The Lawless West (8 page)

“You see,” said Bigot, “up to the time that I was twenty, I didn’t bother the girls none. I had other work, my friend, and I let them go their way while I went mine. But one day Nora Cary came walking by, and I turned around and looked after her. Ever since then I’ve never felt the same.”

He paused, tamped his pipe, then frowned at the floor.

“Next week,” he said, “I asked Nora to marry me. She laughed at me.”

“And you forgot her, I hope?” said Jack fiercely. “If a girl laughed at me, I’d cut out my heart rather’n foller her.”

“I guess that maybe you would,” responded the trapper mildly. There was much about Jack that he did not understand, and that he made no pretense of understanding. “But I didn’t. Next summer I asked her again, and she said no. Next winter I asked her again, and she stopped to think.”

Jack Trainor swore softly. He was beginning to see in the steady patience of the big man a force that would easily wear down the patience, and impose upon the mind of a woman.

“I asked her the next spring again, and she said yes,” went on the trapper, refilling his pipe. “After that I was happy for a couple of years, working all the time and saving up money until I had a lot of it put by. I had enough made to build a house and furnish it, and everything was all ready for the wedding next summer. But, when the time for the wedding came, Nora Cary wasn’t there.”

He began smoking so furiously that his face was almost totally obscured behind the fog.

“She’d run off with Bergen, that went to school with the both of us. They come back that fall and settled down, and next summer Nora had a baby.”

He seemed entirely serene after that brief outburst of smoking. Jack Trainor leaned and listened to him with the most profound attention. He felt an actual awe of the big man, a mental awe as well as a physical one for the giant.

“Things kept on like that,” said Bigot.

“You mean you never stopped loving Nora?”

Bigot looked at him in mild amazement.

“I said she was married,” he said in quiet rebuke.

“I know…I know,” said Jack impatiently, “but I mean…you were pretty fond of her just the same. You didn’t pay much attention to any of the other girls in the town, eh?”

“I ain’t got much time for girls,” said Bigot without emotion. “That is, for girls outside of Nora. Three years ago she died.”

Jack started. It was like the shock that comes
when we hear of the death of a person we know. He had visualized Nora. He had been thinking of her, on this bitter night, in a well-warmed room in some village in the lowlands. And now, suddenly, he knew that she was long since dead. It took his mind with a wrench back to the stolid face of Bigot.

There was something so heart-wringing to him about that placid face that he rose and crossed the room with his quick, nervous step and dropped his hand upon the thick and heavily muscled shoulder of the trapper.

“Good old Joe,” he said heartily and softly. “Good old Joe.”

But Joe looked up to him in immense surprise.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said Trainor, and turned and walked slowly back to his former place. When he faced the trapper again, all the signs of emotion were gone from his face.

“After Nora died,” said Bigot, “I had my sister take the little ones.”

“You did? Would her husband let you do that?”

“Him? He went away,” said the trapper tersely.

The character of the dead woman’s husband was blazoned in sudden light to the mind of Trainor.

“Children cost a good deal,” explained Bigot.

“But what’s this marriage in the spring?” asked, Jack, bewildered.

“Nora has a sister,” said the trapper.

There was another gasp from the cowpuncher. “Well,” he said with feeling, “I’ll be eternally lost. You beat all get out with a tin hat on it, Joe. But go on. She has a sister, eh? And you’re going to marry the sister so’s she can take care of the kids that Nora left behind her when she died?”

This question the big man considered for a time with great care.

“She has the same eyes that Nora had,” he replied after a time, “bright, snapping ones. They are black.”

It was another blow to Jack.

“How old is she?” he asked.

“Twenty.”

“Twenty. And you’re thirty-two. That’s a good deal of difference in the ages, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is. But what difference does time make?”

Again Jack was staggered. He had thought, before he began this conversation, that he knew the other from A to Z. Now he began to feel that he knew nothing except about the surface of Joe Bigot. Time meant nothing to Joe. Why should it mean anything to other persons?

“There is a funny thing,” said Joe, sighing. “She must have letters. Every week she must have a letter.”

“I’ve seen you writing them. But why? The mail only leaves once in two weeks.”

