Part 16

Not that Graham ever preached. Preaching would have presented something tangible against which to revolt, something orthodox to be cried down. In fact, reformation of Molly Lafond's manners of mind or body was the farthest from Graham's thought. He merely represented to her a state of being to which she must rise. The rise was slight, but it was real. It meant the difference between thinking in the abstract or in the concrete. It meant that she was compelled to feel that to men like him, or to women like her, this animal existence, with its finer pleasures of riding, climbing, flirting and sitting on bars, while well enough in its way, was after all but a small and incidental part of life. If the girl had been requested to formulate it, she would not have been able to do so. She apprehended it more in its result; which was to make her just a little ashamed of her everyday manner of existence, without, however, furnishing her with a strong enough motive to rise permanently above it. This, in turn, translated itself into a certain impotent mental discomfort.

As long as Jack Graham preserved the personally indifferent standpoint, the mere fact that he caused her momentary disquiet did not antagonize Molly Lafond against him. Rather it added a certain piquancy to their interviews. He threw out his observations on men and manners lazily, with the true philosopher's delight in rolling a good thing under his tongue. None of them possessed an easily fitted personal application. And his utter indifference as to whether she talked or listened, went or tarried, always secretly pleased her. She liked his way of looking at her through half-closed lids, in the manner of one examining a strange variety of tree or fern; the utter lack of enthusiasm in the fashion of his greetings when she came, or his farewell when she departed; his quite impersonal manner of pointing truths which might only too easily have been given a personal application. And this was the very reason of it, although again she might not have been able to formulate the idea; that although his methods of thought, his mental stand-points, his ways of life constantly accused hers of inertia, carelessness and moral turpiture, nevertheless his personally indifferent attitude toward her relieved them of too direct an application. She enjoyed the advantages of a mental cold shower, with the added satisfaction that no one saw her bedraggled locks.

But when in time the young man went the way of the rest of the camp and began to show a more intimate interest in her, the conditions were quite altered. We may rejoice in anathema against the sins of humanity, in which we may acknowledge a share; we always resent being personally blamed.

Graham indeed went the way of the rest of the camp. His progress from indifference to love he could not have traced himself, although he might with tolerable accuracy have indicated the landmarks--a look, a gesture, a flash of spirit, revealing by a little more the woman whom he finally came to idealize. That her's was a rich nature he had early discovered. That it was not inherently a frivolous or vicious nature, he saw only gradually, and after many days. Then his self-disguise of philosophic indifference fell. He realized fully that he loved her, not for what she did or said, but for herself; and with the knowledge came an acuter consciousness that, whatever her possibilities, her tendency was now to pervert rather than develop them. For the first time he opened his eyes and examined her environment as well as herself.

She spent half of her day alone with Cheyenne Harry. The other half she was restless. The evening she passed in the Little Nugget saloon, where the men, convinced that she was now the mistress of Cheyenne Harry, took even less pains than formerly to restrain the accustomed freedom of their words and actions. Graham viewed her indifference to all this, and her growing absorption by Cheyenne Harry, with some alarm. He conceived that the state of affairs came about more because of a dormant moral nature than because of moral perversity; and as to this he was partly right. But he could not fail to perceive the inevitable trend of it all, no matter what the permitting motive. He would have been less--or more--than human, if he had let it pass without a protest.

At first the protest took the form of action. He tried to persuade the girl to spend the evening in other ways. While the novelty lasted, this was all very well. He epitomized and peptonized his knowledge on all subjects to suit her intellectual digestion. They called it their "lesson time," and he made the mistake of taking it too seriously. He was very much in earnest himself, so he thought she should be so. They talked of nothing but the matter in hand. After a little, there came an evening when she was a trifle tired. The matter in hand did not interest her as much as it should. She leaned the back of her head against her two clasped hands, and sighed.

"I'm stupid to-night," she confessed. "Let's talk. Tell me a story."

Graham was much in love, and so incapable of readjustments. He had thought out carefully several new and interesting things to say.

"I thought you said you were really in earnest about this," he reproached her. "If you are going to improve yourself, you must work; and work cannot depend on one's mood."

All of which was very true, but Jack Graham could not see that there inheres in truth no imperative demand for its expression.

But when another night came, her enthusiasm was less marked, for she saw no escape. After a time she skipped an evening. Then at last she gave it up altogether.

"I'm afraid I'm not intellectual," she confessed, smiling doubtfully. "I told you I'd be a disappointment. It is all interesting and very improving, but--well, I don't know--it seems to make us both cross. I guess we'd better quit."

