He went out and walked aimlessly around in the yard, and went over to the smoking remains of the stable, and to the heap of black ashes where the stacks had been. Manley would be hard hit, he knew. He wished he would hurry and come, and relieve him of the responsibility of keeping Val company. He wondered a little, in his masculine way, that women should always be afraid when there was no cause for fear. For instance, she had stayed alone a good many times, evidently, when there was real danger of a fire sweeping down upon her at any hour of the day or night; but now, when there was no longer a possibility of anything happening, she had turned white and begged him to stay—and Val, he judged shrewdly, was not the sort of woman who finds it easy to beg favors of anybody.

There came a sound of galloping, up on the hill, and he turned quickly. Dull dusk was settling bleakly down upon the land, but he could see three or four horsemen just making the first descent from the top. He shouted a wordless greeting, and heard their answering yells. In another minute or two they were pulling up at the house, where he had hurried to meet them. Val, tucking a side comb hastily into her freshly coiled hair, her pretty self clothed all in white linen, appeased eagerly in the doorway.

"Why—where's Manley?" she demanded anxiously.

Blumenthall was dismounting near her, and he touched his hat before he answered. "We were on the way home, and we thought we'd better ride around this way and see how you came out," he evaded. "I see you lost your hay and buildings—pretty close call for the house, too, I should judge. You must have got here in time to do something, Kent."

"But where's Manley?" Val was growing pale again. "Has anything happened? Is he hurt? Tell me!"

"Oh, he's all right, Mrs. Fleetwood." Blumenthall glanced meaningly at Kent—and Fred De Garmo, sitting to one side of his saddle, looked at Polycarp Jenks and smiled slightly. "We left town ahead of him, and knocked right along."

Val regarded the group suspiciously. "He's coming, then, is he?"

"Oh, certainly. Glad you're all right, Mrs. Fleetwood. That was an awful fire—it swept the whole country clean between the two rivers, I'm afraid. This wind made it bad." He was tightening his cinch, and now he unhooked the stirrup from the horn and mounted again. "We'll have to be getting along—don't know, yet, how we came out of it over to the ranch. But our guards ought to have stopped it there." He looked at Kent. "How did the Wishbone make it?" he inquired.

"I was just going to ask you if you knew," Kent replied, scowling because he saw Fred looking at Val in what he considered an impertinent manner. "My horse ran off while I was fighting fire here, so I'm afoot. I was waiting for Man to show up."

"You'll git all of that you want—he-he!" Polycarp cut in tactlessly. "Man won't git home t'-night—not unless—"

"Aw, come on." Fred started along the charred trail which led across the coulee and up the farther side. Blumenthall spoke a last, commonplace sentence or two, just to round off the conversation and make the termination not too abrupt, and they rode away, with Polycarp glancing curiously back, now and then, as though he was tempted to stay and gossip, and yet was anxious to know all that had happened at the Double Diamond.

"What did Polycarp Jenks mean—about Manley not coming to-night?" Val was standing in the doorway, staring after the group of horsemen.

"Nothing, I guess, Polycarp never does mean anything half the time; he just talks to hear his head roar. Man'll come, all right. This bunch happened to beat him out, is all."

"Oh, do you think so? Mr. Blumenthall acted as if there was something—"

"Well, what can you expect of a man that lives on oatmeal mush and toast and hot water?" Kent demanded aggressively. "And Fred De Garmo is always grinning and winking at somebody; and that other fellow is a Swede and got about as much sense as a prairie dog—and Polycarp is an old granny gossip that nobody ever pays any attention to. Man won't stay in town—hell be too anxious."

"It's terrible," sighed Val, "about the hay and the stables. Manley will be so discouraged—he worked so hard to cut and stack that hay. And he was just going to gather the calves together and put them in the river field, in a couple of weeks—and now there isn't anything to feed them!"

"I guess he's coming; I hear somebody." Kent was straining his eyes to see the top of the hill, where the dismal sight shadows lay heavily upon the dismal black earth. "Sounds to me like a rig, though. Maybe he drove out." He left her, went to the wire gate which gave egress from the tiny, unkempt yard, and walked along the trail to meet the newcomer.

"You stay there," he called back, when he thought he heard Val following him. "I'm just going to tell him you're all right. You'll get that white dress all smudged up in these ashes."

In the narrow little gully where the trail crossed the half-dry channel from the spring he met the rig. The driver pulled up when he caught sight of Kent.

"Who's that? Did she git out of it?" cried Arline Hawley, in a breathless undertone, "Oh—it's you, is it, Kent? I couldn't stand it—I just had to come and see if she's alive. So I made Hank hitch right up—as soon as we knew the fire wasn't going to git into all that brush along the creek, and run down to the town—and bring me over. And the way—"

"But where's Man?" Kent laid a hand upon the wheel and shot the question into the stream of Arline's talk.

"Man! I dunno what devil gits into men sometimes. Man went and got drunk as a fool soon as he seen the fire and knew what coulda happened out here. Started right in to drownd his sorrows before he made sure whether he had any to drown! If that ain't like a man, every time! Time we all got back to town, and the fire was kiting away from us instead of coming up toward us, he was too drunk to do anything. He must of poured it down him by the quart. He—"

"Manley! Is that you, dear?" It was Val, a slim, white figure against the blackness all around her, coming down the trail to see what delayed them. "Why don't you come to the house? There is a house, you know. We aren't quite burned out. And I'm all right, so there's no need to worry any more."

"Now, ain't that a darned shame?" muttered Arline wrathfully to Kent. "A feller that'll drink when he's got a wife like that had oughta be hung!

"It's me, Arline Hawley!" She raised her voice to its ordinary shrill level. "It ain't just the proper time to make a call, I guess, but it's better late than never. Man, he was took with one of his spells, so I told him I'd come on out and take you back to town. How are you, anyhow? Scared plumb to death, I'll bet, when that fire come over the hill. You needn't 'a' tramped clear down here—we was coming on to the house in a minute. I got to chewin' the rag with Kent. Git in; you might as well ride back to the house, now you're here."

"Manley didn't come?" Val was standing beside the rig, near Kent. Her white-clothed figure was indistinct, and her face obscured in the dark. Her voice was quiet—lifelessly quiet. "Is he sick?"

"Well—of course has nerves was all upset—"

"Oh! Then he is sick?"

"Well—nothing dangerous, but—he wasn't feelin' well, so I thought I'd come out and take you back with me."

"Oh!"

"Man was awful worried; you mustn't think he wasn't. He was pretty near crazy, for a while."

"Oh, yes, certainly."

"Get in and ride. And you mustn't worry none about Man, nor feel hurt that he didn't come. He felt so bad—"

"I'll walk, thank you; it's only a few steps. And I'm not worried at all. I quite understand."

The team started on slowly, and Mrs. Hawley turned in the seat so that she could continue talking without interruption to the two who walked behind. But it was Kent who answered her at intervals, when she asked a direct question or appeared to be waiting for some comment. Betweenwhiles he was wondering if Val did, after all, understand. She knew so little of the West and its ways, and her faith in Manley was so firm and unquestioning, that he felt sure she was only hurt at what looked very much like an indifference to her welfare. He suspected shrewdly that she was thinking what she would have done in Manley's place, and was trying to reconcile Mrs. Hawley's assurances that Manley was not actually sick or disabled with the blunt fact that he had stayed in town and permitted others to come out to see if she were alive or dead.

And Kent had another problem to solve. Should he tell her the truth? He had never ceased to feel, in some measure, responsible for her position. And she was sure to discover the truth before long; not even her innocence and her ignorance of life could shield her from that knowledge. He let a question or two of Arline's go unanswered while he struggled for a decision, but when they reached the house, only one point was dearly settled in his mind. Instead of riding as far as he might, and then walking across the prairie to the Wishbone, he intended to go on to town with them—"to see her through with it."



CHAPTER XI

VAL'S AWAKENING

Val stood just inside the door of the hotel parlor and glanced swiftly around at the place of unpleasant memory.

"No, I must see Manley before I can tell you whether we shall want to stay or not," she replied to Arline's insistence that she "go right up to a room" and lie down. "I feel quite well, and you must not bother about me at all. If Mr. Burnett will be good enough to send Manley to me—I must see him first of all." It was Val in her most unapproachable mood, and Arline subsided before it.

"Well, then, I'll go and send word to Man, and see about some supper for us. I feel as if I could eat ten-penny nails!" She went out into the hall, hesitated a moment, and then boldly invaded the "office."

"Say! have you got Man rounded up yit?" she demanded of her husband. "And how is he, anyhow? That girl ain't got the first idea of what ails him—how anybody with the brains and education she's got can be so thick-headed gits me. Jim told me Man's been packing a bottle or two home with him every trip he's made for the last month—and she don't know a thing about it. I'd like to know what 'n time they learn folks back East, anyhow; to put their eyes and their sense in their pockets, I guess, and go along blind as bats. Where's Kent at? Did he go after him? She won't do nothing till she sees Man—"

At that moment Kent came in, and his disgust needed no words. He answered Mrs. Hawley's inquiring look with a shake of the head.

