Part 12

"Ah-ha!" the widow mused. "Now we shall see."

She did, for having given Gordon barely time to pass from sight, Lee routed out Ramon from a comfortable smoke, mounted, and rode after.

XVIII: THE "WIND" BLOWS CONTRARY

In the fundamentals of feeling poor humans are very much alike.

A university training confers no immunity from jealousy, and as he rode into the hills Gordon's thoughts exhibited all of the phases customary with plowboys and professors who have been flouted and flirted and flurried till they can hardly say whether they are standing on their heads or their heels. He assured himself, of course, that he "didn't give a damn"! and smoked a pipe to prove it. But after a few puffs the pipe burned out in his hand, wasting its fragrance on the desert air.

The flashes that fitfully broke his brooding again marked sudden impulses to go back, punch Ramon's head, and lead Lee away by one pretty ear. Mentally he twisted it till she cried out; whereupon he would let go with the admonition, "There! that will teach you to behave!"

Once he even turned to go back. But sanity intervened. He rode on--madder than ever. Also--but, as before said, his thoughts and feelings conformed to the universal type. Let it suffice that when, hours later, he saw the _fonda_ lying like a cup of gold in the ravine below he was in a highly reckless state.

Up to that moment it is safe to say that no thought of Felicia had been in his mind. But when suffering from injured pride, vanity, or love, plowman and professor alike proceed to "take a hair of the dog that bit them" by turning to the nearest maid. Of husbands that have been so caught on the rebound, wives obtained, as it were, on a ricochet, the number shall never be told!

In accordance with this natural law, Felicia's pretty face now flashed up before Gordon's eyes. His exclamation, "Aw, take a drink and forget it!" might, metaphorically, be applied to the _fonda's_ liquors less than to her.

A _peona's_ life gravitates between her grinding at the _metate_ and laundering on the river boulders, with spells of "drawnwork" between. Having put out her "wash" and bathed herself in the stream, Felicia was making her toilet before two inches of cracked mirror she had propped on the lintel against the wooden bar shutter when Gordon came riding down from above.

From her smooth forehead, her cloud-black hair fell in dark waves around a spotless chemisette whose low cut and lack of sleeves revealed the satin-gold of her shoulders. Under the same circumstances a white girl would, of course, have fled. But at the sight of him, alone, she spat out a mouthful of hair-pins that interfered with her welcoming smile, led his horse in under the shady _ramada_, then proceeded calmly with her toilet.

Toward both Sliver and Lee she had displayed a certain sullenness, the dull resentment born of racial oppression, but now while she combed and arranged her hair she flooded Gordon with smiles. And how she talked! eyes, hands, body, shoulders, and tongue going together in a way that would have given the most loquacious of white girls twenty yards start out of a hundred and beaten her to the tape.

The tongue Gordon could not understand. But the big eyes, small hands, golden shoulders told in the language of the universe that she was exceedingly glad! To a young man who had been recently flouted and flattened, the nose of him held down, as it were, on the grindstone of a girl's contempt, it was very soothing. He bathed in the subtle flattery. Like a spring tonic, it percolated, a healing oil, through every pore of his wounded vanity, restoring, revigorating his self-esteem. So he looked on approvingly; even made admiring note of the perfect arms and shoulders.

Her toilet concluded, Felicia surveyed it a few inches at a time in the cracked bit of mirror. Then letting down the wooden shutter, she filled two _copas_ of anisette and, leaning on one shapely elbow, pledged him in Spanish.

"Salud y pesitos, señor!" (Health and a little money!)

In clinking glasses, she touched his hand, but he did not find the contact unpleasant; neither took alarm when she refused a _peso_ note--even after he had filled and drunk again.

A _peona_ refusing money? It was contrary to instinct and tradition! Had he known that, or her private mind, he would have moved on; for he was not only naturally shy with girls, but also responsible beyond his years. But being absolutely ignorant of _peona_ nature, and in fine fettle for sympathetic philandering, he leaned against the bar and chatted as best he could, with his little Spanish helped out by signs.

