Nevada (1995) Page 17

  The clerk smiled and got up. "No. She just sank. Like a limp sack. So she couldn't have hurt herself."

  "Indeed, I'm not hurt," returned Hettie. "You're all very kind. . . . It was silly of me to--to keel over like that."

  While she talked there seemed to be an awful question hammering at her consciousness. When Ben and, Marvie entered, at that moment, she understood what the question was. Neither of them knew what she knew. Her relief was so great that it overcame her, and when she tried to rise she only sank back again.

  "Why, Hettie!" cried Ben, in sharp concern, as he sat down to grasp her. Then Marvie knelt on the seat at her other side. Hettie smiled wanly at them and closed her eyes. She felt dizzy, and then feared to look at them.

  "It's nothin' serious, Mr. Ide," spoke up the clerk, hastily. "She just fainted. It was the shootin'. She peeped out--an' then when I seen her again, there she lay on the floor."

  "Whew, Hettie! You gave me a scare," said Ben, as he hugged her and shook her a little. "But you're all right. It was only you went flooy over a street duel. Why, I'm surprised at you. Anyone would think you'd never heard a gun back in California. . . .

  Come, brace up, Hettie."

  "Take me home," replied Hettie, opening her eyes again. "I--I want to get out of this town."

  "Wal, I should smile! Me, too," joined in Marvie, squeezing her hand. Hettie had never seen the lad look quite as he did then.

  The freckles stood out on his pale wet face. His eyes held a bright stare. She did not dare ask him if he had seen the participants of the street duel. She feared he had.

  "Marvie, you fetch these bundles," requested Ben, as he lifted Hettie to her feet. He had to support her, or she could not have walked just yet. He swore under his breath, then, scornfully, "This Arizona's a nice place for women! . . . Never mind, honey; maybe we'll get over it. I'm thankin' my stars Ina didn't see."

  Ben helped her into the back seat of the buckboard. "There, you're all right. . . . Marvie, put the bundles under the seats. Then get in beside Hettie an' hang on to her. I've got some drivin' to do. Soon as I pick up Ina, I'll sure leave this town in a cloud of dust."

  Hettie did not look to right or left, yet she saw and heard the excited people passing, talking down the street. Ben drove rapidly. Soon the center of town lay behind. The streets were quiet. Hettie lost the cold dread of seeing a lithe stone-faced man in rider's garb. Ben halted the horses before a house set well back in a green yard, and as he leaped to the ground Ina appeared.

  "Hello, you-all!" she called, merrily. "See, Ben, I'm right on the dot. Now, sir." As she reached the buck-board she suddenly halted aghast. "Why, Hettie! . . . You look terrible. Are you ill? Oh, what has happened?"

  "Ina, I'm a poor pioneer," said Hettie, with rueful smile.

  "Nothin' to upset you, wife," replied Ben. "Hettie had a scare.

  There was a shootin' fray downtown, an' she fainted. Climb up, an' we'll be off pronto. These ponies are sure rarin' to go."

  As soon as Ina had climbed up she turned solicitously to Hettie and reached for her hand. "You poor dear! I never saw you look like this. Fainted! That's strange. You never fainted in your life."

  "I did this time, all right," returned Hettie.

  "Why? What happened? Did you see a fight?" queried Ina, excitedly.

  "No. I didn't see--the fight," replied Hettie, shutting her eyes tight. "But I heard it. . . . Then I peeped out--to see a--a dead man lying in the street."

  "How dreadful! Oh, this wild Arizona! It's worse than Forlorn River when we were girls."

  "Worse?" laughed Ben, grimly. "Say, Ina, California in our day could never hold a candle to Arizona."

  "Did you see this fight?"

  "No. I missed it."

  "Did you, Marvie? Oh, I hope you didn't."

  "All I saw of it was the dead man. I walked by him. He had a bloody hole in the top--"

  "Shut up, you infant gun-slinger," interrupted Ben.

  "Did you know the fighters, Ben?" went on Ina, curiously.

  "No. Some one told me Jim Lacy had come to town, lookin' for trouble. He gave a rustler named Hardy Rue choice of leavin' town or throwin' a gun. Rue chose to stick, an' it cost him his life.

  Had no chance on earth, some one said. They met in the street.

  Even break, of course, as these Arizonians call a fair fight. But Rue was fallin' when his gun went off."

