Lonesome Land (22 page)

A C
OMPACT

T
HE 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 into 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 hardworking 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.

“Did you—I feel like a fool for talking like this, but one sometimes clutches at the least glimmer of sympathy and—and understanding, and speaks what should be kept bottled up
inside, I suppose. But I’ve been bottled up for so
long—
” She struck her free hand suddenly against her lips, as if she would apply physical force to keep them from losing
all self-control. When she spoke again, her voice was calmer. “Did you ever get to the point, Mr. Cowboy, where you—you dug right down to the bottom of things, and found that you must
do something or go mad—and there wasn’t a thing you could do? Did you ever?” She did not turn toward him, but kept her eyes to the hills. When he did not answer, however, she
swung her head slowly and looked down at him, where he sat almost at her feet.

Kent was leaning forward, studying the gashes he had cut in the sod with his spurs. His brows were knitted close.

“I kinda think I’m getting there pretty fast,” he owned gravely when he felt her gaze upon him. “Why?”

“Oh—because you can understand how one must speak sometimes. Ever since I came, you have been—I don’t know—different. At first I didn’t like you at all; but I
could see you were different. Since then—well, you have now and then said something that made me see one could speak to you, and you would understand. So I—” She broke off
suddenly and laughed an apology. “Am I boring you dreadfully? One grows so self-centered living alone. If you aren’t interested—”

“I am.” Kent was obliged to clear his throat to get those two words out. “Go on. Say all you want to say.”

She laughed again wearily. “Lately,” she confessed nervously, “I’ve taken to telling my thoughts to the cat. It’s perfectly safe, but, after all, it isn’t
quite satisfying.” She stopped again, and stood silent for a moment.

“It’s because I am alone, day after day, week in and week out,” she went on. “In a way, I don’t mind it—under the circumstances I prefer to be alone, really.
I mean, I wouldn’t want any of my people near me. But one has too much time to think. I tell you this because I feel I ought to let you know that you were right that time; I don’t
suppose you even remember it! But I do. Once last fall—the first time you came to the ranch—you know, the time I met you at the spring, you seemed to see that this big, lonesome country
was a little too much for me. I resented it then. I didn’t want anyone to tell me what I refused to admit to myself. I was trying so hard to like it—it seemed my only hope, you see. But
now I’ll tell you you were right.

“Sometimes I feel very wicked about it. Sometimes I don’t care. And sometimes I—I feel I shall go crazy if I can’t talk to someone. Nobody comes here, except Polycarp
Jenks. The only woman I know really well in the country is Arline Hawley. She’s good as gold, but—she’s intensely practical; you can’t tell her your troubles—not
unless they’re concrete and have to do with your physical well-being. Arline lacks imagination.” She laughed again shortly.

“I don’t know why I’m taking it for granted you don’t,” she said. “You think I’m talking pure nonsense, don’t you, Mr. Cowboy?” She turned
full toward him, and her yellow-brown eyes challenged him, begged him for sympathy and understanding, held him at bay—but most of all they set his blood pounding sullenly in his veins. He got
unsteadily to his feet.

“You seem to pass up a lot of things that count, or you wouldn’t say that,” he reminded her huskily. “That night in town, just after the fire, for instance. And here,
that same afternoon. I tried to jolly you out of feeling bad, both those times; but you know I understood. You know damn’
well
I understood! And you know I was sorry. And if you
don’t know, I’d do anything on God’s green earth—” He turned sharply away from her and stood kicking savagely backward at a clod with his rowel. Then he felt her hand
touch his arm, and started. After that he stood perfectly still, except that he quivered like a frightened horse.

“Oh, it doesn’t mean much to you—you have your life, and you’re a man, and can do things when you want to. But I do so need a friend! Just somebody who understands, to
whom I can talk when that is the only thing will keep me sane. You saved my life once, so I feel—no, I don’t mean that. It isn’t because of anything you did; it’s just that
I feel I can talk to you more freely than to anyone I know. I don’t mean whine. I hope I’m not a whiner. If I’ve blundered, I’m willing to—to take my medicine, as you
would say. But if I can feel that somewhere in this big, empty country just one person will always feel kindly toward me, and wish me well, and be sorry for me when I—when I’m
miserable, and—” She could not go on. She pressed her lips together tightly, and winked back the tears.

Kent faced about and laid both his hands upon her shoulders. His face was very tender and rather sad, and if she had only understood as well as he did—But she did not.

“Little woman, listen here,” he said. “You’re playing hard luck, and I know it; maybe I don’t know just how hard—but maybe I can kinda give a guess. If
you’ll think of me as your friend—your pal, and if you’ll always tell yourself that your pal is going to stand by you, no matter what comes, why—all right.” He caught
his breath.

She smiled up at him, honestly pleased, wholly without guile—and wholly blind. “I’d rather have such a friend, just now, than anything I know, except—But if your
sweetheart should object—could you—”

His fingers gripped her shoulders tighter for just a second, and he let her go. “I guess that part’ll be all right,” he rejoined in a tone she could not quite fathom. “I
never had one in m’ life.”

“Why, you poor thing!” She stood back and tilted her head at him. “You poor—
pal.
I’ll have to see about that immediately. Every young man wants a
sweetheart—at least, all the young men I ever knew wanted one, and—”

“And I’ll gamble they all wanted the same one,” he hinted wickedly, feeling himself unreasonably happy over something he could not quite put into words, even if he had
dared.