CORDUROY

RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL

Books by
RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL

CORDUROY
NARRATIVES IN VERSE
JANE JOURNEYS ON
PLAY THE GAME

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
New York London

THE NEXT MORNING SHE WAS EARLY ON HER HORSE AND SHE WORE HER WORN AND MELLOW CORDUROYS

[Page [31]]

CORDUROY

BY
RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL
AUTHOR OF “PLAY THE GAME,”
“JANE JOURNEYS ON,” ETC.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK : : LONDON : : 1923

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1922, by The Crowell Publishing Company
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
W. S. Y.
WHO HAS PUT ON CORDUROY
AND WEARS IT WELL

CORDUROY

CHAPTER I

FOR the first time in her life—she had been alive twenty-two vivid and zestful years—Virginia Valdés McVeagh, nicknamed, descriptively, “Ginger,” felt something like reverence for a male creature of her own species.

Her father, that stolid Scot, had died while she was a hearty and unimaginative child; Aleck, her only brother, killed on the last day of fighting in the Great War, had been her pal and play-fellow, as were, in lesser and varying degrees, the young ranchers of the miles-wide neighborhood, while the vaqueros and old Estrada, mayordomo of her cattle ranch, were her henchmen, loyal, admiring, unquestioning. Always she had been able to divide the men of her world unhesitatingly into two classes—her equals, her inferiors.

Dean Wolcott was different. He was framed in mystery and hallowed by grief, coming to her—almost like a visitant from another world—in the dawn of a Christmas Day she had vowed not to keep, bringing her the word of her dead brother for which she had thirsted, and a stained and crumpled letter in Aleck’s own hand. It was the first shred of information she had had since the official communication, nearly four months after the armistice. That had come on a delicate day of early California spring; the rains had been late and the hills were only faintly brushed with green, but the wild flowers were out, brilliant, arresting, and the oaks were vocal with linnets and orioles; meadow larks sank liltingly on the low ground; the narrow little creek was lively and vehement, and the air was honey and wine. Everything was awake and alive except Aleck, and Aleck was dead. The grave official statement regretted to inform her that Lieutenant Alexander McVeagh was dead. Dead; not alive any more; never coming back to Dos Pozos; never to ride with her over the range again.

Something in Virginia Valdés McVeagh died likewise. When Aleck was there she had seemed less than her age; now she was more. She ceased at once to be “Ginger.” Swiftly, almost, it seemed, with a single motion, she grew up. She had always been cognizant of every detail of enterprise on the big cattle ranch, and now, with Estrada’s help, she took competent charge. She rode with him over the rolling hills on Aleck’s horse, brought in her cattle from remote pastures, saw to the planting of her alfalfa crops and the harvesting of her wheat, held rodeos, marketed her stock. Leaving off the mellow corduroys which toned alluringly with her skin and eyes and hair, and the brave scarlet sweaters and wine-red velvet dresses which sharply underlined her Spanish coloring, she swathed herself in black as bitterly as her Valdés grandmother would have done. She knew that it cut her beauty in two and she was glad: there had been flagelantes on her mother’s side of the house, three generations earlier.

The slow and difficult year had crawled away; February ... December. Virginia had refused to go to relatives in Los Angeles or San Francisco and asked them not to come to her. This first black Christmas (the one a year earlier had been vibrant with hope) she must be allowed to spend alone, in the luxury of uninterrupted and unconsoled grief. Even the servants—Estrada and his men, old Manuela, the housekeeper, Ling, the moon-faced Chinese cook—were banished to San Luis Obispo on the morning of the twenty-fourth, not to return until the twenty-sixth, but her gift to herself of solitude had been snatched away from her. Dos Pozos was five miles off the highway, but in good weather motorists often took the dirt road for a short cut. This year Virginia had neglected to have it kept up; the bridge, half a mile from the house, was a frail and ancient structure. Aleck had meant to replace it with a permanent one of concrete, and Estrada had begged her to carry out the young señor’s plan, but she would not. Later, perhaps; for the present, she was thankful for anything which made for isolation.

And then, ironically enough, the very thing which was to have kept the world away, brought it to her. It rained in torrents, lavish, riotous California rain; the road sank down into a batter of soft mud; the bridge whined in the storm; at seven o’clock on Christmas Eve four machines and ten persons, wailing children among them, were stranded and helpless. The telephone line was down; the vaqueros spending their holiday in town; and tradition was rigid; no one, gentle or simple, ever lifted the latch of Dos Pozos in vain. Grudgingly, with unadorned civility, Virginia had taken them into the old adobe ranch house and prepared to give them camp fare, for there was no way in which she could summon her servants.

It immediately appeared, however, that her servants did not require summoning; they were already there. The good creatures had merely driven round the turn of the road in the morning, waited until she had ridden off in the rain, and crept back again, hiding themselves discreetly in their quarters. Their idea had been to feed her as the ravens fed the prophet and to keep out of her sight, for they were on intimate terms with her temper and her tongue. When the house party enforced descended upon their mistress they had come boldly forth, rather giving themselves airs; what—they wanted respectfully to know—would she have done without them?

So it fell out that two brisk and cheerful school-teachers and a forlorn widower and his shabby children and a couple of Stanford students and a personage in a limousine made philosophically merry beneath the roof which had fully intended to cover nothing but desolate grief and decent silence, and Ling plied happily between his table and his glowing range, his queue snapping smartly out behind him, and old Manuela built fires and made up beds in the guest rooms, and Estrada rode into San Luis Obispo to send telegrams to distracted families.

When she went to bed at midnight Virginia had worked out something of her rebellion in weariness. She had resurrected toys for the pinched children, helped the school-teachers and the Stanford students to trim a tree for them and to decorate the big rooms with snowberries and scarlet toyon—spurred herself to a civil semblance of hospitality. As she fell asleep she was aware of a feeling she had sometimes had when she was a rather bad and turbulent child—that, having been good, unusually, laboriously good—something good should and must come to her.

It came at sunrise, when Estrada wakened her, calling excitedly in front of her window. She slipped her feet into Indian moccasins and threw a serape about her and padded down the long corridor and out on to the veranda. She heard people stirring as she passed the guest rooms; one of the children was whimpering with eagerness to be dressed and allowed to hunt for its Christmas stocking.

Behind the mayordomo stood a tall man in uniform: for one mad moment her heart stood still and her eyes dilated and blurred and the figure in khaki swam dizzily in the keen morning light.

Then the old Spaniard stepped quickly forward and she saw that his eyes were wet. “Gracias a Dios, Señorita—it is a friend of Señor Alejandrino! At last he has come, over the sea and over the land, to bring you the message!”

The stranger came slowly nearer, staring at her. She saw then that he was a young man, but he did not look young. His eyes were intolerably tired and tragic and he was weary with weakness. He blinked a little as he looked at her; it was as if the brightness of her eyes and mouth and the gay serape hurt and dazed him. “You are—‘Ginger’?” he wanted gravely to know.

He spoke in a hoarse whisper and in a whisper she answered him, breathing fast. “Yes. I am Ginger. Aleck——”

He began to speak, very slowly and carefully, pushing the words before him, one at a time, as a feeble invalid pushes his feet along the floor. He had been with her brother for a month; they had come to regard each other as friends, in the red intimacy of war; they had had a feeling ... something ... that last day, that they would not both come through it. They had written letters and exchanged them, promised each other——

She cried out at that. “A letter? He wrote—you’ve brought me a letter?” She held out her hands, shaking.

He was fumbling at a pocket and his fingers were likewise unsteady. He explained, very humbly, why he had been so long in coming. He had been wounded, too, not an hour later. Shattering wounds ... he moved his thin body uncomfortably as if at a bad memory; shell shock; he had forgotten everything, even to his own name. A month ago, in England, he had started in to remember, and he had been traveling to her ever since. He gave her a worn and soiled bit of paper, folded up like a child’s letter. Estrada slipped softly into the house.

She snatched at it hungrily and read it three times through before she looked up again. Aleck’s crude and boyish backhand; Aleck’s crude and boyish words, hearty, heartening, lifting the black blanket of silence; Aleck.

Then she looked up and caught her breath sharply. A strong shaft of winter morning sunlight had fallen along the veranda, and it was shining on his face and through his face. Virginia had never in all her days harbored an eerie imagining, but she was harboring one now. Her Valdés mother had died when she was a baby, and her upbringing had been along the gray lines of the McVeagh Scotch Presbyterianism; nevertheless, from old Manuela, the housekeeper, she had heard many a colorful tale of the santos. Now, it flashed upon her swiftly, this worn young soldier, more than a man in spirit, less than a man in body, was like a saint; a warrior saint; a martyr saint. He swayed a little, backward, away from her; it seemed entirely possible that he might melt into the bar of sunlight, into the morning.... She had hoped and imagined so many things for so many months ... it was conceivable that she was only hoping and imagining this....

Estrada came out again. His quick Spanish cut into her phantasy. “Señorita, this gentleman is very tired and ill—he must rest!” He put a steadying hand under the young man’s arm and he sagged heavily against him.

Virginia came out of her abstraction with a sharp sigh. “Yes, he must rest. Come!” She caught the serape together with one hand and she was magnificently unaware of her bare brown ankles and her bare brown throat, and the tumbled ropes of black hair swinging over her shoulders, and held open the door. “Come,” she said again, smiling mistily back at him.

The widower’s children were registering shrill rapture over their stockings and the tree; the older members of the house party, having been enlightened by Estrada, drew quietly back and watched with leashed curiosity as the trio went through the room and down the long corridor. Virginia halted before the door of the last bedroom, the heavy old-fashioned iron latch in her hand. “This is Aleck’s room. No one ever comes here but myself; no one else ever takes care of it.” She flung open the door. Then, at the dim prompting of some Spanish forbear, she made a little ritual of it, taking his hand and leading him over the threshold. “Now I give it to you.” She led him gently across the red tiled floor to a great armchair, cushioned with a brilliant Navaho blanket. “This was Aleck’s chair.” She began quite steadily. “He always sat here. And now you are sitting here. And you saw him die, didn’t you? I saw him live, all the years of his life, riding the range, in this house, in this room—and you saw him die. You saw—Aleck—die.” Then she started to cry, very quietly. She slipped down and sat huddled on the floor beside him, her forehead against the big arm of the chair. He leaned over and laid his hand uncertainly on her hair, but he could not manage to say anything to her. It was as if the courage and energy which had driven and dragged him across an ocean and a continent had left him utterly, now that his pledge was kept, his message given.

So they stayed there, in silence, save for the slight sound of her grief, until old Manuela bustled in and took soothing but competent charge. Manuela was not unaware of her mistress’ bare ankles and throat. She cast a scandalized black eye upon them, hurried her off to her own room to dress, flung up a window to the quick morning air, brought a footstool, tucked the Navaho snugly about the young soldier.

“And now, I go to bring the señor something warm to drink. Would you like coffee or chocolate, Señor?”