“Why? I didn’t ask her,” replied the trapper. “All I know is that she wants me to write to her every week, a separate letter. And so I do it.” Sorrow spread over his face darkly. “I write a letter every week,” he reiterated. He said it as a man might speak of a plague. “It is very hard,” and he sighed. “But, you see, it angers her when she doesn’t get the letters, and yet it angers her when she gets them. Look!”

He took out his wallet. From it he removed a sheaf of letters written upon very thin white paper. He selected one of these letters and presented it to Jack. The letter under his hand showed a swift-moving
and rather delicate script flowing across the page. It was a “dashed-off” hand, so to speak. He read:

Dear Joe:

I was away last Saturday at Jessie Haines’s place. When I came back, I got three letters from you in a bunch. Oh, Joe, why do you write such letters?

I could sit in this room and write more about the mountains in five minutes, and more about love, too, than you write in a whole winter.

I know you’re brave and strong and good, but a girl can’t live forever on courage and strength and goodness. She needs something else.

Alice

Jack lowered the letter with a black scowl and passed it back to Bigot.

“So, you see,” said Bigot, “that is why I am glad that I have the blue fox…that we have it, rather. It will be something for her to live on, eh?”

“You think that’s what she meant…that she wanted money?” said Jack.

“Now you are laughing at me?” queried Bigot pathetically. “I know I am stupid. When people talk, I feel like when I was a little boy at the end of the line and they played crack the whip. That’s the way when people talk, sometimes. I go sailing off into nothing. I don’t understand what they are saying.”

Jack Trainor, still smiling in spite of himself, shook his head. “I wouldn’t mock you, Joe. In the first place, I like you too well. In the second place, I respect you too much. In the third place, I’m afraid to.”

“Afraid to?” echoed the big man. He laughed
softly. “You, Jack, fear nothing. You don’t know what fear is.”

“You think not?”

“I know it. Otherwise, you would never have walked into the mountains in that thin suit without food.”

Jack Trainor shook his head. He had long before discovered that it was useless to argue with the trapper on this point. Joseph Bigot had decided to his own satisfaction that Trainor was a daredevil, and he could not be convinced to the contrary. He would have it that the braving of winter in the mountains, by a man to all intents and purposes unclothed and helpless, was a sign of sublime daring rather than ignorance.

“We’ll drop that, then,” said Jack. “But this Alice Cary…Joe, she sure knows what she wants and what she doesn’t want, and one of the things that she doesn’t want is the sort of letter that you write to her. I’d like to see one of ’em if it wasn’t so personal you couldn’t show it to me.”

“Personal?” echoed the mild-eyed giant. “Why, Jack, why shouldn’t you see it? Here’s a couple of ’em here.”

“Ones you didn’t send?”

“I sent ’em just the way they stand, except that I copied ’em clean.”

He handed the two to Trainor, and the second one read:

Dear Alice:

I was glad to get your last letter. I hope you are feeling well now. I am getting along pretty well now. Last week I caught three red foxes and eighteen…

“Say, Joe,” called Trainor, “doesn’t it strike you that she might be interested in something a pile more than she’d be interested in the sort of furs you collected?”

“In what, then? Ain’t that what we got to live on?”

“Forget what you got to live on,” said Jack. “A girl ain’t interested in that. She’ll live on grass seed and hope and be plumb happy, so long as she’s got a gent around handy to tell her every once in a while that he’s mighty fond of her. That’s the way a woman is put together.”

Joe Bigot sighed. “You know pretty near everything, Jack,” he said. “If I had you to coach me, maybe I could write a letter that would keep her interested. Would you show me how it’s done?”

“Why, look here”—Jack chuckled—“I ain’t no professional slinger of fancy English. The best I can do is to work up an interest talking about what I want and why I want it.”

“But,” began Joe, “that won’t help me.”

“Why won’t it?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Joe, tell me just why you want to marry Alice. Is it simply because she’s her sister’s sister?”

The big man pondered. “She’s prettier than Nora ever was,” he decided. “And she’s brighter. And she’s kinder.”

“Did you ever tell her all those things?” asked Jack.