When she suggested that he would learn more quickly if he had a _diccionario_ with "long hair" he laughed, but failed to catch the personal application. Again, if, as on the former occasion, she had repeated the offer made through Sliver, he would also have laughed. But now that she was sure, or thought she was, of her game, she enwrapped herself in a savage modesty; masked advances under alluring retreats.

To tell the truth, as the anisette fulfilled its ordained purpose and burned up his shyness in its consuming flame, he found the flirtation so delightful that an hour slipped by unnoticed. During that time the "long-haired _diccionario_" was in constant use. While her father and mother dozed under the _ramada_ he consulted it about the scenery and natural objects, trees, chickens, pigs; the path, stream, and hills. But when, irresistibly, the range of his questions narrowed to nearer objects--fingers, eyes, hair--the lesson passed the boundaries of etymology into the domain of love.

He was well over that border before he realized it--how far he did not guess until, when he had asked playfully the Spanish for "kiss," the _diccionario_ answered swiftly, not with the word, but with the action to illustrate it.

XIX: A KISS--ITS CONSEQUENCES

If Gordon had happened to look behind him before riding on down into the cañon, he might have seen with the naked eye two black dots crawling like flies along the high bare flank of a mountain far behind. Under a binocular the flies would have resolved into Lee and Ramon. Further, in that clear, dry atmosphere, a good telescope would have revealed both the girl's worried expression and Ramon's glowing ardor. For just as the "wages of sin is death," so the wages of flirtation--especially if the party of the second part be of Latin blood--is apt to be disaster. Lee was now reaping where she had sown, garnering in full measure, heaped up and pressed down, last night's consequences.

With a girl's keen intuition in such things, she had seen it coming and had thought of turning back. But after her summary dismissal of Gordon, that would have appeared ridiculous--besides, though she would not have admitted it, there he was riding on to a rendezvous with that _dreadful_ girl! How she regretted, now, the flirtation! How she berated herself for sending him home! But, there being nothing else to do, she had ridden rapidly, staving off the inevitable with a stream of excited chatter--Ramon's family, _hacienda_ affairs, the scenery--while she dodged like a chased rabbit she secretly wondered at herself. Supposing this were six months ago? Say, on the morning she had put on his hat? Would she have doubled and dodged? She knew better! She could not say, herself, what her answer might have been! But she _did_ know that she would have let him speak.

If then, why not now? Was it Gordon? Her pride--bolstered by irritation, for with a woman's illogic she charged her present plight to him--her pride rose in arms at the thought! Nevertheless, it did not prevent her from riding hard on his trail; nor from holding Ramon off with an effort great as a physical strain.

But it was all in vain. Her retreats, though real, were alluring as the mock ones which, at that moment, Felicia was practising on Gordon. And their effect was the same. Her efforts were as bags of sand piled to check a rising torrent. Stayed for a time, it rose the higher; presently leaped over and swept all before it.

A remark of hers concerning his father's age precipitated the flood. "Si, he has many years." Then, his dark, handsome face aglow, Ramon ran on: "Yesterday he was saying that he would be content to pass could he but see me settled with a wife. I told him it depended on"--he paused, then added the _tu_ of lovers--"on _thee_. If--"

"Oh, Ramon!" she pleaded, in wild distress. "_Please_--don't!"

But the dam was gone! In terms that would seem extravagant in English, but flowed naturally in the eloquent, rhythmic Spanish, he told his love. Sunshine and star fire; moonlight and bird-song; the bloom of spring flowers; loom of the mountains; wide spread of the desert--all were she! Warmth, light, happiness, from her proceeded! She was his universe. In her all beauty dwelt! And so on. To a girl who loved him, it would have been delightful wooing. Six months ago she would have listened, charmed; perhaps have been persuaded. But now--it filled her with dismay.

"Oh, you poor Ramon!" She held out her hand in remorse and pity, but when, seizing it, he tried to draw her to him, she pulled away. "Oh no! _no!_ Oh, what a miserable creature I am! Here I have played--"

But she got no further. Realizing with sympathetic intuition that the moment was unpropitious, he stopped her. "There is no hurry. I did not intend to tell thee for a little while. But there is no harm done. Thou hast always known it."

"Oh yes." Tears dimming the blue eyes, she nodded. "Yes, but--" Then realizing that argument would but reopen the case, she accepted the compromise. "No, I won't answer now. Wait."

