintendence, he
means--that I'll find I am poorly paid or else am operating at a loss;
that with my net I couldn't hire so capable a superintendent.

"Just the same, that's why Dick succeeds in his undertakings. Unless
it's sheer experiment, he never does anything without knowing
precisely, to the last microscopic detail, what it is he is doing."

"He is very sure," Graham observed.

"I never knew a man to be so sure of himself," Paula replied warmly;
"and I never knew a man with half the warrant. I know him. He is a
genius--but only in the most paradoxical sense. He is a genius because
he is so balanced and normal that he hasn't the slightest particle of
genius in him. Such men are rarer and greater than geniuses. I like to
think of Abraham Lincoln as such a type."

"I must admit I don't quite get you," Graham said.

"Oh, I don't dare to say that Dick is as good, as cosmically good, as
Lincoln," she hurried on. "Dick _is_ good, but it is not that. It is in
their excessive balance, normality, lack of flare, that they are of the
same type. Now I am a genius. For, see, I do things without knowing how
I do them. I just do them. I get effects in my music that way. Take my
diving. To save my life I couldn't tell how I swan-dive, or jump, or do
the turn and a half.

"Dick, on the other hand, can't do anything unless he clearly knows in
advance _how_ he is going to do it. He does everything with balance and
foresight. He's a general, all-around wonder, without ever having been
a particular wonder at any one thing.--Oh, I know him. He's never been
a champion or a record-breaker in any line of athletics. Nor has he
been mediocre in any line. And so with everything else, mentally,
intellectually. He is an evenly forged chain. He has no massive links,
no weak links."

"I'm afraid I'm like you," Graham said, "that commoner and lesser
creature, a genius. For I, too, on occasion, flare and do the most
unintentional things. And I am not above falling on my knees before
mystery."

"And Dick hates mystery--or it would seem he does. Not content with
knowing _how_--he is eternally seeking the _why_ of the _how_. Mystery
is a challenge to him. It excites him like a red rag does a bull. At
once he is for ripping the husks and the heart from mystery, so that he
will know the _how_ and the _why_, when it will be no longer mystery
but a generalization and a scientifically demonstrable fact."

 Much of the growing situation was veiled to the three figures of it.
Graham did not know of Paula's desperate efforts to cling close to her
husband, who, himself desperately busy with his thousand plans and
projects, was seeing less and less of his company. He always appeared
at lunch, but it was a rare afternoon when he could go out with his
guests. Paula did know, from the multiplicity of long, code telegrams
from Mexico, that things were in a parlous state with the Harvest
Group. Also, she saw the agents and emissaries of foreign investors in
Mexico, always in haste and often inopportune, arriving at the ranch to
confer with Dick. Beyond his complaint that they ate the heart out of
his time, he gave her no clew to the matters discussed.

"My! I wish you weren't so busy," she sighed in his arms, on his knees,
one fortunate morning, when, at eleven o'clock, she had caught him
alone.

It was true, she had interrupted the dictation of a letter into the
phonograph; and the sigh had been evoked by the warning cough of
Bonbright, whom she saw entering with more telegrams in his hand.

"Won't you let me drive you this afternoon, behind Duddy and Fuddy,
just you and me, and cut the crowd?" she begged.

He shook his head and smiled.

"You'll meet at lunch a weird combination," he explained. "Nobody else
needs to know, but I'll tell you." He lowered his voice, while
Bonbright discreetly occupied himself at the filing cabinets. "They're
Tampico oil folk. Samuels himself, President of the Nacisco; and
Wishaar, the big inside man of the Pearson-Brooks crowd--the chap that
engineered the purchase of the East Coast railroad and the Tiuana
Central when they tried to put the Nacisco out of business; and
Matthewson--he's the _hi-yu-skookum_ big chief this side the Atlantic
of the Palmerston interests--you know, the English crowd that fought
the Nacisco and the Pearson-Brooks bunch so hard; and, oh, there'll be
several others. It shows you that things are rickety down Mexico way
when such a bunch stops scrapping and gets together.

"You see, they are oil, and I'm important in my way down there, and
they want me to swing the mining interests in with the oil. Truly, big
things are in the air, and we've got to hang together and do something
or get out of Mexico. And I'll admit, after they gave me the turn-down
in the trouble three years ago, that I've sulked in my tent and made
them come to see me."

He caressed her and called her his armful of dearest woman, although
she detected his eye roving impatiently to the phonograph with its
unfinished letter.

"And so," he concluded, with a pressure of his arms about her that
seemed to hint that her moment with him was over and she must go, "that
means the afternoon. None will stop over. And they'll be off and away
before dinner."

She slipped off his knees and out of his arms with unusual abruptness,
and stood straight up before him, her eyes flashing, her cheeks white,
her face set with determination, as if about to say something of grave
importance. But a bell tinkled softly, and he reached for the desk
telephone.

Paula drooped, and sighed inaudibly, and, as she went down the room and
out the door, and as Bonbright stepped eagerly forward with the
telegrams, she could hear the beginning of her husband's conversation:

"No. It is impossible. He's got to come through, or I'll put him out of
business. That gentleman's agreement is all poppycock. If it were only
that, of course he could break it. But I've got some mighty interesting
correspondence that he's forgotten about.... Yes, yes; it will clinch
it in any court of law. I'll have the file in your office by five this
afternoon. And tell him, for me, that if he tries to put through this
trick, I'll break him. I'll put a competing line on, and his steamboats
will be in the receiver's hands inside a year.... And... hello, are you
there?... And just look up that point I suggested. I am rather
convinced you'll find the Interstate Commerce has got him on two
counts...."

Nor did Graham, nor even Paula, imagine that Dick--the keen one, the
deep one, who could see and sense things yet to occur and out of
intangible nuances and glimmerings build shrewd speculations and
hypotheses that subsequent events often proved correct--was already
sensing what had not happened but what might happen. He had not heard
Paula's brief significant words at the hitching post; nor had he seen
Graham catch her in that deep scrutiny of him under the arcade. Dick
had heard nothing, seen little, but sensed much; and, even in advance
of Paula, had he apprehended in vague ways what she afterward had come
to apprehend.

The most tangible thing he had to build on was the night, immersed in
bridge, when he had not been unaware of the abrupt leaving of the piano
after the singing of the "Gypsy Trail"; nor when, in careless smiling
greeting of them when they came down the room to devil him over his
losing, had he failed to receive a hint or feeling of something unusual
in Paula's roguish teasing face. On the moment, laughing retorts,
giving as good as she sent, Dick's own laughing eyes had swept over
Graham beside her and likewise detected the unusual. The man was
overstrung, had been Dick's mental note at the time. But why should he
be overstrung? Was there any connection between his overstrungness and
the sudden desertion by Paula of the piano? And all the while these
questions were slipping through his thoughts, he had laughed at their
sallies, dealt, sorted his hand, and won the bid on no trumps.

Yet to himself he had continued to discount as absurd and preposterous
the possibility of his vague apprehension ever being realized. It was a
chance guess, a silly speculation, based upon the most trivial data, he
sagely concluded. It merely connoted the attractiveness of his wife and
of his friend. But--and on occasional moments he could not will the
thought from coming uppermost in his mind--why had they broken off from
singing that evening? Why had he received the feeling that there was
something unusual about it? Why had Graham been overstrung?

       *       *        *       *        *

Nor did Bonbright, one morning, taking dictation of a telegram in the
last hour before noon, know that Dick's casual sauntering to the
window, still dictating, had been caused by the faint sound of hoofs on
the driveway. It was not the first of recent mornings that Dick had so
sauntered to the window, to glance out with apparent absentness at the
rush of the morning riding party in the last dash home to the hitching
rails. But he knew, on this morning, before the first figures came in
sight whose those figures would be.

"Braxton is safe," he went on with the dictation without change of
tone, his eyes on the road where the riders must first come into view.
"If things break he can get out across the mountains into Arizona. See
Connors immediately. Braxton left Connors complete instructions.
Connors to-morrow in Washington. Give me fullest details any
move--signed."

Up the driveway the Fawn and Altadena clattered neck and neck. Dick had
not been disappointed in the figures he expected to see. From the rear,
cries and laughter and the sound of many hoofs tokened that the rest of
the party was close behind.

"And the next one, Mr. Bonbright, please put in the Harvest code," Dick
went on steadily, while to himself he was commenting that Graham was a
passable rider but not an excellent one, and that it would have to be
seen to that he was given a heavier horse than Altadena. "It is to
Jeremy Braxton. Send it both ways. There is a chance one or the other
may get through..."




CHAPTER XX



Once again the tide of guests ebbed from the Big House, and more than
one lunch and dinner found only the two men and Paula at the table. On
such evenings, while Graham and Dick yarned for their hour before bed,
Paula no longer played soft things to herself at the piano, but sat
with them doing fine embroidery and listening to the talk.

Both men had much in common, had lived life in somewhat similar ways,
and regarded life from the same angles. Their philosophy was harsh
rather than sentimental, and both were realists. Paula made a practice
of calling them the pair of "Brass Tacks."

"Oh, yes," she laughed to them, "I understand your attitude. You are
successes, the pair of you--physical successes, I mean. You have
health. You are resistant. You can stand things. You have survived
where men less resistant have gone down. You pull through African
fevers and bury the other fellows. This poor chap gets pneumonia in
Cripple Creek and cashes in before you can get him to sea level. Now
why didn't you get pneumonia? Because you were more deserving? Because
you had lived more virtuously? Because you were more careful of risks
and took more precautions?"

She shook her head.

"No. Because you were luckier--I mean by birth, by possession of
constitution and stamina. Why, Dick buried his three mates and two
engineers at Guayaquil. Yellow fever. Why didn't the yellow fever germ,
or whatever it is, kill Dick? And the same with you, Mr.
Broad-shouldered Deep-chested Graham. In this last trip of yours, why
didn't you die in the swamps instead of your photographer? Come.
Confess. How heavy was he? How broad were his shoulders? How deep his
chest?--wide his nostrils?--tough his resistance?"

"He weighed a hundred and thirty-five," Graham admitted ruefully. "But
he looked all right and fit at the start. I think I was more surprised
than he when he turned up his toes." Graham shook his head. "It wasn't
because he was a light weight and small. The small men are usually the
toughest, other things being equal. But you've put your finger on the
reason just the same. He didn't have the physical stamina, the
resistance,--You know what I mean, Dick?"

"In a way it's like the quality of muscle and heart that enables some
prizefighters to go the distance--twenty, thirty, forty rounds, say,"
Dick concurred. "Right now, in San Francisco, there are several hundred
youngsters dreaming of success in the ring. I've watched them trying
out. All look good, fine-bodied, healthy, fit as fiddles, and young.
And their spirits are most willing. And not one in ten of them can last
ten rounds. I don't mean they get knocked out. I mean they blow up.
Their muscles and their hearts are not made out of first-grade fiber.
They simply are not made to move at high speed and tension for ten
rounds. And some of them blow up in four or five rounds. And not one in
forty can go the twenty-round route, give and take, hammer and tongs,
one minute of rest to three of fight, for a full hour of fighting. And
the lad who can last forty rounds is one in ten thousand--lads like
Nelson, Gans, and Wolgast.

"You understand the point I am making," Paula took up. "Here are the
pair of you. Neither will see forty again. You're a pair of hard-bitten
sinners. You've gone through hardship and exposure that dropped others
all along the way. You've had your fun and folly. You've roughed and
rowdied over the world--"

"Played the wild ass," Graham laughed in.

"And drunk deep," Paula added. "Why, even alcohol hasn't burned you.
You were too tough. You put the other fellows under the table, or into
the hospital or the grave, and went your gorgeous way, a song on your
lips, with tissues uncorroded, and without even the morning-after
headache. And the point is that you are successes. Your muscles are
blond-beast muscles, your vital organs are blond-beast organs. And from
all this emanates your blond-beast philosophy. That's why you are brass
tacks, and preach realism, and practice realism, shouldering and
shoving and walking over lesser and unluckier creatures, who don't dare
talk back, who, like Dick's prizefighting boys, would blow up in the
first round if they resorted to the arbitrament of force."

Dick whistled a long note of mock dismay.

"And that's why you preach the gospel of the strong," Paula went on.
"If you had been weaklings, you'd have preached the gospel of the weak
and turned the other cheek. But you--you pair of big-muscled
giants--when you are struck, being what you are, you don't turn the
other cheek--"

"No," Dick interrupted quietly. "We immediately roar, 'Knock his block
off!' and then do it.--She's got us, Evan, hip and thigh. Philosophy,
like religion, is what the man is, and is by him made in his own image."

And while the talk led over the world, Paula sewed on, her eyes filled
with the picture of the two big men, admiring, wondering, pondering,
without the surety of self that was theirs, aware of a slipping and
giving of convictions so long accepted that they had seemed part of her.

Later in the evening she gave voice to her trouble.

"The strangest part of it," she said, taking up a remark Dick had just
made, "is that too much philosophizing about life gets one worse than
nowhere. A philosophic atmosphere is confusing--at least to a woman.
One hears so much about everything, and against everything, that
nothing is sure. For instance, Mendenhall's wife is a Lutheran. She
hasn't a doubt about anything. All is fixed, ordained, immovable.
Star-drifts and ice-ages she knows nothing about, and if she did they
would not alter in the least her rules of conduct for men and women in
this world and in relation to the next.

"But here, with us, you two pound your brass tacks, Terrence does a
Greek dance of epicurean anarchism, Hancock waves the glittering veils
of Bergsonian metaphysics, Leo makes solemn obeisance at the altar of
Beauty, and Dar Hyal juggles his sophistic blastism to no end save all
your applause for his cleverness. Don't you see? The effect is that
there is nothing solid in any human judgment. Nothing is right. Nothing
is wrong. One is left compassless, rudderless, chartless on a sea of
ideas. Shall I do this? Must I refrain from that? Will it be wrong? Is
there any virtue in it? Mrs. Mendenhall has her instant answer for
every such question. But do the philosophers?"

Paula shook her head.

"No. All they have is ideas. They immediately proceed to talk about it,
and talk and talk and talk, and with all their erudition reach no
conclusion whatever. And I am just as bad. I listen and listen, and
talk and talk, as I am talking now, and remain convictionless. There is
no test--"

"But there is," Dick said. "The old, eternal test of truth--_Will it
work?_"

"Ah, now you are pounding your favorite brass tack," Paula smiled. "And
Dar Hyal, with a few arm-wavings and word-whirrings, will show that all
brass tacks are illusions; and Terrence, that brass tacks are sordid,
irrelevant and non-essential things at best; and Hancock, that the
overhanging heaven of Bergson is paved with brass tacks, only that they
are a much superior article to yours; and Leo, that there is only one
brass tack in the universe, and that it is Beauty, and that it isn't
brass at all but gold."

       *       *        *       *        *

"Come on, Red Cloud, go riding this afternoon," Paula asked her
husband. "Get the cobwebs out of your brain, and let lawyers and mines
and livestock go hang."

"I'd like to, Paul," he answered. "But I can't. I've got to rush in a
machine all the way to the Buckeye. Word came in just before lunch.
They're in trouble at the dam. There must have been a fault in the
under-strata, and too-heavy dynamiting has opened it. In short, what's
the good of a good dam when the bottom of the reservoir won't hold
water?"

Three hours later, returning from the Buckeye, Dick noted that for the
first time Paula and Graham had gone riding together alone.

       *       *        *       *        *

The Wainwrights and the Coghlans, in two machines, out for a week's
trip to the Russian River, rested over for a day at the Big House, and
were the cause of Paula's taking out the tally-ho for a picnic into the
Los Baños Hills. Starting in the morning, it was impossible for Dick to
accompany them, although he left Blake in the thick of dictation to go
out and see them off. He assured himself that no detail was amiss in
the harnessing and hitching, and reseated the party, insisting on
Graham coming forward into the box-seat beside Paula.

"Just must have a reserve of man's strength alongside of Paula in case
of need," Dick explained. "I've known a brake-rod to carry away on a
down grade somewhat to the inconvenience of the passengers. Some of
them broke their necks. And now, to reassure you, with Paula at the
helm, I'll sing you a song:

  "What can little Paula do?
    Why, drive a phaeton and two.
    Can little Paula do no more?
    Yes, drive a tally-ho and four."

All were in laughter as Paula nodded to the grooms to release the
horses' heads, took the feel of the four mouths on her hands, and
shortened and slipped the reins to adjustment of four horses into the
collars and taut on the traces.

In the babel of parting gibes to Dick, none of the guests was aware of
aught else than a bright morning, the promise of a happy day, and a
genial host bidding them a merry going. But Paula, despite the keen
exhilaration that should have arisen with the handling of four such
horses, was oppressed by a vague sadness in which, somehow, Dick's
being left behind figured. Through Graham's mind Dick's merry face had
flashed a regret of conscience that, instead of being seated there
beside this one woman, he should be on train and steamer fleeing to the
other side of the world.

But the merriness died on Dick's face the moment he turned on his heel
to enter the house. It was a few minutes later than ten when he
finished his dictation and Mr. Blake rose to go. He hesitated, then
said a trifle apologetically:

"You told me, Mr. Forrest, to remind you of the proofs of your
Shorthorn book. They wired their second hurry-up yesterday."

"I won't be able to tackle it myself," Dick replied. "Will you please
correct the typographical, submit the proofs to Mr. Manson for
correction of fact--tell him be sure to verify that pedigree of King of
Devon--and ship them off."

Until eleven Dick received his managers and foremen. But not for a
quarter of an hour after that did he get rid of his show manager, Mr.
Pitts, with the tentative make-up of the catalogue for the first annual
stock-sale on the ranch. By that time Mr. Bonbright was on hand with
his sheaf of telegrams, and the lunch-hour was at hand ere they were
cleaned up.

For the first time alone since he had seen the tally-ho off, Dick
stepped out on his sleeping porch to the row of barometers and
thermometers on the wall. But he had come to consult, not them, but the
girl's face that laughed from the round wooden frame beneath them.

"Paula, Paula," he said aloud, "are you surprising yourself and me
after all these years? Are you turning madcap at sober middle age?"

He put on leggings and spurs to be ready for riding after lunch, and
what his thoughts had been while buckling on the gear he epitomized to
the girl in the frame.

"Play the game," he muttered. And then, after a pause, as he turned to
go: "A free field and no favor ... and no favor."

       *       *        *       *        *

"Really, if I don't go soon, I'll have to become a pensioner and join
the philosophers of the madroño grove," Graham said laughingly to Dick.

It was the time of cocktail assembling, and Paula, in addition to
Graham, was the only one of the driving party as yet to put in an
appearance.

"If all the philosophers together would just make one book!" Dick
demurred. "Good Lord, man, you've just got to complete your book here.
I got you started and I've got to see you through with it."

Paula's encouragement to Graham to stay on--mere stereotyped,
uninterested phrases--was music to Dick. His heart leapt. After all,
might he not be entirely mistaken? For two such mature, wise,
middle-aged individuals as Paula and Graham any such foolishness was
preposterous and unthinkable. They were not young things with their
hearts on their sleeves.

"To the book!" he toasted. He turned to Paula. "A good cocktail," he
praised. "Paul, you excel yourself, and you fail to teach Oh Joy the
art. His never quite touch yours.--Yes, another, please."




CHAPTER XXI



Graham, riding solitary through the redwood canyons among the hills
that overlooked the ranch center, was getting acquainted with Selim,
the eleven-hundred-pound, coal-black gelding which Dick had furnished
him in place of the lighter Altadena. As he rode along, learning the
good nature, the roguishness and the dependableness of the animal,
Graham hummed the words of the "Gypsy Trail" and allowed them to lead
his thoughts. Quite carelessly, foolishly, thinking of bucolic lovers
carving their initials on forest trees, he broke a spray of laurel and
another of redwood. He had to stand in the stirrups to pluck a
long-stemmed, five-fingered fern with which to bind the sprays into a
cross. When the patteran was fashioned, he tossed it on the trail
before him and noted that Selim passed over without treading upon it.
Glancing back, Graham watched it to the next turn of the trail. A good
omen, was his thought, that it had not been trampled.

More five-fingered ferns to be had for the reaching, more branches of
redwood and laurel brushing his face as he rode, invited him to
continue the manufacture of patterans, which he dropped as he fashioned
them. An hour later, at the head of the canyon, where he knew the trail
over the divide was difficult and stiff, he debated his course and
turned back.

Selim warned him by nickering. Came an answering nicker from close at
hand. The trail was wide and easy, and Graham put his mount into a fox
trot, swung a wide bend, and overtook Paula on the Fawn.

"Hello!" he called. "Hello! Hello!"

She reined in till he was alongside.

"I was just turning back," she said. "Why did you turn back? I thought
you were going over the divide to Little Grizzly."

"You knew I was ahead of you?" he asked, admiring the frank, boyish way
of her eyes straight-gazing into his.

"Why shouldn't I? I had no doubt at the second patteran."

"Oh, I'd forgotten about them," he laughed guiltily. "Why did _you_
turn back?"

She waited until the Fawn and Selim had stepped over a fallen alder
across the trail, so that she could look into Graham's eyes when she
answered:

"Because I did not care to follow your trail.--To follow anybody's
trail," she quickly amended. "I turned back at the second one."

He failed of a ready answer, and an awkward silence was between them.
Both were aware of this awkwardness, due to the known but unspoken
things.

"Do you make a practice of dropping patterans?" Paula asked.

"The first I ever left," he replied, with a shake of the head. "But
there was such a generous supply of materials it seemed a pity, and,
besides, the song was haunting me."

"It was haunting me this morning when I woke up," she said, this time
her face straight ahead so that she might avoid a rope of wild
grapevine that hung close to her side of the trail.

And Graham, gazing at her face in profile, at her crown of gold-brown
hair, at her singing throat, felt the old ache at the heart, the hunger
and the yearning. The nearness of her was a provocation. The sight of
her, in her fawn-colored silk corduroy, tormented him with a rush of
visions of that form of hers--swimming Mountain Lad, swan-diving
through forty feet of air, moving down the long room in the dull-blue
dress of medieval fashion with the maddening knee-lift of the clinging
draperies.

"A penny for them," she interrupted his visioning. His answer was
prompt.

"Praise to the Lord for one thing: you haven't once mentioned Dick."

"Do you so dislike him?"

"Be fair," he commanded, almost sternly. "It is because I like him.
Otherwise..."

"What?" she queried.

Her voice was brave, although she looked straight before her at the
Fawn's pricking ears.

"I can't understand why I remain. I should have been gone long ago."

"Why?" she asked, her gaze still on the pricking ears.

"Be fair, be fair," he warned. "You and I scarcely need speech for
understanding."

She turned full upon him, her cheeks warming with color, and, without
speech, looked at him. Her whip-hand rose quickly, half way, as if to
press her breast, and half way paused irresolutely, then dropped down
to her side. But her eyes, he saw, were glad and startled. There was no
mistake. The startle lay in them, and also the gladness. And he,
knowing as it is given some men to know, changed the bridle rein to his
other hand, reined close to her, put his arm around her, drew her till
the horses rocked, and, knee to knee and lips on lips, kissed his
desire to hers. There was no mistake--pressure to pressure, warmth to
warmth, and with an elate thrill he felt her breathe against him.

The next moment she had torn herself loose. The blood had left her
face. Her eyes were blazing. Her riding-whip rose as if to strike him,
then fell on the startled Fawn. Simultaneously she drove in both spurs
with such suddenness and force as to fetch a groan and a leap from the
mare.

He listened to the soft thuds of hoofs die away along the forest path,
himself dizzy in the saddle from the pounding of his blood. When the
last hoof-beat had ceased, he half-slipped, half-sank from his saddle
to the ground, and sat on a mossy boulder. He was hard hit--harder than
he had deemed possible until that one great moment when he had held her
in his arms. Well, the die was cast.

He straightened up so abruptly as to alarm Selim, who sprang back the
length of his bridle rein and snorted.

What had just occurred had been unpremeditated. It was one of those
inevitable things. It had to happen. He had not planned it, although he
knew, now, that had he not procrastinated his going, had he not
drifted, he could have foreseen it. And now, going could not mend
matters. The madness of it, the hell of it and the joy of it, was that
no longer was there any doubt. Speech beyond speech, his lips still
tingling with the memory of hers, she had told him. He dwelt over that
kiss returned, his senses swimming deliciously in the sea of
remembrance.

