Читать книгу A Girl of the Plains Country - MacGowan Alice - Страница 5

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Domestic existence at the Three Sorrows was, in those days, a very unsettled affair. Came the day that sullen Chinaman left. Charles Van Brunt had ridden to Mesquite. All the boys were out on the range and the baby was asleep upstairs. Hilda and Aunt Val were alone with the problem. The little girl stood by, while to Miss Van Brunt’s protests, which finally came to be almost hysterical, the yellow man made brief response: “No can do. Velly lonesome.” And though the lady pleaded with him for quite a distance down the long avenue of box elder and black locust, he walked stolidly away in those boat-shaped shoes of his. His lips were tightly shut, his blouse tightly buttoned across a resolute bosom, and his queue tightly coiled around a skull which housed the working machinery of a mind with which poor Aunt Val had never been able to establish communication, nor Hilda to get upon friendly terms.

Uncle Hank himself got supper that evening, but he remarked somewhat humorously that he couldn’t spare himself to cook. He persuaded Missouri into donning an apron and going to work in the kitchen.

“Why don’t they get another Chink?”, the cowboy grumbled.

“Well, as I understand it, they have wrote somewheres for one, but they haven’t heard yet,” said Pearsall.

“No, nor they won’t,” was Missouri’s opinion. “A Chink’s plumb shy of one of these here lonesome ranches. I bet I’m in for a life sentence,” for a ranch rider hates to cook.

Nothing that really could have been called a neighborhood existed in the cattle country of the Lame Jones County of that day, yet the Van Brunts had not been at the Three Sorrows a week before there was an invitation for Miss Valeria to bring Hilda and Burch to spend the day at the Capadine ranch, six miles east of them, and enjoy the company of Clark Capadine, Jr., and the ranch’s young guests, the two Marchbanks children. Shorty drove them over in the buckboard—a vehicle Hilda approved of far more than the shiny closed carriage at home in New York.

To Hilda that visit was a first introduction into the life of her peers as she was to find it from that time on. Clarkie Capadine was a good-natured boy of ten, whom Hilda would have liked very much if she had been capable that day of any natural or comfortable sentiments. But the Marchbanks boy, an advanced person whose name was Lafayette, shortened and pronounced in the Southern fashion, “Fayte,” scorned her utterly. He scorned also his sister Maybelle, five years younger than himself, and therefore near Hilda’s own age. Yet his contempt of Maybelle was nothing worse than the male intolerance of the foolish female, while Hilda learned from him, coldly, insultingly, that she was a tenderfoot. She was not only a child, and a girl at that—she was a tenderfoot. Did she know what chaparajos were?—tapaderos?—latigos?—a cinch, even? She did not. Maybelle was not expected to deal much in these terms on account of her deficiencies as a girl; but Hilda didn’t even know what such things were for! She was a tenderfoot—that’s what she was!

The day was clouded by the murk of Fayte’s sneers. He condescended to rope the girls as they ran screaming; but being rated as dumb driven cattle, even by so mighty a person, wasn’t much of a consolation. Finally he scalped his sister’s dolls by the simple process of pulling their wigs off. Maybelle went whimpering to Mrs. Capadine, who indignantly told the boy that he would not be allowed to go on the return visit to the Three Sorrows which Miss Valeria was already proposing. Fayte said sullenly that he didn’t want to. He said that the Three Sorrows was his ranch, anyhow—by rights—and far’s he was concerned he didn’t care to go and see other people living on it.

His ranch! What could Fayte Marchbanks mean by that? The next day Hilda took the question to her father, but he only laughed. It was Uncle Hank—Uncle Hank, who always talked to one the same as to grown-ups—who finally explained the matter to her, allowing tolerantly, “Oh, just a kid’s bragging. Fayte Marchbanks says things like that, I expect, because his Spanish grandpa, old man Romero, was the first owner of this ranch, and did give the place its name—the Rancho of the Three Sorrows.”

“What do you suppose made him call it such a sad name, Uncle Hank?” Hilda wanted to know. “Do you suppose he had them—three sorrows?”

