Chapter 7

"Oh!" cried the girl presently, pleadingly, "if I may see him just once again! If I just don't have to lose him all at once!" She ran then across the room to another window, through which she whistled shrilly at the negro man dozing in the succulent grass in front of the stable.

"Samson!" she shouted, "saddle Ribbon the quickest you ever did in your life!" And when she saw that the negro had roused sufficiently to execute her commands, she turned from the window hurriedly, went to her clothes-closet hurriedly, changed her house gown for a riding-habit hurriedly, and was out in the yard at the mounting block as the saddle mare was led up from the stable. Taking the bridle from the negro's hand, she leaped into the saddle and was off across the yard like a flash, while the lip of the astonished Samson sagged with impotent inquiry.

Out on the ridge road, she urged the mare to a gallop. All the way she was talking to Madeira, almost praying to him. His face with its trouble and pain still moved before her. "Ah, but you will forgive me!" she was saying to it. "You wait. Wait and see how this ride turns out. I'm going to give myself just one chance, Dad. I'm going to find him, and I'm going riding with him. And I'm not going to say anything. But I look nice, don't I, when I'm riding--and loving--and hoping--and maybe he can't stand it, and if he can't stand it, and rides up close, and stops his horse and tells me--oh, what I hope he will tell me--why, Daddy, dear, I _must_ lean over into his arms for just one minute, mustn't I? You see that, don't you? And maybe after that, everything will be all right, and we can all be happy ever after. I don't see how we could help being happy ever after that, Dad!"

And, praying so, on the galloping mare, Sally Madeira came into the main street of Canaan, and drew rein at last in front of her father's bank. Madeira saw her at once and hurried out to her.

"I'm going to take a little last ride with Mr. Steering, Dad," she said, her head as high as a queen's and her voice strong and sweet. "I didn't want you to think that I was deceiving you. I wanted you to know about it before I did it." Often there was a good deal of the child in Sally's straight gaze, and Madeira saw it there now and loved it.

"You do just exactly whatever you want to, Honeyful," he said. "I don't know--I----" He could not go on at all for a minute, and when he could go on he said abruptly, "I'm going to see Steering, too, before I quite bust up with him, Sally." Then he went quickly back to the bank, and the girl passed on down the street to the post-office, in front of which she saw Steering's horse at the hitching-rail. She sent a bare-footed boy inside to post a letter to Elsie Gossamer and to ask Mr. Steering to come out to her.

While she waited, she could see Steering at the pen-and-ink desk, loitering there, one arm on the desk, watching the thin stream of people that went by him to the convex glass-and-pine booth where the post-office boxes were. The men from the Canaan stores, a lonely drummer from the hotel, some belated farmers and several Canaan young ladies passed Steering, the young ladies seeming not to see him, but, in some subtly feminine way, making it impossible for Steering not to see them--their glowing young faces, their enormous hats, the way their gowns didn't fit, the slip-shod carriage of their bodies, all the differences between them and the only other real western girl he knew. None of the people went out of the post-office at once, all idling at the door for a few minutes. From time to time there was quite a little crush at the door, so that Steering did not see Miss Madeira until her messenger reached him. Then he ran out to her quickly.

"I shan't get down," she told him, speaking in a lower tone than the listening Canaanites approved of. "I was hoping that I might find you here. Get on your horse and let's go to the woods. Wouldn't you like to? The hills are one long glory to-day." It was not the note of her prayer, it was well-ordered and calm. Still, Steering's heart leaped like a boy's at her friendliness, and he began to speak his gratitude in a lyric tune:

"Ah, what fortune! Just to be young and alive and off on the hills with you!" he said, and vaulted to his horse's back from the curb, so easily that even the Missourians who were candidly watching and listening, remarked, "Oh, well, it's because he's got some Missouri in him, that's why-for."

Side by side, the horses moved down Main Street. At the bank Crittenton Madeira was standing at the plate-glass window. He had his thumbs in his trousers pockets, and he was rocking to and fro, shifting his weight from his heels to the balls of his feet peculiarly, as though seeking for balance. His eyes were moodily thoughtful, and he kept snapping at his lower lip with his big white teeth.

"Why, God bless you, Steering!" he cried pleasantly, moving out to the curb as the horses came up, "I made a mistake in missing you at the house yesterday. Want to see you again, as soon as I can. What about to-night, young man? Going to get in home early, aren't you, Sally?"

"Yes, Dad, early."

"Well then, my boy, you just stop by the bank, when you get in from the hills, will you? I shan't leave the bank before eight o'clock. Shan't be home to supper, Honeyful."

"All right, Mr. Madeira, I'll come," assented Steering; "look for me sometime before eight."

"All right, my boy. So long, Honeyful."