Dean Wolcott roused himself with a palpable effort. “I must not stay. My cousin is waiting at San Obispo; he will be anxious—”

“Coffee or chocolate, Señor?” The old woman slipped a soft, small pillow behind his head.

“Coffee, then,” said the stranger, wearily.

“Chocolate will be better, Señor.” She beamed approval on him, quite as if he had chosen chocolate. “I go now to bring chocolate for the señor.”

She was back in ten minutes with a steaming cup and stood over him until he had drunk the last velvet drop of it. “And now the señor will rest.”

The warm comfort of it went over him like a drug. He leaned his head back acquiescently. “Yes; I will rest for a few moments.”

Manuela turned back the spread of delicate Mexican drawnwork and patted the pillows. “The señor would rest better upon the bed,” she said silkily.

Dean Wolcott shook his head. “Thank you; I do not care to lie down. I will sit here for a few moments....”

She was kneeling before him, swiftly and surely divesting him of his shoes. “The señor will rest better upon the bed,” she stated with soft conviction. He got up out of the chair when it became clear that she would lift him out if he did not, and at once he found himself lying in utter lassitude on Aleck McVeagh’s bed. “For an hour ... no longer ...” he said with drowsy dignity.

The old woman drew a light serape up to his chin, nodded indulgently, shaded the window, and went away, treading with heavy softness down the corridor.

She met her mistress at the end of it. The girl had flung herself swiftly into her riding clothes and her eyes were shining. “I must talk to him, Manuela! There are a thousand things to ask!”

“Not yet, my heart,” said the old woman. “First he must sleep. He is broken with weariness.”

Ginger turned reluctantly. Her house party enforced was at breakfast and her place was with her motley guests. What she wanted to do was to wait outside Aleck’s door until Dean Wolcott wakened, but she was feeling amazingly gentle and good, so she went at once to the dining room and presided with her best modern version of the Valdés tradition.

She kept on being gentle with the wayfarers; she was not annoyed with them any longer for having mired down on her neglected road before her neglected bridge. It seemed almost as if she would never be annoyed with anything or anybody again, now that the black blanket of silence was lifted; now that she had word—warm, human, close-range word—of Aleck, and Aleck’s letter.

Her heart lifted when she thought of the messenger. Aleck had sent him to her, and he had come—over the sea and over the land, as Estrada said, fighting his weakness as he had fought the enemy. She summoned up the echo of his tired voice, pushing the words before him slowly, one by one, the memory of him there in the shaft of morning sunlight, the austere beauty of his worn young face. Her guests, filled with lively, kind curiosity, wanted to hear about him, but she let Estrada tell what there was to tell. When she spoke of him it was in a hushed voice—as if he might hear and be disturbed, the length of the rambling old house away; as if he were something to be spoken of in deep respect. It was that way in her own mind; she whispered about him in her thoughts.

CHAPTER II

BY three o’clock Estrada had mended the road and propped the bridge and gotten the four machines under way. Ginger saw them off very patiently. They were volubly grateful and expressive and she let them take all the time they wanted for the thanks and farewells, and waited to wave them out of sight. The last car to round the curve was the one containing the widower and his children—forlorn no longer but exuding sticky satiety and clutching their new treasures.

Then she hurried into the house. The soldier guest was still sleeping, the housekeeper reported. Ginger went on tiptoe to the door and listened. There were the countless questions to ask him about Aleck; she grudged every missed moment.

“We dare not wake him,” said Manuela with authority. “And he must eat before he talks again. Go away, my heart. I will keep watch.” She sat down again in a chair in the corridor and folded her hard brown hands on her stomach. “Listen! Some one comes!”

There was the sound of a motor and Ginger went to see who it was—the house party might have found worse going beyond, and turned back. It was a car from the garage at San Luis Obispo, and before it reached the house she saw that it carried one person beside the driver—a young man who held himself singularly erect. He was, he announced, the cousin who had been waiting, waiting all day, at San Luis Obispo, for Mr. Dean Wolcott. He wanted to know where Mr. Wolcott was. His manner rather conveyed that Mr. Wolcott might have met with foul play; that almost anything might occur in a wilderness of this character.

Miss McVeagh explained that Mr. Dean Wolcott was sleeping; he was greatly exhausted and had been asleep since morning.

The other Mr. Wolcott was clearly annoyed. The trip from Boston to California, undertaken only a day after his cousin had landed from England, had been wholly against his advice and judgment. He had been unable to understand why his cousin could not have mailed Miss McVeagh her brother’s letter, and written her any details.

Ginger, looking levelly at him, saw at once that he had been and always would be unable to understand. She said, very civilly, that she hoped they would both rest for a few days at Dos Pozos before making the return journey.

“Thank you, but that will be quite impossible,” said the young man, hastily. “It will be necessary to leave Los Angeles to-morrow. The entire Wolcott connection—” it was as if he had said—“The Allied Nations,” or “The Nordic Peoples”—“will postpone the holiday festivities until Mr. Dean Wolcott’s return.” He desired to be shown where his cousin was sleeping, and he went briskly in to rouse him, past the protesting Manuela.

Ginger went out of the house. Large as it was, there did not seem to be room enough in it for the newcomer and herself. He brought her sharply out of her mood of whispering gentleness, and she walked a little way toward the bridge and planned to begin work at once on the permanent structure of Aleck’s intention. A big and beautiful idea came to her; there was no way of marking Aleck’s grave, but this bridge should be built in his memory, inscribed to him. It brought the tears to her eyes and she turned, at sound of feet on the path, and saw Dean Wolcott coming toward her, and now, as in the morning, the sun was on him—this time the evening sun, slipping swiftly down behind the hills.

He was faintly flushed with sleep and his voice was stronger and steadier. “I am ashamed,” he said. “I have slept away my one day with you. I had concentrated for so long on the single purpose of bringing Aleck’s message to you that, once it was done, everything seemed to be done. I sank into that sleep as if it were a bottomless pit. I must go back to-night. My mother—my people— You see, I spent only a day with them.”

“You must go,” said Ginger. “You were good—oh, you were good to come!”

They stood then without talking, looking at each other, gravely. They seemed to be groping toward each other through the mists of grief and tragedy and strangeness which encompassed them. The little scene had—and would always have in their memories—a lovely and lyric quality. It was a fresh-washed world; the hills, the roads, the trails, the chaparral were a clean and shining bronze; the distant alfalfa fields were emerald counterpanes and the toyon berries, freed from the last stubborn summer dust, were little shouts of color.

He passed a hand across his troubled eyes. “There is so much to tell you.... Every day, every hour, things grow clearer; I remember more and more. But I will write to you. I will write you everything.”

“I don’t know, I can’t explain—” Ginger was whispering again—“but it almost seems as if you’d brought Aleck back to me. I can never see him again, but—it’s different, somehow. That dreadful, black, lost feeling is gone. I won’t wear black any more; Aleck hated black. And I’m going to build that bridge, as he planned to build it, of stone, and—and put his name on it. It’s—all I can do for him.”

His tired eyes lighted. “Will you let me share it with you—let me design it? I do that sort of thing, you know. I should love helping you with Aleck’s bridge.” His voice was kindling to warmth now. “A bridge—there could be nothing better for a memorial.” He fumbled in his pocket and brought out a notebook and pencil. “Shall we go a little nearer? I’ll make just a rough sketch of the situation.” They walked on.

The cousin came to the edge of the veranda and called a warning; there was very little time. Dean Wolcott frowned and kept steadily on, Ginger walking beside him in her strange new silence. He did not speak again until he had made the small, unsteady sketch on a leaf of his notebook. Then he came a little closer to her, peering at her through the fading light. The sun had gone and the brief afterglow was going. “I will send the design as soon as I am sure of doing it decently—within a few weeks, I hope.” It was as if he were seeing her—her—not merely the person to whom with incredible difficulty and delay he had delivered a message. “And after a while, when I am—myself—may I come again?” His voice was huskily eager. “May I come back? I want to know Aleck’s country; I want to know Aleck’s—you.”

She took his thin fingers into a warm brown grasp. “Please come! Please come and stay!” The other Mr. Wolcott was coming down the path, picking his way neatly through the mud, but she did not let Dean Wolcott’s hand go. “And please come—soon!”

The capable cousin took him away at dusk. They would get a train out of San Luis Obispo at midnight and leave Los Angeles for Boston the next forenoon. He had it all compactly figured out. If they made proper connections—and he looked as if trains rarely if ever trifled with him—they would reach home on the day and at the hour when he had planned to reach home.

Ling and Manuela had hastily cooked and served an early supper and Ginger sat across the table from her two guests, looking at them and listening to them, eating nothing herself. It was to be observed that the worn young soldier and his kinsman shared certain characteristics of face and figure—the same established look of race—but they were two distinct variations on the family theme.

For the first time in her assured and unquestioning life Ginger was acutely aware of her table—of the contrast between the fine old silver and glass which her mother, Rosalía Valdés, had brought with her to Dos Pozos as a bride and the commonplace and stupid modern china which she herself had bought at San Luis Obispo; of old Manuela’s serene crudities of service. The other Mr. Wolcott was carefully civil, but he managed to make her stingingly conscious of the number and variety of miles between Boston and her ranch: he had rather the air of a cautious and tactful explorer among wild tribes. Whenever he looked at her, which was not often, she felt like a picture in a travel magazine—“native belle in holiday attire”—like a young savage princess with strings of wampum and a copper ring in her nose.

But she did feel, at any rate, like a princess: he aroused in her an absurd desire to talk about the McVeaghs in Scotland and the Valdés family in Spain; to drag out heirlooms and ancient treasures.

Dean Wolcott was very white again and said little. When they were in the machine he rallied himself with a visible effort. “I will send the sketch soon,” he said, rather hollowly, “and I will write you—everything.” Then he seemed to sink back into his weary weakness; even the glow died out of his eyes.

Ginger watched the machine’s little red tail light disappear around the curve. She was certain that, directly they were under way, the other Mr. Wolcott was telling him how very much wiser and more sensible, how much less exhausting and expensive it would have been to mail Aleck’s letter to her.

Then she went briskly into her own room and came out into the corridor presently with her arms overflowing with black clothing—black riding things, black waists and skirts, black dresses.

“Manuela,” she said, as the old woman came up to her, staring, “these are for you and your daughters. I’ve done with them.”

Manuela squealed with rapture. “Mil gracias y gracias a Dios, Señorita mía!” she purled. She had begged her mistress to leave off mourning, much as her Spanish soul approved it, and now she had her wish, and this bountiful precipitation of manna besides. She gathered it up gleefully and waddled off with her dark face creased into lines of supreme content.

Ginger was very much pleased with herself. This was the way in which she—Ginger McVeagh—did things. She decided to lay off black, and instantly, with one gesture, she cleansed her wardrobe completely and forever of its somber presence.

