Part 15
So now I understood clearly that it was he who made their plans, timed all their comings and goings, and that they, bitterly as they disliked leaving the water until they were ready, nevertheless had to leave it when he was ready. Of course, if either of them had had any real mind, they would have realized long before that it was of no use to attempt to cope with him and they would have got out quickly when he did, instead of making this scene several times every day. But why did they get out at all when they didn’t want to? Why didn’t they let him go to the haystack by himself? What was the secret of his power? It was they who were always fighting and biting; his serenity was flawless.
I stood on the breast of the pond, turning this over. If you have outrun me and arrived at the truth, it just shows once again how superior readers are to writers in intelligence. I was not destined to fathom it. Many a problem has taken two to solve it and it was Jimsy who--but let that wait. Jimsy came across from the stable and spoke to me now:--
“What are you studying?”
“I have been studying your ducks.”
He looked over at the cabin, where May could be seen moving about in the kitchen, and I saw his face grow suddenly tender. “They’re hers,” he said softly. “She kind o’ wanted ducks round here and so one day I brought ’em to her from town. Then I made this pond for ’em--just dammed the creek across this little gully. Nothing’s wrong with ’em?”
“Oh, no. But they’ve set me guessing.”
He did not believe my story, though he listened with his gray eyes fixed on mine. “That’s wonderful,” he said; “but you’ve made it up. I’d have noticed a thing like that.”
“I don’t think you would. You’re working all day with your stock and your ditches. Think what a loafer I am.”
“It’s most too extraordinary,” he said, and stood looking at the woodpile. He was not really thinking about what I had told him; I could feel that.
“Well, Jimsy!”
We both started a little. It was May, who had come round the corner of the house, and the setting sun shone upon her and made her quite lovely, where she stood shading her eyes, with a little hair floating one side of her forehead.
“Well, Jimsy! Dreaming again! Do you know what time it is? The way you’ve took to dreaming is something terrible!”
Jimsy went into the house.
I was glad that two days more would see me out of this.
Next morning I stood justified--oh, more than justified--in Jimsy’s eyes. No one could have anticipated such a performance at the pond as I was able to show him--it bore me out and surpassed anything I had told him--and no one could have foretold that it would fire Jimsy with a curiosity equal to mine.
The ceremony of the toast was in progress when Jimsy, crossing to the corral, saw me thus engaged. He stuck his hands into his pockets and strolled across to the water’s edge, wearing a broad grin of indulgence.
“Awful busy, you are!” said he.
“Just watch them,” said I.
“Oh, I’ve got a day’s work to do.”
“I’m aware,” I retorted, “that scientific observation doesn’t look like work to the ignorant.”
“What’re you trying to find out?”
“I told you last night. I can’t see how that drake keeps those ducks in order.”
“Oh, I guess he don’t keep ’em in order.”
“I tell you he has them under his thumb.”
Jimsy cast a careless eye upon the birds. They had finished the toast and were swimming about. The quacks of the Duchess were merely quacks to him; he did not hear that she was saying to the Countess: “Hah, Hah, Hah! How do you fancy a back seat this morning?”
“One feels mortified, of course,” I explained to Jimsy, “that she should betray her spite so crudely--a sad but common thing in our country.”
“In the name of God, what are you talking about?” demanded Jimsy.
“Oh, I’m not in the least crazy. New York stinks with people like that.”
At this moment the usual thing happened in the pond--the Duchess made a miscalculation. The drake swam suddenly left instead of right, and the Countess jumped to the favored place. Now it was she who quacked backward at her discountenanced rival.
“She is really the sweeter nature of the two,” I said. But Jimsy was attending to the ducks with an awakened interest; in fact, he was now caught in the same fascination that had held me for so many days. He took his hands out of his pockets and followed the ducks keenly.
“I believe you weren’t lyin’ to me,” he remarked presently.
“You wait! Just you wait!” I exclaimed.
He watched a little longer. “D’you suppose,” he said, “it’s his feathers they love so?”
“His feathers?” I repeated.
“Those two curly ones in his tail. They’re crooked plumb enticing, like they were saying, ‘Come, girls!’”
This reminded me of Jimsy’s unbrushed mound of hair and May’s coldness at his reference to it. “Feathers would hardly account for everything,” I said.
A last spark of doubt flickered in Jimsy. “Are you joshing about this thing?” he asked.
“Just you wait,” I said again.
We did not have to wait. In the judgment of the drake it was time for the haystack; the ducks thought it too soon. All began as usual. Sir Francis had reached the woodpile and taken his attitude, the first protesting scream from the pond had risen to the sky, Jimsy’s face was causing me acute pleasure, when the Duchess did an entirely new thing. She swam to the inlet and began to waddle slowly up the trickling stream. Then I perceived a few yards beyond her the cleanings of some fish which had been thrown out. It was for these she was making.
“She has ruined everything!” I lamented.
“Wait!” said Jimsy. He whispered it. His new faith was completer than mine.
