Part 15

His name was Hayes Tripler, but the other two guides generally called him "Slick" and they looked up to him, for he had ridden No Name, the man-killer, at last year's Pendleton Round-up and hoped this year to be in the bulldogging money over the line at Calgary. Within his limitations he was an exceedingly competent person and given to deporting himself accordingly.

At this present moment he appeared especially well pleased with his own self-cast horoscope. There was a kind of proud proprietary aura all about him.

The watcher inside the tent saw a caressing arm slip from about his daughter's body and he caught the sounds but did not make out the sense of words that passed between them. Then the two silhouettes swung apart and the boy laughed contentedly and flung an arm aloft in a parting salute and began singing a catch as he went teetering off toward the spot where his mates of the outfit already were making the low tilt of a tarpaulin roof above them pulse to some very sincere snoring. But before she betook herself to quarters, the girl bided for a long minute on the verge of the cliff and looked off and away into the studded void beyond her. She seemed to be checking up on the minor stars to see whether any of them were missing. But her father knew better than that. The sidewise cant of her head showed that one of the things she did was to listen while her late companion served due notice on the night to such effect as this:

"You monkey with my Lulu, Tell you what I'll do: Take out a gun and shoot you, And carve you plenty too!"

Mr. Gatling drew the flaps together in an abstracted way and _mmphed_ several times.

"Pretty dog-gone spry-looking young geezer at that," he remarked absently. "Yes, sir, pretty spry-looking."

"Who?"

"Him."

"You actually mean that cowboy?"

"None other than which."

"Oh, Hector! That--that vulgarian, that country bumpkin, that clodhopper!"

"Now hold on there, Romola. Let's try to be just even if we are prejudiced. All the clods that kid ever hopped you could put 'em in your eye without interfering with your eyesight. He's no farm-hand; he's a cow-hand or was before he got this job of steering tourists around through these mountains--and that's a very different thing, I take it. And what he knows he knows blame' well. I wish I could mingle in with a horse the way he does. When he gets in a saddle he's riveted there but I only come loose and work out of the socket. And I'd give about five years off my life to be able to handle a trout-rod like he can. I claim that in his departments he's a fairly high-grade proposition. He's aware of it, too, but I don't so much blame him for that, either. If you don't think well of yourself who else is going to?"

"Why, Hector Gatling, I believe you're really--but no, you couldn't be! Look at the difference in their stations! Look at their different environments! Look at their different view-points!"

"I'm looking--just as hard as you are. You don't get what I'm driving at. I wouldn't fancy having this boy for a son-in-law any more than you would--although at that I'm not saying I couldn't maybe make some use of him in another capacity. Still, you needn't mind worrying so much about their respective stations in life. I didn't have any station in life to start from myself--it was a whistling-post. And yet I've managed to stagger along fairly well. I'd a heap rather see Shirley tied up to pretty near any decent, ambitious, self-respecting young cuss that came along than to have her fall for one of those plush-headed lounge-lizards that keep hanging round her back home. I know the breed. In my day they used to be guitar-pickers--and some of 'em played a snappy game of Kelly pool. Now they're Charleston dancers and the only place most of 'em carry any weight is on the hip.

"But that's not the point. The point is that if Shirley fell for this party she'd probably be a mighty regretful young female when the bloom began to rub off the peach. They haven't been raised to talk the same language--that's the trouble. I don't want her to make a mistake that'll gum up her life before it's fairly started; don't want that happening any more than you do. I don't want her to have a husband that she's liable later on to be ashamed to show him off before the majority of her friends, or anyhow one that she'd maybe have to go around making excuses for the way he handled his knife and fork in company; or something. Right now, the fix she's in, she's probably saying to herself that she could be perfectly satisfied to settle down in a cabin somewhere out here and wet-nurse a lot of calves for the next forty or fifty years. But that's only her heart talking, not her head. After a while she'd get to brooding on Palm Beach.

