Part 6

“Have you?” exclaimed Miss Sophy. “The very thing I was needing. One of the farm horses has broken down, an’ Waters said I’d have to buy another. That is lucky,”—and Miss Sophy chuckled to herself at this speedy returning of the bread she had cast on the waters,—“that is downright lucky. You can be carried out in your own team, and Waters’ll work one o’ your horses right in harvestin’ the wheat, ’n’ that’ll save me buyin’ a horse, ’n’ be a good deal more ’n your board to me, which’ll set your mind to rest about that part on ’t. I always did hate to have anything to do with horses; don’t know anything about ’em, if I did grow up on a farm; never could learn to harness ’em; don’t know a bad one from a good one; expect I’m cheated every time. I dare say you’ll find there’s nothin’ the matter with this one Waters says ’s sick. When you get out there you can begin to keep your eye on Waters ’s soon ’s you’re a mind to. You don’t need to be on your feet to do that, ’n’ he needs watchin’.”

A most injudicious confidence this to put in a stranger, and a thing wholly foreign to Miss Sophy’s habitual way of talking with persons whom she did not know. She could not account for it to herself, and felt a half embarrassment in her own presence, as it were, as she realized it. With an unconscious effort at reassuring her self-respect, she turned to the doctor, as they left the house together, and said, “I don’t know how it is, but there’s something about that fellow makes you trust him ‘on sight,’ as you say on money notes. Don’t you think he’s all right?”

“No doubt of it,” replied the doctor, heartily. “No doubt of his being ’s honest ’s the day is long; but I don’t believe he’s much force.”

“How could he help having force, with that great body o’ his?” said Miss Sophy, ingenuously, coloring as she spoke. “He’s ’most a giant.”

“I didn’t mean that kind of force,” laughed the doctor, privately amused at Miss Sophy’s standard. “Some of the smallest men I’ve ever known have had the most force. I don’t know much about this man. Nobody says any harm of him, though. But that wife of his is a regular devil! He’s a fool to stick to her’s he does.”

Miss Sophy cast her eyes down. “But he’s married to her,” she said. “What’s he goin’ to do?”

“Do!” shouted the doctor. And he thought to himself, “Well! of all queer questions for a steady-going old maid like Sophy Burr to ask! Do!” he repeated. “Why, get a divorce from her quicker ’n lightning! That’s what he’d do if he’d got the force you was talking about.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t think that would be right,” persisted Miss Sophy in a still lower voice, still with downcast eyes. They had been walking fast, and had just reached her gate, and as she said these last words she lifted the latch and held it in her fingers, nervously slipping it up and down. “Gammer Stein says he loves her spite of all she’s done.”

The doctor stared in undisguised amazement. “Loves her!” he ejaculated.

“Yes,” said Miss Sophy; “so Gammer Stein says, and that is the reason he was down there; he follows her wherever she goes.”

“Well, he is a fool, then,” said the doctor. “Beg your pardon, Miss Sophy. The word slipped out unawares to me; but that’s what he is!”

“I suppose most folks would call him so,” answered Miss Sophy, conveying her faint last retaliation and championship in a slight emphasis on the word “most” as she closed the gate.

“I should say so,” retorted the doctor stiffly, walking away with a puzzled sense of sudden antagonism towards Miss Sophy, and a general disposition to reflect contemptuously on spinster views of life. “I should say so!” he muttered to himself again. “What ever has got into Sophy Burr, to be standing up for that kind of immorality!”

And probably nothing short of a revelation from Heaven could have made it apparent to the good doctor’s mind that it was not at all for immorality that Miss Sophy was “standing up.”

In the cool air and peaceful stillness of the Greenhills ranch Zeph mended by the hour, mended so fast that it seemed to him like a miracle, mended spiritually as well as bodily; new resolution, new purpose, awoke within him; clouds lifted, and he saw clearly what he ought to do. This new vision and purpose wrote themselves at once in his face. It was little less than a transformation. So great was the change, that when one morning Miss Sophy saw him driving up to her gate in the Greenhills wagon, she did not know him. It was not quite two weeks since the day she had seen him lying wan and spiritless in his bed.