The Duchess heavily proceeded. In my childhood I used sometimes to see old ladies walking slowly, shod in soft, wide, heelless things made of silk or satin--certainly not of leather, except the soles--which seem to have gone out. The Duchess trod as if she had these same mid-Victorian feet and she began gobbling the fish. If this was any strain upon the drake, he did not show it. The Countess now discerned from the pond what the Duchess was doing and she was instantly riven with contending emotions. The waves from her legs agitated the whole pond as she swam wildly; sometimes she looked at the drake, sometimes at the fish, and between the looks she quacked as if she would die. Then she, too, got out and went toward the fish. I looked apprehensively at the figure by the woodpile, but it might have been a painted figure in very truth. I think Jimsy was holding his breath. When a moral conflict becomes visible to the naked eye there is something in it that far outmatches any mere thumping of fists; here was Sir Francis battling for his empire in silence and immobility, with his ladies getting all the fish. And just then the Countess wavered. She saw Sir Francis, white and monumental, thirty yards away; and she saw the Duchess and the fish about three more steps from her nose. She stood still and then she broke down. She turned and fled back to her lord. It cannot be known what the more forcible Duchess would have done but for this. As it was, she looked up and saw the Countess--and immediately went to pieces herself. I had not known that she had it in her to run so.
I cannot repeat Jimsy’s first oath as he stared at the triumphant drake leading his family to the haystack. After silence he turned to me. “Wouldn’t that kill you?” he said very quietly; and said no more, but began to walk slowly away.
“Now,” I called after him, “will you tell me how he manages to keep head of his house like that?”
If Jimsy had any hypothesis to offer then, he did not offer it, and before he had reached the corral May appeared. I’ll not report her talk this time, it was the usual nursery governess affair: did Jimsy know that he had wasted half an hour when he ought to have hitched up and gone for wood up Dead Timber Creek, and didn’t he know there was wood for just one day left and it would take him the whole day? I escaped to my fishing before she had done and I took my dinner with Scipio.
It is wicked to fish in October, but we ate the trout; and I must tell you of a discovery: when artificial flies fail, and frost has finished the grasshoppers, the housefly is a deadly bait! I am glad at last to have accounted for the presence of the housefly in a universe of infinite love.
At supper I was sorry that Scipio and I had not got off to the mountains that day. Jimsy was still out. He had brought, it appeared, one load of wood from Dead Timber Creek and had gone for another. It was May’s opinion that he should have returned by now. I hardly thought so, but this made small difference to May. She was up from table and listening at the open door three times before our restless meal was over. Next she lighted a lantern and hung it out upon a gate-post of one of the outer corrals, that Jimsy might be guided home from afar. In the following thirty minutes she went out twice again to listen and soon after this she sent me out to the lantern to make sure it was burning brightly.
“He would see the windows at any rate,” I told her.
But now she had begun to be frightened and could not sit in her chair for more than a few moments at a time.
“What o’clock is it?” she asked me.
It was seven forty-five and I think she fancied it was midnight. If Jimsy had been six years old and a perfect fool to boot she could not have been more distracted than she presently became.
“Why, Mrs. Culloden,” I remonstrated, “Jimsy was raised in this valley. He knows his way about.”
She did not hear me and now she seized the telephone. Into the ears of one neighbor after another she poured questions up and down the valley. It was idle to remind her that Dead Timber Creek was five miles to the south of us and that the Whitlows, who lived six miles to the north, were not likely to have seen Jimsy. The whole valley quickly learned that he had not come back with his second load of wood by eight o’clock and that she was asking them all if they knew anything about it. In the space of twenty minutes with the telephone she had made him ridiculous throughout the precinct; and then at ten minutes past eight, while she was ringing up her friend Mrs. Sedlaw for the second time, in came Jimsy. The wood and the wagon were safe in the corral, he was safe in the house and hungry; and, of course, she hadn’t heard him arrive because of the noise of the telephone. He had been at the stable for the last ten minutes, attending to the horses.
“And you never had the sense to tell me!” she cried.
“Tell you what?” He had not taken it in. “Gosh, but that chicken looks good! What’s that lantern out there for?” He was now seated and helping himself to the food.
“And that’s all you’ve got to say to me!” she said. And then the deluge came--not of tears, but words.
Somewhere inside of Jimsy was an angel, whatever else he contained. Throughout that foolish, galling scene made in my presence before I could escape, never a syllable of what he must have been feeling came from him, but only good-natured ejaculations--not many and rather brief, to be sure. When he learned the reason for the lantern he laughed aloud. This set her off and she rushed into the story of her telephoning. Then, and then alone, it was on the verge of being too much for him. He laid down his knife and fork and leaned back for a second, but the angel won. He resumed his meal; only a brick-red sunset of color spread from his collar to his hair--and his eyes were not gray, but black.
That was what I saw after I had got away to my cabin and was in bed: the man’s black eyes fixed on his plate and the pretty girl standing by the stove and working off her needless fright in an unbearable harangue.
