Chapter 11

"Kitty," I whispered, pointing to the house, "draw _that_, and send it to your mother. She will never ask again why you didn't care to live there."

"That has nothing to do with it," she retorted coldly. "I would have lived there, or anywhere, with the right person."

There was no such person. I couldn't help saying it.

She is very handsome when she looks down, proud and a trifle sullen when you "touch her on the raw," as the men say.

"But there _is_ such a person, Kitty," I ventured. I had ventured, it seemed, too far.

"You are my hostess. Your house is my only home. Don't be his accomplice!" I thought it rather well said.

Now that woman's clothes were hanging on the line (and very common-looking clothes they were), so she could not have been a casual guest. Moreover, she was pacing the hard ground in front of the house, and staring at us with a truculent yet uneasy air. Curiosity was strong, and a sort of anger possessed me against the place and everybody connected with it.

When Cecil came out, looking very hot and confused for him, who is always so fresh and gay, I inquired, rather shortly perhaps, "Who is your visitor?"

"I have no visitor," he answered me, as cool as you please. But there was a protest in his eye. I was determined not to spare him or any of the Harshaws.

"Your housekeeper, then?"

"I have no housekeeper."

"Who is the lady stopping at your house?"

"I have no house."

"Your cousin's house, then?"

"If you refer to the person I was talking to--she is my cousin's housekeeper, I suppose."

Tom gave me a look, and I thought it time to let the subject drop. This was in Kitty's presence, though apparently she neither saw nor heard. I walked on ahead of the wagon, so angry that I was almost sick. Instantly Harshaw joined me, with a much nicer, brighter look upon his face.

"Mrs. Daly," he said, "I want to beg your pardon. I could not answer your question before Miss Comyn. The lady, as you were pleased to call her, is Mrs. Harshaw, _my cousin_--Micky's wife, you understand."

"Since when?"

"Day before yesterday, she tells me. They were married at Bliss."

"Well, I should say it was 'Bliss' for Kitty Comyn that _she_ is not Mrs. Harshaw--too," I was about to add, but that would be going rather far. "And what did you want to bring that girl over here for?"

"Mrs. Daly, I have told you,--I thought she loved him."

"And what of his love for her?"

"Good heavens! you don't suppose Micky cares for that old thing he has married! _That_ was what I was trying to save him from. He'd have had to be the deuce of a lot worse than he is to deserve that."

Had it occurred to him, I put it to Cecil Harshaw, to ask himself what the saving of his precious cousin might have cost the girl who was to have been offered up to that end?

"You leave out one small feature of the case," said Harshaw, with a sick and burning look that made me drop my eyes, old woman as I am. "I love her myself so well that, by Heaven! if she had wanted Micky or any other man, she should have had him, if that was what her heart was set upon. But I didn't believe it was. I wanted her to know the truth, and, hang it! I couldn't write it to her. I couldn't peach on Micky; but I wanted to smash things. I wanted something to happen. Maybe I didn't do the right thing, but I had to do something."

I couldn't tell him just what I thought of him at that moment, but I did say to him that he had some very simple ideas for an end-of-the-century young Englishman. At which he smiled sweetly, and said it was one of his simple ideas that Kitty need not be informed who or what her successor was, or how promptly she had been succeeded.

"But just now you said you wanted her to know the truth."

"Not the whole truth. Great Scott! she knows enough. No need to rub it in."

"She knows just enough about this to misunderstand, perhaps. In justice to yourself--she heard you beating about the bush--do you want her to misunderstand you?"

"Oh, hang me! I don't expect her to understand me, or even tolerate me, yet. Mine is a waiting race, Mrs. Daly."

"Very well; you can wait," I said. "But news like this will not wait. She will be obliged to hear it; you don't know how or where she may hear it. Better let her hear it first in as decent a way as possible."