Jack Graham seemed to indicate by his manner that he was disappointed. A good deal of his disapproval was because he saw that her renunciation of these "improving" evenings meant not only the loss of the improvement, but her exposure to worse influences; but of course Molly Lafond did not know that. She took the young man's condemnation entirely to herself, and consequently, when in his presence, felt just a little inferior. She concealed the feeling with an extra assumption of flippancy.

Because of these things, as time went on, she came to see more and more of Cheyenne Harry and less and less of Jack Graham. The latter's mere presence made her ashamed of her lack of earnest purpose. He, for his part, viewed with growing uneasiness the augmenting influence of the dashing Westerner; for he knew the man thoroughly, and believed that his attentions meant no good. In that, at least for the present, he did him a wrong. Cheyenne Harry merely amused himself with a new experience--that of entering into relations of intimacy with a woman intrinsically pure. The other sort was not far to seek, should his fancy turn that way. But to Graham these marked attentions could mean but one thing.

His resolve to speak openly was not carried into effect for a number of days. Finally, quite unexpectedly, he found his chance.

Toward evening, as he was returning from a day's exploitation on his three claims in Teepee, he came across her sitting on a fallen log near the lower ford. The shadows of the hills were lying across the landscape, even out on the brown prairie. A bird or so sang in the thicket. A light wind breathed up the gulch. Altogether it was so peaceful; and the girl sitting there idly, her hands clasped over her knees, gazing abstractedly into the waters of the brook, was so pensive and contemplative and sad, that Graham had to spur his resolution hard to induce it to take the leap. But he succeeded in making himself angry by thinking of Cheyenne Harry.

She saw him coming and shrank vaguely. She felt herself in some subtle way, which she could not define, quite in the wrong. What wrong she could not have told. When, however, she saw that plainly his intention was to speak to her, she smiled at him brilliantly with no trace of embarrassment.

They exchanged the commonplaces of such a meeting.

"Why are you so solemn?" she broke in finally. "You look as if you'd lost your last friend."

He looked at her. "That is the way I feel."

"Oh," said she.

They fell silent. She did not like at all the gloomy fashion of his scrutiny. It made her nervous. She felt creeping on her heart that mysterious heaviness, the weight of something unknowable, which she had lately been at such pains to forget. She did not like it. With an effort, she shook it off and laughed.

"What's the matter?" she cried with forced gayety. "Didn't he sleep well? Don't he like my looks, or the freckle on my nose, or the way I wear my cap?"--she tossed the latter rakishly on her curls, and tilted her head sideways.

"What is the matter?" she asked with a sudden return to gravity.

"You are the matter," he answered briefly.

"Oh dear!" she cried with petulance; "has it come to that?"

"No, it has not come to that, not what you mean. But it has come to this: that your conduct has made every true friend of yours feel just as I do."

She stared at him a moment, gasping.

"Heavens! you frighten me! What _have_ I done? Come over here on this log and tell me about it."

Graham's vehement little speech had vented the more explosive portion of his emotion. Whatever he should say now would be inspired rather by conviction than impulse; and the lover's natural unwillingness deliberately to antagonize his mistress made it exceedingly difficult to continue. He hesitated.

"You _must_ tell me now," she commanded; "I insist. Now, what have I done?"

"It isn't so much what you have done," began Graham lamely, "as what you might do. You see you are very young, and you don't know the world; and so you might walk right into something very wrong without realizing in the least what you are doing, and without meaning to do wrong at all. Everybody owes it to himself to make the best out of himself, and you must know that you have great possibilities. But it isn't that so much. I wish I knew how to tell you exactly. You ought to have a mother. But if you'd only let us advise you, because we know more about it than you----"

The girl had watched him with gleaming eyes. "That doesn't _mean _anything," she interrupted. "What is it, now? Out with it!"

"It's Cheyenne Harry," blurted Graham desperately; "you oughtn't to go around with him so much."

"Now we have it," said the girl with dangerous calm; "I'm not to go around with Harry. Will you tell me why?"

"Well," replied Graham, floundering this side of the main fact; "it isn't a healthy thing for anybody to see any one person to the exclusion of others."

"Yourself, for instance," stabbed the girl wickedly. "Go on."

Graham flushed. "No, it isn't that," he asserted earnestly. "It isn't for the benefit of the others that I speak, but because of the effect on yourself. It isn't _healthy_. You are wasting time that might be very much better employed; you get into an abnormal attitude toward other people; you are laying stress on a _means_ to which there is no _end_, and that is abnormal. I don't know that you understand what I mean; it's philosophy," he concluded, smiling in an attempt to end lightly.

