Lonesome Land (26 page)

There was one bit of music which Manley thoroughly detested. That was the “Traumerei.” Therefore, she played the “Traumerei” slowly—as it should, of course, be
played—with full value given to all the pensive, long-drawn notes, and with a finale positively creepy in its dreamy wistfulness. Val, as has been stated, could be very exasperating when she
chose.

In the kitchen there was the subdued rattle of dishes, unbroken and unhurried. Val went on playing, but she forgot that she had begun in a half-conscious desire to annoy her husband. She stared
dreamily at the hill which shut out the world to the east, and yielded to a mood of loneliness; of longing, in the abstract, for all the pleasant things she was missing in this life which she had
chosen in her ignorance.

When Manley flung open the inner door, she gave a stifled exclamation; she had forgotten all about Manley.

“By all the big and little gods of Greece!” he swore angrily. “Calves bawling their heads off in the corral, and you squalling that whiny stuff you call music in the
house—home’s sure a hell of a happy place! I’m going to town. You don’t want to leave the place till I come back—I want those calves looked after.” He seemed to
consider something mentally, and then added:

“If I’m not back before they quit bawling, you can turn ’em down in the river field with the rest. You know when they’re weaned and ready to settle down. Don’t feed
’em too much hay, like you did that other bunch; just give ’em what they need; you don’t have to pile the corral full. And don’t keep ’em shut up an hour longer than
necessary.”

Val nodded her head to show that she heard, and went on playing. There was seldom any pretense of good feeling between them now. She tuned the violin to minor, and poised the bow over the
strings, in some doubt as to her memory of a serenade she wanted to try next.

“Shall I have Polycarp take the team and haul up some wood from the river?” she asked carelessly. “We’re nearly out again.”

“Oh,
I
don’t care—if he happens along.” He turned and went out, his mind turning eagerly to the town and what it could give him in the way of pleasure.

Val, still sitting in the doorway, saw him ride away up the grade and disappear over the brow of the hill. The dusk was settling softly upon the land, so that his figure was but a vague shape.
She was alone again; she rather liked being alone, now that she had no longer a blind, unreasoning terror of the empty land. She had her thoughts and her work; the presence of Manley was merely an
unpleasant interruption to both.

Some time in the night she heard the lowing of a cow somewhere near. She wondered dreamily what it could be doing in the coulee, and went to sleep again. The five calves were all bawling in a
chorus of complaint against their forced separation from their mothers, and the deeper, throaty tones of the cow mingled not inharmoniously with the sound.

Range cattle were not permitted in the coulee, and when by chance they found a broken panel in the fence and strayed down there, Val drove them out; afoot, usually, with shouts and badly aimed
stones to accelerate their lumbering pace.

After she had eaten her breakfast in the morning she went out to investigate. Beyond the corral, her nose thrust close against the rails, a cow was bawling dismally. Inside, in much the same
position, its tail waving a violent signal of its owner’s distress, a calf was clamoring hysterically for its mother and its mother’s milk.

Val sympathized with them both; but the cow did not belong in the coulee, and she gathered two or three small stones and went around where she could frighten her away from the fence without,
however, exposing herself too recklessly to her uncertain temper. Cows at weaning time did sometimes object to being driven from their calves.

“Shoo! Go on away from there!” Val raised a stone and poised it threateningly.

The cow turned and regarded her, wild-eyed. It backed a step or two, evidently uncertain of its next move.

“Go on away!” Val was just on the point of throwing the rock, when she dropped it unheeded to the ground and stared. “Why, you—you—why—the
idea!
”
She turned slowly white. Certain things must filter to the understanding through amazement and disbelief; it took Val a minute or two to grasp the significance of what she saw. By the time she did
grasp it, her knees were bending weakly beneath the weight of her body. She put out a groping hand and caught at the corner of the corral to keep herself from falling. And she stared and
stared.

“It—oh, surely not!” she whispered, protesting against her understanding. She gave a little sob that had no immediate relation to tears.
“Surely—
surely—
not!” It was of no use; understanding came, and came clearly, pitilessly. Many things—trifles, all of them—to which she had given no
thought at the time, or which she had forgotten immediately, came back to her of their own accord; things she tried
not
to remember.

The cow stared at her for a minute, and, when she made no hostile move, turned its attention back to its bereavement. Once again it thrust its moist muzzle between two rails, gave a preliminary,
vibrant
mmm—mmmmm—m,
and then, with a spasmodic heaving of ribs and of flank, burst into a long-drawn
baww—aw—aw—aw,
which rose rapidly in a tremulous
crescendo and died to a throaty rumbling.

Val started nervously, though her eyes were fixed upon the cow and she knew the sound was coming. It served, however, to release her from the spell of horror which had gripped her. She was still
white, and when she moved she felt intolerably heavy, so that her feet dragged; but she was no longer dazed. She went slowly around to the gate, reached up wearily and undid the chain fastening,
opened the gate slightly, and went in.

Four of the calves were huddled together for mutual comfort in a corner. They were blatting indefatigably. Val went over to where the fifth one still stood beside the fence, as near the cow as
it could get, and threw a small stone, that bounced off the calf’s rump. The calf jumped and ran aimlessly before her until it reached the half-open gate, when it dodged out, as if it could
scarcely believe its own good fortune. Before Val could follow it outside, it was nuzzling rapturously its mother, and the cow was contorting her body so that she could caress her offspring with
her tongue, while she rumbled her satisfaction.