“Sakes alive!” she ejaculated, “that can’t be Zeph Riker! ’Tis too! Well, I never! He’s more of a man than I thought.” And there was a certain indefinable tribute of new respect in her manner as she greeted him with friendly kindness. “How you have picked up! I didn’t know you at first. Ready to go to work, ain’t you? You look as if you was!”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Zeph. “I’m feelin’ fust-rate now; I’m ready to take hold o’ anythin’ ye’ve got for me to do, ’n’ very thankful to you, ma’am, for givin’ me the chance. I expect ye’ve got the right to me; the doctor he was a tellin’ me to-day that he’d about giv’ me up when you come along that day ’n’ took me out to your place.”

“Pshaw!” said Miss Sophy. “That’s all nonsense. There was a dozen dead men in you then! You come in, and I’ll tell you what I want you to do. I’m goin’ to put a good deal of responsibility on you, ’n’ I don’t expect you’ll disappoint me.”

“I’ll try not to,” said Zeph, gravely. “I sha’n’t cheat ye; but I might disap’int ye, for all that. There’s those that’d answer for me not cheatin’ ye, if ye’d like a reference, or somethin’ o’ the kind,” he added.

“No!” replied Miss Sophy. “I’ll take you on your own references—and mine! I ain’t often mistaken in folks, ’n’ I made up my mind the first night I saw you that I’d like to get you to work for me.”

As soon as the words had passed her lips she would have given much to recall them. The effect they produced upon Zeph was pitiful to see. In the flash of a second his face altered. Bitter memories swept over him. His whole figure seemed to droop, to lose strength; he looked again the grief-stricken, wandering, vacillating man who had fumbled weakly at her door that night.

But it passed. In the few moments during which Miss Sophy stood, embarrassed, dumb, wondering at her own thoughtlessness in having thus reminded him of his sorrow, Zeph had wrestled himself free from the sudden grasp of it, and looking her straight in the eyes, said: “I’m more to be trusted now than I was then, Miss Burr. I was pretty near out o’ my mind that night. But I know where I stand now, an’ I’m goin’ to work. I’m all right, ma’am.”

“That’s all right, all right,” exclaimed Miss Sophy, awkwardly. She did not intend to have any further implication with Zeph’s domestic miseries. “If he’s going to be my overseer ’n’ run that ranch,” said the shrewd woman to herself, “he’s just got to be my overseer ’n’ nothin’ else. I can’t be carryin’ all his troubles on my shoulders. Now he’s on his feet, he’ll have to steer his own canoe.”

It was only the helpless that appealed to Miss Sophy. People who were, as she in concise metaphor expressed it, “on their feet” must look out for themselves. She did, and she expected everybody else to. A very odd mixture of sympathy and hardness, compassion and coldness, was Miss Sophy. Even to herself she was puzzling,—so swept away from her bearings sometimes by great waves of pity and desire to help her fellow-beings, and again flintily indifferent to suffering, whose shape or phase antagonized her common sense. There was no limit to her benevolent activity, generosity, when once her heart was touched; but she was quite capable of dismissing other cases with a curt, “I’ve no patience with such people,—no patience at all! They deserve to suffer. Good enough for them!”

But to keep Zeph her “overseer ’n’ nothin’ else” proved not to be so easy as Miss Sophy had thought; and the burden of the thought of his sorrows would not roll off her shoulders as she had intended. Do her best, she could not shake herself free of a haunting consciousness of his trouble and a growing admiration for his courageous patience. No word of allusion to it passed between them. She would not ask, and nothing would have been further from Zeph’s impulse than to offer, any information in regard to the state of affairs; but she fell into the habit of studying his face, and drawing from its expression her own conclusions as to the posture of matters. When he looked cheery and resolute, and spoke with vivacity, she said to herself, “Well, he’s gettin’ along with it wonderfully.” Whenever he looked downcast and was silent, saying only what was needful to be said, wrath shook her inmost soul, and her soliloquies were vindictive. “She’s been pesterin’ him, I know she has, the hussy! I’d like to see her drummed out o’ town!” or “I expect he’s worryin’ himself to death about those children. I don’t believe but the law’d give ’em to him if he’d set about it. He could have the boy out at the ranch’s well as not, an’ the baby could be boarded. I don’t know what the Lord sends children to such women for!”

Ah, very far was Miss Sophy drifting from the purpose she had laid down to herself of letting the overseer of her ranch “steer his own canoe”! She was fast nearing the pass of being ready to snatch from his hands both rudder and oars. It is a dangerous thing for a woman to thus study and pity a man. By paths of whose bearing she does not so much as dream, she is approaching a country whose name, if it were once pronounced in her ears, would terrify her. But there is no one to pronounce the name; the paths are winding; no guide-posts are there; no tokens; not so much as a dropped leaf to show who last went through. Shrewdest of all commanders in the world is Love, who makes his recruits recruit themselves.