He laid his hand caressingly on the knee that had touched hers, and was
grateful with the humility of the true lover. Wonderful it was that so
wonderful a woman should love him. This was no girl. This was a woman,
knowing her own will and wisdom. And she had breathed quickly in his
arms, and her lips had been live to his. He had evoked what he had
given, and he had not dreamed, after the years, that he had had so much
to give.

He stood up, made as if to mount Selim, who nozzled his shoulder, then
paused to debate.

It was no longer a question of going. That was definitely settled. Dick
had certain rights, true. But Paula had her rights, and did he have the
right to go, after what had happened, unless ... unless she went with
him? To go now was to kiss and ride away. Surely, since the world of
sex decreed that often the same men should love the one woman, and
therefore that perfidy should immediately enter into such a
triangle--surely, it was the lesser evil to be perfidious to the man
than to the woman.

It was a real world, he pondered as he rode slowly along; and Paula,
and Dick, and he were real persons in it, were themselves conscious
realists who looked the facts of life squarely in the face. This was no
affair of priest and code, of other wisdoms and decisions. Of
themselves must it be settled. Some one would be hurt. But life was
hurt. Success in living was the minimizing of pain. Dick believed that
himself, thanks be. The three of them believed it. And it was nothing
new under the sun. The countless triangles of the countless generations
had all been somehow solved. This, then, would be solved. All human
affairs reached some solution.

He shook sober thought from his brain and returned to the bliss of
memory, reaching his hand to another caress of his knee, his lips
breathing again to the breathing of hers against them. He even reined
Selim to a halt in order to gaze at the hollow resting place of his
bent arm which she had filled.

Not until dinner did Graham see Paula again, and he found her the very
usual Paula. Not even his eye, keen with knowledge, could detect any
sign of the day's great happening, nor of the anger that had whitened
her face and blazed in her eyes when she half-lifted her whip to strike
him. In everything she was the same Little Lady of the Big House. Even
when it chanced that her eyes met his, they were serene, untroubled,
with no hint of any secret in them. What made the situation easier was
the presence of several new guests, women, friends of Dick and her,
come for a couple of days.

Next morning, in the music room, he encountered them and Paula at the
piano.

"Don't you sing, Mr. Graham?" a Miss Hoffman asked.

She was the editor of a woman's magazine published in San Francisco,
Graham had learned.

"Oh, adorably," he assured her. "Don't I, Mrs. Forrest?" he appealed.

"It is quite true," Paula smiled, "if for no other reason that he is
kind enough not to drown me quite."

"And nothing remains but to prove our words," he volunteered. "There's
a duet we sang the other evening--" He glanced at Paula for a sign.
"--Which is particularly good for my kind of singing." Again he gave
her a passing glance and received no cue to her will or wish. "The
music is in the living room. I'll go and get it."

"It's the 'Gypsy Trail,' a bright, catchy thing," he heard her saying
to the others as he passed out.

They did not sing it so recklessly as on that first occasion, and much
of the thrill and some of the fire they kept out of their voices; but
they sang it more richly, more as the composer had intended it and with
less of their own particular interpretation. But Graham was thinking as
he sang, and he knew, too, that Paula was thinking, that in their
hearts another duet was pulsing all unguessed by the several women who
applauded the song's close.

"You never sang it better, I'll wager," he told Paula.

For he had heard a new note in her voice. It had been fuller, rounder,
with a generousness of volume that had vindicated that singing throat.

"And now, because I know you don't know, I'll tell you what a patteran
is," she was saying....




CHAPTER XXII



"Dick, boy, your position is distinctly Carlylean," Terrence McFane
said in fatherly tones.

The sages of the madrono grove were at table, and, with Paula, Dick and
Graham, made up the dinner party of seven.

"Mere naming of one's position does not settle it, Terrence," Dick
replied. "I know my point is Carlylean, but that does not invalidate
it. Hero-worship is a very good thing. I am talking, not as a mere
scholastic, but as a practical breeder with whom the application of
Mendelian methods is an every-day commonplace."

"And I am to conclude," Hancock broke in, "that a Hottentot is as good
as a white man?"

"Now the South speaks, Aaron," Dick retorted with a smile. "Prejudice,
not of birth, but of early environment, is too strong for all your
philosophy to shake. It is as bad as Herbert Spencer's handicap of the
early influence of the Manchester School."

"And Spencer is on a par with the Hottentot?" Dar Hyal challenged.

Dick shook his head.

"Let me say this, Hyal. I think I can make it clear. The average
Hottentot, or the average Melanesian, is pretty close to being on a par
with the average white man. The difference lies in that there are
proportionately so many more Hottentots and negroes who are merely
average, while there is such a heavy percentage of white men who are
not average, who are above average. These are what I called the
pace-makers that bring up the speed of their own race average-men. Note
that they do not change the nature or develop the intelligence of the
average-men. But they give them better equipment, better facilities,
enable them to travel a faster collective pace.

"Give an Indian a modern rifle in place of his bow and arrows and he
will become a vastly more efficient game-getter. The Indian hunter
himself has not changed in the slightest. But his entire Indian race
sported so few of the above-average men, that all of them, in ten
thousand generations, were unable to equip him with a rifle."

"Go on, Dick, develop the idea," Terrence encouraged. "I begin to
glimpse your drive, and you'll soon have Aaron on the run with his race
prejudices and silly vanities of superiority."

"These above-average men," Dick continued, "these pace-makers, are the
inventors, the discoverers, the constructionists, the sporting
dominants. A race that sports few such dominants is classified as a
lower race, as an inferior race. It still hunts with bows and arrows.
It is not equipped. Now the average white man, per se, is just as
bestial, just as stupid, just as inelastic, just as stagnative, just as
retrogressive, as the average savage. But the average white man has a
faster pace. The large number of sporting dominants in his society give
him the equipment, the organization, and impose the law.

"What great man, what hero--and by that I mean what sporting
dominant--has the Hottentot race produced? The Hawaiian race produced
only one--Kamehameha. The negro race in America, at the outside only
two, Booker T. Washington and Du Bois--and both with white blood in
them...."

Paula feigned a cheerful interest while the exposition went on. She did
not appear bored, but to Graham's sympathetic eyes she seemed inwardly
to droop. And in an interval of tilt between Terrence and Hancock, she
said in a low voice to Graham:

"Words, words, words, so much and so many of them! I suppose Dick is
right--he so nearly always is; but I confess to my old weakness of
inability to apply all these floods of words to life--to my life, I
mean, to my living, to what I should do, to what I must do." Her eyes
were unfalteringly fixed on his while she spoke, leaving no doubt in
his mind to what she referred. "I don't know what bearing sporting
dominants and race-paces have on my life. They show me no right or
wrong or way for my particular feet. And now that they've started they
are liable to talk the rest of the evening....

"Oh, I do understand what they say," she hastily assured him; "but it
doesn't mean anything to me. Words, words, words--and I want to know
what to do, what to do with myself, what to do with you, what to do
with Dick."

But the devil of speech was in Dick Forrest's tongue, and before Graham
could murmur a reply to Paula, Dick was challenging him for data on the
subject from the South American tribes among which he had traveled. To
look at Dick's face it would have been unguessed that he was aught but
a carefree, happy arguer. Nor did Graham, nor did Paula, Dick's dozen
years' wife, dream that his casual careless glances were missing no
movement of a hand, no change of position on a chair, no shade of
expression on their faces.

What's up? was Dick's secret interrogation. Paula's not herself. She's
positively nervous, and all the discussion is responsible. And Graham's
off color. His brain isn't working up to mark. He's thinking about
something else, rather than about what he is saying. What is that
something else?

And the devil of speech behind which Dick hid his secret thoughts
impelled him to urge the talk wider and wilder.

"For once I could almost hate the four sages," Paula broke out in an
undertone to Graham, who had finished furnishing the required data.

Dick, himself talking, in cool sentences amplifying his thesis,
apparently engrossed in his subject, saw Paula make the aside, although
no word of it reached his ears, saw her increasing nervousness, saw the
silent sympathy of Graham, and wondered what had been the few words she
uttered, while to the listening table he was saying:

"Fischer and Speiser are both agreed on the paucity of unit-characters
that circulate in the heredity of the lesser races as compared with the
immense variety of unit-characters in say the French, or German, or
English...."

No one at the table suspected that Dick deliberately dangled the bait
of a new trend to the conversation, nor did Leo dream afterward that it
was the master-craft and deviltry of Dick rather than his own question
that changed the subject when he demanded to know what part the female
sporting dominants played in the race.

"Females don't sport, Leo, my lad," Terrence, with a wink to the
others, answered him. "Females are conservative. They keep the type
true. They fix it and hold it, and are the everlasting clog on the
chariot of progress. If it wasn't for the females every blessed
mother's son of us would be a sporting dominant. I refer to our
distinguished breeder and practical Mendelian whom we have with us this
evening to verify my random statements."

"Let us get down first of all to bedrock and find out what we are
talking about," Dick was prompt on the uptake. "What is woman?" he
demanded with an air of earnestness.

"The ancient Greeks said woman was nature's failure to make a man," Dar
Hyal answered, the while the imp of mockery laughed in the corners of
his mouth and curled his thin cynical lips derisively.

Leo was shocked. His face flushed. There was pain in his eyes and his
lips were trembling as he looked wistful appeal to Dick.

"The half-sex," Hancock gibed. "As if the hand of God had been
withdrawn midway in the making, leaving her but a half-soul, a groping
soul at best."

"No I no!" the boy cried out. "You must not say such things!--Dick, you
know. Tell them, tell them."

"I wish I could," Dick replied. "But this soul discussion is vague as
souls themselves. We all know, of our selves, that we often grope, are
often lost, and are never so much lost as when we think we know where
we are and all about ourselves. What is the personality of a lunatic
but a personality a little less, or very much less, coherent than ours?
What is the personality of a moron? Of an idiot? Of a feeble-minded
child? Of a horse? A dog? A mosquito? A bullfrog? A woodtick? A garden
snail? And, Leo, what is your own personality when you sleep and dream?
When you are seasick? When you are in love? When you have colic? When
you have a cramp in the leg? When you are smitten abruptly with the
fear of death? When you are angry? When you are exalted with the sense
of the beauty of the world and think you think all inexpressible
unutterable thoughts?

"I say _think you think_ intentionally. Did you really think, then your
sense of the beauty of the world would not be inexpressible,
unutterable. It would be clear, sharp, definite. You could put it into
words. Your personality would be clear, sharp, and definite as your
thoughts and words. Ergo, Leo, when you deem, in exalted moods, that
you are at the summit of existence, in truth you are thrilling,
vibrating, dancing a mad orgy of the senses and not knowing a step of
the dance or the meaning of the orgy. You don't know yourself. Your
soul, your personality, at that moment, is a vague and groping thing.
Possibly the bullfrog, inflating himself on the edge of a pond and
uttering hoarse croaks through the darkness to a warty mate, possesses
also, at that moment, a vague and groping personality.

"No, Leo, personality is too vague for any of our vague personalities
to grasp. There are seeming men with the personalities of women. There
are plural personalities. There are two-legged human creatures that are
neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. We, as personalities, float like
fog-wisps through glooms and darknesses and light-flashings. It is all
fog and mist, and we are all foggy and misty in the thick of the
mystery."

"Maybe it's mystification instead of mystery--man-made mystification,"
Paula said.

"There talks the true woman that Leo thinks is not a half-soul," Dick
retorted. "The point is, Leo, sex and soul are all interwoven and
tangled together, and we know little of one and less of the other."

"But women are beautiful," the boy stammered.

"Oh, ho!" Hancock broke in, his black eyes gleaming wickedly. "So, Leo,
you identify woman with beauty?"

The young poet's lips moved, but he could only nod.

"Very well, then, let us take the testimony of painting, during the
last thousand years, as a reflex of economic conditions and political
institutions, and by it see how man has molded and daubed woman into
the image of his desire, and how she has permitted him--"

"You must stop baiting Leo," Paula interfered, "and be truthful, all of
you, and say what you do know or do believe."

"Woman is a very sacred subject," Dar Hyal enunciated solemnly.

"There is the Madonna," Graham suggested, stepping into the breach to
Paula's aid.

"And the cérébrale," Terrence added, winning a nod of approval from Dar
Hyal.

"One at a time," Hancock said. "Let us consider the Madonna-worship,
which was a particular woman-worship in relation to the general
woman-worship of all women to-day and to which Leo subscribes. Man is a
lazy, loafing savage. He dislikes to be pestered. He likes
tranquillity, repose. And he finds himself, ever since man began,
saddled to a restless, nervous, irritable, hysterical traveling
companion, and her name is woman. She has moods, tears, vanities,
angers, and moral irresponsibilities. He couldn't destroy her. He had
to have her, although she was always spoiling his peace. What was he to
do?"

"Trust him to find a way--the cunning rascal," Terrence interjected.

"He made a heavenly image of her," Hancock kept on. "He idealized her
good qualities, and put her so far away that her bad qualities couldn't
get on his nerves and prevent him from smoking his quiet lazy pipe of
peace and meditating upon the stars. And when the ordinary every-day
woman tried to pester, he brushed her aside from his thoughts and
remembered his heaven-woman, the perfect woman, the bearer of life and
custodian of immortality.

"Then came the Reformation. Down went the worship of the Mother. And
there was man still saddled to his repose-destroyer. What did he do
then?"

"Ah, the rascal," Terrence grinned.

"He said: 'I will make of you a dream and an illusion.' And he did. The
Madonna was his heavenly woman, his highest conception of woman. He
transferred all his idealized qualities of her to the earthly woman, to
every woman, and he has fooled himself into believing in them and in
her ever since... like Leo does."

"For an unmarried man you betray an amazing intimacy with the
pestiferousness of woman," Dick commented. "Or is it all purely
theoretical?" Terrence began to laugh.

"Dick, boy, it's Laura Marholm Aaron's been just reading. He can spout
her chapter and verse."

"And with all this talk about woman we have not yet touched the hem of
her garment," Graham said, winning a grateful look from Paula and Leo.

"There is love," Leo breathed. "No one has said one word about love."

"And marriage laws, and divorces, and polygamy, and monogamy, and free
love," Hancock rattled off.

"And why, Leo," Dar Hyal queried, "is woman, in the game of love,
always the pursuer, the huntress?"

"Oh, but she isn't," the boy answered quietly, with an air of superior
knowledge. "That is just some of your Shaw nonsense."

"Bravo, Leo," Paula applauded.

"Then Wilde was wrong when he said woman attacks by sudden and strange
surrenders?" Dar Hyal asked.

"But don't you see," protested Leo, "all such talk makes woman a
monster, a creature of prey." As he turned to Dick, he stole a side
glance at Paula and love welled in his eyes. "Is she a creature of
prey, Dick?"

"No," Dick answered slowly, with a shake of head, and gentleness was in
his voice for sake of what he had just seen in the boy's eyes. "I
cannot say that woman is a creature of prey. Nor can I say she is a
creature preyed upon. Nor will I say she is a creature of unfaltering
joy to man. But I will say that she is a creature of much joy to man--"

"And of much foolishness," Hancock added.

"Of much fine foolishness," Dick gravely amended.

"Let me ask Leo something," Dar Hyal said. "Leo, why is it that a woman
loves the man who beats her?"

"And doesn't love the man who doesn't beat her?" Leo countered.

"Precisely."

"Well, Dar, you are partly right and mostly wrong.--Oh, I have learned
about definitions from you fellows. You've cunningly left them out of
your two propositions. Now I'll put them in for you. A man who beats a
woman he loves is a low type man. A woman who loves the man who beats
her is a low type woman. No high type man beats the woman he loves. No
high type woman," and all unconsciously Leo's eyes roved to Paula,
"could love a man who beats her."

"No, Leo," Dick said, "I assure you I have never, never beaten Paula."

"So you see, Dar," Leo went on with flushing cheeks, "you are wrong.
Paula loves Dick without being beaten."

With what seemed pleased amusement beaming on his face, Dick turned to
Paula as if to ask her silent approval of the lad's words; but what
Dick sought was the effect of the impact of such words under the
circumstances he apprehended. In Paula's eyes he thought he detected a
flicker of something he knew not what. Graham's face he found
expressionless insofar as there was no apparent change of the
expression of interest that had been there.

"Woman has certainly found her St. George tonight," Graham
complimented. "Leo, you shame me. Here I sit quietly by while you fight
three dragons."

"And such dragons," Paula joined in. "If they drove O'Hay to drink,
what will they do to you, Leo?"

"No knight of love can ever be discomfited by all the dragons in the
world," Dick said. "And the best of it, Leo, is in this case the
dragons are more right than you think, and you are more right than they
just the same."

"Here's a dragon that's a good dragon, Leo, lad," Terrence spoke up.
"This dragon is going to desert his disreputable companions and come
over on your side and be a Saint Terrence. And this Saint Terrence has
a lovely question to ask you."

"Let this dragon roar first," Hancock interposed. "Leo, by all in love
that is sweet and lovely, I ask you: why do lovers, out of jealousy, so
often kill the woman they love?"

"Because they are hurt, because they are insane," came the answer, "and
because they have been unfortunate enough to love a woman so low in
type that she could be guilty of making them jealous."

"But, Leo, love will stray," Dick prompted. "You must give a more
sufficient answer."

"True for Dick," Terrence supplemented. "And it's helping you I am to
the full stroke of your sword. Love will stray among the highest types,
and when it does in steps the green-eyed monster. Suppose the most
perfect woman you can imagine should cease to love the man who does not
beat her and come to love another man who loves her and will not beat
her--what then? All highest types, mind you. Now up with your sword and
slash into the dragons."

"The first man will not kill her nor injure her in any way," Leo
asserted stoutly. "Because if he did he would not be the man you
describe. He would not be high type, but low type."

"You mean, he would get out of the way?" Dick asked, at the same time
busying himself with a cigarette so that he might glance at no one's
face.

Leo nodded gravely.

"He would get out of the way, and he would make the way easy for her,
and he would be very gentle with her."

"Let us bring the argument right home," Hancock said. "We'll suppose
you're in love with Mrs. Forrest, and Mrs. Forrest is in love with you,
and you run away together in the big limousine--"

"Oh, but I wouldn't," the boy blurted out, his cheeks burning.

"Leo, you are not complimentary," Paula encouraged.

"It's just supposing, Leo," Hancock urged.

The boy's embarrassment was pitiful, and his voice quivered, but he
turned bravely to Dick and said:

"That is for Dick to answer."

"And I'll answer," Dick said. "I wouldn't kill Paula. Nor would I kill
you, Leo. That wouldn't be playing the game. No matter what I felt at
heart, I'd say, 'Bless you, my children.' But just the same--" He
paused, and the laughter signals in the corners of his eyes advertised
a whimsey--"I'd say to myself that Leo was making a sad mistake. You
see, he doesn't know Paula."

"She would be for interrupting his meditations on the stars," Terrence
smiled.

"Never, never, Leo, I promise you," Paula exclaimed.

"There do you belie yourself, Mrs. Forrest," Terrence assured her. "In
the first place, you couldn't help doing it. Besides, it'd be your
bounden duty to do it. And, finally, if I may say so, as somewhat of an
authority, when I was a mad young lover of a man, with my heart full of
a woman and my eyes full of the stars, 'twas ever the dearest delight
to be loved away from them by the woman out of my heart."

"Terrence, if you keep on saying such lovely things," cried Paula,"
I'll run away with both you and Leo in the limousine."

"Hurry the day," said Terrence gallantly. "But leave space among your
fripperies for a few books on the stars that Leo and I may be studying
in odd moments."

The combat ebbed away from Leo, and Dar Hyal and Hancock beset Dick.

"What do you mean by 'playing the game'?" Dar Hyal asked.

"Just what I said, just what Leo said," Dick answered; and he knew that
Paula's boredom and nervousness had been banished for some time and
that she was listening with an interest almost eager. "In my way of
thinking, and in accord with my temperament, the most horrible
spiritual suffering I can imagine would be to kiss a woman who endured
my kiss."

"Suppose she fooled you, say for old sake's sake, or through desire not
to hurt you, or pity for you?" Hancock propounded.

"It would be, to me, the unforgivable sin," came Dick's reply. "It
would not be playing the game--for her. I cannot conceive the fairness,
nor the satisfaction, of holding the woman one loves a moment longer
than she loves to be held. Leo is very right. The drunken artisan, with
his fists, may arouse and keep love alive in the breast of his stupid
mate. But the higher human males, the males with some shadow of
rationality, some glimmer of spirituality, cannot lay rough hands on
love. With Leo, I would make the way easy for the woman, and I would be
very gentle with her."

"Then what becomes of your boasted monogamic marriage institution of
Western civilization?" Dar Hyal asked.

And Hancock: "You argue for free love, then?"

"I can only answer with a hackneyed truism," Dick said. "There can be
no love that is not free. Always, please, remember the point of view is
that of the higher types. And the point of view answers you, Dar. The
vast majority of individuals must be held to law and labor by the
monogamic institution, or by a stern, rigid marriage institution of
some sort. They are unfit for marriage freedom or love freedom. Freedom
of love, for them, would be merely license of promiscuity. Only such
nations have risen and endured where God and the State have kept the
people's instincts in discipline and order."

"Then you don't believe in the marriage laws for say yourself," Dar
Hyal inquired, "while you do believe in them for other men?"

"I believe in them for all men. Children, family, career, society, the
State--all these things make marriage, legal marriage, imperative. And
by the same token that is why I believe in divorce. Men, all men, and
women, all women, are capable of loving more than once, of having the
old love die and of finding a new love born. The State cannot control
love any more than can a man or a woman. When one falls in love one
falls in love, and that's all he knows about it. There it
is--throbbing, sighing, singing, thrilling love. But the State can
control license."

"It is a complicated free love that you stand for," Hancock criticised.
"True, and for the reason that man, living in society, is a most
complicated animal."

"But there are men, lovers, who would die at the loss of their loved
one," Leo surprised the table by his initiative. "They would die if she
died, they would die--oh so more quickly--if she lived and loved
another."

"Well, they'll have to keep on dying as they have always died in the
past," Dick answered grimly. "And no blame attaches anywhere for their
deaths. We are so made that our hearts sometimes stray."

"My heart would never stray," Leo asserted proudly, unaware that all at
the table knew his secret. "I could never love twice, I know."

"True for you, lad," Terrence approved. "The voice of all true lovers
is in your throat. 'Tis the absoluteness of love that is its joy--how
did Shelley put it?--or was it Keats?--'All a wonder and a wild
delight.' Sure, a miserable skinflint of a half-baked lover would it be
that could dream there was aught in woman form one-thousandth part as
sweet, as ravishing and enticing, as glorious and wonderful as his own
woman that he could ever love again."

       *       *        *       *        *

And as they passed out from the dining room, Dick, continuing the
conversation with Dar Hyal, was wondering whether Paula would kiss him
good night or slip off to bed from the piano. And Paula, talking to Leo
about his latest sonnet which he had shown her, was wondering if she
could kiss Dick, and was suddenly greatly desirous to kiss him, she
knew not why.




CHAPTER XXIII



There was little talk that same evening after dinner. Paula, singing at
the piano, disconcerted Terrence in the midst of an apostrophe on love.
He quit a phrase midmost to listen to the something new he heard in her
voice, then slid noiselessly across the room to join Leo at full length
on the bearskin. Dar Hyal and Hancock likewise abandoned the
discussion, each isolating himself in a capacious chair. Graham,
seeming least attracted, browsed in a current magazine, but Dick
observed that he quickly ceased turning the pages. Nor did Dick fail to
catch the new note in Paula's voice and to endeavor to sense its
meaning.

When she finished the song the three sages strove to tell her all at
the same time that for once she had forgotten herself and sung out as
they had always claimed she could. Leo lay without movement or speech,
his chin on his two hands, his face transfigured.

"It's all this talk on love," Paula laughed, "and all the lovely
thoughts Leo and Terrence ... and Dick have put into my head."

Terrence shook his long mop of iron-gray hair.

"Into your heart you'd be meaning," he corrected. "'Tis the very heart
and throat of love that are yours this night. And for the first time,
dear lady, have I heard the full fair volume that is yours. Never again
plaint that your voice is thin. Thick it is, and round it is, as a
great rope, a great golden rope for the mooring of argosies in the
harbors of the Happy Isles."