"I can't do anything with him," he said morosely. "He's so full he don't know he's got a wife, hardly. You better go and tell her, Mrs. Hawley. Somebody's got to."

"Oh, my heavens!" Arline clutched at the doorknob for moral support. "I could no more face them yellow eyes of hern when they blaze up—you go tell her yourself, if you want her told. I've got to see about some supper for us. I ain't had a bite since dinner, and Min's off gadding somewheres—" She hurried away, mentally washing her hands of the affair. "Women's got to learn some time what men is," she soliloquized, "and I guess she ain't no better than any of the rest of us, that she can't learn to take her medicine—but I ain't goin' to be the one to tell her what kinda fellow she's tied to. My stunt'll be helpin' her pick up the pieces and make the best of it after she's told."

She stopped, just inside the dining room, and listened until she heard Kent cross the hall from the office and open the parlor door. "Gee! It's like a hangin'," she sighed. "If she wasn't so plumb innocent—" She started for the door which opened into the parlor from the dining room, strongly tempted to eavesdrop. She did yield so far as to put her ear to the keyhole, but the silence within impressed her strangely, and she retreated to the kitchen and closed the door tightly behind her as the most practical method of bidding Satan begone.

The silence in the parlor lasted while Kent, standing with his back against the door, faced Val and meditated swiftly upon the manner of his telling.

"Well?" she demanded at last. "I am still waiting to see Manley. I am not quite a child, Mr. Burnett. I know something is the matter, and you—if you have any pity, or any feeling of friendship, you will tell me the truth. Don't you suppose I know that Arline was—lying to me all the time about Manley? You helped her to lie. So did that other man. I waited until I reached town, where I could do something, and now you must tell me the truth. Manley is badly hurt, or he is dead. Tell me which it is, and take me to him." She spoke fast, as if she was afraid she might not be able to finish, though her voice was even and low, it was also flat and toneless with her effort to seem perfectly calm and self-controlled.

Kent looked at her, forgot all about leading up to the truth by easy stages, as he had intended to do, and gave it to her straight. "He ain't either one," he said. "He's drunk!"

Val stared at him. "Drunk!" He could see how even her lips shrank from the word. She threw up her head. "That," she declared icily, "I know to be impossible!"

"Oh, do you? Let me tell you that's never impossible with a man, not when there's whisky handy."

"Manley is not that sort of a man. When he left me, three years ago, he promised me never to frequent places where liquor is sold. He never had touched liquor; he never was tempted to touch it. But, just to be doubly sure, he promised me, on his honor. He has never broken that promise; I know, because he told me so." She made the explanation scornfully, as if her pride and her belief in Manley almost forbade the indignity of explaining. "I don't know why you should come here and insult me," she added, with a lofty charity for his sin.

"I don't see how it can insult you," he contended. "You're got a different way of looking at things, but that won't help you to dodge facts. Man's drunk. I said it, and I mean it. It ain't the first time, nor the second. He was drunk the day you came, and couldn't meet the train. That's why I met you. I ought to've told you, I guess, but I hated to make you feel bad. So I went to work and sobered him up, and sent him over to get married. I've always been kinda sorry for that. It was a low-down trick to play on you, and that's a fact. You ought to've had a chance to draw outa the game, but I didn't think about it at the time. Man and I have always been pretty good friends, and I was thinking of his side of the case. I thought he'd straighten up after he got married; he wasn't such a hard drinker—only he'd go on a toot when he got into town, like lots of men. I didn't think it had such a strong hold on him. And I knew he thought a lot of you, and if you went back on him it'd hit him pretty hard. Man ain't a bad fellow, only for that. And he's liable to do better when he finds out you know about it. A man will do 'most anything for a woman he thinks a lot of."

"Indeed!" Val was sitting now upon the red plush chair. Her face was perfectly colorless, her manner frozen. The word seemed to speak itself, without having any relation whatever to her thoughts and her emotions.

Kent waited. It seemed to him that she took it harder than she would have taken the news that Manley was dead. He had no means of gauging the horror of a young woman who has all her life been familiar with such terms as "the demon rum," and who has been taught that "intemperance is the doorway to perdition"; a young woman whose life has been sheltered jealously from all contact with the ugly things of the world, and who believes that she might better die than marry a drunkard. He watched her unobtrusively.

"Anyway, it was worrying over you that made him get off wrong to-day," he ventured at last, as a sort of palliative. "They say he was going to start home right in the face of the fire, and when they wouldn't let him, he headed straight for a saloon and commenced to pour whisky down him. He thought sure you—he thought the fire would—"

"I see," Val interrupted stonily. "For the very doubtful honor of shaking the hand of a politician, he left me alone to face as best I might the possibility of burning alive; and when it seemed likely that the possibility had become a certainty, he must celebrate his bereavement by becoming a beast. Is that what you would have me believe of my husband?"

"That's about the size of it," Kent admitted reluctantly. "Only I wouldn't have put it just that way, maybe."

"Indeed! And how would you pit it, then?"

Kent leaned harder against the door, and looked at her curiously. Women, it seemed to him, were always going to extremes; they were either too soft and meek, or else they were too hard and unmerciful.

"How would you put it? I am rather curious to know your point of view."

"Well, I know men better than you do, Mrs. Fleetwood. I know they can do some things that look pretty rotten on the surface, and yet be fairly decent underneath. You don't know how a habit like that gets a fellow just where he's weakest. Man ain't a beast. He's selfish and careless, and he gives way too easy, but he thinks the world of you. Jim says he cried like a baby when he came into the saloon, and acted like a crazy man. You don't want to be too hard on him. I've an idea this will learn him a lesson. If you take him the right way, Mrs. Fleetwood, the chances are he'll quit drinking."

Val smiled. Kent thought he had never before seen a smile like that, and hoped he never would see another. There was in it neither mercy nor mirth, but only the hard judgment of a woman who does not understand.

"Will you bring him to me here, Mr. Burnett? I do not feel quite equal to invading a saloon and begging him, on my knees, to come—after the conventional manner of drunkards' wives. But I should like to see him."

Kent stared. "He ain't in any shape to argue with," he remonstrated. "You better wait a while."

She rested her chin upon her hands, folded upon the high chair back, and gazed at him with her tawny eyes, that somehow reminded Kent of a lioness in a cage. He thought swiftly that a lioness would have as much mercy as she had in that mood.

"Mr. Burnett," she began quietly, when Kent's nerves were beginning to feel the strain of her silent stare, "I want to see Manley as he is now. I will tell you why. You aren't a woman, and you never will understand, but I shall tell you; I want to tell somebody.

"I was raised well—that sounds queer, but modesty forbids more. At any rate, my mother was very careful about me. She believed in a girl marrying and becoming a good wife to a good man, and to that end she taught me and trained me. A woman must give her all—her life, her past, present, and future—to the man she marries. For three years I thought how unworthy I was to be Manley's wife. Unworthy, do you hear? I slept with his letters under my pillow." The self-contempt in her tone! "I studied the things I thought would make me a better companion out here in the wilderness. I practiced hours and hours every day upon my violin, because Manley had admired my playing, and I thought it would please him to have me play in the firelight on winter evenings, when the blizzards were howling about the house! I learned to cook, to wash clothes, to iron, to sweep, and to scrub, and to make my own clothes, because Manley's wife would live where she could not hire servants to do these things. I lived a beautiful, picturesque dream of domestic happiness.

"I left my friends, my home, all the things I had been accustomed to all my life, and I came out here to live that dream!" She laughed bitterly.

"You can easily guess how much of it has come true, Mr. Burnett. But you don't know what it costs a girl to come down from the clouds and find that reality is hard and ugly—from dreaming of a cozy little nest of a home, and the love and care of—of Manley, to the reality—to carrying water and chopping wood and being left alone, day after day, and to find that his love only meant—Oh, you don't know how a woman clings to her ideals! You don't know how I have dung to mine. They have become rather tattered, and I have had to mend them often, but I have clung to them, even though they do not resemble much the dreams I brought with me to this horrible country.

"But if it's true, what you tell me—if Manley himself is another disillusionment—if beyond his selfishness and his carelessness he is a drunken brute whom I can't even respect, then I'm done with my ideals. I want to see him just as he is. I want to see him once without the halo I have kept shining all these months. I've got my life to live—but I want to face facts and live facts. I can't go on dreaming and making believe, after this." She stopped and looked at him speculatively, absolutely without emotion.

"Just before I left home," she went on in the same calm quiet, "a girl showed me some verses written by a very wicked man. At least, they say he is very wicked—at any rate, he is in jail. I thought the verses horrible and brutal; but now I think the man must be very wise. I remember a few lines, and they seem to me to mean Manley.

"For each man kills the thing he loves— Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word; The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword.

"I don't remember all of it, but there was another line or two:

"The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold.