Again the horses moved off, side by side. Soon the town lay far behind the riders, who were following the shimmering Di around the blue hills. Where the road ran up the bluff into heavy timber they got into deep odorous silences, the silences of young unspoiled places; musical, too, somehow, over and beyond the stillness. Where the road came down to the bottom land along the river the silence shook with the river's silver mystery. No matter where the road ran, always off beyond them lay the hills, ridge upon ridge, beautiful, glorious.

"Aren't they tremendous?" said the girl, "Aren't you glad they are almost yours?" A sense of possession was indeed mounting into a cry of rejoicing within Steering. He admitted it and then laughed at it.

"It's the house of Grierson that should rejoice," he said longingly.

"Wait until I bring you out above Salome Park," said the girl. "I, too, have some land up here that's worth while. From my land you can look straight across the country for miles, back again into your land."

Sometimes, as they journeyed, they passed log cabins backed up against the long hills, or squatting close to the shining river. Sometimes, as they journeyed, the red bluffs beetled up above them, tall and frowning. Sometimes the trees, trailing long green veils, all but met across the Di below them. Once they passed a saw-mill, set and buzzing; once they had to wait in the woods while a string of cattle stampeded by; once they saw a man in a skiff far down the Di. He raised his hand and waved to them for loneliness' sake. He looked sick with loneliness.

"You know your Missouri by heart," Steering commented admiringly, as she led him through bridle-paths and by short cuts with a fine woodsmanship.

"Well, I ought to. The times that I have been over it, with Piney, a ragged Robin-goodfellow at my heels! This is the apple-jack country that we are in now. Did you know that? Apple-jack stands for our big red apples and for zinc. There's some of both down here, see!" She stopped him on a high spur in the ridge road and waved her riding whip toward the flats below, whose miles upon miles of apple trees made him wonder. "But wait for Salome Park," she insisted, and led him on.

Riding along beside her, listening to her, forgetful of his complications, his hills billowing toward him, Steering grew intensely happy. Just to look at her was enough to make a man happy. Her black, semi-fitting riding-habit outlined her graces of form enchantingly, the admirable litheness of her broad deep chest, her firmly-knit back. In her vigour of well-shaped bone and sinew and muscle she constantly emphasised the unpoetic nuisance of superfluous flesh. Beneath her little black hat her burnished hair lay coiled in soft smooth masses low on her neck. The wonderful vitality that beat through her veins brought the red colour to her cheeks in delicate waves. In her sunny amber eyes the high lights danced far back, dazzlingly.

"Now," she cried at last, "one more climb, and here we are at the summit! Fine, isn't it? That's Salome Park, all of it, as far as you can see, until you see the Tigmores curving around way off yonder to the west again. Ah, yes, I thought you would like it!"

From the summit of the Tigmore Ridge, on which they had stopped, there spread out an endless stretch of country, with small cleared spaces where the wheat and corn could grow, and with trout glens gleaming here and there through the trees, and with bosky places and woodsy places in between.

"Oh, it's wonderful," said Steering.

"This is the best view in the Tigmores," said the girl. "From here you can imagine that you see the Boston Mountains on a clear day. And away off down there run the Kiamichi--you will have to take my word for it, you can't see them. Cowskin Prairie, where the three States and the Territory come together, is off that way, too."

The big Missouri loneliness hung over it all, shutting them in, shutting the world out. "Psha! there isn't any world outside," said Steering, and drew his horse nearer to hers. "There isn't any world outside. This is all there is to it, and just you and I in it. Don't you believe me?"

"We will play that's the way of it," she said, the spell of the land upon her, too, the spell of the day upon her, her own heart's red spell upon her.

"Oh, me! Oh, me!" He brought his horse up closer, his eyes finding hers, and pleading with them.

"Well?" she cried, "well?" a wavering, waiting smile on her lips. Even like that, even leaning toward him she had a splendid self-trust; she was confidential, but a little remote.

Suddenly the man beside her clamped his jaws together harshly and held his tongue imprisoned behind his teeth. His chest lifted and shook as he sucked down a deep breath. There, near her, the glory of the hills outrolled before him, the keen snap of the elixir of love, the deathless, in his blood, life seemed hard, brutally hard. Everything was hard, and wrong. He had come down here for practical purposes, he had come needing every ounce of his energies for those purposes, yet, day by day, and minute by minute, he was being confronted by psychic or moral crises, of one kind and another, that used up all the force in him. Here and now the demand upon him was terrific. His love for Sally Madeira had grown upon him daily, hourly, engaging all that was best in him, pulling him away beyond his old best, inspiring, and remaking him. To have to fight it, even for her sake, even because he must protect her from so hard a fate as fate with him promised to be, was like sacrilege. The force of his self-conflict took all the colour from his lips, all the light from his eyes. "My God! My God!" he cried, a short, sharp cry, that beat up the Tigmores and broke and splintered into the big loneliness futilely. Then he jerked his horse about abruptly. "We must go back now," he said.