"And for that I shall sing you the _Gloria,"_ she answered, "to
celebrate the slaying of the dragons by Saint Leo, by Saint Terrence
... and, of course, by Saint Richard."

Dick, missing nothing of the talk, saved himself from speech by
crossing to the concealed sideboard and mixing for himself a Scotch and
soda.

While Paula sang the _Gloria,_ he sat on one of the couches, sipping
his drink and remembering keenly. Once before he had heard her sing
like that--in Paris, during their swift courtship, and directly
afterward, during their honeymoon on the _All Away._

A little later, using his empty glass in silent invitation to Graham,
he mixed highballs for both of them, and, when Graham had finished his,
suggested to Paula that she and Graham sing the "Gypsy Trail."

She shook her head and began _Das Kraut Ver-gessenheit._

"She was not a true woman, she was a terrible woman," the song's close
wrung from Leo. "And he was a true lover. She broke his heart, but
still he loved her. He cannot love again because he cannot forget his
love for her."

"And now, Red Cloud, the Song of the Acorn," Paula said, smiling over
to her husband. "Put down your glass, and be good, and plant the
acorns."

Dick lazily hauled himself off the couch and stood up, shaking his head
mutinously, as if tossing a mane, and stamping ponderously with his
feet in simulation of Mountain Lad.

"I'll have Leo know that he is not the only poet and love-knight on the
ranch. Listen to Mountain Lad's song, all wonder and wild delight,
Terrence, and more. Mountain Lad doesn't moon about the loved one. He
doesn't moon at all. He incarnates love, and rears right up in meeting
and tells them so. Listen to him!"

Dick filled the room and shook the air with wild, glad, stallion
nickering; and then, with mane-tossing and foot-pawing, chanted:

"Hear me! I am Eros! I stamp upon the hills. I fill the wide valleys.
The mares hear me, and startle, in quiet pastures; for they know me.
The land is filled with fatness, and the sap is in the trees. It is the
spring. The spring is mine. I am monarch of my kingdom of the spring.
The mares remember my voice. They knew me aforetimes through their
mothers before them. Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills, and
the wide valleys are my heralds, echoing the sound of my approach."

It was the first time the sages of the madrono grove had heard Dick's
song, and they were loud in applause. Hancock took it for a fresh start
in the discussion, and was beginning to elaborate a biologic Bergsonian
definition of love, when he was stopped by Terrence, who had noticed
the pain that swept across Leo's face.

"Go on, please, dear lady," Terrence begged. "And sing of love, only of
love; for it is my experience that I meditate best upon the stars to
the accompaniment of a woman's voice."

A little later, Oh Joy, entering the room, waited till Paula finished a
song, then moved noiselessly to Graham and handed him a telegram. Dick
scowled at the interruption.

"Very important--I think," the Chinese explained to him.

"Who took it?" Dick demanded.

"Me--I took it," was the answer. "Night clerk at Eldorado call on
telephone. He say important. I take it."

"It is, fairly so," Graham spoke up, having finished reading the
message. "Can I get a train out to-night for San Francisco, Dick?"

"Oh Joy, come back a moment," Dick called, looking at his watch. "What
train for San Francisco stops at Eldorado?"

"Eleven-ten," came the instant information. "Plenty time. Not too much.
I call chauffeur?"

Dick nodded.

"You really must jump out to-night?" he asked Graham.

"Really. It is quite important. Will I have time to pack?"

Dick gave a confirmatory nod to Oh Joy, and said to Graham:

"Just time to throw the needful into a grip." He turned to Oh Joy. "Is
Oh My up yet?"

"Yessr."

"Send him to Mr. Graham's room to help, and let me know as soon as the
machine is ready. No limousine. Tell Saunders to take the racer."

"One fine big strapping man, that," Terrence commented, after Graham
had left the room.

They had gathered about Dick, with the exception of Paula, who remained
at the piano, listening.

"One of the few men I'd care to go along with, hell for leather, on a
forlorn hope or anything of that sort," Dick said. "He was on the
_Nethermere_ when she went ashore at Pango in the '97 hurricane. Pango
is just a strip of sand, twelve feet above high water mark, a lot of
cocoanuts, and uninhabited. Forty women among the passengers, English
officers' wives and such. Graham had a bad arm, big as a leg--snake
bite.

"It was a thundering sea. Boats couldn't live. They smashed two and
lost both crews. Four sailors volunteered in succession to carry a
light line ashore. And each man, in turn, dead at the end of it, was
hauled back on board. While they were untying the last one, Graham,
with an arm like a leg, stripped for it and went to it. And he did it,
although the pounding he got on the sand broke his bad arm and staved
in three ribs. But he made the line fast before he quit. In order to
haul the hawser ashore, six more volunteered to go in on Evan's line to
the beach. Four of them arrived. And only one woman of the forty was
lost--she died of heart disease and fright.

"I asked him about it once. He was as bad as an Englishman. All I could
get out of the beggar was that the recovery was uneventful. Thought
that the salt water, the exercise, and the breaking of the bone had
served as counter-irritants and done the arm good."

Oh Joy and Graham entered the room from opposite ends. Dick saw that
Graham's first questing glance was for Paula.

"All ready, sir," Oh Joy announced.

Dick prepared to accompany his guest outside to the car; but Paula
evidenced her intention of remaining in the house. Graham started over
to her to murmur perfunctory regrets and good-by.

And she, warm with what Dick had just told of him, pleasured at the
goodly sight of him, dwelling with her eyes on the light, high poise of
head, the careless, sun-sanded hair, and the lightness, almost
debonaireness, of his carriage despite his weight of body and breadth
of shoulders. As he drew near to her, she centered her gaze on the long
gray eyes whose hint of drooping lids hinted of boyish sullenness. She
waited for the expression of sullenness to vanish as the eyes lighted
with the smile she had come to know so well.

What he said was ordinary enough, as were her regrets; but in his eyes,
as he held her hand a moment, was the significance which she had
unconsciously expected and to which she replied with her own eyes. The
same significance was in the pressure of the momentary handclasp. All
unpremeditated, she responded to that quick pressure. As he had said,
there was little need for speech between them.

As their hands fell apart, she glanced swiftly at Dick; for she had
learned much, in their dozen years together, of his flashes of
observance, and had come to stand in awe of his almost uncanny powers
of guessing facts from nuances, and of linking nuances into conclusions
often startling in their thoroughness and correctness. But Dick, his
shoulder toward her, laughing over some quip of Hancock, was just
turning his laughter-crinkled eyes toward her as he started to
accompany Graham.

No, was her thought; surely Dick had seen nothing of the secret little
that had been exchanged between them. It had been very little, very
quick--a light in the eyes, a muscular quiver of the fingers, and no
lingering. How could Dick have seen or sensed? Their eyes had certainly
been hidden from Dick, likewise their clasped hands, for Graham's back
had been toward him.

Just the same, she wished she had not made that swift glance at Dick.
She was conscious of a feeling of guilt, and the thought of it hurt her
as she watched the two big men, of a size and blondness, go down the
room side by side. Of what had she been guilty? she asked herself. Why
should she have anything to hide? Yet she was honest enough to face the
fact and accept, without quibble, that she had something to hide. And
her cheeks burned at the thought that she was being drifted into
deception.

"I won't be but a couple of days," Graham was saying as he shook hands
with Dick at the car.

Dick saw the square, straight look of his eyes, and recognized the
firmness and heartiness of his gripping hand. Graham half began to say
something, then did not; and Dick knew he had changed his mind when he
said:

"I think, when I get back, that I'll have to pack."

"But the book," Dick protested, inwardly cursing himself for the leap
of joy which had been his at the other's words.

"That's just why," Graham answered. "I've got to get it finished. It
doesn't seem I can work like you do. The ranch is too alluring. I can't
get down to the book. I sit over it, and sit over it, but the
confounded meadowlarks keep echoing in my ears, and I begin to see the
fields, and the redwood canyons, and Selim. And after I waste an hour,
I give up and ring for Selim. And if it isn't that, it's any one of a
thousand other enchantments."

He put his foot on the running-board of the pulsing car and said,
"Well, so long, old man."

"Come back and make a stab at it," urged Dick. "If necessary, we'll
frame up a respectable daily grind, and I'll lock you in every morning
until you've done it. And if you don't do your work all day, all day
you'll stay locked in. I'll make you work.--Got cigarettes?--matches?"

"Right O."

"Let her go, Saunders," Dick ordered the chauffeur; and the car seemed
to leap out into the darkness from the brilliantly lighted porte
cochére.

Back in the house, Dick found Paula playing to the madrono sages, and
ensconced himself on the couch to wait and wonder if she would kiss him
good night when bedtime came. It was not, he recognized, as if they
made a regular schedule of kissing. It had never been like that. Often
and often he did not see her until midday, and then in the presence of
guests. And often and often, she slipped away to bed early, disturbing
no one with a good night kiss to her husband which might well hint to
them that their bedtime had come.

No, Dick concluded, whether or not she kissed him on this particular
night it would be equally without significance. But still he wondered.

She played on and sang on interminably, until at last he fell asleep.
When he awoke he was alone in the room. Paula and the sages had gone
out quietly. He looked at his watch. It marked one o'clock. She had
played unusually late, he knew; for he knew she had just gone. It was
the cessation of music and movement that had awakened him.

And still he wondered. Often he napped there to her playing, and
always, when she had finished, she kissed him awake and sent him to
bed. But this night she had not. Perhaps, after all, she was coming
back. He lay and drowsed and waited. The next time he looked at his
watch, it was two o'clock. She had not come back.

He turned off the lights, and as he crossed the house, pressed off the
hall lights as he went, while the many unimportant little nothings,
almost of themselves, ranged themselves into an ordered text of doubt
and conjecture that he could not refrain from reading.

On his sleeping porch, glancing at his barometers and thermometers, her
laughing face in the round frame caught his eyes, and, standing before
it, even bending closer to it, he studied her long.

"Oh, well," he muttered, as he drew up the bedcovers, propped the
pillows behind him and reached for a stack of proofsheets, "whatever it
is I'll have to play it."

He looked sidewise at her picture.

"But, oh, Little Woman, I wish you wouldn't," was the sighed good night.




CHAPTER XXIV



As luck would have it, beyond chance guests for lunch or dinner, the
Big House was empty. In vain, on the first and second days, did Dick
lay out his work, or defer it, so as to be ready for any suggestion
from Paula to go for an afternoon swim or drive.

He noted that she managed always to avoid the possibility of being
kissed. From her sleeping porch she called good night to him across the
wide patio. In the morning he prepared himself for her eleven o'clock
greeting. Mr. Agar and Mr. Pitts, with important matters concerning the
forthcoming ranch sale of stock still unsettled, Dick promptly cleared
out at the stroke of eleven. Up she was, he knew, for he had heard her
singing. As he waited, seated at his desk, for once he was idle. A tray
of letters before him continued to need his signature. He remembered
this morning pilgrimage of hers had been originated by her, and by her,
somewhat persistently, had been kept up. And an adorable thing it was,
he decided--that soft call of "Good morning, merry gentleman," and the
folding of her kimono-clad figure in his arms.

He remembered, further, that he had often cut that little visit short,
conveying the impression to her, even while he clasped her, of how busy
he was. And he remembered, more than once, the certain little wistful
shadow on her face as she slipped away.

Quarter past eleven, and she had not come. He took down the receiver to
telephone the dairy, and in the swift rush of women's conversation, ere
he hung up, he caught Paula's voice:

"--Bother Mr. Wade. Bring all the little Wades and come, if only for a
couple of days--"

Which was very strange of Paula. She had invariably welcomed the
intervals of no guests, when she and he were left alone with each other
for a day or for several days. And now she was trying to persuade Mrs.
Wade to come down from Sacramento. It would seem that Paula did not
wish to be alone with him, and was seeking to protect herself with
company.

He smiled as he realized that that morning embrace, now that it was not
tendered him, had become suddenly desirable. The thought came to him of
taking her away with him on one of their travel-jaunts. That would
solve the problem, perhaps. And he would hold her very close to him and
draw her closer. Why not an Alaskan hunting trip? She had always wanted
to go. Or back to their old sailing grounds in the days of the _All
Away_--the South Seas. Steamers ran direct between San Francisco and
Tahiti. In twelve days they could be ashore in Papeete. He wondered if
Lavaina still ran her boarding house, and his quick vision caught a
picture of Paula and himself at breakfast on Lavaina's porch in the
shade of the mango trees.

He brought his fist down on the desk. No, by God, he was no coward to
run away with his wife for fear of any man. And would it be fair to her
to take her away possibly from where her desire lay? True, he did not
know where her desire lay, nor how far it had gone between her and
Graham. Might it not be a spring madness with her that would vanish
with the spring? Unfortunately, he decided, in the dozen years of their
marriage she had never evidenced any predisposition toward spring
madness. She had never given his heart a moment's doubt. Herself
tremendously attractive to men, seeing much of them, receiving their
admiration and even court, she had remained always her equable and
serene self, Dick Forrest's wife--

"Good morning, merry gentleman."

She was peeping in on him, quite naturally from the hall, her eyes and
lips smiling to him, blowing him a kiss from her finger tips.

"And good morning, my little haughty moon," he called back, himself
equally his natural self.

And now she would come in, he thought; and he would fold her in his
arms, and put her to the test of the kiss.

He opened his arms in invitation. But she did not enter. Instead, she
startled, with one hand gathered her kimono at her breast, with the
other picked up the trailing skirt as if for flight, at the same time
looking apprehensively down the hall. Yet his keen ears had caught no
sound. She smiled back at him, blew him another kiss, and was gone.

Ten minutes later he had no ears for Bonbright, who, telegrams in hand,
startled him as he sat motionless at his desk, as he had sat, without
movement, for ten minutes.

And yet she was happy. Dick knew her too long in all the expressions of
her moods not to realize the significance of her singing over the
house, in the arcades, and out in the patio. He did not leave his
workroom till the stroke of lunch; nor did she, as she sometimes did,
come to gather him up on the way. At the lunch gong, from across the
patio, he heard her trilling die away into the house in the direction
of the dining room.

A Colonel Harrison Stoddard--colonel from younger service in the
National Guard, himself a retired merchant prince whose hobby was
industrial relations and social unrest--held the table most of the meal
upon the extension of the Employers' Liability Act so as to include
agricultural laborers. But Paula found a space in which casually to
give the news to Dick that she was running away for the afternoon on a
jaunt up to Wickenberg to the Masons.

"Of course I don't know when I'll be back--you know what the Masons
are. And I don't dare ask you to come, though I'd like you along."

Dick shook his head.

"And so," she continued, "if you're not using Saunders--"

Dick nodded acquiescence.

"I'm using Callahan this afternoon," he explained, on the instant
planning his own time now that Paula was out of the question. "I never
can make out, Paul, why you prefer Saunders. Callahan is the better
driver, and of course the safest."

"Perhaps that's why," she said with a smile. "Safety first means
slowest most."

"Just the same I'd back Callahan against Saunders on a speed-track,"
Dick championed.

"Where are you bound?" she asked.

"Oh, to show Colonel Stoddard my one-man and no-horse farm--you know,
the automatically cultivated ten-acre stunt I've been frivoling with. A
lot of changes have been made that have been waiting a week for me to
see tried out. I've been too busy. And after that, I'm going to take
him over the colony--what do you think?--five additions the last week."

"I thought the membership was full," Paula said.

"It was, and still is," Dick beamed. "But these are babies. And the
least hopeful of the families had the rashness to have twins."

"A lot of wiseacres are shaking their heads over that experiment of
yours, and I make free to say that I am merely holding my
judgment--you've got to show me by bookkeeping," Colonel Stoddard was
saying, immensely pleased at the invitation to be shown over in person.

Dick scarcely heard him, such was the rush of other thoughts. Paula had
not mentioned whether Mrs. Wade and the little Wades were coming, much
less mentioned that she had invited them. Yet this Dick tried to
consider no lapse on her part, for often and often, like himself, she
had guests whose arrival was the first he knew of their coming.

It was, however, evident that Mrs. Wade was not coming that day, else
Paula would not be running away thirty miles up the valley. That was
it, and there was no blinking it. She was running away, and from him.
She could not face being alone with him with the consequent perils of
intimacy--and perilous, in such circumstances, could have but the
significance he feared. And further, she was making the evening sure.
She would not be back for dinner, or till long after dinner, it was a
safe wager, unless she brought the whole Wickenberg crowd with her. She
would be back late enough to expect him to be in bed. Well, he would
not disappoint her, he decided grimly, as he replied to Colonel
Stoddard:

"The experiment works out splendidly on paper, with decently wide
margins for human nature. And there I admit is the doubt and the
danger--the human nature. But the only way to test it is to test it,
which is what I am doing."

"It won't be the first Dick has charged to profit and loss," Paula said.

"But five thousand acres, all the working capital for two hundred and
fifty farmers, and a cash salary of a thousand dollars each a year!"
Colonel Stoddard protested. "A few such failures--if it fails--would
put a heavy drain on the Harvest."

"That's what the Harvest needs," Dick answered lightly.

Colonel Stoddard looked blank.

"Precisely," Dick confirmed. "Drainage, you know. The mines are
flooded--the Mexican situation."

It was during the morning of the second day--the day of Graham's
expected return--that Dick, who, by being on horseback at eleven, had
avoided a repetition of the hurt of the previous day's "Good morning,
merry gentleman" across the distance of his workroom, encountered Ah Ha
in a hall with an armful of fresh-cut lilacs. The house-boy's way led
toward the tower room, but Dick made sure.

"Where are you taking them, Ah Ha?" he asked.

"Mr. Graham's room--he come to-day."

Now whose thought was that? Dick pondered. Ah Ha's?--Oh Joy's--or
Paula's? He remembered having heard Graham more than once express his
fancy for their lilacs.

He deflected his course from the library and strolled out through the
flowers near the tower room. Through the open windows of it came
Paula's happy humming. Dick pressed his lower lip with tight quickness
between his teeth and strolled on.

Some great, as well as many admirable, men and women had occupied that
room, and for them Paula had never supervised the flower arrangement,
Dick meditated. Oh Joy, himself a master of flowers, usually attended
to that, or had his house-staff ably drilled to do it.

Among the telegrams Bonbright handed him, was one from Graham, which
Dick read twice, although it was simple and unmomentous, being merely a
postponement of his return.

Contrary to custom, Dick did not wait for the second lunch-gong. At the
sound of the first he started, for he felt the desire for one of Oh
Joy's cocktails--the need of a prod of courage, after the lilacs, to
meet Paula. But she was ahead of him. He found her--who rarely drank,
and never alone--just placing an empty cocktail glass back on the tray.

So she, too, had needed courage for the meal, was his deduction, as he
nodded to Oh Joy and held up one finger.

"Caught you at it!" he reproved gaily. "Secret tippling. The gravest of
symptoms. Little I thought, the day I stood up with you, that the wife
I was marrying was doomed to fill an alcoholic's grave."

Before she could retort, a young man strolled in whom she and Dick
greeted as Mr. Winters, and who also must have a cocktail. Dick tried
to believe that it was not relief he sensed in Paula's manner as she
greeted the newcomer. He had never seen her quite so cordial to him
before, although often enough she had met him. At any rate, there would
be three at lunch.

Mr. Winters, an agricultural college graduate and special writer for
the _Pacific Rural Press,_ as well as a sort of protégé of Dick, had
come for data for an article on California fish-ponds, and Dick
mentally arranged his afternoon's program for him.

"Got a telegram from Evan," he told Paula. "Won't be back till the four
o'clock day after to-morrow."

"And after all my trouble!" she exclaimed. "Now the lilacs will be
wilted and spoiled."

Dick felt a warm glow of pleasure. There spoke his frank,
straightforward Paula. No matter what the game was, or its outcome, at
least she would play it without the petty deceptions. She had always
been that way--too transparent to make a success of deceit.

Nevertheless, he played his own part by a glance of scarcely interested
interrogation.

"Why, in Graham's room," she explained. "I had the boys bring a big
armful and I arranged them all myself. He's so fond of them, you know."

Up to the end of lunch, she had made no mention of Mrs. Wade's coming,
and Dick knew definitely she was not coming when Paula queried casually:

"Expecting anybody?"

He shook his head, and asked, "Are you doing anything this afternoon?"

"Haven't thought about anything," she answered. "And now I suppose I
can't plan upon you with Mr. Winters to be told all about fish."

"But you can," Dick assured her. "I'm turning him over to Mr. Hanley,
who's got the trout counted down to the last egg hatched and who knows
all the grandfather bass by name. I'll tell you what--" He paused and
considered. Then his face lighted as with a sudden idea. "It's a
loafing afternoon. Let's take the rifles and go potting squirrels. I
noticed the other day they've become populous on that hill above the
Little Meadow."

But he had not failed to observe the flutter of alarm that shadowed her
eyes so swiftly, and that so swiftly was gone as she clapped her hands
and was herself.

"But don't take a rifle for me," she said.

"If you'd rather not--" he began gently.

"Oh, I want to go, but I don't feel up to shooting. I'll take Le
Gallienne's last book along--it just came in--and read to you in
betweenwhiles. Remember, the last time I did that when we went
squirreling it was his 'Quest of the Golden Girl' I read to you."




CHAPTER XXV



Paula on the Fawn, and Dick on the Outlaw, rode out from the Big House
as nearly side by side as the Outlaw's wicked perversity permitted. The
conversation she permitted was fragmentary. With tiny ears laid back
and teeth exposed, she would attempt to evade Dick's restraint of rein
and spur and win to a bite of Paula's leg or the Fawn's sleek flank,
and with every defeat the pink flushed and faded in the whites of her
eyes. Her restless head-tossing and pitching attempts to rear (thwarted
by the martingale) never ceased, save when she pranced and sidled and
tried to whirl.

"This is the last year of her," Dick announced. "She's indomitable.
I've worked two years on her without the slightest improvement. She
knows me, knows my ways, knows I am her master, knows when she has to
give in, but is never satisfied. She nourishes the perennial hope that
some time she'll catch me napping, and for fear she'll miss that time
she never lets any time go by."

"And some time she may catch you," Paula said.

"That's why I'm giving her up. It isn't exactly a strain on me, but
soon or late she's bound to get me if there's anything in the law of
probability. It may be a million-to-one shot, but heaven alone knows
where in the series of the million that fatal one is going to pop up."

"You're a wonder, Red Cloud," Paula smiled.

"Why?"

"You think in statistics and percentages, averages and exceptions. I
wonder, when we first met, what particular formula you measured me up
by."

"I'll be darned if I did," he laughed back. "There was where all signs
failed. I didn't have a statistic that applied to you. I merely
acknowledged to myself that here was the most wonderful female woman
ever born with two good legs, and I knew that I wanted her more than I
had ever wanted anything. I just had to have her--"

"And got her," Paula completed for him. "But since, Red Cloud, since.
Surely you've accumulated enough statistics on me."

"A few, quite a few," he admitted. "But I hope never to get the last
one--"

He broke off at sound of the unmistakable nicker of Mountain Lad. The
stallion appeared, the cowboy on his back, and Dick gazed for a moment
at the perfect action of the beast's great swinging trot.

"We've got to get out of this," he warned, as Mountain Lad, at sight of
them, broke into a gallop.

Together they pricked their mares, whirled them about, and fled, while
from behind they heard the soothing "Whoas" of the rider, the thuds of
the heavy hoofs on the roadway, and a wild imperative neigh. The Outlaw
answered, and the Fawn was but a moment behind her. From the commotion
they knew Mountain Lad was getting tempestuous.

Leaning to the curve, they swept into a cross-road and in fifty paces
pulled up, where they waited till the danger was past.

"He's never really injured anybody yet," Paula said, as they started
back.

"Except when he casually stepped on Cowley's toes. You remember he was
laid up in bed for a month," Dick reminded her, straightening out the
Outlaw from a sidle and with a flicker of glance catching the strange
look with which Paula was regarding him.

There was question in it, he could see, and love in it, and fear--yes,
almost fear, or at least apprehension that bordered on dismay; but,
most of all, a seeking, a searching, a questioning. Not entirely
ungermane to her mood, was his thought, had been that remark of his
thinking in statistics.

But he made that he had not seen, whipping out his pad, and, with an
interested glance at a culvert they were passing, making a note.