Audibly I sighed, sighed with audible relief, when the Culloden Ranch lay a mile behind Scipio and me and our packhorses the next day. Jimsy had been as self-controlled in the morning as on the night before--except that no man can control the color of his eyes. The murky storm that hung in Jimsy’s eyes was the kind that does not blow over, but breaks. Was May blind to such a sign? At breakfast she told him that the next time he went for wood she would go to see that he got back for supper! I told Scipio that if things were not different when we returned I should move over to his cabin.
“You’d never have figured a girl could get Jimsy buffaloed!” said Scipio.
“He’s not buffaloed a little bit,” I returned.
“Ain’t he goin’ to do nothin’?”
“I don’t know what he’ll do.”
Scipio rode for a while, thinking it over. “If I had a wife,” he said, “and she got to thinkin’ she was my mother, I’d take a dally with her.” His meaning was not clear; but he made it so: “I’d take her--well, not _on_ my knee, but acrost it.”
This I doubted, but said nothing. By and by we were passing the Sedlaw Ranch and Mrs. Sedlaw came running out rather hastily--and began speaking before she reached the gate.
“Oh, howdy-do?” said she; and she stood looking at me.
“Isn’t it perfect weather?” said I.
“Yes, indeed. And so you’re going hunting?”
“Yes. Want to come?”
“Why, wouldn’t that be nice! I thought Jimsy and May might be going with you.”
“Oh, they’re too busy. Good-by.”
She stood looking after me for some time and I saw her walk back to the house quite slowly.
There’s no need to tell of our hunting, or of the games of Cœur d’Alène Solo which Scipio and I and the useful cook played at night. In twenty days the snow drove us out of the mountains and we came down to human habitations--and to rife rumors. I don’t recall what we heard at the first cabin--or the second or the others--but we heard something everywhere. The valley was agog over Jimsy and May. Amid the wealth of details, I shall never know precisely what did happen. Jimsy had left her and gone to Alaska. He hadn’t gone to Alaska, but to New York, with Mrs. Faxon, the alfalfa widow. May had gone to her mother in Iowa. She hadn’t gone to Iowa; she was under the protection of Mrs. Sedlaw. Jimsy and the widow were living in open shame at the ranch. The ranch was shut up and old man Birdsall had seen Jimsy in town, driving a companion who wore splendid feathers. There was more, much more, but the only certainty seemed to be that Jimsy had broken loose and gone somewhere--and over this somewhere hovered an episodic bigamy. But where was Jimsy now? And May? Had the explosion blown them asunder forever? Was their marriage lying in fragments? On our last night in camp we talked of this more than we played Cœur d’Alène Solo. If anybody could tell me the true state of things it would be Mrs. Sedlaw, and at her door I knocked as I passed the next morning.
“Oh, howdy-do?” said I; and she sat looking at me for some moments.
“What luck?” said she. “Get an elk?”
“Yes,” said I. “How are things in general?”
“Elegant,” said she. “Give my love to dear May.”
“Thank you,” said I, not very appropriately.
The lady followed me to my horse. “Seems like only yesterday you came by,” was her parting word. She had certainly squared our accounts.
As we drew in sight of the Culloden Ranch you may imagine how I wondered what we should find there. A peaceful smoke rose from the kitchen chimney into the quiet air. Through the window I saw--yes, it was May!--most domestically preparing food. Outside by the pond a figure stood. It was Jimsy. He was feeding the ducks. I swung off my horse and hurried to Jimsy. Sir Francis was eating from his hand.
“How!” said he in cheerful greeting.
“How!” I returned.
“Get an elk?”
“Yes.”
“Sheep?”
“Yes.”
“Good!”
“You--you’re--you’re feeding the ducks.”
“Sure thing!--Say, I’ve found out his game.”
I pointed to Sir Francis. “His control, you mean?--how he keeps his hold?”
“Sure thing!” Jimsy pointed to the ducks. “Has ’em competin’ for him. Keeps ’em a-guessing. That’s his game.”
It stunned me for a second. Of course he didn’t know that the valley had talked to me.
“Why, how do you do?” cried May, cheerfully, coming out of the house.
Then I took it all in and I broke into scandalous, irredeemable laughter.
A bright flash came into Jimsy’s eyes as _he_ took it all in--then he also gave way, but he blushed heavily.
“Whatever are you two laughing at?” exclaimed May. She looked radiant. That clear note was all melted from her voice. “Mr. Le Moyne, aren’t you going to stay to dinner?”
“Why, thank you!” said Scipio--polite, and embarrassed almost to stuttering.
To Sir Francis Jimsy gave the last piece of toast. It was a large one. If the drake was aware of the tie between Jimsy’s marital methods and his own, he betrayed it as little as he betrayed knowledge of all things which it is best never to notice.
Yes, I am grateful to the game laws. The next legislature made them intelligible.
* * * * *
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] Lately changed to Shoshone River by act of legislature. While we miss the old name, derived from certain sulphur springs, we agree that like the Indian and the cow-boy it belongs to the past.
[2] For reasons, those who in 188--named this place after its chief inhabitant, wished to disguise his name. This they accomplished by changing the order of the letters which spelled it.
[3] To-day the flourishing resort Thermopolis, connected with both north and south by an important line of railway. In those days this lonely spot must have been two hundred miles from any railway.