Читать книгу The Heart of Thunder Mountain - Edfrid A. Bingham - Страница 16

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Doctor Wilson, arriving from Tellurium on the third day after the encounter at Paradise, found Huntington in a bad way, due not so much to the wound in his left shoulder as to the state of his mind. Haig’s bullet was extracted without difficulty or serious complications, but Haig’s words were encysted too deep for any probe. Huntington’s self-love had been dealt a mortal blow; and somebody must pay for it.

First of all it was Claire that paid; then Marion. He did not mean to be disagreeable to them, but never having cultivated self-restraint he had none of it now to ease the days of his convalescence. He filled the house with his clamor, and required as much attention as an ailing child. There were just two ways to keep him quiet. Claire soothed him when she sat at his bedside, with one of his huge “paws” held in her tiny hands; and Marion found, somewhat to her surprise, that Seth liked music. The piano was one of the wonders of the Huntington house, for pianos are not essential instruments in the equipment of cattle ranches, and this was the only one in all that region of cattledom.

In music Seth’s tastes were sentimental. “Lost 51 Chords” and “Rosaries” subdued him almost to tears; and if Marion only brought him tuneful violets every morn he tried his best to be good. So when Claire was not on duty at the bedside Marion must needs be on duty at the piano,––an ordeal that Claire endured, of course, more patiently than Marion.

Claire was almost comically unfit to be a ranchman’s wife, and she too had been a trial on occasions. She was small and delicate, but vivacious, amiable, bright. Her blue eyes always had a childlike wonder in them, and she was fond of wearing her fluffy, golden hair in a girlish knot low on her neck, or even in a long, thick braid down her back, with a blue ribbon bow at the end. She flitted about the house like a butterfly, and yet she had managed somehow to make her home the marvel of Paradise Park.

To begin with it was the ordinary, one-story, rambling house of pine, with spruce-clad hills rising behind it, and a little stream, rollicking down between it and the corrals. But a wide veranda had been constructed on three sides of it, furnished with wicker chairs, and half-screened with boxes of growing flowers. All around the house flowers grew,––old-fashioned garden flowers, roses and geraniums; beds of them everywhere, and blossoming shrubs along the stream.

The house contained, besides the kitchen and the bedrooms, just one big room. This, with its low ceiling, unpainted timbers, and small windows, was not unlike the hall of some old manor house. The floor was covered with Navajo rugs in rich and barbaric colors; the walls were draped with burlap in dull red dyes; and the windows were curtained with chintz in bright 52 yellows and reds. Above the windows and doors hung many heads of deer and elk and mountain sheep, and rifles on racks of horn. Between the two front windows stood the upright piano, and near it a small bookcase filled with novels and volumes of poetry. The big oak table at mealtime was made to look very inviting with white napery and modest china and silver, and a bouquet always in its center. At other times it was a library table, heaped with books and magazines, and in the evening, when the kerosene lamps were lighted, and the piñon was blazing in the great fireplace, the room seemed as remote from Paradise Park as Claire herself.

There was an occasional visitor at Huntington’s in the period of his convalescence, usually a ranchwife eager for another glimpse at Claire’s wonderful housekeeping, or a young cow-puncher drawn by the attraction of two very pretty and unusual women in one house. But the ranchmen themselves, with two or three exceptions, were content to be solicitous at long range––an abstention that relieved and at the same time troubled Huntington. He was not eager to talk with his neighbors about that episode at the post-office, but their aloofness filled him with uneasiness. Well, let them wait! They would hear from him again, and so should Haig!

There was, among the visitors, one whose coming perceptibly lightened the tedium of those days. Marion had the good fortune to see him in time not to be taken by surprise. Seated on the veranda after an exhausting recital for the benefit of Huntington, she perceived the figure of a horseman––yes, it was a horseman––riding 53 out of the pines toward the corrals. She stared. He was so little and so lost between his pony, which seemed extraordinarily big, and his sombrero, which undoubtedly was enormous, that she remained for a moment dumb, and then, choking with laughter, fled into the house.

“Look, Claire, look!” she cried, grabbing her cousin’s arm.

Claire, dragged to the door, looked and giggled.