If Miss Sophy had been told in these days that this constant, half-tender, half-impatient, half-pitying, half-wrathful watch and interest she was keeping up in Zeph’s affairs was carrying her straight and fast into loving him, she would have been ready to slay her informant, and would have been sure the tale was a lie. All the same it was true. This was what was coming to Miss Sophy; helpless, unaware, stout-hearted, sturdy, independent, as she was, it was coming to her, and she did not know it; in her ignorance she was inviting it, making ready for it, feeding it. A mighty passion it would be when once it had Miss Sophy fairly in its clutch; no half-way measure or measures in anything Miss Sophy did, or became.

And so the days wore on, faster than ever, it seemed to her; with this new absorbing interest added to her other duties, she appeared to somehow lose time out of each day, and never, as she phrased it, “get round.” From morning to night she went about her work with her brown straw hat pressed tight down on her forehead. This hat was always to Miss Sophy’s servants a weather-signal. It had hitherto been her habit to wear it only on days of extra work,—house-cleaning, or the refitting of a room, moving of a stove, or some such exigency. The sight of it always struck terror to her workwomen’s hearts. “When Miss Sophy comes down in the morning with her brown hat on,” one of them once said, “we jest know we’ve got to look out an’ step lively!” But this summer the brown hat was worn day after day, till gradually it lost its portentous meaning to the household. It really was no less a symptom of perturbations than before, but they were perturbations whose existence no one suspected,—least of all, Miss Sophy.

The summer had gone and the autumn had begun. October, with its hasty scurrying snows and threatening sleets, took Miss Sophy by surprise. “Goodness!” she cried one morning; “if it ain’t snowing a’ready! Of all climates ever I heard of, I do think this Colorado’s the most unreasonable. It’s bad enough to keep on snowing into May; but to begin again the first week in October is a little too much! It don’t seem but yesterday I had the stoves took down, an’ now they’ve all got to be set up again. It’s as bad as Vermont, every bit.”

“Why don’t you go to South California, Miss Sophy?” said one of her boarders, a young engineer, who had recently come from San Diego. “That’s the climate of all the world; never a flake of snow from one year’s end to the other; flowers blooming out of doors all winter.”

“Really? Truly?” said Miss Sophy, turning a wondering look at him. “I didn’t know as ’twas so warm’s that.”

“It isn’t,” the engineer replied, laughing. “That’s the joke of it. I never suffered more with cold here than I have there, when I’ve got caught out in the mountains at night; but it isn’t cold by the thermometer, and that’s what the plants go by, I suppose; at any rate, I know they’re in bloom all winter, and I’ve seen barley in full head in January.”

“And never any snow, honest, now?” asked Miss Sophy, incredulously.

“Never,” he replied; “that is, never except on the mountains. Once I saw a few flakes come down in Los Angeles; it was in February; it lasted about ten minutes, and everybody in town was out looking at it. There hadn’t been a flake seen there for nine years.”

“That’s where I’d like to live, then!” ejaculated Miss Sophy. “I guess I’ll move.”

“Many a true word’s spoken in jest, Miss Sophy,” laughed the young man as he left the table. “I dare say I’ll see you there yet.”

“You’ll see me in the moon first!” retorted Miss Sophy. “It’s my destiny to live an’ die in Pendar Basin!” And she honestly thought so.

V.

Greenhills was shut up; the cows stabled in town and turned out daily to the meagre winter pasture with the town herd; the horses also, Zeph having represented to Miss Sophy that this would be far her best plan; it was nonsense keeping the ranch house open all winter, he said.

“Just cuttin’ himself right out o’ bread an’ butter,” thought Miss Sophy. “That’s the kind o’ man I knew he was. But what will you do, Zeph?” she said.

“Oh, I shall do very well,” he replied. “I’ve got my house, and there is always teamin’ to do, and odd jobs o’ carpenterin’; they say there’ll be considerable buildin’ here this winter.”

Building! Ah! the word reminded Miss Sophy. She had long wanted to build an addition to her house; she had more than once had estimates made for it, but had given it up on account of the exorbitant price—or so it seemed to her—asked by the builders. Here was her chance.

“I want some buildin’ done,” she said. “I’ve been wantin’ it for a long time. I suppose you’d as soon carpenter by the month as do anything else?”

