Читать книгу The Raider - Charles Alden Seltzer - Страница 4

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For a reason which Ellen could not at once explain the atmosphere had chilled and an unsmiling sky stretched over a section of country that had suddenly become grim and bleak. She had definitely declined her father’s advice and assistance, and now she was deep in the wilderness, alone, and facing the prospect of a ride of more than twenty miles through the night.

She observed that the sky was already darkening, that the sun had gone down and that purple shadows were stealing around her. Moreover, mingling with her inexpressible disappointment over the dereliction of Jim Kellis was a conviction that the Ballinger ancestors were watching her and derisively laughing at her.

Her pride had been hurt, also. She had carried the Ballinger family honour into the wilderness to see it contemptibly ignored. Worse, there was nothing she could do about it.

Obviously, she could not seek Jim Kellis and demand an explanation. There could be no explanation. And she didn’t want to see Kellis again.

She couldn’t cry. She wouldn’t. But her cheeks had whitened from the conflict that her emotions were waging, and there must have been something in her appearance to arouse the pity and sympathy of the Mexican woman, for the latter invited gently:

“You tired. You rest.”

“Tired? Oh no!” Ellen’s laugh was far from being the spontaneous lilt it had always been. There was now a grim note in it.

She had been shocked, of course, and the sympathy of the Mexican woman was a humiliation. But the Ballinger brain was still functioning with its customary energy, the Ballinger dignity had not deserted her; and the cool calm of the sophistication she had spent years in acquiring was concealing her mental distress.

“Thank you,” she added. “But I can’t stop. I am on my way to Randall. You see, I knew Mr. Kellis slightly some years ago. I heard he was out here and I merely wished to inquire about him.”

“Jim away.”

“Yes; I understand.” She smiled sweetly. “When he returns you may tell him that Ellen Ballinger passed. He will be surprised.”

“You Ballinger girl, eh?” There was new interest in the woman’s voice. “You father own the Hour Glass?”

Ellen nodded.

The woman seemed to brighten; her voice became eager.

“Then mebbe you father send for me for work, eh?”

“Have you worked at the Hour Glass?”

“Many time. Jim know you father—well. Me too.”

Ellen’s pulses leaped but she smiled disarmingly.

“But father does not know that you and Jim are married, does he?”

“Oh yes; he know. Him give me present, many time. Ya se ve! He know!”

So that was why her father had suggested sending Jim Peters as an escort! He knew Jim Kellis was married and that she had been starting upon a fool’s errand. He had permitted her to go, not volunteering to tell her. Perhaps he had wanted her to find out for herself, thinking such a shock would be good for her. He had often spoken of what he had been pleased to call “the cockiness of the girls of the present generation,” intimating that a great deal of it should be knocked out of them.

She had heard much of that gospel. All of it resulted from clouded vision and forgetfulness of the shortcomings of the youth of the preceding generation. Twaddle! If she had been as impudent as her father she could have reminded him that he had never been exactly perfect. She could see him from a different angle than that from which he viewed himself, just as he could see her. The difference was that she knew it and he didn’t.

But this trick had been a mean one. He knew that she had always liked Jim Kellis, and telling her of Kellis’s marriage should have been his duty. He had deliberately humiliated her!

Her lips settled into straight lines and the peach-bloom colour again flooded her cheeks.

She smiled at Jim Kellis’s wife.

“I wish you every happiness,” she said.

“Gracias, señorita.”

Ellen rode southward, past the cabin, continuing in the direction she had travelled all day. She certainly would not return to the Hour Glass that night. Perhaps she would not return at all. What a senseless attempt at discipline. How crude, how brutal!

The peach-bloom cheeks were a flaming red as Ellen rode southward into the darkening world. The more she reflected upon her father’s action the more bitter became her resentment. Considering the hatred she now bore her parent she wondered if she had ever loved him.

Ballinger had never been like other fathers. He had done things toward her that shouldn’t have been done. Petty things, mean things—like sending her on this wild goose chase. He’d never given her the love and the consideration he should have given her—that he owed her. Fancy his playing with her affections like that.

But that was a Ballinger family trait—derision. She had observed how it had appeared upon the faces of the ancestors in the photographs. Cold pride, arrogance. She wondered if her mother had known; if that had been the reason her mother had set aside a separate fortune for her, making her independent of the Ballinger money? She silently blessed her mother, as she now vividly remembered the wise, tender, knowing eyes that always gazed out at her from various pictures she treasured.

She rode into a forest which was so dark and forbidding that she would have been frightened had she not been so furiously angry. She had been betrayed by Kellis and mocked at by her father.

She got out of the forest, crossed the river at a shallow and sent her pony through a swale whose southern side was topped by a bare ridge. By the time she gained the crest of the ridge her mood had changed and she was indulging in silent laughter which was inspired by a strange and reckless impulse which had seized her.

She had always been reckless. Some wild and perverse strain in her had made her contemptuous of the code of laws which people referred to as the conventions. Laws were made for people who were not original enough to think for themselves. “No woman of the Ballinger family has ever chased after a man, eh?” she said, aloud, nodding her head at the deep shadows that were slowly closing around her. “Well, Matthew M. Ballinger, this member of the Ballinger family is going to get herself a man before she goes back to the family circle! I will get the first man that looks good to me! And after I get him I’ll make him ride with me to the Hour Glass. And then——”

How it happened she never discovered. She only felt the pony stumble, try to recover his equilibrium, slip and fall. She went out of the saddle, struck on her head and a shoulder and sank into an abyss whose atmosphere was vivid with dazzling flashes of light. She did not see the pony roll to the bottom of the ridge, nor was she aware that she was stretched out, flat on her back, a few feet from the animal.