HERE yuh are then,” said Mrs. Farragoh portentously, stepping to the edge of the porch. “Come up an’ let me get a good look at yuh.” Her good-natured, bullying tone commanded obedience.
Reb grinned at Ronda as they dismounted before the steps. He moved forward sheepishly, doffing the big soiled sombrero.
“Shucks, ma’am, I been powerful busy,” he said apologetically, “or I’d have been here sooner. Miss Ronda said yuh had a piece of news that couldn’t wait.”
“Yes; and I practically had to waltz him over here myself, to make sure he came,” Ronda inserted smilingly.
Mother Farragoh ignored Reb’s lead for the moment. She examined him critically, as a woman might a mannequin, and then turned to Ronda.
“Is this the plausible young rip who’s been backin’ my son?” she inquired. “I don’t seem to reco’nize him. Let me see....”
Her manner further confused Reb, who chuckled his embarrassment. He had a good deal of explaining to do to justify his long absence; but when he had managed this, Mrs. Farragoh changed abruptly.
“Reb, my boy’s passed his bar examination.” Suspicious moisture stood in her eyes, her blunt old warrior’s face seemed soft. “He’s close to bein’ a full-fledged lawyer.” Plain to be seen that the knowledge left her heart full.
“Ma’am, that’s—fine! I reckon yo’re right proud of him.” Reb shuffled, but his manner was sincere.
“Wal, I am. I’m proud o’ you, too, Reb. It was you, got him to take a chance an’ go to Lander right off.” She was husky now. “He was farther along ’n anybody knowed.”
There was more of this. It got to Reb, beyond his diffidence, with unaccustomed warmth; it made him feel good, with Ronda standing there, smiling at him, yielaing all her good will: possessive, too, as a girl will be.
“Billy wants us to come to Lander,” the boy’s mother went on, folding her thick arms. “There’s goin’ to be a kind of celebration. He says he won’t take no excuses.”
Reb looked at her blankly. “Us?” he repeated, taken off his guard.
“Shore. Reckon we c’n do that much fer him.” She was scrutinizing him keenly, asking a question. “I’ll go if I have to wear an Injun bonnet.”
“Yes, and you too, Reb,” Ronda added. She was laughingly in earnest. “The round-up is over. You have no reason to refuse.”
“I—well, I—” he began.
“Don’t yuh say no!” Mrs. Farragoh warned. “I don’t want the job of explainin’ to that boy why yuh didn’t come. Why, he’s a man now, Reb! None of our doin’s is more important than his.”
The prospect of such a trip threw Reb into uncertainty. All his gay self-command threatened to desert. But he clung to one thought.
“Are you goin’ along?” he asked Ronda.
“Yes.” A faint tinge of red unaccountably touched her cheeks as she made answer.
It decided him. He did not pause to question the cause of that flush, appropriating it to himself. “We’ll all go, then,” he said simply. Vaguely he knew that the sojourn to Lander would have its painful aspects for him, but he experienced a delicious clandestine thrill in anticipation of Ronda’s company that made him put the knowledge aside.
There were plans and suggestions. They had no great length of time to spare. The next morning they started off in the spring wagon which Ronda had been driving when Reb first met her.
“Seems queer not to fork a hoss, after the roundup,” he confessed, as they headed south down the Basin. “But I been wantin’ to buy me a new saddle. I’ll do it in Lander.”
He was in excellent spirits this morning. He joked and laughed with them until they were in stitches. They thought they had never seen him in better form. At any time during that long drive he was likely to burst into song. Mother Farragoh’s humorous jibes—she treated him much as a man would have done—found no chink in his impudent armor.
She was dressed stiffly today in bombazine and black ribbons to do honor to her son, her seams bursting, and even Reb was decked out in a new shirt and kerchief and a nearly clean hat, and carried a coat which he obviously disliked to put on. As for Ronda, she was a vision, ravishing in a gown of sheerest blue under her coat, which she said was evening wear, for the party—“We must look our best for Billy, you know, from the minute he lays eyes on us.”
But she had a smile for Reb as she said it, and there was no lapse of her attention for him throughout the day. Her proximity intoxicated him. When she brushed against his shoulder or he caught a whiff of the aroma of her hair, a glimpse of the soft skin at her throat or temples something laid hold of him with almost physical violence. He wanted this girl, as he had done from the first—but more insistently now, a desire with a fierce sting in it. There was no real reason on earth, he told himself with heady assurance, why he could not have her. And once he did, anything would need to have wildcat ferocity to come between them....
The truth was that familiarity with his situation, plus a little honest sweat, had gradually restored to him his self-respect. Other men had dealt with these things. There was no goal beyond whatever barrier that he could not reach if he strove mightily enough.... The wine of Ronda imbued him with unconquerable spirit. His gaiety increased, if anything. Ronda joined with him as in a conspiracy, her cheeks glowing and her eyes bright; and if Mrs. Farragoh bent a wondering glance on Reb occasionally he did not notice it.
They arrived in Lander in the early evening in a gale of merriment. It seemed odd to them all that the town was not decorated, that folk on the street went about their concerns calmly; for there had been much talk of Billy, and had that individual heard their praises he would have lost something of the quietly grinning poise with which he met them at the hotel.
“Don’t eat a thing,” he told them at once. “That will come later. Just get yourselves ready.”
The women retired to their room for this purpose. Billy evaded the offer of a drink, but handed Reb a cigar as they stepped back to the dusky veranda to talk while they waited.
“Well, Reb,” he said with controlled exuberance, “I’ve got my foot on the first rung—thanks to you.”