"They missed it," he said. "It should have been repaired a month ago."

"What has become of all those Nevada mustangs?" Paula inquired.

This was a flyer Dick had taken, when a bad season for Nevada pasture
had caused mustangs to sell for a song with the alternative of starving
to death. He had shipped a trainload down and ranged them in his wilder
mountain pastures to the west.

"It's time to break them," he answered. "And I'm thinking of a real
old-fashioned rodeo next week. What do you say? Have a barbecue and all
the rest, and invite the country side?"

"And then you won't be there," Paula objected.

"I'll take a day off. Is it a go?"

They reined to one side of the road, as she agreed, to pass three farm
tractors, all with their trailage of ganged discs and harrows.

"Moving them across to the Rolling Meadows," he explained. "They pay
over horses on the right ground."

Rising from the home valley, passing through cultivated fields and
wooded knolls, they took a road busy with many wagons hauling
road-dressing from the rock-crusher they could hear growling and
crunching higher up.

"Needs more exercise than I've been giving her," Dick remarked, jerking
the Outlaw's bared teeth away from dangerous proximity to the Fawn's
flank.

"And it's disgraceful the way I've neglected Duddy and Fuddy," Paula
said. "I've kept their feed down like a miser, but they're a lively
handful just the same."

Dick heard her idly, but within forty-eight hours he was to remember
with hurt what she had said.

They continued on till the crunch of the rock-crusher died away,
penetrated a belt of woodland, crossed a tiny divide where the
afternoon sunshine was wine-colored by the manzanita and rose-colored
by madronos, and dipped down through a young planting of eucalyptus to
the Little Meadow. But before they reached it, they dismounted and tied
their horses. Dick took the .22 automatic rifle from his
saddle-holster, and with Paula advanced softly to a clump of redwoods
on the edge of the meadow. They disposed themselves in the shade and
gazed out across the meadow to the steep slope of hill that came down
to it a hundred and fifty yards away.

"There they are--three--four of them," Paula whispered, as her keen
eyes picked the squirrels out amongst the young grain.

These were the wary ones, the sports in the direction of infinite
caution who had shunned the poisoned grain and steel traps of Dick's
vermin catchers. They were the survivors, each of a score of their
fellows not so cautious, themselves fit to repopulate the hillside.

Dick filled the chamber and magazine with tiny cartridges, examined the
silencer, and, lying at full length, leaning on his elbow, sighted
across the meadow. There was no sound of explosion when he fired, only
the click of the mechanism as the bullet was sped, the empty cartridge
ejected, a fresh cartridge flipped into the chamber, and the trigger
re-cocked. A big, dun-colored squirrel leaped in the air, fell over,
and disappeared in the grain. Dick waited, his eye along the rifle and
directed toward several holes around which the dry earth showed widely
as evidence of the grain which had been destroyed. When the wounded
squirrel appeared, scrambling across the exposed ground to safety, the
rifle clicked again and he rolled over on his side and lay still.

At the first click, every squirrel but the stricken one, had made into
its burrow. Remained nothing to do but wait for their curiosity to
master caution. This was the interval Dick had looked forward to. As he
lay and scanned the hillside for curious heads to appear, he wondered
if Paula would have something to say to him. In trouble she was, but
would she keep this trouble to herself? It had never been her way.
Always, soon or late, she brought her troubles to him. But, then, he
reflected, she had never had a trouble of this nature before. It was
just the one thing that she would be least prone to discuss with him.
On the other hand, he reasoned, there was her everlasting frankness. He
had marveled at it, and joyed in it, all their years together. Was it
to fail her now?

So he lay and pondered. She did not speak. She was not restless. He
could hear no movement. When he glanced to the side at her he saw her
lying on her back, eyes closed, arms outstretched, as if tired.

A small head, the color of the dry soil of its home, peeped from a
hole. Dick waited long minutes, until, assured that no danger lurked,
the owner of the head stood full up on its hind legs to seek the cause
of the previous click that had startled it. Again the rifle clicked.

"Did you get him?" Paula queried, without opening her eyes.

"Yea, and a fat one," Dick answered. "I stopped a line of generations
right there."

An hour passed. The afternoon sun beat down but was not uncomfortable
in the shade. A gentle breeze fanned the young grain into lazy wavelets
at times, and stirred the redwood boughs above them. Dick added a third
squirrel to the score. Paula's book lay beside her, but she had not
offered to read.

"Anything the matter?" he finally nerved himself to ask.

"No; headache--a beastly little neuralgic hurt across the eyes, that's
all."

"Too much embroidery," he teased.

"Not guilty," was her reply.

All was natural enough in all seeming; but Dick, as he permitted an
unusually big squirrel to leave its burrow and crawl a score of feet
across the bare earth toward the grain, thought to himself: No, there
will be no talk between us this day. Nor will we nestle and kiss lying
here in the grass.

His victim was now at the edge of the grain. He pulled trigger. The
creature fell over, lay still a moment, then ran in quick awkward
fashion toward its hole. Click, click, click, went the mechanism. Puffs
of dust leaped from the earth close about the fleeing squirrel, showing
the closeness of the misses. Dick fired as rapidly as he could twitch
his forefinger on the trigger, so that it was as if he played a stream
of lead from a hose.

He had nearly finished refilling the magazine when Paula spoke.

"My! What a fusillade.--Get him?"

"Yea, grandfather of all squirrels, a mighty graineater and destroyer
of sustenance for young calves. But nine long smokeless cartridges on
one squirrel doesn't pay. I'll have to do better."

The sun dropped lower. The breeze died out. Dick managed another
squirrel and sadly watched the hillside for more. He had arranged the
time and made his bid for confidence. The situation was as grave as he
had feared. Graver it might be, for all he knew, for his world was
crumbling about him. Old landmarks were shifting their places. He was
bewildered, shaken. Had it been any other woman than Paula! He had been
so sure. There had been their dozen years to vindicate his surety....

"Five o'clock, sun he get low," he announced, rising to his feet and
preparing to help her up.

"It did me so much good--just resting," she said, as they started for
the horses. "My eyes feel much better. It's just as well I didn't try
to read to you."

"And don't be piggy," Dick warned, as lightly as if nothing were amiss
with him. "Don't dare steal the tiniest peek into Le Gallienne. You've
got to share him with me later on. Hold up your hand.--Now, honest to
God, Paul."

"Honest to God," she obeyed.

"And may jackasses dance on your grandmother's grave--"

"And may jackasses dance on my grandmother's grave," she solemnly
repeated.

The third morning of Graham's absence, Dick saw to it that he was
occupied with his dairy manager when Paula made her eleven o'clock
pilgrimage, peeped in upon him, and called her "Good morning, merry
gentleman," from the door. The Masons, arriving in several machines
with their boisterous crowd of young people, saved Paula for lunch and
the afternoon; and, on her urging, Dick noted, she made the evening
safe by holding them over for bridge and dancing.

But the fourth morning, the day of Graham's expected return, Dick was
alone in his workroom at eleven. Bending over his desk, signing
letters, he heard Paula tiptoe into the room. He did not look up, but
while he continued writing his signature he listened with all his soul
to the faint, silken swish of her kimono. He knew when she was bending
over him, and all but held his breath. But when she had softly kissed
his hair and called her "Good morning, merry gentleman," she evaded the
hungry sweep of his arm and laughed her way out. What affected him as
strongly as the disappointment was the happiness he had seen in her
face. She, who so poorly masked her moods, was bright-eyed and eager as
a child. And it was on this afternoon that Graham was expected, Dick
could not escape making the connection.

He did not care to ascertain if she had replenished the lilacs in the
tower room, and, at lunch, which was shared with three farm college
students from Davis, he found himself forced to extemporize a busy
afternoon for himself when Paula tentatively suggested that she would
drive Graham up from Eldorado.

"Drive?" Dick asked.

"Duddy and Fuddy," she explained. "They're all on edge, and I just feel
like exercising them and myself. Of course, if you'll share the
exercise, we'll drive anywhere you say, and let him come up in the
machine."

Dick strove not to think there was anxiety in her manner while she
waited for him to accept or decline her invitation.

"Poor Duddy and Fuddy would be in the happy hunting grounds if they had
to cover my ground this afternoon," he laughed, at the same time
mapping his program. "Between now and dinner I've got to do a hundred
and twenty miles. I'm taking the racer, and it's going to be some dust
and bump and only an occasional low place. I haven't the heart to ask
you along. You go on and take it out of Duddy and Fuddy."

Paula sighed, but so poor an actress was she that in the sigh, intended
for him as a customary reluctant yielding of his company, he could not
fail to detect the relief at his decision.

"Whither away?" she asked brightly, and again he noticed the color in
her face, the happiness, and the brilliance of her eyes.

"Oh, I'm shooting away down the river to the dredging work--Carlson
insists I must advise him--and then up in to Sacramento, running over
the Teal Slough land on the way, to see Wing Fo Wong."

"And in heaven's name who is this Wing Fo Wong?" she laughingly
queried, "that you must trot and see him?"

"A very important personage, my dear. Worth all of two millions--made
in potatoes and asparagus down in the Delta country. I'm leasing three
hundred acres of the Teal Slough land to him." Dick addressed himself
to the farm students. "That land lies just out of Sacramento on the
west side of the river. It's a good example of the land famine that is
surely coming. It was tule swamp when I bought it, and I was well
laughed at by the old-timers. I even had to buy out a dozen hunting
preserves. It averaged me eighteen dollars an acre, and not so many
years ago either.

"You know the tule swamps. Worthless, save for ducks and low-water
pasturage. It cost over three hundred an acre to dredge and drain and
to pay my quota of the river reclamation work. And on what basis of
value do you think I am making a ten years' lease to old Wing Fo Wong?
TWO thousand an acre. I couldn't net more than that if I truck-farmed
it myself. Those Chinese are wizards with vegetables, and gluttons for
work. No eight hours for them. It's eighteen hours. The last coolie is
a partner with a microscopic share. That's the way Wing Fo Wong gets
around the eight hour law."

       *       *        *       *        *

Twice warned and once arrested, was Dick through the long afternoon. He
drove alone, and though he drove with speed he drove with safety.
Accidents, for which he personally might be responsible, were things he
did not tolerate. And they never occurred. That same sureness and
definiteness of adjustment with which, without fumbling or
approximating, he picked up a pencil or reached for a door-knob, was
his in the more complicated adjustments, with which, as instance, he
drove a high-powered machine at high speed over busy country roads.

But drive as he would, transact business as he would, at high pressure
with Carlson and Wing Fo Wong, continually, in the middle ground of his
consciousness, persisted the thought that Paula had gone out of her way
and done the most unusual in driving Graham the long eight miles from
Eldorado to the ranch.

"Phew!" he started to mutter a thought aloud, then suspended utterance
and thought as he jumped the racer from forty-five to seventy miles an
hour, swept past to the left of a horse and buggy going in the same
direction, and slanted back to the right side of the road with margin
to spare but seemingly under the nose of a run-about coming from the
opposite direction. He reduced his speed to fifty and took up his
thought:

"Phew! Imagine little Paul's thoughts if I dared that drive with some
charming girl!"

He laughed at the fancy as he pictured it, for, most early in their
marriage, he had gauged Paula's capacity for quiet jealousy. Never had
she made a scene, or dropped a direct remark, or raised a question; but
from the first, quietly but unmistakably, she had conveyed the
impression of hurt that was hers if he at all unduly attended upon any
woman.

He grinned with remembrance of Mrs. Dehameny, the pretty little
brunette widow--Paula's friend, not his--who had visited in the long
ago in the Big House. Paula had announced that she was not riding that
afternoon and, at lunch, had heard him and Mrs. Dehameny arrange to
ride into the redwood canyons beyond the grove of the philosophers. And
who but Paula, not long after their start, should overtake them and
make the party three! He had smiled to himself at the time, and felt
immensely tickled with Paula, for neither Mrs. Dehameny nor the ride
with her had meant anything to him.

So it was, from the beginning, that he had restricted his attentions to
other women. Ever since he had been far more circumspect than Paula. He
had even encouraged her, given her a free hand always, had been proud
that his wife did attract fine fellows, had been glad that she was glad
to be amused or entertained by them. And with reason, he mused. He had
been so safe, so sure of her--more so, he acknowledged, than had she
any right to be of him. And the dozen years had vindicated his
attitude, so that he was as sure of her as he was of the diurnal
rotation of the earth. And now, was the form his fancy took, the
rotation of the earth was a shaky proposition and old Oom Paul's flat
world might be worth considering.

He lifted the gauntlet from his left wrist to snatch a glimpse at his
watch, In five minutes Graham would be getting off the train at
Eldorado. Dick, himself homeward bound west from Sacramento, was eating
up the miles. In a quarter of an hour the train that he identified as
having brought Graham, went by. Not until he was well past Eldorado did
he overtake Duddy and Fuddy and the trap. Graham sat beside Paula, who
was driving. Dick slowed down as he passed, waved a hello to Graham,
and, as he jumped into speed again, called cheerily:

"Sorry I've got to give you my dust. I'll beat you a game of billiards
before dinner, Evan, if you ever get in."




CHAPTER XXVI



"This can't go on. We must do something--at once."

They were in the music room, Paula at the piano, her face turned up to
Graham who stood close to her, almost over her.

"You must decide," Graham continued.

Neither face showed happiness in the great thing that had come upon
them, now that they considered what they must do.

"But I don't want you to go," Paula urged. "I don't know what I want.
You must bear with me. I am not considering myself. I am past
considering myself. But I must consider Dick. I must consider you. I...
I am so unused to such a situation," she concluded with a wan smile.

"But it must be settled, dear love. Dick is not blind."

"What has there been for him to see?" she demanded. "Nothing, except
that one kiss in the canyon, and he couldn't have seen that. Do you
think of anything else--I challenge you, sir."

"Would that there were," he met the lighter touch in her mood, then
immediately relapsed. "I am mad over you, mad for you. And there I
stop. I do not know if you are equally mad. I do not know if you are
mad at all."

As he spoke, he dropped his hand to hers on the keys, and she gently
withdrew it.

"Don't you see?" he complained. "Yet you wanted me to come back?"

"I wanted you to come back," she acknowledged, with her straight look
into his eyes. "I wanted you to come back," she repeated, more softly,
as if musing.

"And I'm all at sea," he exclaimed impatiently. "You do love me?"

"I do love you, Evan--you know that. But..." She paused and seemed to
be weighing the matter judicially.

"But what?" he commanded. "Go on."

"But I love Dick, too. Isn't it ridiculous?"

He did not respond to her smile, and her eyes delightedly warmed to the
boyish sullenness that vexed his own eyes. A thought was hot on his
tongue, but he restrained the utterance of it while she wondered what
it was, disappointed not to have had it.

"It will work out," she assured him gravely. "It will have to work out
somehow. Dick says all things work out. All is change. What is static
is dead, and we're not dead, any of us... are we?"

"I don't blame you for loving Dick, for... for continuing to love
Dick," he answered impatiently. "And for that matter, I don't see what
you find in me compared with him. This is honest. He is a great man to
me, and Great Heart is his name--" she rewarded him with a smile and
nod of approval. "But if you continue to love Dick, how about me?"

"But I love you, too."

"It can't be," he cried, tearing himself from the piano to make a hasty
march across the room and stand contemplating the Keith on the opposite
wall as if he had never seen it before.

She waited with a quiet smile, pleasuring in his unruly impetuousness.

"You can't love two men at once," he flung at her.

"Oh, but I do, Evan. That's what I am trying to work out. Only I don't
know which I love more. Dick I have known a long time. You... you are
a--"

"Recent acquaintance," he broke in, returning to her with the same
angry stride.

"Not that, no, not that, Evan. You have made a revelation to me of
myself. I love you as much as Dick. I love you more. I--I don't know."

She broke down and buried her face in her hands, permitting his hand to
rest tenderly on her shoulder.

"You see it is not easy for me," she went on. "There is so much
involved, so much that I cannot understand. You say you are all at sea.
Then think of me all at sea and worse confounded. You--oh, why talk
about it--you are a man with a man's experiences, with a man's nature.
It is all very simple to you. 'She loves me, she loves me not.' But I
am tangled, confused. I--and I wasn't born yesterday--have had no
experience in loving variously. I have never had affairs. I loved only
one man... and now you. You, and this love for you, have broken into a
perfect marriage, Evan--"

"I know--" he said.

"--I don't know," she went on. "I must have time, either to work it out
myself or to let it work itself out. If it only weren't for Dick..."
her voice trailed off pathetically.

Unconsciously, Graham's hand went farther about her shoulder.

"No, no--not yet," she said softly, as softly she removed it, her own
lingering caressingly on his a moment ere she released it. "When you
touch me, I can't think," she begged. "I--I can't think."

"Then I must go," he threatened, without any sense of threatening. She
made a gesture of protest. "The present situation is impossible,
unbearable. I feel like a cur, and all the time I know I am not a cur.
I hate deception--oh, I can lie with the Pathan, to the Pathan--but I
can't deceive a man like Great Heart. I'd prefer going right up to him
and saying: 'Dick, I love your wife. She loves me. What are you going
to do about it?'"

"Do so," Paula said, fired for the moment.

Graham straightened up with resolution.

"I will. And now."

"No, no," she cried in sudden panic. "You must go away." Again her
voice trailed off, as she said, "But I can't let you go."

       *       *        *       *        *

If Dick had had any reason to doubt his suspicion of the state of
Paula's heart, that reason vanished with the return of Graham. He need
look nowhere for confirmation save to Paula. She was in a flushed
awakening, burgeoning like the full spring all about them, a happier
tone in her happy laugh, a richer song in her throat, a warmness of
excitement and a continuous energy of action animating her. She was up
early and to bed late. She did not conserve herself, but seemed to live
on the champagne of her spirits, until Dick wondered if it was because
she did not dare allow herself time to think.

He watched her lose flesh, and acknowledged to himself that the one
result was to make her look lovelier than ever, to take on an almost
spiritual delicacy under her natural vividness of color and charm.

And the Big House ran on in its frictionless, happy, and remorseless
way. Dick sometimes speculated how long it would continue so to run on,
and recoiled from contemplation of a future in which it might not so
run on. As yet, he was confident, no one knew, no one guessed, but
himself. But how long could that continue? Not long, he was certain.
Paula was not sufficiently the actress. And were she a master at
concealment of trivial, sordid detail, yet the new note and flush of
her would be beyond the power of any woman to hide.

He knew his Asiatic servants were marvels of discernment--and
discretion, he had to add. But there were the women. Women were cats.
To the best of them it would be great joy to catch the radiant,
unimpeachable Paula as clay as any daughter of Eve. And any chance
woman in the house, for a day, or an evening, might glimpse the
situation--Paula's situation, at least, for he could not make out
Graham's attitude yet. Trust a woman to catch a woman.

But Paula, different in other ways, was different in this. He had never
seen her display cattishness, never known her to be on the lookout for
other women on the chance of catching them tripping--except in relation
to him. And he grinned again at the deliciousness of the affair with
Mrs. Dehameney which had been an affair only in Paula's apprehension.

Among other things of wonderment, Dick speculated if Paula wondered if
he knew.

And Paula did wonder, and for a time without avail. She could detect no
change in his customary ways and moods or treatment of her. He turned
off his prodigious amount of work as usual, played as usual, chanted
his songs, and was the happy good fellow. She tried to imagine an added
sweetness toward her, but vexed herself with the fear that it was
imagined.

But it was not for long that she was in doubt. Sometimes in a crowd, at
table, in the living room in the evening, or at cards, she would gaze
at him through half-veiled lashes when he was unaware, until she was
certain she saw the knowledge in his eyes and face. But no hint of this
did she give to Graham. His knowing would not help matters. It might
even send him away, which she frankly admitted to herself was the last
thing she should want to happen.

But when she came to a realization that she was almost certain Dick
knew or guessed, she hardened, deliberately dared to play with the
fire. If Dick knew--since he knew, she framed it to herself--why did he
not speak? He was ever a straight talker. She both desired and feared
that he might, until the fear faded and her earnest hope was that he
would. He was the one who acted, did things, no matter what they were.
She had always depended upon him as the doer. Graham had called the
situation a triangle. Well, Dick could solve it. He could solve
anything. Then why didn't he?

In the meantime, she persisted in her ardent recklessness, trying not
to feel the conscience-pricks of her divided allegiance, refusing to
think too deeply, riding the top of the wave of her life--as she
assured herself, living, living, living. At times she scarcely knew
what she thought, save that she was very proud in having two such men
at heel. Pride had always been one of her dominant key-notes--pride of
accomplishment, achievement, mastery, as with her music, her
appearance, her swimming. It was all one--to dance, as she well knew,
beautifully; to dress with distinction and beauty; to swan-dive, all
grace and courage, as few women dared; or, all fragility, to avalanche
down the spill-way on the back of Mountain Lad and by the will and
steel of her swim the huge beast across the tank.

She was proud, a woman of their own race and type, to watch these two
gray-eyed blond men together. She was excited, feverish, but not
nervous. Quite coldly, sometimes, she compared the two when they were
together, and puzzled to know for which of them she made herself more
beautiful, more enticing. Graham she held, and she had held Dick and
strove still to hold him.

There was almost a touch of cruelty in the tingles of pride that were
hers at thought of these two royal men suffering for her and because of
her; for she did not hide from herself the conviction that if Dick
knew, or, rather, since he did know, he, too, must be suffering. She
assured herself that she was a woman of imagination and purpose in sex
matters, and that no part of her attraction toward Graham lay merely in
his freshness, newness, difference. And she denied to herself that
passion played more than the most minor part. Deep down she was
conscious of her own recklessness and madness, and of an end to it all
that could not but be dreadful to some one of them or all of them. But
she was content willfully to flutter far above such deeps and to refuse
to consider their existence. Alone, looking at herself in her mirror,
she would shake her head in mock reproof and cry out, "Oh, you
huntress! You huntress!" And when she did permit herself to think a
little gravely, it was to admit that Shaw and the sages of the madrono
grove might be right in their diatribes on the hunting proclivities of
women.

She denied Dar Hyal's statement that woman was nature's failure to make
a man; but again and again came to her Wilde's, "Woman attacks by
sudden and strange surrenders." Had she so attacked Graham? she asked
herself. Sudden and strange, to her, were the surrenders she had
already made. Were there to be more? He wanted to go. With her, or
without her, he wanted to go. But she held him--how? Was there a tacit
promise of surrenders to come? And she would laugh away further
consideration, confine herself to the fleeting present, and make her
body more beautiful, and mood herself to be more fascinating, and glow
with happiness in that she was living, thrilling, as she had never
dreamed to live and thrill.




CHAPTER XXVII



But it is not the way for a man and a woman, in propinquity, to
maintain a definite, unwavering distance asunder. Imperceptibly Paula
and Graham drew closer. From lingering eye-gazings and hand-touchings
the way led to permitted caresses, until there was a second clasping in
the arms and a second kiss long on the lips. Nor this time did Paula
flame in anger. Instead, she commanded:

"You must not go."

"I must not stay," Graham reiterated for the thousandth time. "Oh, I
have kissed behind doors, and been guilty of all the rest of the silly
rubbish," he complained. "But this is you, and this is Dick."

"It will work out, I tell you, Evan."

"Come with me then and of ourselves work it out. Come now."

She recoiled.

"Remember," Graham encouraged, "what Dick said at dinner the night Leo
fought the dragons--that if it were you, Paula, his wife, who ran away,
he would say 'Bless you, my children.'"

"And that is just why it is so hard, Evan. He _is_ Great Heart. You
named him well. Listen--you watch him now. He is as gentle as he said
he would be that night--gentle toward me, I mean. And more. You watch
him--"

"He knows?--he has spoken?" Graham broke in.

"He has not spoken, but I am sure he knows, or guesses. You watch him.
He won't compete against you--"

"Compete!"

"Just that. He won't compete. Remember at the rodeo yesterday. He was
breaking mustangs when our party arrived, but he never mounted again.
Now he is a wonderful horse-breaker. You tried your hand. Frankly,
while you did fairly well, you couldn't touch him. But he wouldn't show
off against you. That alone would make me certain that he guesses.

"Listen. Of late haven't you noticed that he never questions a
statement you make, as he used to question, as he questions every one
else. He continues to play billiards with you, because there you best
him. He fences and singlesticks with you--there you are even. But he
won't box or wrestle with you."

