Corral Nocturne (9 page)

Ellie’s shoes were hurting her badly by now.
Their tightness had not mattered early on, and the occasional
twinge they gave her while dancing she had been too happy to
notice. But now after walking nearly two miles they seemed to be
battering her feet to pieces. The narrow toe was pinching her right
foot at the sides in a way that she knew would blister before long.
Ellie limped along more and more slowly, miserably trying to curl
up her toes inside the shoe in a way that would hurt less. The left
one hurt too, though not as badly yet.

At last the shoe grew too excruciating to
take another step. Ellie dragged to a stop and sat down on a rock
at the side of the road, and pulled it off. The cool night air went
through her damp stocking as she rubbed the sides of her foot,
relieving the soreness. A wilted flower grazed her ear as she
looked across the road, hanging down limply from where she had
pinned it earlier. It was a clear night, and she could see for
miles across the darkened prairie sleeping under a mist of
starlight. But the wide stillness left her that much more alone;
its beauty contrasted more sharply with her own broken night. The
stars themselves were bits of shattered dreams, fallen around her
like glittering shards of glass in the hollow blackness of her
world.

Ellie climbed dully to her feet again and
went on, one shoe in her hand, caring nothing for the destruction
of her silk stocking in the dust underfoot. She no longer cared
about anything. She wanted only to get home, home to cry in her
mother’s arms and try to forget that she had built up a castle of
dreams out of the midnight dance and seen it all crumble to pieces
in a few heart-sickening moments.

Somewhere behind her she heard the rattle of
wheels. She turned her head a little. If the rig was going slowly
she might stay ahead of it for a while. But after a moment she
could tell it was coming quickly, the sound echoing far ahead of
her and rolling back from the low hills. Ellie glanced back once
and then put her head down and went on. For a few seconds she
limped doggedly, and then she gave it up, biting her lip. The buggy
was coming fast, and she thought she knew the gait of the team.
There was nothing she could do. The rig was close enough now that
she could hear the jingling of harness and the familiar rhythmic
snorting of the off horse. She sat down on another convenient rock
at the roadside, holding her shoe in her lap, and waited.

The buggy came past her and stopped, a few
feet ahead. She heard Cole speak twice to the horses before they
would stand, and then he jumped down and came back toward her.

“Ellie, what in the world are you doing out
here?” he said. “What’d you go and disappear like that for? I
looked all over for you, until somebody said you’d gone.”

“The McGregors went home,” said Ellie in a
limp, disheartened voice, determined that she would
not
sniff, “so I had to walk.”

Cole stared at her, thoroughly confused. “But
I was going to drive you home. Don’t you remember?”

“You—you don’t have to feel responsible for
me.” Ellie struggled to be dignified.

“But I
am
responsible for you. I
promised to take you home.”

“Well, you mustn’t feel obligated to take
care of me,” she said, feeling more than ever that if she did not
keep her voice sharp she would cry. “I’ll get home all right by
myself.”

“Yes, in ten or twelve hours, walking like
this! Ellie, what in the name of sense is the matter with you? Are
you sick?” He crouched down beside her, peering into her face.

“No, I’m not. I’m all right—I’d just rather
go home.”

“Well, if that’s what you want,” said Cole.
“You could have come and
told
me. I waited a quarter of an
hour for you before I started looking. And I thought you were
having a good time.”

This last was almost more than she could
bear, so Ellie said hurriedly and with a suspicious tremble in her
voice, “I’m all right, and I just couldn’t walk on this foot with
my shoe, or otherwise I’d be fine. I’d just like to go home.”

“Hurt your foot?” He was looking down at
it.

“Not very,” said Ellie, not very
grammatically.

“Well, anyway,” said Cole, half rising, and
before she knew what he was doing, he had slipped an arm behind her
shoulders and the other beneath her knees and lifted her from her
rock. Ellie instinctively caught an arm around his neck to keep her
balance as he stood up. As he turned toward the buggy the shoe flew
out of her lap and landed under the heels of the horses. The
chestnuts exploded like practiced sprinters off a mark, as if they
had only been standing waiting for the signal. Cole shouted, but he
had his hands full and the horses had a head start, and he had only
taken a step or two before they were tearing away down the road,
the empty buggy careering behind them in a trail of moonlit
dust.