"If there be any one else--" His brow drew down over somber, threatening eyes.

"Oh, there isn't!" She was conscious, herself, of over-emphasis. But she repeated again. "There _isn't_, Ramon!"

"Bueno!" His face cleared. "Then I am content."

Now she was conscious of vast relief as though at the passing of imminent danger. Relief from what? She refused to think.

Content with her reassurance, he laughed and chatted again as they moved on, but it was a miserable girl that rode beside him; one torn between remorse and a dread curiosity concerning feelings which she obstinately refused to examine. When, finally, they rode down into the cañon, curiosity and remorse both gave place to indefinite apprehension. Without trying, she learned more of herself while they followed the zigzag staircases down and down than she dared to contemplate.

Their first view of the _fonda_ showed, of course, only the roof and walls. But from the lower levels they sighted, first, Gordon's horse tied to a post of the _ramada_, then the young man himself leaning at ease across the bar. Ramon, who was riding ahead, obtained first view of the "long-haired _diccionario_," which was now being consulted in the matter of hair and eyes.

"The señor seems to be enjoying himself."

His laugh came floating back. Passing around the next turn, he did not see Lee rein in her beast. Sitting her horse, still as a marble statue, she watched from across the stream the girl's head go up and meet Gordon's in a kiss.

For a disinterested spectator the scene would have had vast interest. The chrome-yellow walls of the _fonda_, toned under the eaves by Time's green brush; the great shading trees through which the sun sent down a greenish lace of light; the stream singing musically among its glazed brown boulders; all formed a proper setting for the forest love which knows no other sanction than that of the eye. The beauty and abandon of it all would have thrilled the aforesaid disinterested spectator; have carried a theater by storm. But Lee was neither disinterested nor an audience--in the accepted sense. She saw only the abandon. Conscious of a deathly chill at her heart, white as the aforesaid statue, she just sat her beast.

In taking the last turn, Ramon's horse dislodged a pebble, and as it rolled down the bank and splashed in the stream Gordon broke the girl's clasp. Ramon was still out of sight, and Gordon's glance of startled inquiry rose to Lee sitting above, so still and quiet.

"My God, she saw it!"

Even as it flashed upon him he was convicted of a vast and sudden change wrought in himself by the last twenty-four hours. Only yesterday he had assured Lee, with sincerity, that he lost interest in grown-up girls. Now, just because she had caught him in a little gallantry, the whole world had gone to smithereens!

"Competition is the life of love!" Mrs. Mills might have added--sometimes its death. The "wind" had blown with a vengeance--from opposite ways. Sitting above, Lee shook under its chill. Below, Gordon shivered. Though only a few seconds passed before she rode on down and joined Ramon in front of the _fonda_, it seemed to both a deathless age.

After passing a pleasant word with Gordon, Ramon had called for a drink, and till Felicia brought her a glass Lee sat quietly talking. But as the girl looked up, revealing the soft glow in her great dusky eyes, Lee stiffened and looked at Gordon.

"I am glad that we overtook you. Señor Icarza has asked me to marry him. You shall be first to congratulate us."

Gordon's glance had risen to hers in wonder and consternation. Then--the tricks fancy plays us! _Fonda_ and ravine faded into a glade in a Java forest where the light broke down through giant fronds and twined a golden aureole around her fair hair. From that great distance, without recognizing it for his own, he heard a voice.

"I wish you all happiness!"

The crash of Lee's glass as she threw it among the stones brought him back to the sight of her riding at full speed down the cañon.

Ramon was looking after her, transfixed with wonder.

Gordon's practical Anglo-Saxon instinct was first to assert itself. He spoke very quietly. "We'd better catch her before she breaks her neck."

XX: SLIVER IS DULY CHASTENED

Had Lee been really trying to break her neck, she could not have ridden more recklessly.

Where the mule path crossed and recrossed the stream, she took it in successive leaps. Once from the crest of an abrupt declivity her beast launched out like a flying bird, yet picked up its stride and flew on full forty-five feet beyond. Unconsciously, she bent to avoid the oaks that reached down gnarled hands to snatch her from the saddle. Possessed by but one impulse, to escape, she raced down the cañon and out upon the plain.