“Haven’t you seen that before?” she asked.

“No! Never!” answered Marion, her hand upon her mouth.

“Of course. He’s just arrived––for the season. He was here last year, and the year before.”

“And they let him?” demanded Marion, thinking of the irrepressible cow-punchers.

“Oh, he’s all right!” Claire assured her. “That is, after you get used to him. The men had all sorts of fun with him the first summer he was here. But he took all their fun good-naturedly, and showed them he had pluck too. They began to like him. Everybody likes him, and so will you.”

“But in the name of––who is he?”

The little man had descended like a parachute from his pony, and was now bobbing rapidly up the graveled walk.

“Smythe,” explained Claire hurriedly. “But he’s here now––I’ll let him tell you––he likes to talk.”

At the foot of the steps he caught sight of the two women in the doorway; removed his wonderful headgear with an eighteenth-century gesture; ducked his 54 head in a twentieth-century bow; and smiled. Claire stepped quickly out on the veranda.

“Oh, Mr. Smythe!” she cried gaily. “I’m so glad to see you. Come in!”

He was an undersized young man, immaculately dressed in brown tweeds and shining boots, a very high white collar and a sky-blue tie. The sombrero swinging in his hand was quite new, ornamented with a broad band of stamped leather, and it had the widest brim obtainable at the shop in Denver where a specialty is made of equipping the tenderfoot for life in the cattle country.

Smythe took Claire’s proffered hand, and bent over it as if he had thought of kissing it, but lacked the courage of his gallantry. Claire introduced him to Marion, answered his questions about Seth, and then fluttered away to the kitchen, where she had an angel cake in the oven not to be entrusted to the cook.

“I arrived only yesterday, Miss Gaylord,” Smythe chirped. “But I’ve heard of you already.”

“I don’t know whether to thank you or not,” answered Marion.

“Oh, if you please! What I heard made me very solicitous about Huntington’s health.”

He smiled knowingly at her, and Marion loosed some of her pent-up laughter. Truly, Smythe was going to be a treat! She studied him stealthily while he chattered on. He wore a pointed beard of reddish hue; his head was quite bald on top, and bulging at the brow; and the contour of that head, with its polished dome, and the narrow face tapering down to the pointed beard, was comically suggestive of a carrot. But it was an intelligent, even intellectual countenance, and his blue 55 eyes were honest and bright. He might be laughed at, but he could not be flouted, she thought.

“Then you’ve been here before, Mr. –––” she began, and hesitated.

“Smythe,” he prompted her generously. “J. Hamerton Smythe. S-m-y-t-h-e. I didn’t change it from Smith, and I don’t know what one of my esteemed ancestors did. But I’m glad he did. It gives me a touch of artificiality, don’t you think? I fear being too natural.”

Marion laughed, and that pleased him. She led the way to chairs near an open window where a black and yellow butterfly hovered over a honeysuckle blossom that had nodded its friendly way into the room.

“I’m from New York too,” Smythe rattled on. “Columbia. Doing a little tutoring and a little postgraduate work. This is my third summer in the Park. Found it by chance. Wanted to go somewhere, and was tired of the old places––Maine and Adirondacks and the rest. Looked at a map in a railroad office, and there it was, sticking right out at me, the first name I lighted on. In small type too––curious, wasn’t it? Clerks in office hadn’t heard of it, but I started out to find it. Thought I’d better get to Paradise when I could. And now I’m glad. I feel like an old settler, and I believe the cow-punchers have ceased to regard me as a tenderfoot. That’s as flattering as a PhD.”

“I’m afraid they laugh at me,” said Marion.

“On the contrary. Believe me, these cowboys have taken to reading poetry since you came.”

“Please be natural, Mr. Smythe!”

“Fact! I’d hardly got my things unpacked before 56 one of them was riding over to ask me if I had a book about Lady Clara Vere de Vere. It seems he’d heard the poem recited somewhere. I asked him why he wanted it, but he looked so flustered that I let him off. Didn’t have a Tennyson with me, unfortunately, but I gave him my Byron, and I think that will hold him for a while.”

“Charming!” exclaimed Marion. “But what has all that to do with me?”