"But there is no decent way. How can I explain to you, or you to her, such a measly affair as this? It began with a question of money he owed that woman on the ranch. He bought it of her,--and a cruel bad bargain it was,--and he never could make his last payment. She has threatened him, and played the fool with him when he'd let her, and bored him no end. His governor would have helped him out; but, you see, Micky has been a rather expensive boy, and he has given the old gentleman to understand that the place is paid for,--to account for money sent him at various times for that ostensible purpose,--and on that basis the bargain was struck, between our governors, for my interest in the ranch. My father bought me in, on a clear title, as Uncle George represented it, in perfect good faith. I've never said a word, on the old gentleman's account; and Micky has never dared undeceive his father, who is the soul of honor in business, as in everything else. I am sorry to bore you with family affairs; but it's rather rum the way Micky's fate has caught up with him, through his one weakness of laziness, and perhaps lying a little, when he was obliged to. How this affair came about so suddenly I can't say. Didn't like to ask her too many questions; and Micky, poor devil, faded from view directly he saw us coming. But at a venture: she had heard he was going to be married, and came down here to make trouble when he should arrive with his bride; but he came back alone, disgusted with life, and found her here. It was easier to marry her than--pay her, we'll say. She has been something over-generous, perhaps. She would rather have had him, any time, than her money, and now was the time. She took advantage of a weak moment."

"A weak and a spiteful moment," I kindly added. "Now if he hastens the news to England, and the Percifers hear of it in New York, how pleasant for Kitty to have all her friends hear that _he_ is married and _she_ is not!"

"Great Heavens!" said the young fellow, "if she would let me hasten the news--that she is married to me!"

"Why don't you appeal to her pride and her spirit now while they are in the dust? Why do you bother with sentiment now?"

I liked him so much at that moment that I would have had him have Kitty, no matter what way he got her.

"Yes," he said; "why not take advantage of her, as everybody else has done?"

"Some people's scrupulousness comes rather late," I said.

"To those who don't understand," he had the brazenness to say. "What is done is done. It's a rough beginning--awfully rough on her. The end must atone somehow. If I don't win her I shall be punished enough; but if I do, it will be because she loves me. And pray God"--He stopped, with that look. It is a number of years since a young man has looked at me in that way, but a woman does not forget.

It was rather difficult telling to Kitty the story of her old lover's marriage, as I took it on myself to do. Not that she winced perceptibly; but I fear she has taken the thing home, and is dwelling on it--certain features of it--in a way that can do no good. From a word she lets slip now and then, I gather that she is brooding over that fancy of hers that Cecil Harshaw offered himself by way of reparation, as she was falling between two stools,--her own home and her lover's,--to save her from the ground. As since that rainy night in the wagon she has never distinctly referred to this theory of his conduct, I have no excuse for bringing it up, even to attack it. In fact, I dare not; she is in too complicated a mood. And, after all, why should I want her to marry either of them? Why should the "hungry generations" tread her down? She is nice enough to stay as she is.

Another thing happened on our way here which may perversely have helped to confirm her in this pretty notion of Harshaw's disinterestedness.

At a place by the river where the current is bad (there are many such places, and, in fact, the whole of the Snake River is a perfect hoodoo) Harshaw stopped one day to drink. The wagon had struck a streak of heavy sand, and we were all walking. We stood and watched him, because he drank with such deep enjoyment, stooping bareheaded on his hands and knees, and putting his hot face to the water. Suddenly he made a clutch at his breast pocket: his Norfolk jacket was unbuttoned. He had lost something, and the river had got it. He ran along the bank, trying to recover it with a stick, and, not succeeding, he plopped in just as he was, with his boots on. We saw him drop into deep water and swim for it, a little black object, which he caught, and held in his teeth. Then he turned his face to the shore; and precious near he came to never reaching it! We women had been looking on, smiling, like idiot dolls, till we saw Tom racing down the bank, throwing off his coat as he ran. Then we took a sort of dumb fright, and tried to follow; but it was all over in a second, before we saw it, still less realized it--his struggle, swimming for dear life, and not gaining an inch; the stick held out to him in the nick of time, just as he passed a spot where the beast of a current that had him swooped inshore.

I am sorry to say that my husband's first words to the man he may be said to have saved from death were, "You young fool, what did you do that for?"