  "Terrible," said his wife, shuddering. "But a rustler cannot be a very great loss to the community."

  "Ina, I sure hope Mr. Jim Lacy sticks around for a while," replied Ben, laconically. "Tom Day told me Hardy Rue might be the leader of the rustlers who've been pinchin' me so hard. But Dillon scouted the idea."

  During this conversation Hettie was glad to have the support of Marvie's arm and shoulder. She had not opened her eyes. But her ears rang acutely with the words she heard.

  "Ben, I reckon you an' sis might shut up, yourselves," declared Marvie, significantly, "or talk about somethin' else."

  "Sure, sonny," agreed Ben. "It's no pleasant subject."

  The spirited team drew the light buckboard at a rapid pace over the smooth, hard road. The breeze stirred by this pace was cool and pleasant to Hettie's throbbing brow. After a long rest, she opened her eyes and sat up again. Already the dark line of cedars was in sight, and beyond them the uneven timbered ridges that ran up to the black frowning Mogollons. How vast and wild that range!

  Hettie's heart seemed to come to life again. It had been locked, clamped, frozen. What was it that had stricken her, almost unto death? If she were only alone in her room, so that she could face the catastrophe, so that she could give way to her agony! But many miles and hours lay between her and seclusion. She essayed to make conversation with Marvie.

  "Your girl is very pretty, Marvie," she said, close to his ear.

  Marvie actually blushed and squirmed in his seat, and gripped Hettie's arm so hard under the robe that it hurt.

  "You had met her before last night," whispered Hettie.

  "Ahuh!" he replied.

  "Marvie, you are no longer a boy. You're a young man with prospects. And she--forgive me--she belongs to that notorious Hatt family. I don't blame you for--for admiring her; she's like a wild rose. But say it's not serious."

  "I wish I could," whispered Marvie, swallowing hard.

  "Marvie! Tell me."

  "Not now. I can't, Hettie," he said, huskily. "But I will when we get home."

  "I'm on your side, Marvie," concluded Hettie, pressing his arm.

  For a while she was able to concentrate her thoughts upon this lad and the girl, Rose Hatt, and the unhappiness that might accrue for both. Marvie was under probation. Yet it would not be long until he was of age and his own master. It seemed altogether unlikely that he would ever return to California. The rich acres of Hart Blaine had no hold upon Marvie.

  Soon Hettie's will succumbed to the tremendous pressure of recurring thoughts and emotion. She gave up. She had to let herself go. Then while her gaze strained out over the yellow and green prairieland, and the rolling ridges with their slopes of sage, and the miles of white grass where herds of cattle grazed, and on and on, and ever upward to the purple ranges lost in the rosy pearly clouds of hot afternoon, while she saw these beautiful characteristics of Arizona, she was confronting herself with the staggering truth.

  She had seen Nevada. She could not torture herself with a thought of doubt--that she might have been mistaken. Sight and heart and mind, her whole being had recognized him in one terrible instant.

  He was in Winthrop. He was Jim Lacy. Jim Lacy, whom range rumor had long made mysterious, famous, ruthless. Jim Lacy was Nevada.

  Back in those Forlorn River days, when she and Ben and Ina and Marvie had loved him as Nevada, even then he had been Jim Lacy.

  Why was she stunned? Ever since Nevada had killed Setter and ridden away never to be heard of again Hettie had realized he had borne a name he could not endure for her or Ben to know. That was not so astoundi
ng. Nevada might have been any one of the noted desperadoes of the West. The overwhelming thing was that Nevada was here in Arizona, alive, virile, stone-faced as she had seen him but once, here in Winthrop, close to the home she and Ben had chosen almost solely in the hope that they might find him some day.

  What if she had seen him? A sickening helpless impotence assailed her. All the longing of years wasted! All the hope and prayer and faith wasted! Vain oblations. Nevada had been false to her, false to the best she had helped to raise in him, false to the blessed conviction she had always entertained--that whoever he was and whatever he had done, out of love for her and assurance of her faith, he would go on to disappear from the evil roads of the West and turn to an honest life. Hettie would have gambled her soul on that. And now the soul she would have staked grew sick with horror and revulsion. Nevada was a consort of rustlers, a bloodthirsty killer, a terrible engine of destruction.