"I wish I had that poem now—I think I could understand it. I think—"

"I think you've got talking hysterics, if there is such a thing," Kent interrupted harshly. "You don't know half what you're saying. You've had a hard day, and you're all tired out, and everything looks outa focus. I know—I've seen men like that sometimes when some trouble hit 'em hard and unexpected. What you want is sleep; not poetry about killing people. A man, in the shape you are in, takes to whisky. You're taking to graveyard poetry—and, if you ask me, that's worse than whisky. You ain't normal. What you want to do is go straight to bed. When you wake up in the morning you won't feel so bad. You won't have half as many troubles as you've got now."

"I knew you wouldn't understand it," Val remarked coldly, still staring at him with her chin on her hands.

"You won't yourself, to-morrow morning," Kent declared unsympathetically, and called Mrs. Hawley from the kitchen. "You better put Mrs. Fleetwood to bed," he advised gruffly. "And if you've got anything that'll make her sleep, give her a dose of it. She's so tired she can't see straight." He was nearly to the outside door when Val recovered her speech.

"You men are all alike," she said contemptuously. "You give orders and you consider yourselves above all the laws of morality or decency; in reality you are beneath them. We shouldn't expect anything of the lower animals! How I despise men!"

"Now you're talking," grinned Kent, quite unmoved. "Whack us in a bunch all you like—but don't make one poor devil take it all. Men as a class are used to it and can stand it." He was laughing as he left the room, but his amusement lasted only until the door was closed behind him. "Lord!" he exclaimed, and drew a deep breath. "I'd sure hate to have that little woman say all them things about me!" and glanced involuntarily over his shoulder to where a crack of light showed under the faded green shade of one of the parlor windows.

He crossed the street and entered the saloon where Manley was still drinking heavily, his face crimson and blear-eyed and brutalized, his speech thickened disgustingly. He was sprawled in an armchair, waving an empty glass in an erratic attempt to mark the time of a college ditty six or seven years out of date, which he was trying to sing. He leered up at Kent.

"Wife 'sall righ'," he informed him solemnly. "Knew she would be—fine guards's got out there. 'Sall righ'—somebody shaid sho. Have a drink."

Kent glowered down at him, made a swift, mental decision, and pipped him by the shoulder. "You come with me," he commanded. "I've got something important I want to tell you. Come on—if you can walk."

"'Course I c'n walk all righ'. Shertainly I can walk. Wha's makes you think I can't walk? Want to inshult me? 'Sall my friends here—no secrets from my friends. Wha's want tell me? Shay it here."

Kent was a big man; that is to say, he was tall, well-muscled and active. But so was Manley. Kent tried the power of persuasion, leaving force as a last, doubtful result. In fifteen minutes or thereabouts he had succeeded in getting Manley outside the door, and there he balked.

"Wha's matter wish you?" he complained, pulling back. "C'm on back 'n' have drink. Wha's wanna tell me?"

"You wait. I'll tell you all about it in a minute. I've got something to show you, and I don't want the bunch to get next. Savvy?"

He had a sickening sense that the subterfuge would not have deceived a five-year-old child, but it was accepted without question.

He led Manley stumbling up the street, evading a direct statement as to his destination, pulled him off the board walk, and took him across a vacant lot well sprinkled with old shoes and tin cans. Here Manley fell down, and Kent's patience was well tested before he got him up and going again.

"Where y' goin'?" Manley inquired pettishly, as often as he could bring his tongue to the labor of articulation.

"You wait and I'll show you," was Kent's unvaried reply.

At last he pushed open a door and led his victim into the darkness of a small, windowless building. "It's in here—back against the wall, there," he said, pulling Manley after him. By feeling, and by a good sense of location, he arrived at a rough bunk built against the farther wall, with a blanket or two upon it.

"There you are," he announced grimly. "You'll have a sweet time getting anything to drink here, old boy. When you're sober enough to face your wife and have some show of squaring yourself with her, I'll come and let you out." He had pushed Manley down upon the bunk, and had reached the door before the other could get up and come at him. He pulled the door shut with a slam, slipped a padlock into the staple, and snapped it just before Manley lurched heavily against it. He was cursing as well as he could—was Manley, and he began kicking like an unruly child shut into a closet.

"Aw, let up," Kent advised him, through a crack in the wall. "Want to know where you are? Well, you're in Hawley's ice house; you know it's a fine place for drunks to sober up in; it's awful popular for that purpose. Aw, you can't do any business kicking—that's been tried lots of times. This is sure well built, for an ice house. No, I can't let you out. Couldn't possibly, you know. I haven't got the key—old lady Hawley has got it, and she's gone to bed hours ago. You go to sleep and forget about it. I'll talk to you in the morning. Good night, and pleasant dreams!"

The last thing Kent heard as he walked away was Manley's profane promise to cut Kent's heart out very early the next day.

"The darned fool," Kent commented, as he stopped in the first patch of lamplight to roll a cigarette. "He ain't got another friend in town that'd go to the trouble I've gone to for him. He'll realize it, too, when all that whisky quits stewing inside him."



CHAPTER XII

A LESSON IN FORGIVENESS

"Well, old-timer, how you coming? You sure do sleep sound—this is the third time I've come to tell you breakfast is ready and then some. You'll get the bottom of the coffeepot, for fair, if you don't hustle." Kent left the door of the ice house wide open behind him, so that the warmth of mid-morning swept in to do battle with the chill and damp of wet sawdust and buried ice.

Manley rolled over so that he faced his visitor, and his reply was abusive in the extreme. Kent waited, with an air of impersonal interest, until he was done and had turned his face away as though the subject was quite exhausted.

"Well, now you've got that load off your mind, come on over and get a cup of coffee. But while you're thinking about whether you want anything but my heart's blood, I'm going to speak right up and tell you a few things that commonly ain't none of my business.

"Do you know your wife came within an ace of burning to death yesterday?" Manley sat up with a jerk and glared at him. "Do you know you're burned out, slick and clean—all except the shack? Hay, stables, corral, wagons, chickens—" Kent spread his hands in a gesture including all minor details. "I rode over there when I saw the fire coming, and it's lucky I did, old-timer. I back-fired and saved the house—and your wife—from going up in smoke. But everything else went. Let that sink into your system, will you? And just see if you can draw a picture of what woulda happened if nobody had showed up—if that fire had hit the coulee with nobody there but your wife. Why, I run onto her half-way up the bluff, packing a wet sack, to fight it at the fire guards I Now, Man, it ain't any credit to, you that the worst didn't happen. I'd sure like to tell you what I think of a fellow that will leave a woman out there, twenty miles from town and ten from the nearest neighbor—and them not at home—to take a chance on a thing like that; but I can't. I never learned words enough.

"There's another thing. Old lady Hawley took more interest in her than you did; she drove out there to see how about it, as soon as the fire had burned on past and left the trail safe. And it didn't look good to her—that little woman stuck out there all by herself. She made her pack up some clothes, and brought her to town with her. She didn't want to come; she had an idea that she ought to stay with it till you showed up. But the only original Hawley is sure all right! She talked your wife plumb outa the house and into the rig, and brought her to town. She's over to the hotel now."

"Val at the hotel? How long has she been there?" Manley began smoothing his hair and his crumpled clothes with his hands, "Good heavens! You told her I'd gone on out, and had missed her on the trail, didn't you, Kent? She doesn't know I'm in town, does she? You always were a good fellow—I haven't forgotten how you—"

"Well, you can forget it now. I didn't tell her anything like that. I didn't think of it, for one thing. She knew all the time that you were in town. I'm tired of lying to her. I told her the truth. I told her you were drunk."

Manley's jaw dropped. "You—you told her—"

"Ex-actly. I told her you were drunk." Kent nodded gravely, and his lips curled as he watched the other cringe. "She called me a liar," he added, with a certain reminiscent amusement.

Manley brightened. "That's Val—once she believes in a person she's loyal as—"

"She ain't now," Kent interposed dryly. "When I let up she was plumb convinced. She knows now what ailed you the day she came and you didn't meet her."

"You dirty cur! And I thought you were a friend. You—"

"You thought right—until you got to rooting a little too deep in the mud, old-timer. And let me tell you something. I was your friend when I told her. She's got to know—you couldn't go on like this much longer without having her get wise; she ain't a fool. The thing for you to do now is to buck up and let her reform you. I've always heard that women are tickled plumb to death when they can reform a man. You go on over there and make your little talk, and then buckle down and live up to it. Savvy? That's your only chance now. It'll work, too.

"You ought to straighten up, Man, and act white! Not just to square yourself with her, but because you're going downhill pretty fast, if you only knew it. You ain't anything like you were two years ago, when we bached together. You've got to brace up pretty sudden, or you'll be so far gone you can't climb back. And when a man has got a wife to look after, it seems to me he ought to be the best it's in him to be. You were a fine fellow when you first hit the country—and she thought she was getting that same fine fellow when she came away out here to marry you. It ain't any of my business—but do you think you're giving her a square deal?" He waited a minute, and spoke the next sentence with a certain diffidence. "I'll gamble you haven't been disappointed in her."