"No, I do not understand in the least. All I understand is that you object to my seeing a certain man, without giving any particular reason for your objections."

"It isn't especially elevating for you to sit every evening in a bar room crowded with swearing and drinking men who are not at all of your class," suggested Graham. "The language they use ought to teach you that."

"They are my people," cried Molly with a sudden flash of indignation, "and they are honest and brave and true-hearted. They do not speak as grammatically as you or I; but you have been to college, and I have been blessed with a chance to read. And whatever language they speak, they do not use it to talk of other people behind their backs!" She reflected a moment. "But that isn't the question," she went on, with a touch of her native shrewdness. "I understood you to make a request of me."

Graham had not so understood himself, but he had a request ready, nevertheless. "That you be a little more careful in the way you go about with Mortimer, then," he begged.

"And why?" she asked again.

"Because--because he means to do you harm!" cried Jack Graham, driven to the point at last.

She rose from the log. "Ah, that is what I wanted to hear!" she returned in level tones--"the accusation. You will tell him this to his face?"

Graham paused. His anxiety was a tangle of suspicions born of his knowledge of men, his intuitions, and his fears. Looking at it dispassionately from the outside, what right had he to interfere? Graham was much in love, brave enough to carry through the inevitable row, and quite willing as far as himself was concerned, to do so; but he could not fail to see that, however the affair came out, it would irretrievably injure the girl's reputation. No one would believe that he would go to such lengths on suspicion of merely future harm. To the camp it would mean his proved knowledge of present facts. So he hesitated.

"You will not, I see," concluded the girl, moving away; "rest easy, I shall say nothing to Harry about it. I don't know what he would do if he heard of it."

She began to walk toward the ford, every motion expressing contempt. She believed she had proved Graham a coward, and this had rehabilitated her self-respect. She was no longer ashamed before him. At the water's brink she turned back.

"And remember this, Mr. Jack Graham!" she cried, her repressed anger suddenly blazing out; "I may be young, and I may not know much of the world, but I know enough to take care of myself without any of your help."

She picked her way across the stepping-stones and disappeared, without once looking back.

XXVI

AND HAS TO GO TO WORK

From that moment Graham ceased to be an integral factor in the girl's history. His only hold on her imagination had been his moral superiority, and it was now gone. She treated him thenceforth as an admirer whose sincerity deserves the consideration which his insistence makes difficult to give ungrudgingly. He was not discouraged or frowned on. He was forgiven promptly as a child is forgiven. But he was kept always scrupulously to his place. The girl now held the whip hand. After a little, when he became too insistent, she cut him cruelly in punishment and only deigned to smile on him again when, to sue forgiveness, he had quite abandoned his attitude of fault-finding.

As for him, the girl's actions soon became hateful. He saw them all wrong, yet he felt his powerlessness to alter them in even the slightest degree. This aroused so powerful but so impotent a rage that shortly he came to react irritably against everything Molly did whether right or wrong. He instinctively arraigned himself in the opposition. He did not want to do this, and his common sense accused him strongly of unreasonableness, but he could not help it. It was greater than he. No matter what the plan, discussion or even conversation, his morbidly sensitive consciousness of the girl's error impelled him to object.

"Let's go over to Rockerville to-day," she would suggest.

"The horses aren't here."

"But it's no great matter to get them. Let's send the Kid."

"I don't know where the Kid is."

"Well, Frosty then."

"Frosty's busy."

"It wouldn't hurt you any to get them yourself."

"One of the saddles is broken."

"You know very well it's only a cinch ring. It can be fixed in five minutes."

"We'll---- Don't you think it is going to be pretty hot?"

"No, I don't; and if I can stand it, I should think you could."

"And----"

"Heavens and earth! It's harder than climbing trees to get you to do anything. Never mind! _I_ don't want to go to Rockerville or anywhere else if it's all that trouble!"

And then Graham would wonder at his stubborn fit. Why shouldn't they have gone to Rockerville? In five minutes he could have got the horses, fixed the saddle. And the day was beautiful. What real reason did he have? He did not know; only he felt an irresistible impulse to object. This was because he loved her, disapproved of her, and was quite powerless over her.

When he was not merely contrary, he was urging strong advice on an unwilling recipient. It was offered in either the pleading or the blustering spirit. If in the former, Molly merely teased him. If in the latter, she became very angry. It was always on the same subject. The girl was wearied with it.