The next morning she was early on her horse and she wore her worn and mellow brown corduroys and her seasoned old Stetson, and Estrada and his men nodded knowingly at each other and smiled shyly at her. It was curious how shy and how respectful they were, the hard-riding, hard-drinking vaqueros. The Spanish and Mexican ones among them had a manner which was just as good and decidedly pleasanter than that of the other Mr. Wolcott, and the Americans, old grizzled chaps in the main who had ridden for her father, had a whimsical poise and a rugged picturesqueness of diction.

It was an oddly feudal life for a twenty-two-year-old girl in the up-to-the-minute days of the twentieth century, the more so, of course, because of her brother’s death, but it had been sufficiently so, even before he went to war. Her mother had died when she was a baby, her father when she was a child; Aleck had firmly sent her away to boarding school three times, and three times he had weakly let her come home. He was bleakly lonesome without her; he concurred, in his happy and simple soul, with the ranchers who laughed and said—“Oh, let her alone—she knows twice as much now as most young ones of her age!” Family connections in San Francisco and Los Angeles protested mildly, but they were busy with their own problems and Dos Pozos was a marvelous place to take the children and spend vacations, and Ginger had probably had about all the schooling she needed for that life and that was undoubtedly the life she meant always to lead. Thus, comfortably, they dismissed the matter, and sent her an occasional new novel for cultural purposes and came months later to find half the leaves uncut. Ginger would have read it with a good deal of enjoyment if she could have stayed indoors long enough; evenings she was apt to be sleepy very early.

Now the word went over the wide neighborhood that Aleck McVeagh’s buddy had come and brought a letter from him, and told his sister all about his life over there, and his death, and Ginger had given away all her mourning and put on her regular clothes and the ranchers rode over on their hard-mouthed, wind-swift horses or drove up in their comfortable, battered cars and asked her to barbecues and rodeos again.

’Rome Ojeda, who lived thirty miles away, heard the news, came the thirty miles at a Spanish canter in a little over four hours, flung the reins over the head of his lathered horse to the ground, walked with jingling spurs on to her veranda and made hearty love to her.

He had intended to marry her ever since she came home from boarding school for the last time and he saw her in a scarlet sport coat and a scarlet tam. He was Aleck’s best friend and Aleck had looked on with satisfaction; he wasn’t keen to give Ginger up to anybody, but it wouldn’t be really giving her up to have her marry old ’Rome, and she’d be mortally certain to marry somebody. Ginger, however, wasn’t at all sure that she was. By and by, perhaps; certainly not now, when she had many much more interesting things to do. So ’Rome Ojeda had bided his time good-naturedly; she was pretty young, and he wasn’t so old himself; just as well, probably, to play around awhile. He let it be rather well known, however, that she was going to marry him as soon as she was ready to marry anybody.

Now he was direct and forceful. “Ginger, look here! You’re old enough now, and you’re all alone, and I’ve waited the deuce of a while. No sense waiting any longer!” He showed his very white teeth in a sudden smile and flung a quick arm about her. He was a big and beautiful creature, Jerome Ojeda, Spanish-American, hot-headed, hot-tongued, warm-hearted. He had almost graduated from the High School at San Luis Obispo; there had been a rodeo in which he wanted to ride, so he rode in it. He took a spectacular first place in the “Big Week” as the affair was called, and he had never experienced the palest pang of regret for the little white cylinder tied with a blue ribbon.

Ginger got herself promptly out of his arms. She wasn’t in the least shocked or resentful but she was disconcertingly cool. “I don’t want to marry—anybody, ’Rome,” she said.

He caught her shoulders in his dark hands and gave her a small shake. “Don’t be a little fool! Of course you want to marry somebody. It’s—what you’re for. You want to marry me, only you don’t know it yet. But you will.” He brought his brown face nearer. “When I make up my mind, I generally put it over, don’t I?” He gave her another little shake. “Don’t I?”

She considered him calmly. “Generally, yes,” she said.

He enveloped her swiftly in a rough, breathtaking hug, and as swiftly let her go again. “All right; I can wait a while longer.” He strode, spurs jingling, toward his horse.

Ginger called after him, hospitably: “Don’t go now,’Rome! Stay for dinner. Look at Pedro—he’s dead tired.”

He swung himself into the saddle without touching the stirrups and smiled back at her. His smile was very white and dazzling in his brown face. “When I stay, querida, I’ll stay—right. And Pedro’ll take me where I want to go; there’ll be horses when I’m gone.” He struck spurs into the dripping horse and was off at a smooth and rhythmic gallop.

Ginger frowned, looking after him. She did like old ’Rome a lot. She liked everything about him except the way he treated his stock. Still, he was no worse than most of them. But she didn’t want to marry him; she didn’t want to marry anybody; she was much too busy and happy.

CHAPTER III

DEAN WOLCOTT sent a dignified and satisfying design for the bridge, and Ginger had it executed in rough stone brought down from the hills. When it was finished it was a sincere and lasting thing, and she never went over it too quickly to rest her eyes on the plate set into the rock which bore Aleck’s name and the dates of his birth and death, and, beneath—“From his sister and his friend.”

After a little time the letters had begun to come; long, fluent, vivid letters; realistic stories of the life he and Aleck had lived together. Ginger read them with laughter and with tears, and wrote short, shy answers on cheap stationery. Ordinarily, she would have used the official ranch paper, with the name at the top—“Dos Pozos, Virginia Valdés McVeagh, sole proprietor,” and a neat cut of a long-horned steer at one side and a bucking horse at the other—but she had a dim sense of what the other Mr. Wolcott’s expression would be when he saw. Therefore, she used tablet paper and envelopes which did not quite match; sometimes she used the regular stamped envelopes. Her writing was unformed and uninteresting; she loathed composing letters and they sounded and looked as if she did. She had never cared about getting them, save Aleck’s. The Los Angeles and San Francisco relatives wrote chiefly to ask if they might come and bring the children for a little visit with dear Virginia, and grateful bread-and-butter notes after they had gone home. She liked getting letters now, however; she found Dean Wolcott’s many-sheeted ones the most enthralling reading she had ever done. He was steadily gaining weight and strength and poise again, he told her. In the early summer he began to talk about coming, and in July he announced that he would arrive at San Luis Obispo on the twenty-sixth.

Ginger sat a long time with this letter in her hand. Then she went to the telephone and called up her favorite aunt by long distance, in San Francisco, and asked if she might come up to her next day and do some shopping.

Her Aunt Fan was cordial and kind. She was really very fond of Ginger; fond enough to like having her with her for little visits but not quite fond enough to visit her on the ranch. Aunt Fan’s idea of the country was a tiresome geographical division through which you passed on your way to a city. Besides, it was a place of beguiling cream and broilers and hot breadstuffs; a place where one invariably and weakly ate too much.

Now she said that Ginger was to come at once and they’d have a wonderful time together; she’d been meaning to send for her, anyway.

Ginger took the day train from San Luis Obispo and reached San Francisco in the evening; this, she knew, was an easier time for her aunt to meet her than in the morning. Aunt Fan had a taxi waiting and bundled her delightedly into it.

“Dearie, are you simply dead? I told the doctor we might join him at Tait’s for a little while, to hear the music and— But I don’t know—” she broke off, looking at her niece’s costume, and shaking her head. “My dear child, where did you get that dress?”

It was a one-piece thing in blue serge of ordinary quality, listlessly trimmed with black braid, and the neck line was just too low and a good deal too high.

“In San Luis,” said Ginger, meekly. She was always meek with her aunt on the subject of clothes. “It was only twenty-two fifty.”

“It looks it,” said Aunt Fan, briefly. “And that mal-formed hat, and light-topped shoes (there hasn’t been a light-topped shoe worn since the flood!) and brown gloves! My dear!” She hailed the chauffeur. “Straight back to the St. Agnes, please.”

“I bought all these things ages ago,” said Ginger, humble still, “before I went into mourning. I’ve given all the black stuff to Manuela. I didn’t think it mattered, just for the train.”

“My child,” said her aunt with solemn and passionate conviction, “clothes always matter. I wouldn’t be divorced in a dress like that.” She sighed. “How you, with your Spanish blood, can have so little sense of line and color— Oh, I know you look well enough on the ranch, on a horse—‘Daring Nell, the Cattle Queen’—that sort of thing, but you can’t ride your horse into restaurants and drawing-rooms and theaters, and as soon as you dismount you look like the hired help!” She was heartily angry with her by the time they arrived at the apartment house. No one could fathom why it had been named the St. Agnes; it was a good deal more like the Queen of Sheba.

Ginger followed her into Apartment C. It was the first time she had visited her aunt here, and it struck her that it was like the inside of a silk-lined and padded candy box de luxe; it was a good deal like Aunt Fan herself.

It began to strike Mrs. Featherstone that her niece was turning the other cheek with unprecedented docility. “Look here,” she cried, catching hold of her and turning her face to the light, “let me look at you. What is it? What’s come over you?” She shook her as ’Rome Ojeda had shaken her but with less muscular authority. “What do you want clothes for?”

“Because I have only things like this, and—” she was entirely unflurried and direct about it—“because Dean Wolcott, Aleck’s friend, you know, is coming out for a visit.”

Aunt Fan studied her thoughtfully. “When’s he coming?”

“The twenty-sixth—a week from Saturday.”

“Oh, Lord!” said her aunt with deep feeling. “How I do detest the country in July! Well, Manuela’ll simply have to bring me a breakfast tray, whether she thinks it immoral or not. I will not get up in the middle of the night.”

“But, Aunt Fan, I didn’t expect you to come.” Ginger was wholly frank about it.

“My dear girl, I don’t suppose you want me any more than I want to come and listen to the crickets with their mufflers open all night, but—I ask you—can you entertain a strange young man, Boston, too, isn’t he?—alone?”

“I don’t see why not,” said her niece, coolly. “He isn’t strange at all; he was Aleck’s friend.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter whether you see or not,” said Mrs. Featherstone, crisply. “I’m coming. I suppose I’ll gain eighteen pounds as I did before. See here, will you promise not to let Ling make waffles?” Her carefully tinted face broke up suddenly into little wrinkles of smiles. “There, never mind! I love you if you do weigh a hundred and ten and eat everything!”

Mrs. Featherstone weighed a hundred and sixty-nine and she ate like a canary and thought about food most of the time, and her large, comely face had a chronic expression of wistful yearning. Clergymen and lecturers and interpreters liked having her in the front row; they found her intense concentration and her blue-eyed gaze extremely helpful and inspiring, and they had no way of knowing that she was thinking raptly to herself— “If I should go over to the Palace for lunch and have turkey hash and potatoes au gratin and popovers and a cup of chocolate, and walk all the way home, fast, I don’t believe I’d gain an ounce!”

She was Ginger’s father’s half sister, and she had been twice married. Her first husband had died and her second had been divorced, but she was still on very kindly and pleasant terms with him. He gave her a generous alimony and she was able to live in a smart apartment with a smart maid and wear the smartest of clothes and she wanted for nothing in the world except food.