“He’s the chap that grabbed you in his arms when you were falling from your horse after that little business at Thompson’s the other day.”

Marion blushed, and then laughed.

“But how did you come to hear about that?” she demanded.

He chuckled.

“Oh, I hear everything!” he replied. “My friends say I’ve a nose for news.”

“Well, I shall be very careful what I say to you.”

“Please, no!” he protested. “I’m a safety vault when it comes to secrets.”

She glanced quickly toward the door of Seth’s bedroom, then toward the kitchen, before she spoke.

“So you’ve heard all about that day at the post-office?” she said in a low voice.

“Yes.”

“Terrible!”

“But not unexpected.”

“Why not unexpected?”

“Well,” he replied, lowering his voice, and leaning nearer to Marion, “I’m afraid Huntington was looking for it.”

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“You mean––he deserved it?”

“I won’t say that. You see––I’m neutral, like Thompson. I like Huntington, and I like Haig. I look at this fight without prejudice, even though I’ve a reason to be prejudiced.”

“In favor of––?”

“Huntington.”

“Why, please?”

“Huntington accepts my friendship, after a fashion.”

“But––the other?”

“Nothing doing!”

Marion stared at him, wondering.

“Fact!” he assured her, with a sheepish smile.

“But why?”

“Don’t know. I’d like to, but he lives like a hermit. Latchstring never hangs outside his door.”

There was a certain evidence of feeling in Smythe’s speech.

“You speak as if you––”

“As if I knew!” He took the words out of her mouth. “I do.”

“How do you know?”

“I tried it.”

“And then?”

“Kicked out!” he replied with a grimace.

Marion laughed in spite of her burning eagerness to hear more.

“Not exactly kicked,” Smythe explained. “But I’d rather have been. He was as polite as––he’s a gentleman, you see, so he knew how to do it without using his hands or his feet.”

“But why?” insisted Marion.

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“Why did I try? Curiosity. Simple, elemental, irresponsible curiosity.”

She laughed again at his frank confession.

“No, I mean why did he kick you out, as you call it?”

“That’s what I want to know. And I will know, too. I tell you, Miss Gaylord, I admire the man immensely. His secretiveness only makes me like him the more, probably because I myself am so garrulous. Most persons, though, cannot tolerate a man who minds his own business. Those who have no reason to hate Haig dislike him because he does not ask them to like him. His affairs are his own. Did you notice that scar?”

“Yes,” answered Marion, scarcely above a whisper.

“Well, you can build any sort of romance you like around that. He has had his romance or tragedy or something, you may be sure. But he’s no ordinary man, whatever he may be doing in Paradise Park. I have heard that he’s surrounded with books and pictures in his cottage. He’s got a Chinaman for a valet, and an Indian for his man Friday, and their mouths are as tight as his. What’s more, he must be all right in the main things, for his foreman and cowboys stick to him through thick and thin, and say nothing. I tell you, Miss Gaylord, I’d like to be a friend of his, if only he gave a––”

“A damn, I believe they say,” she prompted demurely.

“By Jove!” he said with enthusiasm. “You are a––”

She held up a warning finger.

“We’re going to be friends, you know,” she said. 59 “And friends understand each other––without words.”

“Done!” he agreed, reaching for her hand, and shaking it.

“But this mystery,” she said. “Doesn’t anybody know––”

“You know as much as all of us. Of course,” he added banteringly, “there’s no denying a woman, when she starts. He might tell you!”

The speech startled her, and she blushed.

“Now, that’s sheer impudence!” she retorted.

But he continued to look at her with a curious expression. How much had he guessed? In her confusion an impulse seized her. She leaned suddenly toward him, with flushed face and sparkling eyes.

“You dare me?” she demanded, her voice quivering.

“I dare you!” he answered gleefully.

“Well then, he shall tell me!”

“Good!” he exclaimed. “And I’ll be around to take the kicks if he––”

“Oh, Cousin Seth!” cried Marion, leaping to her feet.

The bedroom door had opened, and Huntington came out, dressed in his familiar corduroy suit, but with his left arm still bandaged to his side, Smythe hastened forward to greet him.

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