"She's an angel—and I'm a beast!" groaned Manley, with the exaggerated self-abasement which so frequently follows close upon the heels of intoxication. "She'll never forgive a thing like that—the best thing I can do is to blow my brains out!"

"Like Walt. And have your picture enlarged and put in a gold frame, and hubby number two learning his morals from your awful example," elaborated Kent, in much the same tone he had employed when Val, only the day before, had rashly expressed a wish for a speedy death.

Manley sat up straighter and sent a look of resentment toward the man who bantered when he should have sympathized. "It's all a big joke with you, of course," he flared weakly. "You're not married—to a perfect woman; a woman who never did anything wrong in her life, and can't understand how anybody should want to, and can't forgive him when he does. She expects a man to be a saint. Why, I don't even smoke in the house—and she doesn't dream I'd ever swear, under any circumstances.

"Why, Kent, a fellow's got to go to town and turn himself loose sometimes, when he lives in a rarified atmosphere of refined morality, and listens to Songs Without Words and weepy classics on the violin, and never a thing to make your feet tingle. She doesn't believe in public dances, either. Nor cards. She reads 'The Ring and the Book' evenings, and wants to discuss it and read passages of it to me. I used to take some interest in those things, and she doesn't seem to see I've changed. Why, hang it, Kent, Cold Spring Coulee's no place for Browning—he doesn't fit in. All that sort of thing is a thousand miles behind me—and I've got to—" He stopped short and brooded, his eyes upon the dank sawdust at his feet.

"I'm a beast," he repeated rather lugubriously. "She's an angel—an Eastern-bred angel. And let me tell you, Kent, all that's pretty hard to live up to!"

Kent looked down at him meditatively, wondering if there was not a good deal of truth and justice in Manley's argument. But his sympathies had already gone to the other side, and Kent was not the man to make an emotional pendulum of himself.

"Well, what you going to do about it?" he asked, after a short silence.

For answer Manley rose to his feet with a certain air of determination, which flamed up oddly above his general weakness, like the last sputter of a candle burned down. "I'm going over and take my medicine—face the music," he said almost sullenly, "She's too good for me—I always knew it. And I haven't treated her right—I've left her out there alone too much. But she wouldn't come to town with me—she said she couldn't endure the sight of it. What could I do? I couldn't stay out there all the time; there were times when I had to come. She didn't seem to mind staying alone. She never objected. She was always sweet sad good-natured—and shut up inside of herself. She just gives you what she pleases of her mind, and the rest she hides—"

Kent laughed suddenly. "You married men sure do have all kinds of trouble," he remarked. "A fellow like me can go on a jamboree any time he likes, and as long as he likes, and it don't concern anybody but himself—and maybe the man he's working for; and look at you, scared plumb silly thinking of what your wife's going to say about it. If you ask me, I'm going to trot alone; I'd rather be lonesome than good, any old time."

That, however, did not tend to raise Manley's spirits any. He entered the hotel with visible reluctance, looked into the parlor, and heaved a sigh of relief when he saw that it was empty, wavered at the foot of the steep, narrow stairs, and retreated to the dining room, with Kent at his heels knowing that the matter had passed quite beyond his help or hindrance and had entered that mysterious realm of matrimony where no unwedded man or woman may follow and yet is curious enough to linger.

Just inside the door Manley stopped so suddenly that Kent bumped against him. Val, sweet and calm and cool, was sitting just where the smoke-dimmed sunlight poured in through a window upon her, and a breeze came with it and stirred her hair. She had those purple shadows under her eyes which betray us after long, sleepless hours when we live with our troubles and the world dreams around us; she had no color at all in her cheeks, and she had that aloofness of manner which Manley, in his outburst, had described as being shut up inside herself. She glanced up at them, just as she would have done had they both been strangers, and went on sugaring her coffee with a dainty exactness which, under the circumstances, seemed altogether too elaborate to be unconscious.

"Good morning," she greeted them quietly. "I think we must be the laziest people in town; at any rate, we seem to be the latest risers."

Kent stared at her frankly, so that she flushed a little under the scrutiny. Manley consciously avoided looking at her, and muttered something unintelligible while he pulled out a chair three places distant from her.

Val stole a sidelong, measuring look at her husband while she took a sip of coffee, and then her eyes turned upon Kent. More than ever, it seemed to him, they resembled the eyes of a lioness watching you quietly from the corner of her cage. You could look at them, but you could not look into them. Always they met your gaze with a baffling veil of inscrutability. But they were darker than the eyes of a lioness; they were human eyes; woman eyes—alluring eyes. She did not say a word, and, after a brief stare which might have meant almost anything, she turned to her plate of toast and broke away the burned edges of a slice and nibbled at the passable center as if she had no trouble beyond a rather unsatisfactory breakfast.

It was foolish, it was childish for three people who knew one another very well, to sit and pretend to eat, and to speak no word; so Kent thought, and tried to break the silence with some remark which would not sound constrained.

"It's going to storm," he flung into the silence, like chucking a rock into a pond.

"Do you think so?" Val asked languidly, just grazing him with a glance, in that inattentive way she sometimes had. "Are you going out home—or to what's left of it—to-day, Manley?" She did not look at him at all, Kent observed.

"I don't know—I'll have to hire a team—I'll see what—"

"Mrs. Hawley thinks we ought to stay here for a few days—or that I ought—while you make arrangements for building a new stable, and all that."

"If you want to stay," Manley agreed rather eagerly, "why, of course, you can. There's nothing out there to—"

"Oh, it doesn't matter in the slightest degree where I stay. I only mentioned it because I promised her I would speak to you about it." There was more than languor in her tone.

"They're going to start the fireworks pretty quick," Kent mentally diagnosed the situation and rose hurriedly. "Well, I've got to hunt a horse, myself, and pull out for the Wishbone," he explained gratuitously. "Ought to've gone last night. Good-bye." He closed the door behind him and shrugged his shoulders. "Now they can fight it out," he told himself. "Glad I ain't a married man!"

However, they did not fight it out then. Kent had no more than reached the office when Val rose, hoped that Manley would please excuse her, and left the room also. Manley heard her go up-stairs, found out from Arline what was the number of Val's room, and followed her. The door was locked, but when he rapped upon it Val opened it an inch and held it so.

"Val, let me in. I want to talk with you. I—God knows how sorry I am—"

"If He does, that ought to be sufficient," she answered coldly. "I don't feel like talking now—especially upon the subject you would choose. You're a man, supposedly. You must know what it is your duty to do. Please let us not discuss it—now or ever.

"But, Val—"

"I don't want to talk about it, I tell you! I won't—I can't. You must do without the conventional confession and absolution. You must have some sort of conscience—let that receive your penitence." She started to close the door, but he caught it with his hand.

"Val—do you hate me?"

She looked at him for a moment, as if she were trying to decide. "No," she said at last, "I don't think I do; I'm quite sure that I do not. But I'm terribly hurt and disappointed." She closed the door then and turned the key.

Manley stood for a moment rather blankly before it, then put his hands as deep in his pockets as they would go, and went slowly down the stairs. At that moment he did not feel particularly penitent. She would not listen to "the conventional confession!"

"That girl can be hard as nails!" he muttered, under his breath.

He went into the office, got a cigar, and lighted it moodily. He glanced at the bottles ranged upon the shelves behind the bar, drew in his breath for speech, let it go in a sigh, and walked out. He knew perfectly well what Val had meant. She had deliberately thrown him back upon his own strength. He had fallen by himself, he must pick himself up; and she would stand back and watch the struggle, and judge him according to his failure or his success. He had a dim sense that it was a dangerous experiment.

He looked for Kent, found him just as he was mounting at the stables, and let him go almost without a word. After all, no one could help him. He stood there smoking after Kent had gone, and when his cigar was finished he wandered back to the hotel. As was always the case after hard drinking, he had a splitting headache. He got a room as close to Val's as he could, shut himself into it, and gave himself up to his headache and to gloomy meditation. All day he lay upon the bed, and part of the time he slept. At supper time he rapped upon Val's door, got no answer, and went down alone, to find her in the dining room. There was an empty chair beside her, and he took it as his right. She talked a little—about the fire and the damage it had done. She said she was worried because she had forgotten to bring the cat, and what would it find to eat out there?

"Everything's burned perfectly black for miles and miles, you know," she reminded him.

They left the room together, and he followed her upstairs and to her door. This time she did not shut him out, and he went in and sat down by the window, and looked out upon the meager little street. Never, in the years he had known her, had she been so far from him. He watched her covertly while she searched for something in her suit case.

"I'm afraid I didn't bring enough clothes to last more than a day or two," she remarked. "I couldn't seem to think of anything that night. Arline did most of the packing for me. I'm afraid I misjudged that woman, Manley; there's a good deal to her, after all. But she is funny."

"Val, I want to tell you I'm going to—to be different. I've been a beast, but I'm going to—" So much he had rushed out before she could freeze him to silence again.

"I hope so," she cut in, as he hesitated, "That is something you must judge for yourself, and do by yourself. Do you think you will be able to get a team tomorrow?"