“Here’s your room, dearie,” she said, piloting her niece into a tiny apricot-colored guest chamber. “I suppose it looks small after the ranch; you couldn’t rope a steer in it, but it’s large enough, if you’re not boisterous. You had to sleep on the davenport when I was at the Livingston, didn’t you? This is no end nicer; it ought to be, heaven knows, with what I pay for it. Jim voluntarily gave me another hundred a month, did I tell you?” She sighed and winked her blue eyes violently. “He’s a prince, if ever there was one. He said it was only fair—H. C. of L., and all that. Now, I’ll just slip into something loose and we’ll have a chatter. Lucinda,” she called the little trim negress, “you make Miss McVeagh a cup of chocolate. You’ll see,” she turned to her niece again, “I’ll watch you drink it without a quiver. I ought to be a martyr or something—you know—hunger strikes—” She went away breathlessly to get out of her armor, and Ginger opened the window and let the keen, foggy night air into the little soft room. She always felt trapped in her Aunt Fan’s pretty abiding places. Nevertheless, she stayed a whole week this time, and got snugly into her aunt’s good graces by buying everything she suggested.

“We’ll get downtown early.” Mrs. Featherstone planned earnestly, the night of her arrival, “oh, bright and early, before any one’s out—by eleven o’clock if we can possibly manage it—and get you some things you can wear right out of the shop, before any one sees you.”

She had an excellent sense of values, Ginger’s Aunt Fan, and she let the girl keep true to type in her selections—a mannish coat suit of heather brown jersey, sport blouse of rough creamy silk, snub-nosed little Scotch brogues and wool stockings, fabric gloves with gauntlet cuffs and smart buckles, and a small brown hat which had plenty of assurance even without its stab of burnt orange. “Now,” said Mrs. Featherstone with a sigh of deep relief, “let’s go!”

They went tirelessly, late forenoons and solid afternoons and Ginger had presently a large trunkful of clever clothes—gay ginghams and crisp organdies, boldly plaided sport skirts and sweaters in solid colors to match, and two evening frocks (though these Ginger protested she would never need) in scarlet and persimmon. “I’m having a color spree,” said Aunt Fan. “All the things I’d adore to wear and can’t.”

They were at Dos Pozos four days before Dean Wolcott was due. Mrs. Featherstone had been watching her niece narrowly. “What’s he like, this chap?” she had wanted to know a day or so after Ginger had come to her.

The girl waited an instant before answering. “I—don’t know, Aunt Fan.”

“You don’t know?”

The girl shook her head. “You see, he was only at the ranch one day, and he slept most of that—he was so exhausted. I don’t believe I saw him for two hours in all.”

Aunt Fan stared. “Well—but you must have formed some impression. What do you think he’s like, if you don’t know?”

This time she waited even longer before answering. She was calling up the memory of the Christmas day—the first meeting in the morning; the look of him as he came toward her in the rich light of the setting sun, his weary speech; the way his eyes had kindled. “I think,” she said, wholly unaware that she was speaking with the same whispering gentleness with which she had spoken to him, “he is different from—everybody else in the world.”

Aunt Fan said nothing more, and tiptoed hastily away from the subject. She wrote that night to her former husband—she always wrote to thank him for the alimony—“Jim, I’m keeping my fingers crossed! She’s simply bowled over by this chap, and he certainly must be interested, to cross the continent in July. Heavens, but I’d be glad to see her settled—married to somebody beside a cow-puncher—living in civilization! I wish you’d slip down to Boston and look him up, will you? That’s a lamb! His name is Dean Wolcott and he’s a Harvard man, and a sort of architect. When I think what it would mean to me, to be sure I’d never have to visit her on the ranch again! Be careful not to rush around in the heat, Jim; Boston air is like pudding sauce and you know you never had any sense of taking care of yourself. Let me hear immediately what you find out.”

Ginger had been honest with her aunt. She didn’t know what Dean Wolcott was like, but she would know on Friday! She was not analytical or introspective enough to know what he stood for; to realize that he was—up to that time—not a person to her, but a quality, a substance; he was all the heroes of all the books she had never read; he was the music she had never heard; the far places she had never seen. And he was silvered and hallowed by his association with her beloved dead brother.

Dean Wolcott’s cousin—the other Mr. Wolcott who had disapprovingly guided him across the continent and back—asked him, searchingly, what he was going out to California for. Dean Wolcott wasn’t able to tell him; he wasn’t able to tell himself. He said to his kinsman and reiterated to himself that he wanted to have a look at that bridge; he had designed it in a white heat of enthusiasm, and while he believed it was good, he was anxious to see it finished. Also, he was at some pains to tell his cousin and his own consciousness, he felt he ought to see Miss McVeagh again; he had been a spineless weakling, sleeping away his one day there; it was the very least he could do for old Aleck to see her once more, and tell her, by word of mouth, the things which were flat and cold on the written page.

Nevertheless, passing up many pleasant summer plans made by his family and his friends, making his little explanation over and over again, he felt rather foolish, and the Wolcott connection, as the cousin would have said, did not enjoy feeling foolish. The trip across the sweltering states was unendurably hot; while they were going through Kansas he thought several times of wiring to Dos Pozos that he was ill again, and must turn back. He was still wondering, in Los Angeles, just why he had come, and he wondered from eight to three, in the parlor car of the coast-line day train, rumbling through scenery that was brown and dry and hot, but when he got out at San Luis Obispo he stopped wondering. He knew, at once and definitely, why he had come.

The reason was waiting for him on the platform. She wore a white flannel sport skirt and a scarlet coat of jersey and a black hat with scarlet poppies on it, and she glowed like a poppy herself in heat which wilted other people and made them look faded and drained.

She was driving Aleck’s car, a seasoned and dependable old vehicle, and they said very little, after the necessities of luggage had been seen to, until they had left the town behind and were mounting into the hills. It was hot; Dean Wolcott thought he had never known such heat, but it had a fine, dry, shimmering quality; the breeze, though it might have blown out of an oven, was electric, bracing. He took off his hat and let the sun shine on his head and the wind muss up the precision of his hair. Ginger did not look at him; she never took her eyes from the road when she was driving—a promise she had made Aleck—but she could feel that he was looking at her. She felt very silent and shy and a good deal frightened.

Dean, on the other hand, was feeling, with every minute and every mile, more serene confidence; a greater sense of glad decision. This was why he had come; he must always have known, secretly, in his depths.

“I want to see the bridge,” he said, after the longest of their pauses.

“Yes. I’ll tell you when to begin looking. You can see it a long way.” Eyes rigidly front, even though they had left the worst of the grade now.

He knew that she was frightened and it made him feel tremendously triumphant; surer of himself than he had been since he went down on the last day of fighting.

“Now you can see the bridge,” said Ginger, lifting one hand from the wheel to point it out to him.

“Yes,” said Dean. He did not speak again until they had reached it. Then pride rose in him for an instant. “It is good,” he sighed, contentedly. “I couldn’t be sure. It’s good!” He got out of the car and waited for her to follow, but she would not.

“No; I want you to see it first—alone.”

He went over it, beyond it; stood well away from it and studied it. Then he came on to it again, halting half-way, looking at her. “Now will you come?”

And, just as he had stopped wondering, Ginger stopped being afraid. She went to him steadily, her head high.

He was bareheaded still, and she noticed now for the first time that his hair was very fair and very fine, brushed sleekly back from his forehead, shining; that he was taller than she had realized; that there was a look of power about him for all his slimness and his cool coloring. Then she stopped noticing altogether, because he had come swiftly to her and caught her in his arms.

“Here, on Aleck’s bridge,” he said, happily. “We’ve come to each other across Aleck’s bridge; it was Aleck who brought us together.” Then he ceased talking about Aleck and kissed her. “Scotch granite and Spanish flame; that is what you are,” he told her, holding her away from him for an instant to consider her. “There was never any one like you; you have a stern Scotch chin and a soft Spanish mouth; you are—” then, aware of the way he was wasting time, he left off making phrases and kissed her Spanish mouth, and Estrada, riding in from the range, reined in his horse and stared, wide-eyed, and Aunt Fan, coming out on to the veranda, looked down at them and gasped, and wondered when the result of Jim’s investigations would come, and old Manuela, watching from a window, crossed herself and called fervently upon her favorite saint.

But for the two on Aleck’s bridge there was, for that slender, golden, perishable moment, no one else in the glowing world.

CHAPTER IV

THE world continued to be otherwise uninhabited and to glow rosily for almost a fortnight. Ginger’s Aunt Fan received a very satisfactory letter from Jim Featherstone; the Wolcott Family was as solid as Plymouth Rock, and contemporaneous with it. Dean Wolcott was a young man of excellent lineage, character, and achievement—known already, at twenty-eight, for unusual and original work in his line. He had gone in mildly for athletics at Harvard, topped his classes, made two of the best clubs. He had been popular in a quiet and discriminating fashion.

At the end of his letter Aunt Fan’s ex-husband allowed himself a bit of facetiousness. “I’ve sleuthed the lad down very thoroughly. But—Tremont Street and Dos Pozos! Well, it may work out, if he likes paprika on his Boston beans!”

Mrs. Featherstone was extremely pleased with this report, but she was likewise thorough, so she sent out a hurry call for her good friend, Doctor Gurney Mayfield. This was the doctor with whom they should have supped at Tait’s on the night of Ginger’s shabby arrival in San Francisco, and he had known Aunt Fan since she was nineteen years old and weighed ninety-eight pounds and she would always be Miss Fanny to him. He had taken care of her first husband through his last illness, the more zealously and devotedly because he had always considered him a rival, and he had thought then, after a decent interval, to renew his suit (that was what he called it in his courtly and chivalrous heart) but his Miss Fanny, some time before his idea of that interval had elapsed, met and married Jim Featherstone and went with him to New York and lived unhappily ever after. He was honestly regretful and soberly elated to have her back in California again, and calling on him as always for escort and counsel, and now he came at once at her summons, driving down from the prosperous ranch where he spent his time after retiring from a beloved and almost boundless practice.

Ginger was a great favorite with him; he was keenly concerned about her choice. The thought of her marriage had always made him a little anxious; she was her father and her mother—truly, as her lover had said in his rhapsodic moment, Scotch granite and Spanish flame. The doctor had seen something of the home life of Rosalía Valdés and Alexander McVeagh; it had been quite lyrically perfect, but very high keyed, and he had wondered if it would—or could—last down the years. The Spanish woman had a small velvet voice, convent-trained, and she sat often at the rosewood spinnet which had belonged to her mother before her and sang the songs of the period. They were very sweet and very sentimental and packed with pathos, and some one invariably died in the second verse. He remembered that she had loved best one which ran something after this fashion—

Perhaps it is better we lived as we did,

The summer of love together,

And that one of us tired and lay down to rest,

Ere the coming of wintry weather—

and always turned away from the spinnet with her dark eyes wet.