Val closed and fastened the gate carefully, and went back to where the cow still lingered. With her lips drawn to a thin, colorless line, she drove her across the coulee and up the hill, the
calf gamboling close alongside. When they had gone out of sight, up on the level, Val turned back and went slowly to the house. She stood for a minute staring stupidly at it and at the coulee, went
in and gazed around her with that blankness which follows a great mental shock. After a minute she shivered, threw up her hands before her face, and dropped, a pitiful, sorrowing heap of quivering
rebellion, upon the couch.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

K
ENT’S
C
ONFESSION

P
OLYCARP
J
ENKS CAME AMBLING INTO THE COULEE, RAPPED
perfunctorily upon the door-casing, and entered the kitchen as one who feels
perfectly at home, and sure of his welcome; as was not unfitting, considering the fact that he had “chored around” for Val during the last year, and longer.

“Anybody to home?” he called, seeing the front door shut tight.

There was a stir within, and Val, still pale, and with an almost furtive expression in her eyes, opened the door and looked out.

“Oh, it’s you, Polycarp,” she said lifelessly. “Is there anything—”

“What’s the matter? Sick? You look kinda peaked and frazzled out. I met Man las’ night, and he told me you needed wood; I thought I’d ride over and see. By granny, you do
look bad.”

“Just a headache,” Val evaded, shrinking back guiltily. “Just do whatever there is to do, Polycarp. I think—I don’t believe the chickens have had anything to eat
today—”

“Them headaches are sure a fright; they’re might’ nigh as bad as rheumatiz, when they hit you hard. You jest go back and lay down, and I’ll look around and see what they
is to do. Any idee when Man’s comin’ back?”

“No.” Val brought the word out with an involuntary sharpness.

“No, I reckon not. I hear him and Fred De Garmo come might’ near havin’ a fight las’ night. Blumenthal was tellin’ me this mornin’. Fred’s quit the
Double Diamond, I hear. He’s got himself appointed dep’ty stock inspector—and how he managed to git the job is more’n I can figure out. They say he’s all swelled up
over it—got his headquarters in town, you know, and seems he got to lordin’ it over Man las’ night, and I guess if somebody hadn’t stopped ’em they’d of been a
mix-up, all right. Man wasn’t in no shape to fight—he’d been drinkin’ pretty—”

“Yes—well, just do whatever there is to do, Polycarp. The horses are in the upper pasture, I think—if you want to haul wood.” She closed the door—gently, but with
exceeding firmness, and Polycarp took the hint.

“Women is queer,” he muttered, as he left the house. “Now, she knows Man drinks like a fish—and she knows everybody else knows it—but if you so much as mention sech
a thing, why—” He waggled his head disapprovingly and proceeded, in his habitually laborious manner, to take a chew of tobacco. “No matter how much they may know a thing is so, if
it don’t suit ’em you can’t never git ’em to stand right up and face it out—seems like, by granny, it comes natural to ’em to make believe things is different.
Now, she knows might’ well she can’t fool
me.
I’ve hearn Man swear at her like—”

He reached the corral, and his insatiable curiosity turned his thoughts into a different channel. He inspected the four calves gravely, wondered audibly where Man had found them, and how the
round-up came to miss them, and criticized his application of the brand; in the opinion of Polycarp, Manley either burned too deep or not deep enough.

“Time that line-backed heifer scabs off, you can’t tell what’s on her,” he asserted, expectorating solemnly before he turned away to his work.

From a window, Val watched him with cold terror. Would he suspect? Or was there anything to suspect? “It’s silly—it’s perfectly idiotic,” she told herself
impatiently; “but if he hangs around that corral another minute, I shall scream!” She watched until she saw him mount his horse and ride off toward the upper pasture. Then she went out
and began apathetically picking seed pods off her sweet-peas, which the early frosts had spared.

“Head better?” called Polycarp, half an hour later, when he went rattling past the house with the wagon, bound for the river bottom where they got their supply of wood.

“A little,” Val answered inattentively, without looking at him.

It was while Polycarp was after the wood, and while she was sitting upon the edge of the porch, listlessly arranging and rearranging a handful of long-stemmed blossoms, that Kent galloped down
the hill and up to the gate. She saw him coming and set her teeth hard together. She did not want to see Kent just then; she did not want to see anybody.

Kent, however, wanted to see her. It seemed to him at least a month since he had had a glimpse of her, though it was no more than half that time. He watched her covertly while he came up the
path. His mind, all the way over from the Wishbone, had been very clear and very decided. He had a certain thing to tell her, and a certain thing to do; he had thought it all out during the nights
when he could not sleep and the days when men called him surly, and there was no going back, no reconsideration of the matter. He had been telling himself that, over and over, ever since the house
came into view and he saw her sitting there on the porch. She would probably want to argue, and perhaps she would try to persuade him, but it would be absolutely useless; absolutely.

“Well, hello!” he cried, with more than his usual buoyancy of manner—because he knew he must hurt her later on. “Hello, Madam Author
ess
. Why this haughty air? This
stuckupiness? Shall I get a ladder and climb up where you can hear me say howdy?” He took off his hat and slapped her gently upon the top of her head with it. “Come out of the
fog!”