“He did so, Pettie—in his three daughters. Michaela, his oldest, she took smallpox from a family of Arkansas movers that came driftin’ through these pastures two weeks before she was to have been married. Her looks was ruined. She went into a convent up in Santy Fe. Lola, the next one, was killed in a train wreck. And Guadeloupe, the third, his baby, and the prettiest of the bunch, ran away with Lee Marchbanks, which is Fayte’s and Maybelle’s pa. He said neither of them should ever step foot on his land while he lived. Old Romero’s wife was dead, and he never had no sons. He took the trouble about his daughters hard. He drank up all his property—” Hilda had a moment of wondering how he could do that—“and then drank himself to death.”

“Maybelle says her mother is dead, too,” said Hilda. “They had the sorrow, didn’t they, Uncle Hank? Maybelle and Fayte, I mean.”

“Um—well—it’s all in the past, honey. And Lee Marchbanks—Colonel Marchbanks, they call him, now—is a rich man, I hear, over in New Mexico. Jest leaving the kids with Mrs. Capadine while he brings out his second wife from the east somewheres. I expect they’ll have a fine lady for a mother when they go back.”

“Yes,” said Hilda, turning this information over slowly and curiously in her mind. “I didn’t know that.” She stole a look over her shoulder, through the open door, to where Miss Van Brunt, dressed exactly as she had been used to dress back in her New York home, sat reading a magazine. “Of course I have Aunt Valeria,” she remarked hesitantly.

Hank’s glance followed hers; he crinkled up his eyes in a look that was half smiling, half pitiful. Poor Miss Valeria always looked somehow like a person who had come to stay for only a day or two. The wind that whooped up over those great levels from the Gulf, and brought life and refreshment with it on the hottest summer noon, the wind that Hilda loved and made a playmate of, was to Miss Van Brunt a terrible bugbear—a sort of standing accusation against the whole west Texas country. When it blew three days on end, she went to bed with a nervous headache. When the domestic affairs of the household grew too puzzling, she went to bed with a headache, anyhow; one day Hilda heard Buster say to Missouri in the kitchen, “This here ranching proposition’s got the New York lady plumb buffaloed. Yet she’s sort of game, too—so game she won’t holler. I like to watch her not knowin’ what the mischief’s a-comin’ next, nor whichaway to turn, and pretendin’ she’s plumb wise to the rules.”

“It would be impossible. We never did so in New York. The Van Brunts do not do things that way.” These were Miss Valeria’s weapons of defense, the statements with which she met and repelled clamorous demands.

“Just a ladylike way of yellin’ ‘scat’ to the whole business,” said Buster.

As for the outside affairs, a mere change of ownership was a small matter, so long as Hank Pearsall’s experienced hand still guided them, and they seemed to run smoothly enough. Charley Van Brunt, too, lived at the ranch of the Three Sorrows, a guest—a quiet, graceful guest—whose incompetence was a shield against responsibility. He endeared himself at once to his men by the unvarying courtesy and sweetness of his bearing and the boyish recklessness he displayed when he chose and rode a horse, selecting always for looks and style, without regard to the beast’s disposition. It was plain that he drank heavily in the long evenings when he sat alone in the library, his manager, looking on, hoping that as the first keenness of his grief wore away, this matter would be bettered.

But it was the other way. When Charley began to rouse from the stupor of bereavement, he began also to leave the ranch, on trips to Mesquite, and beyond to El Centro; whence the news came back to Hank that Van Brunt was drinking hard and playing high. He found by natural instinct the clever, well-bred, profligate young Englishmen over on the Bar Thirteen, pensioned—or exiled—by their own families; and after that, between the trips to town, there was drinking and card playing at the Bar Thirteen. In those days the Three Sorrows was the finest property under private ownership in the Panhandle, with pastures all fenced—a rare thing at that time—watered by three noble creeks whose springs were never dry. It had been well stocked when Katharine bought it. Now Hank looked helplessly on, thinking of the two children, saw the money from sales of beef poured into the bottomless pit of Charley’s dissipations. And he understood that more than one mortgage had been put on the place, and that a choice pasture had been sold outright.

And Hank had another small worry, to which he finally applied his own remedy. The men loved to sit on the long back porch, chairs tilted against the wall, waiting for supper. They were freshly washed as to faces and hands, damply slick as to hair; their innocent enjoyment of company other than their own was so evident that it would have been a hard heart indeed which would have grudged them the society of the children; yet Hank listened and was troubled. Did all cowboys swear so much? Had Snake Thompson’s language always been what it now appeared? This might be Charley Van Brunt’s ranch, Charley Van Brunt’s back porch, and these might be Charley Van Brunt’s children—well, as a matter of fact, the ownership of all the articles mentioned was so placed—yet Hank felt himself obliged to speak out and speak distinctly on the subject.