"Oh—to hell with a team!" Manley exploded.

Val dropped her hairbrush upon the floor. "Manley Fleetwood! Has it come to that, also? Isn't it enough to—" She choked. "Manley, you can be a—a drunken sot, if you choose—I've no power to prevent you; but you shall not swear in my presence. I thought you had some of the instincts of a gentleman, but—" She set her teeth hard together. She was white around the mouth, and her whole, slim body was aquiver with outraged dignity.

There was something queer in Manley's eyes as he looked at her, the length of the tiny room between them.

"Oh, I beg your pardon. I remember, now, your Fern Hill ethics. I may go to hell, for all of you—you will simply hold back your immaculate, moral skirts so that I may pass without smirching them; but I must not mention my destination—that is so unrefined!" He got up from the chair, with a laugh that was almost a snort. "You refuse to discuss a certain subject, though it's almost a matter of life and death with me; at least, it was. Your happiness and my own was at stake, I thought. But it's all right—I needn't have worried about it. I still have some of the instincts of a gentleman, and your pure ears shall not be offended by any profanity or any disagreeable 'conventional confessions.' The absolution, let me say, I expected to do without." He started, full of some secret intent, for the door.

Val humanized suddenly. By the time his fingers touched the door knob she had read his purpose, had readied his side, and was clutching his arm with both her hands.

"Manley Fleetwood, what are you going to do?" She was actually panting with the jump of her heart.

He turned the knob, so that the latch clicked. "Get drunk. Be the drunken sot you expect me to be. Go to that vulgar place which I must not mention in your presence. Let go my arm, Val."

She was all woman, then. She pulled him away from the door and the unnamed horror which lay outside. She was not the crying sort, but she cried, just the same—heartbrokenly, her head against his shoulder, as if she herself were the sinner. She clung to him, she begged him to forgive her hardness.

She learned something which every woman must learn if she would keep a little happiness in her life: she learned how to forgive the man she loved, and to trust him afterward.



CHAPTER XIII

ARLINE GIVES A DANCE

A house, it would seem, is almost the least important part of a ranch; one can camp, with frying pan and blankets, in the shade of a bush or the shelter of canvas. But to do anything upon a ranch, one must have many things—burnable things, for the most part, as Manley was to learn by experience when he left Val at the hotel and rode out, the next day, to Cold Spring Coulee.

To ride over twenty miles of blackness is depressing enough in itself, but to find, at the end of the journey, that one's work has all gone for nothing, and one's money and one's plans and hopes, is worse than depressing. Manley sat upon his horse and gazed rather blankly at the heap of black cinders that had been his haystacks, and at the cold embers where had stood his stables, and at the warped bits of iron that had been his buckboard, his wagon, his rake and mower—all the things he had gathered around him in the three years he had spent upon the place.

The house merely emphasized his loss. He got down, picked up the cat, which was mewing plaintively beside his horse, snuggled it into his arm, and remounted. Val had told him to be sure and find the cat, and bring it back with him. His horses and his cattle—not many, to be sure, in that land of large holdings—were scattered, and it would take the round-up to gather them together again. So the cat, and the horse he rode, the bleak coulee, and the unattractive little house with its three rooms and its meager porch, were all that he could visualize as his worldly possessions. And when he thought of his bank account he winced mentally. Before snow fell he would be debt-ridden, the best he could do. For he must have a stable, and corral, and hay, and a wagon, and—he refused to remind himself of all the things he must have if he would stay on the ranch.

His was not a strong nature at best, and now he shrank from facing his misfortune and wanted only to get away from the place. He loped his horse half-way up the hill, which was not merciful riding. The half-starved cat yowled in his arms, and struck her claws through his coat till he felt the prick of them, and he swore; at the cat, nominally, but really at the trick fate had played upon him.

For a week he dallied in town, without heart or courage though Val urged him to buy lumber and build, and cheered him as best she could. He did make a half-hearted attempt to get lumber to the place, but there seemed to be no team in town which he could hire. Every one was busy, and put him off. He tried to buy hay of Blumenthall, of the Wishbone, of every man he met who had hay. No one had any hay to sell, however. Blumenthall complained that he was short, himself, and would buy if he could, rather than sell. The Wishbone foreman declared profanely—that hay was going to be worth a dollar a pound to them, before spring. They were all sorry for Manley, and told him he was "sure playing tough luck," but they couldn't sell any hay, that was certain.

"But we must manage somehow to fix the place so we can live on it this winter," Val would insist, when he told her how every move seemed blocked. "You're very brave, dear, and I'm proud of the way you are holding out—but Hope is not a good place for you. It would be foolish to stay in town. Can't you buy enough hay here in town—baled hay from the store—to keep our horses through the winter?"

"Well, I tried," Manley responded gloomily. "But Brinberg is nearly out. He's expecting a carload in, but it hasn't come yet. He said he'd let me know when it gets here."

Meanwhile the days slipped away, and imperceptibly the heat and haze of the fires gave place to bright sunlight and chill winds, and then to the chill winds without the sunshine. One morning the ground was frozen hard, and all the roofs gleamed white with the heavy frost. Arline bestirred herself, and had a heating stove set up in the parlor, and Val went down to the dry heat and the peculiar odor of a rusted stove in the flush of its first fire since spring.

The next day, as she sat by her window up-stairs, she looked out at the first nip of winter. A few great snowflakes drifted down from the slaty sky; a puff of wind sent them dancing down the street, shook more down, and whirled them giddily. Then the storm came and swept through the little street and whined lonesomely around the hotel.

Over at the saloon—"Pop's Place," it proclaimed itself in washed-out lettering—three tied horses circled uneasily until they were standing back to the storm, their bodies hunched together with the chill of it, their tails whipping between their legs. They accentuated the blank dreariness of the empty street. The snow was whitening their rumps and clinging, in tiny drifts, upon the saddle skirts behind the cantles.

All the little hollows of the rough, frozen ground were filling slowly, making white patches against the brown of the earth—patches which widened and widened until they met, and the whole street was blanketed with fresh, untrodden snow. Val shivered suddenly, and hurried down-stairs where the air was warm and all a-steam with cooking, and the odor of frying onions smote the nostrils like a blow in the face.

"I suppose we must stay here, now, till the storm is over," she sighed, when she met Manley at dinner. "But as soon as it clears we must go back to the ranch. I simply cannot endure another week of it."

"You're gitting uneasy—I seen that, two or three days ago," said Arline, who had come into the dining room with a tray of meat and vegetables, and overheard her. "You want to stay, now, till after the dance. There's going to be a dance Friday night, you know—everybody's coming. You got to wait for that."

"I don't attend public dances," Val stated calmly. "I am going home as soon as the storm clears—if Manley can buy a little hay, and find our horses, and get some sort of a driving vehicle."

"Well, if he can't, maybe he can round up a ridin' vee-hicle," Arline remarked dryly, placing the meat before Manley, the potatoes before Val, and the gravy exactly between the two, with mathematical precision. "I'm givin' that dance myself. You'll have to go—I'm givin' it in your honor."

"In—my—why, the idea! It's good of you, but—"

"And you're goin', and you're goin' to take your vi'lin over and play us some pieces. I tucked it into the rig and brought it in, on purpose. I planned out the hull thing, driving out to your place. In case you wasn't all burned up, I made up my mind I was going to give you a dance, and git you acquainted with folks. You needn't to hang back—I've told everybody it was in your honor, and that you played the vi'lin swell, and we'd have some real music. And I've sent to Chinook for the dance music—harp, two fiddles, and a coronet—and you ain't going to stall the hull thing now. I didn't mean to tell you till the last minute, but you've got to have time to mate up your mind you'll go to a public dance for oncet in your life. It ain't going to hurt you none. I've went, ever sence I was big enough to reach up and grab holt of my pardner—and I'm every bit as virtuous as you be. You're going, and you'n Man are going to head the grand march."

Val's face was flushed, her lips pursed, and her eyes wide. Plainly she was not quite sure whether she was angry, amused, or insulted. She descended straight to a purely feminine objection.

"But I haven't a thing to wear, and—"

"Oh, yes, you have. While you was dillydallying out in the front room, that night, wondering whether you'd have hysterics, or faint, or what all, I dug deep in that biggest trunk of yourn, and fished up one of your party dresses—white satin, it is, with embroid'ry all up 'n' down the front, and slimpsy lace; it's kinda low-'n'-behold—one of them—"

"My white satin—why, Mrs. Hawley! That—you must have brought the gown I wore to my farewell club reception. It has a train, and—why, the idea!"

"You can cut off the trail—you got plenty of time—or you can pin it up. I didn't have time that night to see how the thing was made, and I took it because I found white skirts and stockin's, and white satin slippers to go with it, right handy. You're a bride, and white'll be suitable, and the dance is in your honor. Wear it just as it is, fer all me. Show the folks what real clothes look like. I never seen a woman dressed up that way in my hull life. You wear it, Val, trail 'n' all. I'll back you up in it, and tell folks it's my idee, and not yourn."