Cole stared after them, standing in the road
with Ellie in his arms. He did not say anything until the truant
team had nearly receded from view.

“Well,” he said, “that about tears it!”

He glanced about. Then, without further
comment, he began to walk along the road in the direction the buggy
had gone.

“What—what are you doing?” said Ellie, with
something like dismay.

“I’m seeing you home, of course,” said Cole.
“We’re about halfway; we might as well go on as back.”

“But you can’t—I mean, you—”

“What else do you expect me to do?” said
Cole. “I’ve got to walk, and I’m not leaving you by the side of the
road, even if that’s what you seem to want—Now what’s the
matter?”

“My shoe,” said Ellie in a small voice.

Cole, swallowing a rather grim smile that
Ellie did not try to interpret, retraced his steps. He set her down
again on the rock, retrieved the shoe, which was lying on its side
in the middle of the road, handed it to Ellie and gathered her up
again, shoe and all. Ellie did not try to protest; she knew it
would be futile, and argument was something for which she had no
desire. She did not want to speak to Cole; she could hardly look at
him—being stranded here alone with him, not to mention being
carried by him, was the last thing she could have wished for after
her humiliation. She was silent, her throat aching with efforts to
keep back tears.

Cole walked on for a while without speaking,
and Ellie could not help wondering what he was thinking, though she
suspected it was the last thing she would have wanted to know.
There were still at least two miles of this silent punishment
before her; she did not know how she could bear it.

Cole’s steps slowed, and he spoke to her.
“Ellie, you’re crying. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” said Ellie, who was indeed crying
by now. “You needn’t—mind—you don’t have to try and—take care of
me.”

“That’s the second time you’ve said that.
What is all this about, anyway? What’s wrong, Ellie?”

She did not answer. They had come a fair way
by now, to a bend in the road where there had once been a small
ranch. The remains of the buildings stood back out of sight in the
dark, but out on the flat near the road was an abandoned corral,
partly tumbled down and with traces of the turn-off to the
overgrown yard beside it. Cole went on for a few steps toward this
before he spoke again. A couple of lower rails of the old corral
that had fallen partly off slanted down into the grass together,
making a place that would do as a rough seat, and he set Ellie down
on it and knelt beside her. “Ellie, please tell me what’s wrong.
Have I done something to upset you?”

“No,” said Ellie, her voice very low. She was
thinking, a little remorsefully, of how much the reverse was true;
how kind he had always been to her. It was not his fault.

She kept her eyes down, but Cole was still
watching her earnestly. “Has someone else?”

Ellie shook her head. “No…It isn’t anything I
can—it’s just that I’ve made an awful fool of myself, and I want to
go home.”

Cole persisted. “But it has something to do
with tonight, hasn’t it? Why did you leave so early? If you’d asked
me I would have taken you; you know that.”

“But I didn’t want you to—I mean, I wish you
wouldn’t always feel you have to—”

Cole slapped the palm of his hand on his knee
in exasperation. “There you go again! I can’t figure out why you
keep talking in riddles. Now, you listen here, Eleanor
Strickland—”

“My name is Isabella,” Ellie interrupted him,
rather flatly.

Cole was momentarily flummoxed. He looked at
her, and attempted to gather his thoughts again. “All right,” he
said, “Isabella,” and then he laughed, quite unable to help
himself.

He leaned forward; his voice had that little
persuasive ring in it that she found so hard to resist. “Ellie,
won’t you just tell me? I won’t laugh at you, and I won’t blame
you, honestly. I just can’t help feeling I’ve done something
wrong.”

Ellie was looking down at the faint shadow of
the old corral cast by the moonlight. Her resistance was wearing
away. She felt limp and defeated, and that none of it really
mattered any longer anyway. But she still had a few shreds of pride
left; she could not tell him exactly why she had fled so humiliated
from the dance.

She hesitated, faltered a little, and began.
“I know you’ve only wanted to be kind to me,” she said. She bit her
lip, for her eyes were again full of tears. “And I—I appreciate
every bit of it. But I don’t want you to go on feeling that
you—
ought
to be kind to me, that you need to do things for
me. I don’t want you to be under an obligation. And I understand,
truly, if—if you’d rather not.”