Had she given full rein to her feeling she would have galloped on and on and on over the receding horizon into a strange world that knew naught of her affairs. But as the violence of the exercise drew the blood from her brain, responsibility resumed its sway. Of her own accord she slackened speed and allowed Ramon, whose fast beast had outrun Gordon's, to catch up.

Taught, by long experience, to expect from her always the unexpected, he had set the wild flight down as one of her customary pranks. "Little Wicked One!" he called, coming up. "Have a care for my happiness if not for your neck!" But when, in place of the shy confusion of a newly engaged girl, she turned on him a face of cold distress, the glow faded from his own. "Why, queridita? What--"

"I want you to leave me now." She cut him abruptly off.

His big eyes widened. "After raising me to heaven would you plunge me in--"

"Ah no, no!" She impulsively thrust out her hand. "You have earned far more happiness than I shall ever be able to give. But--"

"Si? But--"

She gave him a little wan smile. "When you come to understand girls better, you will never demand a reason. Men always know why they do a thing, but girls act from feeling; most of the time without knowing the cause."

"But--"

"Ramon," she looked at him with sweet severity, "if I had told you on top of the mountain what I said back there--wouldn't you have been content?"

"Assuredly! It was only--"

"Yes, yes! Now listen. I want you to go, now--and stay till I either send or come. It won't be long--I promise."

"Bueno," he shrugged. "Though minutes will be ages!"

Her hand was still in his. After raising it to his lips, he swung his beast, with a wave of the hand at Gordon in the distance, galloped off to the north.

His departure left her free to review the situation--with little satisfaction. From every angle one fact stood out--in a moment of pique she had engaged herself to a man who, no matter what might have been, she now knew she could never love. Of course it was possible to break it. But even in her desperation she never thought of that.

"You flirted with him," she berated herself. "Led him on to an avowal; accepted him out of spite. You are a mean, despicable, miserable _thing_, and now you'll go through with it."

It never occurred to her that, being so "mean and despicable" it might be against Ramon's interest to inflict herself upon him. Having, with her girl's illogic, made up her mind, she felt that peculiar sense of comfort which men obtain from duty done and women from self-sacrifice. She turned and looked back to see how that other criminal--the chief, if unconscious, cause of it all--was getting along; and though he was too far away for her to read his face, his bent head revealed a comforting dejection.

As a matter of fact, he was just as miserable as--as she could have wished him to be. At first his thoughts and feelings had run in a personal groove. At one fell swoop certain excursions into Java forests and to the Chinese Wall, not to mention other desirable and lovely places, had been swept into the discard of broken dreams. Never would tropical sunbeams break down through giant fronds to twine that golden aureole about a certain head! In consideration of his recent awakening to her values as a traveling companion, he was just as sore and silly and jealous as any young man could possibly be. And just as her reflections had, in womanly fashion, turned to self-sacrifice, so his rose, in masculine style, to high, moral grounds.

"It's a damn shame!" he told himself. "Ramon seems a good sort, but--no greaser is good enough for her!" While the bright, hard specks floated up in his eye, he added, "And it isn't going to be."

For a while he entertained a notion to catch up and cleanse himself by open confession. But realizing that two glasses of anisette plus a vagrant inclination--even if the latter were based on a sense of injury--might not appeal to her woman's logic, he kept his distance. Metaphorically, a quarter-mile of misery stretched between them, across which the dejected droop of her shoulders, his hanging head, wirelessed their hopelessness.

"Poor girl!" he pitied her.

"He's feeling terribly," she told herself, with mournful satisfaction.

Nevertheless, when he came up after she drew rein a half-mile outside of Los Arboles, her face was composed in the sweet gravity becoming to her heroic mood. "Our friends"--she nodded toward the distant buildings--"are quite prejudiced. For the present, I wish you would keep it to yourself."

He bowed with equal gravity, and they rode on in silence.

At the sight of Bull, waiting for them at the _patio_ gate, Lee did cheer up a little--partly because of a natural instinct to hide her hurt, more largely from the sense of protection his presence always gave. Sensitive in all that concerned her, however, he had caught both the droop of her shoulders and Gordon's air of gloom.

