Lonesome Land (3 page)

“Can’t you get anything through you?” his tormentor exclaimed. “You want your girl to find out you’re drunk? You got the license in your pocket. You’re
supposed to get spliced this evening—and look at you!” He turned and went out to the bartender.

“Why didn’t you pour that coffee into him, like I told you?” he demanded. “We’ve got to get him steady on his pins
somehow!
”

The bartender was sprawled half over the bar, apathetically reading the sporting news of a torn Sunday edition of an Eastern paper. He looked up from under his eyebrows and grunted.

“How you going to pour coffee down a man that lays flat on his belly and won’t open his mouth?” he inquired, in an injured tone. “Sleep’s all he needs, anyway.
He’ll be all right by morning.”

The other snorted dissent. “He’ll be all right by dark—or he’ll feel a whole lot worse,” he promised grimly. “Dig up some ice. And a good jolt of bromo, if
you’ve got it—and a towel or two.”

The bartender wearily pushed the paper to one side, reached languidly under the bar, and laid hold of a round blue bottle. Yawning uninterestedly, he poured a double portion of the white
crystals into a glass, half filled another under the faucet of the water cooler, and held them out.

“Dump that into him, then,” he advised. “It’ll help some, if you get it down. What’s the sweat to get him married off today? Won’t the girl wait?”

“I never asked her. You pound up some ice and bring it in, will you?” The volunteer nurse kicked open the door into the little room and went in, hastily pouring the bromo seltzer
from one glass to the other to keep it from foaming out of all bounds. His patient was still sitting upon the edge of the bed where he had left him, slumped forward with his head in his hands. He
looked up stupidly, his eyes bloodshot and swollen of lid.

“’S the train come in yet?” he asked thickly. “’S you, is it, Kent?”

“The train ’s come, and your girl is waiting for you at the hotel. Here, throw this into you—and for God’s sake, brace up! You make me tired. Drink her down
quick—the foam ’s good for you. Here, you take the stuff in the bottom, too. Got it? Take off your coat, so I can get at you. You don’t look much like getting married, and
that’s no josh.”

Fleetwood shook his head with drunken gravity, and groaned. “I ought to be killed. Drunk today!” He sagged forward again, and seemed disposed to shed tears. “She’ll never
forgive me; she—”

Kent jerked him to his feet peremptorily. “Aw, look here! I’m trying to sober you up. You’ve got to do your part—see? Here’s some ice in a towel—you get it on
your head. Open up your shirt, so I can bathe your chest. Don’t do any good to blubber around about it. Your girl can’t hear you, and Jim and I ain’t sympathetic. Set down in this
chair, where we can get at you.” He enforced his command with some vigor, and Fleetwood groaned again. But he shed no more tears, and he grew momentarily more lucid, as the treatment took
effect.

The tears were being shed in the stuffy little hotel parlor. The young woman looked often at her watch, went into the hallway, and opened the outer door several times, meditating a search of the
town, and drew back always with a timid fluttering of heart because it was all so crude and strange, and the saloons so numerous and terrifying in their very bald simplicity.

She was worried about Manley, and she wished that cowboy would come out of the saloon and bring her lover to her. She had never dreamed of being treated in this way. No one came near
her—and she had secretly expected to cause something of a flutter in this little town they called Hope.

Surely, young girls from the East, come out to get married to their sweethearts, weren’t so numerous that they should be ignored. If there were other people in the hotel, they did not
manifest their presence, save by disquieting noises muffled by intervening partitions.

She grew thirsty, but she hesitated to explore the depths of this dreary abode, in fear of worse horrors than the parlor furniture, and all the places of refreshment which she could see from the
window or the door looked terribly masculine and immoral, and as if they did not know there existed such things as ice cream, or soda, or sherbet.

It was after an hour of this that the tears came, which is saying a good deal for her courage. It seemed to her then that Manley must be dead. What else could keep him so long away from her,
after three years of impassioned longing written twice a week with punctilious regularity?

He knew that she was coming. She had telegraphed from St. Paul, and had received a joyful reply, lavishly expressed in seventeen words instead of the ten-word limit. And they were to have been
married immediately upon her arrival.

That cowboy had known she was coming; he must also have known why Manley did not meet her, and she wished futilely that she had questioned him, instead of walking beside him without a word. He
should have explained. He would have explained if he had not been so very anxious to get inside that saloon and get drunk.

She had always heard that cowboys were chivalrous, and brave, and fascinating in their picturesque daredevilry, but from the lone specimen which she had met she could not see that they possessed
any of those qualities. If all cowboys were like that, she hoped that she would not be compelled to meet any of them. And
why
didn’t Manley come?

It was then that an inner door—a door which she had wanted to open, but had lacked courage—squeaked upon its hinges, and an ill-kept bundle of hair was thrust in, topping a
weather-beaten face and a scrawny little body. Two faded, inquisitive eyes looked her over, and the woman sidled in, somewhat abashed, but too curious to remain outside.

“Oh yes!” She seemed to be answering some inner question. “I didn’t know you was here.” She went over and removed the newspaper from the portrait. “That breed
girl of mine ain’t got the least idea of how to straighten up a room,” she observed complainingly. “I guess she thinks this picture was made to hang things on. I’ll have to
round her up again and tell her a few things. This is my first husband. He was in politics and got beat, and so he killed himself. He couldn’t stand to have folks give him the laugh.”
She spoke with pride. “He was a real handsome man, don’t you think? You mighta took off the paper; it didn’t belong there, and he does brighten up the room. A good picture is real
company, seems to me. When my old man gets on the rampage till I can’t stand it no longer, I come in here and set, and look at Walt. ’T ain’t every man that’s got nerve to
kill himself—with a shotgun. It was turrible! He took and tied a string to the trigger—”

“Oh, please!”