“I would sooner do anything for you, Miss Burr, than do anything else,” replied Zeph, with an unconscious emphasis on the “you” which made Miss Sophy feel ashamed of the undercurrent of avariciousness in her proposition.

The plans were soon drawn, the materials procured, and Zeph’s winter work was begun. And now began also new and undreamed-of experiences in Miss Sophy’s breast. Nothing was more natural than that she should be in frequent consultation with her builder, should be continually taking a look at the progress of the building; this she would have done, whoever had been laboring on her new rooms. But to no other man’s hammer would she have listened as she did to Zeph’s. Not a sound of it escaped her ear; if she had been a poet she could have sung a strange song of the things it seemed to say: every vibration its steady stroke made in the air seemed to her to be telling the story of his sad life and his patient goodness. When it stopped, she wondered what he was doing, and often ran in to see. Hour by hour, day by day, she listened to and studied the building up of the walls, the laying of the floors.

“I ’most think I could build a house myself, I’ve watched you so, Zeph,” she said one day.

“I reckon there’s nothin’ you couldn’t do, if you was to try, Miss Burr,” replied Zeph, as he stepped back from a window-sill he was fitting and half shut his eyes to see if it were straight. “There ain’t many women like you.” And Zeph sighed. Women were to him a terrible problem. He was an innocent-minded man by nature, and had remained so spite of rough surroundings. His own experience of the falsity of a fair face and cooing voice had made him not so much bitter as afraid. He could not read the riddle. What was there in a woman to make her such an embodiment of heaven or of hell to a man? Zeph did not like to look any fair woman in the eye since he knew what Rushy was at heart. As for Miss Sophy,—poor Miss Sophy!—into his meditations on her the thought of sex seldom entered. He thought of her only as a force,—a helping, guiding, protecting personality. Perhaps his thoughts of her might have formulated themselves, even yet, somewhat as they did when he crouched in the church pew in instinctive fear of her “dreadful” activity. But by whatever name or trait she stood in his mind, she possessed the grateful loyalty of his steadfast nature. He had no phrases for this sentiment; neither avowed, measured, nor questioned it; he simply acted it. A doubt as to the fealty and service he owed to her no more occurred to him than a doubt as to the love he bore to his children. Money could not have bought from him one hour for which Miss Sophy had need or use. This was simply the man’s instinct; the way he was made; he did not know that there was anything out of the ordinary in it. Persons of this order do not analyze either their own or other men’s motives. They simply are what they are, and live their lives out day by day. They are spared much which more subjective natures suffer of perplexity and pain. But sometimes when a blow strikes them they are shivered to the ground as fatally as a tree is rent by a lightning shaft or uprooted by a sudden blast. And when this happens, nobody knows what did it. People wonder of what they have died.

A dim knowledge of some such quality as this in Zeph was slowly filtering into Miss Sophy’s perception.

“He hasn’t ever got over it,” she said to herself as she went stirring about the house, quite unaware that she was always thinking of Zeph. “He hasn’t ever got over it, ’n’ I don’t suppose he ever will. If he’d only get the children with him he’d stand it better. I shouldn’t wonder if ’twas the death o’ the man yet! The hussy!”

Perhaps if Miss Sophy had not been so absorbed in these reviewings of Zeph’s situation and emotions she might have come sooner to the realization of her own. But she had no time to think of herself. She was forever groping, groping, like one in the dark; half blinded by pity and by a stinging sense of the utter impotence of all outside help for this sorrowing man whose life had been so strangely set side by side with her own.

However, the groping days were nearly over. They could not last forever. Such situations clear themselves by laws no less fixed than the laws which determine the joining and the separating of chemical elements. Events combined to help on the clearing up. Strange things had been happening to Zeph of which Miss Sophy knew nothing, and never would have known except for her half ally and confidante in regard to him, Gammer Stein.

Miss Sophy and Gammer had seen each other seldom of late. The winter had been a severe one, with frequent snows and bitter cold; a foot of snow was to Gammer a more absolute barrier than a stone wall; and to Miss Sophy the mercury at zero meant simply a stiffening of every faculty as well as every muscle. Her energy was in direct ratio to the warmth of the air; at ninety Fahrenheit she was in full vigor; even at a hundred she worked on with delight. In cold weather she grew inert and torpid, and used to say she would like to curl up like a spider and lie in a dark corner till spring.

Thus it had happened that nearly three months had gone by without her seeing Gammer; and one morning in March she said to herself, as she was washing the breakfast dishes, “I really must go and see Gammer to-day. If this wind’ll only stop blowin’, I’ll go right after dinner.” The words had hardly formed themselves in her thought, when, seeing a shadow darken the window, she looked up and saw Gammer herself at the door.