"He _can_ out-box and out-wrestle me," Graham muttered ruefully.

"You watch and you will see what I mean by not competing. He is
treating me like a spirited colt, giving me my head to make a mess of
things if I want to. Not for the world would he interfere. Oh, trust
me, I know him. It is his own code that he is living up to. He could
teach the philosophers what applied philosophy is.

"No, no; listen," she rushed over Graham's attempt to interrupt. "I
want to tell you more. There is a secret staircase that goes up from
the library to Dick's work room. Only he and I use it, and his
secretaries. When you arrive at the head of it, you are right in his
room, surrounded by shelves of books. I have just come from there. I
was going in to see him when I heard voices. Of course it was ranch
business, I thought, and they would soon be gone. So I waited. It _was_
ranch business, but it was so interesting, so, what Hancock would call,
illuminating, that I remained and eavesdropped. It was illuminating of
Dick, I mean.

"It was the wife of one of the workmen Dick had on the carpet. Such
things do arise on a large place like this. I wouldn't know the woman
if I saw her, and I didn't recognize her name. She was whimpering out
her trouble when Dick stopped her. 'Never mind all that,' he said.
'What I want to know is, did you give Smith any encouragement?'

"Smith isn't his name, but he is one of our foremen and has worked
eight years for Dick.

"'Oh, no, sir,' I could hear her answer. 'He went out of his way from
the first to bother me. I've tried to keep out of his way, always.
Besides, my husband's a violent-tempered man, and I did so want him to
hold his job here. He's worked nearly a year for you now, and there
aren't any complaints, are there? Before that it was irregular work for
a long time, and we had real hard times. It wasn't his fault. He ain't
a drinking man. He always--'

"'That's all right,' Dick stopped her. 'His work and habits have
nothing to do with the matter. Now you are sure you have never
encouraged Mr. Smith in any way?' And she was so sure that she talked
for ten minutes, detailing the foreman's persedition of her. She had a
pleasant voice--one of those sweet, timid, woman's voices, and
undoubtedly is quite attractive. It was all I could do to resist
peeping. I wanted to see what she looked like.

"'Now this trouble, yesterday morning,' Dick said. 'Was it general? I
mean, outside of your husband, and Mr. Smith, was the scene such that
those who live around you knew of it?'

"'Yes, sir. You see, he had no right to come into my kitchen. My
husband doesn't work under him anyway. And he had his arm around me and
was trying to kiss me when my husband came in. My husband has a temper,
but he ain't overly strong. Mr. Smith would make two of him. So he
pulled a knife, and Mr. Smith got him by the arms, and they fought all
over the kitchen. I knew there was murder going to be done and I run
out screaming for help. The folks in the other cottages'd heard the
racket already. They'd smashed the window and the cook stove, and the
place was filled with smoke and ashes when the neighbors dragged them
away from each other. I'd done nothing to deserve all that disgrace.
You know, sir, the way the women will talk--'

"And Dick hushed her up there, and took all of five minutes more in
getting rid of her. Her great fear was that her husband would lose his
place. From what Dick told her, I waited. He had made no decision, and
I knew the foreman was next on the carpet. In he came. I'd have given
the world to see him. But I could only listen.

"Dick jumped right into the thick of it. He described the scene and
uproar, and Smith acknowledged that it had been riotous for a while.
'She says she gave you no encouragement,' Dick said next.

"'Then she lies,' said Smith. 'She has that way of looking with her
eyes that's an invitation. She looked at me that way from the first.
But it was by word-of-mouth invitation that I was in her kitchen
yesterday morning. We didn't expect the husband. But she began to
struggle when he hove in sight. When she says she gave me no
encouragement--'

"'Never mind all that,' Dick stopped him. 'It's not essential.' 'But it
is, Mr. Forrest, if I am to clear myself,' Smith insisted.

"'No; it is not essential to the thing you can't clear yourself of,'
Dick answered, and I could hear that cold, hard, judicial note come
into his voice. Smith could not understand. Dick told him. 'The thing
you have been guilty of, Mr. Smith, is the scene, the disturbance, the
scandal, the wagging of the women's tongues now going on forty to the
minute, the impairment of the discipline and order of the ranch, all of
which is boiled down to the one grave thing, the hurt to the ranch
efficiency.'

"And still Smith couldn't see. He thought the charge was of violating
social morality by pursuing a married woman, and tried to mitigate the
offense by showing the woman encouraged him and by pleading: 'And after
all, Mr. Forrest, a man is only a man, and I admit she made a fool of
me and I made a fool of myself.' "'Mr. Smith,' Dick said. 'You've
worked for me eight years. You've been a foreman six years of that
time. I have no complaint against your work. You certainly do know how
to handle labor. About your personal morality I don't care a damn. You
can be a Mormon or a Turk for all it matters to me. Your private acts
are your private acts, and are no concern of mine as long as they do
not interfere with your work or my ranch. Any one of my drivers can
drink his head off Saturday night, and every Saturday night. That's his
business. But the minute he shows a hold-over on Monday morning that is
taken out on my horses, that excites them, or injures them, or
threatens to injure them, or that decreases in the slightest the work
they should perform on Monday, that moment it is my business and the
driver goes down the hill.'

"'You, you mean, Mr. Forrest,' Smith stuttered, 'that, that I'm to go
down the hill?' 'That is just what I mean, Mr. Smith. You are to go
down the hill, not because you climbed over another man's fence--that's
your business and his; but because you were guilty of causing a
disturbance that is an impairment of ranch efficiency.'

"Do you know, Evan," Paula broke in on her recital, "Dick can nose more
human tragedy out of columns of ranch statistics than can the average
fiction writer out of the whirl of a great city. Take the milk
reports--the individual reports of the milkers--so many pounds of milk,
morning and night, from cow so-and-so, so many pounds from cow
so-and-so. He doesn't have to know the man. But there is a decrease in
the weight of milk. 'Mr. Parkman,' he'll say to the head dairyman, 'is
Barchi Peratta married?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Is he having trouble with his
wife?' 'Yes, sir.'

"Or it will be: 'Mr. Parkman, Simpkins has the best long-time record of
any of our milkers. Now he's slumped. What's up?' Mr. Parkman doesn't
know. 'Investigate,' says Dick. 'There's something on his chest. Talk
to him like an uncle and find out. We've got to get it off his chest.'
And Mr. Parkman finds out. Simpkins' boy; working his way through
Stanford University, has elected the joy-ride path and is in jail
waiting trial for forgery. Dick put his own lawyers on the case,
smoothed it over, got the boy out on probation, and Simpkins' milk
reports came back to par. And the best of it is, the boy made good,
Dick kept an eye on him, saw him through the college of engineering,
and he's now working for Dick on the dredging end, earning a hundred
and fifty a month, married, with a future before him, and his father
still milks."

"You are right," Graham murmured sympathetically. "I well named him
when I named him Great Heart."

"I call him my Rock of Ages," Paula said gratefully. "He is so solid.
He stands in any storm.--Oh, you don't really know him. He is so sure.
He stands right up. He's never taken a cropper in his life. God smiles
on him. God has always smiled on him. He's never been beaten down to
his knees... yet. I... I should not care to see that sight. It would be
heartbreaking. And, Evan--" Her hand went out to his in a pleading
gesture that merged into a half-caress. "--I am afraid for him now.
That is why I don't know what to do. It is not for myself that I back
and fill and hesitate. If he were ignoble, if he were narrow, if he
were weak or had one tiniest shred of meanness, if he had ever been
beaten to his knees before, why, my dear, my dear, I should have been
gone with you long ago."

Her eyes filled with sudden moisture. She stilled him with a pressure
of her hand, and, to regain herself, she went back to her recital:

"'Your little finger, Mr. Smith, I consider worth more to me and to the
world,' Dick, told him, 'than the whole body of this woman's husband.
Here's the report on him: willing, eager to please, not bright, not
strong, an indifferent workman at best. Yet you have to go down the
hill, and I am very, very sorry.'

"Oh, yes, there was more. But I've given you the main of it. You see
Dick's code there. And he lives his code. He accords latitude to the
individual. Whatever the individual may do, so long as it does not hurt
the group of individuals in which he lives, is his own affair. He
believed Smith had a perfect right to love the woman, and to be loved
by her if it came to that. I have heard him always say that love could
not be held nor enforced. Truly, did I go with you, he would say,
'Bless you, my children.' Though it broke his heart he would say it.
Past love, he believes, gives no hold over the present. And every hour
of love, I have heard him say, pays for itself, on both sides,
quittance in full. He claims there can be no such thing as a love-debt,
laughs at the absurdity of love-claims."

"And I agree with him," Graham said. "'You promised to love me always,'
says the jilted one, and then strives to collect as if it were a
promissory note for so many dollars. Dollars are dollars, but love
lives or dies. When it is dead how can it be collected? We are all
agreed, and the way is simple. We love. It is enough. Why delay another
minute?"

His fingers strayed along her fingers on the keyboard as he bent to
her, first kissing her hair, then slowly turning her face up to his and
kissing her willing lips.

"Dick does not love me like you," she said; "not madly, I mean. He has
had me so long, I think I have become a habit to him. And often and
often, before I knew you, I used to puzzle whether he cared more for
the ranch or more for me."

"It is so simple," Graham urged. "All we have to do is to be
straightforward. Let us go."

He drew her to her feet and made as if to start.

But she drew away from him suddenly, sat down, and buried her flushed
face in her hands.

"You do not understand, Evan. I love Dick. I shall always love him."

"And me?" Graham demanded sharply.

"Oh, without saying," she smiled. "You are the only man, besides Dick,
that has ever kissed me this... way, and that I have kissed this way.
But I can't make up my mind. The triangle, as you call it, must be
solved for me. I can't solve it myself. I compare the two of you, weigh
you, measure you. I remember Dick and all our past years. And I consult
my heart for you. And I don't know. I don't know. You are a great man,
my great lover. But Dick is a greater man than you. You--you are more
clay, more--I grope to describe you--more human, I fancy. And that is
why I love you more... or at least I think perhaps I do.

"But wait," she resisted him, prisoning his eager hand in hers. "There
is more I want to say. I remember Dick and all our past years. But I
remember him to-day, as well, and to-morrow. I cannot bear the thought
that any man should pity my husband, that you should pity him, and pity
him you must when I confess that I love you more. That is why I am not
sure. That is why I so quickly take it back and do not know.

"I'd die of shame if through act of mine any man pitied Dick. Truly, I
would. Of all things ghastly, I can think of none so ghastly as Dick
being pitied. He has never been pitied in his life. He has always been
top-dog--bright, light, strong, unassailable. And more, he doesn't
deserve pity. And it's my fault... and yours, Evan."

She abruptly thrust Evan's hand away.

"And every act, every permitted touch of you, does make him pitiable.
Don't you see how tangled it is for me? And then there is my own pride.
That you should see me disloyal to him in little things, such as
this--" (she caught his hand again and caressed it with soft
finger-tips) "--hurts me in my love for you, diminishes me, must
diminish me in your eyes. I shrink from the thought that my disloyalty
to him in this I do--" (she laid his hand against her cheek) "--gives
you reason to pity him and censure me."

She soothed the impatience of the hand on her cheek, and, almost
absently, musingly scrutinizing it without consciously seeing it,
turned it over and slowly kissed the palm. The next moment she was
drawn to her feet and into his arms.

"There, you see," was her reproach as she disengaged herself.

       *       *        *       *        *

"Why do you tell me all this about Dick?" Graham demanded another time,
as they walked their horses side by side. "To keep me away? To protect
yourself from me?"

Paula nodded, then quickly added, "No, not quite that. Because you know
I don't want to keep you away ... too far. I say it because Dick is so
much in my mind. For twelve years, you realize, he filled my mind. I
say it because ... because I think it, I suppose. Think! The situation!
You are trespassing on a perfect marriage."

"I know it," he answered. "And I do not like the role of trespasser. It
is your insistence, instead of going away with me, that I should
trespass. And I can't help it. I think away from you, try to force my
thoughts elsewhere. I did half a chapter this morning, and I know it's
rotten and will have to be rewritten. For I can't succeed in thinking
away from you. What is South America and its ethnology compared to you?
And when I come near you my arms go about you before I know what I am
doing. And, by God, you want them there, you want them there, you know
it."

Paula gathered her reins in signal for a gallop, but first, with a
roguish smile, she acknowledged.

"I do want them there, dear trespasser."

Paula yielded and fought at the same time.

"I love my husband--never forget that," she would warn Graham, and
within the minute be in his arms.

       *       *        *       *        *

"There are only the three of us for once, thank goodness," Paula cried,
seizing Dick and Graham by the hands and leading them toward Dick's
favorite lounging couch in the big room. "Come, let us sit upon the
ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings. Come, milords, and
lordly perishers, and we will talk of Armageddon when the last sun goes
down."

She was in a merry mood, and with surprise Dick observed her light a
cigarette. He could count on his fingers the cigarettes she had smoked
in a dozen years, and then, only under a hostess's provocation to give
countenance to some smoking woman guest. Later, when he mixed a
highball for himself and Graham, she again surprised him by asking him
to mix her a "wee" one.

"This is Scotch," he warned.

"Oh, a very wee one," she insisted, "and then we'll be three good
fellows together, winding up the world. And when you've got it all
wound up and ready, I'll sing you the song of the Valkyries."

She took more part in the talk than usual, and strove to draw her
husband out. Nor was Dick unaware of this, although he yielded and
permitted himself to let go full tilt on the theme of the blond
sun-perishers.

She is trying to make him compete--was Graham's thought. But Paula
scarcely thought of that phase of it, her pleasure consisting in the
spectacle of two such splendid men who were hers. They talk of big game
hunting, she mused once to herself; but did ever one small woman
capture bigger game than this?

She sat cross-legged on the couch, where, by a turn of the head, she
could view Graham lounging comfortably in the big chair, or Dick, on
his elbow, sprawled among the cushions. And ever, as they talked, her
eyes roved from one to the other; and, as they spoke of struggle and
battle, always in the cold iron terms of realists, her own thoughts
became so colored, until she could look coolly at Dick with no further
urge of the pity that had intermittently ached her heart for days.

She was proud of him--a goodly, eye-filling figure of a man to any
woman; but she no longer felt sorry for him. They were right. It was a
game. The race was to the swift, the battle to the strong. They had run
such races, fought such battles. Then why not she? And as she continued
to look, that self-query became reiterant.

They were not anchorites, these two men. Liberal-lived they must have
been in that past out of which, like mysteries, they had come to her.
They had had the days and nights that women were denied--women such as
she. As for Dick, beyond all doubt--even had she heard whispers--there
had been other women in that wild career of his over the world. Men
were men, and they were two such men. She felt a burn of jealousy
against those unknown women who must have been, and her heart hardened.
They had taken their fun where they found it--Kipling's line ran
through her head.

Pity? Why should she pity, any more than she should be pitied? The
whole thing was too big, too natural, for pity. They were taking a hand
in a big game, and all could not be winners. Playing with the fancy,
she wandered on to a consideration of the outcome. Always she had
avoided such consideration, but the tiny highball had given her daring.
It came to her that she saw doom ahead, doom vague and formless but
terrible.

She was brought back to herself by Dick's hand before her eyes and
apparently plucking from the empty air the something upon which she
steadfastly stared.

"Seeing things?" he teased, as her eyes turned to meet his.

His were laughing, but she glimpsed in them what, despite herself, made
her veil her own with her long lashes. He knew. Beyond all possibility
of error she knew now that he knew. That was what she had seen in his
eyes and what had made her veil her own.

"'Cynthia, Cynthia, I've been a-thinking,'" she gayly hummed to him;
and, as he resumed his talk, she reached and took a sip from his
part-empty glass.

Let come what would, she asserted to herself, she would play it out. It
was all a madness, but it was life, it was living. She had never so
lived before, and it was worth it, no matter what inevitable payment
must be made in the end. Love?--had she ever really loved Dick as she
now felt herself capable of loving? Had she mistaken the fondness of
affection for love all these years? Her eyes warmed as they rested on
Graham, and she admitted that he had swept her as Dick never had.

Unused to alcohol in such strength, her heart was accelerated; and
Dick, with casual glances, noted and knew the cause of the added
brilliance, the flushed vividness of cheeks and lips.

He talked less and less, and the discussion of the sun-perishers died
of mutual agreement as to its facts. Finally, glancing at his watch, he
straightened up, yawned, stretched his arms and announced:

"Bed-time he stop. Head belong this fellow white man too much sleepy
along him.--Nightcap, Evan?"

Graham nodded, for both felt the need of a stiffener.

"Mrs. Toper--nightcap?" Dick queried of Paula.

But she shook her head and busied herself at the piano putting away the
music, while the men had their drink.

Graham closed down the piano for her, while Dick waited in the doorway,
so that when they left he led them by a dozen feet. As they came along,
Graham, under her instructions, turned off the lights in the halls.
Dick waited where the ways diverged and where Graham would have to say
good night on his way to the tower room.

The one remaining light was turned off.

"Oh, not that one, silly," Dick heard Paula cry out. "We keep it on all
night."

Dick heard nothing, but the dark was fervent to him. He cursed himself
for his own past embraces in the dark, for so the wisdom was given him
to know the quick embrace that had occurred, ere, the next moment, the
light flashed on again.

He found himself lacking the courage to look at their faces as they
came toward him. He did not want to see Paula's frank eyes veiled by
her lashes, and he fumbled to light a cigarette while he cudgeled his
wits for the wording of an ordinary good night.

"How goes the book?--what chapter?" he called after Graham down his
hall, as Paula put her hand in his.

Her hand in his, swinging his, hopping and skipping and all a-chatter
in simulation of a little girl with a grown-up, Paula went on with
Dick; while he sadly pondered what ruse she had in mind by which to
avoid the long-avoided, good night kiss.

Evidently she had not found it when they reached the dividing of the
ways that led to her quarters and to his. Still swinging his hand,
still buoyantly chattering fun, she continued with him into his
workroom. Here he surrendered. He had neither heart nor energy to wait
for her to develop whatever she contemplated.

He feigned sudden recollection, deflected her by the hand to his desk,
and picked up a letter.

"I'd promised myself to get a reply off on the first machine in the
morning," he explained, as he pressed on the phonograph and began
dictating.

For a paragraph she still held his hand. Then he felt the parting
pressure of her fingers and her whispered good night.

"Good night, little woman," he answered mechanically, and continued
dictating as if oblivious to her going.

Nor did he cease until he knew she was well out of hearing.




CHAPTER XXVIII



A dozen times that morning, dictating to Blake or indicating answers,
Dick had been on the verge of saying to let the rest of the
correspondence go.

"Call up Hennessy and Mendenhall," he told Blake, when, at ten, the
latter gathered up his notes and rose to go. "You ought to catch them
at the stallion barn. Tell them not to come this morning but to-morrow
morning."

Bonbright entered, prepared to shorthand Dick's conversations with his
managers for the next hour.

"And--oh, Mr. Blake," Dick called. "Ask Hennessy about Alden
Bessie.--The old mare was pretty bad last night," he explained to
Bonbright.

"Mr. Hanley must see you right away, Mr. Forrest," Bonbright said, and
added, at sight of the irritated drawing up of his employer's brows,
"It's the piping from Buckeye Dam. Something's wrong with the plans--a
serious mistake, he says."

Dick surrendered, and for an hour discussed ranch business with his
foremen and managers.

Once, in the middle of a hot discussion over sheep-dips with Wardman,
he left his desk and paced over to the window. The sound of voices and
horses, and of Paula's laugh, had attracted him.

"Take that Montana report--I'll send you a copy to-day," he continued,
as he gazed out. "They found the formula didn't get down to it. It was
more a sedative than a germicide. There wasn't enough kick in it..."

Four horses, bunched, crossed his field of vision. Paula, teasing the
pair of them, was between Martinez and Froelig, old friends of Dick, a
painter and sculptor respectively, who had arrived on an early train.
Graham, on Selim, made the fourth, and was slightly edged toward the
rear. So the party went by, but Dick reflected that quickly enough it
would resolve itself into two and two.

Shortly after eleven, restless and moody, he wandered out with a
cigarette into the big patio, where he smiled grim amusement at the
various tell-tale signs of Paula's neglect of her goldfish. The sight
of them suggested her secret patio in whose fountain pools she kept her
selected and more gorgeous blooms of fish. Thither he went, through
doors without knobs, by ways known only to Paula and the servants.

This had been Dick's one great gift to Paula. It was love-lavish as
only a king of fortune could make it. He had given her a free hand with
it, and insisted on her wildest extravagance; and it had been his
delight to tease his quondam guardians with the stubs of the checkbook
she had used. It bore no relation to the scheme and architecture of the
Big House, and, for that matter, so deeply hidden was it that it played
no part in jar of line or color. A show-place of show-places, it was
not often shown. Outside Paula's sisters and intimates, on rare
occasions some artist was permitted to enter and catch his breath.
Graham had heard of its existence, but not even him had she invited to
see.

It was round, and small enough to escape giving any cold hint of
spaciousness. The Big House was of sturdy concrete, but here was marble
in exquisite delicacy. The arches of the encircling arcade were of
fretted white marble that had taken on just enough tender green to
prevent any glare of reflected light. Palest of pink roses bloomed up
the pillars and over the low flat roof they upheld, where Puck-like,
humorous, and happy faces took the place of grinning gargoyles. Dick
strolled the rosy marble pavement of the arcade and let the beauty of
the place slowly steal in upon him and gentle his mood.

The heart and key of the fairy patio was the fountain, consisting of
three related shallow basins at different levels, of white marble and
delicate as shell. Over these basins rollicked and frolicked life-sized
babies wrought from pink marble by no mean hand. Some peered over the
edges into lower basins, one reached arms covetously toward the
goldfish; one, on his back, laughed at the sky, another stood with
dimpled legs apart stretching himself, others waded, others were on the
ground amongst the roses white and blush, but all were of the fountain
and touched it at some point. So good was the color of the marble, so
true had been the sculptor, that the illusion was of life. No cherubs
these, but live warm human babies.

Dick regarded the rosy fellowship pleasantly and long, finishing his
cigarette and retaining it dead in his hand. That was what she had
needed, he mused--babies, children. It had been her passion. Had she
realized it... He sighed, and, struck by a fresh thought, looked to her
favorite seat with certitude that he would not see the customary sewing
lying on it in a pretty heap. She did not sew these days.

He did not enter the tiny gallery behind the arcade, which contained
her chosen paintings and etchings, and copies in marble and bronze of
her favorites of the European galleries. Instead he went up the
stairway, past the glorious Winged Victory on the landing where the
staircase divided, and on and up into her quarters that occupied the
entire upper wing. But first, pausing by the Victory, he turned and
gazed down into the fairy patio. The thing was a cut jewel in its
perfectness and color, and he acknowledged, although he had made it
possible for her, that it was entirely her own creation--her one
masterpiece. It had long been her dream, and he had realized it for
her. And yet now, he meditated, it meant nothing to her. She was not
mercenary, that he knew; and if he could not hold her, mere baubles
such as that would weigh nothing in the balance against her heart.

He wandered idly through her rooms, scarcely noting at what he gazed,
but gazing with fondness at it all. Like everything else of hers, it
was distinctive, different, eloquent of her. But when he glanced into
the bathroom with its sunken Roman bath, for the life of him he was
unable to avoid seeing a tiny drip and making a mental note for the
ranch plumber.

As a matter of course, he looked to her easel with the expectation of
finding no new work, but was disappointed; for a portrait of himself
confronted him. He knew her trick of copying the pose and lines from a
photograph and filling in from memory. The particular photograph she
was using had been a fortunate snapshop of him on horseback. The
Outlaw, for once and for a moment, had been at peace, and Dick, hat in
hand, hair just nicely rumpled, face in repose, unaware of the
impending snap, had at the instant looked squarely into the camera. No
portrait photographer could have caught a better likeness. The head and
shoulders Paula had had enlarged, and it was from this that she was
working. But the portrait had already gone beyond the photograph, for
Dick could see her own touches.

With a start he looked more closely. Was that expression of the eyes,
of the whole face, his? He glanced at the photograph. It was not there.
He walked over to one of the mirrors, relaxed his face, and led his
thoughts to Paula and Graham. Slowly the expression came into his eyes
and face. Not content, he returned to the easel and verified it. Paula
knew. Paula knew that he knew. She had learned it from him, stolen it
from him some time when it was unwittingly on his face, and carried it
in her memory to the canvas.