"But if she's set her mind--and you know how stubborn she is when she gets her mind set--thank Heavens she didn't get that from my side of the family!--I say, if she's set her mind on him, Heavens above only knows what's going to happen. She's bewitched, she's hypnotized; it's this free-and-easy Western life that's fascinated her. I can't believe she's in love with him!"

"Well, I don't know. Maybe she's in love with a two-gallon hat and a pair of cowboy pants with silver dewdabs down the sides, or then again on the other hand maybe it's the real thing with her, or a close imitation of it. That's for us to find out if we can."

"I won't believe it. She's distracted, she's glamoured, she's--"

"All right, then, let's get her unglammed."

"But how?"

"Well, for one thing, by not rushing in and interfering with her little dream. By not letting either one of 'em see how anxious we are over this thing. By remaining as calm, cool and collected as we can."

"And in the meanwhile?"

"Well, in the meanwhile I, for one, am going to tear off a few winks. I hurt all over and there's quite a lot of me measured that way--all over."

"You can go to sleep with that--that dreadful thought hanging over us?"

"I can and I will. Watch me for about another minute and you'll see me doing it." He settled himself on his air mattress and drew the blankets over him.

"Well, I know I won't close my eyes this whole night through."

"I've heard you say that before and then had to shake you like a dish towel in the morning to make you snap out of it."

"This time I won't. I don't want to sleep. I want to plan something since you won't help me. Hector"--she reached across from her side and plucked at his top coverlid--"Hector, listen, I've got an idea--let's break off this trip tomorrow. Let's bundle right up and start back East. You can say you've got a message calling you back to the office--say you forgot something important, say--"

"And tip our hands just at the most critical time! We will not!... Mmph!" With a drowsy scornfulness he added this. Ten seconds later he _mmphed_ again, then again. But the third one merged into a snore.

Undeniably Mr. Hector Gatling could be one of the most aggravating persons on earth when he set out to be. Any husband can.

* * * * *

Speaking with regard to the ripening effect of summer nights upon the spirits of receptive and impressionable youth, Mr. Gatling had listed the cumulative possibilities of three moonlit ones hand-running. Specifically he had not included in his perilous category those languishing soft gloamings and those explosive sunrises and those long lazy mornings when the sun baked resiny perfumes out of the cedars, and the unseen heart-broken little bird that the mountaineers call the lonesome bird sang his shy lament in the thickets; nor had he mentioned slow journeys through deep defiles where the ferns grew with a tropical luxuriance out of the cinders of old forest-fires and, in a paradoxical defiance, shook their fronds toward the never-melting snow-caps on the _sierras_ across the cañon; nor yet the fordings of tumbling streams when it might seem expedient on the part of a thoughtful young man to push up alongside and steady a young equestrian of the opposite sex while her horse's hoofs fumbled over the slick, drowned boulders. But vaguely he had lumped all these contingencies.

Three more nights of moon it was with three noble days of pleasant adventuring in between; and on the late afternoon of the third day when camp was being made beside a river which mostly was rapids, Miss Shirley Gatling sought out her father in a secluded spot somewhat apart from the rest. It was in the nature of a rendezvous, she having told him a little earlier that presently she desired to have speech with him. Only, her way of putting it had been different.

"Harken, O most revered Drawing Account," she said, dropping back on a broad place in the trail to be near him. "If you can spare the time for being saddle-sore I want to give you an earful as soon as this procession, as of even date, breaks up. You find a quiet retreat away from the flock and wait there until I find you, savvy?"

So now he was waiting, and from yonder she came toward him, stepping lightly, swinging forward from her hips with a sort of impudent freedom of movement; and to his father's eyes she never had seemed more graceful or more delectable or more independent-looking.

"Dad," she began, without preamble, and meeting him eye to eye, "in me you behold a Sabine woman. I'm bespoken."

"Mmph," he answered, and the answer might be interpreted, by a person who knew him, in any one of half a dozen ways.