“Ain’t she got a mirror? Can’t she look in her mirror and see a pile more than I could ever tell her?”

“That right there,” cried Jack, “would be good enough to put into a letter! The thing for you to do is to loosen up. You got plenty to say. But you’re like a good pitcher at the beginning of the season…you’re afraid to put any stuff on the ball in the cold
weather. Thing for you to do, Joe, is to thaw out. Show a few signs of spring…”

“In January?” said Joseph Bigot, bewildered. “Spring in January? I don’t know what you mean, my friend Jack.”

Trainor threw up his hands. “Here,” he said. “Are you dead certain that Alice Cary is more interested in you than she is in any other young gent down in those parts?”

“She has promised to be my wife,” said Joe with an air of conclusiveness.

Jack sighed. “Because she gave you a promise,” he said, “that’s a pretty good reason for her to want to change her mind…or for her to think about changing her mind…ain’t it? Man, man, when you tie up a dog with a rope, don’t that make the dog want to get away, even if the place you tied him is all covered with marrow bones?”

“If he has the bones to eat,” said Joe, “why should the dog wish to go? Such a dog would be a fool, my friend Jack.”

Jack Trainor studied his friend’s face with the air of one somewhere between anger and amusement and despair. At length he said: “If I sit down and work out a letter for you, will you use it to sort of get you started on a letter of your own?”

“Sure,” said Joe. “Why not? Good Lord, Jack, that would be more than gold in my pocket.”

“Then give me her picture, will you?”

Joe Bigot drew out the picture, and his companion sat for some time studying it intently.

“Who’s the young gent down in the plains,” he said, “that she likes the best?”

“That’d be young Larry Haines,” said Joe. “He was courting her ever since she was a little one.”

“Well,” said Jack, “this is where we start in giving Larry the outside edge of an outside chance. We’re going to freeze him out!”

Jack Trainor walked briskly to the table. He sat down and for ten or fifteen minutes stared constantly at the picture. Then he began to write, and Joe Bigot forgot to smoke, so great was his wonder at the oiled smoothness with which the pen of the smaller man fled across the paper.

It was rolling ground, but not enough to limit the horizon with higher summits here and there. That sheet of green swept away eternally. It washed off to the ends of the earth, and through that clear air, indeed, one felt that the ends of the earth were well nigh visible. Only to the far westward there arose a cloud of pale and indefinite blue, wavering low against the sky. One had to be told to know that those were the Canadian Rockies. Standing on this high place in the low country, all at first seemed monotony. There was the marvelous green of the earth and the marvelous blue of the sky and the pure, pure white of the clouds that blew here and there. There was only the sky and the earth and, in between, a great space of freedom for the mind and the soul to wander. There were few trees. No trees were wanted. No hills were wanted. The smoother and the barer, the better. One did not wish for walls or checks of any kind.

There was a great sense of life in that illimitable
plain. One felt it when there was no moving thing in view save the swift clouds. It was a fruitful land. One knew that the soil was rich without seeing the patch of black, yonder, that the plow had turned up not later than that morning, and that was beginning to dry out to a fallow gray as the sun and the wind worked on it. There was such wealth of soil, indeed, that the careless proprietors rather chose to let the land produce as it would than encourage it with the plow to any great extent.

There were groupings and dottings of cattle, also, wandering here and there, swinging their heads up and down slowly, while their mellow voices came booming, now in loud single calls, and now in more distant and more musical choruses. Toward the farther horizon, one could make out two small towns, each a blur of red roofs wonderfully pleasant between sky and green earth. Nearer at hand was another town—or, rather, just a chance cluster of houses.

On the top of the hill the girl had halted her horse, and her companion had followed suit, although both his horse and he manifested impatience at the pause. But Alice Cary was enjoying every minute, as was attested by the way in which she threw back her head and smiled. She looked from the green hills to the blue sky, and from the wide limitless sky back to the flowing hills.

“Ah, Larry,” she said, “maybe you have to have other things, but I like this pretty well. Maybe you have to have Montreal, but I like this for my part.”

His horse was dancing. He allowed the high-headed creature to prance in front of the horse of Alice. Thereby he cut off her view and forced her to consider him more closely.