Cole had been listening seriously, his brow
knitted as if he were endeavoring to understand. A queer shade of
thoughtfulness passed over his face as she finished, and then it
slowly cleared.

“You mean,” he said quietly, “that you think
I only asked you to the dance as a favor to you—that I’ve been
taking you to picnics and things just because I was sorry for you,
and wanted you to have a nice time? Is that it?”

Ellie did not speak or look at him, but a
single tear splashed on her wrist. It glistened for a second in the
moonlight and she whisked it hastily away, certain he must have
seen it.

“That’s it?”

Still no answer.

“All right. I’ll tell you then. When I asked
you to the picnic that first time, that’s just about how I felt. I
did it because I thought you were a nice kid who deserved to have a
good time, and that I’d take you and show some of the other people
around here what they’d been missing by leaving you out. That’s
what I meant at first. But”—suddenly his arms were around her, and
her heart fluttered up at the unexpectedness of it and the
sensation of being held so close—“the reason I’m here with you
right now, tonight, is because I love you, Ellie. I love you, I
love
you. Can you understand that?”

Ellie could not answer. She heard the words
and understood them, but the meaning still floated beyond her,
could not yet sink into her brain, holding her motionless until it
did. It was all a dream. Cole’s arms tightened around her, and he
bent his handsome dark head down to hers. And then all at once she
saw and felt and heard with marvelous clarity; she knew that she
was sitting with one shoe off in the starlight on the fallen rails
of an old corral, and that Cole Newcomb was kissing her, and it had
gone beyond dreams.

He stopped, and looked down questioningly at
her, as if seeking his answer. Ellie’s face was lifted to his, her
lips parted, her eyes starry with wonder. “Oh,” she said softly,
breathlessly, and then with a thrill of new feeling in the whisper,
“Oh, Cole…”

He kissed her again, and her arms slipped
around him almost without her realizing it. And the stars were
alive again, only now they seemed to be blazing and spinning in
flashes and cartwheels across the sky, better than any fireworks of
the Fourth.

“You looked like a princess tonight,” said
Cole, low and close to her ear, his cheek against hers. “I guess
I’ve been falling in love with you ever since I met you, Ellie—but
it was tonight when I saw you that I said to myself, ‘That’s my
girl.’ I guess I knew it, but I’d never said it right out to myself
before.”

“I think—it was the same with me,” whispered
Ellie. “I didn’t know—until tonight.”

Cole drew back a little, so he could look
into her eyes. His own were flaming with exultant happiness.
“What’d you know, sweetheart?”

She said simply, “That I love you.”

Cole took both her hands in his. “Marry me,
Ellie.”

“Yes,” she said; “yes, I will!”

He pulled her to him again and they both
laughed softly; shy, jubilant, half-incredulous.

“It must be after midnight,” said Ellie after
a moment.

“Oh, who cares,” said Cole. “It takes just as
long to walk a mile after midnight as before. Besides, I haven’t
heard the fireworks from town yet.”

She moved her head to look up at him, her
cheek against the front of his shirt. “What are you going to do
about getting home? You can’t walk all that way back.”

“Probably not,” Cole admitted, “although just
about now I feel like I could do anything. If my team hasn’t turned
in at your place out of sheer habit, I’ll just walk on to
McGregors’ and borrow a mule.”

For some reason this was so funny that they
both went off into fits of laughter. In the midst of it, a faint
bang sounded in the distance. They turned to see a tiny red star
rise from the prairie far to the north and shimmer briefly,
followed by shining streaks of blue and green.

“There they are,” said Cole. They watched
them together, Cole still kneeling in the grass by Ellie’s feet,
her slender arm resting around his neck. The fireworks were far
enough away that the sounds were mere pops and dim thuds; all
around them, the thin trilling of crickets and the whisper of the
night breeze that fluttered Ellie’s skirt seemed louder and
clearer. The tiny fireworks snapped and flashed on the horizon, a
cluster of small colored sparkles, and after a little while,
fizzled out and left the night-sounds alone.