"Such is the case," she went on, quite unafraid. "That caveman over there in the blue shirt"--she pointed--"he's the nominee. We're engaged."

"I can't plead surprise, kid," he stated, taking on for the moment her bantering tone. "The report that you two had come to a sort of understanding has been in active circulation on this reservation for the past forty-eight hours or so--maybe longer."

Her eyebrows went up.

"I don't get you," she said. "Who circulated it?"

"You did, for one," he told her. "And he did, for another. I may be failing, what with increasing age and all, but I'm not more than half blind yet. Have you been to your mother with this piece of news?"

"I came to you first. I--I"--for the first time she faltered an instant--"I figured you might be able to get the correct slant a little quicker than she would. This is only the curtain-raiser. I'm saving the big scene with the melodramatic touches for her. I have a feeling that she may be just a trifle difficult. So I picked on something easy to begin with."

"I see," he said. "Kind of an undress rehearsal, eh?" He held her off at arm's length from him, studying her face hungrily. "But what's the reason your young man didn't come along with you or ahead of you, in fact? In my time it generally was the young man that brought the message to Garcia."

"He wanted to come--he wasn't scared. I wouldn't let him. I told him I'd been knowing you longer than he had and I could handle the job better by myself. Well, that's your cue. What's it going to be, daddy--the glad hand of approval and the parental bless you, my children, bless you, or a little line of that go-forth-ungrateful-hussy-and-never-darken-my-doors-again stuff? Only, we're a trifle shy on doors around here."

He drew her to him and spoke downward at the top of her cropped head, she snuggling her face with a quick nervous little jerk against his wool-clad breast.

"Baby," he said, "when all's said and done, the whole thing's up to you, way I look at it. I don't suppose there ever was a man who really loved his daughter but what he figured that, taking one thing with another, she was too good for any man on earth. No matter who the lucky candidate is he says to himself: 'Well, if I have to have a son-in-law I suppose maybe you'll do, but alongside of her you're a total loss.' That's what any father who's worth his salt is bound to think. And that's what I'd still think no matter who you picked out. I'm not saying now what sort of a husband I'd try to pick out for you if the choice had been left to me. I'd probably want to keep you an old maid so's I could have you around and then I'd secretly despise myself for doing it, too. What I'm saying is this: If you're certain you know your own mind and if you've decided that this boy is the boy you want, why what more is there for me to do except maybe to ask you just one or two small questions?"

"Shoot!" she bade, without looking up, but her arms hugged him a little tighter. "Probably one of the nicest old meal-tickets in the world," she added, confidentially addressing the top buttonhole of his sweater.

"Has it by any chance entered into your calculations at this early stage of the game, how you are going to live--you two? Or where? Or, if I may be so bold, what on?"

"That's easy," she said, and now she was peering up at him through a tousled short forelock. "You're going to set us up on a place out here somewhere--a ranch. We're going to raise beef. He knows about beef. And I'm going to learn. I aim to be the leading lady beefer of the Imperial Northwest before I'm done."

"Whose notion was that?" His voice had sharpened the least bit.

"Mine, of course. He doesn't know anything about it. His idea is that we start in on what he can earn. But my idea is that we start in on a few of the simoleons that have already been earned--by you. And that's the idea that's going to prevail."

"Lucky I brought a fountain pen and a check-book along," he said. "Nothing like being prepared for these sudden emergencies. Still, I take it there's no great rush. Now, I tell you what: You run along and locate your mother and get _that_ over with. She knows how I stand--we've been discussing this little affair our own selves."

"Oh," she said. "Oh, you have?" She seemed disappointed somehow--disappointed and slightly puzzled.

"Oh yes, several times. And on your way kindly whisper to the young man that I'm lurking right here behind these rocks ready to have a few words with him--if he can spare the time."

"Righto!" She reached up and kissed him and went swinging away, suspecting nothing, and for just a moment Mr. Gatling's conscience smote him, that she did not suspect.