“But that isn’t answering me, Alice,” he said. “And for the last week you’ve been dodging me. And…and you know that he’s apt to be back almost any time now. I don’t want to doubt you, but…but it sounds mighty as if you’d changed your mind.”

His horse here worked past and threatened the roan of Alice with a flirt of his hoofs, whereat she reined her mount back deftly. She rode in divided skirts with a bold and swinging style that was extremely mannish in its pattern and extremely feminine in its effect. Her dress, too, with the cowboy red bandanna at her throat, her loose blouse, her heavy leather gloves, and the sombrero on her head was masculine in plan but wonderfully girlish in its results.

“Larry Haines,” she said, “suppose I should tell you that I had changed my mind?”

The horse of Larry Haines was changed to a statue, so closely did it follow the will of its master! Larry Haines, also, gained two inches in height as he jerked himself to rigidity. His lean, handsome face turned to iron, and his eyes glared at her. More than once before, he had half terrified her in this manner. Indeed, it was a part of the mystery and the charm of the man that attracted her. She knew Jessie Haines as well as she knew herself—or better. She knew herself like a book that had been carefully read. But Larry Haines, although she had grown up with him, remained unknown to her. He never shrouded himself with mystery, but there was about him a native strength that thrust other persons to a distance and kept them away from him. He had never wasted much time on girls until he had met her. And then his sudden burst of attentions, beginning
only a short while after her engagement to the former suitor of her sister, had fairly swept her off her feet. She was frankly flattered, because the attentions of Larry Haines made her the envied and the wondered at among the girls of the village.

How he kept up that insistent siege; how, at length, in the absence of the big trapper, she had been won over and had given her promise to leave her home and run away with Larry to be married in the distant city of Montreal—all of these things made up a long story. And now she trembled as she faced the youth.

He took it very quietly. She might have known that he would act in this manner. And yet his quietness was worse than the angry shouting of another man.

“If you told me that you had changed your mind,” he said, “I should believe you, that’s all. You’re free. You’re independent. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t change your mind if you see cause for it.”

But, while he spoke, the color went out of his cheeks and left them yellow—an unhealthy sallow. By that sign and the fixed glittering of his eyes she could guess at the emotion within him, but just the emotion was beyond her. It might be wild grief. Or it might be jealous rage. Or it might be simply injured vanity. But one could never tell what actually happened in the brain of Larry. Of his devilish temper, there could be no doubt. Since childhood, he had been a victim to silent bursts of rage that were dangerous to all around him. Now that he was grown older, his skill with weapons and the persistence of that same fierce temper made him dreaded by men of his own age. They actually shunned him. Wherever he went, he went alone. Strange to say, his dangerous
qualities made him acceptable only in a company of girls, or old men and old women.

Why this should be, Alice had often wondered. But now she understood. Always, before, she had never come closer to the darker side of Larry than the reports that others made of him. But today it was easy to see the panther in him stirring under the surface. All the time that he was attributing perfect freedom to her to do as she pleased, she knew that madness was growing in his brain.

“You know that I wouldn’t change my mind easily, Larry, where you’re concerned?”

“You flatter me,” said Larry.

She looked fixedly at him. No doubt he was mocking both her and himself.

“I’ve never been easy about it…you know that,” she said at length. “I’ve always felt that it was a sin to leave poor Joe in this way.”

“A fellow that has to be pitied isn’t worth thinking about!” exclaimed Larry Haines fiercely. “But let that go.”

“You know what he’s done and what he’s been,” said the girl. “He’s never changed. He was true to poor Nora when everyone was laughing at him. And then he took her babies. He took them just as tenderly as though he had been their father! A man like that…why, how could I refuse him when he asked me to marry him, Larry?”

“I don’t suppose that you could,” said Larry slowly. “I suppose he’s fond of you just for the sake of your sister. But I see that makes no difference with you. You don’t care to be loved for your own sake.”

She raised her hand. His malevolence showed through too plainly. It made her wince.

“I admit,” she said, “that I may have made up my mind to marry him for some such reason. But lately, Larry, I…”

“Ah!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Lately you’ve been thinking about him, and, because he was a long distance from you, you suddenly began to make a hero out of him, you began to make him romantic!”