Paula's Chinese maid, Oh Dear, entered from the wardrobe room, and Dick
watched her unobserved as she came down the room toward him. Her eyes
were down, and she seemed deep in thought. Dick remarked the sadness of
her face, and that the little, solicitous contraction of the brows that
had led to her naming was gone. She was not solicitous, that was
patent. But cast down, she was, in heavy depression.

It would seem that all our faces are beginning to say things, he
commented to himself.

"Good morning, Oh Dear," he startled her.

And as she returned the greeting, he saw compassion in her eyes as they
dwelt on him. She knew. The first outside themselves. Trust her, a
woman, so much in Paula's company when Paula was alone, to divine
Paula's secret.

Oh Dear's lips trembled, and she wrung her trembling hands, nerving
herself, as he could see, to speech.

"Mister Forrest," she began haltingly, "maybe you think me fool, but I
like say something. You very kind man. You very kind my old mother. You
very kind me long long time..."

She hesitated, moistening her frightened lips with her tongue, then
braved her eyes to his and proceeded.

"Mrs. Forrest, she, I think..."

But so forbidding did Dick's face become that she broke off in
confusion and blushed, as Dick surmised, with shame at the thoughts she
had been about to utter.

"Very nice picture Mrs. Forrest make," he put her at her ease.

The Chinese girl sighed, and the same compassion returned into her eyes
as she looked long at Dick's portrait.

She sighed again, but the coldness in her voice was not lost on Dick as
she answered: "Yes, very nice picture Mrs. Forrest make."

She looked at him with sudden sharp scrutiny, studying his face, then
turned to the canvas and pointed at the eyes.

"No good," she condemned.

Her voice was harsh, touched with anger.

"No good," she flung over her shoulder, more loudly, still more
harshly, as she continued down the room and out of sight on Paula's
sleeping porch.

Dick stiffened his shoulders, unconsciously bracing himself to face
what was now soon to happen. Well, it was the beginning of the end. Oh
Dear knew. Soon more would know, all would know. And in a way he was
glad of it, glad that the torment of suspense would endure but little
longer.

But when he started to leave he whistled a merry jingle to advertise to
Oh Dear that the world wagged very well with him so far as he knew
anything about it.

       *       *        *       *        *

The same afternoon, while Dick was out and away with Froelig and
Martinez and Graham, Paula stole a pilgrimage to Dick's quarters. Out
on his sleeping porch she looked over his rows of press buttons, his
switchboard that from his bed connected him with every part of the
ranch and most of the rest of California, his phonograph on the hinged
and swinging bracket, the orderly array of books and magazines and
agricultural bulletins waiting to be read, the ash tray, cigarettes,
scribble pads, and thermos bottle.

Her photograph, the only picture on the porch, held her attention. It
hung under his barometers and thermometers, which, she knew, was where
he looked oftenest. A fancy came to her, and she turned the laughing
face to the wall and glanced from the blankness of the back of the
frame to the bed and back again. With a quick panic movement, she
turned the laughing face out. It belonged, was her thought; it did
belong.

The big automatic pistol in the holster on the wall, handy to one's
hand from the bed, caught her eye. She reached to it and lifted gently
at the butt. It was as she had expected--loose--Dick's way. Trust him,
no matter how long unused, never to let a pistol freeze in its holster.

Back in the work room she wandered solemnly about, glancing now at the
prodigious filing system, at the chart and blue-print cabinets, at the
revolving shelves of reference books, and at the long rows of stoutly
bound herd registers. At last she came to his books--a goodly row of
pamphlets, bound magazine articles, and an even dozen ambitious tomes.
She read the titles painstakingly: "Corn in California," "Silage
Practice," "Farm Organization," "Farm Book-keeping," "The Shire in
America," "Humus Destruction," "Soilage," "Alfalfa in California,"
"Cover Crops for California," "The Shorthorn in America"--at this last
she smiled affectionately with memory of the great controversy he had
waged for the beef cow and the milch cow as against the dual purpose
cow.

She caressed, the backs of the books with her palm, pressed her cheek
against them and leaned with closed eyes. Oh, Dick, Dick--a thought
began that faded to a vagueness of sorrow and died because she did not
dare to think it.

The desk was so typically Dick. There was no litter. Clean it was of
all work save the wire tray with typed letters waiting his signature
and an unusual pile of the flat yellow sheets on which his secretaries
typed the telegrams relayed by telephone from Eldorado. Carelessly she
ran her eyes over the opening lines of the uppermost sheet and chanced
upon a reference that puzzled and interested her. She read closely,
with in-drawn brows, then went deeper into the heap till she found
confirmation. Jeremy Braxton was dead--big, genial, kindly Jeremy
Braxton. A Mexican mob of pulque-crazed peons had killed him in the
mountains through which he had been trying to escape from the Harvest
into Arizona. The date of the telegram was two days old. Dick had known
it for two days and never worried her with it. And it meant more. It
meant money. It meant that the affairs of the Harvest Group were going
from bad to worse. And it was Dick's way.

And Jeremy was dead. The room seemed suddenly to have grown cold. She
shivered. It was the way of life--death always at the end of the road.
And her own nameless dread came back upon her. Doom lay ahead. Doom for
whom? She did not attempt to guess. Sufficient that it was doom. Her
mind was heavy with it, and the quiet room was heavy with it as she
passed slowly out.




CHAPTER XXIX



"'Tis a birdlike sensuousness that is all the Little Lady's own,"
Terrence was saying, as he helped himself to a cocktail from the tray
Ah Ha was passing around.

It was the hour before dinner, and Graham, Leo and Terrence McFane had
chanced together in the stag-room.

"No, Leo," the Irishman warned the young poet. "Let the one suffice
you. Your cheeks are warm with it. A second one and you'll conflagrate.
'Tis no right you have to be mixing beauty and strong drink in that
lad's head of yours. Leave the drink to your elders. There is such a
thing as consanguinity for drink. You have it not. As for me--"

He emptied the glass and paused to turn the cocktail reminiscently on
his tongue.

"'Tis women's drink," he shook his head in condemnation. "It likes me
not. It bites me not. And devil a bit of a taste is there to it.--Ah
Ha, my boy," he called to the Chinese, "mix me a highball in a long,
long glass--a stiff one."

He held up four fingers horizontally to indicate the measure of liquor
he would have in the glass, and, to Ah Ha's query as to what kind of
whiskey, answered, "Scotch or Irish, bourbon or rye--whichever comes
nearest to hand."

Graham shook his head to the Chinese, and laughed to the Irishman.
"You'll never drink me down, Terrence. I've not forgotten what you did
to O'Hay."

"'Twas an accident I would have you think," was the reply. "They say
when a man's not feeling any too fit a bit of drink will hit him like a
club."

"And you?" Graham questioned.

"Have never been hit by a club. I am a man of singularly few
experiences."

"But, Terrence, you were saying... about Mrs. Forrest?" Leo begged. "It
sounded as if it were going to be nice."

"As if it could be otherwise," Terrence censured. "But as I was saying,
'tis a bird-like sensuousness--oh, not the little, hoppy, wagtail kind,
nor yet the sleek and solemn dove, but a merry sort of bird, like the
wild canaries you see bathing in the fountains, always twittering and
singing, flinging the water in the sun, and glowing the golden hearts
of them on their happy breasts. 'Tis like that the Little Lady is. I
have observed her much.

"Everything on the earth and under the earth and in the sky contributes
to the passion of her days--the untoward purple of the ground myrtle
when it has no right to aught more than pale lavender, a single red
rose tossing in the bathing wind, one perfect Duchesse rose bursting
from its bush into the sunshine, as she said to me, 'pink as the dawn,
Terrence, and shaped like a kiss.'

"'Tis all one with her--the Princess's silver neigh, the sheep bells of
a frosty morn, the pretty Angora goats making silky pictures on the
hillside all day long, the drifts of purple lupins along the fences,
the long hot grass on slope and roadside, the summer-burnt hills tawny
as crouching lions--and even have I seen the sheer sensuous pleasure of
the Little Lady with bathing her arms and neck in the blessed sun."

"She is the soul of beauty," Leo murmured. "One understands how men can
die for women such as she."

"And how men can live for them, and love them, the lovely things,"
Terrence added. "Listen, Mr. Graham, and I'll tell you a secret. We
philosophers of the madroño grove, we wrecks and wastages of life here
in the quiet backwater and easement of Dick's munificence, are a
brotherhood of lovers. And the lady of our hearts is all the one--the
Little Lady. We, who merely talk and dream our days away, and who would
lift never a hand for God, or country, or the devil, are pledged
knights of the Little Lady."

"We would die for her," Leo affirmed, slowly nodding his head.

"Nay, lad, we would live for her and fight for her, dying is that easy."

Graham missed nothing of it. The boy did not understand, but in the
blue eyes of the Celt, peering from under the mop of iron-gray hair,
there was no mistaking the knowledge of the situation.

Voices of men were heard coming down the stairs, and, as Martinez and
Dar Hyal entered, Terrence was saying:

"'Tis fine weather they say they're having down at Catalina now, and I
hear the tunny fish are biting splendid."

Ah Ha served cocktails around, and was kept busy, for Hancock and
Froelig followed along. Terrence impartially drank stiff highballs of
whatever liquor the immobile-faced Chinese elected to serve him, and
discoursed fatherly to Leo on the iniquities and abominations of the
flowing bowl.

Oh My entered, a folded note in his hand, and looked about in doubt as
to whom to give it.

"Hither, wing-heeled Celestial," Terrence waved him up.

"'Tis a petition, couched in very proper terms," Terrence explained,
after a glance at its contents. "And Ernestine and Lute have arrived,
for 'tis they that petition. Listen." And he read: "'Oh, noble and
glorious stags, two poor and lowly meek-eyed does, wandering lonely in
the forest, do humbly entreat admission for the brief time before
dinner to the stamping ground of the herd.'

"The metaphor is mixed," said Terrence. "Yet have they acted well. 'Tis
the rule--Dick's rule--and a good rule it is: no petticoats in the
stag-room save by the stags' unanimous consent.--Is the herd ready for
the question? All those in favor will say 'Aye.'--Contrary minded?--The
ayes have it.

"Oh My, fleet with thy heels and bring in the ladies."

"'With sandals beaten from the crowns of kings,'" Leo added, murmuring
the words reverently, loving them with his lips as his lips formed them
and uttered them.

"'Shall he tread down the altars of their night,'" Terrence completed
the passage. "The man who wrote that is a great man. He is Leo's
friend, and Dick's friend, and proud am I that he is my friend."

"And that other line," Leo said. "From the same sonnet," he explained
to Graham. "Listen to the sound of it: 'To hear what song the star of
morning sings'--oh, listen," the boy went on, his voice hushed low with
beauty-love for the words: "'With perished beauty in his hands as clay,
Shall he restore futurity its dream--'"

He broke off as Paula's sisters entered, and rose shyly to greet them.

       *       *        *       *        *

Dinner that night was as any dinner at which the madroño sages were
present. Dick was as robustly controversial as usual, locking horns
with Aaron Hancock on Bergson, attacking the latter's metaphysics in
sharp realistic fashion.

"Your Bergson is a charlatan philosopher, Aaron," Dick concluded. "He
has the same old medicine-man's bag of metaphysical tricks, all decked
out and frilled with the latest ascertained facts of science."

"'Tis true," Terrence agreed. "Bergson is a charlatan thinker. 'Tis why
he is so popular--"

"I deny--" Hancock broke in.

"Wait a wee, Aaron. 'Tis a thought I have glimmered. Let me catch it
before it flutters away into the azure. Dick's caught Bergson with the
goods on him, filched straight from the treasure-house of science. His
very cocksureness is filched from Darwin's morality of strength based
on the survival of the fittest. And what did Bergson do with it?
Touched it up with a bit of James' pragmatism, rosied it over with the
eternal hope in man's breast that he will live again, and made it all
a-shine with Nietzsche's 'nothing succeeds like excess--'"

"Wilde's, you mean," corrected Ernestine.

"Heaven knows I should have filched it for myself had you not been
present," Terrence sighed, with a bow to her. "Some day the
antiquarians will decide the authorship. Personally I would say it
smacked of Methuselah--But as I was saying, before I was delightfully
interrupted..."

"Who more cocksure than Dick?" Aaron was challenging a little later;
while Paula glanced significantly to Graham.

"I was looking at the herd of yearling stallions but yesterday,"
Terrence replied, "and with the picture of the splendid beasties still
in my eyes I'll ask: And who more delivers the goods?"

"But Hancock's objection is solid," Martinez ventured. "It would be a
mean and profitless world without mystery. Dick sees no mystery."

"There you wrong him," Terrence defended. "I know him well. Dick
recognizes mystery, but not of the nursery-child variety. No
cock-and-bull stories for him, such as you romanticists luxuriate in."

"Terrence gets me," Dick nodded. "The world will always be mystery. To
me man's consciousness is no greater mystery than the reaction of the
gases that make a simple drop of water. Grant that mystery, and all the
more complicated phenomena cease to be mysteries. That simple chemical
reaction is like one of the axioms on which the edifice of geometry is
reared. Matter and force are the everlasting mysteries, manifesting
themselves in the twin mysteries of space and time. The manifestations
are not mysteries--only the stuff of the manifestations, matter and
force; and the theater of the manifestations, space and time."

Dick ceased and idly watched the expressionless Ah Ha and Ah Me who
chanced at the moment to be serving opposite him. Their faces did not
talk, was his thought; although ten to one was a fair bet that they
were informed with the same knowledge that had perturbed Oh Dear.

"And there you are," Terrence was triumphing. "'Tis the perfect joy of
him--never up in the air with dizzy heels. Flat on the good ground he
stands, four square to fact and law, set against all airy fancies and
bubbly speculations...."

       *       *        *       *        *

And as at table, so afterward that evening no one could have guessed
from Dick that all was not well with him. He seemed bent on celebrating
Lute's and Ernestine's return, refused to tolerate the heavy talk of
the philosophers, and bubbled over with pranks and tricks. Paula
yielded to the contagion, and aided and abetted him in his practical
jokes which none escaped.

Choicest among these was the kiss of welcome. No man escaped it. To
Graham was accorded the honor of receiving it first so that he might
witness the discomfiture of the others, who, one by one, were ushered
in by Dick from the patio.

Hancock, Dick's arm guiding him, came down the room to confront Paula
and her sisters standing in a row on three chairs in the middle of the
floor. He scanned them suspiciously, and insisted upon walking around
behind them. But there seemed nothing unusual about them save that each
wore a man's felt hat.

"Looks good to me," Hancock announced, as he stood on the floor before
them and looked up at them.

"And it is good," Dick assured him. "As representing the ranch in its
fairest aspects, they are to administer the kiss of welcome. Make your
choice, Aaron."

Aaron, with a quick whirl to catch some possible lurking disaster at
his back, demanded, "They are all three to kiss me?"

"No, make your choice which is to give you the kiss."

"The two I do not choose will not feel that I have discriminated
against them?" Aaron insisted.

"Whiskers no objection?" was his next query.

"Not in the way at all," Lute told him. "I have always wondered what it
would be like to kiss black whiskers."

"Here's where all the philosophers get kissed tonight, so hurry up,"
Ernestine said. "The others are waiting. I, too, have yet to be kissed
by an alfalfa field."

"Whom do you choose?" Dick urged.

"As if, after that, there were any choice about it," Hancock returned
jauntily. "I kiss my lady--the Little Lady."

As he put up his lips, Paula bent her head forward, and, nicely
directed, from the indented crown of her hat canted a glassful of water
into his face.

When Leo's turn came, he bravely made his choice of Paula and nearly
spoiled the show by reverently bending and kissing the hem of her gown.

"It will never do," Ernestine told him. "It must be a real kiss. Put up
your lips to be kissed."

"Let the last be first and kiss me, Leo," Lute begged, to save him from
his embarrassment.

He looked his gratitude, put up his lips, but without enough tilt of
his head, so that he received the water from Lute's hat down the back
of his neck.

"All three shall kiss me and thus shall paradise be thrice multiplied,"
was Terrence's way out of the difficulty; and simultaneously he
received three crowns of water for his gallantry.

Dick's boisterousness waxed apace. His was the most care-free seeming
in the world as he measured Froelig and Martinez against the door to
settle the dispute that had arisen as to whether Froelig or Martinez
was the taller.

"Knees straight and together, heads back," Dick commanded.

And as their heads touched the wood, from the other side came a rousing
thump that jarred them. The door swung open, revealing Ernestine with a
padded gong-stick in either hand.

Dick, a high-heeled satin slipper in his hand, was under a sheet with
Terrence, teaching him "Brother Bob I'm bobbed" to the uproarious joy
of the others, when the Masons and Watsons and all their Wickenberg
following entered upon the scene.

Whereupon Dick insisted that the young men of their party receive the
kiss of welcome. Nor did he miss, in the hubbub of a dozen persons
meeting as many more, Lottie Mason's: "Oh, good evening, Mr. Graham. I
thought you had gone."

And Dick, in the midst of the confusion of settling such an influx of
guests, still maintaining his exuberant jolly pose, waited for that
sharp scrutiny that women have only for women. Not many moments later
he saw Lottie Mason steal such a look, keen with speculation, at Paula
as she chanced face to face with Graham, saying something to him.

Not yet, was Dick's conclusion. Lottie did not know. But suspicion was
rife, and nothing, he was certain, under the circumstances, would
gladden her woman's heart more than to discover the unimpeachable Paula
as womanly weak as herself.

Lottie Mason was a tall, striking brunette of twenty-five, undeniably
beautiful, and, as Dick had learned, undeniably daring. In the not
remote past, attracted by her, and, it must be submitted, subtly
invited by her, he had been guilty of a philandering that he had not
allowed to go as far as her wishes. The thing had not been serious on
his part. Nor had he permitted it to become serious on her side.
Nevertheless, sufficient flirtatious passages had taken place to impel
him this night to look to her, rather than to the other Wickenberg
women, for the first signals of suspicion.

"Oh, yes, he's a beautiful dancer," Dick, as he came up to them half an
hour later, heard Lottie Mason telling little Miss Maxwell. "Isn't he,
Dick?" she appealed to him, with innocent eyes of candor through which
disguise he knew she was studying him.

"Who?--Graham, you must mean," he answered with untroubled directness.
"He certainly is. What do you say we start dancing and let Miss Maxwell
see? Though there's only one woman here who can give him full swing to
show his paces."

"Paula, of course," said Lottie.

"Paula, of course. Why, you young chits don't know how to waltz. You
never had a chance to learn."--Lottie tossed her fine head. "Perhaps
you learned a little before the new dancing came in," he amended.
"Anyway, I'll get Evan and Paula started, you take me on, and I'll
wager we'll be the only couples on the floor."

Half through the waltz, he broke it off with: "Let them have the floor
to themselves. It's worth seeing."

And, glowing with appreciation, he stood and watched his wife and
Graham finish the dance, while he knew that Lottie, beside him,
stealing side glances at him, was having her suspicions allayed.

The dancing became general, and, the evening being warm, the big doors
to the patio were thrown open. Now one couple, and now another, danced
out and down the long arcades where the moonlight streamed, until it
became the general thing.

"What a boy he is," Paula said to Graham, as they listened to Dick
descanting to all and sundry on the virtues of his new night camera.
"You heard Aaron complaining at table, and Terrence explaining, his
sureness. Nothing terrible has ever happened to him in his life. He has
never been overthrown. His sureness has always been vindicated. As
Terrence said, it has always delivered the goods. He does know, he does
know, and yet he is so sure of himself, so sure of me."

Graham taken away to dance with Miss Maxwell, Paula continued her train
of thought to herself. Dick was not suffering so much after all. And
she might have expected it. He was the cool-head, the philosopher. He
would take her loss with the same equanimity as he would take the loss
of Mountain Lad, as he had taken the death of Jeremy Braxton and the
flooding of the Harvest mines. It was difficult, she smiled to herself,
aflame as she was toward Graham, to be married to a philosopher who
would not lift a hand to hold her. And it came to her afresh that one
phase of Graham's charm for her was his humanness, his flamingness.
They met on common ground. At any rate, even in the heyday of their
coming together in Paris, Dick had not so inflamed her. A wonderful
lover he had been, too, with his gift of speech and lover's phrases,
with his love-chants that had so delighted her; but somehow it was
different from this what she felt for Graham and what Graham must feel
for her. Besides, she had been most young in experience of love and
lovers in that long ago when Dick had burst so magnificently upon her.

And so thinking, she hardened toward him and recklessly permitted
herself to flame toward Graham. The crowd, the gayety, the excitement,
the closeness and tenderness of contact in the dancing, the summer-warm
of the evening, the streaming moonlight, and the night-scents of
flowers--all fanned her ardency, and she looked forward eagerly to the
at least one more dance she might dare with Graham.

"No flash light is necessary," Dick was explaining. "It's a German
invention. Half a minute exposure under the ordinary lighting is
sufficient. And the best of it is that the plate can be immediately
developed just like an ordinary blue print. Of course, the drawback is
one cannot print from the plate."

"But if it's good, an ordinary plate can be copied from it from which
prints can be made," Ernestine amplified.

She knew the huge, twenty-foot, spring snake coiled inside the camera
and ready to leap out like a jack-in-the-box when Dick squeezed the
bulb. And there were others who knew and who urged Dick to get the
camera and make an exposure.

He was gone longer than he expected, for Bonbright had left on his desk
several telegrams concerning the Mexican situation that needed
immediate replies. Trick camera in hand, Dick returned by a short cut
across the house and patio. The dancing couples were ebbing down the
arcade and disappearing into the hall, and he leaned against a pillar
and watched them go by. Last of all came Paula and Evan, passing so
close that he could have reached out and touched them. But, though the
moon shone full on him, they did not see him. They saw only each other
in the tender sport of gazing.

The last preceding couple was already inside when the music ceased.
Graham and Paula paused, and he was for giving her his arm and leading
her inside, but she clung to him in sudden impulse. Man-like, cautious,
he slightly resisted for a moment, but with one arm around his neck she
drew his head willingly down to the kiss. It was a flash of quick
passion. The next instant, Paula on his arm, they were passing in and
Paula's laugh was ringing merrily and naturally.

Dick clutched at the pillar and eased himself down abruptly until he
sat flat on the pavement. Accompanying violent suffocation, or causing
it, his heart seemed rising in his chest. He panted for air. The cursed
thing rose and choked and stifled him until, in the grim turn his fancy
took, it seemed to him that he chewed it between his teeth and gulped
it back and down his throat along with the reviving air. He felt
chilled, and was aware that he was wet with sudden sweat.

"And who ever heard of heart disease in the Forrests?" he muttered, as,
still sitting, leaning against the pillar for support, he mopped his
face dry. His hand was shaking, and he felt a slight nausea from an
internal quivering that still persisted.

It was not as if Graham had kissed her, he pondered. It was Paula who
had kissed Graham. That was love, and passion. He had seen it, and as
it burned again before his eyes, he felt his heart surge, and the
premonitory sensation of suffocation seized him. With a sharp effort of
will he controlled himself and got to his feet.

"By God, it came up in my mouth and I chewed it," he muttered. "I
chewed it."

Returning across the patio by the round-about way, he entered the
lighted room jauntily enough, camera in hand, and unprepared for the
reception he received.

"Seen a ghost?" Lute greeted.

"Are you sick?"--"What's the matter?" were other questions.

"What _is_ the matter?" he countered.

"Your face--the look of it," Ernestine said. "Something has happened.
What is it?"

And while he oriented himself he did not fail to note Lottie Mason's
quick glance at the faces of Graham and Paula, nor to note that
Ernestine had observed Lottie's glance and followed it up for herself.

"Yes," he lied. "Bad news. Just got the word. Jeremy Braxton is dead.
Murdered. The Mexicans got him while he was trying to escape into
Arizona."

"Old Jeremy, God love him for the fine man he was," Terrence said,
tucking his arm in Dick's. "Come on, old man, 'tis a stiffener you're
wanting and I'm the lad to lead you to it."