“Boys,” he put it, “you-all have got to ride herd a little closer on your language. Swearing—leastways more’n reason—around where children air at—”

“Say, Hank,” broke in Shorty O’Meara, “how much is in reason to swear when your stirrup leather busts on you, and your left eyebrow hits the ground?”

“Aw, g’long with you,” Hank admonished, half sheepishly. “You know how much. If you don’t you’ll soon find out.”

Old Snake Thompson’s sense of humor, liberty and justice was outraged. Snake used very little language of any sort; when he talked at all it was apt to be done almost exclusively in more or less conventional and automatic profanity, and he made husky protest:

“But, Pearsall—Goddlemighty—I mean—how’s a man to talk? How’s a feller to express hisself? How’ll we get along without any o’ them words?”

“Well,” said Hank dryly, “I could give you a pretty fair list of substitutes.”

“Substitute cuss words?”

“Yes, jest that. You may never have took notice to the fact that I don’t cuss, nor chew tobacker? Well, I used to do both—fact, I was something of a star performer in them two lines.”

“What made you quit, Pearsall?” questioned Shorty discontentedly.

“I quit,” said Hank, “when I got to be a family man, in a manner of speaking. I had a—there was a small chap at my place then, nigh about Pettie’s age, and I sort of looked it over, and made the change on the little feller’s account.”

“Huh!” grunted Old Snake. Shorty made no comment, but Missouri said with feeling:

“This da—durned cattle country is a mighty lonesome land, with few pleasures in it, if you ask me, and a man that neither chews nor cusses misses a sight o’ comfort.”

“Oh, I dunno, Missou’,” the boss demurred mildly, “I’ve tried it both ways, and I don’t see much difference in the comfort. I get as much good out of a cup of coffee as I used to get out of a jolt of red-eye. I’d ruther beller a camp meetin’ hymn, or ‘The Dyin’ Ranger’ than chew tobacker. ‘Con-twist it!’ or ‘Sufferin’ snakes’ or ‘My granny’ is the most horrible oaths I use.” He concluded with sudden seriousness, “I’m not a-joking; I won’t stand for it, boys; I’ll fire the first galoot that turns loose and cusses or talks rough around where the folks is at.”

So the three S cowpunchers rode in off the range of an evening now, the most harmless associates for the little girl. About headquarters they spoke—though somewhat haltingly at times—a tamed and disciplined language, devoid of offense to the tenderest ears.

The Capadines were to come over for noon dinner—which was the only meal you could take visiting on ranches, it seemed, unless you spent the night. Missou’ had said things—Uncle Hank went into the kitchen and shut the door when he said them—but finally he got the dinner, Uncle Hank keeping an eye on him to see that it was all it should be for company. Fayte Marchbanks had come, after all. Things went pretty well while the children were with the grown-ups, for it appeared that Fayte had nice company manners, when he cared to display them; Aunt Val thought him a very well-bred boy. But after dinner, Burchie in the house with Aunt Val and Mrs. Capadine, while the two fathers smoked on the porch, it began to be trying.

On the journey out, among other and greater losses, a trunk containing the children’s toys had gone astray and was never recovered. So Hilda had nothing to offer for Maybelle’s admiration but one small china-all-over doll, which had been held out for her to play with on the train. She realized with a good deal of satisfaction that Fayte Marchbanks couldn’t scalp it; the hair was painted on its china head; small and rather miserable as it looked there were advantages.

The two boys presently ranged off with Fayte’s air rifle, playing at hunting big game; the two girls settled down in the roots of a big tree and arranged for a little dinner.

“I wish I’d brought my dolls,” Maybelle said discontentedly. “I would—only I thought you’d have a lot of your own. You said you had.”

“I have, only—” and poor Hilda told again the story of the lost trunk.

“Well, then, I should think they’d buy you some new ones, if they can’t ever get those again,” Maybelle argued.

“They will,” said Hilda eagerly. “Father’s going to next time he goes to town.”