She flushed hotly and made no answer. He realized that he had gone much too far and instantly changed his tactics. His tone altered to the most soothing smoothness.

“It’s because you’re too good for him or for any other man,” he said gently. “You see, Alice, you are ashamed of yourself because you can’t love him. You think it’s your duty. You don’t see that he’s exactly what he seems…a great clod of a man, Alice! There’s no spark of real feeling in him. There’s no fire in him! Why, you’d be miserable with him!”

She shook her head and smiled at him in such a cocksure and confident manner that he was amazed. Her flush, also, had changed in quality. There was a misty touch to her eyes that alarmed young Haines.

“I thought just what you think about Joe Bigot,” she answered. “I’ve thought it all my life. I’ll even confess now, Larry, that the reason I first became engaged to Joe was because I pitied him, and because I felt, if he were so willing to raise Nora’s babies, I should at least try to do my share. I thought, too, that the only reason he cared for me at all was simply because I’m Nora’s sister. But…” She paused.

“Well?” asked Larry Haines impatiently. “Well?”

“But a few weeks ago there was a change. The letters I have been getting from Joe Bigot would have driven a saint mad. He told me about the weather. He told me about the number of furs he was taking.
And that was about all. Any plowman could have written such letters. Then there was a change! You see, all the time, from the very first, I had been half hoping that behind the dull exterior there might be fire. And it turned out that I was right…I was right! It was like the breaking of a dam. I opened a letter, and his words picked me up on a flood and carried me out of myself! Oh, I wish I could show you that letter!”

“I wish you could,” said Larry dryly. “I’d sure like to see Bigot’s poetry.”

“That’s exactly what it was. It was poetry. The words had actually a rhythm to them. They keep running through my mind…not the real words, you know, but the tune of them.”

“I see,” said Larry in the tone of one who does not see and does not wish to see.

“He began in just the way he usually began a letter…except that there was a little difference in between the words that took my breath away. He began by talking about the cold and the hoar frost and the bursting trees around the cabin and the sense in the air that the world was freezing to death. And, after he had made such a picture of it that I started to shiver myself, he went on to talk about what the mountains would be like when the spring came. And he made such a picture, Larry, such a picture.” Her words failed her; her voice trembled. “And all at once, toward the end of the letter, Larry, he told me that he felt he had been frozen all of his life, and that he had never been able to say what he felt, because he was really asleep…in a wintertime, so to speak. But now he felt a change. It was a thawing, a coming of spring. That was the first letter. It set me tingling to my fingertips to read it. I kept saying to myself…
is the giant going to wake up? Oh, Larry, when I opened the next letter, I knew that he had. And all at once the spring was there! It seems that he loved Nora, or thought he did. But that is nothing to the way he cares for me. It isn’t true that I only shine by her reflected light. And…”

“In one word, you love him at last, Alice.”

“Yes!”

“Then there’s no more to be said about Montreal, of course.”

“But, Larry, I’m terribly sorry.”

“Of course you are. You’re too nice a girl not to be sorry, Alice.”

“Are you sarcastic now?”

“I?”

“I never know. I never can quite tell what’s going on in you.”

“That’s because I’m so simple.”

“At least, I know you’ll forget me quickly.”

“Perhaps you hope so.”

“And I’m right, Larry.”

“You’re wrong. You know what I think of marriage.”

“Marriage? You mean that a man should never marry more than once…that it’s sacrilege to marry more than once? But what has that to do with mere love?”

“Mere love? It means just this…that a man, if he really is in love, can only love once. It’s nonsense to talk about any second affairs. It’s nonsense. It’s Continental, no doubt, but it’s not true. I tell you, my dear, that I shall never care for another woman.”

“Oh, Larry!”

He was silent.

“I know it can’t be true. You are only bitter and
angry now. A month from today in Montreal you’ll be smiling when you remember me off here in the grasslands.”

“A month from today I’ll still be here.”

“Do you mean that?”

“I do.”

“Larry, does it mean that there’s going to be trouble between you and poor Joe?”

He started to deny it, then changed his mind, and there was a wicked gleam in his eye.