"I'm not in the habit of apologizing to people for the clothes I wear." Val lifted her chin haughtily. "I am not at all sure that I shall go. In fact, I—"

"Oh, you'll go!" Arline rested her arms upon her bony hips and snapped her meager jaws together. "You'll go, if I have to carry you over. I've sent for fifteen yards of buntin' to decorate the hall with. I ain't going to all that trouble for nothing. I ain't giving a dance in honor of a certain person, and then let that person stay away. You—why, you'd queer yourself with the hull country, Val Fleetwood! You ain't got the least sign of an excuse You got the clothes, and you ain't sick. There's a reason why you got to show up. I ain't going into no details at present, but under the circumstances, it's advisable." She smelled something burning then, and bolted for the kitchen, where her sharp, rather nasal voice was heard upbraiding Minnie for some neglect.

Polycarp Jenks came in, eyed Val and Manley from under one lifted, eyebrow, smiled skinnily, and pulled out a chair with a rasping noise, and sat down facing them. Instinctively Val refrained from speaking her mind about Arline and her dance before Polycarp, but afterward, in their own room, she grew rather eloquent upon the subject. She would not go. She would not permit that woman to browbeat her into doing what she did not want to do, she said. In her honor, indeed! The impertinence of going to the bottom of her trunk, and meddling with her clothes—with that reception gown, of all others! The idea of wearing that gown to a frontier dance—even if she consented to go to such a dance! And expecting her to amuse the company by playing "pieces" on the violin!

"Well, why not?" Manley was sitting rather apathetically upon the edge of the bed, his arms resting upon his knees, his eyes moodily studying the intricate rose pattern in the faded Brussels carpet. They were the first words he had spoken; one might easily have doubted whether he had heard all Val said.

"Why not? Manley Fleetwood, do you mean to tell me—"

"Why not go, and get acquainted, and quit feeling that you're a pearl cast among swine? It strikes me the Hawley person is pretty level-headed on the subject. If you're going to live in this country, why not quit thinking how out of place you are, and how superior, and meet us all on a level? It won't hurt you to go to that dance, and it won't hurt you to play for them, if they want you to. You can play, you know; you used to play at all the musical doings in Fern Hill, and even in the city sometimes. And, let me tell you, Val, we aren't quite savages, out here. I've even suspected, sometimes, that we're just as good as Fern Hill."

"We?" Val looked at him steadily. "So you wish to identify yourself with these people—with Polycarp Jenks, and Arline Hawley, and—"

"Why not? They're shaky on grammar, and their manners could stand a little polish, but aside from that they're exactly like the people you've lived among all your life. Sure, I wish to identify myself with them. I'm just a rancher—pretty small punkins, too, among all these big outfits, and you're a rancher's wife. The Hawley person could buy us out for cash to-morrow, if she wanted to, and never miss the money. And, Val, she's giving that dance in your honor; you ought to appreciate that. The Hawley doesn't take a fancy to every woman she sees—and, let me tell you, she stands ace-high in this country. If she didn't like you, she could make you wish she did."

"Well, upon my word! I begin to suspect you of being a humorist, Manley. And even if you mean that seriously—why, it's all the funnier." To prove it, she laughed.

Manley hesitated, then left the room with a snort, a scowl, and a slam of the door; and the sound of Val's laughter followed him down the stairs.

Arline came up, her arms full of white satin, white lace, white cambric, and the toes of two white satin slippers showing just above the top of her apron pockets. She walked briskly in and deposited her burden upon the bed.

"My! them's the nicest smellin' things I ever had a hold of," she observed. "And still they don't seem to smell, either. Must be a dandy perfumery you've got. I brought up the things, seein' you know they're here. I thought you could take your time about cuttin' off the trail and fillin' in the neck and sleeves."

She sat down upon the foot of the bed, carefully tucking her gingham apron close about her so that it might not come in contact with the other.

"I never did see such clothes," she sighed. "I dunno how you'll ever git a chancet to wear 'em out in this country—seems to me they're most too pretty to wear, anyhow, I can git Marthy Winters to come over and help you—she does sewin'—and you can use my machine any time you want to. I'd take a hold myself if I didn't have all the baking to do for the dance. That Min can't learn nothing, seems like. I can't trust her to do a thing, hardly, unless I stand right over her. Breed girls ain't much account ever; but they're all that'll work out, in this country, seems like. Sometimes I swear I'll git a Chink and be done with it—only I got to have somebody I can talk to oncet in a while. I couldn't never talk to a Chink—they don't seem hardly human to me. Do they to you?

"And say! I've got some allover lace—it's eecrue—that you can fill in the neck with; you're welcome to use it—there's most a yard of it, and I won't never find a use for it. Or I was thinkin', there'll be enough cut off'n the trail to make a gamp of the satin, sleeves and all." She lifted the shining stuff with manifest awe. "It does seem a shame to put the shears to it—but you never'll git any wear out of it the way it is, and I don't believe—"

"Mis' Hawley!" shrilled the voice of Minnie at the foot of the stairs. "There's a couple of drummers off'n the train, 'n' they want supper, 'n' what'll I give 'em?"

"My heavens! That girl'll drive me crazy, sure!" Arline hurried to the door. "Don't take the roof off'n the house," she cried querulously down the stairway. "I'm comin'."

Val had not spoken a word. She went over to the bed, lifted a fold of satin, and smiled down at it ironically. "Mamma and I spent a whole month planning and sewing and gloating over you," she said aloud. "You were almost as important as a wedding gown; the club's farewell reception—'To what base uses we do—'"

"Oh, here's your slippers!" Arline thrust half her body into the room and held the slippers out to Val. "I stuck 'em into my pockets to bring up, and forgot all about 'em, mind you, till I was handin' the drummers their tea. And one of 'em happened to notice 'em, and raised right up outa his chair, an' said: 'Cind'rilla, sure as I live! Say, if there's a foot in this town that'll go into them slippers, for God's sake introduce me to the owner!' I told him to mind his own business. Drummers do get awful fresh when they think they can get away with it." She departed in a hurry, as usual.

Every day after that Arline talked about altering the satin gown. Every day Val was noncommittal and unenthusiastic. Occasionally she told Arline that she was not going to the dance, but Arline declined to take seriously so preposterous a declaration.

"You want to break a leg, then," she told Val grimly on Thursday. "That's the only excuse that'll go down with this bunch. And you better git a move on—it comes off to-morrer night, remember."

"I won't go, Manley!" Val consoled herself by declaring, again and again. "The idea of Arline Hawley ordering me about like a child! Why should I go if I don't care to go?"

"Search me." Manley shrugged his shoulders. "It isn't so long, though, since you were just as determined to stay and have the shivaree, you remember."

"Well, you and Mr. Burnett tried to do exactly what Arline is doing. You seemed to think I was a child, to be ordered about."

At the very last minute—to be explicit, an hour before the hall was lighted, several hours after smoke first began to rise from the chimney, Val suddenly swerved to a reckless mood. Arline had gone to her own room to dress, too angry to speak what was in her mind. She had worked since five o'clock that morning. She had bullied Val, she had argued, she had begged, she had wheedled. Val would not go. Arline had appealed to Manley, and Manley had assured her, with a suspicious slurring of his esses that he was out of it, and had nothing to say. Val, he said, could not be driven.

It was after Arline had gone to her room and Manley had returned to the "office" that Val suddenly picked up her hairbrush and, with an impish light in her eyes, began to pile her hair high upon her head. With her lips curved to match the mockery of her eyes, she began hurriedly to dress. Later, she went down to the parlor, where four women from the neighboring ranches were sitting stiffly and in constrained silence, waiting to be escorted to the hall. She swept in upon them, a glorious, shimmery creature all in white and gold. The women steed, wavered, and looked away—at the wall, the floor, at anything but Val's bare, white shoulders and arms as white. Arline had forgotten to look for gloves.

Val read the consternation in their weather-tanned faces, and smiled in wicked enjoyment. She would shock all of Hope; she would shock even Arline, who had insisted upon this. Like a child in mischief, she turned and went rustling down the ball to the dining room. She wanted to show Arline. She had not thought of the possibility of finding any one but Arline and Minnie there, so that she was taken slightly aback when she discovered Kent and another man eating a belated supper.

Kent looked up, eyed her sharply for just an instant, and smiled.

"Good evening, Mrs. Fleetwood," he said calmly. "Ready for the ball, I see. We got in late." He went on spreading butter upon his bread, evidently quite unimpressed by her magnificence.

The other man stared fixedly at his plate. It was a trifle, but Val suddenly felt foolish and ashamed. She took a step or two toward the kitchen, then retreated; down the hall she went, up the stairs and into her own room, the door of which she shut and locked.

"Such a fool!" she whispered vehemently, and stamped her white-shod foot upon the carpet. "He looked perfectly disgusted—and so did that other man. And no wonder. Such—it's vulgar, Val Fleetwood! It's just ill-bred, and coarse, and horrid!" She threw herself upon the bed and put her face in the pillow.