“I never!” said Miss Sophy aloud. “If that ain’t speakin’ o’ angels, sure enough! There’s somethin’ cur’us about its so often happenin’ that way!”

“I was just this very minute sayin’ to myself I’d come up ’n’ see you this afternoon, Gammer!” she exclaimed, as she opened the door. “I’m real glad to see you.”

“Then yer’ve heered it!” gasped Gammer, sinking breathless into a chair.

“Heard what?” cried Miss Sophy, instantly alert, already, in her heart, sure it was something about Zeph. “I hain’t heard anything. What’s happened?”

“Rushy Riker’s got her bill,” cried Gammer. “She’s got it; ’n’ she ’n’ thet Nat wuz married last night.”

“Married!” cried Miss Sophy. “What do you mean? How could she be married?”

“Why, she’s billed,” retorted Gammer. “Ther papers come yisterday ’t noon, ’n’ she ’n’ Nat wuz married last night. I allow ther won’t nobody hev nothin’ ter do with ’em,—nobody thet’s decent. I allow ’t ’s the dearest day’s work ever she’s done ’n her life. Thet Nat’ll go off ’n’ leave her some day; he’s none too good; ’n’ she can’t lay down on Zeph agen.”

Miss Sophy stood like a statue, her face scarlet, her eyes flashing.

“Divorced!” she shrieked. “How’d she ever get a divorce? There ain’t a thing against that man, not one!”

“Ter be sure ther ain’t,” said Gammer, settling back in her chair. “I allow thar ain’t no two sides ter thet; she couldn’t hev got no bill ef he’d hev appeared agen it; but he wouldn’t. He talked it over with me. She come up thar ter ther house ’s long ago ’s—wall, somewhar abaout New Year’s, I allaow ’twuz, ’n’ she told Zeph she wuz gwine to bill him ’n’ marry Nat; ’n’ he told her she couldn’t; ’n’ she sez, sez she, ‘I kin ’n’ I will; ’n’ ’tany rate I’m gwine ter live with Nat.’ ‘He’ll never marry ye, Rushy,’ sez Zeph. ‘He will too,’ sez she; an’ then, ef yer’ll b’leeve me, thet thar Zeph,—I swar, I donno ef the man’s flesh ’n’ blood, er what he ez,—sez he, ‘Ef he’ll marry yer, Rushy, I won’t hender yer gettin’ ther bill. Then yer kin live decent. But he’s got ter swar ter marry ye;’ ’n’ I allaow ter yeow, the next night, ef they didn’t both on ’em, she ’n’ Nat, the pizen skunk,—ef thar warn’t both on ’em thar to Zeph’s, tellin’ him what they’d made up thar minds ter dew; ’n’ naow they’ve got ’t done. Thet’s the kind er law thar ez in this hyar country; she’s billed aout clar ’n’ free ez ef she’d been ’z decent ez enny woman could be, ’n’ he wuz ther one ’twuz wrong. He jest never ’peared ’t all. Thet wuz all they wanted. I’d jest like ter see ’em both jugged! I allaow ther wouldn’t nothin’ short er thet tech ’em. ’Twan’t but er few nights sence, thar wuz er dance, a real respectable dance, down thar whar she lives, ’n’ she ’n’ Nat went in, ’n’ thar come up one o’ ther managers, ’n’ sez he, ‘Yer’ll be ser good ’s ter git aout er this room, ’n’ be mighty quick abaout et, tew, or yer’ll git holped aout;’ ’n’ they jest larfed, ’n’ went aout a tossin’ thar heads ez high ’n’ mighty. I allaow naow they’re married they’ll brazen ’t aout. Folks forgits everythin’.”

“Has she got the right to keep the children?” asked Miss Sophy in a hoarse whisper. Her face was very pale now, and the flashing of her eye strangely dimmed.

“I didn’t heer ’t said,” replied Gammer, “but she’s got ’em. I allaow ef he didn’t ’pear, the childen ’d go to her, same ez she got ther bill. ’N’ he sez he’d ruther she hed ’em; they’ll dew more fur her, he sez, ’n everythin’ else. She’s allers good ter ’em. He’ll keep an eye ter ’em.”

“Then he’s ’s free to-day ’s if he’d never been married ’t all,” said Miss Sophy, still in a whisper, still pale, and with dimmed eyes.