"For this," Harshaw panted, slapping his wet breast.

"For a pocket-book! Great Sign! What had you in it? I wouldn't have done that for the whole of the Snake River valley."

"Nor I," laughed Harshaw.

"Nor the Bruneau to boot."

"Nor I."

"What did you do it for, then?"

"For this," Harshaw repeated.

"For a piece of pasteboard with a girl's face on it, or some such toy, I'll be sworn!"

Harshaw did not deny the soft impeachment.

"I didn't know you had a girl, Harshaw," Tom began seductively.

"Well, I haven't, you know," said Harshaw. "There was one I wanted badly enough, a few years ago," he added with engaging frankness.

"When was it you first began to pine for her? About the period of second dentition?"

"Oh, betimes; and betimes I was disappointed."

"Well, unless it was for the girl herself, I'd keep out of that Snake River," my husband advised.

Kitty's face wore a slightly strained expression of perfect vacancy.

"Do _you_ know who Harshaw's 'girl' was?" I asked her the other night, as we were undressing,--without an idea that she wouldn't see where the joke came in. She was standing, with her hair down, between the canvas curtains of our tent. It looks straight out toward the Sand Springs Fall, and Kitty worships there awhile every night before she goes to bed.

"No," she said. "I was never much with Cecil Harshaw. It is the families that have always known each other." The simple child! She hadn't understood him, or would she not understand? Which was it? I can't make out whether she is really simple or not. She is too clever to be so very simple; yet the cleverness of a young girl's mind, centred on a few ideas, is mainly in spots. But now I think she has brought this incident to bear upon that precious theory of hers, that Harshaw offered himself from a sense of duty. Great good may it do her!

The Sand Springs Fall, a perfect gem, is directly opposite our camp, facing west across the lagoon. We can feast our eyes upon it at all hours of the day and night. Tom has told Kitty, in the way of business, that he has no use for that fall. She may draw it or not, as she likes. She does draw it; she draws it, and water-colors it, and chalks it in colored crayons, and India-inks it, loading on the Chinese white; and she charcoals it, in moonlight effects, on a gray-blue paper. But do it whatever way she will, she never can do it.

"Oh, you exquisite, hopeless thing! Why can't I let you alone!" she cries; "and why can't you let _me_ alone!"

"It is rather hard, the way the thing doubles up on you," says Tom. "The real fall, right side up, is bad enough; but when it comes to the reflection of it, standing on its head in the lagoon, I should lie right down myself. I wouldn't pull another pound."

("_Lay_ down," he said; but I thought you wouldn't stand it. Tom would never spoil a cherished bit of dialect because of shocking anybody with his grammar.)

Kitty throws herself back in the dry salt-grass with which the whole of our little peninsula is bedded. The willows and brakes are our curtains, through which the rising moon looks in at us, and the setting sun; the sun rises long before we see him, above the dark-blue mountains beyond the shore.

"Won't somebody repeat

'There is sweet music here that softlier lies?'"

Kitty asks, letting her eyelashes fall on her sun-flushed cheeks. Her face, as I saw it, sitting behind her in the grass, was so pretty--upside down like the reflection of the waterfall, its colors all the more wonderfully blended.

We did not all speak at once. Then Harshaw said, to break the silence, "I will read it to you, if you don't mind."

"Oh, have you the book?" Kitty asked in surprise.

He went to his tent and returned with _a_ book, and sitting on the grass where she could hear but could not see him, he began. I trembled for him; but before he had got to the second stanza I was relieved: he could read aloud.

"Now _there_ is a man one could live on a Snake River ranch with," I felt like saying to Kitty. Not that I am sure that I want her to.

When he had finished,

"O rest ye, brother mariners; we will not wander more!"

Tom remarked, after a suitable silence, that it was all well enough for Harshaw, who would be in London in six weeks, to say, "We will not wander more!" But how about the rest of us?

Kitty sat straight up at that.

"Will Mr. Harshaw be in London six weeks from now?" The question was almost a cry.

"Will you?" she demanded, turning upon him as if this was the last injury he could do her.