"I've got to do it," he said to himself, excusing himself. "I've just got to find out--for her sake and ours--yes, and for his, too. It looks like an impossible bet and I've got to make sure."

With young Tripler he had more than the few words he had specified. They had quite an interview and as they had it the youth's embarrassment, which at the outset of the dialogue had made him wriggle and mumble and kick with his toes at inoffensive pebbles, gradually wore off until it vanished altogether and his native assurance reasserted itself. A proposition was advanced. It needed little pressing; promptly he fell in with it. It appealed to him.

"So we're agreed there," concluded his prospective father-in-law, clinching the final rivets. "We'll all go right ahead and finish out this tour--it's only a couple of days more anyhow and there's still a few cutthroats I want to catch. Then I'll take Shirley and her mother and run on out to Spokane. We'll hustle one of the other boys back tomorrow to the entrance to tell my chauffeur to load some bags in the car and run around to this side and meet us where we come out. We'll leave you there and you can dust back to the starting point through that short cut over the Garden Wall you were just speaking of. The business that I've got in Spokane will keep me maybe two or three days. That'll give you time to get those new clothes of yours and then we'll all meet over at Many Glacier--I'll wire you in advance--and in a day or two we'll all go on East together so's you can get acquainted with Shirley's friends and so forth. But of course, as I said before, that's our secret--all that part of it is. You've never been East, I believe?"

"Well, I've been as far as Minot, North Dakota."

"You'll probably notice a good deal of territory the other side of there. You'll enjoy it. Sure you can pick up all the wardrobe you need out in this country?" His manner was solicitous.

"Oh yes, sir, there's those two swell fellows named Steinfelt and Immergluck I was telling you about that they've got the leading gents' furnishing goods store down in Cree City."

"Good enough! I'd suggest that when picking out a suit you get something good and brisk as to pattern. Shirley likes live colors." Mr. Gatling next stressed a point which already had been dwelt upon: "You understand of course that she's not to know a single thing about all this--it's strictly between us two?"

"Yes, sir."

"You see, that'll make the surprise all the greater when she sees you all fixed up in a snappy up-to-date rigging like young college fellows your age wear back where she comes from. Seems like to me I was reading in an advertisement only here the other day where they're going in for coats with belts on 'em this season. Oh yes, and full-bottomed pants; I read that, too.

"One thing more occurs to me: Your hair is a little bit long and shaggy, don't you think? That's fine for out here but back East a young fellow that wants to be in style keeps himself trimmed up sort of close. Now I saw a barber working on somebody about as old as you are just the other day. Let me see--where was it? Oh yes, it was the barber at that town of Cree City--I dropped in there for a shave when we motored down last week. He seemed to have pretty good ideas about trimming up a fellow's bean, that barber."

"I know the one you mean--Silk Sullivan, next door to the bank. I've patronized him before."

"That's the one. Well, patronize him again before you rejoin us. He knows his business all right, your friend Sullivan does.... Now, mind you, mum's the word. All this part of it is absolutely between us."

"Oh yes, sir."

"O. K. Shake on it.... Well, suppose we see how they're coming along with supper."

Mr. Gatling's strategy ticked like a clock. After they got to Spokane he delayed the return by pretending a vexatious prolongation of a purely fictitious deal in ore properties, his privy intent being to give opportunity for Cree City's ready-made clothing princes to work their will. Since a hellish deed must be done he craved that they do it properly. Then on the homeward journey when they had reached the Western Gate and were preparing to ship the car through the non-negotiable sixty-mile stretch across the summit, he suddenly remembered he had failed to complete his purchases of an assortment of game heads at Lewis's on Lake McDonald. He professed that he couldn't round out the order by telephone; unless he personally selected his collection some grievous error might be made.

"You go on across on this train, Shirley," he said. "I telegraphed your young man that we'd be there this morning and he'll be on the lookout. Your mother and I'll dust up to the head of the lake on the bus and I'll finish up what I've got to do there and we'll be along on the Limited this evening. After being separated for a whole week you two'll probably enjoy a day together without any old folks snooping around. Meet us at the hotel tonight for a reunion."