Some one—she thought it sounded like Manley—came up and tried the door, stood a moment before it, and went away again. Arline's voice, sharpened with displeasure, she heard speaking to Minnie upon the stairs. They went down, and there was a confusion of voices below. In the street beneath her window footsteps sounded intermittently, coming and going with a certain eagerness of tread. After a time there came, from a distance, the sound of violins and the "coronet" of which Arline had been so proud; and mingled with it was an undercurrent of shuffling feet, a mere whisper of sound, cut sharply now and then by the sharp commands of the floor manager. They were dancing—in her honor. And she was a fool; a proud, ill-tempered, selfish fool..

With one of her quick changes of mood she rose, patted her hair smooth, caught up a wrap oddly inharmonious with the gown and slippers, looped her train over her arm, tool her violin, and ran lightly down-stairs. The parlor, the dining room, the kitchen were deserted and the lights turned low. She braced herself mentally, and, flushing at the unaccustomed act, rapped timidly upon the door which opened into the office—which by that time she knew was really a saloon. Hawley himself opened the door, and in his eyes bulged at sight of her.

"Is Mr. Fleetwood here? I—I thought, after all, I'd go to the dance," she said, in rather a timid voice, shrinking back into the shadow.

"Fleetwood? Why, I guess he's gone on over. He said you wasn't going. You wait a minute. I—here, Kent! You take Mrs. Fleetwood over to the hall. Man's gone."

"Oh, no! I—really, it doesn't matter—"

But Kent had already thrown away his cigarette and come out to her, closing the door immediately after him.

"I'll take you over—I was just going, anyway," He assured her, his eyes dwelling upon her rather intently.

"Oh—I wanted Manley. I—I hate to go—like this, it seems so—so queer, in this place. At first I—I thought it would be a joke, but it isn't; it's silly and,—and ill-bred. You—everybody will be shocked, and—"

Kent took a step toward her, where she was shrinking against the stairway. Once before she had lost her calm composure and had let him peep into her mind. Then it had been on account of Manley; now, womanlike, it was her clothes.

"You couldn't be anything but all right, if you tried," he told her, speaking softly. "It isn't silly to look the way the Lord meant you to look. You—you—oh, you needn't worry—nobody's going to be shocked very hard." He reached out and took the violin from her; took also her arm and opened the outer door. "You're late," he said, speaking in a more commonplace tone. "You ought to have overshoes, or something—those white slippers won't be so white time you get there. Maybe I ought to carry you."

"The idea!" she stepped out daintily upon the slushy walk.

"Well, I can take you a block or two around, and have sidewalk all the way; that'll help some. Women sure are a lot of bother—I'm plumb sorry for the poor devils that get inveigled into marrying one."

"Why, Mr. Burnett! Do you always talk like that? Because if you do, I don't wonder—"

"No," Kent interrupted, looking down at her and smiling grimly, "as it happens, I don't. I'm real nice, generally speaking. Say! this is going to be a good deal of trouble, do you know? After you dance with hubby, you've got to waltz with me."

"Got to?" Val raised her eyebrows, though the expression was lost upon him.

"Sure. Look at the way I worked like a horse, saving your life—and the cat's—and now leading you all over town to keep those nice white slippers clean! By rights, you oughtn't to dance with anybody else. But I ain't looking for real gratitude. Four or five waltzes is all I'll insist on, but—" His tone was lugubrious in the extreme.

"Well, I'll waltz with you once—for saving the cat; and once for saving the slippers. For saving me, I'm not sure that I thank you." Val stepped carefully over a muddy spot on the walk. "Mr. Burnett, you—really, you're an awfully queer man."

Kent walked to the next crossing and helped her over it before he answered her. "Yes," he admitted soberly then, "I reckon you're right. I am—queer."



CHAPTER XIV

A WEDDING PRESENT

Sunday it was, and Val had insisted stubbornly upon going back to the ranch; somewhat to her surprise, if one might judge by her face, Arline Hawley no longer demurred, but put up lunch enough for a week almost, and announced that she was going along. Hank would have to drive out, to bring back the team, and she said she needed a rest, after all the work and worry of that dance. Manley, upon whose account it was that Val was so anxious, seemed to have nothing whatever to say about it. He was sullenly acquiescent—as was perhaps to be expected of a man who had slipped into his old habits and despised himself for doing so, and almost hated his wife because she had discovered it and said nothing. Val was thankful, during that long, bleak ride over the prairie, for Arline's incessant chatter. It was better than silence, when the silence means bitter thoughts.

"Now," said Arline, moving excitedly in her seat when they neared Cold Spring Coulee, "maybe I better tell you that the folks round here has kinda planned a little su'prise for you. They don't make much of a showin' about bein' neighborly—not when things go smooth—but they're right there when trouble comes. It's jest a little weddin' present—and if it comes kinda late in the day, why, you don't want to mind that. My dance that I gave was a weddin' party, too, if you care to call it that. Anyway, it was to raise the money to pay for our present, as far as it went—and I want to tell you right now, Val, that you was sure the queen of the ball; everybody said you looked jest like a queen in a picture, and I never heard a word ag'inst your low-neck dress. It looked all right on you, don't you see? On me, for instance, it woulda been something fierce. And I'm real glad you took a hold and danced like you did, and never passed nobody up, like some woulda done. You'll be glad you did, now you know what it was for. Even danced with Polycarp Jenks—and there ain't hardly any woman but what'll turn him down; I'll bet he tromped all over your toes, didn't he?"

"Sometimes," Val admitted. "What about the surprise you were speaking of, Mrs. Hawley?"

"It does seem as if you might call me Arline," she complained irrelevantly. "We're comin' to that—don't you worry."

"Is it—a piano?"

"My lands, no! You don't need a fiddle and a piano both, do you? Man, what'd you rather have for a weddin' present?"

Manley, upon the front seat beside Hank, gave his shoulders an impatient twitch. "Fifty thousand dollars," he replied glumly.

"I'm glad you're real modest about it," Arline retorted sharply. She was beginning to tell herself quite frequently that she "didn't have no time for Man Fleetwood, seeing he wouldn't brace up and quit drinkin."

Val's lips curled as she looked at Manley's back. "What I should like," she said distinctly, "is a great, big pile of wood, all cut and ready for the stove, and water pails that never would go empty. It's astonishing how one's desires eventually narrow down to bare essentials, isn't it? But as we near the place, I find those two things more desirable than a piano!" Then she bit her lip angrily because she had permitted herself to give the thrust.

"Why, you poor thing! Man Fleetwood, do you—"

Val impulsively caught her by the arm. "Oh, hush! I was only joking," she said hastily. "I was trying to balance Manley's wish for fifty thousand dollars, don't you see? It was stupid of me, I know." She laughed unconvincingly. "Let me guess what the surprise is. First, is it large or small?"

"Kinda big," tittered Arline, falling into the spirit of the joke.

"Bigger than a—wait, now. A sewing machine?"

Arline covered her mouth with her hand and nodded dumbly.

"You say all the neighbors gave it and the dance helped pay for it—let me see. Could it possibly be—what in the world could it be? Manley, help me guess! Is it something useful, or just something nice?"

"Useful," said Arline, and snapped her jaws together as if she feared to let another word loose.

"Larger than a sewing machine, and useful." Val puckered her brows over the puzzle. "And all the neighbors gave it. Do you know, I've been thinking all sorts of nasty things about our poor neighbors, because they refused to sell Manley any hay. And all the while they were planning this sur—" She never finished that sentence, or the word, even.

With a jolt over a rock, and a sharp turn to the right, Hank had brought them to the very brow of the hill, where they could look down into the coulee, and upon the house standing in its tiny, unkempt yard, just beyond the sparse growth of bushes which marked the spring creek. Involuntarily every head turned that way, and every pair of eyes looked downward. Hank chirped to the horses, threw all his weight upon the brake, and they rattled down the grade, the brake block squealing against the rear wheels. They were half-way down before any one spoke. It was Val, and she almost whispered one word:

"Manley!"

Arline's eyes were wet, and there was a croak in her voice when she cried jubilantly: "Well, ain't that better 'n a sewin' machine—or a piano?"

But Val did not attempt an answer. She was staring—staring as if she could not convince herself of the reality. Even Manley was jarred out of his gloomy meditations, and half rose in the seat that he might see over Hank's shoulder.

"That's what your neighbors have done," Arline began eagerly, "and they nearly busted tryin' to git through in time, and to keep it a dead secret. They worked like whiteheads, lemme tell you, and never even stopped for the storm. The night of the dance I heard all about how they had to hurry. And I guess Kent's there an' got a fire started, like I told him to. I was afraid it might be colder'n what it is. I asked him if he wouldn't ride over an' warm up the house t'day—and I see there's a smoke, all right." She looked at Manley, and then turned to Val. "Well, ain't you goin' to say anything? You dumb, both of you?"

