CHAPTER VII—THE SHADOW OF THE PAST

Marion Harlan and her uncle, Elam Parsons, did not accompany Carrington to the Castle Hotel. By telegraph, through Danforth, Carrington had bought a house near Dawes, and shortly after Quinton Taylor left the station platform accompanied by his friends and admirers, Marion and her uncle were in a buckboard riding toward the place that, henceforth, was to be their home.

For that question had been settled before the party left Westwood. Parsons had declared his future activities were to be centered in Dawes, that he had no further interests to keep him in Westwood, and that he intended to make his home in Dawes.

Certainly Marion had few interests in the town that had been the scene of the domestic tragedy that had left her parentless. She was glad to get away. For though she had not been to blame for what had happened, she was painfully conscious of the stares that followed her everywhere, and aware of the morbid curiosity with which her neighbors regarded her. Also—through the medium of certain of her “friends,” she had become cognizant of speculative whisperings, such as: “To think of being brought up like that? Do you think she will be like her mother?” Or—“What’s bred in the bone, _et cetera_.”

Perhaps these good people did not mean to be unkind; certainly the crimson stains that colored the girl’s cheeks when she passed them should have won their charity and their silence.

There was nothing in Westwood for her; and so she was glad to get away. And the trip westward toward Dawes opened a new vista of life to her. She was leaving the old and the tragic and adventuring into the new and promising, where she could face life without the onus of a shame that had not been hers.

Before she was half way to Dawes she had forgotten Westwood and its wagging tongues. She alone, of all the passengers in the Pullman, had not been aware of the heat and the discomfort. She had loved every foot of the great prairie land that, green and beautiful, had flashed past the car window; she had gazed with eager, interested eyes into the far reaches of the desert through which she had passed, filling her soul with the mystic beauty of this new world, reveling in its vastness and in the atmosphere of calm that seemed to engulf it.

Dawes had not disappointed her; on the contrary, she loved it at first sight. For though Dawes was new and crude, it looked rugged and honest—and rather too busy to hesitate for the purpose of indulging in gossip—idle or otherwise. Dawes, she was certain, was occupying itself with progress—a thing that, long since, Westwood had forgotten.

Five minutes after she had entered the buckboard, the spirit of this new world had seized upon the girl and she was athrob and atingle with the joy of it. It filled her veins; it made her cheeks flame and her eyes dance. And the strange aroma—the pungent breath of the sage, borne to her on the slight breeze—she drew into her lungs with great long breaths that seemed to intoxicate her.

“Oh,” she exclaimed delightedly, “isn’t it great! Oh, I love it!”

Elam Parsons grinned at her—the habitual smirk with which he recognized all emotion not his own.

“It _does_ look like a good field for business,” he conceded.

The girl looked at him quickly, divined the sordidness of his thoughts, and puckered her brows in a frown. And thereafter she enjoyed the esthetic beauties of her world without seeking confirmation from her uncle.

Her delight grew as the journey to the new home progressed. She saw the fertile farming country stretching far in the big section of country beyond the water-filled basin; her eyes glowed as the irrigation ditches, with their locks and gates, came under her observation; and she sat silent, awed by the mightiness of it all—the tall, majestic mountains looming somberly many miles distant behind a glowing mist—like a rose veil or a gauze curtain lowered to partly conceal the mystic beauty of them.

Intervening were hills and flats and draws and valleys, and miles and miles of level grass land, green and peaceful in the shimmering sunlight that came from somewhere near the center of the big, pale-blue inverted bowl of sky; she caught the silvery glitter of a river that wound its way through the country like a monstrous serpent; she saw dark blotches, miles long, which she knew were forests, for she could see the spires of trees thrusting upward. But from where she rode the trees seemed to be no larger than bushes.

Looking backward, she could see Dawes. Already the buckboard had traveled two or three miles, but the town seemed near, and she had quite a shock when she looked back at it and saw the buildings, mere huddled shanties, spoiling the beauty of her picture.

A mile or so farther—four miles altogether, Parsons told her—and they came in sight of a house. She had difficulty restraining her delight when they climbed out of the buckboard and Parsons told her the place was to be their permanent home. For it was such a house as she had longed to live in all the days of her life.

The first impression it gave her was that of spaciousness. For though only one story in height, the house contained many rooms. Those, however, she saw later.

The exterior was what intrigued her interest at first glance. So far as she knew, it was the only brick building in the country. She had seen none such in Dawes.

There was a big porch across the front; the windows were large; there were vines and plants thriving in the shade from some big cottonwood trees near by—in fact, the house seemed to have been built in a grove of the giant trees; there were several outhouses, one of which had chickens in an enclosure near it; there was a garden, well-kept; and the girl saw that back of the house ran a little stream which flowed sharply downward, later to tumble into the big basin far below the irrigation dam.

While Parsons was superintending the unloading of the buckboard, Marion explored the house. It was completely furnished, and her eyes glowed with pleasure as she inspected it. And when Parsons and the driver were carrying the baggage in she was outside the house, standing at the edge of a butte whose precipitous walls descended sharply to the floor of the irrigation basin, two or three hundred feet below. She could no longer see the cultivated level, with its irrigation ditches, but she could see the big dam, a mile or so up the valley toward Dawes, with the water creeping over it, and the big valley itself, slumbering in the pure, white light of the morning.

She went inside, slightly awed, and Parsons, noting her excitement, smirked at her. She left him and went to her room. Emerging later she discovered that Parsons was not in the house. She saw him, however, at a distance, looking out into the valley.

And then, in the kitchen, Marion came upon the housekeeper, a negro woman of uncertain age. Parsons had not told her there was to be a housekeeper.

The negro woman grinned broadly at her astonishment.

“Lawsey, ma’am; you jes’ got to have a housekeeper, I reckon! How you ever git along without a housekeeper? You’re too fine an’ dainty to keep house you’self!”

The woman’s name, the latter told her, was Martha, and there was honest delight—and, it seemed to Marion, downright relief in her eyes when she looked at the new mistress.

“You ain’t got no ‘past,’ that’s certain, honey,” she declared, with a delighted smile. “The woman that lived here befo’ had a past, honey. A man named Huggins lived in this house, an’ she said she’s his wife. Wife! Lawsey! No man has a wife like that! She had a past, that woman, an’ mebbe a present, too—he, he, he!

“He was the man what put the railroad through here, honey. I done hear the woman say—her name was Blanche, honey—that Huggins was one of them ultra rich. But whatever it was that ailed him, honey, didn’t help his looks none. Pig-eye, I used to call him, when I’se mad at him—which was mostly all the time—he, he, he!”

The girl’s face whitened. Was she never to escape the atmosphere she loathed? She shuddered and Martha patted her sympathetically on the shoulder.

“There, there, honey; you ain’t ’sponsible for other folks’ affairs. Jes’ you hold you’ head up an’ go about you’ business. Nobody say anything to you because you’ livin’ here.”

But Martha’s words neither comforted nor consoled the girl. She went again to her room and sat for a long time, looking out of a window. For now all the cheer had gone out of the house; the rooms looked dull and dreary—and empty, as of something gone out of them.