So Shirley went on ahead. It perhaps was true that Shirley's nerves had suffered after six days spent in the companionship of a devoted mother who trailed along with yearning, grief-stricken eyes fixed on her only child--a mother who at frequent intervals sniffed mournfully and once in a while broke into low moaning and sighing sounds. Mrs. Gatling was bearing up under the blow as well as could be expected, but, even so, there had been hours when depression enveloped her as with sable trappings and at no period had she been what the kindliest of critics would call good company. Quite willingly Shirley went.

"I--I feel as though I were giving her up forever," faltered Mrs. Gatling, following with brimming eyes her daughter's departing form.

"Romola," commanded Mr. Gatling, "don't be foolish in the head. You're going to be separated from her exactly nine hours--unless the evening train's late, in which event it may be as long as nine hours and a half."

"You know what I mean, Hector."

"Don't I? Mmph!"

"But she tripped away so gaily--so gladly. It was exactly as though she wanted to leave us. And yet, Heaven knows I've tried and tried ever since that--that terrible night to show her what she means to me.... Have you got a handkerchief to spare? Mine's sopping."

"You've done more than try, Romola--you've succeeded, if that's any consolation to you. You've succeeded darned well." He stared almost regretfully down the line at the rear of an observation-car swiftly diminishing into a small square dot where the rails came together. "Since you mention it, she did look powerfully chipper and cheerful a minute ago, hustling to climb aboard that Pullman--cheerfuller than she's looked since we quit the trail last Wednesday. Lord, how I wish I could guarantee that kid was never going to have a minute's unhappiness the rest of her life!" Something remotely akin to remorse was beginning to gnaw at Mr. Gatling's heart-cockles.

Indeed, something strongly resembling remorse beset him toward the close of this day. At the station when they detrained, no Shirley was on hand to greet them; nor was there sign of Shirley's affianced. Up the slope from the tracks at the hotel a clerk wrenched himself from an importuning cluster of newly arrived tourists for long enough to tell them the numbers of their rooms and to say Miss Gatling had left word she would be awaiting them there.

So they went up under escort of two college students serving as bell-hops. Collegians as a class make indifferent bell-hops. These two deposited the hand-baggage in the living-room of the suite, accepted the customary rewards and departed. As they vanished, a bedroom door opened and out came Shirley--a crumpled, wobegone Shirley with a streaky swollen face and on her cheek the wrinkle marks where she had ground it into a wadded pillow.

"It's all right, mater," she said with a flickering trace of her usual jauntiness. "The alliance between the house of Gatling and the house of Tripler is off. So you can liven up. I'll be your substitute for such crying as is done in this family during the next day or two. I've--I've been practicing all afternoon."

She eluded the lady's outstretched arms and clung temporarily at her father's breast.

"Dad," she confessed brokenly, "I think I must have been a little bit loony these last two weeks. But, dad, I've taken the cure. It's not nice medicine and it makes you feel miserable at first but I guess it's good for what ails me.... Dad, have you seen--him?"

"Not yet." Compassion for her was mixed in with his own secret exultation, as though he tasted a sweet cake that was iced with a most bitter icing.

"Well, when you do, you'll understand. Even if he doesn't!"

"Have you told him?"

"Of course I have. Did you think I'd try to wish that little job off on you? I didn't tell him the real reason--I couldn't wound him that much. I told him I'd changed. But he--he's really the one that's changed. That's what makes it harder for me now. That's what makes it hurt so."

"Here, Romola," he said, kissing the girl and relinquishing her into her mother's grasp. "You swap tears awhile--you'll enjoy that anyhow, Romola. I've got business down-stairs--got to make some sleeper reservations for getting out of here in the morning. And as soon as we hit Pittsburgh I figure you two had better be booking up for a little swing around Europe."