And yet, if it were any consolation, Jack Graham could have comforted himself with the truth that, next to Cheyenne Harry, he claimed a greater share of her thoughts than any other in camp. His offices were ungrateful, but they had a certain sincerity which prevented their being ignored; and, not forgotten, their acid-like drop of truth ate into that conscience of which she did not yet realize the existence. Her horizon was becoming banked with thunderclouds, looming huge and black and heavy with portent. Graham, as an ideal, had stood for a higher existence. Now, however shrunken his image appeared, the ideal itself remained as something tangible in her collection of moral standards. She acknowledged to herself fiercely that she had fallen from it. She told herself that she did not care.

She was dreadfully alone. Lafond was always kind to her, but she never felt that she knew him. Graham, in spite of his frequent presence, was in reality quite estranged. The Kid and Peter and Kelly and Houston and even old Bill Martin had fallen away from her somehow. She did not know that the reason the older men were less intimate was because she was supposed to be Cheyenne Harry's mistress, and the rule of such cases is "hands off!" And then there was always the stifling formless weight at her heart which she did not understand. She was very unhappy. That with her meant that she was reckless. She threw herself passionately into her affair with Cheyenne Harry as the one tangible human relation left to her in its entirety.

The days followed each other in a succession of passionate exaltations and dumb despairs. Harry kissed her whenever he pleased now. She had long since got beyond mere coquetry. It meant much to her hereditary instincts so to yield, but she gave herself up to it with the abandon of a lost soul delivering itself to degrading wickedness. For in spite of her life and companions she was intrinsically pure, so pure that even Cheyenne Harry, with all his extraordinary influence, did not somehow care to go too far. He kissed her, and at the first, when the long resistance had enhanced her value, he was persuaded that he loved her--that these interviews meant to him what lovers' meetings mean--and so he responded to her passionate devotion with what seemed to be corresponding ecstasy.

But then after a little insensibly the flood ebbed. In the old days she had amused him with her bright laughter, her gay speech, her mocking superiorities, her little coquetries of manner or mannerism. Now she had thrown these weapons away. Her surrender was complete. Her life had simplified to one phase, that of dewy-eyed pleading adoration. At first it pleased his masculine vanity. After a time it cloyed ever so little; Cheyenne Harry missed the "comic relief" in all these heroics. He would have liked occasionally to have climbed hills; or taken long walks; or even run a short race, say to the bend of the road; or to have had played on him a small practical joke; or experienced some other such indication that man is a laughing animal. The girl seemed capable of enjoying nothing but slow and aimless saunterings. In the beginning he had experienced the nameless ecstasy and thrill inherent in the personal contact of the kiss. Now he missed something of those qualities. It seemed no longer strange to him to feel her body near his, to watch her wide eyes half-closed, to press his lips against hers, half-parted. It was still delightful above everything in the world, but there had been one thing better--the kiss of yesterday. In a word Cheyenne Harry's experience was beginning dimly to trace the word "satiety."

Not that either he or the girl realized it. To their thinking minds everything was as usual. But their subconsciousness appreciated it, and interpreted it according to its value. Cheyenne Harry, as has been pointed out, turned instinctively toward a desire for lighter phases in their relationship. Molly Lafond clung the more blindly to her passion. Her only excuse to herself for her abandonment of the better ideal was the reality of that passion. When it should go, her self-respect would vanish with it.

Harry found a certain amusement, too, in seeing Graham jumping around the outer circle like corn in a popper. Graham was usually possessed of so much innate dignity. Now his self-abandonment to the essentially undignified attitude of begging for the petty favor of a quarrelless ten minutes or even a little good-humored smile tickled the other's sense of the incongruous and pleased his vanity. To an extent he was held to the girl now by his pride. A man likes to have a rival when perfectly secure himself, especially when the girl tells him what the rival says to her. This may not be honorable in her, but it is very human. So amusing was it that Harry did not get angry over the reports of Graham's repeated warnings against him.

The latter seemed unable to keep off the subject. He knew that his suspicions only strengthened the girl's obstinate opposition, but he could not help their expression for all that. Sometimes he pleaded, sometimes he threatened, sometimes he assumed the prophet's mantle and foretold all sorts of dire disasters. The girl laughed, or became angry. It would have puzzled Graham to tell which of these moods he preferred: perhaps it would have depended on which of them he was experiencing at the moment.

His saving grace was a sturdy sense of his duty to himself. He felt that sense to be sadly shaken in many ways; but he clung to his work tenaciously, perhaps a little feverishly.

"Nuthin' like a woman to make a man work," observed Bill Martin sagely, "whether she's _fur_ him, or agin' him."

"How about Billy?" inquired Old Mizzou.

Bill Martin laughed. "Billy? Oh, he's _playin'_," he replied.

XXVII

PROSPERITY