But the girl, who had been watching, turned her eyes from him and held her horse still for a short moment. The glory of the hills came on across the wide park to her and enfolded her, met in kind by the radiance of her wonderful hair, her sunny eyes, her glowing skin. The joy of the night before, the morning's passionate grief, the ingenuous hope and prayer in her ride after Steering, the sweet, anxious torture of the journey to Salome Park were all giving place to a large, impersonal comprehension of the conflict in Steering's soul. She had known before that there was trouble brewing between him and her father. She knew now, past all doubting, that he loved her, knew it from his face, his voice. And even while her heart filled and quivered with knowing it, some higher power of divination made her know, too, that he was caught between his love of her and his difficulty with her father in an inexplicable, soul-shaking way.

When Steering, a few feet below her, turned again towards her, she looked finer, fairer, more immortally young and strong than he had ever seen her look. She rode down to him fearlessly and put her hand out. "Sometimes the thing to do is just to stand steady," she said, "isn't that it?"--bridging all the unspoken thought and feeling between them, understanding, helping.

He clung to her hand, and its answering pressure was that of a comrade's, strong and reassuring. "Miss Madeira," he said, at last, simply, "things are so bad with me that if I don't stand steady and face them exactly as they come, not giving in an inch anywhere along the line, I shan't be able to stand at all."

"Ah, but you will stand that way--steady," she said, and drew her hand from his, and led the way homeward. She had accepted her fate to wait and endure while he "faced things."

They went back into the sunset together, almost silent. Far and wide rolled the hills in their flaunting glory, and, now and again, the girl's breath trembled and stung her,--that tidal sense of colour leaping and rioting within her, perhaps. Now and again the man's jaws set together more firmly. When they talked at all it was of little things.

"Why didn't I ever meet you at Miss Gossamer's?" he asked once.

"You were in Philadelphia when I was visiting Elsie, that was why. Neither you nor Mr. Carington were in New York that month. I remember that I got an idea that Elsie missed Mr. Carington, or you, or both. Mr. Carington was in love with her, wasn't he?"

"Yes, he's always been in love with her, I think.--Do you like the East?" he asked again, not caring for the subject of Miss Gossamer.

"To get an education in."

"You are well educated," he said, as though making comparisons.

In that matter of education, her selective abilities had been indeed good. She had taken from her opportunities developmental elements and used them within herself wisely. She had fine conceptions of art, she was well-read; and because she had foreseen that she would be too rich to have any separate use for the things of art and learning, she had seized upon and welded all her inclinations and accomplishments into an harmonious, delightful completeness as Woman. In the result, her education seemed to be one of the especial reasons that you liked her.

"But as for that," said Steering, speaking his thought aloud, "reasons don't count. There are plenty of reasons, but one really never gets at the biggest reason of all."

"You hardly expect me to understand that," she said, laughing frankly, a musical laugh that had in it the shaking, white flash of a rock-fluted hill-stream.

"No, no! I don't expect you to understand that," he said.

They went on through the deep, odorous wood, down close to the river's pale, shallow mystery again, and so back to the big gate at Madeira Place. There at the gate the girl put out her hand to him again.

"Good-bye!" she said softly, "good-bye!"

As he bent to kiss the hand his breath came hard. "It is not good-bye," he said. "It shall not be. I swear it."

Then he dashed on down the ridge road toward Canaan, to find Crittenton Madeira.

_Chapter Ten_

WHO'S GOT THE TIGMORES?

That Monday was hard on Madeira. It was his normal mental habit to come to a conclusion instantly, and cut a way for it across other people's ideas and notions with the impetus and onslaught of a cannon-ball. That Monday his mentality was below--or above--normal. He kept telling himself that he was mixed. His desire to crush Steering, pick him up and crumple him and thrust him aside, stood before him constantly, like the picture of the physical thing. Up to the time that he had seen his daughter run out of the dining-room that morning, her face averted, the desire had been steadily taking on colour and size. But, with the girl's brave broken cry, there had come on to him an intolerable question. For a long time he would not let the question get into words, or in any way define itself within his brain. Still, all morning long, he recognised that the question and that desire of his to crush Steering were ranged before him in some sort of fierce competitive effort. A thousand times he wished that he had had the courage to ask Sally candidly just what she had meant, just where she stood with regard to Steering, but he knew that he could never have asked her. Good friends though he and his daughter were, there was between them the definite reserve that lies between all good friends in the sphere of the big things of life. He could not have asked her, and she could not have told him if he had asked her.