He was not to be deceived. "Been fighting. Wonder what it's all about."

He learned, partially, when Gordon handed him the widow's recipe for "liniment," after Lee had gone in and they were unsaddling at the stable. It ran:

"Dear Friend,--Sliver took Mr. Nevil to see Felicia at the _fonda_ the other day, and Lee caught her wearing his watch-fob. It made her so mad she flirted her head off with Ramon." In her ignorance of later developments, she had concluded: "But there is no harm done. She likes Mr. Nevil, and if you can just keep him away from the _fonda_, I am sure things will turn out all right."

Bull read and reread the epistle a second and third time for his own pleasure, regardless of its sense. In its reverent tenderness there was something pathetic in the way he touched with his big forefingers the signature "Your friend, Mary Mills." Gordon had almost finished caring for the horses before Bull placed the note in his shirt pocket after carefully wrapping it in a piece of newspaper. The ceremony completed, he fished for further information.

"Any one else there?" he inquired, nonchalantly.

"Young Mexican," Gordon replied, with what, for him, was excessive curtness.

"Ramon Icarza, I reckon." Bull went innocently on: "He an' Miss Lee were almost what you could call raised together. She thinks a good deal of him--"

"No reason why she shouldn't."

Nevertheless, the tone caused Bull to duck behind Lee's horse to hide a chuckle. "Jealous! green-cheese jealous. Mary--" he paused, reddening, for never before in his thought had he used her given name. He repeated it with lingering delight. "Mary--was right. We've sure stirred 'em up. On'y we'll have to 'tend to Felicia at once."

His mind thus made up, he proceeded to Felicia's solution with the characteristic directness he gave to any problem. When, after supper that evening, Gordon went straight to the bunk-house, Bull herded Jake and Sliver into the stable to deliberate by lantern-light.

"You-all never orter ha' taken him there," he charged Sliver. "Here we go an' import this young fellow at no end of trouble an' expense, then you herd him right into the arms of another girl."

"Aw! she don't count." Sliver excused himself. "She's Mex an' wild girl." He sagely added: "You see, I was that anxious to make sure he didn't drink. We kain't have no young soaks 'round Lady-girl."

His solicitude drew Jake's satirical grin. "You wasn't looking for a drink yourself, heigh? As for her being Mex an' wild--you damn fool, don't you know that at his age wild girls draws like wild honey. He's be'n there once an' he'll go again."

"If he ain't stopped," Bull qualified.

"If he ain't stopped," Jake nodded. "An' it's up to you to do it."

"But how?" Sliver's broad, round face struggled like a full moon in clouds of helplessness. "How in the 'tarnal kin _I_ stop him?"

"By 'quiring vested rights in the premises," Jake nodded sagely. "If you marry her he kain't come 'round."

"_Marry_ her? _Me?_ Marry a _Mex_?" Sliver almost yelled it.

"That's what." While his thin lips parted in his characteristic wolf grin, Jake went on: "Anyhow, what's your idee in shying an' rearing this-a-way at domestic happiness wuss 'n a colt at flying paper? Why, other men rush for it like 'twas--"

"Sticky fly-paper," Sliver ungallantly supplied. "An' once they're in--_good night_!"

But Jake ignored the interruption. "You-all orter take shame to yourself. Marriage is nature's most holy an' necessary ordinance. Don't all the preachers tell it? An' what would become of the census without it? But here, instead of accepting your lot with thankfulness an' thanking your stars that a girl can be found that's damn fool enough to take you, you-all go a-holding up your head an' howling like a hungry coyote."

While Jake thus orated, Sliver's expression of obstinacy was leavened by fleeting hope. "If you b'lieve all that--what's the matter with you marrying her yourself?"

Jake's thin lips parted again in his sarcastic grin. "I've no calling for it. You see I'm that soft by nat'er any woman could crush my tender feelings. But one glance at your brutal count'nance would tell even a blind man that your wife would be kep' in her place. Besides--was it me that took Gordon up there?"

"Quit your fooling," Bull interposed. Then, unconscious of the humor of the situation, aware in his simplicity only of the danger to his cherished plan, he faced Sliver. "Yes or no--will you do it?"

"No, I'm da--"