Reb congratulated him. He found a change in Billy. a touch of maturity, of self-possession, that had not been there before. He was surprised when Billy handed him a small packet of bills.
“What’s this?” he got out.
“You’ll find that adds up to two hundred dollars,” Billy replied in a pleased tone. “I didn’t need the whole five hundred, Reb. I thought I could give more of it back, but I found—”
Reb cut him off with protests. He would have urged the other to keep the money, but on reflection he stuffed it into his own pocket. It somehow made his secret offense against Billy lighter, if only by a little. And Billy was so pleased to be able to cut down his indebtedness by this much that Reb had not the heart to deny him.
“Judge Hamer and a few colleagues have arranged to admit me to the bar tomorrow,” he announced, as they talked on. “I’ll stay in the Judge’s office for the present. He says he wants me.... He’s giving a little party for us at his home tonight.”
The little party proved to be quite an affair. A number of Lander’s prominent figures were present, with their wives. Mrs. Farragoh commented to Reb sotto voce that she felt like a fish out of water in such company, and Reb was in little better case. He wondered what would have been said if all these highly respectable people were to recognize him in his true colors. They treated him, however, as one of themselves, and his ability to mix readily with all comers stood him in good stead.
Even Judge Hamer—a big, bluff, hearty-voiced man with eyes as piercing as Reb’s own—had known the pound of saddle leather in his youth, and passed a word about the range. Santee was not long in perceiving that Hamer had taken a fancy to Billy Farragoh and meant to put his political influence behind him without reserve. Billy would go far, that was assured.
Later in the evening, after a prodigious meal, with appointments of silver and china and a flutter of napery such as Reb had never before seen, he suffered his first twinge of misgiving as he watched Billy and Ronda Cameron dancing together. It was not their smooth rhythm, suited perfectly to the music, or entirely their graceful complement of each other, as if they had been made to dance together—to live and breathe together —so much as their rapt engrossment in each other, to the exclusion of the entire company, that disquieted Reb. A thin blade of doubt slipped into him which he laughed away uneasily at the punch bowl.
But it was the next morning, at court, that the blow fell. Ronda and Billy had together accorded Reb much attention after that dance; they had talked late, and gone to bed weary and content, all three. In the court room, however, after the sober rite in which Billy was admitted to the Wyoming bar, it was only for each other that the two had eyes. Ronda won to Billy’s side even before his mother: she lifted up her arms, put them around his neck and kissed him.
Even Reb knew there was some special significance in that frank, whole-hearted kiss. A lump in his throat choked him at once, a great blur blinded him and left him dazed and groggy. He stumbled to the door and out, and something seemed to burst in his chest. Ronda loved, not him, but Billy Farragoh! The knowledge had come as a staggering surprise, and it was devastating.
“Why couldn’t I’ve guessed?” he groaned. “Her always bein’ with him—comin’ down here, an’ all.” But even that foreknowledge would not have made his way any easier.
It was Billy who sought him out later, with a clap on the shoulder. An exultant light beamed in the younger man’s eyes.
“Well, Reb—we’ve done it!” he declared, and there was deep gratitude in his voice as well as pride. “Now all you have to do is to bring your troubles to me.”
Reb found the irony of it hard to bear.
Ronda approached them. Billy turned to her with a fond smile. “Now I can announce my engagement to the future Mrs. Farragoh,” he said, with no knowledge of how the words tore.
It was Ronda’s hand that slipped into Reb’s then. “Reb, you’re glad, aren’t you? Doesn’t it please you?”
There was an appeal here that Reb could not refuse, sick as he was at heart. “Shore, I—I reckon I’m tickled to death,” he managed, his grin masking the ache. “You two are made for each other,” he went on gallantly. “I seen that last night.”
Neither noted how late the knowledge had come to him. For his part, only his loyalty to their faith in him could steady him now. With a pang he found himself ranged against the fondest wishes of the two persons he loved most in the world. He drew back from that treachery precipitately. That it was treachery to himself to see it thus did not come to him till long afterward. He had been betrayed earlier, by his own hand, he felt, and he was man enough to admit it.
There was more celebrating that day. Reb found it impossible to enter into the spirit of it. Mother Farragoh alone noted his quiet and talked with him a good deal in a gruff tone that was like a tonic. She had plenty of opportunity. The two young people—he saw their youth now, for he felt like the Old Man of the Mountain—were wrapped up in each other and in the happiness that opened out before them. But when they turned to him, as they did unexpectedly from time to time, he met them bravely, with a ready sympathy. He was still a great spirit to them, whatever he was to himself.
It got to be a kind of nightmare at last from which he was glad to escape. The merest possibility of these two ever discovering him in his true character opened a pit before him like the yawning chasm of death itself. “I’ve got to get along back,” he said, announcing his intention of returning forthwith to Wind River Basin. “Soon as I get me a new saddle I’m on my way.”
It was a different saddle in more ways than one, from the tree he had straddled so long. The very world itself looked different. When he cinched up the blue roan, which had trotted to Lander behind the spring wagon, and headed out, it was with no intention of returning to the duties on the C 8 the others supposed him to be thinking about. His eyes were bleak and he was face to face with the emptiness of existence.
“Reckon I’ll make Cameron my excuses, tell the Bunch to go to hell, an’ ride out of Wyomin’,” he muttered his thought without awareness.
There was no suspicion in him then that he would have difficulty performing any of these things. His heart was haunted by the gray eyes and black tresses of the girl who was lost to him forever; he was able to dwell on nothing else for long, unless it was the dull determination to put unnumbered miles between himself and the scene of this catastrophe.