Val took a deep breath. "We should be dumb," she said contritely. "We should go down on our knees and beg their pardon and yours—I especially. I think I've never in my life felt quite so humbled—so overwhelmed with the goodness of my fellows, and my own unworthiness. I—I can't put it into words—all the resentment I have felt against the country and the people in it—as if—oh, tell them all how I want them to forgive me for—for the way I have felt. And—Arline—"

"There, now—I didn't bargain for you to make it so serious," Arline expostulated, herself near to crying. "It ain't nothing much—us folks believe in helpin' when help's needed, that's all. For Heaven's sake, don't go 'n' cry about it!"

Hank pulled up at the gate with a loud whoa and a grip of the brake. From the kitchen stovepipe a blue ribbon of smoke waved high in the clear air. Kent appeared, grinning amiably, in the doorway, but Val was looking beyond, and scarcely saw him—beyond, where stood a new stable upon the ashes of the old; a new corral, the posts standing solidly in the holes dug for those burned away; a new haystack—when hay was almost priceless! A few chickens wandered about near the stable, and Val recognized them as Arline's prized Plymouth Rocks. Small wonder that she and Manley were stunned to silence. Manley still looked as if some one had dealt him an unexpected blow in the face. Val was white and wide-eyed.

Together they walked out to the stable. When they stopped, she put her hand timidly upon his aim. "Dear," she said softly, "there is only one way to thank them for this, and that is to be the very best it is in us to be. We will, won't we? We—we haven't been our best, but we'll start in right now. Shall we, Manley?"

Manley looked down at her for a moment, saying nothing.

"Shall we, Manley? Let us start now, and try again. Let's play the fire burned up our old selves, and we're all new, and strong—shall we? And we won't feel any resentment for what is past, but we'll work together, and think together, and talk together, without any hidden thing we can't discuss freely. Please, Manley!"

He knew what she meant, well enough. For the last two days he had been drinking again. On the night of the dance he had barely kept within the limit of decent behavior. He had read Val's complete understanding and her disgust the morning after—and since then they had barely spoken except when speech was necessary. Oh, he knew what she meant! He stood for another minute, and she let go his arm and stood apart, watching his face.

A good deal depended upon the next minute, and they both knew it, and hardly breathed. His hand went slowly into a deep pocket of his overcoat, his fingers closed over something, and drew it reluctantly to the light. Shamefaced, he held it up for her to see—a flat bottle of generous size, full to within a inch of the cork with a pale, yellow liquid.

"There—take it, and break it into a million pieces," he said huskily. "I'll try again."

Her yellow-brown eyes darkened perceptibly. "Manley Fleetwood, you must throw it away. This is your fight—be a man and fight."

"Well—there! May God damn me forever if I touch liquor again! I'm through with the stuff for keeps!" He held the bottle high, without looking at it, and sent it crashing against the stable door.

"Manley!" She stopped her ears, aghast at his words, but for all that her eyes were ashine. She went up to him and put her arms around him. "Now we can start all over again," she said. "We'll count our lives from this minute, dear, and we'll keep them clean and happy. Oh, I'm so glad! So glad and so proud, dear!"

Kent had got half-way down the path from the house; he stopped when Manley threw the bottle, and waited. Now he turned abruptly and retraced his steps, and he did not look particularly happy, though he had been smiling when he left the kitchen.

Arline turned from the window as he entered.

"Looks like Man has swore off ag'in," she observed dryly. "Well, let's hope 'n' pray he stays swore off,"



CHAPTER XV

A COMPACT

The blackened prairie was fast hiding the mark of its fire torture under a cloak of tender new grass, vividly green as a freshly watered, well-kept lawn. Meadow larks hopped here and there, searching long for a sheltered nesting place, and missing the weeds where they were wont to sway and swell their yellow breasts and sing at the sun. They sang just as happily, however, on their short, low flights over the levels, or sitting upon gray, half-buried boulders upon some barren hilltop. Spring had come with lavish warmth. The smoke of burning ranges, the bleak winter with its sweeping storms of snow and wind, were pushed info the past, half forgotten in this new heaven and new earth, when men were glad simply because they were alive.

On a still, Sunday morning—that day which, when work does not press, is set apart in the range land for slight errands, attention to one's personal affairs, and to the pursuit of pleasure—Kent jogged placidly down the long hill into Cold Spring Coulee and pulled up at the familiar little unpainted house of rough boards, with its incongruously dainty curtains at the windows and its tiny yard, green and scrupulously clean.

The cat with white spots on its sides was washing its face on the kitchen doorstep. Val was kneeling beside the front porch, painstakingly stringing white grocery twine upon nails, which she drove into the rough posts with a small rock. The primitive trellis which resulted was obviously intended for the future encouragement of the sweet-pea plants just unfolding their second clusters of leaves an inch above ground. She did not see Kent at first, and he sat quiet in the saddle, watching her with a flicker of amusement in his eyes; but in a moment she struck her finger and sprang up with a sharp little cry, throwing the rock from her.

"Didn't you know that was going to happen, sooner or later?" Kent inquired, and so made known his presence.

"Oh—how do you do?" She came smiling down to the gate, holding the hurt finger tightly clasped in the other hand. "How comes it you are riding this way? Our trail is all growing up to grass, so few ever travel it."

"We're all hard-working folks these days. Where's Man?"

"Manley is down to the river, I think." She rested both arms upon the gatepost and regarded him with her steady eyes. "If you can wait, he will be back soon. He only went to see if the river is fordable. He thinks two or three of our horses are on the other side, and he'd like to get them. The river has been too high, but it's lowering rather fast. Won't you come in?" She was pleasant, she was unusually friendly, but Kent felt vaguely that, somehow, she was different.

He had not seen her for three months. Just after Christmas he had met her and Manley in town, when he was about to leave for a visit to his people in Nebraska. He had returned only a week or so before, and, if the truth were known, he was not displeased at the errand which brought him this way. He dismounted, and when she moved away from the gate he opened it and went in.

"Well," he began lightly, when he was seated upon the floor of the porch and she was back at her trellis, "and how's the world been using you? Had any more calamities while I've been gone?"

She busied herself with tying together two pieces of string, so that the whole would reach to a certain nail driven higher than her head. She stood with both hands uplifted, and her face, and her eyes; she did not reply for so long that Kent began to wonder if she had heard him. There was no reason why he should watch her so intently, or why he should want to get up and push back the one lock of hair which seemed always in rebellion and always falling across her temple by itself.

He was drifting into a dreamy wonder that all women with yellow-brown hair should not be given yellow-brown eyes also, and to wishing vaguely that it might be his luck to meet one some time—one who was not married—when she looked down at him quite unexpectedly. He was startled, and half ashamed, and afraid that she might not like what he, had been thinking.

She was staring straight into his eyes, and he knew that she was thinking of something that affected her a good deal.

"Unless it's a calamity to discover that the world is—what it is, and people in it are—what they are, and that you have been a blind idiot. Is that a calamity, Mr. Cowboy? Or is it a blessing? I've been wondering."

Kent discovered, when he started to speak, that he had run short of breath. "I reckon that depends on how the discovery pans out," he ventured, after a moment. He was not looking at her then. For some reason, unexplained to himself, he felt that it wasn't right for him to look at her; nor wise; nor quite pleasant in its effect. He did not know exactly what she meant, but he knew very well that she meant something more than to make conversation.

"That," she said, and gave a little sigh—"that takes so long—don't you know? The panning out, as you call it. It's hard to see things very clearly, and to make a decision that you know is going to stand the test, and then—just sit down and fold your hands, because some sordid, petty little reason absolutely prevents your doing anything. I hate waiting for anything. Don't you? When I want to do a thing, I want to do it immediately. These sweet-peas—now I've fixed the trellis for them to climb upon, I resent it because they don't take hold right now. Nasty little things—two inches high, when they should be two yards, and all covered with beautiful blossoms."



"Not the last of April," he qualified. "Give 'em a fair chance, can't you? They'll make it, all right; things take time."

She laughed surrenderingly, and came and sat down upon the porch near him, and tapped a slipper toe nervously upon the soft, green sod.

"Time! Yes—" She threw back her head and smiled at him brightly—and appealingly, it seemed to Kent. "You remember what you told me once—about sheep-herders and such going crazy out here? The such is sometimes ready to agree with you." She turned her head with a quick impatience. "Such is learning to ride a horse," she informed him airily. "Such does it on the sly—and she fell off once and skinned her elbow, and she—well, Such hasn't any sidesaddle—but she's learning, 'by granny!'"

Kent laughed unsteadily, and looked sidelong at her with eyes alight. She matched the glance for just about one second, and turned her eyes away with a certain consciousness that gave Kent a savage delight. Of a truth, she was different! She was human, she was intolerably alluring. She was not the prim, perfectly well-bred young woman he had met at the train. Lonesome Land was doing its work. She was beginning to think as an individual—as a woman; not merely as a member of conventional society.

"Such is beginning to be the proper stuff—'by granny," he told her softly.

He was afraid his tone had offended her. She rose, and her color flared and faded. She leaned slightly against the post beside her, and, with a hand thrown up and half shielding her face, she stared out across the coulee to the hill beyond.