That was exactly what she had done, herself, and Alexander McVeagh had followed her, ten years later, contentedly, for all his devotion to his son and daughter. He wasn’t at all sure, in his rugged and unadorned version of his forbears’ belief, that he should find her again in the world to come, but he was very sure that the world he was leaving was not much of a world without her. Aleck, the son, had been a simple and uncomplex creature; all McVeagh. It was the girl who combined her father and her mother in a baffling and intricate fashion. The doctor wondered; it would have been simpler and safer, he considered, for Virginia Valdés McVeagh to marry a neighboring rancher—even Jerome Ojeda—though he lacked a little of the fineness the doctor wanted for her—than a Wolcott of Boston.

Doctor Mayfield’s opportunities for studying them together were limited; when they were together—save at meal-times—they took excellent care to be alone together. They motored all over the surrounding landscape by day and by night—it was, by a special dispensation of Providence, a time of white and silver moonlight—and tramped high into the hills. This in itself was an amazing spectacle—Ginger McVeagh afoot; from her tiny childhood she had never walked except on her way to a horse. Dean Wolcott loved walking, however, and she loved Dean Wolcott and the thing was accomplished. Besides, by an odd and dramatically arranged combination of circumstances, she had not, for that period, a horse to offer him. Aleck’s horse, Felipe, which she usually rode, had a wrenched foot, and was turned out, and she was riding her own horse Diablo, about the business of the ranch. Estrada and his men were using all the others, bringing in the stock from the farther feeding pastures. Ordinarily, she would have borrowed a mount for him from a neighbor, but it was a part of the newness and strangeness of things to be motoring and tramping with her strange new lover.

At such times, however, as she had to be about the business of Dos Pozos, the doctor held satisfying converse with Dean Wolcott. He liked him heartily, and reported to Aunt Fan as favorably as Jim Featherstone had done, and after five days he went north again, satisfied with the newcomer as an individual, hopeful about him as Ginger’s husband, and Aunt Fan was left alone.

“Well, it’s ‘the summer of love’ they’re living now, Miss Fanny,” he told her at leaving. “We can only hope it’ll be big enough to see them through ‘the coming of wintry weather.’” But he shook his head. Since he had given up the patching and mending of bodies he had given a lot of thought to minds and souls and temperaments; he was rather well up on them.

Ginger jumped up from the dinner table one day and flew to the telephone. “I must get you a horse,” she said, excitedly. “I don’t know what I’ve been thinking about!” Then she colored hotly and suddenly; she knew very well what she had been thinking about. “You’ve been here nearly two weeks and we haven’t had a ride together, and Friday’s the big day!” She gave her number and stood waiting, the receiver in her hand.

“But—look here,” said Dean Wolcott. “I don’t ride, you know. I’ve told you that before, haven’t I?”

He had told her several times, but it simply didn’t register. For a man—a hundred per cent man, who had been a soldier and her brother’s comrade, who was, above all, her man—not to ride was—ridiculous. He was using a phrase which didn’t mean anything; he probably didn’t care especially about riding (Boston was without doubt a wretched place in which to ride) or didn’t ride especially well; city men didn’t as a rule. But to say he didn’t ride— She was speaking into the telephone. “Hello! Hello! Oh, ’Rome, is that you? How are you?... ’Rome, can you lend us a horse? Felipe’s turned out with a bad foot, and we haven’t a thing for Dean to ride.... Oh, fine,’Rome! Thanks a lot! Bring him over with you Friday morning, will you?” She came back to the table radiant. “’Rome says he’s got just the thing for you; I knew he’d help us out.”

(’Rome Ojeda had heard, as all the countryside had heard, of Ginger’s eastern suitor; it was the chief topic in a land which was ordinarily bare of conversational thrills, but he had taken it quite coolly. He wasn’t, he had been quoted as saying, “worrying none.” Ginger hadn’t given him any thought. He had not, to be sure, telephoned to her or ridden over with congratulations as others had done, but he had been gay and good-natured when they met up on horseback.)

Dean looked at her quizzically. He was beginning, in the last day or two, to look at her with his mind instead of his heart, and he had made several discoveries. One of these was that she was as high-handed and autocratic as a feudal duchess; it was not only that she always wanted and took her own way—she was unaware that there was any other way to want, or to take. But, up to that time, he was not worrying any more than ’Rome Ojeda was. It was picturesque, it was pretty—her high-handedness.

The night before the “big day” she refused to walk or motor or even sit on the veranda, but told him a resolute good night at eight o’clock. “Ling will call you at three, and breakfast’s at three-thirty.”

“We attack at dawn, I see,” said Dean, steering her cleverly into an alcove and out of her aunt’s range of vision. “Then, if my evening is to end at eight instead of ten or eleven, I certainly consider myself entitled to something in the way of recompense.” He swept her into his arms and kissed her.

“Honey,” said Ginger, persuasively, “let me go! And you must get to sleep yourself—we’ve got a big day ahead of us!”

“My dear, I’ve told you several times, though you’ve seemed not to listen to me, that I’m no horseman. I rather think you’d better let me off, to-morrow; it’s highly probable that I’d cut a sorry figure in the saddle.”

Ginger drew back in his arms, wide-eyed. “But you’ll have to ride, Dean! You couldn’t possibly drive the car—we go by trail and straight over the hills—and you couldn’t walk.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’ll be a forty-mile trip, and—why, it wouldn’t be safe, goose! You are a tenderfoot, aren’t you? The steers are all right when you’re on horseback, but they’d rush over you in a wink, afoot.”

“Forty miles,” said Dean, thoughtfully. “It sounds rather a large order, Ginger, dear. Suppose I don’t go?”

“Suppose you don’t—go?” She stared at him and her voice was cold with astonishment. “Why—what’ll everybody think?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“What’ll everybody think about you, if you don’t go—when it’s my ranch and my cattle, and everybody coming back here for the big feed at night and the dance?” she wanted hotly to know.

Dean Wolcott colored slowly. “I fail to see where it is any one’s affair but my own—and yours, of course. If we decide that it is wiser——”

“But we haven’t and we aren’t going to!” she flamed out at him. “Oh, can’t you see how it is? Everybody, Estrada and his men and all the neighbors and people I’ve known ever since I was born, think it’s funny and queer, my being—engaged to you. They think easterners are just like foreigners. I did, too,” she was gentle for an instant, “before you came! And if you ditch the ride, and just sit around the house and wait for the big feed and the dance, they’ll say—anyhow, ’Rome Ojeda’ll say—that you’re bluffed out. ’Rome Ojeda’s been trying to make me say I’d marry him ever since I was fifteen; he’ll say you’re—afraid.”

He did not speak at once, and Ginger, watching him, breathing fast after her long speech, saw that he was looking a lot like the other Mr. Wolcott. “And what will you say, Ginger, if I tell you that I won’t ride? What will you say?” He was very quiet about it. “It doesn’t matter in the least to me what a lot of ranchers and cowboys think or say—Ojeda or any one else. But—what will you say?”

Even a resemblance to the cousin who had convoyed him disapprovingly across the continent made her truculent, and his voice was even more like the other than his expression. “I’ll say you must—” she caught herself midway, aghast to find how nearly she had said the unforgivable thing. She came close to him again and put her arms around his neck and clasped her hands behind his head, and pulled his grave face down to her. “I won’t have to say anything, because I know you’re going to do it for me—aren’t you, Dean—dearest?”

It was the first time she had ever, alone and unassisted—uninvited—kissed him upon the mouth. He caught her hard against him with a strength which seemed ready for any feats of prowess. “I’ll ride—anything—anywhere—you ask me,” he said, unsteadily.

Ling called him at three o’clock. It was dark and unbelievably cold, and he dressed himself with stiff fingers and went heavy-eyed into the dining room. He felt old and jaded and depressed; unhappily conscious of all the strength which hadn’t yet come back to him.

Ginger was there before him, dressed in her oldest riding things, a worn old Stetson on her head, a scarlet bandanna tied, cowboy fashion, about her neck, and she was warm and glowing. She looked as if she had just emerged from the conclusion of their ardent little scene of the night before; Dean felt as if it were something which had happened to him in his youth, and as if his youth had passed a long time ago. He had no appetite, and could barely manage a cup of coffee, and he was almost annoyed with her for eating with excellent relish. They spoke in low tones, remembering Aunt Fan’s earnest pleas that she should not be wakened, but before they left the table there was a pounding of hoofs and a shout from the front of the house.

“There’s ’Rome!” said Ginger, jumping up. “Come along!” She ran out onto the veranda and he followed her slowly.

’Rome Ojeda had ridden in from his ranch the night before and stayed with Ginger’s nearest neighbor, and his horses—the one he rode and the one he was leading—were quite fresh. He swung himself to the ground, dropped the reins, pulled off a buckskin gauntlet and strode over to Dean, holding out his hand. “Mighty pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said, displaying very briefly his white smile in his brown face. “Here’s your mount, Mr. Wolcott,” he nodded toward the red roan.

“Very good of you,” said Dean, stiffly. He felt stiff, body and brain, aching for sleep, cramped and cold.

“Oh—the lunches!” cried Ginger. “Almost forgot them!” She bolted into the house.

Dean Wolcott looked at his horse and hunted wearily through his mind for something sapient to say about him. The fact was that he had not been astride a horse six times in his twenty-eight years. Others of the Wolcott family rode—several of his friends rode; it had merely happened that he had gone in, instead, in what leisure he had from school and college and later, the office, for tennis and golf and walking trips. He had very nearly made tackle in his junior year; three years on the squad. Now he would have traded all these glad activities for a good working knowledge of horseflesh.

One of Ginger’s men brought up her Diablo; there were a dozen riders in the distance, coming nearer at a swinging lope.

The vaquero looked at the roan. “I see you got new horse, Meester Ojeda, no?”

“Yeh,” Ojeda nodded. “Mr. Wolcott’s ridin’ him to-day.” Then he said, very slowly, “Only been rode a coup’la saddles.”

Dean Wolcott pulled himself up. “What do you call him, Ojeda?”

’Rome Ojeda rolled a cigarette. “I call him ‘Snort,’” he said. “He mostly does.”

Ginger’s suitor walked down the shallow steps and went up to the horse with outstretched hand. “Hello, Snort, old chap! Do you——”

The animal pulled back sharply, flinging up his head with a sound vividly descriptive of his name, and ’Rome Ojeda grinned, enjoyingly. “Aside from that, he’s as gentle as a kitten,” he drawled. “Look here, Mr. Wolcott—where’s your spurs?”

