“I’m scared — scared of everything! Of Larry Ormsby especially! And he’s been wonderfully helpful to me. But I can’t help it. I’m afraid of him — of the way he looks at me sometimes, of things he says when he has been drinking. It’s as if there was something inside of him waiting for something. I shouldn’t say that — because I owe him gratitude for — But I’m so afraid! I’m afraid of every person, of every house, of every doorstep even. It’s a nightmare!”
Steve found that one of his hands was cupped over the white cheek that was not flat against his chest, and that his other arm was around her shoulders, holding her close.
“New towns are always like this, or worse,” he began to tell her. “You should have seen Hopewell, Virginia, when the Du Ponts first opened it. It takes time for the undesirables who come with the first rush to be weeded out. And, stuck out here in the desert, Izzard would naturally fare a little worse than the average new town. As for being friends with you — that’s why I stayed here instead of going back to Whitetufts. We’ll be great friends. We’ll—”
He never knew how long he talked, or what he said; though he imagined afterward that he must have made a very long-winded and very stupid speech. But he was not talking for the purpose of saying anything; he was talking to soothe the girl, and to keep her small face between his hand and chest, and her small body close against his for as long a time as possible.
So, he talked on and on and on—
The MacPhails were at home when Nova Vallance and Steve came through the flowered yard again, and they welcomed the girl with evident relief. The doctor was a short man with a round bald head, and a round jovial face, shiny and rosy except where a sandy mustache drooped over his mouth. His wife was perhaps ten years younger than he, a slender blond woman with much of the feline in the set of her blue eyes and the easy grace of her movements.
“The car broke down with us about twenty miles out,” the doctor explained in a mellow rumbling voice with a hint of a burr lingering around the r’s. “I had to perform a major operation on it before we could get going again. When we got home we found you gone, and were just about to rouse the town.”
The girl introduced Steve to the MacPhails, and then told them about the burglar, and of what they had found in the blind man’s cabin.
Dr. MacPhail shook his round naked head and clicked his tongue on teeth. “Seems to me Fernie doesn’t do all that could be done to tone Izzard down,” he said.
Then the girl remembered Steve’s wounded arm, and the doctor examined, washed, and bandaged it.
“You won’t have to wear the arm in a sling,” he said, “if you take a reasonable amount of care of it. It isn’t a deep cut, and fortunately it went between the supinator longus and the great palmar without injury to either. Get it from our burglar?”
“No. Got it in the street. A man named Kamp and I were walking toward the hotel to-night and were jumped. Kamp was killed. I got this.”
An asthmatic clock somewhere up the street was striking three as Steve passed through the MacPhails’ front gate and set out for the hotel again. He felt tired and sore in every muscle, and he walked close to the curb.
“If anything else happens to-night,” he told himself, “I’m going to run like hell from it. I’ve had enough for one evening.”
At the first cross-street he had to pause to let an automobile race by. As it passed him he recognized it — Larry Ormsby’s cream Vauxhall. In its wake sped five big trucks, with a speed that testified to readjusted gears. In a roar of engines, a cloud of dust, and a rattling of windows, the caravan vanished toward the desert.
Steve went on toward the hotel, thinking. The factory worked twenty-four hours a day, he knew; but surely no necessity of niter manufacturing would call for such excessive speed in its trucks — if they were factory trucks. He turned into Main Street and faced another surprise. The cream Vauxhall stood near the corner, its owner at the wheel. As Steve came abreast of it Larry Ormsby let its near door swing open, and held out an inviting hand.
Steve stopped and stood by the door.
“Jump in and I’ll give you a lift as far as the hotel.”
“Thanks.”
Steve looked quizzically from the man’s handsome, reckless face to the now dimly lighted hotel, less than two blocks away. Then he looked at the man again, and got into the automobile beside him.
“I hear you’re a more or less permanent fixture among us,” Ormsby said, proffering Steve cigarettes in a lacquered leather case, and shutting off his idling engine.
“For a while.”
Steve declined the cigarettes and brought out tobacco and papers from his pocket, adding, “There are things about the place I like.”
“I also hear you had a little excitement to-night.”
“Some,” Steve admitted, wondering whether the other meant the fight in which Kamp had been killed, the burglary at the MacPhails’, or both.
“If you keep up the pace you’ve set,” the factory owner’s son went on, “it won’t take you long to nose me out of my position as Izzard’s brightest light.”
Tautening nerves tickled the nape of Steve’s neck. Larry Ormsby’s words and tones seemed idle enough, but underneath them was a suggestion that they were not aimless — that they were leading to some definite place. It was not likely that he had circled around to intercept Steve merely to exchange meaningless chatter with him. Steve, lighting his cigarette, grinned and waited.
“The only thing I ever got from the old man, besides money,” Larry Ormsby was saying, “is a deep-rooted proprietary love for my own property. I’m a regular burgher for insisting that my property is mine and must stay mine. I don’t know exactly how to feel about a stranger coming in and making himself the outstanding black sheep of the town in two days. A reputation — even for recklessness — is property, you know; and I don’t feel that I should give it up — or any other rights — without a struggle.”
There it was. Steve’s mind cleared. He disliked subtleties. But now he knew what the talk was about. He was being warned to keep away from Nova Vallance.
“I knew a fellow once in Onehunga,” he drawled, “who thought he owned all of the Pacific south of the Tropic of Capricorn — and had papers to prove it. He’d been that way ever since a Maori bashed in his head with a stone mele. Used to accuse us of stealing our drinking water from his ocean.”
Larry Ormsby flicked his cigarette into the street and started the engine.
“But the point is” — he was smiling pleasantly — “that a man is moved to protect what he thinks belongs to him. He may be wrong, of course, but that wouldn’t affect the — ah — vigor of his protecting efforts.”
Steve felt himself growing warm and angry.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said slowly, with deliberate intent to bring this thing between them to a crisis, “but I’ve never had enough experience with property to know how I’d feel about being deprived of it. But suppose I had a — well, say — a white vest that I treasured. And suppose a man slapped my face and threatened to spoil the vest. I reckon I’d forget all about protecting the vest in my hurry to tangle with him.”
Larry laughed sharply.
Steve caught the wrist that flashed up, and pinned it to Ormsby’s side with a hand that much spinning of a heavy stick had muscled with steel.