He fretted through a busy morning in a terrible uncertainty. When Sally had come by the bank to tell him of her proposed ride with Steering, he had watched her with painful, anxious scrutiny. But the girl's control had become perfect by that hour, and Madeira had to go back into the bank with the uncertainty still thickly upon him. Pausing there in the bank at the plate-glass window for a reflectful moment, he came to a swift resolve. He saw that he could not afford to make any mistake. He resolved to give Steering another chance to get right on the company matter. When he had gone out to the curb to make an appointment for the evening with Steering, he had told himself that it was because the boy might as well have the chance as not have it, and, when he had gone back, he had known that, lie to himself about it as he might, it was because he was afraid for Sally Madeira, afraid that this Steering was about to mean something in her life, afraid that he, as the girl's father, might bring some unhappiness upon her.

All the long afternoon the thing continued to worry him; added to the torment he was suffering from the burning letter in his vest-pocket, it was well-nigh unendurable. He had to work vehemently to make the time pass. Toward six o'clock, he began to realise that he had been shaping the time toward the evening's appointment with Steering. As he got it shaped he grew more peaceful. He was arranging things so that he could win out with Steering. Little by little he came to accept the winning out as an assured thing, and in accepting it his grievance against Steering lightened, finally appearing to him as an easy thing to dispose of. Even the letter in his pocket grew less scorching. Sometimes he forgot, for minutes together, that it was there. Upon the hypothesis that Steering would "come around" everything smoothed out. Resting securely upon that hypothesis, Madeira even formulated the words with which he would take Steering's surrender: "God love us, that's all right! You just trust to me from now on. From now on I'll look out for you, my boy." He could hear himself saying that.

At six o'clock, still shaping the day toward the appointment with Steering, he took a great bevy of men, farmers, stockmen, storekeepers, to the Canaan Hotel for supper. Headed by Madeira,--who kept close to him a man named Salver, to whom he constantly referred as "our engineering friend from Joplin,"--the party stamped into the hotel dining-room. And though various members of the party were heavily booted, big, brawny, and in other ways cut out as assertive, it was much as though they were not there, so completely did Madeira fill the room. In the hotel office, after the supper had been disposed of, though every man had a cigar or a pipe in his mouth, it seemed as though Madeira were really doing all the smoking, so insistently did the smoke wreaths twist about his big face, as the others edged nearer him and closed in upon him. On the outside, on the way back up town, the street seemed full of Madeira. Even when some few of the satellites broke away from him and scattered into other parts of the town, at the livery stable, the drug store, the Grange, talking a little dubiously, the impression was definite that they were only meteoric scraps, cast-off clinkers that could not stand the fire and the fizz and the whirl in Madeira's orbit.

The superintendent of the Tigmore County schools, a long, lean man with a trick of covert sarcasm, happened to be in Canaan that day, and he cracked a joke about Madeira's "galley-gang," as the bevy of men swept past him on their way back to the bank. In Canaan almost any joke had a fair chance to become classic through immediate and long-drawn repetition, and the superintendent's joke was soon going up and down the street as majestically as though swathed in a Roman toga. By seven o'clock the joke had come on to Madeira's ears. At eight o'clock the superintendent was one of seven men who sat in conference with Madeira in the private office of the bank. That was Madeira's way. Besides Salver, the Joplin man, and the superintendent, there were at the conference Larriman, a man who counted his acres by the thousands in We-all Prairie; Heinkel, the German sheep-raiser from the southern part of the county; Shelby, from the cotton lands of the Upper Bottom; Pegram, the Canaan postmaster, and Quin Beasley, from the Grange store.

They were all still there when Steering came in. Fresh from the hills, young, alert, deep-lunged, brown-faced, Steering was a good sort to look at as he strode into the room. He had ridden on into Canaan to the tune of high, purposeful music, after parting with Sally Madeira. His experience with her out there on the hills, his profounder impression of her fineness, had acted upon him like unbearably sweet harmonies, urgent, inspirational. He was this minute keen for something to do, something hard, earnest, momentous. If the whole truth were told, he wanted to fight.

Madeira got up and shook hands with him, the more vigorously and noisily because of a sharp lambent flare that leaped out from the younger man's consciousness like a warning, and, reaching Madeira, stung and irritated him. As they stood gripping each the other's hand, both big, both vigorous, both determined, there was yet a fine line of distinction between them. On one side of the line stood the younger man with his ideals. On the other side stood Madeira, without any ideals.

"Come in, Steering, my boy!" In spite of himself, in spite of the "my boy," Madeira's voice rang harshly. "Lord love us, we are having a little preliminary meeting here. You know all these gentlemen, I think? I'm just reading to them some matter that I have got ready. I'll go on reading, if you don't mind. Sit down over there and listen."

And, Steering, shaking hands with the men nearest him, and bowing to the men farthest from him, sat down and listened.