“Oh, I sha’n’t need spurs,” said Dean, easily. Just as Ginger had disliked his correct cousin in less than five minutes of acquaintance, so now did he detest this brown and beautiful ’Rome Ojeda with his appalling bigness, his flashing smile, and his crude sureness. He loathed the whole commonplace, rubber-stamp situation in which he found himself—competent wild westerner, eastern tenderfoot, cattle-queen heroine, mob scene of cow-punchers; it was like finding himself placed on the printed page of a tawdry story—like seeing himself on the screen in a cheap and stupid moving picture; like seeing himself in the rôle of unwitting comedian. He knew that, unescapably, he was about to be made to appear ridiculous; and that was a thing no Wolcott ever was. They had reverses, disappointments; they were ill, they suffered, they died; they were never ridiculous. And now Dean Wolcott, whose mother kept his Congressional Medal and his Croix de Guerre in the box with her delicate handkerchiefs, so that, with no parade of them, she could see and touch them every day, was about to afford rude mirth to yokels.

He went again and firmly to his mount, clutched at the mane and the reins, got one foot into the jerking stirrup, scrambled and clawed his way up. The horse, simultaneously with these motions on his part, noisily demonstrating the aptness of his cognomen, did incredibly swift and sudden things with his head, his neck, all four of his legs and his torso. Dean Wolcott, just as the riders came loping up and Ginger stepped out on to the veranda with the packets of lunch in her hands, rose clear of the saddle, appeared to hang an instant in mid-air, sailed over the head of his steed and fell heavily to the sun-baked earth.

CHAPTER V

IT was thus that Virginia Valdés McVeagh, sole owner and proprietor of Dos Pozos, saddle-wise from babyhood, cool and competent as any man among them, presented her betrothed to the friends of her youth, to her world.

Her betrothed, in those swift seconds between his departure from the saddle and his arrival upon the ground, hoped fervently that he might have the good fortune to break his neck, but it appeared immediately that he had not broken anything whatever. He was dizzy, jarred and bruised and lamed, but he was entirely intact, as he curtly made clear to ’Rome Ojeda. ’Rome Ojeda, his white smile flashing, was first to rush to the rescue.

Dean Wolcott picked himself up and brushed himself off, resolutely keeping his eyes away from the veranda and Ginger; he felt he could bear all the rest of it if she would only keep away from him. She was there, however, almost as soon as ’Rome was, her face as pale as possible beneath its brown warmth. She wanted breathlessly and with unashamed anguish in her voice to know if he was hurt, but directly she saw—and heard—that he was not, the color rushed hotly back into her cheeks and she turned shortly away on a spurred heel.

“A little too much hawse, maybe,” said ’Rome Ojeda, smoothly. “Change with Mr. Wolcott, somebody with a quieter cayuse!”

Two or three of the riders promptly dismounted and came forward, but Dean Wolcott shook his head. “Thank you,” he said, stubbornly, “I shall ride this horse or none.” He sounded blatantly dramatic to his own ears. Why hadn’t he laughed it off, made determined comedy of the situation, made them laugh with him, instead of at him? He hated himself for the bombastic attitude he had struck; he hated ’Rome Ojeda and his quivering red roan; he hated his own fatuous folly of weakening the evening before under Ginger’s lips and promising her to make this ghastly fiasco; he was not at all sure that he didn’t hate Ginger.

Old Estrada came forward, respectful, helpful. Dean was fitted out with spurs and quirt, the horse was firmly held until the rider was solidly in the saddle, his feet braced, the reins in a tense grip. But now Snort, as if he had had his little joke, conducted himself in what was, for him, a staid and dignified manner; he pranced, he curvetted, he tossed his handsome head, but he made no effort to dislodge his passenger, and Dean, his head aching dully, his aching body intolerably jolted and jarred, followed in the wake of the procession.

The old mayordomo, riding beside him, explained. They were to drive two hundred and forty steers—two-year-olds that he and his men had been bringing in from the remote pastures—to the shipping point—approximately eighteen miles. On the way back they would collect close to two hundred yearlings and bring them back to the main ranch. It sounded, on the Spaniard’s lips, as simple as hailing a taxicab and driving down Tremont Street.

The other riders, Ginger among them, had spurred ahead. Dean could see through the steadily brightening light that the vaqueros were opening the gates of the great corrals, releasing sluggish, slow-moving, brown streams.

Estrada said softly in his heavily accented English. “Eef you kip near to me, I weel tell you all, Señor.”

“Thank you,” said Dean, civilly. “You are very kind.”

He was very kind, the black-eyed old mayordomo; there was no scorn in his hawklike gaze, nothing but the most respectful desire to be of service. Let others forget that here among them rode—however clumsily—the friend and comrade of his young señor, Alejandrino McVeagh; Vincente Estrada would not forget.

They came up with the other riders, with the brown stream. It was not sluggish now; there were waves, breakers. Brown, twisting, turning bodies, tossing horns, wild eyes; ceaseless bellowing; dust. Ginger and her vaqueros and her neighbors rode on the edges of the stream, shouting, waving their sombreros, now spurring ahead to guard a gate, now in sudden, swallow-swift pursuit of a bolting steer, passing him, turning him, heading him back into the herd.

Dean Wolcott tried to detach himself from the spectacle, to regard it objectively—something whose like he had never seen before, and never would see—but of course, he told himself, after he married Ginger he would often see this sort of thing. She would, he supposed, insist on coming back to her ranch occasionally, unless he could persuade her to sell it. He sought to see her in the frame and with the background of Boston; it was actually the first time, since that moment when they stood midway on Aleck’s bridge, that he had done this. The realization came sharply that he had been looking into a kaleidoscope for two glowing and highly colored weeks. On his summer vacations, when he was a small and quiet child, he had visited at an uncle’s Connecticut farm, and—better than the out-of-doors—he had loved the cool dimness of the big “Front Room.”

Being a gentle and trustworthy child he was allowed the freedom of it. He might turn the pages of the ancient album, lift the conch shells from the whatnot in the corner and listen to the imprisoned sound of the sea, climb carefully upon a chair to inspect the wax flowers and the hair wreaths framed and hanging on the walls; best of all he loved sitting on a slippery hair-cloth sofa, his eyes glued to the tiny window of the kaleidoscope, his soul warm with the joy of color and design. There was always, he remembered now, a distinct effort of his will necessary to remove his reveling eye, to take it away from crimson and jade and orange and ultramarine and deep purple, and return it to the grays and browns and drabs of the material world. And the time had come again, he told himself grimly, his head aching dully, his muscles aching sharply, to take his eye away from the kaleidoscope.

He was following Estrada into the thick of it; he was surrounded by the brown bodies; he was stifled by the brown dust which rose over him. The sun was high, now, and he had stopped being chilled, but he was miserable in so many other ways that he was not able to be thankful. He wondered dully, disgusted, why the powerful creatures, horned, capable of splendid battle, allowed themselves to be driven by a twentieth part of their number of men, herded docilely down to their death.

“Ur-r-ra, ur-r-ra, ur-rrrra!” said Estrada softly to them, “Ur-r-ra!”—and they gave way before him, backing, whirling, pawing at the earth, the bolder ones rolling their red eyes, blowing futile defiance through their dust-grimed nostrils. Now and then a couple of them, truculent, locked horns for an instant, made a little whirlpool of private strife in the brown stream, but at Estrada’s shout, his whirling quirt, his swung sombrero, they gave up; they went on again in their sacrificial procession. Estrada, what time he rode close enough to him and the steers were not bellowing too loudly, gave him bits of information. They would be loaded into the cattle cars at noon, if all went well; they would not reach San Francisco for two days or three, perhaps; yes, the railroad company was obliged to water them—Estrada really did not know exactly what the law was, but there was a law, he was comfortably sure. Yes—those were “loco” steers; the señor would do well to keep his distance from them—they might be sufficiently loco to hook his horse, and his horse, unhappily, was not entirely trustworthy. The ones with the huge and hideous swellings at the sides of their heads had “lumpy jaw”; it was hard to tell the señor exactly what caused it—a foxtail wedged between the teeth, perhaps, made the beginning. No, he shrugged, there was no cure that he had ever heard of; if it could be taken in the beginning—but it was never taken in the beginning. No, it did not hurt the meat, except that, as the señor saw, the lumpy-jawed steers were always poor; he thought—he was not certain of this, but he had heard that they went to feed the prisoners in State’s Prison. This was a very fine herd; the señorita had excellent feeding pastures; she was a remarkable judge of stock. And she was very kind, the señorita; the señor could see for himself that she allowed the cattle to go at a walk; she would not allow them to be driven with dogs or with whips. That was very kind, and it was also very sensible; dogs made them nervous and made them hurry too much; they lost profitable pounds in transit; and the packers did not like you to use whips—they made bruises on the meat. Was not the señorita a wonderful horsewoman? He himself had seen her riding after the herd, just as she was riding to-day, at the age of seven. A proud man, the father of Señorita Ginger, the old Señor Alejandro McVeagh; a proud family. He let his raven-black eyes rest upon his companion for an instant. If the señor would let himself go loose in the saddle, he would find himself riding in greater comfort.

Dean Wolcott tried it; he tried it faithfully. He was willing and eager to try anything which would alleviate his wretchedness, but there was no looseness in him anywhere. Everything was taut, shrieking with painful tension. If he leaned forward, if he leaned back, if he shifted the weight from the stirrups to the saddle, from the saddle to the stirrups, it was worse in another strained or bruised or blistered locality. He knew that his stirrups were too short but he would not dismount to change them; he doubted if he could get on again. “How many miles have we come, Estrada?” He knew they must be almost at their destination, but it would be a comfort to hear it from the Spaniard’s lips.

Estrada considered. “Oh, maybe seex mile, Señor. Maybe leetle more; maybe not so moach.”

“Then we have twelve still to go?”

“Well, we call eet eighteen mile from Dos Pozos, Señor. The time pass very queek now, Señor.”

But it seemed to the señor that no day in his life, even in the trenches, had ever been so long. It was hot, now, blazingly, glaringly hot; it was incredible that he had ever been shivering.

It would last for hours yet, this personal misery, this unendurable monotony; brown, twisting, turning bodies, tossing horns, wild eyes; ceaseless bellowing; dust—stifling, choking, blinding dust; the smell of sweating hides.

Shortly before eleven o’clock they took their lunches out of their pockets and ate, in the saddle, but at any rate they were stationary. The vaqueros held the herd, loosely, in a shallow valley where there was water for them. The neighboring ranchers rode up with Ginger and hoped heartily that Mr. Wolcott was all right after his spill, and they were cordial and kind. As a matter of fact, though he did not dream it, they were very well aware of his plight, and they were feeling a good deal of respect for his sporting endurance. The word had passed more than once, that morning—“Pretty game bird, that boy of Ginger’s!”—“Say, that feller’s not quittin’ any, is he?—sickly lookin’ as he is, too!” A couple of the older men had sharply criticized ’Rome Ojeda for putting a stranger and a guest on a horse like the red roan, and they wondered at Ginger’s permitting it.

The girl rode close to her lover, bright-eyed and glowing and spoke softly. “All right, Dean? Are you all right?”

He told her he was all right. (Could he sit like an old woman at a summer resort and catalogue the number and character of his aches and strains?) He swallowed one sandwich with difficulty; no one had thought to bring a drinking cup, and besides, the steers had hopelessly muddied the creek. Well, they would be at Santa Rita in about an hour.