  But perhaps he had only killed another man! A bad man--a thief-- even as Less Setter had been! The insidious small voice beat at the gate of her consciousness of faithlessness. And she listened, she clutched at it with the hope of a drowning woman, she hugged it to that soul which seemed to be freezing. So with unseeing eyes on the rolling, darkening desert, she admitted more and keener anguish into this strife of love and faith. How could she be faithless in hope, in trust? Had she not sworn, with her lips close to his, that she would die before she ever failed him? What if he had used his deadly gun again? He had killed, as before, perhaps more than once in his life, a worthless wicked man, whose death must serve some good purpose. Nevada had once saved Ben and Ina and her, all of them, from grief and misery. Who could tell what the killing of Hardy Rue might be to some one? No! Nevada had not sunk to the companionship of evil men and women, to drinking, gambling, rustling, to the vile dregs of this wild West.

  Over and over again this stream of consciousness eddied through Hettie's mind, like conflicting tides, now rushing, again receding, now full and devastating.

  Through the waning afternoon, sunset, twilight, dusk, on into the night Hettie acquired deeper insight into the gulf which yawned beneath her.

  The swift horses had swung into the home stretch, over the short- cut road that had been one of Ben's achievements. How the night wind moaned in the lofty pines! It seemed the moan of the world.

  The fragrance of sage filled the air. Down through the pale aisles of the forest moved shadows, unreal, grotesque, things as strange as shadows of the mind.

  Marvie now leaned against Hettie's shoulder, sound asleep. Ina had not spoken for hours. Ben, tireless and silent, kept the horses at a steady clip-clop, clip-clop. He always took pride in driving to town in eight hours and home in nine. A good road, a stanch fast team, a light vehicle, had conquered the one drawback to Ben's wilderness ranch.

  When at last they arrived Hettie crept exhausted to her room, and falling upon her bed, she lay quiet, wanting to rest and think before she undressed. But she fell asleep.

  When she awakened the sun was shining gold in at her window, and the fresh sweet cool fragrance of the forest blew over her.

  Instead of being beautiful they seemed dreadful. She dreaded wakefulness, the daylight, the many duties to be met, the imperative need of action, the facing of her family and of life.

  But she could not keep them back. And with the truth there surged over her the catastrophe that had fallen.

  "Maybe it's not a catastrophe," she whispered to the faithful, waiting silence of her room.

  Hettie sensed then that her greatest trial was yet to come, and a faint intimation of what it might be appalled her. It roused her to battle. Dragging her aching body off the bed, she undressed, and bathed her hot face, and brushed out her tangled hair, and put on her outdoor clothes.

  Then she slipped out without awakening her mother in the adjoining room. What was it that she must do? Find him, save him, or perish! All that she faced in the golden morning light seemed to mingle in one subtle whisper. There was no deceit, no blindness, no vacillation in the nature that spoke to her.

  Only the birds and the wild game, and the calves in the pasture, the roosters in the barnyard, the burros out on the range shared with Hettie those perfect uplifting, clarifying moments of the sunrise.

  Golden gleams of light crossed the brown boles of the stately pines; low down through the foliage shone patches of pink sky; to the north and west opened the vast slant down to the desert, illimitable and magnificent in the rosy, shadowy soft dawn. Deer and antelope grazed with the cows in the pasture. Squirrels barked from the trees, hawks sent down their shrill piercing cries, wild turkeys gobbled from over the ridge. Joy of life, radiance of creation, peace and solitude, wholesomeness and sweetness of nature, the exquisite beauty of woodland and wasteland at the break of day, and a marvelous, inscrutable, divine will pervaded that wilderness scene.

  Hettie absorbed it. She lifted up her head to the one black dome of the Mogollons. The misery of the night faded away like a nightmare. She had been a coward. She had failed to be grateful for the very thing that had been the beginning and end of her prayers. Could she be so slight and shallow a woman as to succumb to heartbreak? A terrible ordeal faced her, the outcome of which she could not divine. She could only endure and fight whatever fate had in store.

  "Oh, if I can cling to this blessed strength!" she cried. "To hold it fast when I'm distracted! To have it in hours of gloom!"

  That day Hettie did not cross the picturesque log bridge that spanned the brook between her cabin and the beautiful rambling residence of her brother. She plunged into her work, which consisted of the housekeeping she shared with her mother, her dressmaking and other personal tasks, and all the bookkeeping necessary to the running of a large expensive ranch.