"I suppose so," he said.

"And you will see my mother, and all of them?"

"I think so--if you wish."

She rose up, as if she could bear no more. Harshaw waited an instant, and then followed her; but she motioned him back, and went away to have it out with herself alone.

I took up the book Harshaw had left on the grass. It was "Copp's Manual"--"For the use of Prospectors," etc.

* * * * *

After all, it is not so sure that Harshaw will go to London. There has been an engineer on the ground since last summer, when all this water was free. He has located a vast deal of it, perhaps the whole. Tom says he can hold only just as much as he can use; I hope there will be no difference of opinion on that point. There generally is a difference of opinion on points of location when the thing located is proved to have any value. The prior locator has gone East, they tell us at the ranch, on a business visit, presumably to raise capital for his scheme; which, as I understand it, is to force the water of the springs up on the dry plains above, for irrigation (the fetich of the country), by means of a pneumatic pumping arrangement. His ladders and pipes, and all his hopeful apparatus, are clinging now like cobwebs to the face of the bluff, against that flashing, creaming broadside of the springs at their greatest height and fall. I was pitying the poor man and his folly, but Tom says the plan is perfectly feasible.

The wall of the river cañon is built up in stories of basalt rock, each story defined by a horizontal fissure, out of which these mysterious waters gush, white and cold, taking glorious colors in the sunlight from the rich under-painting of the rock. There is an awfulness about it, too, as if that sheer front of rock were the retaining-wall of a reservoir as deep as the bluffs are high, which had sprung a leak in a thousand places, and might the next instant burst and ingulf the lagoon, and wipe out the pretty island between itself and the river. Winter and summer the volume of water never varies, and the rate of discharge is always the same, and the water is never cold, though I have just said it is. It looks cold until the rocks warm it with their gemlike tints, like a bride's jewels gleaming through her veil. Back of the bluffs, where it might be supposed to come from, there is nothing for a hundred miles but drought and desert plains. I don't care for any of their theories concerning its source. It is better as it is--the miracle of the smitten rock.

You can fancy what wild presumption it must seem that a mere man should think to reverse those torrents and make them climb the bluff or cram them into an iron pipe and send them like paid laborers to hoist and pump and grind, and light the streets at Silver City, a hundred miles away. And how the cataracts will shout while these two pigmies compare their rival claims to ownership--in a force that with one stroke could lay them as flat as last year's leaves in the bottom of a mill-race!

The particular fall my schemer has located for his own--other claims to be discussed hereafter--is called the "Snow Bank." He says he doesn't want the earth: this one cataract is enough for him. To look at the whole frontage of the springs and listen to their roar, one would think there might be water enough for them both, poor children! Hardly what you'd call two bites of a cherry!

If the springs were the half of a broken diamond bracelet, the Snow Bank would be its brightest gem, lying separate in the case--perhaps the one that was the clasp. It is half hidden by the shoulder of a great barren bluff which, at a certain angle of the sun, throws a blue shadow over it. At other times the fall is almost too bright in its foaming whiteness for the eye to endure.

Kitty is painting it with this shadow half across it; but the light shines upon it at its source. Tom is doubtful if she is showing the fall to the best advantage for his purpose, but he is obliging enough to let the artist try it in her own way first.

"Go up there," she says, "and stand at the head of the spring, if you want to show by comparison how big it is, or how small you are."

He goes, and gets in position, and Kitty makes some pencil-marks on the margin of her sketch. Then she waves her hands to tell him, across the shouting current, that she is done with him. She has been so quick that he thinks he must have mistaken her gesture. Then Harshaw makes the train-conductor's signal for the train to move on.

"You see," she says to Harshaw and me, who are looking over her shoulder, "_that_ would be the size of him in my sketch." She points to the marginal pencil-mark, which is not longer than the nib of a stub-pen. "I can't make a little black dot like that look like a man."

"In this particular sketch, for his purpose, he'd rather look like a dot than a man, I dare say," said Harshaw.