Dean studied Ginger and Ojeda and the rest of them with angry and grudging admiration, their boundless endurance, their lazy confidence, their utter oneness with their mounts. Then, honestly disgusted with himself, he set to work to see the thing as it was, not in its interrelationship to his own unfitness. He told himself unsparingly that he was like the type of American who goes to a foreign land and talks disparagingly about the foreigners; his sense of balance came back. He, Dean Wolcott, was the failure here. These people were integral parts of the virile picture; they fitted strongly into the high brown hills and the blue mountains far beyond, into the wide dry valleys and the deep cañons: he belonged on the pavement, in the shadow of grave buildings, art galleries, quiet clubs, dignified offices. It was absurd to let himself be overcome with such a sense of bitterness and rebellion; suppose he didn’t and couldn’t make good here, according to their crude and simple standards? Could they make good in Boston, according to his? He was weary enough to begin to quote, bromidically to himself. East was east and west was west, and never the twain— Ah, but the twain did, occasionally, brilliantly, satisfyingly, as he and Ginger had met on Aleck’s bridge, the good, simple Aleck who had opened a window into a new world for him, in the trenches; who had given him Ginger.

He looked at her through the blazing and merciless sunlight, blinking as he had done on that first morning. She was in corduroy, worn, rubbed, dusty corduroy, as were almost all of the men. It was the only wear, in this lusty land, apparently. Corduroy; corde du roi: he smiled inwardly; once, long ago, wider waled and softer, and in delicate hues, kings had favored it; wine-red, emerald-green, royal-purple, it had glowed in courts.... Now it had come down in the world—drab, utilitarian ... dust-colored, dust-covered....

They reached the shipping point at last; there was a hectic half hour of getting the steers across the concrete highway; they advanced upon it warily, putting their noses down to it, snorting, pawing, holding back against the pressure of the herd behind them; then they went with a rush, over, up and down, wild, terrified; plunging, slipping. Some one told Dean, curtly, to tie his horse and go out on foot on to the highway to stop the automobiles. It was exquisite relief and exquisite torture to be walking; it was ludicrous to feel a sudden access of power and authority, holding up his hand like a traffic policeman, seeing the cars slam on their brakes and obey him, to have people lean out and ask him questions about the cattle. He was busily useful for thirty minutes; he was doing his job as well as any man of them. Then he was hauling himself unhappily into the saddle again, and they were off.

“Got to make time while we can,” said Ginger, “before we pick up the yearlings. Let’s go!”

She was away at a swinging lope, and Snort, without notification from his rider, went after her. In spite of shrieking muscles and weeping blisters, there was a keen sense of exultation about it; he had balance, equilibrium; he was able to conceive of liking this sort of thing, loving it ... dominion....

’Rome Ojeda passed them, drew his horse back on his haunches, waited for them. “Well, goin’ to make a hand with the yearlings, Mr. Wolcott? That was easy this mornin’; they’d been moved two—three times, those steers. These young-uns are different.”

“He sure is going to make a hand, ’Rome,” said Ginger, confidently. “It’ll take all of us, and then some!”

He saw, presently, why it would take all of them, why he must strive, in his awkward and unready fashion, to “make a hand.” The young steers were timid, suspicious, quarrelsome; stupid, quick to get into a blind and unreasoning panic—brown streaks of speed when they broke away from the bunch. Ginger was here, there, everywhere, swallow-swift on Diablo, darting after a fugitive—up a sheer bank, down a steep cañon, hanging low out of her saddle, Indian-fashion, to dodge a dangerous branch. Estrada had had to give up his duties as guide; he was in the thick of the job. Dean rode alone, and Snort, who, by some miracle of mercy, had been mild and tractable earlier in the day, now developed temper and temperament. Any sort of riding, after the long hours in the saddle, was active discomfort; riding Snort was torture.

A dog ran out of a ranch house and barked; the herd, which had settled down for half an hour into something like order and calm, started milling; round and round, like an eddying whirlpool, trying to turn, to start back; there was the sharp sound of a fence giving way—they were into the rancher’s orchard, they were into his field, and then over his hill—they were off and away.

Thundering hoofs; shouts, curses; Ginger went by him in a furious flash. “Dean! What’s the matter with you? Make a hand, can’t you? Make a hand!”

He made a hand, of sorts. He was part and parcel of the noisy, breathless chaos. He was never to know by what magic he remained in or near the saddle; certainly there was little left of power or volition in his racked and tired body. They were back at last upon the road; they were moving steadily forward again. ’Rome Ojeda came up to him. “Well, you sure are makin’ a hand,” he said, genially. Dust had settled thickly on his face; it made his smile whiter and more flashing than ever by contrast. “But we got’a watch ’em, still! They’re sure one wild bunch! They—” he broke off abruptly at Ginger’s cry—

“Dean! Dean! Head him off! Get him! Get him!”

A lone young steer had sneaked away from his side of the herd, from under his inattentive nose, and was galloping clumsily off across a field.

“’Atta boy!” said ’Rome Ojeda, loudly. “Go get ’em! Dig in your spurs! Ride ’em, cowboy!”

Doggedly, bitterly, he struck his spurs into his horse: they cleared the edge of the road at a bound, they were after the steer, up with him, beyond him, turning him: he was loping back to his fellows. Dean’s head felt light and strange; it had ceased to belong to his body.

“’Atta boy!” sang out Ojeda.

Estrada was smiling: Ginger was smiling, too. It was the first time she had smiled at him, in that fashion, all day. He was going to fall off of Snort presently, any moment now, simply because he couldn’t sit him any longer, but, meanwhile, he’d turned the steer. He was making a hand. By some convulsive and involuntary motion of his aching leg muscles he dug the spurs into Snort once more. Instantly the horse, snorting, trumpeting, had bolted with him. He didn’t care, especially; let him take him fast and far, away from the dissembled scorn of Ginger’s world, away from ’Rome Ojeda’s cool appraisal, away from Ginger. He would hold on a little longer; then he would let go. He would hold on; he couldn’t stop Snort—there was nothing left in his arms to stop him with—but he would hold on. Hold on ... hold on.... He thought, presently, that he must be saying it aloud, but it was Ojeda’s voice.

“Hold on! Hold on! I’m a-comin’! Hold on!” There was, on the surface, hearty reassurance in it; underneath, he knew, there was sneering scorn. He came up with him, nearer, nearer, exactly like a rescuer in a wild west film, came abreast of him, reached out, caught hold of Snort, pulled him to a standstill, turned back his head so that he could not buck. “He sure was goin’ wicked,” he said, gently. “He sure was goin’ wicked.”

If Ginger had seen it, she gave no sign. Estrada came back to ride beside him. “Ur-r-ra!” he said soothingly to the wild young steers. “Ur-rrr-ra! Ur-rr-ra!”

No one spoke to Dean Wolcott and he spoke to no one. He was too much occupied with his black and seething hatred of ’Rome Ojeda. He had been rescued, moving-picture style; moving-picture style he was hating his rival, his rival who had shown him up; he was wishing passionately that he might get even with him. He groped for his sense of humor, of fitness. He, Dean Wolcott, hating this cow-puncher, planning to be revenged upon him— His sense of humor was gone, lost, swallowed up in the dust. Now they were back again in the old monotony; brown, twisting, turning bodies, tossing horns, wild eyes; ceaseless bellowing; the stench of hot and sweating hides; dust; enveloping, smothering dust. Ginger, save for her scarlet neckerchief and her scarlet cheeks, was covered with dust, dust-covered, dust-colored; dust-brown. Corduroy; what was it that plants and animals took on from their surroundings? (Was it possible that he was beginning to forget again?) What was it? He had learned it when he was a child. It was gone, though. No! Protective resemblance! That was what it was, and that was what Ginger’s inevitable corduroy was; it was the color of the dust, the blinding, stifling dust of this parched land of summer; protective resemblance; dust; corduroy.

“Señor, we are here! We are arrive’ at home, Señor! Do you not weesh to get down?” It was Estrada, dismounted, standing beside him, and they were just below the veranda of the old adobe at Dos Pozos. “Señor, are you seek?”

He was not sick, he told him. (He was really not even suffering any longer; it was some time, now, since there had been any feeling at all in his arms or his legs.) “Yes, I wish to get down,” he said with dignity. He wanted to keep his dignity; ’Rome Ojeda was watching him, and Ginger was watching him, and the ranchers were watching him.

“Ees a long, hard day, Señor,” said Estrada, softly.

It was almost dusk now, and they had set out soon after dawn. “Oh—somewhat,” said Dean Wolcott, jauntily. “Rather long, of course, but very interesting.” Then he got down from his horse and stood for a moment, smiling uncertainly at the old Spaniard before he dropped to the warm earth for the second time that day. This time he had fainted.

CHAPTER VI

GINGER could understand bullets; she could understand a broken arm or leg or collar bone; a broken neck was entirely comprehensible to her. But she could not understand fainting; not, above all, a man’s fainting.

As soon as she was sure that he was not dead (she had heard of sudden death by heart failure) she was not aware of any feeling but deep chagrin. She did not follow when he was helped into the house and to his room by Estrada and ’Rome Ojeda; she sent old Manuela to him but she did not go herself. She went instead to her room and got out of her dust-grimed riding things and under a cold shower, and into one of the evening frocks which her Aunt Fan had made her buy. It was the scarlet one, and she piled her dark hair high and put in her carved ivory comb which had come down to her from her Valdés grandmother, and put a red flower behind her ear, and regarded herself in her small mirror with hearty and entire satisfaction. Not three times in her life had she ever dressed herself so painstakingly, or been so pleased with the result.

She went to the dining room and looked over the lavish supper and summoned in her guests, and after the riotous meal she started the dance with ’Rome Ojeda, and she was dancing with him for the fourth time in an hour when her aunt came into the room and called her.

Mrs. Featherstone told her that she was annoyed beyond words, but this seemed hardly a correct statement of her case, as she proceeded to emit sharp staccato showers of them. She called her niece among other things a heartless young savage and asked her what she thought of herself, eating and dancing and flirting like that, when her sweetheart was sick and suffering. Ginger, as a matter of fact, thought very well of herself that evening; she was as hard and bright as polished metal and no more tender. Presently—in the morning, perhaps—she would be wretchedly aware of the crudeness and cruelty of her attitude; now she was unyielding.

“Oh, does he want to see me?” She shrugged, and when she did that she was all Valdés. Dean Wolcott would have been reminded of a Goya painting, but Aunt Fan was too angry to be reminded of anything.

“Of course he wants to see you! Why shouldn’t he?”

“Did he ask you to bring me?” Her eyes were fathomless.

“No, he didn’t; he has too much pride, of course, but——”

“Pride!” said Ginger, bitterly. “I shouldn’t think he’d have much pride left, after to-day!”