  She did not see Ben all day. Late in the afternoon, when she went out to walk a little in the open air, she espied Marvie sitting on the porch, a most abject-looking lad.

  "Hello, Marv, old pard! Come and walk with me," she said, brightly.

  "Aw, I want to die!" replied Marvie.

  "Goodness gracious! Well, don't do that on my porch. It'd be a perpetual reminder of you."

  She dragged him to his feet and locking an arm with his led him off into the woods, until they were out of sight of anyone at the house. Then Hettie bade him sit with her under an old pine where the fragrant brown needle mat looked so inviting.

  "Now, Marv, I'm through teasing," she said, with a gravity that suited his mood. "What's the trouble?"

  "I had a run-in with Ben," replied the lad. "First one we ever had."

  "You did? Well, I've had a thousand. When Ben gets sulky and cross a good run-in clears him up, as a thunderstorm does a sultry day. Where did Ben go to-day?"

  "He finally rode off to a deserted homestead over here, five miles or so. Some one found tracks of California Red, and that news upset Ben. Then he waited round hours for Dillon, who didn't come.

  Raidy, who's on the outs with Dillon, said some things that made Ben sorer. You know Raidy. Well, doggone it, Ben pretty soon pitched into me."

  "What for?" queried Hettie, practically.

  "Nothin'. Not a darned thing. 'Cept I moped along at a job he gave me. Fixin' fence. If there's any job I hate it's that. He swore at me. Then I told him to go to the devil--I'd quit and go home."

  "What did Ben say?" asked Hettie.

  "He said, 'Go ahead, you bull-headed, lop-eared little jackass.' . . .

  So I rode off home. And I reckon I'll quit. I'm goin' to be a rustler."

  "All right. You want to become a rustler," returned Hettie, accepting the statement. "What for?"

  Marvie did not reply for a long while, during which his head sank lower.

  "Hettie, I'm turrible--in love," he said at last, with an effort.

  "Rose Hatt?"

  "Yes. It couldn't be nobody else."

  "Does Rose love you?" asked Hettie, softly, her hand going to Marvie's.

  "I thought she did, at first," replied the boy, wr
ithing. "She let me kiss her--kissed me back. But last night, when I asked her to meet me again, she said no. I got mad. But she stuck to it. When I accused her of flirtin', and me dead in earnest, she said:

  'Marvie, I've a bad name. I belong to the Hatts. You've a lovely sister' (she'd seen YOU) 'and a proud family. I'm only a backwoods girl. It won't do. I'll not see you no more.' She ran away from me then an' I couldn't find her. She'd hidden or left the dance.

  In the mornin' I tried again. No luck."

  "Marvie, I admire Rose for that," said Hettie, earnestly. "I think she's a square girl, even if she is a Hatt."

  "Now, Hettie, don't you go talkin' like dad or mother," burst out Marvie, warningly.

  "Oh, Marvie, I won't," declared Hettie, ashamed of the fact that she had been about to do so. By Marvie's warning she estimated his regard for her.

  "I don't care a damn about myself--even when I do love her turrible," went on Marvie, passionately. "But what's to become of Rose?"

  In the sincerity and inevitableness of youth he had hit upon the thing that mattered most.

  "I understand, Marvie," said Hettie, gravely. "You make me ashamed. Rose is not to blame for her family, for her surroundings, for--anything."

  "Now you're talkin' like Hettie Ide," returned Marvie, fervently.

  "And I'm givin' you a hunch. If Rose really loves me I'll stick to her. In spite of dad or Ben or anyone!"

  Hettie dropped her head. Here was a problem. What should she say?

  Marvie's confidence in her suddenly meant more than ever before.

  He needed something from her.

  "What knocks me flat is--I'm afraid she doesn't love me," went on the lad. "I'm goin' to find out, though, if I have to ride right under Cedar Hatt's nose. . . . Last night I believed she didn't.

  This mornin' I thought she did. If not--if she was only a little hussy--why'd she say she had a bad name and wouldn't meet me no more?"

  Hettie had no quick reply to his passionate query. Owing to her own stress of emotion during the last twenty-four hours, she was far from being her old logical self. But she was fighting a conviction that Rose Hatt had shown nobility and sacrifice in her attitude toward Marvie's advances. If those attributes did not spring from love, Hettie did not know what to call it.