"Oh, I'm all right," Dick smiled, shaking his shoulders and squaring
himself as if gathering himself together. "It did hit me hard for the
moment. I hadn't a doubt in the world but Jeremy would make it out all
right. But they got him, and two engineers with him. They put up a
devil of a fight first. They got under a cliff and stood off a mob of
half a thousand for a day and night. And then the Mexicans tossed
dynamite down from above. Oh, well, all flesh is grass, and there is no
grass of yesteryear. Terrence, your suggestion is a good one. Lead on."

After a few steps he turned his head over his shoulder and called back:
"Now this isn't to stop the fun. I'll be right back to take that
photograph. You arrange the group, Ernestine, and be sure to have them
under the strongest light."

Terrence pressed open the concealed buffet at the far end of the room
and set out the glasses, while Dick turned on a wall light and studied
his face in the small mirror inside the buffet door.

"It's all right now, quite natural," he announced.

"'Twas only a passing shade," Terrence agreed, pouring the whiskey.
"And man has well the right to take it hard the going of old friends."

They toasted and drank silently.

"Another one," Dick said, extending his glass.

"Say 'when,'" said the Irishman, and with imperturbable eyes he watched
the rising tide of liquor in the glass.

Dick waited till it was half full.

Again they toasted and drank silently, eyes to eyes, and Dick was
grateful for the offer of all his heart that he read in Terrence's eyes.

Back in the middle of the hall, Ernestine was gayly grouping the
victims, and privily, from the faces of Lottie, Paula, and Graham,
trying to learn more of the something untoward that she sensed. Why had
Lottie looked so immediately and searchingly at Graham and Paula? --she
asked herself. And something was wrong with Paula now. She was worried,
disturbed, and not in the way to be expected from the announcement of
Jeremy Braxton's death. From Graham, Ernestine could glean nothing. He
was quite his ordinary self, his facetiousness the cause of much
laughter to Miss Maxwell and Mrs. Watson.

Paula was disturbed. What had happened? Why had Dick lied? He had known
of Jeremy's death for two days. And she had never known anybody's death
so to affect him. She wondered if he had been drinking unduly. In the
course of their married life she had seen him several times in liquor.
He carried it well, the only noticeable effects being a flush in his
eyes and a loosening of his tongue to whimsical fancies and
extemporized chants. Had he, in his trouble, been drinking with the
iron-headed Terrence down in the stag room? She had found them all
assembled there just before dinner. The real cause for Dick's
strangeness never crossed her mind, if, for no other reason, than that
he was not given to spying.

He came back, laughing heartily at a joke of Terrence's, and beckoned
Graham to join them while Terrence repeated it. And when the three had
had their laugh, he prepared to take the picture. The burst of the huge
snake from the camera and the genuine screams of the startled women
served to dispel the gloom that threatened, and next Dick was arranging
a tournament of peanut-carrying.

From chair to chair, placed a dozen yards apart, the feat was with a
table knife to carry the most peanuts in five minutes. After the
preliminary try-out, Dick chose Paula for his partner, and challenged
the world, Wickenberg and the madroño grove included. Many boxes of
candy were wagered, and in the end he and Paula won out against Graham
and Ernestine, who had proved the next best couple. Demands for a
speech changed to clamor for a peanut song. Dick complied, beating the
accent, Indian fashion, with stiff-legged hops and hand-slaps on thighs.

"I am Dick Forrest, son of Richard the Lucky, Son of Jonathan the
Puritan, son of John who was a sea-rover, as his father Albert before
him, who was the son of Mortimer, a pirate who was hanged in chains and
died without issue.

"I am the last of the Forrests, but first of the peanut-carriers.
Neither Nimrod nor Sandow has anything on me. I carry the peanuts on a
knife, a silver knife. The peanuts are animated by the devil. I carry
the peanuts with grace and celerity and in quantity. The peanut never
sprouted that can best me.

"The peanuts roll. The peanuts roll. Like Atlas who holds the world, I
never let them fall. Not every one can carry peanuts. I am God-gifted.
I am master of the art. It is a fine art. The peanuts roll, the peanuts
roll, and I carry them on forever.

"Aaron is a philosopher. He cannot carry peanuts. Ernestine is a
blonde. She cannot carry peanuts. Evan is a sportsman. He drops
peanuts. Paula is my partner. She fumbles peanuts. Only I, I, by the
grace of God and my own cleverness, carry peanuts.

"When anybody has had enough of my song, throw something at me. I am
proud. I am tireless. I can sing on forever. I shall sing on forever.

"Here beginneth the second canto. When I die, bury me in a peanut
patch. While I live--"

The expected avalanche of cushions quenched his song but not his
ebullient spirits, for he was soon in a corner with Lottie Mason and
Paula concocting a conspiracy against Terrence.

And so the evening continued to be danced and joked and played away. At
midnight supper was served, and not till two in the morning were the
Wickenbergers ready to depart. While they were getting on their wraps,
Paula was proposing for the following afternoon a trip down to the
Sacramento River to look over Dick's experiment in rice-raising.

"I had something else in view," he told her. "You know the mountain
pasture above Sycamore Creek. Three yearlings have been killed there in
the last ten days."

"Mountain lions!" Paula cried.

"Two at least.--Strayed in from the north," he explained to Graham.
"They sometimes do that. We got three five years ago.--Moss and Hartley
will be there with the dogs waiting. They've located two of the beasts.
What do you say all of you join me. We can leave right after lunch."

"Let me have Mollie?" Lute asked.

"And you can ride Altadena," Paula told Ernestine.

Quickly the mounts were decided upon, Froelig and Martinez agreeing to
go, but promising neither to shoot well nor ride well.

All went out to see the Wickenbergers off, and, after the machines were
gone, lingered to make arrangements for the hunting.

"Good night, everybody," Dick said, as they started to move inside.
"I'm going to take a look at Alden Bessie before I turn in. Hennessy is
sitting up with her. Remember, you girls, come to lunch in your riding
togs, and curses on the head of whoever's late."

The ancient dam of the Fotherington Princess was in a serious way, but
Dick would not have made the visit at such an hour, save that he wanted
to be by himself and that he could not nerve himself for a chance
moment alone with Paula so soon after what he had overseen in the patio.

Light steps in the gravel made him turn his head. Ernestine caught up
with him and took his arm.

"Poor old Alden Bessie," she explained. "I thought I'd go along."

Dick, still acting up to his night's rôle, recalled to her various
funny incidents of the evening, and laughed and chuckled with
reminiscent glee.

"Dick," she said in the first pause, "you are in trouble." She could
feel him stiffen, and hurried on: "What can I do? You know you can
depend on me. Tell me."

"Yes, I'll tell you," he answered. "Just one thing." She pressed his
arm gratefully. "I'll have a telegram sent you to-morrow. It will be
urgent enough, though not too serious. You will just bundle up and
depart with Lute."

"Is that all?" she faltered.

"It will be a great favor."

"You won't talk with me?" she protested, quivering under the rebuff.

"I'll have the telegram come so as to rout you out of bed. And now
never mind Alden Bessie. You run a long in. Good night."

He kissed her, gently thrust her toward the house, and went on his way.




CHAPTER XXX



On the way back from the sick mare, Dick paused once to listen to the
restless stamp of Mountain Lad and his fellows in the stallion barn. In
the quiet air, from somewhere up the hills, came the ringing of a
single bell from some grazing animal. A cat's-paw of breeze fanned him
with sudden balmy warmth. All the night was balmy with the faint and
almost aromatic scent of ripening grain and drying grass. The stallion
stamped again, and Dick, with a deep breath and realization that never
had he more loved it all, looked up and circled the sky-line where the
crests of the mountains blotted the field of stars.

"No, Cato," he mused aloud. "One cannot agree with you. Man does not
depart from life as from an inn. He departs as from a dwelling, the one
dwelling he will ever know. He departs ... nowhere. It is good night.
For him the Noiseless One ... and the dark."

He made as if to start, but once again the stamp of the stallions held
him, and the hillside bell rang out. He drew a deep inhalation through
his nostrils of the air of balm, and loved it, and loved the fair land
of his devising.

"'I looked into time and saw none of me there,'" he quoted, then capped
it, smiling, with a second quotation: "'She gat me nine great sons....
The other nine were daughters.'"

Back at the house, he did not immediately go in, but stood a space
gazing at the far flung lines of it. Nor, inside, did he immediately go
to his own quarters. Instead, he wandered through the silent rooms,
across the patios, and along the dim-lit halls. His frame of mind was
as of one about to depart on a journey. He pressed on the lights in
Paula's fairy patio, and, sitting in an austere Roman seat of marble,
smoked a cigarette quite through while he made his plans.

Oh, he would do it nicely enough. He could pull off a hunting accident
that would fool the world. Trust him not to bungle it. Next day would
be the day, in the woods above Sycamore Creek. Grandfather Jonathan
Forrest, the straight-laced Puritan, had died of a hunting accident.
For the first time Dick doubted that accident. Well, if it hadn't been
an accident, the old fellow had done it well. It had never been hinted
in the family that it was aught but an accident.

His hand on the button to turn off the lights, Dick delayed a moment
for a last look at the marble babies that played in the fountain and
among the roses.

"So long, younglings," he called softly to them. "You're the nearest I
ever came to it."

From his sleeping porch he looked across the big patio to Paula's
porch. There was no light. The chance was she slept.

On the edge of the bed, he found himself with one shoe unlaced, and,
smiling at his absentness, relaced it. What need was there for him to
sleep? It was already four in the morning. He would at least watch his
last sunrise. Last things were coming fast. Already had he not dressed
for the last time? And the bath of the previous morning would be his
last. Mere water could not stay the corruption of death. He would have
to shave, however--a last vanity, for the hair did continue to grow for
a time on dead men's faces.

He brought a copy of his will from the wall-safe to his desk and read
it carefully. Several minor codicils suggested themselves, and he wrote
them out in long-hand, pre-dating them six months as a precaution. The
last was the endowment of the sages of the madroño grove with a
fellowship of seven.

He ran through his life insurance policies, verifying the permitted
suicide clause in each one; signed the tray of letters that had waited
his signature since the previous morning; and dictated a letter into
the phonograph to the publisher of his books. His desk cleaned, he
scrawled a quick summary of income and expense, with all earnings from
the Harvest mines deducted. He transposed the summary into a second
summary, increasing the expense margins, and cutting down the income
items to an absurdest least possible. Still the result was satisfactory.

He tore up the sheets of figures and wrote out a program for the future
handling of the Harvest situation. He did it sketchily, with casual
tentativeness, so that when it was found among the papers there would
be no suspicions. In the same fashion he worked out a line-breeding
program for the Shires, and an in-breeding table, up and down, for
Mountain Lad and the Fotherington Princess and certain selected
individuals of their progeny.

When Oh My came in with coffee at six, Dick was on his last paragraph
of his scheme for rice-growing.

"Although the Italian rice may be worth experimenting with for quick
maturity," he wrote, "I shall for a time confine the main plantings in
equal proportions to Moti, Ioko, and the Wateribune. Thus, with
different times of maturing, the same crews and the same machinery,
with the same overhead, can work a larger acreage than if only one
variety is planted."

Oh My served the coffee at his desk, and made no sign even after a
glance to the porch at the bed which had not been slept in--all of
which control Dick permitted himself privily to admire.

At six-thirty the telephone rang and he heard Hennessy's tired voice:
"I knew you'd be up and glad to know Alden Bessie's pulled through. It
was a squeak, though. And now it's me for the hay."

When Dick had shaved, he looked at the shower, hesitated a moment, then
his face set stubbornly. I'm darned if I will, was his thought; a sheer
waste of time. He did, however, change his shoes to a pair of heavy,
high-laced ones fit for the roughness of hunting. He was at his desk
again, looking over the notes in his scribble pads for the morning's
work, when Paula entered. She did not call her "Good morning, merry
gentleman"; but came quite close to him before she greeted him softly
with:

"The Acorn-planter. Ever tireless, never weary Red Cloud."

He noted the violet-blue shadows under her eyes, as he arose, without
offering to touch her. Nor did she offer invitation.

"A white night?" he asked, as he placed a chair.

"A white night," she answered wearily. "Not a second's sleep, though I
tried so hard."

Both were reluctant of speech, and they labored under a mutual
inability to draw their eyes away from each other.

"You ... you don't look any too fit yourself," she said.

"Yes, my face," he nodded. "I was looking at it while I shaved. The
expression won't come off."

"Something happened to you last night," she probed, and he could not
fail to see the same compassion in her eyes that he had seen in Oh
Dear's. "Everybody remarked your expression. What was it?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "It has been coming on for some time," he
evaded, remembering that the first hint of it had been given him by
Paula's portrait of him. "You've noticed it?" he inquired casually.

She nodded, then was struck by a sudden thought. He saw the idea leap
to life ere her words uttered it.

"Dick, you haven't an affair?"

It was a way out. It would straighten all the tangle. And hope was in
her voice and in her face.

He smiled, shook his head slowly, and watched her disappointment.

"I take it back," he said. "I have an affair."

"Of the heart?"

She was eager, as he answered, "Of the heart."

But she was not prepared for what came next. He abruptly drew his chair
close, till his knees touched hers, and, leaning forward, quickly but
gently prisoned her hands in his resting on her knees.

"Don't be alarmed, little bird-woman," he quieted her. "I shall not
kiss you. It is a long time since I have. I want to tell you about that
affair. But first I want to tell you how proud I am--proud of myself. I
am proud that I am a lover. At my age, a lover! It is unbelievable, and
it is wonderful. And such a lover! Such a curious, unusual, and quite
altogether remarkable lover. In fact, I have laughed all the books and
all biology in the face. I am a monogamist. I love the woman, the one
woman. After a dozen years of possession I love her quite madly, oh, so
sweetly madly."

Her hands communicated her disappointment to him, making a slight,
impulsive flutter to escape; but he held them more firmly.

"I know her every weakness, and, weakness and strength and all, I love
her as madly as I loved her at the first, in those mad moments when I
first held her in my arms."

Her hands were mutinous of the restraint he put upon them, and
unconsciously she was beginning to pull and tug to be away from him.
Also, there was fear in her eyes. He knew her fastidiousness, and he
guessed, with the other man's lips recent on hers, that she feared a
more ardent expression on his part.

"And please, please be not frightened, timid, sweet, beautiful, proud,
little bird-woman. See. I release you. Know that I love you most
dearly, and that I am considering you as well as myself, and before
myself, all the while."

He drew his chair away from her, leaned back, and saw confidence grow
in her eyes.

"I shall tell you all my heart," he continued, "and I shall want you to
tell me all your heart."

"This love for me is something new?" she asked. "A recrudescence?"

"Yes, a recrudescence, and no."

"I thought that for a long time I had been a habit to you," she said.

"But I was loving you all the time."

"Not madly."

"No," he acknowledged. "But with certainty. I was so sure of you, of
myself. It was, to me, all a permanent and forever established thing. I
plead guilty. But when that permanency was shaken, all my love for you
fired up. It was there all the time, a steady, long-married flame."

"But about me?" she demanded.

"That is what we are coming to. I know your worry right now, and of a
minute ago. You are so intrinsically honest, so intrinsically true,
that the thought of sharing two men is abhorrent to you. I have not
misread you. It is a long time since you have permitted me any
love-touch." He shrugged his shoulders "And an equally long time since
I offered you a love-touch."

"Then you _have_ known from the first?" she asked quickly.

He nodded.

"Possibly," he added, with an air of judicious weighing, "I sensed it
coming before even you knew it. But we will not go into that or other
things."

"You have seen..." she attempted to ask, stung almost to shame at
thought of her husband having witnessed any caress of hers and Graham's.

"We will not demean ourselves with details, Paula. Besides, there was
and is nothing wrong about any of it. Also, it was not necessary for me
to see anything. I have my memories of when I, too, kissed stolen
kisses in the pause of the seconds between the frank, outspoken 'Good
nights.' When all the signs of ripeness are visible--the love-shades
and love-notes that cannot be hidden, the unconscious caress of the
eyes in a fleeting glance, the involuntary softening of voices, the
cuckoo-sob in the throat--why, the night-parting kiss does not need to
be seen. It has to be. Still further, oh my woman, know that I justify
you in everything."

"It... it was not ever... much," she faltered.

"I should have been surprised if it had been. It couldn't have been
you. As it is, I have been surprised. After our dozen years it was
unexpected--"

"Dick," she interrupted him, leaning toward him and searching him. She
paused to frame her thought, and then went on with directness. "In our
dozen years, will you say it has never been any more with you?"

"I have told you that I justify you in everything," he softened his
reply.

"But you have not answered my question," she insisted. "Oh, I do not
mean mere flirtatious passages, bits of primrose philandering. I mean
unfaithfulness and I mean it technically. In the past you have?"

"In the past," he answered, "not much, and not for a long, long time."

"I often wondered," she mused.

"And I have told you I justify you in everything," he reiterated. "And
now you know where lies the justification."

"Then by the same token I had a similar right," she said. "Though I
haven't, Dick, I haven't," she hastened to add. "Well, anyway, you
always did preach the single standard."

"Alas, not any longer," he smiled. "One's imagination will conjure, and
in the past few weeks I've been forced to change my mind."

"You mean that you demand I must be faithful?"

He nodded and said, "So long as you live with me."

"But where's the equity?"

"There isn't any equity," he shook his head. "Oh, I know it seems a
preposterous change of view. But at this late day I have made the
discovery of the ancient truth that women are different from men. All I
have learned of book and theory goes glimmering before the everlasting
fact that the women are the mothers of our children. I... I still had
my hopes of children with you, you see. But that's all over and done
with. The question now is, what's in your heart? I have told you mine.
And afterward we can determine what is to be done."

"Oh, Dick," she breathed, after silence had grown painful, "I do love
you, I shall always love you. You are my Red Cloud. Why, do you know,
only yesterday, out on your sleeping porch, I turned my face to the
wall. It was terrible. It didn't seem right. I turned it out again, oh
so quickly."

He lighted a cigarette and waited.

"But you have not told me what is in your heart, all of it," he chided
finally.

"I do love you," she repeated.

"And Evan?"

"That is different. It is horrible to have to talk this way to you.
Besides, I don't know. I can't make up my mind what is in my heart."

"Love? Or amorous adventure? It must be one or the other."

She shook her head.

"Can't you understand?" she asked. "That I don't understand? You see, I
am a woman. I have never sown any wild oats. And now that all this has
happened, I don't know what to make of it. Shaw and the rest must be
right. Women are hunting animals. You are both big game. I can't help
it. It is a challenge to me. And I find I am a puzzle to myself. All my
concepts have been toppled over by my conduct. I want you. I want Evan.
I want both of you. It is not amorous adventure, oh believe me. And if
by any chance it is, and I do not know it--no, it isn't, I know it
isn't."

"Then it is love."

"But I do love you, Red Cloud."

"And you say you love him. You can't love both of us."

"But I can. I do. I do love both of you.--Oh, I am straight. I shall be
straight. I must work this out. I thought you might help me. That is
why I came to you this morning. There must be some solution."

She looked at him appealingly as he answered, "It is one or the other,
Evan or me. I cannot imagine any other solution."

"That's what he says. But I can't bring myself to it. He was for coming
straight to you. I would not permit him. He has wanted to go, but I
held him here, hard as it was on both of you, in order to have you
together, to compare you two, to weigh you in my heart. And I get
nowhere. I want you both. I can't give either of you up."

"Unfortunately, as you see," Dick began, a slight twinkle in his eyes,
"while you may be polyandrously inclined, we stupid male men cannot
reconcile ourselves to such a situation."

"Don't be cruel, Dick," she protested.

"Forgive me. It was not so meant. It was out of my own hurt--an effort
to bear it with philosophical complacence."

"I have told him that he was the only man I had ever met who is as
great as my husband, and that my husband is greater."

"That was loyalty to me, yes, and loyalty to yourself," Dick explained.
"You were mine until I ceased being the greatest man in the world. He
then became the greatest man in the world."

She shook her head.

"Let me try to solve it for you," he continued. "You don't know your
mind, your desire. You can't decide between us because you equally want
us both?"

"Yes," she whispered. "Only, rather, differently want you both."

"Then the thing is settled," he concluded shortly.

"What do you mean?"

"This, Paula. I lose. Graham is the winner. Don't you see. Here am I,
even with him, even and no more, while my advantage over him is our
dozen years together--the dozen years of past love, the ties and bonds
of heart and memory. Heavens! If all this weight were thrown in the
balance on Evan's side, you wouldn't hesitate an instant in your
decision. It is the first time you have ever been bowled over in your
life, and the experience, coming so late, makes it hard for you to
realize."

"But, Dick, you bowled me over."

He shook his head.

"I have always liked to think so, and sometimes I have believed--but
never really. I never took you off your feet, not even in the very
beginning, whirlwind as the affair was. You may have been glamoured.
You were never mad as I was mad, never swept as I was swept. I loved
you first--"

"And you were a royal lover."

"I loved you first, Paula, and, though you did respond, it was not in
the same way. I never took you off your feet. It seems pretty clear
that Evan has."

"I wish I could be sure," she mused. "I have a feeling of being bowled
over, and yet I hesitate. The two are not compatible. Perhaps I never
shall be bowled over by any man. And you don't seem to help me in the
least."

"You, and you alone, can solve it, Paula," he said gravely.

"But if you would help, if you would try--oh, such a little, to hold
me," she persisted.

"But I am helpless. My hands are tied. I can't put an arm to hold you.
You can't share two. You have been in his arms--" He put up his hand to
hush her protest. "Please, please, dear, don't. You have been in his
arms. You flutter like a frightened bird at thought of my caressing
you. Don't you see? Your actions decide against me. You have decided,
though you may not know it. Your very flesh has decided. You can bear
his arms. The thought of mine you cannot bear."

She shook her head with slow resoluteness.

"And still I do not, cannot, make up my mind," she persisted.

"But you must. The present situation is intolerable. You must decide
quickly, for Evan must go. You realize that. Or you must go. You both
cannot continue on here. Take all the time in the world. Send Evan
away. Or, suppose you go and visit Aunt Martha for a while. Being away
from both of us might aid you to get somewhere. Perhaps it will be
better to call off the hunting. I'll go alone, and you stay and talk it
over with Evan. Or come on along and talk it over with him as you ride.
Whichever way, I won't be in till late. I may sleep out all night in
one of the herder's cabins. When I come back, Evan must be gone.
Whether or not you are gone with him will also have been decided."

"And if I should go?" she queried.

Dick shrugged his shoulders, and stood up, glancing at his wrist-watch.

"I have sent word to Blake to come earlier this morning," he explained,
taking a step toward the door in invitation for her to go.

At the door she paused and leaned toward him.

"Kiss me, Dick," she said, and, afterward: "This is not a...
love-touch." Her voice had become suddenly husky. "It's just in case I
do decide to... to go."

The secretary approached along the hall, but Paula lingered.

"Good morning, Mr. Blake," Dick greeted him. "Sorry to rout you out so
early. First of all, will you please telephone Mr. Agar and Mr. Pitts.
I won't be able to see them this morning. Oh, and put the rest off till
to-morrow, too. Make a point of getting Mr. Hanley. Tell him I approve
of his plan for the Buckeye spillway, and to go right ahead. I will see
Mr. Mendenhall, though, and Mr. Manson. Tell them nine-thirty."

"One thing, Dick," Paula said. "Remember, I made him stay. It was not
his fault or wish. I wouldn't let him go."

"You've bowled _him_ over right enough," Dick smiled. "I could not
reconcile his staying on, under the circumstances, with what I knew of
him. But with you not permitting him to go, and he as mad as a man has
a right to be where you are concerned, I can understand. He's a whole
lot better than a good sort. They don't make many like him. He will
make you happy--"

She held up her hand.

"I don't know that I shall ever be happy again, Red Cloud. When I see
what I have brought into your face.... And I was so happy and contented
all our dozen years. I can't forget it. That is why I have been unable
to decide. But you are right. The time has come for me to solve the
..." She hesitated and could not utter the word "triangle" which he saw
forming on her lips. "The situation," her voice trailed away. "We'll
all go hunting. I'll talk with him as we ride, and I'll send him away,
no matter what I do."

"I shouldn't be precipitate, Paul," Dick advised. "You know I don't
care a hang for morality except when it is useful. And in this case it
is exceedingly useful. There may be children.--Please, please," he
hushed her. "And in such case even old scandal is not exactly good for
them. Desertion takes too long. I'll arrange to give you the real
statutory grounds, which will save a year in the divorce."