“But he’s been in town lots of times since you lost ’em,” said Maybelle, the practical. “Why doesn’t he bring you—one decent one, anyhow?” She looked scornfully at the china-all-over.

“He forgets.” Hilda’s lip trembled, but it would never do to let any one see how cruel the hurt of this forgetfulness was. “That is, he has been forgetting it, but if ever he goes to Fort Worth he’ll remember, and then he’ll bring me the most beautiful doll that money can buy. It’ll be so long,” her trembling hands measured the length, “and have kid shoes and a white dress and a blue sash—he’s promised. Now I’ll go and get something for our party.”

Hilda was gone to the house quite a while. Missou’ had been hard to persuade, and didn’t want to let her have the little cakes. When she came back she found Maybelle curiously excited, while the two boys stood back, Clarke Capadine looking rather scared, Fayte grinning.

“Will you boys come to our party?” she asked doubtfully, taking stock of what Missou’ had finally given her, wondering whether it would be enough.

Clarke muttered and looked down, but Fayte grinned more than ever.

“Sure. Let’s make it a funeral—if there’s scraps enough to bury. The firing squad’s been here while you were gone.”

And then she saw the scattered bits of china sprinkled over the play-house, the rifle in his hand.

Hilda didn’t know for a minute quite who it was that screamed. Something that was not herself seemed to come up in her throat and issue from her mouth in a volume of sound that scared the children and brought the men running from the porch. Quickly as they came, Uncle Hank was quicker. He had jumped away from the pony he was just about mounting over at the corral, and run across the lawn; Hilda was in his arms when her father and Mr. Capadine arrived.

“What in time’s the matter?” the old man asked. Clarke Capadine had stood his ground, but Fayte Marchbanks was running. Hank caught sight of the gun in his hand. “Is the child shot?”

“My doll! My doll!” Hilda’s voice had come down to a moan. “I hadn’t but just one, and—”

Maybelle’s finger was in her mouth. She took it out to point to the little sprinkling of white scraps.

“Hilda—are you hurt?” That was her father. “Put her down, Pearsall. See if she’s injured.” Uncle Hank set her on her feet. The gust of passion had gone by. She was weak from it—and terribly ashamed.

“He broke her doll,” the old man explained. Hilda loved him for the serious tone. Maybelle giggled. Hilda heard another laugh somewhere, but it wasn’t Mr. Capadine, for he said:

“That boy ought to be thrashed.”

She turned and buried her face against Uncle Hank, sobbing now, but very quietly.

“Hilda—don’t be silly,” came Miss Val’s impatient voice. “Go get another doll to play with. See—you’re spoiling all the good time for your little visitors.”

“I—hadn’t—but just one,” it came very muffled from the folds of Uncle Hank’s coat. Her father said quickly,

“Oh, that’s so. But, Hilda, I’m going to buy you more dolls. Be a good girl now. Stop crying.”

“I don’t want but just one, papa.” Hilda choked, raised her head and tried to straighten her face. “When—when will you get me my doll?”

They were all looking at her. It was a terrible moment. Yet Hilda somewhat forgot it in the importance of that question.

“The very next time I go to town,” said her father. “The handsomest one I can find, dear. Now go on with your play—and don’t let’s have any more hysterics.”

He went back to the house. Clarke Capadine had slipped away in the direction Fayte took. Uncle Hank stayed a few minutes, till he saw that Hilda seemed to be herself again, then he mounted and rode away to his work.

But that evening, when Hilda came at bedtime to bid him good night, she looked so woebegone, and her feet dragged so that he inquired:

“Not afraid to go upstairs alone, air you, Pettie? Been seeing any of them Skulkin’ Door-imps lately?”

She shook her head.

“No—not much. That isn’t it. Never mind.”

“Or Barrel-tops?” Hank pursued cheerily. “You let me know if any of them come around—and I’ll stave ’em in for you.”

“The—the doll.” She got out the two words, and could manage no more, but let them lie as they fell.

“Sure enough!” The old man caught her up in his arms and started for the stairs. “That doll-baby’s still on your mind, ain’t it? I know. Uncle Hank’ll carry you up to bed.” And on the way he whispered, “Never you mind, Pettie; there’s got to be a trip to Forth Worth right soon—Forth Worth—a real big city; and I’ll make sure your doll-baby comes back from there.”