“Then give me her picture, will you?”
Joe Bigot drew out the picture, and his companion sat for some time studying it intently.
“Who’s the young gent down in the plains,” he said, “that she likes the best?”
“That’d be young Larry Haines,” said Joe. “He was courting her ever since she was a little one.”
“Well,” said Jack, “this is where we start in giving Larry the outside edge of an outside chance. We’re going to freeze him out!”
Jack Trainor walked briskly to the table. He sat down and for ten or fifteen minutes stared constantly at the picture. Then he began to write, and Joe Bigot forgot to smoke, so great was his wonder at the oiled smoothness with which the pen of the smaller man fled across the paper.
Chapter 5
It was rolling ground, but not enough to limit the horizon with higher summits here and there. That sheet of green swept away eternally. It washed off to the ends of the earth, and through that clear air, indeed, one felt that the ends of the earth were well nigh visible. Only to the far westward there arose a cloud of pale and indefinite blue, wavering low against the sky. One had to be told to know that those were the Canadian Rockies. Standing on this high place in the low country, all at first seemed monotony. There was the marvelous green of the earth and the marvelous blue of the sky and the pure, pure white of the clouds that blew here and there. There was only the sky and the earth and, in between, a great space of freedom for the mind and the soul to wander. There were few trees. No trees were wanted. No hills were wanted. The smoother and the barer, the better. One did not wish for walls or checks of any kind.
There was a great sense of life in that illimitable plain. One felt it when there was no moving thing in view save the swift clouds. It was a fruitful land. One knew that the soil was rich without seeing the patch of black, yonder, that the plow had turned up not later than that morning, and that was beginning to dry out to a fallow gray as the sun and the wind worked on it. There was such wealth of soil, indeed, that the careless proprietors rather chose to let the land produce as it would than encourage it with the plow to any great extent.
There were groupings and dottings of cattle, also, wandering here and there, swinging their heads up and down slowly, while their mellow voices came booming, now in loud single calls, and now in more distant and more musical choruses. Toward the farther horizon, one could make out two small towns, each a blur of red roofs wonderfully pleasant between sky and green earth. Nearer at hand was another town—or, rather, just a chance cluster of houses.
On the top of the hill the girl had halted her horse, and her companion had followed suit, although both his horse and he manifested impatience at the pause. But Alice Cary was enjoying every minute, as was attested by the way in which she threw back her head and smiled. She looked from the green hills to the blue sky, and from the wide limitless sky back to the flowing hills.
“Ah, Larry,” she said, “maybe you have to have other things, but I like this pretty well. Maybe you have to have Montreal, but I like this for my part.”
His horse was dancing. He allowed the high-headed creature to prance in front of the horse of Alice. Thereby he cut off her view and forced her to consider him more closely.
“But that isn’t answering me, Alice,” he said. “And for the last week you’ve been dodging me. And…and you know that he’s apt to be back almost any time now. I don’t want to doubt you, but…but it sounds mighty as if you’d changed your mind.”
His horse here worked past and threatened the roan of Alice with a flirt of his hoofs, whereat she reined her mount back deftly. She rode in divided skirts with a bold and swinging style that was extremely mannish in its pattern and extremely feminine in its effect. Her dress, too, with the cowboy red bandanna at her throat, her loose blouse, her heavy leather gloves, and the sombrero on her head was masculine in plan but wonderfully girlish in its results.
“Larry Haines,” she said, “suppose I should tell you that I had changed my mind?”
The horse of Larry Haines was changed to a statue, so closely did it follow the will of its master! Larry Haines, also, gained two inches in height as he jerked himself to rigidity. His lean, handsome face turned to iron, and his eyes glared at her. More than once before, he had half terrified her in this manner. Indeed, it was a part of the mystery and the charm of the man that attracted her. She knew Jessie Haines as well as she knew herself—or better. She knew herself like a book that had been carefully read. But Larry Haines, although she had grown up with him, remained unknown to her. He never shrouded himself with mystery, but there was about him a native strength that thrust other persons to a distance and kept them away from him. He had never wasted much time on girls until he had met her. And then his sudden burst of attentions, beginningonly a short while after her engagement to the former suitor of her sister, had fairly swept her off her feet. She was frankly flattered, because the attentions of Larry Haines made her the envied and the wondered at among the girls of the village.
How he kept up that insistent siege; how, at length, in the absence of the big trapper, she had been won over and had given her promise to leave her home and run away with Larry to be married in the distant city of Montreal—all of these things made up a long story. And now she trembled as she faced the youth.
He took it very quietly. She might have known that he would act in this manner. And yet his quietness was worse than the angry shouting of another man.
“If you told me that you had changed your mind,” he said, “I should believe you, that’s all. You’re free. You’re independent. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t change your mind if you see cause for it.”
But, while he spoke, the color went out of his cheeks and left them yellow—an unhealthy sallow. By that sign and the fixed glittering of his eyes she could guess at the emotion within him, but just the emotion was beyond her. It might be wild grief. Or it might be jealous rage. Or it might be simply injured vanity. But one could never tell what actually happened in the brain of Larry. Of his devilish temper, there could be no doubt. Since childhood, he had been a victim to silent bursts of rage that were dangerous to all around him. Now that he was grown older, his skill with weapons and the persistence of that same fierce temper made him dreaded by men of his own age. They actually shunned him. Wherever he went, he went alone. Strange to say, his dangerousqualities made him acceptable only in a company of girls, or old men and old women.
Why this should be, Alice had often wondered. But now she understood. Always, before, she had never come closer to the darker side of Larry than the reports that others made of him. But today it was easy to see the panther in him stirring under the surface. All the time that he was attributing perfect freedom to her to do as she pleased, she knew that madness was growing in his brain.
“You know that I wouldn’t change my mind easily, Larry, where you’re concerned?”
“You flatter me,” said Larry.
She looked fixedly at him. No doubt he was mocking both her and himself.
“I’ve never been easy about it…you know that,” she said at length. “I’ve always felt that it was a sin to leave poor Joe in this way.”
“A fellow that has to be pitied isn’t worth thinking about!” exclaimed Larry Haines fiercely. “But let that go.”
“You know what he’s done and what he’s been,” said the girl. “He’s never changed. He was true to poor Nora when everyone was laughing at him. And then he took her babies. He took them just as tenderly as though he had been their father! A man like that…why, how could I refuse him when he asked me to marry him, Larry?”