"If I so make up my mind," she smiled wanly.

He nodded.

"But I may not make up my mind that way. I don't know it myself.
Perhaps it's all a dream, and soon I shall wake up, and Oh Dear will
come in and tell me how soundly and long I have slept."

She turned away reluctantly, and paused suddenly when she had made half
a dozen steps.

"Dick," she called. "You have told me your heart, but not what's in
your mind. Don't do anything foolish. Remember Denny Holbrook--no
hunting accident, mind."

He shook his head, and twinkled his eyes in feigned amusement, and
marveled to himself that her intuition should have so squarely hit the
mark.

"And leave all this?" he lied, with a gesture that embraced the ranch
and all its projects. "And that book on in-and-in-breeding? And my
first annual home sale of stock just ripe to come off?"

"It would be preposterous," she agreed with brightening face. "But,
Dick, in this difficulty of making up my mind, please, please know
that--" She paused for the phrase, then made a gesture in mimicry of
his, that included the Big House and its treasures, and said, "All this
does not influence me a particle. Truly not."

"As if I did not know it," he assured her. "Of all unmercenary women--"

"Why, Dick," she interrupted him, fired by a new thought, "if I loved
Evan as madly as you think, you would mean so little that I'd be
content, if it were the only way out, for you to have a hunting
accident. But you see, I don't. Anyway, there's a brass tack for you to
ponder."

She made another reluctant step away, then called back in a whisper,
her face over her shoulder:

"Red Cloud, I'm dreadfully sorry.... And through it all I'm so glad
that you do still love me."

Before Blake returned, Dick found time to study his face in the glass.
Printed there was the expression that had startled his company the
preceding evening. It had come to stay. Oh, well, was his thought, one
cannot chew his heart between his teeth without leaving some sign of it.

He strolled out on the sleeping porch and looked at Paula's picture
under the barometers. He turned it to the wall, and sat on the bed and
regarded the blankness for a space. Then he turned it back again.

"Poor little kid," he murmured, "having a hard time of it just waking
up at this late day."

But as he continued to gaze, abruptly there leaped before his eyes the
vision of her in the moonlight, clinging to Graham and drawing his lips
down to hers.

Dick got up quickly, with a shake of head to shake the vision from his
eyes.

By half past nine his correspondence was finished and his desk cleaned
save for certain data to be used in his talks with his Shorthorn and
Shire managers. He was over at the window and waving a smiling farewell
to Lute and Ernestine in the limousine, as Mendenhall entered. And to
him, and to Manson next, Dick managed, in casual talk, to impress much
of his bigger breeding plans.

"We've got to keep an eagle eye on the bull-get of King Polo," he told
Manson. "There's all the promise in the world for a greater than he
from Bleakhouse Fawn, or Alberta Maid, or Moravia's Nellie Signal. We
missed it this year so far, but next year, or the year after, soon or
late, King Polo is going to be responsible for a real humdinger of
winner."

And as with Manson, with much more talk, so with Mendenhall, Dick
succeeded in emphasizing the far application of his breeding theories.

With their departure, he got Oh Joy on the house 'phone and told him to
take Graham to the gun room to choose a rifle and any needed gear.

At eleven he did not know that Paula had come up the secret stairway
from the library and was standing behind the shelves of books
listening. She had intended coming in but had been deterred by the
sound of his voice. She could hear him talking over the telephone to
Hanley about the spillway of the Buckeye dam.

"And by the way," Dick's voice went on, "you've been over the reports
on the Big Miramar?... Very good. Discount them. I disagree with them
flatly. The water is there. I haven't a doubt we'll find a fairly
shallow artesian supply. Send up the boring outfit at once and start
prospecting. The soil's ungodly rich, and if we don't make that dry
hole ten times as valuable in the next five years ..."

Paula sighed, and turned back down the spiral to the library.

Red Cloud the incorrigible, always planting his acorns--was her
thought. There he was, with his love-world crashing around him, calmly
considering dams and well-borings so that he might, in the years to
come, plant more acorns.

Nor was Dick ever to know that Paula had come so near to him with her
need and gone away. Again, not aimlessly, but to run through for the
last time the notes of the scribble pad by his bed, he was out on his
sleeping porch. His house was in order. There was nothing left but to
sign up the morning's dictation, answer several telegrams, then would
come lunch and the hunting in the Sycamore hills. Oh, he would do it
well. The Outlaw would bear the blame. And he would have an
eye-witness, either Froelig or Martinez. But not both of them. One pair
of eyes would be enough to satisfy when the martingale parted and the
mare reared and toppled backward upon him into the brush. And from that
screen of brush, swiftly linking accident to catastrophe, the witness
would hear the rifle go off.

Martinez was more emotional than the sculptor and would therefore make
a more satisfactory witness, Dick decided. Him would he maneuver to
have with him in the narrow trail when the Outlaw should be made the
scapegoat. Martinez was no horseman. All the better. It would be well,
Dick judged, to make the Outlaw act up in real devilishness for a
minute or two before the culmination. It would give verisimilitude.
Also, it would excite Martinez's horse, and, therefore, excite Martinez
so that he would not see occurrences too clearly.

He clenched his hands with sudden hurt. The Little Lady was mad, she
must be mad; on no other ground could he understand such arrant
cruelty, listening to her voice and Graham's from the open windows of
the music room as they sang together the "Gypsy Trail."

Nor did he unclench his hands during all the time they sang. And they
sang the mad, reckless song clear through to its mad reckless end. And
he continued to stand, listening to her laugh herself merrily away from
Graham and on across the house to her wing, from the porches of which
she continued to laugh as she teased and chided Oh Dear for fancied
derelictions.

From far off came the dim but unmistakable trumpeting of Mountain Lad.
King Polo asserted his lordly self, and the harems of mares and heifers
sent back their answering calls. Dick listened to all the whinnying and
nickering and bawling of sex, and sighed aloud: "Well, the land is
better for my having been. It is a good thought to take to bed."




CHAPTER XXXI



A ring of his bed 'phone made Dick sit on the bed to take up the
receiver. As he listened, he looked out across the patio to Paula's
porches. Bonbright was explaining that it was a call from Chauncey
Bishop who was at Eldorado in a machine. Chauncey Bishop, editor and
owner of the San Francisco _Dispatch_, was sufficiently important a
person, in Bonbright's mind, as well as old friend of Dick's, to be
connected directly to him.

"You can get here for lunch," Dick told the newspaper owner. "And, say,
suppose you put up for the night.... Never mind your special writers.
We're going hunting mountain lions this afternoon, and there's sure to
be a kill. Got them located.... Who? What's she write?... What of it?
She can stick around the ranch and get half a dozen columns out of any
of half a dozen subjects, while the writer chap can get the dope on
lion-hunting.... Sure, sure. I'll put him on a horse a child can ride."

The more the merrier, especially newspaper chaps, Dick grinned to
himself--and grandfather Jonathan Forrest would have nothing on him
when it came to pulling off a successful finish.

But how could Paula have been so wantonly cruel as to sing the "Gypsy
Trail" so immediately afterward? Dick asked himself, as, receiver near
to ear, he could distantly hear Chauncey Bishop persuading his writer
man to the hunting.

"All right then, come a running," Dick told Bishop in conclusion. "I'm
giving orders now for the horses, and you can have that bay you rode
last time."

Scarcely had he hung up, when the bell rang again. This time it was
Paula.

"Red Cloud, dear Red Cloud," she said, "your reasoning is all wrong. I
think I love you best. I am just about making up my mind, and it's for
you. And now, just to help me to be sure, tell me what you told me a
little while ago--you know--' I love the woman, the one woman. After a
dozen years of possession I love her quite madly, oh, so sweetly
madly.' Say it to me, Red Cloud."

"I do truly love the woman, the one woman," Dick repeated. "After a
dozen years of possession I do love her quite madly, oh, so sweetly
madly."

There was a pause when he had finished, which, waiting, he did not dare
to break.

"There is one little thing I almost forgot to tell you," she said, very
softly, very slowly, very clearly. "I do love you. I have never loved
you so much as right now. After our dozen years you've bowled me over
at last. And I was bowled over from the beginning, although I did not
know it. I have made up my mind now, once and for all."

She hung up abruptly.

With the thought that he knew how a man felt receiving a reprieve at
the eleventh hour, Dick sat on, thinking, forgetful that he had not
hooked the receiver, until Bonbright came in from the secretaries' room
to remind him.

"It was from Mr. Bishop," Bonbright explained. "Sprung an axle. I took
the liberty of sending one of our machines to bring them in."

"And see what our men can do with repairing theirs," Dick nodded.

Alone again, he got up and stretched, walked absently the length of the
room and back.

"Well, Martinez, old man," he addressed the empty air, "this afternoon
you'll be defrauded out of as fine a histrionic stunt as you will never
know you've missed."

He pressed the switch for Paula's telephone and rang her up.

Oh Dear answered, and quickly brought her mistress.

"I've a little song I want to sing to you, Paul," he said, then chanted
the old negro 'spiritual':

  "'Fer itself, fer itself,
     Fer itself, fer itself,
     Every soul got ter confess
     Fer itself.'

"And I want you to tell me again, fer yourself, fer yourself, what you
just told me."

Her laughter came in a merry gurgle that delighted him.

"Red Cloud, I do love you," she said. "My mind is made up. I shall
never have any man but you in all this world. Now be good, and let me
dress. I'll have to rush for lunch as it is."

"May I come over?--for a moment?" he begged.

"Not yet, eager one. In ten minutes. Let me finish with Oh Dear first.
Then I'll be all ready for the hunt. I'm putting on my Robin Hood
outfit--you know, the greens and russets and the long feather. And I'm
taking my 30-30. It's heavy enough for mountain lions."

"You've made me very happy," Dick continued.

"And you're making me late. Ring off.--Red Cloud, I love you more this
minute--"

He heard her hang up, and was surprised, the next moment, that somehow
he was reluctant to yield to the happiness that he had claimed was his.
Rather, did it seem that he could still hear her voice and Graham's
recklessly singing the "Gypsy Trail."

Had she been playing with Graham? Or had she been playing with him?
Such conduct, for her, was unprecedented and incomprehensible. As he
groped for a solution, he saw her again in the moonlight, clinging to
Graham with upturned lips, drawing Graham's lips down to hers.

Dick shook his head in bafflement, and glanced at his watch. At any
rate, in ten minutes, in less than ten minutes, he would hold her in
his arms and know.

So tedious was the brief space of time that he strolled slowly on the
way, pausing to light a cigarette, throwing it away with the first
inhalation, pausing again to listen to the busy click of typewriters
from the secretaries' room. With still two minutes to spare, and
knowing that one minute would take him to the door without a knob, he
stopped in the patio and gazed at the wild canaries bathing in the
fountain.

When they startled into the air, a cloud of fluttering gold and crystal
droppings in the sunshine, Dick startled. The report of the rifle had
come from Paula's wing above, and he identified it as her 30-30 as he
dashed across the patio. _She beat me to it,_ was his next thought, and
what had been incomprehensible the moment before was as sharply
definite as the roar of her rifle.

And across the patio, up the stairs, through the door left wide-flung
behind him, continued to pulse in his brain: _She beat me to it. She
beat me to it._

She lay, crumpled and quivering, in hunting costume complete, save for
the pair of tiny bronze spurs held over her in anguished impotence by
the frightened maid.

His examination was quick. Paula breathed, although she was
unconscious. From front to back, on the left side, the bullet had torn
through. His next spring was to the telephone, and as he waited the
delay of connecting through the house central he prayed that Hennessy
would be at the stallion barn. A stable boy answered, and, while he ran
to fetch the veterinary, Dick ordered Oh Joy to stay by the switches,
and to send Oh My to him at once.

From the tail of his eye he saw Graham rush into the room and on to
Paula.

"Hennessy," Dick commanded. "Come on the jump. Bring the needful for
first aid. It's a rifle shot through the lungs or heart or both. Come
right to Mrs. Forrest's rooms. Now jump."

"Don't touch her," he said sharply to Graham. "It might make it worse,
start a worse hemorrhage."

Next he was back at Oh Joy.

"Start Callahan with the racing car for Eldorado. Tell him he'll meet
Doctor Robinson on the way, and that he is to bring Doctor Robinson
back with him on the jump. Tell him to jump like the devil was after
him. Tell him Mrs. Forrest is hurt and that if he makes time he'll save
her life."

Receiver to ear, he turned to look at Paula. Graham, bending over her
but not touching her, met his eyes.

"Forrest," he began, "if you have done--"

But Dick hushed him with a warning glance directed toward Oh Dear who
still held the bronze spurs in speechless helplessness.

"It can be discussed later," Dick said shortly, as he turned his mouth
to the transmitter.

"Doctor Robinson?... Good. Mrs. Forrest has a rifle-shot through lungs
or heart or maybe both. Callahan is on his way to meet you in the
racing car. Keep coming as fast as God'll let you till you meet
Callahan. Good-by."

Back to Paula, Graham stepped aside as Dick, on his knees, bent over
her. His examination was brief. He looked up at Graham with a shake of
the head and said:

"It's too ticklish to fool with."

He turned to Oh Dear.

"Put down those spurs and bring pillows.--Evan, lend a hand on the
other side, and lift gently and steadily.--Oh Dear, shove that pillow
under--easy, easy."

He looked up and saw Oh My standing silently, awaiting orders.

"Get Mr. Bonbright to relieve Oh Joy at the switches," Dick commanded.
"Tell Oh Joy to stand near to Mr. Bonbright to rush orders. Tell Oh Joy
to have all the house boys around him to rush the orders. As soon as
Saunders comes back with Mr. Bishop's crowd, tell Oh Joy to start him
out on the jump to Eldorado to look for Callahan in case Callahan has a
smash up. Tell Oh Joy to get hold of Mr. Manson, and Mr. Pitts or any
two of the managers who have machines and have them, with their
machines, waiting here at the house. Tell Oh Joy to take care of Mr.
Bishop's crowd as usual. And you come back here where I can call you."

Dick turned to Oh Dear.

"Now tell me how it happened."

Oh Dear shook her head and wrung her hands.

"Where were you when the rifle went off?"

The Chinese girl swallowed and pointed toward the wardrobe room.

"Go on, talk," Dick commanded harshly.

"Mrs. Forrest tell me to get spurs. I forget before. I go quick. I hear
gun. I come back quick. I run."

She pointed to Paula to show what she had found.

"But the gun?" Dick asked.

"Some trouble. Maybe gun no work. Maybe four minutes, maybe five
minutes, Mrs. Forrest try make gun work."

"Was she trying to make the gun work when you went for the spurs?"

Oh Dear nodded.

"Before that I say maybe Oh Joy can fix gun. Mrs. Forrest say never
mind. She say you can fix. She put gun down. Then she try once more fix
gun. Then she tell me get spurs. Then... gun go off."

Hennessy's arrival shut off further interrogation. His examination was
scarcely less brief than Dick's. He looked up with a shake of the head.

"Nothing I can dare tackle, Mr. Forrest. The hemorrhage has eased of
itself, though it must be gathering inside. You've sent for a doctor?"

"Robinson. I caught him in his office.--He's young, a good surgeon,"
Dick explained to Graham. "He's nervy and daring, and I'd trust him in
this farther than some of the old ones with reputations.--What do you
think, Mr. Hennessy? What chance has she?"

"Looks pretty bad, though I'm no judge, being only a horse doctor.
Robinson'll know. Nothing to do but wait."

Dick nodded and walked out on Paula's sleeping porch to listen for the
exhaust of the racing machine Callahan drove. He heard the ranch
limousine arrive leisurely and swiftly depart. Graham came out on the
porch to him.

"I want to apologize, Forrest," he said. "I was rather off for the
moment. I found you here, and I thought you were here when it happened.
It must have been an accident.'"

"Poor little kid," Dick agreed. "And she so prided herself on never
being careless with guns."

"I've looked at the rifle," Graham said, "but I couldn't find anything
wrong with it."

"And that's how it happened. Whatever was wrong got right. That's how
it went off."

And while Dick talked, building the fabric of the lie so that even
Graham should be fooled, to himself he was understanding how well Paula
had played the trick. That last singing of the "Gypsy Trail" had been
her farewell to Graham and at the same time had provided against any
suspicion on his part of what she had intended directly to do. It had
been the same with him. She had had her farewell with him, and, the
last thing, over the telephone, had assured him that she would never
have any man but him in all the world.

He walked away from Graham to the far end of the porch.

"She had the grit, she had the grit," he muttered to himself with
quivering lips. "Poor kid. She couldn't decide between the two, and so
she solved it this way."

The noise of the racing machine drew him and Graham together, and
together they entered the room to wait for the doctor. Graham betrayed
unrest, reluctant to go, yet feeling that he must.

"Please stay on, Evan," Dick told him. "She liked you much, and if she
does open her eyes she'll be glad to see you."

Dick and Graham stood apart from Paula while Doctor Robinson made his
examination. When he arose with an air of finality, Dick looked his
question. Robinson shook his head.

"Nothing to be done," he said. "It is a matter of hours, maybe of
minutes." He hesitated, studying Dick's face for a moment. "I can ease
her off if you say the word. She might possibly recover consciousness
and suffer for a space."

Dick took a turn down the room and back, and when he spoke it was to
Graham.

"Why not let her live again, brief as the time may be? The pain is
immaterial. It will have its inevitable quick anodyne. It is what I
would wish, what you would wish. She loved life, every moment of it.
Why should we deny her any of the little left her?"

Graham bent his head in agreement, and Dick turned to the doctor.

"Perhaps you can stir her, stimulate her, to a return of consciousness.
If you can, do so. And if the pain proves too severe, then you can ease
her."

       *       *        *       *        *

When her eyes fluttered open, Dick nodded Graham up beside him. At
first bewilderment was all she betrayed, then her eyes focused first on
Dick's face, then on Graham's, and, with recognition, her lips parted
in a pitiful smile.

"I... I thought at first that I was dead," she said.

But quickly another thought was in her mind, and Dick divined it in her
eyes as they searched him. The question was if he knew it was no
accident. He gave no sign. She had planned it so, and she must pass
believing it so.

"I... was... wrong," she said. She spoke slowly, faintly, in evident
pain, with a pause for strength of utterance between each word. "I was
always so cocksure I'd never have an accident, and look what I've gone
and done."

"It's a darn shame," Dick said, sympathetically. "What was it? A jam?"

She nodded, and again her lips parted in the pitiful brave smile as she
said whimsically: "Oh, Dick, go call the neighbors in and show them
what little Paula's din.

"How serious is it?" she asked. "Be honest, Red Cloud, you know _me,"_
she added, after the briefest of pauses in which Dick had not replied.

He shook his head.

"How long?" she queried.

"Not long," came his answer. "You can ease off any time."

"You mean...?" She glanced aside curiously at the doctor and back to
Dick, who nodded.

"It's only what I should have expected from you, Red Cloud," she
murmured gratefully. "But is Doctor Robinson game for it?"

The doctor stepped around so that she could see him, and nodded.

"Thank you, doctor. And remember, I am to say when."

"Is there much pain?" Dick queried.

Her eyes were wide and brave and dreadful, and her lips quivered for
the moment ere she replied, "Not much, but dreadful, quite dreadful. I
won't care to stand it very long. I'll say when."

Once more the smile on her lips announced a whimsey.

"Life is queer, most queer, isn't it? And do you know, I want to go out
with love-songs in my ears. You first, Evan, sing the 'Gypsy
Trail.'--Why, I was singing it with you less than an hour ago. Think of
it! Do, Evan, please."

Graham looked to Dick for permission, and Dick gave it with his eyes.

"Oh, and sing it robustly, gladly, madly, just as a womaning Gypsy man
should sing it," she urged. "And stand back there, so, where I can see
you."

And while Graham sang the whole song through to its:

  "The heart of a man to the heart of a maid, light of my
        tents be fleet,
   Morning waits at the end of the world and the world is
       all at our feet,"

Oh My, immobile-faced, a statue, stood in the far doorway awaiting
commands. Oh Dear, grief-stricken, stood at her mistress's head, no
longer wringing her hands, but holding them so tightly clasped that the
finger-tips and nails showed white. To the rear, at Paula's dressing
table, Doctor Robinson noiselessly dissolved in a glass the anodyne
pellets and filled his hypodermic.

When Graham had finished, Paula thanked him with her eyes, closed them,
and lay still for a space.

"And now, Red Cloud," she said when next she opened them, "the song of
Ai-kut, and of the Dew-Woman, the Lush-Woman. Stand where Evan did, so
that I can see you well."

And Dick chanted:

"I am Ai-kut, the first man of the Nishinam. Ai-kut is the short for
Adam, and my father and my mother were the coyote and the moon. And
this is Yo-to-to-wi, my wife. Yo-to-to-wi is the short for Eve. She is
the first woman of the Nishinam.

"Me, I am Ai-kut. This is my dew of women. This is my honey-dew of
women. Her father and her mother were the Sierra dawn and the summer
east wind of the mountains. Together they conspired, and from the air
and earth they sweated all sweetness till in a mist of their own love
the leaves of the chaparral and the manzanita were dewed with the honey
dew.

"Yo-to-to-wi is my honey-dew woman. Hear me! I am Ai-kut! Yo-to-to-wi
is my quail-woman, my deer-woman, my lush-woman of all soft rain and
fat soil. She was born of the thin starlight and the brittle
dawn-light, in the morning of the world, and she is the one woman of
all women to me."

Again, with closed eyes, she lay silent for a while. Once she attempted
to draw a deeper breath, which caused her to cough slightly several
times.

"Try not to cough," Dick said.

They could see her brows contract with the effort of will to control
the irritating tickle that might precipitate a paroxysm.

"Oh Dear, come around where I can see you," she said, when she opened
her eyes.

The Chinese girl obeyed, moving blindly, so that Robinson, with a hand
on her arm, was compelled to guide her.

"Good-by, Oh Dear. You've been very good to me always. And sometimes,
maybe, I have not been good to you. I am sorry. Remember, Mr. Forrest
will always be your father and your mother.... And all my jade is
yours."

She closed her eyes in token that the brief audience was over.

Again she was vexed by the tickling cough that threatened to grow more
pronounced.

"I am ready, Dick," she said faintly, still with closed eyes. "I want
to make my sleepy, sleepy noise. Is the doctor ready? Come closer. Hold
my hand like you did before in the little death."

She turned her eyes to Graham, and Dick did not look, for he knew love
was in that last look of hers, as he knew it would be when she looked
into his eyes at the last.

"Once," she explained to Graham, "I had to go on the table, and I made
Dick go with me into the anaesthetic chamber and hold my hand until I
went under. You remember, Henley called it the drunken dark, the little
death in life. It was very easy."

In the silence she continued her look, then turned her face and eyes
back to Dick, who knelt close to her, holding her hand.

With a pressure of her fingers on his and a beckoning of her eyes, she
drew his ear down to her lips.

"Red Cloud," she whispered, "I love you best. And I am proud I belonged
to you for such a long, long time." Still closer she drew him with the
pressure of her fingers. "I'm sorry there were no babies, Red Cloud."

With the relaxing of her fingers she eased him from her so that she
could look from one to the other.

"Two bonnie, bonnie men. Good-by, bonnie men. Good-by, Red Cloud."

In the pause, they waited, while the doctor bared her arm for the
needle.

"Sleepy, sleepy," she twittered in mimicry of drowsy birds. "I am
ready, doctor. Stretch the skin tight, first. You know I don't like to
be hurt.--Hold me tight, Dick."

Robinson, receiving the eye permission from Dick, easily and quickly
thrust the needle through the stretched skin, with steady hand sank the
piston home, and with the ball of the finger soothingly rubbed the
morphine into circulation.

"Sleepy, sleepy, boo'ful sleepy," she murmured drowsily, after a time.

Semi-consciously she half-turned on her side, curved her free arm on
the pillow and nestled her head on it, and drew her body up in nestling
curves in the way Dick knew she loved to sleep.

After a long time, she sighed faintly, and began so easily to go that
she was gone before they guessed. From without, the twittering of the
canaries bathing in the fountain penetrated the silence of the room,
and from afar came the trumpeting of Mountain Lad and the silver whinny
of the Fotherington Princess.




THE END










End of Project Gutenberg's The Little Lady of the Big House, by Jack London