The landlady stopped short and stared at her. “What? Oh, I won’t go into details—it was awful messy, and that’s a fact. I didn’t git over it for a couple of months.
He coulda killed himself with a six-shooter; it’s always been a mystery why he dug up that old shotgun, but he did. I always thought he wanted to show his nerve.” She sighed, and drew
her fingers across her eyes. “I don’t s’pose I ever will git over it,” she added complacently. “It was a turrible shock.”

“Do you know,” the girl began desperately, “if Mr. Manley Fleetwood is in town? I expected him to meet me at the train.”

“Oh! I kinda
thought
you was Man Fleetwood’s girl. My name’s Hawley. You going to be married tonight, ain’t you?”

“I—I haven’t seen Mr. Fleetwood yet,” hesitated the girl, and her eyes filled again with tears. “I’m afraid something may have happened to him.
He—”

Mrs. Hawley glimpsed the tears, and instantly became motherly in her manner. She even went up and patted the girl on the shoulder.

“There, now, don’t you worry none. Man’s all right; I seen him at dinner time. He was—” She stopped short, looked keenly at the delicate face, and at the
yellow-brown eyes which gazed back at her, innocent of evil, trusting, wistful. “He spoke about your coming, and said he’d want the use of the parlor this evening, for the wedding. I
had an idea you was coming on the six-twenty train. Maybe he thought so, too. I never heard you come in—I was busy frying doughnuts in the kitchen—and I just happened to come in here
after something. You’d oughta rapped on that door. Then I’d ’a’ known you was here. I’ll go and have my old man hunt him up. He must be around town somewheres. Like as
not he’ll meet the six-twenty, expecting you to be on it.”

She smiled reassuringly as she turned to the inner door.

“You take off your hat and jacket, and pretty soon I’ll show you up to a room. I’ll have to round up my old man first—and that’s liable to take time.” She
turned her eyes quizzically to the porky-cheeked portrait. “You jest let Walt keep you company till I get back. He was real good company when he was livin’.”

She smiled again and went out briskly, came back, and stood with her hand upon the cracked doorknob.

“I clean forgot your name,” she hinted. “Man told me, at dinner time, but I’m no good on earth at remembering names till after I’ve seen the person it belongs
to.”

“Valeria Peyson—Val, they call me usually, at home.” The homesickness of the girl shone in her misty eyes, haunted her voice. Mrs. Hawley read it, and spoke more briskly than
she would otherwise have done.

“Well, we’re plumb strangers, but we ain’t going to stay that way, because every time you come to town you’ll have to stop here; there ain’t any other place to
stop. And I’m going to start right in calling you Val. We don’t use no ceremony with folk’s names, out here. Val’s a real nice name, short and easy to say. Mine’s
Arline. You can call me by it if you want to. I don’t let everybody—so many wants to cut it down to Leen, and I won’t stand for that; I’m
lean
enough, without
havin’ it throwed up to me. We might jest as well start in the way we’re likely to keep it up, and you won’t feel so much like a stranger.

“I’m awful glad you’re going to settle here—there ain’t so awful many women in the country; we have to rake and scrape to git enough for three sets when we have a
dance—and more likely we can’t make out more’n two. D’you dance? Somebody said they seen a fiddle box down to the depot, with a couple of big trunks; d’you play the
fiddle?”

“A little,” Valeria smiled faintly.

“Well, that’ll come in awful handy at dances. We’d have ’em real often in the winter if it wasn’t such a job to git music. Well, I got too much to do to be
standin’ here talkin’. I have to keep right after that breed girl all the time, or she won’t do nothing. I’ll git my old man after your fellow right away. Jest make yourself
to home, and anything you want ask for it in the kitchen.” She smiled in friendly fashion and closed the door with a little slam to make sure that it latched.

Valeria stood for a moment with her hands hanging straight at her sides, staring absently at the door. Then she glanced at Walt, staring wooden-faced from his gilt frame upon his gilt easel, and
shivered. She pushed the red plush chair as far away from him as possible, sat down with her back to the picture, and immediately felt his dull, black eyes boring into her back.

“What a fool I must be!” she said aloud, glancing reluctantly over her shoulder at the portrait. She got up resolutely, placed the chair where it had stood before, and stared
deliberately at Walt, as if she would prove how little she cared. But in a moment more she was crying dismally.

CHAPTER TWO

W
ELL-MEANT
A
DVICE

K
ENT
B
URNETT, BEARING OVER HIS ARM A COAT NEWLY PRESSED IN THE
Delmonico restaurant, dodged in at the back door of the saloon,
threw the coat down upon the tousled bed, and pushed back his hat with a gesture of relief at an onerous duty well performed.

“I had one hell of a time,” he announced plaintively, “and that Chink will likely try to poison me if I eat over there, after this—but I got her ironed, all right. Get
into it, Man, and chase yourself over there to the hotel. Got a clean collar? That one’s all-over coffee.”

Fleetwood stifled a groan, reached into a trousers pocket, and brought up a dollar. “Get me one at the store, will you, Kent? Fifteen and a half—and a tie, if they’ve got any
that’s decent. And hurry! Such a triple-three-star fool as I am ought to be taken out and shot.”