"Well, shall I put him in? I can make a note of it on the margin: 'This black dot is Mr. Daly, standing at the spring-head. He is six feet'"--

"But he isn't, you know," Harshaw says. "He's five feet ten--if he's that."

"Ten and a half," I hasten to amend.

Our lunch that day had been left in the boat. We went down and ate it under the mountain birches at a spot where the Snow Bank empties into the lagoon--not _our_ lagoon, as we called it, between our camp and the lovely Sand Springs Fall, but the upper one, made by the springs themselves, before their waters reach the river. In front of us, half embraced by the lagoon and half by the river, lay a little island-ranch of about ten acres, not cut up in crops, but all over green in pasture. A small cabin, propping up a large hop-vine, showed against a mass of birch and cottonwood on the river side of the island.

"What a place for a honeymoon!" said I.

"There is material there for half of a honeymoon," said Tom--"not bad material, either."

"Oh, yes," I said; "we have seen her--that is, we have seen her sunbonnet."

"Kitty, you've got a rival," I exclaimed: for there in the sunny centre of the island, planted with obvious design right in front of the Snow Bank, _our_ Snow Bank, was an artist's big white umbrella.

"Why should I not have, in a place like this?" she said. "If the schemers arrive by twos, why not two of my modest craft? _We_ shall leave it as we find it; we don't intend to carry it away in our pockets." She stopped, and blushed disdainfully. "I forgot," she murmured, "my own mercenary designs."

"I have not heard of these mercenary designs of yours. What are they, may I ask?" Harshaw had turned on his side on the grass, and half rose on one elbow as he looked at her.

"That is strange," mocked Kitty, with supreme coldness. "You have always been so interested in my affairs!"

"I always shall be," he replied seriously, with supreme gentleness.

"I ought to be so grateful."

"But unfortunately you are not."

"I should be grateful--if you would move a little farther to the right, if you please. That young person in the pink sunbonnet is coming down to water her horses again."

Harshaw calmly took himself out of her way altogether, lighted his pipe, and went down close to the water, and sat there on a stone, and presently, as we could hear, entered into easy conversation with the pink sunbonnet, the face of which leaned toward him over the pony's neck as he stooped to drink. The splashed waters became still, and softly the whole picture--pink sunbonnet, clay-bank pony, pale and shivery willows, and deep blue sky--developed on the negative of the clear lagoon.

There was no use in saying how pretty it was, so we resorted to the other note, of disparagement. I remarked that I should not think a pink sunbonnet would be ravishingly becoming to the average Snake River complexion, as I had seen it.

"_That_ sunbonnet is becoming, you bet!" Tom remarked. "Wait till you see the face inside it."

"Have you seen it?"

"Quite frequently. Do you think Harshaw would sit there talking with her, as he does by the hour, if that sunbonnet was not becoming?"

"As he does by the hour! And why have we not heard of her before?" I requested to be told.

"Business, my dear. She is a feature of the scheme--quite an important one. She represents the hitch which is sure to develop early in the history of every live enterprise."

"Indeed?" I said. And if Harshaw talked with her on business, I didn't see what his talking had to do with the face inside her bonnet.

"I don't say that it's always on business," Tom threw in significantly.

"Who is the lady in the pink sunbonnet, and what is your business with her?" I demanded.

"I question the propriety of speaking of her in just that tone," said Tom, "inasmuch as she happens to be a lady--somewhat off the conventional lines. She waters her own stock and milks her own cow, because the old Indian girl who lives with her is laid up at present with a fever. Her father was an artist--one of the great unappreciated"--

"So that was her father painting the Snow Bank?" I interrupted.

"Her father is dead, my dear, as you would have learned if you had listened to my story. But he lived here a good many years before he died. He had made a queer marriage, old man Decker tells me, and quarreled with the world on account of it. He came here with his disputed bride. She was somebody else's wife first, I believe, and there was a trifling informality about the matrimonial exchange; but it came out all right. They both died, and a sweeter, fresher little thing than the daughter! Adamant, though--bed-rock, so far as we are concerned."

"What do you want that belongs to her?" I asked. "Her island, perhaps?"