“Now, that just shows how childish and ridiculous your standards are,” her aunt scolded. “Just because he happens not to be able to ride like a buckeroo—because he’s lived a different sort of life——”

“You don’t understand,” said Ginger. Her voice was adamant, too. “You don’t understand at all. Well—I’ll see him, for a minute.” She nodded to a hovering partner and went down the long corridor to Aleck’s room. Her aunt did not understand and she did not understand herself, all that was swaying her. It wasn’t alone that her lover had cut a sorry figure on horseback; it was that she, Ginger McVeagh, feudal lady of the range, princess of the blood in the eyes of her henchmen, had said, in effect—“There is no one among you all fit to be my mate; I must have a stranger, an easterner, some one higher and finer. Now I have found him! Wait until you see him—wait, and behold why I have chosen him.” They had waited and they had beheld, and now, she knew, for all their civility about it and their good-natured inquiries about him they were amused and amazed that she should have picked Dean Wolcott; they were aghast, as she was aghast.

Old Manuela was seated beside the bed but she rose at once and waddled out into the hall. She had been waiting and watching anxiously for her mistress for an hour, and she was sure, in her simple heart, that everything would be all right now.

The big room was only dimly lit, but she could see how shockingly white and ill he looked. Nevertheless, it roused in her no whispering gentleness this time, as it had done on Christmas Day; healthy young animal that she was—she had taken mumps and measles and chicken pox on her feet and never spent an hour of daylight in bed in all her life—it rather repelled her.

He opened his eyes in time to catch something of her mood in her expression and his own face stiffened. “You shouldn’t have bothered to come; I’m quite all right. Manuela and your aunt have looked after me.” Again, he blinked his tired eyes a little, as he had at his first sight of her, months ago; she was too bright, too vivid, too glowing.

It would not have been difficult to recapture the magic of the night before; if Ginger had dropped to her knees and kissed him as she had kissed him then—if Dean had managed a ragged sentence of regret for disappointing her—’Rome Ojeda would have waited long for his next dance. But instead, she stood looking down at his pallor and limpness and he lay looking up at her scarlet cheeks and her incredible vigor, and the moment got away from them. Presently, Ginger hoped with an edge in her voice that he’d have a good night, and Dean trusted, with ice in his, that she’d have a good time.

They did their best, in the week that followed. Dean was limping about by noon and Ginger staying at home to be with him, and they were gentle with each other, but it scared and sobered them to see that it wasn’t any use. It was as if they had been blowing bubbles together, lovely, shimmering iridescent ones, which had fallen and burst, and now they were trying to gather up the little damp spots which were left and make billowy, floating bubbles out of them again.

The truth was that they had arrived, simultaneously, at the third stage of their knowledge of each other. The first had been her breathless reverence for him, the messenger from her dead brother, the worn young visitant from another world, and his dazed recognition of her warm and vital beauty; next—when they had come together on Aleck’s bridge and in the fortnight following—she had made him into a saint and fairy prince and lover, and he—his senses smitten with loveliness, his returning strength and virility leaping to meet hers, leaning on it, mingling with it; now they were regarding each other quite clearly, with detachment. She saw a rather pale and precise young man, obviously out of drawing in her landscape, and he saw a highly colored and careless young woman who fitted so snugly into the rough western picture that he doubted the possibility of ever seeing her against a different background.

For a little space they were painstakingly gentle with each other; then, mysteriously, irritations sprang at them out of thin air. If it made Ginger impatient to find him clumsy and inept at the things of her world, it jarred increasingly upon him to have her say, “It sure does look like we’re going to have a scorcher,” to find her utterly blank about books and plays and music. In her milder moods it seemed as if he might beguile her into reading, but the question of where to begin appalled him. It was not what she should read, but what she should have read. It was all summed up in that one sentence—the empty lack which he found in her. In her swiftly melting moods of tenderness, when she gave up a ride to stay with him in the cool old adobe, closed against the hot air from eight o’clock in the morning, after the California tradition, she was singularly unsatisfactory as a companion, what time she was not in his arms. He discovered exactly why this was the case. She might pull off her jingling spurs and fling aside her Stetson and come into the big living room and sit down, and stay docilely for an hour or more—but her mind never came indoors. That was it. She might sit as softly as her Valdés great-grandmother in Sevilla, but her whole preoccupation was with the vigorous world outside.

He began to see, reluctantly, and with a chill sense of disaster, the impermanence of their relation. While he was kissing Ginger there were no questions and no problems, but life, he was cannily sure, could not consist wholly of kissing Ginger. The house of their love had been built upon the sands; shining, golden sands, but sands for all that, and he told himself grimly—able, now and then, to stand away from his situation and see it with a saving grain of humor—that the lasting structure of his affection must be built not only upon the rock, but upon Plymouth Rock. He found himself stressing his purity of speech, professing even more ignorance than was really his with regard to horses and cattle and crops; and Ginger, for her part, let the dresses she had bought in San Francisco hang idle in her closet and strode in to supper in her worn corduroy trousers and her brown shirt.

It needed, presently, only a small weight to tip the scales, and ’Rome Ojeda supplied it. It was a day of dry and dazzling heat, and they had planned a cool and quiet afternoon in the merciful sanctuary of the house. Ginger had brought out the old Spanish chests which had come to Dos Pozos with Rosalía Valdés and they were to revel in old Spanish laces and embroideries and jewelry, and puzzle over yellowed Spanish letters, and Dean was happier and more hopeful than he had been for days. Ginger had changed her riding things for a thin thing in yellow, and she was adorably gentle.

Then ’Rome Ojeda rode noisily up to the veranda and called them to come for a ride. He was on Pedro, leading Snort, and he said he would slip down to the corral and saddle Diablo while Ginger was changing her clothes.

It was astonishing to see how quickly the cool old room, dimly shaded, had changed into a field of hot battle. They were never able to remember subsequently, either of them, just what went before the final challenge; there must have been speeches ripe with bitterness on both sides before Dean heard himself saying slowly—like a person in a play—“Very well, then; if you go, this is the end.”

Ginger went, flinging herself into her riding suit and marching through the house with her Scotch chin held high and her Spanish mouth hard, slamming the door for good measure and springing into Snort’s saddle and loping furiously away, but she didn’t really believe it was the end. She had a very good time with ’Rome Ojeda and a wild and satisfying ride, and when she came back, four hours later, she was good-natured again. She wasn’t entirely ready to forgive Dean, but she was ready to consider forgiving him, and she went into the house to find him and tell him so.

She did not find him. She found, instead, an irate and voluble Aunt Fan who had been generating rage for hours.

“You needn’t call him,” she said. “He won’t hear you, not unless you can shout loud enough to make yourself heard at San Luis Obispo. I dare say you could, if you put your mind to it—it’s simply horrible, the way you yell to the men in the corral. Tomboys are all right and very fetching, but let me tell you, Ginger McVeagh, you’ve grown up, and tom-women aren’t cunning at all, and if you can’t key down and act more like a lady and less like a——”

“San Luis?” Ginger stood still and looked at her. She did not seem to have heard anything else beside the name of the town. “San Luis? What’s he doing there?”

“He’s catching the Coaster to Los Angeles to-night; that’s what he’s doing there, Ginger McVeagh. And to-morrow morning he’ll be on his way to Boston, and why he hasn’t gone before, heaven only knows—I don’t. Now if you’ve got anything in your head but ’Rome Ojeda and long-horned steers and alfalfa crops you’ll stop staring at me and get——”

“Did he say anything?” she wanted to know in a mild and wondering voice. “What did he say, Aunt Fan?”

“He said, ‘Tell her I’ve gone; she will understand,’ and he was white as a sheet. If ever anybody in this world looked like death on a pale horse, that boy did when he walked out of this house. He telephoned into town for a machine and he was packed before it got here, and he shook hands with me and with Manuela and Ling and out he marched, and if you want my opinion, Ginger McVeagh——”

Ginger did not in the least want her opinion; she wanted Dean Wolcott, sharply and imperatively. She walked out of the corridor and into the living room where they had begun the afternoon together. The old chests were there still, and the table was spread with a litter of ancient treasures. She picked up a fichu of yellowed lace and put it down again, and a fan with sticks of carved ivory and looked at it gravely, as if she had never seen it before. It had surprised her and worried her a little to find him so warmly interested in things of that sort; she would have preferred having him clumsily ignorant about them, good-humoredly tolerant. Now, she realized, it would never need to worry her again. She stood staring down at the beautiful old things; they looked mellow and very wise. Three generations of Valdés women had used them before her, but she knew, suddenly, that she hated them and never wanted to see them again. She began to stuff them hastily back into the carved chests of dark and satiny wood, and called to Manuela to put them away in the storeroom.

Her aunt followed her before she had finished. “If you hurry,” she said urgently, “if you get out the car this minute and fly, you can catch him at San Luis!”

Ginger did not answer her for an instant. Then she said, deliberately and without passion, “I don’t want to catch him at San Luis, Aunt Fan. I don’t want to catch him—anywhere.”

Mrs. Featherstone went home to San Francisco the next day, thoroughly out of temper with her niece and heartily willing to wash her hands of her. She told her, at parting, that she had missed the one golden and handsome opportunity of her life which was far beyond her deserts, and that she would never have another such and it served her right; she sincerely hoped she would marry ’Rome Ojeda and have seven wild children, all born with spurs on. It sounded like the laying on of a robust old-fashioned curse.

Ginger let Estrada drive her aunt in to town to take her train. She was very tired of being berated; she didn’t want to talk about Dean Wolcott any more and she didn’t want to think about him any more. She went steadily about the business of Dos Pozos in the days that followed; old Manuela wiped her eyes furtively and burned three candles to the saint of the impossible, and Estrada was gravely regretful.

“I miss very much that young señor,” he said to his silent mistress. “That is a very fine gentleman, Señorita.”

There were many inquiries for him at first among her rancher neighbors, but after she had said—“He has gone. No, he is not coming back,” to a few of them, the word went over the whole vicinity; they stopped asking for him, and they were immensely cordial and approving in their manner to Ginger.

’Rome Ojeda showed less restraint; he was openly triumphant about it. “Snappy work,” he said to Ginger, with his flashing grin. “I guess maybe we didn’t show him up, between us, me’n Snort! Say, I’m a-goin’ to get that hawse a medal! He sure did spill the Boston beans!”

Ginger listened to him at first without comment, but she said, presently, “’Rome, he was Aleck’s friend; I’m never going to forget that.”

“Lord,” said ’Rome Ojeda, comfortably, “I guess a feller’d bunk in with ’most anybody, over there.” But he stopped talking about Dean Wolcott and he did not immediately urge his own claims. There was something about Ginger, about her looks and her voice, that he didn’t quite understand. He told himself that he’d better just let things loaf along, “as was,” for the present.

Dr. Gurney Mayfield made a detour to take in Dos Pozos on his motor trip next month. He was greatly surprised and disappointed not to find his young friend, Dean Wolcott.